“Yeah.” Toni set her lunch on the edge of Katherine’s desk—it looked far more appetizing than Katherine’s salad—while she cleaned up the soda spill. “I’ve been thinking about you and your friend.”
“It’s nice to see you too.” Katherine should have been more friendly, but she was irrationally angry at her boring chicken salad after seeing the delicious-looking sub Toni was about to eat, and she didn’t know why the woman was there after she’d dismissed them so quickly the week before. “Why were you thinking about me and Megan?”
Toni used her foot to kick the door closed as soon as Katherine got behind her desk. “You mean other than the obvious?”
“That we’re all three experiencing parapsychological phenomena in conjunction with a near-death experience?”
Toni stared at her.
“We’re all doing psychic stuff.”
Toni wrinkled her nose. “Yeah. That.”
“So you’re admitting that you’re experiencing things out of the normal range for you?”
Toni wadded the tissues up in her fist, braced an elbow on the arm of her chair, and leaned forward. “Tell me, Professor, do I seem like a crier to you?”
Chapter 10
“No.” Why did Katherine feel like she was being led into a trap? “You do not seem like a crier to me. Then again, biologically, everyone is a crier unless you have keratoconjunctivitis sicca, in which case you should be seeing a doctor.”
Toni cocked her head. “You’re a blast at parties, right?”
“I am, actually. I kill at trivia nights too.”
That made Toni smile. “I can cry, and lately I’ve been crying a lot. Like a lot, Doc.”
“I’d really prefer it if you call me Katherine.”
“Fine, Katherine, not Kat or Katie, I’ve been crying way more than normal, and it’s actually starting to become a problem.” She reached for her sandwich. “Do you think I want to get pissed off while I’m tuning an engine and burst into tears? By the way, I’m going to eat because I only have so much time I can be away from the garage and traffic around this place is absolutely packed around lunchtime.”
“Yes, I avoid driving anywhere near the college in the middle of the day.”
“Seriously.”
Toni claimed the corner of Katherine’s desk and took a knife from her pocket to cut her sandwich in half. “Now, don’t get me wrong. I come from a big-ass, emotional Italian family. Overreaction is not foreign to me. But the first time I got that super-overwhelmed feeling where I felt like I needed to cry or I would literally burst out of my skin—”
“You mean other than the extreme empathy during the incident at the gym?”
Toni paused and lifted her eyes to Katherine. “I don’t know what that was. I don’t know how I did it. I felt… wrong the minute I saw that guy.”
“Something about him triggered your instincts.”
She kept cutting her sandwich. “I have good instincts about people—it’s hard to describe, but that’s part of the reason my dad put me in charge of hiring guys for the garage when I was like twenty. I just had feelings about people, and I was a good judge of character. But when I walked past that kid the first time, my skin was literally crawling.”
“Do you think you were sensing his feelings? The root of empathic power is understanding the feelings of other people.”
“Maybe?” She frowned. “If I was sensing his feelings, then it was even weirder. Because I got nothing from him.”
“Explain that. What do you remember?”
Toni paused cutting her food. “He was like… a void. A feelings black hole.”
Even the idea of it caused her to shiver. “But you were watching him. Keeping close to him.”
“I remember feeling drawn to him, which is weird when you think about it because he gave me the creeps. But I couldn’t not pay attention to him.”
“Had you ever felt anything like that from a person before?”
“That emptiness?” She shook her head. “No. Nothing like it. And then I saw you tackle him, saw Megan holding that gun—I didn’t even see him with the gun, I just saw it in her hand—I was so confused. At first I thought she was a cop or something. But then you were on the ground and that guy looked like he was about to murder you, and I just reacted.”
“He knocked me off and you jumped on him.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I took on someone way bigger than me because I’m an idiot.” She pursed her lips. “I tackled him and pushed his shoulders down. Just sat on his chest. And the only thing I could think was this asshole needed to chill out. Whatever was happening, he needed to chill out.” Toni looked away from Katherine, focusing on a spot over her shoulder. “I don’t remember much else, just that massive adrenaline rush, that sensation where everything slows down a little, you know? And that feeling was so big inside me. He had to calm down. He had to, or people were going to die.”
“And he did.”
Toni nodded.
“Do you remember being surprised? Or feeling anything from him?”
“Not really. I remember thinking, ‘That’s right, asshole, you better stay down.’ But that was probably supreme overconfidence. He could have flicked me off like a piece of lint. I have a big ass, but he was a bigger dude.”
Katherine narrowed her eyes. “Do you remember touching his skin?”
Toni blinked. “Um… yes. My hand was kind of right where his neck and shoulder meet, and I remember because he was sweaty and superhot. Like way hotter than you would expect. The man felt like a furnace.”
Katherine made a mental note to look up which drugs could cause a fever like that.
“I mean, I think he was definitely on something, right?” Toni sat back and took a bite of her sandwich. “There had to be some drugs happening there?”
“It’s a possibility. I’m trying to find out more from the police, but they don’t want to answer any of my questions.”
“Hmm.” She licked something off her thumb. “I can ask my cousin. He’ll tell me.”
“I don’t
