The Isis Collar

meant I was going to have to deal with yet another insurance company.

Suckfreakintastik.

My first call was to Creede. No answer. Then again, he’d said he’d be out of touch. But he’d also said he’d leave a message. Hmpf. He was a big bad mage; he could definitely take care of himself. But still, it wasn’t like him not to call when he promised.

My second call was Bruno. He picked up on the first ring.

“Hey.” A simple greeting, but it held a world of warmth.

“Hey yourself.” I couldn’t quite manage to make my voice sound normal.

“Uh-oh. What’s wrong?”

“Bad day. Really, really, bad day.”

He sighed, but forced a hint of humor into his voice. “Where does it rank on the epic scale of Celia Graves disasters?”

I laughed. Which was exactly what he’d intended. “Let’s see, if the rift was a ten…”

“Oh yeah, the rift was definitely a ten.”

I thought about it for a second. “Probably a six. Six point five.”

He sighed. “Do you need me to come? I’m meeting with Dr. Sloan, but we can reschedule.”

I thought about it for all of about ten seconds. “Actually, I kind of need to talk to him, too. I just figured he wouldn’t be in on a Friday afternoon.”

“He wanted us to have plenty of uninterrupted time for our first meeting about my dissertation.”

Time that I was now interrupting. Oops.

I could hear Dr. Sloan’s voice in the background. “Have her come on down.”

“You hear that?” Bruno asked.

“I heard. Tell him thanks. I’ll be there as quick as I can.” I grabbed my purse and started downstairs. I’d made it all the way to the reception desk before I remembered I didn’t have my car.

Rizzoli straightened up from something Jones was showing him. “Going somewhere?”

I nodded. “Actually, yeah. I need to meet with an expert about the incident this morning. He’s also been investigating the death curse on me and I want to ask whether that has anything to do with my reaction to the school event. Actually, it’s Dr. Sloan—the book that’s missing is his.”

Gail perked up. “You mean Aaron Sloan? Brilliant man. He guest lectured a few times when I was at Harvard. Frankly, I might have to call him myself if this spell turns out to be what I think it is. ”

That made both me and Rizzoli look at her sharply, but she just looked back at her runes, then closed her eyes. Her fingers moved, casting. But Rizzoli asked the obvious. “Should I send you with Celia to talk to him?”

She shook her head, her voice now slightly singsong. “No. I need to concentrate on this and still have to sample the people in the conference room for any coercion or memory reduction spells. Someone should have noticed a woman in the room before Ms. Graves arrived.” Well, yeah. That was a good point. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me. “But it would help if you could pave the way with him. Tell him it’s an E14 spell so far and might contain traces of D71 workings. That’ll get his interest up and he’ll probably call me.”

Rizzoli nodded sagely, but I got the impression he didn’t understand a word she’d just said. “E14 and D71. Got it. Let’s go, Celia. I’ll take you over.” I raised my brows in a silent question. Why did I need company? “Consider it protective custody until we know more about why you’re being targeted.”

He gave a gentlemanly bow and waved me toward the door. I sighed and preceded him out the door with only a minor limp. Dawna was chatting with a cute gray-suit near the door and I got the impression from her sultry smile that their conversation had nothing to do with the investigation. “Going to the college now. Be good.” I grabbed my purse from where it was hiding out of sight behind the computer monitor.

She smirked and winked. “I always am. Except when I’m … bad.”

That made the agent smirk, too, and Rizzoli let out a small growl. “Go assist Special Agent Jones, Davies. She’ll need someone to gather the evidence once she raises it from the floor, and you seem to have nothing better to do.”

Agent Davies’s gaze moved to the floor and he fidgeted nervously while Dawna blushed and scurried to her desk.

Ron noticed me and tried to catch my attention with eyes blazing, but I so didn’t want to talk to him right now. What was happening wasn’t precisely my fault, but this probably wasn’t helping his settlement conference any. I pretended not to see him and scurried out the front door. I only made it past the agent guarding the entrance because Rizzoli was right at my elbow. Ron wouldn’t be that lucky, if he tried at all.

I started to ask Rizzoli a question, but he held up his hand and put his cell phone to his ear. “Nancy?… Dom. Hey, find some reason to get Davies off this case. Pull him back to base.… Okay, yeah. Thanks.”

I waited until we were in the car before I commented. “A little harsh, don’t you think? It was just innocent flirting.”

“Not so innocent, Graves. What worried me wasn’t that he was flirting. It was that he didn’t notice you.”

That made me frown because I didn’t get what he was saying. “Try again. Maybe I’m just dense today, but I don’t understand.”

He looked almost amused. “You really don’t, do you? Okay, short version: You’re a siren. Every other male in the room except those who are shooting blanks like me or are not heterosexual noticed you. Couldn’t take their eyes off you. Except Davies, who couldn’t take his eyes off your friend. That level of interest in anyone could impact this investigation. I don’t care if they date—hell, that’s almost guaranteed from the way they were looking at each other. But not here and not now. Got it?”

“Oh. That’s a lot to get from a quick glance. What exactly is your specialty at the Bureau? I mean, most agents have some sort of special talent. Not many plain humans there, I’ll bet.”

He turned on the frontage road toward the university back entrance. “More than you’d think, actually. There are good and bad things about having people with specialized paranormal talents in the department. The good is you get people who can solve cases better. But only certain cases. They tend to rely on their strengths, and when you only have a hammer, you see every problem as a nail. I prefer people with full tool belts, and humans bring that to the table.”

His answer made me smirk at him. “One of your talents seems to be misdirection. Because you didn’t answer my question.”

He smiled, his eyes crinkling at the corners with good humor. “You’re right. It is.” He let that sink in with a prolonged moment of silence.

Finally I shook my head with amused weariness. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?”

“Intuition.”

I turned my head to stare at him. His smile didn’t fade. “Excuse me?”

“You asked my talent. That’s it. I’m a level-eight Intuitive.”

Intuition was a measurable talent? “Really? Is that a psychic or magical gift? What exactly does it mean?”

“It started out as a clairvoyant talent but was moved to the psychic talents when I was a kid. But now it’s considered partly magical, too, as science has learned more about the brain and meta-mitochondrial DNA. So now it’s its own subset, which bumped me up the chart by about four levels. I sucked on the clairvoyant and psychic scales. I wasn’t much better than a plain human.”

“So you’ve got really good intuition? That’s it?”

His reply was a laugh that was genuinely amused and not at all insulted. “It’s a lot more useful than you think. I’m always in the right place at the right time. I meet people I need to and ask the right questions exactly when I should. I pick the correct people to go with me on an assignment to get the results we need to solve a case. So far, I’ve got a ninety-three percent average of satisfactorily closing case files. That gets you noticed in my business.”

“Then you happening to be the person who showed up at my office the first time we met wasn’t coincidence?”

As his hand flipped the lever for the blinker he shook his head and turned in at the university’s back gate. The main entrance doesn’t have a security shack. But this one, close to the administration building, does. I dug my