Somewhere very deep inside me, where I didn’t think Judy could catch it, I thought of a tiny baby girl sacrificing herself for her brother’s strength, and a scared teenager sacrificing her own confused love for the boy’s future.
“Yeah,” I said out loud, my voice rough in my own ears. “I get sacrifice. You’re on to something. I never thought of it that way.”
Judy curved a smile that darkened her eyes, taking the light out of them until they were like the snake’s. I rubbed my own eyes, then my sternum, wishing my vision would stop misbehaving. “Are you all right?” Judy asked solicitously.
“Yeah.” I sat on my hands to make them stop rubbing. Maybe there was something I could sacrifice to fix my vision. I’d think about it when my lesson was over. “So do I get a lesson, or what? Or is this just a ‘make Joanne think’ day?”
“Your energy is low,” Judy said. “Are you up for more than thinking?”
My energy was lower than a snake’s belly. I chuckled, more of a shoulder roll than a sound. “I don’t know. I could use about a week’s worth of sleep.”
“Not with Virissong coming in two days time.” Judy’s voice deepened, becoming stern. I put my head against my knees and made an mmph sound.
“I have other things to do, too. Besides help a godling back into the world. He is one of the good guys, right?” I looked over the arch of my knees. Judy lifted her eyebrows.
“What does your heart tell you?”
My heart, upon consultation, told me thud-thud, thud-thud, which was reassuring if not particularly helpful. My mind, which I trusted more as a vehicle for telling me things, was still conflicted.
“Stop thinking so much,” Judy said sharply. “You must learn to trust your feelings, Joanne Walker.”
I exhaled noisily through my nose, pressed my eyes shut, and tried to stop thinking.
All kinds of thoughts immediately filled my mind. Whether or not my black shoes, the ones that went best with my dress uniform, were polished, and if I was going to have time to polish them before the funeral. Why exactly it was called a parkway when you drove on it and a driveway when you parked on it. Whether all of this was real or a manifestation of my overactive imagination, in which case, couldn’t I at least have Keanu Reeves or Carrie Anne Moss as company?
Gradually all that noise faded away, although I kept an eye out for Keanu showing up. Less likely things had happened.
A quiet part of me acknowledged that the basic problem was I thought the members of the coven were, in general, nuts. Virissong, with his semi-godlike powers and his ambition to make the world a better place, didn’t sound half-bad. If he were a little more concrete—like, oh, say, Ted Turner, with his billion-dollar gift to the United Nations—I’d be right there waving a little “Go Viri!” flag. It wasn’t that hard to see the world needed some help. In my good moments, I even thought I could step up to the plate and offer a little myself.
An even quieter part of me admitted the really basic problem wasn’t the coven at all. It was my own skepticism. The coven, at least, believed. They were willing to take action and risks to make the world a better place.
I was supposed to be dedicated to that sort of thing myself. Instead I was sitting on the benches, pissed at the coach for making me turn out for the team.
Maybe it was better if I stuck to car analogies. The point was, I didn’t want to believe, and my recalcitrance kept me stymied. And that was exactly what my spirit animals had told me would be my hardest battle. Accepting.
“Yeah,” I finally said out loud. “Okay. I get it. I donno how long it’ll last, but I get it.” It never lasted long, in my experience.
“Why do you fight so hard?” Judy asked. Hairs stood up on my arms and I shivered, envisioning shields rolling up around me like car windows. I didn’t want to answer her question, not out loud and not to myself. All I wanted to do was sit and struggle with acceptance. I didn’t need an audience for that.
“Fade to black,” I said, and everything did.
The fade stayed with me even after I opened my eyes, back in my own body. I wasn’t even sure Ihad opened my eyes, until I lifted a hand and poked myself in the pupil. Sparks flew through my vision and my eyes watered, darkness fading back into light. I turned to look at the VCR clock, where blinking green numbers told me it was six-thirty.
Six-thirty meant I could get a two-hour nap in before getting ready to meet Morrison for Cassandra’s funeral. It also meant I could grab a shower and dash over to see how Colin was doing. I was still thinking that sounded like a good idea when the alarm woke me up again.
Morrison was early. I don’t know who was more surprised I was ready, him or me. He knocked on the door at nine-twenty, and I went to open it, holding my shoes in my hand.
I saw the same curious expression cross his face that I felt cross mine. With me barefoot and him shod, he had a good two inches height on me. It felt extremely peculiar to be looking up at my captain, and judging from his drawn-down eyebrows, it felt just as peculiar to be looking down at me. He looked down at my feet. I dropped my shoes and stepped into them, putting myself at a half-inch advantage. “Better?”
He rolled his shoulders back, filling my doorway considerably more than he had a moment before. “Yeah.” He sounded growly. I didn’t blame him. Finding myself on unequal footing—literally—with him made me uncomfortable, too, especially since when it normally happened, it was because I was deliberately wearing heels so I’d be taller.
I stepped backward so I could see him better, my wretched vision notwithstanding. In dress uniform he didn’t look like a superhero going to seed. He just looked heroic, broad-shouldered and strong-jawed and capable. He had his cap tucked under his arm with military precision. I wondered if he’d ever been in the military, or if he just had clear ideas about how a police captain should present himself.
“You look good, Captain.” Could I get sued for saying something like that? We were both off-duty. Well, I was off-duty. I thought Morrison was, but sometimes me and thinking didn’t get on so good. At any rate, whether he could sue me or not, it was true. In the hall light, my inverted vision wasn’t so bad, and his shoulders had sort of a silver glow where his shadow should’ve been. It didn’t quite make him look like an angel—that would’ve been too much for me to stay polite about—but it gave him an aura of confidence and strength that made me sentimental again about working for him.
“Thank you,” he said gruffly. “You ready?”
“Yeah.” I crooked a smile at my feet and shooed Morrison out of the way so I could step out and lock my door. There wasn’t any real reason for the little sting of disappointment that the compliment hadn’t been returned, other than me being a fickle, fickle beast.
The ride to the cemetery was a quiet one. I had enough sense to not suggest we take Petite. Morrison drove an unmarked police-issue Ford, the sort that isn’t fooling anybody about being a cop car, and I rode shotgun, silently watching the streets slide by. We drove into Crown Hill Cemetery and parked, walking over tired green grass toward a gathering crowd. We couldn’t have been more in sync if we’d tried, our paces matching exactly. Morrison pretended not to notice.
Nerves and guilt bubbled in my stomach and I tried to chase them away with a quiet question. “No service?”
Morrison said, “Only the graveside service,” and volunteered nothing else, leaving me to my churning stomach. I’d never gone to one of these, not for a victim, not in an official capacity. I felt like I should’ve done more, like I should’ve been there in time to save Cassandra Tucker. I wondered if he felt the same way, as if he’d failed the girl whose funeral we were about to attend. I wondered if any police officer couldnot feel that way, doing this.