“Yeah. Just, my vision’s been all funky for a few days. Ever since—” Reticence popped through again. I hadn’t told Judy about the talk with Big Coyote in the desert, and didn’t really want to. I didn’t want to talk to anybody about that yet. The deja vu brought on by Cassandra’s funeral after the desert still made me uncomfortable, sufficiently uncomfortable that I didn’t want to think about it. My vision narrowed down again and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, making black sunbursts behind my eyelids. “Ever since the first ritual.” It was close enough.

“Ah.” Judy didn’t sound surprised. I squinted my eyes open to find her nodding wisely. “It’s the power you’re using, almost certainly. Think of it like stretching muscles you’re not accustomed to. You’ll adjust.”

“Before I go blind?” I muttered. I stopped rubbing my eyes, but the after-images of darkness still hung around the edges of my vision. It was like looking into binoculars. “Anyway, thanks. So I’ve noticed some people aren’t seeing the spirit animals out there. What’ s up with that?”

“A matter of faith.” Judy hesitated. “And maybe something more. You released a great deal of power last night. I’m not entirely sure it went the way it was intended to.”

I made a face. “Yeah, I kind of got that with the whole massive earthquake thing. I hope that was an accident.”

Judy shook her head. “I’m sure it was. And tonight’s ritual should finish everything and put it all back to rights. You’ll have to be brave tonight, Joanne. It’s going to be hard.”

“I can handle it. I just lived through being the epicenter of an earthquake, after all.” My, wasn’t I brash and cocky. Judy smiled at me.

“Good. I think we’ll move on to your next lesson in the morning. You should save your strength for tonight, now. You’ll be ready, in the morning.”

“You sure I won’t be all burned out?”

“Positive. It’s the nature of sacrifice, after all. The more you give, the more of you there is to give.”

That sounded very mystical and reassuring. “All right. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

Judy nodded. “Tomorrow. Good luck tonight.”

“Thanks.” I opened my eyes, still sitting under hot shower water. I felt cleaner and almost ready to face the day, even though my vision was still tunneled. I tried blinking it away and succeeded in blinking water into my eyes, nothing more. Oh well, it’d faded before.

The phone rang and I leaped out of the tub, all elbows and knees and flailing as I ran for it. I didn’t know why I was in such a hurry; my answering machine worked just fine. Telephones caused a Pavlovian response in me. Someday I was going to spend a few weeks training myself out of it, so that when a telemarketer called I didn’t compulsively leap up and race to see who it was. Possibly the whole training prospect would be more successful if I got more than one phone call a week.

I knocked the phone’s base off the nightstand as I snatched the receiver up, gasping, “Hello?” into it. Thank God genuine video phones hadn’t been invented. I hadn’t even grabbed a towel. Ford Prefect would despair of me.

“Joanie? You okay? This’s Billy.”

“Oh. Hi. Yeah. I was in the shower, that’s all. What’s up?” My heart rate slowing down, I edged back into the bathroom to reach for a towel. The phone cord wouldn’t reach. I stretched as far as I could, an awkward naked ballet, trying to snag the towel with my fingertips as Billy spoke.

“What the hell happened last night?”

“You sound like Morrison. What do you mean?”

“Earthquakes and monsters roaming the streets? Ring a bell?”

My foot slid out from under me. I seized the towel on my way down, but it didn’t provide any kind of support. I crashed to the floor, banging most parts of my body on the floor, the doorjamb, and the falling towel rack, variously. I lay there, afraid to even groan while I judged whether anything was badly injured, then fumbled for the phone, I’d dropped sometime during my dramatic descent.

“Joanie? Joanne? Are you all right? Joanie? Jesus Christ! Jo—”

“I’m okay,” I announced, hoping it wasn’t an overstatement.

“What the hell happened?”

“I fell.” I sat up cautiously, trying to extract my leg from around the door frame. “I think I’m okay. Um. Monsters roaming the streets?”

“Don’t play dumb with me.”

“I’m not. I just didn’t know anybody else could see them.” Although if anybody could, of course it would be Billy. My friend the True Believer.

“Well, I promise you, it’s not just me. The station’s hopping like a madhouse. Calls coming in from all over the city, some of them from people who’re seeing things and lots from people who think their friends have lost their minds.”

“You the only one there?”

Billy understood what I meant, even if the question hadn’t come anywhere near asking it. “No, there’s me and Jen Gonzales in Missing Persons and a bunch of people from your little séance back in January. I donno who else.”

“It wasn’t a séance.”

“Joanne!”

I’d never heard Billy sound so annoyed. I winced, clutching my towel against my chest. “Yeah, sorry, not a good time for arguing details. Look, I’ll…” What the hell was I going to do? “I’ll come down to the station. I don’t know what good I can do, but somebody else on duty can’t hurt, at least.”

“Forget coming to the station, Joanie. Figure out what’s going on. Gimme a call when you know. Maybe we can figure out how to fix it.”

“It’ll be fixed tonight,” I said without thinking. I could all but hear Billy shake his head.

“Tonight might not be soon enough. Get busy, Joanie. This is important.” He hung up. I got dressed and went to find Faye.

Actually, I got dressed, went outside, and discovered my car wasn’t there. How quickly we forget. I swore and went back upstairs to call a cab.

It took forty-five minutes to arrive. I desperately wished Gary was on duty, and not just because he always managed to dump his current fare and come skidding to my doorstop when I needed a ride. He’d delivered me to a crime scene back in March, and had been terribly sulky that Morrison wouldn’t let him hang around and gawk. I wanted him to be there to gawk with me.

I made two loops around my block while I waited for the cab, checking out the havoc caused by the earthquake and the spirits running amok. There was often a drunk or two sleeping it off in the park across the street from my apartment building, but this morning everyone, even the drunks, was awake and a little wild-eyed. Apparently seeing spirits all over will sober a person right up.

And there were more and more of them, and they were becoming more solid. I watched a moose cross in front of me and dent the grass it stepped on, although it didn’t stay bent. I kept side-stepping around things that weren’t quite real, often into things that were, like a jogger who stopped and yelled at me for three minutes straight. At least he was keeping his heart rate up. Just about everyone was crabby, either from seeing animals that couldn’t possibly be there, or from having to deal with people who were having hallucinations. I didn’t know which group I felt sorrier for. Both, maybe. The coven and I had disturbed the natural order of things. I wondered if it’d ever really been like this, thousands of years ago, with so many spirits roaming free. I wasn’t sure our modern world could adapt to it.

The cab ride to the station was frustrating. There were now creatures settling themselves in the middle of the road, deliberately springing toward moving vehicles as if they were prey. Sometimes vehicles ended up with visible impact marks from monsters smashing into them; other cars would just suddenly swerve and crash into something. Earthquake debris littering the streets made more than enough targets to bash against, even if other vehicles weren’t on the roads. I clenched my fingers around the cab’s armrest and threw banishment thoughts at the spirits with all my strength. It didn’t help.