That seemed painfully unlikely, especially at this juncture.

“Can you just get me his address, Jen?” I had to at least try to draw a line in the sand. I had no illusions about how long it’d stay drawn if Jen insisted, but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

Jen said, “Huh,” and then, “Just a second,” leaving me to eye my reflection and the phone in the rearview mirror. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

“All right, here it is. You have something to write with?”

Apparently it could be. I scrambled for a pencil, writing down the address and repeating it back to her. “Thanks, Jen. Look, the topaz seems to be working. You can probably sleep safely if you’re hanging on to it. It looks like it’s keeping Billy’s brother from going under, anyway.”

She said, “Huh,” again, then, “Ok, if I get desperate. Thanks,” and hung up on me. I glanced over my shoulder as I keyed Petite on, and pulled out onto the street wondering what I was going to do if Morrison wasn’t home.

I didn’t have to worry about it. Morrison’s Avalon was parked next to a quarter-ton Dodge Ram in the driveway of a two-story cream-colored house with trim that looked black in the nighttime city lights. Curtains lined the insides of windows. I didn’t have curtains on my windows, only the blinds the apartment had come with when I’d rented it in college. At a glance, Morrison was Suzy Homemaker, compared to me. Of course, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were probably Suzy Homemaker, compared to me. I bet Morrison cooked his own meals, too. He certainly mowed the lawn, right up to the edge of a picket fence that matched the trim. I’d never thought of Morrison as a picketfence kind of guy. Young spruce trees bordered the fence, with hedges growing up between them. They looked like they probably reduced the noise off the street, which might help a cop sleep better at night.

Unless, of course, he had employees calling him up in the middle of the night to rant and rave and profess jealousy to him. This minute examination of his front lawn was not getting me any closer to dealing with my embarrassing behavior or the woman in Morrison’s bed. The Ram had to be hers. I couldn’t imagine Morrison owning a recreational vehicle.

I gritted my teeth and left Petite, following a stone footpath up to Morrison’s front door. Yellow rosebushes lined the front of the house, and a wheelbarrow sat up against the bushes on the porch’s far side. A blue tarp was tucked neatly around the barrow’s burden, a plastic-wrapped set of shears weighing it down for good measure.

I knocked on the door, staring at my feet, and nobody answered. I could think of a lot of reasons why someone might not answer the door at two in the morning, and none of them were reasons that suggested pushing the doorbell was a good idea. I did it, anyway. For a moment I thought it was broken, then heard it bong twice with increasing volume, and decided it probably rang three times, working its way up to being heard instead of starting out shrill and scaring the hell out of the people inside. It seemed like a good doorbell for a cop.

Nobody answered the doorbell, either. My tummy did a quick dive and swoop to the left, bringing illness intense enough to break a cold sweat on my forehead, and I finally clued in to the familiarity of the sensation. A similar sickness had prompted me to get off an airplane and go running across Seattle in search of a woman trying to outrace a pack of dogs, seven months earlier. The younger me had referred to it as being hit in the stomach with a golf club. I had more than justifiable nerves going on here.

The power inside me lit up like the Fourth of July once I finally recognized it. Gary was right. I really did need to figure out how to balance my life somehow. My focus was so limited I could either have power running or I could have emotional awareness turned on. I was almost certain that those two things ought to be intimately tied up in each other, instead of being divisive as the Grand Canyon.

That was about all the recrimination I had time for. The Sight fell over me again, doubling my vision for a few seconds, then settling out in a manner that was starting to feel familiar, if not quite natural. The walls of Morrison’s house thinned, support structures glowing strong and purposeful, and objects within became clear in their own neon bright colors. If I wanted to become a thief, this second sight thing could be very useful for casing out a joint ahead of time.

As if in disapproval, my vision wavered and flickered, darkening. I lifted a hand in silent apology to the power and it steadied again. I could practically hear a disapproving sniff, and despite everything found myself smiling. I wasn’t sure if it was me sniffing or if the magic I carried actually had a personality of its own, but either way I thought it was funny. Only I would end up with opinionated magic. Maybe that was the price of ignoring it for over a decade. It’d struck out on its own, forged new territory in the heart and soul of the Other realm, and came back with a smart-ass little voice that pointed out the obvious to me and didn’t like it when I thought about being naughty with my power.

I was doing it again. Procrastinating. I’d been staring through Morrison’s front door at the discreetly ornate wooden frame of a picture, not letting the Sight take me farther into the house. I had no words for how much I didn’t want to get an eyeful of Morrison and Barbara Bragg in bed together. On the other hand, I noticed I was physically leaning backward, my heels dug into the porch, and that my stomach was cramping from wanting to move forward. I hadn’t felt anything like this much impatience when I’d astrally snuck through Suzanne Quinley’s parents’ home. Somehow it suggested my power knew something I didn’t, and the more time I wasted the worse it was going to be.

Not that I could think of anything worse than getting to watch Morrison making love to his cute redheaded evil girlfriend. I ground my teeth together and let loose the dogs of war, separating from my body entirely so I could follow the urgent power that had brought me to Morrison’s home.

CHAPTER 26

Last time I’d done this I’d walked through the whole house as if I was there physically. This time there was no transition. I snapped to Morrison’s side without heed to intervening walls or worry about the house’s layout.

He lay sprawled on his back in the kitchen, for which I was perversely grateful. Kitchens were common areas, a room to invite people into. The bedroom, where I feared I’d end up, would’ve been unbearably intimate. Invading Morrison’s privacy was one thing. Invading his bedroom was something else.

He hadn’t, I remembered with a flush of bewilderment, had the slightest compunction about walking into my bedroom a couple days earlier. I suddenly had no idea how to react to that.

Lucky for me, it wasn’t a good time to be thinking about it. Barbara crouched at Morrison’s side, her hand over his heart. Her colors, half the rainbow in hue, were so vivid it hurt to look at her. Even in my astral form, when she moved it left blurs of crimson and sapphron and azure smeared across my retinas like acid etching into my eyes, sheer radiant power.

It was also incomplete, as if someone had thoughtlessly cut away her left hand, unaware that doing so maimed the whole. There were gaps of darkness as razor-sharp as the colors, spots of black that didn’t complete the whole. I hadn’t seen those slashes earlier, neither when she’d come into Morrison’s office nor when she was with Mark. I hoped that was because she was actively pursuing magic now, thereby exposing her flaws, and not because I was blind and stupid. I had a sense of patterns in the darkness, but looking that hard made my head ache, and there were other things to focus on.