CHAPTER 4
Once upon a time, the antiseptic smell of hospitals gave me sneezing fits every time I went in one. The past month I’d been in and out of them often enough that the sneezing had reduced itself to just feeling like somebody’d stuffed plugs up my nose, making my eyes tingle and water. It wasn’t much of an improvement, and I really wanted to just not have to go into hospitals at all anymore.
The universe was supremely indifferent to what I wanted. I rubbed my nose and followed Morrison up to an ordinary hospital room, not the intensive-care unit I was expecting. Billy Holliday was, by all appearances, sleeping comfortably in a bed that looked too small for his barrel-chested frame. There was an oxygen sensor on one finger, and monitors I couldn’t identify beeped in the background. He looked fine.
His wife, on the other hand, looked like hell. I’d only seen Melinda Holliday look less than lovely once previously, during the demon-in-her-kitchen episode a couple of weeks earlier, but the one-two punch seemed to have taken the spark out of her. Her dark hair was in a listless ponytail, olive skin drawn and pale and she wasn’t dressed to disguise early signs of pregnancy. Since I’d been admonished not to mention she was pregnant for several weeks yet, I knew she was worried: Mel wasn’t the kind of woman who would accidentally dress badly, or let show something she wanted kept private.
Morrison stopped in the doorway and let me go in ahead of him. Or maybe he made me go in ahead of him, but either way, I went in as he hung back in the door frame. Mel looked up and blatant relief swept her expression, tears bright in her brown eyes. “Joanie. Michael said he’d get you on his way over. I’m so glad you’re here.” She got herself around the bed and over to hug me as she spoke, while I stumbled over the idea of someone calling Morrison by his given name. I knew he had one, of course, but it was the mental equivalent of Babe Ruth saying, “Hiya, King!” to King Edward of England.
I wasn’t sure who would find it more appalling that I was putting Morrison on the same pedestal as British royalty: Morrison, or the English. Fortunately, it was a thought that would never escape the confines of my mind.
“It’s gonna be okay,” I said to the top of Melinda’s head. “Billy’s going to be fine. What happened?”
Mel extracted herself from the hug, stepping back with her chin lifted, a way of instigating control over her emotions. “I don’t know. He just wouldn’t wake up this morning. The doctors said his vitals are strong and he seems to be in REM sleep, but he just won’t wake up.”
“I’ll do what I can, Mel. I’m not all that good at this.” I sat down at Billy’s side, trying not to gnaw on my lower lip.
“You’ll help him.” She went back to her seat on the other side of the bed, taking Billy’s hand. I bit my lip after all and looked over my shoulder at Morrison.
He leaned in the door frame, arms folded across his chest as he stared at me so intently I felt a blush crawling up my cheeks. My drum dangled from his fingertips, against his ribs, like he’d forgotten it was there, though I was certain he hadn’t. He was waiting for something, and I knew both what and why. I almost couldn’t blame him.
Morrison had never actually been present when I’d tried healing someone before, though he’d been in the vicinity and had seen the evidence of success after the fact. Proof didn’t make him happy about my talents, and I could feel discomfort rolling off him in waves. It wasn’t any especial attunement to emotion or altered states of being that let me feel it, either, just his glower and the tightness of his shoulders.
“Mel could drum me under,” I offered. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear—he wanted to be told none of this was necessary—but it was the best I could do. By getting me here he’d already pushed well past the boundaries of what he considered reasonable behavior. It wasn’t the first time he’d forced his own hand into asking what my esoteric gifts might be able to come up with, but it was the first time he’d found himself playing an actively supporting role.
I had complete and total sympathy with the not wanting to be there for it. I’d have checked out myself, if I could’ve, although that impulse was slowly being replaced by a grim determination to just get this shamanism thing right. A wash of regret burbled through me, leaving weary sadness behind. “You don’t have to do this, Captain.”
“Yeah, I do.” Morrison shoved off the doorjamb, making it creak. I startled at his contrary agreement, then found myself staring at the man.
I tended to think I was Morrison’s size because I was Morrison’s height, but seeing him framed in the doorway reminded me why I also tended to think of him as an aging superhero. The summer heat had taken some of the extra flesh he’d been carrying from around his middle, so the aging part seemed to slip away, leaving just the hero behind. His hair needed cutting, which was the sort of thing I rarely noticed on myself, much less anyone else, but the marginally longer length played up silver streaks that in turn emphasized just how damned blue his eyes were. I wished, very abruptly, that we were at the office and he was in his usual two-piece suit instead of shirtsleeves, so I’d just see my boss, instead of a man.
I turned back to Billy with my shoulders hunched, just in time to catch Melinda’s pursed-lip look of curiosity before she schooled it into neutrality. My shoulders went higher, and Morrison came up behind me, dragging a chair to the foot of Billy’s bed. I heard the door click shut as he sat down, the drum held awkwardly but carefully in one hand. “Heartbeat rhythm, right?”
I looked back at him and he shrugged. “People talk, Walker. Especially about you.”
Millipedes stampeded up and down my spine, leaving me with shivers and a bump of nausea in my stomach. “I wish you hadn’t said that.” I knew on some level that people talked about me. It was clear from the way offices or the garage beneath the station would get quiet when I came in, and from how guys I’d once considered friends wouldn’t quite look at me anymore. Having it said out loud, though, was a lot different from knowing it.
Morrison, bless his sensitive soul, said, “Too bad,” and knocked a heartbeat thump into my drum.
The world lit up as if a few thousand angels had dropped by for afternoon tea. Gold splattered my vision, fading to lens flares of white and peach before clarity reasserted itself.
And what clarity it was, going far beyond the normal solidity of day-to-day life. A second sight descended over mine, giving the room, the sunlight in the window, the three people with me, everything, a depth that made normal vision seem weak and meaningless. Even the hospital walls glowed with purpose, vibrant green telling me they held their place as a hall of healing and took pride in that. Dust motes in the air glittered like star stuff, and I knew that if I got up to look out the window, there would be neon-bright colors flooding the streets, purposeful vitality making up all the aspects of the world. Every time I looked around me with the second sight, a part of me wanted to never let it go. Doing so ached inside of me, as if the overblown beauty visible through a layer of magic was how everything ought to be seen. Like I was cutting myself off from something important, when I looked at things with an ordinary woman’s vision.
I’d never really seen Morrison through these eyes, though I’d felt his colors a few times, deep blues and purples that spoke of reassurance and confidence about his place in the world. Looking at him now, I could see red tingeing the edges of his aura, confirming his irritation in participating in this—charade wasn’t the right word, and not even he thought so. Escapade. It was only that, though: irritation. There was no deep coil of red through his colors, nothing that poisoned his drumming against what I wanted to accomplish with Billy. As I watched, discoloration roiled through, shading blue toward a sickly green and purples into murky reds. He couldn’t have said Get on with it, Walker, any more clearly if he’d spoken aloud. My shoulders flinched back and I looked across the bed at Mel.