Sunlight from the window behind her was captured in her hair, streams of fire that helped lighten an orange-streaked yellow aura that lay flat against her skin. That wasn’t right: when I’d last seen Mel’s colors, they’d danced and swirled around her, even in the midst of a very bad situation. That they were dulled and drained now worried me. I reached across Billy to take her hand.
Power poured into me, unrelenting as a river delta. I blinked twice, each blink bringing my second sight deeper into Melinda’s aura, until I could see what she was doing. A ball of sunlight was collected over her heart, drawing all her surface colors down into it. Orange and yellow ran against the flow of blood, pulling in from her skin to become evermore intense as it neared her heart. Once there, she pushed it outward, toward Billy. Billy’d made a similar offering to me a few months earlier, lending his strength to my own so I could try to defeat a banshee before it killed again.
But the life force Melinda was pouring into her husband wasn’t helping him stay alive. I kept one hand over Melinda’s and put the other over Billy’s heart, turning my focus down to him. His colors were fuchsia and orange, oddly complementary to Melinda’s, and I could feel that they were locked up tight, kept in the psychic equivalent of a strongbox. A trickle escaped, but not to keep his heart beating and mind functioning. It felt as if it was being drained, a pinhole leak that something was feeding from. The thinnest fraction of that was allowed to divert and keep him alive, like a vampire that knew perfectly well it would die if its food source did.
Right now, though, Billy wasn’t providing the real food source. Melinda’s sunshine strength was being swallowed whole by lethargic blackness that had a heavier feeling to it than death. Death held a remoteness to it, a star-spangled void that didn’t carry burdens; but the darkness that held Billy felt like sleep. It was laden with dreams and portent, pressing down like night paralysis, as if it wanted something. Death, in my experience, didn’t want. It just took.
“Melinda.” I wasn’t quite sure I was talking out loud, but she looked up, dark eyes shining with too little light. “Mel, you have to stop it,” I said quietly. “You’re exhausting yourself, and if you keep doing this it’ll be bad for the baby.” I could see the baby’s cheerful rose-colored glow, still safe from the power drain Melinda was putting on herself, but with the way she shed energy, it was a matter of time before the baby started to suffer. “You have to stop. You’re not helping Billy by doing this. You’re helping whatever’s done this to him.”
Disbelief, then rage, flashed in Melinda’s eyes before the stream of power cut off so sharply I felt blinded for a moment. I lifted a hand to my eyes, shaking my head, and mumbled, “You’re going to have to teach me how to do that. Jesus.”
She gave me a very faint smile. “Later.” Melinda, like Billy, was not only comfortable with the world of the paranormal, but had sought it out. She’d told me once she and Billy had met at a paranormal activities conference, and that her grandmother had been a bruja, a witch. I would have snorted up my sleeve at such an admission a year ago, but as my life had grown increasingly weird, I’d discovered a couple of things. One was that more people than I’d have ever imagined believed in a mystical world that complemented our own.
The other was that I was desperately grateful for those friends who didn’t think I was insane, especially when I’d been less than generous in my opinions about their sanity before my own world had turned upside down.
“Morrison?” I was half afraid to turn my head to look at the captain. My grip on second sight was usually so tenuous that moving my physical body while trying to hold on to it was a work of vast concentration.
On the other hand, when Morrison had begun the drumbeat, something abnormal had happened. It usually took at least a breath or two before I could slide into another state of consciousness. I generally had to wrestle with deliberate acceptance, with choosing, to exit what I was learning to think of as the Middle World, and I always had to struggle to hold on to the shaky ability to see auras and energies. I did not slam into double vision and healing trances with no time to blink. Maybe I was getting better at this.
Or maybe it had something to do with Morrison.
I made myself look at him instead of pursuing that thought. He hadn’t stopped drumming, although he looked far more uncomfortable with it than Gary ever had. A twinge of unhappiness sailed through me as I wished it was Gary doing the drumming. His enthusiasm for whatever weird shit I was about to get myself, and him, into, somehow made it easier. “Think you can keep that up for about fifteen minutes?”
Morrison’s mouth pulled into a sour twist. “Pretty sure I can handle it. If I start getting carpal tunnel I’ll let Melinda pick it up.”
I stuck my tongue out, feeling more like an e-mail emoticon expressing exasperation than a person making a face at my boss. Morrison looked completely taken aback, which I found surprisingly satisfying. I went with the victory and turned back to Billy. “Give me fifteen minutes, and then stop. I should wake right up.”
“And if you don’t?”
Visceral memory shot through me, the warmth of Morrison’s hand on my shoulder just before a monster from another realm of reality had eaten me for lunch. The touch had saved my life, although Morrison sure as hell didn’t know that, and I really didn’t like thinking about it.
“Then put your hand on my bare skin,” I muttered. Mel, whose hand I still held, lifted our hands, and then her eyebrows. I glanced up long enough to meet her gaze, then looked away, remembering Phoebe’s insistence that she’d shaken me repeatedly, trying to wake me, but that I’d flinched back into wakefulness the instant my boss touched me.
“It has to be Morrison.” I could barely hear myself through the mumbles, and try as I might I didn’t miss Melinda’s slow smile or the glance she gave the police captain at the end of the bed. I sighed and straightened my spine, trying to concentrate on the drumbeat and nothing else. I wasn’t sure where to begin with bringing Billy out of his sleep, but sitting around feeling embarrassed that I had a cru—
The door behind me banged open, preventing me, thankfully, from finishing that thought, and an incredulous voice demanded, “What in the hell is going on in here?”
CHAPTER 5
Next time I get handed an exciting new power set, I want it to include a Spidey sense that warns me of oncoming danger. Or, in this case, oncoming doctors. I yanked my hands away from Billy like a guilty pickpocket. Morrison stopped drumming, and true to my word, my second sight fell away in a rush. Disorientation buzzed over me and I shoved to my feet, wondering why normality felt so wrong. I saw Melinda come to her feet, too, but the doctor was scowling at Morrison. “What,” he demanded again, “the hell is going on in here?”
That offended me on all kinds of levels. First off, any questions about what was going on ought to have been addressed to Melinda, as the ill man’s spouse. Second, while Morrison did have the drum, and I could see how that made him the instigator in the doctor’s eyes, I was the one who’d been doing the laying-on of hands. I might not like my powers, but I wasn’t by God going to let somebody else get blamed for them. Especially not Morrison, who’d taken enough on the chin this morning.
Third, the guy simply hit all my arrogant-prick medical professional buttons. He stalked across the room in his white doctor’s coat and put his hand out for the drum. A heavy ring with a yellow stone glittered on his hand, making the gesture all the more imperious and insulting. I thrust myself between him and Morrison like a knife, glowering. Morrison’s chair scraped on the floor as he pushed it back, but to my surprise, he didn’t stand.