“All right. I need to close up some stuff and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Yet another reason to love my rattly old Rover: four-wheel drive and aggressive tires. Not that they’d save me if I drove like an idiot, but I’d seen enough SUVs in ditches from the ice and mud after the storms to take care and assume nothing.

The Rover managed the trip fine, even with a few patches of ice pretending to be snow in the curvy shadows where Fauntleroy Way wriggles along the coast and then turns inland to climb the hill that I live on top of. There were plenty of parking spaces in Endolyne Joe’s lot, and I could see through the restaurant’s windows that the place was mostly empty.

Officially, the area is Fauntleroy, but the bit just south of the ferry landing is called Endolyne—pronounced “end o’ line,” since it used to be the end of the trolley line until sometime in the 1950s when the last of the Interurban service was shut down. The restaurant is supposedly named for a notorious womanizing trolley conductor called Endolyne Joe, but I wasn’t sure how much truth there was in the tale.

Once again, Will was waiting at a table in a warm corner while the few other customers in the place had chosen to sit at the counter in the immediate blast of heat from the blue-and-white-tiled kitchen. I was hungry, but I had very little desire to eat and shooed the waiter off with “Just coffee, please.” Will reached for my hands and I let him take them without either resisting or aiding. I felt a cold that had nothing to do with the white dusting of snow outside.

“Harper, I’m sorry. That was just the stupidest thing I could have done.”

“I don’t know—freaking out seems like a pretty normal reaction to what happened. Abandoning me under the viaduct… now that was a little rough.” It wasn’t until the words were out of my mouth that I realized how pissed off I was, how saddened, how very disappointed. And how little I cared if I hurt him back.

He shook his head and looked upset. “I know. It was… rotten. I was so shocked by what I thought I saw…”

The waiter returned with a thick-walled mug of coffee for each of us and a plate of coffee cake for Will. I pulled my hands back and wrapped them around the mug, happy for the extra heat and the escape from Will’s grip. I glanced aside and didn’t see any sign of the blue filament of Grey stuff I’d seen on his hands at our last parting, so my discomfort was purely human.

“What did you think you saw?” I asked.

He looked uncomfortable and I noticed that the glow of energy around him fluxed greenish and sank down. “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t true.”

I was out of patience with being diplomatic. “Maybe it was true. Maybe the thing you saw that you don’t want to believe really was a zombie and maybe I really did tear it into pieces.”

Will jerked back against the upholstery of his seat. “What?”

I pitched my voice down to a harsh whisper. “I don’t know what you think you saw—what sort of justification or confabulation you’ve made for it—but the fact is two monsters walked up to us on the street and I dismantled one of them. To you they looked like bums, but to me they were a hairy man and a walking corpse, and the zombie had to go. And that’s what they really were and that’s what really happened. I’m not crazy, before you ask. I’m telling you the unvarnished truth: I talk to ghosts; I work for monsters. That’s the big, ugly secret you always wanted to know. There it is.”

I sat back with my coffee mug and glared at him and waited to hear what he would say.

Will gaped at me, his face very pale. The light reflecting off the yellow walls turned his silver hair a buttery blond and he looked young and confused and charmingly nerdy behind his spectacles. I felt like I’d kicked a puppy.

“Why?” he choked out.

“Why what?” I replied in a milder voice. “Why work for them? Why tell you now? Why lie?”

“Why are you being like this?”

“I’m not ‘being’ anything but truthful—as ugly as it is. This is why I never discuss my cases and why I disappear and why terrible things seem to happen around me. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. Usually it’s not nice or pretty—it’s brutal and damned ugly and I wish I wasn’t stuck in it. But I do the best I can to keep the ugly from spreading. That’s what I had to do Friday night.”

“By… tearing that… creature”—Will fought to get the words out, and I could see the energy around him twisting and flushing with clashing colors—red, green, orange, and vivid naked blue—“…tearing it apart… you were… making something better?”

I had tried to explain it before and I knew he wasn’t taking it in any better now, so why waste the breath repeating myself “Yes” was all I said.

“But… what happ—”

“What do you think happened?” I demanded, leaning forward again, pinning his gaze with mine. I wished I could push on him somehow—at least stop the strobing, polychromatic storm around his body—but it wouldn’t have been right.

“You—I don’t know.” He slumped in his seat. “I don’t know what you did. I saw you reach into him and he… fell apart. And there was some light. And then he was gone.”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s about it.”

The colors around him collapsed to a miserable olive green that clung like toxic smoke. He looked shrunken and disjointed. “How often? How often does it happen?”

I started to say it wasn’t common, but when I tallied it in my head, the number of disturbing and awful things I’d done or seen or had a hand in was too big, and the zombie was actually one of the better incidents—at least someone had taken some relief from it. My pause was too long, and Will saw me calculating the number of horrors.

He shook his head. “I can’t live with that. I can’t take on that… breakage.”

I was torn between outraged silence and screaming, but I chose to speak calmly.

“I don’t have a choice.”

“I guess… this isn’t going to work, then. I am sorry. I am.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m a great girl, except for the ghosts and the craziness.” He shifted in his seat and I held up my hand to stop him. “No. I think it’s my turn to go.”

I got up, still holding my coffee cup. I handed it to a waiter as he passed. “I can’t finish this.” Then I looked back down at Will. It seemed like I ought to kiss him good-bye—a nice Hollywood gesture—but I didn’t. “I am sorry, too, Will. I love you but I don’t belong with you.”

I left, villainous and caddish, because although I felt angry and wrecked and horrid I was also relieved. At least it was over and I didn’t have to care about anyone but me. I wondered if by “breakage,” Will meant mine. Maybe he thought I was crazy and that’s what he couldn’t bear. Or maybe he got it and he just couldn’t face that. Even a tiny dose of the Grey was more than I’d wish on most people, and certainly not on Will, no matter how upset or brokenhearted I was.

Driving was difficult. My eyes kept tearing up and the fog of the Grey seemed worse with the snow light. The road was icy and treacherous—like me, I thought, and then got angry with myself for it. Anger made the tears stop, at least, and I thought I would not go home and feel sorry for myself.

I killed time going to the gym and then doing some research for Nanette Grover’s cases before I headed home again, a little depressed and just wanting to be alone with the simple needs of home and pet. I did chores and played with Chaos for a while. The weather didn’t seem to be agreeing with her, and I caught her shivering a few times. I wondered if I ought to turn up the heat in the condo, though it didn’t seem uncomfortable to me. I reminded myself that she was six years old, so she was entitled to an occasional bout of crankiness, and offered her a raisin, which elicited a bouncing war dance and begging for more treats.

She tried to steal any treats I might be hiding by climbing my legs and searching in my sweaters before crawling around my shoulders to get tangled in my hair and plant whiskery ferret kisses on my face and neck.