I threw all of my concentration into it, pressed my power into reading the paper. Something that felt like a sinus headache started to throb, but I pushed even harder in my attempt to read the letter. The world went black.

When I woke up, I found myself lying on the floor, tipped over in Connor’s chair. Luckily, since I had fallen over behind both our desks, I was blocked from the view of anyone who would have been passing down the aisle. The back of my head hurt like crazy, and when I felt it, there was a painful lump just above the base of my skull from where I had hit the floor.

I stood up, shaking worse than I usually did after a psychometric episode. I stumbled over to my desk and fished around in my drawer for a roll of Life Savers. Erring on the side of caution, I grabbed two of them. This wasn’t normal. Usually I felt a little drained from using my power, but it shouldn’t have been this bad.

Someone or something had blocked me from reading Connor’s letter.

16

I headed home nursing the goose egg on the back of my head. I was all prepared for a good sulky walk and then a few hours of sleep before meeting up with Connor at Central Park again, but sadly, what I wanted didn’t seem to matter much to the universe at large. When I parted the curtains of the movie theater, there was Mina, sitting in one of the coffee shop’s comfy chairs, waiting for me. Her back was pressed into one corner of the chair, and her legs were thrown in irreverence over the opposite arm of it, showing off her evil little curves. She was still dressed as if she had come from watching The Matrix one too many times.

“What are you doing here?” I said. I quickly closed the curtain behind me, not really sure what I was trying to hide. The offices were well obscured behind the door at the very back of the theater, so all I really ended up hiding was the movie theater itself. I quickly looked around the coffee shop. At this time of night there weren’t too many people I knew from the D.E.A. in there. More important, I was glad to see that Jane wasn’t there. Her running into Mina right now was the last thing I wanted.

Mina swung her legs off the arm of the chair and crossed them at the ankle as she sank farther back into the cushions, giving a catlike stretch that accentuated every curve of her body. I tried not to notice, but failed miserably.

“You must really like vampires, huh?” she said when she settled down.

I wasn’t following. “I’m sorry . . . ?”

Mina looked at me like I was thick in the head. “I’ve been sitting here for hours,” she said. “You must have sat in there and watched Nosferatu a million times today.”

Right, Nosferatu. It all came clear. For a moment I’d forgotten that Mina didn’t know what I really did for a living, so she assumed I had been sitting in the movie theater all day.

Still, what was she doing here at all?

I sat down across from her and leaned in close, whispering. “Have you been following me, Mina?”

She laughed, a little bit of that old-school crazy lighting up in her eyes. “God, that sounds so stalkery . . .”

“And yet here we are.”

“I didn’t follow you the whole day,” she said, as if that somehow excused following me at all. Her face turned to a mask that was a combination of disgust and disdain.

“Okay, look, yes, I followed you,” she continued, “but I didn’t want to pay to get into the Javits Center, not with all those comic nerds there. They kept approaching me outside of the place, getting their skeevies all over me, asking if I had come as Trinity or some chick from BloodRayne, whatever the hell that is. Creeps. Anyway, I just had to wait you out. I lost you for a few hours after that, but caught up with you again. When you came into this coffee shop, I followed you in, but man, you and your vampires.”

“I’m sorry,” I fired back. “Are you giving me shit over vampires?” I laughed. “Yeah, I’m the one who loves vampires, Mina. Me. Yep. Pot, have you met Kettle?”

I stood up, fuming. “Look,” I said, staring down into her eyes with the darkest, most serious look I could muster. “You can’t follow me like this, Mina. So knock it off.”

I tried to walk away, but she grabbed my sleeve. She tugged it much harder than I thought her capable of, and I fell off balance into the same chair she sat in. Mina wrapped her arms around me to hold me in place, cradling me on her lap. Before I could wriggle free, her voice was in my ear.

“I can follow you, and I will,” she said with commanding sharpness. “You forget. I don’t have a ‘day job’ to go to, and who’d hire an ex-con, anyway? An ex-con, by the way, who ended up in jail in the first place because someone—and I’m not naming names here, Simon—didn’t have my back. I’ve got all the time in the world to follow you around, thanks to that. Until you agree to help me, I’ve got nowhere else to go. So stop hanging out at comic conventions and watching movies all day, and say you’ll do what I’m asking you to. I need to get my hands on The Scream.”

Despite her obvious delight in torturing me, there was also that note of desperation in her voice again.

“Don’t you think need is a little strong, Mina?” I said, trying to twist out of her hold on me. To anyone watching it might have looked like we were a frisky new couple fooling around. That would turn a few heads around here, since everybody knew I was with Jane. I wanted to break free, but Mina was even stronger than I remembered. “You don’t need that painting; you want it.”

“That’s really none of your concern,” Mina said, finally pushing me away. I slid onto the coffee table and across several open magazines before falling to the floor, but not before slamming my hip bone on one of the corners of the table.

Pain shot down my leg in tiny needles.

“The only thing you should be concerned with,” Mina continued, “is what I’ll do to your precious little Janey if you don’t go along with my plan. Help me out and we part ways, no harm done. I’m out of your life forever.” She stood up, not even bothering to give me a hand from where I was on the floor. The look on her face was one of disbelief as she shook her head at me. “God, how can you stand it? Doesn’t living an upright life just drive you nuts? Going shopping instead of taking what you want, having a happy little girlfriend, going to the movies all day? You used to do bold, beautiful, brash things. You used to be somebody worth knowing. If I lived your life now, I’d die of boredom.”

For a second I wanted to just get it out of my system and tell Mina everything—about my psychometric powers, the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, the Fraternal Order, even about the fact that Jane and I weren’t such the happy little couple—but I held my tongue.

I knew Mina too well. If I even hinted at any part of my new life or showed any signs of weakness, she would only twist it to her advantage.

Could I believe her? Would she keep her word and leave me alone if I just did this one last job for her? Mina had always had a strange honor-among-thieves thing she stuck to. Her words might be crazy, her legality was questionable, but in matters with her associates, she kept her word. Just get rid of Mina by simply helping her out with this one job. Get in, get out, say good riddance, and have her get the hell out of my life for good, as she promised. I could compromise myself this one last time if it would protect the people I cared for. I could already feel myself justifying it. It wasn’t like I was doing the actual stealing. More of an assist, really . . .

I picked myself up off the floor of the coffee shop. “You may find my life boring,” I said. I brushed a bunch of muffin crumbs from the table off my pants. “But I like it just fine, thank you very much. Just tell me when we’re doing this.”