Spirit Dances

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Talk to me, Walker. You look like a ghost.” Morrison ducked his head so he could catch my gaze and bring it up, which was surprising enough that it worked.

For a second, anyway. The pedantic part of me then couldn’t help looking over myself, wondering if I really did look like a ghost. Not really: they tended to be more transparent and monochromatic than I was, though I had to give Morrison the nod for my color being off. “Sorry. That woman had breast cancer. Healing it wiped me out.”

“You can…” Morrison sounded like he was about to swallow his tongue. “You can do that?”

“Apparently. I’m also thinking it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, not unless I want to kill myself. There’s probably a better way, maybe if I set up a healing circle, a drum…” I trailed off, letting the building hold me up as I looked toward the theater inside. “Like what they were doing. Creating a controlled center of power. I’ll work it out later. Long-term project.”

One side of Morrison’s mouth curled up. “You’ve changed.”

I blinked back toward him. “Really?” It was a stupid question. I knew he was right. Still, having him come out and say it warranted a slightly incredulous response.

My stupidity didn’t seem to bother him, as he simply nodded instead of calling me out on it. “You’re a lot more confident.”

“I was always confident.” About cars.

For some reason I didn’t have to say the last two words aloud. Morrison managed to hear them anyway, or at least I hoped that was what he was responding to as the rest of his mouth joined the smile. “No, Walker. You were arrogant. You probably still are, but confidence sits better. I think even three months ago you wouldn’t have been standing here telling me flat-out this thing wasn’t a wendigo or that you could heal terminal illnesses but thought you needed a focal point. The whole thing would have embarrassed you.”

Now the corner of my mouth turned up. “And it would’ve pissed you off. Sir.”

“My mother likes to say ‘a body can get used to anything, even being hanged, as the Irishman said.’”

I laughed, then became more solemn. “Oh, great. I don’t know, Morrison. I’ve screwed up so much. So many people’ve gotten hurt. I had to get over myself. And…”

His eyebrow twitched upward and I found myself at a loss. I’d been going to say “Coyote coming back really helped,” which was true, but which was also suddenly something I really didn’t want to say to Morrison. Not when we were getting along so well. So what came out of my mouth was unexpected, if heartfelt: “And you helped. No matter how much you didn’t like it, you took this talent of mine in stride way before I did. It’s been a year now, you know? Since the banshee? A year almost to the day. And you were the one who pulled me onto that case, because you accepted I had a potentially useful skill set whether you understood it or not. So I owe you a lot, boss. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” There was a momentary pause while we were both uncomfortable with all of that before Morrison got another very slight smile, this one sly. “Or were you just saying all that to soften me up for something I’m not going to like?”

I groaned. “No, not on purpose, but now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure I got the killer’s attention when I healed that woman.”

Morrison’s good humor drained away, leaving him to study me as though I was some kind of new and especially nasty stain on his shoe. “Take a walk with me, Detective.”

That couldn’t be good. I fell into step with him, arms wrapped around myself. Sleeveless velvet sheath dresses were very sexy, but not at all warm, and I’d left my coat in Petite for dramatic effect. Women weren’t too bright sometimes. We got a little distance from the theater before Morrison said, “You remember you’re suspended from duty, right?”

“The theater’s not in our jurisdiction anyway. It all works out,” I said flippantly. “It’s not like either thing is going to stop me from investigating.”

He glowered at me, but it was a resigned sort of glower. “I know. Walker, what do you mean, you got his attention? From what you’ve said, from what I’ve seen, you’ve been throwing power around Seattle for the last year like Jackson Pollock threw paint, and this guy only just now notices you? Explain that to me.”

We hadn’t gotten more than fifty feet away from the theater, but I stopped to goggle at my boss. Never mind women not being too bright. I clearly wasn’t too bright.

There was no need to damn my entire gender just because I was a moron. I tented my hands over my nose and mouth, stared at Morrison over my fingertips and finally said, “I can’t. Not unless it’s someone brand-new to the Pacific Northwest, but if it is, I don’t know why he’d choose here to make his attack. I’d want to work from comfortable territory, myself.”

“The date?”

“I don’t think International Everybody Is Irish Day carries any kind of mystical kaboom. If it was the equinox, may…”

I looked skyward. It was a gorgeous clear night, with a few determined stars glittering past the city lights and the moon’s glow. I said a few choice swear words under my breath, then, aloud, said, “It’s not the date. It’s the damned moon.”

Morrison looked up, too. “Full moon? What, it’s a werewolf?”

I glared at him, equilibrium further restored by familiar irritation. “I don’t think there’s any such thing. No, it’s all about dates and phases of the moon with me. Twelfth night, spring equinox, summer solstice, Halloween, wint—”

“Fourth of July?”

I hunched my shoulders guiltily, having skipped that one on purpose. “I don’t think that one has any mystical relevance. I’m pretty sure it was completely my fault, just back lash from the solstice. Backlash from the whole first half of last year. It just reached critical mass in early July. The point is I’m betting this is tied up with the full moon, whatever it is. It’s not as perfect as last year, when the moon lined up with the equinox, but the dancers were still rehearsing then. Even if my guy’s been watching them that long, they wouldn’t have been ready to…harvest.” I wished to hell another word had come to mind.

From Morrison’s expression, so did he. It took several long seconds for him to get over it, but eventually he said, “Can you backtrack the guy?” in a tone prepared for disappointment.

Unfortunately, it was the right preparation. “Not from here. I’m a lousy tracker, Morrison. I’m still relying on getting up high and taking a look around the city for anything that looks wrong.”

Morrison turned his wrist over, looking at his watch, then dug into his lapel to retrieve and activate his cell phone as he headed for the parking lot. “Seattle Center’s closed, but I’ll call ahead and have security let us in.”

“Us?” I ran after him, trying not to gape, and caught his arm to haul him away from the Avalon. “No way. I get to drive. First, you always drive, and second, my coat’s in Petite and I’m freezing.”

“Walker, your vehicle is a death trap.”

“Petite saved my life in a race with the Wild Hunt. I’d like to see your puny fiberglass Avalon do that.” Toyota Avalons weren’t fiberglass. They had full steel bodies, just like my Boss 302 did, but I was willing to bet Morrison didn’t know that. Either way, I was driving my own damned car to the Seattle Center, with or without Morrison in it.

I wasn’t about to admit aloud that I kinda hoped it was with. Petite was accustomed to my long legs climbing in and out of her, but she’d never had a tuxedo-clad man in her soft black leather interior. I thought they’d look good together, and wanted an eyeful of that particular candy.

Instead I got an eyeful of Morrison grinding his teeth. “Do you expect to be outracing the Wild Hunt this evening, Walker?”

“That’s not the point.” I reached Petite—I’d tucked her into as protected a corner as I could find in the lot, since I trusted no one and nothing with my baby’s handcrafted purple paint job—and turned back to my boss, one eyebrow elevated in either challenge or expectation, depending on how he wanted to interpret it.

He said, “I’ll meet you there,” and left me to climb into Petite all by my lonesome.

A dour security guard at the Seattle Center examined Morrison’s credentials and my lack of them—I’d handed them over to Morrison that morning, and for some reason he wasn’t carrying them around with him—and gave us a look that said yeah, sure you’re on police business, but he keyed the elevator on and sent us up to the Space Needle’s rotating floor without any vocal commentary.

Seattle at night from the darkened restaurant was spectacular. Bridges and their reflections stretched across the water, and streets busy with cars glittered with motion. Six hundred feet in the air was much too far away for sound to carry, especially through the heavy glass windows, so the changing lights and roadways had an unusual serenity to them. And that was just with my normal vision.

I wouldn’t have said so aloud, but I was relieved I could trigger the Sight. I wasn’t as bone-exhausted as I’d been in the moments after healing the blonde woman, but I didn’t feel all that bright and perky, either. I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to See anything at all, after that over-exuberant display.

With the Sight triggered, Seattle took on gorgeous overtones, brilliant streaks of red marking human life along the highways, which were themselves black dead strips across the earth, unnatural with their engineered curves and straight lines. Off to the east, the university poured out the whole spectrum, many of the colors reaching both deep and high, as if scholarship had taken root and reached for the stars.

That was the healthy living layer of the city. Beneath it, or beside it, or maybe even occupying the same space, I couldn’t exactly tell, was Seattle’s darker side. I’d only learned to see it recently, and I didn’t like looking at it at all. But I knew better, by now, than to ignore it. There were markers all over of things that had gone wrong: murders, car crashes, suicides, fights. The dance theater was a new bleak mark on the cityscape tonight, and I thought if there was a modicum of fairness in the world, there would also be some kind of nasty streak leading directly from the theater back to our killer’s lair.

There wasn’t, of course. The image of Naomi’s heart being eaten rose again, putting a new thought in my mind: that all the power she’d briefly harbored had also been eaten in one great gulp, effectively hidden from view until it—to put it less than delicately—passed out the other end.

“Ew.” I wrinkled my nose and glanced down, taking in the quiet Seattle Center grounds below me. The icky image faded, leaving me to think that the security guard’s skepticism wasn’t that far off the mark. Sneaking up here could fall under a seriously romantic gesture, if things were just a little different between me and my boss.

But despite a handful of moments in which I’d regretted it, they weren’t different. Morrison had brought me up here to study the city on an esoteric level, not to admire the view. Last time he’d made a gesture that big, it had been an offer to drum me into a shamanic trance, something so far out of his comfort zone that I was still astonished he’d made it. I wasn’t the only one who’d changed, though I didn’t know that he’d appreciate the observation.

He came up behind me—I didn’t know what he’d been patrolling the restaurant for, but he’d made a full round of it while I’d just gone straight to a window—and said, “So what do you see?”

“Nothing wrong, yet. Nothing that looks like a power surge. Do you want to see?” I dragged my attention from the far-below grounds and turned to Morrison, half afraid and half hoping he’d say yes.

His eyebrows furrowed, physical manifestation of emotion that was equally visible in his aura: a jolt of red went through his usually purple-and-blue colors, but was tamped by a swirl of pale yellow, irritation just slightly outgunned by curiosity. “Do I want to see what?”

“Seattle’s colors.” I slipped my heels off and lost my height advantage plus some, since Morrison was still wearing shoes. Being shorter than he was felt vulnerable, and it took active willpower to not put my shoes back on, or at least stand on my toes. Icy palpitations rushed over me, more than just the floor beneath my bare feet being cold. My heartbeat was jackrabbit fast and my stomach full of sloshy discomfort, none of which had happened last time I made this offer. “I tried this with Billy once and it worked. I can lend somebody the Sight for a minute or two, if you want to see how I see.”

Morrison looked at my feet. “Do you have to be barefoot for it to work?”

“No, but you have to stand on my feet and that would hurt like hell, on heels. Take your shoes off, for that matter. I’m not having shod feet standing on my bare ones.”

Curiosity won out, though Morrison shot a glance toward the elevator as he toed his shoes off. “If that guard comes up to check on us…”

I grinned. “Yeah, I know. But wait, it gets worse. Have you ever had anybody older than about six try to stand on your feet?”

“I taught a girlfriend to waltz in college. She stood on my feet.”

“You can waltz?”

“Can’t you?”

“Morrison, some days I’m lucky to be able to walk. Okay, put your feet on mine. No, really stand on them. Don’t worry, Billy must’ve outweighed you by fifty pounds when we did this.” I wrapped my arm around Morrison’s ribs and hauled him right up against me. He emitted a sound I could only define as an undignified squeak, and I grinned again, this time from about a centimeter away from his face. Laughing at him—at us—made it easier to not think about being pressed up against my boss in what could only be considered an intimate manner. Laughing also made it slightly easier to ignore the scent of Old Spice, which, antithesis of trendy or not, really did smell good. It made me want to put my nose in his neck and inhale, which would almost certainly be ill-advised.

That was not the path I needed my thoughts to be going down. I gave myself a mental shake. “This is the ‘worse’ part. How hard did you have to hang on to your girlfriend to keep her on your feet?”

Morrison made another sound, this one more of a grunt and therefore slightly more dignified, and put his arms around my waist. “She was a lot smaller than you are.”

“I’m sure she was smaller than you are, too. Look over my shoulder.” Unreasonably piqued by the comment, I slapped my hand on top of Morrison’s head with a little more force than absolutely necessary. “I bind what I hold and share the Sight of old.”

It was a marginally better couplet than the humiliating gibberish I’d spouted when I’d tried this with Billy. Morrison still slid an arched-eyebrow look at me, which meant I got to watch from up close and personal as gold filtered through his blue eyes, sure sign that magical vision was kicking in.

He reared his head back, enough of a retreat that my stomach soured with hurt disappointment. I loosened my grip, but he tightened his in turn, so I was stuck there, clinging to him. There were circumstances under which this would seem ideal. Somehow this wasn’t turning out to be one of them. Heat crawled up my cheeks and I reminded myself, not for the first time, that I should make a habit of thinking before speaking. If I’d thought about it I’d have never, ever offered to give my boss a glimpse of the world the way I could see it.

Morrison adjusted his weight and balance again, reversing his retreat without ever taking his gaze off mine, and wet his lips before saying, very softly, “Your eyes are gold.”

“So are yours.”

Whatever he’d expected me to say, that apparently wasn’t it. The heart-pounding intimacy of being wrapped around each other couldn’t stand up to Morrison abruptly crossing his eyes, like he’d be able to see them if he only tried hard enough.

I laughed out loud and turned his head slightly, so he was looking over my shoulder again. “Check out the window, boss. You’re supposed to be seeing what I see.”

He murmured, “Subtle silver and blue,” next to my ear. He’d shaved today—I’d only seen him stubbly once in the four years I’d known him—but eighteen hours after the fact, I felt sandpaper brushing my cheek. It gave my heart a little twist and made me want, again, to put my nose in his neck. I was saved only by him adding, “Is that what you see when you look at people?”

“What? No. What?” God, I was a stunning conversationalist. Even if people with bodies mashed up against one another weren’t typically expected to have profound conversations—after all, they were probably either in a subway or a bedroom, if they were as pressed close as Morrison and I were—monosyllabic inanities were still on the disappointing end of witty repertoire. Fortunately after a second or two my brain caught up to what he was probably actually asking. “That’s just me. My aura. It’s usually silver and blue. You’re purple and blue. Billy’s fuchsia and orange.”

“Really? I’m purple? I thought you would be. Like that car of yours.”

My mouth, unwisely, said, “Maybe that’s magic’s way of saying we’re simpatico,” and Morrison, much more wisely, released me and stepped back.

I looked down and to the side, suddenly brimming with self-loathing at a potency level usually reserved for teenagers. If the floor opened up and dropped me six hundred feet to the Seattle Center grounds, that would almost be sufficient punishment for the humiliation of saying something so incredibly stupid and desperate and stupid. And desperate. I’d closed the damned door on a potential relationship with Morrison months ago. The niggling detail that at least one of us had put a foot in that door to keep it from slamming shut was not supposed to bear any relevance to my life.

It might have borne a lot less relevance if I wasn’t half-sure it was Morrison’s foot in the door. He’d asked me to dance at the Halloween party. He’d gotten huffy and territorial when Coyote came back. He’d even come to get me on New Year’s Eve, thus pretty much ensuring he and I would be ringing in the new year together, whether or not anybody else was around.

None of which overruled the fact that he was my boss, but all of which, put together like that, set fire to my humiliation and turned it into good old-fashioned crankiness. Okay, fine, I’d put us in a bit of a compromising position there, but if we were doing some kind of stupid song and dance around a not-relationship, it wasn’t fair that he made small advancing movements and then staged full-scale withdrawals when I said something imprudent but hopeful.

Genuinely pissed off, I snatched up my sandals and glared at my boss. “I’m going to check out the other side of the city. I’ll call you tomorrow if I’ve found anything.”

Morrison’s expression shut down, betraying a whole lot as it did so. I wasn’t sure he knew what he’d done wrong, but I was even less sure he didn’t know. I caught a hint of I deserved that and a pinch of I’m your boss, how dare you and some disappointment and some resignation, all of which transformed into a mask as stony as my own before he said, “I’ll tell security you’ll be out shortly,” and stalked to the elevator.

I waited until the doors dinged shut before pitching a shoe after him as hard as I could.