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.
CHAPTER NINE
Emotional turmoil probably wasn’t the best mental state to hunt bad guys in, but I stomped around the empty restaurant anyway, widdershins to its rotation, and stopped where I could see the northern half of the city. Everything blazed with too much light, like my temper offered the Sight extra oomph. That would’ve been great, if it just zoomed in on one particular shining spot, but no, instead it had to make everything more brilliant and vital. The actual places of power I knew about, like Thunderbird Falls on Lake Washington, were glorious, white magic reaching for the sky like welder’s arcs.
The phrase white magic caught my attention and broke my own temper tantrum. The power dancing over the waterfall was literally white, fed daily by the goodwill and positive energy of those people who were drawn to a place where magic had happened. They had chosen to make the new falls a place of companionship, if not exactly worship. The visible-to-me result of so many Magic Seattleites offering up a bit of who they were to keep the place refreshed and invigorated was a magic made of so many people and colors and auras that it became white, a culmination of all colors.
I’d never thought about it before, but the correlation between white equaling good magic and black equaling bad magic suddenly seemed pretty fricking obvious. It didn’t even strike me as much of a values judgment. It was just that bad magic tended to be detractive—like, oh, say, eating somebody’s heart out—where good tended to be additive. In the light spectrum you generally ended up with either black or white if you did enough of either of those things.
Well, in theory, anyway. My vaguely recalled artistic attempts at finger painting as a child suggested if you kept adding one color to another what you really got was nasty brown-gray muck, but that was of absolutely no help here and now. Besides, auras blended better than acrylics.
Minor turn-of-phrase epiphanies aside, the Sight-bright city wasn’t showing me much of what I hoped to see. I was disappointed, but a small calm spot inside me suggested I wasn’t surprised. If I’d been planning a major power-grab, I’d have created some kind of haven where my newly stolen magic wasn’t the moral equivalent of a neon arrow flashing to say BAD GUY LOCATED HERE! It wouldn’t be a null spot, either, because that would be just as obvious. It would look, in essence, like the rest of the city: streaked with life and activity, but not so much or so little as to stand out.
I probably should have thought of that before dragging Morrison up to the Space Needle in the middle of the night. Not that I was about to apologize. I went back to the elevator and collected my shoe, keeping an idle eye on the view while I waited for the doors to open. It appeared I was right about getting up high to have a look around not being sufficient as a tracking method. Well, I lived and I learned. Though more accurately I got stabbed, beaten up, rolled over, hung out to dry and learned, but at least I was learning.
And if the view-from-above approach hadn’t worked, then I could be grateful that for once, I actually knew what tactic to try next. Shoes dangling from my fingertips, I headed back home to wake Coyote from a sound sleep.
SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1:58 A.M.
In an ideal world, that would have meant climbing into bed and putting my cold feet on him. On the other hand, in that ideal world I would’ve had no reason to accidentally take Morrison on a date. Ideal, it seemed, had many strange and unexplored convolutions. Either way, instead of climbing into bed, I changed into sweats and a T-shirt, got my drum and tucked a blanket against my apartment’s front door to cut down on the draft. I hadn’t eaten in hours, so I was as prepared as I could be to settle down on the living-room floor to thump a quiet fingertip beat against the drum’s painted surface.
Fifteen months ago, mostly I’d moved from one realm to another by dint of getting hit on the head, or from pure exhaustion loosening me from my body and sending me somewhere else. I’d gotten better at it, and could largely step from the Middle World—day to day reality—into shamanic trances that let me travel to a wide variety of different planes at whim.
My whim was evidently not on call tonight. Half-formed images kept flitting through my mind: Patricia Raleigh’s snarl as she’d swung the baseball bat, Naomi’s heart being gobbled up, Raleigh’s shock when the bullet impacted her shoulder, the blonde woman’s cancer stretching forward into her future, Raleigh lying wide-eyed and shallow-breathed on the floor, and more vividly than any of those, Morrison’s eyes filtering gold.