“I am absolutely certain you’re you,” Jamie said, cramming his feet into his sneakers. “You trust me, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Mick said promptly.
“Good, blue eyes, that’s good. Now can you tell me where you are?”
“I, um . . . ”
“Jamie,” Lila hissed, “what on earth is going on?”
“Mick’s in trouble,” he said over his shoulder, heading down the short hallway to the living room to find his keys. The Saturn was Lila’s, and he didn’t normally drive it, relying on buses and subway trains to get him to and from work, but there were no buses this time of night, and he couldn’t leave Mick out there in the state he was in.
“I should have guessed. God knows you wouldn’t race off like this for your mother.” Mick and Lila had not taken to each other the one time they’d met.
“Can you find a street sign?” he said to Mick.
A long pause, during which Jamie did not panic because he could still hear Mick breathing. He and Lila stood staring at each other, neither one of them quite willing to have the argument they were on the brink of.
“Rossiter!” Mick said triumphantly. “I’m on the Rossiter Street Bridge.”
One of the jumpers had gone off the Rossiter Street Bridge; Jamie wondered if Mick had remembered that, or if this was just unhappy coincidence. “Good, blue eyes. Now, don’t hang up, okay? It’ll take me ten minutes to get to you, but I’ll stay on the phone the whole time. You can talk to me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Mick said. He sounded lost again. “But why would you . . . ”
“Why would I what, blue eyes?” Jamie asked, buttoning a couple of random buttons on his shirt. Lila tsked, rolled her eyes, and came over to do the buttons up properly.
“I stole his life. Why would you help me?”
There was the confirmation Jamie hadn’t needed. “Because you need me,” he said. “Besides, remember you trust me? And I don’t think you stole anybody’s life.”
Lila finished buttoning his shirt, stepped back with a firm pat to his chest. “You can make it up to me later,” she said in a sultry whisper and turned to make her way back to bed.
“Blue eyes?” Jamie said. “You still with me?” He left the apartment, took the stairs two at a time.
“I, um . . . yeah. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If you really thought I wasn’t me?”
“Course I would,” Jamie said. “But that’s not what I think. I think you are you.” Out into the crisp night air, around to the back of the building and the parking lot.
“Oh,” Mick said, a barely voiced exhalation.
Jamie unlocked the Saturn, wedged himself in. “Talk to me,” he said to Mick. “When did you start feeling funny?”
“I’ve always been fake,” Mick said, his voice thin and desolate and eerie. “Glass eyes.”
It was something Jamie had thought more than once himself, pale as Mick’s eyes were against his unnaturally black hair. “You didn’t think you were fake yesterday.”
“Of course I did. I’ve always been fake. It just didn’t . . . it didn’t bother me before.”
Jamie whipped the car around in the tightest three-point turn that parking lot had ever seen, and put his foot down. This time of night, traffic was sparse, and he drove hard and fast, all the while encouraging Mick to keep talking, asking questions, trying both to keep him from jumping—for there was never the slightest doubt in Jamie’s mind that that was why Mick was on the Rossiter Street Bridge—and to get more information, some hint as to the parameters of the thing they were dealing with. He wondered if it was Mick’s esper that had made it hit so hard, so quickly. Wondered if in another three or four days, it would be him on the bridge.
He left the car half on the sidewalk on the north bank of the river and walked, carefully not allowing himself to run, out to the midpoint where Mick was standing, leaning against the railing like a drunk.
At least he wasn’t on the railing, and Jamie took what felt like the first breath he’d had in years.
He hung up the phone only when he saw Mick glance at him, and in another three strides, he was standing beside his partner. The Rossiter Street Bridge wasn’t very high, but it was high enough.
“Hey, blue eyes.”
Mick was looking carefully at his hands where they rested on the bridge railing. He whispered something.
“Sorry, what?”
“You can tell now, can’t you? That I’m an impostor?”
“Oh, Christ, Mick,” Jamie groaned, although it wasn’t Mick’s fault, and he knew it. Except, said a mean and entirely reasonable voice in the back of his head, that he won’t go for the esper training like Jesperson’s been on at him . . .
A sudden, blessed inspiration. “Come on. We’re going to go see Jesperson.”
“Jesperson?”
“You remember, the nice man we work for? Class nine necromancer. No impostor could ever get by him.”
And to his relief, Mick said, “Okay,” and let himself be shepherded to the car.
At 8:30 that morning, Jamie was leaning against the wall of the BPI clinic, watching Mick sleep the sleep of the heavily drugged. Jesperson had wasted no time in calling out the night-shift decon team, and then had torn strips out of Jamie’s hide for not thinking to do the same. Jamie was too relieved to mind, too relieved, now, to do anything but stand and watch Mick sleep and occasionally remember to take a mouthful of lukewarm coffee.
“Well,” said Jesperson, scaring the living daylights out of him, “at least we know considerably more than we did.” And he added, almost under his breath, “Damn and blast the boy,” making the ritual sign to nullify his words with his free hand.
Jamie eyed the stack of reports in his other hand with foreboding. “What do we know, sir?”
“It’s definitely a curse, and it was definitely laid on Sharpton, rather than being transmitted by a curse-vector. But there’s no structure to it.”
“Meaning?”
“This isn’t the work of a magic-user,” Jesperson said grimly. “It’s not even really a curse, in the technical sense. More like an extremely powerful ill-wishing.”
“Thought those went out with the bustle.”
“That’s just the problem, Keller. Ill-wishing is much less common these days, thanks mostly to improvements in public education, but by its nature it will always happen—if only among the ill-educated and the very young.”
“You don’t think a child did this?”
“I was speaking in general terms. And, no, this curse is not the product of a child’s psyche.”
“So it must be someone without much education?”
“Or someone whose mind is not well-controlled at the moment. There is a reason necromancers fear senile dementia above all other illnesses, you know.”
Jamie frowned, trying to figure out where Jesperson was headed. “Mrs. Coulson? But—”
“She and Sharpton are the only two who have survived. And Sharpton only survived because something—training or motherwit or God knows what—impelled him to call you before he—”
“Did anything stupid,” Jamie finished hastily; his memories of the Rossiter Street Bridge were still too vivid for comfort. “So you want me to go see Mrs. Coulson again?”
“At the very least, that ill-wishing needs to be raised. I’m giving you Juliet-seven until Sharpton’s back on his feet. She can take care of that part.”
“Yessir,” Jamie said without enthusiasm. Juliet-seven was Marie-Gabrielle Parker, one of this year’s crop of rookies.
“She’s a class two necromancer,” Jesperson said, amused. “And someone has to blood the tyros, Keller.”