2 Death Rejoices (11 page)

I sighed and slogged to the bathroom to splash some cool water on my face, and was alarmed at what I saw: bags under my eyes, burnt nose and forehead from an unsuccessful tanning session, peeling skin along the edges. My bangs stood straight up and flopped sadly to the left. There were pillow creases on my cheek. Maybe pillow creases were sexy.

I lit a pink candle, closed my eyes, and told myself I was not only powerful and limber, but gorgeous. I asked the mirror to show me something fabulous. Sadly, I'm not easily duped, and the glamour spell failed spectacularly. The only thing staring out of my mirror was a tired nitwit with bad hair whose half-snarl reflected a serious attitude problem.

I did a quick make-up routine, a sweep of mascara and a dotting of lip gloss, fairly certain I was fooling no one but feeling slightly better. Harry's feed last night should have bolstered my immune system, but my cold was clinging like sick magic; I still felt drained, feverish, and weary, and in desperate need of caffeine and four more hours under the covers.

How was I going to survive Hood's evil training routine? I brushed my ash blonde hair and dragged it up into a high ponytail; my hair, once shorn too-short by a psycho hose-beast named Danika Sherlock, had finally grown long enough to be cut in a shoulder-length bob. It was still unruly most of the time. Sometime between an ill-conceived necromimesis spell and my being nearly ripped apart by ghouls, my hair had developed a kink in it that neither combing, nor mousse, nor flat iron could tame. Harry told me this was cosmic punishment for dabbling in off-white magic, tiptoeing on the left hand path. He suggested that next time it might be worse, like a bulging nose wart, or an un-pluckable black hair in an areola; I had given him a rude left-handed gesture and told him to shut his undead trap.

I flexed at the mirror, imagining I was Linda Hamilton in one of the
Terminator
flicks, visualizing badass muscles that weren't there. I aimed finger guns at the mirror and did a broad wink. That wasn't any better. The candle had left a pale pink blob of wax on the marble top of my vanity; after I blew it out, I had to use my thumbnail to scrape the evidence off so Harry wouldn't see. A tiny ivory shard caught my eye.

The Waterloo tooth sat on the counter top. It hadn't been there three minutes ago. I frowned at it and stomped over to toss it in my nightstand drawer. Then I shoved my legs into yoga pants, grabbed a faded black t-shirt (
World of Warcraft, for the Horde!
), hauled on a pair of pink leather gloves and my jogging shoes, and padded through the kitchen to the back door.

“Nice morning. Did you warm up?” Hood said, enjoying himself far too much considering the obscene hour. He gave me a once-over; because of his well-honed cop face, I couldn't tell what he thought. “Ready for a work out?”

My idea of a workout was having to get off the couch to fetch more Fig Newtons. Hood didn't wait for a reply. He tossed me a curt, “Keep up,” and took off.

I blinked at the sight of his tight tush jogging toward the road and, drawing a deep breath, started after him. My short legs had to pump twice as quickly to keep up with his long-legged strides. I matched him, though, determined not to let him keep his smug grin for long. My ponytail whipped from side to side as I found my sniffly-snuffling rhythm.

“Are you actually sick?” Hood asked. “I didn't believe your Tweet this morning.”

“My what?”

“I follow you on Twitter.”

“What? I don't have a Twitter account.”

“Sure you do.” He slowed to finger-brush his iPhone and flashed me a Twitter profile. The handle was @MBGrtWShark. The profile picture was me giving a camera the finger. Classy. The most recent Tweet said:
Even superheroes get the #sniffles
.

Harry.

“To do: clock a dead guy with a sock full of pennies.” I rubbed my forehead. “Next you're gonna tell me I have a Facebook page.”

“If you don't, who's been playing Farmville with me?” He smiled and started up again at a healthy jog. “I never understood why they call you the Great White Shark?”

“The first case I worked on with the FBI involved hunting a sexually sadistic serial killing revenant who hunted kids. It was awful.”

“I remember that. Jeremiah Prost.”

“Yep. Forensic psychiatrists call serial sexual sadists the ‘great white sharks’ of the criminal world. Some idiot journalist figured the worst bad guy should be fought by the best good guy, and ran with that. Called me the Great White Shark of psychic investigations. It stuck. Little did they know, I'm
so
not the best good guy.”

“If you get winded, fall back.”

Pretending I wasn't, I panted behind him, “Pshaw.”

His body made it look easy as he drove his lean body forward along the road, his running shoes crunching gravel. The sheer physicality of him still took me by surprise, though it shouldn't have; I'd seen it every damn morning for the past two weeks.

“To the end of the road and back today,” he said easily, “I clocked it at a mile and a half. That okay with you?”

“Twice, if you like,” I bragged. “I don't get tired.”

This was a half-truth; Harry's resilience offered me a great deal of stamina. Though out of shape and wrestling with the head cold, I was still blessed with a touch of the unnatural. Sure, Hood could beat me in most things, hands-down, but if he was expecting me to collapse after a bit of jogging, he had no idea just how wrong he was.

We made it to the end, right up to the wooden barriers blocking the end of the road at the fishing camps, when he took a sideways jot and continued past them into the shade on a sun-dappled seasonal snowmobile track. I knew it eventually met up with the one that came around the side of my cabin. If we ran all the way around the lake, that was going to be a lot more than a mile and a half. Hood carried on, not taking his eyes off the forest, seeming to look far into the distance, through a stand of oak, red-berried Elder, false indigo, and late golden currant bushes at the upcoming curve, where, in rippling blue slashes, the lake showed through moisture-jeweled greenery.

Hood's voice was gruff but not out of breath. “You know, I've been a real dick to you.”

“I know, right? Six A.M. is bullshit.”

“I meant, a dick about Dunnachie.”

I blew my bangs out of my face with an upward puff. This was the first time since Dunnachie's disappearance that the sheriff had verbally brought him up, but I knew what he meant. He'd been tense with me, suspicious without asking outright, and every once in a while I caught him giving me the side-eye.

“It's been rough on you,” I allowed. “You lost your chief deputy, your friend.”

“Not your fault,” he said. “I treated you like it was. I think I'm here every morning more to punish you than to help Chapel.”

“Jogging around the lake with a hot cop isn't really punishment.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I know you didn't kill him.”

“I didn't,” I agreed, but the lump in my throat prevented me from saying anything else.

He slowed by a bunch of fallen logs, covered in twigs and time and moss, and then stopped. I didn't complain; my lungs were burning. Through the noise of my coughing, Hood stared up at the hints of early morning sun peeking through the canopy, then passed a hand over his face and stood looking down a tumble-down shoreline littered with rock and muck to gaze at the lake.

“Is he out there somewhere, Marnie?”

The question made me go still. I scanned his torso without success for the tell-tale bulge of a firearm, then felt silly and disloyal for doing it. “People don't just vanish.” I heard myself say, but thought of the late Ruby Valli, invisible witch-walking psycho-geezer, and added, “Generally speaking.”

“Look, if I hurt you during training, if I get too rough, it's just because I'm used to training full-grown men, and you're so small. You know that, right? It has nothing to do with Dunnachie.”

“You're just saying this so you can knock me around some more. What's it going to be today, cheap shot to the kidneys?” I asked, showing him a smile.

He echoed it, his lopsided, full of sheepishness. He'd already bruised me more than a little during our occasional sparring sessions. Well, they were supposed to be sparring sessions, but what they usually turned into was me flailing and swearing at him while he laughed and dropped me repeatedly on my butt in the yard while he shouted advice. The bruises mattered more to him than they did to me; I could take it.

“So, now that we're out here, tell me what you did wrong,” he said.

I snort-laughed. “Dude, it's me. You'll have to narrow that request down.”

“What did you do wrong today?”

“I didn't set my alarm, get up early, hide in the hedge, and ambush you with a slap-chop to the collarbone?”

His head did a slow crawl back and forth. “Take a look around you.”

I obliged him, noting rocks, trees, a sprawling twinberry honeysuckle, insect chirping, bird chatter, fallen logs, scrubby bushes; I didn't see what he was getting at.

He sighed. “How often do you come out this far?”

The whole place was unfamiliar terrain. I shrugged. “Never. Why would I? There's nothing here.”

“Who else is out here?”

“You.”

“And?”

I saw his point in a throat-thickening rush.

“Feel that?” One of his hands darted forward to poke my belly. I had to steel myself so as not to rocket backward. “In your gut? Got a little fear brewing there?”

I didn't answer. My tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth.

“You should,” he said seriously. “You just followed a man twice your size deep into the woods where no one can hear you.”

Dark Lady defend me
. I made two sweaty, gloved fists, knowing that was beyond pointless, doing a quick inventory of anything on my body, hoping for some sort of miracle weapon to appear. It must have showed on my face, because Hood made a soft approving noise.

“Good,” he said. “Whatcha got?”

“Nothing,” I admitted.

“Not true,” Hood said. “Tell me whatcha got.”

I ran through a list of possible weapons. “Ferocity,” I said. “I'm meaner than you.”

“Irrelevant. What else?”

“Witchcraft.”

“Seen it, doesn't impress me. What else?”

I felt a flicker of irritation. “Teeth. Fingernails. Elbows. Kneecaps.”

“Better. What else?” He didn't look happy, squaring his shoulders against me, taking a step forward.

“Speed,” I said. “I'm faster than you.”

“Yeah?” He half-crouched, a puma preparing to lunge. “Show me.”

I tugged my gloves off and slammed them down on the path at his feet in a tossing-down-the-gauntlet move that would have been a whole lot cooler if they didn't make a limp little
ploof
in the dust.

In gym class, I always got picked first for dodge ball. I'm faster than I look; it's the short legs. So when his sudden forward motion scrambled my feet, I bolted like a scalded rabbit.

Sprinting ahead down the path away from civilization was a mistake, and instantly Hood shouted at my back, “Not deeper into the woods, dummy!”

I kept going. The rapid, heavy crunch of his running shoes wasn't far enough behind that I could risk a glance. Pumping my legs harder, I made it my mission to thoroughly humble Rob Hood by putting him so far in my wake he'd lose sight of me. I thrust my head into the sweltering shelter of the path and cranked the speed.

He was closing the gap, but I was about to prove him wrong about the witchcraft. I'd been throwing my focus into studying Earth magic lately. Throwing out a hand, I hooked an aspen by the trunk and swung bare-handed into the woods, lunging doe-like over a fallen log. Under my naked palms, I felt the stirring, electric warmth of psi as I began to summon the strength of Earth. Bushes whapped me in the face. I clutched a handful of them, squeezing a rush of green energy from their leaves. Close behind, I heard the sheriff. (“
Seen it. Doesn't impress me
.”) He wasn't even breathing heavily yet. Gaining on me. I ducked a low branch, dodging a clump of dogwood to circle back to the path, putting a wide swath of thimbleberry between us. Above, a flock of crows fluttered into the air.

Between pants, I hitched, “
Morrigan, mighty battle maiden, ride with me.”

A hot flush of white-bright energy flushed my chest, and all ten crows dropped from the sky with a chorus of startled cries. A resulting twenty feet of road spread between me and Stamina Boy, and the burn in my muscles disappeared. I could have run like this, windless and weightless, for a year. Laughter exploded from deep in my belly.

By the time my sneakers slip-splashed through a puddle, his own laugh caught up to me. I chanced a peek back at him. He'd slowed to a lazy jog, stopping near a clump of Ponderosa pines.

“Good!” he called. “You
are
fast. Jesus, that's unnatural.”

I smirked, doing a tight circle and running back to him, making a sassy face complete with tongue sticking out.

He pointed at me. “Watch it.”

“How'd I do, coach?” I asked, avoiding trotting through the puddle a second time by sticking to the edge of the road. “Not bad for a dummy, eh?”

He barely got out the words, “No,
watch—
”

The road disappeared into ditch. My footsteps swung into emptiness. The shock made me prematurely release Morrigan's magic boost into the ether, causing my knees to turn to rubber. With an alarmed whoop, I flailed through brush and belly-flopped to the bottom of the pit. Mud back-splashed Hood in the face, a reddish-brown whip across his cheeks. I peeled myself to a crawl, thick muck sucking the stretchy pants away from my skin.

Shoving a tide of twigs out of my face, I gaped up in open-mouthed astonishment and found matching amazement in the perfect O of Hood's muck-striped lips. I backhanded stray hairs off my forehead and left a streak of reeking sludge across my brow.

Hood's sudden bellow of laughter made me blush hard. I waded over on my knees, not wanting to stick a bare hand back in the mud to hoist myself to standing, or to claw up the bank, or to muddy the big hand he stooped to offer. Branches from the surrounding brush snagged me; I suppose it was inevitable, the ripping fabric complaint that came next. My ass felt far too cool all at once for it not to be exposed.