He dared breathe again after they turned a corner. More than one psychic there, for sure.
The kind of people with power to spare.
A few more like tonight, and even the Master could no longer control Him.
F
aith couldn’t tell if she’d really sensed the killer among the onlookers, or if it had been her imagination. Sure, she was weird. But could she really recognize a particular heartbeat, a particular smell, in that kind of crowd?
Probably she’d just been distracted by Roy Chopin and Butch Jefferson watching her retreat.
“They asked a lot of questions,” noted Moonsong, after a block. “Who Krys dated, if we knew anybody who would want to hurt her. That was nice and thorough of them.”
“Bull! Did you see how they looked at me when I told them I’d met Krys at an astrology class?” Between grief, guilt and frustration, or maybe the simple boredom of waiting out the administrative elements of a crime scene, Absinthe had chewed most of her black lipstick off. “Like I was crazy. Like
Krystal
was crazy. It’s disrespectful, is what it is.”
“Krystal would have thought it was funny,” Moonsong insisted. Her real name was Emily, but a surprising number of psychics changed their names. It wasn’t so much to hide their true names—like Faith masquerading as Madame Cassandra when she made anonymous calls to the police. It was more about…identity.
About making a fresh start, even honoring their unusual abilities.
“Well, it’s not funny,” said Absinthe who, because Faith had helped her through the paperwork of a legal name change, really was Absinthe. Faith had majored in pre-law, before dropping out.
Until she knew what she was, it seemed premature to settle on what she should do.
Moonsong’s expression set. “But she would have thought it was. Remember? Whenever people got all cynical about what she did, she’d say, ‘That is
so
Queen of Swords.’”
Absinthe laughed. “Or she’d say, ‘Don’t get all Virgo on me.’”
Then she pressed a black-nailed hand to her mouth as her laugh shuddered into a sob. Moonsong circled her dark arms around her, and the two of them walked like a four-legged, two-headed creature.
So much for an endless slumber party.
Faith wrapped her arms around herself and tried not to picture Krystal’s dead blue eyes and the welts on her throat. Mostly she tried not to imagine the moments before Krystal had died.
She and her three roommates took the same close, shadowed, cobblestone streets that had seen five of them heading out mere hours before. Never had the quieter, late-night backstreets of the French Quarter seemed so empty.
“Would you…?” Evan hesitated beside her, then forged on. “You don’t like to be touched, right?”
Faith longed for normal contact at that moment far more desperately than she feared the intimacy. “It’s not so bad if you don’t touch bare skin. I mean…yes. I could use a hug.”
So awkwardly, like a junior-high kid learning the waltz, Evan positioned one hand on Faith’s shirted back, the other on her denim-covered hip, and drew her tentatively against his shirtfront.
She laid her cheek on his shoulder and sighed. The worst of the night’s horrors eased, if only a little, under the comforting thrum of his concern and his heartbeat, gently muffled by the pressed cotton of his shirt.
What a sweet, sweet man. They were kind, all of them.
Krystal.
Tears of gratitude and loss burned in Faith’s eyes.
Faith’s roommates knew her secrets—the few she’d figured out herself, anyway. Better yet, they accepted her abilities without demanding explanations. They respected her need for privacy. And they were, for the most part, able to deal with her despite her issues. The so-called fringe really had become friends.
A little over a year ago, Faith had gone to a psychic fair to figure out if being psychic was why she was such a freak. She’d hoped that maybe, like in the
Ugly Duckling
story, she would discover she’d been a swan all along. A psychic swan.
It didn’t happen that way.
They
turned out to be swans, all right, but
she
was still something different and strange. A heron, maybe. Maybe something weirder, like a platypus.
God, she’d wanted to be one of them. To be one of
anything.
But she couldn’t predict the future. She didn’t get reincarnation. The only impressions she felt off runes or tarot cards were a sense of who’d last held them, partly because of how they smelled. The true psychics used paranormal,
extra-
sensory skills. Faith’s abilities seemed to be pure
sensory.
Just…sensory with the volume turned up.
These weren’t her people, after all. But she’d liked them—and more important, they’d brought out her protective instincts. As Absinthe pointed out, a lot of people distrusted psychics. And too many psychics depended on ethereal defenses when they could use a good lesson in kickboxing. After an incident at the psychic fair’s “open circle,” when Faith had faced down some large, loud disbelievers, she’d realized that this half-hidden community needed someone like her. Someone who could kickbox, sort of, and who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Even the ex-military pagans, when in a sacred circle, had hesitated.
Faith had not.
She hadn’t started protecting them just to buy their friendship. Between her mother’s paranoid habit of relocating every few years, and Faith’s own issues about touching, Faith had resigned herself to being a loner. But the psychic community had welcomed her. When one of Krystal Tanner’s roommates had moved out, and they’d started looking for someone to pay a fifth of the rent, they’d asked Faith, who’d jumped at the chance to fulfill that slumber-party dream of sisterhood.
Now Krys was dead. Murdered.
Faith pulled back from Evan’s platonic embrace, smiled her sad thanks, and continued walking.
Some protector she’d turned out to be.
“I heard what happened. Are you all right?”
The man who asked that, two days later, was Faith’s supervisor. Black-haired, brown-eyed, bearded Greg Boulanger ran the day shift of the crime-scene unit. He was something of a Cajun science geek with the extra strike against him of being management. At almost forty, he was clearly too old for Faith’s interest. And yet she liked him. A lot.
And not just because she felt loyal to him for hiring her.
The best way she could describe how comfortable she felt around Greg was that he had a quiet presence. Kind of like her roommate Evan did. Besides, like so many of the people who worked evidence, Greg often smelled of balloons. It was because of the latex gloves, Faith knew. But the scent had remarkably pleasant, innocent associations, all the same.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. He stood beside the desk where she sat. Although his brown eyes seemed concerned behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Greg didn’t come at her with the shield of sympathy that so many other people in the office had…probably because, despite being a nice guy, he remained distracted by the job.
“Even coroners aren’t cavalier about the bodies of people they know,” Greg insisted. “People you know are different. They’re supposed to be.”
“I’m okay.”
“You should probably take some time off.”
“No. Really. I kind of like being here.”
Greg’s eyebrows rose as he looked around them. Unlike those on television, the crime-scene unit consisted of four rooms and one small hallway, crowded into too little floor space on the third floor of a generic municipal building. Faith’s desk, up front, was open to a room with three other desks and two crowded worktables. Books overflowed on shelves. The place smelled like a cross between a library and a science lab, with an undercurrent of death because of the morgue down the hall.
“I’ve been handling the practical stuff,” Faith tried to explain. “Calling her family—Krystal was from East Texas. Packing her belongings for when they come. Contacting a local funeral director to make arrangements for after…”
Her need for a deep breath surprised her. So much for Krystal’s lessons in stress management through breath control. Maybe Faith wasn’t so okay after all.
“After her body’s released?” Greg finished for her, gentle.
Faith nodded. “And contacting the coroner to see when that will be. The family wants to have two funerals, one here for her friends and one in Caddo, just for them, so I’ve been helping to arrange that.”
Greg picked up the sheaf of evidence reports that still needed to be entered into the computer system and turned it over. “All the more reason you need a break. Things are crazy with that gang shooting.”
Krystal’s death hadn’t been the only murder that weekend.
“But this
is
a break. Everyone at home…well, they were friends with Krystal longer than I was.” Her roommates smelled of salty tears and wet misery. Their very breathing sounded like an uneven dirge. The usually strong Absinthe’s moods seemed to carry an unpleasant edge of guilt, too. Not that Faith blamed any of them. She felt more than a little guilty that her own grief felt so distant and so, well…mundane.
Absinthe had distracted herself by increasing the spiritual “shields” around their apartment, with incense and crystals; she’d stayed up all night making protective amulets for each of them. Faith wore hers even now, under her top, more for sentimental reasons than because she believed in it.
She didn’t
dis
believe.
Moonsong had taken to bed, hoping Krystal’s spirit could contact her in a dream so that they could say a proper goodbye—though Faith thought it was as likely that grief or depression had simply exhausted her. Evan, bless him, had run interference with Krystal’s other friends, spending hours on the phone, answering the same questions over and over. No, they didn’t know why anyone would have killed Krystal. No, the police knew nothing. No, they couldn’t believe she was dead.
Maybe that was the difference. Faith was the only one among them to have spent time with Krystal’s corpse. She very much believed her friend was dead, so she seemed best able to handle all the customary indignities that shouldn’t be heaped on people in mourning, either her roommates or the poor Tanner family.
Greg sighed. “Then don’t go home. Go to the zoo or the aquarium. Take a riverboat ride. Go shopping.”
Faith shook her head. She could justify forgetting Krystal for whole minutes at a time, to focus on her work. But to shop? “I’m good here.”
“That’s debatable.”
She stared, confused, and he sighed. “Since you’re personally involved, you’ll want to keep some extra distance from this case. You understand that, don’t you? It’s not that I distrust you, but if anything compromises the evidence…”
“I understand.” Between this job, and her pre-law work at Tulane, she
got
evidence.
Her boss’s pale eyes focused on her as intently as they might focus on a strand of hair, or a fingerprint, or a particular bug he might be studying. Which, from Greg, was quite a compliment.
She was still startled when she caught a whiff of attraction. Even more when, almost as if an afterthought, he tucked a strand of her blond hair behind her ear.
Because he was wearing latex gloves—he almost always did, around here—the touch didn’t send an unpleasant jolt through her. In fact, she wouldn’t describe the sensation as unpleasant at all.
He was a human. She was a human. It was human contact.
But here, it still unnerved her. To judge from how his eyes widened, it unnerved him, too. Greg stepped quickly back, fisting his hand as if he’d done something wrong with it. And he hadn’t. It wasn’t like he’d traced her lips, or her collarbone. It wasn’t like he’d told her she looked hot in black.
“I…” he said, then cleared his throat. “Sorry. We’ve still got that Storyville shooting to deal with. I’d better go check on some ballistics results the lab was faxing over….”
To maybe the relief of both of them, Faith’s phone rang.
She smiled reassurance at Greg as she picked it up, but he was already hurrying away. “Evidence,” she said.
“I told you the Quarter was a dangerous place.”
Faith hadn’t had time to brace herself against this second wave of guilt. “Mother?”
“I just saw the news,” insisted Tamara Corbett. “Krystal Tanner—she’s one of your roommates, isn’t she? The one from Texas?”
“Well…she
was.
”
“Please, Faith. Don’t try to make light of it!”
“Trust me, Mom. I’m not making light of anything. But there’s no reason for you to worry. You know she wasn’t killed at the apartment, don’t you?”
“But she was in the Quarter. Were you there, too?”
Faith scowled at her computer screen, not sure how to answer that.
“Oh, baby…” moaned her mother, which was even worse than lecturing. Tamara had always been overly protective of Faith. All they’d ever had was each other. Leaving home to move in with Krystal and the others had been one of the hardest things in Faith’s life. Especially since she’d been able to hear the reality of her mother’s despair in her catching breath, in her pounding heartbeat, as she left. She’d been able to smell it on her, to taste it in the air.
But that wasn’t the only thing Faith had been sensing when she moved out. The guilt in the air hadn’t just been her own. And until her mom was able to explain what
that
was all about…
Well, wasn’t Faith’s life complicated enough?
“I’m okay, Mom,” she said now, feeling like the grown-up in this equation. “I mean, of course I’m not okay, but considering everything, I’m as good as can be expected. Try not to worry.”
That was like saying
try not to fly away
to a frightened bird.
Or like saying
try not to wonder where you’re from
to a fatherless girl, which was essentially what her mother had said whenever Faith tried to pursue the mystery that shrouded her past. Had she inherited her freakishly keen senses from her dad’s side of the family? Was it possible she might have cousins, even distant cousins, even
one,
who understood what she was going through?
Tamara had always refused to talk about Faith’s dad. He’d left them, he hadn’t wanted them, he’d died, and that was that. Her stubbornness on that front made it easier not to bleed sympathy for her seeming apprehension now.