reassuring.” I closed my eyes. “What happened?”
I felt Marie and Gary cast uncomfortable glances at Billy. “Billy,” I said without opening my eyes, “go change your shoes, would you?”
Mortal offense filled his voice. “What, so you can get your story straight? What kind of detective do you take me for?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” I tried to remember where I’d heard that recently. Oh, yeah. Coyote.
My head began to hurt again.
I pushed up on an elbow, opening my eyes. “I’m asking as a friend, Bill. Or I’ll steal your distributor cap.”
He grinned reluctantly. “Friends don’t threaten friends’ distributor caps. Look, you sure you’re okay, Joanie? You look like hell.”
“I’m sure. I’m fine. I swear I’ll explain it later.”
“Arright.” Billy stood up. So did Gary. They sized each other up while I worked on climbing to my feet. Gary nodded tersely, and Billy walked off. It all smacked of some sort of bizarre male testosterone thing. I tried hard to ignore it.
“What happened?” I asked again. My balance was off. I spread my arms out, trying to find my center. Then it occurred to me that Coyote wanted me to do exactly that, and my head hurt more. I rubbed my temple, then my face, and that didn’t hurt at all. Fascinated, I prodded at my cheek. No pain.
“You got a scar,” Gary pronounced, staring wide-eyed at my face. “On your cheek. Where she cut you. A real thin scar. It was still bleeding just a minute ago.”
I slid my fingertips over my cheek, feeling the thin line, perfectly healed. “What,” I asked for the third time, “happened?” The scar felt weird. I’d always had good skin.
“The Hunt took Cernunnos away,” Marie said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever hurt him like that before.”
“Bully for me.” I kept rubbing my cheek. “How’d I get into the parking lot?”
“I carried you,” Gary volunteered. “The diner was on fire.”
I turned around and looked at it. Sure enough, it was on fire. There were firemen there now, and I realized I’d been hearing the sounds of water and steam and men calling to one another since I woke up. Clouds of steam and smoke rose up, and, as I watched, a section of the roof fell in. All and all, I was glad Gary hadn’t left me in there. “Thanks. What happened to the sword?”
Gary jerked a thumb toward his cab. “In the back seat. I thought we oughta leave it in you until the paramedics got here, but Marie kept sayin’ we had to get it out. Guess I’m not much good at sayin’ no to a dame.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you look like the henpecked husband type.” My fingers drifted back to the hole in my shirt, feeling skin through it. It felt perfectly normal. I pulled the collar of the shirt out and peered down. Gary guffawed. I muttered, “Oh, shut up,” and kept looking.
My bra was a bloody mess, and there was a gash in it. “God damn it,” I said, “that was a new bra.”
Gary laughed again, and I looked up long enough to glare at him. “Sure, laugh. It cost sixty bucks. God-damned men don’t have to buy goddamned expensive underwear….” I peered down my shirt again. There was no indication the bloody mess on the shirt and bra was from my own bleeding. Breasts, bra, blood, no hole in my chest. Lookit that. I felt like an X-File.
“You kept flashing between living and dying,” Marie said. “I just had the feeling that you wouldn’t live if the sword stayed in you.”
“You were right.” I stopped peeking down my shirt. It was too weird.
“So she made me pull the sword out,” Gary said, his whole face wrinkling up in a grimace. “And then…” He trailed off. Marie drew in a breath.
“And then you began to heal. Just like magic.”
“It was magic,” I mumbled.
“What?” Gary laughed again.
“It was magic,” I repeated, unconvincingly. Marie developed a smug grin. Even smug looked attractive on her. It wasn’t fair.
“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” she said with a reasonable amount of diplomacy. Unfortunately, her grin ruined the sincerity of the moment.
“A lot’s changed since then,” I muttered. A cord tightened around my heart, then loosened, like a bowstring snapping. A sudden vision of the cracked windshield blurred my vision, and a spiderweb-thin line in it sealed up, healing. I shivered a little and wrapped my arms around my ribs. “C’mon. Let’s go talk to Billy.”
“Wait.” Marie caught my arm. “We have a problem.”
Those were not the words I wanted to hear. It took a long time to convince myself to say, “What kind of problem?”
“Cernunnos wasn’t the one I fought at the church.”
I frowned at her without comprehension. “He couldn’t have been,” I said after a minute. “You took that knife from him.” I felt terribly clever for figuring that out, especially when surprise, followed by embarrassment, washed across Marie’s face.
“You’re right. I didn’t even think—but who was he, then? The Hunt was after me,” she insisted. I unfolded one hand from around my ribs to head off her protestations.
“I know. I saw. Maybe it was somebody human who’s working for him.” I admired how I said that, all casual-like. I could handle my world being turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe. No problem. I was cool. I was good. Yeah.
“Then why didn’t he follow me into the church?”
I stared down at her, at a loss. So much for being cool. “I don’t know. Look.” I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Billy and get that part of this over with before we try to figure the rest of it out, okay?” I glanced at Gary. He nodded. So, after a reluctant moment, did Marie.
We went to talk to Billy.
Once upon a time, a nice young half-Cherokee half-Irish girl went to college and got the ultimate would-you-like-fries-with-that degree: English. I had no illusions that I’d get a job in my field when I graduated from college, but I’d never planned to. I already had a day job. I’d started learning how to fix cars when I was barely old enough to walk, and I never really wanted to do anything else.
When I graduated from the University of Washington, my part-time college gig at a local mechanic’s shop couldn’t upgrade me to full-time, so I hired on with the North Precinct police department. The best part about it was I didn’t have to move out of the apartment I’d been renting since my sophomore year of college.
There was just one itty-bitty catch: my then-supervisor, Captain Nichols, wanted me to go to the police academy. It was the black-and-white photos they took for station ID that did me in: my Native American blood showed through like a waving red flag, and Nichols couldn’t resist a bonafide Indian woman on the roster. It made the
