more antagonistic kind of normal than normal-normal was. I knew why: he was going easy on me because of the shooting, which meant he really didn’t think I’d screwed up. I was glad of that, but he was shooting so straight I thought maybe inadvertently asking him on a date hadn’t been a mistake after all. I didn’t know what it meant if it wasn’t a mistake.
And it didn’t matter very much right then. Morrison’s expression descended toward its more-usual exasperation the longer I didn’t answer the question. I spewed a more detailed answer, hoping to get the more genial Morrison back as a reward. “The wendigo was eating souls, but I was able to track Naomi’s into the Dead Zone. Whatever attacked her was just after the energy she’d collected. It’s a completely different M.O.”
“And the heart?”
“The wendigo wasn’t after viscera. It was chewing the external flesh, trying to re-establish a body for itself. No, this is different, Morrison. I’m sure the heart was the focal point for whatever magic was used to strip Naomi of all that energy.” I put a fist over my own heart. “It’s what we perceive as the center of our emotions. I mean, we say we mean things from the heart, we suffer heartache, we pledge our hearts, we wear our hearts on our sleeves. The only other organ we assign as much importance to is the brain, except brain-dead bodies can be kept alive if the heart continues pumping and not the other way around. The heart is our core, the perfect and obvious point to attack if you’re trying to collect the emotional and spiritual power of an individual. If I was going to try something like that—”
“Which you wouldn’t.”
I broke off, gaping. “No, because I’m not insane. I mean, I couldn’t, this is black magic, it’s sorcery, not shamanism, I’d be—I mean, Jesus Christ, Morrison, of course not! What the hell?”
His nostrils flared and words came through pinched lips: “You have a track record of doing incredibly stupid things in an attempt to figure out who or what your adversary is. Reverse engineering something like this sounds right up your alley.”
Righteous indignation bubbled up and spilled over into splutters. Splutters only, because he was right. It did sound like exactly the kind of moronic thing I’d try.
This did not seem like a good time to explain my plan had actually been more along the lines of throwing down a big shiny gauntlet of my own power in an attempt to get the killer’s attention, even though in comparison to Morrison’s fears, it seemed very mild and practical. Instead I collected my splutters into words. “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I think my magic would cut out on me. It has definite opinions about what I’m allowed to do with it. I mean, it went flat this morning, and that whole scenario was a hundred percent mundane, no paranormal activity involved. I’m pretty sure eating people’s hearts, even with the best of intentions, is right out.”
Morrison harrumphed, apparently satisfied, and I tried to gather my derailed thoughts. “If I was going to try something like that, which I’m not, I would use representational magic. Like voodoo, where you use a doll to—right, you know what voodoo is. Only instead of a doll I’d use a candy heart, or something. I’d devour it—would you stop looking at me like that?”
“I was wrong,” Morrison said in a deadly tone. “I thought I was all out of freak, but listening to one of my detectives discussing devouring hearts while dressed to kill pushes the limits. Skip to the end game, Walker. I can’t take much more of this.”
Probably the “dressed to kill” bit wasn’t supposed to make me grin, so I tried to keep it to a tiny smile, and looked somewhere else so meeting Morrison’s eyes wouldn’t loosen the expression into full-blown idiocy. I could be such a girl sometimes that I wanted to kick myself. Fortunately there were several dozen people still outside the theater, hanging around muttering quietly and eyeing the lobby in hopes of someone coming out with answers. They gave me something to focus on while I gave Morrison his end game. “Eating the representational heart would give me the physical and emotional target to draw down the power. Once the power drain was complete, destroying the actual heart would sever any link between myself and the body. There’s nothing left, no representational evidence, no physical evidence, no psychic residue. Excuse me. I have to go cop a feel on a pretty woman.”
Morrison said, “You what?” in the sort of resigned tone that indicated he’d never keep up with my inconstant ways, and stayed where he was while I hurried across the theater patio.
The cancer-infected woman I’d noticed in the theater was tall, maybe five foot nine, but she wore flats, so I towered over her as I tapped her shoulder. She turned from her friends, an eyebrow arched curiously, and looked me up and down. I did the same, because the word statuesque could have been coined just for her. Valkyries of yore wanted to look like this woman: broad-shouldered, generously endowed, long legs and a mass of genuinely golden hair that I didn’t think came out of a bottle. Her eyes were brown, which surprised me: I almost expected them to be as yellow as her hair. If she’d had a hint of a tan, the snug goldenrod dress she wore would have made her look like a giant banana, but she was so fair-skinned I couldn’t even find any freckles. She was about thirty-five, and aside from that touch of malignant pink in her breast, literally glowed with health. I wished everybody—including myself—had her level of fitness, and said, a bit rashly, “Hi. Do you believe in magic?”
“I don’t know about magic, but if you’re about to ask me on a date, I’ll believe in miracles,” she offered.
Apparently she had the confidence necessary for the bright-colored dress, too, and for a moment I genuinely regretted my limited palate of sexual preferences. “I’m sorry. I wish I was. Instead I’m going to say something really, really weird, and I hope you’ll believe me.”
She arched an eyebrow, looked over her shoulder at her friends, then faced me again, arms folded under her breasts. It was closed-off body language, but she contradicted it by putting her weight on one leg, hip cocked out and the other foot angled sideways to indicate a degree of willingness to listen. I had clearly been a detective too long, if I was studying her body language that carefully, but she took my mind off it by using her language-language, too: “If this is the ‘you should be a model’ speech, I’ve heard it before.”
“It’s much weirder than that. I’d like to hold your hands for a minute or two.”
Her other eyebrow skyrocketed up to match the first. “Are you sure you’re not asking me out?”
“Sadly, yes. I’d rather explain afterward, if that’s okay.”
She oofed as one of her friends elbowed her in the ribs and made a ribald comment, but she put her hands out. I took them, but she made like it was all her idea, grasping mine firmly. Her hands were rough, as if she worked with chemicals or just did fifty pull-ups on an iron bar every day. “You work out?”
“Enough to get noticed, I guess.” A glow of pleasure erupted from her, turning her dominant-yellow aura as brilliant a goldenrod as her dress, and putting her in exactly the kind of mental place I wanted her in. Overlooking the morning’s mess-up, I’d been able to heal people with a drawn-out vehicle analogy for most of the past year, aligning aliments to my mechanic’s trade knowledge. More recently, though, I’d stepped it up a notch, and could affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. It helped enormously, though, if my patient was receptive. Joyful and full of self-confidence was just about as positive and receptive a mental space as I could ask for.
She said something I didn’t hear as my attention went internal. My power leaped to life, no longer reluctant as it had been that morning. It felt like it was making up for lost time, or more likely, making up for the choice I’d made that morning. I didn’t exactly feel guilty,
