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
