Suzanne Quinley, sophomore. Interests: art, drama, volleyball. Birthday: January 6. Goals: being Picasso.
“At least she doesn’t want to be John Malkovich,” I mumbled.
“She probably doesn’t know who John Malkovich is,” Jen said dryly. “He’s too old for her.”
“Picasso’s older,” I pointed out. “Is this all there is? No phone number, nothing on where she lives?” I shuffled back to one of the photos and compared it to the drawing Jen had done. There were probably about a hundred thousand blond teenage girls in Seattle, but this one felt right. I looked up at Jen, hopeful.
She held out a thin manila folder. “I expect you to worship at my toes.”
I flipped it open. It held three pieces of paper and a black-and-white photograph, taken a year or two earlier. One paper was a copy of a birth certificate; the second, an adoption record. The third was a brief biography. I stared at the papers for a moment, then lifted my eyes to Jen’s in admiration. “How’d you do this?”
“Magic, chica.” She waggled her fingers and smiled. “Got a friend in the State Department. Everybody’s got an FBI file. Public record.”
My eyebrows shot up. “Public?”
She didn’t even look uncomfortable. “For some definition of public.”
“You’re a bad woman, aren’t you, Jen?”
“Got what you needed, didn’t I? Right down to her home address. Which you’re going to need, since school let out twenty minutes ago. You should get going.”
“Last time you said that I went and broke my head open on the front steps. I’ll go as soon as I can. I’ve got something else to take care of first.” I pushed a hand through my hair, wondering if it looked as bad as it felt. “Gary, did you bring my drum?” The big cabby nodded. “It’s in the cab. I’ll grab it.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s get this show on the road, then.”
CHAPTER 25
We ended up down in the garage break room, the place I was most comfortable in the station. A surprising number of people followed us down, evidently all struck with the need to take a break at exactly the same time. Morrison was conspicuous by his absence, for which I was both grateful and resentful. He, after all, had seen the diner’s security tapes and had come around far enough to reinstate me to work on the case. It seemed like he should come keep an eye on me while I did the weird stuff that he’d reinstated me to do.
Maybe I didn’t need to work on that damsel in distress routine after all. The idea of Morrison keeping his eye on me implied I might need him to rescue me, which seemed both unlikely and annoying. Fortunately, my replacement, Thor the Thunder God, came in from the garage with the rest of the mechanics. His arrival knocked me out of sulking over the captain.
“This really isn’t going to be that exciting,” I said to Gary. He had a duffel bag over his shoulder and was carrying it carefully. I assumed my drum was in there, protected against the weather.
“Want me to get ‘em out of here?” He looked more hulking than usual, like a rooster with his feathers fluffed out. I almost laughed.
“No, I think it’s okay. I just, ah.” I stopped arranging an empty space on the floor and looked around at the two dozen men and women crowding the break room. “No. No, in fact, I think I have an idea. All right, look, everybody.” I lifted my voice and straightened, arms akimbo. Nearly everyone came to attention, like I was their worst drill sergeant returned to haunt them. I fought off laughter again.
“This isn’t,” I repeated, “going to be very exciting. I’m going to sit here in a trance while Gary bangs a drum. I take it pretty much everybody’s gotten the lowdown by now.”
Nobody would quite look at me, or at each other. Especially at me. I couldn’t help wondering if they were here to see if my freaky new life was real, or if I’d just lost my mind. Either way, I couldn’t help laughing. Nothing traveled faster than gossip, and getting the lowdown had brought most of them here. “Right,” I said. Bruce, at least, met my eye with an unapologetic little shrug. “Since you’re all here anyway, I’m gonna ask a favor of you.”
Maybe a dozen people were left when I was done explaining what I wanted to try. To my surprise, Thor stayed. He glowered and folded his arms over his chest when I arched an eyebrow at him, but he didn’t move. I wondered what his real name was as I waited another moment before beginning. No one else left, so I sat down Indian-style in the middle of the crowd. Gary sat down across from me and took my drum out from the duffel bag.
“I brought this, too.” He withdrew Cernunnos’s rapier, sheathed in leather, from the bag. My eyes widened.
“Don’t tell me you had a scabbard just lying around.”
Gary shrugged a bit. “Okay, I won’t tell you. Take it.” He offered the sheathed blade to me, and I placed it across my lap. Curious murmurs rose and fell, but no one asked outright. That would come later, I imagined. A lot of questions were going to come later. Either that or a lot of people were going to start finding excuses not to talk to me ever again. I wondered which route I’d have taken, if someone else had been trying to pull this off.
“Not gonna lie down this time?” Gary asked.
“I think I’ll be okay. If I fall over, somebody can prop me up.” I inhaled, a long slow breath through my nostrils, and let my eyes drift closed. The first beat of the drum was deep and certain and sent chills over my arms. I straightened my spine involuntarily.
I knew I could do what I wanted to do. I didn’t know if I could do it on purpose. I remembered the electric awareness of the airport, the charge in the air that was the life force of hundreds of people coming and going about their business. It had been so available, the urge to tap it obvious and nearly irresistible.
There, on the scale I’d reached for power on, it would have been deadly. Here I wanted only a fraction of that power, and I was asking for it to be volunteered. The drum settled into a rhythm that matched my heartbeat. I exhaled, and with the exhalation stood, leaving my body sitting empty on the floor, motor functions operating while my consciousness stepped out for a breather.
The room’s inhabitants glowed with the same peculiar neon life force I’d seen outside my apartment when I’d gone for the inadvertent visit to the dead shamans. It was the same force that had unlocked inside me, although less potent; the same astonishing skinlessness I’d experienced in the coffee shop while talking with Morrison. They were full of life, breathing and pulsing with it. Curiosity caught me for a moment and I looked past them, through the walls of the garage, to study the look of living earth from below instead of above.
I shouldn’t have; it was depressing. Bisected and intersected with concrete, there wasn’t much living at all. The sunken building walls had their own sense of purpose, their own energy, but it wasn’t what I was looking for and I didn’t have the time to examine it more carefully.
I withdrew back into the break room, concentrating instead on the brilliant auras of my co-workers and friends. And Thor. Billy had shown up, a stolid wall of fuchsias and oranges. Unlike almost everyone else, he held his hands in front of him, a coiling ball of color writhing between his palms. Jen, nearby, held the same kind of ball, in boiling yellow and brown. I didn’t even know brown came in neon.
A few of the others stood that way as well. The others simply stood where they were, casting curious, silent glances at the body I’d temporarily abandoned—not that it was apparent I’d done so—and at the people around them. Their energy rolled off them in waves, flickering away like flame. Some were clearly concentrating on extending goodwill toward me, visible in sheets that dissipated without focus. The rest had less ability to focus, offering not much more than their simple essence.
I reached for the sheets of goodwill first, wondering how to temper the power. Was a wish of good thoughts an infinite gift, or did it exhaust the giver? If it did, I had to make this very fast, or find a way to slow down the output. There was too much I didn’t know.