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I couldn’t remember being so relaxed. The darkness was warm, unlike in the Dead Zone, where it had weight and purpose and chill, even when it wasn’t being visited by deadly snake-gods. I could rest here forever, warm and content and safe.
One of the floaties popped into something brighter and more solid, making me chuckle. Last time I’d seen these things, a whole host of them had come tumbling out of the black to rassle for dominance over one another. This time only one creature came, that quick burst of light seeming distant and hopeful. It was a coyote, I could see that, more ethereal than my Coyote and much more playful than the Big Coyote I’d met in the desert. It disappeared, leaving me resting in darkness again, then leaped forward, suddenly far closer.
The fourth time it reappeared, it did so directly in front of me, and looked up with a loll-tongued grin before butting its head against my thigh so hard I felt the ache all the way to the bone. I offered my hand, grinning back at the spirit animal, and it wrapped its long tongue around my wrist, then without warning or pain, began chowing down on my arm.
Surprise ricocheted through me, more out of familiarity and unexpectedness than fear or anger, and I gaped down at the spirit coyote’s silver fur and see-through lines as it worked on swallowing me whole. I’d been through this before, though I realized quite suddenly that the person I was in my dream hadn’t been. That part of me knew to expect this, but still felt more than a little horror and panic at being had for lunch. I had the peculiar sensation of trying to reassure myself that everything would be okay, and the even more peculiar sensation of not getting through to myself. After a few seconds I realized that for the other part of me, having Coyote eat me hurt, and I remembered that being the thunderbird’s snack hadn’t been a bowl of cherries, either. I was trying to figure out how to get past the pain and offer new reassurances when something nudged my ankle.
I peeled my arm away from my eyes, blinking blearily at legs visible up to slacks-clad knees. The knees bent into a crouch, hands dangling over them as Mark peered down the length of Petite’s undercarriage to grin at me. “This your idea of a fancy date, Joanne?”
Tuesday, July 5, 7:53 p.m.
I crunched up several inches, then crashed back down again, having narrowly avoided smashing my head on Petite’s engine. “Ma—uh? What’re you—what time is it? Jesus!” I flinched up a second time, again just barely missing bashing my head, and rolled to the side, getting out from beneath my car before I did myself serious injury. “Did I fall asleep out here?”
“It’s ten to eight,” Mark said. “I’m early. Sorry.” He stayed in his crouch, still grinning at me while I scrambled to my feet and pushed oily hands through my hair, then swore and rubbed them on my jeans. “Looks like you’re not quite ready.”
I stared at him wide-eyed, then turned to stare at my Mustang. Concrete wasn’t my favorite place to sleep, but concrete beneath a jacked-up vehicle was just asking to get dead. I couldn’t place the blame on Petite, but somehow I wanted to, as if she’d lulled me into a potentially deadly nap. “It’s eight o’clock?” The location of the sun and the coloring of the sky suggested Mark was not, in fact, lying to me. “Uh. Jesus.” I was never at my best right after I’d woken up, but waking up after an all-day snooze in a parking lot was high on a list of Ways to Discombobulate Joanne. I was astonished no one’d called the police or dropped the car on me or stolen my tools. I swung back around to stare at Mark some more, as if doing so would provide some sort of explanation for my behavior.
“You okay?” He looked up at me with the amusement still there, but dampened by genuine concern. “How long’ve you been out here?”
“Since…like, God, noon. Somewhere like that.” I pushed my hand through my hair again, then rubbed the scar on my cheek and felt grease slick across my face. Mark put his hands on his thighs and pushed out of his crouch, grinning again. He wore a maroon button-down that played up the red in his hair and looked soft. I curled my fingers against my face to keep myself from smearing oil all over his clothes, too, and transferred my attention to taking tools out from under my car so I could remove the jack. That was safer than feeling up Mark’s shirt.
“I came home to do some work on the car and to think, and…” My heart had started hammering too hard, making a wash of fright climb up my throat. I could believe I might fall asleep under Petite for a few minutes, maybe even an hour or two. But with the sun traveling through the sky and heating up both the day and the car, not to mention leaking light around the mask my elbow’d made, and with people in and out of the parking lot all day—that just wasn’t normal. I knotted my hands around the jack and held on, trusting it to not give out and crush me now when it hadn’t bothered to all day. “I can’t believe I slept out here.” My thoughts were still running down those tracks, wash, rinse, repeat. “That hard, all day. It’s not…”
“Natural?” There wasn’t any teasing in Mark’s voice, though he sounded wry. I looked up from the jack, then ratcheted it down, mouth pressed thin. “It’ll be okay,” he said, sounding a great deal like I had trying to reassure myself within the context of my dream. “Look. I’ve got reservations for eight-thirty at the Ponti Seafood Grill. You’re going to need some food, and I know you don’t have anything in your apartment.” I heard a smile come into his voice and looked up to see it reflected on his face. “I’m guessing you’re not the kind of woman who takes two hours to primp and get ready to go out. Why don’t we go up to your apartment, you can clean up and we can go to dinner? I won’t keep you long, I swear, but you’re going to have to eat one way or another, right?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t have anything to wear to Ponti’s.” Not that there was much dress code anywhere in Seattle—casual wear, hallmark of the Northwest, was accepted anywhere I ever ate—but Mark looked nice, and I didn’t have anything between jeans and sweaters and my dress uniform.
A car door banged shut somewhere in the parking lot and Phoebe’s voice sailed toward me: “Are you avoiding me, Joanne? You didn’t answer your pho—ooh. Hello.” The last, I guessed, wasn’t directed at me, as she appeared from down the lot and looked Mark up and down. “Hi. I’m Phoebe.” She offered a hand, seizing Mark’s forearm in a traditional warrior’s grip when he took it. Her expression was delicious, trying to watch both of us at once. “What’s up, Joanne?”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. I had managed to double-book the single evening I’d had plans for in months. “Uh. I, uh.”
“You have a date,” Phoebe surmised, laughter glinting in her eyes. “Is that why you said you couldn’t go out tonight? You’re not going out in that, are you?” She eyed my jeans and T-shirt with dismay, which didn’t seem fair. I’d barely gotten them grease-stained.
“I, uh.”
Phoebe turned a very bright grin on Mark and grabbed my upper arm as solidly as she’d taken Mark’s. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Give me twenty minutes and you won’t recognize her. Joanne, come with me.”
“I, uh,” I managed one more time, and Phoebe dragged me off to my apartment.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Start talking,” she hissed as soon as we were inside the building door, though it didn’t stop her from pulling me up the stairs. “Who is he? Why didn’t you say something? He’s really cute, Joanne! What were you doing working on your car if you’ve got a date? What were you doing working on your car if you were supposed to go out with me? My God, it’s a good thing I came along. You’d have just worn that, wouldn’t you?” The barrage of questions and comments got us up five flights of stairs and into my apartment, where Phoebe let me go and flung her giant black purse onto my couch. “Talk,” she repeated. “I want the dirt! No, wait. Go get in the shower.” She shed her denim jacket as she spoke, revealing worn hip-hugging jeans and a black sleeveless spandex shirt that said “Hottie” in rhinestones across her breasts.
“I’m in over my head, aren’t I?” That was easier than trying to answer any of her zillions of questions.
“You dress fine for slouching off to Bethlehem.” Phoebe knocked the front door closed with a toe and leaned on the couch, arms folded. “But for dating you have less dress sense than my dog. Of course you’re in over your head. Shower.” She pointed imperiously at my bedroom. “Never fear. Phoebe is here. I’ll turn you into a heartbreaker.”
“I don’t want to be a heartbreaker,” I said somewhat dizzily, and went to take a shower. Somebody was in control, even if it wasn’t me. For the moment I just went with it. My brain didn’t seem to have quite woken up yet.
Four minutes of hot water later I felt slightly less fuzzy. The best thing about hair as short as I wore mine was the absolute minimal time frame it took to wash it. Phoebe was in my bedroom when I exited the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her hands on her hips and her expression dismayed as she studied my closet. “I was right,” she said dourly. I stuck my jaw out defensively.
“Right about what?”
Phoebe turned on me, thick eyebrows lifted. She very nearly had an eyebrow, rather than eyebrows. It kind of went along with the compact, muscular build she’d gotten from years of fencing. In car terms, she was a Porsche: small, sleek, fast and powerful. In people terms, I was afraid to mention a pair of tweezers in her presence, for fear she’d kick my ass. “You have nothing at all to wear. It’s okay.” She’d moved her purse to my bed, and now she upended its contents onto the comforter. A glimmering gold thing fell out, then a pair of jeans and a tri-fold leather wallet that had taken a lot of beating. A compact bag fell on top of all of it. Phoebe pushed the wallet into her back pocket and shook the jeans out. “Put these on.”
I clutched my towel and squinted at the jeans. There was something wrong with them. “Are those yours? They’re short.”
“No, they’re not. Either. Not mine and not short. Put them on.” She thrust them at me. I edged by her and got some undies out of my dresser first, squirming into them before taking the jeans. I had the distinct impression I was being bulldozed and I’d somehow given tacit permission for that to happen. “What’s the gold thing?”
“Get the jeans on first.”
“I’m trying. They don’t fit. They’re too short.”
Phoebe inspected my ankles. The jeans hit right where they were supposed to, boot-cut and swinging against my anklebones. “They are not.”
“Up here!” I pulled the towel up to show her, trying desperately to pull the jeans up. The waistband wouldn’t go past my hipbones. My bellybutton was yards above the waistband.
“That’s where they’re supposed to hit, Joanne.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I yanked again, which was certainly uncomfortable, if not in the least productive. I was giving myself an all-around wedgie. Phoebe slapped my hands away from the waistband, zipped the zipper and buttoned the button, then stood back and nodded approvingly.
“Okay, that’s good. Shirt now.” She handed over the gold glimmery thing. I held it up in dismay.
“This isn’t a shirt. It’s a piece of gold lamé. With strings.”
“Wow. I wouldn’t have put money on you knowing what lamé was. It’s a shirt.” She took it away from me and tied two of the strings around my neck. “See?”
“I am not wearing this in public.”
“Yes, you are. C’mon, lose the towel.” She tugged it. I squawked and clutched it against my chest.
“Phoebe!”
“Trust me, Joanne. Would I lead you astray?”
“Yes.” I sighed and unwrapped the towel, feeling put-upon. Phoebe tied another series of strings behind my back, then clucked her tongue.
“Okay. Got any hair gel?”
“Will you have a heart attack if I say yes?”
“No.” She sounded far too cheerful, and went into my bathroom to root around. “You don’t own any makeup?”
“What would I do with it?” I sat on the bed, wondering what I’d gotten myself into. Phoebe clucked again and came back out with a palmful of mousse that she rifled through my hair.
“Close your eyes. And tell me about this guy while I do your makeup.” She unzipped the compact bag and dumped its content onto my bed, too: foundation, blush, lipstick, little jars of loose makeup and about fourteen makeup brushes of various sizes. The rest of it I didn’t recognize, which made me nervous. “Close your eyes,” she ordered again. I did. “Does he have a brother?”
“No,” I muttered, “he’s got a sister.” Wretched petite curvy redheaded Barbara. I could remember her name easily enough. It didn’t make sense that it’d taken numerous repetitions for me to remember Mark’s.
“That’ll do,” Phoebe said saucily enough as I opened my eyes. She nearly poked me with a brush and scowled. I closed my eyes again. “Where’d you meet him? How long’ve you been dating?”
“I just met him last night, Phoebe.”
“Ooh, first date. Good thing I’m here. What about Gary?”
My eyes popped open again. “What about him?”
“Does he know you’re seeing a younger man, too?”
“I’m not dating Gary! He’s seventy-three years old, Phoebe!”
“Uh-huh,” she said, full of polite disbelief. “Sure. So’s Sean Connery.”
I screwed up my face, feeling like words wanted to explode out and not knowing what I was going to say. “Anyway, he thinks I should go out with Mark. That’s practically the only reason I am.” Somehow that didn’t sound like it helped matters any. “Anyway,” I repeated, strenuously enough to burst something, “I’m sorry about double-booking. I don’t know how that happened. It’s—”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay, because I’m going to get all the prurient details afterward. You’ll feel too guilty to hold out on me. Open your mouth.”
“I hate lipstick.”
“I didn’t ask. Open your mouth.”
I opened my mouth. A moment later Phoebe gave me a tissue to smack on, then pointed me toward the bathroom mirror. “Go on. Go look at yourself.”
I eyed her, then got up and went to look.
Even if the mirror hadn’t told me so, Mark’s expression when we came back out of the bedroom said everything that needed saying. The ridiculous little gold shirt had strings that criss-crossed through half a dozen loops from my shoulder blades to the small of my back, where the shirt stopped entirely. Phoebe’s makeup job gave my skin a startling warm golden glow. I’d dug a pair of three-inch strappy gold heels out of the closet, finally glad for the rare bout of shoe lust that had prompted me to buy them years ago. I’d never worn them. Mark did a double-take at my feet when he realized I stood as tall as he did, then developed a slow, astonished smile that made me self-conscious and pleased all at once. Phoebe looked insufferably smug.
“My plan,” she told Mark airily, “had been to get Joanne a social life, but she seems to be managing it on her own. I’ve got a new plan. Now Joanne helps me get a social life. She said you had a sister.” Her grin was bright, and Mark laughed.
“I do. Look, I didn’t mean to bust in on you two having a night out. Can I make it up somehow? You could come to dinner with us, Phoebe.”
“Absolutely not.” Phoebe waggled a finger at him. “But if you can get Joanne out to Contour in Pioneer Square for a few hours after dinner, I’ll call it even.”
“I can’t dance, Phoebe,” I protested. “I really can’t. And this is a fluke. If I need to help you get a social life, you’re a disaster.”
Phoebe turned the waggling finger on me. “I, personally, am coming off a very bad breakup, which you don’t know because we’ve never really hung out before. So, see, you’ll be good for me. It’s a whatchacallit, parasitic relationship.”
Mark and I said, “Symbiotic,” at the same time, and I lifted an eyebrow at him before turning back to Phoebe, curiosity getting the better of me. “When was the breakup?”
“I thought cops didn’t know words like symbiotic,” she said, grinning. Then she assumed a guilty expression. “Um. A year and a half ago. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if you can’t dance. Make her come out, anyway, Mark. A very wise man once said, ‘Get up and dance, anyway, because nobody else cares if you can’t dance.’”
“I’ll try,” he promised. “Who said that?”
“Dave Barry. It was one of his life lessons. Right after ‘Do not take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.’ Now go.” Phoebe beamed at both of us. “See you guys later.”
I left the apartment with Mark, feeling somehow like I was walking half an inch in the air.
I’d hit the earth again by the time we went down five flights of stairs to get to my car. I hadn’t been on a date in so long I had absolutely no idea how to conduct myself on one, which didn’t go a long way toward creating the casual bantering atmosphere one tends to hope for on a first date. If that’s what this qualified as, anyway. I wasn’t sure, under the circumstances. Mark, however, was apparently much better at this sort of thing than I was, and put an appreciative hand on Petite’s roof as I unlocked her doors. “You did all the work on this yourself, huh? What year is she?”
The way to my heart was through my car. A blind man could see that. Morrison couldn’t, but a blind man could.
Morrison was really not the point here. I smiled at Mark and nodded. “Yeah. She’s a 1969 Boss 302. There were only about seventeen hundred built, and about half of them are automatics. Someday when I’ve got a lot more time and money I’m going to convert her to a manual. That’s my big dream for her.” Mark didn’t look glazed over yet, so I went on happily. “She was just a junker in somebody’s barn when I found her. They let me take her for the price of hauling her out of there. It’s been her and me ever since.”
“She’s beautiful.”
Mark was obviously a genius. I beamed and nattered on about my car all the way down to the restaurant. Unlike Morrison, Mark knew enough about cars to not embarrass himself, and unlike most men, he didn’t seem to feel it necessary to try to out-guy me on the topic. I noticed I’d been talking nonstop as we walked into the restaurant, and reined myself in with an effort and a surprisingly easy laugh. “You kind of found my Achilles’ heel. Get me started on cars and I can’t shut up.”
“Nah.” Mark waved his hand. “I like hearing what people are passionate about. You learn all kinds of things that way. Everybody’s got something they’re geeked about.”
“Geeked?” I laughed again. “I didn’t know geek was a verb.”
“Sure.” Mark actually held my chair for me as I sat down. What fascinating and bizarre behavior the courting male displayed. I wondered if he’d try ordering my dinner for me, too. “I’ve got this theory,” he said as he sat down. “Used to be that being a geek was a bad thing, like being a dork or a nerd, right?”
I put my elbows on the table and folded my fingers under my chin. “Sure.”
“Right.” He nodded. “But then computers got to be everyday appliances, people needed geeks, and now it’s pretty cool to be a geek. And I think the word has adapted. Now you can be a computer geek, a car geek, a cooking geek—”
“Those are called foodies,” I interrupted, smiling. Mark made a face at me and I laughed out loud again. “Sorry. I think I got that word from the Food Network.”
“You’re not sorry.” He didn’t look in the slightest bit upset, though, turning his face-making into a laugh of his own. “My point is if you’ve got a hobby or a job or a passion that you know a lot about, that other people don’t, you’re that kind of geek, and you get geeked about your topic.”
“So geeked is a new word for excited,” I said. “Were you an English major, Mark?”
His eyebrows quirked. “It shows?”
I made a loose fist and put it out, palm down. Mark, who knew a cue when he saw one, did the same and bonked his knuckles against mine. “Fellow English majors of the world, unite.”
“Bad spellers of the world,” Mark said, half under his breath, and together we said, “Untie!” Mark’s grin went so wide it looked fit to split his face. He put his menu aside—I hadn’t even noticed the waiter handing them to us—and said, “Know what really drives me insane? Misused quote marks on signs. ‘Big “sale’”,” he said, complete with air quotes around “sale.” “‘Price “reduction’”. ‘Lasagna “special’”.”
“Oh, my God. Me, too.” I actually leaned forward and grabbed his hand in sympathy. He was too good to be true. Not only was he cute and willing to listen to me babble about Petite, but he had the same language issues I did. I wanted one of my very own.
The thought that I could possibly have one of my very own heated my cheeks. Taking him home for a not-repeat of last night’s performance suddenly sounded pretty entertaining. For the first time I could remember, the idea made me smile, and I wasn’t embarrassed at all to let my English geek get out of hand. “Doesn’t it make you just want to stop and fix the signs, or go in and yell at people until they understand that using quotes like that implies sarcasm? That they’re saying exactly the opposite of what they mean? ‘“Rock-bottom prices’”!” Now I did air quotes, too, which was probably good, as it released Mark’s hand from my enthusiastic prison. “Or apostrophes. Don’t get me started on apostrophes. How hard is it to remember that i-t-apostrophe-s means ‘it is,’ or ‘it has’?”
“True confession time.” Mark leaned forward, too, dropping his voice to admit, “I can never remember that one. I always have to think about it.”
“But I bet you get it right when you think about it!”
“Well.” He sat back with a disparaging wave of his hand that made us both laugh. “Yes.” He lifted his menu with a challenging arch of an eyebrow. “First one who finds a typo in the menu wins dessert.”
“Oh, you’re on.” I picked up my menu and started flipping through it, grinning broadly. The waiter appeared at my elbow to ask politely if we wanted wine or appetizers, and Mark and I caught each other giving the other guarded looks. I pursed my lips and glanced sideways at the waiter. “No, thanks,” I said.
Mark nodded. “A few more minutes, please.”
The waiter slipped discreetly out of view again. “I’m not much of a wine drinker, anyway,” I mumbled. Mark gave me a disarming smile.
“More of the sort to go right for the hard stuff, huh?”
I made a laugh that was mostly in my nose and the top of my mouth, and therefore came out an unattractive wet snort. How delightful. Mark’s smile broadened, though, so maybe it wasn’t as gross as I thought it’d been. “I’m good with beer. I don’t usually drink liquor.”
“Does it mess up your—” Mark broke off, caught between winsome curiosity and apology. “Tell me to screw off if it’s none of my business, but I’m really curious about what Gary mentioned this morning. Shamanism? You’re really into that? Does drinking mess it up?”
For one brief moment I seriously considered killing Gary for opening his big mouth. My inexplicable powers did not strike me as good first-date discussion material. Bitching about the slaughtering of the language, yes; magic powers, no. I sat there looking at Mark for what felt like a very long time indeed, considering whether or not I wanted to answer his questions, and how far I wanted to get into the answers if I did. “No,” I said finally. “Drinking just impairs my judgment like it does anybody else’s. Um.”
“You don’t want to talk about it.” Mark’s smile went all apologetic. “Sorry. It’s just…talk about things to get geeked about. Magic. Shamanism. It sounds interesting.”
“Does it?” I scratched the back of my neck, looking at my menu. “There’s just no real way to talk about it without sounding insane.” I glanced up with a shrug. “I mean, honestly, if I went into it, explained what it was all about and said I had magic powers and could affect the weather,” which I managed to say without wincing, although it was a trial, “or could heal people, and you said, yeah, cool, I’m down with that, frankly, I’d think you were nuts.” I did think he was nuts. He’d been far too easy about the whole thing this morning. On the other hand, he asked smart questions about Petite. Maybe a willingness to consider the esoteric was a flaw I could learn to live with. I’d sort of have to, if I ever wanted to have a boyfriend again. Either that or I was going to have to develop a secret identity, and I didn’t think I had the body for running around in leather catsuits.