or something? I thought you were a cop.” He brought a glass of orange juice to the table and gave me a quirky little grin that went a fair way toward melting my knees, even if I both knew better and was sitting down, anyway. Nobody ever said knee-melting only worked on the vertical.
I managed to mutter, “Thanks,” and tried giving Gary the hairy eyeball to shut him up, but he answered Mark with such blasé cheer I knew he was ignoring me on purpose.
“Not that kinda grounding. Spiritual grounding. Food anchors your soul to your body, makes it a lot harder to go spirit questing. Jo here’s a shaman.” He said it all casual-like, but his gray eyes were sharp and judging as Mark went back to the stove to make another omelet. Me, I just sank down into my chair until my nose practically touched the eggs, and shoveled as many bites into my mouth as I could before Gary took notice of me again.
“No shit,” Mark said curiously. “Like a medicine man? What exactly does a shaman do, anyway?” He grinned, bright and open. “Get hooked up with some peyote, maybe?”
My stomach contracted around the food I’d eaten. I unhunched from over the plate and Mark noticed, speaking a little more quickly, as if he was afraid I’d cut him off. Which was exactly what I’d been going to do, so I couldn’t exactly blame him.
“No, no, look, I’m sorry, I’m kidding. Bad joke, sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, expression all fussed as he looked at me. “I just never met a shaman before. Guess I don’t know what to say. Mom says her grandad was Navajo—”
“What,” Gary said, “not a Cherokee princess? I thought those came standard these days.”
I shot him a look. I actually was part Cherokee, although not through remote ancestors. My father’d grown up in Qualla Boundary and I’d gone to high school there. There were a lot of people there who legitimately could claim Cherokee blood, but most of them weren’t royalty. Mostly it seemed like people from much further away than the Carolinas—or Oklahoma—had managed to land themselves the royal blood. It was like the U.S. version of being descended from Cleopatra.
Mark only laughed. The guy was nine kinds of casual. Maybe he did this for a living, like the kid in Six Degrees of Separation. Never mind his health or my peace of mind. It seemed like I shouldn’t trust him.
I’d start not trusting him as soon as I was done eating breakfast. I hunched over it again, hoping Gary wouldn’t notice.
“Nah. I guess my family came over from England in the early nineteenth century and settled in the southwest during one of the land rushes. Never had a chance to hook up with Cherokee royalty.”
“Just Navajo.”
“Well, she never said he was royalty.” Mark slid me a wink and a bit of an “Overprotective, isn’t he?” look. I avoided Gary’s eyes and stuffed a too-large piece of omelet into my mouth. “Anyway, whether he was or not, that’s like the total of my familiarity with Indian culture.”
“Native American,” Gary said in a tone that sounded remarkably like one I’d employed on him some months earlier, when he’d called me Indian. Mark had the grace to turn red around his jawline and lift his hands in apology.
“Native American. Sorry. Maybe you can tell me about it sometime, Joanne. I’d like to hear about it.”
So he was good-looking, but he was bonkers. Anybody who was that agreeable about the possibility of magic woo-woo stuff in people he’d just met pretty much had to be. I knew I shouldn’t trust him. At least my friends at the police department had gotten mixed up in my séance-thing back in January because they knew me and wanted to help, not because they were buying into a whole big weird world of Other out there.
Gary grunted, a small noise that I couldn’t interpret as pleased or displeased, and saved me from responding by saying, “Not now. We got work to do.”
“Sure,” Mark said easily. “Some other time. I don’t want to get in the way.”
I inhaled a chili bean and started coughing, then washed cough and bean down with a long swig of orange juice. The acidity made my nose sting, and the whole combination made my eyes water, which let me open my eyes all the way. Overall I called it a win and stuffed an entire half slice of toast into my mouth before anybody could expect me to say anything. I didn’t see why I should. Gary and Mark seemed to be getting on just fine.
The doorbell rang.
My social life was not such that the doorbell rang twice in one week, much less twice in five minutes. I stuck my head out, turtle-like, over my omelet, surprise keeping me in the pose for a few seconds. Then, afraid Gary would dump my food if I left it unguarded, I clutched the plate and went to answer the door.
A leggy blond woman and a six-year-old girl stood outside it. The girl noticed neither the bathrobe nor the plate of food I held and squealed, “Ossifer Walker!” before leaping up into my arms with the confidence of a child who’d never been dropped.
Chili-cheese omelet went flying over the door, the rug and the girl as I fumbled the plate while catching her. Her mother looked completely dismayed. “I am so sorry. I thought—it was this morning, wasn’t it? Tuesday, nine-fifteen? We were going to have a tour of the station?”
“Oh, God.” I juggled the girl around until she was sitting on my hip, and gave her a falsely bright smile that she didn’t seem to see through. “Hi, Ashley. You look nice and healthy. Are you keeping hydrated?”
“Yes,” she announced, pleased with knowing the word. “I drink six glasses of water a day.” She held up all ten fingers, demonstratively, and my fakey smile turned into a real grin.
“Good for you. Um, Ashley? We’ve got chili all over ourselves. We should probably get cleaned up.”
“Do we hafta?”
“Yes,” her mother and I said together, and I put Ashley down. I’d encountered her a few weeks earlier, the victim of heat stroke. My power had refused to let me ignore it that time, and once her core temperature was stabilized I’d sent her to the hospital. She’d come away from it with the idea that I was some kind of hero, and that she wanted to grow up to be a “peace ossifer,” just like me. “I’m sorry,” I said to her mother. Allison. Allison and Ashley Hampton. Just the names sounded like they belonged somewhere a lot ritzier than a college apartment turned permanent abode. “I completely spaced it. If you’re not in a time crunch I can get cleaned up and—”
“Wow,” Ashley said dreamily. I wrinkled up my face and looked over my shoulder. Mark, in all his half-naked glory, was leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, grinning. See, when a six-year-old notices that a guy’s gorgeous, you know it’s not just your overactive imagination telling you he is.
“Breakfast, ladies?” He was going to use all the food in my house. “We’ve got omelets and doughnuts.”
“Mommy!” Ashley crowed. “Can I have a doughnut pllleaaaase?”
“You already had breakfast, Ashley,” Allison said automatically. Ashley wriggled all over.
“I know, but plllleaaaaase?”
“Come on in.” A sense of the absurd was blooming over me, forming a stupid amused smile on my face. “Join the party. Mark can feed you,” I said, like that was perfectly normal, “and I’ll get dressed and we can go to the station.” I ushered Allison Hampton into the apartment, leaned on the door and waited for another shoe to drop.
The phone rang, and I laughed out loud. Everyone peered at me curiously as I made my way over chili-stained carpet to pick it up. “Grand Central Station.”
“This is Phoebe,” a woman said. “You’ve been a total flake the last two weeks, so I’m calling to remind you about your—”
“Fencing lesson,” I said with a groan that sounded like a laugh even to me. “I know this is going to shock you, but—”
“You forgot.” Phoebe sounded