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Morrison had donea hell of a job corralling the audience, given the late start he’d had. There were probably three hundred people still in the lobby, and security guards at the doors chitchatting politely with men and women who didn’t seem too terribly eager to escape, anyway. Human nature, I guessed; they probably wanted to be among the first to know what had happened, all the better to gossip about in the morning.

Lots and lots of them turned my way when I came out of the theater, their auras spiking with curiosity. With the weight of their interest, I realized that between my height, the form-fitting green dress and the fact I’d run up on stage seconds after Naomi collapsed, I was probably pretty recognizable. Sneaking out a side door or up to the mezzanine floor to peek at the crowd might’ve been smarter, but smart wasn’t so much my stock in trade.

Not mostly, anyway. I was smart enough to not say “She’s dead,” which was sort of my first impulse. Even when peoplestarted asking, I kept my mouth shut and just looked over them, grateful that the strappy heels meant I could see virtually everybody.

Nobody had the mark of a killer. Auras were rife with nosy interest and concern, with boredom, with amorous intentions and chilly brush-offs, but no one was burgeoning with the kind of energy the killer had stolen. I sighed, singled Morrison out of the crowd—he was at one of the doors, badge on display as he smiled at a redhead at least ten years older than he was—and made my way through the gathering to his side. “Can I talk to you privately, boss?”

The redhead’s expression flashed from a downright sulk at my interruption all the way to smug delight as I finished with the wordboss.She actually tucked a card into his lapel as he backsided the door open and gestured me through. I couldn’t help stealing another look at her as Morrison followed me, and my big mouth said, “You like redheads, huh?” without consulting me on the topic first.

Morrison looked back at her, too, then at me. “What makes you say that?”

“Oh, Barbara Bragg was a redhead, and now her. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” Rita Wagner had asked if I believed in God. I thought a kind God would probably strike me dead right then just to save me from myself. Since nobody did, I chalked one up in the “not so much” column, and tried to shrug off the conversation causally.

Morrison was amenable enough to shrugging it off, though he said, “Maybe redheads like me,” before a considerably more relevant, and much more Morrison-like, “What happened after I left?”

“Whatever attacked Naomi ate her heart.” I was horrified at how steadily that came out.

Morrison’s eyes popped. “What is it with you and bodies getting eaten lately, Walker? Is it another wendigo?”

“No.” I had plenty more to say than just a categorical denial, but it struck me again that Morrison had been bizarrely normal all day. Normal like a normal person, not normal like my boss, which was a much 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 notinsane.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 thelimits. 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 wordstatuesquecould 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 touchof 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.”