Page 16

With the Sight triggered, Seattle took on gorgeous overtones, brilliant streaks of red marking human life along the highways, which were themselves black dead strips across the earth, unnatural with their engineered curves and straight lines.

Off to the east, the university poured out the whole spectrum, many of the colors reaching both deep and high, as if scholarship had taken root and reached for the stars.

That was the healthy living layer of the city.

Beneath it, or beside it, or maybe even occupying the same space, I couldn’t exactly tell, was Seattle’s darker side.

I’d only learned to see it recently, and I didn’t like looking at it at all.

But I knew better, by now, than to ignore it.

There were markers all over of things that had gone wrong: murders, car crashes, suicides, fights.

The dance theater was a new bleak mark on the cityscape tonight, and I thought if there was a modicum of fairness in the world, there would also be some kind of nasty streak leading directly from the theater back to our killer’s lair.

There wasn’t, of course. The image of Naomi’s heart being eaten rose again, putting a new thought in my mind: that all the power she’d briefly harbored had also been eaten in one great gulp, effectively hidden from view until it—to put it less than delicately—passed out the other end.

“Ew.” I wrinkled my nose and glanced down, taking in the quiet Seattle Center grounds below me.

The icky image faded, leaving me to think that the security guard’s skepticism wasn’t that far off the mark.

Sneaking up here could fall under a seriously romantic gesture, if things were just a little different between me and my boss.

But despite a handful of moments in which I’d regretted it, they weren’t different.

Morrison had brought me up here to study the city on an esoteric level, not to admire the view.

Last time he’d made a gesture that big, it had been an offer to drum me into a shamanic trance, something so far out of his comfort zone that I was still astonished he’d made it.

I wasn’t the only one who’d changed, though I didn’t know that he’d appreciate the observation.

He came up behind me—I didn’t know what he’d been patrolling the restaurant for, but he’d made a full round of it while I’d just gone straight to a window—and said, “So what do you see?”

“Nothing wrong, yet. Nothing that looks like a power surge. Do you want to see?” I dragged my attention from the far-below grounds and turned to Morrison, half afraid and half hoping he’d say yes.

His eyebrows furrowed, physical manifestation of emotion that was equally visible in his aura: a jolt of red went through his usually purple-and-blue colors, but was tamped by a swirl of pale yellow, irritation just slightly outgunned by curiosity. “Do I want to see what?”

“Seattle’s colors.” I slipped my heels off and lost my height advantage plus some, since Morrison was still wearing shoes.

Being shorter than he was felt vulnerable, and it took active willpower to not put my shoes back on, or at least stand on my toes.

Icy palpitations rushed over me, more than just the floor beneath my bare feet being cold.

My heartbeat was jackrabbit fast and my stomach full of sloshy discomfort, none of which had happened last time I made this offer.

“I tried this with Billy once and it worked. I can lend somebody the Sight for a minute or two, if you want to see how I see.”

Morrison looked at my feet. “Do you have to be barefoot for it to work?”

“No, but you have to stand on my feet and that would hurt like hell, on heels. Take your shoes off, for that matter. I’m not having shod feet standing on my bare ones.”

Curiosity won out, though Morrison shot a glance toward the elevator as he toed his shoes off. “If that guard comes up to check on us…”

I grinned. “Yeah, I know. But wait, it gets worse. Have you ever had anybody older than about six try to stand on your feet?”

“I taught a girlfriend to waltz in college. She stood on my feet.”

“You can waltz?”

“Can’t you?”

“Morrison, some days I’m lucky to be able to walk.

Okay, put your feet on mine. No, really stand on them.

Don’t worry, Billy must’ve outweighed you by fifty pounds when we did this.

” I wrapped my arm around Morrison’s ribs and hauled him right up against me.

He emitted a sound I could only define as an undignified squeak, and I grinned again, this time from about a centimeter away from his face.

Laughing at him—at us—made it easier to not think about being pressed up against my boss in what could only be considered an intimate manner.

Laughing also made it slightly easier to ignore the scent of Old Spice, which, antithesis of trendy or not, really did smell good.

It made me want to put my nose in his neck and inhale, which would almost certainly be ill-advised.

That was not the path I needed my thoughts to be going down. I gave myself a mental shake. “This is the ‘worse’ part. How hard did you have to hang on to your girlfriend to keep her on your feet?”

Morrison made another sound, this one more of a grunt and therefore slightly more dignified, and put his arms around my waist. “She was a lot smaller than you are.”

“I’m sure she was smaller than you are, too. Look over my shoulder.” Unreasonably piqued by the comment, I slapped my hand on top of Morrison’s head with a little more force than absolutely necessary. “I bind what I hold and share the Sight of old.”

It was a marginally better couplet than the humiliating gibberish I’d spouted when I’d tried this with Billy. Morrison still slid an arched-eyebrow look at me, which meant I got to watch from up close and personal as gold filtered through his blue eyes, sure sign that magical vision was kicking in.

He reared his head back, enough of a retreat that my stomach soured with hurt disappointment.

I loosened my grip, but he tightened his in turn, so I was stuck there, clinging to him.

There were circumstances under which this would seem ideal.

Somehow this wasn’t turning out to be one of them.

Heat crawled up my cheeks and I reminded myself, not for the first time, that I should make a habit of thinking before speaking.

If I’d thought about it I’d have never, ever offered to give my boss a glimpse of the world the way I could see it.

Morrison adjusted his weight and balance again, reversing his retreat without ever taking his gaze off mine, and wet his lips before saying, very softly, “Your eyes are gold.”

“So are yours.”

Whatever he’d expected me to say, that apparently wasn’t it. The heart-pounding intimacy of being wrapped around each other couldn’t stand up to Morrison abruptly crossing his eyes, like he’d be able to see them if he only tried hard enough.

I laughed out loud and turned his head slightly, so he was looking over my shoulder again. “Check out the window, boss. You’re supposed to be seeing what I see.”

He murmured, “Subtle silver and blue,” next to my ear.

He’d shaved today—I’d only seen him stubbly once in the four years I’d known him—but eighteen hours after the fact, I felt sandpaper brushing my cheek.

It gave my heart a little twist and made me want, again, to put my nose in his neck.

I was saved only by him adding, “Is that what you see when you look at people?”

“What? No. What?” God, I was a stunning conversationalist. Even if people with bodies mashed up against one another weren’t typically expected to have profound conversations—after all, they were probably either in a subway or a bedroom, if they were as pressed close as Morrison and I were—monosyllabic inanities were still on the disappointing end of witty repertoire.

Fortunately after a second or two my brain caught up to what he was probably actually asking.

“That’s just me. My aura. It’s usually silver and blue.

You’re purple and blue. Billy’s fuchsia and orange. ”

“Really? I’m purple? I thought you would be. Like that car of yours.”

My mouth, unwisely, said, “Maybe that’s magic’s way of saying we’re simpatico ,” and Morrison, much more wisely, released me and stepped back.

I looked down and to the side, suddenly brimming with self-loathing at a potency level usually reserved for teenagers.

If the floor opened up and dropped me six hundred feet to the Seattle Center grounds, that would almost be sufficient punishment for the humiliation of saying something so incredibly stupid and desperate and stupid.

And desperate. I’d closed the damned door on a potential relationship with Morrison months ago.

The niggling detail that at least one of us had put a foot in that door to keep it from slamming shut was not supposed to bear any relevance to my life.

It might have borne a lot less relevance if I wasn’t half-sure it was Morrison’s foot in the door.

He’d asked me to dance at the Halloween party.

He’d gotten huffy and territorial when Coyote came back.

He’d even come to get me on New Year’s Eve, thus pretty much ensuring he and I would be ringing in the new year together, whether or not anybody else was around.

None of which overruled the fact that he was my boss, but all of which, put together like that, set fire to my humiliation and turned it into good old-fashioned crankiness.

Okay, fine, I’d put us in a bit of a compromising position there, but if we were doing some kind of stupid song and dance around a not-relationship, it wasn’t fair that he made small advancing movements and then staged full-scale withdrawals when I said something imprudent but hopeful.

Genuinely pissed off, I snatched up my sandals and glared at my boss. “I’m going to check out the other side of the city. I’ll call you tomorrow if I’ve found anything.”

Morrison’s expression shut down, betraying a whole lot as it did so.

I wasn’t sure he knew what he’d done wrong, but I was even less sure he didn’t know.

I caught a hint of I deserved that and a pinch of I’m your boss, how dare you and some disappointment and some resignation, all of which transformed into a mask as stony as my own before he said, “I’ll tell security you’ll be out shortly,” and stalked to the elevator.

I waited until the doors dinged shut before pitching a shoe after him as hard as I could.