Contact

He wanted to see the detectives leave as ignorant as when they’d arrived. Stupid, arrogant suits. He wanted to gloat.

When finally they emerged, a younger man with an old black partner, they didn’t seem as helpless as He’d hoped. The younger one looked dusty enough to have been clambering around the crawlspace over the ceiling.

But they didn’t look satisfied, either. Or done.

Both seemed distracted by the blond bitch who’d chased Him from His kill before he was done. The one with the green tank top and the miniskirt. He didn’t like that one at all.

“Let me or Roy get you a cab now, Miss Faith,” He heard the black man say. “Gang activity’s gotten worse, not far north of here. No need for you to take chances.”

“No,” said the girl, all but backing away. “Really. My roommates will walk with me. We’ll be safe together.”

The trio who shuffled nearer, red-eyed and lost, looked as if they needed more protection than they would provide. Even the man among them had the posture of a girl.

Those three looked familiar—from Jackson Square.

More psychics?

Even as He thought that, as His breath fell shallow and His heartbeat sped and his groin tightened, the one called Miss Faith suddenly turned her head. Her unnerving green gaze raked across the remaining onlookers as if she knew what she was looking for.

He leaned back just enough to hide behind the shoulders of some good ol’boy. When He dared look again, she’d gone. She seemed to deliberately ignore the detectives staring after her. She was too busy dividing her attention between her friends and the street around them, like a little blond bodyguard.

He dared breathe again after they turned a corner. More than one psychic there, for sure.

The kind of people with power to spare.

A few more like tonight, and even the Master could no longer control Him.

Chapter 2

F aith couldn’t tell if she’d really sensed the killer among the onlookers, or if it had been her imagination. Sure, she was weird. But could she really recognize a particular heartbeat, a particular smell, in that kind of crowd?

Probably she’d just been distracted by Roy Chopin and Butch Jefferson watching her retreat.

“They asked a lot of questions,” noted Moonsong, after a block. “Who Krys dated, if we knew anybody who would want to hurt her. That was nice and thorough of them.”

“Bull! Did you see how they looked at me when I told them I’d met Krys at an astrology class?” Between grief, guilt and frustration, or maybe the simple boredom of waiting out the administrative elements of a crime scene, Absinthe had chewed most of her black lipstick off. “Like I was crazy. Like Krystal was crazy. It’s disrespectful, is what it is.”

“Krystal would have thought it was funny,” Moonsong insisted. Her real name was Emily, but a surprising number of psychics changed their names. It wasn’t so much to hide their true names—like Faith masquerading as Madame Cassandra when she made anonymous calls to the police. It was more about…identity.

About making a fresh start, even honoring their unusual abilities.

“Well, it’s not funny,” said Absinthe who, because Faith had helped her through the paperwork of a legal name change, really was Absinthe. Faith had majored in pre-law, before dropping out.

Until she knew what she was, it seemed premature to settle on what she should do.

Moonsong’s expression set. “But she would have thought it was. Remember? Whenever people got all cynical about what she did, she’d say, ‘That is so Queen of Swords.’”

Absinthe laughed. “Or she’d say, ‘Don’t get all Virgo on me.’”

Then she pressed a black-nailed hand to her mouth as her laugh shuddered into a sob. Moonsong circled her dark arms around her, and the two of them walked like a four-legged, two-headed creature.

So much for an endless slumber party. Faith wrapped her arms around herself and tried not to picture Krystal’s dead blue eyes and the welts on her throat. Mostly she tried not to imagine the moments before Krystal had died.

She and her three roommates took the same close, shadowed, cobblestone streets that had seen five of them heading out mere hours before. Never had the quieter, late-night backstreets of the French Quarter seemed so empty.

“Would you…?” Evan hesitated beside her, then forged on. “You don’t like to be touched, right?”

Faith longed for normal contact at that moment far more desperately than she feared the intimacy. “It’s not so bad if you don’t touch bare skin. I mean…yes. I could use a hug.”

So awkwardly, like a junior-high kid learning the waltz, Evan positioned one hand on Faith’s shirted back, the other on her denim-covered hip, and drew her tentatively against his shirtfront.

She laid her cheek on his shoulder and sighed. The worst of the night’s horrors eased, if only a little, under the comforting thrum of his concern and his heartbeat, gently muffled by the pressed cotton of his shirt.

What a sweet, sweet man. They were kind, all of them.

Krystal. Tears of gratitude and loss burned in Faith’s eyes.

Faith’s roommates knew her secrets—the few she’d figured out herself, anyway. Better yet, they accepted her abilities without demanding explanations. They respected her need for privacy. And they were, for the most part, able to deal with her despite her issues. The so-called fringe really had become friends.

A little over a year ago, Faith had gone to a psychic fair to figure out if being psychic was why she was such a freak. She’d hoped that maybe, like in the Ugly Duckling story, she would discover she’d been a swan all along. A psychic swan.

It didn’t happen that way. They turned out to be swans, all right, but she was still something different and strange. A heron, maybe. Maybe something weirder, like a platypus.

God, she’d wanted to be one of them. To be one of anything. But she couldn’t predict the future. She didn’t get reincarnation. The only impressions she felt off runes or tarot cards were a sense of who’d last held them, partly because of how they smelled. The true psychics used paranormal, extra- sensory skills. Faith’s abilities seemed to be pure sensory.

Just…sensory with the volume turned up.

These weren’t her people, after all. But she’d liked them—and more important, they’d brought out her protective instincts. As Absinthe pointed out, a lot of people distrusted psychics. And too many psychics depended on ethereal defenses when they could use a good lesson in kickboxing. After an incident at the psychic fair’s “open circle,” when Faith had faced down some large, loud disbelievers, she’d realized that this half-hidden community needed someone like her. Someone who could kickbox, sort of, and who wouldn’t hesitate to do so. Even the ex-military pagans, when in a sacred circle, had hesitated.

Faith had not.

She hadn’t started protecting them just to buy their friendship. Between her mother’s paranoid habit of relocating every few years, and Faith’s own issues about touching, Faith had resigned herself to being a loner. But the psychic community had welcomed her. When one of Krystal Tanner’s roommates had moved out, and they’d started looking for someone to pay a fifth of the rent, they’d asked Faith, who’d jumped at the chance to fulfill that slumber-party dream of sisterhood.

Now Krys was dead. Murdered.

Faith pulled back from Evan’s platonic embrace, smiled her sad thanks, and continued walking.

Some protector she’d turned out to be.

“I heard what happened. Are you all right?”

The man who asked that, two days later, was Faith’s supervisor. Black-haired, brown-eyed, bearded Greg Boulanger ran the day shift of the crime-scene unit. He was something of a Cajun science geek with the extra strike against him of being management. At almost forty, he was clearly too old for Faith’s interest. And yet she liked him. A lot.

And not just because she felt loyal to him for hiring her.

The best way she could describe how comfortable she felt around Greg was that he had a quiet presence. Kind of like her roommate Evan did. Besides, like so many of the people who worked evidence, Greg often smelled of balloons. It was because of the latex gloves, Faith knew. But the scent had remarkably pleasant, innocent associations, all the same.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. He stood beside the desk where she sat. Although his brown eyes seemed concerned behind his wire-rimmed glasses, Greg didn’t come at her with the shield of sympathy that so many other people in the office had…probably because, despite being a nice guy, he remained distracted by the job.