I swear, there’s nothing between us. It was that one time! I was drunk, I made a mistake, I’m only human!
I’m more than just a palm, four fingers, and a thumb, you know!
I know, I know . . . I’d never take you for granted, right hand. You’re like my right hand! And oh crap, pay attention, you’re about to lose Leah.
He liked her slender frame and medium height; at just under six feet, he was a comfortable head taller. It made him want to fold her into his arms and protect her. It made him want to fold her into his arms and kiss her until she was panting as hard as he was. I hope she lets me get the whole story out. Also I should probably work out more, because I should not be this out of breath after jogging after her for thirty seconds.
“—on with it.”
“Right. Listen, this is gonna sound weird—”
“Doubt it.”
“—but someone’s out to get you, and—”
“I know.”
“Oh. Oh! Well.” He tried a smile to see if she’d reflexively smile back—lots of women did, like people always shook your hand if you stuck it out there, but Leah was po-faced. “It’s easier, then. If you know what’s going on.”
“You would think.” She shifted; he was so busy watching her face he forgot to watch her hands. “But in fact, sometimes that makes it more difficult.” Then she stabbed him.
“Hey!” It wasn’t even a little bit like the movies. In the movies, half the time the bad guy (not that Archer was the bad guy, though later he understood why she thought so, and also, dammit!) didn’t even know he’d been stabbed at first. Too busy ranting at the hero to notice. Plus the heroes kept their knives so insanely sharp the villain didn’t even feel it going in. But Archer knew instantly that she had taken a knife out of her bra
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and stabbed him in the shoulder.
“Son of a bitch! In your bra? What the hell, Leah? What else is in there? In your bra? I should have seen that coming. But I was distracted because, y’know, bra. Ow-ow-ow.”
“I—I—” She looked, if possible, more shocked than he did. Not that he could see his face. But he felt pretty shocked, so he probably looked it and ow-ow-ow. “I can’t see you!”
“Well, your aim is pretty impressive.”
“I—I was wrong. That was disgraceful.” She did look remorseful, which went a little way toward cheering him up as blood dripped down his shoulder and pattered on the sidewalk. “It’s just as well I could not ram it home in your heart. All those ribs to get through—ugh. Most of the time the blade just glances off them. In the end it’s often too much trouble.”
“Wait. What?”
“But they will arrest you on my say-so and then you can sit in a cell and think about what you did.”
“What?”
“Not that you didn’t have it coming,” she scolded him. Yeah. She was scolding him. He tried to pay attention as his blood drip-drip-dripped into his battered sneaker, which had seen worse days, but not many. “You should be ashamed, killing me all the time. What is it with you? Were we married in another life? Are you killing me over and over again because I cheated on you?”
“What? No. What?” Waves of weird kept closing over him. First she was very very close and then she was very very far away. In all cases she was telling him off. Was it a dream? And if it was, was it a nightmare? It was weird that he didn’t know. He should know. He should be able to figure that much out at the least.
“Listen. I was hired to follow you but I do not like the vibe on this job. I wanted to warn you. I betrayed my solemn oath as an amateur private investigator and you took a knife out from between your boobs and stabbed me. Why’d you drag your boobs into it, Leah? Why? They didn’t deserve that. They’re innocent!”
A smile! And the smile did that thing to her face where years fell away and she looked mischievous and ready to have fun or make trouble or both.
“Private investigators do not take sacred oaths and I did not drag my boobs into anything, and stop calling me by my first name like you know me. Then . . . I was right. I can’t see you. I’m afraid I have confused you with my murderer. So what you’ve babbled at me as you go into shock makes sense.”
“I’m not going into shock.” He shivered so hard for a second he wondered if he was having a seizure. “All right, I’m going into a little bit of shock. Why were you dressed as a birthday candle in that picture?” he shouted because she was very very very very far away. When did she have time to run away so quickly? And she was smaller, now, too. “Come back!”
“Yes, definitely a mix-up, as normally you would have killed me by now.” She was looking at him thoughtfully and blinking her wide-set hammerhead eyes, which was a pleasant change from how dispassionate she’d been earlier. “Why can’t I See you? Do you know? Will you tell me?”
I . . . understand . . . none of this. More important, how can I get her to go out with me? He shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it. “My client wants you and not in a good way. So I came to . . . what’s that sound?”
“You’re bleeding.”
“Bleeding makes a sound?”
“I’ve signaled for an ambulance. You’re hearing the siren.”
He blinked at her like an owl, a stabbed owl, and swayed on his feet. He was unreasonably overjoyed when she reached out and steadied him. “Hey, thanks, if I fall, I’ll prob’ly bleed more and also it would hurt probably, I dunno, it doesn’t hurt as much as it did earlier. Careful, you don’t want to get any on you.”
She was looking at him in the oddest way. “Thank you. You’re right, I wouldn’t want any on me. That was thoughtful.”
“Okay, and when you didn’t stick the knife in my heart, that was also thoughtful, so thanks for not lethally knifing me.”
Another smile! Two in thirty seconds! Or had it been an hour? Who cared? She’d fall in love if he didn’t bleed out and they’d make babies who were weird and had gorgeous smiles and hammerhead shark eyes. “Beautiful shark-eyed babies,” he told her and, to Leah’s credit, she didn’t flee, or hoist a knee into his balls. “When’d you do that? Make the ambulance come?”
“While you were whining about how I didn’t kill you.”
“Whining! No wonder you don’t have any friends except that homeless lady in the park.”
“That lady used to be the mayor of Boston, is not homeless, and never mind about my friends or lack of same. If you aren’t my killer, who are you? I don’t know why I can’t see you, but you must know that at least.” She took his elbow and gently shook it. “Concentrate. Tell me.”
“I keep saying. The client wants you. Really wants you.”
She stepped back. She hadn’t been afraid of him when she thought he was someone else, someone who would have killed her, but now, now she stepped back. And that smile was long gone. What. The. Fuck? “Oh, no,” she breathed.
“Yeah.”
“Not . . .”
“Yeah. Your mom. She really wants to see you. She says the time has come for you to forgive each other and work on your comeback.”
She stabbed him in the other shoulder.
SEVEN
“You can just back right off, Nazir!”
The strange man who had accosted her on the street was in quite a snit. He kept batting the air like a spitting kitten when she came near, which annoyed the intern trying to stitch him up. And though they were in the least romantic place on earth, save for perhaps a sewage treatment plant or a phosphate mine, she was having trouble not staring at his peculiar, gorgeous eyes. One faded denim blue, one a light green like seawater. Even with his shock-induced tiny pupils, they were extraordinary.
He was extraordinary, which explained why she was rapidly overcoming her knee-jerk reaction to someone in her mother’s employ. He wasn’t . . . handsome, exactly. If you took his qualities and exam
ined them separately, he was downright funny-looking, like Julia Roberts or Gotye.
His nose was too long. His mouth was too wide. His eyes were striking but odd. His hair was, as Madeleine L’Engle described such things, “hair-colored hair,” a sort of light brown with dim lighter brown highlights, and he needed a haircut; the ends curled under just below the nape of his neck. His thick bangs were always falling in his eyes—it was a wonder he had been able to spy on her at all.
So, yes: taken apart, odd-looking. Together, it worked. Together, he was somewhat . . . dazzling.
How annoying.
“Hey! Nazir! I’m screaming at you in the middle of an ER. Please pretend to care.”
She smiled at him. “No more Leah, eh?”
“I’ll never call you Leah again, Leah! That Leah, the Leah that was, the Leah I might have had wonderful children with, is dead to me forever.”
“You are,” she decided, “overly dramatic. And possibly deranged.”
“Because I’ve been fucking stabbed, you heartless psychotic!”
“I’m not psychotic,” she said, stung. Most likely.
“Warning her, warning her, and she stabs me!”
“It’s true.”
“Twice!”
“I’m sorry about the first one,” she added.
“See? She admits it! Ow-ow-ow!” He jerked on the gurney, and seized the doctor’s sleeve. “That stuff you said would numb me? Is not numbing me.” Then he snapped his head around to glare at her again. “Wait, just the first one? You’re only apologizing for the first stab?”
“I thought you were the killer who keeps killing me.”
“I don’t even know how to be in a conversation with her,” he complained to the harried intern. “Ow! You said the Novocain would kick in right away.”
“Usually it does.”
“Ow, argghh!”
“Unless I did it wrong again.”
“Again? Here’s some advice, doctor—if that is your real name,” he snarled, then ruined the fierce effect by puffing his bangs out of his eyes. “That is not something a patient wants to hear ever.”
“I didn’t want to be a doctor,” the intern confessed. He was a harassed-looking blond twentysomething who needed a haircut and about thirty hours of sleep. Leah had seen skulls with shallower eye sockets. “My dad insisted.”
“Why the hell would you tell me that?”
“Sleep deprivation.” Leah cleared her throat. “Your father insists because in two lives your father—and mother, actually, in your last one it was your mother—wants to be a doctor, cannot get it done, and makes you go to med school to fulfill their thwarted dreams,” Leah told him.
She looked away from their wide eyes. God, when would she learn not to blurt out Insights to strangers? (At least, strangers who weren’t new patients.) The intern had been trying to work and was clearly out of his depth and then . . . then she saw him. All of him. Saw his parents, saw their lives. Saw how it could end for him if he didn’t break the cycle. A maddening aspect of her “gift”: there were plenty of times she interacted with someone for hours (her receptionist) or saw them many times (the woman who cut her hair every six weeks) and never got so much as a glimpse into their lives, past or otherwise.
She cleared her throat again
(stupid nervous tic; anxiety phlegm!)
and added, “Really, you should be a veterinarian. It’s the only way I can see you getting out of this tedious cycle.”
The intern pounced. “I would love to be a vet. People are just gross.”
“Awful,” Leah agreed.
“Dogs and cats and, I dunno, birds and lizards, that’d be okay.”
“Much more interesting. Also,” she added, “they don’t talk.”
“They don’t talk,” the doctor replied, delighted. “But it’s too late now.”
“It’s not, actually.”
“All the money they spent, sending me to school.” He looked at his bloody gloves and shook his head. “I can’t do it to them. They took out loans. They took on second jobs. They helicoptered the hell out of me.”
“So?” She had zero patience with parents living their dreams through their progeny. And not much more for the progeny who wouldn’t stand up to said parents. Then again, Leah allowed she had a peculiar bias against parents in general, after being raised by the foul unnatural creature who was her mother. “If you won’t stand up to them, get used to this life again and again. It’s your fourth pass, you know.” It was. She could see it, could see the doctor, all of him: George Stanton, DOB 2/6/1821, DOD 6/2/1865. Harry Bennett, DOB 6/3/1865, DOD 1/2/1905. Carolyn Whitman, DOB 1/2/1905, DOD 12/5/1968. All docs. All hating it. All dying in a state of vicious dissatisfaction. The saddest thing about her gift was when she explained their mistakes to people, only to see them turn around and make more of them.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt this bit of career counseling, Dr. Pay Attention to Your Patient. I myself never planned on becoming a Pee Eye, but none of the local art schools would take me and I hated my part-time job at the morgue. But I am a stabbing victim in mortal agony, so fix me already!”
“You are not,” Leah said, annoyed.
“Which part?”
“You’re not in agony.”
“You don’t get to decide about my agony,” he snapped back. “You don’t get to decide anything about me. In fact, you should be way nicer to me so I don’t press charges. Like, fourth-date nice.” His gaze dropped to her breasts, which she should have minded, but he had such a stupidly hopeful look on his face she did not. On the other hand, he might have been eyeing her cleavage (such as it was) for weapons. Which, since she had two more knives concealed on her person, was wise.
“That reminds me,” the doc said, finishing the last stitch with a satisfied grunt. He straightened and rubbed his back, cursed when he remembered he still had bloody gloves on and had smeared just Archer’s blood all over his shirt, and yanked them off. “Did you want to press charges, Ms. Nazir?”
She closed her eyes but the outraged shriek came anyway: “What?”
“I did have cause,” she reminded him.
Archer was so outraged he could only gape at her for several seconds while the doctor cleared away the mess—they were short of nurses at Northwestern Memorial, and it was making everyone grumpy. Finally, he managed, “Right, I forgot, she’s an Insighter, so she gets a pass on felony assault because bogus.”
The doc nodded. “She does if you killed her before.”
He was wrong, but Leah said nothing. Sometimes it was better to let people keep believing the myths. In fact, she could file a complaint about the stalking, but couldn’t have him prosecuted for anything he might have done to her in a former life.
“First of all, I didn’t kill her before. I’ve never killed anybody in any life. Second, our judicial system,” Archer announced to the room, “needs work.” He thought of his father for a moment, and the uncle his father was in prison for killing, and shivered.
“On that we agree.” Insighters were rare, like physics geniuses, and like physics geniuses, they were treated with a combination of awe and impatience, and sometimes bone-deep dread. People needed them and resented needing them. They could do things most could not, and their talents weren’t quantifiable or controllable. It made for uneasy symbiosis. The Traynor bill, which had been plodding through Congress for years, did nothing to clarify matters. It had made things murkier, and even Leah didn’t think Insighters should get away with some of the things they got away with. “I won’t press charges. You have been punished enough.”
“Got that right.”
“But when you get out of here, we are going to see It. Also, you will need a new job because you will not be spying on me any longer. Tell It to hire someone else.”
“Got that right.” He paused. “Are you calling y
our mom It?”
She ignored him. “Dr. Drange, are you admitting him?”
“It’s Derange,” the doc, whose ID badge was smeared with blood corrected, and what an unfortunate name for a physician. He was scribbling in Archer’s chart. “Overnight at least, yeah. Couple of stab wounds would normally warrant a longer stay, but they’re pretty shallow. Messy, but not dangerous.”
“What do you know about my stab wounds? You’re a future veterinarian! I happen to think they’re messy and dangerous.”
“I think,” Derange added, raising a blond brow at her, “your heart wasn’t in it.”
“Shows what you know.” Archer was out of his foaming rage and entering Sulk Mode.
It did, actually. My heart wasn’t in it. Well, the second time.
“I said I was sorry,” she said when they were alone.
“You apologized for one grotesque wound, not both.”
“As I am certain,” she continued, “you are sorry for spying on me and scaring me.”
“Scaring you? No way in hell. An IRS audit wouldn’t scare you. Goddamned Typhoid Mary wouldn’t scare you.” Since Leah had met Mary Mallon just last year, he was correct. “You don’t scare.” A half-second pause, followed by, “Okay, sorryIscaredyoubutyoudidn’thavetostabmetwice.”
“You’re right.” She thought for a few seconds. Am I really going to do this? Yes. I am. “Can I get you anything?”
He blinked those dazzling eyes at her. “What?”
“You say ‘what’ a lot. Magazines? Gum? A cigar? Do you want me to call anyone?”
“. . . no.”
He doesn’t have anyone. Like me. The thought brought another unwitting smile to her lips.
“Why are you looking at me like that with your sexy shark eyes?”
“I . . .” Because I can’t see you, and I would like to. “I apologize.”
“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying this. I can’t believe I’m even thinking it. But . . .”
And that’s how she found herself spending the night curled into a surprisingly comfortable chair beside Archer’s hospital bed, the beeps and boops of the monitors around her lulling her into a sleep almost deeper than Archer’s drugged one.