Phoebe stared at me. I suspected I wasn’t helping myself. “Believe me, I was more comfortable being normal. I don’t talk about it because I don’t want people to look at me the way you’re doing. I’m sorry I can’t prove it. All I can say is for me it’s real, and I’ll try to keep it out of your hair if you still want to give me fencing lessons.”

She echoed, “‘For you it’s real.” Jo, real is real. You don’t get a different real than I do.”

“Of course I do.” I blinked, genuinely surprised. “You’re five-four, I’m five-eleven and a half. We experience different realities based on that, never mind something as off the wall as shamanism. We have a lot of converging points in our realities, but you live in a reality where you need a stepladder to change a smoke alarm, and I live in one where the top shelf in the kitchen is a reasonable place to keep things I use regularly. From one perspective, me being a shaman isn’t any weirder than you trying out for the Olympic fencing team.”

“It’s a lot weirder.”

“Yeah?” I arched my eyebrows. “How many Olympic-class athletes do most people know?”

“How many shamans do most people know?”

“That’s my point.” I shrugged. “They’re both extraordinary. I’ll grant you that the difference is, if you tell people you tried out for the Olympic team, they’re likely to say, ‘Really? Cool,’ and if I tell people I’m a shaman, they’ll probably say, ‘Oh, reaaalllyyy…’ and be uncomfortable.”

“Well, what’m I supposed to do?”

I let out a breath of semi-laughter. “I’d ignore it.” I had ignored it, but that hadn’t worked out so well for me. Phoebe, however, wasn’t stuck living between my ears. “Write it off as ‘oh my God, Joanne’s lost her mind,’ and don’t worry about it any more than you’d worry about a friend who collected snow globes or something else you had no interest in. The nice thing about me is I’m not likely to regale you with stories about shamanism, whereas some of those collector types can’t talk about anything else.” I thought it was a very convincing argument. In fact, I sort of wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. Presumably I’d been too hung up with self-loathing and rejection. I bet this approach was much healthier.

Phoebe looked at me a long time, like if she scowled hard enough or long enough, she might worm her way inside my mind and get a better understanding of what’d gone wrong. Finally, though, she shook her head and said, “Yeah, okay, whatever,” and picked up her gear bag. “Are we going to fence, or what?”

I met Billy back at the precinct building, damp with sweat but in a better humor. He said, “I guess it went okay with Pheeb,” and tossed me the keys to an unmarked police cruiser. I wanted to take Petite, but with the cost of gas what it was, driving a police vehicle on police business just made the receipts easier. At least I got to drive. Not that I could remember Billy ever doing the driving since we’d been partnered.

In police academy, they’d impressed on us that there were two kinds of good drivers. One was the kind who followed all the rules, drove the speed limit, never double-parked and always wore their seat belts. I was usually that kind of driver.

But I’d also cut my driver’s teeth on hairpin Appalachian roads with plunging cliffs on one side and sheer rock face on the other. I could jackass Petite around a forty-five-degree turn at speeds way above the limit without losing momentum, and I’d spent my share of time feeling like Wile E. Coyote, dangling in the air over a dark green valley when me and another driver’d met coming opposite directions on a road barely wide enough for one. Dancing a police car through road cones and driving with blown-out tires was nothing.

Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I missed North Carolina and Qualla Boundary. I said, “Huh,” out loud, and Billy looked askance at me. “Nothing. Just an alarming display of internal emotional stability.”

He said, “Good,” dryly. “Sonata gets upset around unstable people, and I’d like her to be able to get these ghosts off me.”

“Sonata? Like the musical piece? Did she name herself? Oh, God. She’s a new-age hippie freak, isn’t she?”

“I swear to God, Joanne, if you can’t behave yourself I’m leaving you in the car.”

Me and Doherty in the driveway, together but separate, leaped to mind. I shut my mouth and drove us to Sonata’s house, up on Capitol Hill. It was one of those gorgeous old Victorians that requires either inheritance or obscene wealth to buy. Being a medium seemed ideal for “just happening” to come into such an inheritance.

The woman who opened the ornately windowed front door was, in fact, a long-haired hippie freak, one in her mid-sixties who’d probably never left the Woodstock era. She wore moccasins, gypsy skirts with beaded belts, and an inordinate number of rings on her thin fingers.

She also wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a smiley face that had a splash of blood marring its cheerful yellow circle. It wasn’t exactly a hippie vibe. I tried to rearrange my prejudices as she put her fists on her hips and inspected us.

Inspected me, more accurately. Billy obviously already had the all-clear, and I was just as obviously lacking. After a good long examination, she said, “Are you sure this is the one you were talking about, William? She’s got skepticism written all over her.”

I glanced at my hands to check, but they were, thankfully, unmarred by ink. Stranger things had happened. Billy, ruefully, said, “I’m sure. It’s good to see you, Sonny.” He kissed her cheek and she smiled, then offered me a hand.

“All right, come on in, unbeliever. I’m Sonata.”

“I’m Joanne.” I thought “Joanne” had a nicer ring than “unbeliever,” but I wasn’t sure Sonata would call me by it. She nodded and ushered us in.

Victorians were the ultimate houses for séances. Sonny’s was brighter and more airily decorated than I expected, but it still had a sense of somber grandiosity. I hoped she’d bring us to a dark room with the requisite enormous wooden table, and was looking forward to searching it for knockers and strings, but we went into a well-lit, comfortable living room where a young man was drinking a glass of wine.

Disappointment must’ve shown on my face, because Sonata looked amused. “Dark corners and spooky rooms are for charlatans, Joanne. This is Patrick. He’d be my partner in crime, the one dripping cold water down gullible séance attendees’ spines while I asked if they felt the icy touch of the grave, if you’re trying to keep track of how I’d run my scam. Pat, this is Joanne Walker, and you know William.”

“Sure. Nice to meet you, Joanne.” Patrick was a little older than me and had the unaffected good looks of a California surfer boy. My opinion of what constituted a medium shifted rapidly. Not only did Sonata wear inappropriate T-shirts, but she apparently had a hot young thing to keep her company. Maybe growing up to be a hippie freak wouldn’t be so bad.

The hippie freak gave me another amused smile. “I’ll be turning the lights down. Spirits are more comfortable in dim lighting. But if what William says is true, you won’t need light to see if what I do is real or not.”

My ears got hot. “I don’t know. Billy’s aura doesn’t change when he talks to ghosts, and I can’t normally see them myself.” I didn’t like that I could see these ones. It suggested the cauldron—if that was the root cause—had some kind of back door into my own magic, and I had no idea how to face or even find it. “For all I know, the Sight won’t show me anything with you.”

Sonny tilted her head, interest piqued. “I have to go into a trance to speak with the spirits. That may be different enough to trigger your ability to detect magic.” She turned a knob on the wall as she spoke, and the lights dimmed.

I yawned. Unless absolute catastrophe struck, I was going home and going to bed after this. Billy looked as if he was having similar thoughts. Sonata sat down cross-legged on a cushion, hands palms upward on her thighs, thumb and middle fingertips curved in loose circles to touch. Patrick knelt just behind her, close enough to touch, and bowed his head like a guardian angel.