A gigantic hollow tube settled over me, bringing fresh air with it. Creatures I didn’t think could crawl scoured the tube’s sides and clambered up, the air and walls thick with them. I couldn’t see where they were going, but I went with the masses, scrambling away from devastating heat toward a new world somewhere beyond the sky.

And gasped awake to find myself in the comparatively cool air of a Seattle night, nestled against Mark Bragg’s chest. Phoebe and Barb stood close by, faces concerned. “God, Joanne,” Mark said as my eyes opened. “Are you okay?”

“You guys didn’t…” No. Of course they hadn’t seen that. “I had a…” Visions weren’t really my thing. Well. Visions hadn’t really been my thing up to this point. I had no idea if they were something I’d get on a regular basis from now on or not. If they involved passing out in dance clubs, I hoped they’d be an infrequent visitor to my repertoire. “What happened?” Somebody else talking sounded good.

“You just collapsed,” Mark said in bewilderment. “One second we were dancing and you just slithered down to the floor. I picked you up and Barb and Phoebe cleared a path. Are you all right, Joanne?”

I started to lift a hand to rub my cheek, then realized I was still cradled against Mark’s chest. He wasn’t standing, so most of my weight was really in his lap, but he held me close, like I might be fragile. Since fragile and I had never really been on speaking terms, I felt a little silly, and tried squirming loose. Mark didn’t quite let me go, though he relaxed his hold some. “I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I just had a little…”

A little psychic escapade. Phoebe’d seen me zone out in the locker room a couple weeks earlier, but I hadn’t explained it. Mark, thanks to Gary, knew a little about my shamanism gig. Barb had no idea. None of it made me want to confess to the truth. “I just got dizzy all of a sudden.”

Phoebe’s hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm. “Oh, my god. You’re not pregnant or anything, are you?” The question was filled with equal parts of horror, glee and interest.

Mark, holding me, went very still. My first thought, almost incongruously, was it might’ve been easier if even one person had reacted that way, and my second was that it would not do at all to reach out and throttle my friend. She could not possibly know the demons she stirred up with the question. It felt like it took a long time indeed to pull a sick smile into place and say, “Uh, no, I don’t think so, Phoebe. Maybe dinner didn’t agree with me.”

“You had shrimp in your salad,” Mark said hastily. “Maybe that was it.” Barb looked between the two of us knowingly, though she kept her mouth shut. That was good. I didn’t want to have to punch Morrison’s girlfriend in the mouth.

Well. All right, never mind that. “I’m okay,” I said after a couple of seconds. “But I think I might call it a night now. It’s been kind of a weird day.” Between Mark and Billy and unsaid things with Morrison and conking out in the parking lot and having a date and—yeah. Weird day.

“I’ll drive you,” Mark said, and I discovered I felt well enough to say “Like hell” in a relatively mild voice. “Nobody drives Petite but me.”

He chuckled. “All right. Guess you’re feeling okay, if you’re up to arguing about it. Barbie, I’ll meet you later, all right? Phoebe, it was nice to meet you.”

Barbie?

Mark helped me to my feet, and I had enough sense not to echo his nickname for her out loud. Or snicker at it, which was also high on my list of things to do. I wondered if Morrison knew his new girl was named after a toy.

I had a brief, unpleasant suspicion there was a word for what I was feeling toward Barbara in regards to her relationship with Morrison, and that only small, nasty people let themselves indulge in the emotion described by that word.

Fortunately, nobody ever said I was a good person. Phoebe hugged me, Barb shook my hand and Mark walked me back to Petite very carefully. It’d gotten later than I thought, pressing two in the morning, and the streets were empty as we drove back to my apartment, listening to music too loudly. A few blocks from the building Mark turned the music down and glanced at me. “So what really happened back there?”

I sucked air in through my teeth. “I had a vision.” It took a long time to say that.

Mark quirked a smile. “This is killing you, isn’t it?”

I hoped not, or that it was only figurative if it was. “Yeah. Look.” Apparently that word took so much effort I couldn’t say anything again until I’d pulled into my building’s parking lot and killed the engine in my usual spot. “Look,” I said again, then.

Mark said, “Hang on,” and got out of the car. Came around to my door and opened it for me, giving a little half bow as I chuckled and climbed out. He closed the door behind me gently, patted Petite’s roof, and then turned his attention to me. “Okay. Now go.”

“Why now?”

“Because it’s much less awkward to kiss you good night and make an elegant exit after your speech when I’m already on my feet,” he said, smiling openly. I stared at him for a few seconds, then laughed.

“Confident, aren’t you?”

“Hopeful,” he corrected. “So what were you going to say?”

“You know, I really don’t know.” The heel of my hand went to my breastbone and rubbed there, a nervous habit I hadn’t been able to break since getting a sword stuffed through me. “Just…”

“Joanne.” Mark lifted a finger, as if he’d put it over my lips but didn’t complete the touch. “You seem like a pretty solid person. Obviously this shamanism thing is important to you but you don’t want to talk about it, so how about we just leave it at that? You get to where you want to talk, well, I’m kind of hoping I’ll be around for that. In the meantime, I won’t push and I won’t roll my eyes and mutter, ’What a kook,’ when you’re gone, okay? Does that sound like a good place to work from?”

I felt a disbelieving smile pull at my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said around it. “That sounds pretty great, actually. Maybe too good to be real.” I knew people whose too-good-to-be-real early relationships had turned into actually-just-good-enough-to-be-real ones. I knew ones that hadn’t turned out, too, of course, but all of a sudden I was feeling hopeful. So he was a kook who was willing to go with my whole magic-filled lifestyle. For somebody like me, that might not be a bad thing. And he knew when not to push it, which for somebody like me was perfect. “Where exactly did you come from?”

“Arizona.” He grinned, touched my cheek and ducked his head to steal a brief kiss, as threatened. Then he stepped back with another grin and a wink, and left me smiling idiotically after him as he sauntered off to find his car. Not until he left did I stagger upstairs to collapse in my bed, eyes wide despite a great weariness encroaching on me. I felt peculiarly normal, which struck me as all wrong, because nothing in the past twenty-four hours had been normal for me.

Which was a complex thought in and of itself. The last six or seven months, when I’d thought something along those lines, it’d meant old gods and spirit guides and magical things were going on. Right now it meant I’d almost accidentally slept with somebody and had gone out dancing and appeared to have something of a social life. That was all wildly abnormal. Billy’s illness might’ve been mystical in nature, but by God if my mind hadn’t assimilated that as an ordinary thing that happened in the course of Joanne’s life.

I honestly couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or not.

Somewhere right around the edge of sleep I could feel an idea of what I should be doing next starting to form. I was afraid to look too closely at it, for fear of sending it scurrying away. A few hours’ sleep before work might shake it loose, and in the morning I’d have to tell Phoebe I owed her one. Who could’ve known that a little R & R was good for the soul? I rolled over, chortling sleepily at myself, and dragged a pillow across the bed to moosh my face into it. It smelled faintly of Mark’s after-shave, which made my stomach tighten up, but the vast sleepies had a head start on berating myself with a what were you thinking lecture.