He left me standing in the hallway, blinking in astonishment after him.

I lurked around the hall outside Morrison’s office, mostly out of sight, until he came back from the Channel Two interview. He wasn’t quite in dress uniform, but his clothes were crisper than usual, as if he’d known the interview was coming. But crisp or not, there were worried wrinkles around his eyes, and his gaze was concerned as it roved over the empty desks in the room outside his office. A frown pinched his eyebrows, and a wave of wry exasperation filtered through me. I was pretty sure he was looking for me. Even in the midst of a crisis I could annoy him with the mere question of my presence. Go, me. Morrison went into his office and I lurked for a couple more minutes, giving him some time to wind down after the interview before coming out of hiding to tap on his door.

He said, “There you are. Good job with Corvallis,” as I came in. I actually looked over my shoulder to see if there was someone else behind me, which got a faint smile out of my captain. “I’m talking to you, Walker.”

“So I see. It just seemed incredibly unlikely.”

“Take what you can get,” Morrison suggested, and gestured toward a chair. “Now tell me what the hell is going on with my police force.” I sat, then sank into the chair as weariness swept over me. Morrison’s mouth soured as I fought and lost to a yawn big enough to make my eyes water. “Did I interrupt your beauty sleep, Walker?”

“No.” I squeaked it out on the last of the yawn. “Robert Holliday did. Mel’s gone to sleep, too.”

A subtle flinch went through him. “Melinda Holliday? She’s not—” Morrison’s expression darkened until his blue eyes were almost as gray as Gary’s. “What’s going on, Walker?”

“She’s not a cop,” I finished for him. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Morrison. Billy and Melinda kind of make sense. They’re—” I struggled with the right way to say this. “Like me,” I finally said, though it was incomplete. “I don’t know why I’m still awake.”

“Because they’re not like you,” Morrison said flatly. “Holliday’s a believer, Walker, but he can’t do what you do. You want to see the roster of people who are out today?” He shoved paperwork across his desk at me. I leaned forward to pick it up, not wanting to see it at all.

Almost everyone from the garage was on it. Nick, who hadn’t smiled at me in months, except in the dream that morning. The guys I’d been drinking with on the Fourth; all the old friends I’d bantered with in my sleep. Bruce was there, and so was Ray. For a moment I thought I was onto something, but I let it go with a hoarse laugh. Morrison wasn’t on the list, and he’d featured heavily in the dream. Damn. It’d been a good thought.

I slid further down in my chair and put one foot against Morrison’s desk and my elbow on the armrest so I could push my knuckles against my mouth and rub my thumb over the scar on my cheek. Somewhere during the fidgeting I got the impression Morrison was looking at me disapprovingly, but I couldn’t stop. “All I know is whatever this is, I woke it up,” I said through the barrier of my knuckles.

Morrison stood, then walked across the room to windows that overlooked the parking lot. He’d taken his jacket off before I’d come into the office, and sunlight softened the sharpness of his white shirt, making a faint shadow of his torso inside the fabric. The line of him was casual, hands in his pockets, but I could almost see tension rolling off his shoulders. Energy fluttered behind my breastbone and I pushed the heel of my hand against my stomach, then stopped fighting the push of power and let myself blink.

And I could see, with a capital S. Morrison’s colors, dominant purples and blues, were stained with the tension I could now literally see. There was too much red in his purple, edging it toward burgundy, and the colors clouded over his shoulders in roiling dark swirls. Blues were tinged toward black, the color of anger mixed with fear. Not, emphatically not, fear for himself, but concern for his people, and anger at being helpless in the face of their illnesses. Compassion ran deep in him, royal-blue tempered to something more soothing, but gray ran through it, the frustration of being unable to act. Just beyond him, my second sight let the sky thrum with neon intensity, bright electric colors of life making Morrison seem unusually solid and grounded by distress.

I didn’t really mean to get up and walk over to him, and I certainly had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. Morrison made it a moot question by turning to look at me when I was still a few steps away. A flicker of expression washed over his face, and he said, “Your eyes are gold again,” before brushing past me and returning to his desk. I stood there alone, staring out the window at a world of garish colors.

Morrison said something else and I flinched, all the brilliance of my other sight disappearing in a flash. I closed my eyes, not particularly wanting to look at a dull-colored earth and more particularly not wanting to look at Morrison, though I turned my head toward the sound of his voice. “I’m sorry, sir. What did you say? I was…I wasn’t listening.”

“I said you sound pretty confident that this sleeping sickness is caused by an it.” There was nothing at all about his phrasing that made it a question, but it was one. I nodded and my eyes came open whether I wanted them to or not. There was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock on one of the bookshelves in Morrison’s office; I stared at its slim glass form and the seconds ticking away as I answered.

“You remember when the lights went out in January?”

“As if I could forget.”

I ignored his tone and shrugged at the clock. “I really screwed up with that. I guess it was kind of like using a bulldozer to swat a fly. It sent…” My hand lifted and made a wave in the air, all of its own accord. “Ripples. All those snowstorms. The heat wave.”

“You’re telling me you can affect weather patterns, Walker?” Morrison sounded rightfully disbelieving. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, fingers cool against the corners of my eyes.

“You know, sir, if I could summon a little thundercloud above your head to prove myself, I’d do it, but I don’t think I could even if it’d help anything. That’s…” I struggled for a word, and the only one I could come up with was, “magic. Making something out of nothing. I can’t do that. All I can do is manipulate what’s there, move energy and shape it some, and if I do it badly, we get snowstorms and heat waves and thunderbirds, oh my. I don’t know. Maybe I could make a ministorm above your head if I had the training. I don’t.” I dropped my hand and went back to staring at the clock, then at the calendars above it. Three of them, turned to the past, present and upcoming months. All three were covered in Morrison’s handwriting, tiny but readable. I talked to the fine print, pretending my boss wasn’t really in the room.

“Everything that happened a couple weeks ago, all that stuff with Colin Johannsen and Faye Kirkland. It got started because I should’ve started out years ago as a firecracker, and instead I showed up a decade too late as an atom bomb. It was like I threw up a big red arrow in the sky pointing to me and saying, ’Stupid newbie on the astral scene, please use and abuse to your heart’s content.’” I had never once put all this into words, and I was pretty sure there were better people to be telling it to than Morrison. On the other hand, Gary and Coyote both basically understood the problem already, and right then I couldn’t think of anybody else who might need to understand it more than my boss.

“I thought everything I’d screwed up had been fixed on the solstice, but I guess not. Whatever’s putting people to sleep, I woke it up, and now it’s hunting and I’ve still got that arrow blinking over my head.” That sounded like I was completely concerned with myself, which was bitterly untrue.