"Can it be done? Because if it can—" I hadn't often left my body behind. A handful of times, maybe, and always in a crisis. I relaxed into my chair—a task in itself, as it was hard plastic—and thought about the peculiar sensation of standing over there when I could see my body sitting over here. An underlying part of me considered leaving my body behind to be joining the world of the Sight wholesale. I wasn't comfortable with that. I liked my body, and the world the Sight showed me was detached and gorgeous. I was afraid to become too attached to it, for fear I'd become detached myself.

The middling detail that I'd spent a significant chunk of my life deliberately detached was not to be considered. Vaguely grumpy at the thought, I got up and walked across the room, arms folded under my breasts and gaze locked downward. "All I need is a—"

My voice wasn't. I put my hand on my throat, then turned back to see myself lolling in the plastic chair beside Billy's desk. Billy grabbed my wrist, and I felt the distant pressure of his fingers checking my pulse before he looked around the room, eyebrows drawn down. "Joanie?"

It was a few minutes after five, and Homicide was mostly cleared out. Even so, everybody who was left glanced up, then exchanged looks that said they were suddenly in a hurry to go out for coffee and gossip about the Paranormal Pair.

Me, I walked back to Billy, silent on weightless feet, and gave his paperwork a push with one finger.

My finger slid through it with the sensation of paper cuts. I yelped and drew back, shaking my hand, then glanced at my body. A sliver of red awakened on one fingertip, and I grimaced. A little more determined, I reached for the papers, picked them up, and tapped them into a tidy stack before setting them back down on his desk and snapping back into my body, where I stuck my bleeding finger in my mouth. "Ow."

Billy did a fine impression of a goldfish, his eyes bulging and mouth popping. "Did you just—?"

I said, "I did," around my finger. "Never tried that before. See what I did?" I stuck my finger out at him and he eyed it.

"Aren't you a healer?"

"Oh. Right." Something like a paper cut didn't even require a car metaphor anymore. I just wanted the injury sealed, and voilà, it was. In theory I should be able to do that with much graver damage, but I hadn't leveled up that high yet. "So I can affect the physical world even out-of-body. I have this…nasty theory. We keep finding bodies with no signs of foul play in the immediate vicinity. Maybe they're being killed where we're finding the bodies, but the attack is coming on an astral level. The blood and viscera could be feeding back through the spirit into the separate body. No physical mess to clean up."

Billy, whom I thought of as being fairly tough, turned a little green around the gills. "Is that possible?"

I faced my palms upward. "The murders in Woodland were ugly, but their point was to channel souls to something separate that hungered for them. Same thing with the mess at Halloween. This is a little different, so I don't know that it's possible, but I'm not ruling it out."

"Wouldn't it leave a mark? Like Mel's power circle?"

I'd never seen Billy seem out of his depth before. Maybe it meant I was finally catching up to the rest of the class. I wasn't sure if it felt good or profoundly alarming. "I just rearranged your desk with almost no effort, much less a power circle, so not necessarily. If you're talking about somebody with a lot of rage or fear, and I'd think we kind of have to be, it's…" My brain caught up with where my mouth was going, and stopped my chatter with a sound of dismay. "Somebody could be doing this without knowing it."

"They could be eating bodies, stripping them of their souls, and leaving the corpses on unmarked territory without knowing it?" Billy's voice rose sharply enough that the handful of remaining detectives looked around at each other again, then, to a man, started mumbling about coffee breaks. In a rustle of coats, heavy boots and slamming doors, we were alone. Billy glowered after them. "Nobody offered to bring us a cup back."

"I wouldn't have, either. Look, I'm just saying it's possible. Maybe not probable, but the human psyche is messed-up territory. So we need to pursue this, but for the first time I'm thinking maybe we shouldn't go in with all guns blazing."

My cell phone gave its six-note warning that a text message was coming in as I finished speaking. So did Billy's. We both went still, my tense expression mirrored on his face, and I silently put a fist on one palm. He echoed the motion and we beat our fists against our palms in tandem, one two three.

I came up scissors. He came up rock. I swore and stood up to pull my phone out of my pocket, reading the message out loud: "Possible new victim. Positive identification, oh, shit."

"What?" Billy was on his feet, leaning toward me like the tension in his body would negate whatever I had to say. "Who?"

I pressed my hand over my mouth, fingers icy, belly cramping. "I'm sorry, Billy. I'm so sorry. It's Mandy Tiller."

And it was unquestionably my fault.

Mandy was still breathing when we got there.

We were fast: the paramedics were only just pulling into the driveway when we reached the Tillers' home, a few blocks away from Billy's. The fact that there were paramedics at all pushed some of the churning terror in my stomach aside and made room for something almost worse: hope. No one else had needed a paramedic. I fell out of Billy's van and ran across the Tillers' lawn, skidding across snow to reach Mandy's side.

Unlike the other victims, she had only one bite mark. A stretched-out wound had torn her coat and shirt and left a broad toothy gash in her forearm. A pool of blood stained the stairs under her head, which was both horrible and wonderful. All the others had been found in clean sites, and I knew for certain Mandy hadn't been attacked miles away and been dumped on her own front steps. I'd been with her barely an hour earlier.

A paramedic put a hand on my shoulder. "Excuse me, ma'am."

I whispered, "Ten seconds. Just give me ten seconds. Please," and let the Sight wash over everything.

Blood seeped from her skull, a simple but significant wound that cried out for healing. I clenched my hands, wishing I had time, wishing I didn't have an audience. But the paramedics could care for the head wound; what I was more worried about was the utter nothingness which had surrounded all the other victims. And though unlike them, Mandy still breathed, she also had no spark of life. Her aura didn't even lie flat against her skin, giving me some hint of her well-being. It was just gone.

What I could See were vestiges of my own power, familiar silver-blue tendrils still lingering from our adventure earlier in the day. I jerked around to look at Billy with the Sight, searching for similar remnants around him, and found nothing. But it had been weeks since I'd used my power on him, and even then it hadn't been the kind of physical shield I'd used on Mandy. I didn't know if the residue had protected her in some way or not, but even if it had, that didn't exactly balance out setting her up as a potential victim in the first place.

While I was looking at Billy, the paramedics swooped in and got Mandy onto a stretcher. Jake Tiller sat on top of the porch steps, wrapped in a huge winter jacket and blank-gazed with fear. One of the paramedics offered his hand. Jake took it blindly, letting the man guide him down the stairs toward the ambulance. The poor boy's aura was static white, shock too great for his true colors to wash through. Billy, a few yards away, was talking to the cop who'd texted us, and I heard the guy say, "The kid came home from ball practice and found his mom lying on the steps. He called 911. Probably saved her life."