"Is there a problem with my men? Who are y—" She swallowed the question, staring up at me, then yanked her hat off, like it would help her see me better. Dark honey hair collapsed around her shoulders in classic salon-commercial style, but there was nothing particularly inviting about her expression. "Joanne?"

There'd been a lot of things I wanted to leave east of the Mississippi. The woman standing in front of me had been one of them. We'd been best friends for about thirty seconds, about a million years ago, and it had gone all to hell over a boy. I scraped a few brain cells together and managed, eventually, to produce a witty response no doubt years in the making:

"Hi, Sara."

"What are you doing here, Joanne? Where'd you send my men?"

"Your m—what'm I—what're you doing here? I live in Seattle. Don't tell me you live in Seattle. Your men? Really?" I turned to look after the duo beating feet down the road. "You brought them in?"

"No, they were here when I arrived, but I've got rank. What're you—"

I pulled out my SPD badge again and earned a credible sneer from the woman who'd once been my best friend. I said, "Oh come on now," sort of vaguely. "Don't tell me you're going to play that whole federal/state jurisdiction superiority thing."

"Not as long as you stay out of my way."

That had a peculiarly school-yard ring to it. I stood there watching snow melt in Sara's hair and reeling at the idea that we hadn't moved past that. I mean, I was no great shakes in terms of emotional maturity, but dwelling on rivalries that had exploded almost fifteen years earlier seemed a little much. It didn't mean I wanted to be bosom buddies again, but I could hardly fathom getting in jurisdictional fights because I'd nailed the boy she'd wanted in high school.

Coyote, a bit diffidently and from a safe distance, said, "You two know each other?"

I said, "Yes," and Sara said, "No," at the same time, and Coyote looked like he wished he hadn't asked. I said, "Yes," again more firmly. "We went to high school together. This is Sara Buch—" "Isaac."

I wasn't moving, but my feet slipped anyway. I lurched upright again, clutching the air for support, and turned goggly eyes on Sara. "You're kidding. The same—?"

She drew herself up, all but hissing. She was taller than she'd been in school, though still quite a lot shorter than I was. I'd thought she was beautiful, back then. She'd grown up just as pretty, except for the pinch of anger between her eyebrows. She'd been buckwheat blonde in school, but the dark honey tones suited her better, playing up her cheekbones and skin tones. "Yes, the same Isaac. Just because you got everything you wanted in high school doesn't mean you—"

I lost the rest of what she said to gales of laughter. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes went bright, making her even prettier, but I couldn't stop laughing. I doubled over, still whooping, and finally braced my hands on my thighs so I could peer up at her. "I'm sorry. Are you serious? You really think I wanted to get pregnant and have twins at fifteen? I just wanted him to like me, Sara, and I was a moron. You said you didn't like him. I swear to God, I had no idea you were just playing it cool. I wasn't that good at reading people. I'd never had a real girlfriend before, with Dad moving us around all the time. I swear I didn't get it. I tried telling you this back then. I'm really sorry. I had no idea." I straightened up and offered a hand in peace. Handshakes were formal gestures, but I'd never felt like I was participating in ritual before when I initiated one. I'd been wanting to say that for a long time.

Sara didn't look like she'd been waiting to hear it a long time. "Oh, I'm not just talking about Lucas. It was you and that stupid drum you were so proud of, you and all your stories from all over the place, like you were some kind of hot shit because you'd traveled—"

I had never previously experienced the phrase my head was spinning in a literal sense, but I began to feel as if someone had taken a stick and was liberally stirring my brains. The world went zipping to the left and I clutched my skull with both hands, trying to steady it. "Wow. You're serious. That's…really not how I meant to come across."

If I'd meant anything, it had been to keep people from picking on me. I recognized now that I'd had a massive chip on my shoulder. I could see how it could've come across as arrogance, but the idea was—to me, anyway— laughable. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be a prick."

"Like it matters now."

Apparently it did, but I was smart enough not to say that. The smart part of me, in fact, thought I should maybe focus on the dead person a couple dozen feet away so that we could sort out what could be sorted, and then go inside and have Irish coffees to ward off the cold. The teenage girl inside me, though, said, "But he went back to Canada. How'd you guys get back in touch?"

Sara's pretty face went shifty. "We never lost touch. We wrote letters after he went home."

All the air whooshed out of me like I'd taken a solid gut-punch to the diaphragm. It wouldn't unknot enough for me to inhale again, even when I hunched over, trying to find a little more room to exhale so I could convince the whole breathing process to restart properly.

I hadn't really blamed Lucas for leaving. I'd never been sure that he wasn't supposed to be in North Carolina for just the one semester anyway, since he'd left at Christmas, which was a perfectly reasonable time to go back home. It also meant he was gone weeks before I'd started to visibly show, and because teenagers frequently aren't too smart, very few people had bandied his name around as the possible partner to my predicament.

Nobody counted backward to figure out when the deed was done; they just gossiped and suggested names of boys I had no interest in. Sara and Lucas were the only two who actually knew. The idea that he'd just walked away, disappeared entirely, was one I was okay with. My mother had done more or less the same thing with me.

Somehow him walking away from me and keeping in touch with Sara was a whole lot less okay. I wasn't sure if I wanted to cry or throw up. So much for emotional maturity.

I don't know what Sara saw in my face, but it apparently fed whatever jealous beast she'd been keeping in her heart all these years, because what I saw in hers was a flash of triumph. Revenge, best served cold. I'd never cried over that particular fiasco in my life. For the first time I wanted to. Might have, if I could've gotten the breath, but my head was starting to hurt from a lack of oxygen, and my belly still wouldn't unknot.

Coyote put his hand on my shoulder, and a pulse of dry desert air rolled through me. It unwound my stomach, letting me catch a breath and pull myself upright, and warmed my extremities a smidge. I'd given people little hits like that, but I'd never received one. It felt good, all strengthening and compassionate. I hoped that's what it was like when I was the healer, rather than the healed.

Once I was stable, Coyote put his hand out. Sara took it, which she hadn't done with me. "It's nice to meet you, Agent Isaac. I'm Cyrano Bia, and this is Gary Muldoon. We need to take a look at your victim."

"Seattle Police Department hasn't got jurisdiction here."

"That's okay," Coyote said easily. "We're not police." He stepped over the police line and ambled toward the body without waiting for a response. Sara shot me a withering look and went after him.

In most ways, that was helpful. It meant I could shake off astonishment and take a look at the marked earth again. Or it would have if I was the kind of person who had her shit that much together, but I never had, still didn't, and probably never would. Gary came up beside me and said, "Jo?" as tentatively as I'd ever heard him speak.