PsyCop: GhosTV Part 17

"Step back," I said, before she could do anything scary like sneak into my flesh suit while I wasn't wearing it, and she flinched away like I'd physically slapped her. I hadn't meant it to come out quite so aggressive. It was just a cop-habit.

She did back off, some, but she was still staring at my physical body as if she'd seen a ghost. "Victor Bayne."

"Do I know you?" I was still using the I'm-gonna-kick-your-door-in tone of voice, but after the sound of all those non-words where 131.

names and numbers should have been, hearing my own name totally freaked me out.

She whirled around to face my astral body and said something very urgent to me. It sounded like...heck, I didn't know what it sounded like. It didn't even sound like words. "What?" I snapped.

She repeated herself. Again, nothing. She wailed, "Don't you recognize me?"

"Look, lady. I don't know who you are. If I met you at some Psych thing or I worked a case for you or whatever-I'm sorry. I don't remember." A jumble of emotions played over her face-excitement, fear, agita-tion-and then, finally, understanding. "Wait a minute-I know why you can't hear what I'm saying. When you knew me, I went by the name FaunWindsong."

There was a sickening lurch. I opened my eyes. My mouth tasted terrible. And my lower back hurt like h.e.l.l. Maybe I hadn't appreciated the freedom of being astral during the act itself, but now that I was once again prisoner in my chains of flesh, I recalled my OBE with more than a little longing.

I'd meant to wake Jacob and tell him what just happened, but I was exhausted-jetlagged and backachy and plain old wiped out, and before I knew it I was deeply, profoundly asleep.

After a few hours in the black pit of sleep, I stretched my legs to test the limits of my freedom, and when I found I could go all the way to the footboard, I enjoyed a moment of pure, unfettered relief. But then I realized that if I could stretch out to my full length, Jacob wasn't in bed with me.

I opened my eyes. Thankfully, I was still in the physical plane. Jacob was in the narrow center aisle with his arms outstretched, doing 132.

some kind of dramatic pose. Yoga. Tai Chi. Playgirl. Something like that.

"Hey," I said. My voice sounded gravelly, and I felt like I'd spent the night flailing around in a ball pit.

Jacob stopped posing and did a couple of neck rolls. "Hey. It's only five o'clock here. We're two hours off."

I sat up, experienced a twinge behind my glutes, and said, "I think I pulled something yesterday." Given my newfound neurosis about whether or not I was athletic enough for Buff Flexington over there, I was surprised I even admitted it. I was probably just distracted- because the thing that was really on my mind was my unscheduled flight in Astral Land.

Jacob perched on the edge of the too-small bed and rolled me onto my stomach. "Where does it hurt?"

"My back, my a.s.s, all the way down my leg."

"Sciatic nerve. Which side?"

"Right."

He ran his thumbs over my lower back, firmly, but not hard, not yet.

It was easier to start talking when I wasn't looking at him. "So...about the TV."

"I've been thinking about that," he said. "Maybe we should start with every dial at a baseline of five and go from there. Maybe there's some sort of tension that's created when one dial is high and another is low, a tension that's not there when everything's the same."

"Ow...no, don't stop. It hurts good." Jacob dragged his thumbs over the meat of my a.s.s and dug them in. I saw stars, semi-good stars.

"There," I managed, through the pain.

"Uh huh."

133.

"Did we leave it on?"

The sickening yet sublime thumb pressure let up. "The TV? No." He realized he'd stopped rubbing and sank his thumbs into the muscle again. "Why?"

"You didn't have...dreams or anything?"

"Nothing special. Something about being late for a lecture I thought I'd dropped...but I was the age I am now, not nineteen. And Carolyn was there. She was kind of my sister, though." He trailed off. The ma.s.sage grew rhythmic, as if his attention had gone back to his dream in search of another detail or two he might recall. Once the ma.s.sage had become truly excruciating, it stopped, hurt more for a moment, then felt blissful. "Why? What did you dream?"

"I'm not totally sure."

He rolled me onto my back and pushed my knees to my chest, and I gasped at the pain of the stretch-which gave me a second to figure out how to tell him. Why didn't I just come right out and say it, anyhow? The GhosTV must have done something to me that made me project. Either it did something permanent to me while we were twisting the k.n.o.bs, or it worked simply from being plugged in, whether or not we thought it was actually on.

But I knew why I didn't start getting into any of that. Jacob had been in the room, too. He'd been wrapped right around me, protecting me, while I was the one cavorting in the astral with my old nemesis Faun Windsong, while I was the one playing in the ball pit. Frankly, Jacob was lucky he'd gone as long as he had without meeting Camp h.e.l.l's most arrogant medium-and the ball pit left a lot to be desired. Even so, he'd feel gypped. Personally, I wouldn't-but I've always been content to sit out the rides that made me puke.

Jacob took hold of my calf and crossed my right leg over my left. He pushed both legs toward my chest. The leg-crossing aspect of the 134.

stretch found the muscle group Jacob had been thumbing like a pain-seeking missile.

It shouldn't have come as any big surprise to me that Jacob always knew how to ma.s.sage my hurts away. He was accustomed to putting his body through its paces, and then dealing with the results of it.

How often did his rigorous training-which verged on self-abuse at times, if you asked me-result in soreness, stiffness, knots, or worse?

Probably more often than I realized.

He didn't show it, though. Never. Jacob, limping around, favoring something that he'd pulled? Not only had I never seen it, I couldn't even picture it. And yet it didn't take an empath to know that my man of steel had plenty of soft spots just waiting to be jabbed. In the same way he'd picked up the ability to a.n.a.lyze the micro-expressions of a liar, I'd figured out how to gauge the level of his hurt disappointment by the depth and breadth of the vertical line between his eyebrows. Knowing that I'd been gallivanting through the astral while he'd been benched on the sidelines? It didn't take a genius to figure out it would sting to hear it.

But knowing that I'd lied to him? That wouldn't pain him any less.

d.a.m.n it all.

I tried to figure out how to tell him, but it was like being ordered to chop off someone's body parts and trying to gauge the least horrible appendage to start with. Maybe it would help to blame the electronics, or at least it wouldn't make me look like as much of a jerk. "See, the TV...while we were asleep-"

Footfalls thundered down the hall, and then urgent voices sounded through the door. Jacob was on his feet and climbing over the spare bed in under a second. I scrambled to get my pants on.

Jacob unlocked the door and pulled it open, not as dramatically as he 135.

would have if his own body wasn't blocking its swing, but still fast.

"Is there a problem?"

"Sir? Oh, I...I'm sorry to wake you so early. I just had the strongest impression that there was something really important in this room." Faun Windsong. Oh joy.

136.

Chapter 16.

I stepped over the corner of the spare bed, still b.u.t.toning the waistband of my pants, and said, "Hey, Faun."

"How do you know that name?" Faun Windsong looked pretty much like she had in the astral-maybe ten pounds heavier and a few generations more Caucasian, but I could have picked her out of a lineup, no problem. What about me, though? Did I look that different?

It had been my physical body she'd recognized from the astral, though. So Miss I'm-The-Trainer must not have remembered.

"It's me. Victor Bayne."

"Victor...Bayne?" She slipped past Jacob, drawn to me like I was a ghost she'd spotted on a Psych apt.i.tude test. "Wow...it is you. My name is Katrina Wojtowicz now."

"You don't remember...?" I glanced sideways at Jacob to see if he'd intuited "astral projection" from whatever I wasn't saying. He c.o.c.ked an eyebrow. d.a.m.n it all. I'd really wanted to tell him alone.

She clasped both of my hands with both of hers and jerked them up and down, and I wondered if that's the way hippies were greeting one another these days. "Victor Bayne. Wow. It's been such a long time. When did you get here?"

"Yesterday. We're, ah...we're looking for Lisa. She's my friend."

"She's my friend, too." She sounded exactly like she had in the astral.

137.

Exactly. Only it wasn't as if the conversation was a continuation of the one we'd had outside our bodies. It was totally new to her.

"But how are you in the room that those...wait a minute. Are you still in the PsyCop program?"

"That's what the license says."

She looked me up and down, and I felt profoundly s.h.i.+rtless. "It hasn't changed you much. You don't look much older than you did when we were at Heliotrope Station."

Yeah, well, I wore my damage on the inside. "Thanks. You look great, too." She'd changed as much as Richie and Stefan, which was to say, if I didn't know any better, I wouldn't have recognized her.

"So you walk through murder scenes and look for cold spots?"

"Not exactly."

"And you thought you might find something here-what, some kind of clue?"

She said the word clue as if she was humoring me. What the f.u.c.k did she know? While she was busy traipsing around PsyTrain in her organic cotton yoga pants, I'd been putting three dozen wristlocks on a jerk named Sando so a criminal couldn't sue me for hurting him with my handcuffs. So she had no business taking that tone with me. "If you don't mind," I said, "I need to get dressed." Jacob nudged her back across the threshold, shut the door and turned toward me. I reached across the corner of the mattress that separated us, and ran my hand along his forearm. "Last night, I went out of my body: you know, astral projection, like. I think it was the GhosTV's fault. I ran into her-Faun Windsong, I guess she's Katrina Somebody now, but remember, I told you when I knew her back at Camp h.e.l.l.

She's a medium. And she came up here through the floor with me and said the GhosTV was glowing."

138.

It wasn't exactly the "you lied to me" look that Jacob gave me...but it was still pained. "Don't you think you could have told me this fifteen minutes ago?"

"I was going to."

"You've been awake for how long? We could have put together a game plan. What were you waiting for?"

For the right words to miraculously occur to me-but I couldn't tell him that, so instead I said, "I was in the middle of starting to tell you about it."

He cut his eyes to the doorway. Through the gap at the bottom I could see two points of shadow, like she was standing there with her face pressed against the door just waiting for us to finish our conversation so she could rejoin it and have the final say on everything. I pulled a fresh s.h.i.+rt out of the garment bag and put it on. "I have a feeling," I said. Quiet. So someone with their nose against the door would have trouble hearing it.

Jacob gave me a tiny "go on" nod.

"They're not telling us something."

Jacob smiled-and he's not one for rolling his eyes, but he almost did.

He was no stranger to questioning subjects who were hiding something from him.

I indicated the GhosTV with my eyes. "If that thing makes me project, and if I can figure out how to use it, I can poke through this place all I want and no one'll be any the wiser."

Jacob eased forward so that when he spoke, his voice was out of range of the door. "Won't someone astral see you?"

"If they do, they won't remember. I saw Faun Windsong last night and she has no idea-and she's the teacher."

139.

Jacob eyed me. "Okay."

"The hard part of getting astral is staying that way without snapping back into your body-and thanks to the GhosTV, I can stay astral for a long stretch of time, no problem. Faun's so full of herself she underestimates everyone. I could probably do some research on OBE basics, get up to speed on projecting, and sneak under the wire-and if she does catch me, I'll play dumb."

"Is that...safe? What about that sc.u.mbag Barnhardt at Rosewood- what if you run into someone like him, someone who's up to no good?"

I doubted someone like him would have their very own psychic body-guard curled around them like I did, though I couldn't quite figure out how to tell Jacob about that red ribbon of power snaking through my silver cord without sounding like some kind of parasite. "I'll be astral, too. And I've been sucking white light, huge amounts of it, since the Clinton administration. I think I could handle anything any astral sonofab.i.t.c.h could throw at me."

He wanted to say no. Not because he didn't think I was psychically strong. We both knew that while I might not be able to pick up the barbell he bench-pressed without the aid of a forklift-in the non-physical realms, if anyone could hold their own, it was me. He was scared because if I did it, I'd have to do it alone.

I leaned over the mattress, took his face in both of my hands, and pressed a kiss to his mouth. Believe me, I'm under no illusion that I can sway someone as determined as Jacob with something as fleeting as a kiss. I just wanted to feel his solidity, his presence, and let him know that I d.a.m.n well appreciated him-besides, it was the only way I could figure out to tell him, in that half a second we had to ourselves, that I wasn't alone. He was with me.

His mustache and beard brushed over my lips, and beneath the whis-kers, his mouth. Full. Warm. Gentle, since I'd caught him by surprise.

140.

"We'll work out the details later," I said with our mouths still touching. "Right now, I want to keep my edge. That means keeping her away from the GhosTV."

Jacob caught my arms by the wrists and pulled my hands from his face. He placed a kiss on the backs of my fingers-firmly on my good hand, and gentle as a b.u.t.terfly's wing on the hand that had been sc.r.a.ped to hamburger. He nodded, once, then turned and opened our door.

When Faun Windsong tried to elbow in again, he blocked her like a defensive lineman. "Ms. Wojtowicz?" He offered his hand in lieu of entrance to our room. "Jacob Marks, Chicago P.D. You'll have to excuse me, my badge is on the nightstand-and the nightstand is behind an impa.s.sable wall of furniture."

"I don't need to see your badge. Bert told me who you are." Her eyes darted from Jacob to the negative s.p.a.ce in the doorway-but unless she could spew her astral body out as she was speaking to him, there'd be no way for her to get past him. "If we could just-"

"We have a lot to discuss. Over coffee? Somewhere we can all sit down?"