Chapter One
I was watching Judge Judy...and wishing I was her.
I didn’t wish I was very many people—in fact, very few—but she was one of the few. No, I didn’t want to be on TV (that was, if I could even show up on TV, which I didn’t think I could without copious amounts of makeup), nor did I want to deal with the steady stream of derelicts who filled her courtroom.
I wanted to be confident like her. Fearless like her. Smart like her. Hell, I wanted to talk like her, too.
I checked the time on my cell phone. It would probably have been easier to check the time on my watch, had I owned a watch. The last one I’d owned had gotten destroyed on a case. Now, I had my eye out for a shock-resistant, werewolf-resistant and demon-resistant watch. Maybe Timex made one.
My client was late, which I hated. But that gave me more time with Judge Judy, whom I loved. It also gave me more time to finish sewing up Anthony’s boxer shorts. These were the third pair of shorts I had mended today. I’d seen enough skid marks to last a lifetime. Hell, this last pair looked like an aerial shot of a drag strip starting gate.
But, new boxer shorts cost money, and sewing the old ones was mostly free. And so, like the good mother I was, I powered through Anthony’s homage to Jackson Pollack, and sewed the gaping tear in the crotch area. I sewed quickly, deftly, never even poking my finger. The vampire in me heightened all my physical senses, even during the day, but more so at night. Now, something as mundane as sewing was almost fun. I still got a kick out of what I could do. I was learning to appreciate who I was, or what I was.
I didn’t have much choice, of course.
I either appreciated my current condition, or I went mad. I hadn’t entirely ruled out the latter. I was only ninety-eight percent sure that I wasn’t in a padded cell somewhere, wearing a straitjacket, rocking absently, and drooling—looking, on second thought, a lot like Anthony when he played some of his video games.
As I finished sewing the shorts, I heard a car door slam in my driveway. Synchronicity at its best.
I quickly snipped off the thread with my weirdly sharp fingernails—nails that could never, ever be filed down, damn them—and hurriedly tossed the shorts in Anthony’s room, just as the doorbell rang. More good timing, as Judge Judy had just pronounced her latest verdict, a verdict I couldn’t have agreed with more.
I smiled, turned off the TV, and headed for the door.
I’d like to meet Judge Judy someday.
Chapter Two
My client’s name was Henry Gleason.
He didn’t look like a Henry Gleason. To me, a Henry Gleason should be a big, chubby guy with a cherubic face who gesticulated a lot, and made “to the moon” comments.
This Henry didn’t gesticulate. He sat dourly in front of me. His aura was dour, too. Yes, I can see auras. I’m a freak like that. His aura suggested that someone had run over his cat.
“How can I help you, Mr. Gleason?”
I sensed, right off the bat, that there was something drastically wrong. Not even sort of wrong, but chaotically wrong. His aura was literally spitting fire, snapping around him like solar flares, or so many dragons breathing fire. I kept seeing the image of a small, pleasant-looking woman. These days, I got psychic hits with the best of them. I could also catch fleeting thoughts...words and images. But only those who were tuned into me could catch my own thoughts. This man, this stranger who was about to become anything but a stranger, was not privy to my thoughts. He also wasn’t privy to what I was. Or, rather, what I really was.
Judging by his mental condition—or lack thereof, as he appeared to have hit some sort of rock bottom—I doubted he would care what I was. Mr. Gleason needed help, and he would have taken it from the devil himself. Little did Henry Gleason know how close he really was to that.
“My wife is missing,” he began...and that was about as far as he got for the next few minutes. He broke down completely, and his aura snapped and flared and shrank in on him. That Henry was a total mess, I had no doubt. Ever the good hostess, I pushed a box of Kleenex his way, although he didn’t see it at first.
I waited as he struggled to get hold of himself. I got this sometimes: clients who came into my office and lost it. Generally, it was because a loved one was cheating on them. I didn’t always take the cheating spouse cases. The truth was, I wouldn’t take any of them if I didn’t have to. However, I had something called a mortgage to deal with. And a car note and bills and two kids.
And food...oh, God, the food. Who knew twelve-year-old girls could eat so much? Anthony I was prepared for. But not Tammy.
Anyway, I mostly took the jobs that came my way. Mostly. Some cases, I turned down. Some prospective clients, however, I never heard from again. It sometimes turned out that they just needed a shoulder to cry on, but then, they didn’t hire me. So, the sympathy seekers who came to my home office and cried and got it out of their systems, well, I never saw them again.
I didn’t make a dime off them, either.
You win some, you lose some.
But Henry Gleason wasn’t airing his marriage’s dirty laundry. He wasn’t walking me through, step by step, his wife’s sordid affairs or the intricacies of her deception. No, he was weeping for one of two reasons: he truly missed his wife, or he was putting on a show.
I would know soon enough which it was.
No, I didn’t know all. I wasn’t God. In fact, I was about as far from God as one could get. But these days, I could tell if someone was lying to me. It wasn’t very hard for me to learn their secrets. What exactly was going on here, I didn’t know. But one thing was obvious: Henry Gleason wasn’t putting on a show. His pain was real.
So, I waited. As I waited, I sent him a mental nudge to reach for the box of tissues which, after pausing briefly and cocking his head slightly, he did. He hadn’t known I had given him a mental nudge. It was probably better that he didn’t.
He blew his nose, gathered himself, and said, “I’m a total and complete mess. I’m sorry.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
He tried to smile, failed miserably, and gave up. I noted his shaking hands, and his darting eyes that never seemed to settle on anything longer than a few seconds, if that.
I decided to kick things off.
“What happened to your wife, Henry?” I asked.
“I don’t know. How did you know?”
“Never mind that,” I said, and gave him another mental nudge to drop it. I asked, “Did you hurt her?”
He looked at me sharply. “No. Never.”