Chapter 4
He was going to be late, again. These people were in his way, and he allowed the impulse to throw an elbow to shove aside a young woman with a heavy backpack, following it up by shouldering his way past another person whose gender and age he didn’t notice.
He hated all of them—these people who were clearly less important than he was, less driven, less likely to contribute anything meaningful to the world.
He was a financial advisor, for fuck’s sake.
He made people money—these pathetic excuses probably just made coffee or fast food breakfast sandwiches or bagged groceries and would all be replaced by robots in a few years anyway.
I shuddered, resisting the urge to rush to the nearest bathroom to scrub at my hands, and not just because it would likely mean a detour to the public grocery store bathrooms, which was not a place anyone ever really wanted to go if they could help it.
I knew from experience that if I let myself start scrubbing at my hands after a particularly unpleasant vision, I was likely to rub them raw and painful before I stopped, trying to get rid of the traces of other people’s memories off my skin.
They didn’t literally linger, of course.
There was nothing for me to scrub away—memories didn’t stick to my skin, just in my thoughts.
I was Lady Macbeth all over again, scrubbing at things that weren’t there.
Usually, I could control the impulse. It would last a fraction of a second, and then I could push past it. Return to the closest thing I had to normal. But not today.
Today, I was exhausted and having trouble concentrating on anything.
Even the slightest brush of my fingers was triggering other people’s lingering thoughts.
Normally, I had the wherewithal to stay focused on the here and now despite the occasional momentary contact with something that wasn’t mine or at least familiar.
It was only if I picked up an object or pressed my skin against it for more than five or ten seconds that someone else’s thoughts would push their way into my head.
Today, it took maybe a full second. Maybe.
It was not good.
This one had come from a man on the street who was pushing his impatient way between the rest of us just trying to get to our jobs or the coffee shop or school or wherever we had to go, minding our own business.
Encounters like that one really make me dislike humanity.
I’m not very good at social interactions on a good day, preferring my own company even to people I like. But on a bad day—which it definitely was, even though it was only about half-past eight—I sometimes feel like I’m actually a hazard to human society.
I shoved my hands in the pockets of my fleece jacket—it was warm enough today and not raining so that just a light fleece was comfortable—and tried very hard not to bump into anyone else before I had to take my hand out of its safe cocoon to open the front door to Beyond the Veil, although I deliberately pulled the sleeve of the jacket down over my hand when I did so.
The lights were on, so I didn’t need to unlock the door.
That meant that Ward and Mason were here, since I knew Beck was out for the next few days in Georgia somewhere.
I slipped inside, pulled my laptop out of its locked drawer, set it in the dock with the extra monitor and keyboard, and then hit the button to start it up, giving it time to boot itself while I went in back to get my mug and hopefully some coffee from the pot Ward usually made the second he got in.
I might have let out a startled sound when I found a complete stranger in the kitchen, holding a mug of coffee.
At least it wasn’t my mug, because that would have possibly pushed me into doing or saying something even more awkward and rude than usual.
The man was around my height, but much broader and with darker, coppery skin, his hair—black with a white streak—pulled back into a braid.
He blinked at my squeak. “Um. Hi.” He held out a big hand. “Elliot Crane.”
I’d known he was coming, of course, not that I’d actually remembered that this morning. He was building a custom summoning table for Ward and Beck and was a friend of Hart’s.
I swallowed, not wanting to be insulting, but also not wanting to touch him.
But he had the sleeves of his flannel shirt—blue and green—rolled up, exposing dark muscled forearms, one with the hint of a tattoo I couldn’t see most of, and keeping the cuffs well away from his hands.
So I took a little breath and shook his hand, finding it callused and strong.
At least he wasn’t the type to crush your hand just because he could.
“Rayn,” I said. “Alverno,” I added when I realized that just giving my first name when he’d given both of his might be considered rude or weird.
I pulled back my hand as soon as politeness permitted.
“Nice to meet you, Rayn,” came the friendly enough reply. “You work the front desk, right?”
I nodded, wanting to get at my mug, which was behind him in the drying rack. I wasn’t sure how to ask him to move, though. “You’re making the table,” was all I could think of to say.
“Yeah,” he agreed, then took a sip of coffee. Then he seemed to realize that he was standing between me and both coffee and mugs, then gave me a small smile. “Sorry, I’m in the way.” He stepped to the side, allowing me to retrieve my mug.
I smiled back, knowing that agreeing with him out loud would probably be rude. I grabbed the ceramic mug, then turned to find him holding the handle of the fridge door.
“You take cream?”
I nodded again, and he held the door for me so that I could retrieve the sweet cream creamer that I put in pretty much all my hot drinks—coffee, tea, even cocoa. It had my name written on it in sharpie.
“You put it in first?” Elliot asked, watching as I poured some in my mug, then returned the bottle to the fridge.
I nodded a third time, then took the pot to add coffee. “It stirs it that way by itself.” One fewer thing I had to touch, since I didn’t need to use a spoon.
“Clever,” he remarked. “I’d say I’ll have to try that, but I take mine black.” He held up his mug in a kind of toast.
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I tried another small smile. People mostly let me go about my business without complaint as long as I smile at them. Elliot seemed the same, as he smiled back, then went back to leaning against the counter as I hurried back to my desk.
He seemed nice enough, but I didn’t really like strangers.
I knew he was going to be here at least a couple weeks, though, so I supposed I should try to be friendlier.
I told myself I’d start that tomorrow, since today it was about all I could do to force myself to log into the computer, just in case someone had touched the keyboard keys.
My coworkers knew not to—and they didn’t have reason to, since we all had access to the same shared files and programs, and they all had their own computers.
Sometimes, though, random people would try to use it to check their email or something.
They couldn’t, of course, if the laptop had been locked up, but that didn’t stop people from trying if I wasn’t here to physically be in the way.
I guess people see a keyboard and monitor and assume it must be a full computer.
Usually, one entitled client touching my keyboard wouldn’t be a big deal. Today, everything was a big deal. I felt raw, exposed, and unsettled.
No one else had touched the keyboard, and nothing dramatic happened when I logged on.
I took a deep breath and tried to actually get to work, hoping that a normal routine would help recalibrate me.
It didn’t. What it did do at least was help to distract me from the fact that I had a constant low level of anxiety running throughout the entire day.
At least until Ward came and interrupted me at lunchtime. “Rayn?”
I yelped, then flushed. I hated the fact that I was jumpy most of the time, and thanks to my hyper-aware psychic senses, I’d become even jumpier.
“Are you okay?” he asked, rolling himself a bit closer to my desk.
“I’m fine,” I half-lied. There wasn’t anything really wrong with me, although ‘fine’ wasn’t quite the most accurate term to describe my current state of being. I wasn’t sick or injured or even upset about anything. Just… on edge.
And still feeling guilty about the fact that I hadn’t made any progress with Cass’s worry stone and I really didn’t want to, while at the same time wanting to be helpful to Hart and Raj.
Ward gave me a look that said he didn’t believe me. “Well, if there’s anything you want to talk about, you know you can talk to me, right?”
I nodded. I did know that.
“Or Mason,” the warlock continued.
I nodded again. I nod a lot. Much easier than trying to use words.
You really shouldn’t keep lying to yourself, sunshine. I even jumped a little at Sylvia’s words, then sighed.
Ward was giving me a look that said he really didn’t believe that I was fine.
He knew, obviously, that Sylvia had startled me, not that he could hear Sylvia when she spoke just to me.
That was one of the nice things about talking to Sylvia—she had the ability to talk to everybody who could hear her or just focus on one of us at a time.
Archie Lagarde—our other resident ghost—couldn’t do that.
According to Mason, it was because Sylvia herself had some kind of innate witch magic that was sympathetic to communication—possibly air magic, he thought, although he had also snarkily suggested fire, since every time she and Ward tried to do something and it backfired, it did so literally.
There were a couple of scorch marks under some of the rugs at Beyond the Veil, and Mason had mentioned there was at least one at their house, too.