8 
MINDFIELDS
Bonaparte Bakery.” Sarah White’s voice had a certain power to it. She was a confident woman, half earth-goddess type and half no-bullshit independent business owner. More importantly, Sarah was a cunning woman with a good reputation who lived in Bonaparte, New York, only forty-five minutes away. I’d met her once before when I needed help breaking a curse.
“Hi, Sarah.” I had my burner phone on speaker so that everyone else could hear. “This is Tom Morris.”
“You’re still alive.” She didn’t seem disappointed, but she didn’t sound overjoyed, either. “And you’re tense.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And you’re still using that fake name.” Sarah was one of the sharpest women I’d ever met. Not just intelligent—if cunning folk weren’t abstract thinkers with a lot of questions, they wouldn’t become druids or shamans or witches or houngans in the first place. But unlike a lot of cunning folk, Sarah had common sense too. Somehow, we’d met and parted on reasonably good terms anyhow. “You never have told me your real one.”
“That’s true,” she admitted. “Should I hang up and start running now?”
Beside me, Sig snorted. We were in a backseat that Choo had bolted down in his van, with Kevin Kichida’s unconscious form propped between us.
“Probably,” I said. “But I would count it as a personal favor if you didn’t.”
There was a moment of silence. I was telling Sarah that I was willing to formally place myself in her debt, and neither of us took that lightly. Favors are one of the primary currencies that cunning folk trade in, and the price they exact is always more than you bargained for. The last time I owed Sarah White a favor, I was almost drowned by a pissed-off Scandinavian water spirit.
“Who’s that with you?” Sarah finally asked.
“I’m with some friends. You’ll meet them if you say yes.”
“Knights?” Her voice took on a slight edge.
“Come on, Sarah,” I chided her. “I said friends.”
“Then you’ve changed,” she said. “That’s good. Will your friends owe me a favor too?”
“No,” I denied flatly.
“Yes,” Sig insisted.
Sarah heard her and laughed, a quick, quiet, almost reluctant laugh. “So, it’s that kind of friend.”
I didn’t ask what kind she meant.
Sarah sighed. “What kind of trouble are you in this time, Mr. Not-Tom-Morris?”
“I have an untrained psychic in a coma,” I said. “He’s one of your people.”
“Yes, because everyone with the sight is the same.” Her voice was sardonic. “Just like all knights.”
Okay, she had me there. “His name is Kevin Kichida.”
“I don’t care what his name is or how gifted he is. I choose who my people are,” she re-emphasized, just in case I hadn’t gotten the point the first time.
I tried a different tack. “What about me, Sarah? Am I one of your people?”
Another silence. Instead of answering the question, she said: “You really have changed.”
“I’ve changed some,” I admitted. “But my word is still good.”
“Yes it is.” She sighed again. “And you’re one of the few people I know who would put himself in my debt for a complete stranger, even if you are a killer.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. Next to me, Sig grunted and stirred restlessly.
Sarah briskly got down to business. “Is this Kevin person breathing fast and shallow, like he’s going to vomit in an aspirator? Or does he seem dead?”
“It’s like somebody pulled a drain inside him and his soul went down it,” I said. “He’s barely breathing at all, and his body is cold. We’re keeping him bundled up.”
Silence again.
“Is that worse?” I wondered.
“It means he’ll probably still be alive by the time you get here,” Sarah told me. “But I’m going to have to go looking for him in the Dreamtime. And when you’re looking for a frightened person lost or hiding in the Dreamtime, it can be a minefield.”
Speaking of danger… Shit. I had to tell her. “Hey, Sarah? Another cunning person is trying to kill this kid, and I’m still trying to figure out why. So if you take us into your place of power, you might be putting yourself in danger. You should know that.”
“You’re right. You have only changed in some ways.”
“Women,” Molly commented.
“Does that mean come on over or stay the hell away from me?” Choo wondered.
Sig didn’t have any trouble translating. “It means come here but I’m pissed about it. How well do you know this woman, John?”
Something in Sig’s tone made me obscurely defensive. We had spent the previous night driving from Clayburg and had been through three supernatural incidents in the space of twelve hours before maybe killing a kid. We were all stressed out and tired and cranky. “I barely know her at all. We spent two days together total.”
“You only knew me for one day before you decided you liked me.” Sig had a strange tone in her voice. It was supposed to sound lighthearted and cute, but it was a bit like encountering a six-foot-seven, three-hundred-pound mugger dressed in a pink tutu and a tiara.
I didn’t know what to say, so I just looked at her.
“And you weren’t exactly tripping over your feet in your rush to tell her you were involved with someone just now,” Sig went on.
“I was focusing on the essentials,” I said. “But that reminds me—would you mind pretending to be my sister?”
Sig turned her blue eyes on me with that full intensity that makes me feel like I’m standing on a subway rail and liking it. “I would.”
“That was a joke. She’s not an ex,” I told her.
“But you wanted her,” Sig said with complete certainty.
“She’s a cunning woman,” I protested, and that didn’t even sound like a direct answer to my own ears. “I’d rather have sex with a power outlet.”
“Because dangerous women are such a turnoff for you.” Molly wasn’t being helpful.
Choo put his ten cents in. “She sounds hot.” Choo was actually sitting in the shotgun seat while Molly drove because he was examining Kevin Kichida’s smartphone. Molly is the only person who Choo will let drive his van without an argument, by the way. He has a bit of a bias against demi-humans. I think Choo pictures fire-breathing dragons and twelve-foot-tall scaled dogs with horns and such attacking the van the moment Sig or I get behind the wheel.
Sig lowered her voice and spoke in a throaty way. “You know who I am.”
“Since when do I sound like Antonio Banderas?” I demanded. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“I would count it as a personal favor if you didn’t,” Sig continued on in the same voice, waggling her eyebrows up and down suggestively for emphasis. “Am I one of your people?”
Look, I have a lot of experience with a lot of things, but real relationships aren’t one of them. I once fell in love when I had no business doing so, and that selfishness got a woman killed. If there was a way of escaping that fact, I would have found it by now. I lived a kind of half-life under that weight for a long time, and then I met Sig, and she saw right through my smokescreens and aliases, saw me through the eyes of the dead woman I’d loved, as a matter-of-fact. I could sense Alison behind Sig too, or in Sig even though I didn’t know that’s what I was sensing, and suddenly it seemed like I had a real intimate connection with someone again whether I wanted one or not. Sig had been stuck in her own bad patterns, and we had come into each other’s lives like runaway trains crashing through a living room from opposite sides.
So, I seriously didn’t know when I asked, “Are you really jealous?”
“Maybe a little,” Sig admitted. “You never mentioned this woman before today. And I can tell she’s attractive from the way you talk to her.”
For some reason, I had a mental flashback of Molly in the pancake house, shaking her fist and going, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”
I shifted Kevin’s body so that I could give Sig a stare of my own. “I’ve lived a long time, Sig. There are a lot of things I haven’t mentioned.”
“This seems like a pretty important one,” she said.
I might not know much, but I knew better than to ask why. “Come on, Sig. You’re the woman I’m trying to build something with. You have to know that.”
“You still need to say it sometimes.” Her voice was both affectionate and exasperated. “Especially when we’re in messed-up situations.”
“I’d tell you two to take it to the back of the van, but this ain’t that kind of a van,” Choo interrupted, holding up Kevin’s smartphone. “Besides, Parth finally broke into this phone’s account. We found something.”
Thank God.