Brendan had not made it to Jillian’s office yet. As far as she could tell, he hadn’t risen by the time she walked out of her trailer into the insistently bright Louisiana morning. She hadn’t wanted to wake him. If she was having trouble sleeping with the absence of traffic noises and an excess of crickets, she could only imagine what he was going through.
“Are you sure you don’t want coffee, Ms. Canton?” Sonja asked, setting what looked like a pre-cut pie made out of slices of several different pies on the little side table by Jillian’s desk.
“You can just call me Cordelia, thanks.” Cordelia offered her a shy smile, her cheeks flushing. Sonja deserved every bit of her reputation. She was clearly competent and ruthlessly stylish, even in this rough, Neiman Marcus-less environment. “Thanks, but caffeine makes it difficult to control my shield.”
“That’s interesting!” Dani, the mayor’s aforementioned girlfriend, exclaimed. “My gift is sensitive to that sort of thing, too.”
Dani’s colorful, creative, and slightly snarky style was a considerable contrast from Sonja’s—form-fitting jeans with a crazy quilt inset to cover a hole in the knee, a necklace made from rainbow resin T-rex bones, and a t-shirt that featured a llama ringing a doorbell. It read, “Llama-llama-ding-dong.”
Dani continued. “I have dynakinesis, which is a fancy way of saying I can manipulate energies around me, like the energy coming off the rift. But I have to watch what I eat. The fewer processed foods and artificial sweeteners, the better. No coffee.” She paused to choose a slice of apple caramel pie from Sonja’s careful presentation. “But I give myself permission to eat pie, because otherwise, I might be a threat to myself and others.”
“Very sensible. Also, are we really eating pie at nine in the morning?” Cordelia asked.
“Pie is pretty much an all-day food in Mystic Bayou,” Sonja told Cordelia, who claimed a piece of pumpkin bourbon. Now that she wasn’t overwhelmed by the Halloween crowd, Cordelia could feel Dani’s gift radiating off of her, a sort of mental glow. She seemed happy and balanced in a way Cordelia couldn’t even dream of for herself. But it was nice to bask in that light.
“I’ll make sure I stock decaf tea for you in the future.” For her part, Sonja took this discussion of psychic powers and pie in stride, like she seemed to take most things about their extraordinary surroundings. She didn’t have a gift that Cordelia could sense, but she shared that same settled happiness. Maybe it was something in the bayou water? Maybe if Cordelia stayed there long enough, she would achieve that aura of satisfied peace.
Cordelia took a bite of pumpkin custard and flaky crust and moaned indecently. This was the best pie she’d ever tasted. It was everything you’d hope a dessert could be—rich and sweet, without being too sweet, spicy and buttery. If her mother had ever baked, Cordelia would have hoped it would taste like this. A warm comforting weight slid down into her belly, centering her in this room and her task at hand. She would find the baker of this pie and offer them all of her money.
Rather than being offended by her pornographic pastry responses, Dani and Sonja just grinned in unison.
“Siobhan’s pies do that to everybody,” Sonja assured her.
Dani leaned forward, an eager expression on her face. “So, I’ve never been able to ask Miss Bonita about her gift, because, well, she’s a terrible gossip and I’m afraid anything I say to her or anything she sees will be repeated to everyone in Mystic Bayou.”
Cordelia frowned. “Miss Bonita?”
Sonja slid gracefully into one of the comfortable wingback chairs in front of Jillian’s desk. “Our local postmaster has a similar gift to yours, but her abilities aren’t nearly as strong.”
“Really?” asked Cordelia. “You didn’t consider asking her to consult on the artifact?”
“Jillian didn’t feel right asking a civilian to take on what amounts to hazardous duty,” Sonja said. “This is the League’s mess to fix…since technically, factions within the League have been surreptitiously making the rift worse since we arrived.”
Cordelia’s mouth dropped open. “That…was not mentioned in my assignment briefing.”
“I should really let Jillian cover it,” Sonja said, fondly. “I tend to over-summarize, where she’ll have bullet points and subpoints, and probably a reading list.”
“There will be homework. Jillian is really sneaky about making you learn stuff without you realizing it, but ultimately, you’re going to be a better, more well-rounded person, so you might as well just go with it,” Dani said. “So, how does your gift work? I mean, with mine, I have to do a lot of visualizing and hand-waving to get the energy to bend to my will. But you—seeing everything that you see has to be scary and fascinating and weird all at the same time. When you touch something, does whatever you see show up like a movie in your head?”
Cordelia quirked her lip. “It sounds like you have to actively engage to work your gift, but I’m surrounded by mine all the time. It’s like I’m a big exposed nerve, always open to seeing something, because our thoughts and our emotions leave an echo on the things we touch, the walls around us, the ground we walk on. The bigger and louder those emotions, the stronger that echo. And if I touch something or someone or, if I’m really unlucky, walk into a room where the echo is particularly strong, then all of a sudden I’m in an unwanted virtual reality experience, the full three hundred and sixty degrees.” She paused to take a bite of pie. “I’m seeing it from the perspective of the person who left that echo, everything they felt and intended and thought. It can be really overwhelming, particularly if the memory is negative, but in a room like this, where I feel like most of the echoes are positive—except for something involving blue lava and the…wastebasket—it’s not all that uncomfortable.”
“That’s fascinating. Would you mind sitting down with me sometime for an interview?” Jillian asked. “I’m still putting together a cross-section study of all the different types of magic found in the bayou, including the League employees.”
Cordelia looked up to see Brendan and Jillian standing in the doorway. Brendan was wearing very dark sunglasses, which he pushed on top of his head to rest in his hair. While Jillian beamed happily and assumed her seat behind her desk, Brendan stared at Cordelia with concern. She assumed that he’d heard her description. Was he concerned because her gift was similar to his? Was this a professional insecurity thing? She certainly hoped not—and not just because she would be very disappointed in a backward attitude from someone she found so interesting—but because it was just tiresome. She’d had more than enough of that during her days with the carnival. She expected much better in a professional setting, even if those professionals were shifters and psychics and whatever the hell Brendan was.
Even now, the way he stared at her, like he was trying to memorize her, was unnerving. What was he? Why couldn’t she feel anything when she touched him? How were they going to work together if he was a blank slate to her? She’d never worked with a partner before. Artifacts were left in the wall-mounted storage boxes in her DC office each morning. She examined them, wrote reports, returned them to their boxes, and then new artifacts appeared the next morning. Even her supervisor primarily contacted her through email.