I turned away, back to the rucked bedclothes, settled my chin on my knees and let my eyes unfocus. I spoke fragments aloud as I remembered them, and as I spoke, the pieces shifted into a reasonable order. The hot blue sky, and low walls of crenellated brick. Tar bubbling up, sticking to shoe soles; the smell of sweat, mine/his. The belfry empty; someone to meet there, but it was empty. Looking around, out over the rooftops, the street, way down, no fear. Sound behind. A thing—not clear, something awful, leaping at my face—screaming, arms up, a step back and the wall comes up hard below my knees and what’s coming is more terrible than the thing I saw on the roof…

I stopped a little before the nightmare had, and my fingers dug into the mattress for security’s sake. A decent silence had been in place for a few seconds before I said, “He was set up.”

“Yeah. I’d thought so, but now we’re sure. And there was no one else on the roof, so we can quit looking for a hitter. Here.” She held one of my glasses out to me, and I smelled whiskey. Since I didn’t think I had any whiskey, she must have brought it with her. I drank it off and shuddered at the silken burn of it.

“So how did you get in?” I asked, as soon as I had my breath back.

“You left the door unlocked. It’s a bad idea.”

“I leave it unlocked all the time. Usually there aren’t any cops in the neighborhood.”

“Very funny.”

“Did you just drop by to see if I was having a nightmare?”

Rico said, “Actually, yes. When I got home, I found Linn waiting for me. He’d been thinking about what happened when you laid hands on Charlie’s body. According to him, the theory is that elves can make stuff like that work because they’ve… God, what did he say?… integrated their conscious, subconscious, and unconscious minds better than we have. He said if you couldn’t remember what happened when you touched the corpse, you’d probably passed the whole trauma straight into your unconscious, and there was a good chance you’d get a nice little package delivered in your dreams tonight.” stared at her. “Tell your partner to quit the cop business and take up psychotherapy. So you came to hold my hand?”

“I came because he said that, depending on the quality of Charlie’s last moments, there was a good chance you could take major damage from it.”

“Oh.”

“And to find out if Charlie took anything with him to the Happy Hunting Ground that will help me find his goddamn boss.” Her words were so measured and fierce that I had to look at her. Still a statue, but not a Madonna. Her face was hard and still, with only the eyes alive.