“Ah. Not to hold my hand, but to pick my brain. Well, do you know anything more now than you used to?”

“Not very damned much.”

“What about the thing I saw? That jumped at me—him.”

Rico sighed. “An illusion. Hell to do in full sunlight, but it only had to be convincing for a second. Still, it’s beginning to seem like our friend is finest-kind illusionist.”

“Sounds like an elf.”

“You’d think so.” Rico smiled at me, another of her humorless ones, and stood up. “But you can find things you’ve never seen and do psychometry with corpses. I’d say the species stereotypes are going to hell in this town.” She crossed the room, turned in the doorway, and took something out of a jacket pocket. “Catch,” she said, and tossed it. When I caught it, I found it was a flask, black leather over silver. “Don’t waste it. It’s Tully. Probably older than both of us.”

I remembered the taste over my tongue: honey on fire. “I don’t need—”

“Yeah, you do. And lock the damned door behind me. If for no other reason than that a guy who sleeps bare-assed should be more concerned about who might walk in.”

She closed the door behind her. There was only the one candle; I don’t think, even if she’d waited for it, that she could have seen me blush.

This time the thunder cracked before the lightning’s afterimage started to fade. It sounded like the World Tree had been split, and to say it made me jump would not quite cover it. Maybe tomorrow it would be cooler.

You can do psychometry with corpses. As if it were now part of my permanent repertoire. Well, it wasn’t. It had been traumatic, dangerous, and not even particularly useful. And embarrassing, besides. To hell with it, and to hell with Sunny Rico. When next she asked me to find something, I’d pretend to come up zero, and live with the resulting discomfort.

I lay back, closed my eyes, and found the pavement of High Street rushing up at me behind my eyelids. Rico had been right. I spent an hour in intermittent conference with her flask before I could sleep again.

Chapter 3. Valid I.D.