“Put it on.” He looked almost gray with panic, eyes darting all around on the sidewalk. She tried, but her arm wouldn’t cooperate. “Put it on, hurry up! This is the worst day, absolutely the worst day of my life. I know you don’t care about that, but it is. Everything was supposed to happen today, and nothing worked, nothing. It’s all going up in smoke.”

He stopped and a thin panicked giggle worked its way out of his mouth in a gust of steamy breath. His eyes had a strange shine to them.

“But you’ll work,” he said. He took her arm and threaded it in the sleeve, dressed her like a rag doll. She huddled in the warmth of the coat. “Come on, walk. Walk faster.”

It seemed to take forever to reach the next corner, a nightmare of uncertain steps and the tight stretch of Spandex over her skin, of dizziness and heat prickling. He was talking to her again, but she hardly understood what he was saying until he shook her hard enough to rattle her teeth.

“Can you feel it?” he asked. “Is it starting yet?”

What boiled up out of her this time wasn’t nausea, it was knowledge.

He was talking about burning. He’d put something on the clothes to make Velvet burn. Oh, Jesus, like Arnold, like the man at the hockey game.

She was going to die.

A police car turned a corner and started toward her. She felt the headlights wash over her like sunlight.

The man tightened his grip on her arm.

“Don’t,” he warned her. “If you run, it’ll only happen faster.”

She shoved him as hard as she could. He stumbled backward, hit a patch of ice and slid. He grabbed a parking meter to keep from falling. She shrugged his coat off and ran for the police car. Her legs vibrated like rubber bands, her skin flared hot, hotter.

Oh, god, no. No, not like this.

She collided with the hood of the police car with bruising force, stared into the startled faces of two uniformed cops, and hobbled on. There was water flooding out over the sidewalk near Dallas Alley, a wet shimmer in the gleam of neon. A pipe had broken in the cold.

She fell full length in the water and rolled. The shock made her scream, but she kept rolling, back and forth, until she was soaking wet and the cops were pulling her to her knees.

“Drunk,” she heard one of them say.

One of the wallets she’d stolen fell out of her skirt. Then the second.

“Stupid,” the other one said. “Up, lady. Let’s take a little ride.”

She was shivering convulsively as they slammed the back door of the squad car, but she was alive. Alive.

The man was gone from across the street. His coat lay discarded on the sidewalk, flapping like a ghost in the wind.