“Sorry.” Standing and running her fingers lightly over the strings, Charlie watched him lean into the notes and wondered if the voices he heard in his head counted as sound. Did a voice falling in the overgrown area between Dan’s ears make a sound if there was only Dan to hear it? She frowned at the strain on the homily and fiddled with her tuning pegs even though everything seemed fine. Usually, she’d be all over a charm about sound, but right now, next to a man who certainly knew every dirty crack in the sidewalk, the only thing in her head was George Canyon’s cover of “Rhinestone Cowboy” and once that got in, good luck getting it . . .

She smiled. “Do you know what an earworm is, Dan?”

He scratched up under the edge of his toque again. “Crawls in your ear, lays eggs, lots of screaming?”

“No, I think that was an episode from one of those retro TV shows.” She really didn’t want to know what he was studying under his fingernails. “An earworm is what they call a piece of a song you can’t get out of your head.”

“No room in my head.”

“Not out there, no.” Humming softly, she ran G F E up the fretboard. “But I’m going to give you an earworm that’ll write a charm on the inside of your head, and that charm will block all the thoughts that aren’t your own.”

“So, no screaming?”

“Not unless you want to.”

He shrugged. “Sometimes it helps.”

“Used be in a punk band,” Charlie told him. C, Cmaj7, G. “I get that.”

Dan held up his hand before she could touch the strings again. “You’re telling me all this because I’m crazy, right? Because if I tell people about sitting in the forest with a girl writing a song on the inside of my head, no one will believe me.”

“Pretty much.”

“Okay, then.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“I DON’T SUPPOSE IT OCCURRED TO YOU to ask if Dan might be wanted by the FBI for reasons pertaining to actual criminal activity?”

Charlie shoved her hands into her jacket pockets and stared out over the city skyline. Naked and horned, David sounded more like the old David, the David with the doctorate in criminal psychology, than he had at any time since the change. Which would have been a good thing had he not been sounding like the old David at her. The old David had been a pedantic know-it-all and she’d always been glad they were too close to be listed.

“Charlie?”

“That would be a no.”

“That would be because?”