I wake up as the Cav shudders to a halt, flinch at the sunlight bouncing off the hood. I feel our lawn to the left, the drone of delirium and trivia; I yank free of the seatbelt and sprint onto the grass, don't stop until I'm surrounded by our signs and the world washes away into a gauzy hum about Ed Gein and Emperor Norton. I stand there for a while in the center of the lawn, looking at a portrait of Lizzie Borden like she might be my mother.

"So you slept well then?" Paul asks, as he slips up behind me.

I don't answer. He doesn't ask again, and he doesn't mind; he just watches me, skips a step forward when the dizziness hits. My doubts about him curdle into guilt.

"We should go inside," he says, after a minute that feels like seconds.

I nod, swallow. My throat's still raw. "We should."

"Need another minute?"

"Need another hundred. But"—I turn toward the house—"I can have those when we don't have a disaster breathing down our necks."

Paul shrugs, and falls in next to me, still silent. The signs do the talking for us.

"What do they know already?" I ask, as we step up to the side door.

He smirks; not even an ounce of shame. "Sent 'em a quick narrowcast, just the basics. Enough to make a couple phone calls."

I nod, open the door, and take some time apart from my stoicism. The stress hits me in the sternum, stacks up double and triple as our group link fires everyone's emotions back in their faces; we get a handle on own echoes, but it's another moment before we can manage to look each other in the face. Dr. Barg's in his rolling chair, feet up on the coffee table, and Arabella's in the doorway to the kitchen; she ducks out of sight as soon as we finish our little riot. I do my best to put on a smile.

Dr. Barg frowns at me. "You don't need to pretend."

"Not for you, I don't." I drop onto the couch. "Any bites since I've been gone?"

He glances toward the kitchen. "Several."

There's a clink of something solid striking glass, the bubble and crack of liquid over ice. Arabella's preoccupied on the level of the average heart surgeon. I keep watching Dr. Barg; an hour on from a link-up I don't need to ask leading questions. He looks back at me, and I feel his brain winding up.

"The locals are on the warpath," he says. His face is pale enough I can't assume hyperbole. "Every angle man who wishes we weren't around has called me today, made sure I know the agreement is in jeopardy. Some of them were less than polite."

"No assaults, though?" I ask. "No big ugliness?" These questions shouldn't be so nonchalant.

Barg shrugs, which nicely underlines how tight he's wound. "Arabella and I made a few calls. Other teams, Compton, Detroit, major hubs like that." He cuts off, tongues the inside of his cheek. "They've got nothing like what we've been seeing. The only dead angle man this week was a gang shooting somewhere in Michigan."

"So we're isolated," I say. The room feels very small. "That's probably good."

"Or evidence we're being targeted," Paul suggests. I try not to let that idea touch my brain.

There's a rattle of glass and ice, and another waft of tension as Arabella comes breezing out of the kitchen, holding a tray like it's full of baby alligators. I look toward her, just in time to get my choice of three squat, sweaty vodka gimlets.

We have a moment of held breaths and warm shivers, a smile I wish only I could see; a storm rolls through her as I look away, but it had to be fast with Dr. Barg watching.

"Thank you dear." I'm almost whispering. I take a sip; it's perfect, one sweet finger tapping my forebrain. I kick back with the drink in my hand and let the confidence pour down through my chest. "So, no murders. But what about demons? Any other teams getting targeted, any weird unrest in the population?"

"We're not a herd of cattle," Paul admonishes.

"No—" Greasy whispers crawls through my memories; there's a second where I think they might be new. "Cattle are better behaved." But all the funny has been sucked out of it.

Dr. Barg looks away from us as Arabella sits down next to me, pretends not to notice when Paul doesn't get a drink. "No unrest. No purely astral contact. Things are normal."

There was a time when that would've made me scoff. "They could be covering something up."

"Right now they really couldn't," Arabella says. "The angle men here on this side are jumpy as hell, and the peacekeepers are on the warpath. Some demon made a day trip to San Francisco to Denver and got jumped and brain-probed as soon as he came back through the arrival gate. It was nearly an actual police incident." Somewhere under the layers of ballistic superiority, Arabella finds the idea thrilling.

I scoff. "Because that's not suspicious."

"Sometimes demons are foolish too," Dr. Barg says, with a loaded glance in Paul's direction. "But I still want to know what he was doing here. Paul, that's on your plate as soon as we're done for the night."

"Aye aye," he says, complete with salute. Not even a backhanded comment; now I know we're being serious.

"So," I say, as my head starts to swim, "we've got J. Random Demon making an off-the-record day trip to San Francisco, and we're all alone in the hideous supernatural murder department." Spiders tap-dance over my brain. "That's lovely. Informative." I look at Barg, look at Arabella. "Now what aren't you telling me that's got you wound up so tight?"

The two of them trade a look; their auras are cloudy, and there's some sympathy on deck to go with whatever they're thinking. My parents looked like this when they put my dog to sleep.

Barg nods to Arabella, and looks at me with the leaden smile of a born martyr. "I talked to your friend up north, Binkowski?"

"Dr. Bingo." Paul sounds surprised. "He didn't give you any lip?"

"I think my presence is a bit less polemical than yours," Barg drawls. "I persuaded him this really was as important as you claimed, and he dug through his files for a little more information about his deceased client."

Paul leans in, coiled like a tiger. "We've got a lead on him?" He looks like he wants to lick Dr. Barg. "When did he come through?"

Barg breathes hard through his nostrils. "2008, this time. But on his first ride onto this plane, about 1990."

All the hairs on my body stand at attention. "Runner?"

He doesn't quite nod. "Dropped out in '92. That cult in New York the Inquisition tried to scapegoat, their first nationally-covered failure?"

Everyone dips into their adrenal gland and takes a heady sip. My brain's spinning, and Arabella wishes she could sit down more than she is already.

"It might be coincidence," she says, for what's clearly the third or fourth time; but she's all but whining, and you can feel the hollows in those words.

"Doubt the spook squads think that," Paul murmurs.

"No, it's..." I take another sip, let the drink fight off my nerves. "Arabella's right. I mean, she's got the right idea." That storm of hers gets larger, but she's too busy being scared to let it break. "This isn't how the Inquisition would operate."

"Present tense, there?" Paul's glowering at me, unimpressed.

"No, Paul, man, think." I jam a knuckle into my temple. "Think. Guy at Dr. Bingo's place said it, right, the Inquisition's got no juice anymore. If they thought they'd found a genuine demon, they'd out him first. Get the belief flowing again."

I can actually see Dr. Barg's shoulders rise out from under the weight. I swat away the questions skittering up at me, try to fight the nerves gathering around my spine. It all liquefies as Arabella's hand slides across my shoulder.

"Randall's right. The Inquisition's not stupid." There's a twinge in her, a flash of a woman in white sprinting across a lawn. "They'd want the public to see them succeed. If Morrison's rider had history with the Inquisition, it might be the best news we've heard."

Paul slaps the arm of his chair. "And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I heard the weirdest statement ever."

"Paul," Dr. Barg grates.

Paul doesn't even try to look satisfied. Things are shifting back toward normal.

"So that's good," I say. I breathe, put my hand on Arabella's. Dr. Barg looks positively bilious, so I give her hand a squeeze for good measure. "Real good." I can still feel the rust on Barg's mood, the ugly thought Arabella's got gripped tight. "Now tell me about the real problem."

Again, they freeze up; this time, Dr. Barg looks at Arabella. She shrugs, and we're not touching anymore.

"When Paul narrowcast to me, we called around to local hospitals," Barg says. His lips press together hard. "We found Carmel Morrison."

I flash back to the bathroom, and my throat's burning again. Dr. Barg nods in response to my mood.

"Santa Clara Kaiser," Arabella says. "Intensive Care Unit."

Lighting strikes twice. "She's alive. Really, alive?" I look back at Arabella, and know right away not to smile.

"Unconscious," she says. "But alive." Color flees from her face to her chest. "A live victim."

That kills the mood. My heart runs to my stomach for comfort, and I shiver from my skull to my toes. Dr. Barg unfolds his interlaced fingers, leans toward me with the grey expression of a suicide clinician; I'm trying not think the words before he says them.

"I need you all to go," Dr. Barg says. He glances at Arabella. "All three of you."

I look down at my hands. I'm still thinking about the color white, and I'm suddenly very tired.

"She's in danger, Randy," Arabella says. Her thoughts are on the woman in white again, the feel of her feet on the pavement, the shock of reading a man's thoughts. "She's a psychic without anyone to teach her. And besides..." Her attention drifts down to my hands.

"This will take all three of you," Dr. Barg says, now with simmering insistence. "The girl shouldn't be awake, you'll need to—"

"I'll go," I say, so at least he'll stop explaining it to me. I close my eyes, let Paul's smugness creep in unhindered. "I'll go, I'll go, just...don't make this about saving her." I stand up, reel a little. "Let me go change shirts."

My eyes hurt, and my mind's binary with sleep dep, flipping switches between fight and flight. I'm drunk on top of it, and I can hear my eyes begging for some rest.

But Arabella's right. They're both right. Carmel Morrison's alive. And a live victim might have the killer's face somewhere in her memories.