Spell Blind by David B. Coe Page B

join them for dinner this coming weekend. I didn’t bother reminding her that the full moon was coming up; even with friends, the phasings weren’t easy to talk about. I asked for a raincheck. She said the following week would be good, and passed the phone to Kona.
    “You been with Robby all this time?” Kona asked without saying hello.
    “No. A reporter who I met at the Deegans’ tracked me down at my office and asked me a bunch of questions.”
    “A reporter?”
    “A blogger, actually. But Wriker was afraid of her, so I assume she’s pretty big.”
    “You mean Billie Castle?”
    Why was I the only person who’d never heard of her? I guess I needed to spend more time online. Or not.
    “Yeah. You know her work?”
    “Of course. Who doesn’t?”
    “Well, anyway,” I said. “She wanted to know all about the Blind Angel case and why the PPD hadn’t caught the guy yet, and what my firing had to do with it all.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “As little as possible.”
    I could almost see Kona nodding. “Good. How’d it go with Robby?”
    “He admitted selling to Claudia. Seems they were an item for a while. But he denied having anything to do with the other victims.”
    “You think he was lying?” Before I could answer, she said, “Never mind. Of course he was lying.”
    “I doubt we can prove it, though,” I said.
    “Yeah, so do I.”
    “And speaking of things we can’t prove, you should tell narcotics to keep one eye on Robby and another on a Spark den on 23rd near the freeway and the railroad.”
    “All right. Care to explain that?”
    “Not really. Not now.”
    We both fell silent for a few seconds.
    “Listen, Kona, I know this is the PPD’s investigation, and I should stay away from actual investigating—”
    “I never should have said what I did, Justis. It’s not like we’re tracking down leads or focusing in on suspects. We’ve got nothing here.”
    “Then you won’t mind if I poke around a little, maybe check in with some of my kind?”
    “Not at all,” she said. “Let me know what you find out.”
    “Of course.”
    “And partner?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Watch yourself. If you start getting close to this guy, he’s not going to like it.”
    “Right. Talk to you tomorrow.”
    I hung up and took care of some of that paperwork. I would have preferred to head home, but I wanted to make sure that Billie Castle was long gone before I stepped outside again.
    By the time I headed for the Z-ster, night had fallen and the moon was up. It was well past a quarter full and bone white in a velvet sky. And though we were still several days away from the full, I could already feel it tugging at my mind, bending my thoughts, making me shiver in spite of the warm air.
    Describing the phasings to someone who wasn’t a weremyste was like trying to describe color to someone who had been born blind. Words weren’t adequate. The closest I’d heard anyone come to getting it right was something my dad told me not long after my mom died. We weren’t getting along at the time, and his grip on reality, which had already become tenuous before Mom’s death, was slipping fast. But what he told me then in anger still rang true to this day.
    “It’s like somebody reaches a hand into your stinkin’ brain,” he said, “and swirls it around, making a mess of everything. The thoughts are still there—your sense of who you are and how the people around you fit into your life—but they’re scrambled. There’s no order, no time or space or story line. The boundaries disappear. Love and hate, rage and joy, fear and comfort—you can’t tell anymore where one ends and the next begins. And the worst part is, you know it’s happened—you know that it all made sense a short while before, and that now it’s gone. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
    That was how it felt to me every time. You’d think after a couple of hundred phasings—three days a month for half a lifetime—I’d