"Anyway, rugby," said Boz. "That's what he should play. None of these pantywaist paddings and mouth guards and so on."

"I can't remember the last time I was this bored," said Incy, heading toward his room. "I'm going to make some calls. Shout when you're ready to go."

"Incy," Cicely said in surprise.

"We're ready now," I started to point out, but his door closed. I gave Cicely and Boz a surprised look. "What's with him? Don't we look ready?"

Boz shrugged: It was Incy being capricious once again. I raised my eyebrows and then collapsed on a settee and put my feet up. I'd be walking in these gorgeous leopard-print instruments of torture later-might as well save my feet now. "Who's he calling?"

Cicely finished up the wine in her gla.s.s. "Who knows? We ran into some people at Clancy's last week."

I almost started. I'd been in Clancy's several months ago, when I was trying to escape, to disappear. I'd run into a couple old friends there (old-ha ha), and I'd told Beatrice that I was hiding from Incy, as a kind of game. Had they run into her last week? What had she told them? That had been the night our friend Kim had used magick to wipe out a small percentage of Boston's songbird population. It had been... grotesque. Nauseating. A complete misuse of power. Even I could see that. It had been the thing that had convinced me to go back to River's Edge the second time.

But speaking of misuse of power...

"Did either of you see Incy with that girl last night, at the gallery?" I asked in a low voice. Incy's door was closed, but I wanted to be careful.

"Which one?" Katy asked. "There are always so many." She pretended to swoon, and we laughed.

"The tall one, in the lilac dress," I said. "I thought I saw-it looked like... like Incy used magick on her."

Cicely's eyebrows rose.

"How?" said Katy.

"To me it looked like he used magick to... take her personal power. I don't know what to call it. But everyone has it, and people can use magick to take it from someone. And then the taker is stronger."

"Yeah, of course," said Boz, and I almost fell out of my chair.

"You know about this?" It had been unwelcome news to me. Was I the only one out of the loop?

"Yeah, you hear about it," said Boz, frowning. "But you need to know what you're doing, and you need to have power yourself. Magickal power. None of us have ever been near being able to do something like that. Enough to get a cab, yeah, or make someone trip." He smiled at a memory. "But for big stuff you'd have to, you know, pay attention and learn things."

"I think Incy has," I whispered, and described what I had seen, and that Incy had told me that the girl had taken a daisy.

Cicely made a pooh-pooh face. "Everyone uses a little magick sometimes."

"Yeah, a little," I agreed. "But this is bigger."

"Sounds like a daisy. But you think he used magick on her?" Boz asked, keeping his voice down.

I nodded, not enjoying this conversation. Feeling like a traitor. An uptight busybody. Would they even believe me, given the way I'd ditched them so coldly months ago? I never would have questioned this before. It was a pain, this whole "knowing right from wrong" thing.

Boz sat down and ran his hand through his blond hair, which only made it look more perfectly mussed. He glanced at Incy's shut door, then seemed to exchange a look with Katy. "I admit feeling like... Incy's been going to extremes lately," he said quietly.

A fluttering of alarm ran down my spine. "What do you mean?"

"Here we go again," Cicely muttered.

Boz ignored her. "He just seems more... reckless," he said uncomfortably. "Like with the cabbie, that night last fall. He's just taking weird risks. Some of them have been really dangerous. Over the edge, even for me." He gave a self-conscious little laugh.

"I told you, you're overreacting," said Cicely, looking irritated. "Incy just likes to have fun. A couple of things have taken a bad turn, but stuff happens. It wasn't his fault."

Boz looked like he wanted to argue with her, and I got the feeling they'd had this conversation before.

"Bad turns like what?" I asked.

Boz shook his head. "It's just-nothing is ever enough. He's always used other people, but now... it's like they're not even real to him."

Boz was the king of users. For him to feel that Incy had crossed some line was actually pretty scary.

"There was a thing with a stray dog. He didn't hurt it, but he made it... do things, to be funny. I don't know." Boz looked less and less willing to talk about it. "He seems different, but I can't put my finger on it. Actually, though, he's been a lot better since you've been back." He smiled at me. "Maybe it was just a phase."

"I've been worried, too," Katy almost whispered. "I mean, we're all kind of a.s.sholes, but I didn't think we were crazy. But there's this place, it's really-"

"You're all being ridiculous." Cicely's voice was cutting. "Incy's the same as he ever was: out looking for a good time. Like all of us. I don't know what's the matter with you."

"I don't know what's the matter with you, either."

I jumped at Incy's voice and turned to see him standing in the doorway of his room. Where the door had been solidly shut the last time I blinked. How had he opened it so quickly and silently? How had he overheard us? His face was stiff, his eyes cold. "I can't believe you're out here talking about me behind my back!" I would have thought he was joking, being intentionally overdramatic, but he looked truly upset.

"What else would we talk about?" I said lightly, pretending not to see his anger. He'd always been a hothead, quick to explode and even quicker to get over it. I knew how to deal with it. "You're the most interesting thing there is."

For a moment he faltered, his face softening, but then his expression got cold again. "But you weren't talking about my good looks, or my charm, or how my face looks the youngest out of all of you," he said mockingly. "You were saying that you were worried about me. That I had gone to extremes. What extremes? Why are you all ganging up on me?"

His face looking the youngest...? What on earth? I mean, we all looked young. We all got carded still.

"We're not ganging up on you," Cicely said, shooting me an angry glance.

"What extremes?" Incy asked again. "Give me an example." He'd been sweet, almost tender, with me since I'd been back, but right now he looked p.i.s.sed and unyielding.

Boz slowly stood, to show that he was several inches taller than Incy. "Just relax, man," he said. "There's no conspiracy. We're friends talking about one of our own."

"Yes, talking about," Incy said tightly, his eyes narrowed. "Not to. If you're so worried about me, why don't you just talk to me? Why do you have to go behind my back? Why are you so jealous of me?"

"Jealous! What are you talking about?" Katy asked.

Incy turned to Katy. "You know what I'm talking about. You guys have been talking about me for weeks, saying I'm crazy, I'm dark, I'm doing evil things."

Katy's eyes widened. "No, we haven-"

"Stop! Just stop!" Incy's voice filled the hotel room. If he were a regular person, I would wonder if he was hopped up on something. But a lot of recreational drugs, besides alcohol, don't work well on us. "Look, I'm advancing! You aren't! You're going nowhere." He paced the room. "I just want us to be together, like old times. But you guys won't come with me. You're jealous." He turned to stare at us, his black eyes lit with fire from within. I sat up a little. Okay, this was weird. Incy was worked up and sounded totally paranoid.

Was he being crazy, dark, doing evil things? Had he been doing dark magick, as I thought, and was that affecting him? His pacing was abrupt, jerky, kind of manic. I'd seen him pitch fits before, when things didn't go his way. He'd thrown things and sworn at strangers and shouted wildly. I'd taken it in stride, even found it amusing sometimes: spoiled Incy. But he'd never been like this, paranoid and accusatory. Except in my dreams. My visions. I remembered the chopped-up bodies, the bone-filled fire.

Maybe... was it possible that I had come here to stop those things from happening? That everything had led me here to help? Maybe Incy was on the edge, and I was here to pull him back, away from the abyss. Not to get all swellheaded about my karmic influence. But the idea that I was here to help on purpose was ever so much more appealing than thinking I'd come here to pointlessly party my brains out. Which of course I had.

"Oh good Lord," I said, sounding bored, trying to keep my tension on the DL. In the past I'd always been able to talk him down, and though this seemed different, I would try. I took another cookie from the tray and nibbled on one edge to give myself a second to think. "I mean, get over yourself, Incy."

He whirled in his pacing. "You!" he said. "I trusted you!"

I raised my eyebrows just a little, implying that he wasn't worthy of a full eyebrow raise. "Yeah. Of course you do. But listen, not that it's not fascinating to talk about you. I mean, it is. I was enjoying it, with or without you. But it's one thing to talk about someone, and it's another thing to listen to someone yap about themselves." I popped the rest of the cookie in my mouth and stretched, arching my back over the arm of the settee.

"I love you," he almost whispered. "Why have you turned against me?" His fists swung back and nervously hit the wall behind him, not hard enough to cause damage.

"No one's turned against you," I said. Jeez, this really wasn't like him. He'd always been the opposite, in fact, sure that everyone loved him and wanted to be near his charm.

He looked at me sadly. "You think I'm evil. You think I'm crazy."

Okay, color me officially worried. This was new behavior in someone whose behavior I'd been seeing almost every day for a hundred years. I thought about how River had reached out to me, even at my most obnoxious. How she had been calm and accepting. I had come back to be with Incy, my best friend. I wasn't going to ditch him just because there was something going on with him. I wanted to offer help to him, the way River had offered it to me. I wanted to make a difference in his life, even if I had failed so miserably with Meriwether and Dray. And myself.

Boz, Katy, and Cicely all looked upset and uncomfortable. I got the impression that he'd been doing this while I'd been gone, and without me to handle his outbursts it had gotten to be a real problem.

"We... think you're a little full of yourself, frankly," I said. "Come on-you, evil? The most evil I've ever seen you was when you paired your hippie sandals with that gorgeous sharkskin suit. And crazy?" I tapped my chin with one finger, obviously "thinking." "Okay, yes. I'll buy crazy. You won't eat fruit. You don't like fruit. Which everyone in the world likes. I've seen you lick the chocolate off a strawberry and put the strawberry back. You were in French Polynesia, land of the awesome, ever-present fruit, and you ate, like crackers. That, yes, suggests a certain lightness of the playing deck. But this-" I waved my arm around. "The drama, the theater? You wish."

Incy was pretty surprised. Oh, I had actually seen him more evil than my example. More evil than I had even realized at the time. But right now I needed to derail his train of thought.

Boz shifted in his chair, watching me. Katy looked like she'd rather be anywhere else. Cicely looked angry.

"However, if you're done with your pity party, I'm hungry." I swung my feet onto the floor and looked up at him. "You done? With the evilness and the whatnot?"

Like he'd flicked a switch, his face lost its sad, angry look. He blinked several times and scanned the room, as if he was reorienting himself. All I wanted to do now was go lie down with a cold rag on my head. I really needed to figure out what was going on, and if I could do anything. Could I maybe get him up to River's aunt, Louisette, in Canada? Was he even that bad off? I didn't know how much of this to blow off as dramatic Incy and how much to freak out about.

Incy swallowed, looking pale but more like himself. He went over to the suite's wet bar and poured himself a couple fingers of scotch, then tossed it back. Adding alcohol to this volatile situation would be very helpful, definitely. Then he turned around again and looked at me. I looked back, an obviously patient look on my face.

"Oh, Nas," he said, coming over to me. He knelt on the ground by my feet and took one of my hands in his. I wanted to recoil at his touch, and that shocked me. He gave a rueful laugh and shook his head slightly. "Thank G.o.d you're here. You see how I need you? You're the only one who understands me." I thought I heard Cicely give an angry little cough. Incy's hands were cold and clammy; sweat dampened his forehead and sideburns. He leaned his head down on our hands, on my knees. "I missed you so much. I just do better when you're here. You make me feel human."

"Ew," said Katy.

"You know what I mean," Incy said, raising his head. "Normal. Real."

This was seriously creeping me out. "Glad to hear it," I said briskly. "We aim to please. The sound you're hearing is my stomach rumbling."

He laughed, looking totally like his old self, and rose smoothly from the floor. He took a silk pocket square from the jacket on the back of a chair and gently dabbed his face.

"Andiamo," he said, then swept up his jacket and headed for the door.

Behind him, Boz and Katy met my eyes. I raised my eyebrows at them. They didn't think this was over. And neither did I.

CHAPTER 21.

Really? You think so, dear?" Widow Barker's eyes blinked at me behind her cat's-eye gla.s.ses.

I fluttered my hands-all this business talk made my pretty little head hurt. "I cain't even tell you, Miz Barker," I said. "Just between you 'n' me, I'd rather be readin' a magazine by the pool at Beaufort's Motel."

The word motel had three syllables with my Southern accent. Mo-tay-el.

"These men, they're always up in arms about something or other," the widow confided, and we shared a laugh. She got up and took the drip coffeepot off the old-fashioned corncob stove. I pushed my cup closer and she filled it with coffee as thick and black as the stuff I was actually interested in: Texas oil.

It was 1956, and southeastern Texas had been gushing with black crude for forty years. Now some people were speculating that the geologic shale vein ran much farther west than had been expected. I'd already been through the California gold rush of 1849; that had turned out very well for me. This time I wanted to be an owner of the resource rather than merely a provider of an adjunct resource.

Which was why I was trying to buy the widow Barker's oil and mineral rights out from under her for a pittance.

Time had not been kind to the widow Barker. The rough stone markers in the yard showed that she had buried two husbands and four sons. I would have thought she had a thing against male people if I hadn't known that the sons had died in World War II; her first husband had run off and drank himself to death; and the second husband had toppled his tractor on the steep hill in the north pasture, just two years earlier.

Now she was living on a tiny government pension, and it showed: Her pink gla.s.ses with the rhinestones in the corners were the only new thing in evidence around here. The small farmhouse hadn't been painted in decades; you could barely see chips of white paint still clinging to the weathered gray clapboards. The stove was, as I mentioned, the kind that you fired up with old corncobs from the feed corn her second husband had farmed for thirty years.

"But why does your cousin think this would be a good place for your mother?" the widow asked, sitting down again at the scrubbed wooden table.

"He just says it would be a lot of land, and she could garden," I said, my tone implying that I thought my cousin was nuts.

"I guess," said the widow, trying not to look out the window at the parched, arid ground that stretched as far as the eye could see. I gave her a limpid smile and took a sip of coffee that was surprisingly good. Her faded eyes turned slightly calculating. "But I always promised my husband-my first husband, that is-that I would never break up the parcel. This land was in his family for generations. His great-granddaddy started this farm before Texas was even a state."

I had no idea if this was true or not, just drank my coffee, looking concerned. "The whole parcel?" I said unenthusiastically. "Oh, I don't know about that. I think Mama would want just the house and enough land for Old Shep to run around a bit. Maybe five acres?"

But the widow Barker had an idea caught in the cogs of her brain. "That's what my neighbor Edford Spenson said," she told me disapprovingly. "He pestered me all last spring. I told him I wouldn't sell. No, I promised Leland that I wouldn't break up the parcel, and I won't! If you want this property, you have to take all of it."

"But-" My eyes widened in distress beneath my big, black bouffant hairdo. My Texas hairstyle. "Miz Barker, that's almost a thousand acres!"

"No, Miss Whitstone," said the widow. "It's almost two thousand acres." She started to look worried-there was probably no way I'd agree to buy two thousand acres.

"Oh goodness," I murmured, taking another Lorna Doone. In fact, county records had shown that her parcel was 1,967 acres, give or take a couple feet. Farmland around here had once gone for as much as sixty-five dollars an acre, but that was before the drought of the last five years.

The widow fidgeted nervously with her paper napkin, her gnarled knuckles stiff with arthritis. She was probably only around sixty, and I marveled that she'd packed a whole life into that brief amount of time, with a beginning, a middle, and now an ending. With no children or grandchildren, no spouse, she was planning to move to Oklahoma and live with her younger sister, also a widow.

"Goodness," I said again, working sums with my fingernail on my own napkin. I inhaled. "Miz Barker-at thirty-seven dollars an acre, that's, oh my goodness. That's seventy-four thousand dollars!"

She tried not to look exhilarated. I imagined that she was picturing herself arriving at her sister's house, several battered suitcases holding all her worldly possessions, and being able to proudly say that she was not here on sufferance, on charity. She had an inheritance, and she could contribute her fair share.

"Edford offered me fifty dollars an acre," she said, which I knew was an outright lie. I could argue her down to probably thirty-five an acre. I took another cookie and dunked it in my coffee. Lorna Doones were dang good.

"Well, you see, Miz Barker, I really only need about five acres," I said again. "Old Shep doesn't hardly get around anymore."

"You could do a lot with two thousand acres," she said. "I'd rather it go to you and your mama instead of Edford or some old oil company who wants to break it all up." Awl k.u.mpneh.

I gave her a weak smile. "My cousin says-" I began, but she cut me off.

"Your cousin is a smart man," she said. "With all kind of business sense, I'm sure. But this is between you and me. Woman to woman. I won't lie to you: This land hasn't been good to me. It needs new blood. It needs you and your mama, come to bring new life to it. I'm ready to sell, ready to live in Greer's Pa.s.s, Oklahoma, and never have to mess with this land no more. But it's got to be the whole parcel. And it's got to be fifty dollars an acre!"

She drew herself up, her gray, thinning hair pulled back into an indifferent bun. Her face was wrinkled and leathery from sixty years of the Texas sun. She was definitely gouging me on the land price, but I liked the widow Barker. I grinned at her.

"Miz Barker, I do believe my cousin Sam is goin' to blow a gasket," I said. "But I have money from my daddy, and this is my mama, after all. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take your whole parcel-and I'll give you..." I faltered, then reached for my resolve and swallowed visibly. "Forty dollars an acre!"