"Language!" I snapped. I'm not sure why I kept channeling my mother whenever I was around Mia, but I couldn't help it.

"Oh, please-I can watch you decapitate a demon with two mouths, but I'm not allowed to swear?"

"You weren't supposed to see that."

"I watched from the office." Her eyes took on a strange cast-as if some light had abandoned them, and there was just a terrifying blankness beneath. "I saw all of it. Everything. I wanted to tear my eyes out, but I couldn't. And if there was some way to erase all of it-to erase you, Derrick, the demon, all of the"-she swallowed-"all of the blood, and the fire-I'd do it. I'd do it in a second."

I stared at her levelly.

"But there isn't-is there?"

"No," Derrick said. "I'm sorry, sweetheart, but there isn't."

"Don't worry. It's perfectly natural to be confused, to not want to talk about this whole thing." The words came out before I could stop them. God, I sounded like a teen pregnancy pamphlet.

Mia managed to glare at me, and I remembered that no thirteen-year-old girl wants to be told that she's "perfectly natural." I couldn't think of anything to say that might make her feel better, though. I was at a loss.

"For now," I said, "I think we should all just go home. I'll leave my cell phone on, and if anything happens-no matter what-call me, and I'll come get you."

"Are you sure that's wise?" Derrick asked. "Maybe Mia could stay at the lab-just for the night. Selena might okay it-"

"My aunt won't let me." Her face was a mask of resolve again. "It's cool, though. That guy said that she was coming to pick me up."

"Marcus? Yes, I'm sure he called her a while ago."

"He doesn't seem to like you," Mia observed.

"You picked up on that?" Derrick asked. "It's so subtle."

She managed to smile weakly.

"Maybe we can talk tomorrow," I said.

Mia looked at me sharply. "I thought you weren't supposed to see me again-it's a conflict of interest, remember?"

I stared at her in surprise for a moment. "You heard that?"

"I'm good at eavesdropping," she said unemphatically. "That Marcus guy said you weren't supposed to come near me."

"Well-" I swallowed. How quickly could I throw away my career? "I'm not sure that I can follow those instructions exactly."

"Tess-" Derrick began.

I turned on him. "Oh, like you're just going to sit idly by. We both have to keep working this, and you know it."

"Even if it costs us our jobs? Or worse?"

I shrugged. "There are more important things."

I almost believed it.

Mia gave me an odd look. Almost like she was seeing me for the first time. I knew then that I didn't need to ask her why she'd lied. It didn't matter. She trusted me, and I trusted her. It was a beginning.

For a while, we were all silent. Then Mia cleared her throat.

"So . . .demons." She looked at me. It wasn't really a statement or a question. I'm not sure what it was. "Huh," she said.

"Huh," I replied.

At that moment, the door to the examination room opened, and Selena walked in. Directly behind her was Cassandra.

I froze as soon as I saw her. My heart was pounding-but she barely even looked at me. She went straight to Mia and hugged her.

"Are you all right, sweetheart?"

Surprisingly, Mia accepted the embrace. I realized that this was going to be even more complicated than it seemed. This was a girl who loved her aunt-her only surviving parental guardian. I couldn't just accuse the woman of murder right in front of her, ripping her life to shreds.

"Miss Polanski," Selena said, "your niece is fine, but she was involved in a very serious incident. Tess and her partner, Derrick, managed to subdue the attacker, and Mia was unharmed. But we're still conducting an investigation."

"Of course." Her look was grim. "You need to find out who did this. What sort of monster would attack three innocent people in broad daylight?"

"We're trying to figure that out, ma'am," Selena said. "Can you tell us where you were around four thirty p.m. today?"

Cassandra blinked. "Why, that was barely an hour ago. I was at work. That Marcus person-"

"Marcus Tremblay?"

"Yes." She frowned. "He had a very unpleasant phone manner."

Even though I was a bit wary of Cassandra right now, I still had to smile.

Selena didn't. "That's him," she said simply.

"Well, he phoned me at work, to see if I could come pick Mia up. So of course I got here as soon as I could."

"And where do you work?"

"SemTec Laboratories on Georgia and West Pender."

"She's a chemist," Mia said. It sounded so normal.

"Yes." Cassandra smiled. "That's right. Boring stuff, I'm afraid."

Then the most surprising thing happened. Cassandra walked over to me, and wrapped me in a tight embrace.

"Thank you," she said simply. "Thank you for protecting Mia."

"You-you're welcome, "I stammered. "Miss Polanski-"

Something passed between us-I couldn't quite put it into words, but it was a mixture of warning and gratitude. You've done me a favor, and I've done you one. But come no closer.

Cassandra stepped back, smiling. "Everyone here is so efficient. I'll have to send you all a gift basket."

"Aunt Cassie." Mia glared at her.

"I'm sorry, dear. I don't mean to embarrass you in front of all the forensics experts." She laid a hand on Mia's back. "Now let's go home, before anything else happens to you."

Watching them go, I wondered how safe "home" was.

I wondered how safe any of us were.

11.

The first time Derrick and I met, I was wearing a spiked dog collar and dancing on Katie Green's sofa. I'd smoked some amazing pot about an hour before, and by the time I heard the first strains of Depeche Mode on the CD player, I was pretty much gone. As an undergrad doing a social-sciences degree at the University of British Columbia, I felt the need to go through a "dark" period, which included experimenting with a lot of drugs and listening to Violator with all the lights off in my apartment. Yes, I had a plasma globe. Yes, I painted triptychs with names like "Raven Mother Blesses Her Children." To my credit, I've gotten a lot better-although if I'm minding my own business and suddenly hear "Judy Is a Punk," my body will actually explode unless I start dancing. Really.

I was a few minutes away from putting a lamp shade on my head when Derrick walked into the living room. He was wearing a blue silk shirt, black dress pants, and loafers. He had one blond streak in his hair. He was Duckie from Pretty in Pink. I could have died. I had no idea that, years later, Derrick would angrily start crying at the precise moment when Duckie started crying, legs pulled up to his chest, somehow occupying the same fucked-up space as John Cryer as he mourned for Molly Ringwold. Except that Derrick was mourning for Tim, his asshole of an ex who was now dating a blond eighteen-year-old with a lip piercing. "It's like I kiss a boy," he told me once, "and they just become evil. Like I'm gay kryptonite."

I fed him chocolate macaroons, and we finished watching the movie. Afterward, I convinced him to prank call Tim and pretend to be a herpes clinic. It was healing.

Derrick looked up at me and smiled. "Having fun?"

"God, I love this album." I half sat, half flopped onto the couch, my leather skirt riding up perilously around my thighs. "Don't you love this album?"

"Sure." He sat down next to me. "Cool party, huh?"

I rolled my eyes. "Blah, blah. Katie Green is such a thundercunt. "

"You think so?"

"Fuck yeah. She totally slept with Brad Hewitt when he was going out with Stacey Lomar. And I heard she's like a total clepto. She steals cosmetics and shit all the time from Eaton's."

The first was a rumor. The second was entirely fictionalized, and I had no idea why I said it. I just found the image of Katie Green stealing Venom lip gloss to be incredibly funny. Her parents were both lawyers, and they'd bought her a Mercedes S-Class for her sixteenth birthday.

"Wow." Derrick was polite enough to look surprised. "I totally didn't know that about her. That's so harsh."

"It is harsh." I leaned back in the sofa. I remember that it suddenly seemed very big-like I was in a boat with green cushions, sailing on a green crayon sea. "What did you say your name was again? Dylan? Like Dylan Thomas?"

"Derrick, actually."

"Isn't the word 'milkwood' amazing? Don't you wonder about it? Like, sometimes I lie in bed at night and wonder what it would be like to be under milkwood. Floating on a sea of milk, like the fucking Lady of Shallot."

He didn't say anything, but I think I saw his pupils dilate. "It's awesome to meet you, Derrick." I grinned blearily at him. "So did you want to go upstairs?"

His cheeks went red. "Like-to one of the bedrooms?"

"Um, yes, to one of the bedrooms." I put my hand on his knee.

"S-s-sure." He smiled. "Sure, what the hell. Let's go."

"I should warn you, though. I'm having a bit of trouble walking in these boots." I was wearing a pair of knee-high stilettos that I'd bought from Cabbages 'n Kinx, and to say that I had "trouble" walking in them was an understatement. I looked like a female praying mantis climbing up the stairs.

"That's okay. You can lean on me."

"What a gentleman." I grabbed his arm. "A diamond in the rough."

Derrick led me up the stairs to a room belonging to Katie's younger sister. There was an enormous poster of Boyz II Men above her bed, and a signed picture of Mariah Carey right beside it. The comforter was pink and ruffled. None of this deterred us. We made out for about twenty minutes before Derrick told me he was gay. By that time, the pot was starting to wear off, but I was just paranoid enough to think that I might be gay as well. Derrick assured me that I was probably straight, and flattered me by saying what a great kisser I was-much better than the other three girls that he'd kissed in his entire lifetime, including his grade-seven lab partner, Erika Holtz. "She had braces," he explained, "and not the clear plastic kind.

This was some serious hardware. If you had an elastic band, you could play percussion on them."

An hour later, we were eating chocolate-coconut pie at a nearby Denny's while I secretly rolled another joint beneath the table. We walked along EnglishBay-back then, the trendy CoalHarborneighborhood had barely been developed; it was still just an explosion of cranes, cinderblocks, and half-finished buildings. We picked our way among the rubble, like explorers walking on the surface of the moon. Now there's a glowing paintbrush in the middle of the water, and a scroll of neon light that fluoresces in different mellow colors, welcoming you to the waterfront in Sannitch, a dialect of Coast Salish territory: xw w'e s y'si., xw.n'e.' .e. ste..w'. "Don't be afraid. Be like the light."

In the pinhole blackness of that warm night by the water, we walked along SunsetBeach, stoned from my little glass pipe. I remember how Derrick used to stare at it, curious at how the brownish vapor collected in its soft heart; how it looked like a moth fluttering. We walked underneath Granville bridge and the cars went galumphing over our heads, bump bump of the careless wheels, or a time code or the flash of a pulse, the blooming of blood along plains of vesicle. Kept walking past the waterfront homes where dogs barked richly, past the stone steps dipped in water, all the way to "Be Like the Light," and then we both got lost in the blank waters for a while. Derrick talked about coming out to his parents, how his mother had told him that he could be anything but a Republican, and I snickered and spit on my fingertips from laughing.

Derrick didn't say as much, but I think it was one of the first times that he'd ever been truly high. Magic is different. The rushing of the power, the howling of it through every chamber of your body, like hungry vapor-it's different. They say that there's a 60 percent incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among mages and telepaths. I didn't doubt it. Sometimes you had to turn to other powers, other spells. Things you could control. Maybe even necromancers smoked weed. I amended that. Necromancers definitely smoked weed. Given the historical association between cannabis and the Arabic assassin guilds, dealing in death centuries ago, necromancers may very well have invented 420.

"Shh," Derrick whispered all of a sudden. "Quiet. Let's try to be quiet like sea turtles, okay?"

I stared at him. "You are gone, Siegel."

His eyes were red-rimmed, but he laughed. "No-no- shh-just try it. Just try, okay? Sea turtles."

"Sea turtles," I said flatly.

I think I may have fallen a little in love with him then, as much as a straight-but-not-narrow girl can be in love with a fragile gay boy. Fragile, but not weak. Years later, I would watch him ruthlessly interrogate a demon informant, plucking thoughts from his brain like you might randomly play guitar strings, his expression never changing.

Derrick put his hand on top of mine, and his fingers were red from the cold. I thought sea turtles. I thought it mightily, as a child might dream of a swimming pool or a lick of ice cream in secret.

"Wheeyaa." Derrick laughed and leaned over the railing. "Doesn't it feel like we're going over the edge, like we're moving on the face of the water and something's holding us up?"

What was it, though? I thought later. What held?

What didn't yield into plant fiber and the silken hair on leaves, decomp, cell death, and heartache? What said no lean out just lean out I've got you. Or was it only a rustle of gears, the pistons in my body, in Derrick's body, firing, failing, and the coping silence after.

I said fuck it. I made Derrick my friend. I thought about sea turtles.

I was remembering all of this because Derrick had decided to stay the night at my place- something we hadn't done in ages. The crime tape was finally gone, and aside from a few holes in the wall, it almost looked more like a domicile than a war zone. Marcus had kindly footed the bill for a new door-I guess he felt bad. Derrick reasoned that if something ugly crawled through the window, it would be better to have two people here. Frankly, I think he was just scared of sleeping alone, but so was I, so it worked out well.

"Should we put on some music?" Derrick asked.

I rolled my eyes. "This isn't a slumber party. Before we break out the episodes of AbFab, we should probably attempt to devise some sort of strategy for surviving the next couple of days."

My claim for seriousness was undermined slightly by the fact that I was wearing Garfield pajamas and holding my Laura Ashley comforter.