I let out a short, sharp "Ahhh!" and heard one coming from the other side of the door, maybe a little higher than mine. I stepped back and heard the deadbolt slide, then the door unlocked and a short woman with a scowl who looked like she came up to about my belly button was staring up at me, grey hair all done up in a bun.

"What do you want?" she asked, hand against her chest. "You just about gave me a heart attack!"

"Uhm," I said, tongue twisting around, "I'm, uh ... Augustus."

She peered at me through her thick glasses. "Augustus who? That doesn't tell me anything. What do you want?"

"I'm here about, uh ... Kennith?"

"You asking or you telling me that?" She took her hand off her chest.

"I'm here about Kennith," I said. "I wanted to ask you some questions."

"Who are you with?" That scowl made me want to take another step back.

"I'm with, uh ..." I tried to remember the mouthful of jargon that Sienna's agency was called. "The, uh ... metahuman police."

She gave me a look. "The who what?"

"The agency responsible for policing metahumans," Sienna answered for me as she came around the corner, floating through the air. "Ms. Coy?"

"Mrs. Coy," the lady answered, staring furiously at her, like her floating was nothing. "And don't you make any jokes about it, either."

"Oh, coy, like-" I started then stopped myself. "Well, you did refuse to answer the door for a while, so ... maybe you shouldn't play it so-"

She raised a hand like she was going to hit me, and I stopped and took a step back. "I am your elder and you will respect me," she said. "If your mother didn't teach it to you, come a little closer and I will."

"Ma'am," Sienna said as she landed on the front porch, "we're here about Kennith."

"I heard him the first time he said it," Mrs. Coy said, staring her down. "What do you need to say about him?"

Sienna gave me a look, something in the realm of This lady is going to be a pain in the ass. "We're here about what happened to him."

"You mean how he died?" she asked, getting right to it. Even Sienna looked a little taken aback by her bluntness on that one.

"Uhh ... yeah," I said. "That's right."

"Well, then why didn't you just say that?"

"It's kind of a delicate thing," Sienna said. "I didn't want to just throw it out there in case no one had told you ..."

Mrs. Coy's head dropped. "You didn't think I'd notice my boy got struck by a bolt of lightning outside my own window?" She yanked the glasses off her head and thrust them out at each of us in turn. "How blind do you think I am that something like that would escape my notice?" She turned her head, showing us each of her ears in turn. "Do you see hearing aids here? Do you think I would miss the crack of thunder?"

"Was there a crack of thunder?" Sienna asked, and for a minute I thought Mrs. Coy was going to lunge right out at her.

"Of course there was a crack of-" Mrs. Coy's face got screwed up for a minute, and then she paused, like she was thinking about it. "Well, there had to be, didn't there? Of course there was. Thunder follows lightning, that's how it is."

"Thunder follows lightning because the air currents make that noise as the electricity is discharged from clouds or something, right?" I asked Sienna. She just sort of shrugged and nodded, all in one. "So if he was killed by someone who could shoot lightning out of their hand, there wouldn't be thunder, would there?"

"What in the blue hell are you talking about?" Mrs. Coy asked.

"Ma'am," Sienna said gently, which sounded a little strange on her, "we think Kennith was killed by a metahuman who generates lightning bolts from their hands." She lowered her voice even further, almost to a whisper. "We think he was murdered."

Mrs. Coy put her glasses back on and squinted at us, smacking her lips together like she was thinking something over real hard. "You think he was murdered?"

"Yes, ma'am," Sienna said.

"By a bolt of lightning?"

Sienna looked to me again, and this time I could see the pained need for reassurance pass across her face in a flash quicker than the lightning we were discussing. I got it, because Mrs. Coy had one of those personalities like those clouds that make thunder-she made everyone want to wince and take a step back. "Yes, ma'am. We think so. We'd like to ask you some questions about Kennith because ... we're trying to track down the person we think did this."

Mrs. Coy screwed up her face again, and then pushed her door wide open. "You can come in, then." And she backed away from the door slowly, shoulders hunched over, looking for the first time not like a force of nature hurling herself at us at the gates to her own castle but like a woman-an older woman-who had lost her son.

Sienna Mrs. Coy's house smelled of good food. We followed her down the hall into a living room that looked well-lived in, older furniture that had a stately aura about it-classy and aged well, kind of like the woman herself. The outside of the house might have been a little rough, but the inside was the domain of this tiny terror, and she clearly kept it completely in line, like her own personal kingdom.

"Y'all want anything to eat?" Mrs. Coy asked. "People from the church brought all manner of food."

"I just ate," I said apologetically. I watched Augustus catch her eye and shake his head.

"I can't hear your head rattle," Mrs. Coy said, eyeing him.

"Ah, no, ma'am, thank you," Augustus said, tripping over his words. I couldn't blame him; she had that effect on me, too.

"Would you like some iced tea?" she asked, passing through a small gap between counter and wall into a kitchen on the far side of the room.

"Uh, sure," I said. "Please."

"Yes, please," Augustus said.

She moved about the kitchen for a few minutes, preparing three big pint glasses of tea with ice. I watched her go about the business, slowly, steadily, until she'd finished pouring all three of them. When she got done, she sort of stared at them for a moment and I could see her conscious mind clicking away realizing what she'd just done, and how she didn't have enough hands to effectively carry all of them. "You," she said to Augustus, "come help me with these."

Augustus snapped to it, nice guy that he was, and he grabbed two glasses and hurried them over to us while Mrs. Coy took the third for herself and settled in on one side of her couch, taking up maybe three-quarters of a plaid-ish cushion. She held the iced tea glass in her hand, and I watched it start to sweat. It wasn't exactly sweltering in her house, but it was warm, and she was wearing only a thin cotton dress.

Augustus handed me a glass and I took it up, immediately taking a long drink. When the tea hit my lips, I froze. It was like no tea I'd ever had. I'd gotten used to the British version of tea. This was not that. This was diabetes encased in a glass cylinder.

It was sugared like a soft drink, with a hint of honey running throughout. I tried not to slurp, because even as my brain was protesting that this was way, way too sweet for me, my tongue was asking me for more and more. Also, in fairness, it was kind of warm, so a cold drink felt pretty good.

"What do you think happened to my Kennith?" Mrs. Coy asked as I pulled the glass away from my face. I didn't really want to pull it away, but I needed to stop before I drowned myself in this stuff.

"Ma'am, we don't exactly know," Augustus answered for me while I composed myself. He gave me a sidelong look like he knew the tea had captured me and was holding me prisoner. The secret ingredient may have been heroin, because all I wanted at that moment was MOAR TEA.

"Another man was killed the same night," I said, finding my voice again. "Roscoe Marion. Does that name sound familiar?"

Her eyelids fluttered as she thought it over. "I read his name in the paper, but ... other than that, no. I don't think so. I don't recall Kennith or anyone else ever mentioning him to me before."

"How was Kennith doing?" I asked. "I know he was on ... probation."

"He was following the rules," she said. "He worked at the tire shop down the road. He didn't go out at night, just went to work and came home straightaway afterward. His parole officer came by a couple times a week at first, but we hadn't seen him in a while now." She shook her head. "I don't see how he could have been in any trouble, let alone enough for someone to want to kill him."

I made a mental note about the tire shop. "Did he ever have friends come by?"

She looked up at me. "Just that Darrick. He would stop by every once in a while. I never did like him."

"What was wrong with him?" Augustus asked.

"He had no respect," Mrs. Coy said, and she was off to the races again, animated and irritated. "He would honk his horn on the driveway until Kennith came out and talked to him, like an animal. No manners."

"What was Darrick's last name?" I asked.

"Cary," she said. "Darrick Cary. I'll write it down for you so you can beat on his door for a while." She puckered her lips and gave me enough of a look that told me what she thought about my tactics.

Augustus's lips went into a thin line. "Darrick Cary ... young guy. About yea tall?" He held up a hand to around his chin. "Drives a little SUV?"

"He's in a fancy Corvette now, but that's him," Mrs. Coy said, looking at Augustus with more than a little mild irritation. "He a friend of yours?"

"No," Augustus said, looking more than a little offended. "We went to school together is all. I know of him."

"Can we talk about the night Kennith was killed?" I asked.

"I don't see anyone stopping you," Mrs. Coy said, just a little short of a snap.

"What can you tell us about that night?" I asked.

"Well, let's see," Mrs. Coy said, with more than a little irony dripping, "it was the night before last, so it might take me a while to remember since it was so long ago. How do these stories normally start? 'It was a dark and stormy night'? Yeah, it started like that." She was clearly annoyed at us. "Kennith and I were sitting on the couch watching TV-"

"What were you watching?" Augustus asked.

She looked daggers at him-big, fat, stabby ones. "What does it matter what we were watching?"

"We try and be as thorough as possible, Mrs. Coy," I said as gently as I could. Augustus, for his part, looked like he was going to stutter an answer out somewhere around 2050. This woman was extremely off-putting.

"We were watching that show with the boy and the girl that fall in love-" She shook her head. "I don't know, he picked. I was reading a magazine." She glared at Augustus. "You want to know what magazine it was? People, okay? People magazine. It had that little blond tramp on the cover, the one with the-" She squinted at me. "You know her. That little skinny-ass bitch."

This was the problem with being well known; Mrs. Coy had been holding out on me a little bit all along, at least. Normally that would have thrown up a cloud of suspicion, but I couldn't really blame her for being a little ornery two days after her son died. "I used to know her," I corrected.

"Anyway, if we can escape some of these details," Mrs. Coy said, "we were sitting there and the TV went out. Just the TV, not the power. It started spitting that white static. It was storming, so we didn't think too much of it, but then there was a noise outside and Kennith thought maybe a branch had fallen on the roof, maybe took out the TV."

"Don't they bury those cables nowadays?" Augustus asked.

"We have an antenna," Mrs. Coy said, pointing to the roof. She paused, waiting. "May I continue?"

"Sorry," Augustus muttered.

"So he went out and looked, and-let me wrap this up before either of y'all go interrupting me again-I heard something, then a scream, and by the time I got out there, he was dead in the yard. Burned all up."

"Did you hear thunder?" I asked.

She concentrated hard, thinking it over. "There was thunder earlier in the night, for sure. I remember hearing it crack, feeling it rattle the house. But ... I don't remember it when he screamed, not at all. His scream was so clear, so much louder than the ..." She swallowed, nearly choking on her emotions before she got ahold of herself. "... than the rain on the roof."

I couldn't look away from her. "Mrs. Coy ... did you ever see a branch?" She stared blankly at me. "The one that made the noise Kennith heard."

She frowned, thinking again. "No, I did not. I suppose I forgot about it in the fuss afterward. But no, there was no branch, no sign of anything."

"Thank you, Mrs. Coy," I said, and watched her put her face on her hand. "We'll ... let ourselves out if that's all right with you."

"Are you going to catch the person who did this to my baby?" she asked, looking up at me again.

"I'm going to try," I said. "They're not making it easy on me. Whoever it is, they're covering their tracks so well that we can't even prove for a fact that someone did it, at least not yet."

"I don't even know what to think," she said, shaking her head. "If you could please ... just ... leave me alone."

"Yes, ma'am," I said, and gestured to Augustus.

He paused, just a little ways off from the arm of her couch. "Our condolences, Mrs. Coy."

She looked up at him, all trace of sarcasm gone, replaced by a twin track of tears glistening their way down her cheeks. "Thank you, young man," she said, and we left her to her grief.

"What do you suppose happened with the branch?" Augustus asked as we closed Mrs. Coy's front door behind us.

"I think our killer jumped on the roof," I said, walking back down her driveway with a purpose. "Sat there and waited until Kennith showed his face, then nuked it off with a lightning bolt."

"Burned his face off?" Augustus asked, sounding horrified. "For real?"

"Eh, from the autopsy photos it seemed like it caught Kennith in the hand," I said. "But still, it wasn't pretty."

"Man, I am hearing all the grossest stuff with you today," he said. "Old men sleeping with pretty starlets-"

"Like that never happens."

"-people getting their faces fried off," he went on. "This is not as clean as factory work."

"Good thing you can use your powers to fix that problem," I said, halting at the sidewalk. "Who is Darrick Cary?"