The PowWow

She called me before I called her.

I want to note that for the record because it mattered to me in a way I wasn't entirely prepared for. I'd been sitting with my phone in my hand for twenty minutes constructing reasonable professional justifications for making the call — the mark, the possession confirmation, the investigation requiring interdepartmental communication — when it rang.

Rachel Stryker. Calling me.

I answered on the second ring. Not the first, because the first ring is desperate, and I had some dignity left.

"You have something," she said.

"The mark on the body," I said. "Naomi found it on secondary examination. Base of the spine. Tissue alteration that doesn't read as burn or tattoo but has characteristics of both. Jacob confirmed what it means."

"Which is?"

"Possession. Demonic. The mark is a brand of some kind. Not made by human hands."

Silence on her end. The particular silence of a woman who had been recalibrating her understanding of the world in small increments since the Nathanial Lim case and was making another quiet adjustment.

"Come over tonight," she said. "We should discuss it."

I looked at my phone.

Looked at Jacob, who was reading across the room and had the grace to appear completely unaware of my existence.

"Seven?" I said.

"Seven," she said. And hung up.

I set the phone down on the coffee table with the careful precision of a man trying to appear normal.

Jacob turned a page.

"Not a word," I said.

"I wasn't going to say anything," he said.

"Good."

He turned another page. "Seven is a good time."

I picked up the phone and went to my room.

Her door opened before I knocked, which meant she'd heard me pull up outside her house, which meant she'd been waiting for me, which was information I carefully did not know what to do with and filed in the rapidly expanding folder labeled things about Rachel Stryker that I am not equipped to process in real time.

"Come in," she said.

I came in.

The house was the same as always — clean, organized, everything in its considered place. But the coffee table had a charcuterie board on it. Actual charcuterie. Arranged with attention. Cheeses and cured meats and small clusters of grapes and the kind of crackers that had been selected rather than grabbed, and two glasses, and an open bottle of red breathing on the side table.

I stood in the entryway for a moment longer than was strictly natural.

She planned something.

The thought arrived with the force of a minor revelation and immediately produced seventeen follow-up thoughts, none of which I was going to say out loud, the first being that Rachel Stryker did not casually produce charcuterie boards for professional case discussions, the second being that I had absolutely no framework for what to do with that information, and the third being that whatever I was going to do with it I needed to do it without looking like I was doing anything at all.

"Sit," she said, already moving toward the wine.

I sat. In the middle cushion, because I was paying attention now.

She poured without asking — the particular confidence of someone who already knew the answer to the question she wasn't asking. She handed me the glass and settled onto the couch beside me. Not across from me. Beside me. Closer than the case files on the coffee table strictly required.

I cleared my throat.

"The wine is — " I stopped. Started again. "This is good wine."

That was the wine connoisseur in me coming out.

Rachel's mouth curved slightly. "I'm glad you think so."

She tucked one leg beneath herself and turned slightly toward me, the case file open across her knee, a pen in her hand. Professional. Present. And close enough that when she leaned forward to set the file on the coffee table her shoulder crossed the established geography of the cushion between us.

I became temporarily unable to remember what possession was.

Focus, I told myself. You are a man of above-average cognitive function. You process patterns faster than most people form them. You identified the connection between a chipped fingernail and a campaign complaint file from across a morgue. You can discuss demonic possession with a woman sitting next to you on a couch.

You are absolutely going to be fine.

She smells like something that isn't the wine.

You are not fine.

"Tell me about the mark," Rachel said.

I told her about the mark. Professionally. With complete sentences and everything. The location, the tissue alteration, Naomi's findings, Jacob's confirmation. Rachel listened the way she always listened — fully, without interruption, pen moving occasionally.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

"The Goth group at the rally," she said. "You said they ran."

"Before we got within conversation distance."

"And the wrongness you described — " She paused, the pen tapping once against the file. "You and Jacob both felt it."

"Yes."

"And now a mark on the body that corresponds to — " She stopped. I watched her fit the pieces together in the precise, methodical way she fit everything together. "The mark isn't post-mortem."

"No."

"It was placed before death. Before the exsanguination."

"Before everything," I said. "Naomi thinks it preceded any other intervention by a significant margin."

Rachel looked at the file. "Which means the recruitment and the marking happen first. Then the blood taking." She looked up. "They were prepared. Branded. Before anything else was done to them."

"Yeah."

She held that. I watched her hold it — the moment where the investigator and the evidence arrived at a conclusion that the investigator's framework had been built to resist. She didn't resist it. Not anymore.

"I owe you an apology," she said.

The shift was clean and direct and completely characteristic of her. No preamble. No softening.

"Last time you were here," she said. "I was — the way I handled that was professional in the wrong direction." She looked at me. "I was protecting process when I should have been listening."

"Rachel — "

"Let me finish." Not sharp. Just clear. "You were right about not being just a civilian. You were right that what I had wasn't nothing." A pause. "I knew you were right when you said it. I just didn't — " She stopped. The pen turned once in her fingers. "I wanted it to still be manageable. Things that fit inside procedure are manageable."

I looked at her. "And things that don't?"

She looked back. "Are sitting at my coffee table eating charcuterie."

I almost smiled. Didn't.

"I'm not asking you to step outside procedure for me," I said.

"I know." A beat. "I'm considering stepping outside it for myself."

The room was very quiet.

Say something, I thought. You are capable of language. You have used it successfully on multiple occasions. This is a moment and you are in it and you should say —

"There's something I've been wanting to ask you," I said.

She waited.

You are not worthy of this woman, said the part of my brain that had apparently decided now was the time for that particular observation. She is precise and principled and she could have anyone and she planned a charcuterie board and you said the wine was good like a man reporting to a committee —

"Jacob and Naomi," I said. "They're — there's something there. I think they could both use an evening that isn't a morgue or a crime scene."

Rachel's expression moved through something I couldn't fully read.

"I thought," I said carefully, "that if you were open to it — the four of us. Dinner somewhere that doesn't smell like antiseptic."

She looked at me for a long moment. Something behind her eyes settled into something quieter and more certain.

"A double date," she said.

"If that's what you wanted to call it."

The corner of her mouth moved. "Is that what you want to call it?"

Yes, said every functional part of my brain simultaneously. Yes that is exactly what I want to call it. I want to call it that and I want to say several other things that I have been not saying for several months and I want —

"I think," I said, with what I felt was considerable restraint, "that it could be a good evening."

Rachel picked up her wine glass. Looked at it. Then at me.

"Saturday," she said. "Tell Jacob to make a reservation somewhere that can accommodate him."

"He'll appreciate the consideration."

"I know how doors work," she said. "I've watched him use them."

I laughed. Actually laughed, the kind that arrived before I'd approved it. Rachel's smile came all the way out this time, unguarded, the badge completely off for a full three seconds before she remembered it existed.

Three seconds.

I'd been keeping track.

I stayed another hour. The case and the charcuterie and the wine and the comfortable rhythm of two people who had stopped pretending the conversation was only about the case.

When I left she walked me to the door, which she didn't always do.

"Levi," she said, as I stepped onto the front porch.

I turned.

"The wine was good," she said. "I'm glad you thought so."

I held that all the way down the walkway and into the Highlander.

Jacob was still reading when I got in. He looked up.

"Well?" he said.

"Saturday," I said. "Make a reservation somewhere that can fit you through the door."

He looked at me for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moved.

"Good," he said.

It was.