Deja Who (Insighter #1)(14)

“Yes, definitely a mix-up, as normally you would have killed me by now.” She was looking at him thoughtfully and blinking her wide-set hammerhead eyes, which was a pleasant change from how dispassionate she’d been earlier. “Why can’t I See you? Do you know? Will you tell me?”

I . . . understand . . . none of this. More important, how can I get her to go out with me? He shook his head in a vain attempt to clear it. “My client wants you and not in a good way. So I came to . . . what’s that sound?”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Bleeding makes a sound?”

“I’ve signaled for an ambulance. You’re hearing the siren.”

He blinked at her like an owl, a stabbed owl, and swayed on his feet. He was unreasonably overjoyed when she reached out and steadied him. “Hey, thanks, if I fall, I’ll prob’ly bleed more and also it would hurt probably, I dunno, it doesn’t hurt as much as it did earlier. Careful, you don’t want to get any on you.”

She was looking at him in the oddest way. “Thank you. You’re right, I wouldn’t want any on me. That was thoughtful.”

“Okay, and when you didn’t stick the knife in my heart, that was also thoughtful, so thanks for not lethally knifing me.”

Another smile! Two in thirty seconds! Or had it been an hour? Who cared? She’d fall in love if he didn’t bleed out and they’d make babies who were weird and had gorgeous smiles and hammerhead shark eyes. “Beautiful shark-eyed babies,” he told her and, to Leah’s credit, she didn’t flee, or hoist a knee into his balls. “When’d you do that? Make the ambulance come?”

“While you were whining about how I didn’t kill you.”

“Whining! No wonder you don’t have any friends except that homeless lady in the park.”

“That lady used to be the mayor of Boston, is not homeless, and never mind about my friends or lack of same. If you aren’t my killer, who are you? I don’t know why I can’t see you, but you must know that at least.” She took his elbow and gently shook it. “Concentrate. Tell me.”

“I keep saying. The client wants you. Really wants you.”

She stepped back. She hadn’t been afraid of him when she thought he was someone else, someone who would have killed her, but now, now she stepped back. And that smile was long gone. What. The. Fuck? “Oh, no,” she breathed.

“Yeah.”

“Not . . .”

“Yeah. Your mom. She really wants to see you. She says the time has come for you to forgive each other and work on your comeback.”

She stabbed him in the other shoulder.





SEVEN


“You can just back right off, Nazir!”

The strange man who had accosted her on the street was in quite a snit. He kept batting the air like a spitting kitten when she came near, which annoyed the intern trying to stitch him up. And though they were in the least romantic place on earth, save for perhaps a sewage treatment plant or a phosphate mine, she was having trouble not staring at his peculiar, gorgeous eyes. One faded denim blue, one a light green like seawater. Even with his shock-induced tiny pupils, they were extraordinary.

He was extraordinary, which explained why she was rapidly overcoming her knee-jerk reaction to someone in her mother’s employ. He wasn’t . . . handsome, exactly. If you took his qualities and examined them separately, he was downright funny-looking, like Julia Roberts or Gotye.

His nose was too long. His mouth was too wide. His eyes were striking but odd. His hair was, as Madeleine L’Engle described such things, “hair-colored hair,” a sort of light brown with dim lighter brown highlights, and he needed a haircut; the ends curled under just below the nape of his neck. His thick bangs were always falling in his eyes—it was a wonder he had been able to spy on her at all.

So, yes: taken apart, odd-looking. Together, it worked. Together, he was somewhat . . . dazzling.

How annoying.

“Hey! Nazir! I’m screaming at you in the middle of an ER. Please pretend to care.”

She smiled at him. “No more Leah, eh?”

“I’ll never call you Leah again, Leah! That Leah, the Leah that was, the Leah I might have had wonderful children with, is dead to me forever.”

“You are,” she decided, “overly dramatic. And possibly deranged.”

“Because I’ve been fucking stabbed, you heartless psychotic!”

“I’m not psychotic,” she said, stung. Most likely.

“Warning her, warning her, and she stabs me!”

“It’s true.”

“Twice!”

“I’m sorry about the first one,” she added.

“See? She admits it! Ow-ow-ow!” He jerked on the gurney, and seized the doctor’s sleeve. “That stuff you said would numb me? Is not numbing me.” Then he snapped his head around to glare at her again. “Wait, just the first one? You’re only apologizing for the first stab?”

“I thought you were the killer who keeps killing me.”

“I don’t even know how to be in a conversation with her,” he complained to the harried intern. “Ow! You said the Novocain would kick in right away.”

“Usually it does.”

“Ow, argghh!”