Walking Dead. C.E. Murphy
haranguing Thor. “Is this guy bothering you, Joanie?”
“Terribly. Help, help.” I made a feeble attempt to escape, then blew a raspberry and leaned against Thor. “I haven’t noticed any correlation between the time of year and the amount of weird in my life, no. Get back to me in five years and I might have a better…what do you call it.”
“Survey sample?” Melinda suggested.
“Yeah, something like that. But I don’t think it fluxes and rises with the time of year. I mean, what kind of mystical portent does the second week of July have?” Actually, everything that’d happened in July had been entirely my fault, not some kind of magic cosmic conjunction. I didn’t feel it necessary to mention that aloud.
“Well,” Thor said, “it had enough mystical portent to make me ask you out. That’s got to count for something.”
“No,” Melinda said dryly, “what’s mystical is she said yes.”
“I had to. It was Alan Claussen’s band. I like them.” I actually scraped up a few lines of lyrics, half singing, “Ill met by moonlight, first kiss, stolen late at night,” which got a round of applause from Melinda as Thor staggered back as far as the press of people would let him, a hand over his heart.
“I see how it is. I’m only wanted for my concert tickets.”
I patted his shoulder, since he’d only escaped to about eighteen inches away. “Your concert tickets and your uncanny talent under the hood. There are worse things a guy could be wanted for.”
Too late, I realized the error of my phrasing, and raised my voice to say, “He’s a mechanic! I’m a mechanic! I like guys who are good with cars!” over Billy and Melinda’s synchronized “OooOOooh!”
“The lady,” Thor said cheerfully, “doth protest too much. You’re not helping yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” I was too pink cheeked and laughing to get myself out of that alive anyway, so I took a swallow of my fizzy drink and reveled in the sheer simple fun of being teased by my friends.
“Jo!” Phoebe squished through the crowd and seized my arm. I straightened away from Edward, and Phoebe shook me. I went agglty while she said, “You have so got to get a load of your boss,” and swung me around to face the door. Still rattling, I looked for Morrison and whatever costume had everybody I knew insisting I needed to see him.
Instead, the doors flew open and an entire cadre of zombies lurched through them.
CHAPTER TWO
It said something very disturbing about what I’d come to consider a normal life that the first thing I did was reach for the sword on my hip. The peace knot held, which gave me enough time to remember that this was a Halloween party, and that hordes of undead weren’t unexpected at such festivities.
Still, loosening my fingers from the sword’s hilt took more effort than it should’ve. Phoebe, more or less under my elbow, said, “Well?” in such obvious delight that I scowled at her, then looked back at the zombies.
“What? Morrison’s a zombie?”
“No!” She thrust a finger out, pointing dramatically. I followed the line of her arm and still didn’t see my boss. There were a pair of cross-dressed hippies, an Elvira being hit on by an exceptionally sleazy-looking vampire, an ’80s Miami Vice look-alike and what appeared—from various blue skin, white hair and black leather costumes—to be the entire cast of a science-fiction show, but Morrison’s distinctive silvering hair wasn’t visible anywhere. I shot Phoebe an irritated look, opened my mouth to speak, and my gaze snapped back to Don Johnson without consulting my brain.
“Oh my God.”
Morrison turned around at my high-pitched exclamation, and Melinda, gleefully, said, “Told you he was a cop.”
I made a gurgling noise deep in my throat.
He had it all: the gradated cop sunglasses, which were not at all the right shape for his face; the pastel-pink shirt, unbuttoned far enough to show the world that Morrison had a very nice chest with what appeared to be the ideal amount of coarse, graying hair. The white blazer thrown over his shirt matched pale slacks and he wore loafers without socks. I stared at his feet, trying to wrap my mind around Morrison being that casual, then brought my gaze back up to the crowning horror.
“What did you do to your hair?”
Self-conscious wasn’t a look I was accustomed to seeing on Captain Michael Morrison. He touched his head, then glowered at me. “What’d you do to yours?” “It’s a wig!”
At a loss for moral high ground wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on him, either. “It’s temporary,” he muttered.
I laughed, and, without thinking, slid my fingers through the tidy brown cut. It wasn’t a bad color. I just thought of the silver hair and the damn blue eyes as part and parcel of Morrison’s aging-superhero look. Changing the hair made him look younger and more human. “You’ve even got stubble.” Stubble no more belonged in Morrison’s universe than, say, animistic-based shamanic magic did. It didn’t stop either of those things from being in his universe, but they didn’t belong. “Look at you, Morrison.”
Instead, he looked at me, which made me notice I still had my fingers in his hair.
I said, “Shit,” and pulled my hand back, focusing on his shoulder while I tried not to blush. It didn’t work, and the best I could do was hope nobody called me on it. Hoping nobody’d noticed I’d been feeling up Morrison’s head was asking too much. “Sorry. Is, uh, is that the color it used to be?”
“It was blond.”
“Really?” Silver-shot suited him, and I couldn’t imagine him with anything else. Even seeing it, I couldn’t quite imagine it.
“Really,” he said with a hint of amusement, then helped me get my footing back by saying, “Look at you, Detective.”
I regained enough equanimity to give him a severe look. “I’m a princess warrior. You’re the detective here, Captain.”
“I’m in disguise,” he told me. “You’re not supposed to call me captain.” He hesitated a moment, looking a couple inches up at me. My boots were heeled, giving me a rare height advantage. Unshod, Morrison and I were the same height down to the half inch, and I’d been known to wear heels just for the satisfaction of looking down on him. Not recently, though, so finding myself taller than he was disconcerting.
He let his hesitation out in a breath, said, “Looks like a good party, Walker. Thanks for inviting me,” and reached past me to accept a drink from somebody.
I stayed where I was a few seconds too long, convinced he’d been going to say something else entirely and still waiting for him to say it. Morrison, and the party, moved on, leaving me wondering just what it was I’d thought he’d been going to say, and what I thought I’d have said in return. Not that long ago Morrison and I had had a wholly antagonistic relationship. Like everything else in my life, it’d gotten more complicated lately.
No, that wasn’t true. We’d drawn some lines in the sand, the captain and I, that was all. I, had drawn a line in the sand. I’d taken a promotion to detective instead of taking a chance on something else entirely, and Morrison respected the decision I’d made. Which meant whatever it was I thought he’d been going to say, he wouldn’t have, and I needed to stop worrying about it.
I nodded, a too-visible acknowledgment that I’d given myself a firm talking-to, and turned around to find all my friends looking as if there were many, many unspeakably interesting things going on in their minds, and as if they would all very much like to speak them. Even Thor had a hint of that look about him, and while picking up on subtle social clues wasn’t my strong point, I was pretty sure the guy who was more or less my boyfriend wasn’t supposed to look like that with regards to me having a conversation with another man.