Page 32 of The Diamond in the Rough

Sylvia grinned at him, but the expression was more predatory than friendly.“Very well. Raj it shall be, kitten.”

Hart chortled.

Raj glared at him.

Sylvia’s grin was definitely more smirk than smile.

Raj looked over at Ward. “That’s the best I’m going to get, isn’t it?” he asked, sounding resigned.

“Probably,” Ward agreed, looking pretty resigned himself.

In the end,over pizza that Hart ordered on the FBI’s budget, Ward grudgingly agreed to let the FBI officially hire me through Beyond the Veil, but he wasn’t going to put me out there as an optional hire unless and until this case was over and I agreed that psychic consulting was something I wanted to do more permanently.

Since even I didn’t really know if it was something I wanted to do as a one-off, much less as a regular thing, I thought that was more than fair.

I’d also gotten to eat pizza with pepperoni, sausage, bacon,andham on it, because there was somebody eating pizza besides me who wasn’t a vegetarian—Mason by choice and Hart and Ward because otherwise both of them would end up very ill. I didn’t mind eating vegetarian, but it was a special treat when I got to eat meat that wasn’t cold cuts or canned tuna or prepackaged ham slices, which wasusually all I ever got for myself, since I live on a pretty tight budget.

Ward and Mason pay me more than fairly—far more, given how largely useless I am at anything other than spreadsheets and scheduling—but being a psychic is expensive if you actually want to buy things that don’t come with a whole emotional history. Some things are cheap and easy—things like paper plates, tissues, anything mass-manufactured that never needed to be touched by human hands.

But anything more complicated than that—furniture, for instance, and even clothing—got handled at some point by human beings, either in the manufacturing, inspecting, processing, shipping, or sales part of its life. And anythingactuallynice that was made by live human beings had to be magically wiped or it had to be made by somebody who loved their job—and most people, for the record, don’t seem to love their jobs. So if I wanted things that didn’t come with lots of memories and feelings, I had to spend more to get them.

I didn’t really get pizza much, and if I did, it was the cheap frozen kind. It wasn’t fresh and it never had more than one kind of meat on it. The fact that Raj, as a shifter, needed more protein meant that I got a special treat, although I did feel a little bit like Raj was letting me have pizza that he otherwise would have eaten himself. Not that shifters can’t also eat vegetarian pizza—of course they can. But I still felt a little guilty about the slice I’d taken.

But that was beside the point.

I was officially working for the FBI. Temporarily, but officially.

I wasn’t at all sure that I was ready for that kind of pressure.

6

She was sick—theflu, she thought, given the feverish feeling that she’d woken up with this morning. She’d downed a bunch of acetaminophen, which seemed to have helped for the last few hours, although it was starting to feel like she needed to take more.

But it was too soon. She shouldn’t need to take more for another two hours at least.

She needed to get this done. Then she could go home and sleep it off. Take some more acetaminophen and maybe some aspirin and a decongestant. Make tea. Rest before she had to go to work at the laundromat.

I gaspedas I forced my fingers to let go of the towel.

“Okay, kid?” Hart asked.

I nodded, then looked up, meeting first Hart’s lavender gaze, then Raj’s golden-brown, then Cass’s blue-grey. The fourth member of the team, Drew Shao, was still upstairs in the office, doing some sort of search on the computer.Financials or business contacts or email or something. It wasn’t my job to know.

“I think the maid had Arcana,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure she’s the only one who handled this after it was completely sterilized.”

The hotel where they’d found Yvonne Gates-Adams, the murdered woman, used an intensive machine-cleaning process for all their linens to the point where the only thing I got off them was the thoughts of the maid who had hung them in the room. Magical cleaning or hanging laundry out in the sun to dry were the only ways to guarantee the destruction of the Arcanavirus, and a hotel did enough laundry that outdoor drying wasn’t feasible.

They might be looking at a law suit if this maid really did have Arcana and guests traced infections back to them, though. It was illegal to work in public service or an open office if you had Arcanavirus, so most people just stayed home if they had any symptoms that even might be Arcana. Unless you were working multiple jobs to make ends meet like this maid had been.

“Anything else?” Raj asked. “There’s blood spatter on it.”

“Nothing,” I replied. “Blood doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Aren’t you a death witch?” Hart asked.

“Shit,” Cass breathed, her slight accent drawing out the word. “You’re a death witch, too?”

I nodded. “Yes, but that really just means I can see and speak to ghosts.”