“About guessing their psychic ability?” she asked, frowning slightly.
“No, about not being any fun.”
“Oh, I bet you’re lots of fun away from work,” she said, smiling and raising an eyebrow at me.
I was suddenly wondering if she was flirting with me. I wasn’t very good at subtle, and maybe she was just being friendly.
“We’re all more fun away from work,” Brent said, and he definitely didn’t mean anything by it, so I let it go. Maybe I was starting to look for people flirting with me, or expecting it; weird. There was a time in my life when I was pretty oblivious to all of it.
Agent Gillingham said, “Special Agent Kirkland is right behind me; he had to take a phone call.”
I didn’t even try to hide my unhappy about that bit of news. “That makes you unhappy; why?” Gillingham said.
“You don’t have to be psychic to know that,” I said.
“It was in my report,” Manning said.
“I meant I wasn’t trying to hide my feelings,” I said.
“There’s not hiding your feelings and then there’s being obvious about it,” Gillingham said. She looked hard at me and I felt a brush of something. She was probing me.
“Keep your powers to yourself, Agent.”
She actually blushed a little.
“What do you mean, Blake?” Manning asked.
“Did Gillingham just try to peek?” Brent asked.
“Yeah, she tried to peek,” I said.
“I didn’t feel anything,” Manning said.
“Me, either, which meant it was really subtle,” Brent said, smiling and friendly, but there was something in his eyes that was thinking too hard. I realized that he was a little bit psychically gifted, at least enough to usually pick up active psychic probing, but he hadn’t sensed what the other agent had done.
“It was,” I said. I looked at Gillingham.
“I’m sorry, Marshal.”
“Sorry for trying to sneak a peek inside when you know full well that’s considered rude among practitioners, or just sorry you got caught?”
“Both,” she said, and her lips smiled when she said it, but her eyes stayed serious and thoughtful.
“If instructors told you I was hot psychically, then you should know I’d sense it.”
“They said you were powerful, but like a bull in a china shop.”
“I smash things, is that it?”
“Sometimes, but it’s more you are so powerful psychically that you just bull your way through everything, so subtle energies are lost to you because you give off so much of your own energy it makes you blind to other practitioners.”
“Once, maybe, but not much gets by me anymore.”
“You’re even more powerful than I was told. Being around you is like standing next to power lines just humming through the air.”
“Most psychics don’t describe me that way.”
“How do they describe you?” she asked.
“Scary.”
She laughed, and I wasn’t sure if it was humor or nerves. I might even have asked, but the door opened behind her, and it was my fellow marshal and unhappy coworker.
“Hi, Larry,” I said.
“Anita,” he said. He closed the door behind him. He didn’t shake hands with Gillingham, just nodded at her.
“I see you’ve met Agent Gillingham before,” I said.
“Did she try to probe your thoughts yet?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at Gillingham. “I told you not to do it, didn’t I?”
She looked embarrassed again. “I was very low-key about it. I thought her own power would hide it.”
“You thought your little knock-knock would be lost in the loudness of her own energy, is that it?”
Gillingham nodded.
“What did I tell you?”
“Not to try,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because Marshal Blake is better at being a practitioner than the instructors at Quantico seem to think.”
“Remember, I sat through those same classes, Teresa. Their information is several years out of date about Anita, and I suspect several other major powers in the states.”
“Not the world?” Manning asked.
“Interpol seems to keep better track of their psychics and whether they upgrade their skills,” he said.
“Why do you think that is?” Manning asked.
“They’ve had practitioners on their force longer than we have, for one thing.”
I said, “And they keep files on psychics in case they get powerful enough for Interpol to feel they represent a danger to the public, because they have to have enough proof in their files to get their version of a warrant of execution for the witch.”
“Witch is a religion, not a psychic talent,” Gillingham said.
“In the United States,” I said.
She frowned and looked at Larry, as if for confirmation. I wondered if he’d been one of her mentors, or even a teacher. “Anita’s right; in parts of Europe you’re a practitioner, or a psychic, until you get powerful enough for the government to see you as a danger and then they label you a witch. It’s still legal to kill witches in parts of Europe.”
“I thought witch meant what a rogue vampire or lycanthrope is here, that they’ve killed people,” Gillingham said.
Larry and I both shook our heads. “They just have to prove that the practitioner is sufficiently dangerous,” Larry said, “but they don’t actually have to have hurt anyone yet, in some parts of Europe. It’s even worse in parts of South America and Africa.”