Glasses? I mused, No one wears glasses unless…
My suspicion was borne out when Dr. Miller tucked them away with a grimace. Crap, they were for seeing auras without tapping into one’s second sight, which humans generally couldn’t do unaided without a lot of practice. Great. Nothing like a good first impression.
The amulet he wore shifted to a reddish gray, and the FIB’s psychiatrist gave me an apologetic smile as he scooted his chair in. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Morgan,” he said from between Edden and me. “Call me Ford.”
Jenks’s wings clattered, and he flew to land on the table, standing with his hands on his hips so the hilt of his garden sword showed. “That thing reads emotions, doesn’t it?” he said belligerently. “Is that how you do your job? You use that to know if people are telling the truth or not? Rachel isn’t lying. If she says she doesn’t remember, she doesn’t remember. She’d want to find Kisten if she could.”
Ford glanced down at it again, taking it off from around his neck and setting it on the table. “The amulet isn’t reacting to her, it’s reacting to me. Sort of. And I’m not here to find out if Ms. Morgan is lying. I’m here to help reconstruct what I can of her artificially muted memory with the intent to find Mr. Felps.”
I felt a stab of guilt, and his ley line amulet flashed a brief gray-blue once more.
“If she allows it,” he added, fingering the metallic disk. “The longer we wait, the less she will remember. We are under a time constraint, especially if Mr. Felps is in trouble.”
Ivy’s eyes were closed as she struggled to hide her emotions. “Rachel, he’s dead,” she whispered. “For the FIB to play on your hope to make their job of finding him easier is wrong.”
“You don’t know he’s dead,” Edden protested, and a chill took me when she opened her eyes. They were black with pain.
“I’m not going to listen to this,” she said.
I stiffened when she rose and walked out. Jenks hovered uncertainly, then buzzed out after her. The smell of the coffee pulled at me, and I went to pour myself a mug, filling two more for Ford and Edden. The first gulp hit me like a balm, doing as much as the soft breeze coming in the window to soothe me. Maybe there was something to this up-at-dawn stuff.
“What do I do?” I said as I put the coffee before the two men and sat.
Ford’s smile was brief but sincere. “If you would put this on?”
The amulet settled into my hand, and I felt the hum of ever-after running through it, tugging on me as if trying to pull it from my fingertips. “What does it do?”
He hadn’t let go of the charm yet, and feeling his fingers slide against mine, I looked up in almost shocked surprise. His lips quirked in a smile when the amulet in my hand turned to a delicate lavender. I was starting to see a pattern here.
“Your friend was correct. It’s a visual show of your emotions,” he said, and I cringed. I could guess what lavender meant, and I forced my thoughts to remain puritan pure as I looped it over my head. Unlike an earth-charm amulet, this one only had to be within my aura to work, not touching skin.
“But you said it was responding to you, not me.”
A brief look of pain passed over his features. “It is.”
My eyes widened. “You mean you can feel other people’s emotions? Naturally? I’ve never heard of that before. What are you? You don’t smell like a witch.”
Chuckling, Edden took his coffee and retreated to the corner of the kitchen, pretending to watch Jenks’s kids in order to give us some privacy.
Ford shrugged. “Human, I guess. My mother was the same way. She died from it. I’ve never heard of anyone else like me. I’m trying to find a way to make it work for me instead of against me. The amulet is for you, not me, so you know exactly what I’m feeling from you. The intensity of emotion is shown by brightness and the type of emotion by color.”
I started to get a sick feeling. “But you can feel my emotions whether I’m wearing the amulet or not?” I asked, and when he nodded, I added, “Then why am I wearing it?”
Edden shifted nervously at the window. I knew he wanted us to get on with it.
“So that when we’re done and you take it off, you have the illusion that I’m not listening anymore.”
Jenks came in right about then, changing his mind about landing on my shoulder at the last moment to park it on Edden’s shoulder when he saw my look. It made sense, even if it was a lie. “That’s got to be hell,” I said. “Someone ought to make a muffler for you.”