“What’s your name?”
“Shaw James,” I told her, crossing my arms.
“Geez, lookit your biceps. You’re bigger than the car!”
I squinted at her. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Adele,” she answered. “You know, like the singer Adele.”
As if it were necessary to explain the name.
She squinted at me. “Don’t people your age know who that is?”
People my… oh dear God. I was thirty-eight, I wasn’t dead. “Yeah,” I muttered.
“Anyway, I’m Adele Lawson, but everyone calls me Delly, like a sandwich shop except it’s not spelled that way. It’s spelled like D-E-L and then another L and a Y.”
Uh-huh. “Okay, I’m thinking since you’re here and not Sian––”
“Wow,” she rushed out excitedly. “You said that perfect. Most people butcher her name. They think it’s cyan, like the color blue, but you said it right, like she and on. That’s awesome.”
I could tell already, after mere moments on the job, that it was going to be annoying.
“How’d you know?”
“Good guess,” I said instead of telling her that I was Scottish and how my folks had married and then immigrated from Inverness, Scotland, to the US before my oldest brother, Tiernan, was born. I didn’t go into how they bought a house in North Riverside in Chicago and raised all seven of their sons there. It wasn’t any of her business, and we weren’t going to be friends. I wanted to get in and out of this town that looked to me as though it was never dry. “Now, where is Miss Coburn, since she’s not here to meet me?”
She thrust her hand out. “Thank you for catching me. I normally just fall,” she said, ignoring my question.
I already knew she normally fell, from her reaction, and I wanted to start already, to get the show on the road, but I took her hand gently, because she seemed fragile, like a baby bird, and I didn’t want to break her. “You’re welcome, Delly,” I said, repeating her name so it would imprint on my brain. I got a lot of crap for not retaining names and calling people by saying “You there, in the plaid,” or something like that. It was especially bad after you’d been on the job for two weeks and people thought you were close friends or something.
She wrapped her other hand around mine. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to have you here,” she said with another deep sigh. “Sian got stuck with Benji at a clearing, so since my part was done earlier, I was sent to get you and bring you back with me.”
And this was why people who were supposed to be my friends, or if nothing else, my colleagues, had laughed their asses off at lunch the day before. I was here in Rune to protect a paranormal investigator.
I read his file to the table at lunch the day before. Benjamin—Benji—Grace was a trained psychiatrist who had left his practice in Portland, Oregon, to research, investigate, and rid people of malevolent ghosts and spirits.
“The issue is not the paranormal,” Jared Colter assured me when I got back to the office after lunch the day before. “The issue is that this man is being threatened, and local law enforcement there is not protecting him.”
“Maybe because they’re not prepared to apprehend spirits,” I told my boss as respectfully as possible. “Perhaps there’s a witch or necromancer he could call.”
Jared squinted at me. “His friend Sian, who works with him, says that she has been with him when he’s been threatened and that there are too many mishaps for it to be arbitrary.”
Of course there were. “And we don’t think that, her being his friend and co-worker, she might be a bit biased?”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “But we won’t know that until you get there.”
“You know,” I said, clearing my throat. “Cooper is so much better with––”
“What?”
I was going to say the crazy. Cooper was better with the crazy and the kind of people who went along with it than I was. Being the youngest son in a Scottish Catholic family, by the time I came along, my folks were practical pragmatists, no more magic and foolishness left. Even the Easter Bunny and Santa had gone by the wayside once I showed up, so really, there wasn’t anyone in the office less suited to being a Ghostbuster, or to protect one, than me. I had been raised whimsy-free.
“James?”
“Cooper is better with the off-the-beaten-track cases than me,” I apprised my boss, using the kindest tone in my arsenal, one notch from sounding placating. “I’m more the fixer you send when muscle is what’s needed.”
He shook his head. “You never give yourself enough credit, James,” he replied, using my last name, which was his way. “You’re actually the least violent member of this team.”
Probably because if it came down to me having to use my strength, I was going to hurt someone. Badly. It took a lot for me to act, because once I did, there would be blood.