Ritual Magic

differently in our brains than language, see? He makes himself understood pretty well. Right, Hardy?”
    The broken man smiled at Denise with the sweetness usually reserved for very young children, then held out both hands to Lily, still smiling.
    Lily didn’t pass up a chance to get a reading on people. She moved closer and learned that he probably lacked the chance to bathe often. She put her hand in his. Not a trace of magic. His dark eyes were filmed at the edges with cataracts. “You’re Mr. Hardy?”
    He shook his head.
    “He likes to be called Hardy,” the man on the bed put in helpfully. “No ‘mister.’”
    Hardy nodded, but his smile faded. There was something odd about his eyes, the intent way he looked at her . . . suddenly uncomfortable, Lily thought about her third grade teacher and felt a pang of sympathy for the other nurse. Mrs. Hawkins had been kind of creepy, too.
    Hardy frowned. “H-h-hard road, heavy load. You true, you blue.” He still held her hand in one of his, but reached up to pat her cheek with the other. He started humming—a pop song this time, one she knew, though the words eluded her. It wasn’t recent.
    “Hey, Hardy, you aren’t the only one who wants to hold hands with the pretty girl,” the man in the bed said. The crooked smile he gave her might have been charming many years before, when he still had all his teeth. “I’m Festus Liddel, miss, and I guess you’ve come to see me.”
    “I guess I have,” Lily said, disentangling her hand from Hardy’s. “And I’d be happy to shake your hand, too, Mr. Liddel.”
    “Well, I got to go check on my patients,” Denise said, smiling at all of them, “but you come talk to me later, Agent Yu.”
    Festus Liddel had dry, cracked skin, a deep scratch on the back of his hand, and he smelled worse than Hardy. A lot worse. He also had a trace of an empathic Gift. It was weak, but it was wide open. “How can you stand it here?” Lily exclaimed before she thought.
    Liddel flinched. “What do you mean?”
    Lily cursed herself for introducing the subject of her Gift—and his—so poorly. She must be more tired than she’d realized. “I apologize for giving away information you might not want revealed. I’m a touch sensitive, and—”
    “Get away! Get away! I don’t have anything to do with magic!”
    Liddel, it turned out, had been raised in a fundamentalist sect that hated magic even more than they did gay sex. It took time to find that out—time, and Hardy crooning country music lyrics about how he believed in love, music, magic, and you. By which he meant
Yu
, Lily supposed, since he put his hand on Lily’s shoulder when he sang that part. He seemed to want Liddel to relax and trust her.
    Amazingly, it worked. Liddel did calm down and let Lily explain and apologize for speaking about his Gift. “I understand that many people don’t want others to know, and I deeply regret mentioning it out loud. I was concerned. A hospital is a miserable place for someone with . . .” She paused, hunting for a way of referring to empathy without using the word in front of Hardy so she wouldn’t give away even more than she already had. And realized Hardy wasn’t there. “Where did he go?”
    Liddel shrugged. “Guess he was called elsewhere.”
    Lily was used to noticing things. Her job depended on it; sometimes her life did, too. It bothered her that the big man had slipped out without her noticing. “You’ve known him a long time?”
    “So they say. To me, I just met him tonight. Guess I must have met him after 1998. That’s what year it is for me.”
    Startled, she said, “But you trust him. You seemed to be relying on him.”
    “He’s a man of God, isn’t he? Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have a church of his own. I’ve never been around anyone who felt like . . . like he’s true, all the way down, the way Hardy is.”
    Lily had a sinking sensation. “Almost like a saint.”
    “Well, the Brethren don’t hold with all that papist stuff, so that’s not a word I’d use. But I guess if you were Catholic, you’d call him a saint. You Catholic?”
    “Ah—no. But the subject of saints has been on my mind recently. You seem very calm about losing a large part of your life, Mr. Liddel.”
    “I was upset at first, but after Hardy reminded me how God has a plan for each of us. Besides, it looks like what I lost was the worst part.” He chuckled. “I probably wouldn’t remember much of those years