Running Hot

his other kids, the ones he and his new wife had.”
    “I had a mom, too,” Wayne said around a mouthful of bread. “She didn’t cook much, though. She was more into martinis and pills. Called ’em her little mood elevators. She used to hide the bottles around the house so my dad wouldn’t find them.”
    “That had to be hard for you,” Grace said. She reached for the salad tongs and told herself she would not ask any more questions.
    “Dad knew about the pills and the booze,” Wayne said. “He told me a few years later that was why he took off with his secretary when I was eleven.”
    “You’re not supposed to call ’em secretaries anymore,” Petra informed him with an air of authority. “They’re administrative assistants or somethin’.”
    “I knew that,” Wayne said.
    She should definitely change the subject now, Grace thought, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself from asking one more question.
    “What happened to your mother, Wayne?”
    “Pretty much what you’d expect.” He shrugged. “A few months after Dad split, she took a lot of pills and made a really big pitcher of martinis. I found her dead on the sofa the next morning.”
    No one said a thing. Petra and Luther concentrated on the lasagna on their plates. They all knew one another’s stories, she thought. And now she knew them, too. It was one of the ways they were linked together.
    On impulse she set the tongs aside.
    “I’m so sorry you had to be the one to find her,” she said quietly.
    “Like Petra said, it was a long time ago.”
    She realized all three had stopped eating. They were staring at Wayne’s heavily tattooed forearm, which happened to be resting on the table next to her. She looked, too, and saw that her palm was resting on his warm, bare skin in a comforting gesture that partially covered a portion of a skull and crossbones.
    “Why can I touch you?” she asked. Slowly she raised her hand and held it in front of her face. “Why can I touch all of you without pain? After that incident with the housekeeper, I should have been sensitive for at least a week or longer.”
    Petra’s expression tightened in a knowing look. “When did you get burned the first time?”
    Her first impulse was to say she didn’t want to talk about the past. But they had shared their stories with her. They had a right to know; she wanted them to know.
    “In a foster home,” she said, automatically putting both hands out of sight under the table. “I was . . . attacked. When the bastard touched me I sort of . . . touched him back. He died.”
    Petra nodded, unperturbed. Wayne looked equally unconcerned. He forked up another bite of lasagna. Luther drank some beer and waited.
    “How old were you when you did the guy in the foster home?” Petra asked.
    “Fourteen,” she said, wincing a little at the expression “did the guy.”
    “You would have been just coming into your talent,” Petra said. “The Society shrinks believe that a traumatic event during that time can really screw up your senses, sometimes for life. My guess is the shock of the attack together with the psychic jolt you must have got when you whacked the SOB who tried to rape you left you with a real delicate sensitivity to touch.”
    Luther looked at Petra. “You talked to a Society psychologist?”
    “Wayne and I both went for a while after we retired from the agency,” Petra said. “We were having trouble sleeping and some other problems. The doc explained a lot of stuff to us.”
    “That’s right,” Wayne said. “She told us that, what with our dysfunctional childhoods and the kind of work we did for the agency, we both had a lot of issues. Said she couldn’t cure us but she kept us from eating our own guns.”
    Petra turned back to Grace. “Thing is, what with having been a foster kid and then having a couple of little psychic incidents, you’re probably a tad messed up, too.”
    Grace clamped her hands very tightly together in her lap. “Little psychic incidents? I killed two people with my aura.”
    “And I used a rifle,” Wayne said. He ripped off another chunk of bread and reached for the butter knife. “Doesn’t matter how you do it. Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to pay for it in the psychic zone. Looks like, in your case, your sense of touch was permanently affected.”
    She stilled. “Then why is it I can touch Luther and you and Petra without having to brace myself?”
    Petra smiled. Light glinted on the gold ring in