All the Birds in the Sky - Charlie Jane Anders Page 0,56

their necks and inner thighs. So Patricia was properly motivated when she slid onto the leather-top stool next to Garrett and whispered in his ear. “I bet you’ll have one hell of a hangover tomorrow. But you know what? I know the best hangover remedy there is. This shit will cure anything.” She made it sound miraculous, but also sexy and illicit. He popped both the pills she gave him without hesitation. Then she helped him into a cab, and he went home to Pacific Heights, to sleep it off. She hadn’t lied: The shit she’d given him would indeed cure anything.

There was zero chance that Patricia would sleep after putting a curse on someone. But she would be careful and would follow Kawashima’s advice to avoid overreaching. She knew why they were so worried about her going off the rails: She could still see Toby’s corpse when she closed her eyes. The janky expression, like Toby was about to sit up and tell a dirty joke.

Patricia had to crouch down to talk to a confused marmalade cat, who needed help finding his way home. (He remembered what his house looked like on the inside, but not on the outside.) Patricia checked on Jake the krokodil junkie, who seemed stable now, give or take, and then she cruised the St. Mary’s emergency room, looking for people to heal on the down-low. She spent a couple hours trying to compose a letter to the Parks Department on behalf of some gophers whose burrow was being disturbed, pointlessly, by some inept landscaping in Golden Gate Park. It took a lot of concentration to translate from gopher language into bureaucratese.

Right about now, Garrett Borg would be evaporating into a whiskey-scented cloud over his heart-shaped bed.

Patricia ended up at the edge of the Park, on Fulton. Staring at the warm dirt, so full of life, between her pointy toes. She wasn’t pacing herself, after all. She dug in her bag for her phone and peered at the screen. There was nobody for her to call at three in the morning. Even at three in the afternoon, there would have been nobody to call. Maybe Kevin, her ambiguous friend-with-benefits/boyfriend? She was trying not to crowd him. The traffic light at the edge of her vision changed primary colors. It was another hot, itchy night.

An owl landed on a branch nearby, without a sound. “Hello,” Patricia said. The owl blinked at the sound of her voice.

“If I can see you, so can others,” the owl said.

“I’m not trying to hide, exactly,” Patricia said. The owl shrugged with its whole body, like it was Patricia’s funeral, then flew off again because there were some gophers with an imperfect burrow not far away.

Just as Patricia was rallying to pull her butt out of the dirt and go home, someone sat on the low stone wall and blocked her view of the street. A man. She almost hid, but decided not to bother.

It was Laurence, and he was crying into a napkin with a picture of a woman inside a cocktail glass. Patricia almost walked away—Laurence would never even know she’d been there—until her Healer instinct kicked in.

Patricia made as much noise as possible coming up behind Laurence, so as not to sneak up on him. But he still jumped off the wall so hard, he fell and skinned one knee. Patricia helped him up and braced him, then steered him back to the wall where he’d been sitting.

“Oh hey,” Laurence said, making sense of her features. “It’s you.” This was the first time she’d seen the grown-up Laurence act anything but cocky. Hunched over, flushed, he looked more like the Laurence she remembered.

“Is everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I just went for drinks with my coworkers, and I’m kind of a maudlin drunk.” He paused. “But also … I feel like I’m screwing up everything. I’m losing my girlfriend. Serafina. You met her, she’s amazing. And meanwhile, I have all these people expecting me to work miracles, and I can only accomplish so much with asinine stunts like the one you witnessed. My boss—Milton—is counting on me, my supersmart team is counting on me, but most of all, I made a promise to myself. I always thought that if I just had the chance, I could change everything—and it turns out that maybe, I’m just not good enough. So I resort to trying to trick people into thinking I’m a ‘wunderkind,’ to make up for the fact that I