she was.
* * *
She was in bed with the cat, in that half sleep where things were happening that could only happen in dreams but you were still half-awake and you couldn’t tell the real from the dream. Johnny Love was in her room, but there were no walls. She was in the werewolf murder scene from Otherworld, only the werewolf hanging on the stone wall was alive, growling and writhing and powerful enough to spring—
A door opened somewhere, and Barrie was shocked into full reality; it was her own bedroom door.
And Robbie walked in.
She hadn’t given him a key, she hadn’t left her door open, but of course none of that mattered to a talented shifter. He could turn into an ant, a mite, and get in pretty much however and wherever he wanted. Certainly he’d gotten into her, she thought bitterly.
He just stood at the foot of the bed, as if waiting for her to give him permission to come forward, and he was reflected in all the mirrors of the room, illusion on top of illusion. She was silent as she just looked at his face, really looked at him. He didn’t look like Robbie Anderson. He had copper hair and green eyes, unlike Robbie Anderson’s gold-brown hair and golden gaze. His features were different. It was only the surreal beauty of him that gave him away.
He looked at her in the bed, and she felt the familiar fire in her body. It wasn’t fair.
“I’ve been calling,” he said, his voice low. “You haven’t picked up for hours. I was worried.”
He moved closer, and she knew she had to say something then, to stop him, because in the next second it wouldn’t matter who he was or what he intended to do to her, it could be anything, as long as he touched her again.
“I know who you are,” she said, her mouth dry and her heart pounding off the charts.
He didn’t stop in his tracks, exactly, but he was suddenly very still.
“Johnny told me. He couldn’t say if you killed him, but he did say you would know what happened.” She picked up the cat then and hugged her close to her chest.
“Johnny told you? What did you do, have a séance?” He stopped, and Barrie could tell he understood. To his credit, he didn’t try to pretend he didn’t know what she was talking about. And in a million years she couldn’t have interpreted the look on his face.
“How is he?” Mick asked abruptly, and if she hadn’t been so completely confused about everything, she would have said his voice was longing.
She shook her head and felt tears close by. “He’s...lost. Unresolved. He doesn’t actually know what happened to him.”
“I didn’t kill him, Barrie,” Mick said, and as he shook his head, the mirrors in her bedroom reflected him, hundreds of images.
“I don’t even know who you’re trying to be!” she cried out. “How can I believe you?”
“Just let me explain,” he said. She waited, and he paced the room, his reflections pacing with him, and it was a long time before he stopped and spoke.
“You have to understand. I don’t think of myself as Robbie Anderson. Ever. I left him behind fifteen years ago.”
“But how could you just disappear? You were so famous.”
The moonlight through the French doors caught his face, and for a moment he looked as ghostly as Johnny had. “I shifted. I shifted into someone else permanently. Someone different. Someone I could actually want to be.”
Barrie was silent, just looking at him.
“I was afraid what happened to Johnny would happen to me.”
She stared at him. “You thought someone would kill you?”
“That and...other things.” He began to pace again, laughed without humor. “I thought I could lose my soul. I know that sounds dramatic.” He shook his head. “I told you I used people. When you’re as famous as we were, the three of us, so young, you have a lot of people lining up to be used. It was like...realizing I was hooked on a drug and I needed to quit, go cold turkey, before someone really got hurt. Like me. And about a dozen other people.”
His voice lowered, became raw, painful. “Johnny had just died. No one said it was murder, just that he’d OD’d. DJ was so coked out, speeded out, whatever else he was doing, I couldn’t even talk to him anymore. I didn’t know what I wanted or who I could trust, all I knew was that