Next thing I knew I was waking up in a corner of base on a mess of bedding. Someone had brought it all back in from the van in the night, made up a nest of it, and set me down to sleep like a small child. The thought both irked and warmed me.
And sitting at the monitors, dressed, preened, and ready for the day before even God himself (as usual), was Naru.
I groaned and rubbed my eyes of dust as I sat up. "Do you sleep at all?"
"You've seen me sleep. Tea, please." He didn't even look at me, nor did his fingers miss a beat while scrolling through footage.
"Jeeze, you could let me wake up first."
The clicking paused. "I could always wake you up."
I had to laugh. "What? Kissing me senseless? I thought you said you weren't going to do that anymore."
He had his dry smirk, which he only gave me partial of as he was only inclined to glance at me before turning back to his work. "More like dump holy water on you. Purifying, enlightening, and invigorating. I am not of a mind to sexually molest my assistants on the job."
"So you do off the job? Wait, sexually molest?"
He just chuckled low and repeated his command for tea, to which I begrudgingly moved to comply with.
"Who's molesting who?" said the bed head of Takigawa, which had poked through the door, followed by the rest of his lanky frame.
"Good. I need someone to investigate the basement."
Takigawa gave Naru a sleepy glare. "Basement? This place doesn't have a basement."
"According to the blueprints, which our employer has just now emailed, it does."
I shuddered over my tin can of earl grey. "Super creepy!"
"Then what have we been using all this time?" asked Takigawa
"The maps drawn up by the building contractors to show the locations of asbestos. Apparently the basement escaped them."
"And me." Monk scratched the back of his head as he leaned over Naru to take a peek at the computer screen he showed him. "Jeeze, no wonder we didn't find it. What took him so long?"
"Some paltry excuse about digital copies," said Naru tersely. "Either way, I need someone to scout it and set up a camera. I'd rather not bring Ms. Hara after yesterday. She is technically injured."
"You're not going to make him go alone," I said, accidentally dropping the teaspoon with the leaves into the teapot's strainer.
Naru gave me one of his signature droll stares. It took me a second, but I got it. He planned on going with, and, by default, so would Lin.
Fishing out the teaspoon and tapping it on the side of the teapot, I said, "Then I'm going to."
The slap of Naru's palm against the table made both of us jump, and the ferocious glare he turned on me made even the bravest part of me, which was use to Naru's fury, cringe.
"I will not have this argument with you," he said, blue eyes like frozen steel. "You are staying here with the others. Only if I deem it safe will you be going anywhere outside this room."
I trembled beneath his despot words. Though it crossed my mind to argue—as no one was my master—the thought no sooner was born than it died, because I could see it: the rare slight hunch of his shoulders, the paleness around his narrowed eyes, the almost imperceptible way his stomach clenched in.
"Did I really scare you that much?" I said without thinking.
He snorted, as though the thought were laughable, but didn't answer as he pushed up from his chair and busied himself with pulling out a spare camera and thermographer.
Meanwhile, Takigawa had put a hand to the doorway as though to brace himself and openly gawked at our boss.
"Wow. I think you actually gave me a chill there, boss. Should you be using a tone like that on a girl, let alone your girlfriend?"
In answer, Naru just snapped at him to get dressed.
I finished his tea and set it next to his laptop with the best air of meekness I could manage. Though I couldn't see how he had a right to speak to me like that, I couldn't entirely blame him. I had ignored him times before and put myself into danger's way. Not to mention the fear was unmistakable. I had to shake off the guilt for being the cause of that fear, even if I had no choice in the matter.
Which was why, despite his rigid objections to any public displays of affection from me, I kneeled down next to where he was tugging out another tote of electric cables and put a hand on his neck. When he turned his head to me I caught his chin and pressed a kiss to his temple.
"I love you."
He blinked at me. At this proximity I could pick out more minute signs of his apprehension that I had missed before: his quick, but controlled breaths, and a slight tremor only seen at the tips of his fingers.
Then he clenched his jaw, smoothed his brow into a plain of determination, and tugged his chin from my grasp.
"You're staying here."
"I know."
"Stay by John and Ayako's side, I don't even want you in a different room from them."
"Okay."
He paused, glancing at me in a way I could read as mistrust, then straightened.
"I hope this new compliancy isn't just slyness," he said.
"I thought by now you'd see that I'm concerned for you."
He humphed. "I'm invincible."
"Which means you have muscles, right? Because now that I think about it, I've never seen you without a shirt."
That threw him off enough to disarm his mistrust and allow me to retreat back to the 'cooking' corner of the base and dig out breakfast. Not to mention that Takigawa returned about then, followed by John who was not only dressed and groomed, but bright-eyed as though he had been awake for hours.
"I suppose I'm to stay here with the ladies?" he said.
"If you would," said Naru. "Lin should be back any minute now."
And as though summoned by those very words, Lin appeared from the hallway with a squeak of door hinges, a packet of digital memory cards in hand to pass over to Naru, who set them next to the computer. Without much ado, the three of them left, and John and I took our places at the monitors, me a bit more gingerly than him as I was still sore from the night before.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Alright," I said, giving him my best smile. "Thanks to you!"
John chuckled and shook his head. "You never cease to surprise me with your ability to bounce back after all we've been through."
"Nonsense. They're just fodder for ghost stories, right?" Which gave me an idea for a date—a really good date. Naru had said he was good at telling ghost stories, and I knew I was the boss at them.
"Have any dreams?" he asked, pulling over Naru's forgotten cup of tea. I said I'd make another, so he took a swig.
"Nothing of importance. Just the usual, you know, glowy lights. Though I did hear this weird...keening noise, like something wailing."
"Seems like a lot of your visions of late have been auditory. Wonder if that could be a clue."
"Well, she doesn't like to be seen, so it's not a stretch to say she doesn't like seeing either."
"Strange. Perhaps we can use that to help narrow down the patients."
"Actually," I tugged over Naru's computer, which he had foolishly left unguarded. "We can probably get underway with that."
John looked as though to question whether it was all right to use my boss's computer without asking, but probably though that, since I was his girlfriend, I could do stuff like this, and scooted his chair in. I took a gamble and typed in 'patient logs' in the program search bar on the start menu and whistled when several items popped into life.
"Lucky guess," said John.
"Forget that, I can't believe how fast it pulled those up! My laptop's a freaking dinosaur compared to his. Pfft, figures." I clicked on the first document that caught my eye. It didn't take us too long to learn that the spreadsheets were of the same hospital, this one, but taken over a span of five years each. The patients were listed by check in date, then by last name and age. In a burst of computer techie genius, John pointed out a way to rearrange and search the spreadsheets by diagnosis, in which I put in 'blindness.'
"I think blindness is more of a symptom," he said, as the computer spazed and listed out about a billion entries with blindness as a symptom, possible or realized.
"Okay..." My fingers hovered over the keys, ready to launch, but I drew a blank. "Um..."
"Try glaucoma."
"Thanks."
But as my eyes skimmed over the results of one spreadsheet and then another, nothing seemed to pop out at me. One name after another skimmed past me without even a tremor of recognition.
On the last spread sheet (years 1985 to 1990), I sighed and decided I better get to readying that extra cup of tea for my boss's return. John took over when I left, chin rested on his thumb, with his forefinger to his upper lip.
As steam wafted up from the stream of tea, I said, "You know, in my dreams she wasn't blind. Just not looking. Just focused on that wall, being small...that poetry..." I stopped as another idea occurred to me. "Wait, John, what about mental illnesses?"
Just as he looked over to me, Ayako came in with a yawn, dressed, but otherwise frumpy.
"Be a dear and pour me a cup, will you?" she said to me. "And a toasted bagel, if you would."
"Excuse me, I'm not your maid," I said, more than a little affronted. It was bad enough that I served as tea girl to Naru.
"Then how bout just the tea then? As a friend?"
"Ugh, fine."
"There's a girl."
Which left me to deal with an even more irate Naru when he returned to find all his readymade tea gone. John apologized profusely, even though it was Ayako who had scarfed down seconds. The little teapot I'd brought along only served enough for three cups, and that's when supplemented by cream, and Ayako had taken none.
I, for one, was still sore from the possession, befuddled by the mystery, and done putting up with his grumpy attitude. Thus, the moment I could slam the stupid tea-addict's earl grey with cream before him, I stomped off into the cot room to find a good corner to fume (or pout).
"Everyone treating me like their freaking hostess," I grumbled. "Creepy thoughts keep sneaking into my head, Naru won't even give me a decent 'I love you too,' the self-absorbed, stick-up-his-ass narcissist." I knew it was because he was stressed with the case, I knew it was because he was worried about me, I knew he probably had some other stupid weird thing that pissed him off too (because that's just how he worked, he had to be grouchy and piss-in-his-pants sour all the time), but I was grouchy too, and angry, so thus, I didn't care.
And what was I even here for now? I wanted to help solve the case—heck, I loved solving cases, I loved the mystery and adventure like the unhealthy thrill junky I was—but this was usually about the time someone suggested we back out, or I back out. Maybe Naru was just finally accepting how much help I was in gathering clues and solving the mystery.
But how could I solve anything if I was blocked off from other spirits?
That's not your real gift, Mai.
I caught the ribbon of that thought and slipped it between mental fingers. That's right. Clairvoyance wasn't just seeing spirits, was it? I wasn't Masako, I didn't operate like Masako, and I didn't have to.
I wound the thought tight in my fingers.
"Whelp, better get to sleep again, I suppose. Hopefully this time Gene won't hog it all."