“Silas Black…” I repeated, as if saying it out loud would give me some idea who the fuck this Azkaban escapee’s cousin was.
It didn’t.
“I don’t know anyone named Silas Black.”
“Large. Dark hair. The nurses can describe him.”
Another memory flashed in my mind. A man with amber eyes and dark brown hair hanging down to his shoulders. Bare-ass naked, because why wouldn’t he be… He’d told me to run.
“That’s him,” I whispered. “That’s the man I saw in the ravine. The one who?—”
I stopped myself before I saidturned into a wolf, because I could see from Cole’s expression that I had already maxed out my credibility for the day before I even started talking.
“The one who was there when Mark—when whoever it was—” I caught myself again. My credibility wasn’t just maxed out, it was overdrawn. “Look. I know what I sound like. But there was a man and there was a…creature, and I need you to understand that I am not making this up.”
Cole’s pen hovered over his notebook. He hadn’t written anything in the last five minutes. The notebook was a prop at this point, a courtesy extended to the confused head-injury patient so she’d feel like her statements were being taken seriously.
Yazzie, on the other hand, was watching me with an expression that defied easy categorization. Not pity, exactly, and not the level of concern my story would generate if it were actually believed. But if the light was right, I could see a tiny little sprout of something that said maybe, just maybe she was starting to wonder if there was more here than pure delusion.
“Miss Gregory,” Cole said, and I could hear the period at the end of whatever he was going to say before he said it. The conversation was wrapping up. He was going to close his notebook and click his pen and say something about following up and then walk out of my hospital room and file a report that used the phraseinconsistent with objective evidenceat least three times.
“I can describe them. Both of them, in detail.”
Cole paused. “You’ve already described?—”
“I told you what happened. I haven’tdescribedthem. Like, specifically. Their features. What they looked like.” I was grasping and I knew it, but I didn’t have much alternative. “You have sketch artists, right? People who draw faces from descriptions? Get one in here. Let me describe the man. If the nurses confirm the sketch matches the guy who brought me in, that at least proves I’m not inventing people.”
Cole rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. I recognized the gesture. It was the one my Property Law professor made when a student asked a question that was technically within the scope of the syllabus but spiritually a waste of everyone’s time.
“Fine. I’ll have Chen come by. Give us twenty minutes.”
He stepped out. Yazzie stayed.
We looked at each other across the bedrail. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she sat very still.
“You think I’m crazy too,” I said.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Your partner’s face said it for both of you.”
“Cole isn’t my partner. We’re from different agencies. And what I think isn’t relevant to what I can put in a report.”
That was an interesting answer. I filed it away.
The sketch artist arrived in about forty minutes, which I spent staring at the ceiling and having a deeply unproductive internal debate about whether I should have told a different, more believable story, just to keep me from getting thrown into the loony bin if nothing else. But that would have required constructing a plausible alternative story on the fly, and my brain was not yet firing on all cylinders in the creative fiction department.
Chen was a slight man with wire-framed glasses and a quiet demeanor. He set up a large pad on a portable easel, pulled a chair close to my bed, and produced a set of pencils.
“Whenever you’re ready, Miss Gregory.”
I closed my eyes. And there he was, sharp as a photograph, burned into whatever part of the brain stores things it can’t explain.
“His face is… wide. Not fat. Structured. Like the bones underneath are bigger than most people’s. Heavy brow, not Neanderthal, just prominent. Strong jaw—square, covered instubble, maybe a week’s worth. His nose looked like it had been broken at least once, maybe twice. It sits a little to the left.”
Chen’s pencil moved. He didn’t rush me, just asked clarifying questions in a low, unhurried voice.Wider or narrower through the cheekbones? How deep-set are the eyes? Describe the hairline. I answered them with a certainty that surprised me. Not because I was good at remembering faces, although I was. Because I couldn’t have forgotten this one if I’d tried.
“His eyes are lighter than you’d expect for his complexion. Amber. Like light brown but with gold in them. Unusual.”
