“Just Ruthie.”
Over the years I’d done a bit of research on psychic phenomena. According to the “experts” I was psychometric, which meant I could pick up information and images from touching objects—inanimate and animate. Considering my sudden ability to see, hear, and talk to a dead woman, I appeared to have latent channeling abilities too.
Jimmy had gone silent, thinking. “The gift is different for everyone. Ruthie said she got her tips from God.” He shook his head. “Hell, she probably did.”
“What are you talking about?”
Jimmy lifted his gaze to mine. “The world is full of monsters, Lizzy, and someone has to kill them. That someone is me, and the someone who tells me what they are, where they are, and who they are was Ruthie, but now…” He spread his hands. “Baby, it’s you.”
Chapter 7
I didn’t bother to chastise him for calling me “baby.” I had bigger problems than that.
I hadn’t ever wanted to see Jimmy Sanducci again, and now I was supposed to work with him to save the world from monsters? Talk about a bad day in supernatural fantasyland.
“What if I don’t want this power?” Hell, I didn’t want the one I’d been born with.
“Only death releases you from it.”
My fingers curled into fists. Jimmy took several steps back. “Don’t be mad at me; I was against it. Ruthie called me to town. She wanted us to tell you together.”
“Oh, that would have gone well,” I muttered. At the first sight of Jimmy, I’d have been out of there.
“There wasn’t time to prepare you. If she’d died before she passed on her power it would have been lost.”
I could understand Ruthie’s desperation, but I wasn’t exactly thrilled to be infected against my will.
“She’d been waiting years for you to accept who you are.”
My chest went tight. Ruthie had always encouraged me to be happy with my gift and use it to help others. I’d become a cop so I could fulfill the latter without using the former. My psychometry had always creeped me out nearly as much as it had creeped out everyone who’d ever witnessed it. Except for Ruthie.
“She thought it would be easier for you to accept this” —he made a gesture with his hands to encompass the fine mess I was already in—”if you’d accepted that.”
I had to say, the odds didn’t look good.
“Wait a second,” I said. “You and Ruthie were arguing before she was… hurt. How could she have been planning to give me her power, when only death releases it? Makes no sense.”
“She knew her time was near. Seers have to be aware of the end or risk taking their powers with them to the grave.”
“What if I hadn’t shown up when I did?”
“You didn’t just show up accidentally. When I said Ruthie called me to town, I didn’t mean by phone. Didn’t you often feel sudden, irresistible compulsions to see her?”
My eyes narrowed and he shrugged. “Ruthie had skills of her own, even before she became ‘the one.’“ Jimmy made quotation marks in the air around the last two words.
“I’m going to smash your Matrix DVD into itty-bitty pieces.”
“I’m not kidding, Lizzy.”
“Neither am I.”
“She said she dreamed of me. Maybe that’s how she sent out those vibes; I don’t know. But I came, and so did you.”
I understood now the urgency of the need that had overcome me at Murphy’s. When Ruthie had sent out whatever vibes she had, she must have already been dying.
I tried to focus. There was so much I needed to know. “Ruthie was the only one?”
“Figure of speech. There are dozens like her, hundreds like me. You don’t think two people could counteract all the supernatural evil in the world, do you?”
“Until last night I didn’t know there was any supernatural evil.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t suspect it. Not with your gift.”
I’d known there was evil—hell, everyone did—but supernatural? Hadn’t seen that coming.
“Ruthie raised you for this. Me too.”
“What?” My voice was so loud I startled a few doves out of the rafters.
“She chose us for what we were, raised us to be what we were meant to be. Ruthie was a general in a war that’s been raging for aeons.”
If I thought my mind had been spinning after the berserker’s visit, that was nothing compared to now.
“Ever since the angels fell,” Jimmy continued, “there’ve been monsters on this earth. It was part of the plan.”
“What plan?”
“The big plan.” Jimmy spread his arms. “Good versus evil. We need to win for the human race to survive.”
I sat on the cot and put my head in my hands. Jimmy just kept on talking.
“Ruthie’s duty was to make certain the fight continued after she was gone. She had to find people like us to do that.”
“She chose us because she loved us,” I whispered.
Jimmy snorted. “We were delinquents. Foulmouthed, smelly little rats.”
“Speak for yourself.”