"Nina Kiriki Hoffman - Haunted Humans" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Nina Kiriki)

She shuddered and lifted the phone again. For a moment she closed her eyes
tight, concentrating on crashing all the thoughts she didn't want to
entertain.
She pressed autodial for the answering service, and smiled down at the message
pad when Poppy picked up.

"Account 551, please," D.J. said, and took the rest of the messages without a
hitch.

Morgan Hesch sat on one of the puffy striped couches in the Mental Healing
Center waiting room and stared at the bits of dirt he'd tracked on the white
speckled rug. Why did they have a lawn out front if they wanted to keep the
rug
clean? Well, yeah, there was a brick walk that wound across the lawn, but what
if you were coming from the other direction? And the lawn was green and
healthy,
but there were those flower beds. Somebody must rake the edges all the time to
make the dirt look so -- so clean. Like nothing had ever stepped on it since
the
dawn of time. Morgan hated that kind of clean. If blackboards were bare in his
college classes when he got there, he always chalked something on them before
he
sat down. If the dirt were blank he just had to put a footprint in it. If
things
were wide open, any force, good or evil, could enter and control them.

So the floor was no longer blank, either, not peppered with those chunks of
earth that had fallen out of the waffle-stomper soles of his hiking boots.
Morgan looked at the bits of squared dirt and slid his left hand in between
the
third and fourth buttons on his shirt, hiding it against his chest. One of his
insiders, Shadow, always wanted to hide Morgan's hands.

"Miss Deej?" Morgan said, his knees knocking against each other, not because
he
was cold, just to be doing something.

He could only see the top of her head over the wall that hid the desk from him
and everybody else. She had messy frizzy brown hair that she parted in the
middle. He watched the part lean back until he could see Deej's eyes, green
like
the devil's, over the divider as she looked at him.

"Yes, Morgan," she said. One of her better voices. Not the first-time-&phone
voice which said, I'm-here-to-help,-don't bother-to-know-I'm-human. Definitely
not the I-can't-have-a-relationship-with-you-because-it-wouldn't-be-prof
essional voice. She'd given up on that one after he'd been seeing Dr. Dara
Kabukin for two months. Not the don't-bother-me-I'm-in-the-middle-of-something
voice, and not the okay,-okay-yes-I-guess-I-can-look-up voice. More of a
I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-but-I'm-glad-for-a-distraction voice. Actually he