How did he take it? Well, for one thing, he didn't ask me a lot of stupid questions like How do you know? He knew how I knew. He knew a little about the mediation thing. Not a lot, but enough to know that I communicate, on a somewhat regular basis, with the undead.

I guess it was the fact that it was his own mother I'd been communicating with this time that brought tears to his blue eyes . . . which freaked me out a bit. I had never seen Doc cry before.

"Hey," I said, alarmed. "Hey, it's okay – "

"What – " Doc was choking back a sob. I could totally tell. "What did she l-look like?"

"What did she look like?" I echoed, not sure I'd heard him right. At his vigorous nod, however, I said, carefully, "Well, she looked . . . she looked very pretty."

Doc's tear-filled eyes widened. "She did?"

"Uh-huh," I said. "That's how I recognized her, you know. From the wedding photo of her and your dad, downstairs. She looked like that. Only her hair was shorter."

Doc said, the effort he was making not to cry causing his voice to shake, "I wish I could … I wish I could see her looking like that. The last time I saw her, she looked terrible. Not like in that picture. You wouldn't have recognized her. She was in a c-coma. Her eyes were sunken in. And there were all these tubes coming out of her – "

Even though I was sitting like a foot away from him, I felt the shudder that ran through him. I said, gently, "David, what you did, when you guys made the decision to let her go … it was the right thing. It was what she wanted. That's what she needs to make sure you understand. You know it was the right thing, don't you?"

His eyes were so deeply pooled in tears, I could hardly see his irises anymore. As I watched, one drop escaped, and trickled down his cheek, followed quickly by another on the opposite side of his face.

"I-intellectually," he said. "I guess. B-but – "

"It was the right thing," I repeated, firmly. "You've got to believe that. She does. So stop beating yourself up. She loves you very much – "

That did it. Now the tears were coming down in full force.

"She said that?" he asked, in a broken voice that reminded me that he was, after all, still a pretty young kid, and not the superhuman computer he sometimes acts like.

"Of course she did."

She hadn't, of course, but I'm sure she would have if she hadn't been so disgusted by my gross

incompetency.

Then Doc did something that completely shocked me: he flung both his arms around my neck.

This kind of impassioned display was so unlike Doc, I didn't know what to do. I sat there for one

awkward moment, not moving, afraid that if I did, I might gouge his face with some of the rivets on my jacket. Finally, however, when he didn't let go, I reached up and patted him uncertainly on the shoulder.

"It's okay," I said, lamely. "Everything is going to be okay."

He cried for about two minutes. His clinging to me, crying like that, gave me a strange feeling. It was kind of a protective feeling.

Then he finally leaned back, and, embarrassed, wiped his eyes again and said, "Sorry."

I said, "It's no big deal," even though, of course, it was.

"Suze," he said. "Can I ask you something?"

Expecting more questions about his mother, I said, "Sure."

"Why do you smell like fish?"

I went back to my room a little while later, shaken not just by Doc's emotional reaction to the message I'd delivered but also by something else, as well. Something I had not told Doc, and which I had no intention of mentioning to Jesse, either.

And that was that while I'd been hugging Doc, his mother had materialized on the opposite side of the bed, and looked down at me.

"Thank you," she said. She was, I saw, crying about as hard as her kid. Only her tears, I was

uncomfortably aware, were of gratitude and love.

With all these people crying around me, was it really any wonder that my eyes filled up, too? I mean, come on. I'm only human.

But I really hate it when I cry. I'd much rather bleed or throw up or something. Crying is just …

Well, it's the worst.

You can see why I couldn't tell any of this stuff to Jesse. It was just too . . . personal. It was between Doc and his mom and me, and wild horses – or excessively cute ghosts who happened to live in my bedroom – weren't going to get it out of me.

Jesse, I saw when I glanced up from the article I'd been staring at unseeingly – How to Tell If He Secretly Loves You. Yeah, right. A problem I so don't have – was grinning at me.

"Still," he said. "You must be feeling good. It's not every mediator who single-handedly stops a

murderer."

I grunted, and flipped over another page. "It's an honor I could definitely have lived without," I said. "And I didn't do it single-handedly. You helped." Then I remembered that, really, I'd had the situation well in hand by the time Jesse had shown up. So I added, "Well, sort of."

But that sounded ungracious. So I said, grudgingly, "Thanks for showing up the way you did."

"How could I not? You called me." He had found a piece of string somewhere, and now he dragged it in front of Spike, who eyed it with an expression on his face that seemed to say, "Whadduya think, I'm stupid?"

"Um," I said. "I did not call you, all right? I don't know where you're getting this."

He looked at me, his eyes darker than ever in the rays of the setting sun, which poured unmercifully into my room every night at sundown. "I distinctly heard you, Susannah."

I frowned. This was all getting a little too weird for me. First Mrs. Fiske had shown up when all I'd been doing was thinking about her. And then Jesse did the same thing. Only I hadn't, to my knowledge, called either of them. I'd been thinking about them, true.

Jeez. There was way more stuff to this mediating thing than I'd ever even suspected.

"Well, while we're on the subject," I said, "how come you didn't just tell me that Red was Doc's mom's nickname for him?"

Jesse threw me a perplexed look. "How would I have known?"

True. I hadn't thought of that. Andy and my mother had bought the house – Jesse's house – only last summer. Jesse couldn't have known who Cynthia was. And yet …