"Hi. I'm Madison Sloan, and I'm horribly embarrassed." Then she shook Heda's hand. Her echolocation drifted over the girl's body. ‘Damn,’ she thought.

"She's chiseled from marble! And you've been gawking at her abs for an uncomfortable amount of time.'

“You okay?"

“Can we go now?"

“Hey, have the police told you anything about the case?"

Strangely, Madison enjoyed unloading what she knew. She stopped a couple of times and explained that she'd been asked not to divulge something by the cops, and Heda was really cool about not pressuring her. A brief silence followed, then Madison asked what her companion was going to study. Then she found out that Heda was a mad reader and wanted to be a writer.

“What kind of writing?"

“Promise you won't laugh?"

No."

Heda grinned. Hey, it was an honest answer.

"Dark romance. I mean, I love reading just about anything, and I'd like to try fantasy and sci-fi someday, but . . . I dunno. It's like, I have this crystal ball into this world that turns people on. I want to give people a taste of it, ya know? Though vampires and ‘werewolves'," she said, using air-quotes around the word "werewolves," “have been done to death." Shifters often joked amongst themselves at how weird the werewolf Legend had gotten over the years. Except for silver being a dangerous weapon, almost everything else humans had gotten wrong.

"I was thinking ghosts might be a good place to start."

"I think that'd be cool," Madison replied.

"I'm not much of a reader, obviously. I'm kind of limited to what's available on audio book, and I'm usually listening to music if I've got my ears free."

“Do you do movies at all? Sorry, but it just occurred to me that I have no idea what's doable for you."

“Movies, not so much. Billy or Sasha have to be with me, it has to be a movie they've seen already, and it had to be mostly deserted so they can explain what's going on. I like the theater though. Plays and stuff. I can hear and see things there."

"Hey," Heda said, thinking of the girl bouncing around the studio, "do you Like dancing?"

Madison's face lit up.

"I LOVE dancing. Billy won't go out on the floor, but he'll take me sometimes. But Sasha will light up the floor with me." She actually twirled around.

"No one sees anything in that kind of crowd. It's about sound and movement and feel --" She wondered if she was just sounding weird now.

"You like getting felt up on the dance floor?" Heda joked. Well, sort of joked. Hell, she LOVED the press of bodies on her when she danced, especially hot young women. Like Madison. ‘Stop it,' she thought. ‘The last thing the girl needs is you hitting on her. But she's just so . . . hot.' It was more than the body or even the smile that had gotten Heda's attention. It had been that voice.

"I just like being like everyone else."

Heda thought back to what she knew Billy said about Madison's animal totem. They were a communal creature, and Heda had seen enough Animal Planet to realize that bats often gathered together in large groups that, to Madison, might seem like a bunch of warm-blooded creatures pressed against each other on a dance floor.

“Well, this is it " Madison said.

"I guess you've got to get going.”