"So have either of you read the documents I sent you last week?" asked Maggie Armitage. She didn't seem to mind either way, John thought. Her flat was full of light, as well as occasional tables covered with interesting stones, bits of wood and hardware, souvenirs of the Silver Jubilee, shabby ancient paperbacks, and improbably healthy houseplants. She had offered them tea; Lesley had accepted, drinking through a straw.

"I read them," said John.

"And?" asked Maggie. "I can guess what you think."

"I think it's shambolic, really," said Lesley. "Barely a hundred years old and split twenty different ways and half of them don't think the other half have any idea."
"That sums it up," said Maggie. "Makes it rather similar to most other human endeavours. Except your science, Doctor."

"Call me John, please," John said. "The early days of the Royal Society aren't very reassuring, either."

"So you think, given time, people will sort it out? Do you know anything about the history of Christianity or Islam or Judaism? If you're waiting for consensus, it may take a while." She sighed. "I try to teach a fairly clean version of the so-called Western Reiki Tradition, though I've been working in so many others for so long I can't guarantee I'm not corrupting it. But like many other forms of energy healing— do either of you know any? No? All right.—reiki is tolerant of blurred boundaries. The universe, if you like, is willing to try to understand what you mean. Quite different from your tradition, Lesley. That said, of course, you should try to be precise, and draw the symbols in your head as carefully as you can, even if all that that affects is your intent." She looked at them for moment. "Do you even believe in chi? Not that it matters, but I'd like to make discussing energy fields as painless as possible."

Lesley's face was hidden, of course, but the set of her body seemed to radiate implacability. More rationalist than—most, he thought. How would Sherlock have handled a painful, chronic injury like hers? He'd been aware enough that his beauty gave him advantages—. "I doubt that either of us is your typical student, Maggie, but I promise it's more than curiosity that brings us here. Why don't you treat us like we aren't from the other side of the fence, and we'll try to act as though we believe in the system?"

Maggie nodded. "That's how most people do it, John, whatever reason they have to want reiki in their lives." She looked at Lesley. "If you feel at some point today that you would be more comfortable with your mask off, Lesley, don't worry about sparing my feelings."

"Maybe later," said Lesley.

"Very well, then." She switched into a more teacherly style, rolling her eyes right back when Lesley did without missing a beat. " Chemical reactions involve changes in electrical charge, and our bodies, full of chemical and electrical reactions from digestion to regulations within the smallest parts of our cells, have an electrical field around them. That's one way our technological era characterises the human aura, which has been studied one way or another since we've been human, and likely before—don't you have a dog at the Folly that sees ghosts?—"

By the end of an hour John had a working knowledge of theories that seemed at least slightly better grounded than astrology. John and Lesley practiced trying to feel energy between their own two hands, and between one another's, and the three of them had tossed around a sort of invisible tennis ball that he almost thought he could believe he nearly felt.

"What's this like for you, Lesley? I know you Isaacs play a version of this—"

"Different. This doesn't feel like much of anything, really." said Lesley. "Ours involves physical objects that can give you a bruise. Dr. Walid makes us play in helmets."

"It must have been hard for you to accept magic, at first," said Maggie.

"I never really had a choice," Lesley said. "It wasn't a matter of belief when my face fell off."

"But becoming what Thomas calls a practitioner—that took more than belief that magic was 'out there'. You accepted it personally. Not everyone has the persistence."

There was a pause John _felt_ as Lesley decided to trust them both, a bit. "I was going mad," she said, a touch of defiance. "Trying to make the light wasn't any less mad than despair. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but it gave me something else to think about. Besides killing myself. Sorry, I know I'm not supposed to say that."

"You wouldn't be the only one to think of that," John said. It was a funny way to try to make someone feel normal. She stared at him.

"I know that. The other person who survived the initial, umm, injury did kill himself."

"I meant in this room."

She stared at him. He shook his head before she could shape the name. "Not after Sherlock; before all that, when I came back from Afghanistan. I'm better now. And I know people don't like to hear it mentioned, but suicidal ideation isn't uncommon."

Lesley exhaled slowly. "They give us hell about it in support group—facial injury support group, at my doctors'."

"I don't think not mentioning it helps," said John. "And speaking as someone whose best friend jumped off St. Bart's without any warning, I'd rather know you had thought of it than not."

"Lesley," said Maggie, "It's a lot to ask you to take the word of an old woman you've only just met, and I admit what you've lost is less avoidable, more obvious—"

"More 'In your face'—" Lesley said bitterly.

"—Exactly that—than what happens to most people; but loss is the biggest thing people have in common. And there's no response so terrible, so frightening or wicked, that other people haven't had it. So there's no need to be afraid of your own. You're trained to assess things; don't fail that training now, don't be frightened off. And don't be afraid to tell other people about it, to defend your feelings. Any more than John was defending Sherlock Holmes's memory, when you know what all the gutter press was saying."

Perhaps a white witch was used to naming the elephants in a given room, John thought. He smiled a little at Maggie; he liked being useful, after all, and if she could use him to give Lesley just a little more peace with her own unhappiness—but right now Lesley had had enough, he thought. Give it time to settle in. "All right then," he said. "So when are you going to ordain us, Maggie?"

It turned out she rather liked the metaphor, though she said it was more like opening a door than transferring a mystical gift. John had his doubts; the reiki tradition seemed to make a thing of something very like apostolic succession. But they discussed signs and visions (they sounded a good deal to John like the auras seen by some migraine and epileptic sufferers), and then, in silence, Maggie drew on the tops of their heads and the palms of their hands. Then she invited them to try to summon up the energy between their hands again.

"Damn," said Lesley, echoing John's thoughts. "That's interesting."

And it was. Not because John could feel anything, but because what he didn't feel was different from the not-anything he had (hadn't) felt before. He bounced it in his hand as they had earlier, and it was different. All right, it was easier to believe he had a small ball of energy, something like that.

Lesley was raising her hands toward her face. "Try it on John first," Maggie suggested. "If that's all right, John?" He nodded. "Hold your hands an inch or so away from him, sweep slowly down, paying attention to any difference you feel. The next pass, you'll try to smooth them out, comb them out, but the first time is just assessing. This is straight-up Therapeutic Touch—I see you've heard of that, too, John— but it's more both your style than the proper reiki tradition." She talked about the reiki hand positions anyway, pouring the energy into the recipients' 'chakras'—energy centres in a person's body—one by one as Lesley moved her two hands from his head down past his shoulders—no, she went back over them and shook her head.

"But I know you were wounded there," she said. "You talked about it the other day."

"It's still interesting you felt it," said Maggie. Lesley went on moving her hands past John's shoulders, chest, hips, stopped around mid-thigh.

"Your leg, too?"

"Sometimes. It's psychosomatic."

"It still feels…messed up."

"What are you feeling, John?"

"I can feel warmth from her hands." And he could, almost like a slight pressure, though he could see she wasn't touching him. "But I can see where her hands are, so it could just be me being aware of her." Whatever else it might be, it was peaceful.

"Bless you both, you can be patron saints of double-blind studies."

Maggie guided Lesley through 'assessing' him, and when she went back to the air on both sides of the scar in his shoulder, John could feel something stranger than warmth, almost an internal wriggle of the scar tissue toward Lesley's hands. It was very odd. But again, he could see her, and there was no telling what could be done with a placebo response. (None at all, which made pharmaceutical trials so interesting.) "Try putting your hands where you think he needs the energy most."

Lesley placed her hands on the shirt-cotton almost exactly over the scars each side of John's body. Actual physical contact was reassuring, after the spooky sensation at a distance. Her hands were so warm it was startling: distinct but not completely different from the sensation of Raven's hands. He could feel it as both he and Lesley relaxed into their positions, as though the honey-thick wave of not-light were pouring over them both, sinking them into a quiet separate realm. He could think, but for the moment he didn't need to.

A few minutes later he could feel the curtain around them thin. Some of the luxurious weight on his limbs went away as Lesley stirred.

"It felt like it was drinking from my hands, but now it's—less, I guess," Lesley said.

Maggie nodded. "Sometimes you may want to stay on some part of someone indefinitely, but you usually won't have the opportunity. Smooth it out a few times—" Maggie gestured in the air— "and step away."

John noticed that both he and Lesley seemed to be coming out of a short nap—he shied from the word 'trance'—, taking deep breaths. He stretched his arms out; the wounded one felt looser, better, and both shoulders felt more free, as though he'd been more faithful to his PT exercises than he actually had.

Maggie suggested they walk around the room a bit, and pressed water and biscuits on them. "I want you both earthed again: I can tell it hit hard. Eating and drinking, anything physical, helps you become more focussed in this world, which you'd well to remember if you find yourself giving reiki in your daily lives."

After a quarter hour's break, Maggie asked if it would be all right with Lesley if she and John switched places. Lesley said yes, and took John's chair. He warmed up the ball of energy that he couldn't really feel between his palms again, and moved his hands carefully, slowly, along the inch or so of air surrounding Lesley's body. The difference between her head and the rest of her from her neck down was startling; he reached her ankles and shook out his hands. "Can I go from her feet up?" he asked.

"Yes, of course. You won't turn her inside out, John."

They both laughed a little, relaxing, and John consciously exhaled and tried not to feel like a cheap conjurer. But if he let himself imagine, it did _seem_ as though the immediate area around Lesley had a sort of consistent note, one that changed a little around one of her knees—all humans have dodgy knees, he thought, stock argument against intelligent design—, changed a little again near her heart, and went completely to discord around her masked face. Compassion swelled out of him; John wished, with all his heart, that he _could_ help—

"John," came Maggie's voice. "This might be a good time to remind you you're not supposed to be doing this on your own, you don't have to pull it out of yourself. In fact even if you can, it's a bad idea. Open up the top of your head and pull it in from outside, from God if you believe in God, from heaven or primordial fire or cosmic rays—just let the good stuff, wherever it comes from outside, pour through you. That's what the symbols on your head and hands are supposed to do, open the chakras or whatever you like and let you consciously move it toward Lesley."

His mind threw up a crowd of responses: "'That white light/Pouring down from the heavens/I haven't got time for the pain' oh, he really didn't; but you had to make time or it came and up behind you, a doctor had to have time… He took another deep breath. 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower' , no need to 'believe' in that, that was everywhere… this planet anyway… 'the Universal Will to Become' ". If there was a force in the universe toward wholeness, toward order and beauty and not-pain, John was open to that. He thought of catching a beam of starlight and pulling it in through the top of his head, where Maggie had drawn whatever; sending it out through the palms of his hands, on his hope and his sympathy to Lesley. He felt the not-energy twist and wind in his palms and almost startled away; breathed calm into himself as he did in surgery or shooting guns or pool; quieted his mind, smoothed at the furor and angry dissonant spikes he didn't quite feel from Lesley's face, and hesitantly rested his hands on her head and shoulder.

Whatever reiki was for the receiver, the patient, it was powerfully relaxing for the practitioner, a warm waterfall spilling over them both; but after a few moments or minutes he became aware that Lesley was becoming more tense rather than less. He took his hands off her shoulders and glanced at Maggie.

"Carry it down and ground it, smooth it out and leave; it's gentler that way," she said. John moved his hands down as he had when 'assessing' Lesley, still aware of wanting to smooth and soothe and calm, though the jangle was quieter. He brought his hands to his own sides.

"Was it interesting for you?" he asked, when Lesley hadn't moved after a few seconds.

"Yeah," she said, very shortly.

"Are you all right?"

"John, why don't you go into the kitchen and make tea?" Maggie said. "Take a few minutes. You'll need it to find things, anyway. Or you can use your secret reiki powers to home in on the Assam."

"I'm happy to, what?"

She waved him out of the room. "I forgot, you don't get those till tomorrow."

More than he bargained for. As the electric kettle started its heavy breathing he could hear what was almost certainly Lesley breaking down into heaving sobs. There was a kitchen door behind a box and a basket and a couple of very functional-looking brooms, so John moved them, closed it, and devoted himself to seeing whether there were any biscuits.

About ten minutes later, Maggie came into the kitchen and John poured the contents of the kettle into the teapot. "Didn't want it to stew."

"Thoughtful. She's pulled herself back together. It happens sometimes, actually; I would have warned you both."

"What happens?"

"Spontaneous helpless crying, often for no reason anyone can explain."

"She has reason—"

"Of course she does, and for the most part she's kept them bottled up, living with two men for Heaven's sake. Sorry."

John shrugged and carried the tray into Maggie's sitting room.

"Sorry," Leslie said. She had taken off her mask; her eyes were red and puffy. The medical part of John's brain wondered how well her almost certainly compromised sinuses drained these days. Ah, God, her nose.

"Maggie says it happens sometimes—"

"Not to me—"

"All the more reason you should be aware that it does happen, so you can respond well for your recipient," said Maggie, taking control of the teapot. "Do you take sugar, Lesley?"

"I don't usually but I'll have two this time, ta."

"Sensible." Maggie prepared Lesley's tea and gave it to her.

"I wasn't planning to do this for anyone but myself," Lesley said. "That doesn't make me any more eager."

"Your Nightingale's recovering from a gunshot sound, though, isn't he?" asked Maggie.

"I can't imagine him wanting this, since he really doesn't believe in any of it," said Lesley. "You saw how he was the other night, John. Unless I sneak up behind him, and that doesn't seem right."

"It's not," said Maggie. "We ask if they want reiki, if they mind if we try to offer them healing; we don't impose. Though sometimes I've found it just turns on before it's crossed my mind. Some people have strong objections to anyone messing with their auras at all."

"Can't say I blame them," said Lesley.

"You know more about this, John, don't you? Medical ethics?"

"If someone comes to the surgery they are usually already asking for our help," said John. "I've heard nurses ask people in hospital if they mind if the nurse tries to help them with their hands. And I think the chaplains just lump it in with praying with them, which seems a bit odd if they were going to do the full-body assessment you just showed us."

"That's the ideal; most of us are far more informal. Since reiki is only part of my life and work as a witch, I usually end up grabbing people's hands for a few minutes," said Maggie. "I ask when I can, when permission doesn't already seem to have been implied. But your patients are asking for bog-standard NHS-certified Western medicine, which etheric healing certainly is not, so asking before you do reiki on them would be preferable—if you have time to explain it, which I gather many doctors don't, let alone five to fifteen minutes to spend mostly in silence. And then in the reiki tradition dating from Dr. Usui himself, it's said people should pay for treatment so they will value it, which goes against the Western tradition of 'freely you have received, freely give'."

"You charged us," Lesley pointed out.

"For two afternoons' time, and at a discount," Maggie said. "Because I don't often get doctors—nurses, yes, but a doctor's training doesn't usually teach humility—or police officers who are open-minded enough to inquire." She smiled ruefully. "That being said, I end up giving most people a discount for some reason or other, because I believe it's important to let as much of this energy loose as I can."

They spent another hour practising on one another (John was cautious with Lesley at first, but her expressed desire not to 'sob like a schoolgirl' again seemed to protect her) and on Maggie. If John were to have believed that he could sense auras, he would have said Maggie's was stronger and far less jagged than what he hadn't felt emanating from Leslie. But he rested his hands on her shoulders and pretended to open to whatever good there might be floating at large in the cosmos, and once again, felt profoundly relaxed.

Then Maggie sent them around her flat to try using reiki to sense things other than humans. It was weirdly entertaining. One of Maggie's cats was receptive to his efforts; the other gave him a look of such hauteur he didn't even try. Lesley called from the kitchen, "Maggie, the tomatoes seem good, but I think the fish has gone by."

"That's very likely; I bought it last week. Right, then; do you want to come back tomorrow, and I'll give you the second degree?"

"That sounds a bit worrying," John said.

"No, nothing of the sort," Maggie promised. "More of an 'in for a penny, in for a pound' sort of thing."

They agreed to meet again the next day, and John and Lesley left the warm flat for the murky late afternoon chill outside. "Do you want me to see you home?" John asked.

"I'm fine," she told him. "Thanks, anyway. That was really strange and I didn't much like it, but I feel all right now. See you tomorrow!"

John called Greg Lestrade. "We still on?" He and Greg saw one another every couple of weeks; John had less of a sense that Greg was checking up on him than he had been in the autumn. It was a good sort of friendship.

"Yeah, not too bad today. I can get away a bit early if you want to meet sooner."

"Great." It wasn't quite a gastropub, but they did better food than many. Maggie had suggested they might want to eat lightly and with more attention to nutrition than usual, but John found the idea of a pint of bitter strongly in line with his medical inclinations. And the company was soothing; he was fond of Greg. That didn't mean he was eager to explain what he'd been doing that day. Greg made it easy, as it turned out.

"So my work lately's been sordid and sad and not very interesting," he told John.

"Nothing above an eight?" Sherlock's presence (his absence) was thickly around everything they said, which made it easier; no thoughtful pauses, they just went ahead and mentioned him.

"God, no, nothing above about a five. What about you? What did 'Constable Grant' want with you?" Greg needed no air quotes to make the title highly suspicious.
"Invited me to dinner with him and his DI," John said.

"At the Folly? What's it like inside?"

"Pretty much what you'd expect from the outside. High ceilings and panelling and very good food. You've never been there?"

"It's not the kind of place other coppers go, if they can avoid it. The DIs in Belgravia, maybe, but Seawoll starts to steam if anyone outside his nick mentions them or the 'm' word. We don't like to talk about it."

"Apparently not, I'd never heard there was a branch of the Met that did magic. Though it's about the last thing I'd ever have expected to hear Sherlock talk about, so no wonder there."

"In that, if nothing else, the rank and file agree with him…Did you see anything, well, weird?"

John wasn't ready to tell him about Mother Thames, or Ravensbourne, or the troll; and Greg didn't actually seem to want to hear anything too strange. "Not at dinner. I was doing a spot of first aid for a homeless man and Peter turned out to be a handy man with a light, though."

"I've heard about those. You know, no one'd been assigned to that unit in fifty years before he turned up. And I hear there's another young constable there, who's supposed to be on medical leave?"

"Yeah, PC Lesley May. She's very nice."

"She was badly injured in that mess at Covent Garden last autumn, right?"

"Her face is a mess, but other than that she seems to be doing well. We're doing a reiki workshop together."

"That has to be the cleverest first date strategy I've heard in a while."

"No, actually, it's about safety in numbers. She's more than 20 years younger than I am, Greg!"

"And I still say she could do much worse. And it's the only reason I can see you doing something that…" Greg trailed off.

"Empirically void? New Age Eastern woo-woo?"

"I don't know that I'd be quite that harsh, but yeah, that. You're not going to become a homeopath on us, are you, John?"

"God, I hope not. No. I really like reproducible results."

"So how—?"

"I was dared by someone who had just done something remarkable to my shoulder. The one I was shot in."

"I keep forgetting that."

"I wish I could. It's not that bad, actually, most days, but this woman put her hands on it and it felt…really good. And she said I could learn to do similar, and one thing led to another."

"So are you dating this other woman?"

"No! Just an acquaintance."

"I dunno, people putting their hands on you… a woman whose dare you took. Is this one too young, too?"

"No idea," John said, remembering Raven's unlined face and unfathomable eyes.

"But she's teaching you?"

"No, that'd be Maggie Armitage, who, before you ask, is probably thirty years older than I am."

"Oh, her? Good! I've met her a few times. She works with the old duffers at Mornington Crescent sometimes."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Peculiar Crimes Unit. Stuff that's less dodgy than the Folly. Mostly."

John looked at his friend. "How many special units for weird does the Met have?"

"As many as we need. Well, not quite." Greg drew on his beer. "We don't solve everything, as you know… . So I gather you're not exactly at ease with the laying on of hands."

"No, I never thought I'd be doing it. And I'm not comfortable at all with something going on and no science to back it up."

"Funny. We always thought you were the heart and he was the brain."

"I LIKE science. I took three A-levels before I even started training. I did most of my science at work and he did his on the kitchen table, but you never thought we were on different sides, did you? "

"You sounded like it when you'd rate him for being an insensitive bastard. Which he richly deserved, a lot of the time." Greg looked at John. "They do reiki in regular hospitals, yeah?"

"Yeah, but it's not one of the itemised treatments. I didn't think about it as long as everything else that _needed_ doing was getting done. But I'd never felt anything like it, either. I don't think it's likely to replace PT but maybe along with?"

"Sometime we're not at a pub you can try it on me, if you want," Greg said. "I have this—"

"DON'T tell me, if I can feel it out I'll know the worst—"

"I know your training is in science, yeah, and God knows what the army taught you on top of that, but don't worry so much. Just think of it as part of bedside manner, or counselling, whatever they taught you about taking care of patients instead of taking care of illness."

"That's what I'm telling myself. Like not looming over children and using simple words instead of medical Latin as much as I can. Just another friend human move."

"Are you afraid you're going to go off the deep end and move to India?"

"Not really." John thought about it. "I think if people hear I'm doing reiki or Therapeutic Touch or whatever kind of, of witchcraft, they'll just take it as one more sign I've gone off the rails. I got enough of that when Sherlock was alive but there was compensation for it then."

"And God knows he was loud enough he made you look nicely normal and commonplace, if you didn't look very closely. What do you care about being 'on the rails', John? You aren't made for it. Everything I know about you—you get sick and miserable when you have to behave the way you think people are supposed to behave."

John stared at him. Greg looked deliberately unfazed.

"Look, I'm an officer of the Queen's Peace, and I like it when people manage to live a nice humdrum routine; it's easier to figure out when they snap. But not everyone's cut out for a quiet life just inside the North Circular. You keep acting like you want that, dated all those nice women, but you don't. Hell, do people who want a quiet sensible life join the army?"

"Maybe not," John admitted.

"We've been worried about you—the people who know you, Mrs. Hudson for certain—and weird as the Folly is, at least they aren't the same as you trying to pretend to be a mild-mannered GP. I hadn't pegged you for auras and spiritual healing but maybe it makes sense. More sense than pretending you want nine-to-five and football on Sundays."

But I did want that, John thought; I just also wanted chases through warehouses and Sherlock making ridiculous deductions about the referee and ruining the ends of whatever I was trying to read. He looked surreptitiously at his hand—seemingly the same as ever—and wondered if the pulse he felt in his palm was really any different from what it had been the day before.