"You don't look so good. Or else I'm still blind."

Horatio paused at the door to Rowan Mean's hospital room, somewhat taken aback to be so easily read, and smiled at her.

She cocked her head, closed one eye –the blue one, he noted, her right one- and stared at him. "And up goes the mask."

Once again he paused, then looked down, shook his head and sat by her bedside, looking piercingly at her. "How are you doing?"

She leaned back and stared at him a moment longer, both eyes open, before shrugging. "Fine. Sore. Natural remedies just take longer but", she waved a finger at him. "I don't get any nasty side effects."

He cocked a brow at her emphasis. "You, um, you have a license with the Nopal Creek CoC."

Her eyelids fell to half-mast, and he grinned at that. "So fine." She sighed in exasperation. "Go ahead, I've heard all the jokes. I wouldn't have stayed in my line of business if I couldn't put up with them."

"I'm not exactly sure what to make of your business to begin with."

She bristled. "You know, I don't imagine I could walk into your office tomorrow, look at whatever machines or stuff it is you use to do whatever it is you do, and understand any of it, let alone work with it."

There was a brief, sharp silence between them.

"I'm sorry, that was –", he began.

"That was rude of me, I didn't mean –", she began almost simultaneously.

He smiled while she looked at her hands. "Rowan, what is it you do?"

She drew in a deep breath. "You know, I don't rank much higher than a phone psychic in most people's opinion", she began quietly. "Nine out of ten calls I get are cranks asking if I'm for real. Half are just plain cranks. And nine out of the remaining ten are from some irate wife who wants a curse put on her cheating husband, or a husband who wants a love charm put on his cheating wife." She half-glared at him, but there was a smile behind it. "Funny how it always, always splits right down the gender line."

"I take it it doesn't work that way."

She leaned back. "No, it does not work that way, at all. I don't make love potions, I don't make good luck charms, I don't put curses on people. Even if I could I wouldn't do it for money, and if I could do it, don't you think I'd have done it back there at… wherever? Whoever?"

"But you did do something?"

It was her turn to stare piercingly at him. "If I answer that question, are you going to believe the answer?"

Horatio ducked his head. Foremost in his mind was her credibility as a witness: he knew all too well that once they caught the killers and their lawyers got wind of her job description, they'd tear her to shreds before she ever got to testify.

"You know, you're the first cop of any kind that's actually given that answer some thought."

He looked up at her then, to find her giving him that peculiar wink, blue eye closed. She blinked. "But you won't. Of course you won't, man o' science that you are."

"Why were you looking at me like that?"

"To see which way your mind was going to get made up." As his brow furrowed, she gestured vaguely. "To see your odds."

"My odds?"

"Yes, your odds. Why do you look like it's so weird? Everything in life is odds, whether you get up when the alarm rings or hit the snooze button. Tea or coffee? Eggs or OJ? Maybe all of the above? Which way's gonna be faster to get to your work? Where's the traffic going to be at?"

She had Horatio's attention, if only because he was a bit startled at the ring of truth in a field he had not considered. "And what do you do with those odds, Rowan?"

Once again she looked dubiously at him. "Hypothetically speaking, of course." He spread his hands helplessly. "I look at them. It's like staring at a spider web that's always moving, with everything connected."

"So you… look at odds, and see which way the dice will come up? You should've moved to Las Vegas."

"I value my sanity as much as my insight." Her voice chilled immediately. "I live out in the middle of nowhere because that way I don't get swamped by everyone always trying to twist fate, cheat luck, squeeze a little bit more from here or there even if there's no more luck to be had. There's nothing but luck in Vegas – the closest I ever got was ten miles away and I'm lucky my brain didn't explode, who knows what'd have happened to me if I tried touching it."

"Touching it. So you do affect it."

She pursed her lips. "When I can, yes. When there's room, when there's give on the web." Her tone and her glare were a challenge. "If I can smooth out one place and move the odds to somewhere else, then I do, as best I can."

"That's… That's an interesting way to put it." He caught her mismatched gaze with the steel of his own. "If everything goes wrong, that's just bad luck, but if anything goes right, you can take credit for it."

She flinched not a whit from his challenge, but he saw her eyes go to ice and snow, felt the tentative friendliness between them vanish like sea spray. "Tell you what: I did what I could, back there in the 'Glades. There were three of us and a lot more of them. I touched what I could, how I could. And when – not if!- when push comes to shove and you get that one-in-a-million shot, then you can come back and show me how solid the rock of your scientific disbelief still is, but until then, since I don't see why you need a quack and a weirdo like me for anything else until you've got a trial or something, I'd appreciate it if you got busy somewhere else other than my room." With that, she turned pointedly away, settling down in the hospital bed and giving every indication she expected to drop off to sleep and have him be gone like a bad dream any moment.

"Rowan." He couldn't let it end like that – he couldn't let her slip away and into uncertainty like Victoria. "Rowan."

"What?", she asked tartly.

He was silent, at a loss for what to say that would not betray him and would not belittle her.

"You know….", she said tiredly into the long silence. "Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. There's animals on this word with brains the size of our teeth who see into the light and radiation spectrum farther, more precisely, than we do, unless we use machines. Why is it so hard to believe that a human being can see something, just because you can't?"

"I think that's because", he said slowly, "what you see is something that cannot be measured by any known machine, on any known spectrum."

"What a weird thing for you, of all people, to say.", she replied in the same tart tone. "On what machine do you measure the comfort you give the people you help when you put a criminal away?"

He looked sharply up, but she had not turned around.

"Why'd you come see me, anyways? No one's said I can even leave."

He sighed, back on solid ground. "Because Victoria Randall just checked herself out, and is planning to leave the state."

"Ah."

"I would like to ask, Rowan, what are your plans for the future?"

Her shoulders moved lightly. "I don't know. I can't stay long, Miami's a very expensive city compared to Nopal Creek. I don't know if I could start my business here, and even if I could, no one would take me seriously. And it's too big a place anyways, too… complicated."

"Rowan", he said slowly, gently. " I don't think these people have given up. I don't think they're willing to give up. I would like you to stay here, where I can keep an eye on you, until we've caught them."

"I've got nowhere I can stay." She cocked her head to peer at him over one shoulder. "Unless you count the beach, and that's illegal, isn't it?"

"Don't you worry about that, you let me worry about that, but I want to know… I want to know that you'll let me watch over you until this is over with."

She did turn at that, to stare at him with those mismatched eyes. There was deep exhaustion there – but also plenty of fight left. "You don't take no for an answer very well, do you?"

"Not if I can help it, no." He smiled again.

She buried her face in her pillow with an exasperated sigh. "Oh, fine. Can't be worse than the time I ended up sharing a house with a Scientologist."

She startled a chuckle out of him with that.