Strange Brew by Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Jim Butcher, Karen Chance, P. N. Elrod, Rachel Caine, Faith Hunter, Caitlin Kittredge, Jenna Maclane, Jennifer van Dyck, Christian Rummel, Gayle Hendrix, Dina Pearlman, Marc Vietor, Therese Plummer, Karen Chapman

dammit.
    I was doing fine until he met my eyes, and he whispered, “Holly. Wasn’t it finished? Didn’t we get him?”
    Holy hell. He remembers.
    For a frozen second I couldn’t think what to say, but training came back to me in a rush. Establish control. Guide the dialogue .
    “Andrew,” I said, and my voice was low and gentle and soothing, entirely steady. “Andrew Toland. Do you hear me?”
    He nodded. He hadn’t blinked since focusing on me.
    “I need you to sit up now,” I said. “Can you do that?”
    He could, and he did. He swung his legs over the edge of the cold morgue table and came upright, and I stopped him long enough to adjust the sheet over his lap. I wasn’t usually so fussy, but Andrew had thrown me off; I couldn’t see him as a tool. He was a man, a living, vital man .
    He hadn’t looked away at all from my face. There was something very unusual about him. I’d brought back hundreds of dead, and I couldn’t think of a single one who’d begun the process with a question like that. It takes time for the personality to reassert itself, for memories to come clear.
    He had been crystal-clear from the moment our souls had touched.
    “Holly, you must tell me the truth,” Andrew said. “Did we kill that bastard?”
    How could he possibly remember who I was ? I’d had one other soul I’d brought back twice, the CEO of a major corporation who’d forgotten to pass along the passwords to some vital corporate accounts. I’d had to do it twice because the board of directors wanted to be sure they had everything from him, and that man, young and fit as he’d been, hadn’t recognized me at all. Hadn’t remembered a thing from one resurrection to the next.
    “Holly!” His tone was sharp with concern. He was concerned. About me . I came back from about a thousand miles away and realized that he was frowning, totally focused on me. “Can you hear me?”
    I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It came out a strained, strangled gasp. “Yes,” I managed to say. “I hear you, Andrew. We stopped him.”
    “Then I expect there’s a tale to be told about why I’m back here.” He released me from his stare to turn it on the room around us. “Well, this place don’t get any prettier.”
    He remembered that, too? Unbelievable. “How do you feel?”
    “Feel?” His gaze came back to me, electric and warm, and his lips curved into a smile. “Alive would say it fine. But I’m not alive, I know that. You’ve brought me back again. Why?”
    I turned away to pick up a stack of clothes from the pile nearby. Hospital scrubs for now, nothing fancy. I handed them to him, and he considered them for a few seconds.
    “Clothes,” I said. It was unnecessary; he clearly knew what they were, but I was rattled. I was all too aware of Detective Prieto at the viewing window, seeing me lose my cool.
    That earned me another fey smile from Andrew. He had a nice face—a little sharp, with a pointed chin. In certain lights, in certain moods, he would look sinister, except for the humor in his eyes. “I know we’re well acquainted, but a bit of privacy?…”
    I turned my back. I heard the faint sound of his bare feet slapping the cold floor as he stood, and the rustle of fabric moving over skin.
    He was way, way too fast. Too well adjusted, for any newly revived corpse. He had continuity , and that meant he remembered all the trauma of the first resurrection.
    “How long?” he asked. “How long have I been away this time?”
    I cast a look over my shoulder, and found he was adjusting the fit of the pants on his hips. Except for the slight, indefinable distance in his eyes, he could have been any hospital attendant. He looked completely… alive.
    “About a year,” I said. “Andrew—”
    “Feels like yesterday,” he said, and looked down at his hands. He flexed them carefully. “Awful strange, not knowing that,”
    “We have work for you,” I said. I was sticking to my script, even though Andrew had lost his.