Книга - Shaman Rises
Shaman Rises
C.E. Murphy
Joanne Walker has two choices:Defeat the enemy…or lose her soul tryingFor over a year, Joanne has been fighting the Master–the world's most abiding evil entity. She's sacrificed family, friendships, even watched potential futures fade away…and now the Master is bringing the final battle to Joanne's beloved Seattle.Lives will be lost as the repercussions of all Joanne's final transformation into her full Shamanic abilities come to her doorstep. Before the end, she'll mourn, rejoice–and surrender everything for the hope of the world's survival. She'll be a warrior and a healer. Because she is finally a Shaman Rising."The twists and turns will have readers shaking their heads while devouring the next page." –USA TODAY on Raven Calls
Joanne Walker has two choices:
Defeat the enemy…or lose her soul trying.
For over a year, Joanne has been fighting the Master—the world’s most abiding evil entity. She’s sacrificed family, friendships, even watched potential futures fade away…and now the Master is bringing the final battle to Joanne’s beloved Seattle.
Lives will be lost as the repercussions of all Joanne’s final transformation into her full Shamanic abilities come to her doorstep. Before the end, she’ll mourn, rejoice—and surrender everything for the hope of the world’s survival. She’ll be a warrior and a healer. Because she is finally a Shaman Rising.
“The twists and turns will have readers shaking their heads while devouring the next page.”
—USA TODAY on Raven Calls
Praise for C.E. Murphy (#ub10e58da-f658-5391-a41b-f6b6bf8d2c59)
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist,
magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels
and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff
should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling,
interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes
will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping,
well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—
and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
“Murphy carefully crafts her scenes and I felt every gust of wind
through the crispy frosted trees…. I am heartily looking forward
to further volumes.”
—The Discriminating Fangirl
Spirit Dances
“An original and addictive urban fantasy!”
—Romancing the Dark Side
Raven Calls
“The twists and turns will have readers shaking their heads
while devouring the next page.”
—USA TODAY
Mountain Echoes
“Shaman Joanne Walker can’t seem to catch a break in the
penultimate chapter of Murphy’s outstanding and long-running series.… Her past and present collide in this emotionally charged novel
that illustrates Joanne’s unique evolution.”
—RT Book Reviews on Mountain Echoes
Also available from C.E. Murphy and Mira LUNA (#ub10e58da-f658-5391-a41b-f6b6bf8d2c59)
The Walker Papers
URBAN SHAMAN
WINTER MOON
“Banshee Cries”
THUNDERBIRD FALLS
COYOTE DREAMS
WALKING DEAD
DEMON HUNTS
SPIRIT DANCES
RAVEN CALLS
MOUNTAIN ECHOES
The Negotiator
HEART OF STONE
HOUSE OF CARDS
HANDS OF FLAME
Shaman Rises
C.E. Murphy
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
…honestly, this one’s for me.
Author’s Note (#ub10e58da-f658-5391-a41b-f6b6bf8d2c59)
Back in Y2K when I wrote Urban Shaman, I thought the Walker Papers would be a seven-book series. They grew to nine with the sale of the first “trilogy”—people kept referring to Urban Shaman, Thunderbird Falls and Coyote Dreams that way—and very quickly I began to see the story structure as three trilogies, with Joanne going through certain steps of growing up in each of those trilogies.
I did not, frankly, ever expect it to span a total of eleven books, if you include Winter Moon’s “Banshee Cries” as a book (and I do!), or the independent collection of Walker Paper stories, No Dominion, as part of the series (and I certainly do!).
Eleven books is a lot, and while I know there are a fair number of dedicated readers who reread the whole series when a new book comes out, I thought I might offer up a quick, rather wildly inaccurate in detail but reasonably spot-on in spirit, recap for you. A jaunt—with all due apologies to a couple of boys—down the road so far:
Urban Shaman: Former police mechanic and now beat cop Joanne Walker is dragged into a world she doesn’t want to know exists when a coyote spirit gives her the choice between death or life as a shaman, after she’s skewered by Cernunnos, god of the Wild Hunt. She chooses life (look, nobody said it was a good choice, just a choice) and races to save a young woman named Suzanne Quinley from becoming a pawn in a game between Cernunnos and his son Herne.
Winter Moon—“Banshee Cries”: Joanne’s boss and love inter—no, no, no, he’s just the boss—pulls Jo on to a case of ritual murders, already trusting her magic more than she does. But Joanne’s not the only one on the case—her mother is back from the dead to protect Joanne from the banshee she hunts and from the banshee’s master, whose dark magic is more than Joanne is ready to handle.
Thunderbird Falls: Despite two mystical adventures, Joanne’s still got her head stuck firmly in the sand—if she ignores her shamanic powers, maybe they’ll go away. They don’t, of course, but there are ramifications to her ignorance: her beloved cab-driving friend Gary Muldoon is witched into having a heart attack; relative innocent Colin Johannsen and behind-the-scenes manipulator Faye Kirkland die trying to bring Joanne’s increasingly dangerous enemy, the Master, onto the earthly physical plane; and Seattle’s landscape is rearranged, creating a new waterfall on Lake Washington. It is not Joanne’s finest hour.
Coyote Dreams: No longer able to pretend her shamanic powers haven’t changed her life, Joanne finally steps up. But since her spirit guide, Coyote, hasn’t been responding since he saved her ass in Thunderbird, Jo’s totally on her own when a Navajo maker god begins putting Seattle’s police force to sleep. To her humiliation, her suspicions of Morrison’s new girlfriend, Barbara Bragg, are (not wrongly) attributed to jealousy. Even when Barbara and her twin brother, Mark, prove to be the god’s avatars, Joanne’s not so much vindicated as horrified, because god-induced visions make it clear that Coyote wasn’t a spirit guide at all, but another shaman, who died to save her. In the end, though, she’s accepted that shamanism is her future, and to reader outrage everywhere, she’s carefully turned down Morrison’s relationship proposal in favor of becoming a detective on the police force.
Walking Dead: The Black Cauldron of legend comes to Seattle, and with it come zombies. Suzanne Quinley makes a reappearance and saves Jo from zombies by calling on her grandfather, Cernunnos, god of the Wild Hunt. Unfortunately, it turns out even gods are susceptible to the Master’s cauldron, and Joanne in turn barely saves Cernunnos and his home world of Tir na nOg before she and her police partner, Billy Holliday, manage to destroy the cauldron—through the willing sacrifice of Billy’s long-dead sister’s soul, which he has carried with him most of his life.
Demon Hunts: A lost human spirit becomes a flesh-eating windigo, and, in seeking Joanne’s assistance, leaves a stretch of murders making a beeline toward her. Coyote finally returns, alive, in one piece, and runs straight into Joanne’s arms. Morrison has issues with that. Joanne has issues when Sara Buchanan, now the wife of Lucas Isaac, the boy who fathered the twins Joanne never, ever talks about, turns up as the federal investigator on the case as it crosses into national park territory. Gary totally saves the day, and Coyote, after asking Joanne to come with him, returns to Arizona alone.
Spirit Dances: Joanne’s partner, Billy Holliday, is nearly killed on a routine investigation. Shooting the perpetrator (not fatally) starts Jo on a slide to the realization she’s not going to be able to be both a cop and a shaman. She accidentally transforms Morrison into a wolf during a dance performance known for its healing powers. A werewolf bites Joanne, causing her to go larking off to Ireland for a cure immediately after quitting her job and declaring her love for Morrison. Readers everywhere scream bloody murder at me.
Raven Calls: A romp through time and the Irish Underworld (what Joanne knows as the Lower World, albeit with a different landscape) reveals Joanne’s dead mother as the new queen of the banshees and sees Joanne fight off the werewolf bite with Coyote’s psychic assistance. Joanne’s mother sacrifices everything to buy Jo just a little more time in the fight against the Master.
No Dominion: Gary’s history is not at all as he remembers it: he and his wife, Annie, have been fighting the Master longer than he ever knew, and Cernunnos guides him through an attempt to protect Annie from the Master and change their future. Also includes several short stories.
Mountain Echoes: Joanne’s dad is missing not just from North Carolina, but from the whole time line. As she tries to find him, the Master finally gets a physical foothold in the Middle World (our world), by way of going through Joanne’s twelve-year-old son, Aidan. Morrison arrives with the best entrance in the whole series and saves the day, and our star-crossed lovers finally get their moment together right before Gary calls Joanne to tell him that Annie Muldoon is alive....
Shaman Rises: Is in your hands. Commence reading, ideally with “Wayward Son” wailing on your mental soundtrack!
Contents
Cover (#u2e784405-7f76-5a8b-a3e0-c3fabd269af2)
Back Cover Text (#u5339bb02-f633-59c3-b8d4-818fd0d53806)
Praise
Booklist
Title Page (#ufb76a493-697d-5aa6-8ee9-cc004a1b2210)
Dedication (#ua1d62ba4-d0d2-56ae-bf1c-5279c6e27546)
Author’s Note
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Acknowledgments
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One (#ub10e58da-f658-5391-a41b-f6b6bf8d2c59)
Friday, March 31, 11:29 p.m.
Annie Marie Muldoon was supposed to be dead.
She had been dead the whole fifteen months I’d known her husband, and she’d been dead the three years previous to that, too. That had been pretty much literally the first thing I’d learned about Gary Muldoon: his wife had died of emphysema on their forty-eighth wedding anniversary, so no, he didn’t have a cigarette for me to bum. He’d told me a lot about her in the past year and some: how she’d been a nurse, how she had been the breadwinner in their home for much of their marriage, how they’d traveled the world and how she had been a bright and gentle spirit. Everything he’d said had made me wish I could have met her.
Nothing he’d said had prepared me for the possibility I might. Not even the shamanic magic I’d finally mastered led me to believe it was possible. I did not, as a rule, see ghosts or talk to dead people.
I was, however, perfectly capable of seeing and talking to people lying in hospital beds, which is where Annie Muldoon was, and where, according to her records, she had been for the past four days. The doctors were embarrassed about that, because according to their other records, she was dead, and somebody had clearly made a horrible mistake. Doctors weren’t renowned for their apologies, but every time I’d spoken to one in the past couple hours, he or she had apologized to me, and I wasn’t even technically a family member.
Gary, though, had made it pretty damned clear to them that they not only could, but should, be talking to me. He’d accepted every strange leap and twist of my life with equanimity, but this one had taken him in the teeth. He sat hunched and haggard at Annie’s bedside, looking every one of his seventy-four years for the first time since I’d known him. He’d gotten up to hug me when I’d arrived. Other than that, he’d been sitting with Annie, holding her hand and watching her breathe.
She was a tiny woman, made smaller by sickness. The apologetic doctors had already told me six or eight times that she had emphysema, just like the older records showed, and...and then they faltered into silence. None of them had an explanation for her recorded death. None of them had any idea where she’d been in the intervening four and a half years. None of them were in fact entirely clear on how she’d shown up not just at the hospital, but in a bed, in a private room, and they sure as hell didn’t understand how a dead woman’s insurance policy was still active. That, of all things, was going to be the most trouble later. I didn’t want Gary getting in trouble for insurance fraud.
The rest of it, I could explain.
Friday, March 31, 8:30 a.m.
“Jo,” Gary had said on the phone, “I’m in Seattle. It’s my wife, Joanie. It’s Annie. She’s alive.” And my appetite vanished.
It should have vanished, of course, because I’d just eaten about eleven metric tons of food at Lenny’s, the diner in Cherokee Town, North Carolina, that I’d loved as a teen and still thought highly of as an adult. But this was the bad kind of vanishing appetite. It wasn’t sated. It was sick, my stomach suddenly in a hurry to reject every bite I’d just indulged in. I said, “But you were in Ireland,” through a rushing sound in my ears, and only half heard Gary saying something about the hospital having called him two days ago and now he was home and Annie was alive.
I got up from the table, leaving my breakfast date, Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, to either pay the bill or skip out on the check. It wasn’t that I didn’t plan to pay. I just wasn’t thinking that clearly as I went out into the cool Appalachian morning. “Gary. Gary, start again. Say that again. Annie—Annie...”
I didn’t want to disbelieve him. I didn’t want to say the words out loud: Annie died five years ago, Gary. My life was too damned weird to brush him off entirely, but coming back from the dead five years later was way beyond my ordinary level of weird.
Gary’s voice shook. “Jo, I ain’t told you the half of what happened with me when I went riding with Cernunnos.”
“...tell me.” I got myself across the diner’s parking lot and sat on the hood of the Chevy Impala I’d rented to drive around Cherokee in. I pulled my knees up, wrapped an arm around them and put my head against them, like I could protect myself from all hell breaking loose if I curled into a small enough ball. “Okay, Gary, tell me what’s going on.”
“I went ridin’ off with Horns to fight in Brigid’s war, and—” My old buddy caught his breath and I could all but hear him editing the story down to the bare bones. “An’ I caught the Master’s attention, Jo. The rest of it don’t matter right now, but he saw me. He looked right inta me, Joanie, an’ he promised he was gonna take away everything I loved. He promised he was gonna take Annie away, Jo.”
I closed my eyes hard. Gary and I had gone to Ireland together so I could hunt down the source of visions I’d been having, but a funny thing had happened on the way to the forum. My magic had thrown us into Ireland’s distant past, where I’d had to prove myself as a shaman by summoning a god. I’d called on Cernunnos, god of the Wild Hunt, who was itching for a fight with our common enemy, a death magic we called the Master. I’d had other things to deal with just then, and Gary had volunteered to join Cernunnos in that battle. I hadn’t seen him again until he rode up and stuffed a sword through the banshee queen who was trying to kill me.
I’d thought that was it. He hadn’t suggested there was anything else to the story. Of course, in the twelve or fifteen hours immediately after our Irish adventures had ended, I’d been alternating between sleeping, eating and trying to help my cousin Caitríona get her feet under herself as the new Irish Mage. Then a friend had called me from North Carolina and told me my father was missing, and I’d been on the next plane to America. There had not, frankly, been much time for catching up.
Apparently I’d missed a lot. I caught pieces of the story now, stitching Gary’s fear and confusion into something coherent only because he repeated bits often enough that I was able to build a time line. He had asked, no, demanded that Cernunnos take him into his own past so he could protect Annie from the Master’s meddling. But we’d all learned the hard way that time travel didn’t work that smoothly. The time line wanted to stay the way it was, without interference. One change in an era meant nothing else could be changed. Cernunnos had warned Gary not to make a move until the last possible minute. So he hadn’t, and somewhere along the way he’d forgotten things, forgotten about killing the demon in Korea, forgotten about—
“Wait, wait, what? You killed a demon in Korea, Gary? What the hell, that was fifty years ago and you, dude, Gary, you didn’t know anything about magic when I met you.”
“That’s what I’m tellin’ you, Jo, he took it away. This whole damned life I led, this life me an’ Annie led. I’m remembering it all now, like somebody’s scrubbin’ away the fog. He tried killin’ her half a dozen times in half a dozen ways, Joanie, an’ in the end he got a black magic inside her to eat up her lungs. You remember Hester Jones?”
I sat up straight, blood draining from my face. To my surprise, Morrison was a few feet away, leaning on a different car’s hood, arms folded across his chest as he waited to be there when I needed him. My chest filled with gratitude and I managed a wan smile, but I was mostly thinking about Hester Jones.
I’d never known her when she was alive. She was one of half a dozen Seattle shamans who had died a few days before my own power had awakened. She and they had pooled their resources so they could remain in the Dead Zone, a place of transition between life and death, long enough to set me on the path I needed to be on. Hester had had a sour-apples voice and a permanently pinched mouth. I remembered her very clearly, and nodded like Gary could see it.
“She tried helpin’ Annie, but it didn’t work. Not mostly. She found Annie a couple spirit animals, though—”
I was on my feet again somehow, looking past Morrison toward the blue mountains. “What animals? Morrison, can you go get my dad? Or Aidan? Both? Now?”
Morrison, bless him, pushed away from the car he’d been leaning on and headed into the diner without asking any questions. Gary was still saying, “A stag an’ a cheetah. She kept sayin’ how silly a cheetah was, like that was a young girl’s spirit animal, not an old lady’s,” when Aidan, the son I’d given up for adoption almost thirteen years earlier, came running out of the diner. His mother Ada followed him, and Morrison, now on his phone, came out after them.
Aidan skidded to a stop in front of me, cheeks flushed with excitement. He’d had a hell of a few days. His once-black hair was bone-white and even more shocking in sunlight than it had been in the diner. “What’s going on? What do you need? Are you okay?”
“Information on spirit animals. What do cheetahs and stags represent? What gifts do they offer the people they come to?”
“Stags are strength and virility—” He blushed saying the second word and cast a sideways glance back at his mom, who studiously didn’t notice. Still blushing, he shoved his hands in his pockets and mumbled, “Um, those are the ones I know about mostly. Cheetahs, I don’t know about cheetahs, they’re—”
“Time.” Morrison’s voice sounded unusually deep compared to Aidan’s boyish soprano. “Your dad’s saying that cheetahs offer gifts of speed and time. Not the way your walking stick spirit animals do, he says, but—” He broke off, tilted the phone away from his head to look at it slightly incredulously, then lifted his eyebrows and went on. “Did you know, he says, that cheetahs are one of a few cat breeds that can’t retract their claws, and can’t you see how that gives them the grip to pull someone—”
“—past when she died, Jo,” Gary was saying in my other ear. “She died at 11:53, seven minutes to midnight, doll, I know that right down in my bones, ’cept she didn’t. I’m rememberin’ it different now, rememberin’ how she held on, Jo. She held on until midnight, an’ Cernunnos... I dunno, Joanie. He came outta the light and she put her hands out to him and...an’ that was it. Next thing I knew I was back with the Hunt and I couldn’t remember my whole life right, and we were headin’ back for you. It all didn’t start comin’ back to me until the hospital called and said Annie was...there.”
“How is she?”
“Dying.”
The blunt word hit me like a red dodgeball, smack in the gut. Breath rushed out of me, though I should’ve known that “dying” was the only really possible answer. “How long does she have?”
“They got her on life support, Jo. She ain’t awake. They don’t know if she’s ever gonna wake up an’ they ain’t sure she should. Sounds like they think the only thing keepin’ her alive is that she’s sleepin’.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. Hang in there, Gary. I love you.”
There was a startled silence on the other end of the line before Gary’s voice came across one more time, gruff with worry and pleasure. “Love you, too, doll.”
We both hung up. Aidan peered between me, Morrison and my phone, which was fair enough. Five minutes earlier Morrison and I had been being, in Aidan’s assessment, mooshy and gross, and now I was saying “I love you” to men named Gary. I decided to let the kid work that one out on his own, and looked at Morrison.
He handed me his phone. I took it, catching the scent of Old Spice cologne clinging to it, and smiled as I said, “Yeah, Dad, thanks for the help. Um, look, I know I said I was going to hang around, but something’s come up. I gotta go back to Seattle, like now.”
Aidan said, “But—!” and his mother put her hand on his shoulder, which slumped. I made an apologetic face at him and spoke to him and my dad both. “It’s my best friend. His wife is...sick.” Back from the dead was more than I wanted to try explaining, since I barely comprehended that myself. “I’m not even sure I should waste the time driving home. I think I need to fly.”
“Are you willing to leave Petite behind?” Morrison asked.
I snorted, then realized he was serious. “No, what, are you kidding? I thought you’d—I mean, you drove her out here...”
“Walker, do you really think there’s any chance I’m letting you go back to Seattle to help Annie Muldoon without me at your side?”
A rush of embarrassed, delighted, teenage-intense emotion rushed through me and turned my face hot. I wasn’t used to the idea that somebody, anybody, much less a silvering fox like Morrison, wanted to be at my side. And now that he made me think of it, he was the only other person in the immediate vicinity who understood just how alarming it was that Gary’s wife was merely sick. “I guess, I mean, no, when you put it that way....”
“That’s what I thought. So either we’re both flying or we’re both driving.”
“I can’t...drive fast enough. I mean, the record for driving across the States is about thirty hours, and we’ve got most of that distance to cover.”
Morrison flicked an eyebrow again at the fact I knew what the cross-country driving record was, but he didn’t comment on that. He said something far more astonishing instead. “I can call in some favors and get the roads cleared, get us a police escort across the country. How fast can you do it then?”
My jaw dropped. I closed it again, wet my lips, and felt my jaw fall open again. “You have never been as sexy as you are right now.” Aidan, hearing that, looked mortified while I kept gazing in stunned lust at Morrison. “You would do that? What excuse would you use?”
“That I had a critical case and couldn’t fly, which happens to be true. How fast could you make the drive?”
“About...” I closed my eyes, envisioning the route, the roads, and Petite’s top speed before slumping. “Even if I could keep her pegged, which is unlikely, it’d take most of a day, and I haven’t slept since...” I didn’t know when. Drooping, I tried to rub a hand across my eyes. There was a phone in it, which made me realize I hadn’t actually ended the conversation with Dad. I put the phone back to my ear and said, “Did you go get Petite?” and got an affirmative grunt in response. “Okay. I need you to drive her to Seattle.”
Morrison’s eyebrows shot skyward while I tried not to think too hard about what I was asking. Dad had already driven my beloved 1969 Mustang down the mountain to his house, which under ordinary circumstances would be grounds for kneecapping. I did not let other people drive Petite. Except Morrison had driven her all the way from Seattle to bring her—and himself—to me in a moment of need, and now I was telling Dad to haul her big beautiful wide back end across the country again. I could take it as a sign of maturity and of letting go, but really it was more a sign of desperation.
“You, ah. What?” Dad sounded as shocked as Morrison looked, but possibly for different reasons. “You need me to what?”
“Drive my car to Seattle, Dad. You know the road.” A thread of humor washed through that. My father and I had driven all over the country in my childhood. The idea that he might not know the way—which was not at all why he was asking—amused me. Any port in a storm, I guessed.
Dad’s silence spoke volumes. Up until about twelve hours ago, we hadn’t talked to one another, much less seen each other, in years. My doing, because I’d been on a high horse it had eventually turned out I had no business on. We had only just barely buried the hatchet, though, and it was a big thing to ask. A three-thousand-mile thing to ask, in fact. I was trying to figure out another course of action when Dad cleared his throat. “How soon do you need her there?”
My knees went wobbly with relief. “As soon as possible.”
“I’ll pack a bag and leave from here.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Daddy.” I mashed my lips together. I hadn’t called my father “Daddy” in well over a decade. It was, in my estimation, kind of a low blow.
A breath rushed out of him loud enough to be heard over the phone, and I decided it wasn’t as low a blow as it would have been if I’d Daddy’d him in the asking. He said, “See you in Seattle, sweetheart,” and hung up.
I folded the phone closed and handed it back to Morrison. “I got the Impala at the Atlanta airport. We can drop it off when we—crap. My credit card is maxed out.” I shot a guilty glance into the Impala, where lay a gleaming new ankle-length white leather coat. “I have no money for a last-minute plane ticket. Maybe I better drive after all.” I reached for Morrison’s phone to call my father back, but he put it in his pocket.
“I got this one, Walker.”
Part of me wanted to protest. The much smarter part smiled gratefully and whispered, “Thanks.”
Morrison nodded while Aidan went to see what it was that had broken my credit card. He dragged the coat out and knocked my drum, which was under it, onto the floor of the car, which made him say a word I imagined his mother liked to pretend he didn’t know. After putting the drum back carefully, he held the coat up to me, then made me put it on over my protest of, “You’ve seen me in it already, Aidan....”
I received a glare worthy of the fiercest fashionista, even if he was a few weeks shy of thirteen years old. Still glaring he studied me, twirled a finger to make me spin and finally gave me a peculiarly familiar smile when I faced him again. “That’s an awesome coat. You look like an action hero.”
I struck the best heroic pose I could manage, chin up, arms akimbo, gaze bright on the horizon. Aidan laughed, but I’d bought the coat in part because it really did make me feel like a hero, like I was wearing a white hat that proclaimed me as one of the good guys. It was a nice feeling, and I wasn’t too concerned with the thought that it also made me a target. I’d done a fine job of becoming a target without the coat’s assistance, so I figured I might as well enjoy it if I could.
When I shook off my silly pose, Ada and Morrison had moved away, leaving Aidan still grinning at me without noticing we’d been given some space. I flicked a fingertip at his white hair. “If this stays like that, you won’t need a white coat to look like a good guy.”
He rolled his eyes scornfully. “You don’t watch enough movies. Anybody with totally white hair is always the bad guy.”
“Oh. Jeez, you’re right. Okay, you’re just going to have to buck the trend. Look, Aidan, I’m sorry I’ve got to go. I really did want to hang around a few days.”
His mouth twisted, disappointment not quite strong enough to make him defensive. We weren’t that close, which was okay, and besides, he got to the crux of the matter, focusing on what was important. “Is it a shaman thing? Is that why you’ve gotta go?”
“Yeah. My best friend’s wife is sick, really sick, and...” I swallowed, because I didn’t at all want to pursue my thoughts to their logical end. “And I have to try to help.”
“We can’t always.” The kid was solemn enough to be five times his actual age. “You know that, right? Not everything can be healed.”
“But sometimes they can be fought,” I said quietly. “Sometimes putting up the fight is what matters. But I guess you know that. Especially after the last couple days.”
Aidan shifted uncomfortably. “You did most of the fighting. I just...was awful.”
“You were possessed, and you didn’t give in to it, Aidan. That’s what matters. You held out so I could fight for you.”
“A lot of people still got hurt.”
“Yeah, and I know it’s not going to be easy for you to accept that none of that was your fault. You and I were both targets, and the thing that came after us loves collateral damage.”
“How’re we supposed to make that better?”
I looked west, like I could see all the way to Seattle. “That’s what I’m going home to do, kiddo. I’m gonna make it better. I’m going to finish it.”
Chapter Two (#ub10e58da-f658-5391-a41b-f6b6bf8d2c59)
Morrison spent most of the drive to Atlanta on his cell phone, dealing with airlines and last-minute ticket-changing fees. I listened with half an ear, but concentrated on driving. Food had restored me quite a bit, but I really didn’t have any business being behind a wheel. The only reason I was driving was I would’ve been worse at dealing with airline bureaucracy. It was bad enough listening to Morrison’s half of the conversation, full of, “Is that the best you can do?” and, “What about business class?” and, “I’ll talk with another airline,” which he did—several times—before he finally hung up the phone with a snap. “You’re not going to like this.”
“Morrison, the list of things I don’t like right now starts in Seattle, goes to Ireland, stops by Cherokee County and then swings back to the Pacific Northwest, so you don’t really have to try to soften the blow, okay?”
He chuckled, which was probably more than I deserved, given my tone, which I’d been trying to modulate toward rue instead of snarling and had only half succeeded. “All right. Everything direct to Seattle is booked up until the evening flights.”
“What? Why?”
“Kids going home from spring break.”
I had a brief moment of loathing for spring break. “So we fly indirect.”
“Which won’t get us there any faster, but will leave us exhausted. When was the last time you slept, Walker?”
I had no idea. “I have no idea. Two days ago? Maybe three.”
“You need rest.”
“You can’t possibly be suggesting I take a nap while Gary’s wife is back from the dead and dying.”
“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. How much good are you going to be to Muldoon if you’re half-conscious and snarling?”
That was as low a blow as Daddy-ing my father had been, but it was also very effective. I tightened my hands around the wheel, pressed my lips thin and, after a minute, nodded. “Fine. So, what, we crash out on the airport floor for a couple hours before catching a flight back home?”
“You sound like a college student. No, Walker, we rent a hotel room for a few hours so you can get some actual rest.”
“Morrison, I don’t know if I’ll even be able to sleep. There’s no point in sitting around a hotel room for hours—”
“Joanne, she’s on life support and there are doctors taking care of her. You may have a great gift, but even it’s going to burn out if you don’t take care of yourself. We’ll still be there before midnight. It’ll be all right.”
I slid a glance at him. He must really mean it, if he was using my first name. Truth was, Morrison looked tired, too. He hadn’t had much more sleep than I had. I bit my lower lip and looked back at the road, but nodded. “Okay. All right. Fine.” Right on cue my jaw opened in a yawn big enough to set my eyes watering.
Morrison, manfully, didn’t laugh at me. We drove in silence for a minute or two, me yawning repeatedly, before he distracted me from the yawns by bringing up a topic I didn’t want to think about. “The Raven Mocker got away, Walker.”
My hands tightened involuntarily on the steering wheel. “I know.”
There was no way to pretend otherwise. The creature I’d come to North Carolina to hunt, a Cherokee legend called Raven Mocker, had possessed a human body and escaped in the last minutes of our fight. By some accounts Raven Mocker was a fallen angel, but not exactly the Western sense of an angel. More of a sky spirit, a creature from what I knew as the Upper World, a plane of ephemeral beings. In Cherokee legend it wasn’t so much a messenger from God as a guide that had itself gotten lost. It didn’t matter. Fallen angels were, by anybody’s mythology, bad, and this one survived by sucking the life and soul out of living bodies, then taking the bodies as hosts. And we’d lost it. It had disappeared into the woods, fled to the west while we were picking up the pieces of the chaos it had caused.
Under those circumstances, Annie Muldoon’s reappearance, alive and more or less well, did not bode well. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell Gary.”
“We’ve got until tonight to think about that.”
* * *
Until tonight wasn’t enough. Despite my protests, I slept like the dead in the hotel room and stumbled through airport security like a zombie, which was a phrase I should be careful with, all things considered. I managed to get on the plane with my drum, which I wasn’t about to relegate to checked luggage and which didn’t technically fit in the carry-on bin above my head, but the flight attendants seemed to be studiously Not Noticing it. I was pretty certain my subconscious was running a “these are not the droids you’re looking for” kind of thing on them, and while part of me thought my subconscious probably shouldn’t be allowed to do magic without me, the rest of me was just basically glad it was doing so.
I stared out the window the whole flight home, unable to sleep and without much to say. My heart twisted when we flew over the Mississippi, New Orleans a distant smear on the horizon. There had been a brief moment this morning, as we’d talked about driving home, when I’d imagined visiting the bayou with Morrison. For all the traveling Dad and I had done when I was a kid, we’d never hit the Big Easy, and going with Morrison had sounded wonderful. My heart thumped offbeat again and I put my fist over it, trying to breathe.
I closed my fingers on something in my coat’s inside chest pocket. I hadn’t even known it had an inside chest pocket. I took the thing out, eyebrows elevated. It looked like a sharpened hair stick of pale wood, which I decided for no particular reason must be ash, its end tipped in silver. First I was astonished it had made it through security, and then I wasn’t. Ash and silver had enough known magical qualities that even I was aware of them, and I doubted any kind of security could stop magic that really wanted to get on an airplane. I wondered if Caitríona had slipped it into my coat back in Ireland and I’d just never noticed. Except the coat had been balled up repeatedly over the past few days, so I thought I’d have noticed. I squinted down at the distant bayou again, feeling vaguely as though I’d missed something.
Morrison eyed the hair stick, then me, dubiously. “Going to grow your hair out, Walker?”
“Not in this lifetime, but it’s pretty, isn’t it?” I tucked the stick back in my pocket for safekeeping, and pressed my forehead against the window, watching New Orleans fade in the distance.
When I moved again, a faint circle of sweat and grease was left on the window. I stared at it, then snorted. It seemed like about a million years since I’d last done that, but it had only been fifteen months.
“What?” Morrison sounded concerned.
I slipped my hand into his, not sure which of us I intended to reassure. “This all started flying back home to Seattle. I feel like I’m coming full circle.”
“You’re better prepared for it now.”
“Am I?” I’d been running nonstop for two weeks, ever since a dance performance had caused me to accidentally turn Morrison into a wolf. And that had been the least of it. I’d also quit my job, stopped a sacrifice, gotten bitten by a werewolf, been to Ireland, made amends with my dead mother, defeated an avatar of evil, flown to North Carolina, reconciled with my estranged father, met the son I’d given up for adoption, and released an evil angel into the world. Furthermore, I could count the number of meals and hours of sleep I’d had in that time, which was never a good sign.
Morrison spoke with simple confidence. “You are.”
I looked at him, at his clear blue eyes and serious face, at the tiredness in his own expression and the strength of conviction that was such a great part of his appeal. There were deeper lines than usual around his mouth. I suddenly wanted them to go away, so I leaned over and kissed him.
His surprised smile gave me the boost I needed as much as his certainty did. I mashed my face against his shoulder, feeling better. “I need a vacation.”
“You can have one when this is over.”
“You think we’ll be alive to vacate when it’s over?”
“I do.” Again, his confidence was unwavering.
I smiled into his shoulder again. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
We rented a car at Sea-Tac. Morrison gave me a hairy eyeball for that and suggested the taxi ranks, but I wasn’t about to climb into another taxi like I’d done with Gary a year ago. I had visions of dragging some other unsuspecting driver into my unrelentingly weird life, and that would be just too much. Renting the car didn’t take long, but it still took longer than I wanted it to. I glanced at the clock as we pulled out into what passed for late-night traffic in Seattle. Dad was probably somewhere around Saint Louis by now, if he was burying Petite’s needle. I wished we could do the same, but it took almost an hour to get to Seattle’s General Hospital. I took my drum and went into the too-familiar, loathed, sharp-antiseptic-scented building.
For the first time since I could remember, it didn’t give me a visceral twist of pain and a seizure of sneezes. I’d been braced against both, and stumbled at not encountering them. Morrison put a hand under my elbow and I gave him a half-surprised smile. Maybe a lot more than I had realized had healed while I was in North Carolina. It was easier to see the scars now, easier to admit my hatred of hospitals came from Aidan’s sister dying in one so soon after her birth. Easier, now that I knew she lived on in her own way, in Aidan’s powerful two-spirited soul.
“You all right, Walker?”
“Better than I have any right to be.” Feeling stronger than I should, I led Morrison up to Annie’s room, where every hope I had of telling Gary that his wife was probably a simulacrum embodying evil died on my lips.
Annie Muldoon’s aura burned raging, brilliant green around a fist of darkness that throbbed and strained with her every heartbeat. I Saw it without even trying, without triggering the shamanic Sight I would normally use to diagnose a patient with. Gary, ashen and old, got up from Annie’s bedside and hugged me until I couldn’t breathe. His aura wasn’t visible: the Sight was registering extraordinary power, like the occasions when my own magic took on a visible component. I hugged him back and mumbled a promise about everything being okay, then stole a glance at Morrison.
His aura wasn’t visible, either, but thunderclouds in blue eyes offered an opinion on me promising things were going to be okay. Not for the first time, I wished my cosmic power set came with telepathy, because I wanted to say, “Well, I have to at least try!” but I could hardly say it out loud with Gary right there. Besides, I’d said it about every seven minutes on the flight, or it had felt like it, anyway. I did have to try, and I would have even if Annie’s aura had been a mire of black pitch and oil slicks.
But it wasn’t. The green was vibrant, and I knew that color. I knew it down to the depths of my soul. The creature who wore that color within himself had wormed his way in, way deep inside me, and he had no intention of leaving. I would know his mark anywhere. It was Cernunnos’s color, blazing green that threatened to burn my eyes, my mind, away if I looked at him unguarded for too long. Cernunnos had been there when Annie died, in the memories Gary had recovered.
I set Gary back a few inches, my hands on his shoulders, and met his eyes. “Tell me again, Gary. Tell me exactly what happened when she died. All of it. She had two spirit animals with her, a cheetah and a stag—” Embarrassment caught me and I blushed so hard I couldn’t speak for a few seconds. Of course Cernunnos had been in attendance, if a stag, of all creatures, had come to her. Cernunnos wasn’t the horned god for nothing: every year he grew a crown of antlers, becoming more and more of the stag, before shedding them again and regaining something approaching humanity. In the parlance of my teenage years, d’oh.
“—toldja, Joanie, at a minute past midnight he came through the damned wall and Annie sat up, reachin’ for him, and the whole goddamned world went white and next thing I knew I was back with the Hunt, headin’ back to you.”
“What did he say?”
Gary shoved a hand through his white hair. He had a headful of it, but it needed washing or brushing or some kind of attention, because it looked thinner than usual. So did he, for that matter. “He said...hell, Jo, I don’t know. He said somethin’ about the stag and sagebrush—”
I shot a look at Morrison, whose eyebrows were raised. “Call Dad. Find out what sage has to do with anything.”
“He’s in the car, Walker. He shouldn’t talk while driving.”
“Call him anyway, please. Go on, Gary.”
“And he said somethin’ about bending time to come to her when the stag called, an’ he said...hell, Jo,” Gary said again. It wasn’t, I thought, that he didn’t remember, so much as, as I had discovered time and again, it was hard to talk about magic. People loved stories about it, and liked to imagine maybe it was real, but faced with real magic in their lives, a reticence cropped up even when everybody listening knew the truth. I gripped his shoulders and nodded, encouraging him, and after a minute he went on. “He said we’d been waitin’ for the very end so we could make our move, like we’d talked about. An’ he said she was beyond my reach, but that she always had been as long as I’d known him. An’...an’ he said he’d guide her to her resting place when it was all over.”
A tiny thump of hope squeezed the air out of my lungs. It escaped as a laugh, almost without sound. “And she went into the light, is that what you said before? She actually literally went into the light, that was the last you saw of her?”
“Yeah.” Gary gave a smile, thin and watery, but a smile. “Yeah, Horns said she’d gone into the light an’ he figured that wasn’t the fate the Master’d been plannin’ for her at all, so it made it kinda bearable. Except...” He looked back at his wife, then at me, all humor gone and his gray eyes hollow. “C’mon, Jo,” he said, as quietly as I’d ever heard him speak. “Who’re we kiddin, doll? What’re the chances that’s really Annie lyin’ there?”
Morrison glanced up sharply, relief and admiration in his expression. My lungs emptied again, this time with a blow-to-the-gut rush, because although it was what I’d been dreading telling him, I didn’t want Gary to have thought of it himself. It was too sad and too cynical, and far too likely, when I wanted like crazy to pull off some kind of fairy-tale ending.
But the fact that he’d thought of it made it a little easier to draw a deep breath and admit “Not good” aloud. “I hope like hell it is, Gary, but...”
He nodded. A nurse came in to check Annie’s blood pressure, stopped short at seeing a crowd in the room and said in an excellent, hackle-raising warning tone, “Visiting hours aren’t until—”
“This’s my granddaughter and her partner,” Gary said flatly. “They’re family. They stay.”
The nurse was old enough to have the authority age brings, but Gary’s tone and greater age apparently trumped hers. She stiffened from the core out, then gave one sharp nod and went about her business. Morrison, who wasn’t exactly uncomfortable with authority, and I, who often had problems with it, both stood still as hunted mice until she left, pretending if we didn’t move she wouldn’t notice us again.
Gary’s big shoulders rolled down in apology after she was gone. “Sorry ’bout that.”
“For preemptively adopting me? I’m okay with it.” I hugged him again and he grunted, casting a look at Morrison. I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s smile before he said, “Partner works for me. Holliday’s going to have to adapt.”
To my surprise and pleasure, Gary gave a huff of laughter. “Diff’rent kind of partner. ’Sides, Joanie quit the day job, so Holliday’s gonna have to adapt anyway.”
He was still calling me Joanie, which meant he was really not okay. Gary had never called me Joanie, always Jo, unless I was undergoing some sort of major emotional meltdown. Unless, as it turned out, he was undergoing some sort of major emotional meltdown. I didn’t think he even knew he was doing it. I put on my best smile, which was pretty wry. “Yeah. Billy is going to kill me for quitting without even warning him. I’m hoping he’ll have cooled down in the two weeks he hasn’t seen me.”
“Him and Melinda came by yesterday,” Gary said. “He’s worried, not mad. Worried about a lotta things.”
Including, no doubt, Annie Muldoon’s reappearance on the scene. I nodded, then lifted my chin a little. “Go on, go sit back down, or go get a drink of water if you want. I’ll do everything I can, Gary. You know I w—”
A doctor swept in imperiously and glowered at us all. “Mr. Muldoon, I understand we have some more family visiting. It’s already well past visiting hours and we don’t normally allow more than one family member at a time—”
“My dead wife turned up again outta nowhere and you’re tellin’ me my granddaughter ain’t supposed to be here? I’m an old man, Erickson, and I’m tired. You need to talk to anybody from here on out, you talk to my granddaughter, Joanne Walker. Jo, this’s Dr. Pat Erickson. Erickson, this’s Jo’s partner, Mike. If Jo ain’t here, you talk to him.” Like a cranky bear just out of hibernation, Gary lumbered back to Annie’s bedside and sat.
Dr. Pat Erickson was about forty-five, with expertly dyed auburn hair and a long nose. She was about six feet tall, just like I was, and I bet she was accustomed to people deferring to her because of her height, if nothing else. So was I, so there was a possibility of an interesting-in-the-Chinese-sense dynamic raising its ugly head, but after a few long seconds of sizing me up, Dr. Erickson sighed. “I’m sorry for the confusion with your grandmother, Ms. Walker. May I speak to you outside for a moment?”
My jaw flapped. Erickson herded me into the hall while I collected my wits and, once we were there, apologized again. “Hospital records get lost,” she said unhappily. “People do not. Ms. Walker, can you explain any of this? The only thing that makes sense is that she’s been in private care for the past four and a half years, but there are no records of it, and clearly your grandfather has no recollection of that....”
“You’re right. She has been in private care.” If my suspicions were right, it had been very, very private care, and there would never be any real-world explanations for it. I stared at the bridge of her nose, hoping I was giving the impression of looking sincerely into her eyes as I struggled to pull together a story she might accept. “She, um. We...weren’t aware of it. I know that sounds impossible, but it appears that a...humanitarian organization...has been caring for her. They...prefer to remain anonymous, so they can select the people they wish to help without...their doors being beaten down by needy applicants. They specialize in providing long-term life support to patients on the verge of death. Apparently my grandmother...had arranged that if she became very ill, they were to take her away at the point of death. She didn’t want us to know, because she felt our lives would better be able to go on, the healing process would be able to proceed, if we believed she was...really dead. It was only when she was returned to the hospital that we were...notified that this had taken place.” I was going to give myself an award for fast talking. Maybe Erickson’s long nose had inspired me, Pinocchio-like.
Confused relief flashed across the doctor’s features. She wanted to believe me, because it gave the medical professionals who had lost Annie Muldoon a way out. Besides, I was almost telling the truth. Or I thought I was, anyway, and that helped sell the story. Erickson’s only protest was, “But your grandfather didn’t mention any of this...”
“He’s had a very hard few days, Doctor. In his position I don’t think I’d have tried to explain it, either.”
Erickson’s shoulders relaxed a fractional amount. “No, I suppose not. Ms. Walker, I understand private organizations wanting to remain anonymous, but it would be enormously helpful if we could receive their medical records for Mrs. Muldoon. If they’ve released her to standard care they must believe there’s some hope or change in her diagnosis. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t admit her through regular channels, though. I don’t understand how they could avoid it. We do not have people simply walk in and claim a bed, Ms. Walker.”
“I’ll see if I can get answers for you,” was probably the most useless promise I’d ever made, but Dr. Erickson seemed grateful for it. She shook my hand and let me go back into Annie’s room, where Morrison was standing over Gary like a protective gargoyle.
“Sagebrush is used in shamanic healing to help clear the lungs,” Morrison offered as I sat across from them. “Your father says good luck.”
“Lungs, of course. Emphysema, or something that presents as it. And the sickness is still right there.” I put my hand above her chest, not quite touching her, and added, “Tell him thanks,” even though Morrison was obviously no longer on the phone with Dad.
Gary stirred, everything about his actions heavy and hopeless. “Everything okay with the doctor, Jo?”
“Yeah.” I told them the story I’d given Erickson, ending with her supposition that the mysterious private carer had concluded something had changed and that was why Annie had been returned to a public hospital. I took her hand as I spoke, letting my consciousness sink more toward investigating her health than the discussion we were having.
It didn’t take healing magic to feel her fragility. Paperlike skin lay against knobbly bones, no excess flesh to pad them. Her breathing remained perfectly steady, but a machine was doing most of it for her, so that wasn’t surprising. The heart monitor beeped, such a familiar sound from film and television that I hadn’t even heard it until I was sitting quietly and listening. An oxygen monitor was taped to one finger, weighting not just her hand, but her whole self: it seemed like she was so light and fragile that without that inconvenient piece of plastic she might float away. She had a strange scent, the hospital’s antiseptic cleanliness lying over a deeper, earthier smell. It should probably have been the smell of death and decay, but it brought to mind cool green growing places, and mist beading on leaves. I knew that scent: I’d been to the place that birthed it.
For all that it had only been a moment since I’d stopped speaking, I was still startled when Gary asked, “Is the doc right? Did somethin’ change?”
“Yeah. Me. I’m ready now.” I pressed my eyes shut and put my forehead against Annie’s hand a moment before looking up again, meeting Gary’s eyes, glancing at Morrison, basically trying to establish myself as calm, cool and in control. “I wasn’t, when she got sick. I didn’t know you, and even if I had, I could never have helped. Not back then.”
“I nearly called you about a million times, anyway.” Gary’s mouth thinned, fair acknowledgment of the twist his life had evidently taken. At this stage, I was used to my own past not being quite as I remembered. Weirdly, that didn’t make it any easier to know Gary’s wasn’t what he remembered, either. “It ain’t normal, Jo, remembering things two ways.”
“Sure it is. Cernunnos apparently does it all the time.”
That got a laugh out of the old man, which was worth everything to me. I smiled, then spread my fingers beneath Annie’s hand. “Anyway, you didn’t need to call me back then, because you had Cernunnos in your pocket. Gary, I want you to think about everything he said to you. Did he ever say she was dead?”
“He said she’d gone into the light, doll. He said he was gonna take her to her resting place. He said...” Gary trailed off, unwilling to reiterate the list again.
I couldn’t blame him, but he hadn’t repeated a couple of the things I thought were important. “And he said he’d bent time to come to her, and that he couldn’t take you where she’d gone, right? Gary, did you go back to Tir na nOg after that?”
“No, I di—” Gary sat bolt upright, looking like himself for the first time since we’d arrived. “What’re you sayin’, Jo? Did Horns lie to me?”
“I think he might’ve gone a long way to avoid lying to you, actually. Gary, her aura, it’s blazing green, like his. Not as bright. I can look at it without going blind, but it’s the same color. It’s like Suzanne’s, not quite human. I don’t think she died, Gary. I think he took her to Tir na nOg to rest until he could get her to me.”
“Jo, give it to me straight. What’re you sayin’?”
“I’m saying that if I’m right, this really is Annie. And I can heal her.”
Chapter Three (#ub10e58da-f658-5391-a41b-f6b6bf8d2c59)
Morrison’s gaze went flat. It took everything I had not to make pleading eyes at him, and instead to keep my attention on Gary. I knew, I knew I shouldn’t have said that aloud, and if I was wrong I was never going to forgive myself. Morrison wasn’t ever going to forgive me, either.
The complete stillness in Gary’s face, the utter cessation of expectation, of hope, of fear, of anything, somehow said that he would forgive me if I was wrong, and that was almost worse than the alternative. I tried to keep my voice steady. “I could be wrong, Gary. I might be wrong. But Cernunnos wouldn’t have brought her to me if he didn’t think there was a chance. And that means either...” I swallowed. “Either it’s her and I’ve got a chance, or Cernunnos is corrupt and we’re all screwed and have been since the beginning. I choose not to believe that. Gary, with your permission...I’ll try.”
“No way I could say no, doll. Whaddaya need us to do?”
“Just keep the doctors off my back. I don’t know how long this is going to take. Morrison...” I gave him a pained, apologetic look, and some of his anger faded. “Will you drum me under? And do you think we can move Annie’s bed far enough away from the wall that I can build a power circle around her?”
“That’s not going to go over well.” Whether he meant moving the bed or drumming up a power circle in a hospital room, I wasn’t sure, but between the three of us we did edge Annie’s bed several inches away from the wall, then rotated it about thirty degrees so it aligned east-west. I squeezed between the wall and the bed, for once not self-conscious about greeting the cardinal directions aloud and asking them to be the points of my power circle. I guessed that meant I was getting better about ritual.
Not that much better, though, because what I really ended up with was a power diamond, with Annie sort of squeezed in the middle. It couldn’t be helped: the room wasn’t big enough and the medical equipment wasn’t mobile enough for anything else, but it emphasized the awareness that my whole shamanic approach seemed to be that rules were made to be broken. I sat beside Annie again and gave Morrison a hopeful look. He got my drum from the corner I’d tucked it in, and he and Gary sat across from me.
Gary did a double-take at the drum, which was fair enough. When he’d first seen it, its broad round surface had been painted with a wolf, a rattlesnake and a raven. Or I’d always assumed it was a wolf, anyway, until the painting had faded and disappeared. Only then did I start to think maybe it had been a coyote, representing my spiritual guide and mentor, whose influence on me had begun to wane. In the past few days I’d found a new spirit animal, a walking stick bug, and a new image had come in strong on the drum, obliterating the coyote: a praying mantis, its sticklike legs folded in its best-known pose. The rest of the drum remained unchanged: crossbars inside it to hold on to, beads and feathers dangling here and there from the four-inch-deep sides and a drumstick padded with raspberry-red-dyed rabbit fur. Morrison spun the drumstick in his fingers with unexpected grace, then, at my nod, began a steady beat.
Energy burst forth, a visible ripple, like sound waves had been given color so ordinary eyes might see them. Not that my eyes were ordinary: I was using the Sight, calling on magic, but the shock of power seemed so natural I was surprised I couldn’t always see it. It leaped from one point of the diamond to the next with each beat of the drum, passing through each of us as it closed the circle. It picked up all our colors—Gary’s solid silver, my gunmetal-blue, Morrison’s blue and purple—and it came together as a soft white wall of magic. That was what white magic really was: additive, the power of many working together. Black magic was subtractive, sucking life away from one or many in order to feed itself.
And that was what was going on inside of Annie Muldoon. The sickness that had been put inside her was eating away at her life and strength for its own benefit, and to the eventual detriment of the world. That wasn’t just about Annie. That was simply how the Master worked. Every spark of love and life he was able to extinguish gave him an incrementally larger hold on humanity. Annie was the poster girl for demonstrative purposes today, but it wasn’t like the entire battle lived or died with her. There would always be other hills to take. Right now, though, taking this particular hill would be enough. I exhaled quietly and let myself slip out of my body, searching for a way through the darkness to heal Annie Muldoon’s body and soul.
An unexpectedly familiar vista came into focus around me as I left my body behind. The first several times I’d spirit-walked, I’d been unable to control it, and had dug my way through to the different metaphysical planes I needed to reach. Literally dug: I’d usually end up in loamy, life-filled earth, my sense of myself turning badger or vole or wormlike as I churned my way through the soil in search of my destination. I was back there again, working through dirt chunked with vast rocks and water-filled drainage points. Back in the day, the impediments probably would have stopped me cold. These days, not so much.
For one thing, back in the day I’d have assumed there was only one path to get to where I was going, and that it lay straight ahead. I smiled faintly at my slightly younger self, then extended my hands upward. I supposed I shouldn’t really have been able to: I was packed into dirt and stone, but I’d always been able to move through it while in an astral realm, and at the moment it made me think of swimming. I wasn’t the world’s strongest swimmer, but I wouldn’t drown in a pool, which was enough. For an instant the dirt surrounding me was pool water, and I was on the bottom of the pool. I bent my knees, pushed off all the way through my toes, and burst upward into the heart of Annie Muldoon’s inner sanctum, into the garden that represented the state of her soul.
Dirt splashed away from me like water, rolling off my skin and streaming from my clothes. I ran my hand over my hair to get rid of the worst of the “wet,” then turned my palm up to watch dirt absorb into the lifeline there, just as water might do. The part of me that would always be six years old wanted to squeak, “So cool!” and do a little dance. Shamanism’s basic tenet was change: to heal someone, it was necessary to change their outlook for just an instant, just long enough to get their attention. It worked that way on every level, so if I could make myself believe, even briefly, that dirt was water, well, then, I could move through dirt like I could move through water.
Magic, when I let myself acknowledge it, was really pretty damned nifty. I shook the last of the dirt away and lifted my eyes, trying to prepare myself for the worst possible visage of Annie’s garden.
Unfortunately, I got it. I had just come off a visit to Aidan’s war-ravaged garden, a place that had been so damaged it crumbled beneath our feet. Annie’s was maybe even worse than that.
What had no doubt once been greenery was infested with black oil. Not just slicked with it, but grayed-out leaves pulsed black ichor through their thin veins like it was sap, and the roots of bleached grass sucked death out of the dry soil. Meadows and scant trees rolled on forever, the size of the place reminding me a little of the jungle that represented Gary’s garden. It appeared a life well-led created a tremendous depth of soul that was represented by vast distances. I thought of my own small, tidy garden, and how the walls that penned it in were only just now crumbling. I had a long way to go to catch up to Gary and Annie. Or even Morrison, for that matter. I was getting there, though, and every step I took through my own garden or someone else’s helped me become a little more of what I wanted to be.
Feeling a bit braver and more confident, I walked into Annie’s meadows, trying not to shiver at the bleak sky above. It twisted in unhealthy purples and blacks, and I had the distinct sense it was pulling at me and at the garden around me. Wonderful. A miniature black hole in the midst of Annie’s garden. Just what we all needed. Even more distressingly, it reminded me of the vortex Raven Mocker had come through, back in Carolina. I did not want to follow that thought to its obvious conclusion.
Instead, I reached out and touched a branch on one of the sickly, sparse trees as I went by. It crumbled, leaving a tacky substance on my fingertips. My own magic glimmered softly beneath the sticky stuff, shields ensuring that it wouldn’t sink into my skin and contaminate me, too.
Which it certainly wanted to do. It smeared across my fingers without help from me, seeking a way in so it could infect this new, healthy territory it had found. I lifted my hand, hoping for a way to get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior, then hesitated. There was always a heart to the darkness, and it was just possible I could let the muck guide me there.
Not all that long ago, the very thought would have gotten me in trouble. I was grateful that the stuff didn’t instantly slide through my shields and gobble up my soul. Even so, I concluded it probably wouldn’t be all that smart to grab another branch and get more of the glop on me. Naturally, that’s what I did: coated both hands in the unpleasant crumbly sticky goo, then closed my eyes and did my best to feel whether it wanted to tug me in any particular direction. It reminded me of driving on a worn road, where the wheels of the vehicle slid into ruts and rumbled along there whether the driver liked it or not. It meant turning aside was difficult, but I wasn’t looking to turn aside just now. I wanted that easy pull, and it seemed like it should work.
Nothing happened.
After standing there long enough to start feeling foolish, I opened my eyes again and swallowed a squeak. Apparently my definition of nothing and the garden’s definition of nothing were not the same. I was no longer in a meadow. I was no longer in a garden, for that matter. I stood on the very edge of a black precipice, wind rushing up to rip tears from my eyes. I couldn’t see a damned thing below me, but above me was the center of the vortex, screaming silently against the small bones of my ears. Hints of shimmering green quartz ran through the black stone beneath my feet like a source of light, the only real light visible in this place. It gave me an unearthly glow and struck me as just the faintest, tiniest strike against the dark, against evil and misery and dreadfulness as a whole. I said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” out loud, and edged one quarter of an inch farther over the cliff, looking down.
The vortex above me was pulling even harder now, straining to haul me upward into it. Straining to pull the very bottom of the world up into it, as far as I could tell, and that made me think there was something at the bottom that it wanted.
Before I let myself think about it, I dived off the cliff.
I had fallen off the side of forever once before, in the Upper World. Then, a thunderbird had caught me. This time I was pretty certain nothing was going to catch me, but I was less afraid than I should have been. I had no idea where the bottom was, though once in a while I got a brighter glimpse of the falling world around me, as the green quartz flared and darkened again in the cliff face. I whispered, Raven? inside my head, and though my oldest and best-loved spirit animal didn’t actually appear, he offered something he had never shared before: a gift of wings.
I didn’t fly. My fall didn’t even slow. Not until the bottom of the pit finally came into view, a thin green light that strengthened and brightened as I fell closer. At the critical moment that sense of wings flared, slowing me, breaking my fall. I hit the ground in a three-point crouch, feeling like a goddamned superhero, and bounced to my feet crowing, “I’m Batman!”
Bouncing up was nearly my undoing. The vortex’s upward pull dragged me up several feet before it lost its grip. I fell again, far less gracefully this time, and stayed down when I hit.
The green light was coming from a crack in the pit’s floor, which I could now see clearly because my face was mashed into it. The rock broke away under my weight, which was probably a bad sign, but it didn’t collapse entirely while I stared into the light and tried to wrap my mind around what I saw.
Apparently I’d stumbled on the shamanic version of Snow White. An emerald-green stone casket—not really a casket, more a cocoon—was buried beneath the pit, and Annie Muldoon lay within the cocoon. Quiet, soothing power pulsed from it, bringing a soft and unexpected scent of mist and leaves with it. I pushed my right arm into the crack, seeing if I could touch the cocoon.
I couldn’t, quite. It had been well buried. I twisted to look toward the vortex, wondering if the cocoon had in fact been really well buried and that the vortex was only just now managing to tear its way through the earth to reach it. Assuming the shards of quartz in the cliff were related to the casket, it seemed fairly likely. Which meant—
Well. It meant we’d barely timed this right. If Morrison and I had been half a day later in arriving from North Carolina, the vortex would’ve gotten to Annie before I did. As it stood, I was afraid to dig her out for fear we’d both go flying up into the great mouth of darkness in the sky. I was going to have to go down to her.
Goose bumps stood on the back of my neck and swept down my arms, sending a chill into my belly, where it churned around a little bit. I had never had a problem with enclosed spaces until two weeks ago, when I’d had to make a mad run out of a collapsing cave system. Since then, I’d discovered a growing tendency toward heebie-jeebies when presented with squeezing myself into tight spaces, which had happened more often than seemed reasonable in a mere two weeks. The upshot was a quick internal lecture about tough luck and the lesson therein, not that I could think of any useful lessons beyond “Stop getting embroiled in mystical altercations that squish you into crevasses and cracks,” which seemed like sound, but possibly unfollowable, advice.
I knocked some of the thinning pit floor away with my elbows and knees while ruminating over all of that, and fell five feet onto Annie Muldoon’s crypt.
This had all started with a crypt, or darned near, anyway. Me and Gary, we’d gone hunting for a lady I’d seen from an airplane, and we’d shoved the top off a church altar that we’d started thinking of as a crypt as soon as Gary had wondered out loud if maybe a vampire was in it. I had sworn up and down that there was no such thing as vampires, and indeed, there had been no vampire, only a screaming woman who ejected herself from the altar-cum-crypt at a high velocity.
“You can scream,” I told Annie through my teeth, “but if you turn out to be a vampire I am going to be really pissed off. Vampires don’t exist.”
Annie, sleepily, murmured, “Of course they do.”
Chapter Four (#ulink_961fa460-4e4b-564e-8432-fe54cedf0eff)
I screeched and bucked backward. The vortex howled delight and tried to seize me. Swearing, I dug my fingers into Annie’s cocoon and hauled myself closer to it. Her lashes untangled, revealing eyes that were vividly green in the cocoon’s light. I wondered what color they were supposed to be and muttered, “There are. No. Vampires.”
Annie’s gaze and voice both grew clearer, as if she was just learning to focus. “What on earth do you imagine the Master is, Joanne? Oh! Joanne!” Even caught in the cocoon, she reached for me like a mother might, fingertips trying to graze my cheekbone. “I know you,” she whispered in astonishment. “You’re my Gary’s Joanne. My father painted you.”
I gave myself a quick look to see if I’d been war-painted recently without noticing. I hadn’t, or at least not on any body parts that were easily visible. A couple seconds later I realized that probably wasn’t what she’d meant, and turned red enough that I could see my skin turn a sickly brown in the sarcophagus’s green glow.
“Am I dreaming?” Annie asked, then looked pained. “How many patients have I heard say that, but...I remember...I remember...I was dying. The god came. The god.” Her eyes widened in a breathless admiration I knew all too well. “The horned god. Did he really come? There was the stag and the cat,” and she took a moment out of her admiration to look exasperated at the very idea, which made me absolutely adore her. I was going to bring her home not just for Gary, but for me, because I couldn’t help but love anybody whose estimation of a big-cat spirit animal was in league with mine. “The cat,” she repeated, “the cat and the light. The white—oh. Oh. I am dead, aren’t I. I was a nurse too long, young lady. Don’t imagine I haven’t heard people talk about the white light.”
“You’re not dead.” My voice cracked. “And I’m going to keep you that way. I’ve looked into that white light more than once. Usually it’s just the sun trying to burn out my retinas.”
Perplexity slid across her face, then turned to a smile. Probably she hadn’t imagined death to involve people muttering about burned-out eyeballs, which probably gave her some hope that I was telling the truth. “But then what’s happened to me? To Gary?”
“Gary’s waiting for you, sweetheart. Cernunnos stole you out of time, put you to sleep in Tir na nOg, until I could come help out. You know me.” My voice cracked again and tears stung my nose. “And I’m going to. I’m going to save you, Annie.”
“No, I wasn’t sleeping. I dreamed...I dreamed I was...” She trailed off like the dream had escaped her, as they do, and seriousness rose in Cernunnos-green eyes. “You can’t save everyone, Joanne. Sometimes we make sacrifices so others can live. Don’t imagine you can’t sacrifice me, if you need to.”
“Sacrifices are what the bad guys make,” I whispered. “Sacrifices are—”
Realizations tumbled together in my mind, pieces crashing into place, making a picture I’d never even known I was supposed to see. Cernunnos and Tir na nOg had come so close to death with the cauldron. All of a sudden I thought it hadn’t just been the Master taking advantage of the cauldron’s bindings breaking. It had been his move against Cernunnos for stealing Annie from him. Kill Tir na nOg and Annie would die, too. Cernunnos had nearly sacrificed everything, betting on me. And he’d won. There had been no sacrifice of his godhood, of his world. I’d thwarted it, even if I hadn’t known it at the time. Things kept coming together, circles closing.
Boy, the Master had to hate me right down to the black burned bones of his rotten soul.
That made me happy. More than happy. Absofreakinglutely joyful, and with that joy came a spike of gunmetal magic that shot skyward, spiking through the vortex.
Its pull faltered and a sense of shock washed through me, as if the vortex itself hadn’t expected me to fight back at all. As if the thing on its other side hadn’t imagined I had it in me. I pressed a finger against Annie’s cocoon, near where her own hand had tried to reach for me. “You hang out here a minute. I’m going to go spit in death’s eye.”
Two minutes earlier I’d have said getting to my feet would be asking to be sucked into the netherworld the Master commanded. Two minutes earlier I might have been right, but things had changed since then. Annie Muldoon was alive and, as far as I could tell, human through and through. A god had bet the rent on me and won. My best friend had traveled through time to save the woman he loved, and the man I loved believed in me.
If I ever needed grounding, those things would always be there. I stood up, digging my toes into the shimmering green softness that contained Annie. It was cool and earthy, centering me in my world and in Tir na nOg. I thrust my left hand toward the sucking vortex and shouted.
My rapier, the aos sí–crafted blade of silver that I’d taken from Cernunnos the first time we met, materialized in my hand. Shamanic power poured into it, healer and warrior no longer at odds with each other. It gathered, strengthened, readied itself, and when I shouted again and thrust the sword skyward, a burst of magic cracked forth like lightning from a bottle. The vortex sucked it in, encouraging it to run faster, until the first splinter of power touched it. Then the vortex shied back, rejecting the shamanic magic. I stabbed upward again, sending another shock upward.
I felt like Conan. I felt like Red Sonja in white leather instead of a chain-mail bikini. I felt like a match for the dark side of the Force, and I was going to take one more toy from the Master right now, because I could. “This one’s mine, you bleak bastard! The gods chose this one, you mean son of a bitch, and you can’t do a thing about it. I choose this one,” I said more softly, “and you’re not taking her away.”
I knelt, still with power pouring through the sword. The Master wasn’t going to let us go easily, once he got over his surprise at my audacity, so I dug my fingers into Annie’s cocoon, working my way through its ferociously green threads. Cernunnos’s strength was a lover twining around my hand, clinging to my arm, searching for a way into my heart.
I let it in. I had to: I could never shield myself against the horned god. He was too primal and too enticing, and had etched himself in my soul the first time I’d laid eyes on him.
But neither was I his. He’d offered me a place at his side time and again, and three times, I’d taken it. I’d ridden with him and his Wild Hunt, and I knew in my core that if I rode with him again I would lose my humanity, and want nothing but the god. For all my fears and uncertainties, I still wanted my human life. I wanted Morrison. I wanted the future we could share, if we were that lucky. If we survived this. So no matter how deeply Cernunnos’s power ran or how eagerly it prodded, I wouldn’t let it steal me away. Annie needed his strength more than I did right now, and I intended to leave her everything I could.
Thread by thread, Annie’s features came clearer as Cernunnos’s magic recognized mine and released its prize to me. Here, under the god’s care, in the heart of his magic and at the center of her garden, she was young and lovely, with humor and spark in her face. My fingers touched hers, then wrapped around her hand. I pulled her to her feet, surprised at how tiny she was: nearly a foot shorter than me, and dressed in a full-skirted 1950s dress that made the most of her small waist. She reminded me of Gary in his own garden, a young man in his prime, handsome, fit, confident. They were a beautiful couple, and I was going to see them back together in the Middle World.
The last of Cernunnos’s green power unwound, releasing Annie from the cocoon. Some of the unwinding magic swirled around my own, joining the blended silver and blue that raced upward. With that green haze sweeping around my power, the two of us, shaman and god, in it together, it seemed only appropriate to cry, “From hell’s heart, I stab at thee,” to the cringing vortex above.
That, of course, was a mistake.
The vortex lost cohesion, which sounded like it should be a positive development. Except instead of falling apart, it became a spidery black thing, thin piercing legs breaking apart from the core and slamming downward. Not even at me, not really. At Annie, who was weak on her feet, barely learning to move again after being cocooned for years on end.
Her hand was still in mine. My shields slid around her as snugly as a hug. Her presence within them solidified, as if she took comfort from the metaphysical embrace. I felt the first spark of her aura, burnished copper with streaks of red, reasserting itself after the cushion of Cernunnos’s magic. The thinnest threads of green still sparkled through it, just as I imagined I felt them in mine: Cernunnos was within us, not quite apart from this battle, but not quite there, either. That was okay. His moral support was enough.
Spider legs tapped against our shields, prickling and prying. The sound settled behind my ears and made hairs rise on my arms. Annie’s breath was sharp and rough now that she was out of the cocoon, like the emphysema was coming on full bore.
Like thinking it gave the spidery attack an opening, a chink appeared in our armor. Annie’s hand clenched on mine. “It’s me. I can’t hold it back. It’s still in me.”
“I can hold it back.” Even as I spoke, one of the skinny legs wriggled its way through, making the thinnest stain of black on the inside of my shields. My lip curled and I strengthened them, cutting off the darkness. No more seeped through, but what was there leaped from the shields into Annie, blackening the copper of her spirit and coating her lungs.
My hands were full, one with Annie’s grip, the other with my sword, as power continued to roar toward the shattering vortex. I still tried to move to fight the infection, and instead spasmed violently to check myself from my first impulse.
Annie’s attention snapped from the emerging spider to me. “What was that?”
“A really bad idea.”
She glanced back at the sky, at the killing cloud that had spent years trying to dig her out of Cernunnos’s protective tomb, then gave me an arch look. “Worse than that?”
“Yeah.” I looked skyward, too, then drew a sharp breath through my nostrils. “Unless you trust me completely.”
“With my life,” Annie Muldoon said with such simple clarity that I nearly wept.
Then I drove my sword into her heart.
It was hard to tell who was more surprised, Annie or the evil thing hungering for her soul. Her mouth and eyes turned to enormous circles, but she remained silent. Silent, when somebody had just stuffed a sword into her. Silent, which told me it probably didn’t hurt, which was what I’d expected. We were in the much-depleted garden of her soul, but it was her soul. I wasn’t attacking her physical body, but the sickness inside it. Still, being stabbed was the sort of thing that might instinctively cause a person to scream, and she didn’t.
Nor did the vortex, not yet. I clenched my stomach, wondering why, wondering what I had missed, and it came to me with absurd clarity. Of course there are vampires, Annie had just said to me, and everybody knew you didn’t kill a vampire just with silver. It took wood, too.
I reached inside my coat and took out the hair stick I’d discovered over New Orleans, clasping it against the hilt of my rapier and infusing the silver with ash.
The vortex became a sound of pain and rage so great I could barely comprehend it. Tornadoes and tearing metal, cats fighting and fingernails on chalkboard, on and on in outrage and fear. A breath escaped me, not quite as triumphant as laughter. Just a breath that acknowledged my stupid-ass idea had some merit, if the howling darkness was so angry at the action.
Because swords—my sword in particular—cut both ways. It was a weapon, by its very nature meant to kill, and there was something here to kill, a creeping illness that ate and tore at Annie’s life. I saw that sickness punch downward, gathered by the rapier and stretched, rather than torn, by the complex weave of ash wood inside the silver blade. It came out beside her spine, the rapier driving it through and then out of Annie’s body. Mostly out: threads, scraps, still clung inside her, hooked ends catching in the bronchi and alveoli and holding on. Annie shuddered, though she still said nothing, wildfire-green eyes intent on me. Trusting me, which was so brave as to be madness. But her father had dreamed me, Gary loved me, and she had spent years wrapped in Cernunnos’s land, protected by a god who knew and coveted me. I was a stranger, but not unknown. I gave her my best smile and a confident nod, and released the sword’s other edge within her.
Killing, yes. That was what a blade like this was made for. But scalpels saved lives, too, and my sword, like myself, had accepted its destiny and heritage. A killing thrust to pierce the sickness, but also to drive healing magic through Annie’s center. Silver and blue split apart, burning through her veins faster than any heart could send it. It lit her up from within, racing back and forth, up and down, crashing into itself and splashing waves of gunmetal where it merged. Sizzling heat turned to flashes of silver fire where it encountered the Master’s invading power. As fast as I saw it, it was gone again, leaving only my magic in its place. My power split again, chasing the sickness and glowing with heat of its own, like molten silver.
Molten silver. I had watched Nuada, the sword’s maker, turn his own living silver flesh into this blade, and for the first time I wondered if some part of the elf king was part of this battle, too. If he reached through time in his own way, lending a whisper of elfin immortality to the fight against the Master. It would never make a mortal live forever, but its inexorable age might lend a little more light to the path Annie had to tread.
Because I couldn’t get it all. I should be able to, in the heart of Annie’s garden, in the lingering warmth of Cernunnos’s cocoon. I’d fought so many battles in spirit realms that I’d almost thought it was going to be that easy. That I was going to save Annie Muldoon here in the heart of her garden, and cast the Master out forever.
But from here, watching and feeling the threads of his power burn and hiss, I could tell they reached back into the Middle World. He’d had his fingers dug into Annie’s ordinary human life so deeply and for so long in the Middle World that maybe I could never have won this fight purely in the spiritual planes. More than that, though, the Master finally had a host in the real world: Raven Mocker was out there somewhere, anchoring him. That meant the Master was more strongly entrenched in the world now than he had ever been in my encounters with him, and I was pretty sure winning a real-world throw-down would tie him to the world far more strongly than any kind of spiritual battle could. After all this time and effort, he wasn’t going to settle for second best.
And the truth was, the body he’d taken for Raven Maker was second best. I wasn’t kidding myself. Odds of the Master sticking with Raven Mocker’s original host body, a guy named Danny whom I’d known as a kid, were vanishingly rare. Annie had called him a vampire, and there were two things I was certain vampires did: kill people, and make more like themselves.
And into that, Annie Muldoon had shown up. Honestly, on every level, I knew the smart thing to do would be to cut the last threads holding Annie to life, and to let her go free. I was pretty certain her soul, if not her body, could escape the Master’s claws now. There were shadows inside her, thrown into sharp relief by the sword’s brilliance, but they were nothing like the weight of sickness that had brought her to—and beyond—death’s door. They were a toehold, a place to start again, not something to forever condemn her soul. I should, on any kind of smart bet, let her go now.
I was demonstrably not the type to take a smart bet. Not when faced with the woman Gary and Cernunnos had bent time to bring to me for healing. Not, when I got down to the crux of the matter, when faced with any kind of impossible odds and the slightest chance of setting them right.
“We have to go up,” I said quietly. “Right into the maw. It’s been chewing its way down through your garden—your soul—to the core of your being. Cernunnos has been protecting you, and that gave me a chance to burn most of the sickness out. But we’ve got to take it back, Annie. We’ve got to take your garden back. We have to go through the darkness to come out the other side.”
Annie took the shallowest breath possible around the rapier’s blade, just enough for a weak question. “How?”
“With this.” I nodded at the sword, not wanting to wiggle it and hurt her. Not that it should hurt, but wiggling it just seemed cruel. “It’ll be just as much of a shock coming out as it was going in, but it’s going to be carrying some of your essence, too, when it comes out. Between you, me and it, we’re going to punch right through to the Middle World. We’re going home, Annie. I’m bringing you back to Gary.”
I yanked the sword out before she had time to brace herself.
Power cracked open the sky. My power, Annie’s power, Cernunnos’s, maybe a touch of Nuada’s, too. Cumulative white magic for the second time in a morning, this time born from within. Far above us, far beyond the edge of the cliff I’d dived off—a cliff now illuminated by roaring magic—far up there, the blackened and corrupt roof of Annie’s garden suddenly shone, sloughing off the first sheen of dark magic. I wrapped my arm around Annie’s waist like I was Errol Flynn and she was Olivia de Havilland, snugging her against my body. The roaring power focused by the sword contracted, swinging us in a cinematic arc toward the breaking sky.
Annie finally did shriek, laughter coming out as a high-pitched shout. That had to be a good way to start back on the road home, with laughter and excitement. I focused on it, adding it to the upswelling of magic, and chunks of blackened sky started to fall away. We leaned together, swinging around them, always climbing, scrambling, hurrying upward. There was no vortex left, its spidery legs withdrawn or so quashed within Annie’s body and soul that it had no strength to stop us. Part of me thought, It can’t be this easy, and the rest of me, sounding rather like that little voice that had recently slipped away, said, What the hell about any of the past year has been easy?
We ricocheted past the cliff edge I’d leaped off, still careening upward. Above us, not nearly so far above us anymore, the sky split the width of a hair, then broke apart to let a torrent of white magic come pounding in.
It fell around us like rain, bringing Annie’s garden back to life where it touched down. It streamed across our bodies, pounding at the wealth of green power that Cernunnos had left around Annie. Her own aura began to emerge, rich with age and deep copper in color. It complemented the remaining green wonderfully, but it complemented something else even more: the silver that began shivering out of the falling magic. Gary’s silver, the solid rumbling V8-engine strength of his soul coming to help his wife find her way home again.
Annie’s aura went from emergent to radiant in a heartbeat, pouring the warmth of life up and out. It caught in the rain of white magic and spilled back down again, reviving her garden further, until we rushed through the crack in the sky back into the Middle World.
We actually slammed into the hospital room ceiling before bouncing back to our bodies again. I sat up straight, rubbing my nose. Just within my vision, beyond the shadow of my fingertips, Annie took a sharp, soft breath of her own, not dictated by the ventilator’s steady rhythm. Everything else in the room went silent, even the beeping of the monitors. Or maybe not; maybe the next moment happened fast and only seemed to stretch an impossibly long time. It didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter, because Annie Marie Muldoon opened her eyes and smiled at her husband. “Hello, sweetheart.”
Chapter Five (#ulink_231762c4-0932-5c43-a6c7-3168ac459412)
Color drained from Gary’s face. From his hands, too: I could see them whiten around where they held Annie’s, and I bet they were suddenly icy to the touch. Annie squeezed his fingers gently, still smiling. “It’s me. I think it’s me. I think your Joanne wouldn’t have let me come back, if I wasn’t me anymore.”
Gary shot me a harder look than he’d ever given me before, like for a moment he couldn’t forgive me for the idea of not bringing her back. I kind of couldn’t blame him, even though his protectiveness came after the fact. He caught up to that realization a moment later and turned his attention back to Annie. His hands were shaking as he lifted her fingers to his mouth, and though he tried a couple of times, he couldn’t make it all the way to words.
That was okay, because Annie seemed to have some. Her voice was warm and steady, comforting, even though she was the one newly back from the dead and could be expected to be at loose ends. But then, she’d been a nurse. Maybe that helped. Or maybe it was easier to come back from the dead than to have mourned and moved on, only then to be presented with a bona fide miracle. “It’s still there. I can still feel it inside me, making my lungs feel heavy. It wants out. I won’t let it,” she said with perfect equanimity. “I’ll die first. I already did once.”
“You won’t have to.” I sounded just as calm, just as resolved. Annie gave me a brief smile. Gary didn’t. I wasn’t even certain he was breathing.
“I’m sure you’re right, Joanne. Now.” Her smile turned stern, though there was a suspicious spark of brightness behind her emerald eyes. She turned all of that stern amusement on her husband, and flicked one eyebrow high up on her forehead. “Imelda, Gary? Is there something I should know about Imelda Welch from Kansas?”
Gary’s mouth fell open, a blush curdling his face. His jaw flapped a few times and a wheeze emerged. I peered between them, nigh unto bursting with curiosity. Finally his wheeze became a breathless grunt, which he followed up by seizing Annie in his arms and burying his face in her shoulder.
For a woman just back from the dead, she looked to have a hell of a grip as she knotted her own arms around Gary and held on tight. For a while neither of them were coherent, mumbles and breaths of laughter interspersed with caught gasps of sobs. I sat there smiling idiotically, tears running unheeded down my face, until it finally occurred to me that they might want a little privacy. My knees were wobbly when I stood, but Morrison was there, his own face as unabashedly wet as mine. He drew me across the room, then murmured, “Imelda?” so quietly that I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t been wondering the same thing. I shrugged and tugged him a step or two closer to the door. We could hang out in the hall for a while, until Gary was ready to come get us. Morrison glanced back at the Muldoons one more time, a blinding smile appearing on his features. As we stepped out of the room, he took a deep breath. “Did you see them? Walker, I want to ask you—”
His question fell into startled silence as the door closed behind us. I blinked tears away, still smiling at him, then followed his uncertain gaze.
Suzanne Quinley, granddaughter of a god, sat on a bench across the hall.
She glanced up as the door closed behind us, looking lost in a massive gray hoodie and skinny blue jeans. Her long legs were drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, making her all elbows and knees. Ethereal elbows and knees, though, even disguised by the hoodie. She was slim-built with fine bones, and her wheat-pale straight hair still curtained her features.
When she looked up, I thought it was just as well that her hair often hid her face. Her eyes were so green, so vivid and sharp, that they seemed to be the only living, human thing about her. Therein lay the irony, of course, because she’d gotten that stunning gaze from her immortal grandfather, Cernunnos, god of the Wild Hunt.
Cernunnos, whose power I’d just been messing with in the room behind me. My voice broke as I blurted, “Suzy? Is everything okay?”
For a girl who was all elbows and knees, she unwound with surprising grace and flung herself the short distance across the hall into my arms. I grunted and fell back a step. Morrison caught our weight and straightened us up while Suzy clung to my ribs like a hungry leech. “I knew if I came here I’d find you!”
Last time Suzanne Quinley had said something of that sort to me, she’d been coming to warn me that she’d had visions of my death. Shortly thereafter we’d fought zombies together, a scene which had left me whimpering and sniveling like a child. I did not want to reenact any of that, but it was a little hard to say, Augh! Get off me, kid! without causing offense. “What’s wrong, Suze? What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”
Suzy pulled out of my arms with an expression not dissimilar to Annie’s when she’d mentioned the spirit cheetah. Except I’d had warning about the spirit cat, but had none at all for Suzy’s exasperated reply. “It’s two in the afternoon. And my best friend, Kiseko, and her boyfriend, Robert Holliday, magicked me here from Olympia last night.”
“Rob—” My tongue and brain got all tangled up trying to decide which of those things I should latch on to. Being an honorary aunt of the boy in question, the second bit won. “Robert has a girlfriend?”
Suzy rolled her eyes as only a fifteen-year-old could. “Kiseko says not, but yeah, right. Anyway, they magicked me, Detective Walker, isn’t that more important?”
“Ah. Um. Not ‘Detective’ anymore. I’m just plain old Joanne. How did they...magic you? It’s two in the afternoon? What?” I had the terrible idea I was so far behind that I’d never catch up, and I was kind of afraid to even try. Even so, I looked to Morrison for confirmation about that last, and he nodded. I held up a palm, silencing Suzanne for a few seconds, and said, “It’s two in the afternoon? It was midnight—!”
“You were under for twelve hours, Walker. More than twelve hours. Muldoon and I were—” Morrison took a sharp, deep breath, then abruptly pulled me into a hug. “I was starting to wonder if you were coming back, Walker.”
Muffled by his shoulder, I said, “I did. I always will. I’m sorry. Twelve hours?” Now that I knew half a day had passed I was suddenly incredibly thirsty and a bit woobly of knee. “I’ve never been under that long before. It didn’t feel that long. It felt...” It had felt like minutes, just as it always did. But it had been a hell of a lot of untangling and wrangling in there, and what I knew about more traditional shamanic healings didn’t generally suggest they happened in the blink of an eye that I was accustomed to. I’d apparently just about met my match, which wasn’t exactly a shocker. The Master had been my match—more than my match—all along. “How did you keep the hospital staff off us?”
Morrison grunted, a sound which may have been intended as a distant cousin to laughter. “Muldoon went off on a tear about freedom of religion and infringement of civil rights. They cited the patient’s rights and their own obligations and threatened to call the police. Finding out my rank took the wind out of their sails. Aside from checking her vitals they left us alone after that.”
“Jesus,” I said, heartfelt, and Morrison tightened his arms around me.
“Don’t do that again, Walker. Try not to do that again.”
“I’ll try.”
“A-hem.” Suzy drew our attention back to her, and I couldn’t decide if her tone of offense was for us ignoring her or for what her friends had done. “They called me. Like I was a magic dog or something. And then...” Offense flew out the window, replaced by a shiftiness that had no business on a face as young and innocent as Suzanne’s. Never mind that she’d pretty well lost any innocence the day we’d met, when her adoptive parents had been murdered by her birth father, whom I had then run through with a sword. “Then some things happened. But that’s not important right now!”
Some things happened was not a phrase I wanted to consider too deeply when discussing two teenage girls and a teenage boy as participants. Morrison the police captain, however, had no compunction against it at all. “What kinds of things, Suzanne?”
Suzy blinked and turned scarlet from the collar of her shirt up. “Oh. My. God. Not those kinds of things. Omigod. No, it was magic stuff, not—omigod.”
The poor kid was fit to die of mortification. Morrison, who could not be embarrassed on such, or perhaps any, topics, studied her momentarily like he was deciding whether she was telling the truth. She kept blushing a flaming blush until he nodded with satisfaction and gave her a brief, reassuring smile. I wasn’t nearly that good a person, and merely tried not to laugh. “Okay, so it wasn’t that kind of stuff. What kind of magic stuff?”
“It was like stuff with...I don’t know, it was kind of creepy. But I’ve been having visions since then, or I haven’t been, and that’s the important part, Dete—uh, Ms. Walker.”
All my laughter dried up. “Visions of what?”
“I don’t know!” The last word was nearly a wail. Suzy collapsed back onto the bench, shoulders slumped, elegant fingers dangling between her legs. “I don’t know. Darkness, but not like nighttime. It’s alive, it’s...it’s greedy. It’s...it’s fighting the green,” she said in obvious embarrassment, though I had no idea what she was embarrassed about. “It wants something. It wants something really important, and I can’t See what.”
I exhaled noisily. “It’s the thing that made the cauldron, Suzy. It’s the Master. And he probably wants me.”
“I don’t think so. It more like he wants...me.”
My teeth clicked together and a hole opened up in my heart. There were a lot of reasons I could imagine something dark wanting Suzy. “Maybe we better go back to ‘what kind of magic stuff?’”
Suzanne sighed deeply enough that I thought I’d better go sit next to her. That kind of sigh preceded long stories, in my experience. But all she said was, “Kiseko was trying to raise an earth element, and she got me. I guess that kind of makes sense, but whatever. Anyway, when, or once, I came through, so did something else. And it felt...bad. And I fought it, and I won, but it, like, leaked oil inside my head. All I can see is the darkness, futures where everything has gone dark. That, and green. And I’m green, Detec—Ms. Walker. Ms. Walker.”
“You can call me Joanne.”
Suzy hesitated. “I don’t think so. My aunt would look at me. But thanks. Anyway, it’s like I feel all these dark futures in my head, Ms. Walker, and...and they want something. Something that’ll help them come true.” She swallowed. “I’m afraid it’s me.”
“Then we won’t let that happen.” I sat down beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, tugged her closer to me, and did my best to sound like a confident, reassuring grown-up. “It’ll be fine, Suzy. I promise.”
She sighed again and leaned on me. Morrison, still standing across the hall, got an oddly soft expression, then looked away with a smile. I decided not to read anything into that, because I was pretty sure it crossed into territory I wasn’t yet prepared to tread. “How long has this been going on, Suze?”
“Since last night? They only just summoned me.”
I closed my eyes, mumbling, “I’m going to have to tell Billy his son is summoning people. That’s not going to go over well.” Then my eyes popped open again. “Wait, last night? How did you even know I was here?”
“Every paper in Seattle is talking about the woman who came back from the dead. Where else would you be?”
“North Carolina,” I said dryly. “That’s where I was until...” I paused to adjust my mental time line. “Until last night. Wait, does that mean it’s April first? This is all a pretty crappy idea of an April Fools’ joke.”
Morrison didn’t even crack a smile, and Suzy kind of slumped in defeat. Apparently it was a crappy enough April Fools’ joke that it wasn’t even worth commenting on.
Staring at her toes, Suzy mumbled, “Well, I just, I mean, I thought you’d be here.”
“How does anybody even know about Annie? It shouldn’t be in the papers. I’d think the hospital would be trying to keep it quiet.”
“That Channel Two reporter got hold of it. The pretty one. She was covering some other story at the hospital and heard people talking about this old woman who turned up out of nowhere. So she turned the story into an exposé on the carelessness of the Seattle hospital systems. She was on the national news last night.”
I groaned and sat forward to put my face in my hands. “Laurie Corvallis? God, the national news? That’s got to thrill her right down to her cold-blooded toes. How much you want to bet she parlays this into an anchor position somehow?”
“That’s a bet I wouldn’t take,” Morrison answered. I smiled in admiration of his wisdom while Suzy peered between us.
“We’ve met Laurie Corvallis,” I explained. “Frankly, we’re lucky she’s only doing an exposé on the hospital system, not trying to shine light on the magical aspects of the world. Believe me, if she thought there was anything hinky about this, and that she could make a story of it that people would believe, she’d be all over that like white on snow.”
“Hinky.” Suzy wrinkled her nose dubiously. “Did she really just say hinky?”
“I’ve learned to think of her verbal tics as part of her charm,” Morrison said, straight-faced enough that I thought I should be offended. Then he cracked a grin and Suzy let go a relieved little burst of giggles, like she’d desperately needed the pressure release. Morrison was much better at kids than I was.
Of course, I was pretty certain giant squid were better at kids than me. That was good. Under the circumstances, somebody needed to be. I drew my tattered dignity around myself and sniffed. “If you’re quite finished making fun of me...?”
Suzy giggled again, which pleased me. I squeezed her shoulders. “Okay. First—wait. First, does your aunt know you’re here, this time?” Much to my relief, she nodded. “Good. Wait. How? If you got magicked—never mind. You promise she knows?” Suzy nodded again and I struggled past all the hows and whys to focus on the important part. “In that case, I’m basically not letting you out of my sight until this is over, okay? I can keep you safe if we’re together.”
It occurred to me that I needed to tell Annie Muldoon the same thing, and that I’d just left her all alone with Gary. My stomach turned upside down and I got up awkwardly, limbs no longer responding the way they should. Annie had said vampires were real. And Annie was back from the dead. I wobbled over to the room door and peered through the window.
My knees weakened. I put my hand on the doorknob for support, and my forehead against the window. They were fine. Holding hands, foreheads pressed together, looking for all the world like wrinkly teenagers in the throes of puppy love.
“Walker?”
“I just had an ugly thought. Never mind. It’s okay.” I sounded like I’d swallowed a rasp. Morrison and Suzy—she’d gotten up when I did, though I hadn’t really noticed in the moment—came to frown through the window. Morrison’s frown cleared a bit as he saw the lovebirds, then deepened again when he looked back at me. I gave him my best sick smile. “You could maybe say I trust her about as far as I could throw her.”
“She’s pretty little, and you’re pretty strong,” Suzy said thoughtfully. “I bet you could throw her quite a ways, if you got a good grip. Like the back of her pants and her collar, maybe.”
She blinked at us with such innocence in her big green eyes that we both laughed. She brightened, making me realize she’d been trying hard to break the tension, just as Morrison had done for her. Poor kid shouldn’t have to be the grown-up. I tugged a lock of her pale hair in thanks, then lifted my eyebrows. “You’re probably right, at that. I could probably even chuck you a fair distance.”
A spark of teen wickedness sparked in her eyes. “Just try.”
I lunged for her and she shrieked, fleeing down the hall. I gave a half-voiced roar and chased her a few yards while Morrison said, “Walker,” in despair. I looked back at him with a grin and he presented me with a weak version of the Almighty Morrison glare that used to have me quaking in my shoes. Even that was interrupted by his phone ringing, so he turned away and I went back to chasing Suzy down the hall until a nurse gave us both scathing looks. We scurried back toward Morrison, both of us trying not to giggle.
Morrison’s expression shut down my laughter. Suzy put her arms around my ribs like a much younger kid and huddled under my arm, both of us listening to Morrison’s grunted responses and a handful of short sentences before he snapped his phone shut and met my eyes.
“There’s just been a mass murder at Thunderbird Falls.”
Chapter Six (#ulink_3df7d81e-74bd-5fce-adcd-62049b9bd748)
Saturday, April 1, 2:02 p.m.
If Suzy hadn’t been holding on, I’d have fallen. As it was, the world didn’t gray out: it went black. Not a dizzy sort of black. Dark magic sort of black, swirling up to eat at the auras I was half aware of seeing. Snipping away at Morrison’s purples and blues, drinking greedily at Suzy’s blaze green. I shouted, a hoarse hurtful sound.
Black spilled away under a rush of my own magic, gunmetal pushing back at the darkness. I swung around, out of Suzy’s grip, until I faced Lake Washington. Until I faced Thunderbird Falls, which had been a bastion of white magic in Seattle. I could always See the falls. Power shot upward from it, white magic full of faint rainbow hues that eventually crashed against the clear blue sky or thick gray clouds, and spilled back down over Seattle, bringing a bit more pleasantry and generosity than had been there before. That was a gift of the good-hearted and good-willed New-Agey types in Seattle, by the covens and the other folk who had been drawn to the falls. Their difficult birth had rearranged Seattle’s landscape, but it had been turned into a good thing.
And now it was dying.
Ichor oozed upward through the column of white magic, its stain growing exponentially. The faint rainbow tints tainted to oil slicks instead, white shading to shades of gray. I could See perfectly well that it still reached for the sky, but it felt heavier, like the darkness was dragging it down. Like it would be happier buried in the earth, though I didn’t know if that was true. It seemed to me that if the white magic could rain cheer and contentment down on people, that black magic raining doom and misery would be right up the Master’s alley.
On the other hand, the vicious truth was I didn’t yet know the Master’s endgame. I was good at self-aggrandizing, but I seriously doubted his entire goal was to obliterate me and my friends. It was definitely on his to-do list, because we were a constant pain in his ass, but I didn’t think he would call it done and dusted the moment I was a smear on the pavement. In fact, if I thought that, I might’ve even been willing to become that smear just to offer everybody else a get-out-of-jail-free card. But no, it wasn’t going to work that way, and while I was acknowledging that, my feet headed toward the elevators at top speed.
I didn’t get twenty feet before I lurched to a halt again. Morrison just about ran me down. “Walker?”
“I can’t go without Annie.” My legs trembled with indecision. “I mean, I really—if I can only keep Suzy safe by keeping her with me, and Annie’s still got the sickness in her—”
“Walker, the hospital is not going to let you walk out of here with a seventy-six-year-old woman who has just awoken from a coma after mysteriously returning from death.”
“I could make us invisible.”
“You can do that?” Suzy’s voice popped into the shrill register only attainable by a teenage girl in full-on thrill mode. “Can I do that?”
I spared half a second to imagine what I would have done as a teen with the ability to turn invisible and said, “No,” without really caring if it was true. Suzy drooped and fell back a couple steps as I twitched, trying to decide which way to go. “I can’t go without Annie, Morrison. I can’t leave her here without protection. Or if it comes to it, I can’t leave Gary here without protection from her. I have to get her. Look, just—just go without me, okay? Go, and I’ll try to get the doctors to understand—”
“Walker, I can’t go without you!”
That was so preposterous I stopped trembling and gaped at Morrison. He passed a hand through his silver hair. “A mass murder at Thunderbird Falls is your department, Walker. Whatever’s happened there, you’re going to need to see it. I can’t give you what you’re going to need in a written report. You have to see it. To See it. The sooner, the better, right? Because magic doesn’t linger and you can’t track it.”
I stared at him a long moment or two, wondering when he’d become such an expert on magic. Over the past fifteen months, obviously, but it still jarred me to hear him say such things outright. “Yes. Yeah. You’re right. I just—”
A door down the hall behind us banged open. Morrison and I both flinched, reaching for duty weapons neither of us were carrying. A few seconds later, Suzy, now wearing a light blue T-shirt, sailed past, balanced on the back lower frame of a wheelchair occupied by a small figure in a gray hoodie. “Taking Grandma for her walk!” she caroled as they swept past the nurses’ station two dozen feet ahead of us. “We’ll be back in twenty minutes!”
“Get off that wheelchair, young lady!” somebody bellowed after her. Suzy jumped off the frame and ushered the wheelchair into an open elevator before anybody had time to stop her. The doors slid closed, leaving me and Morrison goggling down the hall.
Gary, shrugging on a Windbreaker and carrying my drum in one hand, lumbered up to us. “I hear we got places to be, doll.” He sounded more like his old self. I stared at him without much comprehension, too, until he swung a finger, lassolike, and pointed it toward the elevators. “That girl’s gonna be out the front door in three minutes, Jo. We goin’, or what?”
“Yes! Yeah! We’re going. We’re...going.” I jolted into motion with the first word, and tried not to let my feet slow down as I stuttered toward the end of the sentence. Morrison, marching alongside me, was as apoplectic as he ever had been when facing down the curves my life threw at him. Gary, however, had a grin that looked fit to beat the devil.
Since that was kind of what we had to do, it gave me heart. The three of us got in another elevator and followed Suzy out of the hospital. Nobody gave any of us a second look: there were plenty of other patients in wheelchairs or on crutches, making slow rounds over the hospital grounds. Morrison broke into a jog, gaining ground on us before disappearing into the parking lot. When we were as far away from the hospital front doors as we could get, he appeared in our rented car.
Annie Muldoon clambered inside the car and threw her hood back to reveal a delighted smile. “I always wanted to ride in a getaway car! I apologize, Captain Morrison, for putting you in this awkward position. I’m grateful for your assistance.”
Suzy flung herself into the far passenger’s side of the car, catching Morrison’s look of bewilderment. “I explained everything to Grandma, I mean, Mrs. Muldoon, on the way out.”
Morrison breathed, “I sincerely doubt that,” and Suzy huffed in exasperation.
“I explained enough. She knows who you are.”
“And I appreciate the difficulty of your situation,” Annie said. By that time we were all in the car, me riding shotgun after Gary and I had engaged in a silent discussion-slash-argument about whether he or I would take it. In the end he’d pointed ferociously at Annie, indicating he was not moving an inch farther from her side than necessary. I put my drum in the trunk and got in the front passenger seat.
“Mrs. Muldoon, I’m not sure even I appreciate the difficulty of my situation right now.” That said, Morrison put the car in Drive and peeled out of the parking lot. “Walker, call Dispatch. Tell them to put out an APB that I am in a rented blue Toyota Avalon, license plate number CTAK3887—”
“You know the car’s license plate number?” I asked in admiring astonishment.
Morrison’s lifted eyebrow suggested he memorized the plates of every vehicle he ever got in, no matter how little time he expected to spend in it. “And that I am approaching Thunderbird Falls from the southwest, at as high a speed as I can manage. This vehicle is not to be stopped for traffic violations.”
Morrison was going to rack up traffic violations on my behalf. I’d never heard anything half so sexy in my life. I put the call in and gasped gladly when I recognized the dispatcher who picked up: my old friend Bruce. “I’ll see if I can get any squad cars to clear some streets for you,” he offered without missing a beat. “Where are you coming from, exactly?”
I told him, finishing with, “If I could cook I’d make you and Elise the best meal you’d ever had, in thanks.”
“I can cook,” Annie put in.
I laughed, relaying the offer, although not who it was from. Bruce counter-offered with a cook-off, his wife’s tamales against the best Annie could come up with, and then got serious again. “I can get you a police escort starting in about fifteen blocks. I’ve got other cars moving to clear the road ahead of you, but with the escort you’ll have sirens. Be careful, Joanie.”
“It’s Jo, now. And we will be.” I hung up, gave Morrison the down-low and spent the next seven minutes trying not to shriek with speed-demon joy as my staid, steady boss took corners too fast, blew traffic lights, rode the meridian and braked hard from accelerations.
Annie, in the back middle seat, bounced and clapped her hands when the escort, sirens wailing and lights flashing, joined us. I burst out laughing, and Suzy had her knuckles in her mouth, trying to hold back squeals. “Wonder if this is what the president feels like,” Gary rumbled.
Morrison shot him one short look in the rearview mirror before bringing his attention back to the road. “The president doesn’t usually travel this fast in land vehicles. This better get us there in time, Walker.”
That cut the legs right out from under my glee. There was no in time: people were already dead. But if I could work a power circle, at least maybe I could contain the black magic swallowing up the falls’ power, and if we were incredibly lucky, maybe we could snare the murderer.
Chances were not good that we’d be incredibly lucky.
With the police escort, we got to the falls in record time. I was out of the car before Morrison had finished pulling into a parking space, but somehow he was still only two steps behind me. I half noticed Gary getting out with Annie and Suzy, but he drew them away from the crime scene that Morrison and I ran for. I was grateful for that: Annie might’ve been a nurse, but Suzy was just a kid, and she didn’t need to see the horror smeared across the beach.
I didn’t count them. I just saw that there were lots, and mentally leaped to the number: thirteen. A coven. A coven meant they all had at least some tiny flush of magical talent. That had to be the ultimate murder prize for the Master. That had to help him to no end. No wonder the falls’ magic was so badly damaged, and no wonder it kept getting worse. I was willing to bet these people had been pouring their hearts and souls into that power right up to the moment of their deaths.
And they weren’t just dead. They’d had their hearts ripped out, every single one of them. Their ribs were broken outward like someone had shoved a hand through their backs and emerged clutching the hardest-working muscle in the body. The blood sprays looked like that, too, easily visible because the victims were all flat on their backs in a perfect circle, as if something very startling had leaped from the earth at their center and the surprise had knocked them all over backward. The blood looked like their hearts had been ripped out after that, like the same something had then come up through their spines and taken the hearts skyward. I shuddered, unable to drag my gaze from the red gaping holes in their chests.
Peripherally, I knew mundane things were going on. Morrison had left me standing stock-still a stone’s throw from the bodies, and was taking charge of the gathering cops, medical teams and, God forbid, reporters. His calm took some of the edge off rising hysteria, though I Saw glimpses of anger and shock sparking through his aura. Eyewitnesses were babbling stories to anyone who would listen, including others who had been there. Some of them were arguing with one another. Pale-faced cops were trying to take down the comments without looking at the bodies, and I saw my friend Heather Fagan, head of the North Precinct’s forensics team, cross under the police tape with her mouth set in a thin grim line. All of this activity was going on around me, and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring myself to look at the faces I was holding out of focus because I was afraid of what I would see.
Afraid it would be worse than blood and bone and viscera spattered across a sand-addled shore. The horribleness of that made me breathe a sharp laugh, which in turn let me close my eyes. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I’d be able to look elsewhere when I opened them again. I did that on purpose, with them still closed: moved my gaze, pointed it in the direction of faces, not bodies. It still took turning my hands into fists to make me open my eyes again.
The first face I saw was a young man. Early twenties, nice-looking, familiar.
“Garth.” The name didn’t make it past my throat. Didn’t even shape my lips as my stomach dropped and left a wake of ice where it had been. Garth Johannsen, Colin’s older brother. Colin, who had played host to a dark sorcerer and paid for it with his life in the battle that had birthed Thunderbird Falls. I thought Garth had gotten out of the Magic Seattle scene. It looked like he’d gotten back in.
I knew the other faces, too. Duane, the very decent guy whose blood I’d shared in a rather literally minded ritual. Thomas, their Elder, the male counterpart to the Crone. Roxie, who’d been as cute as her name.
But I’d been wrong. I’d misjudged in my counting. There weren’t thirteen bodies. There were twelve.
Marcia Williams, the coven’s leader, was missing.
Chapter Seven (#ulink_7c476f99-ea26-58a0-a407-3a9b84473366)
“When?” My question rasped beneath the general babble, not loud enough to gain anyone’s attention. I cleared my throat and tried again. “When? When exactly did this happen?”
Two dozen witnesses turned my way with two dozen answers. Well, no, more like with about four answers, the majority of which were 1:53 p.m. I took that as the median and hobbled a few steps away from the bodies. “Morrison? Michael?”
He turned his head half an inch at his surname, indicating he’d heard me, but when I used his first name he came around full circle, eyes dark with concern. “What is it, Walker?”
“What time exactly did Annie wake up?”
“One fifty-three.”
Of course. I would trust Morrison to know the precise moment that the world planned to end, so I had no doubt at all he was right. I pressed my fingertips into the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t wearing glasses. I hadn’t been wearing them for a while, but the world wasn’t in soft focus. I wondered, briefly, if all the shape-shifting had fixed my vision, then let it go, because there were far more important things to think about. Like, “Then we have a problem.”
If Morrison was the kind of person to give me a no shit look, that would have been the time to do it. Instead, a thread of tension knotted his aura and his shoulders, but so subtly I wasn’t certain anybody else could see it. “Another problem?”
“One to discuss in private.”
A line appeared between his eyebrows. He said, “One moment,” to the cop he’d been talking to and gestured for me to lead the way.
I took us several steps away. “Witnesses say this went down at 1:53, Morrison.”
“I know. What does tha—” He closed his eyes momentarily before regarding me steadily. “Walker, I want you to tell me there’s no connection between Annie’s revival and...this.”
“I want to tell Annie that.”
I knew Morrison could lose control. I’d seen him blow his top any number of times. I was usually the cause, in fact. But when it came down to the job, the man kept his cool better than anyone I’d ever known. Silence stretched for five heartbeats before he said, “Then tell me what happened.”
“When I went in for Annie—” I broke off, uncertain if that made sense to anyone but me. Morrison nodded, indicating I should continue. “When I went in, the thing coming for her—for her soul, her life essence—it had a sense of urgency. It felt like the Raven Mocker coming into the world. Like it was being birthed but it—” I faltered, then said it all in a rush. “Like it needed a body to be born into. Like Annie was meant to be its host. And when I rescued her...”
“...it found somewhere else to go. Instantaneously? Is that possible?”
I looked toward the bodies, back at Morrison, and shrugged. “At a guess, I’d say yes. They were using magic right then, so they were primed, and...” I exhaled until my lungs were as empty as I could make them, then inhaled until tears prickled my eyes. “And they were marked, I bet. Somehow. Because this is the coven I worked with last July, Morrison. I knew these people. I worked magic with them, and that...might have made them susceptible. It all comes around.” I felt very tired suddenly, a bone weariness that had nothing to do with too little sleep and a lot to do with sorrow and regret.
Morrison’s voice gentled. “It isn’t your fault, Walker.”
I sighed. “Not in so many words, no, but even so. It’s coming to an end.” I said that for myself as much as him, because I couldn’t bear the idea of my associates dying for the folly of having met me.
“Yes.” There was a strange note in that word.
My eyebrows furled. “You can’t possibly be sorry about that, Morrison. This hasn’t exactly been a hayride for you.”
“Or for any of us. No, I just wondered, for a moment—” He broke off and shook his head, leaving me scowling at him in perplexity.
“Boss, look, if I’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that if you’ve got something to say you should probably get it off your chest, because who knows if you’re going to get another chance.”
“‘Boss?’”
I rolled my eyes. “Old habits. Morrison. Mike. Whatever. What’s wrong?”
The corner of his mouth quirked. “‘Mike.’ ‘Boss’ may be easier to take than that. A maudlin thought, Walker, and not one appropriate to the circumstances. I wondered if you would still need or want me when this is over.”
The man’s vulnerabilities rose at the weirdest time. There was absolutely nothing I could say to that, so I stepped forward, slid my fingers into his short silver hair and gave him a knee-weakening kiss right there in front of God and everybody.
Morrison said something like, “Asllfmph,” against my mouth, and was scarlet over every inch of visible skin when I finally released him. I put my fingertip against his lips, whispered, “Don’t be silly,” and kissed my finger away, too. “Now we should get back to business.”
Somewhere in that last word the surrounding silence made itself noticed to me. I pursed my lips, practically certain I didn’t want to look around, but of course I did, anyway.
The whole crime scene had come to a halt. Everybody—cops, forensics, witnesses—was staring at us. It even felt like the sucking darkness in the falls’ power had paused to gape at our inappropriate public display of affection.
“Sorry.” My grin and my blush were running even odds as to which would split my head first. I flapped my hand at our observers. “As you were.”
Throats cleared, gazes averted, people shuffled, and within a few seconds everybody was back to the duties of the moment. Morrison, still red around the collar, muttered, “You have no sense of decorum, Walker,” but didn’t sound as put out as I thought he was trying to.
I smiled at him. “I know. It’s part of what you find so appealing about me. That totally blew the office betting pool, though. No way we can rig it now. Come on.” I took his hand and pulled him a few steps back toward the cop he’d been talking to. “Let’s get back to work.”
“Wait. Walker, a dozen supernatural deaths in broad daylight. How—?”
“I think that mostly depends on Heather.” I squinted toward the lead forensics officer, whose crouched form was silhouetted by sunlight bouncing off the lake. “And whoever is the medical examiner, I guess, because the only logical, real-world way this happened was with some kind of tiny rigged explosives, worn either voluntarily or planted on the coven.”
“Explosives of which they will find no physical evidence.”
I had to love a man who didn’t end sentences with prepositions. “Right. It’s a pretty good cover story for the press, though. I mean, I don’t like it, because it feeds right into the whole Wiccans as crazy cult types, but most people would accept it.”
Morrison sighed, looking out at the lake. “Last time something went down at Thunderbird Falls you gave me a plausible line for it, too. Is that the line you want—” His teeth clenched, and I couldn’t blame him one bit.
“I don’t want you to give them any line, Morrison. I’ll go talk to Heather and I’ll talk with the M.E. This kind of spin isn’t something you should be handling. Let the flack fall on me. I’ve been a problem employee all along.”
“You quit two weeks ago.”
I kept forgetting that. My whole face wrinkled up, not at the reminder, but because it meant my only viable excuses to be here were either magic-related, or because I was Morrison’s girlfriend. Neither was going to go over spectacularly well with the top brass.
I put that on a mental shelf to worry about later. “So I did, which means any weirdness can be laid squarely at my feet and the emphasis can be on me no longer being a cop.”
“The reasons for which are now murky, since half of Seattle just saw us kissing.”
“Dammit, Morrison, I was trying to reassure you in a way I thought you’d believe. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences.” I clearly should have been, but as was usual with me and thinking, I was applying it too little and too late. “The good news is there’s so much magic whirling around here right now that everything’s going to be a fog for most of these people, so let’s not worry about it. I’m going to go talk to Heather. You go...do your thing.” As he strode off, I realized his thing, at the moment, was taking the lead on this investigation. Police captains weren’t generally supposed to do that, but he was certainly the ranking officer on the scene, and he had a vested interest in getting my mess cleaned up.
Forget whether I was going to want him when this was over. He’d be crazy to still want me. I sighed—I seemed to be doing that a lot—and worked my way around the bloody circle to approach Heather Fagan.
She stopped me with an upraised palm as I made to step over the police line. “You’ve already been in here, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Over there, next to Garth. I’ll give the guys my shoe information.” I lifted a foot and wiggled it a little.
“Garth. You know these people?” Heather put her hands on her thighs and pushed out of her crouch. “Is this going to turn out like the Ravenna Park death?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m not going to get any answers I like. And maybe not any at all.”
“Right.”
Heather gave me a flat look. “What is it with you?”
“...I’m a shaman, and this sort of crap has been following me around for about a year. It’s almost over now.”
She stared at me a couple of seconds, and I wondered if lying would have been the better tactic after all. Not that she would have believed a lie, either. But she didn’t call me on it, only snorted. “Over. Malarkey. Fine. I’ll make sure Sandra is the M.E. on this. She’ll find whatever is necessary to make this story bearable to the general public. Who’s your lead detective?”
I looked over my shoulder toward Morrison, but I knew the answer. “Billy Holliday. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Holliday. Of course. The one guy weirder than you are. And the one guy you can trust to help cover this up.”
“Just like you’re about to do.” I wanted to be very clear on that. Heather thrust her jaw out, but nodded. I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”
“Because I can’t do my job if I have tabloid reporters breathing down my neck demanding to know the real story when I can’t provide a rational and logical explanation for something like this.”
“What if there isn’t one?”
Heather pressed her lips together so hard they disappeared into a thin white line before she spoke. “My niece works in a morgue. Last Halloween she dismembered an animated dead body with a scalpel.”
“Holy crap! About yay tall,” I said, waving my hand at about shoulder height, “wears her hair in a braid? I met her! She’s your niece?”
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- Жанр: Зарубежное фэнтези, Любовное фэнтези, Современная зарубежная литература
- Язык: Книги на английском языке
- Объём: 350 стр. 2 иллюстрации
- ISBN: 9781472096678
- Дата выхода книги: 11 мая 2019
- Версия: 📚 Электронная книга
Joanne Walker has two choices:Defeat the enemy…or lose her soul tryingFor over a year, Joanne has been fighting the Master–the world's most abiding evil entity. She's sacrificed family, friendships, even watched potential futures fade away…and now the Master is bringing the final battle to Joanne's beloved Seattle.Lives will be lost as the repercussions of all Joanne's final transformation into her full Shamanic abilities come to her doorstep. Before the end, she'll mourn, rejoice–and surrender everything for the hope of the world's survival. She'll be a warrior and a healer. Because she is finally a Shaman Rising."The twists and turns will have readers shaking their heads while devouring the next page." –USA TODAY on Raven Calls
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