by C. E. Murphy
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
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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.
