Wintermoon

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Arright.” Gary’s voice brightened considerably. “Maybe there’ll be a body.”

  Morrison glared magnificently when I arrived with Gary in tow. The two of them facing off was wonderful to behold: Morrison was pushing forty and good-looking in a superhero-going-to-seed way, with graying hair and sharp blue eyes. Gary, at seventy-three, had Hemingway wrinkles and a Connery build that made him look dependable and solid instead of old, and his gray eyes were every bit as sharp as Morrison’s. For a few seconds I thought they might start butting heads.

  But Morrison pointed at Gary and barked, “You stay here.” Gary looked as crestfallen as a wet kitten. I actually said, “Aw, c’mon, Morrison,” and got his glare turned on me. Oops.

  “It’s arright, Jo.” Gary gave me a sly look that from a man a few decades younger would’ve had my heart doing flip-flops. “I bet there’s a body. You can tell me about it at dinner. You need a ride home?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Morrison said in a sharp voice. Gary winked at me, shoved his hands in his pockets, and sauntered back to his cab, whistling. I choked on a laugh and turned to follow Morrison, tromping through a truly unbelievable amount of snow. It had started snowing in mid-January and, as far as Seattle was concerned, hadn’t stopped in the two months since. Even the weathermen merely looked stunned and resigned, mumbling excuses about hurricane patterns in the South having unexpected consequences in the Pacific Northwest.

  “What is it with you two?”

  “So what’s going on, Captain?” We spoke at the same time, leaving me blinking at Morrison’s shoulders and starting to grin. “What is it with us? Me and Gary? Are you serious?”

  “He answers your phone.” Morrison was talking to the footprints in the snow in front of him, not me. My grin got noticeably bigger.

  “Only the once. That was like six weeks ago, Morrison. And who told you that, anyway?” I wanted to laugh.

  “I’m just saying he’s a little old for you, isn’t he?” Morrison’s shoulders were hunched, as if he was trying to warm his ears up with them. I grinned openly at his back and lowered my voice so it only just barely carried over the squeak and crunch of snow as we walked through it.

  “All I’ll say is, you know how they say old dogs can’t learn new tricks? Turns out old dogs have some pretty good tricks of their own.”

  Morrison’s shoulders jerked another inch higher and I laughed out loud, the sound bouncing off tree branches black with winter cold. Snow shimmered and fell off one, making a soft puff and a dent in the snow below it. Morrison flinched at the sound, head snapping toward it as his hand dropped to his belt, like he’d pull a weapon. My laughter drained away and I followed him the rest of the way to a park baseball diamond in silence.

  He climbed up snow-covered bleachers, making distinct footprints in the already walked on snow, compacting it further. I put my feet in precisely the same places he’d stepped, fitting my sole print to his exactly. We had the same size feet, and in police-issue boots his prints were indistinguishable from mine, at least to the naked eye. A forensics officer could probably tell there was a weight difference between the two of us—in Morrison’s favor, thank God—but for the moment I enjoyed the idea of stealing along behind the captain, invisible to anybody trying to track me.

  Morrison stopped on the step above me and turned so abruptly I nearly walked into him. I rocked back on my heels, one step below him, my nose at his chest height as I frowned up at him. “Thanks for the warning.” I hated looking up, physically, to Morrison: we were the same height, down to the half inch that put us both just below six feet, and any situation that made me look up to him made me uncomfortable.

  Of course, the reverse was also true, and I’d been known to wear heels just so I’d be taller than he was. No one said I was a good person.

  “Tell me what you see.”

  Assuming he didn’t want me to describe him—which, had he not been so antsy about the snow falling from the tree a few moments ago, I’d have probably done just to annoy him—I turned away, looking over the baseball diamond.

  It was buried beneath two feet of the wet, heavy snow that had made my jeans damp from tromping through it. I shook one foot absently, knocking snow off my boot. I’d lived in Wisconsin for a winter, so snow wasn’t entirely new to me, but this was ridiculous for Seattle, and I said so. Morrison huffed out a breath like an annoyed bull and I puffed my cheeks, muttering, “Okay, fine. I see snow.”

  Well, duh. Clearly Morrison wanted more than that. “Snowmobile tracks. I didn’t even know people in Seattle owned snowmobiles. Um. Footprints around the diamond, like people’ve been playing snowball.” I thought that was pretty clever. Snowball, like baseball, only with snow, right? Morrison didn’t laugh. I sighed. Poor, poor put-upon me.

  “There are cops, there’s some teenagers over there, there’s—” Actually, there were a lot of cops, now that I was looking. Picked out in dull blue under the gray sky, they worked their way around the baseball diamond and stumped their way through the outfield. “There’s, um.” I frowned. “I don’t hear anything, either. There aren’t any people around. Dead trees…”

  “No,” Morrison growled, full of so much tension that I looked over my shoulder at him, feeling my expression turning worried. “What do you see,” he repeated, and suddenly I got it. A drop of ice formed inside my throat and spilled down into my stomach, like drinking cold water on an empty belly. I folded my arms around myself defensively, shaking my head.

  “Shit, Morrison, it doesn’t—it doesn’t work like that. I mean, I’m not, like, good enough to make it work, I don’t know how, I don’t want to—”

  “God damn it, Walker, what do you see!”

  I turned back to the field, stiff as an automaton, my lower lip sucked between my teeth. One of my arms unfolded from around me completely of its own will, hand drifting to rub my sternum through my winter jacket.

  There was no hole in my breastbone, no scar to suggest there’d ever been one. But I found myself pulling in a very deep breath, trying to rid myself of the memory of a silver blade shoved through my lung and the bubbling, coppery taste of blood at the back of my throat. I’d nearly died eleven weeks ago, and instead found that buried within me was the power to heal myself, and maybe a great deal more. More than one person had called me a shaman since then. I didn’t like it at all.

  “I’m not any good at this, Morrison. I don’t know if I can do it on purpose.” My voice was strained and thin, full of reluctance. Morrison didn’t say anything. Once upon a time—not that long ago—the only thing he and I had had in common was a complete disdain for the paranormal and people who believed there were things that went bump in the night. I’d been struggling for the past three months to get back to that place. Back to a world that made sense, where I didn’t feel a coil of bright power burbling in the core of me, waiting to be used. I desperately wanted to believe it had been some kind of peculiar dream. Most days I was able to cling to that.

  Morrison was not helping me cling. I could feel the tension in him, not with any extrasensory perception, but with how still he was holding himself, and the deliberate steadiness of his breathing. He wasn’t any happier than I was about asking, which perversely made me willing to play ball. I put my teeth together, muttering, “Only you could get me to do this.”

  That struck me as being alarmingly accurate. I found myself abruptly eager to do it, so I didn’t have to think about what I’d just said.

  Unfortunately, I was at a complete loss as to how to proceed. I’d pulled denial over my head like a blanket the past several weeks. Now that someone was asking me to use my impossible new gifts, I didn’t know where to start.

  Just thinking about it made the power inside me flutter like a new life, full of hope and possibility. I swallowed against nausea that was as unpleasantly familiar as the idea of life inside me, and tentatively reached for the bubble of power.

  A spirit guide called Coyote had suggested to me I work through the
medium I knew best: cars. In reaching for that bubble of energy, I tried to do that. Morrison wanted me to see. Well, if I wasn’t seeing clearly, then the windshields needed washing.

  Power spurted up through me, a sudden warm wash that felt startling against the cold winter afternoon. A silver-blue spray swished over my vision, just like wiper fluid. I closed my eyes against the brightness and a perceived sting and, without really meaning to, envisioned windshield wipers swooping the liquid away, leaving my vision clear. The sting faded and I opened my eyes again.

  The world was beautiful. Even the gray sky glimmered with light, sparks of water shimmering above me. As I brought my gaze down, trees whose branches were weighted with snow flickered with the greenness of waiting life, only cold and dead to the mundane eye. Sap waited to rise, leaves prepared to bud, all a promise of explosive activity the moment winter let go its hold. The chain-link fences that surrounded the ball field had their own resolute purpose, created and placed to do a specific thing. A distinct sensation of pride in doing the job emanated from them.

  The people on the field radiated different energy, swirling colors that bespoke worry or fear or determination, the rough shapes of their personalities hammering into me and leaving nothing taken for granted. I wanted to turn and look at Morrison, to get a sense of him with this other sight I’d called up, but I was afraid if I moved, I’d lose it again. I dropped my gaze to the field itself, still not knowing what I was looking for—

  And a wave of maliciousness slammed into me like a tornado. It whipped around the core of power inside me and dug claws in, sharp knife-edges of pain cramping my belly. It sucked the heat out of me, draining the coil of energy in sudden throbs, faster than a heartbeat. My knees crumpled, light-headedness sweeping over me.

  Morrison caught me under the arms so easily he might have been waiting for me to fall. I twisted toward him, grabbing his coat as he slid an arm around me more firmly.

  “You’re all right.” His voice sounded like it was coming from unreasonably far away, given that I knew he was right behind my ear. “I’ve got you.”

  I didn’t want to move, desperately glad for the support he offered, both physical and other. His presence was solid and comforting, a wall of commitment and strength in deep, reassuring purples and blues. I doubted he knew he was projecting his own personal energy in a way that let me borrow some, but I was incredibly grateful for it.

  I managed a shaky nod, hanging on to the flow of strength he offered, using it to shore up my own depleted silvers and blues. After a few seconds I was able to get my legs under me again, though Morrison didn’t quite let me go. I locked my knees and made myself turn to look at the field again.

  Crimson lines, bleeding with pain and rage, flowed up from the field, following the lines of the baseball diamond. Points of vicious black stabbed behind my eyes, making marks that seemed to shoot up into the sky and fade somewhere beyond the stars. Looking at the field felt like someone was digging talons into my innards, trying to pull them out and bind me to the death that had already been wrought there.

  Gary was wrong. There wasn’t a body.

  There were three.

  2

  “C’mon, Walker. Tell me what you see. Talk to me, Walker.”

  “How many have you found?” My voice was groggy, as if I was talking through pea soup. Morrison let out a breath that sounded like it meant to be a curse.

  “Just the one. What’re we missing?”

  “Two more.” I slid out of his grasp and to the snow-covered bleachers. My jacket wasn’t nearly long enough for sitting on, and cold started seeping through my jeans immediately. “All women. There and there and there.” I pointed blindly at the field, unable to convince myself to lift my eyes and study it again. Not that it would’ve helped: the snow was only snow again, not breathing with its own chaotic pattern of lights. I was just as glad that I couldn’t hang on to the second sight for long. “What the hell made you call me in for this?”

  “Holliday.”

  That explained a lot. Billy Holliday—besides having one of the more unfortunate names I’d ever encountered—was the department’s number-one Believer. I’d played a mocking Scully to his Mulder until my own sensible world turned upside down. He’d been remarkably kind, all things considered, in not giving me too much shit since then. If something struck him as genuinely abnormal about the murders, it made a certain amount of sense for him to think of me.

  God, how I wished he hadn’t. I slumped down, forehead against my knees, which reminded me that I’d smacked my head earlier. I pressed my palm against it, trying—not very hard—to call up just enough of that energy inside me to smooth the bump away. It didn’t work. I was almost grateful. It suggested I wasn’t as completely weird as the past couple of minutes proved me to be. My silence drew on long enough to prompt my boss to keep talking, something I hadn’t intended but for which I was also grateful.

  “Some teenagers found the first body. Holliday was on call and when they dug her free—you should probably see for yourself.”

  “Do I have to?” My voice was still thin. “I’m a beat cop, Morrison, not a homicide detective.” I’d never wanted to be either, despite having attended the academy. I’d been a mechanic, and the short version was Morrison’d hired my replacement when I had to go overseas for a while. But thanks to my mixed ethnic heritage—I was half Cherokee—I looked too good on the roster to actually fire. Instead, I’d gotten an upgrade from mechanic to actual living breathing cop. Morrison figured—hoped—I’d spit in his face and quit.

  I couldn’t stand to give him the satisfaction. Which left me sitting in the snow, whining and praying he’d give me a break.

  “You have to.”

  So much for praying. I got up, brushed snow off my cold bottom, and stumped down the bleachers.

  Billy’d obviously been on duty when the kids called in about the body, because he was wearing sensible shoes. Typically, when he got called unexpectedly he came in wearing a pair of great heels, which I still noticed because he had better taste in shoes than I did. I’d never heard anybody tease him about cross-dressing, partly because he was a hell of a detective, and partly because he was something over six feet tall and looked like he could break you in half. It didn’t hurt that his wife could’ve been Salma Hayek’s slightly more gorgeous sister. At the moment, though, he was wearing regulation boots and crouched over a frozen woman whose insides were no longer in. I stopped several feet back and said, “Jesus,” by way of announcing my arrival.

  The woman’s intestines stretched out of her belly and into the snow, ropy frozen lines of blackness buried in the cold. Her stomach had been cut open in an efficient X, and judging from the rictus her face was frozen in, she’d probably been alive when it happened. If it’d been summertime, I probably would have lost my lunch, but the icy strands and beads of cold on her face looked so surreal I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it having been a person once. She looked like a prop on a sound stage for a movie set in the Arctic.

  “Hey, Joanie.” Billy was watching the guys from forensics brush snow away from the woman’s body, careful detailed work that gave lie to the fact that the weather had almost certainly destroyed any available evidence. “Glad you could make it.” He pursed his lips and shrugged. “Well.”

  “I know what you mean.” I edged a few steps closer, staring down at the woman reluctantly. “Why’d you want me?”

  “Look at her.” He shrugged again. “Got ritual murder all over it.”

  “Did the dead lady tell you that?”

  Billy gave me a dirty look that I deserved. I’d only learned recently that some of his intuitive leaps in homicide cases were courtesy of an occasional ability to converse with ghosts. It was not the kind of thing I was comfortable with, even though—or particularly because—I could now do it myself. “No,” he said. “The physical evidence did. Can you not make jokes right now, Joanie? This woman deserves some respect.”

  “These women.” I
let out a long exhalation, looking at my feet. “There’s two more. I…saw them.”

  Satisfaction showed in Billy’s voice for just an instant. “I knew bringing you in was the right thing to do. You get anything else?”

  Creepy-crawlies shivered over my skin, making me even more uncomfortable than a wet butt and dead bodies did by themselves. Billy was much, much easier with weird shit than I was. The shamanic gift that I hated having would have been far better off residing in him. “No. I’m sorry.” I forbore to mention I didn’t have a clue how to get anything else. He looked disappointed enough as it was. I lowered my voice, feeling like a member of a Sekrit Brotherhood that dared not voice its name. “Did you get anything?”

  Billy shook his head. “Been dead too long. I never get anything from people who’ve been dead more than forty-eight hours. They lose their connection with the world.”

  I nodded, then frowned. “I thought you said your sister visited you three years after she died.”

  “I guess blood’s thicker than ether.”

  The wind picked up as he spoke, a hair-raising keen that had no business anywhere outside of a holler. I instinctively lifted my shoulders against it, then felt a scowl crinkling my forehead so hard it ached. There was no new chill in the air, no cutting cold through my coat, despite the shriek of sound. A shadow came down over the world, making me look up at the sky, as if the sun wasn’t already hidden beneath doomfully gray clouds.

  There were no clouds. A window framed the section of sky I could see, scattered stars valiantly struggling against the light of a brilliantly full moon. Irish lace curtains caught at the moon’s edges, making it whimsical and delicate in the clear black sky. Seattle’s snowbound chill was driven from my skin, and the breath I took was full of warm air and the scent of tea.

  Recognition jolted through me like needles under my fingernails. I knew the window; I knew the curtains, and I knew that if I looked to my left I would see a near stranger, lying beneath a handmade quilt and dying of nothing more than her own determination to do so.