Wintermoon

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Well, can you go get more?”

  I slid down in my chair, glaring futilely at Billy’s computer screen. “What have I done for you lately, huh?”

  “It’s the nature of the beast, Joanie. Can’t get no satisfaction.” He gave me a sideways look. “Are you really okay?”

  “Right as rain.” I scratched my jaw where the blood had been. “I don’t know how real this thing is, Bill. I’m not sure if it’s something you can catch. Whatever Mother did to it set it back a lot of years, but she thought she’d have the power to destroy it, and that was a big fat bust. And whatever it is has got a master.”

  “Forget about the master. The master isn’t the thing stringing girls out by their guts, right?”

  “Right.” God, I hoped I was right.

  “Then he’s not our problem right now. By the way, Melinda wants to know if you’re still coming over for dinner.”

  I blinked. “What?”

  “It’s the equinox tonight. She invited you last week, remember?”

  “And you think to bring this up in the context of masters? Or was it being strung out by your guts?”

  Billy fashioned a crooked grin. “You know Mel. She’s a slave driver.”

  I laughed. “So a little bit of both. Yeah, I don’t see why not. I mean, you tell me. I know it’s the first forty-eight hours of a murder investigation that are most critical, but we’re kind of way the hell past that. Is taking the night off going to make a critical difference?”

  “If it does, it’s my ass in the hot seat, not yours. You’re just a beat cop, remember?”

  “A beat cop who isn’t doing her job today. Crap.” I got to my feet. “Did Morrison put somebody on the Ave to cover for me, or am I going to get beaten within an inch of my life the next time he sees me?”

  “You’re fine, Joanie.” Billy’s voice was gentle. “People who spontaneously rupture eardrums, even if they follow it up with a little lay-your-hands-on-me action, are generally considered out for the day.”

  I sat back down. “Yeah? That happens enough to have a protocol for it?” Probably only with me around. Great. “Can I bring Gary to dinner? Petite’s still in the shop.”

  Billy looked around. “Where’d he go?”

  “Back to work. Some of us,” I said in my best gruff Gary voice, “gotta work for a living, darlin’.”

  “Oh. Sure, bring him. Mel cooks enough to feed an army anyway.”

  “That’s because you have four kids, Billy. That is an army.” I scooted forward, nodding at his computer. “Okay, so I’m Detective Holliday’s personal assistant for the day, I guess. What do you want me looking for?”

  Billy snorted. “I can look up weird shit on the Net, Joanie. You’re the one with the direct line to higher powers.”

  “Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, Billy. Don’t say things like that. Higher powers my ass.” I actually shuddered.

  “Whatever you want to call it, you’ve got a bead on something I can’t access. Even the captain knows it.”

  A fact which did not fill me with joy and glee. I sighed, dropping my chin to my chest. “Last time I went into the wonderful world of the weird, my eardrums exploded, Billy.”

  “Look at it this way. At least nobody shoved a sword through your lung.” He gave me a sunny smile that held up to the glare I shot his way.

  “Thank you. Thank you, Billy, that really helped a lot. Bastard.”

  “Hey.” Billy looked injured. “My parents were married.”

  “Mine weren’t.” Huh. I’d never thought of myself as a bastard before. Interesting, what you can get through almost twenty-seven years of living without thinking. “Look, Billy?” I heard myself get all quiet, like I was about to impart something important. Billy heard it, too, and leaned forward.

  “My mother had the chance to eliminate this guy back when she faced him. She didn’t because she was pregnant with me and she didn’t want to risk me. So this whole thing is kind of my fault.” I wrapped my arms around my ribs, staring at a broken corner of tile beneath Billy’s desk. “I mean, the fact that there are more dead women now. I know I’m being sort of a jerk, because I hate all this crap, but…I really want to get this thing solved. I need to. Whatever it takes.”

  Billy clapped his hand on my shoulder, solid and reassuring. “We’ll figure it out, Joanie. We’ll get this guy. You’ll get your piece.”

  Or maybe he said peace. I wasn’t sure.

  7

  The drumming hadn’t been enough to fill me up. Not all the way, at least. Maybe a hundred drums would’ve poured so much energy and power into me that I’d have been good to go for the rest of the day, the rest of the week, as long as it took. But by midafternoon I was stumbling like Petite did when she ran short on gas, and nothing I did brought me even one whit closer to figuring out what the Blade was or how to stop him from killing someone else.

  So I did what any sensible woman would do. I went—no, not shopping. My idea of an ideal shopping experience was walking into the store, finding exactly what I wanted on the first rack I stopped at, buying it, and being out of there in five minutes. I was a retailer’s nightmare.

  But I was also a well-trained Seattleite. When the chips were down, I went for coffee.

  The Missing O was half a block down the street from the precinct building, run by an entrepreneurial young fellow who thought the idea of opening a doughnut and coffee shop next to a police station was pretty funny. After a while the cops started thinking it was funny, too, and began to take a certain pride in being the O’s number-one clientele.

  A barista greeted me not by name, but by drink: “Tall hot chocolate with a shot of mint?” I waved an agreement and went to pay without ever having to say anything. A minute later I was ensconced in the corner, hands wrapped around the drink.

  A coffee shop with a mug of hot chocolate was no place to solve the world’s problems from, but it beat a sharp stick in the eye. I let my eyes half close, watching the world through a blur of lashes and waiting for inspiration to strike.

  Inspiration, last I checked, did not come in the form of Captain Michael Morrison. Well. He was certainly inspiring in some ways. He frequently inspired me to mouth-frothing argument, for example. At the moment, though, he stood a few feet away, frowning down at me as if unsure how to approach. I untangled my eyelashes and looked up at him. “I don’t bite.” I thought about that statement, then nodded, determining it was true. I couldn’t remember having bitten anyone in my sentient years.

  Morrison let out a fwoosh of air and shrugged his shoulders. He was wearing a seaman’s coat with big black buttons, so out of fashion it looked like haute couture. “That’s a great coat.”

  He looked as startled as I felt. To the best of my recollection, nothing like a compliment had ever passed my lips when I was speaking to the captain. He shrugged again, hands in his pockets, which made the whole coat move like a woolen wall with a purpose in life, and sat down. “Thanks. Belonged to my father.”

  “Seriously?” I supposed it was unlikely Morrison had sprung fully formed from the forehead of his mother, but I’d never given much thought to his family. “He was a sailor?”

  “Merchant marines. He died when I was twelve.”

  Neither of us knew what to say after that. I slid down in my seat and wrapped my fingers around my hot chocolate tightly enough to bend the cardboard. “So,” I said after a while, just as he said, “Your hearing’s back.” I twitched a grin at the plastic top of my cup and nodded. I didn’t see if Morrison smiled, too.

  “You and Holliday learn anything yet?”

  “We would’ve mentioned it if we had.” It came out sarcastic. I hadn’t meant it to. I saw Morrison’s bulk move back a few centimeters, like he was responding to my nasty tone and putting extra space between us. Good, Joanne. Antagonize the boss. Again. “I’m trying, Captain. I really am.”

  He muttered, “You certainly are,” under his breath, making me look up in amused offense. His expression hadn’t ch
anged. Maybe I was the only one who thought he was making a joke. Great. Just great.

  “I really want to solve this.” I kept my voice low, afraid he’d think I was kidding. After a moment something relaxed in his gaze, a little gleam of approval coming into it. I annoyed Morrison for a variety of reasons, starting with knowing a lot more about cars than he did, and ending, emphatically, with wanting a career as a mechanic when it was his opinion I could be a good cop. It was possible I’d taken one tiny baby step toward a better relationship with him by genuinely wanting to solve this case.

  “Has it occurred to you that you might be in danger, Walker?”

  The chocolate was hot enough to keep my fingers stinging with warmth, or I’d have dropped it in my lap, hands suddenly numb from surprise. “Sir?” I never called Morrison sir. I don’t know which of us liked it less.

  “Your mother turned this killer in thirty years ago. If he puts you together with her—”

  I sat there staring at him, slack jawed with stupefaction. “It’s unlikely,” I finally heard myself say. “Different country, different names, pretty much no connection….”

  “Except whatever the hell you’ve got going on up there.” Morrison pointed a thick finger at my head. I touched my own temple guiltily. The man had a point. Crap. He had a point, and I had no idea what to do if he was right. I blinked at the table, hoping it might come up with a brilliant answer or two.

  “Is this going to turn out like the last case?”

  Then again, maybe I hadn’t taken any steps toward him approving of me at all. I curled a lip at the top of my hot chocolate, doing my best James Dean impression. “You mean with a dead body and no actual proof of guilt aside from the word of a semihysterical teenage girl?”

  Morrison gave a credible growl that rumbled up from the depths of his chest. I took that as a yes, and shrugged uncomfortably. “I’m putting my money on ‘probably.’”

  Silence stretched over the table long enough to break. I looked up when it snapped, to find Morrison glaring out the window, his mouth set in a thin line. At least he wasn’t glaring at me. “Get me some answers, Walker. Tell me how to stop somebody else from dying.”

  I lowered my gaze to the cup again. “For what it’s worth, Morrison, I don’t like this any more than you do.”

  He stood up, the chair feet squeaking back against the wet floor. “That’s the only thing that makes it bearable.”

  I didn’t feel any less alone, watching him leave, shoulders broad and strong in the seaman’s coat.

  I locked myself in the broom closet back at the station and struggled to get inside my own mind. When I finally did, my garden looked like somebody had dumped ash all over it, making it as tired and gray as I felt. It was not reassuring. Nor was the fact that it took Coyote a very long time indeed to show up, or that he looked distracted when he did. How a dog could look distracted, I didn’t know, but there you had it.

  “I’m not,” he said for the umpteenth time, “a dog.”

  One of the few thoughts I seemed to be able to keep to myself around him was the private glee at being able to get on his nerves with something as simple as calling him a dog. It made me feel better right away. I even managed a bright grin. “Sorry. I need your help.”

  “God helps those who help themselves, Joanne.”

  I startled. “What, you’re a Christian now?”

  “Is that so strange?”

  “Is it strange that my shape-shifting coyote spirit guide is a Christian? You tell me.”

  He finally looked at me, little spots of brighter-colored fur above his eyes lifting like eyebrows. “No,” he said. “It’s not. You’ve got too many preconceptions, Walkingstick.”

  “I wish you people would stop calling me that.” I didn’t like having my original last name bandied around. Especially not when I was dealing with psychic realms I didn’t really understand. The idea that names had power was one I could grasp, if nothing else. Which actually brought me to my point: “I need to know how to protect myself, Coyote.”

  He snapped his teeth at me and got up to pace toward me, looking alarmingly like a predator instead of a scavenger. “You should’ve been learning that for most of the last three months.”

  “So sue me. Are you going to throw me to the wolves just because I’m slow on the uptake?” More than slow, I admitted. One might go so far as to say recalcitrant. Deliberately recalcitrant.

  I could live with that.

  At least, I could live with it as long as he gave me the help I needed now. Possibly, very possibly, this was not a good long-term game plan. I promised myself I’d think about that later. Preferably much later. I did my best puppy-dog eyes on Coyote.

  Note to self: puppy-dog eyes work better on people who do not actually possess puppy-dog eyes themselves. Coyote looked disgusted. I retreated on the puppy-dog defense and tried a verbal one. “All I need to know is how to protect the very core part of me, Coyote. My name. That kind of thing. I don’t want the bad guys to be able to get to it easily.”

  “A thought which only strikes you now that a bad guy is looming.”

  “Yeah.”

  Coyote dropped his head in a very human motion, and sighed so deeply I was surprised he didn’t start coughing. “You know how to do it, Joanne. Think in metaphors.”

  “What?” I found myself grinning just a little. “Like airbags and steel frames keeping my little ol’ name safe?”

  He gave me a look that would reduce a lesser woman to blushes of embarrassment. I valiantly ignored the burning in my cheeks and mumbled, “Oh.”

  “I don’t know why I put up with you.” He snapped his teeth at me again, and was gone.

  “Because I’m cute and irresistibly charming,” I said to the empty garden. No one, not even a mockingbird, responded.

  “Please tell me dinner isn’t going to suck as much as the rest of today has.” I leaned over the top of Billy’s computer, sighing. He looked up, offended.

  “Are you dissing Mel’s cooking?”

  I snorted a laugh. “No. I just feel useless.” I put my hands on his desk, letting my head hang. “Find anything about the Blade?”

  Billy let out an explosive sigh and creaked back in his chair, hands folded behind his head. “Comic book references. Stuff about some swordsman named Bob Anderson. Wesley Snipes pictures.”

  “Really?” I perked up, edging around his desk to try to get a look at the screen. “Any half-naked ones?”

  “Joanie!”

  I drooped. “I didn’t think so. There wasn’t nearly enough half-naked Wesley in those movies, anyway.”

  Billy gave me a flat look. “Any luck with the psychic stuff?”

  My cheeks went hot with discomfort. “No. I…can’t get there.” My jaunt to see Coyote had tapped me out. I couldn’t get any further out of my body than your average caterpillar could. In fact, a caterpillar, with its whole transformation process, was probably going to have more success than I was right now.

  “Oh.” Billy’s silence stretched out a few long moments. “All three of the dead women are from the greater Seattle area,” he said eventually. “The Captain went to visit their families. To tell them. I was hoping we’d have something for him when he got back.”

  “Way to lay the guilt on, Billy.” I slumped again, my head heavy enough to strain my neck. “All right. Look. I’m going to go down to the park and, um…” I wet my lips. “You remember that thing I did in the garage in January?”

  Billy let out a huff of laughter. “How could I forget?”

  “A lot of people seem to have. Or they’re trying hard to.” I shook my head. “I thought maybe I’d try something like that again down at the park. Having you along would be helpful. You, uh. Know how to put your energy out there.” Pulling my tongue out with forceps would have been more fun than saying that sentence. Billy, bless his pointy little head, didn’t laugh. He just stood up and grabbed his coat.

  Fresh snow glittered over paths that had been stomped down by a
lot of police officers in the past twenty-four hours. The sky was clearing, leaden gray clouds parting to let sparks of sunlight through. I squinted at the ground, kicking up sprays of snow as I tromped through the park, a few steps ahead of Billy.

  I could feel Billy walking behind me on a more than physical level. In January I’d asked people to offer up their energy to help me net a god. Billy was getting ready to do that again, coiling his own essence into a ball that he’d be able to share with me when I needed it. Not, I thought, unlike what I’d done for my mother, in the memory/dream connection that morning. I blurted, “Sheila didn’t defeat that thing by herself,” filling up the silence of the snow-covered field with my voice. “I was there.”

  “Of course you were there.” Billy sounded confused. “She was pregnant with you.”

  “No, I mean, I was there…twice.” Such a gift I had for explanation. “He was kicking her ass. I threw her some power. It went right through…me…into her.”

  “You boosted your fetal self so your mom could draw enough power to defeat the Blade?”

  Billy made it sound so succinct and sensible that I had to look over my shoulder at him to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. I nodded. “Yeah. And then he noticed me, the adult me, and came after me, which distracted him enough that Sheila could…get him.” I didn’t really know what she’d done, besides stab a sword of light through his spinal cord. Maybe that was enough to set your average evil minion back thirty years.

  “So,” Billy said, “when you’ve got this time-travel thing down pat, you want to slip back to about, oh, ’85 and tell me to invest in Microsoft?”

  I laughed. “Only if you promise to share the proceeds with me.” I hunched my shoulders, trying to rid myself of the itchy sensation between the shoulder blades. My interference with Sheila’s confrontation twenty-seven years ago felt important. I just wasn’t sure why.

  I bounced off a wall that wasn’t there and crashed back into Billy’s chest. He oofed, catching me, then frowned down at me. “Joanie?”

  “I have no fucking clue.” I put my hand out and encountered resistance. I prodded, then stepped forward and leaned into it, feeling like a mime. Billy fought a grin and completely lost the battle.