Walking Dead

by C. E. Murphy

  I was getting big for my britches. I barely had a handle on my own magic, and there I was thinking I could help other people learn to manage theirs. On the other hand, they said teaching is the best way to learn, so trying couldn’t hurt. Much.

  “Could you?” Hope spilled through her voice and I squeezed her shoulders.

  “I can sure try.” The promise ended with a loud rumble from my stomach. I’d had lunch at the Space Needle, but apparently all the acid caffeine had dissolved it. “But first things first. When did you eat last?”

  “This morning.” Suzy’s tummy rumbled, too.

  I pulled together a weak smile and tugged her to her feet. “There’s a Denny’s a few blocks away. Let me buy you lunch, and you can tell me what’s been going on.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She looked up through a curtain of thin blond hair. “I don’t think we have very much time. I came to find you because I’ve been having nightmares, Officer Walker. Nightmares about a, a—” She made a circle with her hands, uncertainty darkening her pale features. “A huge black barrel. But not a barrel, a—a something else, there’s a name for it—”

  I dropped my chin to my chest, eyes closed to summon the strength to say, “Cauldron?”

  “Yeah! I couldn’t think of the word.” Suzanne lit up vocally and I glanced at her, but her pleasure slipped away as fast as it had arrived. “Nightmares about a cauldron, and about you dying in it.”

  After the third or fourth prediction of my death, it seemed like it should become old hat and that I wouldn’t worry about it. It turned out it was still a brand-new hat, though, because even having survived my death several times now, cold slammed through my blood like an arctic wind. The breath ran out of me in a huh, and for a moment the world went dark, Suzanne the solitary pinpoint of light to guide me home again.

  Truth was, she looked worse than I felt. I shoved a hand at my hair and clobbered myself on the head with my water bottle, which was sufficiently humiliating as to push away mindless terror with a high-pitched chuckle. I brought my voice back down to a more normal range. “I’ve heard that before, and I’m still standing. Don’t worry, Suzy. It’ll be okay.”

  “You don’t believe me. Nobody does. I thought you would.” The poor thing deflated. I’d have needed a bulldozer to make her any flatter. I put my hands on her shoulders again, trying to get her to look up. When she finally did, I pulled a smile from somewhere, and actually kind of bought into it myself.

  “I do believe you. When the grandchildren of gods drop by to make dire predictions, I listen.” Oh, lordy, if the me a year ago could’ve heard me now, she’d take the shotgun I’d abandoned and whack me over the head with it. I even had sympathy for that me wanting to do so. But at this point if a precognitive teenager turned up to tell me I was going to die, well, I was a slow learner, but not that slow. “This is probably the last question you want me to ask, but do you have any idea when?”

  “Halloween,” Suzanne whispered. “Today.”

  On the positive side, I’d gotten through more than half the hours allotted to Halloween already, and I wasn’t dead yet. On the negative, that meant the next ten hours could be very hairy. I looked at my watch. The next ten hours, eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to be exact. It struck me that I’d be better off wearing the copper bracelet my father’d given me than the watch. I wondered if I could to go home and get it, or if moving would alert the universe that I was now worthy of hunting. I sort of didn’t want to, just in case.

  Poor Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears while I stood there chasing idiotic thoughts around in a circle in my mind. I sat back down and squeezed her shoulders. “It’ll be okay. There’s a lot of daylight left to burn. Was it nighttime in the vision?”

  “Um.” Her voice cracked on the single syllable, but she nodded. “It was—there were—” She dragged in a deep breath and straightened her spine. She was tall, though she probably wouldn’t grow up to rival my height. Still, I sat up straighter, too, hoping it was for sorority and not machismo. “There are a lot of people in the vision. Most of them are shouting your name.”

  A trickle of curiosity slipped down my gullet and took up place in my diaphragm, cold and bright. “What name, exactly?”

  “Joanne, Officer Walker, things like that. I don’t really remember. I just remember that you go into the cauldron.”

  “Ah.” The spot of curiosity turned warm, as if satisfied, and I put my head in my hands. “That’s okay, then. It’ll be okay.”

  Relief broke Suzanne’s voice: “It will be?”

  I nodded into my hands. “Yeah. It will. I promise.” Joanne Walker could die in the cauldron, and all it would be was a shedding of another skin.

  Because my name wasn’t Joanne Walker.

  Oh, I responded to it, certainly, the same way I responded to e-mail sent to petiteboss1969@gmail.com, but that didn’t make it my name. My birth certificate read Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, which was pronounced Shevaun Grania, not Seeohbawn Grainy. I’d looked up the pronunciations dozens of times and still didn’t quite believe it. My father had taken one look at the Irish mess bestowed on me by my mother, and anglicized it as he saw fit. I’d been Joanne my entire life, and I’d changed my last name from Walkingstick to Walker the day I graduated high school and left my Cherokee heritage behind. Two people besides me knew my real name, and I hadn’t talked to my father in years.

  The other was—inevitably—Morrison. I’d confessed the truth once without meaning to, and later in far more detail while trying to save his life. Names—and truth, it turned out—had power. I’d managed to get Morrison out of trouble, but if I had to stand back and look at it, I could see how somebody might consider Joanne Walker to be a mask. She was a hell of a lot more real than Siobhán Walkingstick, who, as far as I was concerned, barely existed, but the shamanic world might well consider her to be a construct sheltering my core.

  I really didn’t want to give Joanne up, but part of me saw a big fat sign of inevitability hanging over my head. She could die and leave Siobhán in her place, and I suspected the result would be nothing more—or less—than my skill ratcheting up another notch. That was shamanism: that was change.

  One thing was for sure, though. I didn’t care how burned-down-to-essentials I got: I wasn’t going to start using Siobhán in day-to-day life. Scary stuff happened when people got ahold of my real name, and no way was I signing up for that kind of grief on a daily basis.

  I lifted my head, cheeks puffed out, and blew a raspberry at the graveyard. “Your visions, Suzy. Do you control them? Can you call one up when you want to?” I’d be impressed as hell if she could. Precognition wasn’t one of my tricks, but if a fourteen-year-old me had been handed that particular bag, I’d have probably cowered under the bed until it went away.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. At fourteen, with Coyote’s guidance in my dreams, I’d have jumped at it. I had jumped at the chance to become a shaman, albeit unknown to my waking self. I’d wanted to be special, and that wasn’t a good place for a young shaman to start from. On the other hand, I’d needed the training. Getting it in the sleeping world had covered all the bases: it prevented me from taking the darker path my bratty teenage nature would’ve dictated, while also preparing me to grow into someone worthy of the power I’d been granted. It’d been working very well, right up to the point where my older self came along and stole my teenage version’s studies for her own use. I had a lot to answer for, and much of it was to myself.

  “You want me to see what else I can see, don’t you.” Suzy sounded very calm for a girl with tear tracks on her cheeks. “You want to know if I can see anything that’ll help you win whatever it is you’ve got to fight.”

  “No.” Somewhere in the few seconds she’d been speaking, I aged about a thousand years. “What I want is to buy you some lunch and drive you home to Olympia where you can go back to a normal life. I don’t want to ask you to look to the future and watch people die.�
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  “But you’re going to anyway.”

  I turned my head to study the girl. Her gaze was steady, all green and full of fire, like her grandfather’s. No fear, no anger, just the sort of resolution the young can cling to because they haven’t yet experienced loss, and can’t imagine it would ever happen to them.

  Except Suzanne Quinley’d lost her whole family in one horrible afternoon, and had almost lost herself. It wasn’t bravado I saw in her eyes. It was courage. More courage, I thought, than I’d ever experienced myself.

  I finally nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. I’m sorry, but can you See for me, Suzanne?”

  “It’s okay.” She smiled, a sudden gentle thing, and put her hand over mine. “It’s okay, Officer Walker. It’s what I came here to do.”

  All the color spilled out of her eyes, leaving them hideous and bone white.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I didn’t know what it was about magic that made people’s eyes go funky. The first precognitive I’d known had done the same trick, and then color had bled back in, turning the irises black with hints of blue and gold around where the pupil ought to be. Suzanne’s did that, too, only with green instead of blue. Mine apparently went gold when I used the Sight, and so had Billy’s. Weirdly, I didn’t remember the coven’s collective eyes changing color when they called up earth magic. A half-formed idea that the power’s source dictated the change settled in my brain and faded out. It hardly mattered right now. I could pursue it when I wasn’t asking a teenager to see the future on my behalf.

  The clever part of me thought it’d be safer not to use the Sight on a girl reaching for the future, especially one who burned as brightly as she did by nature. The less clever part gave over to it without much consideration. Maybe it was human curiosity; maybe it was the shaman in me, hoping I could somehow help or guide her. Either way, the Sight flickered on in the same breath that Suzanne’s eyes went white, and for a little while, the whole universe stopped.

  She blazed. My God, she blazed, emerald fire pouring off her so hot it turned white at its edges. The world bent toward her as though she’d become a gravity center, pulling everything askew. My breath, light stuff that it was, had no chance, and my heart began to ache as my lungs emptied. The sunspots and flares I’d seen earlier cut through time in all directions, lashing out and hauling fragments of—

  Of not just the future, but possible futures. All of them, and all the possible pasts, with every decision made and every path not taken highlighted with chance and choice. Boundless chaos and unavoidable pattern tumbled together, overwhelming and inevitable all at once. Suzanne was concentrating on me, and I on her, and with both of us bound together by magic and intent, I Saw every life I might have ever led.

  Moving forward from this moment, spilling literally no more than a few days into the future: Thor on his knee with a diamond ring and a nervous smile, accompanied by a rough “I thought I was going to lose you, Joanne. I’d rather not do that.” Chance and choice rushed forward from there, brief examination of a surprisingly ordinary life filled with neither great regret nor great joy, making it an easy calm course to follow. A dozen similar futures splintered around that, some taking longer to come to fruition, but all of them gentle lives, quiet paths as I helped the people around me in small ways. Making a difference without risking myself: that was the core of who I became in those worlds. I had someone to go home to, something to lose, and never strayed so far as to lose him.

  My heart twisted, longing for that comfort, but at the same time those futures turned ephemeral, fading away. I’d already chosen a harder road, and the ease of a tranquil family life seemed very far away.

  Backward, but not very far: Morrison standing under the July sun in his T-shirt and dark shades, arms folded over his chest as he asked, “Would you take a promotion?”

  And that time, in that future-past, I whispered, “No,” closing the door on an investigative position in the force and opening one that let Captain Michael Morrison tug his shades off, stare at me incredulously, then pull me into an abrupt hug that felt as bewilderingly wrong as it did fundamentally right.

  Sideways: a young man with my eyes and his father’s straight nose looked at me with utter exasperation, and that was a future that sprang up no matter what path I followed. In one branching past, I stayed in Qualla Boundary and raised my son; in one splintering future I met him again, and either way, he was a teen and I was his exasperating progenitor.

  Back, back so far it wasn’t about me anymore, but my parents. Sheila Anne MacNamarra brought a three-month-old baby girl to Joseph Leroy Walkingstick, and her ruthless ability to make hard choices melted under his quick warm smile. I spirit-walked at four, in that future-past, and my imaginary friends weren’t; they were only invisible to most people. I knew Coyote for what he was, then, and the laughing girl I was got on a Greyhound bus to visit him in Nevada the summer I turned fifteen.

  And some things were fated, it seemed, because that me got pregnant, too, but when her Coyote lover found out, he came east to Carolina and it was a cheerful pair of young idiots who got married at the winter solstice. They should have been broken, so badly broken, but instead when the twins came early, Ayita, the baby girl born first with so little strength, survived thanks to the healing magic that bloomed in both her parents. Aidan, always stronger, lived as well, and that future-past, in its way, came around to the exasperated teenage boy again. This time, though, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his equally exasperated sister.

  Right there, right now, in the real world, fire scalded my cheeks, thin lines of heat and regret for a life I’d never so much as imagined. But then Morrison was there again, in another future I might never see, roaring like a bull as he stood his ground and fired his gun once, twice, again, until the clip emptied and he flipped it around to pistol-whip whatever was coming at him. Gary was there, too, a big old man with linebacker shoulders, crashing forward against a fog of darkness, and I knew that the woman I’d become wouldn’t have wanted to miss those two, not for anything in this world, and maybe not even for anything in any other world, either.

  I couldn’t see far enough down any one path to know if the girl who’d married Coyote would’ve been there to fight Herne or stop a banshee. Maybe she just would’ve had different battles to face, and the lives I’d disrupted, failed, or saved here in Seattle would never have been bent out of shape. Maybe there were paths I could’ve taken, that my parents could’ve taken, that would’ve let everybody come out alive.

  But maybe, just maybe, I was who and where and what I needed to be. Maybe all the prices that had been paid were nothing more than part of the high cost of living. For all my bitching and complaining, my life was turning out okay. Too much time spent mourning what might have been seemed like a reliable way to let bad guys latch on to me and push me toward mistakes.

  Another future-past whipped around me: a recognizable me, the Joanne Walker we all knew and loved, with almost all her same history in place, standing in Seattle’s heart like she belonged there. Only one anomaly ran through her life, compared to mine: the boy was at her side, and always had been, not given up for adoption as I’d done. Magic snapped around me, blue and silver and brilliant, but the boy had his arms folded, boredom writ large through his body language.

  I said, “Aidan,” out loud, and with the sound of my voice the myriad futures and pasts shivered to a stop. I caught a glimpse of a classroom, and of a kid in a vampire costume bent over a school desk. He lifted his head when I spoke, curiosity filtering though his expression as he twisted around, as if he’d heard someone behind him speak his name.

  Across bent space and time and three thousand miles, I met my eleven-year-old son’s eyes and said, idiotically, “I really hope there’s no such thing as vampires.”

  Aidan rolled his eyes, settling into that already-familiar look of exasperation, and went back to his schoolwork.

  Suzanne whispered, “Here,” with such concentration it pulled me away from
regarding all my possibilities. They lashed away from me, whipcords coming unbound and cracking the air with uncontrolled sonic snaps. I flinched at each sound, but Suzy turned blind eyes on them, confidence in the set of her jaw, and a lifetime of maybes braided together into a bolt of white that struck a thin true line going forward. Chaos receded, a lesser thing than Suzanne’s will, but despite the thread’s brilliance, when I tried to follow it forward, I met resistance. More than resistance: I was simply forbidden that path.

  True future, the usually snarky part of my brain whispered. Whatever lay on the other end of that bright line, I wasn’t allowed to see it because it was my true future, and no one could walk that more than once. I didn’t know where that piece of information had come from, but it was wreathed in certainty.

  Suzanne, though, wasn’t similarly constrained. For one, it wasn’t her thread to follow. For two, I wasn’t sure middling details like not being allowed to see your own future applied to the grandchildren of deities. “We’re outdoors,” she said in a shaking voice. “At a house. A home. There’s a swimming pool with children’s toys beside it. The moon is overhead, reflected in the water.”

  I shot a convulsive glance skyward. It’d been gray and drizzly for days, and the overcast sky gave no particular hint of wanting to clear. Even with the Sight turned to it, all I saw were heavy clouds ready to release another torrent of rain. Oddly enough, that cheered me. Maybe Suzy had the day wrong.

  Because it was so easy to mistake Halloween, when people dressed up as monsters, for any other day of the year, when they mostly kept the monsters inside. For a few seconds I was tempted to go home and put on my silly leather costume. Everybody knew she was one of the good guys, and wearing a nice obvious tag like that seemed like a good idea.