Demon Hunts

by C. E. Murphy

  I badly did not want to see what Faye Kirkland’s death looked like, splashed across Billy’s lawn. On the other hand, maybe recognizing it would give me a hint as to how to heal that space a little faster, so there were no malingering effects to distress his family. I actually held my breath, trying to pull the bright shamanistic world into conjunction with the darker, murderous version I was looking at now. A headache spiked in my right eye as two opposing world views fought for domination, then finally settled down like a cat and dog determined to ignore each other. The Hollidays’ home came into focus, a beacon in the dark.

  For long seconds I wasn’t at all sure I was actually seeing their house, because all I really Saw was the brightness, same as I’d seen earlier. Faye’s death came into slow focus, but it was a shadow, with nothing of the strength or horror I expected it to have. I felt Melinda there, full of love and confidence and determination. Full of serenity, greater by a considerable margin than the terrible things that had happened that summer.

  Relief and delight bubbled in my chest and made my eyes sting enough to threaten the Sight. Apparently a deliberate application of positive energy could make a difference, which gave me an uplifting spark of hope for the whole wide world. “Your wife is something else, you know that, Billy?”

  “Yeah,” he said with a note of pride that fell just short of smug. “Yeah, I do.”

  Buoyed by the knowledge that it was possible to fight back against marks left by abominations, I turned toward the next-nearest site of ritual murder that I knew about: Woodland Park.

  Dark power sledgehammered me alongside the skull.

  I dropped into my chair like I’d had my strings cut. Nausea rose up, hurrying to find an escape route, and I ducked my head between my knees, classic crash position as I gasped for air. Billy’s worried “Joanie?” was louder this time, and I barely managed to get fingertips above the table’s edge to give him a semi-reassuring wave.

  “I’m okay. I’m…” I fumbled for my glass of water and took a few tiny sips while still in crash position, which wasn’t the easiest of tasks. “Oogh. Okay. I’m…” I’d said that once already. I got my elbow onto the table and cranked myself up inch by inch, neck stiff as I made myself peek outside again.

  Three points of a diamond raged with malevolence, pouring sick purple-gray power into the sky. I couldn’t imagine what kind of whammy that field would’ve had if the last murder, the last point on the diamond, had been completed. As it was, if I hadn’t been heartened by what the Hollidays had accomplished just before looking at the diamond, I would’ve been down for the count. It was so astonishingly strong and so utterly desolate that I had no idea how I’d failed to notice it earlier.

  Two answers came to mind: one, I hadn’t been looking for it, and two, on a subconscious level I suspected I’d been trying hard to ignore it. Seeing the world in shades of sick and well was supposed to be my purview, but right here, right now, I was just barely able to handle it. Six months ago it would’ve sent me running for the hills.

  Billy came around the table and caught my hand. His fingers felt scalding, which slowly resolved itself into an awareness that mine were icy. “You all right, Joanie?”

  “All right” covered a host of sins. I nodded, pressed my eyes closed and nodded again. “Yeah. I just got…an idea of what I should be looking for.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  An uncomfortable shuffle behind us made us both turn to find our waitress, plates in hand, looking concerned. “Is everything okay? Did the tart not agree with you?”

  Visions of consorting with saucily-dressed women over lunch rose unbidden. I fought back the urge to admit that they weren’t really my type, instead mumbling, “No, no, it was fine, sorry, I…”

  Billy stood up with a smile. “Banged her knee on the table, you know that nervy place doctors hit with the hammer? Only worse. She’s fine. Lunch looks great.”

  Relieved, the waitress put our food on the table and scurried off. I worked my way to sitting and looked sadly at my food. “I probably shouldn’t eat if I’m doing all this vision stuff. You’re a good liar.”

  “I’m a very good liar,” Billy corrected, “and you’re not doing quest work here. Even if you were, you should see yourself, Walker. You look like a ghost. Eat. If we have to wait a couple hours to look at the city again, so be it.” He nodded at my plate and repeated, “Eat.”

  He was the senior partner in this relationship. Who was I to argue? Besides, I felt like I’d been run over, and food sounded like the first step to recovering. I bent over my lunch and shoveled it in like a prisoner.

  Twenty minutes of intense eating and the savoring of an incredible chocolate concoction that should have been called “I’ll do anything the chef says as long as he lets me have another one of these things” later, I nerved myself up to take another look at the city. The double vision of life and death settled more easily this time, suggesting that I was probably supposed to be able to do something like this. Still, I avoided looking toward the Woodland baseball park. It would’ve been a shame to lose that lunch.

  We’d rotated around so we were looking over the south of the city. There were all the marks of homicide and suicide and car wrecks—those several hundred deaths a year on Seattle roads made a real mess of the streets—but nothing like the hideous power of the banshee’s murder site. I knew where another one should be, and got up to walk widdershins around the restaurant, watching for the black spike that should be the Museum of Cultural Arts.

  It was nothing like as nasty as Woodland Park, though Jason Chan’s death throbbed in the air. He’d died to set the black cauldron free, his blood smeared around it to break binding spells, but it was less ritualized than the banshee’s work had been. That, and there was only one of him, to the three dead girls in the park.

  I was just starting to think there was nothing to find, no power circle or controlling factor, when black light flared at the Troll Bridge.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Tuesday, December 20, 12:13 P.M.

  I forgot about the bill and ran for the elevator, struggling to get my cell phone out of my pocket as I went. Billy shouted after me, then swore and hurried to pay the bill as I hopped around, waiting impatiently on both the elevator and the phone.

  The phone came through first, Morrison sounding unusually gruff, which was saying something. “What do you want, Walker?”

  “Get somebody over to the Fremont Troll right now. I don’t know what I just saw, but it was something. Something bad. Billy and I are on our way, but we’re at the Seattle Center and traffic’s going to be impossible.”

  Morrison went silent and the elevator dinged. I rushed in the instant the doors were open wide enough to let me. Billy finished dealing with the check and hurried after me, but not fast enough. By the time he joined me in the elevator I was jittering around like a wind-up toy. Morrison came back to the phone, gruffer yet. “I’ve got a car on the way. Call me the minute you know something, Walker.”

  “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” I hung up before I heard Morrison’s response to that, and Billy folded his arms and gave me a look that said “Well?” as the elevator made its way down six hundred feet.

  “I don’t know. I saw something. It looked bad.” I had the gut-deep feeling I’d just witnessed a murder, and I was weirdly excited about it. I mean, not that I wanted to be seeing murder done at a distance, but it was a brand-new and interesting aspect to my powers. It seemed like it could do some good if I could figure out how to harness it.

  “Is it our guy?”

  “I don’t know. The troll’s even less rustic than Ravenna Park. We’re just going to have to go find out. Do you have a siren for the minivan?”

  “Yeah, but if you tell my kids, no one will ever find the body.”

  I made a vague attempt at a Scout’s oath salute, and we ran for the car the moment the elevator disgorged us.

  It took eight minutes to get to the troll. Short
of teleporting we couldn’t have gotten there faster, but I still leaned into the seat belt like I was at the races and my willpower alone could get my horse across the finish line first. Well, except any races I’d go to would be NASCAR rather than Kentucky Derby, but the sentiment was solid.

  The Fremont Troll was one of Seattle’s more charming landmarks, as far as I was concerned. He was a concrete monster beneath the Aurora Avenue North bridge—they’d even renamed the road Troll Avenue in his honor—and he had a real Volkswagen Bug in one hand, like he’d just grabbed it from the bridge above. People came to climb and play on him regularly, and every Halloween the locals threw a party at him. I’d never gotten around to going, and now with my exciting new power set, I was sort of afraid to. He was only concrete and rebar, but that was in the Middle World, the one we lived in day-to-day. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen if somebody with shamanic gifts came by on a night when the world walls were thin.

  Two patrol cars and a paramedic ambulance had gotten to the scene before us. I knew one of the cops—Ray Campbell, a six-foot-tall bodybuilder squished into a five-foot-five body. He’d been a patrol cop for years, never interested in moving up to detective or even to a command position. “No chance to bust balls,” he’d explained to me once. Busting balls was Ray’s favorite expression and possibly his favorite pastime, and I was hardly going to argue with him about when and where the most opportune moments to do so came along.

  He turned toward us with a determined expression that said “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave now” before it faded into a grimaced greeting. “Hey, Walker, Holliday. Don’t know why the captain sent us down here, but it was a good call. She’s not dead yet.”

  Billy and I said, “Yet?” together, then traded off on other questions like, “Is she going to be?” and “What happened?” and “Can I help?”

  That last was me, edging toward the ambulance. The paramedics no doubt had it under control, but healing magic made my palms itch with the desire to do something.

  Ray looked back and forth between us, then folded his arms over his broad chest. “You know how bums hole up down here. Looks like a fight over some booze got out of hand, and she got stabbed with a broken bottle. She oughta be dead. If we hadn’t gotten here she would be. Stay out of it, Walker. You don’t want to give the Captain anything else to explain.”

  I did a fine job of freezing like a nervous rodent before my shoulders slumped and I shifted back toward Billy. Ray looked like he’d gone up against a wrecking ball and lost, but he was plenty smart. He nodded firmly once I got back to where I’d started, and cheer crept across his face. “Somebody’ll have blood on their hands, or know who does. Just gotta bust a few balls to find out who. Probably don’t need you two down here, if you want to head back up to the station.”

  “Okay. Good. That’s great. I mean, it is. It’s great. I’m glad she’s not dead.” And I was. I’d just been hoping we’d gotten a lucky break, and happened on our cannibal in the middle of chewing on someone. I got on my phone and called Morrison, feeling like quite the sad sack as I offered, “All it was was a mugging over some booze. A woman got stabbed, but the paramedics got here in time, so it looks like she’s going to be all right.”

  “All?” Morrison said incredulously. “You just saw an aggravated assault from halfway across the city and saved somebody’s life, and all it rates is an all?“

  When he put it that way it seemed like more of an accomplishment. I cleared my throat uncomfortably, and Morrison said, “Good job, Walker,” and hung up the phone to leave me standing next to a giant concrete troll. I stared up at his hubcap eye, and thought if he winked it wouldn’t be any more startling than my boss telling me I’d done well.

  He didn’t wink, and after a minute I reeled back toward the minivan. Ray and the others had this one under control; no need for the Paranormal Pair to hang around getting in the way of a perfectly ordinary assault investigation. “I think this puts us back at Joanne Walker as bait. Unless you’ve come up with something better.”

  Billy said, “I think I have,” and a Channel Two news van came whipping down the road and screeched to a halt in front of the ambulance.

  ———

  Laurie Corvallis jumped out of the van like she was on the verge of a huge news story. To the driver’s credit, he pulled the van back out of the paramedics’ drive path before dragging a camera out and following Laurie. She was already halfway to where I was struggling to yank the minivan’s door open. Billy had locked it. Very safe of him. Annoying, but safe. I jerked at the handle, then put my back against the vehicle like I had enemies approaching from all sides. “What in God’s na—”

  Wrong approach. I thrust my jaw out, trying to rewrite my internal dialogue, and tried a second time. “Can I help you with something, Ms. Corvallis?”

  “Just going where the stories are, Detective Walker. Do we have another cannibal victim here?” Her blue eyes were eager in much the same way a piranha’s were. I wondered why I kept comparing her to carnivorous fish.

  “We have a completely unrelated incident here. Go away.” I winced. “I mean, sorry you came out for nothing.”

  “Now, Detective.” Corvallis’s voice went from eager to warm, even condescending, like we were old friends and I was being silly over something unimportant. “I saw how you went tearing out of the Seattle Center. Do you really expect me to believe it’s over nothing?”

  “You were following me?”

  Her cameraman got the camera up and running as I asked, and I found myself suddenly blinking into its brilliant light. It was a gray Seattle day already, and under the bridge it bordered on dark, but the floodlight seemed like overkill. I shielded my eyes with one hand and squinted toward the camera guy. “I fed you a burger and fries this summer. Is that enough of a bribe to get you to turn that thing off if I ask you to?”

  He gave me a bright smile. “Maybe once.”

  “Right.” I didn’t ask, and his grin broadened. Corvallis gave him a dirty look and he wiped the smile away, but he winked when she turned back to me.

  “To answer your question, yes, I was following you. I think you’re where the action is, Detective.”

  Billy, on the far side of the minivan, snorted over the clunk of the doors finally unlocking. “You’ve obviously never checked her social calendar, then.”

  “You’re not helping.”

  “Want me to?” Ray stumped over to us, looking Corvallis up and down with an expression that lay between lascivious and threatening. I had a sudden vision of him asking me if she needed her balls busted while the cameraman was filming, and blurted, “This is Ray Campbell, the officer on this case. He’s the man you’ll want to talk to, Ms. Corvallis. Thanks for your interest. I’m sure your superiors are eager for an in-depth report on the plight of the homeless in Seattle. We all need our social awareness raised.”

  I pulled the door open and fell into the seat, hauling my legs up in my haste to escape. Ray planted himself front and center between the minivan and Corvallis, and she gave me a daggered glare over his shoulder before putting on a reporter-playing-nice smile and stuck her microphone in Ray’s face. Billy hopped into his side and closed the door behind him. “That woman’s going to get you in trouble someday.”

  “You mean more trouble than the Seattle Slaughterer thing this morning?” I put my seat belt on and tried not to look over my shoulder as we left the scene a few seconds behind the ambulance. “I know. Worse, though, she’s going to get herself in trouble. Look, this whole Magic Seattle thing, the whole world of the other and all that. How do you keep people from getting in over their heads and getting hurt?”

  “Lobotomization.” Billy grinned at my expression. “You can’t keep people from getting hurt, Joanie. You can warn them, but somebody like Corvallis isn’t likely to leave the hunt unless something throws her off the scent. You’re doing a good job of leaving a scent.” He thumped his hand against the steering wheel and muttered, “That analogy might’
ve gotten out of control.”

  I laughed. “You think?” My humor slipped away. “I just don’t want people getting hurt on my account.”

  “Laurie Corvallis won’t get hurt on your account. She’ll get hurt on the story’s account, but never on yours.” He shook his head. “We do the best we can. You did good today. You just saved somebody’s life. That’s about all we can ask for.”

  “That and a break on the cannibal case.”

  Billy eyed me. “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, there, Joanne. You just pulled off a miracle. What’s the problem?”

  I rubbed my thumb over my palm, then cracked my knuckles, feeling like I was trying to discharge the healing power that had sprung to life. “I don’t know. I wanted that to be our cannibal.”

  “So did I, but come on, Walker. What’s it take to make you happy? First you don’t want to be a shaman, now you’re hitting it out of the park and you’re not satisfied because it’s a different ball than the one you were watching? Give yourself a little credit.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m happy, I’m happy!” I wrinkled my nose at the traffic and said, more quietly, “I’m glad she’s alive, Billy, and maybe you’re right. Maybe I should be elated. It just feels like in the grand scheme of things this is what I should be doing all the time, so it doesn’t feel like…enough.” By the time I got to the end of that, I was smiling again, ruefully. “I need some serious work on my perspective, don’t I?”

  “You sure as hell do.”

  “Arright.” A little bubble of delight burst inside me, like that healing power had figured out what to do with itself after all. I’d saved somebody. That was, in fact, pretty cool. Good thing I had people like Morrison and Billy around to beat that into my head. “Okay. Can we head back up to the Needle? We kind of bolted out of there, and I can’t think of anywhere better for a perspective adjustment.”