by C. E. Murphy
I let her explain about the golden-furred predator in the tunnels when we got back to the campfire group, and was pleasantly surprised that half a dozen of them agreed, not even grudgingly, to come keep an eye on the chamber. I didn’t remember seeing another way out of there, and suggested they didn’t even need to go into the chamber itself, but their friend Lynn was dead, others were missing and their attitude had something of a witch hunt to it. I hoped Billy could keep them from going after the wolf, but I had to trust him to it: every minute I stayed below was another minute Morrison could get killed in, and I didn’t care how disorganized the homeless mob was when I left them.
It took less time to get back to the mosaic and ladder than it had taken to get away from it. It was one of those fixed truths of the universe: the road back was always shorter, presumably because then I knew where I was going. I scrambled back to the surface and ran for the parking garage, because, like a moron, I had left my phone in Petite. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d run more than a block, much less a whole damned mile. I had an agonizing stitch in my side by the time I collapsed into Petite’s bucket seat, lodging dirt and muck in the leather, and frantically dialed Melinda. “Well? Where is he? And how do you even know?”
“I’ve been listening to Billy’s police scanner,” she said without the slightest repentance. I wanted to kiss her for the breach of protocol. “He got himself into the Market somehow, Joanne. They’re still chasing him around it.”
“The Market? What the hell is he doing downtown? And aren’t half the internal passages blocked off by gates?” I slammed Petite’s door, locking it, and was running again before I’d finished the questions.
Melinda gave a very unladylike snort. “I’m not sure how much locks and gates matter to shapeshifters, Joanne. That would be your area of expertise.”
“Like telepathy is yours?” I wanted to keep her on the phone. It was easier to run if I could huff and puff and bellow questions to take my mind off the fact that I was in no condition to sprint around downtown Seattle. I promised myself I would take up jogging Monday morning.
Mel’s voice stiffened a little. “It’s hardly an area of expertise.”
“Oh, come on, Melinda!” I skidded out of the garage, got my feet under me again and headed west on Pine Street as fast as my breathless body could take me. “You’re the most understated adept I’ve met! You’ve been in a coven, you say you’re just a wise woman, I mean come on, what does that mean?” It would have been a more impressive interrogation if I’d gotten the questions out that smoothly, but I was gasping for air about every third word.
Melinda’s stuffiness faded into mild amusement. “I told you covens didn’t suit me. I have a certain amount of empathic talent, and the better I know someone, the more at tuned I become. A full coven is too large—there are always a few people whose thoughts and ambitions are distasteful, so I decided a long time ago to take my grandmother’s path, and remain mostly apart from the magical world. Those who need me, find me.”
“And the whole thing tonight? You were talking in my head!” I crashed into a wall, bounced off and hauled ass around the corner toward the Market’s main entrance, bellowing, “Detective Joanne Walker, I’m the one here to handle the animal! I repeat, I am in command of this situation, please fall back and report to me!” as I went.
A couple of downtown cops I didn’t know appeared, looking somewhere between relieved and outraged. Neither, to my huge relief, had their guns unholstered. Apparently someone had actually listened when I’d demanded the wolf not be shot.
“I take it you’re there,” Melinda said in my ear. I wheezed, “Yeah,” and heard her smile through the phone. “Then go find Michael, Joanne. Certainly that’s more important than learning about me and my quiet little magics.” She hung up. I bent over, coughing what tasted like iron filaments from my lungs.
One of the cops, bemused, said, “You sure you’re in charge?” and I flapped my phone hand at him, patting myself down with the other as I searched for my badge.
Which, of course, I didn’t have. I wheezed an obscenity, then waved my phone more urgently. “North Precinct. Detective Joanne Walker. Not on duty, but in charge. Dial Morrison on the phone for confirmation.” Morrison obviously wasn’t going to answer, but the call would go through to his cell, which identified him as the North Precinct captain. I hoped that would be enough.
The cop took my phone and made the call as I leaned on the building, catching my breath. He looked about fourteen, though he couldn’t have been less than twenty-one, only seven years my junior. I hoped he wasn’t fresh enough out of the Academy to be determined to do everything absolutely by the book, since Morrison wasn’t going to answer. After a few seconds he took a breath like he was about to speak to someone, then let it out as he waited on the brief, clipped message announcing Morrison wasn’t available right now. He mouthed, “Not picking up,” to me, and said, “This is Officer Donald King with the West Precinct. I was calling to confirm Detective Joanne Walker’s jurisdiction in the case of a wolf sighting at Pike Place Market. You can reach me at,” and gave a number I promptly forgot. Then he hung up, handed me the phone and said, “It’s the biggest damned wolf I’ve ever seen. It’s gotta be four feet tall at the shoulder. You want to be in charge, you got it. What can we do?”
“Point me toward it and whatever you do, just. Don’t. Shoot it. In fact, just point me toward it and stay up here to guard the door. Don’t let it out, if it runs.”
Young Officer King gave me a dubious look, but nodded. “How’re you gonna catch it, ma’am? You don’t have a tranq gun or a net….”
“Through force of personality.” I had my breath back, and pushed off the corrugated steel door I’d been leaning on. “All right. Let me in, let me in, by the hairs, by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin.”
King gave me another uncertain look. “That story didn’t end up so well for the wolf, ma’am.”
Like I needed a fairy-tale pedant at my back. “Good point. What level’s he on?”
“Down next to the comic shop,” the other cop said. “Or he was last time we got a look at him. He got backed up against one of the internal gates, so we closed the next one up and called in.”
I didn’t know how Morrison had gotten that deep into the Market in the first place, but I counted small blessings that he’d gotten stuck, and jogged through the single open door.
SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 1:39 A.M.
Most tourists knew the Market from the ubiquitous fishmonger images: cheerful guys flinging whole fish at one another while maintaining outrageous, loud conversation and flirtations. That was the Market’s public face. But in the middle of the night, all that was left of the daytime bustle were concrete floors and the distinct, cold scent of fish. I broke to the left, heading for wood floors and slopes and stairs that offered only emergency lighting and exit signs to see by. In daylight, the Market was quirky, loud, entertaining and slightly impossible to navigate, since its floors didn’t necessarily match up with each other. It was less fun in gloom, though halfway to the comic shop I realized the Sight could take care of that little problem, and braced for brilliance as I kicked it on.
The impossible brightness didn’t hit me, this time. I was getting better at tempering the new power. That was good. It showed me warm flashes of human auras that said a couple people slept in shops, which surprised me. The owners had to know about them: homeless people came into the Market to get out of the weather, but I doubted many of them ended up behind the counter in the bead store or under a café table once the businesses closed down for the day. The Market’s hours were varied, with restaurants staying open fairly late and farmers opening early, so with restrooms handy and tacit permission from a store owner, it probably wasn’t a bad place to flop for a few nights. Certainly safer than being on the street, in a pinch.
Except for the occasional dire-size wolf running around after hours, anyway. The Sight pinpointed Morrison as easily as it had noticed the sleepe
rs: he was one floor below me, and judging from the comparative calm of his aura, no longer terrified. Not happy: there were red spikes through the purple and blue, indicating agitation, but at least he wasn’t going every which way with panic. I ran downstairs, trying not to thump too loudly.
Apparently I thumped loudly enough, because instead of a content wolf curled up in a corner with his tail over his nose, which is what I was hoping for, I got a bristly wolf with his back to a corner and his teeth bared. He’d come as far as he could within the Market; there wasn’t enough room for him to clear a jump between the gate behind him and the ceiling above it. Of course, I didn’t know how he’d gotten through locked front doors, either, so I wasn’t absolutely certain the jump was insurmountable. I had the hopeful thought that he’d decided to stop running and wait for me to show up and rescue him, but the snarling muzzle didn’t support that theory.
I stopped a good forty feet from him, wondering if making myself smaller would come across as non-threatening or vulnerable to his wolfy mind. Non-threatening was good. Vulnerable, not so much. Instead of trying I said, “Hey, boss,” as softly as I could. “It’s me, Joanne. Everything’s going to be okay, all right? I just really need you to come with me.”
I’d read somewhere that dogs had the cognitive power of a two-or three-year-old human child. A two-year-old would almost certainly understand what I’d just said. Whether he’d agree to come along was a whole different matter. That was the price of being two: old enough to comprehend and old enough to be stubborn. Morrison’s ears flattened, and I had the distinct impression if he’d understood, he was going to be stubborn. I’d gotten him into this mess. There was probably a certain wisdom in not entirely trusting me to get him out of it, especially since I didn’t know how. My best bet was bringing him back to the dance troupe and using the first half of their performance to power his transformation back to humanity. “Snap your teeth once if you understand me.”
He growled, which I didn’t think was close enough to count. I scowled at him a moment, then sighed and sat down anyway, not caring if my sudden smallness made me vulnerable. I could only think of one way to communicate with him, and trying it while I was on my feet was likely to lead to me falling over. I took one deep breath, and prepared to flee my body.
I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.
Actually the problem was it was way too easy. I fled, all right. Under normal circumstances, I’d have fled into some kind of familiar territory, often digging up through the earth to enter Morrison’s garden. That was how I saw the human soul: as a garden, with their general mental health reflected in how sparse or lush that garden was. Gary, my septuagenarian best friend, didn’t just have a garden: he had a whole jungle, warm and inviting and fantastic to explore. My own, though an awful lot healthier than it had been fifteen months ago, was still pretty spartan, with walls and straight lines and only a few bits where things were starting to get overgrown and develop some personality.
The first time I’d intruded on Morrison’s garden, I’d expected it to be tidy and rigid, like mine, which went to show just how well I knew my boss. The psychic reflection of his soul was way toward the Gary end of the spectrum: a mountainous, rugged landscape with vast pollution-free skies and raptors carried on the wind. That was where I expected to end up this time, too.
Instead I shot skyward, fresh new uncontrolled power boosting me to realms I never intended to visit. Air thinned as the sky paled, blue fading until stars sparkled through it. I left behind mountains I’d climbed once, a long time ago: mountains that dwarfed the Himalayas, their sharp peaks stabbing at the cool sky. The sun hung much too far away, so far I doubted I should be able to feel its heat, though the unfamiliar world below me was clearly not frozen.
It was just as clearly not my world. Things rode the wind with me, most of them barely held in one shape, like someone had released spirits from their bodies and set them drifting. A few were more real, for lack of a better word: far below me sunlight glittered off gold wings, reminder of the thunderbird I’d once encountered. I triggered the Sight like it might give me binocular vision, but not only was it not designed to do that, it had no effect anyway. I was already viewing everything psychically, and couldn’t reach any deeper.
There were lots of places to visit, astrally speaking. Out of all of them, I’d spent the least time here, in the Upper World. In fact, the only other time I’d come here, it had also been an accident. It had been a test, then, though I hadn’t known it at the time. I was a little better prepared in terms of knowledge for facing another such test. Sadly, given the events of the evening, I was possibly even less prepared magically, which was saying something.
I was not prepared for a swarm of locusts to buzz out of the pale sky and attack me. Sadly for my dignity, I shut my eyes and screamed like a little girl, flailing in an attempt to get the things off me. Instead they clung with remarkable determination, jillions of little feet sticking to me while I gibbered. I wasn’t precisely afraid of bugs, any more than I was afraid of mice. But something in my hind brain turned me into a fifties housewife when a mouse skittered across the floor, and apparently swarms of green buzzing bugs did the same thing.
Except the bugs kept buzzing, and I could only keep up the shrieking and squirming for so long before I started feeling like an idiot. Last time an animal had come after me in the Upper World, it had eaten me. The grasshoppers weren’t doing that. I pried one eye open to look nervously at them.
They weren’t grasshoppers. Lots of them were green, it was true, but the one sitting on my shoulder was a praying mantis, its odd leaflike limbs crooked like Dr. Evil’s as it watched me. A shudder started at the bottom of my soul and worked its way up to chill my skin. The mantis lifted its feet delicately and put them back down again as goose bumps disturbed him. Somehow it looked disappointed, which was not an expression I was accustomed to seeing on a bug. I mumbled a sheepish apology, and opened my other eye so I could look at the host of insects swarming me.
They had to number in the hundreds, even thousands. Not all of them were mantises, but enough were: I was pretty sure that many carnivorous bugs could make short order of me if they wanted to. Unlike the thunderbird, though, that didn’t seem to be their purpose. They seemed to be waiting on me, which made flailing and shrieking seem even less productive. I pulled my arms in tight, trying not to squish any bugs, and peered at them. Stick bugs, all of them, the sort I’d seen lots of in North Carolina. Those that weren’t mantises were my paternal family’s namesakes, walking sticks. It would be hypocritical to freak out over a bug I was named after, so I made myself unfold an arm and put a hand out to one of the bigger walking sticks. It walked carefully up my arm, paused at my shoulder to smack the mantis away, then put two of its long spindly legs against my face. I bit back a squeal of panic and stared cross-eyed at the thing.
It stared back. I don’t know what I expected from a bug, but that wasn’t it. It should have been it, since bugs weren’t known for their great interspecies communications, but I’d spent a fair amount of time having prolonged discussions with ravens, rattlesnakes, coyotes and occasionally other animals. In my world, a bug that talked to me wouldn’t have been all that unusual. But no, it just sat there gazing at me, and finally dropped its feet and walked back down my arm again, leaving me, once more, with the sensation I’d disappointed an insect.
When it reached my fingertips, it jumped off, and the Upper World disappeared from around me.
I was a little surprised to awaken in Morrison’s garden. I’d forgotten that’s where I’d been headed, before the stick insect interlude. It took a moment to shake off the feeling of hundreds of tiny bug feet crawling all over me, and to take a good look around.
I was in roughly the same place I’d been last time I’d visited his garden: a granite cliff littered with stubborn trees and a vista that overlooked half the world. Precarious for me, perhaps, but it was an easily defensible spot. Morrison could effectively shove
an unwanted visitor off the cliff, if he had to protect the core of what he was. The whole garden was wild country, the sort that could kill somebody anyway, if they weren’t careful, and the fact that it reflected Morrison’s soul said a lot about his confidence and competence.
It was also perfect territory for a wolf, but I doubted Morrison would be shapeshifted here. If he was, the situation was a whole lot worse than I thought, and my half-baked ideas of bringing him back to the dance troupe were going to require a great deal more baking, and probably Coyote’s guidance as well. My Coyote, Little Coyote, not the desert-stalking archetype. I didn’t want to bother him for any reason, not if I could avoid it.
Nor did I want to start bellowing for my boss. That seemed inexcusably rude, as if barging into his garden wasn’t already. So I stood there, watching an eagle on an updraft, until I got the spine-itchy feeling of someone looking at me. I turned around.
Morrison sat a few yards away, a magnificent silver wolf with blue eyes and an expression very like Morrison-the-man could wear: one that said, somewhat impatiently, What are you doing here, Walker?
“What I’m not doing is having yet another silent conversation with an animal. Come on, Morrison. I know this place, right here, and if I know it, you can’t be so far gone as to be stuck as a wolf in your own garden. I’m sure it’s very sexy and all, but I need to talk t—”
He shivered into human form somewhere far too close to the beginning of my last sentence, and remained where he was, with the exact same expression he’d had as a wolf. Except now he was—well.
At least he was dressed. Or at least mostly dressed, which he wouldn’t be if he’d shifted back to human in the real world. He was in jeans, which Morrison almost never wore, and a snug tanktop-style undershirt. No shoes. No socks. No shirt over the tanktop, and for some reason the tank was about eight hundred times more provocative than being totally shirtless would have been. It was the whole promise of something more, I guessed, but damn, it worked. A year ago I’d thought he was a little soft around the middle. The softness had disappeared over the course of the past twelve months, but the tanktop provided an opportunity to appreciate just how not-soft he was. Really clean solid muscular arms looped around his knees. Broad smooth shoulders with the shadow of a tattoo on one, though I couldn’t see what it was. The idea of Morrison having a tattoo at all cranked my brain around a few times and set it on a bewildered spin cycle. It was not, however, my brain which was doing most of the assessment of a half-dressed Morrison, so I didn’t really miss it as I licked my lips and kept right on gawking.
