by C. E. Murphy
My phone, buried deep in a pocket, buzzed a voice mail warning as we came back into full satellite coverage. Mandy glanced at me as I dug the phone out. “If you answer that, is it going to throw you back into something like what just happened?”
“There probably won’t be an avalanche involved, but…” The missed call was from Billy. “But yeah, it’s likely.”
“Then do me a favor,” Mandy said. “Don’t answer until you’re out of my car.”
I closed my phone and leaned my head against the window, feeling the rift between myself and the rest of the world all the way back into town.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wednesday, December 21, 4:55 P.M.
I didn’t even bother to listen to Billy’s message, just went straight to the station after returning Mandy’s hiking gear to her. Billy wasn’t technically at work today, not any more than I was, but if something new and horrible had gone wrong, he’d almost certainly be at the precinct building to tell me.
I ran into Ray just inside the doors, more literally than I would’ve liked. He stayed planted where he was, like a fireplug, and I bounced off with a grunt. “Ow. What do you do, eat hubcaps for breakfast?”
“Plate mail,” he said unexpectedly, and looked pleased when I laughed. “That woman yesterday, she’s okay. Even agreed to go into a sponsored dry-out program. Guess getting her balls busted with a busted bottle showed her the light.”
I spent way too long working out the busted bottle balls, then shook myself all over and smiled. “That’s great. Sorry for siccing Corvallis on you. How’d that go? I swear, that woman’s a betta.” I was doing it again, comparing her to vicious fish. At least bettas, like Corvallis, were pretty. Cold and scaly, but pretty.
Surprise dug deep wrinkles into Ray’s forehead. “You think? I always liked her on the television, the way she doesn’t take crap from anybody. A real reporter, not like most of ’em on TV now. Anyway, it went great. We’re going out to dinner tonight.”
I scraped my jaw off the floor soon enough to stutter, “Have fun,” before he stumped out the doors, and stood there in the blast of cold air marveling at philosophies undreamed of.
A cynical worm crept into my thoughts, wondering if Corvallis had only agreed to go out with Ray as a way to gain inside information into the department and, by proxy, me. Then the worm began eating its own tail until it disappeared into a plonk of nothingness inside my brain, because Ray could most certainly handle himself. I didn’t envy Corvallis trying to pump him for information he didn’t plan to share.
That brought an unfortunately suggestive image to mind. I clutched my head, trying to shake it-both head and image-loose, and went upstairs to see if Billy was around, or if anybody had details on what else had gone wrong.
To my dismay, Billy was there, which meant something had gone wrong. I sat on the edge of his desk and waited silently for him to look up, but I wasn’t expecting the haggardness in his face when he did. I slid off the edge of the desk into the chair beside it, ice forming inside my stomach. “What happened?”
“What happened? My partner disappeared all day and I’ve been sitting here with my gut turning to acid waiting for her to get back. And to keep my mind off it I’ve been going over the files of a dozen people eaten alive over the past six weeks, and coming up dry. What the hell do you mean, what happened?”
I slumped in the chair, relief turning to a burp that I inexpertly hid behind one hand. “Sorry. From your expression I thought maybe somebody else was dead. Our gambit kind of worked. We flushed the thing out, but it started an avalanche and got away.” I related the relevant parts of the day, ending with, “I don’t know what it was, Billy. I know what it wasn’t. It’s not a god. It didn’t have that kind of power. It’s not even a sorcerer, but it’s not exactly human, either.”
Billy was taking notes and muttering, “Not quite human, eats human flesh, invisible but physical spirit form…you do that.”
“What?” I cranked my jaw up for the second time, a guilty blush burning my ears. “Oh. God. Yeah, I guess I do.” There was no guess about it. Very early on I’d learned to bend light around myself to make a mirage, to suggest I wasn’t there. It was a matter of changing perceptions, which was one of the basic precepts of shamanism, and nobody had to know I’d gotten the idea from a comic book.
I’d looked at my reflection once when I’d pulled that cloak around me, and I had the sudden disturbing realization that Billy was right: what my opponent had done that morning had looked a lot like my trick. “It’s another shaman?”
That was disturbing on a lot of levels. One, and rather obviously, shamans weren’t supposed to go around eating people, except maybe symbolically. A shaman who went bad wasn’t a shaman anymore, but a sorcerer, at least in a lot of Native American myths. But my admittedly limited experience with sorcery had a different feel to it: seductive, rational, sacrificial…
I was starting to notice a lot of nasty things came across as seductive. Not blatantly so-no women in red dresses, no rain of wealth from the sky-but seductive nonetheless. Good didn’t seem to be quite so charming, which I kind of thought was a mistake on the home team’s part. Enlightenment and altruism weren’t actually that common, as far as I could tell. People tended to want things, and evil tended to offer those things.
“Is that even possible?”
I rattled myself out of considering good’s ineptitudes and frowned at Billy. “I don’t know. I mean, it wouldn’t be a shaman anymore, but I don’t know if a sorcerer still has the same bag of tricks. Virissong was never trained as a shaman, and he’s the only sorcerer I’ve ever met.”
“Okay, how about other shamans you’ve met?”
“They’ve all been dead.” I sounded pretty lost and miserable when I said that, and cleared my throat like it would make me bigger and stronger. “Really. The only other living shaman I’ve ever spoken with was Coyote, and…”
“Yeah.” Billy sighed. “I’m sorry, Joanie.”
“Me too.” I scrubbed my hands through my hair, itching my scalp and hoping invigorated blood flow would awaken some kind of deep understanding in my soul. “Okay. This is what I know. That thing-” I straightened up suddenly. “Billy, I want to try something. Can astral projections have physical manifestations?”
To my chagrin, Billy threw his head back, laughed aloud, then settled back in his chair with a broad grin. “I can’t believe I just heard you say that. A year ago you’d have been snorting in your sleeve and rolling your eyes if you’d heard me say something like that. And here you are, full of confidence and completely serious when you ask about physical manifestations of astral projections.”
A little blossom of embarrassed pleasure burst in my chest. I hunched my shoulders and looked down, but shot Billy a glance through my eyebrows. “You know I think that’s the first time you’ve given me even a little bit of shit about any of this?”
His grin got even wider. “I guess I figured you could take it by now.” Some of the teasing slipped away, though the smile stayed just as big. “Don’t get me wrong, there were times I wanted to say I told you so, but…”
“But you’re a much better person than that, and you thought sending me off in a sulk would be counterproductive?”
“Something like that, yeah.” Billy grunted as I scooted my chair forward to lean over and give him a hug. Normally I reserved that kind of soppy behavior for Gary, but just this once I thought we both deserved it.
“Thanks, Billy. Seriously. For putting up with all the crap I ever gave you, and for not rubbing my nose in it when I got hit in the teeth with your world. I owe you a lot.”
“You can fix my car for free for the rest of your life in repayment.”
“I do anyway.”
Billy shrugged, still smiling. “Guess that works out, then. All right, Walker. What was that about physical manifestations of astral projections?” He started laughing again, and I couldn’t blame him.
“Can it be done? Because if it
can-” I hadn’t often left my body behind. A handful of times, maybe, and always in a crisis. I relaxed into my chair-a task in itself, as it was hard plastic-and thought about the peculiar sensation of standing over there when I could see my body sitting over here. An underlying part of me considered leaving my body behind to be joining the world of the Sight wholesale. I wasn’t comfortable with that. I liked my body, and the world the Sight showed me was detached and gorgeous. I was afraid to become too attached to it, for fear I’d become detached myself.
The middling detail that I’d spent a significant chunk of my life deliberately detached was not to be considered. Vaguely grumpy at the thought, I got up and walked across the room, arms folded under my breasts and gaze locked downward. “All I need is a-”
My voice wasn’t. I put my hand on my throat, then turned back to see myself lolling in the plastic chair beside Billy’s desk. Billy grabbed my wrist, and I felt the distant pressure of his fingers checking my pulse before he looked around the room, eyebrows drawn down. “Joanie?”
It was a few minutes after five, and Homicide was mostly cleared out. Even so, everybody who was left glanced up, then exchanged looks that said they were suddenly in a hurry to go out for coffee and gossip about the Paranormal Pair.
Me, I walked back to Billy, silent on weightless feet, and gave his paperwork a push with one finger.
My finger slid through it with the sensation of paper cuts. I yelped and drew back, shaking my hand, then glanced at my body. A sliver of red awakened on one fingertip, and I grimaced. A little more determined, I reached for the papers, picked them up, and tapped them into a tidy stack before setting them back down on his desk and snapping back into my body, where I stuck my bleeding finger in my mouth. “Ow.”
Billy did a fine impression of a goldfish, his eyes bulging and mouth popping. “Did you just-?”
I said, “I did,” around my finger. “Never tried that before. See what I did?” I stuck my finger out at him and he eyed it.
“Aren’t you a healer?”
“Oh. Right.” Something like a paper cut didn’t even require a car metaphor anymore. I just wanted the injury sealed, and voila, it was. In theory I should be able to do that with much graver damage, but I hadn’t leveled up that high yet. “So I can affect the physical world even out-of-body. I have this…nasty theory. We keep finding bodies with no signs of foul play in the immediate vicinity. Maybe they’re being killed where we’re finding the bodies, but the attack is coming on an astral level. The blood and viscera could be feeding back through the spirit into the separate body. No physical mess to clean up.”
Billy, whom I thought of as being fairly tough, turned a little green around the gills. “Is that possible?”
I faced my palms upward. “The murders in Woodland were ugly, but their point was to channel souls to something separate that hungered for them. Same thing with the mess at Halloween. This is a little different, so I don’t know that it’s possible, but I’m not ruling it out.”
“Wouldn’t it leave a mark? Like Mel’s power circle?”
I’d never seen Billy seem out of his depth before. Maybe it meant I was finally catching up to the rest of the class. I wasn’t sure if it felt good or profoundly alarming. “I just rearranged your desk with almost no effort, much less a power circle, so not necessarily. If you’re talking about somebody with a lot of rage or fear, and I’d think we kind of have to be, it’s…” My brain caught up with where my mouth was going, and stopped my chatter with a sound of dismay. “Somebody could be doing this without knowing it.”
“They could be eating bodies, stripping them of their souls, and leaving the corpses on unmarked territory without knowing it?” Billy’s voice rose sharply enough that the handful of remaining detectives looked around at each other again, then, to a man, started mumbling about coffee breaks. In a rustle of coats, heavy boots and slamming doors, we were alone. Billy glowered after them. “Nobody offered to bring us a cup back.”
“I wouldn’t have, either. Look, I’m just saying it’s possible. Maybe not probable, but the human psyche is messed-up territory. So we need to pursue this, but for the first time I’m thinking maybe we shouldn’t go in with all guns blazing.”
My cell phone gave its six-note warning that a text message was coming in as I finished speaking. So did Billy’s. We both went still, my tense expression mirrored on his face, and I silently put a fist on one palm. He echoed the motion and we beat our fists against our palms in tandem, one two three.
I came up scissors. He came up rock. I swore and stood up to pull my phone out of my pocket, reading the message out loud: “Possible new victim. Positive identification, oh, shit.”
“What?” Billy was on his feet, leaning toward me like the tension in his body would negate whatever I had to say. “Who?”
I pressed my hand over my mouth, fingers icy, belly cramping. “I’m sorry, Billy. I’m so sorry. It’s Mandy Tiller.”
And it was unquestionably my fault.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mandy was still breathing when we got there.
We were fast: the paramedics were only just pulling into the driveway when we reached the Tillers’ home, a few blocks away from Billy’s. The fact that there were paramedics at all pushed some of the churning terror in my stomach aside and made room for something almost worse: hope. No one else had needed a paramedic. I fell out of Billy’s van and ran across the Tillers’ lawn, skidding across snow to reach Mandy’s side.
Unlike the other victims, she had only one bite mark. A stretched-out wound had torn her coat and shirt and left a broad toothy gash in her forearm. A pool of blood stained the stairs under her head, which was both horrible and wonderful. All the others had been found in clean sites, and I knew for certain Mandy hadn’t been attacked miles away and been dumped on her own front steps. I’d been with her barely an hour earlier.
A paramedic put a hand on my shoulder. “Excuse me, ma’am.”
I whispered, “Ten seconds. Just give me ten seconds. Please,” and let the Sight wash over everything.
Blood seeped from her skull, a simple but significant wound that cried out for healing. I clenched my hands, wishing I had time, wishing I didn’t have an audience. But the paramedics could care for the head wound; what I was more worried about was the utter nothingness which had surrounded all the other victims. And though unlike them, Mandy still breathed, she also had no spark of life. Her aura didn’t even lie flat against her skin, giving me some hint of her well-being. It was just gone.
What I could See were vestiges of my own power, familiar silver-blue tendrils still lingering from our adventure earlier in the day. I jerked around to look at Billy with the Sight, searching for similar remnants around him, and found nothing. But it had been weeks since I’d used my power on him, and even then it hadn’t been the kind of physical shield I’d used on Mandy. I didn’t know if the residue had protected her in some way or not, but even if it had, that didn’t exactly balance out setting her up as a potential victim in the first place.
While I was looking at Billy, the paramedics swooped in and got Mandy onto a stretcher. Jake Tiller sat on top of the porch steps, wrapped in a huge winter jacket and blank-gazed with fear. One of the paramedics offered his hand. Jake took it blindly, letting the man guide him down the stairs toward the ambulance. The poor boy’s aura was static white, shock too great for his true colors to wash through. Billy, a few yards away, was talking to the cop who’d texted us, and I heard the guy say, “The kid came home from ball practice and found his mom lying on the steps. He called 911. Probably saved her life.”
“He’s smart,” Billy agreed. “Friends with my son.” I let the rest of their conversation fade away as I turned my gaze to the snow-littered steps and yard.
Anybody else and I might’ve thought she’d slipped on the stairs and cracked her head, but I knew Mandy Tiller hadn’t received a gash-toothed bite on her arm that morning. I’d have healed it if she had. So the thing ha
d come after her, and somehow, it had failed to walk away with her life. I was less certain about the safety of her soul.
There were imprints in the snow on the uncovered porch, just like the ones I’d seen yesterday morning. I didn’t touch them this time, afraid I’d flatten them into nothing and destroy any chance of a lead. I’d seen, that morning, how far this thing could jump in a single bound. And it did jump, traversing space like it was real. But then, so did I, when I separated from my body. I didn’t float through walls or fly up to rooftops. I walked through the doors and climbed stairs, treating the astral world essentially like the real one.
It was a paltry thing to go on, but at least it was something. I stood up and followed their imprints’ potential trajectory, scanning the yard and sidewalk and street without finding a hint of where the thing might have landed. Neighbor’s yard, across the street, empty. No trees bigger than bushes to ricochet off anywhere in easy sight.
A quick wash of snow, unsettled by the rumble of ambulance engines, slid off the roof and poofed into the yard, narrowly missing the porch. I flinched, reminded of the avalanche.
More snow flopped down, less vigorously than if someone had shoveled it, but with a certain amount of enthusiasm. A ghost of forensics training came back to me and I crouched again. There was no kickback in the imprint, no spray that suggested the beast had jumped forward. The indentations looked like it had squatted, just as I was doing now. My gaze strayed to the roof.
Well. Just because I’d never tried floating up to a rooftop didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. I pressed my spine against the house, propping myself against it, and for the second time in an hour, slipped the surly bonds of earth.
My subconscious had a mean sense of humor. It had let me float through a closed door, but not a wall, because one was meant for walking through and the other wasn’t. But that had been nearly a year ago, and I had more control now. Gravity was permitted, I decided, to exert the smallest influence over me, just enough to keep me from floating into the stratosphere and beyond. I weighed in at a little over one-sixty, but there was no reason my astral form couldn’t be light as a thought.
