by C. E. Murphy
Forget whether I was going to want him when this was over. He’d be crazy to still want me. I sighed—I seemed to be doing that a lot—and worked my way around the bloody circle to approach Heather Fagan.
She stopped me with an upraised palm as I made to step over the police line. “You’ve already been in here, haven’t you?”
“Yeah. Over there, next to Garth. I’ll give the guys my shoe information.” I lifted a foot and wiggled it a little.
“Garth. You know these people?” Heather put her hands on her thighs and pushed out of her crouch. “Is this going to turn out like the Ravenna Park death?”
“Yes.”
“So I’m not going to get any answers I like. And maybe not any at all.”
“Right.”
Heather gave me a flat look. “What is it with you?”
“...I’m a shaman, and this sort of crap has been following me around for about a year. It’s almost over now.”
She stared at me a couple of seconds, and I wondered if lying would have been the better tactic after all. Not that she would have believed a lie, either. But she didn’t call me on it, only snorted. “Over. Malarkey. Fine. I’ll make sure Sandra is the M.E. on this. She’ll find whatever is necessary to make this story bearable to the general public. Who’s your lead detective?”
I looked over my shoulder toward Morrison, but I knew the answer. “Billy Holliday. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Holliday. Of course. The one guy weirder than you are. And the one guy you can trust to help cover this up.”
“Just like you’re about to do.” I wanted to be very clear on that. Heather thrust her jaw out, but nodded. I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”
“Because I can’t do my job if I have tabloid reporters breathing down my neck demanding to know the real story when I can’t provide a rational and logical explanation for something like this.”
“What if there isn’t one?”
Heather pressed her lips together so hard they disappeared into a thin white line before she spoke. “My niece works in a morgue. Last Halloween she dismembered an animated dead body with a scalpel.”
“Holy crap! About yay tall,” I said, waving my hand at about shoulder height, “wears her hair in a braid? I met her! She’s your niece?”
I received another flat look for my enthusiasm. “Cindy wanted to talk about it. I wanted to forget everything that had happened that night, but Cindy wouldn’t let it go. Two months later, a bunch of frozen bodies shriveled up and turned to dust in the morgue while I was watching.”
That wasn’t strictly true. I, in fact, had been watching at the time. But I was willing to give Heather the poetic license here, since I was certain she felt like it had happened on her watch, if not under her very gaze. “Cindy wouldn’t let that go, either, and she wouldn’t let me let it go. Ever since then I’ve been seeing things I don’t remember noticing, or wanting to think about, before.
“This—” and she jabbed a finger toward the bodies with a certain vicious frustration “—is one of them. I don’t want to think there’s no rational explanation, Detective Walker. I’ve always believed there is one for everything. But I see you here, and I think about Cindy carving up zombies, and freeze-dried bodies, and facing a dozen dead people with no instantly obvious cause of death—” her lip curled, because burst chests and missing hearts were pretty obviously the cause of death, but I knew what she meant “—and I know the only answer I’m going to get is going to be unsatisfactory, so I would rather provide a rational lie on a police report than leave an entire city of people terrified that if they come down to Lake Washington for an afternoon at the waterfall, their hearts are going to explode out of their bodies!”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Be sorry for their families, who are probably going to spend the rest of their lives struggling to understand the lies we tell them.”
“If, when this is over, the truth is easier to believe, I’ll tell them the truth.” It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could offer.
Heather’s eyes narrowed. “If the truth is easier to believe than the lie?”
“No. If the truth is easier to believe than it is now.” Because if we won, I wondered if it might not be. One way or another, there was going to be a lot of magic released into the world. Maybe it would be easier to tell grieving families it had killed their loved ones, instead of letting them believe they had either been forced, or had chosen, to die in an inexplicable cult death at the foot of a newborn waterfall. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Heather, I know this sucks, so...thank you.”
“You want to thank me, you...” She hesitated, eyes searching my face. “You go talk to Cindy when this is over. Because if she can’t let this thing go, the thing with zombies and...this...” she said with an unhappy look at the bodies, before sharpening her gaze on me again. “If she can’t let it go, then I don’t want her exploring it by herself. I want her to have a teacher, somebody I know and trust. I don’t want to be standing over her body like this someday because she took a wrong turn.”
An ache filled my chest. I tried to breathe it away and couldn’t catch air at all, only made a small hiccuping sound and nodded. “I will. I promise.”
“Good. Thank you.” Heather turned away, going back to her job like none of our conversation had happened. Maybe she wished it hadn’t. I managed to draw a shuddering breath and stumbled away, confused and touched and frightened by her trust in me. I hoped I could be the guide Cindy needed. I hoped I could be the guide any of the kids I’d met needed: Cindy, my cousin Caitríona, Suzanne Quinley...even the Holliday kids, though them to a lesser degree, since they had their parents, who were far more stable than I was.
I was still fumbling with the idea of being a teacher when Marcia Williams rose out of the earth and backhanded me.
Chapter Eight
The blow caught me across the cheekbone, picked me up and threw me through the air. Stunned, I flew in a backward arc, already cringing at the idea of Heather’s fury at me messing up the crime scene by landing in it.
I missed by about six feet, landing ass-first in sand that sprayed up my shirt and fell into the back of my jeans. My cheek throbbed, right along the scar, and my tailbone, having been violently introduced to the earth, popped loudly. Sand began to itch in unfortunate places while I sat there shaking my head and trying to clear my vision.
Marcia was in her fifties and eight inches shorter than me. No way on this earth could she hit that hard, or throw me that far. It didn’t take a genius to know she wasn’t the one in charge, even if it was her body doing the dirty work. I shook my head one more time and lurched upward, getting a look at her with the Sight.
Everything about her was the shining opposite of Raven Mocker. Where it—he, since it had taken over Danny Little Turtle’s body—where he was sharp and dark, with angel wings that dragged soot and blackness with them, whatever rode Marcia was soft and shining silver.
That offended me on a visceral level. Silver was Gary’s color. Silver was one of my colors. Silver was Cernunnos and his horse, liquid metal to dip my fingers in. Silver was Nuada, whose living flesh had made both the rapier I carried and the necklace I wore. The bad guys did not, comma dammit, get to have silver souls.
The bad guys weren’t supposed to be beautiful, and Marcia’s aura was.
It lived, flowing and flexing, so that her wings were in a constant state of change. Misty feathers glimmered, fading and brightening, and sent the shapes of their quills plunging back into her body. Each one struck like an arrow, digging deeper into her flesh like the rider was confirming its hold on her. Marcia’s colors had been earthy. There was nothing left of that in her, or if there was, it was buried so deep I couldn’t see them without an intimate examination.
I was more than happy to engage in one. I dug my toes into the sand for purchase and launched myself back toward Marcia.
She was gone long before I got there. Under other circumstances I might have ad
mired the rapid grace of her transit, like mercury spilling over the sand. Her toes barely touched as she ran, spiritual wings lifting her, lightening the weight of her body until even without the Sight she seemed inhuman. Angelic.
All around the falls, voices lifted in astonishment and relief as the regulars recognized Marcia. Power swirled in the air, offering her strength, and like a thunderclap I realized what they Saw: one of their fallen returned, graced with an angel’s wings. They believed in her. In her, and that meant—
Power slammed me in the chest and knocked me back again. I skidded through sand, stopping wrist-deep in cold lake water. Seattle’s adepts gathered around me in a half circle at the lake’s edge, eyes alight with magic. Marcia had risen from death and attacked me, and by their lights, that made me the bad guy.
There were moments I absolutely hated my life. “Guys, I—”
They threw a net. Woven of magic, cast by dozens of hands, white at its core and only tainted with gray along individual threads, it spun out and collapsed over me, disturbing the water not a whit. It tightened, squeezing my arms against my sides and flattening me back into the water until I was wet from head to hip, up to ear depth. For a moment, just a moment, I stared up at wisps of cloud in the blue afternoon sky and wondered what I’d done to deserve this.
Then Suzanne screamed. I threw off any pretense of caution and called my physical totems to mind: Cernunnos’s sword. The copper bracelet my father had given me more than ten years ago, nestled safely beneath the arm of my coat. My mother’s silver necklace, a gift to my maternal line from Nuada himself. The Purple Heart medal Gary had given me that shielded my heart. Purple and copper blended together, becoming a small round bracer shield on my left arm. It was a thing of magic to begin with, but I lent it an edge, filling it with healing magic as I slashed the threads of the net.
None of my captors expected me to be able to do that. The net flew apart, threads untangling and carrying sparks of clean magic back into the users. Or I sure hoped for that last part, because I did not need a few dozen thralls on my back while I went to see what was up with Suzy.
The strongest of the adepts adapted before I was on my feet again, throwing a new, darker, stronger net. I lifted the shield and slapped it away, the action as much mental as physical, and muttered, “Knock it off. I’m good at nets,” as I stalked through them.
I felt their shock anew as the net rebounded off the shield, then suffered a quick pleased thrill as I realized even the idea of the shield glimmered with my own shields. Coyote would be so proud of me, keeping those things intact without conscious thought.
He’d be prouder if I’d been keeping them over Suzy and Annie without conscious thought. Marcia had gone after them while I was distracted by her posse. Without thinking, I whispered, Renee? silently, and took two running steps to get to them.
At the back of my head, a spirit animal shivered to life. A walking stick, my family’s namesake, whose gift to me was time travel. I called her Renee because it was alliterative, matching Raven and Rattler, my other two guides.
Time folded, just a little. Only enough to validate the old time slowed down cliché, except this time it didn’t slow down. It really did fold, letting me cross more distance than I should have been able to in those two steps. I slid between my friends and Marcia in the blink of an eye, and had the gratifying experience of watching astonished rage blacken her face before she slammed into me full force.
My shields should have held me in place. Instead, I went backward into Gary’s arms.
Marcia went straight into my chest.
Not literally. Not physically. But spiritually, yeah, she dived right in, and for the first agonizing instant I thought she shouldn’t have been able to do that. My shields were going strong, no chinks in the armor. My lungs, filled with raging silver angel, informed me otherwise. I made a desperately quick review of the choices leading up to this moment, concluding it had been either absorb her or let her go through me into Annie or Suzy. Obviously that wasn’t going to happen, so I’d chosen Door Number Absorb.
Why the hell I hadn’t opted for bounce her off me was a question for another time. Or not, since my sardonic inner voice said, Because now she’s trapped, and I had to agree trapped was better than running around on the beach stirring up chaos. We’d taken the fight to an inner battleground, where she could only damage me.
My shields were stronger than they’d ever been. To my eyes, to my sense of the world, we hadn’t left the beach. The colors were off, the sky yellower than it should be and the earth redder, but that was just a hint of the Lower World, a place of physical monsters and magic, bleeding through. It was far better that we’d bounced there than straight into my garden, which is where a bad guy would have landed me with a sneak attack not all that long ago. I was so much better than I’d been.
The question was whether I was good enough. I’d lost the Raven Mocker. I couldn’t afford to lose the thing that rode Marcia. In this Lower World beach, there was no trace of Marcia at all, only the silver-winged monster that had taken her over. Its face stretched, showing fangs its mouth wasn’t big enough to hold, and its clawed fingers tapped together like it was waiting to plunge them into my heart. Its eyes were featureless, no pupil, no iris, just blank shining silver, but I had no doubt it saw me.
Saw me, and saw our surrounds. For the briefest moment it paused, suddenly in serene repose as it took in the yellowed sky and red sand beach. In that moment it was perfectly beautiful, its face flawless, its body—it really was a she—smooth and curved and lovely. If Michelangelo had worked in silver, he might have made such a creature as this one.
Then she snarled a smile and the beauty was gone. She pounced. I dodged. Her wings swept around, beating at me like a swan’s, and to my astonishment I went down under the battering. It hurt, even if my shields made the damage negligible. I bellowed, Raven! inside my skull, on the desperate assumption that one bird knew how to fight another.
Something new happened at the back of my skull. Raven responded as he always did, with a flash of enthusiasm and chattering commentary, but he didn’t leap forth the way I expected him to. Instead, he twisted inward, kloking urgently.
My rattlesnake awakened and spun himself around Raven, scales hissing with speed. They turned in opposite directions, becoming more and more one with each other. Sharing the gifts that were theirs: transition between life and death, shape-shifting, speed. They rose up together, slim and strange, Raven’s feathers glittering with black-sheened scales, Rattler’s scales taking on the soft shining edge of wings. Renee tapped their foreheads with two long sticklike legs, and fire poured from them into me.
There was no pain in a shape-shifting done correctly, nor could there be any at all in the Lower World, where spirit was all. The fire was exultation, pride, power, release, as my spirit guides were able to truly work together for the first time, no longer hampered by my self-doubts and endless denials. They were meant to bring me individual gifts. I’d had no idea that together they could offer even more than that.
I became Raven, but vast. Even in the Middle World, mass didn’t displace with shifting: I would be a 165-pound bird, impossibly large. But here in the Lower World, with no constraints except my imagination, I was more than that. Rattler’s golden skin shattered across my black feathers, making them shine in the morning light. I gathered Rattler’s predatory instincts to me, shedding Raven’s scavenging ways. A skree burst from my throat, an ear-rupturing sound of a creature that had once acknowledged me, and whose shape still ran in my blood.
I was the thunderbird, and this, the waterfall, was my place.
Claws extended, wings buffeting, I leaped on the silver angel and drove my beak toward its throat. It screamed with Marcia’s voice, but Marcia was a mortal concern, a concern that belonged to Joanne Walker, and I was more than that. I opened my beak and hissed, a sound from Rattler that suited this golden eagle very well. My tongue flicked out, forked and tasting the silver thing’s fear.
I struck again, certain of victory.
It slipped from my claws, narrowing, elongating, taking a new and familiar shape: the shape of my old enemy, the serpent. That was as it should be. We had been locked in this battle, in these shapes, for as long as humanity had existed. For longer, perhaps, but without humans to count time, the aeons before had no meaning.
The snake reared up, still winged, but its wings would never be as powerful as mine. I crashed mine together with the sound of thunder. Dizziness came into its featureless eyes. I cried delight and struck again, but this time it flung itself sideways and rose again, lightning quick in its counterattack. Its fangs scraped my shields, unexpectedly sending blue sparks up: I had already forgotten that the Joanne part of me used magic that color, when Thunderbird-me was as gold as sunrise. We fought, tearing the land around us, waking currents in the water and rending clouds from the sky in our battle. It weakened and I did not. It was only a matter of time, and time was as much my gift as this magnificent shape. Time was Renee, my walking stick, and she was on my side.
A weight smashed into me from nowhere, hitting me between the wings. It flattened me against the earth, impossibly strong. I kicked and scraped the sand, trying to gain purchase and flip myself over, but it pushed harder, crushing my breath and my bird bones. The serpent-angel was beneath me. That was something. I opened my beak and slashed again, determined to kill it before my breath was gone forever.
It sank into the sand as if the thing crushing me was shoving it away, as well, until it was absorbed like silver oil. I screamed, thunderous anger that shook the very grains beneath me, but I couldn’t clear the sand away to find the retreating serpent. Rage blinded me, turning my vision molten gold. Under that heat the raven and the rattlesnake began to disentangle, sinking away just as the serpent did. I tried to catch them, too, but they slipped through my feathers-becoming-fingers, leaving me strangely bereft and magicless in the Lower World.
Distantly, very distantly, I heard shouts. That was unusual. Activity in the Middle World didn’t generally pass into my attention when I was in the Lower World. Of course, my journeys into the spirit realms, although they seemed to me to take place in real time, often happened inside the space of a breath or the blink of an eye. It was very possible I’d never been in here long enough for things to happen in the real world around me. This made twice in one day, though, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good or a bad sign.
