Harper lifted an eyebrow. Huh, it’s a bit like seeing the darker, prettier edition of me—more buff, and maybe an inch or two taller, though that could be the shoes. But the general description could be either of us, she thought. Don’t meet too many women over five foot ten. Damn, that’s unnerving.
The woman in white looked her over with a professional fast flicker common to cops and con men and straightened. “Hi,” she said. “Are you with the house?”
“No. My name’s Harper Blaine and I don’t reside here, but you could say it’s my side of the street.”
Harper cocked her head and glanced a bit sideways through the Grey. The woman was bright—and it wasn’t just the white leather coat. Her energy corona reached out in all directions and twined around her in iridescent blue and clear amber with twists of spring green, stabbed here and there with small black thorns, like reminders of passing death. An assembly of spirits stood with her. Interesting. The house’s energetic form was as dark and dense as a coal mine delineated with flickers of red and white energy that shone through billowing smoke. Whatever they are, her shining companions aren’t haunts. “You’re not with this house either,” Harper said. “Got pulled in by that ‘solve the mystery and win money’ thing?”
Harper Blaine was nearly my height, dressed far more professionally than I, and, as far as I could tell, in desperate need of a sandwich. Or three. Possibly seven. I considered her limp, her silver cane, and her location in a haunted house, and wondered if she needed a sandwich because she was recovering from using too much magic, which I had personally found tended to eat the flesh right off my bones. Except I would have liked to think I’d have noticed if somebody was wielding that kind of power in my town, so maybe she was just a very thin person.
“Joanne Walker. You can call me Jo. And yeah, kind of. I mean, who doesn’t need ten grand? But I’m working on getting a private investigator’s license and this could be the last step I need for qualifying. And I didn’t think anybody else serious would be here. But you’re serious.”
I mashed my lips together before they let any more idiotic-sounding words escape. By serious I meant Ms. Blaine had a fricking fascinating aura, unlike anything I’d ever seen before. She looked connected to the spirit worlds in a way I hadn’t encountered, like she could step in and out as easily as breathing. There was a soft greyness to it that made my eyes want to slide right off her and not quite see her, almost like she was a ghost. I didn’t do ghosts, by which I mean I couldn’t See them, so she wasn’t one herself, but she was . . . something.
“I am serious,” she agreed while I was trying to figure out what else she was. “I’m also a PI.”
Cold lumped in my stomach and drew it downward, like the house had gotten inside me after all. I needed this gig, not competition on it, or I was going to be living off my boyfriend’s goodwill forever, which was a perfectly horrible idea. I opened my mouth to plead my case, but what came out was a belligerent “Wait, what? You’re a female supernatural PI in Seattle who’s nearly as tall as I am and I’ve never heard of you before? That’s not even possible.” My hostility faded as the truth of that struck me. “Wait. It really almost is not possible. The world kind of took a nasty-feeling dip to the left when I walked through the door. Did that happen to you?” I took two long strides to the door and yanked it open.
Or that was the plan, anyway. What really happened was I took two long strides, put my hand on the knob, and got a white-hot shock that threw me halfway down the hall. I landed on my tuchus, stared in offense between the doorknob and my throbbing hand, and said, “I’d say try the door, but, uh, ow. Uh. Okay, look. This house is a big sucking black spot on the spirit world’s property value, and I generally give the city a once-over every week or so to make sure this kind of thing isn’t there. And it wasn’t here, but it’s not new, either. And you’re . . . not new, either, except to me. And your aura is weird. Not evil-weird,” I said hastily. “Just weird-weird. And . . . look, do you have any experience with parallel universes? Because I have a little, and I don’t think we’re getting home until we fix this haunted house.”
Harper let out an unhappy laugh. “First job back and it’s a death trap. Goody.” Parallel universes? Why didn’t I bring Quinton? She narrowed her eyes and ground through the possibilities; then she reached for the door, but pulled her hand back at the last second. “No . . . that would be stupid of me, wouldn’t it?” And that door does not look friendly. It had sprouted ugly crimson spikes as soon as Walker touched it. Harper poked it with her cane and the door emitted a sizzle and a fountain of sparks, but gave no way. Definitely not.
“Something’s very not-right here. A planar shift of some kind could explain why neither of us has any prior knowledge of a place this strange.” She glanced at Walker, whose aura increased in intensity, then faded back to normal as she shook her burned hand. Her formerly burned hand: it looked fine now. Harper’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting trick. And since you’re not trying to kill me, my guess would be we both fit some requirement of this ten-grand puzzle. But there have to be clues . . . What about those things on the table?” she asked, limping closer. The table’s surface shone with an oil-slick radiance. Hrm? “Wait. Give me a second.”
She eased closer to the Grey, getting a bit ghostly in the here and now, to look at the room from another perspective. It didn’t look better. The grid of magic’s warp and weft seemed very distant and the house was as impenetrable in the world between as if it had been built of paranormal cement or sat in a rift of nothingness that howled and keened. Even the temporaclines—planes of frozen time that piled up like sheets of ice—weren’t quite right here and shimmered with a fire-limned silver edge. The furniture seemed spun of ghostlight and the air was crushingly cold in this mode. She felt dizzy, suffocated, and electrified as the dense black walls began to bleed. Not good, not good!
Harper backed away from the fringe of the worlds, coming back up to the normal like a swimmer gasping for air. She stumbled and had to catch her balance with the cane, though she hadn’t moved. Something shrieked, rushing in a storm of light toward them from the narrow stair at the back of the room. The sound seemed to push into the air with the palpable force of a bomb blast.
“Jo! Get down!” Harper yelled, reaching for the sharp silver edge of the Grey as her hand slipped on the cane’s handle. Oh shit!
Get down was great advice. I heard it right about the same time a blast of ice slammed into my spine and shoved me out of this plane of existence and into another.
That sort of thing used to happen to me all the time, before I had any kind of decent control over my shamanic gifts. Lately it hadn’t happened at all, so taking a sharp breath in the red-skied, yellow-earthed super-saturated colors of the Lower World—a place where spirits took physical form—was a shock. And dangerous: getting yanked between planes was a good way to wake up dead.
There was a presence there, an anger so old it had rooted in the Lower World’s earth and grown up, tall and sharp and narrow. It had entrapping walls that tried to squeeze closer together, as if it could capture me. The soil beneath my feet was blood-blackened with obsidian blades of grass growing from it, and as I watched, a broken, twisted human form cracked the earth and reached clawed fingers toward me.
I hauled myself back into the regular world, double-time.
I hadn’t been gone more than five heartbeats, but when I came back Harper looked like she was also sliding out of the world we were sharing. The soft greyness of her aura enveloped her, and I remembered she’d just said first job back. I yelled and stretched my hands toward her, casting a psychic net. I honestly didn’t know if I was trying to catch her or the cold blast she’d warned me about, but I was determined to catch something.
Except I didn’t. My net, which was typically very good at snagging things with physical form, passed through Harper like she was a ghost and never stood a chance of catching the ethereal explosion. I bellowed, “What the actual—” and considered that I
had no idea how my new friend here felt about swearing. She seemed like she might be the type to get uptight over it, so I ended on a flaccid “. . . heck . . .” and scuttled on hands and knees to see if Harper was okay.
Harper couldn’t reach Walker to pull the aegis over them both before the other woman seemed to . . . blink out for a moment, without actually going anywhere at all. With the shield barely pulled, Harper got bowled over by the blast of icy energy. Then something warm touched her and she flinched unconsciously, rolled, and went a little Grey, stifling the urge to scream as her leg gave notice of its disapproval. She reached for the bright chill, hoping to get ahold of it or at least a feel for what it was. Black, red, spiky, ice, pain, fire, fury, I-hate-you, why-don’t-you-die—
“Holy crap,” she spat and let go, sprawling on the floor as the hot-cold searing of the thing’s energy whipped away into the blackness. Ass over teakettle like a godsdamned amateur and landed on my gun, to boot. And I didn’t even help the woman. Embarrassing. Normally, Harper restrained her language in front of clients and people she didn’t know, but at the moment a fit of blue words seemed entirely appropriate. “I am going to take you a-freakin’-part, you nasty bit of paranormal shit,” she muttered. She reached for the cane and grimaced at Walker, who didn’t look like she needed much help, to be honest. “Sorry—I don’t mean you. I’m not usually so foul, but that . . . thing has pissed me off. I’m supposed to be good at this shit and here I am on my back like a bug.” She slapped the floor in frustration. “Fuck. Ow.”
Walker snorted a giggle. “And I was just thinking you might be a bit of a stiff.”
“Only if I die again. I think I’m all out of rebounds.” Harper sat up and clutched the cane, trying to push herself upright.
Walker got her shoulder under Harper’s armpit and lifted as she muttered, “Die again? Do you make a habit of it?” in a tone that somehow accepted that the answer was yes.
Upright again, Harper propped herself against the wall for a moment. She blew out a breath and pushed her hair out of her eyes with her free hand. “That was a complete lack of fun. Thanks. I’m still pretty clumsy with this thing and I really don’t want to land on my ass again before that bundle of ire and bad news comes back. Damn, I’m out of shape.”
Walker looked her up and down, her aura gleaming a little brighter in the dim room. “Yeaaaah. You know, I’m a shaman. A healer. I could do something about that injury . . .”
Harper smiled. “I appreciate the offer, but the problem is that I heal too fast. The doctors were a little weirded out by the wound knitting up without a bone in place—an intact leg without a shin attracts surgeons like a corpse attracts flies. It’s doing all right—I’m just not used to it yet.”
Walker actually brightened. “Oh. It’s like that, is it? I get that. Okay. So how’d you lose your, uh, shin?” Her brightness faded into a cringe, although Harper thought it was from imagining what losing a shin felt like more than any other consideration.
“Oh, you know . . . mages, monsters . . . bit off more than I could chew and had to chew it anyway. And I assume you do know,” Harper added, eyeing the evidence of deaths that marked her aura. She shrugged. “So . . . what’s your take on our brush with whatever that thing was? Because I’m getting a distinct whiff of ghost—but not your garden-variety repeater or low-level haunt—something a lot bigger and meaner.”
“Lady,” I said with genuine feeling, “when we get out of here I’m gonna buy you a drink. We can get tanked and exchange mystical magical war stories.” My mouth shut off long enough for my ears to hear what she’d said, and my eyebrows rose. “Ghost? No, a ghost wouldn’t have knocked me into the Lower World, and besides, I saw a—well, it felt like it had been human once, so maybe demon but eh, no, the closed-in walls, the rage, the ambition, probably a sorcerer. Blood magic shamanism is sorcery. Evil,” I added helpfully, in case I hadn’t made myself clear so far. “Bad. No-good yucko stuff.”
Honestly, I sounded like I was twelve, and Harper’s increasingly controlled expression suggested she thought so, too. I muttered, “I’m gonna shut up now,” and hoped to God I would. To help myself, I went to have a look at the table of artifacts, now scattered halfway down the hall.
An ivory bracelet, an iron key, a faded photograph of two beautifully kept Victorian houses with a narrow strip of lawn between them, and a heart-shaped locket, opened to show the portraits within had both been scratched out with something sharp. I let the locket dangle from its chain, so Harper could see the ruined pictures as they spun. “Betcha one of these pictures is our shaman. Wait, sorcerer-ghost, not shaman-ghost. Ghorcerer. Or does that sound too much like the guy you buy your groceries from?”
Harper did her best to keep a straight face. She favored silence and distance as her own defense against nerves, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate Walker’s approach—this house would make anyone nervous. She moved to follow and peer over the other woman’s shoulder. Her view of the artifacts was partially blocked by Walker’s crouching body.
The photo seemed ordinary enough, but the others—key, bracelet, and locket—wore the remnant colors of blood, darkness, and acts of evil intent. The clinging energy didn’t seem to bother Walker. It would have bugged the shit out of Harper, and she screwed up her face as she wondered exactly how a shaman worked. She’d have asked, but her attention was caught by the locket, spinning as Walker picked it up. The defaced portraits gave off flashes of silvery ghostlight torn by slashes of scarlet ire. Harper winced from the sharp stabs of light. Damn. Well, if it doesn’t bug her, maybe it’s not really a dark artifact . . .
“Ghorcerer,” Harper agreed, steeling herself against the glare. “That works. From my perspective, energy lingers, and the stronger and more terrible it was to begin with, the more likely it is to hang around, whether it manifests as an entity or something else.”
I beamed at her. “That’s how it works for me, too. We’re totally simpatico here. Awesome.” I picked up the key—old-fashioned, heavy iron, large, but not otherwise special—and along with it, the bracelet, which was tangled in the key’s teeth. The bracelet was made of narrow strips of hollow ivory, strung on a silver chain and kept apart from one another by silver beads. I handed the locket to Harper and disentangled the bracelet from the key, glancing up at her as I did so.
Harper growled and her face became a crone’s, lined and hollowed and full of ancient rage. I knew that face, as if I’d seen it in the mirror every day of my life, and I hated it with every inch of my being.
I didn’t even need a weapon. I just flung myself up out of my crouch and drove my shoulder toward her gut, screaming my loathing at the top of my lungs.
The locket had come into Harper’s hand as cold and heavy as guilt and she staggered a step to the right as it seemed to weigh her down. A growl of foreign fury rose from her throat and her vision darkened as if blood dripped from her brow. No, that’s not right . . . She wrenched her gaze sideways at Walker just as a barbed coil of blackness lashed from the bracelet and encircled the other woman’s head like a crown.
Walker lunged for her with a scream of hatred, coming in low and hard. Harper planted the cane and pivoted aside. Walker rushed past, close enough to shove Harper back a step; then she spun around, her expression twisted with revulsion. Without a thought, Harper put her weight on her right foot and swung the cane toward Walker’s knees with both hands, the locket tangling on the handle. The silver scrolls imbedded in the dark wood sparked and gleamed as the cane’s shaft cut the air like a scythe, and words forced themselves from Harper’s mouth in hard jolts. “No. You. Don’t. Alma.” The four words wove around the part of her mind that was screaming No! What are you doing? like the long strands of a net, choking it off.
“You can’t stop me again, Mae—!” Walker lurched for the cane and the bracelet flew from her hand, striking a singing spark as it bounced off the wood and metal to skitter across the floor. Walker’s eyes went wide, all vestiges of rage vanish
ing as her empty hand closed over the metal tracery. The iron key dropped from her other hand. She jumped at the sound and yanked on the cane.
The locket slithered down the shaft, arcing a trail of red and blue sparks as it slid. The sensation of being trapped fell away and Harper hauled backward on the cane, pulling it from Walker’s grasp. Then she flicked the stick sideways and the delicate necklace cleared the cane’s tip to soar across the room and rattle to a distant halt.
Harper stumbled against the nearest wall and leaned clumsily into it. “What the fucking hell? Are you out of your damned mind, or do you make a habit of picking up bits of solidified evil without checking from a distance first?”
“What? What! You swung at me—!”
“You jumped me first,” Harper replied, breathing a little harder than mere exertion accounted for. “I thought you were going to kill me. You certainly looked like you had it in mind.”
“Not my mind! I mean, that’s not what I was thinking at all because it wasn’t you I wanted to kill! Or not kill, or . . . wait. Who the hell is ‘Alma’ anyway?” Walker pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, eyes closed.
“I have no idea,” Harper snapped.
“But that’s what you called me. And you were—you were Mae. I can almost—almost hear them. Feel them. Mae really doesn’t like Alma.” Walker’s eyes popped open to focus on Harper’s cane. “What’s with that thing? I mean, it’s silver, I figured there was something hinky about it, but what’d it do? Where’s it from?”
Urban Allies: Ten Brand-New Collaborative Stories Page 23
