by C. E. Murphy
"I don't know why I put up with you." He snapped his teeth at me again, and was gone.
"Because I'm cute and irresistibly charming," I said to the empty garden. No one, not even a mockingbird, responded.
* * *
"Please tell me dinner isn't going to suck as much as the rest of today has." I leaned over the top of Billy's computer, sighing. He looked up, offended.
"Are you dissing Mel's cooking?"
I snorted a laugh. "No. I just feel useless." I put my hands on his desk, letting my head hang. "Find anything about the Blade?"
Billy let out an explosive sigh and creaked back in his chair, hands folded behind his head. "Comic book references. Stuff about some swordsman named Bob Anderson. Wesley Snipes pictures."
"Really?" I perked up, edging around his desk to try to get a look at the screen. "Any half-naked ones?"
"Joanie!"
I drooped. "I didn't think so. There wasn't nearly enough half-naked Wesley in those movies, anyway."
Billy gave me a flat look. "Any luck with the psychic stuff?"
My cheeks went hot with discomfort. "No. I…can't get there." My jaunt to see Coyote had tapped me out. I couldn't get any further out of my body than your average caterpillar could. In fact, a caterpillar, with its whole transformation process, was probably going to have more success than I was right now.
"Oh." Billy's silence stretched out a few long moments. "All three of the dead women are from the greater Seattle area," he said eventually. "The Captain went to visit their families. To tell them. I was hoping we'd have something for him when he got back."
"Way to lay the guilt on, Billy." I slumped again, my head heavy enough to strain my neck. "All right. Look. I'm going to go down to the park and, um…" I wet my lips. "You remember that thing I did in the garage in January?"
Billy let out a huff of laughter. "How could I forget?"
"A lot of people seem to have. Or they're trying hard to." I shook my head. "I thought maybe I'd try something like that again down at the park. Having you along would be helpful. You, uh. Know how to put your energy out there." Pulling my tongue out with forceps would have been more fun than saying that sentence. Billy, bless his pointy little head, didn't laugh. He just stood up and grabbed his coat.
* * *
Fresh snow glittered over paths that had been stomped down by a lot of police officers in the past twenty-four hours. The sky was clearing, leaden gray clouds parting to let sparks of sunlight through. I squinted at the ground, kicking up sprays of snow as I tromped through the park, a few steps ahead of Billy.
I could feel Billy walking behind me on a more than physical level. In January I'd asked people to offer up their energy to help me net a god. Billy was getting ready to do that again, coiling his own essence into a ball that he'd be able to share with me when I needed it. Not, I thought, unlike what I'd done for my mother, in the memory/dream connection that morning. I blurted, "Sheila didn't defeat that thing by herself," filling up the silence of the snow-covered field with my voice. "I was there."
"Of course you were there." Billy sounded confused. "She was pregnant with you."
"No, I mean, I was there…twice." Such a gift I had for explanation. "He was kicking her ass. I threw her some power. It went right through…me…into her."
"You boosted your fetal self so your mom could draw enough power to defeat the Blade?"
Billy made it sound so succinct and sensible that I had to look over my shoulder at him to see if he was kidding. He wasn't. I nodded. "Yeah. And then he noticed me, the adult me, and came after me, which distracted him enough that Sheila could…get him." I didn't really know what she'd done, besides stab a sword of light through his spinal cord. Maybe that was enough to set your average evil minion back thirty years.
"So," Billy said, "when you've got this time-travel thing down pat, you want to slip back to about, oh, '85 and tell me to invest in Microsoft?"
I laughed. "Only if you promise to share the proceeds with me." I hunched my shoulders, trying to rid myself of the itchy sensation between the shoulder blades. My interference with Sheila's confrontation twenty-seven years ago felt important. I just wasn't sure why.
I bounced off a wall that wasn't there and crashed back into Billy's chest. He oofed, catching me, then frowned down at me. "Joanie?"
"I have no fucking clue." I put my hand out and encountered resistance. I prodded, then stepped forward and leaned into it, feeling like a mime. Billy fought a grin and completely lost the battle.
"Gonna grow up to be Marcel Marceau?"
"I sure as hell hope not. Can you, um…?"
Billy, showing a remarkable ability to understand Jo-speak, edged around me and walked through the wall I'd hit. He turned, eyebrows lifted.
"Shit," I said in my best thoughtful tone. And, "What the fuck." Apparently crashing into invisible walls brought out the naughty words in me. Curious, I pulled my glove off and put my hand against it directly.
A dangerous burst of dull red flashed around the entire baseball diamond, so quickly it was gone almost before I registered it. A tingle of malicious familiarity made the nerve in my elbow ache.
Morrison was right. The Blade had found a way to recognize me.
Eight
"Joanie?" Billy stepped back through the barrier as if it wasn't there. I leaned harder on it, prodding at it with my hands and trying to do the same with my mind. It failed miserably. I did not think of my mind as a poking instrument. There was no scalpellike wit here, no sharp-as-a-knife insights. Nor could I come up with a car analogy that would let me slide through the wall. Cars and walls, in my experience, smashed together, not phased through one another. Not that I'd ever smashed up a car myself. Petite was the only vehicle I'd ever owned and I'd have killed myself before running her into anything.
"Joanie?" Billy asked again. I took my hand off the wall, my nerve quieting as soon as I broke the contact.
"I can't get through." Obviously. "He put up some kind of firewall."
"A firewall."
"Yeah, you know. To keep unfriendlies out of your computer network?"
"I know what a firewall is, Joanie. I'm just questioning your usage. How come it let me through, if it's a firewall?"
I lifted my eyebrows at him. "It doesn't recognize you as an unfriendly. It's programmed for me." It was a lot easier to think in terms of computer protocols than magic. I thought I might be on to something here.
"Right. So can you still do the thing you were going to do?"
I pursed my lips and looked through the invisible barrier. "One way to find out." The core of power in me was waking up, the wall providing some kind of challenge it felt ready to stand up to. I was pretty sure it was a false high, but I was willing to take it.
"Last time I did this," I said, more to myself than Billy, "it didn't actually do a damned bit of good."
"You're older, wiser, and stronger now." There was an unexpected resonance to Billy's voice, a depth of faith that I knew full well I didn't deserve. Still, it made me straighten my shoulders and drag in a deep breath of cold air. I closed my eyes momentarily, feeling the steam from my breath beading into water on my eyelashes.
When I opened them again, I wasn't quite in my own body anymore. The core of silver-blue energy was alive inside me, pushing me out as though there wasn't enough room for the two of us in this town. For a moment I felt like I was being given a gift I didn't really deserve: I hadn't done any of the training Coyote thought I should, and I wasn't sure I ought to be able to slip out of my body so easily.
The flip side to that, equally frightening, was that if I could do it without any training, then maybe he was right, and it really was something I should be doing with my life. I didn't like that possibility any better at all.
Right in front of me, the Blade's firewall glimmered dark red, like blood seeping out from the heart of the world. It cut off my ability to see anything inside it with more than ordinary eyes. I turned my head very slowly, unsur
e if my body was doing the same thing, but afraid to move too quickly for fear of jarring myself out of the double vision. Beyond the firewall, the world was full of neon colors, pulses of life that looked like a kid with fingerpaints had gone wild. Billy was just to my right, a swirling ball of orange and fuchsia energy held in his hands. I whispered, "Thanks," and though I was pretty sure I hadn't said it out loud, he crooked a grin and nodded his head once in acknowledgment. I reached out for his colors, calling them to me as politely as I could. They leaped out of his hands, whirling together like agitated kittens, and spun into the silver and blue core of me.
I felt, instantly, a dozen times stronger. My mind cleared, focus spilling through my limbs as if the blood had just remembered that it was supposed to be running. I didn't expect the sudden boost in clarity. It suggested my power really hadn't recovered from the run-in with the Blade that morning. Or almost thirty years ago. Whichever. The point was, if Billy's energy was bringing the world into that much sharper relief, I was even more tapped than I'd thought.
Buoyed by his dancing fuchsia and brilliant orange, I spread my hands, sending tentacles of power darting over the Blade's shield. Silver slithered over red, trailing my and Billy's colors like banners, testing and tracing the barrier. I went up, not around, looking for weak points that would allow me to hack into the system.
Giggling while out of body was an interesting experience. It felt like champagne bubbles in my nose and fingertips, little sparkles of glee that didn't require containment.
As if in response to my laughter, the red wall faltered.
My giggles cut off as I jumped to take advantage of the weakness, a thin spot in the barrier that began to strengthen again even as I slid threads of power into it. I envisioned taloned nails that could grasp and tear more efficiently than my own, and worried at the spot like a determined rodent. I found myself grinning again, wondering what Coyote would think of me throwing over the car analogy in favor of using psychic rats to claw my way through a magical firewall. Even as I grinned, a silver tendril punched its way through the wall. Other colors, Billy's and mine both, leaped to the spot, squirming through and braiding together to strengthen each other without ever blending or losing any of their own distinctive coherence.
My hands lifted of their own accord, making claws that wrenched apart from one another, as though prying open a bear trap. The wall above me groaned and then tore, great jagged chunks ripping free with the same metal-on-metal shrieks I'd encountered that morning.
I was abruptly very cold, sweat standing out on my face and beading into my eyes. A dispassionate part of my mind suggested shock? and for a dizzying moment I considered stopping before I found myself facefirst in a snowbank, dying of exposure. The power I was using gasped and shriveled, the jaws I'd forced open in the red wall beginning to crash shut again. My knees gave out and I dropped to the snow. The chill helped me focus, and I used the energy that had been keeping me on my feet to try to keep the wall torn asunder. It had life of its own, forced and vicious, with no purpose beyond keeping me out. Destroying me, if it could.
And it was going to. I crumpled farther into the snow, pressure bearing down on my weakening breach in the wall like so much newspaper. I knotted my fingers in snow, feeling icy chunks bite into the lines of my ungloved hand and then melt into bone-aching cold. I was going to be pulverized by someone who wasn't even there. What an embarrassing way to die.
At least Morrison wasn't there to see it. For a moment I went in a mental circle, annoyed that that was my last thought, then realizing it couldn't be, because this was my last thought—
Power slammed into me, drawn from a depth that I could barely fathom. Deep purple, burnt sienna—Billy's colors, but at their most profound. I could feel the love he drew on, lacing his colors with such gladness I was happy to stop breathing, so long as I could do it for them—
I didn't come to my feet. My body was irrelevant, left behind as I sprang forward on the force of the power Billy gave to me, unstinting. I slammed my fingers, all swirled with dominant purple, into the barely existent crack—all that was left of my opening in the wall—and tore it apart.
Redness shattered all around me, breaking in huge chunks of raw-edged power that collapsed into fragments as they hit the ground. I boiled through the opening and stood against the waves of blood rage that had gone into the killings. The bodies were gone, but the black power that linked one woman to another was still there, seeped in the earth beneath the snow like their blood. I could see lines that hadn't been there the day before—or that I hadn't been strong enough to see. Billy's outpouring of energy made my skin tingle, even if I'd left my actual body behind.
He can't keep this up forever, Joanne. Stop fucking around. Did other people have little voices in their heads that said things like that? I could stretch myself out a little and touch a hundred thousand minds in Seattle just to find out, but I was afraid the answer would be no. I refrained, instead focusing on the thin lines rising up from each of the three points where the women had died.
They came together in thready blackness, like oil-smeared string that glimmered and twisted with unhealthy light, making three points of a pyramid. They joined at the apex and braided together, reaching higher until the braid grew watery and distant. I could see it cut through the clouds and into the blue-ness of the sky beyond, but it faded before it reached the dark curve of space above the world. I was almost certain it faded, not that my vision was failing. The power diamond wasn't complete. The Blade needed one more body to finish building his stairway to heaven. That was the good news.
The bad news was it obviously didn't matter that the bodies themselves were gone. The power their deaths had bought was there, seared into the ground. Taking the three women away from the park hadn't broken the spell, and I wasn't sure what would.
The worst news was I could only think of one way to find out. The rich colors of Billy's power hadn't faded at all, memories coalescing around me: moments of love, laughing until the tears came; moments of holding sick children, afraid of what the night might bring. The bright spark of his wife's smile; the open acknowledgment that his girls had him wrapped around their little fingers, that his boys made him puff up with a fatherly pride he felt a little silly about, in this enlightened day and age.
What he was giving me was the part of him that would never, could never, give up. It was his center, his family, the core of all his strength, and just as surely, the center of all his weaknesses. He embraced every bit of it, flinging it toward me with everything he had, giving me the power to reach all the way to the stars. He knew what he was doing: he could protect himself from the lethal drain but chose not to. Instead he offered up power far beyond the limits of safety. I could take it and follow the Blade's black thread into the heart of its darkness, and learn what lay behind him.
This morning and almost thirty years ago, my mother had had the same choice.
I fell back into my body with a jolt so hard it made my teeth ache, refusing the maelstrom of power offered to me by my friend. Refusing to take what he would give until the moment his system went into critical failure. I wouldn't take it, not even to fight the thing that wielded the murderous Blade.
Weak with exhaustion, I was still able to turn in time to catch Billy as he fell, the very life of him drained almost to the sticking point.
* * *
The earth itself had power to spare, a thin green-and-blue flow far beneath its frozen surface. I reached for it with a worn-out plea, dragging the offered trickles of energy up through the snow and into myself. I couldn't reach even as far as the scattered trees, much less beyond the park's boundaries to beg for some of Seattle's teeming life energy. I had to wait, bent over Billy's chilled form, drawing in tiny spurts of strength until the swirling core of silver-blue inside me gave a little groan, and let power flow into my hands.
I fell back on the analogies I knew best. Billy's battery was drained and needed a jump. The thought of jumping Billy made me
burble a snicker. His wife would beat me up.
The logical side of my mind said that if part of a person was the battery, it would probably be his mind. My hands drifted over Billy's heart without paying any attention to the logical part of my mind. I actually made little pinchers of my fingers, like jumper-cable heads, and clumsily stabbed one hand against my own heart, the other staying over Billy's.
It was a long and slow transfer of strength, my eyes half-shut and my head bowed over his. I was gaining very little for myself; what I could draw from the frozen ground beneath the snow I simply siphoned into Billy. His color improved gradually and he finally chuckled, more shaking his body than sounding in my ears. "Think we can walk out of here if we lean on each other?"
"Mngrnf." I thought that was supposed to be "maybe." Billy seemed to understand, and we took a couple of long minutes to climb to our feet, giggling with exhausted clumsiness.
"You find anything out?" he asked once we were both on our feet.
"Yeah." I tried out this whole walking thing, one shaky step. I could feel weary relief spill through him and into me.
"What?" His first step wasn't any steadier than mine. I smiled wearily and pulled myself up a little straighter, letting him lean on me.
"I found out I've got the best friends in the world. C'mon. Let's go, Holliday. Your wife's expecting us for dinner."
Nine
"I swear on my wife's grave." Gary herded me up the stairs to Billy's front door, maneuvering Billy into line behind me. Mel stood in the open doorway, looking bemused. Gary spoke to her, not to me or Billy, which was just as well, because we'd gone well past punch-drunk sometime in the past hour of work and were howling with laughter every time anybody moved. "I swear on Annie's grave," Gary repeated to Mel, "this ain't my fault. They were like this when I picked 'em up at the station."
"I'd ask why Billy wasn't driving," Melinda said, getting out of her husband's way as he snickered and staggered through the door, "but I think I see why. I'm Melinda Holliday." She threaded a hand between me and Billy to shake Gary's, then fixed me with a gimlet eye. "Have you two been out drinking, Joanie?"
