Demon Hunts
Demon Hunts
C.E. Murphy
This next case is way out of her jurisdiction… Seattle police detective Joanne Walker started the year out mostly dead, and she’s ending it trying not to be consumed by evil. Literally. She’s proven she can handle the gods and the walking dead. But a cannibalistic serial killer? That’s more than even she bargained for. What’s worse, the brutal demon leaves no tracks.So, if Joanne is to stop its campaign of terror, she’ll have to hunt it where it lives: the Lower World, a shamanistic plane of magic and spirits. Trouble is, Joanne’s skills are no match for the dangers she’s about to face—and her on-the-job training could prove fatal to the people she’s sworn to protect….“Joanne remains an appealing protagonist.” —Publishers Weekly on Walking Dead
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and her books
THE WALKER PAPERS
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
THE NEGOTIATOR
Heart of Stone
“An exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
House of Cards
“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”
—LOCUS
Hands of Flame
“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…. Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
C.E. Murphy
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Author Note
By the time Demon Hunts comes out in June 2010, you’ll have just missed the Brenda Novak Diabetes Research auction, which she runs every May. In 2009 I offered a “Tuckerization”—an opportunity to have a character named after a reader—in the auction, and will very likely do the same in future auctions. Please keep an eye on my Web site, cemurphy.net, for information about such opportunities in the upcoming years!
—Catie
This one’s for Tara.
(I think that’s enough apologizing now, don’t you? :))
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, December 20, 4:34 A.M.
Someone had been chewing on the body.
Not something. Something, in the grand scheme of life, seemed like it would be okay. Things—cats, dogs, raccoons: choose your omnivore, I wasn’t picky—were expected to chew on dead flesh. I was no forensics expert, but I’d learned a few basics at police academy. For example, a bear stripped of its skin and missing its skull can so easily be mistaken for a skinned human that the exposed meat has to be tested in order to ascertain what kind of animal it had been. For another example, humans have a very round, even cusp to their bite that most mammals don’t share. So I was pretty confident it was a someone, and not a something, who had eaten part of Charlie Groleski’s left arm.
This was really not how I wanted to start the holiday season.
My partner, a holiday himself—Billy Holliday—swung down beside me. The Christmas carol he was whistling turned into a low long warble of dismay. “Looks like somebody ate him.”
“I’d noticed.” I rocked back on my heels—a dangerous endeavor, since I was halfway up a low cliff, standing on a semi-sheer rock face. I was roped into a harness that was secured at the top of the cliff, but leaning back still felt like asking for trouble. “Tell me something, Billy. How come we get all the exciting cases?”
“We don’t.” Billy crouched beside the body, his own harness squeaking and rattling with the motion. I edged several inches to the side and squinted nervously at the drop immediately to my left. Harsh white searchlights stared back at me, the generators powering them shaking all quietude from the morning. The lights made sharp shadows of our narrow ledge, enhancing my awareness that there wasn’t really enough room for two people on the ledge, much less two people and a corpse. “Daniels, he gets exciting cases,” Billy said. “Drug murders, Mafia turncoats, revenge killings. We never get that stuff.”
“You don’t think half-eaten dead guys stuffed into crevasses are exciting?”
He shook his head. “No. I think they’re weird. We get the weird cases, not the exciting ones.” He pushed up and wrapped a hand around his rappelling line for balance. “Groleski must’ve been dead from the time they called in a missing persons report, maybe before. Too many days. I can’t get anything from him.”
I muttered, “Crap,” and let the Sight wash over me.
Billy was right, if you wanted to get technical about it. He and I constituted Seattle’s only paranormal detective team, a truth which slightly less than a year earlier I would have pulled my tongue out before believing, much less uttering. We got the weird cases, the ones that could potentially have a supernatural element to them.
He saw dead people. Murdered people, more specifically. Their ghosts tended to linger, and he was the man they could turn to, if he got there within two days of their brutal deaths. Unfortunately for Charlie Groleski, that was too short a window to allow him an opportunity to offer insight as to who’d chewed him up and spat him out.
I, thanks to an unpleasant experience which had left me with a choice between dying or life as a magic-user, was a shaman. Once upon a time, my long-term plans had involved maybe opening my own mechanic’s shop. Instead, I was a healer and a warrior up at four in the morning, exhaling steamy breath into an ice-cold Seattle morning, on a case that wasn’t actually in my jurisdiction.
The department—city-wide, not just the North Precinct where Billy and I worked—was being as goddamned quiet about this case as they could. Murders happened. They increased around the holidays. That was part and parcel of modern city life, and had probably been part of every civilization all the way back to Cain and Abel. As far as I could tell, it was one of the things that made humans human.
But there usually weren’t a half dozen bodies found over the course of several weeks, all of them looking like they’d been pre-Christmas-dinner appetizers. Charlie Groleski had been missing for sixteen days, though aside from the gnawed flesh, his body was in pretty good condition. The media had started calling global warming “climate change” instead, and the longer, colder winters Seattle had been experiencing the past few years ran with that appellation. We’d gotten our first solid freeze in mid-November, and nothing had fully thawed out since, including poor dead Charlie.
Billy had his way of looking at a crime scene: through the deceased’s words, if at all possible. Mine was different, and I’d learned early on not to contaminate what my normal vision could see by accessing the Sight right away. Once I saw the world that way, it lingered, influencing everything else.
Winter, viewed through eyes that saw the breath and life pulse of the world, was heart-achingly beautiful. The earth itself lay dormant, a dark forgiving depth scored by brilliant pulses of light that were the living things traveling on its surface. Billy stood out as a flare of fuchsia and orange, and I glanced at my own hands to see familiar silver and blue dancing over my skin. Everyone had an aura, and their well-being could be read through that burst of color.
Whatever colors Groleski had once sported, they were long gone, swallowed by death. I wasn’t looking for them, though. I was looking for marks in the earth: anything that would show me something of the madman who’d killed and eaten half a dozen people in the greater Seattle area over the past two months. It took a god to actively obscure himself from the Sight, but time and the winter season could wipe away the traces a killer might leave behind. I’d never tracked someone in summer, but I had the idea that the softened earth would hold an impression longer. Someday I would probably find out if I was right.
Today, though, all I saw was the calm deep brown of the earth. There were no stains to accompany Groleski’s frozen body; he’d apparently been killed and eaten elsewhere, and only removed to this location afterward. Why anyone would haul a body halfway up a cliff was beyond me, except it was in keeping with the other victims. They were all outdoorsy types. Only one or two had gone missing while hiking or trail-breaking, but they’d all been found in haunts like the ones they’d loved to spend their lives in. Groleski’d been a rock climber.
“Walker?” A man’s voice rose up from below, floodlights too bright to let me see the speaker when I glanced down.
Not that I needed to. I dropped my chin to my chest and took a moment before shouting a response. “Sorry, Captain. I’ve got nothing.”
I was too far away to hear his exasperated sigh, but I felt it ripple over my skin anyway. I was good at disappointing Captain Michael Morrison. Some days it seemed like my only stock in trade. I could have lived with that, but this was the third time in a row I’d failed to come through on this case. At least the other two times he hadn’t been awakened at oh-god-thirty to call a dud shaman to a crime scene: those bodies had been found in daylight. This one should’ve been, too. Nobody in their right mind would be scouring cliffs at three in the morning, but Groleski’s brother had found the body. I guessed a family missing a member wasn’t in its right mind.
Billy jerked his thumb, and I leaned back from my stabilizing rope, bouncing the ten or twelve yards down to the ground. The harness became a Gordian knot under my cold fingers and Morrison’s gimlet eye, but the rope began to draw up as soon as my weight stopped holding it taut. The forensics team would be taking our place with Groleski’s body, now that the esoteric detectives had completely failed to see anything untoward. Some good we were.
Morrison waited for me to regain my balance, then folded his arms over his chest in expectation. The searchlights did him no favors, turning his silvering hair white and making the lines of his face deeper and more haggard. Even his eyes were pale and hard, as though deep blue river water had frozen into ice. “Am I wasting time pulling you two out here, Walker?”
Steam clouded around my head as I breathed out, an excellent physical approximation of the exasperation shooting through me. “Not any more than it wastes the forensics team’s time, boss. They haven’t found jack shit, either, but nobody thinks they shouldn’t be here.” I winced, not exactly an apology for my tone, but at least recognition that I should modulate it. I wasn’t at my best at four-thirty in the morning, which didn’t excuse mouthing off to my captain.
Fortunately, almost half a decade of mutual antagonism mixed up with more recent emotional complications had, if not inured Morrison to my smart mouth, at least prepared him for it. He managed to both ignore and respond to me, which took some doing. “Forensics works in this world, Walker. You’re supposed to have some insight into another one.”
I honestly didn’t know which of us was more astounded that he’d be saying something like that. Billy had always been an I want to believe freak, but until recently, all Morrison and I had had in common was a sarcastic dismissal of all things paranormal. Truth was, my boss had come around faster than I had. Less than two months after my first encounter with the world of weird, Morrison had demanded I do what I could with the Sight to help solve a series of ritual murders. I’d kept dragging my feet for months after that, trying to make my magic go away, but the captain had chinned up and expected me to use all the talents at my disposal.
I stood there gazing at him and trying to squeeze that revelation into my rigid little world view. I’d known he was too good a cop to ignore my skills if they might be useful, but somehow I hadn’t quite grasped the idea that he’d accepted my power before I had. Every smart-ass comeback I had died on my lips. “I’m sorry, boss. Everything’s frozen, even what the Sight can see. I’m not some kind of mystical Indian tracker.”
Morrison gave me a sharp look that I accepted with a groan. Technically, I was some kind of mystical Indian tracker. My dad was Cherokee, and not even I was arguing about the mystical part anymore. The only part where the description fell down was in tracker, which I manifestly was not. I’d proven remarkably poor at hunting down mythical bad guys—at least, poor at hunting them down as quickly as I thought I should—and had no idea if that was because my schooling was incomplete, or if I was just inept. I muttered, “Shit,” and for some reason the faintest smile cracked Morrison’s glower.
Billy rappelled down beside us and got out of his harness with a great deal more grace than I’d shown. He’d lost a good twenty pounds in the last couple months—dropping the baby weight, he called it; his wife had just had their fifth child—and moved more lightly for it, even though he was still taller than both Morrison and myself. “We’ve got to find a way to catch up with this guy faster,” he said.
“Like before he kills anybody else,” Morrison said, so flatly Billy and I both looked at him a moment. I’d heard Morrison’s angry voice plenty of times—usually directed at me—but this wasn’t outrage. It was helplessness, and that wasn’t something Morrison indulged in often.
Billy recovered first, tugging his rappelling rope to let the guys at the top know he was out. The rope and harness rose into darkness as he spoke. “You know the chances are we’re already too late for that, Captain. We’ve got at least two more missing persons reported, and we’ll be damned lucky if they’re still alive. But what I’m talking about is where Walker and I can help. This guy cleans up after himself. We haven’t found any DNA to work with, so Forensics is at a loss, and unless we get to a body faster, Walker and I aren’t much good, either. Even my resources outside the department—”
Morrison lifted his hand. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
Billy hesitated, glancing at me, then nodded once. “Yeah. Okay. Look, I’m sorry, Captain. Right now we’re at a dead end.”
I breathed, “No pun intended,” and Billy gave me a dirty look. I mouthed, “Sorry,” then flinched as my hip pocket began to ring. Billy glanced at his watch and arched his eyebrows, and I shrugged, taking a few steps away from my companions to wrestle my phone out. The number was unfamiliar. “Yeah, this is Joanne Walker.”
“Hey, doll. Where are you?”
I pulled the phone away to give it a sideways look, though a smile threatened the corner of my mouth. There was one man on this earth who could get away with calling me doll. “It’s pushing five in the morning, Gary. What do you mean, where am I? Where do you think I am?”
“Well, you ain’t at home, ’cause I called that number twice. And you weren’t sleeping, ’cause you never answer that fast when you have been, and you never sound this awake. You on a hot date, Jo?”
The threatening smile broke and I laughed. “You should be the detective, not me. No, I wish. I’m at a crime scene. Morrison called me a couple hours ago. What’s up? Where are you calling from? I don’t know the number.”
“I’m at dispatch.” For anybody else I knew, that meant the precinct building, but Gary worked part-time as a cabbie. I’d climbed into his taxi almost a year ago, and my life had quite literally never been the same since. Still smiling, I listened to him rattling on, waiting for him to reach the eventual point: “I was gonna cover for Mickey’s shift ’cause his grandkids are coming in today from Tulsa, but one of the other cars just called in, Jo. He found a dead lady at Ravenna Park.”
CHAPTER TWO
I snapped my fingers and gestured Morrison and Holliday over to me before Gary stopped talking. Both men creaked through the snow toward me and I echoed Gary’s words, looking back and forth between my boss and my partner. “A driver at Tripoli Cabs just found a body across from my apartment building, in Ravenna Park. The guy’s freaked out, says the body is still warm and it looks like it’s been chewed on.”
“Who the hell’s calling to tell you th—” Morrison broke off mid-question and bared his teeth. “Muldoon. Walker, have you been spouting off about cases to your octogenarian boyfriend?”
“Septuagenarian,” I said with a sniff. “Gary’s only seventy-three.” The boyfriend part didn’t bear responding to. Half the people I knew were convinced I was dating a guy old enough to be my grandfather, and I’d given up arguing with them. On the other hand, being haughty about Gary’s age gave me an excuse to not answer the bit about whether I’d been discussing cases with people who weren’t members of the police force. Not that it mattered too much. As quiet as the department was trying to keep the killings, after six weeks of missing persons and murders, the media was starting to take notice. “Are we going, or what?”
The look Morrison gave me indicated I had in no way actually avoided the question of whether I’d been talking about the case off campus. Still, he made a sharp gesture toward the distant parking lot and got on his phone to invite the forensics team to join us. I slipped my way down the hill with Billy a few steps behind me. Five minutes later we were in his minivan, both of us hunched over the heater vents in hopes of thawing.
I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s gold Avalon pulling out of the lot, and felt vaguely self-conscious that I’d had to ask Billy to pick me up. My classic Mustang, Petite, was in the shop, though even if she hadn’t been, the increasingly snowy Seattle winters weren’t good for her low-riding purple self.
It was a long drive back to our part of town. I watched out the window and Billy kept quiet, both of us stuck with what I bet were similar ruminations. Ravenna Park wasn’t a real outdoors getaway place, not like some of the other areas we’d found bodies. It was also the first time a victim had turned up within the North Precinct boundaries. That meant we were moving back into our own jurisdiction, but it also meant any kind of pattern we might have established had been obliterated. I considered hoping it was a separate case, and then cringed at the thought. We really didn’t need two cannibalistic killers.
We came down Brooklyn Avenue, a block to the west of my apartment building. Gary, leaning on the hood of his cab like a gargoyle protecting the crime scene, waved as we drove by. He was outside a police perimeter—the North Precinct building was only half a mile away, and Billy and I were far from the first cops to arrive—but didn’t look like he minded at all. Billy pulled up and we got out, me shaking my head. “It’s a quarter after five in the morning, Gary. You’re not supposed to be hanging out at crime scenes looking like somebody gave you a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.”
He put on a convincingly innocent expression and gestured to another cabbie, whose face looked green in the sallow amber lights as he talked with a couple of other cops. “Henley was all shook up. Thought it’d be only right to come down and give him some moral support.”
“Uh-huh. Morrison’s going to kill you, you know that, right?” I slipped up against the big old man and gave him a brief hug anyway. Gray-eyed, white-haired, and still sporting the linebacker build he’d had as a young man, Gary was essentially the kind of person I wanted to grow old to be. As far as I could tell, he’d never lost his sense of wonder. For a girl with shamanic potential lurking under her surface, I’d managed to thoroughly quench my own. Gary’d done his best to unquench it in the months we’d known each other, and I loved him for it.
He kissed my forehead. “Sure, darlin’, but some things are worth getting killed for. Hugs from pretty girls, f’rex.”
I grinned. “Did you really just say ‘f’rex’? I didn’t think people really said that.”
“You don’t think people call girls doll, either.” He let me go with a vocally solemn, “Captain,” that made no attempt at hiding the sparkle in his eyes. I turned to watch Morrison’s approach and tried to judge the integrity behind his scowl. It looked pretty credible.
“Good morning, Mr. Muldoon,” Morrison said with unexpected politeness. Possibly he didn’t blame Gary for me telling tales about work. More likely there was some kind of strange male ritual of respect or tolerance that had been passed when they’d fought together against an army of zombies. Billy and I had been there, too, but apparently we hadn’t earned the same free pass, as Morrison turned his scowl on us. “Walker, Holliday, quit screwing around and get to work.”
I flicked a salute that my boss would no doubt take as sardonic, and ducked under the police tape. “Yes, sir.”
Heather Fagan, the no-nonsense head of the North Precinct’s forensics team, told me exactly where I was allowed to place my feet, forbade either of us to so much as breathe on the corpse, and walked away grousing about contaminated crime scenes. Billy and I exchanged rueful glances and tip-toed to the body, both teasing and completely serious in our attempts to not pollute her working area.
For once I didn’t wait on Billy’s conversation with a ghost, and just let the Sight filter over my normal vision. The world brightened again, night and streetlights fading to inconsequentiality. I could navigate mazes and mountain passes blindfolded, as long as I could call on the Sight: it poured its own brilliance all around me, and even its shadows were places of light.
Still-warm or not, the dead woman coiled on her side in the snow didn’t have the slightest hint of color to her. Death wasn’t black: it was empty, a space of nothingness surrounded by the living world. Even that was an illusion, as all the little bacteria that helped a body decompose had life of their own. But as long as I didn’t look too deeply, I only saw a patch of cool gray nothing where she rested.
All around her, though, the earth was scoured with ridges of darkness. I called for a flashlight, tilting it down to illuminate the ground. Tall blades of dead grass stuck up and cast thin shadows, but there were no visible ripples in the snow to echo the lumps beneath it, nor any pressure from footsteps around her body. “Heather? How’d she get here?”
I could feel Heather’s glare from fifteen feet away. “She lives in the building across the street.”
Electricity shot down my spine and I jerked upward, staring first at Heather, then at the eight-story apartment building a couple hundred feet away. “That one?”
Heather turned to look at it. “Yeah. That’s what her driver’s license says, anyway. I don’t think she wandered out here to die. There aren’t any footprints, so somebody must have dumped her, but yeah, she died two hundred feet from her home. Her name was Karin Newcomb. University ID. I guess most of the tenants there are students.”
“Most of them.” My heartbeat rabbited hard enough I was surprised my voice didn’t shake. “Heather, that’s where I live.”
“Jesus Christ. Did you know her?”
I shook my head even as I tried to draw some hint of recognition from her profile. “I don’t remember ever seeing her, but there are forty apartments in that building. People are always moving in and out. God, how horrible.” Her death hit me harder, all at once, than any of the others had. Not because I was afraid it could’ve been me, but because I might have known her. The fact that I hadn’t was irrelevant. I found myself making a silent promise that we’d find her killer, like I’d been previously lacking motivation and only just now really meant it.
I said, “Shit,” under my breath and tried to pull my thoughts back to what Heather’d been saying before ID’ing the girl to me. That was the only way I was going to keep the stupid little promise I’d just made. “How did they dump her? There’s no skid marks, so she wasn’t thrown out of a vehicle. She looks like she was placed here, but there aren’t any footprints.”
Heather stalked back to my side. With her winter hat and boots on, she came up to my eyebrow, which made her taller than most of the women I knew. “I know. It’s been the same thing all over the city. No matter where we find the body, no matter how long we think it might’ve been there, there’s no indication that anybody carried it there. She hasn’t been dropped, either.” A circling finger encompassed Karin Newcomb’s form. “No spray of snow, and since neither rigor mortis nor the cold has set in, there should be some displacement of limbs if she had been. Instead she’s nestled up perfectly. It’s like—”
She bit her tongue on the last word: magic. “Yeah,” I said, willing to go where she wasn’t. “It is.”
I crouched, flashlight bouncing a long oval off the snow as I examined the scene with the Sight again. Individual flakes, loosely packed, turned into a river of blue glitter under my gaze, but even then I didn’t see footprints. Not in the snow, at least. The ridges beneath it, though, resolved into ten long narrow strips, five and five with a few inches of space between them. Roundish marks cupped the bases of both sets of ridges. I rocked forward in my crouch so I could feel the balls of my feet press into my insoles. Snow creaked under my boots, warning me of the impressions I was leaving behind.
Impressions that the killer hadn’t left. Somehow his weight had been transferred through the delicate crystals and into the earth below. “Heather, I need to scrape away some of the snow.”
To her credit, she only said, “Where?” instead of arguing with me. Up until very recently, if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have argued. Not for the first time, I gave thanks that the people around me weren’t as obstreperous as I was, then gestured to the curve of the dead woman’s back. There were other marks beneath the snow, but the crouched set had the most weight to them, as if they might last longer and give more information about what had left them.
Heather stepped forward, her aura a brilliant, efficient red. I put the flashlight in her hand with an apologetic grimace. “I know this is your job, but I’m afraid someone else’s hands in there might contaminate what I’m seeing. If something comes up, there’ll be plenty for you to examine.”
Her aura leeched toward ice blue, a color that became audible in her tone, too. “If something comes up.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I might be imagining things.” It was a better answer than it’s magic. Even if she’d heard the rumors about my predilections—and she had, or she wouldn’t have bitten off her magic comment a minute ago—normal people didn’t want their police work done by psychics and shamans. I suspected someone with a degree in Forensic Sciences really, truly and deeply didn’t want it’s magic as an answer for anything.
Heather exhaled sharply. I took it as permission and began brushing snow back from the frozen earth, trying not to disturb anything more than the narrow strips where I saw footprints in one level of my double vision. After a minute I scraped my way down to the ground, verifying that my eyes couldn’t see what the Sight did. I breathed a curse and shook my head at Heather. “There’s not going to be anything here that’ll do you any good. I’m sorry.”
“Then you can get out of my crime scene, Detective, and let my people get back to work.”
“Yeah, in just…” I stripped my glove off and slid my hand into the hollow I’d dug. A hillock of snow collapsed over my fingers, sending cold shivering through me.
It had nothing on the black ice beneath my palm. It sucked away my body heat with a willful vengeance, like it wanted to drag me in and abandon me in the cold. I jerked back with an ingénue’s gasp and coiled my other hand around my fingers. The ridges in the earth had flattened, like I’d put pressure on them. The notion that cold was all they were made of, and that my warmth had negated their chill, lingered in my thoughts.
Still cradling my hand, I pushed to my feet and turned in a slow circle, scanning the nearby earth for more of the narrow-toed footprints. Nothing: not on the ground, and not scored into any nearby trees. “It couldn’t just disappear.”
Morrison, a few feet away, said, “It?” and Heather drew herself up more stiffly.
I uncradled my hand and pinched the bridge of my nose with those fingers, half surprised they were willing to bend without shattering. “It. Him. Whatever. Billy, have you got…?”
God, how I’d changed. Billy and I usually retreated to The Missing O, a coffee and doughnut shop near the precinct building, to discuss the more unusual aspects of our cases. A few months earlier if anybody had told me I’d ask him straight out, in public, if he was getting a read on a ghost, I’d have sent some nice young men in clean white coats after them. I still wasn’t quite bold enough to spell it out, but none of us—not me, not Billy, not Morrison, and probably not Heather, since Billy’s fondness for the paranormal was legendary in the precinct—needed me to. We all knew what I was asking.
Billy came the long way around the body, his face tight. “Could be that she’s clinging to the location she died in.”
Heather made a disgruntled sound under her breath and walked away. Billy and I watched her, neither of us wanting to look at Morrison as I said, “But you don’t think so.”
“I don’t know.” My partner pulled his hand over his mouth. “I’ve never run into it before. Ghosts are usually tied to their physical forms, so even when the body is dumped they go with it. It could be there’s some kind of trap in place to keep them where they’re dying, though. Maybe…” He shot a guilty look at Morrison, who blew a breath from puffed cheeks.
“Go ahead, Holliday. Let’s hear your supposition.”
“That’s all it is, sir. Conjecture. But this guy is eating, or at least tasting, these bodies. If it’s something that feeds on human souls, then the physical desecration might be secondary to the spiritual one. It could be that chewing the bones is representative of…” He trailed off as Morrison got one of those looks that I recognized as something I usually triggered. It was one part disgust, one part disbelief and one part deliberate patience, all mixed well with resignation.
“Feeds on human souls.”
I said, “We’ve encountered it before, Captain,” in the smallest voice I possessed. Morrison turned his complicated expression on me, and it was all I could do to not dig a toe into the snow. “It’s essentially what Barbara and Mark Bragg were doing, sir, under Begochidi’s influence. Gathering strength by draining human lives. That’s what was putting everyone to sleep in July.”
Morrison looked to the sky, as if beseeching God to give him strength. I peeked at Billy, who shrugged his eyebrows, and we both came to attention as Morrison spoke again. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how I’ve spent twenty years in the force without ever hearing a hypothesis that it feeds on human souls on a case before.”
I didn’t really get the idea he was talking to us. Besides, that wasn’t what he wondered at all. What he really meant was, why was he now hearing that kind of hypothesis, when the world had been a sensible and straightforward place up until about a year ago.
The answer to that, of course, was me. One Joanne Walker, reluctant shaman thrust into a life that walked half a step out of pace with the normal world. Billy’s talents had always helped him solve cases. They hadn’t brought the truly bizarre to the fore. I was the one who fought gods and tangled with demons on the department’s time. I was coming to believe that all of those things—gods, demons, witches, spirits—had always been there, slipping alongside the real world and going more or less unnoticed. Sometimes cases went unsolved, or inexplicably strange things happened in them, but it took a mirror to show most people the explanation for those incomprehensible events.
I was that mirror. Without me, last winter’s ritual murders would have been just that, with no banshee’s head to show as a prize. Without me, no one would have seen a thunderbird battle a serpent over Lake Washington, or gone traipsing through dream worlds to share secret moments in each other’s souls. I’d come around to believing in magic, but forcing those around me to believe, too, wasn’t something I liked at all.
I said, “I’m sorry,” very, very quietly.
“You’re saying that too often lately, Walker.” Morrison shoved his hands into the pockets of his seaman’s coat and hunched his shoulders before letting them fall in a show of having given up the fight. “I called you two in for a reason. I shouldn’t bitch when you do what I brought you in to do. This hypothesis. Tell me how it would work.”
To my dismay, Billy lifted his eyebrows at me. I was the slow kid in class, the one scrambling through years of make-up work. If either of us had an answer, it should be him.
Well, really, I should have one, too. I pushed my hat off and scruffed my fingers through my hair, staring at the dead woman. “If it’s murder by magic, if somebody’s trying to capture souls, then there’s probably some kind of power circle involved.” I shot a quick glance at Billy, who looked approving, and a second one at Morrison, who looked dangerously uncomprehending. “Like people would use in a horror movie,” I said lamely. “A pentagram, for example, but it doesn’t have to be a pentagram. You can use—”
I fumbled at my throat, flipping the thumbnail-sized pendant of my necklace above the collar of my shirt. It was a quartered cross wrapped in a circle, a symbol used by both sides of my heritage. In Ireland, it was the Celtic cross, older than Christianity’s, and for the Cherokee it was the power circle, all the directions encompassed by the universe. “You can use something like this, or probably anything else that’s meaningful to you. A peace symbol, maybe.” My attempt at a smile was met by Morrison’s steely gaze. “Anyway, you create your circle and invoke your patrons and when you’re done you have a sealed area that can either keep things in or out, depending on which you set it up for.” I’d participated in one fairly recently, or I’d have had no idea how to catch a wayward soul.
Morrison stared at me, or possibly at my necklace, for a long moment, then made his voice very steady. “All right. This power circle. Would it leave a mark?”
This time I got my expect-an-answer glance off first, planting it on Billy. His mouth pursed and he shook his head. “It might, but I wouldn’t be able to see it. Jo—”
“I don’t know if I can see residue, but I can check by looking for Mel’s. But if we have murder by magic—” I liked that phrase “—going on, then whatever mark it leaves isn’t going to be anything like Melinda’s. If I can see a shadow cast by hers, maybe I can figure out how to look for its opposite, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
“You have to,” Morrison said. “I’ve got nobody else.”
I breathed a laugh that wasn’t. “So no pressure, then. All right. Okay. I’ll try, Captain. I’ll do my best.”
He gave me a short nod, and I took a few steps back from the dead woman’s body. Police tape rustled against my hips and I turned to duck under it.
Blinding light erupted in my vision, and from out of it came a microphone and a woman’s voice: “Detective Walker. Laurie Corvallis from Channel Two News. I’m sure you remember me. What a delight to find you at the heart of another grotesque crime scene. What would you like to say to our viewers?”
CHAPTER THREE
The first eight or twelve things that sprang to mind were not answers Morrison would approve of. I squinted into the light and managed to pull up a terse smile in lieu of what I wanted to say. By the time I made out Corvallis’s silhouette against the brilliance, I’d come up with something other than chuck you, farley, and kept my voice as pleasant as I could. “Ms. Corvallis, I don’t find it at all delightful to be in the midst of a murder scene, and I think it’s dismaying that you do. Beyond that, no comment. Sorry.”
Truth was, I probably shouldn’t have indulged in that much commentary, but at least I got the satisfaction of seeing Corvallis’s lip curl like I’d made a palpable hit. I ducked out of the camera light, blinking furiously to readjust to the dark, and heard Morrison’s grim, “Ms. Corvallis. What do you think you’re doing here?” behind me. I turned back to watch them, glad to be out of the spotlight.
Corvallis was just a little over five feet tall and had some kind of truly American ethnic background that had graced her with epicanthic blue eyes and café latte skin to go with very straight black hair. On TV, I thought she was gorgeous. In real life, I thought she was a pain in the ass. Even so, I had to admire how she stood up to Morrison, whose ten inches in height advantage didn’t seem to faze her at all. “I’m trying to report a news story, Captain. You wouldn’t want the story to be about the police obstructing the media, would you?”
“I want to be able to notify the family before they see their daughter’s death as the lead story on the morning news,” Morrison snapped. “And I want you to heed the decision that came from over your head to leave this story alone until we get some kind of break on it. I understand that investigative reporting is your job,” he said over her protest, and to my surprise his voice softened. “But you know enough details on this case to understand how frightened people are going to be, and that it’s dangerous and disturbed enough without adding the possibility of copycat murderers.”
“So you admit this morning’s victim is the last in a long line of murders by the Seattle Cannibal?”
My mouth bypassed my brain and said, “You’re kidding. Seattle Cannibal? There’s nothing euphonious or catchy about that at all. Maybe the Seattle Slaughterer. At least that’s alliterative.” About halfway through the last word I tried stuffing my fist in my mouth to shut myself up, but it was far too late. Morrison and Corvallis both turned to me, and from Morrison’s expression I figured I could count what was left of my detecting career in a matter of hours. Possibly minutes.
Corvallis, on the other hand, was smiling. For a pretty woman, she looked remarkably like a barracuda. “The Seattle Slaughterer,” she echoed. “I like that. Thank you, Detective Walker. Anything else you’d care to add?”
Short of issuing an invitation to my forthcoming ritual suicide, I couldn’t think of anything. I shook my head and backed away before laser beams actually shot out of Morrison’s eyes and immolated me.
A few steps beyond the news crew, I ran into Gary, who caught me, then thumped the side of his cab as an invitation to pull up against the hood and lean. “You’re right. ‘Slaughterer’ is better than ‘cannibal.’ Still a mouthful, though.”
I groaned. “You’re not helping.”
“I figure I already did my bit of helping.” He sounded less pleased than he should, and I frowned at him. He lifted a big shoulder and let it fall in a shrug that, as always, reminded me of plate tectonics. “Cops ain’t using the regular frequencies to call around about these murders, doll. Cabbies listen in on those all the time, but there’s been nothing to hear. I figure you’re using cell phones for everything.”
“Yeah. Mostly this isn’t patrol-car stuff anyway.”
“’Zactly. So how’d she know to turn up today?” Gary opened a hand, palm to the sky. “Listenin’ in on taxi frequencies, I bet. Henley called it in on his radio.”
I said, “Well, shit,” more philosophically than I thought those words could be said. “It had to happen eventually. Still, when Morrison comes over here to kill me, I’m putting you between us so I can run. He won’t kill you. You’re not his employee, and he respects his elders.” I didn’t know if that last part was true, but it seemed likely.
Gary chuckled. “You’re real thoughtful. So what’d you see over there?” He jerked his chin toward the crime scene.
“Bigfoot.” It was as good a name for whatever had left the claw marks as anything else. I looked over my shoulder toward my apartment building, where my bed lay cold and abandoned. “It’s Tuesday. I’m not even supposed to be at work today, but somehow I’m out chasing yeti at seven in the morning.”
“It’s a great life, innit?” Gary split a broad grin full of white teeth and I laughed despite myself.
“You have a demented sense of great. Hey! Billy!” I lifted my voice and waved as my partner ducked under the police tape. He crunched through snow turning to slush and joined us, rubbing his gloved hands together for warmth. “Morrison just gave us orders to go study Melinda’s power circle, right?”
“What you really want to know is if you can use that as an excuse to get out of here before Corvallis finishes with him and he comes to tear you a new—”
“Yes,” I admitted hastily. “Please. I’m trying not to think about my impending doom. Can we go?”
“You think he’s going to be any less pissed if he has to wait to yell at you?”
“I think if I’m really lucky we’ll come up with something and distract him from yelling.” I pushed away from Gary’s cab, looking between it and him. “I’d invite you along, but you’re covering Mickey’s shift.”
“Think you can handle it without me?”
That was actually a surprisingly good question. I glanced at Billy, who shrugged his eyebrows. “Mel can pull up that power circle by herself, if that’s what you need.”
I turned back to Gary, knocking my shoulder against his. “Okay, so probably, if I’m just looking for residue.” I sounded confident. I wished I felt half as certain. “I’ll call if something comes up, okay?”
“Arright, doll.” Gary lumbered into his cab and I leaned over the open door as he buckled in.
“Look, Gary, in case nobody else says it. Thank you. You caught us a break here this morning.”
He gave a dismissive snort, but his eyes were bright with pleasure as he pulled the door closed and drove off. I waved after him and turned to Billy with a smile still on my face.
My partner had his own smile, smirkier than mine, though there wasn’t any meanness in it. I puffed up, indignant without knowing why. “What?”
“Nothing.” Billy’s amusement expanded as I huffed. “I swear, nothing! You’ve changed a lot in the last year, that’s all. Gary’s good for you.”
“Oh, don’t you start that, too.”
“Nah, that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“Nothing. Get in the car.” Billy, grinning unrepentantly, herded me toward the minivan, and I went, muttering dire but unmeant imprecations on the way.
Tuesday, December 20, 7:42 A.M.
My pique at Billy couldn’t withstand the warm fuzzy feeling I always got at seeing his sprawling house, which said home to me in a way nowhere I’d lived ever had. A new front porch boasted Christmas decorations and colored lights, and a plastic snowman dominated the front yard. Two much smaller actual snowmen flanked him, the larger wearing a winter hat I recognized as belonging to Billy’s oldest son, Robert. He was pushing twelve, old enough to start thinking about looking cool over being cold, and I doubted the hat would be rescued before spring.
Billy’s wife, Melinda, appeared on the porch in the midst of a rush of children. Most of them converged on the van, yanking the doors open hard enough to rock the whole vehicle as they spilled in with a cacophony worthy of a marching band. I picked out a demand from Clara to be brought to school and squeals of delight that I’d come to visit, followed by howls of dismay as six-year-old Jacquie realized she couldn’t both visit me and go to school. It made me feel loved, and somehow made up for the ear full of jam-slathered toast courtesy of Erik, the three-year-old.
Billy did an excellent impression of a roaring bull elephant, and ten seconds later the older kids were buckled in and I was standing in the driveway with Erik on my hip and strawberry jam in my hair. Melinda minced down the steps to join me, and we all waved goodbye, though baby Caroline—not quite two months old—required her mother’s assistance to do so. Billy pulled out of the driveway and I turned to Melinda, sagging in astonishment. “I honestly don’t know how you do it.”
Erik caroled, “With meeee!” and smeared some more jam across my face. I wrinkled my nose, trying to get the itchy, sticky stuff to retreat, and Melinda laughed aloud.
“Yes, with you. You’re mama’s helper, aren’t you? How about Joanne puts you down and you run inside to get us all a washcloth? Look how messy Joanne is! Silly Joanie!”
“Siwwy Joanie!” Erik squirmed down my side, depositing crumbs, butter and jam as he went, and ran for the house.
Melinda looked me up and down. “I’d lend you something clean to wear while I threw those in the wash, but all of my clothes would be too small and all of Bill’s would be too big.”
I rubbed a bit of jam off my cheek. “It’s okay. I just expect you to peel me off the walls if I get stuck to them.”
“Fair enough.” Melinda herded me inside the house as if I were one of her children, and I went without complaint. Erik met us in the front hall bearing a soaking wet washcloth, which his mother wrung out and applied to me with the same brutal efficiency she turned on her son a moment later. I stood there trying not to laugh, and a moment before Erik’s cherubic smile came clean, she realized what she’d done and turned to me with cheeks pink from mortification.
I held on to solemnity with every ounce of my being and thrust my jam-sticky hands out for her to scrub. Melinda hit me with the washcloth, and I threw my head back and laughed. “You’re the best mom ever, Mel. Woe betide any mess that gets in your way.” I went to wash my hands, still laughing, and Melinda turned her ruthless washing back on her son. Half an hour later he was involved with a complex game of “pile up blocks and knock them over” in the playroom, and Melinda and I slipped into the room off it that was hers alone.
The only time I’d been in there previously, it had been a place of ritual lit by candles. It was dramatically less mystical with floor lamps turned on and light pouring in from the playroom, but the wide power circle painted on the concrete floor remained the same. A sister circle marked the ceiling, and I’d seen how power could flood between the two of them, making a column of living magic. Caroline unfolded a hand from within her sling and grasped for the upper circle, burbling with dismay when it didn’t come closer. I found myself eyeing the baby, then her mother, who lifted a hand, palm out, to deny me. “She can’t talk. I’m not even sure she can see as far as the circle.”
“They all saw the Thing in the kitchen.” “They” were Melinda’s kids, and the Thing had been a terrible, enormous serpent: a monster made manifest in the Hollidays’ home. It, in fact, was the reason there was a new front porch; half the house had been stretched and torn in getting the serpent out of there.
Melinda gave me a flat look. “The Thing in the kitchen was real. Anybody would’ve seen it.”
“Robert knows when magic’s being done. He says the dead make hospitals cold. And he says Clara senses things, too.”
“Does that really surprise you? Given Billy? Given me?”
“Mel, the day this all stops surprising me is probably the day I wake up dead. I know Billy’s a medium, and I know you see auras and know how to run a coven, but I don’t know anything about your talent. Do you have a name for what you are?” I’d been wanting to ask for months. It’d just never seemed like the right time.
I wasn’t sure now was right, either, but Melinda considered me briefly before shrugging. “Only a wise woman, maybe. A witch, a midwife. I would have been the one people came to for potions and cures in Mexico, but only because my grandmother was truly a bruja. She had the Sight, she had power, and she was the one who taught me to honor la diosa, the goddess. My mother,” she added, eyebrows elevating, “was very Catholic, and hated that I was drawn from the church to follow Nana’s path. My own children will not have to face that fight.”
A smile crooked my lips. “What if they go back to the church?”
“That’s their decision. They will not face that fight,” she said again. “Not from me.” She gave Caroline a finger to hold on to and waggled the baby’s hand for a moment before speaking again. “I grew up watching Nana communicate with and see into a world beyond ours. She called me sensitive and taught me what she could, but that’s all I am, Joanie. Sensitive. I see auras, but not to the depth you do. I can gather my energy and waken a power circle, but I can’t heal. I’ve been part of a coven, and found it didn’t suit me. My grandmother had seven children, but she lived alone after my grandfather died. Wise women in the tales often do, and let those who need them come to them. Not many people come looking, but I’m here when they do.”
“I’m grateful.” I cleared my throat on the words, discomfited at how they’d burst out. I was more grateful than I could say. Without people like Billy and Melinda, the past year of adapting to my burgeoning powers would have been impossible, rather than merely extraordinarily difficult. I still thought I didn’t deserve them, but I was trying hard to step up so I did.
Melinda smiled, then tipped her head toward the power circle. “I awakened it after Billy called so there would be residue for you to investigate. At least, if it works that way.”
“I hope it does, because I doubt whoever’s out there—” I broke off, glancing out of the room toward Erik, and breathed, “eating people” before continuing in a normal voice, “I doubt they’re going to light up any kind of power circle just for my benefit in finding them.”
“Caroline and I will get out of your way. I’ll be in the playroom with the babies if you need anything.”
A smile didn’t seem sufficient. I stepped over to her and squooshed both friend and baby into a hug. “I don’t think it’ll take long. Thanks, Mel.”
“My pleasure,” she said, and from the light in her aura, I knew she meant it. Inexplicably happy despite having been awakened at two in the morning to hunt cannibalistic killers, I turned my attention and the Sight on the remnants of the power circle, eager to see what could be seen.
CHAPTER FOUR
A whisper of power danced in the room, so faint with sunshine yellow and streaked orange that I wouldn’t have been able to name the colors if I hadn’t already associated them with Mel. They glimmered up and down like a fine sheen of waterfall mist caught between the wheels inscribed on the floor and ceiling.
More, there was a lingering sense of what she’d done to awaken the circle. The one time I’d seen her use magic, she’d been calling on a goddess in hopes of getting some questions answered. As it happened, talking with a goddess had been trumped by other events, but I could feel a hint of similar intent in the circle now. It wasn’t quite the same: then, we’d come as supplicants, and what was left now was more a greeting, offering honor and admiration, and taking nothing in return.
It reminded me that I’d promised my black-winged spirit guide that I’d do a better job of honoring and listening to it, and that I hadn’t made any effort to lately. “Hey, Melinda?”
Her answering, “Yeah?” came from the playroom, followed by Erik’s cheery shriek as he knocked over another pile of blocks. I smiled and put my hand up, not quite touching the shimmering curve of fading magic. “Was this a keep-things-in or a keep-things-out circle?”
“Figure it out yourself, Joanne!” She sounded rather like Erik, quite cheerful and maybe a little teasing. I raspberried her without rancor and focused on the circle again. She was right. If I was a slightly more clever shaman I’d have known it without asking. Nobody’d ever accused me of brilliance, though.
Emboldened, I touched the faint residue, trying to keep an open mind to learn what it could tell me. The open mind bit was the hard part: on one level I wanted to snort at myself for imagining thin air would give me any information at all.
The circle had been for keeping things in. Certainty exploded in me, then tumbled into bits of information that seemed to rise up rather than be the product of any conscious thought. For a few heartbeats I was Melinda, greeting my goddess with gladness and an open heart. The circle’s walls were protection both for the being within and for the world without: neither was entirely meant to interact with the other in this plane. Here, in the confines of Melinda’s sanctuary, there was very little chance of outside elements attacking, and so the power circle’s purpose was to constrain the goddess so she wouldn’t warp the world around her with her presence.
Constrain was an awkward word there, implying control. But it was the constraint of a thousand-acre wildlife preserve: the creatures inside it were free to do as they pleased, with no outside interference. Melissa didn’t control her goddess, and indeed, standing there with the awareness of her power circle thrumming through me, I knew that whomever she worshipped had barely been present at all. It was, again, like the sun: it would come up and warm the earth whether someone stood to greet it or not. I was half glad and half disappointed that she hadn’t had time to answer our call at Halloween. The gods I’d met had been awe-inspiring, but they’d both been men. Meeting the female of the species would’ve been interesting. Probably in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense of the word, but interesting.
I put a little pressure against the remaining magic, then stepped over the painted lines to enter the power circle. There was no resistance; wouldn’t have been even if Melinda had been pouring strength into it. It was meant to keep things in, after all. If it was active I might not be able to get out without Mel’s help, but with nothing more than a biding memory of magic in place, I thought I could come and go as I pleased. If not, Melinda would presumably rescue me as soon as I promised to babysit her horde of children so she and Billy could have a date night.
Amused, I turned to each of the four cardinal points of the circle and offered awkward bows in each direction before kneeling in its center. “I didn’t bring any gifts,” I said aloud, trusting that Melinda either wouldn’t hear or—more likely—wouldn’t think I was batshit insane for talking to an empty room. “I wasn’t really planning on dropping in, but I remembered that I promised I’d do better, so I thought I should strike while the iron was hot.”
I wet my lips, wondering if spirit guides worked in metaphor, then wondered what the hell else they could possibly work in. “I could use some help, if you’re in the mood to provide it.” It wasn’t graceful, but at least it acknowledged that my guide was autonomous, which was a lot smarter than trying to make demands.
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, I’d have been deep inside the spirit realm talking to my mentor, Coyote, when I asked for help. Chances were he’d have been six kinds of useless, offering up little more than cryptic advice for me to sort out on my own. That was one of several million problems with being a shaman: they dealt with, and often were, tricksters who never gave straight answers to anything. But Coyote had died months ago, leaving me with achingly little wisdom and even less surety as to the path I was on. The closest thing I had to a saving grace—aside from Billy and Melinda and Gary, who were angels from on high as far as I was concerned—was somewhere in the heart of the spirit world, a raven had befriended me and become my guide. Billy was alive because of that bird, and I wondered if I’d ever really said thank you.
Stung by the thought, I closed my eyes and dropped my chin to my chest. The circle’s power lines glowed against the back of my eyelids, much more strongly than before. Sometimes the Other was like that, easier to see when I wasn’t looking in the real world. “Actually, nevermind. I can probably get through what’s going on now on my own. Let me just say thanks for last time, instead. I wish I knew how to do this properly. Do spirit ravens like shiny things as much as real ones do?” I closed my fingers around my silver necklace, smiling at the idea of a raven trying to steal it. “Maybe I’ll find you something else.”
An approving klok! echoed, the big popping noise ravens made when they were interested in or scolding something. It sounded real, like it had happened in the room instead of in my head. I opened my eyes, bemused, to find a raven standing in front of me. He tilted his head and I tilted mine the same way, mirror image to a curious bird.
He was white outlines, like he’d grown up from the power lines of Melinda’s circle. I could see individual feathers etched in shining light, and I could also see right through him, to the concrete and paint beneath us. He’d looked that way before, in the darkness of a spirit animal quest, but mostly when I’d seen him he’d looked like a proper raven, glossy black-blue and startlingly large with a ruff of sharp feathers at his throat. He preened, stretching one translucent wing out to its full length, then tucked it back in and peered at me.
At a loss for what else to do, I extended a hand and said, “Hello, Mister Raven,” and only afterward considered the possibility that not everyone called animals “mister,” or worse, that my guide might somehow be offended by the human appellation. I frequently greeted animals that way, though, and evidently he didn’t mind, because he hopped forward, said klok! again, and nipped the sleeve of my sweater until the copper bracelet I wore was exposed.
He bit that even harder, hooked beak bouncing off beaten metal and scraping into the etched animals that encircled it. I pulled back, squelching the urge to thwap his beak. “Hey. That’s mine. No eating it, even if it is shiny. I’ll bring you tinsel or something, next time.” What possible use a spirit raven could have for tinsel or, in fact, any tangible object, I didn’t know, but at least I now had it confirmed that he liked shiny things. He went quaarrk and settled back, tilting his head again, so I tentatively scratched him under the beak, like he was a cat. His quark was softer this time and I smiled before mumbling, “So, thank you, anyway. For helping me with Billy. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
For a bird, he looked remarkably self-satisfied. I chuckled and rubbed his jaw harder, and he leaned into it, making little raveny sounds of contentment. I felt my own shoulders relax and only just then realized how tired I was. 2:30 A.M. wakeup calls were not my friend. I exhaled a long breath, and half-consciously watched it bead on the air like frost.
It wafted over my raven, making him sparkle briefly, and when it passed, he looked like a normal raven, gleaming black with bright eyes. He hopped into my lap and we both watched the remnants of my breath extend over the lines of Melinda’s power circle. Shadows made of light shifted in the paint, then drifted up, reaching for the matching circle above me. When they touched, brilliance flared, then faded again, leaving me feeling rather safe and warm and cozy in a wreath of active power.
“Ah,” I said a bit distantly. “Reached one of those altered states of being, have I? This is nicer than being hit on the head.” There were dozens of ways to reach power and other worlds: sleep deprivation, drugs, unconsciousness, drumming and simple practice were among them, and so far the only one I hadn’t tried was drugs. Drinking myself into oblivion and waking up with a god-infested mortal didn’t count. I tipped my head to peer at my raven. “Can you talk now?”
He said, “Nevermore,” then looked incredibly annoyed.
I couldn’t help it: I laughed, then more carefully rubbed the top of his feathery head. “Sorry. My subconscious probably made you say that, if it’s possible. What’s going on?”
He made a popping sound, his own breath steaming, and all around me Melinda’s sanctuary fell away.
Desolate snow and ice rose up in its place. A howling came with it, so high and sweet and sad it took a long time to understand it was the wind shrieking over frozen wastelands. Once I understood, I felt it, cutting through my sweater and into my bones, making them as cold as the spaces between stars. The Bigfoot print I’d seen under the snow had felt that way when I’d touched it, so icy it was almost beyond words.
A figure appeared in the blowing wind and snow, gray in the brightness. It walked erratically, pushed by the elements, and stumbled often, as if it had very little strength to carry on. I jumped to my feet and saw a blur of wings, the raven a singular midnight-colored spot in all the white. He latched on to my shoulder, digging in with powerful talons, but the pain was a comfortable thing compared to the cold bisecting me.
A second figure, then a third, joined the first. Other shadows made silver spots in the snowstorm, too indistinct for me to be certain they weren’t mere mirages. They all moved in different directions, though if I was close enough to see all of them, they had to be able to see each other. I waved a hand, shouting, and heard my own voice swallowed up by the wind. Anger burgeoned in me and I braced myself, drawing a deep breath and shouting from my diaphragm.
One of the figures hesitated, then turned a shadowy face toward me. I yelled in relief, waving madly, and it stopped where it was, then looked around as I bellowed, “Over here! Come on, over here!”
Instead, it swung around, suddenly purposeful, and strode away through the storm. I let out another yell, this time of frustration, and flung myself after it. Snow reached up and grabbed my thighs, my hips, and then gobbled me whole, ice and snow collapsing over my head.
I screamed, clawing for the surface, and the raven tightened his claws in my shoulder again. Inside a breath I was on top of the snow again, bullied by the wind and floundering with exhaustion. My compatriots were gone, leaving me alone on the ice field with only a raven as company. I ran a few feet, then fell to my knees, panting for air that was too wild to run smoothly into my lungs. “Where are we? Who are they?”
Quoth the raven, Nevermore, and this time he didn’t sound irritated by it. I craned my neck, trying to see the bird on my shoulder clearly. “They’re dead? This isn’t the Dead Zone. And I can’t see ghosts.”
As soon as I said it I knew I was wrong. I could see ghosts, when the raven was on my shoulder. I thought it was something to do with a raven’s transitory state between life and death, with its history as a beast found feasting after battles and its mythology of riding the shoulders of those who ushered the living into another world. “They’re ghosts?”
Ravens didn’t have lips to curl, but he did a fine job of curling his lip anyway, thereby relegating me to my usual position of being a day late and a dollar short in terms of esoteric knowledge. “If they’re not ghosts and this isn’t the Dead Zone—” Which it wasn’t; that much, at least, I was sure of. What I referred to as the Dead Zone was a bleak nothingness about half a meter smaller than eternity. This frozen landscape had bleak written all over it, but it also had the personality of a storm. The Dead Zone had no such thing. “—then where are we?”
The raven dumped me unceremoniously back into Melinda’s power circle.
I had not been lying on my back when I went under. I was now, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Melinda in the doorway, Caroline in her arms and a curious expression on both faces. With Caroline, it probably meant gas. With Mel, it probably meant she was trying really hard not to ask why I was flat on my back in the middle of her sanctuary. “Do you have any spirit animals, Mel?”
She, after a moment’s hesitation, said, “Yes….”
I fluttered a hand in reassurance. “Don’t worry, I’m not rude enough to ask what they are. Just, do they ever effectively coldcock you and leave you sprawled on the floor?”
The corner of her mouth quirked. “I’m afraid not.”
“I didn’t think so. I don’t get no respect.” The raven was no longer visible, though I could feel his weight on my chest, like he was staring at me. Waiting for me to get my act together, presumably. “I think I jump-started your power circle. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You shouldn’t have been able to, but it’s okay.”
“Really?” I pushed up on my elbows. Light still glimmered around the edges of the circle, stronger than the residuals Melinda’d left for me to study. I suddenly got the idea she was outside it because she wasn’t allowed in, which wasn’t good on two levels. One, it was her circle, so it seemed like she should be able to breeze right through anything I did. Two, and possibly more important, I didn’t know how to take it down. It felt nothing like the healing power I’d become reasonably competent at drawing on; that came from within, and the circle’s power seemed to be outside of me. Its strength had come from somewhere else. The raven, maybe. I squinted the Sight on to give him a hard look, but the little bastard disappeared and left me to deal with my own problems. “Really on both counts? It’s really okay, and I shouldn’t have been able to?”
“Really on both counts. If I didn’t like you, it wouldn’t be okay at all, but if I didn’t like you, I think you probably wouldn’t have been able to. I hope.” Melinda frowned, giving me the uncomfortable sensation that I was out of her league, magically speaking. I mean, I knew I was, according to what she and Billy kept telling me, but knowing it and feeling it were two different things.
“We’ll go with me not being able to. I’m not even sure I opened this one. Did you see a, um, bird on my chest?” I didn’t want to define my spirit guide as a raven any more than Mel wanted to confess to her own totem animals. It was irrational, but I felt strongly about it, and Mel didn’t look surprised as she shook her head.
I whooshed air out and put my head on my knees for a moment. Memory crept over me and I peeked up again, the Sight in place once more.
Breath only showed up in cold air, and Melinda’s sanctuary was nice and warm. But I still saw the particles of my exhalation dance across the power lines, shaking down the magic that had grown up. I stared at it, flabbergasted. The only other time I’d opened a power circle, it’d been with a blood sacrifice—not, in the grand scheme of things, the best way to go. It struck me that the breath in my lungs was just as important a component of what kept me alive, and, as far as offerings went, seemed pretty profound. “I think you’ve got to teach me how to deliberately awaken a power circle, Mel.” Before I did something critically stupid and woke up dead from attempting it someday. My raven guide probably wouldn’t have let that happen just now, but I didn’t like to think what could’ve happened if I hadn’t already entreated him.
It also struck me that breath was, in its way, incidental. Once it left the body, it became part of the air again, always in transition. That might have accounted for the disconnect I felt with the magic powering the circle.
I suspected that on a fundamental level, what I’d just accidentally done was extremely dangerous. I scrambled up out of the circle and did my best to hide behind Melinda, who was at least seven inches shorter than I was. “Soon,” I added. “Maybe now would be good.”
“Not unless you’ve got a babysitter in your pocket. The kids would be too much distraction.”
I felt my pocket. “I have a cell phone. That’s almost as good.”
Melinda laughed. “Cell phones are notoriously bad at watching three-year-olds. They have no defense system.”
“But Gary does! Maybe I can get him to come over when he gets off shift.” I pulled the phone out and it rang, surprising me enough that I nearly dropped it. Caroline giggled and waved her hands, apparently delighted by my antics. I gave her a finger to hold and, charmed by her smile, picked up the call without looking to see who it was.
“Walker,” Morrison said tightly. “Get to the morgue as fast as you can. Something’s happening to the bodies.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Charlie Groleski had shriveled into a husk.
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was an ice-age corpse, the kind that occasionally turns up in glaciers. His skin had that same dried brown leathery look to it, with his hair matted and stringy by turns, and his fingers clawed as if great age had withered them to nubs. He had a faint odor of decay, the smell of something so long dead that it’s given up stinking and is just a few hours away from collapsing into nothing. Part of me wanted to give him a prod and see if he would fall in on himself and become nothing more than a dust shadow on the cold morgue slab.
I resisted, based on the certainty that it wouldn’t win me any friends, but I really wanted to. Billy, as if suspecting the direction of my thoughts, edged between me and Groleski’s body, and pointed toward Karin Newcomb’s.
I’d been avoiding looking at her, a little afraid I might recognize her after all. I didn’t; either we’d never crossed paths in the months we’d lived in the same apartment building, or she’d become one of a blur of college-aged brunettes who’d lived there in the seven years I had. Either way, she deserved better. Whether she deserved better of the world at large, or me in specific, though, I wasn’t sure.
Unlike Groleski, she hadn’t had time to freeze, but like him, she was falling in on herself. Taken together, they looked like separate stages of a horror film special effect, with Groleski the advanced decomposition. “Know what it reminds me of?”
Billy gave me a pained look. “If you make a joke, Walker…”
“No, I’m being serious.” I crouched, studying Karin Newcomb’s deteriorating form. “They’re falling apart the same way Ida and the girls did, but more slowly. Like they weren’t just frozen, but they were being held together with magic, too.”
“Huh.” Billy put his arms akimbo and stared down at the dead people like he was trying to find fault in my comparison. Apparently he didn’t find any, because after a moment he said, “Think we’ve got another banshee on our hands?”
“I love how you say that like it’s normal.” I glanced up, looking for rubber gloves, and waved at the box when I found it. Billy handed me one and I did my best proctologist’s snap putting it on, then risked poking a finger into the dead woman’s ribs. The flesh dented like an ancient Peeps, with a soft rain of marshmallow cascading over my fingertip. Only it wasn’t marshmallow. I withdrew my hand and stared into the hole I’d made. It didn’t look like something that could happen to a human body. “Billy, those women who died back in March…did anybody notice anything like this happening to their bodies?”
I stood up, not wanting to look into the dried-marshmallow effect in Karin’s ribs any longer, and caught Billy’s quick shake of his head. “They’d all been eviscerated. Cause of death was pretty obvious. And they all had ID on them, so I think the bodies were released to the families pretty fast. I don’t remember anything like this. I guess we could get a court order to have them exhumed, if you think we need to.”
A shudder made hairs rise on my arms. “Let’s not unless we’re sure we have to. How about our other victims, has this been happening to them?”
He shook his head again. I stripped the rubber glove off and pushed my fingers through my hair. “What’s the date?”
“December twentieth, why?”
I’d known that. I’d known it very clearly, because tomorrow was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I’d only asked in order to buy time. Sadly, the second and a half it took Billy to answer wasn’t nearly as much as I’d hoped to buy, and it didn’t give me any way out of proposing a supernatural hypothesis. “Tomorrow’s the solstice. These things tend to get stronger around the pagan high holy days.”
Pagan high holy days. Like half of them—more than half—weren’t marked in some way by the modern world and practitioners of most modern religions. Easter fell suspiciously close to the spring fertility festival of Beltane, midsummer meant a weekend of partying while the sun didn’t go down, and I didn’t think there was much of anybody fooling themselves about Christmas lying cheek-by-jowl with the midwinter solstice. Mardi Gras, Halloween—they were all tied in with ancient holy days, even if we didn’t always consciously draw the lines between them. I snorted at myself and shook it off; it didn’t really matter who celebrated them or what they were called. The point was, certain times of the year had natural mystic punch, and we were on the edge of one of those days today. That didn’t exactly comfort me.
Neither did the fact that banshees seemed inclined to swarm during the holy days. Twice this year I’d faced them, and I was in no particular hurry to go up against one again. They worked for a much bigger bad, a thing they called the Master. I only knew a handful of things about him, but none of them was good.
No, that wasn’t true. One of them was good: as far as I could tell, he wasn’t corporeal. No killer demon walking the earth. That was a win, and I’d learned to be grateful for small favors.
Everything else about him, though, scared the crap out of me. I knew he found me amusing, and it was my general opinion that being found amusing by alarmingly powerful entities was not something to be sought. I also knew that ritual murders, carried out by his banshee minions, fed him enough strength to keep an eye on the world. I knew he could come a hair’s breadth from killing a god, and I knew the only reason I wasn’t already dead was my mother had sacrificed herself to keep me alive.
I very much didn’t want Charlie Groleski’s and Karin Newcomb’s shriveling forms to be the work of banshees, because that meant the Master was stirring, and I’d already pissed him off twice this year. Unfortunately for me, that’s what experience suggested we were looking at.
“Joanne?” Billy put his hand on my shoulder, startling me out of my grim examination of the bodies. “You okay, Walker?”
“Are the bodies exsanguinated?”
My partner gave me a look usually reserved for his kids mouthing off. “You know they aren’t. You just wanted an excuse to use ‘exsanguinate’ in conversation.”
I flashed him a guilty little smile that turned back into a frown. “Yeah, but maybe it’s good that they’re not, since the winter moon murders were all pretty much drained of blood. Even if it’s banshees again, this is different.”
“If it’s banshees again I’d rather it was the same, so we’d have a pattern to follow. Holy shit!” Billy levitated about four feet back, with me right beside him, as Groleski’s body fwoomped into a much smaller mass. Dust rose up, lingering in the air, and Billy all but vaulted another slab to snatch up medical masks. He tossed one to me and put one on, eyes bugged above its white line. “What the hell was that? Where’s the doctor?”
“Here, Detective.” A red-haired woman wearing medical glasses over her own mask swept in, hurrying but not alarmed. “You did ask me to step outside.”
We had, because although Sandra Reynolds had been the coroner on this case for the past six weeks, neither Billy nor I had wanted to stand around discussing things like banshees in front of her. She’d been watching through the window of the observer’s room, the place where families were most often taken to identify the bodies of their loved ones. It wasn’t soundproofed, but with the door closed it was unlikely she’d have overheard us running through mystical answers to our murders. Magic didn’t seem like her thing. She picked up a slim metal rod and bent over Groleski’s deflating body, dust poofing up to mar her safety glasses. I felt a shock of relief she was wearing them. I had no reason to think the particles were dangerous, but then, I didn’t have a reason not to think so, either.
Groleski flattened a little more as she edged the rod through his remains. I was glad I hadn’t poked him after all. The guilt of making him collapse like that would’ve kept me awake for days. Reynolds muttered, “This is fascinating,” in a tone that suggested that it was genuinely fascinating, and also a pain in the ass. “None of the other bodies have shown this kind of exsanguination.”
I shot a triumphant look at Billy, who rolled his eyes as the doctor continued, “It’s not just blood loss. A thawing body should be—” she glanced at us and clearly decided to go for a non-technical term “—squishy. I have no explanation for the rapid decay into dust.” Apparently quite happy, she scraped a pile of Charlie’s remains into a test tube and stoppered it. “I’m going to have to take a look at this.”
“So,” I said much more quietly, “am I.”
I hadn’t been using the Sight, mostly because it’d shown me nothing useful when we’d come across the bodies in the first place. I let it slip over my vision now, and watched a trail of red and yellow sparks follow Dr. Reynolds out of the morgue. I’d heard guys on the force call her a spitfire, and thought her aura colors reinforced that.
To my dismay, hers was the only aura I got a read on. There were no hints of dark magic clinging to the disintegrating bodies. They just looked dead. I glanced at Billy just to make sure my mojo was working, and got a reassuring flare of his orange and fuchsia colors. Well, reassuring in that I wasn’t defective. Less reassuring in that I was still batting zero in the paranormal detecting ballpark. “Morrison’s not going to like this.”
Worry sharpened Billy’s voice: “Not going to like what? What do you see?”
“Nothing.” I leaned against the nearest non-body-carrying slab and pulled my mask down. “You don’t need that thing. There’s nothing more dangerous there than any long-dead body might be carrying.”
Billy tugged his own mask down. “Like bubonic plague, you mean?”
I snorted, waving him off. “They’re not that long dead. And besides, aren’t most of the annual cases of plague in this country in, like, Arizona? No, what Morrison’s not going to like is I’m still not getting anything. If they weren’t falling apart like rotting…” I couldn’t think of anything that fell apart like they were doing, and finished, “…corpses,” lamely. “Anyway, I’d just think it was natural if it wasn’t happening so fast. I don’t like to go back to the captain with nothing.”
“None of us do.”
“Yeah, but…” There was nothing to say after that, because the sentence would end “but you don’t have a crush on him,” if I was being flippant, and with the same sentiment expressed in weightier terms if I was being brave. I wasn’t brave. Or flippant, for that matter, because even though it was an embarrassingly open secret, I wasn’t actually in the habit of going around admitting I’d sort of fallen for my captain. I didn’t even like admitting it to myself.
Billy, who was a better man than I, said, “So how do we find something to go to him with?” instead of taking the opportunity to razz me.
“I have two ideas. Do you want to hear the one you’ll be okay with or the one you’ll hate first?”
He stared at me. “If I say the one I’m okay with, is there any chance I won’t have to hear the one I’ll hate?”
I held my fingers an inch apart. “A little one.”
“Let’s go with that, then.” He folded his arms across his chest and glowered at me, which would have been thoroughly intimidating if I was one of his children.
“Okay. We go talk to your friend Sonata and see if she’s in tune enough with the dead to get a rise out of any of our murder victims. We also find out if she knows anybody who can diagnose a decomposition like this one, because it’s obviously not natural. Then we go to Morrison with whatever we’ve learned.”
“This is the better idea? Share case details with someone outside the force? How much will I not like the other one?”
“A lot.” I tilted my head toward the door. “So shall we go talk to Sonny?”
Sonata Smith outclassed Billy by a mile in the rank of speaks-with-the-dead. She was in her sixties and lived in a gorgeous old Victorian up on Capitol Hill, exactly the kind of house I’d imagine a medium lived in. That, though, was the end of where she conceded to meet my expectations. Her séance partner was a surfer-boy-looking former theology student in his early thirties, and she liked wearing violent comic book T-shirts, neither of which seemed very peaceable and medium-like to me. On the other hand, Billy was a six-foot-two police detective with a fondness for yellow sundresses, so I should’ve known better than to try to lay expectations on what constituted typical behavior for a medium. Or anybody else, probably.
Either way, Sonny was one of the relatively few Magic Seattle people I knew, and pretty much the only one I trusted besides Billy and Melinda. Left to my own devices, I’d managed to meet up with entirely the wrong crowd, so I was happy to lean on Billy’s expertise instead of my own shaky judgment.
We’d called ahead, but Sonny still pursed her lips as if we were unexpected when she answered the door. After a moment she rearranged the expression into a smile and said, “William, Joanne, come in,” and stepped aside. We got about two steps past the threshold before she said, “I take it this is about the murders. Can I get you some tea?”
Billy and I exchanged looks, and I put on a patently fakey smile. “At least Morrison can’t be pissed if everybody’s already talking about them, right?”
“Not everyone,” Sonata said. “Just that awful woman on Channel Two. She broke the story this morning. The Seattle Slaughterer, they’re calling him.”
I winced from the bottom of my soul all the way out. Billy groaned. “Tea would be great, Sonny. Green tea is supposed to be good for you, right? Would enough of it make somebody invulnerable? Because Joanie’s going to need it.” He followed Sonata into the kitchen, and I trailed along behind, wondering how many different ways Morrison was going to kill me. I’d gotten up to four highly creative ways to die before Sonata got us seated at the table and put a kettle on to boil.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I don’t know of anything that’s that good for you.”
Billy, more cheerfully than I thought was appropriate, said, “You’re dead,” to me.
I dropped my forehead to the table and said, “Maybe not,” words muffled by the shining wood. It smelled faintly of lemon Pledge, old and familiar. “Neither of us can pick up anything at all from the bodies we’re finding, Sonny. Even the one this morning didn’t have a ghost lingering, and she was freshly dead. I was thinking maybe if you gave it a shot, or if you knew somebody who could…” I peeked up, trying for convincing puppy-dog eyes.
Sonata looked unmoved, not even blinking when the kettle suddenly whistled. She let it go on, piercing the air, and finally shook her head. “I know who should be able to help.”
I sat up, hope surging in my chest as Sonata went to take the kettle off. “Who?”
She turned her profile to me, concern thinning her lips. “Joanne, it should be you.”
CHAPTER SIX
The kettle’s whistle faded into a rush of staticky background noise that lingered underneath, then swallowed, Sonata’s words. I was vaguely aware of Billy’s grimace, but mostly I was paying attention to the hiss between my ears and the abiding feeling that I should have expected Sonata to say something like that.
Three or four thousand self-directed recriminations lined up to pile themselves on me. If I hadn’t done this, if I’d only done that—I had a list of mistakes longer than my arm. It was all too easy to believe that by foundering around as I’d done the past year, I’d missed the mark on where I was supposed to be standing. Back in January, when everything had started and I’d been burning with power released after years of imprisonment, there’d been one brief and kind of glorious moment when I’d believed I could save, or heal or protect the whole city of Seattle. I’d lost most of that confidence while struggling to learn about my talents, but apparently I hadn’t lost the sensation that I should be able to do something like that. That I should, in essence, be so much better than I was.
Memory caught me in the gut, a visceral recollection of an alternate timeline I’d briefly been given viewing access to. There’d been a woman a lot like me in that other world, only she had her shit together. She had a life, a family, friends and she would have known how to hunt down whoever was killing and snacking on Seattleites. For a moment I ached with the regret of not being her.
But—and this was the crux, and always would be—she had never chosen to come live in Seattle. Whatever battles she had to fight, they were somewhere else, with someone else. This was the path I was on, and if I’d screwed up, well, that was life. I was finally starting to wrap my mind around the idea of making things better in the future instead of beating myself up for things that had gone wrong in the past. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it had to be enough.
I spread my fingers wide on the shining kitchen table, and made my voice louder than the blood rushing in my ears. The moment of believing I could protect Seattle came back to me, but like through a fun-house mirror: it was a little too far away, a little too distant to feel real. “You’re probably right. It probably should be me. Here’s the thing, though, Sonny. I hardly even know what that means. Can you…” I got up, suddenly unable to hold still, and stalked across the kitchen, trying not to look at either Billy or Sonata.
“Can you tell me what’s missing? What…what I should be? God, what a stupid question. It’s just that I’m so far behind the curve I can’t even see it. I don’t know what’s wrong, much less how to fix it. If I can understand…” I spread my hands again, this time against the air, and made myself meet the others’ eyes. “Some hero I am, but right now I don’t have any idea where to start.”
Tension turned to uncomfortable sympathy in Sonata’s gaze. “For what it’s worth, Joanne, it wasn’t until I met you that I began to understand, myself. William…?”
Billy shook his head. “I’m not part of the scene like you are, Sonny, you know that. For me it’s mostly what I can do through the job. You’re my one real contact with the world.”
“Why is that?” I interrupted, genuinely surprised. “You’re like a true believer, Billy. Why aren’t you neck-deep in it?”
“Mostly because of Brad.”
“Oh.” I wished I hadn’t asked. Doctor Bradley Holliday was Billy’s older brother. They’d had a sister, too, Caroline, who’d been between them in age, but she’d drowned in an accident when she was eleven. Her bond with Billy had kept her ghost at his side for thirty years, and that had driven a wedge between the brothers. I wasn’t certain whether it was envy or anger or some combination thereof, but Brad had never taken to the paranormal the way Billy had. It’d never occurred to me that maybe Billy hadn’t embraced it as much as he’d have liked, in order to keep a degree of peace in the family.
Or maybe he’d embraced it just as much as he needed to. I knew he and Melinda had met at a conference about the paranormal. Fifteen years and five kids later it didn’t look, from the outside, like he was missing too much.
“We had a disaster last year,” Sonata said quietly. “Within the community, at least, it was a disaster. This city had a number of genuinely powerful protectors, Joanne. Shamans, mostly. People who mitigated the world’s effects, both meteorological and anthropological.” A brief sad smile turned one corner of her mouth. “They were one of the reasons Seattle had a reputation as a good place to live.”
A space in my belly turned hollow and worried. “They all died, right? Hester and Jackson and…”
Pure surprise wiped Sonata’s sorrow away. “That’s right. You knew them? Roger and Adina and Sam?”
I sat again, suddenly weary. “I met them. I met them after they died.” They, as much as Coyote, had set me on a shaman’s path.
Sonata, who communed with the dead, didn’t even blink at that confession. Instead she said, “A few others left, after the murders. They were afraid, and that fear poisoned their ability to help the city, so maybe it was the right choice. But it left Seattle vulnerable. I thought we would have to simply work it out, that we’d eventually draw new talent back to us. But then I met you.”
“And you realized the new talent was here in a shiny incompetent package.”
Sonata pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t have put it that way. You’re not incompetent, merely…”
“Uneducated.” Really, not even I thought I was genuinely incompetent, not anymore. When push came to shove I had so far managed to get the job done, so I probably wasn’t actually incompetent. Inept, inexperienced, ill-equipped, yes, but those all had a little less sting than incompetency. “How can you tell I’m supposed to be the one who steps up? How can you tell I’m worth half a dozen other shamans?”
“You single-handedly destroyed the black cauldron.”
I wet my lips and caught Billy’s gaze. “That wasn’t technically me.”
To my surprise, he shook his head. “Sonata’s right, Joanie. That was pretty close to impossible. The cauldron was hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old, and imbued with enough magic that it essentially had a life of its own. You know what getting near it felt like.”
I did. It was seductive, calling me home to a promise of rest and peace. Not even gods were immune to its song. But I clung to a stubborn thread of denial. “Billy, I didn’t destroy it. You know that.”
“I know that over the cauldron’s whole history there are stories of people trying to break it. In all that time, you were the only one who pulled all the right elements to her so that it could be shattered. It wasn’t your sacrifice, but I think it was your presence as a nexus that made it possible.”
I wailed, “But what if I’d moved to Chattanooga?” and they both looked at me before Sonata laughed.
“Then perhaps the cauldron would have gone to Chattanooga. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you start wondering down those lines, Joanne. We can’t know what might have been.”
I thought of the alternate self whose life I’d seen glimpses of, and clamped my mouth shut on an I can. It hadn’t, after all, been my talent that let me see a dozen different timelines. “Okay. One more stupid question, and then I promise to go…” Save the world seemed a little melodramatic, so I went with “stop the killer,” and added, “somehow,” under my breath.
Out loud, I said, “Does every city have a group of shamans like Seattle did? People who try to protect the place?”
“Many do. There are…” Sonata sighed and went back to the counter, brewing the tea that had been abandoned. “There are both more and fewer shamans, or adepts of any kind, than there have ever been, Joanne. More, because there are more people than ever before. Fewer, because…”
“Because there are more people than ever before.” I mooshed a hand over my face. “Five hundred years ago there’d have been a shaman in every tribe, maybe. One person for a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, individuals. Now there’re billions of people, and any given shaman has tens of thousands to tend to. Right?”
“In essence.”
I blew a raspberry. “Why aren’t there more…adepts?” I liked that word better than “magic users”, probably because people could be adept at lots of things and I could at least pretend I wasn’t talking about the impossible as if it were ordinary. The whole train of thought led me to snort at my own question before anyone had time to answer. “Like Joanne the Unbeliever has to ask.”
“It’s partly an artifact of the era,” Sonata agreed, then glanced at Billy, who looked uncomfortable. I sat up straighter, ping-ponging my gaze between them, and Sonata sighed again. “The last twelve months have been hard on the magic world, Joanne. More of us have died than usual. It’s like a catalyst was set.”
Oh, God. I said, “Was that catalyst me?” in a small voice, and to my undying relief, Sonata’s frown turned into a quick shake of her head.
“I don’t think so. I could be wrong,” she amended hastily, “but you strike me as the response, Joanne. When I look at you I see the answer to, not the start of, the troubles.”
The hollow place in my belly came back. My brain disengaged from my mouth and went distant, surprised to hear the question I voiced: “Do you know an Irish woman called Sheila MacNamarra?”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. She was an…adept. As far as I can tell, she spent her whole life fighting—” I broke off, looking for a less dramatic phrase than what leaped to mind, then shrugged and used it anyway. “Fighting the forces of darkness. She went up against the Master, the one who created the cauldron. More than once, even. I think that was sort of what she…did.”
Recognition woke in Sonata’s eyes. “The Irish mage. I know of her. I didn’t know her name.”
My heart leaped and a fist closed around it all at once, sending a painful jolt through my chest. “You’ve heard of her? What do you know about her?”
Because what I knew about Sheila MacNamarra was embarrassingly limited. She liked Altoids; that was almost the sum total of what I’d learned about her in four months of traveling at her side. It was only after she died that I discovered she was an adept of no small talent, and that she’d spent her life fighting against—to put it extravagantly but accurately—the forces of darkness.
It was only after she died that I learned how far she’d gone to protect me.
Sonata was nodding. “I know of her as a power, yes. We don’t use names often, Joanne. You should know that by now. And mages are by their nature reclusive. As far as I know, no one’s seen the Irish mage outside of her homeland in decades. I’ve never even heard of anyone going to study with her, which is a little unusual. I don’t know if she has any protégés.”
“One,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”
It would have taken a dolt to miss the implications, and while Sonata was a bit of a long-haired hippy freak, she was by no means stupid. She sharpened her gaze on me, eyebrows shooting up again, this time making a question all of their own.
“She was my mother,” I said tiredly, “and she died a year ago tomorrow.”
I didn’t typically think of myself as an emotional lightweight. I didn’t tear up at Hallmark commercials, although extreme vehicle makeover shows could get me. I had a secret stash of romance novels that didn’t fit my girl-mechanic image, but even when they got angsty I didn’t sniffle over them. I had not, in fact, cried when my mother died. I’d barely known her, and I hadn’t liked her very much. But for some reason my throat got painfully tight and my nose stuffed up as I made my announcement.
Billy and Sonata were conspicuously silent, for which I was grateful. After a couple deep breaths I regained enough equilibrium to say, “She gave me to my dad when I was just a baby, because she had to keep fighting the Master.” That was so inaccurate as to be an outright lie, but I didn’t feel like getting into the complex time-slip that had happened both nine months and almost thirty years ago in my personal timeline. “Would her death be enough to start messing up the balance? Was she that big a gun?”
Sonata’s eyes were dark. “What’s your calling, Joanne? What are you, in adept terms? What are we?”
“Me? I’m a shaman. You two are mediums. Melinda’s, I don’t know, a witch or something. Why?”
“And what do you suppose a mage is?”
“I don’t know. It’s a wizard. A sorc…” Except sorcerer, in my experience, connotated bad guy, and I was pretty damned sure Sheila MacNamarra hadn’t been a bad guy. I fell silent, staring at Sonata and working through the rankings I was aware of.
Mage didn’t fit anywhere on the scale. It suggested major mojo, skills on a level that beggared the rest of us. Which, from what little I’d seen, summed up my mother nicely. I said, “Phenomenal cosmic powers?” in a small voice.
Sonata nodded. “If she’s dead, then our side has lost a great warrior.”
I snorted loudly enough to make my ears pop. “Our side? So far I haven’t seen a lot of us versus them, Sonata. I’ve mostly seen badly screwed-up people in need of help.” Where “people” sometimes meant “gods of unimaginable power,” but who was counting?
“And yet you just said your mother spent her life engaged in battle against this ‘Master.’ Is he not the other side?”
Anybody who commanded banshees—or anything else—to ritual murder in order to feed on the blood and souls of the dead was, I had to admit, pretty much inherently on the other side of where I stood. “All right, point taken. So her death could’ve been the catalyst. Or a catalyst.” I didn’t like the idea of that much hanging on my mother’s life.
She probably hadn’t liked the idea, either.
I put my face in my hands. “Basically what you’re telling me is that never mind the cannibal, I have much larger problems looming. Only I can’t never mind the cannibal, so I’m just going to have to figure out a way to make it all work. Which is what I’ve been doing all along.”
God, I missed Coyote. He was only moderately helpful, mostly by way of kicking me in the ass until I did, in fact, figure it out myself, but having him there to kick my ass would have made me feel a lot better. I exhaled into my palms, then looked up at Billy. “Okay. Sonata was the likable idea. Now for the one you’re going to hate.”
He sighed. “All right. What do I hate?”
I put on what I hoped was a convincing, cheerful smile. “I’m going to use myself as bait.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Billy said, “Excuse us,” and hustled me out of Sonata’s house so fast it could have been magic. I warded off his outrage with raised palms, or tried to, and opted to explain rather than wait for him to stop telling me what a bad idea it was.
It wasn’t that I thought it was a particularly great idea myself. It was just better than setting somebody else out as bait, which argument didn’t slow Billy down at all. “Look, I’m going to head up to the Space Needle and have a look around the city first,” I said in my best reasonable tone. “I’ll see if I can pull up any residue like I saw from Melinda’s circle—”
That, at least, got his attention. “You saw something? Why the hell didn’t you say so earlier?”
“Because I took a cab from your house to the coroner’s instead of you picking me up, and I forgot while we were examining decomposing bodies and talking to mediums, okay? I’m sorry.” Billy had the grace to look apologetic, and I charged onward. “Anyway, yes, I saw residue from Mel’s circle, so I thought I could at least try picking up someone else’s. If we’re lucky it’ll turn out there’s some lunatic controlling a…” I had no idea what, really. A cannibal, clearly, but beyond that I didn’t know. “A flesh-eating monster. And then we can bag the guy and be done.”
Billy gave me a look that said when have we ever been lucky? and I shrugged it off. “And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll try the bait thing.”
“Need I point out that this thing is going after outdoorsy types, which you’re not?”
It was true. I was more the grease monkey type. I said, “Still,” like I’d presented that comment aloud, then leaned heavily on the hood of his minivan. “Ravenna Park isn’t exactly a great outdoors kind of landscape, either, Billy.”
“You know, I’m pretty sure I hate where this is going, too.”
“She was found in Ravenna Park. She lived in my apartment building. What if—”
“I seriously doubt it.”
A tiny rush of relieved laughter escaped me. “You didn’t let me finish.”
“You were going to say, what if this thing that eats souls was after you. What if it’s circling around to you, and Karin Newcomb just got in the way. Joanne, do you know any of the others who died? Is there any kind of connection at all?”
“No….” Even I knew the apartment building connection was tenuous, but my life had been one unpleasant coincidence after another all year long. Stranger things could, and had, happened.
“Then don’t do that to yourself. This is bad enough as it is.”
“On the other hand, if it’s not coincidence,” which I really wanted it to be, “I’d make good bait. So unless you’ve got a better idea, let’s try scoping out the city from the Needle, and then…” I shrugged. “Then we’ll see.”
Billy ground his teeth, got in the minivan, and drove us to the Space Needle. Normally he might’ve proposed we do something crazy like actual detective work, but there were about a hundred cops on the cannibal case and so far no one had gotten a break. Every crime scene had been utterly bereft of DNA evidence. We hadn’t been able to pinpoint an area the killer might be in, because the victims were from all over the city. In my grumpier moments I suspected our cannibal had watched too many crime shows and knew better than to hunt in a six-block radius around his home. Or a six-mile radius, for that matter.
The total lack of DNA was part of why Morrison had called Billy and me in. It wasn’t like chewed meat could be licked clean, and there were streaks of blood on the bodies, if not puddles under them, which suggested they hadn’t been thoroughly washed before being dumped. But even if they had been washed, even in the unlikely event that someone could scrub every last bit of their own genetic markers out of the body they’d just snacked on, that would’ve left residue, too. The absolute nothing was impossible, and impossible was supposed to be our department.
Billy, who would’ve scolded me for doing the same thing, came down Broad Street, parked the van in a taxi zone about a hundred feet from the Needle’s foot and hung a police vehicle tag in it. We waved our badges at security and hopped the “only going to the restaurant, don’t need the tour guide” elevator to the fiftieth floor. It wasn’t as much fun, but it was faster.
The police badges also meant we didn’t have to buy the restaurant’s overpriced lunch, although my stomach rumbled when the scent of food hit my nostrils. “Think we can expense it to the department?”
“I’m writing off filling up the minivan’s tank. Might as well try expensing filling up mine.” We got a table at the room’s outer edge and ordered lunch while I turned the Sight on the city.
It looked healthier than it had the last time I’d done this. Then there’d been a malaise spreading over Seattle, one that eventually awakened the dead. Today there was nothing so appalling, and, as the room turned and I drifted through the surreal, brilliant colors of the shamanic world, I thought there were worse ways to spend a lunch hour. Maybe I could come up here once a week to make sure all was well, though the pragmatic part of me suggested I’d better get an annual pass if I wanted to do that. They’d probably notice if I kept dropping by and cheating my way in with a police badge.
Billy, diffidently, asked, “Getting anything?”
I shook off my musings enough to answer. Our seats had rotated far enough to the north that I could now see down Aurora Avenue. Billy’s house, off to the west, lit up with the remains of the circle Melinda’d drawn for me. I glanced farther east, toward Lake Washington, and caught a glimmer of brightness at the corner of my eye. “Nothing I don’t recognize. I can see your house, but it’s almost straight on to us now. I might need line of sight to really pick things up.”
“You didn’t with the cauldron.”
“The cauldron was spilling gook all over the city,” I said irritably. “I’ve never tried looking for the remnants of somebody’s power before. I can see a glimmer over at Matthews Beach, but I—oh. I guess I don’t have to wait for the restaurant to turn that far before I get a straight look at it, huh?” Embarrassed, I got up and walked around the restaurant until I could see the lake.
Matthews Beach was where the thunderbird had fallen six months ago, and where my prize idiocy had torn the landscape into a new shape. There was a waterfall there now, and almost no one in Seattle remembered how it got its name. Some of those who did, though—people who belonged, like it or not, to Magic Seattle, like me and Billy—came together there daily, greeting the sunrise, waking the world and generally pouring goodwill and power into a place they saw as mystically significant.
The result was a glow that beggared the light from the Holliday’s home. It was like a miniature nuclear warhead had gone off, that much purity of white. I rubbed one eye and went back to the table. “I can definitely see power spots if I’m looking for them. Thunderbird Falls is brimming over. It kind of makes me wonder how things can get out of kilter here, if there’s that much basically positive energy being poured out.”
“Watched the news lately?”
I sagged and didn’t even perk up when the waitress brought my onion-and-cheese-tart appetizer. Hey, if I was expensing the meal, I figured I should enjoy it. And if I wasn’t able to expense it, I’d definitely better enjoy it. “Yeah. It’s all Laurie Corvallis, Talking Head, Spreading the Bad Word. Why doesn’t anybody ever report on the good stuff?”
“Disaster’s good for the oligarchy. Ha,” Billy said to my goggle-eyes. “Fair’s fair. You pull out ‘exsanguinate,’ I pull out ‘oligarchy.’”
“I’m in awe. There’s nothing sexier than a guy with a big vocabulary. Don’t tell your wife I said that.” I glanced back at the view, searching for telltale shimmers of power. There were flashes here and there, tiny bright spots that didn’t have enough strength to hold my attention, much less to represent a power circle. “I wonder…”
My gaze drifted back to the Hollidays’ distant house. The power emanating there was the good kind, full of life, rather than anything that would harness a killer and send it to do its bidding. I’d never looked for something darker. “Ritual murder probably leaves a different kind of mark than happy fluffy-bunny magic, huh?” I held my breath a moment, working myself up to it, then reached for the magic inside me.
I’d been depending on auras, and on the brilliant light and dark of a world viewed through shamanistic eyes. There was no healing component to that, nothing that required a wakening of the particular magic I commanded. But that magic was life-magic, so attuned to preservation and healing that the one time I’d used it as a weapon against a living thing, it had nearly wiped me out. It rebelled against death, and in so doing, might help me See places in Seattle where darkness had prevailed.
After one glance, I wished I’d never thought of it.
A couple hundred people died every year in Seattle through homicide or suicide. I knew the statistics; I’d worked some of the cases. But I’d never thought about what kind of mark that might leave on the psychic landscape, or how long it might last. There were jagged spots all over the place, far more than could be accounted for over the course of a single year. Dizziness caught me and I widened my eyes, trying to See more clearly. Trying, mostly, to See when the world itself started to heal from the wounds cut in it by violent deaths. There were places where healing was obviously happening, the mark of murder fading but not yet gone, but from the sheer number of still-vicious slashes, recovery time looked to be in the decades or even centuries, rather than months or years. My stomach seized up, making me regret the onion tart appetizer, and I put my hand on the curved window in front of me, ostensibly for balance.
Really, though, the greater part of me was trying to reach through the glass into the city. I wanted to soothe the damage it had taken; the damage the dead themselves felt, though it was much too late for that. Billy said, “Joanie?” worriedly, and I dredged up a wan smile to accompany a whispered, “It’s so sad.”
Murders looked different from suicides. I stared across the city, both fascinated and horrified that I could tell the difference. They all bled black and red and spilled out to leave dark gashes in the lives around them, but murders had an external violence to them, leaving behind a spray that reminded me of a blood spatter. Suicides were more internal, wrapped up tight with sharp edges pointing inward. Nauseated, I jerked toward the north, searching for the Quinleys’ home.
Its mark was no worse than any of the other murders I’d just studied. Incomprehension swam between my ears, then cleared up as I struggled to link thoughts through the bleak chaos of the dead’s world.
Rachel and David Quinley hadn’t died in ritual murder. They’d just been slaughtered by a madman who wanted to steal their daughter. A warning had been left written in their blood, but sick as that was, it wasn’t ritualized. My hand turned to a fist against the glass, then dropped to my side. I could think—dismayingly—of at least three places where actual ritual murder had been attempted or achieved, and one of them was still in my line of sight: Billy’s home.
I badly did not want to see what Faye Kirkland’s death looked like, splashed across Billy’s lawn. On the other hand, maybe recognizing it would give me a hint as to how to heal that space a little faster, so there were no malingering effects to distress his family. I actually held my breath, trying to pull the bright shamanistic world into conjunction with the darker, murderous version I was looking at now. A headache spiked in my right eye as two opposing world views fought for domination, then finally settled down like a cat and dog determined to ignore each other. The Hollidays’ home came into focus, a beacon in the dark.
For long seconds I wasn’t at all sure I was actually seeing their house, because all I really Saw was the brightness, same as I’d seen earlier. Faye’s death came into slow focus, but it was a shadow, with nothing of the strength or horror I expected it to have. I felt Melinda there, full of love and confidence and determination. Full of serenity, greater by a considerable margin than the terrible things that had happened that summer.
Relief and delight bubbled in my chest and made my eyes sting enough to threaten the Sight. Apparently a deliberate application of positive energy could make a difference, which gave me an uplifting spark of hope for the whole wide world. “Your wife is something else, you know that, Billy?”
“Yeah,” he said with a note of pride that fell just short of smug. “Yeah, I do.”
Buoyed by the knowledge that it was possible to fight back against marks left by abominations, I turned toward the next-nearest site of ritual murder that I knew about: Woodland Park.
Dark power sledgehammered me alongside the skull.
I dropped into my chair like I’d had my strings cut. Nausea rose up, hurrying to find an escape route, and I ducked my head between my knees, classic crash position as I gasped for air. Billy’s worried “Joanie?” was louder this time, and I barely managed to get fingertips above the table’s edge to give him a semi-reassuring wave.
“I’m okay. I’m…” I fumbled for my glass of water and took a few tiny sips while still in crash position, which wasn’t the easiest of tasks. “Oogh. Okay. I’m…” I’d said that once already. I got my elbow onto the table and cranked myself up inch by inch, neck stiff as I made myself peek outside again.
Three points of a diamond raged with malevolence, pouring sick purple-gray power into the sky. I couldn’t imagine what kind of whammy that field would’ve had if the last murder, the last point on the diamond, had been completed. As it was, if I hadn’t been heartened by what the Hollidays had accomplished just before looking at the diamond, I would’ve been down for the count. It was so astonishingly strong and so utterly desolate that I had no idea how I’d failed to notice it earlier.
Two answers came to mind: one, I hadn’t been looking for it, and two, on a subconscious level I suspected I’d been trying hard to ignore it. Seeing the world in shades of sick and well was supposed to be my purview, but right here, right now, I was just barely able to handle it. Six months ago it would’ve sent me running for the hills.
Billy came around the table and caught my hand. His fingers felt scalding, which slowly resolved itself into an awareness that mine were icy. “You all right, Joanie?”
“All right” covered a host of sins. I nodded, pressed my eyes closed and nodded again. “Yeah. I just got…an idea of what I should be looking for.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
An uncomfortable shuffle behind us made us both turn to find our waitress, plates in hand, looking concerned. “Is everything okay? Did the tart not agree with you?”
Visions of consorting with saucily-dressed women over lunch rose unbidden. I fought back the urge to admit that they weren’t really my type, instead mumbling, “No, no, it was fine, sorry, I…”
Billy stood up with a smile. “Banged her knee on the table, you know that nervy place doctors hit with the hammer? Only worse. She’s fine. Lunch looks great.”
Relieved, the waitress put our food on the table and scurried off. I worked my way to sitting and looked sadly at my food. “I probably shouldn’t eat if I’m doing all this vision stuff. You’re a good liar.”
“I’m a very good liar,” Billy corrected, “and you’re not doing quest work here. Even if you were, you should see yourself, Walker. You look like a ghost. Eat. If we have to wait a couple hours to look at the city again, so be it.” He nodded at my plate and repeated, “Eat.”
He was the senior partner in this relationship. Who was I to argue? Besides, I felt like I’d been run over, and food sounded like the first step to recovering. I bent over my lunch and shoveled it in like a prisoner.
Twenty minutes of intense eating and the savoring of an incredible chocolate concoction that should have been called “I’ll do anything the chef says as long as he lets me have another one of these things” later, I nerved myself up to take another look at the city. The double vision of life and death settled more easily this time, suggesting that I was probably supposed to be able to do something like this. Still, I avoided looking toward the Woodland baseball park. It would’ve been a shame to lose that lunch.
We’d rotated around so we were looking over the south of the city. There were all the marks of homicide and suicide and car wrecks—those several hundred deaths a year on Seattle roads made a real mess of the streets—but nothing like the hideous power of the banshee’s murder site. I knew where another one should be, and got up to walk widdershins around the restaurant, watching for the black spike that should be the Museum of Cultural Arts.
It was nothing like as nasty as Woodland Park, though Jason Chan’s death throbbed in the air. He’d died to set the black cauldron free, his blood smeared around it to break binding spells, but it was less ritualized than the banshee’s work had been. That, and there was only one of him, to the three dead girls in the park.
I was just starting to think there was nothing to find, no power circle or controlling factor, when black light flared at the Troll Bridge.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tuesday, December 20, 12:13 P.M.
I forgot about the bill and ran for the elevator, struggling to get my cell phone out of my pocket as I went. Billy shouted after me, then swore and hurried to pay the bill as I hopped around, waiting impatiently on both the elevator and the phone.
The phone came through first, Morrison sounding unusually gruff, which was saying something. “What do you want, Walker?”
“Get somebody over to the Fremont Troll right now. I don’t know what I just saw, but it was something. Something bad. Billy and I are on our way, but we’re at the Seattle Center and traffic’s going to be impossible.”
Morrison went silent and the elevator dinged. I rushed in the instant the doors were open wide enough to let me. Billy finished dealing with the check and hurried after me, but not fast enough. By the time he joined me in the elevator I was jittering around like a wind-up toy. Morrison came back to the phone, gruffer yet. “I’ve got a car on the way. Call me the minute you know something, Walker.”
“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” I hung up before I heard Morrison’s response to that, and Billy folded his arms and gave me a look that said “Well?” as the elevator made its way down six hundred feet.
“I don’t know. I saw something. It looked bad.” I had the gut-deep feeling I’d just witnessed a murder, and I was weirdly excited about it. I mean, not that I wanted to be seeing murder done at a distance, but it was a brand-new and interesting aspect to my powers. It seemed like it could do some good if I could figure out how to harness it.
“Is it our guy?”
“I don’t know. The troll’s even less rustic than Ravenna Park. We’re just going to have to go find out. Do you have a siren for the minivan?”
“Yeah, but if you tell my kids, no one will ever find the body.”
I made a vague attempt at a Scout’s oath salute, and we ran for the car the moment the elevator disgorged us.
It took eight minutes to get to the troll. Short of teleporting we couldn’t have gotten there faster, but I still leaned into the seat belt like I was at the races and my willpower alone could get my horse across the finish line first. Well, except any races I’d go to would be NASCAR rather than Kentucky Derby, but the sentiment was solid.
The Fremont Troll was one of Seattle’s more charming landmarks, as far as I was concerned. He was a concrete monster beneath the Aurora Avenue North bridge—they’d even renamed the road Troll Avenue in his honor—and he had a real Volkswagen Bug in one hand, like he’d just grabbed it from the bridge above. People came to climb and play on him regularly, and every Halloween the locals threw a party at him. I’d never gotten around to going, and now with my exciting new power set, I was sort of afraid to. He was only concrete and rebar, but that was in the Middle World, the one we lived in day-to-day. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen if somebody with shamanic gifts came by on a night when the world walls were thin.
Two patrol cars and a paramedic ambulance had gotten to the scene before us. I knew one of the cops—Ray Campbell, a six-foot-tall bodybuilder squished into a five-foot-five body. He’d been a patrol cop for years, never interested in moving up to detective or even to a command position. “No chance to bust balls,” he’d explained to me once. Busting balls was Ray’s favorite expression and possibly his favorite pastime, and I was hardly going to argue with him about when and where the most opportune moments to do so came along.
He turned toward us with a determined expression that said “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave now” before it faded into a grimaced greeting. “Hey, Walker, Holliday. Don’t know why the captain sent us down here, but it was a good call. She’s not dead yet.”
Billy and I said, “Yet?” together, then traded off on other questions like, “Is she going to be?” and “What happened?” and “Can I help?”
That last was me, edging toward the ambulance. The paramedics no doubt had it under control, but healing magic made my palms itch with the desire to do something.
Ray looked back and forth between us, then folded his arms over his broad chest. “You know how bums hole up down here. Looks like a fight over some booze got out of hand, and she got stabbed with a broken bottle. She oughta be dead. If we hadn’t gotten here she would be. Stay out of it, Walker. You don’t want to give the Captain anything else to explain.”
I did a fine job of freezing like a nervous rodent before my shoulders slumped and I shifted back toward Billy. Ray looked like he’d gone up against a wrecking ball and lost, but he was plenty smart. He nodded firmly once I got back to where I’d started, and cheer crept across his face. “Somebody’ll have blood on their hands, or know who does. Just gotta bust a few balls to find out who. Probably don’t need you two down here, if you want to head back up to the station.”
“Okay. Good. That’s great. I mean, it is. It’s great. I’m glad she’s not dead.” And I was. I’d just been hoping we’d gotten a lucky break, and happened on our cannibal in the middle of chewing on someone. I got on my phone and called Morrison, feeling like quite the sad sack as I offered, “All it was was a mugging over some booze. A woman got stabbed, but the paramedics got here in time, so it looks like she’s going to be all right.”
“All?” Morrison said incredulously. “You just saw an aggravated assault from halfway across the city and saved somebody’s life, and all it rates is an all?”
When he put it that way it seemed like more of an accomplishment. I cleared my throat uncomfortably, and Morrison said, “Good job, Walker,” and hung up the phone to leave me standing next to a giant concrete troll. I stared up at his hubcap eye, and thought if he winked it wouldn’t be any more startling than my boss telling me I’d done well.
He didn’t wink, and after a minute I reeled back toward the minivan. Ray and the others had this one under control; no need for the Paranormal Pair to hang around getting in the way of a perfectly ordinary assault investigation. “I think this puts us back at Joanne Walker as bait. Unless you’ve come up with something better.”
Billy said, “I think I have,” and a Channel Two news van came whipping down the road and screeched to a halt in front of the ambulance.
Laurie Corvallis jumped out of the van like she was on the verge of a huge news story. To the driver’s credit, he pulled the van back out of the paramedics’ drive path before dragging a camera out and following Laurie. She was already halfway to where I was struggling to yank the minivan’s door open. Billy had locked it. Very safe of him. Annoying, but safe. I jerked at the handle, then put my back against the vehicle like I had enemies approaching from all sides. “What in God’s na—”
Wrong approach. I thrust my jaw out, trying to rewrite my internal dialogue, and tried a second time. “Can I help you with something, Ms. Corvallis?”
“Just going where the stories are, Detective Walker. Do we have another cannibal victim here?” Her blue eyes were eager in much the same way a piranha’s were. I wondered why I kept comparing her to carnivorous fish.
“We have a completely unrelated incident here. Go away.” I winced. “I mean, sorry you came out for nothing.”
“Now, Detective.” Corvallis’s voice went from eager to warm, even condescending, like we were old friends and I was being silly over something unimportant. “I saw how you went tearing out of the Seattle Center. Do you really expect me to believe it’s over nothing?”
“You were following me?”
Her cameraman got the camera up and running as I asked, and I found myself suddenly blinking into its brilliant light. It was a gray Seattle day already, and under the bridge it bordered on dark, but the floodlight seemed like overkill. I shielded my eyes with one hand and squinted toward the camera guy. “I fed you a burger and fries this summer. Is that enough of a bribe to get you to turn that thing off if I ask you to?”
He gave me a bright smile. “Maybe once.”
“Right.” I didn’t ask, and his grin broadened. Corvallis gave him a dirty look and he wiped the smile away, but he winked when she turned back to me.
“To answer your question, yes, I was following you. I think you’re where the action is, Detective.”
Billy, on the far side of the minivan, snorted over the clunk of the doors finally unlocking. “You’ve obviously never checked her social calendar, then.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Want me to?” Ray stumped over to us, looking Corvallis up and down with an expression that lay between lascivious and threatening. I had a sudden vision of him asking me if she needed her balls busted while the cameraman was filming, and blurted, “This is Ray Campbell, the officer on this case. He’s the man you’ll want to talk to, Ms. Corvallis. Thanks for your interest. I’m sure your superiors are eager for an in-depth report on the plight of the homeless in Seattle. We all need our social awareness raised.”
I pulled the door open and fell into the seat, hauling my legs up in my haste to escape. Ray planted himself front and center between the minivan and Corvallis, and she gave me a daggered glare over his shoulder before putting on a reporter-playing-nice smile and stuck her microphone in Ray’s face. Billy hopped into his side and closed the door behind him. “That woman’s going to get you in trouble someday.”
“You mean more trouble than the Seattle Slaughterer thing this morning?” I put my seat belt on and tried not to look over my shoulder as we left the scene a few seconds behind the ambulance. “I know. Worse, though, she’s going to get herself in trouble. Look, this whole Magic Seattle thing, the whole world of the other and all that. How do you keep people from getting in over their heads and getting hurt?”
“Lobotomization.” Billy grinned at my expression. “You can’t keep people from getting hurt, Joanie. You can warn them, but somebody like Corvallis isn’t likely to leave the hunt unless something throws her off the scent. You’re doing a good job of leaving a scent.” He thumped his hand against the steering wheel and muttered, “That analogy might’ve gotten out of control.”
I laughed. “You think?” My humor slipped away. “I just don’t want people getting hurt on my account.”
“Laurie Corvallis won’t get hurt on your account. She’ll get hurt on the story’s account, but never on yours.” He shook his head. “We do the best we can. You did good today. You just saved somebody’s life. That’s about all we can ask for.”
“That and a break on the cannibal case.”
Billy eyed me. “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, there, Joanne. You just pulled off a miracle. What’s the problem?”
I rubbed my thumb over my palm, then cracked my knuckles, feeling like I was trying to discharge the healing power that had sprung to life. “I don’t know. I wanted that to be our cannibal.”
“So did I, but come on, Walker. What’s it take to make you happy? First you don’t want to be a shaman, now you’re hitting it out of the park and you’re not satisfied because it’s a different ball than the one you were watching? Give yourself a little credit.”
“Okay, okay, I’m happy, I’m happy!” I wrinkled my nose at the traffic and said, more quietly, “I’m glad she’s alive, Billy, and maybe you’re right. Maybe I should be elated. It just feels like in the grand scheme of things this is what I should be doing all the time, so it doesn’t feel like…enough.” By the time I got to the end of that, I was smiling again, ruefully. “I need some serious work on my perspective, don’t I?”
“You sure as hell do.”
“Arright.” A little bubble of delight burst inside me, like that healing power had figured out what to do with itself after all. I’d saved somebody. That was, in fact, pretty cool. Good thing I had people like Morrison and Billy around to beat that into my head. “Okay. Can we head back up to the Needle? We kind of bolted out of there, and I can’t think of anywhere better for a perspective adjustment.”
It wasn’t perspective I was after so much as trying to map out Seattle’s hot and cold spots, magically speaking. The good news was, our brief dash to the Troll had given me enough time to digest lunch. Turning the in-depth Sight back on didn’t upset my tummy again. Triumphant, I ordered us each another one of the amazing chocolate desserts. Billy pulled his cell phone out and sat down to wait for them while I took a slow meander around the restaurant.
I wanted my city to be a bastion of light and happiness. What I could See, with the initial shock of looking into darkness reduced, was that it looked pretty well-balanced. It was no shining city upon a hill, but neither was it one drawn into despair. Pockets of brilliance matched patches of darkness closely enough that I actually let go a sigh of relief. Sonata’s concern about the city, maybe the world, being pulled out of whack was very likely a valid one, but at least it wasn’t going to all come tumbling down tomorrow. Reassured, I turned my focus on Ravenna Park, where Karin Newcomb had been found that morning.
Someone or something mystical had dumped her there. It had left ice-cold marks on the earth. It had to have left some kind of trail. If I thought it with enough determination, maybe it would be true.
Apparently I wasn’t thinking hard enough. Either that or I’d wiped away any trace when I’d pressed my hand into the cold tracks the thing had left, because there was barely even a streak of darkness where Newcomb’s body had been found. She hadn’t died there, and dead bodies evidently didn’t carry bleak marks of their own; only violent deaths did.
Good to know, but not at all helpful to me at the moment. I stood there a long time, gaze unfocused as I studied the highs and lows of passion and power within the city, but there were no trails leading in or out of anywhere we’d found a body. Our cannibal was a lot better at hiding his tracks than I was at following them. I felt like I was just a step too far behind, like I could track him if I could only catch up just a little more. I wished to hell I hadn’t flattened out the cold marks he’d left beside Karin Newcomb.
Next time. Next time I’d know better, but next time meant somebody else would already be dead.
Billy said, “Anything?” quietly from just behind me. I startled out of my reverie and blinked over my shoulder at him before shaking my head. He put his phone away and pointed a thumb at our table. “In that case, you might as well eat dessert before it melts. And then we’ll try my idea.”
“Your idea is to consign me to consumer hell?”
I balked in the doorway of an outdoors store, which was to say it sold outdoors equipment, not that it was outside. If it had actually been outside it might’ve been less overwhelming; there wouldn’t be three visible stories of canoes, bicycles, skis, winter gear, tents, campfire utensils, hiking boots and backpacks. And those were just the things I could recognize. There were hundreds of items within eyeshot that I simply had no name for, and no earthly idea what their use might be.
The whole place made my heart beat too fast, like it was actively dangerous. Grumpiness didn’t so much creep over me as bludgeon me, and I tried to back up, trusting the door was an escape route. “I don’t like shopping, Billy. Especially in giant warehouses filled with a million things I can’t possibly need.”
Sadly, the door was blocked by my partner, and made a lousy escape route after all. He prodded my spine to drive me forward, and I dragged my feet as I went. “What are we doing here? I guess if I’m going to go play bait I need equipment, but the department must have some.” That didn’t really seem very likely, now that I thought about it. “Or they could borrow it from Fish and Game, or something. I’m not spending eleven thousand dollars on setting a trap.”
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C.E. Murphy
This next case is way out of her jurisdiction… Seattle police detective Joanne Walker started the year out mostly dead, and she’s ending it trying not to be consumed by evil. Literally. She’s proven she can handle the gods and the walking dead. But a cannibalistic serial killer? That’s more than even she bargained for. What’s worse, the brutal demon leaves no tracks.So, if Joanne is to stop its campaign of terror, she’ll have to hunt it where it lives: the Lower World, a shamanistic plane of magic and spirits. Trouble is, Joanne’s skills are no match for the dangers she’s about to face—and her on-the-job training could prove fatal to the people she’s sworn to protect….“Joanne remains an appealing protagonist.” —Publishers Weekly on Walking Dead
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and her books
THE WALKER PAPERS
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
THE NEGOTIATOR
Heart of Stone
“An exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
House of Cards
“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”
—LOCUS
Hands of Flame
“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…. Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
C.E. Murphy
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
Author Note
By the time Demon Hunts comes out in June 2010, you’ll have just missed the Brenda Novak Diabetes Research auction, which she runs every May. In 2009 I offered a “Tuckerization”—an opportunity to have a character named after a reader—in the auction, and will very likely do the same in future auctions. Please keep an eye on my Web site, cemurphy.net, for information about such opportunities in the upcoming years!
—Catie
This one’s for Tara.
(I think that’s enough apologizing now, don’t you? :))
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, December 20, 4:34 A.M.
Someone had been chewing on the body.
Not something. Something, in the grand scheme of life, seemed like it would be okay. Things—cats, dogs, raccoons: choose your omnivore, I wasn’t picky—were expected to chew on dead flesh. I was no forensics expert, but I’d learned a few basics at police academy. For example, a bear stripped of its skin and missing its skull can so easily be mistaken for a skinned human that the exposed meat has to be tested in order to ascertain what kind of animal it had been. For another example, humans have a very round, even cusp to their bite that most mammals don’t share. So I was pretty confident it was a someone, and not a something, who had eaten part of Charlie Groleski’s left arm.
This was really not how I wanted to start the holiday season.
My partner, a holiday himself—Billy Holliday—swung down beside me. The Christmas carol he was whistling turned into a low long warble of dismay. “Looks like somebody ate him.”
“I’d noticed.” I rocked back on my heels—a dangerous endeavor, since I was halfway up a low cliff, standing on a semi-sheer rock face. I was roped into a harness that was secured at the top of the cliff, but leaning back still felt like asking for trouble. “Tell me something, Billy. How come we get all the exciting cases?”
“We don’t.” Billy crouched beside the body, his own harness squeaking and rattling with the motion. I edged several inches to the side and squinted nervously at the drop immediately to my left. Harsh white searchlights stared back at me, the generators powering them shaking all quietude from the morning. The lights made sharp shadows of our narrow ledge, enhancing my awareness that there wasn’t really enough room for two people on the ledge, much less two people and a corpse. “Daniels, he gets exciting cases,” Billy said. “Drug murders, Mafia turncoats, revenge killings. We never get that stuff.”
“You don’t think half-eaten dead guys stuffed into crevasses are exciting?”
He shook his head. “No. I think they’re weird. We get the weird cases, not the exciting ones.” He pushed up and wrapped a hand around his rappelling line for balance. “Groleski must’ve been dead from the time they called in a missing persons report, maybe before. Too many days. I can’t get anything from him.”
I muttered, “Crap,” and let the Sight wash over me.
Billy was right, if you wanted to get technical about it. He and I constituted Seattle’s only paranormal detective team, a truth which slightly less than a year earlier I would have pulled my tongue out before believing, much less uttering. We got the weird cases, the ones that could potentially have a supernatural element to them.
He saw dead people. Murdered people, more specifically. Their ghosts tended to linger, and he was the man they could turn to, if he got there within two days of their brutal deaths. Unfortunately for Charlie Groleski, that was too short a window to allow him an opportunity to offer insight as to who’d chewed him up and spat him out.
I, thanks to an unpleasant experience which had left me with a choice between dying or life as a magic-user, was a shaman. Once upon a time, my long-term plans had involved maybe opening my own mechanic’s shop. Instead, I was a healer and a warrior up at four in the morning, exhaling steamy breath into an ice-cold Seattle morning, on a case that wasn’t actually in my jurisdiction.
The department—city-wide, not just the North Precinct where Billy and I worked—was being as goddamned quiet about this case as they could. Murders happened. They increased around the holidays. That was part and parcel of modern city life, and had probably been part of every civilization all the way back to Cain and Abel. As far as I could tell, it was one of the things that made humans human.
But there usually weren’t a half dozen bodies found over the course of several weeks, all of them looking like they’d been pre-Christmas-dinner appetizers. Charlie Groleski had been missing for sixteen days, though aside from the gnawed flesh, his body was in pretty good condition. The media had started calling global warming “climate change” instead, and the longer, colder winters Seattle had been experiencing the past few years ran with that appellation. We’d gotten our first solid freeze in mid-November, and nothing had fully thawed out since, including poor dead Charlie.
Billy had his way of looking at a crime scene: through the deceased’s words, if at all possible. Mine was different, and I’d learned early on not to contaminate what my normal vision could see by accessing the Sight right away. Once I saw the world that way, it lingered, influencing everything else.
Winter, viewed through eyes that saw the breath and life pulse of the world, was heart-achingly beautiful. The earth itself lay dormant, a dark forgiving depth scored by brilliant pulses of light that were the living things traveling on its surface. Billy stood out as a flare of fuchsia and orange, and I glanced at my own hands to see familiar silver and blue dancing over my skin. Everyone had an aura, and their well-being could be read through that burst of color.
Whatever colors Groleski had once sported, they were long gone, swallowed by death. I wasn’t looking for them, though. I was looking for marks in the earth: anything that would show me something of the madman who’d killed and eaten half a dozen people in the greater Seattle area over the past two months. It took a god to actively obscure himself from the Sight, but time and the winter season could wipe away the traces a killer might leave behind. I’d never tracked someone in summer, but I had the idea that the softened earth would hold an impression longer. Someday I would probably find out if I was right.
Today, though, all I saw was the calm deep brown of the earth. There were no stains to accompany Groleski’s frozen body; he’d apparently been killed and eaten elsewhere, and only removed to this location afterward. Why anyone would haul a body halfway up a cliff was beyond me, except it was in keeping with the other victims. They were all outdoorsy types. Only one or two had gone missing while hiking or trail-breaking, but they’d all been found in haunts like the ones they’d loved to spend their lives in. Groleski’d been a rock climber.
“Walker?” A man’s voice rose up from below, floodlights too bright to let me see the speaker when I glanced down.
Not that I needed to. I dropped my chin to my chest and took a moment before shouting a response. “Sorry, Captain. I’ve got nothing.”
I was too far away to hear his exasperated sigh, but I felt it ripple over my skin anyway. I was good at disappointing Captain Michael Morrison. Some days it seemed like my only stock in trade. I could have lived with that, but this was the third time in a row I’d failed to come through on this case. At least the other two times he hadn’t been awakened at oh-god-thirty to call a dud shaman to a crime scene: those bodies had been found in daylight. This one should’ve been, too. Nobody in their right mind would be scouring cliffs at three in the morning, but Groleski’s brother had found the body. I guessed a family missing a member wasn’t in its right mind.
Billy jerked his thumb, and I leaned back from my stabilizing rope, bouncing the ten or twelve yards down to the ground. The harness became a Gordian knot under my cold fingers and Morrison’s gimlet eye, but the rope began to draw up as soon as my weight stopped holding it taut. The forensics team would be taking our place with Groleski’s body, now that the esoteric detectives had completely failed to see anything untoward. Some good we were.
Morrison waited for me to regain my balance, then folded his arms over his chest in expectation. The searchlights did him no favors, turning his silvering hair white and making the lines of his face deeper and more haggard. Even his eyes were pale and hard, as though deep blue river water had frozen into ice. “Am I wasting time pulling you two out here, Walker?”
Steam clouded around my head as I breathed out, an excellent physical approximation of the exasperation shooting through me. “Not any more than it wastes the forensics team’s time, boss. They haven’t found jack shit, either, but nobody thinks they shouldn’t be here.” I winced, not exactly an apology for my tone, but at least recognition that I should modulate it. I wasn’t at my best at four-thirty in the morning, which didn’t excuse mouthing off to my captain.
Fortunately, almost half a decade of mutual antagonism mixed up with more recent emotional complications had, if not inured Morrison to my smart mouth, at least prepared him for it. He managed to both ignore and respond to me, which took some doing. “Forensics works in this world, Walker. You’re supposed to have some insight into another one.”
I honestly didn’t know which of us was more astounded that he’d be saying something like that. Billy had always been an I want to believe freak, but until recently, all Morrison and I had had in common was a sarcastic dismissal of all things paranormal. Truth was, my boss had come around faster than I had. Less than two months after my first encounter with the world of weird, Morrison had demanded I do what I could with the Sight to help solve a series of ritual murders. I’d kept dragging my feet for months after that, trying to make my magic go away, but the captain had chinned up and expected me to use all the talents at my disposal.
I stood there gazing at him and trying to squeeze that revelation into my rigid little world view. I’d known he was too good a cop to ignore my skills if they might be useful, but somehow I hadn’t quite grasped the idea that he’d accepted my power before I had. Every smart-ass comeback I had died on my lips. “I’m sorry, boss. Everything’s frozen, even what the Sight can see. I’m not some kind of mystical Indian tracker.”
Morrison gave me a sharp look that I accepted with a groan. Technically, I was some kind of mystical Indian tracker. My dad was Cherokee, and not even I was arguing about the mystical part anymore. The only part where the description fell down was in tracker, which I manifestly was not. I’d proven remarkably poor at hunting down mythical bad guys—at least, poor at hunting them down as quickly as I thought I should—and had no idea if that was because my schooling was incomplete, or if I was just inept. I muttered, “Shit,” and for some reason the faintest smile cracked Morrison’s glower.
Billy rappelled down beside us and got out of his harness with a great deal more grace than I’d shown. He’d lost a good twenty pounds in the last couple months—dropping the baby weight, he called it; his wife had just had their fifth child—and moved more lightly for it, even though he was still taller than both Morrison and myself. “We’ve got to find a way to catch up with this guy faster,” he said.
“Like before he kills anybody else,” Morrison said, so flatly Billy and I both looked at him a moment. I’d heard Morrison’s angry voice plenty of times—usually directed at me—but this wasn’t outrage. It was helplessness, and that wasn’t something Morrison indulged in often.
Billy recovered first, tugging his rappelling rope to let the guys at the top know he was out. The rope and harness rose into darkness as he spoke. “You know the chances are we’re already too late for that, Captain. We’ve got at least two more missing persons reported, and we’ll be damned lucky if they’re still alive. But what I’m talking about is where Walker and I can help. This guy cleans up after himself. We haven’t found any DNA to work with, so Forensics is at a loss, and unless we get to a body faster, Walker and I aren’t much good, either. Even my resources outside the department—”
Morrison lifted his hand. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
Billy hesitated, glancing at me, then nodded once. “Yeah. Okay. Look, I’m sorry, Captain. Right now we’re at a dead end.”
I breathed, “No pun intended,” and Billy gave me a dirty look. I mouthed, “Sorry,” then flinched as my hip pocket began to ring. Billy glanced at his watch and arched his eyebrows, and I shrugged, taking a few steps away from my companions to wrestle my phone out. The number was unfamiliar. “Yeah, this is Joanne Walker.”
“Hey, doll. Where are you?”
I pulled the phone away to give it a sideways look, though a smile threatened the corner of my mouth. There was one man on this earth who could get away with calling me doll. “It’s pushing five in the morning, Gary. What do you mean, where am I? Where do you think I am?”
“Well, you ain’t at home, ’cause I called that number twice. And you weren’t sleeping, ’cause you never answer that fast when you have been, and you never sound this awake. You on a hot date, Jo?”
The threatening smile broke and I laughed. “You should be the detective, not me. No, I wish. I’m at a crime scene. Morrison called me a couple hours ago. What’s up? Where are you calling from? I don’t know the number.”
“I’m at dispatch.” For anybody else I knew, that meant the precinct building, but Gary worked part-time as a cabbie. I’d climbed into his taxi almost a year ago, and my life had quite literally never been the same since. Still smiling, I listened to him rattling on, waiting for him to reach the eventual point: “I was gonna cover for Mickey’s shift ’cause his grandkids are coming in today from Tulsa, but one of the other cars just called in, Jo. He found a dead lady at Ravenna Park.”
CHAPTER TWO
I snapped my fingers and gestured Morrison and Holliday over to me before Gary stopped talking. Both men creaked through the snow toward me and I echoed Gary’s words, looking back and forth between my boss and my partner. “A driver at Tripoli Cabs just found a body across from my apartment building, in Ravenna Park. The guy’s freaked out, says the body is still warm and it looks like it’s been chewed on.”
“Who the hell’s calling to tell you th—” Morrison broke off mid-question and bared his teeth. “Muldoon. Walker, have you been spouting off about cases to your octogenarian boyfriend?”
“Septuagenarian,” I said with a sniff. “Gary’s only seventy-three.” The boyfriend part didn’t bear responding to. Half the people I knew were convinced I was dating a guy old enough to be my grandfather, and I’d given up arguing with them. On the other hand, being haughty about Gary’s age gave me an excuse to not answer the bit about whether I’d been discussing cases with people who weren’t members of the police force. Not that it mattered too much. As quiet as the department was trying to keep the killings, after six weeks of missing persons and murders, the media was starting to take notice. “Are we going, or what?”
The look Morrison gave me indicated I had in no way actually avoided the question of whether I’d been talking about the case off campus. Still, he made a sharp gesture toward the distant parking lot and got on his phone to invite the forensics team to join us. I slipped my way down the hill with Billy a few steps behind me. Five minutes later we were in his minivan, both of us hunched over the heater vents in hopes of thawing.
I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s gold Avalon pulling out of the lot, and felt vaguely self-conscious that I’d had to ask Billy to pick me up. My classic Mustang, Petite, was in the shop, though even if she hadn’t been, the increasingly snowy Seattle winters weren’t good for her low-riding purple self.
It was a long drive back to our part of town. I watched out the window and Billy kept quiet, both of us stuck with what I bet were similar ruminations. Ravenna Park wasn’t a real outdoors getaway place, not like some of the other areas we’d found bodies. It was also the first time a victim had turned up within the North Precinct boundaries. That meant we were moving back into our own jurisdiction, but it also meant any kind of pattern we might have established had been obliterated. I considered hoping it was a separate case, and then cringed at the thought. We really didn’t need two cannibalistic killers.
We came down Brooklyn Avenue, a block to the west of my apartment building. Gary, leaning on the hood of his cab like a gargoyle protecting the crime scene, waved as we drove by. He was outside a police perimeter—the North Precinct building was only half a mile away, and Billy and I were far from the first cops to arrive—but didn’t look like he minded at all. Billy pulled up and we got out, me shaking my head. “It’s a quarter after five in the morning, Gary. You’re not supposed to be hanging out at crime scenes looking like somebody gave you a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.”
He put on a convincingly innocent expression and gestured to another cabbie, whose face looked green in the sallow amber lights as he talked with a couple of other cops. “Henley was all shook up. Thought it’d be only right to come down and give him some moral support.”
“Uh-huh. Morrison’s going to kill you, you know that, right?” I slipped up against the big old man and gave him a brief hug anyway. Gray-eyed, white-haired, and still sporting the linebacker build he’d had as a young man, Gary was essentially the kind of person I wanted to grow old to be. As far as I could tell, he’d never lost his sense of wonder. For a girl with shamanic potential lurking under her surface, I’d managed to thoroughly quench my own. Gary’d done his best to unquench it in the months we’d known each other, and I loved him for it.
He kissed my forehead. “Sure, darlin’, but some things are worth getting killed for. Hugs from pretty girls, f’rex.”
I grinned. “Did you really just say ‘f’rex’? I didn’t think people really said that.”
“You don’t think people call girls doll, either.” He let me go with a vocally solemn, “Captain,” that made no attempt at hiding the sparkle in his eyes. I turned to watch Morrison’s approach and tried to judge the integrity behind his scowl. It looked pretty credible.
“Good morning, Mr. Muldoon,” Morrison said with unexpected politeness. Possibly he didn’t blame Gary for me telling tales about work. More likely there was some kind of strange male ritual of respect or tolerance that had been passed when they’d fought together against an army of zombies. Billy and I had been there, too, but apparently we hadn’t earned the same free pass, as Morrison turned his scowl on us. “Walker, Holliday, quit screwing around and get to work.”
I flicked a salute that my boss would no doubt take as sardonic, and ducked under the police tape. “Yes, sir.”
Heather Fagan, the no-nonsense head of the North Precinct’s forensics team, told me exactly where I was allowed to place my feet, forbade either of us to so much as breathe on the corpse, and walked away grousing about contaminated crime scenes. Billy and I exchanged rueful glances and tip-toed to the body, both teasing and completely serious in our attempts to not pollute her working area.
For once I didn’t wait on Billy’s conversation with a ghost, and just let the Sight filter over my normal vision. The world brightened again, night and streetlights fading to inconsequentiality. I could navigate mazes and mountain passes blindfolded, as long as I could call on the Sight: it poured its own brilliance all around me, and even its shadows were places of light.
Still-warm or not, the dead woman coiled on her side in the snow didn’t have the slightest hint of color to her. Death wasn’t black: it was empty, a space of nothingness surrounded by the living world. Even that was an illusion, as all the little bacteria that helped a body decompose had life of their own. But as long as I didn’t look too deeply, I only saw a patch of cool gray nothing where she rested.
All around her, though, the earth was scoured with ridges of darkness. I called for a flashlight, tilting it down to illuminate the ground. Tall blades of dead grass stuck up and cast thin shadows, but there were no visible ripples in the snow to echo the lumps beneath it, nor any pressure from footsteps around her body. “Heather? How’d she get here?”
I could feel Heather’s glare from fifteen feet away. “She lives in the building across the street.”
Electricity shot down my spine and I jerked upward, staring first at Heather, then at the eight-story apartment building a couple hundred feet away. “That one?”
Heather turned to look at it. “Yeah. That’s what her driver’s license says, anyway. I don’t think she wandered out here to die. There aren’t any footprints, so somebody must have dumped her, but yeah, she died two hundred feet from her home. Her name was Karin Newcomb. University ID. I guess most of the tenants there are students.”
“Most of them.” My heartbeat rabbited hard enough I was surprised my voice didn’t shake. “Heather, that’s where I live.”
“Jesus Christ. Did you know her?”
I shook my head even as I tried to draw some hint of recognition from her profile. “I don’t remember ever seeing her, but there are forty apartments in that building. People are always moving in and out. God, how horrible.” Her death hit me harder, all at once, than any of the others had. Not because I was afraid it could’ve been me, but because I might have known her. The fact that I hadn’t was irrelevant. I found myself making a silent promise that we’d find her killer, like I’d been previously lacking motivation and only just now really meant it.
I said, “Shit,” under my breath and tried to pull my thoughts back to what Heather’d been saying before ID’ing the girl to me. That was the only way I was going to keep the stupid little promise I’d just made. “How did they dump her? There’s no skid marks, so she wasn’t thrown out of a vehicle. She looks like she was placed here, but there aren’t any footprints.”
Heather stalked back to my side. With her winter hat and boots on, she came up to my eyebrow, which made her taller than most of the women I knew. “I know. It’s been the same thing all over the city. No matter where we find the body, no matter how long we think it might’ve been there, there’s no indication that anybody carried it there. She hasn’t been dropped, either.” A circling finger encompassed Karin Newcomb’s form. “No spray of snow, and since neither rigor mortis nor the cold has set in, there should be some displacement of limbs if she had been. Instead she’s nestled up perfectly. It’s like—”
She bit her tongue on the last word: magic. “Yeah,” I said, willing to go where she wasn’t. “It is.”
I crouched, flashlight bouncing a long oval off the snow as I examined the scene with the Sight again. Individual flakes, loosely packed, turned into a river of blue glitter under my gaze, but even then I didn’t see footprints. Not in the snow, at least. The ridges beneath it, though, resolved into ten long narrow strips, five and five with a few inches of space between them. Roundish marks cupped the bases of both sets of ridges. I rocked forward in my crouch so I could feel the balls of my feet press into my insoles. Snow creaked under my boots, warning me of the impressions I was leaving behind.
Impressions that the killer hadn’t left. Somehow his weight had been transferred through the delicate crystals and into the earth below. “Heather, I need to scrape away some of the snow.”
To her credit, she only said, “Where?” instead of arguing with me. Up until very recently, if I’d been in her shoes, I’d have argued. Not for the first time, I gave thanks that the people around me weren’t as obstreperous as I was, then gestured to the curve of the dead woman’s back. There were other marks beneath the snow, but the crouched set had the most weight to them, as if they might last longer and give more information about what had left them.
Heather stepped forward, her aura a brilliant, efficient red. I put the flashlight in her hand with an apologetic grimace. “I know this is your job, but I’m afraid someone else’s hands in there might contaminate what I’m seeing. If something comes up, there’ll be plenty for you to examine.”
Her aura leeched toward ice blue, a color that became audible in her tone, too. “If something comes up.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I might be imagining things.” It was a better answer than it’s magic. Even if she’d heard the rumors about my predilections—and she had, or she wouldn’t have bitten off her magic comment a minute ago—normal people didn’t want their police work done by psychics and shamans. I suspected someone with a degree in Forensic Sciences really, truly and deeply didn’t want it’s magic as an answer for anything.
Heather exhaled sharply. I took it as permission and began brushing snow back from the frozen earth, trying not to disturb anything more than the narrow strips where I saw footprints in one level of my double vision. After a minute I scraped my way down to the ground, verifying that my eyes couldn’t see what the Sight did. I breathed a curse and shook my head at Heather. “There’s not going to be anything here that’ll do you any good. I’m sorry.”
“Then you can get out of my crime scene, Detective, and let my people get back to work.”
“Yeah, in just…” I stripped my glove off and slid my hand into the hollow I’d dug. A hillock of snow collapsed over my fingers, sending cold shivering through me.
It had nothing on the black ice beneath my palm. It sucked away my body heat with a willful vengeance, like it wanted to drag me in and abandon me in the cold. I jerked back with an ingénue’s gasp and coiled my other hand around my fingers. The ridges in the earth had flattened, like I’d put pressure on them. The notion that cold was all they were made of, and that my warmth had negated their chill, lingered in my thoughts.
Still cradling my hand, I pushed to my feet and turned in a slow circle, scanning the nearby earth for more of the narrow-toed footprints. Nothing: not on the ground, and not scored into any nearby trees. “It couldn’t just disappear.”
Morrison, a few feet away, said, “It?” and Heather drew herself up more stiffly.
I uncradled my hand and pinched the bridge of my nose with those fingers, half surprised they were willing to bend without shattering. “It. Him. Whatever. Billy, have you got…?”
God, how I’d changed. Billy and I usually retreated to The Missing O, a coffee and doughnut shop near the precinct building, to discuss the more unusual aspects of our cases. A few months earlier if anybody had told me I’d ask him straight out, in public, if he was getting a read on a ghost, I’d have sent some nice young men in clean white coats after them. I still wasn’t quite bold enough to spell it out, but none of us—not me, not Billy, not Morrison, and probably not Heather, since Billy’s fondness for the paranormal was legendary in the precinct—needed me to. We all knew what I was asking.
Billy came the long way around the body, his face tight. “Could be that she’s clinging to the location she died in.”
Heather made a disgruntled sound under her breath and walked away. Billy and I watched her, neither of us wanting to look at Morrison as I said, “But you don’t think so.”
“I don’t know.” My partner pulled his hand over his mouth. “I’ve never run into it before. Ghosts are usually tied to their physical forms, so even when the body is dumped they go with it. It could be there’s some kind of trap in place to keep them where they’re dying, though. Maybe…” He shot a guilty look at Morrison, who blew a breath from puffed cheeks.
“Go ahead, Holliday. Let’s hear your supposition.”
“That’s all it is, sir. Conjecture. But this guy is eating, or at least tasting, these bodies. If it’s something that feeds on human souls, then the physical desecration might be secondary to the spiritual one. It could be that chewing the bones is representative of…” He trailed off as Morrison got one of those looks that I recognized as something I usually triggered. It was one part disgust, one part disbelief and one part deliberate patience, all mixed well with resignation.
“Feeds on human souls.”
I said, “We’ve encountered it before, Captain,” in the smallest voice I possessed. Morrison turned his complicated expression on me, and it was all I could do to not dig a toe into the snow. “It’s essentially what Barbara and Mark Bragg were doing, sir, under Begochidi’s influence. Gathering strength by draining human lives. That’s what was putting everyone to sleep in July.”
Morrison looked to the sky, as if beseeching God to give him strength. I peeked at Billy, who shrugged his eyebrows, and we both came to attention as Morrison spoke again. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how I’ve spent twenty years in the force without ever hearing a hypothesis that it feeds on human souls on a case before.”
I didn’t really get the idea he was talking to us. Besides, that wasn’t what he wondered at all. What he really meant was, why was he now hearing that kind of hypothesis, when the world had been a sensible and straightforward place up until about a year ago.
The answer to that, of course, was me. One Joanne Walker, reluctant shaman thrust into a life that walked half a step out of pace with the normal world. Billy’s talents had always helped him solve cases. They hadn’t brought the truly bizarre to the fore. I was the one who fought gods and tangled with demons on the department’s time. I was coming to believe that all of those things—gods, demons, witches, spirits—had always been there, slipping alongside the real world and going more or less unnoticed. Sometimes cases went unsolved, or inexplicably strange things happened in them, but it took a mirror to show most people the explanation for those incomprehensible events.
I was that mirror. Without me, last winter’s ritual murders would have been just that, with no banshee’s head to show as a prize. Without me, no one would have seen a thunderbird battle a serpent over Lake Washington, or gone traipsing through dream worlds to share secret moments in each other’s souls. I’d come around to believing in magic, but forcing those around me to believe, too, wasn’t something I liked at all.
I said, “I’m sorry,” very, very quietly.
“You’re saying that too often lately, Walker.” Morrison shoved his hands into the pockets of his seaman’s coat and hunched his shoulders before letting them fall in a show of having given up the fight. “I called you two in for a reason. I shouldn’t bitch when you do what I brought you in to do. This hypothesis. Tell me how it would work.”
To my dismay, Billy lifted his eyebrows at me. I was the slow kid in class, the one scrambling through years of make-up work. If either of us had an answer, it should be him.
Well, really, I should have one, too. I pushed my hat off and scruffed my fingers through my hair, staring at the dead woman. “If it’s murder by magic, if somebody’s trying to capture souls, then there’s probably some kind of power circle involved.” I shot a quick glance at Billy, who looked approving, and a second one at Morrison, who looked dangerously uncomprehending. “Like people would use in a horror movie,” I said lamely. “A pentagram, for example, but it doesn’t have to be a pentagram. You can use—”
I fumbled at my throat, flipping the thumbnail-sized pendant of my necklace above the collar of my shirt. It was a quartered cross wrapped in a circle, a symbol used by both sides of my heritage. In Ireland, it was the Celtic cross, older than Christianity’s, and for the Cherokee it was the power circle, all the directions encompassed by the universe. “You can use something like this, or probably anything else that’s meaningful to you. A peace symbol, maybe.” My attempt at a smile was met by Morrison’s steely gaze. “Anyway, you create your circle and invoke your patrons and when you’re done you have a sealed area that can either keep things in or out, depending on which you set it up for.” I’d participated in one fairly recently, or I’d have had no idea how to catch a wayward soul.
Morrison stared at me, or possibly at my necklace, for a long moment, then made his voice very steady. “All right. This power circle. Would it leave a mark?”
This time I got my expect-an-answer glance off first, planting it on Billy. His mouth pursed and he shook his head. “It might, but I wouldn’t be able to see it. Jo—”
“I don’t know if I can see residue, but I can check by looking for Mel’s. But if we have murder by magic—” I liked that phrase “—going on, then whatever mark it leaves isn’t going to be anything like Melinda’s. If I can see a shadow cast by hers, maybe I can figure out how to look for its opposite, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
“You have to,” Morrison said. “I’ve got nobody else.”
I breathed a laugh that wasn’t. “So no pressure, then. All right. Okay. I’ll try, Captain. I’ll do my best.”
He gave me a short nod, and I took a few steps back from the dead woman’s body. Police tape rustled against my hips and I turned to duck under it.
Blinding light erupted in my vision, and from out of it came a microphone and a woman’s voice: “Detective Walker. Laurie Corvallis from Channel Two News. I’m sure you remember me. What a delight to find you at the heart of another grotesque crime scene. What would you like to say to our viewers?”
CHAPTER THREE
The first eight or twelve things that sprang to mind were not answers Morrison would approve of. I squinted into the light and managed to pull up a terse smile in lieu of what I wanted to say. By the time I made out Corvallis’s silhouette against the brilliance, I’d come up with something other than chuck you, farley, and kept my voice as pleasant as I could. “Ms. Corvallis, I don’t find it at all delightful to be in the midst of a murder scene, and I think it’s dismaying that you do. Beyond that, no comment. Sorry.”
Truth was, I probably shouldn’t have indulged in that much commentary, but at least I got the satisfaction of seeing Corvallis’s lip curl like I’d made a palpable hit. I ducked out of the camera light, blinking furiously to readjust to the dark, and heard Morrison’s grim, “Ms. Corvallis. What do you think you’re doing here?” behind me. I turned back to watch them, glad to be out of the spotlight.
Corvallis was just a little over five feet tall and had some kind of truly American ethnic background that had graced her with epicanthic blue eyes and café latte skin to go with very straight black hair. On TV, I thought she was gorgeous. In real life, I thought she was a pain in the ass. Even so, I had to admire how she stood up to Morrison, whose ten inches in height advantage didn’t seem to faze her at all. “I’m trying to report a news story, Captain. You wouldn’t want the story to be about the police obstructing the media, would you?”
“I want to be able to notify the family before they see their daughter’s death as the lead story on the morning news,” Morrison snapped. “And I want you to heed the decision that came from over your head to leave this story alone until we get some kind of break on it. I understand that investigative reporting is your job,” he said over her protest, and to my surprise his voice softened. “But you know enough details on this case to understand how frightened people are going to be, and that it’s dangerous and disturbed enough without adding the possibility of copycat murderers.”
“So you admit this morning’s victim is the last in a long line of murders by the Seattle Cannibal?”
My mouth bypassed my brain and said, “You’re kidding. Seattle Cannibal? There’s nothing euphonious or catchy about that at all. Maybe the Seattle Slaughterer. At least that’s alliterative.” About halfway through the last word I tried stuffing my fist in my mouth to shut myself up, but it was far too late. Morrison and Corvallis both turned to me, and from Morrison’s expression I figured I could count what was left of my detecting career in a matter of hours. Possibly minutes.
Corvallis, on the other hand, was smiling. For a pretty woman, she looked remarkably like a barracuda. “The Seattle Slaughterer,” she echoed. “I like that. Thank you, Detective Walker. Anything else you’d care to add?”
Short of issuing an invitation to my forthcoming ritual suicide, I couldn’t think of anything. I shook my head and backed away before laser beams actually shot out of Morrison’s eyes and immolated me.
A few steps beyond the news crew, I ran into Gary, who caught me, then thumped the side of his cab as an invitation to pull up against the hood and lean. “You’re right. ‘Slaughterer’ is better than ‘cannibal.’ Still a mouthful, though.”
I groaned. “You’re not helping.”
“I figure I already did my bit of helping.” He sounded less pleased than he should, and I frowned at him. He lifted a big shoulder and let it fall in a shrug that, as always, reminded me of plate tectonics. “Cops ain’t using the regular frequencies to call around about these murders, doll. Cabbies listen in on those all the time, but there’s been nothing to hear. I figure you’re using cell phones for everything.”
“Yeah. Mostly this isn’t patrol-car stuff anyway.”
“’Zactly. So how’d she know to turn up today?” Gary opened a hand, palm to the sky. “Listenin’ in on taxi frequencies, I bet. Henley called it in on his radio.”
I said, “Well, shit,” more philosophically than I thought those words could be said. “It had to happen eventually. Still, when Morrison comes over here to kill me, I’m putting you between us so I can run. He won’t kill you. You’re not his employee, and he respects his elders.” I didn’t know if that last part was true, but it seemed likely.
Gary chuckled. “You’re real thoughtful. So what’d you see over there?” He jerked his chin toward the crime scene.
“Bigfoot.” It was as good a name for whatever had left the claw marks as anything else. I looked over my shoulder toward my apartment building, where my bed lay cold and abandoned. “It’s Tuesday. I’m not even supposed to be at work today, but somehow I’m out chasing yeti at seven in the morning.”
“It’s a great life, innit?” Gary split a broad grin full of white teeth and I laughed despite myself.
“You have a demented sense of great. Hey! Billy!” I lifted my voice and waved as my partner ducked under the police tape. He crunched through snow turning to slush and joined us, rubbing his gloved hands together for warmth. “Morrison just gave us orders to go study Melinda’s power circle, right?”
“What you really want to know is if you can use that as an excuse to get out of here before Corvallis finishes with him and he comes to tear you a new—”
“Yes,” I admitted hastily. “Please. I’m trying not to think about my impending doom. Can we go?”
“You think he’s going to be any less pissed if he has to wait to yell at you?”
“I think if I’m really lucky we’ll come up with something and distract him from yelling.” I pushed away from Gary’s cab, looking between it and him. “I’d invite you along, but you’re covering Mickey’s shift.”
“Think you can handle it without me?”
That was actually a surprisingly good question. I glanced at Billy, who shrugged his eyebrows. “Mel can pull up that power circle by herself, if that’s what you need.”
I turned back to Gary, knocking my shoulder against his. “Okay, so probably, if I’m just looking for residue.” I sounded confident. I wished I felt half as certain. “I’ll call if something comes up, okay?”
“Arright, doll.” Gary lumbered into his cab and I leaned over the open door as he buckled in.
“Look, Gary, in case nobody else says it. Thank you. You caught us a break here this morning.”
He gave a dismissive snort, but his eyes were bright with pleasure as he pulled the door closed and drove off. I waved after him and turned to Billy with a smile still on my face.
My partner had his own smile, smirkier than mine, though there wasn’t any meanness in it. I puffed up, indignant without knowing why. “What?”
“Nothing.” Billy’s amusement expanded as I huffed. “I swear, nothing! You’ve changed a lot in the last year, that’s all. Gary’s good for you.”
“Oh, don’t you start that, too.”
“Nah, that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?”
“Nothing. Get in the car.” Billy, grinning unrepentantly, herded me toward the minivan, and I went, muttering dire but unmeant imprecations on the way.
Tuesday, December 20, 7:42 A.M.
My pique at Billy couldn’t withstand the warm fuzzy feeling I always got at seeing his sprawling house, which said home to me in a way nowhere I’d lived ever had. A new front porch boasted Christmas decorations and colored lights, and a plastic snowman dominated the front yard. Two much smaller actual snowmen flanked him, the larger wearing a winter hat I recognized as belonging to Billy’s oldest son, Robert. He was pushing twelve, old enough to start thinking about looking cool over being cold, and I doubted the hat would be rescued before spring.
Billy’s wife, Melinda, appeared on the porch in the midst of a rush of children. Most of them converged on the van, yanking the doors open hard enough to rock the whole vehicle as they spilled in with a cacophony worthy of a marching band. I picked out a demand from Clara to be brought to school and squeals of delight that I’d come to visit, followed by howls of dismay as six-year-old Jacquie realized she couldn’t both visit me and go to school. It made me feel loved, and somehow made up for the ear full of jam-slathered toast courtesy of Erik, the three-year-old.
Billy did an excellent impression of a roaring bull elephant, and ten seconds later the older kids were buckled in and I was standing in the driveway with Erik on my hip and strawberry jam in my hair. Melinda minced down the steps to join me, and we all waved goodbye, though baby Caroline—not quite two months old—required her mother’s assistance to do so. Billy pulled out of the driveway and I turned to Melinda, sagging in astonishment. “I honestly don’t know how you do it.”
Erik caroled, “With meeee!” and smeared some more jam across my face. I wrinkled my nose, trying to get the itchy, sticky stuff to retreat, and Melinda laughed aloud.
“Yes, with you. You’re mama’s helper, aren’t you? How about Joanne puts you down and you run inside to get us all a washcloth? Look how messy Joanne is! Silly Joanie!”
“Siwwy Joanie!” Erik squirmed down my side, depositing crumbs, butter and jam as he went, and ran for the house.
Melinda looked me up and down. “I’d lend you something clean to wear while I threw those in the wash, but all of my clothes would be too small and all of Bill’s would be too big.”
I rubbed a bit of jam off my cheek. “It’s okay. I just expect you to peel me off the walls if I get stuck to them.”
“Fair enough.” Melinda herded me inside the house as if I were one of her children, and I went without complaint. Erik met us in the front hall bearing a soaking wet washcloth, which his mother wrung out and applied to me with the same brutal efficiency she turned on her son a moment later. I stood there trying not to laugh, and a moment before Erik’s cherubic smile came clean, she realized what she’d done and turned to me with cheeks pink from mortification.
I held on to solemnity with every ounce of my being and thrust my jam-sticky hands out for her to scrub. Melinda hit me with the washcloth, and I threw my head back and laughed. “You’re the best mom ever, Mel. Woe betide any mess that gets in your way.” I went to wash my hands, still laughing, and Melinda turned her ruthless washing back on her son. Half an hour later he was involved with a complex game of “pile up blocks and knock them over” in the playroom, and Melinda and I slipped into the room off it that was hers alone.
The only time I’d been in there previously, it had been a place of ritual lit by candles. It was dramatically less mystical with floor lamps turned on and light pouring in from the playroom, but the wide power circle painted on the concrete floor remained the same. A sister circle marked the ceiling, and I’d seen how power could flood between the two of them, making a column of living magic. Caroline unfolded a hand from within her sling and grasped for the upper circle, burbling with dismay when it didn’t come closer. I found myself eyeing the baby, then her mother, who lifted a hand, palm out, to deny me. “She can’t talk. I’m not even sure she can see as far as the circle.”
“They all saw the Thing in the kitchen.” “They” were Melinda’s kids, and the Thing had been a terrible, enormous serpent: a monster made manifest in the Hollidays’ home. It, in fact, was the reason there was a new front porch; half the house had been stretched and torn in getting the serpent out of there.
Melinda gave me a flat look. “The Thing in the kitchen was real. Anybody would’ve seen it.”
“Robert knows when magic’s being done. He says the dead make hospitals cold. And he says Clara senses things, too.”
“Does that really surprise you? Given Billy? Given me?”
“Mel, the day this all stops surprising me is probably the day I wake up dead. I know Billy’s a medium, and I know you see auras and know how to run a coven, but I don’t know anything about your talent. Do you have a name for what you are?” I’d been wanting to ask for months. It’d just never seemed like the right time.
I wasn’t sure now was right, either, but Melinda considered me briefly before shrugging. “Only a wise woman, maybe. A witch, a midwife. I would have been the one people came to for potions and cures in Mexico, but only because my grandmother was truly a bruja. She had the Sight, she had power, and she was the one who taught me to honor la diosa, the goddess. My mother,” she added, eyebrows elevating, “was very Catholic, and hated that I was drawn from the church to follow Nana’s path. My own children will not have to face that fight.”
A smile crooked my lips. “What if they go back to the church?”
“That’s their decision. They will not face that fight,” she said again. “Not from me.” She gave Caroline a finger to hold on to and waggled the baby’s hand for a moment before speaking again. “I grew up watching Nana communicate with and see into a world beyond ours. She called me sensitive and taught me what she could, but that’s all I am, Joanie. Sensitive. I see auras, but not to the depth you do. I can gather my energy and waken a power circle, but I can’t heal. I’ve been part of a coven, and found it didn’t suit me. My grandmother had seven children, but she lived alone after my grandfather died. Wise women in the tales often do, and let those who need them come to them. Not many people come looking, but I’m here when they do.”
“I’m grateful.” I cleared my throat on the words, discomfited at how they’d burst out. I was more grateful than I could say. Without people like Billy and Melinda, the past year of adapting to my burgeoning powers would have been impossible, rather than merely extraordinarily difficult. I still thought I didn’t deserve them, but I was trying hard to step up so I did.
Melinda smiled, then tipped her head toward the power circle. “I awakened it after Billy called so there would be residue for you to investigate. At least, if it works that way.”
“I hope it does, because I doubt whoever’s out there—” I broke off, glancing out of the room toward Erik, and breathed, “eating people” before continuing in a normal voice, “I doubt they’re going to light up any kind of power circle just for my benefit in finding them.”
“Caroline and I will get out of your way. I’ll be in the playroom with the babies if you need anything.”
A smile didn’t seem sufficient. I stepped over to her and squooshed both friend and baby into a hug. “I don’t think it’ll take long. Thanks, Mel.”
“My pleasure,” she said, and from the light in her aura, I knew she meant it. Inexplicably happy despite having been awakened at two in the morning to hunt cannibalistic killers, I turned my attention and the Sight on the remnants of the power circle, eager to see what could be seen.
CHAPTER FOUR
A whisper of power danced in the room, so faint with sunshine yellow and streaked orange that I wouldn’t have been able to name the colors if I hadn’t already associated them with Mel. They glimmered up and down like a fine sheen of waterfall mist caught between the wheels inscribed on the floor and ceiling.
More, there was a lingering sense of what she’d done to awaken the circle. The one time I’d seen her use magic, she’d been calling on a goddess in hopes of getting some questions answered. As it happened, talking with a goddess had been trumped by other events, but I could feel a hint of similar intent in the circle now. It wasn’t quite the same: then, we’d come as supplicants, and what was left now was more a greeting, offering honor and admiration, and taking nothing in return.
It reminded me that I’d promised my black-winged spirit guide that I’d do a better job of honoring and listening to it, and that I hadn’t made any effort to lately. “Hey, Melinda?”
Her answering, “Yeah?” came from the playroom, followed by Erik’s cheery shriek as he knocked over another pile of blocks. I smiled and put my hand up, not quite touching the shimmering curve of fading magic. “Was this a keep-things-in or a keep-things-out circle?”
“Figure it out yourself, Joanne!” She sounded rather like Erik, quite cheerful and maybe a little teasing. I raspberried her without rancor and focused on the circle again. She was right. If I was a slightly more clever shaman I’d have known it without asking. Nobody’d ever accused me of brilliance, though.
Emboldened, I touched the faint residue, trying to keep an open mind to learn what it could tell me. The open mind bit was the hard part: on one level I wanted to snort at myself for imagining thin air would give me any information at all.
The circle had been for keeping things in. Certainty exploded in me, then tumbled into bits of information that seemed to rise up rather than be the product of any conscious thought. For a few heartbeats I was Melinda, greeting my goddess with gladness and an open heart. The circle’s walls were protection both for the being within and for the world without: neither was entirely meant to interact with the other in this plane. Here, in the confines of Melinda’s sanctuary, there was very little chance of outside elements attacking, and so the power circle’s purpose was to constrain the goddess so she wouldn’t warp the world around her with her presence.
Constrain was an awkward word there, implying control. But it was the constraint of a thousand-acre wildlife preserve: the creatures inside it were free to do as they pleased, with no outside interference. Melissa didn’t control her goddess, and indeed, standing there with the awareness of her power circle thrumming through me, I knew that whomever she worshipped had barely been present at all. It was, again, like the sun: it would come up and warm the earth whether someone stood to greet it or not. I was half glad and half disappointed that she hadn’t had time to answer our call at Halloween. The gods I’d met had been awe-inspiring, but they’d both been men. Meeting the female of the species would’ve been interesting. Probably in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense of the word, but interesting.
I put a little pressure against the remaining magic, then stepped over the painted lines to enter the power circle. There was no resistance; wouldn’t have been even if Melinda had been pouring strength into it. It was meant to keep things in, after all. If it was active I might not be able to get out without Mel’s help, but with nothing more than a biding memory of magic in place, I thought I could come and go as I pleased. If not, Melinda would presumably rescue me as soon as I promised to babysit her horde of children so she and Billy could have a date night.
Amused, I turned to each of the four cardinal points of the circle and offered awkward bows in each direction before kneeling in its center. “I didn’t bring any gifts,” I said aloud, trusting that Melinda either wouldn’t hear or—more likely—wouldn’t think I was batshit insane for talking to an empty room. “I wasn’t really planning on dropping in, but I remembered that I promised I’d do better, so I thought I should strike while the iron was hot.”
I wet my lips, wondering if spirit guides worked in metaphor, then wondered what the hell else they could possibly work in. “I could use some help, if you’re in the mood to provide it.” It wasn’t graceful, but at least it acknowledged that my guide was autonomous, which was a lot smarter than trying to make demands.
Once upon a time, not all that long ago, I’d have been deep inside the spirit realm talking to my mentor, Coyote, when I asked for help. Chances were he’d have been six kinds of useless, offering up little more than cryptic advice for me to sort out on my own. That was one of several million problems with being a shaman: they dealt with, and often were, tricksters who never gave straight answers to anything. But Coyote had died months ago, leaving me with achingly little wisdom and even less surety as to the path I was on. The closest thing I had to a saving grace—aside from Billy and Melinda and Gary, who were angels from on high as far as I was concerned—was somewhere in the heart of the spirit world, a raven had befriended me and become my guide. Billy was alive because of that bird, and I wondered if I’d ever really said thank you.
Stung by the thought, I closed my eyes and dropped my chin to my chest. The circle’s power lines glowed against the back of my eyelids, much more strongly than before. Sometimes the Other was like that, easier to see when I wasn’t looking in the real world. “Actually, nevermind. I can probably get through what’s going on now on my own. Let me just say thanks for last time, instead. I wish I knew how to do this properly. Do spirit ravens like shiny things as much as real ones do?” I closed my fingers around my silver necklace, smiling at the idea of a raven trying to steal it. “Maybe I’ll find you something else.”
An approving klok! echoed, the big popping noise ravens made when they were interested in or scolding something. It sounded real, like it had happened in the room instead of in my head. I opened my eyes, bemused, to find a raven standing in front of me. He tilted his head and I tilted mine the same way, mirror image to a curious bird.
He was white outlines, like he’d grown up from the power lines of Melinda’s circle. I could see individual feathers etched in shining light, and I could also see right through him, to the concrete and paint beneath us. He’d looked that way before, in the darkness of a spirit animal quest, but mostly when I’d seen him he’d looked like a proper raven, glossy black-blue and startlingly large with a ruff of sharp feathers at his throat. He preened, stretching one translucent wing out to its full length, then tucked it back in and peered at me.
At a loss for what else to do, I extended a hand and said, “Hello, Mister Raven,” and only afterward considered the possibility that not everyone called animals “mister,” or worse, that my guide might somehow be offended by the human appellation. I frequently greeted animals that way, though, and evidently he didn’t mind, because he hopped forward, said klok! again, and nipped the sleeve of my sweater until the copper bracelet I wore was exposed.
He bit that even harder, hooked beak bouncing off beaten metal and scraping into the etched animals that encircled it. I pulled back, squelching the urge to thwap his beak. “Hey. That’s mine. No eating it, even if it is shiny. I’ll bring you tinsel or something, next time.” What possible use a spirit raven could have for tinsel or, in fact, any tangible object, I didn’t know, but at least I now had it confirmed that he liked shiny things. He went quaarrk and settled back, tilting his head again, so I tentatively scratched him under the beak, like he was a cat. His quark was softer this time and I smiled before mumbling, “So, thank you, anyway. For helping me with Billy. I couldn’t have done it without you.”
For a bird, he looked remarkably self-satisfied. I chuckled and rubbed his jaw harder, and he leaned into it, making little raveny sounds of contentment. I felt my own shoulders relax and only just then realized how tired I was. 2:30 A.M. wakeup calls were not my friend. I exhaled a long breath, and half-consciously watched it bead on the air like frost.
It wafted over my raven, making him sparkle briefly, and when it passed, he looked like a normal raven, gleaming black with bright eyes. He hopped into my lap and we both watched the remnants of my breath extend over the lines of Melinda’s power circle. Shadows made of light shifted in the paint, then drifted up, reaching for the matching circle above me. When they touched, brilliance flared, then faded again, leaving me feeling rather safe and warm and cozy in a wreath of active power.
“Ah,” I said a bit distantly. “Reached one of those altered states of being, have I? This is nicer than being hit on the head.” There were dozens of ways to reach power and other worlds: sleep deprivation, drugs, unconsciousness, drumming and simple practice were among them, and so far the only one I hadn’t tried was drugs. Drinking myself into oblivion and waking up with a god-infested mortal didn’t count. I tipped my head to peer at my raven. “Can you talk now?”
He said, “Nevermore,” then looked incredibly annoyed.
I couldn’t help it: I laughed, then more carefully rubbed the top of his feathery head. “Sorry. My subconscious probably made you say that, if it’s possible. What’s going on?”
He made a popping sound, his own breath steaming, and all around me Melinda’s sanctuary fell away.
Desolate snow and ice rose up in its place. A howling came with it, so high and sweet and sad it took a long time to understand it was the wind shrieking over frozen wastelands. Once I understood, I felt it, cutting through my sweater and into my bones, making them as cold as the spaces between stars. The Bigfoot print I’d seen under the snow had felt that way when I’d touched it, so icy it was almost beyond words.
A figure appeared in the blowing wind and snow, gray in the brightness. It walked erratically, pushed by the elements, and stumbled often, as if it had very little strength to carry on. I jumped to my feet and saw a blur of wings, the raven a singular midnight-colored spot in all the white. He latched on to my shoulder, digging in with powerful talons, but the pain was a comfortable thing compared to the cold bisecting me.
A second figure, then a third, joined the first. Other shadows made silver spots in the snowstorm, too indistinct for me to be certain they weren’t mere mirages. They all moved in different directions, though if I was close enough to see all of them, they had to be able to see each other. I waved a hand, shouting, and heard my own voice swallowed up by the wind. Anger burgeoned in me and I braced myself, drawing a deep breath and shouting from my diaphragm.
One of the figures hesitated, then turned a shadowy face toward me. I yelled in relief, waving madly, and it stopped where it was, then looked around as I bellowed, “Over here! Come on, over here!”
Instead, it swung around, suddenly purposeful, and strode away through the storm. I let out another yell, this time of frustration, and flung myself after it. Snow reached up and grabbed my thighs, my hips, and then gobbled me whole, ice and snow collapsing over my head.
I screamed, clawing for the surface, and the raven tightened his claws in my shoulder again. Inside a breath I was on top of the snow again, bullied by the wind and floundering with exhaustion. My compatriots were gone, leaving me alone on the ice field with only a raven as company. I ran a few feet, then fell to my knees, panting for air that was too wild to run smoothly into my lungs. “Where are we? Who are they?”
Quoth the raven, Nevermore, and this time he didn’t sound irritated by it. I craned my neck, trying to see the bird on my shoulder clearly. “They’re dead? This isn’t the Dead Zone. And I can’t see ghosts.”
As soon as I said it I knew I was wrong. I could see ghosts, when the raven was on my shoulder. I thought it was something to do with a raven’s transitory state between life and death, with its history as a beast found feasting after battles and its mythology of riding the shoulders of those who ushered the living into another world. “They’re ghosts?”
Ravens didn’t have lips to curl, but he did a fine job of curling his lip anyway, thereby relegating me to my usual position of being a day late and a dollar short in terms of esoteric knowledge. “If they’re not ghosts and this isn’t the Dead Zone—” Which it wasn’t; that much, at least, I was sure of. What I referred to as the Dead Zone was a bleak nothingness about half a meter smaller than eternity. This frozen landscape had bleak written all over it, but it also had the personality of a storm. The Dead Zone had no such thing. “—then where are we?”
The raven dumped me unceremoniously back into Melinda’s power circle.
I had not been lying on my back when I went under. I was now, and out of the corner of my eye I could see Melinda in the doorway, Caroline in her arms and a curious expression on both faces. With Caroline, it probably meant gas. With Mel, it probably meant she was trying really hard not to ask why I was flat on my back in the middle of her sanctuary. “Do you have any spirit animals, Mel?”
She, after a moment’s hesitation, said, “Yes….”
I fluttered a hand in reassurance. “Don’t worry, I’m not rude enough to ask what they are. Just, do they ever effectively coldcock you and leave you sprawled on the floor?”
The corner of her mouth quirked. “I’m afraid not.”
“I didn’t think so. I don’t get no respect.” The raven was no longer visible, though I could feel his weight on my chest, like he was staring at me. Waiting for me to get my act together, presumably. “I think I jump-started your power circle. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You shouldn’t have been able to, but it’s okay.”
“Really?” I pushed up on my elbows. Light still glimmered around the edges of the circle, stronger than the residuals Melinda’d left for me to study. I suddenly got the idea she was outside it because she wasn’t allowed in, which wasn’t good on two levels. One, it was her circle, so it seemed like she should be able to breeze right through anything I did. Two, and possibly more important, I didn’t know how to take it down. It felt nothing like the healing power I’d become reasonably competent at drawing on; that came from within, and the circle’s power seemed to be outside of me. Its strength had come from somewhere else. The raven, maybe. I squinted the Sight on to give him a hard look, but the little bastard disappeared and left me to deal with my own problems. “Really on both counts? It’s really okay, and I shouldn’t have been able to?”
“Really on both counts. If I didn’t like you, it wouldn’t be okay at all, but if I didn’t like you, I think you probably wouldn’t have been able to. I hope.” Melinda frowned, giving me the uncomfortable sensation that I was out of her league, magically speaking. I mean, I knew I was, according to what she and Billy kept telling me, but knowing it and feeling it were two different things.
“We’ll go with me not being able to. I’m not even sure I opened this one. Did you see a, um, bird on my chest?” I didn’t want to define my spirit guide as a raven any more than Mel wanted to confess to her own totem animals. It was irrational, but I felt strongly about it, and Mel didn’t look surprised as she shook her head.
I whooshed air out and put my head on my knees for a moment. Memory crept over me and I peeked up again, the Sight in place once more.
Breath only showed up in cold air, and Melinda’s sanctuary was nice and warm. But I still saw the particles of my exhalation dance across the power lines, shaking down the magic that had grown up. I stared at it, flabbergasted. The only other time I’d opened a power circle, it’d been with a blood sacrifice—not, in the grand scheme of things, the best way to go. It struck me that the breath in my lungs was just as important a component of what kept me alive, and, as far as offerings went, seemed pretty profound. “I think you’ve got to teach me how to deliberately awaken a power circle, Mel.” Before I did something critically stupid and woke up dead from attempting it someday. My raven guide probably wouldn’t have let that happen just now, but I didn’t like to think what could’ve happened if I hadn’t already entreated him.
It also struck me that breath was, in its way, incidental. Once it left the body, it became part of the air again, always in transition. That might have accounted for the disconnect I felt with the magic powering the circle.
I suspected that on a fundamental level, what I’d just accidentally done was extremely dangerous. I scrambled up out of the circle and did my best to hide behind Melinda, who was at least seven inches shorter than I was. “Soon,” I added. “Maybe now would be good.”
“Not unless you’ve got a babysitter in your pocket. The kids would be too much distraction.”
I felt my pocket. “I have a cell phone. That’s almost as good.”
Melinda laughed. “Cell phones are notoriously bad at watching three-year-olds. They have no defense system.”
“But Gary does! Maybe I can get him to come over when he gets off shift.” I pulled the phone out and it rang, surprising me enough that I nearly dropped it. Caroline giggled and waved her hands, apparently delighted by my antics. I gave her a finger to hold and, charmed by her smile, picked up the call without looking to see who it was.
“Walker,” Morrison said tightly. “Get to the morgue as fast as you can. Something’s happening to the bodies.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Charlie Groleski had shriveled into a husk.
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have thought he was an ice-age corpse, the kind that occasionally turns up in glaciers. His skin had that same dried brown leathery look to it, with his hair matted and stringy by turns, and his fingers clawed as if great age had withered them to nubs. He had a faint odor of decay, the smell of something so long dead that it’s given up stinking and is just a few hours away from collapsing into nothing. Part of me wanted to give him a prod and see if he would fall in on himself and become nothing more than a dust shadow on the cold morgue slab.
I resisted, based on the certainty that it wouldn’t win me any friends, but I really wanted to. Billy, as if suspecting the direction of my thoughts, edged between me and Groleski’s body, and pointed toward Karin Newcomb’s.
I’d been avoiding looking at her, a little afraid I might recognize her after all. I didn’t; either we’d never crossed paths in the months we’d lived in the same apartment building, or she’d become one of a blur of college-aged brunettes who’d lived there in the seven years I had. Either way, she deserved better. Whether she deserved better of the world at large, or me in specific, though, I wasn’t sure.
Unlike Groleski, she hadn’t had time to freeze, but like him, she was falling in on herself. Taken together, they looked like separate stages of a horror film special effect, with Groleski the advanced decomposition. “Know what it reminds me of?”
Billy gave me a pained look. “If you make a joke, Walker…”
“No, I’m being serious.” I crouched, studying Karin Newcomb’s deteriorating form. “They’re falling apart the same way Ida and the girls did, but more slowly. Like they weren’t just frozen, but they were being held together with magic, too.”
“Huh.” Billy put his arms akimbo and stared down at the dead people like he was trying to find fault in my comparison. Apparently he didn’t find any, because after a moment he said, “Think we’ve got another banshee on our hands?”
“I love how you say that like it’s normal.” I glanced up, looking for rubber gloves, and waved at the box when I found it. Billy handed me one and I did my best proctologist’s snap putting it on, then risked poking a finger into the dead woman’s ribs. The flesh dented like an ancient Peeps, with a soft rain of marshmallow cascading over my fingertip. Only it wasn’t marshmallow. I withdrew my hand and stared into the hole I’d made. It didn’t look like something that could happen to a human body. “Billy, those women who died back in March…did anybody notice anything like this happening to their bodies?”
I stood up, not wanting to look into the dried-marshmallow effect in Karin’s ribs any longer, and caught Billy’s quick shake of his head. “They’d all been eviscerated. Cause of death was pretty obvious. And they all had ID on them, so I think the bodies were released to the families pretty fast. I don’t remember anything like this. I guess we could get a court order to have them exhumed, if you think we need to.”
A shudder made hairs rise on my arms. “Let’s not unless we’re sure we have to. How about our other victims, has this been happening to them?”
He shook his head again. I stripped the rubber glove off and pushed my fingers through my hair. “What’s the date?”
“December twentieth, why?”
I’d known that. I’d known it very clearly, because tomorrow was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. I’d only asked in order to buy time. Sadly, the second and a half it took Billy to answer wasn’t nearly as much as I’d hoped to buy, and it didn’t give me any way out of proposing a supernatural hypothesis. “Tomorrow’s the solstice. These things tend to get stronger around the pagan high holy days.”
Pagan high holy days. Like half of them—more than half—weren’t marked in some way by the modern world and practitioners of most modern religions. Easter fell suspiciously close to the spring fertility festival of Beltane, midsummer meant a weekend of partying while the sun didn’t go down, and I didn’t think there was much of anybody fooling themselves about Christmas lying cheek-by-jowl with the midwinter solstice. Mardi Gras, Halloween—they were all tied in with ancient holy days, even if we didn’t always consciously draw the lines between them. I snorted at myself and shook it off; it didn’t really matter who celebrated them or what they were called. The point was, certain times of the year had natural mystic punch, and we were on the edge of one of those days today. That didn’t exactly comfort me.
Neither did the fact that banshees seemed inclined to swarm during the holy days. Twice this year I’d faced them, and I was in no particular hurry to go up against one again. They worked for a much bigger bad, a thing they called the Master. I only knew a handful of things about him, but none of them was good.
No, that wasn’t true. One of them was good: as far as I could tell, he wasn’t corporeal. No killer demon walking the earth. That was a win, and I’d learned to be grateful for small favors.
Everything else about him, though, scared the crap out of me. I knew he found me amusing, and it was my general opinion that being found amusing by alarmingly powerful entities was not something to be sought. I also knew that ritual murders, carried out by his banshee minions, fed him enough strength to keep an eye on the world. I knew he could come a hair’s breadth from killing a god, and I knew the only reason I wasn’t already dead was my mother had sacrificed herself to keep me alive.
I very much didn’t want Charlie Groleski’s and Karin Newcomb’s shriveling forms to be the work of banshees, because that meant the Master was stirring, and I’d already pissed him off twice this year. Unfortunately for me, that’s what experience suggested we were looking at.
“Joanne?” Billy put his hand on my shoulder, startling me out of my grim examination of the bodies. “You okay, Walker?”
“Are the bodies exsanguinated?”
My partner gave me a look usually reserved for his kids mouthing off. “You know they aren’t. You just wanted an excuse to use ‘exsanguinate’ in conversation.”
I flashed him a guilty little smile that turned back into a frown. “Yeah, but maybe it’s good that they’re not, since the winter moon murders were all pretty much drained of blood. Even if it’s banshees again, this is different.”
“If it’s banshees again I’d rather it was the same, so we’d have a pattern to follow. Holy shit!” Billy levitated about four feet back, with me right beside him, as Groleski’s body fwoomped into a much smaller mass. Dust rose up, lingering in the air, and Billy all but vaulted another slab to snatch up medical masks. He tossed one to me and put one on, eyes bugged above its white line. “What the hell was that? Where’s the doctor?”
“Here, Detective.” A red-haired woman wearing medical glasses over her own mask swept in, hurrying but not alarmed. “You did ask me to step outside.”
We had, because although Sandra Reynolds had been the coroner on this case for the past six weeks, neither Billy nor I had wanted to stand around discussing things like banshees in front of her. She’d been watching through the window of the observer’s room, the place where families were most often taken to identify the bodies of their loved ones. It wasn’t soundproofed, but with the door closed it was unlikely she’d have overheard us running through mystical answers to our murders. Magic didn’t seem like her thing. She picked up a slim metal rod and bent over Groleski’s deflating body, dust poofing up to mar her safety glasses. I felt a shock of relief she was wearing them. I had no reason to think the particles were dangerous, but then, I didn’t have a reason not to think so, either.
Groleski flattened a little more as she edged the rod through his remains. I was glad I hadn’t poked him after all. The guilt of making him collapse like that would’ve kept me awake for days. Reynolds muttered, “This is fascinating,” in a tone that suggested that it was genuinely fascinating, and also a pain in the ass. “None of the other bodies have shown this kind of exsanguination.”
I shot a triumphant look at Billy, who rolled his eyes as the doctor continued, “It’s not just blood loss. A thawing body should be—” she glanced at us and clearly decided to go for a non-technical term “—squishy. I have no explanation for the rapid decay into dust.” Apparently quite happy, she scraped a pile of Charlie’s remains into a test tube and stoppered it. “I’m going to have to take a look at this.”
“So,” I said much more quietly, “am I.”
I hadn’t been using the Sight, mostly because it’d shown me nothing useful when we’d come across the bodies in the first place. I let it slip over my vision now, and watched a trail of red and yellow sparks follow Dr. Reynolds out of the morgue. I’d heard guys on the force call her a spitfire, and thought her aura colors reinforced that.
To my dismay, hers was the only aura I got a read on. There were no hints of dark magic clinging to the disintegrating bodies. They just looked dead. I glanced at Billy just to make sure my mojo was working, and got a reassuring flare of his orange and fuchsia colors. Well, reassuring in that I wasn’t defective. Less reassuring in that I was still batting zero in the paranormal detecting ballpark. “Morrison’s not going to like this.”
Worry sharpened Billy’s voice: “Not going to like what? What do you see?”
“Nothing.” I leaned against the nearest non-body-carrying slab and pulled my mask down. “You don’t need that thing. There’s nothing more dangerous there than any long-dead body might be carrying.”
Billy tugged his own mask down. “Like bubonic plague, you mean?”
I snorted, waving him off. “They’re not that long dead. And besides, aren’t most of the annual cases of plague in this country in, like, Arizona? No, what Morrison’s not going to like is I’m still not getting anything. If they weren’t falling apart like rotting…” I couldn’t think of anything that fell apart like they were doing, and finished, “…corpses,” lamely. “Anyway, I’d just think it was natural if it wasn’t happening so fast. I don’t like to go back to the captain with nothing.”
“None of us do.”
“Yeah, but…” There was nothing to say after that, because the sentence would end “but you don’t have a crush on him,” if I was being flippant, and with the same sentiment expressed in weightier terms if I was being brave. I wasn’t brave. Or flippant, for that matter, because even though it was an embarrassingly open secret, I wasn’t actually in the habit of going around admitting I’d sort of fallen for my captain. I didn’t even like admitting it to myself.
Billy, who was a better man than I, said, “So how do we find something to go to him with?” instead of taking the opportunity to razz me.
“I have two ideas. Do you want to hear the one you’ll be okay with or the one you’ll hate first?”
He stared at me. “If I say the one I’m okay with, is there any chance I won’t have to hear the one I’ll hate?”
I held my fingers an inch apart. “A little one.”
“Let’s go with that, then.” He folded his arms across his chest and glowered at me, which would have been thoroughly intimidating if I was one of his children.
“Okay. We go talk to your friend Sonata and see if she’s in tune enough with the dead to get a rise out of any of our murder victims. We also find out if she knows anybody who can diagnose a decomposition like this one, because it’s obviously not natural. Then we go to Morrison with whatever we’ve learned.”
“This is the better idea? Share case details with someone outside the force? How much will I not like the other one?”
“A lot.” I tilted my head toward the door. “So shall we go talk to Sonny?”
Sonata Smith outclassed Billy by a mile in the rank of speaks-with-the-dead. She was in her sixties and lived in a gorgeous old Victorian up on Capitol Hill, exactly the kind of house I’d imagine a medium lived in. That, though, was the end of where she conceded to meet my expectations. Her séance partner was a surfer-boy-looking former theology student in his early thirties, and she liked wearing violent comic book T-shirts, neither of which seemed very peaceable and medium-like to me. On the other hand, Billy was a six-foot-two police detective with a fondness for yellow sundresses, so I should’ve known better than to try to lay expectations on what constituted typical behavior for a medium. Or anybody else, probably.
Either way, Sonny was one of the relatively few Magic Seattle people I knew, and pretty much the only one I trusted besides Billy and Melinda. Left to my own devices, I’d managed to meet up with entirely the wrong crowd, so I was happy to lean on Billy’s expertise instead of my own shaky judgment.
We’d called ahead, but Sonny still pursed her lips as if we were unexpected when she answered the door. After a moment she rearranged the expression into a smile and said, “William, Joanne, come in,” and stepped aside. We got about two steps past the threshold before she said, “I take it this is about the murders. Can I get you some tea?”
Billy and I exchanged looks, and I put on a patently fakey smile. “At least Morrison can’t be pissed if everybody’s already talking about them, right?”
“Not everyone,” Sonata said. “Just that awful woman on Channel Two. She broke the story this morning. The Seattle Slaughterer, they’re calling him.”
I winced from the bottom of my soul all the way out. Billy groaned. “Tea would be great, Sonny. Green tea is supposed to be good for you, right? Would enough of it make somebody invulnerable? Because Joanie’s going to need it.” He followed Sonata into the kitchen, and I trailed along behind, wondering how many different ways Morrison was going to kill me. I’d gotten up to four highly creative ways to die before Sonata got us seated at the table and put a kettle on to boil.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I don’t know of anything that’s that good for you.”
Billy, more cheerfully than I thought was appropriate, said, “You’re dead,” to me.
I dropped my forehead to the table and said, “Maybe not,” words muffled by the shining wood. It smelled faintly of lemon Pledge, old and familiar. “Neither of us can pick up anything at all from the bodies we’re finding, Sonny. Even the one this morning didn’t have a ghost lingering, and she was freshly dead. I was thinking maybe if you gave it a shot, or if you knew somebody who could…” I peeked up, trying for convincing puppy-dog eyes.
Sonata looked unmoved, not even blinking when the kettle suddenly whistled. She let it go on, piercing the air, and finally shook her head. “I know who should be able to help.”
I sat up, hope surging in my chest as Sonata went to take the kettle off. “Who?”
She turned her profile to me, concern thinning her lips. “Joanne, it should be you.”
CHAPTER SIX
The kettle’s whistle faded into a rush of staticky background noise that lingered underneath, then swallowed, Sonata’s words. I was vaguely aware of Billy’s grimace, but mostly I was paying attention to the hiss between my ears and the abiding feeling that I should have expected Sonata to say something like that.
Three or four thousand self-directed recriminations lined up to pile themselves on me. If I hadn’t done this, if I’d only done that—I had a list of mistakes longer than my arm. It was all too easy to believe that by foundering around as I’d done the past year, I’d missed the mark on where I was supposed to be standing. Back in January, when everything had started and I’d been burning with power released after years of imprisonment, there’d been one brief and kind of glorious moment when I’d believed I could save, or heal or protect the whole city of Seattle. I’d lost most of that confidence while struggling to learn about my talents, but apparently I hadn’t lost the sensation that I should be able to do something like that. That I should, in essence, be so much better than I was.
Memory caught me in the gut, a visceral recollection of an alternate timeline I’d briefly been given viewing access to. There’d been a woman a lot like me in that other world, only she had her shit together. She had a life, a family, friends and she would have known how to hunt down whoever was killing and snacking on Seattleites. For a moment I ached with the regret of not being her.
But—and this was the crux, and always would be—she had never chosen to come live in Seattle. Whatever battles she had to fight, they were somewhere else, with someone else. This was the path I was on, and if I’d screwed up, well, that was life. I was finally starting to wrap my mind around the idea of making things better in the future instead of beating myself up for things that had gone wrong in the past. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it had to be enough.
I spread my fingers wide on the shining kitchen table, and made my voice louder than the blood rushing in my ears. The moment of believing I could protect Seattle came back to me, but like through a fun-house mirror: it was a little too far away, a little too distant to feel real. “You’re probably right. It probably should be me. Here’s the thing, though, Sonny. I hardly even know what that means. Can you…” I got up, suddenly unable to hold still, and stalked across the kitchen, trying not to look at either Billy or Sonata.
“Can you tell me what’s missing? What…what I should be? God, what a stupid question. It’s just that I’m so far behind the curve I can’t even see it. I don’t know what’s wrong, much less how to fix it. If I can understand…” I spread my hands again, this time against the air, and made myself meet the others’ eyes. “Some hero I am, but right now I don’t have any idea where to start.”
Tension turned to uncomfortable sympathy in Sonata’s gaze. “For what it’s worth, Joanne, it wasn’t until I met you that I began to understand, myself. William…?”
Billy shook his head. “I’m not part of the scene like you are, Sonny, you know that. For me it’s mostly what I can do through the job. You’re my one real contact with the world.”
“Why is that?” I interrupted, genuinely surprised. “You’re like a true believer, Billy. Why aren’t you neck-deep in it?”
“Mostly because of Brad.”
“Oh.” I wished I hadn’t asked. Doctor Bradley Holliday was Billy’s older brother. They’d had a sister, too, Caroline, who’d been between them in age, but she’d drowned in an accident when she was eleven. Her bond with Billy had kept her ghost at his side for thirty years, and that had driven a wedge between the brothers. I wasn’t certain whether it was envy or anger or some combination thereof, but Brad had never taken to the paranormal the way Billy had. It’d never occurred to me that maybe Billy hadn’t embraced it as much as he’d have liked, in order to keep a degree of peace in the family.
Or maybe he’d embraced it just as much as he needed to. I knew he and Melinda had met at a conference about the paranormal. Fifteen years and five kids later it didn’t look, from the outside, like he was missing too much.
“We had a disaster last year,” Sonata said quietly. “Within the community, at least, it was a disaster. This city had a number of genuinely powerful protectors, Joanne. Shamans, mostly. People who mitigated the world’s effects, both meteorological and anthropological.” A brief sad smile turned one corner of her mouth. “They were one of the reasons Seattle had a reputation as a good place to live.”
A space in my belly turned hollow and worried. “They all died, right? Hester and Jackson and…”
Pure surprise wiped Sonata’s sorrow away. “That’s right. You knew them? Roger and Adina and Sam?”
I sat again, suddenly weary. “I met them. I met them after they died.” They, as much as Coyote, had set me on a shaman’s path.
Sonata, who communed with the dead, didn’t even blink at that confession. Instead she said, “A few others left, after the murders. They were afraid, and that fear poisoned their ability to help the city, so maybe it was the right choice. But it left Seattle vulnerable. I thought we would have to simply work it out, that we’d eventually draw new talent back to us. But then I met you.”
“And you realized the new talent was here in a shiny incompetent package.”
Sonata pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t have put it that way. You’re not incompetent, merely…”
“Uneducated.” Really, not even I thought I was genuinely incompetent, not anymore. When push came to shove I had so far managed to get the job done, so I probably wasn’t actually incompetent. Inept, inexperienced, ill-equipped, yes, but those all had a little less sting than incompetency. “How can you tell I’m supposed to be the one who steps up? How can you tell I’m worth half a dozen other shamans?”
“You single-handedly destroyed the black cauldron.”
I wet my lips and caught Billy’s gaze. “That wasn’t technically me.”
To my surprise, he shook his head. “Sonata’s right, Joanie. That was pretty close to impossible. The cauldron was hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old, and imbued with enough magic that it essentially had a life of its own. You know what getting near it felt like.”
I did. It was seductive, calling me home to a promise of rest and peace. Not even gods were immune to its song. But I clung to a stubborn thread of denial. “Billy, I didn’t destroy it. You know that.”
“I know that over the cauldron’s whole history there are stories of people trying to break it. In all that time, you were the only one who pulled all the right elements to her so that it could be shattered. It wasn’t your sacrifice, but I think it was your presence as a nexus that made it possible.”
I wailed, “But what if I’d moved to Chattanooga?” and they both looked at me before Sonata laughed.
“Then perhaps the cauldron would have gone to Chattanooga. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you start wondering down those lines, Joanne. We can’t know what might have been.”
I thought of the alternate self whose life I’d seen glimpses of, and clamped my mouth shut on an I can. It hadn’t, after all, been my talent that let me see a dozen different timelines. “Okay. One more stupid question, and then I promise to go…” Save the world seemed a little melodramatic, so I went with “stop the killer,” and added, “somehow,” under my breath.
Out loud, I said, “Does every city have a group of shamans like Seattle did? People who try to protect the place?”
“Many do. There are…” Sonata sighed and went back to the counter, brewing the tea that had been abandoned. “There are both more and fewer shamans, or adepts of any kind, than there have ever been, Joanne. More, because there are more people than ever before. Fewer, because…”
“Because there are more people than ever before.” I mooshed a hand over my face. “Five hundred years ago there’d have been a shaman in every tribe, maybe. One person for a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, individuals. Now there’re billions of people, and any given shaman has tens of thousands to tend to. Right?”
“In essence.”
I blew a raspberry. “Why aren’t there more…adepts?” I liked that word better than “magic users”, probably because people could be adept at lots of things and I could at least pretend I wasn’t talking about the impossible as if it were ordinary. The whole train of thought led me to snort at my own question before anyone had time to answer. “Like Joanne the Unbeliever has to ask.”
“It’s partly an artifact of the era,” Sonata agreed, then glanced at Billy, who looked uncomfortable. I sat up straighter, ping-ponging my gaze between them, and Sonata sighed again. “The last twelve months have been hard on the magic world, Joanne. More of us have died than usual. It’s like a catalyst was set.”
Oh, God. I said, “Was that catalyst me?” in a small voice, and to my undying relief, Sonata’s frown turned into a quick shake of her head.
“I don’t think so. I could be wrong,” she amended hastily, “but you strike me as the response, Joanne. When I look at you I see the answer to, not the start of, the troubles.”
The hollow place in my belly came back. My brain disengaged from my mouth and went distant, surprised to hear the question I voiced: “Do you know an Irish woman called Sheila MacNamarra?”
Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. She was an…adept. As far as I can tell, she spent her whole life fighting—” I broke off, looking for a less dramatic phrase than what leaped to mind, then shrugged and used it anyway. “Fighting the forces of darkness. She went up against the Master, the one who created the cauldron. More than once, even. I think that was sort of what she…did.”
Recognition woke in Sonata’s eyes. “The Irish mage. I know of her. I didn’t know her name.”
My heart leaped and a fist closed around it all at once, sending a painful jolt through my chest. “You’ve heard of her? What do you know about her?”
Because what I knew about Sheila MacNamarra was embarrassingly limited. She liked Altoids; that was almost the sum total of what I’d learned about her in four months of traveling at her side. It was only after she died that I discovered she was an adept of no small talent, and that she’d spent her life fighting against—to put it extravagantly but accurately—the forces of darkness.
It was only after she died that I learned how far she’d gone to protect me.
Sonata was nodding. “I know of her as a power, yes. We don’t use names often, Joanne. You should know that by now. And mages are by their nature reclusive. As far as I know, no one’s seen the Irish mage outside of her homeland in decades. I’ve never even heard of anyone going to study with her, which is a little unusual. I don’t know if she has any protégés.”
“One,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”
It would have taken a dolt to miss the implications, and while Sonata was a bit of a long-haired hippy freak, she was by no means stupid. She sharpened her gaze on me, eyebrows shooting up again, this time making a question all of their own.
“She was my mother,” I said tiredly, “and she died a year ago tomorrow.”
I didn’t typically think of myself as an emotional lightweight. I didn’t tear up at Hallmark commercials, although extreme vehicle makeover shows could get me. I had a secret stash of romance novels that didn’t fit my girl-mechanic image, but even when they got angsty I didn’t sniffle over them. I had not, in fact, cried when my mother died. I’d barely known her, and I hadn’t liked her very much. But for some reason my throat got painfully tight and my nose stuffed up as I made my announcement.
Billy and Sonata were conspicuously silent, for which I was grateful. After a couple deep breaths I regained enough equilibrium to say, “She gave me to my dad when I was just a baby, because she had to keep fighting the Master.” That was so inaccurate as to be an outright lie, but I didn’t feel like getting into the complex time-slip that had happened both nine months and almost thirty years ago in my personal timeline. “Would her death be enough to start messing up the balance? Was she that big a gun?”
Sonata’s eyes were dark. “What’s your calling, Joanne? What are you, in adept terms? What are we?”
“Me? I’m a shaman. You two are mediums. Melinda’s, I don’t know, a witch or something. Why?”
“And what do you suppose a mage is?”
“I don’t know. It’s a wizard. A sorc…” Except sorcerer, in my experience, connotated bad guy, and I was pretty damned sure Sheila MacNamarra hadn’t been a bad guy. I fell silent, staring at Sonata and working through the rankings I was aware of.
Mage didn’t fit anywhere on the scale. It suggested major mojo, skills on a level that beggared the rest of us. Which, from what little I’d seen, summed up my mother nicely. I said, “Phenomenal cosmic powers?” in a small voice.
Sonata nodded. “If she’s dead, then our side has lost a great warrior.”
I snorted loudly enough to make my ears pop. “Our side? So far I haven’t seen a lot of us versus them, Sonata. I’ve mostly seen badly screwed-up people in need of help.” Where “people” sometimes meant “gods of unimaginable power,” but who was counting?
“And yet you just said your mother spent her life engaged in battle against this ‘Master.’ Is he not the other side?”
Anybody who commanded banshees—or anything else—to ritual murder in order to feed on the blood and souls of the dead was, I had to admit, pretty much inherently on the other side of where I stood. “All right, point taken. So her death could’ve been the catalyst. Or a catalyst.” I didn’t like the idea of that much hanging on my mother’s life.
She probably hadn’t liked the idea, either.
I put my face in my hands. “Basically what you’re telling me is that never mind the cannibal, I have much larger problems looming. Only I can’t never mind the cannibal, so I’m just going to have to figure out a way to make it all work. Which is what I’ve been doing all along.”
God, I missed Coyote. He was only moderately helpful, mostly by way of kicking me in the ass until I did, in fact, figure it out myself, but having him there to kick my ass would have made me feel a lot better. I exhaled into my palms, then looked up at Billy. “Okay. Sonata was the likable idea. Now for the one you’re going to hate.”
He sighed. “All right. What do I hate?”
I put on what I hoped was a convincing, cheerful smile. “I’m going to use myself as bait.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Billy said, “Excuse us,” and hustled me out of Sonata’s house so fast it could have been magic. I warded off his outrage with raised palms, or tried to, and opted to explain rather than wait for him to stop telling me what a bad idea it was.
It wasn’t that I thought it was a particularly great idea myself. It was just better than setting somebody else out as bait, which argument didn’t slow Billy down at all. “Look, I’m going to head up to the Space Needle and have a look around the city first,” I said in my best reasonable tone. “I’ll see if I can pull up any residue like I saw from Melinda’s circle—”
That, at least, got his attention. “You saw something? Why the hell didn’t you say so earlier?”
“Because I took a cab from your house to the coroner’s instead of you picking me up, and I forgot while we were examining decomposing bodies and talking to mediums, okay? I’m sorry.” Billy had the grace to look apologetic, and I charged onward. “Anyway, yes, I saw residue from Mel’s circle, so I thought I could at least try picking up someone else’s. If we’re lucky it’ll turn out there’s some lunatic controlling a…” I had no idea what, really. A cannibal, clearly, but beyond that I didn’t know. “A flesh-eating monster. And then we can bag the guy and be done.”
Billy gave me a look that said when have we ever been lucky? and I shrugged it off. “And if that doesn’t work, then I’ll try the bait thing.”
“Need I point out that this thing is going after outdoorsy types, which you’re not?”
It was true. I was more the grease monkey type. I said, “Still,” like I’d presented that comment aloud, then leaned heavily on the hood of his minivan. “Ravenna Park isn’t exactly a great outdoors kind of landscape, either, Billy.”
“You know, I’m pretty sure I hate where this is going, too.”
“She was found in Ravenna Park. She lived in my apartment building. What if—”
“I seriously doubt it.”
A tiny rush of relieved laughter escaped me. “You didn’t let me finish.”
“You were going to say, what if this thing that eats souls was after you. What if it’s circling around to you, and Karin Newcomb just got in the way. Joanne, do you know any of the others who died? Is there any kind of connection at all?”
“No….” Even I knew the apartment building connection was tenuous, but my life had been one unpleasant coincidence after another all year long. Stranger things could, and had, happened.
“Then don’t do that to yourself. This is bad enough as it is.”
“On the other hand, if it’s not coincidence,” which I really wanted it to be, “I’d make good bait. So unless you’ve got a better idea, let’s try scoping out the city from the Needle, and then…” I shrugged. “Then we’ll see.”
Billy ground his teeth, got in the minivan, and drove us to the Space Needle. Normally he might’ve proposed we do something crazy like actual detective work, but there were about a hundred cops on the cannibal case and so far no one had gotten a break. Every crime scene had been utterly bereft of DNA evidence. We hadn’t been able to pinpoint an area the killer might be in, because the victims were from all over the city. In my grumpier moments I suspected our cannibal had watched too many crime shows and knew better than to hunt in a six-block radius around his home. Or a six-mile radius, for that matter.
The total lack of DNA was part of why Morrison had called Billy and me in. It wasn’t like chewed meat could be licked clean, and there were streaks of blood on the bodies, if not puddles under them, which suggested they hadn’t been thoroughly washed before being dumped. But even if they had been washed, even in the unlikely event that someone could scrub every last bit of their own genetic markers out of the body they’d just snacked on, that would’ve left residue, too. The absolute nothing was impossible, and impossible was supposed to be our department.
Billy, who would’ve scolded me for doing the same thing, came down Broad Street, parked the van in a taxi zone about a hundred feet from the Needle’s foot and hung a police vehicle tag in it. We waved our badges at security and hopped the “only going to the restaurant, don’t need the tour guide” elevator to the fiftieth floor. It wasn’t as much fun, but it was faster.
The police badges also meant we didn’t have to buy the restaurant’s overpriced lunch, although my stomach rumbled when the scent of food hit my nostrils. “Think we can expense it to the department?”
“I’m writing off filling up the minivan’s tank. Might as well try expensing filling up mine.” We got a table at the room’s outer edge and ordered lunch while I turned the Sight on the city.
It looked healthier than it had the last time I’d done this. Then there’d been a malaise spreading over Seattle, one that eventually awakened the dead. Today there was nothing so appalling, and, as the room turned and I drifted through the surreal, brilliant colors of the shamanic world, I thought there were worse ways to spend a lunch hour. Maybe I could come up here once a week to make sure all was well, though the pragmatic part of me suggested I’d better get an annual pass if I wanted to do that. They’d probably notice if I kept dropping by and cheating my way in with a police badge.
Billy, diffidently, asked, “Getting anything?”
I shook off my musings enough to answer. Our seats had rotated far enough to the north that I could now see down Aurora Avenue. Billy’s house, off to the west, lit up with the remains of the circle Melinda’d drawn for me. I glanced farther east, toward Lake Washington, and caught a glimmer of brightness at the corner of my eye. “Nothing I don’t recognize. I can see your house, but it’s almost straight on to us now. I might need line of sight to really pick things up.”
“You didn’t with the cauldron.”
“The cauldron was spilling gook all over the city,” I said irritably. “I’ve never tried looking for the remnants of somebody’s power before. I can see a glimmer over at Matthews Beach, but I—oh. I guess I don’t have to wait for the restaurant to turn that far before I get a straight look at it, huh?” Embarrassed, I got up and walked around the restaurant until I could see the lake.
Matthews Beach was where the thunderbird had fallen six months ago, and where my prize idiocy had torn the landscape into a new shape. There was a waterfall there now, and almost no one in Seattle remembered how it got its name. Some of those who did, though—people who belonged, like it or not, to Magic Seattle, like me and Billy—came together there daily, greeting the sunrise, waking the world and generally pouring goodwill and power into a place they saw as mystically significant.
The result was a glow that beggared the light from the Holliday’s home. It was like a miniature nuclear warhead had gone off, that much purity of white. I rubbed one eye and went back to the table. “I can definitely see power spots if I’m looking for them. Thunderbird Falls is brimming over. It kind of makes me wonder how things can get out of kilter here, if there’s that much basically positive energy being poured out.”
“Watched the news lately?”
I sagged and didn’t even perk up when the waitress brought my onion-and-cheese-tart appetizer. Hey, if I was expensing the meal, I figured I should enjoy it. And if I wasn’t able to expense it, I’d definitely better enjoy it. “Yeah. It’s all Laurie Corvallis, Talking Head, Spreading the Bad Word. Why doesn’t anybody ever report on the good stuff?”
“Disaster’s good for the oligarchy. Ha,” Billy said to my goggle-eyes. “Fair’s fair. You pull out ‘exsanguinate,’ I pull out ‘oligarchy.’”
“I’m in awe. There’s nothing sexier than a guy with a big vocabulary. Don’t tell your wife I said that.” I glanced back at the view, searching for telltale shimmers of power. There were flashes here and there, tiny bright spots that didn’t have enough strength to hold my attention, much less to represent a power circle. “I wonder…”
My gaze drifted back to the Hollidays’ distant house. The power emanating there was the good kind, full of life, rather than anything that would harness a killer and send it to do its bidding. I’d never looked for something darker. “Ritual murder probably leaves a different kind of mark than happy fluffy-bunny magic, huh?” I held my breath a moment, working myself up to it, then reached for the magic inside me.
I’d been depending on auras, and on the brilliant light and dark of a world viewed through shamanistic eyes. There was no healing component to that, nothing that required a wakening of the particular magic I commanded. But that magic was life-magic, so attuned to preservation and healing that the one time I’d used it as a weapon against a living thing, it had nearly wiped me out. It rebelled against death, and in so doing, might help me See places in Seattle where darkness had prevailed.
After one glance, I wished I’d never thought of it.
A couple hundred people died every year in Seattle through homicide or suicide. I knew the statistics; I’d worked some of the cases. But I’d never thought about what kind of mark that might leave on the psychic landscape, or how long it might last. There were jagged spots all over the place, far more than could be accounted for over the course of a single year. Dizziness caught me and I widened my eyes, trying to See more clearly. Trying, mostly, to See when the world itself started to heal from the wounds cut in it by violent deaths. There were places where healing was obviously happening, the mark of murder fading but not yet gone, but from the sheer number of still-vicious slashes, recovery time looked to be in the decades or even centuries, rather than months or years. My stomach seized up, making me regret the onion tart appetizer, and I put my hand on the curved window in front of me, ostensibly for balance.
Really, though, the greater part of me was trying to reach through the glass into the city. I wanted to soothe the damage it had taken; the damage the dead themselves felt, though it was much too late for that. Billy said, “Joanie?” worriedly, and I dredged up a wan smile to accompany a whispered, “It’s so sad.”
Murders looked different from suicides. I stared across the city, both fascinated and horrified that I could tell the difference. They all bled black and red and spilled out to leave dark gashes in the lives around them, but murders had an external violence to them, leaving behind a spray that reminded me of a blood spatter. Suicides were more internal, wrapped up tight with sharp edges pointing inward. Nauseated, I jerked toward the north, searching for the Quinleys’ home.
Its mark was no worse than any of the other murders I’d just studied. Incomprehension swam between my ears, then cleared up as I struggled to link thoughts through the bleak chaos of the dead’s world.
Rachel and David Quinley hadn’t died in ritual murder. They’d just been slaughtered by a madman who wanted to steal their daughter. A warning had been left written in their blood, but sick as that was, it wasn’t ritualized. My hand turned to a fist against the glass, then dropped to my side. I could think—dismayingly—of at least three places where actual ritual murder had been attempted or achieved, and one of them was still in my line of sight: Billy’s home.
I badly did not want to see what Faye Kirkland’s death looked like, splashed across Billy’s lawn. On the other hand, maybe recognizing it would give me a hint as to how to heal that space a little faster, so there were no malingering effects to distress his family. I actually held my breath, trying to pull the bright shamanistic world into conjunction with the darker, murderous version I was looking at now. A headache spiked in my right eye as two opposing world views fought for domination, then finally settled down like a cat and dog determined to ignore each other. The Hollidays’ home came into focus, a beacon in the dark.
For long seconds I wasn’t at all sure I was actually seeing their house, because all I really Saw was the brightness, same as I’d seen earlier. Faye’s death came into slow focus, but it was a shadow, with nothing of the strength or horror I expected it to have. I felt Melinda there, full of love and confidence and determination. Full of serenity, greater by a considerable margin than the terrible things that had happened that summer.
Relief and delight bubbled in my chest and made my eyes sting enough to threaten the Sight. Apparently a deliberate application of positive energy could make a difference, which gave me an uplifting spark of hope for the whole wide world. “Your wife is something else, you know that, Billy?”
“Yeah,” he said with a note of pride that fell just short of smug. “Yeah, I do.”
Buoyed by the knowledge that it was possible to fight back against marks left by abominations, I turned toward the next-nearest site of ritual murder that I knew about: Woodland Park.
Dark power sledgehammered me alongside the skull.
I dropped into my chair like I’d had my strings cut. Nausea rose up, hurrying to find an escape route, and I ducked my head between my knees, classic crash position as I gasped for air. Billy’s worried “Joanie?” was louder this time, and I barely managed to get fingertips above the table’s edge to give him a semi-reassuring wave.
“I’m okay. I’m…” I fumbled for my glass of water and took a few tiny sips while still in crash position, which wasn’t the easiest of tasks. “Oogh. Okay. I’m…” I’d said that once already. I got my elbow onto the table and cranked myself up inch by inch, neck stiff as I made myself peek outside again.
Three points of a diamond raged with malevolence, pouring sick purple-gray power into the sky. I couldn’t imagine what kind of whammy that field would’ve had if the last murder, the last point on the diamond, had been completed. As it was, if I hadn’t been heartened by what the Hollidays had accomplished just before looking at the diamond, I would’ve been down for the count. It was so astonishingly strong and so utterly desolate that I had no idea how I’d failed to notice it earlier.
Two answers came to mind: one, I hadn’t been looking for it, and two, on a subconscious level I suspected I’d been trying hard to ignore it. Seeing the world in shades of sick and well was supposed to be my purview, but right here, right now, I was just barely able to handle it. Six months ago it would’ve sent me running for the hills.
Billy came around the table and caught my hand. His fingers felt scalding, which slowly resolved itself into an awareness that mine were icy. “You all right, Joanie?”
“All right” covered a host of sins. I nodded, pressed my eyes closed and nodded again. “Yeah. I just got…an idea of what I should be looking for.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
An uncomfortable shuffle behind us made us both turn to find our waitress, plates in hand, looking concerned. “Is everything okay? Did the tart not agree with you?”
Visions of consorting with saucily-dressed women over lunch rose unbidden. I fought back the urge to admit that they weren’t really my type, instead mumbling, “No, no, it was fine, sorry, I…”
Billy stood up with a smile. “Banged her knee on the table, you know that nervy place doctors hit with the hammer? Only worse. She’s fine. Lunch looks great.”
Relieved, the waitress put our food on the table and scurried off. I worked my way to sitting and looked sadly at my food. “I probably shouldn’t eat if I’m doing all this vision stuff. You’re a good liar.”
“I’m a very good liar,” Billy corrected, “and you’re not doing quest work here. Even if you were, you should see yourself, Walker. You look like a ghost. Eat. If we have to wait a couple hours to look at the city again, so be it.” He nodded at my plate and repeated, “Eat.”
He was the senior partner in this relationship. Who was I to argue? Besides, I felt like I’d been run over, and food sounded like the first step to recovering. I bent over my lunch and shoveled it in like a prisoner.
Twenty minutes of intense eating and the savoring of an incredible chocolate concoction that should have been called “I’ll do anything the chef says as long as he lets me have another one of these things” later, I nerved myself up to take another look at the city. The double vision of life and death settled more easily this time, suggesting that I was probably supposed to be able to do something like this. Still, I avoided looking toward the Woodland baseball park. It would’ve been a shame to lose that lunch.
We’d rotated around so we were looking over the south of the city. There were all the marks of homicide and suicide and car wrecks—those several hundred deaths a year on Seattle roads made a real mess of the streets—but nothing like the hideous power of the banshee’s murder site. I knew where another one should be, and got up to walk widdershins around the restaurant, watching for the black spike that should be the Museum of Cultural Arts.
It was nothing like as nasty as Woodland Park, though Jason Chan’s death throbbed in the air. He’d died to set the black cauldron free, his blood smeared around it to break binding spells, but it was less ritualized than the banshee’s work had been. That, and there was only one of him, to the three dead girls in the park.
I was just starting to think there was nothing to find, no power circle or controlling factor, when black light flared at the Troll Bridge.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tuesday, December 20, 12:13 P.M.
I forgot about the bill and ran for the elevator, struggling to get my cell phone out of my pocket as I went. Billy shouted after me, then swore and hurried to pay the bill as I hopped around, waiting impatiently on both the elevator and the phone.
The phone came through first, Morrison sounding unusually gruff, which was saying something. “What do you want, Walker?”
“Get somebody over to the Fremont Troll right now. I don’t know what I just saw, but it was something. Something bad. Billy and I are on our way, but we’re at the Seattle Center and traffic’s going to be impossible.”
Morrison went silent and the elevator dinged. I rushed in the instant the doors were open wide enough to let me. Billy finished dealing with the check and hurried after me, but not fast enough. By the time he joined me in the elevator I was jittering around like a wind-up toy. Morrison came back to the phone, gruffer yet. “I’ve got a car on the way. Call me the minute you know something, Walker.”
“You’re a good man, Charlie Brown.” I hung up before I heard Morrison’s response to that, and Billy folded his arms and gave me a look that said “Well?” as the elevator made its way down six hundred feet.
“I don’t know. I saw something. It looked bad.” I had the gut-deep feeling I’d just witnessed a murder, and I was weirdly excited about it. I mean, not that I wanted to be seeing murder done at a distance, but it was a brand-new and interesting aspect to my powers. It seemed like it could do some good if I could figure out how to harness it.
“Is it our guy?”
“I don’t know. The troll’s even less rustic than Ravenna Park. We’re just going to have to go find out. Do you have a siren for the minivan?”
“Yeah, but if you tell my kids, no one will ever find the body.”
I made a vague attempt at a Scout’s oath salute, and we ran for the car the moment the elevator disgorged us.
It took eight minutes to get to the troll. Short of teleporting we couldn’t have gotten there faster, but I still leaned into the seat belt like I was at the races and my willpower alone could get my horse across the finish line first. Well, except any races I’d go to would be NASCAR rather than Kentucky Derby, but the sentiment was solid.
The Fremont Troll was one of Seattle’s more charming landmarks, as far as I was concerned. He was a concrete monster beneath the Aurora Avenue North bridge—they’d even renamed the road Troll Avenue in his honor—and he had a real Volkswagen Bug in one hand, like he’d just grabbed it from the bridge above. People came to climb and play on him regularly, and every Halloween the locals threw a party at him. I’d never gotten around to going, and now with my exciting new power set, I was sort of afraid to. He was only concrete and rebar, but that was in the Middle World, the one we lived in day-to-day. I wasn’t quite sure what would happen if somebody with shamanic gifts came by on a night when the world walls were thin.
Two patrol cars and a paramedic ambulance had gotten to the scene before us. I knew one of the cops—Ray Campbell, a six-foot-tall bodybuilder squished into a five-foot-five body. He’d been a patrol cop for years, never interested in moving up to detective or even to a command position. “No chance to bust balls,” he’d explained to me once. Busting balls was Ray’s favorite expression and possibly his favorite pastime, and I was hardly going to argue with him about when and where the most opportune moments to do so came along.
He turned toward us with a determined expression that said “I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave now” before it faded into a grimaced greeting. “Hey, Walker, Holliday. Don’t know why the captain sent us down here, but it was a good call. She’s not dead yet.”
Billy and I said, “Yet?” together, then traded off on other questions like, “Is she going to be?” and “What happened?” and “Can I help?”
That last was me, edging toward the ambulance. The paramedics no doubt had it under control, but healing magic made my palms itch with the desire to do something.
Ray looked back and forth between us, then folded his arms over his broad chest. “You know how bums hole up down here. Looks like a fight over some booze got out of hand, and she got stabbed with a broken bottle. She oughta be dead. If we hadn’t gotten here she would be. Stay out of it, Walker. You don’t want to give the Captain anything else to explain.”
I did a fine job of freezing like a nervous rodent before my shoulders slumped and I shifted back toward Billy. Ray looked like he’d gone up against a wrecking ball and lost, but he was plenty smart. He nodded firmly once I got back to where I’d started, and cheer crept across his face. “Somebody’ll have blood on their hands, or know who does. Just gotta bust a few balls to find out who. Probably don’t need you two down here, if you want to head back up to the station.”
“Okay. Good. That’s great. I mean, it is. It’s great. I’m glad she’s not dead.” And I was. I’d just been hoping we’d gotten a lucky break, and happened on our cannibal in the middle of chewing on someone. I got on my phone and called Morrison, feeling like quite the sad sack as I offered, “All it was was a mugging over some booze. A woman got stabbed, but the paramedics got here in time, so it looks like she’s going to be all right.”
“All?” Morrison said incredulously. “You just saw an aggravated assault from halfway across the city and saved somebody’s life, and all it rates is an all?”
When he put it that way it seemed like more of an accomplishment. I cleared my throat uncomfortably, and Morrison said, “Good job, Walker,” and hung up the phone to leave me standing next to a giant concrete troll. I stared up at his hubcap eye, and thought if he winked it wouldn’t be any more startling than my boss telling me I’d done well.
He didn’t wink, and after a minute I reeled back toward the minivan. Ray and the others had this one under control; no need for the Paranormal Pair to hang around getting in the way of a perfectly ordinary assault investigation. “I think this puts us back at Joanne Walker as bait. Unless you’ve come up with something better.”
Billy said, “I think I have,” and a Channel Two news van came whipping down the road and screeched to a halt in front of the ambulance.
Laurie Corvallis jumped out of the van like she was on the verge of a huge news story. To the driver’s credit, he pulled the van back out of the paramedics’ drive path before dragging a camera out and following Laurie. She was already halfway to where I was struggling to yank the minivan’s door open. Billy had locked it. Very safe of him. Annoying, but safe. I jerked at the handle, then put my back against the vehicle like I had enemies approaching from all sides. “What in God’s na—”
Wrong approach. I thrust my jaw out, trying to rewrite my internal dialogue, and tried a second time. “Can I help you with something, Ms. Corvallis?”
“Just going where the stories are, Detective Walker. Do we have another cannibal victim here?” Her blue eyes were eager in much the same way a piranha’s were. I wondered why I kept comparing her to carnivorous fish.
“We have a completely unrelated incident here. Go away.” I winced. “I mean, sorry you came out for nothing.”
“Now, Detective.” Corvallis’s voice went from eager to warm, even condescending, like we were old friends and I was being silly over something unimportant. “I saw how you went tearing out of the Seattle Center. Do you really expect me to believe it’s over nothing?”
“You were following me?”
Her cameraman got the camera up and running as I asked, and I found myself suddenly blinking into its brilliant light. It was a gray Seattle day already, and under the bridge it bordered on dark, but the floodlight seemed like overkill. I shielded my eyes with one hand and squinted toward the camera guy. “I fed you a burger and fries this summer. Is that enough of a bribe to get you to turn that thing off if I ask you to?”
He gave me a bright smile. “Maybe once.”
“Right.” I didn’t ask, and his grin broadened. Corvallis gave him a dirty look and he wiped the smile away, but he winked when she turned back to me.
“To answer your question, yes, I was following you. I think you’re where the action is, Detective.”
Billy, on the far side of the minivan, snorted over the clunk of the doors finally unlocking. “You’ve obviously never checked her social calendar, then.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Want me to?” Ray stumped over to us, looking Corvallis up and down with an expression that lay between lascivious and threatening. I had a sudden vision of him asking me if she needed her balls busted while the cameraman was filming, and blurted, “This is Ray Campbell, the officer on this case. He’s the man you’ll want to talk to, Ms. Corvallis. Thanks for your interest. I’m sure your superiors are eager for an in-depth report on the plight of the homeless in Seattle. We all need our social awareness raised.”
I pulled the door open and fell into the seat, hauling my legs up in my haste to escape. Ray planted himself front and center between the minivan and Corvallis, and she gave me a daggered glare over his shoulder before putting on a reporter-playing-nice smile and stuck her microphone in Ray’s face. Billy hopped into his side and closed the door behind him. “That woman’s going to get you in trouble someday.”
“You mean more trouble than the Seattle Slaughterer thing this morning?” I put my seat belt on and tried not to look over my shoulder as we left the scene a few seconds behind the ambulance. “I know. Worse, though, she’s going to get herself in trouble. Look, this whole Magic Seattle thing, the whole world of the other and all that. How do you keep people from getting in over their heads and getting hurt?”
“Lobotomization.” Billy grinned at my expression. “You can’t keep people from getting hurt, Joanie. You can warn them, but somebody like Corvallis isn’t likely to leave the hunt unless something throws her off the scent. You’re doing a good job of leaving a scent.” He thumped his hand against the steering wheel and muttered, “That analogy might’ve gotten out of control.”
I laughed. “You think?” My humor slipped away. “I just don’t want people getting hurt on my account.”
“Laurie Corvallis won’t get hurt on your account. She’ll get hurt on the story’s account, but never on yours.” He shook his head. “We do the best we can. You did good today. You just saved somebody’s life. That’s about all we can ask for.”
“That and a break on the cannibal case.”
Billy eyed me. “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, there, Joanne. You just pulled off a miracle. What’s the problem?”
I rubbed my thumb over my palm, then cracked my knuckles, feeling like I was trying to discharge the healing power that had sprung to life. “I don’t know. I wanted that to be our cannibal.”
“So did I, but come on, Walker. What’s it take to make you happy? First you don’t want to be a shaman, now you’re hitting it out of the park and you’re not satisfied because it’s a different ball than the one you were watching? Give yourself a little credit.”
“Okay, okay, I’m happy, I’m happy!” I wrinkled my nose at the traffic and said, more quietly, “I’m glad she’s alive, Billy, and maybe you’re right. Maybe I should be elated. It just feels like in the grand scheme of things this is what I should be doing all the time, so it doesn’t feel like…enough.” By the time I got to the end of that, I was smiling again, ruefully. “I need some serious work on my perspective, don’t I?”
“You sure as hell do.”
“Arright.” A little bubble of delight burst inside me, like that healing power had figured out what to do with itself after all. I’d saved somebody. That was, in fact, pretty cool. Good thing I had people like Morrison and Billy around to beat that into my head. “Okay. Can we head back up to the Needle? We kind of bolted out of there, and I can’t think of anywhere better for a perspective adjustment.”
It wasn’t perspective I was after so much as trying to map out Seattle’s hot and cold spots, magically speaking. The good news was, our brief dash to the Troll had given me enough time to digest lunch. Turning the in-depth Sight back on didn’t upset my tummy again. Triumphant, I ordered us each another one of the amazing chocolate desserts. Billy pulled his cell phone out and sat down to wait for them while I took a slow meander around the restaurant.
I wanted my city to be a bastion of light and happiness. What I could See, with the initial shock of looking into darkness reduced, was that it looked pretty well-balanced. It was no shining city upon a hill, but neither was it one drawn into despair. Pockets of brilliance matched patches of darkness closely enough that I actually let go a sigh of relief. Sonata’s concern about the city, maybe the world, being pulled out of whack was very likely a valid one, but at least it wasn’t going to all come tumbling down tomorrow. Reassured, I turned my focus on Ravenna Park, where Karin Newcomb had been found that morning.
Someone or something mystical had dumped her there. It had left ice-cold marks on the earth. It had to have left some kind of trail. If I thought it with enough determination, maybe it would be true.
Apparently I wasn’t thinking hard enough. Either that or I’d wiped away any trace when I’d pressed my hand into the cold tracks the thing had left, because there was barely even a streak of darkness where Newcomb’s body had been found. She hadn’t died there, and dead bodies evidently didn’t carry bleak marks of their own; only violent deaths did.
Good to know, but not at all helpful to me at the moment. I stood there a long time, gaze unfocused as I studied the highs and lows of passion and power within the city, but there were no trails leading in or out of anywhere we’d found a body. Our cannibal was a lot better at hiding his tracks than I was at following them. I felt like I was just a step too far behind, like I could track him if I could only catch up just a little more. I wished to hell I hadn’t flattened out the cold marks he’d left beside Karin Newcomb.
Next time. Next time I’d know better, but next time meant somebody else would already be dead.
Billy said, “Anything?” quietly from just behind me. I startled out of my reverie and blinked over my shoulder at him before shaking my head. He put his phone away and pointed a thumb at our table. “In that case, you might as well eat dessert before it melts. And then we’ll try my idea.”
“Your idea is to consign me to consumer hell?”
I balked in the doorway of an outdoors store, which was to say it sold outdoors equipment, not that it was outside. If it had actually been outside it might’ve been less overwhelming; there wouldn’t be three visible stories of canoes, bicycles, skis, winter gear, tents, campfire utensils, hiking boots and backpacks. And those were just the things I could recognize. There were hundreds of items within eyeshot that I simply had no name for, and no earthly idea what their use might be.
The whole place made my heart beat too fast, like it was actively dangerous. Grumpiness didn’t so much creep over me as bludgeon me, and I tried to back up, trusting the door was an escape route. “I don’t like shopping, Billy. Especially in giant warehouses filled with a million things I can’t possibly need.”
Sadly, the door was blocked by my partner, and made a lousy escape route after all. He prodded my spine to drive me forward, and I dragged my feet as I went. “What are we doing here? I guess if I’m going to go play bait I need equipment, but the department must have some.” That didn’t really seem very likely, now that I thought about it. “Or they could borrow it from Fish and Game, or something. I’m not spending eleven thousand dollars on setting a trap.”
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C.E. Murphy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: This next case is way out of her jurisdiction… Seattle police detective Joanne Walker started the year out mostly dead, and she’s ending it trying not to be consumed by evil. Literally. She’s proven she can handle the gods and the walking dead. But a cannibalistic serial killer? That’s more than even she bargained for. What’s worse, the brutal demon leaves no tracks.So, if Joanne is to stop its campaign of terror, she’ll have to hunt it where it lives: the Lower World, a shamanistic plane of magic and spirits. Trouble is, Joanne’s skills are no match for the dangers she’s about to face—and her on-the-job training could prove fatal to the people she’s sworn to protect….“Joanne remains an appealing protagonist.” —Publishers Weekly on Walking Dead