by C. E. Murphy
“If she got caught like Morrison did, how come he hasn’t reverted to human? How come she just turned back into a wolf? I don’t think she’s a victim of anything, Walker. I think she’s your killer.”
I stopped and flashed my light back to eyeball my partner. “Come on, Billy. I can pop back and forth between shapes. In theory, anyway. Probably. I bet I can. With practice.”
“With practice! You just said Morrison was caught. You can’t have it both ways, Walker. Either somebody knows what they’re doing or they don’t.”
“So maybe she’s—” I couldn’t think of what she might be, since I knew she wasn’t a shaman, but Billy cut across me, getting straight to the point.
“Somebody who ripped someone’s throat out?”
I stared at him, and Rita’s half-visible shadow behind him suggested, “Let’s argue about it somewhere else.”
I crawled forward again, light bouncing wildly off the closed-in walls—they were dirt, not brick; someone had dug this space out—and tried to come up with an explanation I liked with regards to Tia. By the time we got free of the tunnel, we were filthy and I was no closer to an answer.
There were, as some small favor, dirty wolf tracks crossing the small room we’d entered, which told us which of the two doors—I used the word advisedly—to choose. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been this far out.” Rita looked up anyway, like the ceiling might offer answers. “I think we’re getting out of downtown by now. We’ve come a long ways.”
“Then we must be running out of Underground, right? She couldn’t have gone far.” Determined, I triggered the Sight again, baring my teeth against the now-expected blinding whiteness. It flared without giving me a single hint of the depth of viewpoint I knew it could, like it was unduly impressed with the weight and pressure of earth around us. I wasn’t certain, though, if it was the Sight itself at fault or if it was me, this time, since I was trying hard not to think about just how far underground we were. Knowing that, however, and shaking it loose were two entirely different things.
Rita said something, but I stopped where I was, in the middle of the room, suddenly irritated. I had had, even by my standards, a hell of an evening so far. Unlike my usual hellacious nights, though, this one had lined me up with what felt like an atom bomb’s worth of fresh power just waiting to be used. Just because my standard operating procedure had always been rushing in where angels feared to tread didn’t mean I actually had to do that now. “Billy, I need advice.”
He was at the door the tracks led through, scowling down it and clenching his hands like he wished he had his duty weapon with him. He stopped doing both, though, to gawk at me. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t remember asking him for advice even once in the whole roller coaster of the past year. I’d barely even asked Coyote for advice, though in my defense, I’d wanted to. He’d just been unavailable for a lot of that time. Which made Billy the better person to ask for advice, probably, since he’d pretty much been around since moment one of Joanne’s Shamanic Awakening.
And now that I had his attention I didn’t know where to begin. “You know how I told you about my real name?” I finally asked.
His eyebrows elevated, but he nodded and even flickered a smile. “Good thing, too. Caroline Siobhán’s a nicer name than Caroline Joanne.”
I smiled, too. “Yeah, it is.” The Hollidays had nearly named their baby girl after me, which had prompted a confession to the train wreck of a name I never used. That, and they’d gone through a lot, thanks to me, and also I was slowly, cautiously, trying to come clean with the people I was closest to. I’d spent more than a decade holding secrets and damage close to the chest, which was poisonous even for perfectly normal people, and which made a nasty mess of shamanic potential in someone like me. Shedding all the protective layers wasn’t easy—in fact, of my friends, Morrison was the only one who knew all the parts of the truth about my history, and that was because he’d gone digging on his own—but I was getting there.
And since shedding was exactly what had happened to me under Rattler’s influence tonight, it seemed like this was as good a time as any to start doing crazy things like asking for help and advice. “Earlier, after the truck hit me and my spirit animal put me back together, I had this weird idea. This idea that I’d been…reborn.”
Billy, who was no slouch in the detecting department, said, “As Siobhán Walkingstick.”
I nodded. “And you saw how wiped out I was. The power got stripped down to a kernel before the troupe danced me up some energy again. Right now I can’t See past the end of my nose because every time I try the magic just goes kerblewy. It’s too big. It’s—” I waved my hands in the air, not sure what I was trying to express. “More solid? Confident? I don’t know. Than it’s been. The rebirth, the dance, they did something to me.”
Billy, strongly, said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Right. Of course he did, and he hadn’t even gone through the shedding process I had. He’d just been nailed by what the dance troupe offered. I said, “Right,” out loud and itched my fingers through my hair. “So basically I need to know if this is a good time to completely change my modus operandi. If I should make a power circle, sit my ass down in the middle of this room, stop arguing for my own limitations and try to figure out how to make this whole huge-feeling power work for me. I might be able to, I don’t know. Map this place out in my head. See—” and I tried to invest the word with a capital S beyond it being the beginning of a sentence “—where Tia went, assuming I can get the goddamned Sight to work right at all. The point is, should I try things I’ve never tried because I’ve been too busy busting down doors, metaphorical guns blazing and hoping I don’t get my face eaten off?”
“I assume that’s the other option here.”
“Pretty much.”
Billy lost his grip on a solemn expression just briefly, and I tried not to snicker, myself. It was a frustrated sort of laughter, but it was also hard not to appreciate the mucked-up mindset which required asking if getting my face eaten off was perhaps not a good idea.
“How long would the map and search take?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know for certain it would work. I mean, it should, if I can control the fricking Sight. Mapping the layout shouldn’t be more than the magical equivalent of clearing all the rooms in a video game until the one big shiny spot left blinking on the screen is the bad guy.”
Billy gave me a look which suggested that if he did not have a twelve-year-old son, my analogy would have been utterly meaningless. I shrugged apologetically and went on. “Here’s the thing. Conceptually this is new to me, and I don’t know how long it would take. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe hours. The problem is I might be all topped up full of shiny strong brand-new ready-to-be-used magic right now, but I haven’t tested it yet. I’ve blacked out Seattle. I’ve caused earthquakes, for God’s sake. If this mapping idea goes wrong, if I pour out too much power down here beneath the city, I’m afraid I could send the whole downtown into Puget Sound.”
Billy stared at me a few long seconds, then, in a very steady even voice, said, “Let’s bust down some doors and get our faces eaten off.”
Tia leaped out of the wrong door and tried to eat our faces off.
She landed on Rita, who was smallest and closest, and who screamed like—well, like she was being crushed by a gigantic wolf. This time I reacted the way I should have when Patty Raleigh came after Billy: shields spun across the room, not just springing up around Rita so Tia’s enormous jaws snapped and skidded against them, but then slamming into the wolf, knocking it back. It was the most integrated defense-and-attack I’d ever pulled off, a hint of how my power was going to respond in familiar territory. Premature triumph bloomed in me, though at least for once I appreciated it was premature.
Tia whipped around behind the shield, snarling and searching for a way out. There wasn’t one: between Raleigh and Morrison in the past thirty-si
x hours, I at least had the sense to pin the shields up against the wall. “Rita, you okay?”
Her high-pitched, gibbered response indicated I’d asked a stupid question. Billy, though, gave her a brief once-over and reported, “She’s all right,” which I took to mean she hadn’t been bitten or otherwise scathed. I wasn’t sure anybody could be mentally all right after that, but one thing at a time. I inched toward the captured wolf, then, in a fit of brilliance, whispered a sword into my hand before a crisis demanded I have it.
The blade was a silver rapier, and I did mean silver, as in the precious metal, not just the color, that I’d taken off a god the very first day I’d been a shaman. The weapon had become part of my armament—I’d been taking fencing lessons for the past year so I could use it properly—but nobody in their right mind carried a four-foot-long rapier around Seattle. Most of the time it lived beneath my bed, where despite my utter lack of attention to it, it refused to tarnish. Neither did my necklace tarnish, now that I thought about it, so the maker they had in common had probably done something to the metal.
It was equally likely that its maker had invested it with the willingness to be called across a breach of space, since I didn’t think bending space was generally within a shaman’s purview. Whether it was my magic or its, though, the sword could be pulled from under my bed and into my hand from a range of up to tens of miles, maybe more, and that let me have it in my repertoire without garnering a reputation as a freak.
Well. Without garnering a reputation as a sword-carrying freak, anyway. I pointed the thing at the wolf as dramatically as I could, and with my best Errol Flynn sneer, demanded, “Show yourself!”
Wolves perhaps didn’t respond well to human language commands. She jumped at me, bounced off the shield and snarled again, showing impressively large canines. Big brave me shrieked like a little girl and cowered back a step before remembering I was the one with the sword, the shields and the human brain. In theory, I had the upper hand. “That’s not going to work. Look, I mostly want to know what happened to you. Were you at the dance concert last night? Did you accidentally get transformed during the shapeshifter dances?”
Truthfully, I doubted it. Billy’s point about the woman’s ability to shift freely made too much sense. Still, there was a passing chance that Tia was a victim, and there was some important law of the land about innocent until proven guilty. Maybe the fact that she remained a wolf now supported that: presumably an in-control human shapeshifter would switch to the form which would permit communication. My sword wavered a bit. I didn’t want to stab Tia.
With the unerring sense of a predator recognizing weakness, she leaped again. This time, though, she did transform, lupine body surging to human in a ripple that passed through my shields without a whisper of protest. Rita screamed, but before the leaping woman hit the floor she shifted a second time, front paws catching her weight. She wheeled toward the door she’d come from, and disappeared from sight in an instant.
Rita’s scream cut off in astonishment. Billy and I both took a few steps toward the door the wolf had exited through, then stopped, staring at one another. He didn’t have to ask: after a few seconds of slow brain-grinding, I said, “God damn it, she’s like the goddamned wendigo.”
Billy, who hadn’t been there for that, only elevated his eyebrows and waited. I transferred my sword to my left hand and rubbed my face until it burned with warmth. “Sort of like the wendigo, anyway. The shields don’t work very well on things that are pure or active magic, and the Lower World is all about the magic. Every time the wendigo went there, I lost my grip. And it could slip back and forth with out any effort, so basically it was like trying to catch a live fish with bare hands.”
“I thought the wendigo was…” Billy trailed off, obviously looking for the right phrasing. “Less human than that.”
“Yeah, no, it was. I don’t know what she is.” I did. I just didn’t want to say it, because there was no such thing as a werewolf. Why banshees and thunderbirds and spirit animals were okay and werewolves weren’t, I didn’t know, but I was determined that there should be no such thing as werewolves. They were too Hollywood, or something. “It’s just the principle’s the same. The shields don’t work well on pure magic, and if shapeshifting between one form and another isn’t pure magic, I don’t know what is.”
Rita, who had a more practical grasp on the situation, said, “Is she going to come back?” which made us all edge into the center of the room, creating a back-to-back tri angle. Rita scooped up the flashlight I’d dropped when I’d called the sword and shone her two lights at both doors, then twisted a little to shine one of them at me. “You have a sword.”
It was obviously a question. It was equally obvious that an explanation would take all night, so I shrugged. “It’s a magic sword.”
“People,” Rita said, sounding very much like I had not all that long ago, “don’t have magic swords.”
“They don’t shapeshift into wolves, either,” I pointed out as nicely as I could. Billy coughed suddenly, and I suspected I’d sounded a lot like he had once upon a time, tolerating my utter refusal to believe what he knew was true. I said, “Sorry,” to him, and his cough turned into a guffaw.
“Water under the bridge, Joanie. Water under the bridge. Are we going to stand here all night waiting to see if she comes back?”
It sounded like a good plan to me, but it wasn’t actually going to get the job done. “Just give me a minute to at least be damned good and sure she’s not lurking around the corner.”
“Be my guest.”
The Sight flashed on, a burst of white that unexpectedly faded into normality. Well, normality in terms of being able to See beyond the physical walls of the world. I didn’t know if it was necessity forcing me to get my act together, or if I was adjusting to the new power level, but either way, the walls around us turned a shadowy gray-green. Most buildings blazed green, a sentry color of certainty in their duty, but these ones were too old and neglected; they’d forgotten their purpose. I felt sorry for them, and like my emotional state affected my magic, white surged up again. I said “Stop that” aloud to myself, and hauled my emotions into as steady a line as I could get them.
The doors on either side of us led into alleys that looped around, explaining how the wolf had come at us so easily from the evidently-wrong direction. Another path led away from that looped hall, and I saw a rush-and-tumble maze of twisty little passages, all alike, leading into stretches of underground that I suddenly, seriously doubted were Underground at all. “Seattle’s not built on a bunch of cave systems, is it?”
“No. It’s volcanic sediment and sandstones,” Billy said with utter confidence. Rita and I both turned to look at him and he spread his hands. “Robert just did a science fair project on Puget Sound geology. Why?”
I reeled the Sight back in and squinched my face up. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m seeing things. It just looks like this direction is riddled with caves and tunnels.”
After a long, cautious silence, Billy said, “It was a pretty big earthquake….”
“No. Absolutely not. No fricking way. I do not accept that as a possibility.” In order to prevent myself from considering it—because the idea had leaked into my mind, too, and I wanted it far, far away—I took my flashlight from Rita, whispered the sword back to its hiding place beneath my bed and boldly strode through the closest doorway.
Rita, following me, said, “Earthquake?” to Billy in an appropriately hushed voice, but there wasn’t anywhere I could escape overhearing her.
“Last July, remember the one that tore up Lake Washington and made Thunderbird Falls? That was Detective Walker.”
I muttered, “It was June, and I was having a bad day,” and bent forward as the passageway got lower. Rita took a breath like she wanted to ask a dozen questions, but restrained herself as I got down on hands and knees to continue forward. I was certain there was room: Tia, either in human or canine form, had fit through, and I was pretty sure
she didn’t outweigh me. “Look, I know she isn’t right in front of us, but once we get through here I want you to let me take point and you two stay back to back, okay? Rita, are you sure you even want to be here?”
“People have been brought through here recently, Detective. There are heel marks in the dirt, like they were dragged.”
I stopped and looked at the dirt under my hands, which was littered with paw prints and, indeed, drag marks. “Please tell me you’d noticed that, Billy.”
“Crawling behind two of you who are wiping out the marks? No. Good job, Rita. We owe you one.”
“We see a lot more than people think we do,” Rita said softly. “Just because you don’t see us…”
I said, “Remind me to hire you as my eyes and ears on the street when we get done with this,” and Rita breathed a smile behind me.
“Joanne,” Melinda Holliday said, loud and clear and inside my head, “we have a problem. The police have found Michael.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I bucked upright, smashed my head against the low ceiling, howled with outrage and came down again saying, “What the fuck?” mostly to the voice inside my head. “Melinda?”
“Melinda?” Billy looked around in alarm and I snapped a fist closed like I was snatching the sound from the air.
“Since when is your wife telepathic, Billy? Melinda? Melinda!” I finally tried Melinda? inside my head, and got startlement back in response. Melinda, what the fuck?
Impatience shot through her answer: “For heaven’s sake, Joanne, I don’t know how long I can maintain this. Wherever you are doesn’t have cell reception and this is important. Get somewhere you can call me before they decide to shoot Michael.”