by C. E. Murphy
They only wrapped around me, cool and uncomfortably inviting. I hadn’t seen a death aura before, and if I’d been asked, I’d have guessed it would be terrifying, an unknown slash of black and fear. This glimpse made me think the auras surrounding illness were worse; there was fight left in the sick, and what encompassed me now had moved far beyond that.
I backed up, uneasy with the accepting nature of the cauldron’s remnants. If its shadow took away the edges of pain and the sharpness of worry, the cauldron itself would be much more potent. If it offered that kind of peace to everyone, I didn’t think a living body diving in would be the charm that broke it apart. It’d be an easy suicide, climbing into that thing. I shuddered and took another step back.
With distance, and maybe with my rejection, the cauldron’s shadow lessened. The books and manuscript fragments burned away most of their murk, as though they’d been freed of the cauldron’s touch. They were gorgeous, ciphers standing out in gold against creamy backgrounds. I edged closer, peering at the display-case information to learn what was oldest, and turned to the piece—barely more than a sliver of parchment—to see what ancient knowledge looked like with the Sight. I had the idea that if I could hold my gaze just right, then a picture or an answer would leap out at me, like a magic-eye optical illusion.
For a while the gold cipher on the page simply wavered at me. Then it twinned, a scarlet streak racing through it, and dizziness made my eyes cross. The Sight vanished, and I clapped a hand over my face, muttering. Aside from turning the Sight off, that was basically what the magic-eye illusions did to me, too. I should’ve known better.
My cell phone buzzed and I slipped it free, glad of something real to focus on. Billy’s voice came over the line, exasperated but not surprised: “The security tapes have been looped. We’ve got nothing. Is forensics there yet?”
I looked toward the entryway, where the team was just moving in. “Yeah. Look, did you get anything?”
“We’ll talk about it in the car. You?”
A frown creased my forehead as I turned the Sight back on, looking toward the forensics team and the museum’s entrance. Wisps of black tar caught against the floor, minute smears I wouldn’t have seen if the cauldron hadn’t tried to draw me in. The forensics team walked over them, smearing their slight presence into even less, and I started to jog down the hall, cell phone still at my ear as I passed the team. A few seconds later I charged out the front door, Sight still blazing.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I think I did.”
CHAPTER 10
Seattle was built on myriad hills. We’d driven up a bunch of them to reach the museum, but I’d been too intent on getting inside to stop and appreciate the vista when we’d arrived.
Now it was marred. Smears of black spread out like contrails, as if the cauldron had been broken into pieces and dragged across the city. I doubted it: thieves bothering with a reputedly magic cauldron would presumably be after the magic, and wouldn’t risk breaking its power by taking it apart. That, and destroying a seventy-gallon wooden tank banded by iron would leave a bunch of debris behind, so either we had the world’s tidiest killer on hand, or the cauldron was still in one piece.
Which, judging from the way the trails of its death-mark were spreading, meant the city would eventually be cloaked in the stuff. It also meant tracking the cauldron wouldn’t be easy: there was no nice straight line from A to B for us to follow.
An idle thought crossed my mind: either the cauldron had left a trail of misery behind it as it traveled, or whoever was responsible for packing it up and moving it from one location to another had some kind of serious mojo going on. I said, “Remind me to talk to the shipping company,” into my phone, and could almost hear Billy’s puzzled look. “Never mind. Look, what I found isn’t necessarily helpful—”
“What is it?”
I heard his voice both in the phone and behind me, and turned around. He hung up and quirked an eyebrow. I glanced back at the death shroud expanding over the city. “The cauldron’s gone. I mean, we knew that, but it’s out in the city somewhere, and it’s not leaving an easy trail to follow. Either it’s been broken into pieces—”
“Not a chance.”
Billy’s confidence made me feel all proud for having sussed that out myself. “Yeah, I didn’t think so. The thing is…” I trailed off, putting thoughts together. Billy gave me about a minute before impatience started dancing through his aura in bright flashes. “Its aura’s so filled with death it leaves marks everywhere it goes. The display area back there is just a big black smear, with the Sight. I’m sure this place has got loading docks, that they don’t bring the exhibits in through the front door, so I know the cauldron’s gone out the front door. The floor looks like a kid’s been walking through tar.”
“But?”
I held my breath, eyeing Billy. Of everyone I knew, he was least likely to give me hell if what I was about to suggest didn’t work. “You, um. Want to try something?”
His eyebrow requirked itself. “Is this something that’ll get me in trouble with Mel?”
Laughter took some of my nerves away. “No. I read this thing about how to give somebody the Sight temporarily. I think it wouldn’t hurt for you to see what I do.”
“You want me to stand on your feet and look over your left shoulder?”
My jaw dropped. “How’d you know?” He knew because I was the kid at the back of the class. “Does it work?”
“I don’t know. Melinda can tap into auras, but she doesn’t have the Sight like you do. I’ve never known anybody who does.” He walked up and put his feet on mine, keeping his weight on his heels. “Let’s give it a shot.”
I put my hand on top of his head, which was part of the ritual I’d read about, and drew breath to chant the charm. “…this isn’t going to work.”
“Not with that attitu—”
“No, I mean, it didn’t actually say, but I’m pretty sure you can’t be touching the ground. I think you need to really stand on my feet.”
Billy looked down. “I’ll crush them.”
“That possibility did occur to me. Will you please stand on them before somebody comes out here and finds us like this? Ow!” Billy weighed two-sixty if he weighed an ounce, and while my shoes were good solid clodhoppers, meant for stomping around all day in, they weren’t especially meant to be stood on by a second party. He wobbled and we seized each other’s waists, trying to keep balanced. Maybe I’d been wrong. Standing in parking lots clinging to coworkers might get him in trouble with Melinda after all. I blurted, “Between my hands and my feet, these things I do keep, to a warrior of light, I grant you the Sight!” and waited for my head to explode of embarrassment.
Billy, gratifyingly, said, “Oh, wow.”
My gaze jerked to his face, a couple inches away from my own. “It worked?”
His eyes were filmed with gold. Morrison and Thor had said mine had changed color when I’d used the Sight. I was pleased enough that I forgot having a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound man on my feet hurt, and let him stand there a while before I even thought to howl with pain. Just before I started to complain, he shook himself and stepped back, a broad, astonished smile on his face as gold drained out of his eyes and left them brown again.
“Is that what you always see?”
“God, no. I’d get a headache and keep trying to walk through walls if I saw them as translucent all the time.” Flippant half truths were my friends. I was a little afraid I’d become more and more disconnected if I used the Sight all the time. I wanted to belong in the world, not float above it, and I worried that using too much magic might unhinge me. On the other hand, I said, “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” and meant it.
“It’s amazing.” Billy let that linger a moment, then slid me a crooked grin. “Warrior of light, huh?”
I groaned. I was pretty sure the charm I’d read had been less stupid than mine, but I couldn’t remember all of its words. “I’m not a poet.”
“Th
ere are worse things than being a warrior of light.” His grin stayed in place a moment, before he brought himself back to the matter at hand. “The black film?”
“That’s the cauldron. Billy, I had a thought.”
He gave me a look that said “congratulations,” and I made a face. “Yeah, yeah. No, listen. It’s all over the city, that stuff. And the cauldron’s supposed to be death magic, the kind that brings the dead back to life.”
Billy thinned his lips. “So you’re thinking maybe you don’t have to throw a body in to the cauldron to bring them back.”
I touched a finger to the tip of my nose. “What time did our cauldron go nuts at the party last night? Around eleven?”
“About that.”
“Want to bet Jason’s time of death is eleven o’clock?” We hadn’t been told yet how long Chan had been dead, but I didn’t really think I needed a professional assessment on that one. “How long ago did the security tapes start looping? And what about the other guard, Redding? Why isn’t he dead?” I was mostly talking to myself, not really expecting answers, but Billy chuckled quietly.
“You’re getting better at asking good questions, Walker. One of our tech guys will look at it and see if they can figure it out, but the security tape loop’s got the right guards making the right rounds for the whole night. I don’t know when it was filmed, but somebody did his homework. He had to cover four different guards for the whole weekend, and he got them all.”
I sighed and looked out at the city. The Sight was gone, leaving Seattle overcast and dreary. It’d get worse, too, with the days getting shorter still over the next couple months. “How long’s the exhibit been in town?”
“Since the beginning of the month, but it’s been advertised for almost a year. Plenty of time to set up.”
“Great. Have we got yesterday’s guards in to talk yet?”
“They’re on their way.”
I nodded and ran my hands through my hair, fisting them there before letting go and turning to Billy. “I think Jason’s death broke the wards, and that’s what set off the ghosts last night.”
“Why didn’t they get charged up when it got to Seattle, then? Or any time in the month it’s been sitting here?” Billy wasn’t arguing, just making sure I’d thought my claim through.
“It was warded.” I didn’t know if I’d missed the warding—not that I had clue one about what wards might look like—or if it’d been obliterated when the cauldron was moved, but I was, for once, certain of myself. “I know it’s the haunted time of year, but the ghosts and the cauldron—it’s not coincidence, Billy.”
He said, “Don’t let yourself get so fixated you overlook other possibilities,” but what I heard was agreement. He was right: I shouldn’t cling too hard to my theory and maybe end up blinding myself to the truth, but at least he didn’t think I was barking up the wrong tree. Or into the wrong cauldron, for that matter.
“I won’t.” I turned away from the city before voicing the other idea I suspected Billy shared: “So. Sandburg?”
“Oh, yeah.” He nodded once. “I think so.”
Thunder rumbled up above and fat blots of rain chased us back into the museum to pursue our case.
Sunday, October 29, 4:44 p.m.
Four months of detective work hadn’t yet accustomed me to just how damn long it took to question everybody linked to a murder case. Meghan, the poor girl who’d found Chan’s body, had to be tranquilized before she could answer questions, and then she spoke in a soft monotone, tears draining down her cheeks. I’d eat my hat if she had anything to do with the murder. The security guards who’d worked the day shift swore they’d seen nothing and that the cauldron had been safely in place when they’d done their last check at a quarter to six.
The Sight, it turned out, was a half-decent lie detector. It picked up on the same kinds of things a polygraph did: anxiety tended to spike pretty much the same way in everybody. Baseline emotions ran pretty high during questioning, but to the best of my ability to tell, everyone was telling the truth about what they had or hadn’t seen.
What threw me off was Sandburg read as innocent, too. I wanted him to be guilty; it’d be easy. But until Chan’s autopsy report came back, and maybe not even then, we didn’t have anything to pin on him except access and timing. He didn’t have an alibi for the sixteen hours prior to turning up at work. He’d eaten dinner out, and had a credit-card slip to back up that claim, and then had gone home, where he had no family to verify whether he’d been there or not. Arresting him would be tidy, quick and satisfying. But only if we were right, and his steady pale aura said we weren’t.
Billy and I were both near staggering with exhaustion before we finished. I’d gotten a whole three hours of sleep before work, and he’d had to drive home, so couldn’t have gotten more than two and a half at the outside. I pulled in at the Missing O, the coffee-and-doughnut shop down the street from the precinct building, without asking or being told. We had a dozen things to discuss about the case. Instead we hunkered down over enormous cardboard cups and tried to keep our chins from dipping in. After enough coffee had turned to acid in my belly, I shuffled over and ordered two apple fritters and two maple-covered pershings before asking Billy if he wanted anything.
He glowered at me, which was disproportionately funny, and I came back to the table, giggling as I handed over his share of the doughnuts. “I never did get lunch.”
“So we’re having doughnuts for dinner? Don’t tell Melinda. I’ve gained twenty-eight pounds since she got pregnant and I’m supposed to be on a diet.”
“You’ll lose it after she has the baby. You did last time.”
“Most of it.” Billy looked at his fritter despondently, then shrugged and ate half of it in one bite. “Dunno why it didn’t all come back off.”
I grinned and slid down in my chair. The coffee—plain black this time, no flavorings to mess with the doughnuts—was starting to give me a false perkiness. “Did you get anything from Chan?” A lot of cops came to The O to do business, but not many did it so their coworkers wouldn’t overhear them talking about discussions with the dead.
Billy sighed around a smaller bite of doughnut. “Not as much as I’d hoped. He didn’t really know he was dead yet. Said he had a migraine when he came in. I checked his records, he had prescription medication for them. He got the light-sensitive kind, with halos and sparks, so he liked working nights. He said he had one, not enough to make him really off his game, but that he wasn’t at his best. He thought the lights around the cauldron display’d set it off. Poor kid. In the end I told him to just go over to one of the quiet corners and sleep it off, that I’d clear it with Sandburg. With any luck he’ll just fade out.”
I licked maple frosting off my pershing while I listened. It was a disgusting habit, but I’d been eating doughnuts that way since I could remember. First maple sweetness, then cinnamony goodness beneath it, spiraled in a flat roll bigger than my palm. Yum. I had to wipe my mouth to ask, “That was it? Nothing else at all?”
Billy shook his head. “He said it was quiet, that Redding entertained him with stories about his family, but that was about it. He never saw what hit him. Usually they don’t when it comes from behind.”
“I don’t remember seeing anything about Redding’s family.” I dropped my doughnut, appetite gone. “Do I need to talk to them?”
“No, Chan said they were killed in a wreck years ago. A wife and two little girls. Redding liked to talk about them, and never got married again. He still wears his wedding ring. Chan figured that was love.”
“Oh.” My appetite, fickle thing that it was, came back immediately upon realizing I didn’t have to go break bad news to an unsuspecting wife. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah. I hope we find him alive. I—Who is that guy?”
I turned to see Daniel Doherty opening the O’s front door. I didn’t think he could be looking for me specifically, unless somebody’d told him when Billy and I radioed to say we were heading b
ack to the office, in which case I was going to pull someone’s toenails out. Doherty’s gaze roved over the café in the way that strangers in a strange land look: as if they know they’re the wrong type to hang out there but that they’re shy on choices, yet still willing to turn tail and run if the territory looks too unfriendly.
I did my best to look unfriendly.
His expression of surprise, then relief, told me that one, he hadn’t been looking for me, and two, that he would now cling to me like a leech. Briefcase in hand, he scurried over to our table. “Detective Walker.”
“Mr. Doherty.” I had a pretty good growl when I wanted one, but it failed to deter him. He offered Billy a hand, saying, “Daniel Doherty, it’s a pleasure to meet you. May I join you?”
Billy picked up on my subtle “no” signal—I was kicking him under the table—and said, “Yeah, sure, Mr. Doherty. We were just discussing a murder case. What do you do?”
I kicked him one more time. Doherty put his briefcase down, tugged the thighs of his pants up an inch and sat. “I’m in insurance. I was at your office today to talk to Detective Walker.” He procured a rueful smile that was probably meant to be charming. “I’ve been waiting for her to come back, and someone was kind enough to tell me I could get a decent cup of coffee here.”
“Why the hell are you here on a Sunday, anyway?” I demanded. “Don’t you have a family to go home to?”
“Actually, no,” he said pleasantly, “but I came in because I believe your schedule gives you the next two days off, and I didn’t want to miss you in case you had plans that took you out of town for your weekend. Really, I won’t be in your way, Detective. I’ll just be an observer. I could have even done this without informing you, but that approach always makes me feel like something of a Peeping Tom. It’s an unpleasant sensation.”
Not nearly as unpleasant as my elbow breaking his nose was going to be. Billy looked back and forth between us like we were a Ping-Pong match. “Committing insurance fraud, Joanie?”