by C. E. Murphy
If there was, I didn’t think they’d passed through to it.
Matilda tore away from Sonata’s body, her aura losing the healthy color it’d stolen from me and turning discolored green again. It stretched and thinned like a snot toy flung against the wall, distorting her features until she became something alien and terrible. Her fingers turned to claws, tearing at Sonata’s flesh, and finally, howling wordlessly, she boiled out of Sonata’s body. Sonata collapsed into Patrick’s arms, the spirit quite literally no longer moving her.
The last parts of Matilda dove forward, dissipating into me.
I dove after her.
A song ran through my head: Round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. I spun after Matilda without a hint of control and even less idea where we were going. If we were going anywhere: I had no sense of the dead girl’s ghost, no feeling of her presence. For all I knew, she’d launched herself at me to give me a scare, and for all I could tell, that was all that had happened.
I broke through into the cold bleak space of the Dead Zone, and hung in its infinity with every cell in my body straining to hear or see or feel an intruder. What I got, in spades, was nothing. No ghosts. No vengeance. No giant snakes or dead shamans or spirit guides, though I’d have taken the first several gladly if I could have the last one back.
This place has much in common with dreams, Coyote’d told me. I hung on a few long seconds, forgetting about Matilda and just wishing, wishing, that my friend and mentor might step through the nothingness and snap his teeth at me one more time.
After what felt like forever and still no time at all, I let go, fleeing the Dead Zone and retreating to the garden at the center of my soul.
The door to the desert was closed tight, key still in place under a lump of moss. Aware I was probably risking too much, I put the key in the lock and turned it, opening the door to a sandblast of wind that came scraping down the crater my door made the inverse apex of. Magic waited at the ready, the ridiculous Trans Am all but making tire treads in the earthy floor. But no one came screaming through the door, not from either side, and I locked it again before studying my garden.
I usually looked at it with pretty normal eyes, not calling up the Sight. This time, though, I was searching for intruders, and for once in my life, put everything into it. I could taste the waterfall with my skin, hear the recovering soil with my gaze. It flowed through me, filtered by my blood and magic, and I encountered impurities by the dozens. By the thousands, but even so, I recognized them as my own. Such overblown pride, hiding uncertainty, and the same with arrogance and smart-ass commentary. Shining confidence in a few places, strong enough to become a different kind of arrogance; those were my mechanics skills, or, of all things, the ability to deconstruct a poem. There were a hundred cracks in my armor—flaws in the windshield, when I turned my metaphor to vehicular terms—but they were mine, and not streaked with Matilda’s vitriolic hate.
Glad no one could see me, I folded my hands over my heart and knelt there at the southern end of my garden, hidden by mist, and called up the tiniest shield of magic possible, just a spark of blue-and-silver light starting in the core of me. It expanded with every heartbeat, slow deliberate press outward, until my arms were spread and the magic kept thrumming to greater and greater dimensions. I didn’t know how long it took, encompassing the whole of my garden with that new shield, but in time I felt the new one touch the old. A thrill shot back from the melding shields, zapping into my fingertips and squirreling through my body with a joie de vivre of its own. I looked up and silver-blue shimmered overhead, shields melding like a sunset of negative colors. I thought—I hoped—nothing alien could have remained within me, not when I’d begun a new shield from something so small and close, and strengthened the old with it.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have Sonata and Billy check me out. I stepped back into the real world.
Patrick had knelt, Sonata still cradled in his arms. My hands were fisted, something I only noticed because my nails cut into my palms. I needed to trim them. My fingernails, not my palms. I put my hands together in front of my stomach and uncurled the left with the still-knotted right hand, then made myself unfold the right fingers with my left. “What happened?”
Patrick’s aura remained serene, but tempered itself toward gold, as if that was the color of his sorrow. “They’ve been destroyed completely. It’s the worst fate I can imagine for a human soul.”
“Worse than being angry ghosts for a hundred years?” My hands were cold. I was abruptly aware of how tired I was, though Patrick had done the heavy lifting in the last few minutes.
“Worse than that,” he agreed quietly. “They might have found redemption, at the end, and instead chose a darker path.”
“You think there’s such a thing as redemption?” I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer, though I didn’t know what I was afraid of if he gave one. I did want an answer to, “What are you, anyway?”
“I do.” Patrick was maybe the steadiest soul I’d ever laid eyes on. His voice didn’t hold the richness that made some actors compelling, but his calm conviction had the same effect on me. I could listen to him read a phone book, as long as he did so with the resolution that he spoke with now. “I believe the worlds beyond ours are complex, and that we have almost no idea how we mortals interact with them. But I also believe the soul continues on, and that where spirit remains, hope resides.”
Then he shrugged, becoming a little more ordinary again, and said, “I suppose I’m a theologian. I went to seminary, but I was never comfortable with some of the strictures, so I left and studied comparative religion at university instead. My mother and Sonata were great friends. I’ve been coming by for years when she does a séance, in case something goes wrong.”
“Has it ever gone wrong before?”
“This is the second time.” Patrick spread his fingers over Sonata’s hair, and I finally shook myself loose from my physical stupor and came to kneel next to her. “The second I’ve been present for, at least. She’s been doing this longer than I’ve been alive. Is she all right?”
Actually, aurawise, she looked fine. Tired: the yellows and reds weren’t as bright, but they didn’t look sickly, and Matilda’s ghostly green had faded entirely. “She’s just sleeping. Billy, am I clear to…?” I glanced his way, studying his aura for shadows and finding none.
“Sonny could tell you better than I can.” Billy frowned at the sleeping medium. “I think they’re gone.”
I nodded, turning back to Sonata. Light and warmth balled in my hand, healing magic at its most simple and comforting. It dropped into Sonata’s chest, and though her breathing hadn’t been strained, it eased a little. She turned her face against Patrick’s chest and settled in, like a child seeking protection. His aura flared, white going hard and bright. The Sight winked off, sparing me a headache. “She’ll be fine. Give her a few minutes and you can wake her up.”
“Thank you.” It was effectively a dismissal. I got to my feet and went back to Billy, whose frown had deepened.
“I thought you couldn’t see them.”
“I can’t. Usually. I think it’s the cauldron.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and wished I was wearing my glasses so I could take them off and clean them; anything that would give me something to do while I tried to sort my thoughts into language. “I think Matilda might have tried jumping into me. I didn’t see her go through the Dead Zone, and I cleaned my garden as best I could and can’t see her, but…”
Sonata inhaled a soft waking-up breath. Billy and I darted to Patrick’s side, so we were all sort of hovering above Sonny when she opened her eyes. She looked from face to face, eyebrows rising. “That bad, was it?”
“Yoda she’s become. In trouble we all are.” The Sight came back on, assuring me that her colors were steady and strong. “You’ll be okay.”
“And will you?” Sonata’s eyebrows rose and she gave me a curious glance that went on to become a careful study. “She lea
ped for you, didn’t she? But I don’t see any traces of her riding you. The exorcism may have worked. Did you learn anything from her?”
I exhaled, glad she’d given me an all-clear. “A little. We need to be looking for a murder or missing person in the year 2000. That’ll give us…”
The truth was, I wasn’t sure what it would give us, but I hoped it would be a tie to the cauldron. I’d feel like a prize fool if this wasn’t all somehow intertwined.
“The captain’s not going to be thrilled with us digging up cold cases when we’ve got a hot one on our hands.” Billy offered Sonata a hand, but it was Patrick who helped her to her feet. She leaned on him and he kissed her temple, earning a brief, weary smile from the older woman. I re-revised my estimation of Patrick’s position in Sonata’s life. Exorcist, yes, boytoy, no, but they had something most people didn’t manage to share with people of their own generation, much less with somebody three decades their senior or junior. The two of them made my nose all stuffy and my eyes sting, and reminded me I hadn’t talked to Gary in a couple of days.
I rubbed my nose surreptitiously and cast a shrug in Billy’s direction. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll have caught the guy. Maybe all we’ll need to do is a jailhouse interview.” Because the odds of having caught somebody who’d been murdering people every fifty years for at least the last two centuries were so high. I wondered what a two-hundred-year-old killer looked like. Maybe the murders were part of a fountain-of-youth ritual, but the idea of a wrinkly bag of bones slicing people up was both funnier and scarier.
Billy gave me a look that said more or less all those things, except maybe without the bag-of-bones part, then turned his attention back to the medium and her exorcist. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine after a stiff drink or two.” Sonata quirked a smile and stepped out of Patrick’s embrace to give Billy a hug, then to shake my hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more help. That doesn’t happen very often.”
“You not being helpful, or insane ghosts taking over your body?” Sometimes my mouth said things even my brain wished it didn’t. I pulled my tongue back under control and added, “You were helpful. We know more than we did before. Thank you.”
Sonata said, “You’re welcome,” with a hint of dryness that turned considering as she went on. “Neither happens often. Even angry spirits usually want resolution more than corporeal form, and offer all the information they can. This one…”
Her gaze went to Patrick, and he said, “Matilda,” with the ease of long understanding. Sonata mouthed the name, then turned back to me.
“When the sessions are over all I remember are impressions. Usually I feel drained, like I’ve spilled my soul, and I’m left with a sense of relief and sometimes gratitude.” She pressed a hand over her stomach, eyes closed, as if she reached for the memory of a dream. “I can feel fear and rage distantly now. From the exorcism, I think, but below that, further away…Matilda didn’t have a need to share her troubles as most restless spirits do. There was too much control in her, and that…” Her eyes opened again, gaze frank and direct on mine. “That’s not usual. That may well be something beyond her, controlling her. Be careful, Detective Walker.”
I opened my mouth for a flippant “I always am,” realized that wasn’t true, and instead said, “I will be. Thanks,” more subduedly than usual. Everybody exchanged a second round of goodbyes, and I got halfway out the door before my question from earlier popped into my head. I turned back to Sonata and Patrick, earning a mutter from Billy as I did so. “Sorry. One more thing. Do you guys know if there’s such a thing as a magical-items black market?”
“Of course there is. The darker the art, the blacker the market.” Sonata frowned. “Why do you ask?”
I lifted a finger, heading off her question with another of my own. “I know you do ghosts, not auras, but can an aura lie?”
Billy shouldered back in. “Mel’d say yes. That an aura can be tricked the same way a lie detector can be. With enough physical or emotional control, everything might read positive or negative on the polygraph, but you wouldn’t be able to tell what parts of it were true or false because it all read the same. Why?”
I wiped my hand over my mouth, remembering Sandburg’s steady, calm aura. “I was just thinking that if I was looking to move a big-ticket item on a black market, one way to distract from what I was doing would be to have a couple people turn up missing or dead. Sonata, do you know anybody who might deal in…?”
The medium drew herself up primly. “I don’t associate with that kind of person.” After a moment she relented, turning a palm skyward. “I can ask in a few places. Probably better for me to ask than to have police nosing around.”
“Thank you.” We did another round-robin of goodbyes, and this time got the door closed behind us before Billy said, “You’re back to Sandburg, then?”
“Him or Redding, but out of the two, the cultural anthropologist fascinated by ancient legends of magic seems the more obvious option.” I climbed into the car and Billy got in the other side, both of us sitting in silence for a moment. Eventually I said, “You take me to the nicest places. Murder scenes. Séances. And without even buying me dinner first.”
He snorted and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating we should get going. “I’ll stop in the station and set up a search on unsolved cases from Y2K. Maybe we’ll get a hit.”
“Yeah.” I had a thought I didn’t like. It took the whole drive to nerve myself up to speaking. Even then, when we got back to the precinct building and I’d killed the ignition, I had to lean forward and hang on to the steering wheel before I could manage words. “Mugwitch’s cauldron’s been buried somewhere in Ireland for centuries, right?”
“Matholwch.” Billy got out of the car, exasperated, and I followed him like a lonely puppy.
“Matholwch, Mugwitch, Mud-blood, whatever. The point is, it’s been buried on the other side of the world. So if I’m right about the party ghosts being woken up by Mugwi—Matholwch’s—cauldron, we might be dealing with murders that took place in Ireland over the last several centuries.”
It wasn’t fair. I knew keeping things to myself was bad. From Billy’s expression, I could tell voicing them wasn’t exactly popular, either. He kept the hard look on his face all the way through saying, “I’m going to work with the assumption that these are local ghosts stirred up by the cauldron’s presence.”
“Why? Wouldn’t it be better to have ritual murders linked to the cauldron? Some kind of appeasement or something?” I wasn’t trying to be a smartass. I really wasn’t. It just made sense to me: shake a death cauldron and ghosts come out, regardless of whether it’s their home turf or not.
Billy sighed. “It’d be tidy, and I’d rather that than find out we’ve missed semi-centennial murders in Seattle, not that I know how we’d have caught them. It’s not much of a pattern. But I don’t have jurisdiction in Ireland, and neither do you. So we look where we know the territory.”
I knew he was right. My mouth still went all droopy, like sugar in the rain. Billy sighed again, louder this time. “Okay, all right, fine. I’ll add Interpol to the search. You’re fixing the minivan for a year if it comes up dry.”
It seemed like a bad time to point out I’d fix the minivan anyway. I beamed, said good-night and headed home, praying nothing would go wrong so I could get a full night’s sleep.
CHAPTER 13
Monday, October 31, 8:13 a.m.
I jolted out of bed with the conviction of a woman who’s just heard the bell tolling for her. Thirty seconds later I was scrubbing shampoo out of my hair and reaching for a towel, having completed the fastest shower in human history. My heart raced from the unexpected wake up, adrenaline souring my stomach. My brain hadn’t yet identified whatever noise had awakened me, but it didn’t matter. I was late for work. Morrison would ride my ass and I’d deserve it. I couldn’t believe I’d slept through the alarm.
I couldn’t, in fact, believe tha
t I’d gotten home and gone to bed uneventfully. My past experiences suggested I’d be up for three days straight while I tried to get the world sorted out, so I was grateful for small favors. I tore out of the bathroom and flung my clothes on, then sat down and put my forehead against my knees. I was due in at eight. In the grand scheme of things, Morrison wouldn’t be any more pissed if I got in at 8:31 a.m. than at eight-thirty. Something had woken me up with a scare, and I knew by now that was a bad sign. Half a minute to figure it out wouldn’t signal the end of the world. On the other hand, not taking that half minute might. Such was my life.
The panic faded from my chest, heart rate slowing. I’d been awake barely two minutes. Two minutes was a lot of time in terms of things going wrong, so whatever’d awakened me—a guttural snort, I suddenly remembered, like a wookelar from the old Tim Conway Disney film. The wookelar had been a flesh-eating monster of some kind. It was too early to deal with flesh-eating monsters. I looked for door number two.
It opened with a bolt of sunny revelation. Heat flashed up my face, reached the top of my head, got bored and rushed back down again toward my collarbone. There was no wookelar. Furthermore, I hadn’t slept through the alarm. I’d turned it off because Mondays and Tuesdays were my days off.
And then I’d woken myself up with my own snoring.
Hands over my face, I toppled into my pillow and blushed until my head pounded. This was the sort of event that haunted a person through the years until she suddenly couldn’t take it anymore and flung herself from a building top. Darwinian embarrassment, though in my case it was too late. I’d already passed on my genetic legacy. For a rare moment I let myself dwell on that, hoping the son I’d given up for adoption was more socially adroit than his biological mother.
Of course, Godzilla was smoother than I was. I crawled out of bed and drank two glasses of water, trying to get the blood in my face to thin, and considered going back to bed. Starting all over again seemed like a better way to face the day than starting out by terrorizing myself with violent snoring.