by C. E. Murphy
“Can that happen?”
“Maybe. If you believe it can, maybe.”
I nodded, uncomfortable with the idea. I’d brushed by enough darkness already. I didn’t like the thought that some of it might latch on and corrupt me. “And the others?”
Billy folded his arms across his chest, making himself a wall. “This is the part I like. The guys who’d do it for the money and not care about the death magic wouldn’t touch it because of the wards. They were too—”
“Bright,” Sonata finished, when he broke off and glanced at her. “Whatever was holding the cauldron’s magic under wraps was so strong it actually burned when someone with ill intent touched it. That kind of power is magnitudes beyond what most people can imagine, much less command or effect. It’s like giving an infant a baseball bat. The baby can’t even grasp the bat, much less wield it.”
I looked between them. “So somebody who knew what they were doing wouldn’t touch it, and somebody who didn’t, couldn’t?”
“In essence, yes. I wouldn’t know how to begin breaking wards like the ones described.”
“Described? I thought you said everybody in town with an inkling of magic had been by to see it.”
Sonata gave me a strange little smile. “I work with the dead, Joanne. I don’t care for the idea of even observing a monstrosity that’s meant to tear them from their rest and force them to walk in the world again. There are those who would say we need to see evil to recognize it, but I don’t feel there’s any shame in turning my back on it. Sometimes denying a thing can make it lose its power.”
My eyebrows shifted upward. “I guess.” I’d spent too much time the past several months seeing how badly denial worked for me to agree with Sonata’s choice, but it wasn’t mine to make. “Well, okay, thank you. That’s something, at least. The usual suspects aren’t likely to be the right guys this time.” Not that I had any idea, in Magic Seattle terms, who the usual suspects might be. It was probably something I should find out, although maybe not right now. I turned to Billy, eyebrows still elevated. “Anything on Sandburg?”
“No mystical connections I can find so far, but I’m on my way to see if I can shake anything loose in questioning. You want to come along? You’re the aura reader.”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I’ve got to take care of something else. Call me as soon as you know anything, okay?”
“Yeah. You, too.” Billy waved me off and I ran downstairs to get my gun.
Maybe it was the all-American good ol’ boy in me, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something especially sexy about a chick with a shotgun. I didn’t by nature have a Southern drawl, though I defy anybody who’s lived in the Carolinas for four years to come through it entirely unscathed. Even my father’s accent hadn’t really rubbed off on me, for all that he’d been the one who taught me to talk. I’d spent too much time on the road and heard too many different voices to sound like I was from anywhere in particular.
Walking out of the precinct building with the gun, though, made me want to roll around in being a languid, long tall drink of badass, and there was nothing better than some down-home vocal sugar to complete the picture. My personal sound track switched to a five-beat blues riff, and woe betide anybody who caused those last two da-dums to become the distinctive click of a shotgun cocking.
Plus, it made Daniel Doherty sit up and look nervous, which was a win all on its own. He didn’t have to know the gun was currently unloaded, or that it would only be carrying rock salt when it was. I waved at him, which didn’t seem to reassure him at all, and climbed into Petite, feeling like the sexiest damn thing on earth. Not even stopping at the supermarket to buy five pounds of rock salt was enough to undo my cool. I actually had a plan, and nothing could stop me. The fact that it wasn’t a very good plan pretty much didn’t bother me. It was all I had, so I was going to run with it. I got a squeeze-top bottle of water at the supermarket, too, and drank as much as I could before pouring the rest out Petite’s window.
There was a new chapel outside Crown Hill Cemetery, an addition to what was essentially a neighborhood graveyard. I slipped in, refilled my bottle with water from the font and mumbled an apology to anybody who might be offended. I figured sixteen ounces of borrowed holy water was a much lesser offense than zombies lurching around Seattle.
Man, I was hung up on zombies. So far the cauldron had only stirred ghosts, but I had visions of the undead sluffing around the city, eating brains and dropping body parts as they went. I was willing to err on the side of overkill, having done too little, too late, far too often.
I walked into the cemetery with a shotgun on one hip and a plastic bottle of holy water in the other, and decided I really needed a better costume for this kind of thing than jeans and a sweater. Maybe not the warrior-princess outfit, but something involving a dramatic black coat, at the very least. Or maybe a white one, since I’d been bitching about bad guys skulking around in broody black. I’d hate to be mistaken for one of them.
Cauldron mist hung above the graveyard like soot, fine black particles drifting against one another with barely enough weight to pull them earthward. Looking at it with the Sight, it seemed like I shouldn’t be able to breathe easily, but it didn’t cling in my throat or chest. Not now, at least. I wasn’t sure what happened when the sun went down and it became Halloween night, and I didn’t much want to find out.
I found a patch of darkness, popped the top of my squeeze bottle and spun around, spraying water in a circle around me. Heavy droplets spattered, gems of light against the black fog. Where they collided, the mist was absorbed and fell to the ground, nothing more than water, all the darkness washed away. Tiny threads of steam hissed up from the grass, then faded, leaving a smell of springtime, which was to say, rotted earth turning new again.
That was it, the sum total of my plan. Much like Richard Feynman, I’d felt it wiser to experiment without an audience before wowing the world with the shamanistic equivalent of a glass of ice water, an O-ring and my brilliance. I capered in a little dance and shook my shotgun at the sky, then sprayed another circle of holy water to watch the mist fail beneath it.
I didn’t know whose belief made it work. I had theories, which had been enough to send me out to try. Holy water was new magic, which was to say it had been recently blessed, not that the idea of holy water was new. That meant it had the strength of youth, which didn’t necessarily trump the treachery of old magic, but combined with my expectation of causing change, and maybe with the God in whose name the water had been blessed favoring life over death—it had been worth a shot, and whatever the reason, whatever the combination, it had worked.
Now all I needed to do was hose down every graveyard and morgue in Seattle with holy water before sunset. No problem. I had another plan. Ablaze with triumph, I sprayed the rest of the water around, then pulled my phone out of my pocket and laboriously dialed Billy’s number. I had the phone to my ear and was drawing breath to make outlandish requests, when a semi-familiar girl’s voice said, “Officer Walker?”
I very nearly jumped out of my skin, and given my particular talents and proclivities, that phrase could take on an unfortunate reality. Fortunately for both of us, I merely jolted around guiltily to see who’d caught me spraying a bottle of water over gravestones. I didn’t think I could get nailed for vandalism, but I could certainly be run up a flagpole as a disgrace to the department. Morrison would love that.
The green-eyed girl standing a few yards away didn’t look inclined to turn me in. In fact, she mostly looked lost, and maybe like she wasn’t quite human, with her wraith-pale skin and wheat-colored hair. The sneakers and jeans and high-school letterman’s jacket were all a bit more prosaic and grounding, but in fact, she wasn’t quite human, and I knew it. My voice went up two registers. “Suzanne?”
Relief swept the girl’s face and she ran forward to hug me, hanging on like I was the last lifeline on the Titanic. Bewildered, I dumped the shotgun and put my arms around her. “Yo
u’re okay, Suzanne. I’ve got you. It’s okay now.”
I had no idea what was okay, and really, if she was here looking for me, it probably wasn’t okay at all. That, however, didn’t seem like the appropriate thing to say. Suzanne Quinley’s parents had died horribly ten months earlier, and I’d been too late to save them. She’d almost had her soul stolen away by a vengeful demi-god herself, but I’d gotten there in time for that. The aftermath had sorted out that she was the granddaughter of a god, and even looking at her with ordinary eyes showed me an ethereal air. I had no idea what she would look like with the Sight, and wasn’t ready to find out. I said, “You’re okay,” again, then carefully disengaged her from the hug and put her back a step, my hands on her shoulders. “What are you doing here, Suzy? You should be in Spokane. Is everything okay with your aunt?”
Suzy whispered, “Olympia,” and I felt like a cad. One little girl mixed up with my first big encounter with the paranormal, and I couldn’t even remember where she’d gone to live after her parents were murdered. “My aunt’s okay. I came to find you.”
“How come?” I didn’t think of myself as especially good with kids, even if the kid in question was pushing adulthood. I nudged Suzy toward one of the graveyard benches and put my arm around her shoulders when we sat. “How did you find me? This isn’t where I usually hang out.”
“I knew you’d be here.” The poor girl sounded as if she’d been crying for a week, all stuffed up and exhausted. I hugged her harder, and she thunked her head against my shoulder like I was some kind of reliable support. I put my chin on her head and tried to figure out what to say. I didn’t want to shatter the illusion, but I also didn’t like the sound of I knew you’d be here. Before I asked, she sighed miserably and said, “I know all kinds of stuff about what’s going to happen now.”
“Now. Since January. Since your birthday.”
Suzy nodded and I bit my tongue against a thousand or so questions, instead staring across the graveyard. The Sight had turned off when Suzanne scared me, and the scene looked typical for any rainy October afternoon in a Seattle cemetery. Soft misty light with a few patches of brighter clouds in the sky taunted us with the possibility of sunshine, and headstones sat in innumerable rows, all of them looking quite fierce and protective of their unmoving charges. There was no hint of anything that said the world was other than what it appeared to be. Nothing, at least, except the presence of a fourteen-year-old girl who should’ve been in school sixty miles away. I said, “Okay,” without especial enthusiasm, and the Sight slipped back on.
We sat on the edge of a messy circle of clean air, cauldron mist beaten down by my rainfall of holy water. Three minutes ago I’d been sure my clever trick had worked. Now I hoped I hadn’t just hurried things along, though the rich warm colors of the earth around us didn’t look like they were being in any way impugned upon by dark magic. The headstones were protective of their dead, imbued with their own rocky strength and purpose, but it wasn’t the kind of presence that could fight back, if bodies should start rising. The earth could fight for itself if necessary, but people like me were supposed to come to the game on its behalf. Shamans had willpower; the earth didn’t, exactly. It had an implacable sense of being, but it wasn’t conscious the way animals were, and if something hurt it badly enough for it to fight back—well, we called those things acts of God, or climate change, and were little more than frantic parasites trying to stay alive under a planetary version of warfare.
It was a nice little philosophical consideration, and it let me not look at Suzy for a while. But that was what I’d called the Sight up for, so I sat back to take a good look at her.
I’d never really looked at her grandfather with the Sight. Doing so was rubbing grease on a fat pig’s ass: he was so astonishing by nature that I imagined he’d burn my eyes out if viewed with magical vision. And if Suzanne was any indication, I was painfully right in that assessment.
She burned. Not like Sonata’s friend Patrick, whose serenity was a bastion of warmth and comfort, but like moonlight, bright enough to warn that she reflected a far greater glory. She was young, very young, and the brilliance would only grow as she aged. Loops and flares, like sunspots, already rippled across her aura. Rippled across her skin, in a way that auras didn’t. Power was a part of her, but not like it was part of me. At the end of the day my magic, no matter how strong it might be, was only human. Suzanne’s was tempered by her mortal blood, but its core was raw and chaotic. She was unbound by time, and I Saw spikes shooting off her, reaching into the future and snapping back again to give her the precognition that had brought her to me. They came as dreams and visions, interpreted by a mind that was, in most ways, only a girl’s.
In most ways. Looking at her, I knew I could perhaps save the world, or at least parts of it, when I was at full power.
Suzanne Quinley could destroy it.
That seemed like a hell of a burden to lay on a kid. I put my arm around her shoulder again and tugged her back against me, my chin on her head once more. “Does everything you see come true?”
“Yeah. Everywhere.” She slumped against me. “I thought I was going crazy. But then I had a dream about a soldier from Olympia dying, and two days later it was in the papers. I started checking Googe things, and then I…stopped.”
“Oh, God. I would have, too.” It was bad enough to be playing catch-up all the time. I couldn’t imagine how much it would suck to see the future and be unable to stop what was going to happen. “I’m sorry, Suzy. I might be able to help.”
There went my mouth, haring off making promises my brain didn’t know if it could keep. But really, even if she was of immortal descent, she was still a human girl, and human minds weren’t meant to be unstuck in time. I might be able to heal that rift in her mind, or at least help her learn some control.
I was getting big for my britches. I barely had a handle on my own magic, and there I was thinking I could help other people learn to manage theirs. On the other hand, they said teaching is the best way to learn, so trying couldn’t hurt. Much.
“Could you?” Hope spilled through her voice and I squeezed her shoulders.
“I can sure try.” The promise ended with a loud rumble from my stomach. I’d had lunch at the Space Needle, but apparently all the acid caffeine had dissolved it. “But first things first. When did you eat last?”
“This morning.” Suzy’s tummy rumbled, too.
I pulled together a weak smile and tugged her to her feet. “There’s a Denny’s a few blocks away. Let me buy you lunch, and you can tell me what’s been going on.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She looked up through a curtain of thin blond hair. “I don’t think we have very much time. I came to find you because I’ve been having nightmares, Officer Walker. Nightmares about a, a—” She made a circle with her hands, uncertainty darkening her pale features. “A huge black barrel. But not a barrel, a—a something else, there’s a name for it—”
I dropped my chin to my chest, eyes closed to summon the strength to say, “Cauldron?”
“Yeah! I couldn’t think of the word.” Suzanne lit up vocally and I glanced at her, but her pleasure slipped away as fast as it had arrived. “Nightmares about a cauldron, and about you dying in it.”
After the third or fourth prediction of my death, it seemed like it should become old hat and that I wouldn’t worry about it. It turned out it was still a brand-new hat, though, because even having survived my death several times now, cold slammed through my blood like an arctic wind. The breath ran out of me in a huh, and for a moment the world went dark, Suzanne the solitary pinpoint of light to guide me home again.
Truth was, she looked worse than I felt. I shoved a hand at my hair and clobbered myself on the head with my water bottle, which was sufficiently humiliating as to push away mindless terror with a high-pitched chuckle. I brought my voice back down to a more normal range. “I’ve heard that before, and I’m still standing. Don’t worry, Suzy. It’ll be
okay.”
“You don’t believe me. Nobody does. I thought you would.” The poor thing deflated. I’d have needed a bulldozer to make her any flatter. I put my hands on her shoulders again, trying to get her to look up. When she finally did, I pulled a smile from somewhere, and actually kind of bought into it myself.
“I do believe you. When the grandchildren of gods drop by to make dire predictions, I listen.” Oh, lordy, if the me a year ago could’ve heard me now, she’d take the shotgun I’d abandoned and whack me over the head with it. I even had sympathy for that me wanting to do so. But at this point if a precognitive teenager turned up to tell me I was going to die, well, I was a slow learner, but not that slow. “This is probably the last question you want me to ask, but do you have any idea when?”
“Halloween,” Suzanne whispered. “Today.”
On the positive side, I’d gotten through more than half the hours allotted to Halloween already, and I wasn’t dead yet. On the negative, that meant the next ten hours could be very hairy. I looked at my watch. The next ten hours, eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to be exact. It struck me that I’d be better off wearing the copper bracelet my father’d given me than the watch. I wondered if I could to go home and get it, or if moving would alert the universe that I was now worthy of hunting. I sort of didn’t want to, just in case.
Poor Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears while I stood there chasing idiotic thoughts around in a circle in my mind. I sat back down and squeezed her shoulders. “It’ll be okay. There’s a lot of daylight left to burn. Was it nighttime in the vision?”