by C. E. Murphy
It’d be back to normal, or I’d be dead. Either way, I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore. Doherty lifted his head to stare at me, then gave a feeble nod and looked around like the Vodka Fairy might appear at any moment. I nudged Suzy inside and we left Doherty behind.
She managed to hold her tongue for ten whole steps. “Shouldn’t you have told him the truth?”
“No. By next week he’ll have talked himself out of the truth anyway. I might as well give him something to hang his hat on. Left here, then upstairs.”
I prodded her toward Homicide—the department, not the act—and she gave me a dubious look, but took the stairs two at a time before stopping at the top and saying, “You should’ve told him the truth.”
“Suze.” I scrubbed a hand through my hair, then turned what I hoped was an earnest but serious face on her. “Suzy, you’re atypical. You went through a lot of weird and horrible crap in January, and you came out of it believing everything that had happened. I’ve spent most of the past year watching people rationalize away the things that happen when I’m around. Half my best friends aren’t anymore, because they can’t quite convince themselves that what they saw wasn’t real, and it makes them afraid of me. Doherty’s going to be happier thinking he got caught up in a movie production than he is thinking zombies are actually rising on Halloween night. Trust me on this.”
She stuck her arms akimbo and thrust her jaw out. “So how come I believe it all?”
“Aside from the premonitions you can’t shake?” I spread my hands. “I guess you’re just happier knowing the truth. You’re tough. A lot tougher than I am. C’mon, I need to talk to Billy and see if he’s gotten anywhere on our murder case.”
Suzy hung back, frowning. “I’m not tougher than you. You’re a real hero. You saved me. You help people.”
God save me from the faith of innocents. I looked at the granddaughter of a god and knew that even if she preferred knowing the truth, I stood in one of her blind spots.
What the hell. Everybody needs heroes. I pulled her into a rough hug, promised, “I’m trying, anyway,” and only then did we brace ourselves and walk through the doors into chaos.
Monday, October 31, 5:57 p.m.
I’d have hated to be on emergency dispatch right then. Halloween night was always nutty, and the department put extra people on in preparation for that, but nobody’d been given a primer on what to do with dozens of calls reporting that poor dead Fido had risen from the backyard grave and was trying to get inside the house, or that Goldy the fish was working her way back up the toilet drain. Grim-faced detectives were responding to unsolved homicides in which the dead were returning home, and I bet Missing Persons was suffering from exactly the same kind of deluge. It wasn’t the kind of scene anybody in their right mind would take a fourteen-year-old into, but I didn’t have anywhere better to bring Suzanne, and she was rather literally the only thing standing between me and certain death. I had no intention at all of bringing her on the case with me tonight, but storing her somewhere safe where I could communicate with her seemed like a good idea.
My desk was in the middle of the uproar, though. Not exactly the most peaceful place to sit and wait out a zombie attack or a cauldron search. I picked up the receiver on my desk to phone Morrison, and Billy pushed the call button down with a thick finger. “Want to tell me why there’s an insurance adjudicator downstairs gibbering about zombie movies?”
I put the phone over my collarbone and groaned. “Because the other explanation was too unpalatable. Do you think if he loses his mind they’ll just give me my money?”
“Detective Walker’s having a bad day.” Suzanne inserted herself into the conversation with a bright smile and an offered hand. “I’m Suzanne Quinley. We talked on the phone. Hi.”
Billy said, “Hi,” and shook her hand sort of automatically, but he didn’t take his gaze off me. “How bad?”
“My bad day doesn’t really matter, Billy. Did you talk to Sandburg?” I couldn’t believe it was still Monday. I hadn’t even gotten up twelve hours ago, but the day had been going on forever. We were only about five hours short of the forty-eight hour mark since Jason Chan had died and the cauldron at my party had awakened. Time was running out, and that didn’t even include Suzy’s premonition.
“I brought him in for questioning. Completely rattled him. I think he would’ve confessed to anything if it meant getting out of there, but either I’m the worst judge of character in Seattle or he was genuinely offended at the idea he might be involved in trying to sell the cauldron. I ended up sending him home again. The guy’s got no hint of being a runner.” Billy hitched himself onto the edge of my desk, arms folded across his chest. “The flip side is our tech guys say the security-tape loops started Friday just after the close of business. Everything matches up with the loop from three weeks ago perfectly. That means somebody with fantastic hacking skills or easy access is probably responsible.”
“Redding or Sandburg.” I pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. “I have a question I’m going to regret asking. Could somebody be manipulating Sandburg through magic so he didn’t even know he was involved in anything illegal?”
Billy stared at me a long moment. “Occam’s razor says no. Could you do something like that?”
Creepy-crawlies ran over my skin, reminding me of the unpleasant shock of slamming weaponized magic into Cernunnos. “I don’t think I could, but witchcraft might be able to. Faye Kirkland magicked Gary into a heart attack. Seems like if you can do that, you might be able to affect people’s actions.”
Billy tipped his head back and glared at the ceiling. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure he was counting to ten. When he reversed his gaze again, it was to fix it on me like I’d become a bug for collecting. “I don’t know, Walker. My department is ghosts. Do you think it’s a real possibility?”
“I still think the cultural anthropologist is more likely than the security guard. Redding’s probably dead by now. If I were stealing a cauldron to bring somebody back to life, I’d want to do a test run first.” My stomach, which didn’t know a cue when it heard one, rumbled ferociously. I had no idea when I’d eaten last.
Suzy, voice small, said, “I could look and See.”
“See?” Billy frowned at her. “See what?”
“If that man is dead. I can…” She faltered, looking at me.
“Suzy can see the future,” I said matter-of-factly. “Ever since January and the thing with Herne and Cernunnos.”
Now, if somebody’d said that to me, I’d have gotten all skeptical. Billy didn’t even blink. “We’ve got some of his personal effects in the evidence lockers. Would that help?”
Suzanne’s eyes widened, then lit up. “I don’t know. I never tried. Do you think it might help me control it? Because that would be awesome.”
Billy said, “Using tangible objects belonging to the subject is a time-honored way of honing focus,” which I was pretty sure meant “yes.” Two minutes later we were downstairs opening an evidence locker while a bored recruit looked on. I wondered if he’d get a flashy show that would wipe away his boredom, and couldn’t decide if I thought that would be good or not.
Suzy fluttered her hands over the handful of things with Redding’s name sticky-taped to them: a glasses case, a pair of civilian shoes, a long raincoat and hat, and an ink sketch of his wife and children, “A. Redding” printed in small letters in the lower right-hand corner. It was a head-and-shoulders image of all of them, his daughters in pigtails and his wife’s hair in an upswept Gibson-girl style. I saw women on the street occasionally who still wore their hair like that: members of a small church I didn’t know the proper name of, but which I thought of as the Church of the Ladies with Hair. Those women usually wore long skirts and blouses, and Redding’s wife had the slightly puffed sleeves I associated with that look. The building manager out in Ballard had mentioned the bingo group, but not a church. Then again, it wasn’t like I knew whether my neighbors went t
o church, either.
Suzanne lifted the sketch with careful fingers. I was just as glad I wasn’t watching with the Sight as her eyes went all creepy and white again. She shuddered from the core all the way out, until bumps stood up on her skin and her hair looked like it’d been rubbed through static. Color flooded back into her eyes, eating away the white, and she sounded sick as she whispered, “He’s still alive, but he won’t be in a few hours. He dies at the same time you do, Detective Walker.”
“He what?” In Billy’s defense, I was reasonably certain his eardrum-rupturing outrage was over the part of that statement where I died, but Suzanne and I both nearly teleported five feet away at his sheer volume. She shot me a panicked look. I waved her down, and tried to do the same to Billy.
“Suzy had a premonition about my death, too. It’s why she came up here from Olympia, to warn me. It’s all right. It’s going to be fine.” I turned to Suzy, pretending my voice of reason was such that it would drown out Billy’s horror.
It didn’t, of course. He repeated, “It’s what?” and hauled me back around to face him.
Normally I’d object to being manhandled like that. Normally, though, I wasn’t looking my death in the face, so I just kind of got a warm fuzzy over him being that worried. I’d give him shit later, if I lived. Which I intended to do.
But if I didn’t, it was good to have a chance to see him again, and to say goodbye. He was going to have to pick up a lot of pieces if I got myself killed, and I kind of wanted to look him in the eye and say I was sorry, if it was coming to that. “It’s going to be okay. I think I’ve got this one under control, Billy. Don’t worry. I’ve been under a death sentence before and come through okay.” I squeezed his arm, gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile and turned back to Suzanne. “Did he die in the same place I do? At the house with the swimming pool and the toys?”
Poor Suzy, all big eyes and misery, nodded. I exhaled noisily. “That’s actually kind of good. It means we’re going to find him. Did you see anything else this time? Any other markers that would help us place the house?”
“It’s good that you’re going to die?” Billy demanded.
“If Redding and I are supposed to go out at the same time, that means if we can save one of us, we should both be okay. And me, I’m all for not letting anybody get thrown into a cauldron and resurrected, so I’m kind of planning for nobody to die, partner.” I gave Billy a genuinely sunny smile. Apparently I thought my logic was infallible.
Beneath all of that, Suzy whispered, “I didn’t see anything else. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine, sweetie. We’re going to find him. It’ll be okay.” I actually believed that, but Billy growled.
“Walker, if Suzanne’s seeing your death, you need to stay the hell away from anything that looks at all like her premonitions.”
“I don’t think that’d work. I think I could lock myself in one of the cells and…” Okay, I had to admit that locking myself in a cell seemed like a pretty sure-fire way of not dying by a household swimming pool. “Look, it doesn’t matter, Billy. I’m doing this.”
“No. You’re not.” Billy set his jaw. “What you’re going to do is go tell Morrison about the premonition, and he’s going to decide whether you get to walk into a trap.”
Somewhere in the big bad universe was a version of me who snorted, rolled her eyes and blew off Billy’s demand. After all, she was an adult and a shaman and knew her own mind and what needed to be done. So, for that matter, did I.
Not terribly long ago I’d have done as Billy asked because I’d have figured Morrison would give me a way out. Going into a dangerous situation was one thing. Going into a situation where my death had been clearly predicted was something else, at least if you were willing to take it on faith that dire prophecy had any basis in reality, which I was. No police captain would order an officer into certain death. That was for the military.
Me, I knocked on my boss’s door and went in knowing even if he forbade me from going forth and doing my thing, I’d go forth and do it anyway. I barely knew me anymore, but I thought the new me was probably a distinct improvement over the old.
Morrison looked up and got the usual pained expression that came with finding me darkening his door. “Two office visits in one day, and you’re not even supposed to be at work. What did I do to deserve this?”
“Sorry. Would you rather Billy and I left the Chan case to molder for two days?” I sat down without waiting for an invitation, figuring I’d be on my feet for the whole interview otherwise. “Remember Suzanne Quinley?”
“Pretty little blond girl whose parents were murdered in January,” Morrison said, apparently without having to think about it. Given that it’d been both my first paranormal experience and my first murder case, I wasn’t surprised he could pull it up that easily, but I was willing to bet he could do the same with an awful lot of far more mundane cases. Morrison was good at his job, and cared about his people. “What about her?”
“She’s upstairs in Homicide. No, nobody’s dead. Yet.” I winced at the last word popping out. It wasn’t going to help my cause. “She’s been having visions in the aftermath of what happened in January. She came up from Olympia to tell me she’s had a premonition of my death in the cauldron. Tonight.”
Morrison’s expression slipped into something worse than neutrality. Neutrality meant I’d just said something unbelievable to the point of exasperation and that he was trying to hide his irritation with me. I was used to that, and had gotten to where I drew a small degree of comfort from it.
Under no circumstances could I imagine gaining any comfort from a look of gut-level belief covered by a stoic refusal to let emotion through. What was I supposed to say, Go me, the dread Morrison’s finally on board? I turned my face away, gaze fixed on a tall, slim glass clock on one of the captain’s bookshelves. It read 6:17 p.m., which meant in the worst-case scenario I had five hours and forty-three minutes to live. The clock’s tick and my heart both seemed very loud in the face of Morrison’s silence, but I couldn’t make myself look back at him.
The clock clicked over to 6:18 p.m. and quite a few seconds before Morrison finally spoke. “Why are you telling me this?”
I set my lips, looked back at him, and looked away again, then did it all a second time before managing to fix my eyes on the desk in front of him, if not on my boss himself. “Billy thought that the boss man should make the decision about whether I was going to go off and potentially get myself killed.”
“Bullshit.”
My gaze popped up to his. “No, really, that’s why. I’d have just gone and done it without asking, otherwise.”
Morrison spread his hands on his desk and leaned forward. He didn’t get up, but he didn’t have to: the whole effect was one of looming anyway. “And if I say no?”
“C’mon, Captain.” My voice softened and I tilted my head, a sad smile creeping up from somewhere. “You’re not going to say no. You know that as well as I do. Even if you did…” I shrugged. “I have to go anyway. It’s my job.”
“So I’m not going to say no and you wouldn’t listen if I did. Why’d you bother?”
Because Billy told me to was clearly not going to cut it. The other obvious, if sticky, answer was one I’d closed the door on back in July when I’d taken the promotion to detective, and had maybe locked shut when I started dating Thor. Well, if it was locked, there was still a major draft blowing through the cracks. I wasn’t sure there was anything to be done about that, or that I really wanted there to be. It made dating safer, knowing my heart was tangled up somewhere else.
Man, I was really a piece of work. Thor deserved better. I either had to break up with him or get over Morrison. Or get murdered by a cauldron, if the first two choices were too hard. And all that thinking about other things gave my mouth the opportunity to say, “I came to say goodbye,” without checking in with my brain first. “Just in case.”
The captain turned purple. “Y—”
; “Morrison. You asked, okay? I don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. I personally think it’s going to involve banishing the living dead, retrieving a stolen cauldron and hopefully solving a murder. But Suzanne’s having visions about my death, so there’s a non-zero possibility that I might not survive. I’m hard to kill. You know that. You’ve seen the tapes. But you wanted to know why I came to talk to you, and I’m telling you.” I looked away, suddenly tired. “There aren’t very many people I’d want to say goodbye to, in the event of. You’re one of the few. So I’m saying it. You can give me shit later when I come through just fine.”
“Walker…”
I sighed and got up. “Next time there’s a death warrant on my head, we’ll just let this stand as writ, okay? I’ve said my melodramatic little goodbye. No more fuss after this. Just me, getting out of your hair.” I managed a tired little smile. “Your weird-colored hair.”
If it’d been me, I’d have at least put a hand to my head. Morrison didn’t. “Could I talk you out of going, if I tried?”
“Do you want to?”
“You’re an officer under my command. I don’t want you walking into a death trap.”
I ducked my head and let go a soft breath of laughter. Somehow Morrison dancing around his own evident impulse to protect me made my own inability to face certain truths a little more palatable. I looked up, still smiling. “That didn’t answer the question, boss.”
Chagrin deepened the lines of his face. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to call him on avoiding the topic, so instead of making him actually answer, I said, “You can’t order me not to go, because I won’t listen, and asking me not to go will just make it harder. Don’t make it harder, okay?”