by C. E. Murphy
A raging deep river of green, of greed, slammed out of nowhere and dragged me into Sandburg’s depths. Triumph and panic bloomed within me at equal rates: that kind of avarice could push a man to do almost anything—including drown a nosy shaman who went poking around in his soul uninvited. But I only needed to hold on a few seconds, just long enough to see where Sandburg’s hunger brought us.
The river swept me into a library at the edge of a desert: monumental pillars under a hard blue sky. Within seconds it morphed around me, changing from the legendary library at Alexandria to a modern, recognizable Library of Congress. To, I realized with embarrassment, a representation of a repository of all knowledge. Greed wasn’t necessarily for power, and what lay at Sandburg’s core was a desire to know things. With that much passion driving him, I suddenly felt sorry for anybody who tried to trick or ensorcel him into doing something he didn’t know he was doing. I jerked my gaze to the side in a silent apology as Sandburg bounded up the museum steps to join us.
“Have you found something?”
“We need to take another look around the murder scene,” Billy said. “I’m afraid it’s going to seem a little strange. If you could let us in, I’ll explain while the others prepare.”
“A little strange?” Sandburg unlocked the doors and reset the electronics with his pass code. I could See the numbers he’d pressed, and the order in which they’d been chosen, fading from one end of the spectrum to the other. I filed that away under Handy Tricks, though I doubted it was a morally superior use of shamanic magic. “One of my guards is dead, another missing, and Matholwch’s legendary cauldron has been stolen. How much stranger can anything be?”
“We’re going to work under the assumption that the magic of the cauldron is real, and see if we can contact the dead to learn more about it.” Billy spoke so reasonably that Sandburg nodded agreement before he’d fully grasped what had been said.
“We—you—what?”
“Mr. Sandburg, if you don’t mind sitting down with the rest of us, your presence will be extremely calming to Jason Chan’s spirit.” Sonata tucked her arm through Sandburg’s and walked him down the hall. “The familiar is very comforting to the dead, and I would be terribly appreciative of your help in this matter.” She was wearing a white blouse instead of the dead-happy-face T-shirt, which I thought was probably a good choice for out-of-house calls. The blouse went better with her smile and gentle tone. Sandburg found himself agreeing all over again, though I could all but see his mind whirling and trying to make sense of what she was saying.
The cauldron’s black smear had lessened considerably. It was, I thought, partly that I’d shaken off its effects once, and partly that it was losing the connection with the place it had rested. Either way, that had to be a good thing: I couldn’t imagine that with the weight of death pulling at them, any ghost might survive long in its presence. Billy said, “Chan’s gone,” under his breath. “Poor kid went ahead and crossed over.”
“I’m sorry we have to disturb him again.”
Sonata got Sandburg settled down at the farthest point from the cauldron’s empty space. “William, if you’ll stand here…?” She pointed him to a place a few steps to Sandburg’s right, and took up a place opposite Billy on Sandburg’s left. I shuffled over to stand much closer to the cauldron’s dais than I wanted to, and Gary, without being told, stood opposite me, so the five of us made a half circle around the display. “William explained your intentions to me, Joanne. The dead must have a desire to speak with the living for me to bring those who’ve crossed over all the way back to this world. If Jason Chan is reluctant—”
“As long as you can get him as far as the Dead Zone, I can talk to him.” I sat down, folding my legs and plucking at the vest, but decided to leave it on. Easier than arguing with Billy, who gave me a stern look as he, too, sat down. The others did the same—sat, not frowned at me—and Sandburg, looking nervous, followed suit. I felt a surge of sympathy for the mild museum curator. A few months earlier, I’d have felt just as awkward and out of place as he did.
Now, though, I glanced at my friends, then nodded at Gary. “Let’s do this thing.”
The first beat of the drum shattered the cauldron’s remaining death shroud from the air.
CHAPTER 23
Everybody except Gary flinched, though I didn’t know if the shared wince was because the drum was surprisingly loud or if everyone had a sense of the shroud falling. I thought it got distinctly easier to breathe. It was like being in Los Angeles after a rare rainstorm: all of a sudden you couldn’t see the air anymore, and breathing instantly felt less labored.
It was a good sign, anyway. My drum and my magic were all tied up with one another. If the cauldron’s murk could fall under a good thump of healing magic, maybe that meant the universe was on our side. I was all for that.
I was also procrastinating, in that I was allowing myself to be distracted by things that weren’t actually the drum and an inward focus that would send me to the Dead Zone. On the other hand, while we were short on time, we were also trying a séance, and if Sonata could call Jason Chan to us without me tripping the light fantastic, that seemed like a better way to go. My track record for speaking with the dead wasn’t what it could be, and Sonata’s talents actually lay in that direction. I wondered suddenly where Patrick was, and whether it was safe to be conducting a séance without him.
Sonata’s “Weary spirits” rolled through the room and earned another flinch from everybody except Gary, who was evidently completely at one with the drum. I envied him a bit, then tried to tuck away emotion and get ready to slip through the walls of the worlds if Jason didn’t answer Sonata’s call. “I beg forgiveness, spirits, for disturbing you. I come seeking knowledge, not about what lies beyond the veil, but about what has come to pass on this side of it. I have come to a place of sorrow and violence in hopes that one among you may have answers to share with me. Jason Chan,” she said much more quietly. “I know you seek no vengeance, but your fading memories of this world may help us to save another life. Will you speak with me?”
All of us, even Gary, straightened up and peeked around, searching out ghosts. Sandburg looked both poleaxed and fascinated, like he didn’t believe he was participating in a séance and at the same time wanted it to be real with all the strength of a child’s hopeful imagination. Shots of pink zotted off his aura, fireworks-bright, and I had to think that if he was guilty, he wouldn’t be nearly so excited about the prospect of a ghost coming to point a finger at him. Too bad. It would’ve been easy for him to be the killer.
“Jason Chan,” Sonata repeated, then began a quiet, oddly respectful litany of the young man’s history on earth. His full name, Jason Matthew, and his birth date, the nineteenth of September. He’d been barely twenty-four. His family’s names, the towns he’d lived—all information available from his work record, and all of it meant to draw a dead man closer to the living’s world.
All of it meant to draw him closer to life, when there was an ancient, magical cauldron pouring warped vitality back into the dead, and when we already knew that it could help a ghost latch on to mortal magic and gain corporeal form.
Wow. I’d had some really bad ideas, but right then, this one was the prizewinner. I said, “Oh, crap” out loud, and let go of the real world as fast as I could, racing for the Dead Zone.
I wasn’t at all sure it was safer for me to go traipsing around the Dead Zone than it was to call ghosts back from the dead, not when the cauldron was doing its thing. I was, though, very sure that letting Jason Chan or any other ghost get a foothold back in the real world was a mistake, and the only way I saw to have my cake and eat it, too, was to fling myself into another plane of existence and hope like hell it worked.
My general impression of the Dead Zone was a bit Hitchhiker’s Guide: it was a tad smaller than incomprehensible infinity so the human mind could encompass just how really, really big it was. My few encounters with the dead—or anything else there, for
that matter—had put me sort of in the middle of an impossibly large space, so that I could feel properly insignificant. It went on for-freaking-ever, and even when I moved around, it never let up with the hugeness factor, or gave me the impression of being near to anything.
Jason Chan stood right on the edge of infinity, about to dive over into the living world. Space and time and eternity spread out, all that enormous emptiness somehow unquestionably behind him, and the only thing standing between him and a twisted unlife was me.
I sprang at him, catching him in the middle with my shoulder, and we skidded halfway across the universe before coming to a stop. The edge of the Dead Zone disappeared, thankfully and familiarly an endless distance away. I flopped over, trying to calm a rabbit-fast heart.
Jason, upon whom I’d flopped, said, “Jesus Christ, lady, what the hell is your problem?” He flung me off in a tangle of elbows and knees, and I skittered onto my backside.
“Sorry. Sorry, I—”
“Are you crazy? What’re you doing tackling people like that? Are you—” He broke off, panting for breath and staring at me. After a couple of seconds his ire faded, leaving him with a little grin. “Okay, so this isn’t usually how I meet girls, and you’re nuts, but maybe I shouldn’t bitch if women are going to literally throw themselves at me.” He offered a hand. “Jason Chan. You always tackle guys when you want to meet them?”
It probably said something about my life that I actually had to think about it before saying, “I don’t think so,” and shaking his hand. “I’m Joanne Walker. Sorry about that.”
“Nothing to be sorry for.” His grin broadened and we finished getting untangled from one another. “I’ve seen you before.”
Dude. Even the dead used the worst pick-up line in history. I said, “Er, no, I don’t think so,” again, and he shook his head.
“Yeah, I have. You were at the museum yesterday with that cop who was asking me about the cauldron. You were the other cop!” He scooted back a few inches and looked me over. “I didn’t recognize you right away. You look better now, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
He’d been dead when I was at the museum yesterday. I opened my mouth to say that, then decided it wasn’t the best way to keep a conversation going. I glanced at myself instead, discovering my astral self didn’t feel a need for bulletproof vests, and that I wore knee-torn jeans and an oil-stained white tank top. Work clothes, in other words, though the job in question was mechanic, not detective. I guessed I knew how my subconscious continued to define me. “It’s fine. You look better than you did yesterday, too.”
Because yesterday he’d had his head bashed in, which hadn’t been such a good look for him. Today his self-image was what he’d looked like alive: young, broad shouldered, short black hair, quick smile. He was cute, the kind of guy you’d bring home to Mom. “How’s your head? Billy said you had a migraine.”
“It’s gone,” he said with a mix of astonishment and satisfaction, then laughed. “The migraine’s gone. My head’s still here.” He clapped both hands against it, making sure of that, and grinned again. “So, did you guys have any luck with the cauldron? The other detective said he’d clear my going home with Sandburg, but he’s gotta be pissed. You’d think he’d given birth to that thing, or something.”
“We’re still looking for it. That’s…” Ice crept over my arms and made me shiver. Jason Chan apparently had no idea he was dead. I didn’t know what would happen if I pointed it out to him. “That’s why I’m here. I hoped I could ask you a few more questions.”
“Sure.” He glanced around, then came back to me with a smile. He smiled easily, this dead young man. I wondered if he had when he’d been alive. “Would it be unprofessional if I took you out for a drink while I answered your questions? This isn’t the greatest place to get to know each other.”
There were many aspects of my bizarre life that I was coming to accept. Getting hit on by a dead guy was not one I was eager to mark up as commonplace, or, in fact, as anything less than seriously creepy. “Maybe we’d better keep it professional. If you could concentrate on your surroundings, it might help you remember details that escaped you earlier due to your migraine.”
“Oh, sure.” Jason frowned, glancing around again. I had no idea what he saw, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t the rolling endless gray of the Dead Zone. “Like I said to the other detective, I came in to work with a low-grade migraine. Seemed like I’d had one all month, so my focus wasn’t at its best.”
“I’ve only had a migraine once. I thought I probably had a brain tumor and was going to die.” Embarrassingly enough, that was true. It certainly gave me sympathy for somebody who suffered them regularly.
Jason shot me a rueful look. “Yeah, basically. It wasn’t that bad, but—you know, it was weird, but I swear it got worse around that cauldron. I always get a light show when a migraine comes on, but just looking at that thing was like staring at the sun.”
The ice that had settled over my skin melted suddenly, turning to a trickle of interest down my spine. “Really? I know it sounds odd, but that might be important. Can you describe exactly what you saw?”
He hesitated, eyebrows drawing down. “I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you ask, it was always the same. That’s not what usually happens. Usually the patterns change when I looked away from something. Anyway, usually it was—” He broke off with a sheepish laugh. “You’re going to think this sounds stupid.”
“You wouldn’t believe some of the things I’ve heard, said and done in this job. Try me.”
Chan rolled his eyes and looked away, then glanced back. “I said it was like looking at the sun, and it was. All kinds of flares and loops in really bright white and gold. But it was dark in the middle of it, like there was a black hole in the center of the sun. And the way the loops wove around it, moving all the time, it was like they were constantly retying themselves around the darkness in the middle.”
“The warding spell.” I dropped my face into my hands, rubbing a thumb over the scar on my cheek. Lots of people got migraines. I wondered how many of them were at least occasionally seeing, but not recognizing, auras or magic being done. Hoping Jason hadn’t picked up on the spell comment, I looked up again. “Is that what it looked when you came in Saturday?”
“Shouldn’t you be writing this stuff down?”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” I reached for my back pocket, where, in real life, I never carried a pad of paper. But this was the Dead Zone, an astral plane, and if I needed paper, it would be there. And so it was, a little spiral-bound blue notebook with a puffy Mustang sticker on the cover. My subconscious not only thought I was still employed as a mechanic, but also that I was nine years old. Great. At least there was a pen stuck through the spirals. “Sorry, go ahead.”
“It’s Jason Chan, C-H-A-N, and my number is 216—”
I laughed, cutting him off. “I have all your particulars back at the station, Jason.”
He snapped with a melodramatic sweep of his arm. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“I guess not.” Too bad he hadn’t had the opportunity to try when he was alive. “So, Saturday night?”
“There was nothing weird. Archie and I always trade off which wing we’re doing. He did the special-exhibits wing first while I did the permanent wing, and then we’d switch. The place is so quiet we never thought we needed to stick together. We’d say hi when we crossed in the lobby, and if one of us was early—like we’d made it into the other wing before the other one was done—we’d give each other hell. Archie’s a cool old guy. Is he okay?”
“We don’t know yet. I’m sorry.” Jason’d told Billy the same things, but I wrote everything down in my notebook. I wondered again what he’d think if he realized he was dead, but I didn’t want to get into it. I’d thought avoiding the topic of the cauldron with Sandburg had been complicated. At least that hadn’t made me want to apologize.
“So my head was hurting anyway, but now that you asked me to
think about it, the lights I’d gotten used to seeing around the cauldron were different. It was like the black in the middle was getting bigger. I radioed Archie and said it was coming to life, like in that movie? I mean, it’s that time of year and everything.” He smiled suddenly. “I’m taking my little sisters trick-or-treating tonight. They’re eleven and fourteen and they’re dressing up as these anime characters. First time I saw them in their costumes I just about locked them in their rooms. My sisters aren’t supposed to look that hot.”
My answering smile didn’t get anywhere near my eyes. I was pretty sure Jason’s sisters weren’t going trick-or-treating, and might never again, with all the associations Halloween would now have for them. “Anyway,” he said, “Redding told me I was an idiot and I kept going on my rounds, but every time I came through there was less light than there’d been. I remember it must’ve been around ten-thirty or eleven that I stopped and really took a good look at it, because I’d never been able to without it making my head hurt more. Then—” A deep frown marred his forehead, and I wished there was a way to head him off. “Then I guess the lights flared up again, because my migraine got a hell of a lot worse. The next thing I really remember is talking to Detective Holliday, and…and then to you.
“Detective Walker, what happened to me?” Jason’s voice got very small, the Dead Zone pulling him impossibly far away, until he was barely more than a dot in my perception. Sonata’d called him close to the living world, and now the dead one was taking him back.
“You were tricked, Jason.” An image of Coyote, my mentor and one of the world’s most famous tricksters, flashed behind my eyes. I’d given Jason a few minutes of real life again, whether I’d meant to or not, and the universe was reordering that, undoing what had been done. Tricksters weren’t kind, but humans learned from them. Learned, or failed to learn at their peril.
If that was what I was on the road to becoming, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. But that was the price I’d paid for my own life, and so if I was to become a trickster, I hoped I could at least manage to leave my fools a little dignity behind. “Something evil tricked you,” I said very quietly. “And now I’ve done it again, to learn what I needed. I’m sorry, Jason Chan. I hope you can forgive me.”