by C. E. Murphy
There was no fight left in Ida Redding’s body, nor in her daughters’. They were still relaxing, in fact, falling out of tormented arches and twisted shapes to collapse into stillness on the earth. A terrible stillness: one that spoke of life already spent and gone. I didn’t need the Sight to tell me we’d broken the cauldron too late, but it washed over me anyway, lighting up the bodies of three people who should have been left in peace more than a century and a half ago.
Two things came blazingly clear, holding me in time and letting the rest of the world fall back in irrelevance for just an instant. The Reddings’ fresh-born souls still lingered, bewildered and injured but not ripped from their bodies; not swallowed by the banshees’ hunger. I blinked in astonishment and my ability to see them faded; mine wasn’t a talent for observing ghosts, and all I was left with was a layered look at the bodies they’d abandoned.
Between midnight and one minute after. That was the window Redding could revive his family in. What he hadn’t known, what the banshees and the Master had never told him, was that those sixty seconds would be the only time in which life ran in their veins again. The bodies lying on the grass were tens of decades dead, burned with years of primitive preservation. It hadn’t been only salt and ice that had kept them together, but magic, as well, and I could see that fading; could see the collapse of cellular structure. They would decompose by morning, finally gone to the ashes they should have been so many years ago. Exhaustion and sorrow closed my eyes for a moment, before I made myself look again at the chaos surrounding me.
Redding himself was on his knees with his forehead against the earth, hands folded over his head. I could hear his sobs, and thought, uncharitably, that he was doing nobody any good. Suzy was hidden behind Gary, who still had my blazing blue rapier in hand, though he’d flung his sword arm up as if in defense. Morrison looked as though he—
Actually, he looked like he was in the midst of cauldron-diving himself, only to rebound off an invisible barrier. He looked pissed, mostly, with a solid dash of confused added to the mix.
As for myself, I lay on a huge iron-bound oaken circle, shards of the cauldron blown to bits around me. In fact, iron bands were scattered all over the yard, and chunks of oak were floating in the pool. A half circle of slivers, some delicate and some massive, lay at Morrison’s feet, like they’d hit something and slid off again. I shot another look at Gary and my sword. He lowered it and shrugged.
Belatedly, I realized I was technically lying on Billy, not on the cauldron’s base at all, and that he wasn’t breathing.
There was something in shamanism called soul retrieval, which was exactly what it sounded like: sometimes people get inexplicably sick and began to fade away. The shamanistic viewpoint on that was their souls somehow become dislodged from their bodies, which then begin to die, as the essential life force is no longer there to vitalize it. Soul retrieval was the moral equivalent of Shamanic Graduate School: it was not the sort of thing the half-trained and emotionally damaged should undertake.
Obviously, I undertook it. I rolled off Billy’s chest bellowing, “CPR! CPR! Morrison, he needs CPR!” which, really, was not the calmest or most awesomely shamanistic way to approach the situation. The truth was, though, I didn’t think I had the stuff to get Billy’s breathing back in line and go chasing after his soul at the same time. I trusted my boss could handle restarting Billy’s heart.
Me, I closed my eyes and ran for the Dead Zone.
I had one advantage. I knew Billy’s soul had gotten lost. I wasn’t working on conjecture. Caroline had wiped out the cauldron, and it could be read one of two ways. One, she’d taken too much of Billy with her. Two, and this was the one I thought more likely, he’d just flat-out refused to let go, and had been ripped away from the life she was trying to give back to him. If there was anything left to her now, she’d be trying to stop him from crossing over. I just needed to get there in time to give her a helping hand.
The Dead Zone refused to let me in.
Intellectually I knew why. I was too agitated, not centered enough, and hadn’t been forcibly thrust into an alternate state of consciousness by, say, being clocked over the head. Shamans, I suspected, were supposed to be patient. Patience was a virtue. I was not especially virtuous. I felt Morrison crash down beside me on the cauldron’s remnants and let go a silent shout at the inside of my head: Morrison was doing his part. I had to do mine so he wouldn’t be disappointed. I had to do whatever it took to find Billy and stitch him back to his body. While I railed at myself, Gary picked me up and moved me from the cauldron, which was no small feat. A moment later I heard a whisper of breath being pressed out of Billy’s lungs, like wings on the wind.
Raven wings had cut the air when I’d last left the Dead Zone.
I dropped my chin to my chest, throat going tight and eyes filling with hot tears. “Raven, Morrigan, Trickster, Maker. You guided me once before. You showed yourself to me when I sought a teacher. I don’t do you the honor I should, I know that, but for what it’s worth, it’s because I’m an idiot, not because I don’t trust you. I just don’t…think about giving thanks and bringing baubles. I’m still not very good at this. I’m taking it more seriously, but I’m still not what anybody’d want me to be.” I opened my eyes, turning a tear-stained face toward the cool distant moon. “I need your help, Raven. Protect my spirit. Protect my soul. Help me find my friend. Please.”
Sleek black feathers enclosed me, and I fell backward into the Dead Zone.
I had never, not once, felt any degree of control in the Dead Zone. Sometimes I could slide from place to place, but mostly if I moved it was through my subconscious getting the better of me. Tackling Jason had been a by-product of my entrance: an object in motion tends to stay in motion.
The raven on my shoulder changed all of that.
I didn’t know if it was because ravens were so strongly associated with death, or if it was that having a spirit guide in a dangerous part of the astral realm genuinely made it safer. Either way, the Dead Zone’s near-infinite curve shrank to a definable space, one that I could look from end to end of. My vision was unusually sharp and clear, letting me see things I’d never seen before. Tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of ghosts slipped through the emptiness. They were on a journey, and for a brief moment I saw all the paths they took. Thousands upon thousands of them traveled a river; thousands more walked hand in hand with a figure who shifted from the familiar cowled death’s-head to a slender and effete being I thought of instantly as Morpheus. As many again rose upward, soaring to whatever lay beyond, and thousands sank down, all of them crossed the Dead Zone in search of another world.
I could have seen them all, if I’d wanted. Could have looked into their eyes, known them as the people they’d been. My vision was that clear, a raven-sharp consideration of a transition mortal eyes weren’t quite allowed to see. Another time I might want to do that: to sit and consider, to sense fear or hope or a hundred other emotions, but not now. Not with Morrison trying to force breath back into Billy’s body, and his spirit taking one of these innumerable tracks to a new aspect of existence.
“Help me find Billy?”
My raven companion leaped off my shoulder and winged its way through the starless void. The half shadows of passing mortality faded with its departure, leaving me alone in a zone grown smaller but no less mysterious.
What felt like a heartbeat later, but had to have been longer, given the distance the raven had traveled, it let forth an excited caw and spun around on a wingtip. I took a single step and joined it, trying not to gape at the space I’d crossed. It settled down on my shoulder again, and clarity washed over my vision again.
Billy rode on the river, one of many in a long flat boat poled by a man with coins for eyes. I caught his shoulders—Billy’s, not the boatman’s—and he turned an uninterested gaze on me. I swallowed, suddenly nervous. The raven dug its claws into my shoulder reassuringly, making me wince. “Ow. Hey. Hey, Billy. It’s me, J
oanie. Joanne,” I corrected myself, then wrinkled my face and leaned forward to whisper in his ear.
“It’s me, Joanne, except you kind of deserve better than that, don’t you. My name’s Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, and you’re my partner in defeating crime, and I’m hoping you don’t really want to take this path just yet.”
He stayed still, not responding. I sat back, lower lip in my teeth. “Come on, Billy. I can take you home. If you think this might not be your time, c’mon and listen to me. We’ll get through this. Caroline didn’t finally let go just to have you join her right away. You must know that.”
His pupils dilated at his sister’s name. Relieved laughter gasped through me. “Yeah. You remember Caro, Billy. She’s been watching out for you all this time. You know what she’s done to protect you. You know she didn’t do it just so you could give up and die. Come on. Come home with me, Billy. You need to get back to Melinda and the kids. Remember them? Robert and Clara and Jackie and Eric? The new one on the way? You remember.”
His gaze got clearer with every name. The raven’s claws tightened again and it plucked a strand of my hair out, making me yelp. The sharp sound got an uncertain laugh from my partner, whose eyebrows drew down after a few seconds. “Joanie? Is that a raven on your shoulder?”
“Yeah,” I said, back in the real world. Billy dragged in a sharp breath all on his own, sending Morrison and Gary back a few feet in relief and surprise. “Yeah,” I said again. “It is. Welcome back to the world of the living, Detective Holliday. I think I’m gonna have to do a spirit quest for you, man. Find some kind of totem animal willing to keep you out of trouble when you’re hanging around me.”
Billy closed his eyes and lay there for a minute, looking and sounding like all he was doing was practicing breathing. Then he said, “That sounds like a good idea. Shouldn’t I be dead?” in a very calm voice.
I knew that voice. It was the one I used when I was trying really hard not to panic. “Not for lack of trying on your part. I took it up with the management.” I put my hand over his heart, calling a whisper of healing magic to make certain of its steadiness. It felt tired, which I could certainly appreciate, but his aura was strong enough, and I slipped a bit of magic under his skin, hoping it would help.
His breathing got easier and he lay there another minute, staring at the sky. For a scene as chaotic as Redding’s backyard had been a few minutes earlier, it was incredibly quiet now. The moonlight and water were peaceable, and not even Morrison had anything to say. Finally Billy said, “Thanks.” Three sets of hands reached out to help him as he sat up. He said, “Thanks,” again, and we all flinched back about five feet when his cell phone rang.
“It’s five minutes past twelve,” I said in astonishment. “Who’s calling you?”
He found his phone, paled in its blue screenlight, said, “Mel,” and answered with a hurried “Mel? Is everything—What? Right now? Oh, hell. No, I’m—No, Mel, this isn’t a good—”
“Holliday,” Morrison said in disbelief. “If that’s your wife telling you she’s giving birth, you had better not be about to tell her this isn’t a good time.”
Billy’s mouth snapped shut. His gaze shifted from me to Morrison to Gary, then back to the captain, and he cleared his throat. “Call an ambulance. I’ll meet you at the hospital. I love you, Melinda.” He hung up with a look of tortured apology that Morrison made another disbelieving sound at.
“Go. For God’s sake, Holliday, go. Your wife is giving birth. If you’re strong enough, get out of here. We can wrap this up without you.”
Billy retained the apologetic look another few seconds. “I’m fine. I shouldn’t be, but I’m fine.”
“That happens a lot around Walker. Go on, Detective.” An unexpected smile slipped over Morrison’s face. “And congratulations.”
Billy’s expression faded from apologetic to shocked, then took a sharp right turn toward thrilled. “Thanks, Captain.” He scrambled to his feet and tore out of Redding’s yard like his tail was on fire.
I pursed my lips. “How’s he going to get to the hospital? You didn’t exactly come in on normal channels.”
Morrison looked pained. “The department’ll pick him up if he’s got enough sense to call it in.” He took his cell phone out and made the call himself, requesting a second squad car for himself. “Walker, do we have any concrete evidence on this guy?”
This guy was Redding, who’d crawled to his dead family and lay still among them. Very still: entirely too still, in fact. I jerked a few steps toward him, then ran the rest of the way, dropping to my knees to put a hand over his chest. Neither heartbeat nor breath stirred, and blue magic flared, instinctively rising to the challenge of forcing life back into a broken body.
I turned my gaze toward Morrison. “I think he’s had a heart attack. Um. Should I…?”
“Can you?”
“Yes.” Tired confidence filled me. “Yes. I can save him. He can stand trial for trying to kill me. For killing Jason Chan, probably. For—”
Suzy quietly said, “There are bodies buried beneath the swimming pool. I can see police officers digging them up. I can see—” She blanched and shivered. “I can see the rituals he tried to bring them back. I can see his anger, his despair. He needed the cauldron. Nothing else had the power, but he kept trying. He has a lot to answer for.”
I rolled my lips in, then nodded. “There’s your evidence, sir, and it’ll go down a whole lot better than attempted murder when I don’t have a scar on me to prove I was attacked. Or we could just…”
Morrison’s silence didn’t last that long: it couldn’t, not when a man’s life was in the balance and every second counted toward brain functionality. But it seemed like a long time indeed before my captain exhaled and said, “Do what you think’s best, Walker. This one’s your call.” He turned away, deliberately leaving me to Redding and my own decision.
I looked down at the four bodies surrounding me. Three broke and shrank as I watched, and the fourth was achingly whole beside them. Whole, and yet what was inside him was more badly distorted than even the rapidly decaying family around him.
I could bring him back. Make him stand trial; make him answer for murders whose resolution might close heartbreaking chapters in strangers’ lives. I could make him face a world in which he’d failed in a mission of such desperate love that it had taken him across centuries and driven him to commit horrendous crimes. I could force him to live with a broken heart, maybe with a broken mind, until death came to his door again. I could make him face the faces of those whose families he’d murdered, and could hope he would pay a price in guilt every day for the rest of his life.
I could not, in any way, see how doing that would make the world a better place.
The bodies below the pool would be identified. Answers would be brought to grieving families. They might be denied the catharsis of a trial, but they would be offered another, even more final solution to their hurt: the man who had done these things to their loved ones was dead.
Archie Redding had died knowing he’d lost. I couldn’t imagine a heavier price for him to pay, and I had no stomach at all to prod him back to a life of nothing but sorrow. I closed my hand, healing magic subsiding within me, and got to my feet with tears sliding down my face.
“S’a good girl.” Gary slipped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me against his chest. A sob broke in my throat and I made a fist against his chest, coughing tears. “S’a good girl,” he said again, into my hair. “Right choice ain’t always easy.”
“Is it ever easy?” My voice shook like a kid’s, and he squeezed me tighter.
“’Course. Looked like divin’ into that cauldron was easy.”
I snorfled against his shoulder and took a step back with a hoarse laugh. “Pretty much, yeah. What happened when I went in?”
“It exploded,” he said with as much satisfaction as I’d felt at blowing up the undead warriors.
I sniffled again, but my smile g
ot stronger. “That’s what I hoped it would do. How come you didn’t get blown up?”
He lifted my rapier, which he’d been holding away as he hugged me. “Guess this sword of yours tapped into the medal I gave you, ’cause it threw up a shield that kept us all from gettin’ perforated.” He said the last word like it was made of candy, rolling it around in his mouth. “Didja see our entrance, darlin’?”
“You mean you, the Wild Hunt and about a million pounds of kick-ass? Yeah. I caught that.” Tears still spilled down my cheeks, but a grin worked its way across my face. I shouldn’t be grinning. All sorts of things had gone badly tonight. I’d almost died. Billy’d almost died. The grin, though, wouldn’t die. “How’d that happen? How’d you pull it off?”
Suzy stepped up, all but digging her toe in the earth. “I Saw the Hunt’s terror. The cauldron was pulling them in, so I called them to me again. I guess blood’s even stronger than death.”
I glanced after Billy, thought of Caroline, and felt my smile go crooked. Happy, but crooked. “Yeah, I think sometimes it is. Good job, Suzy. Good job, everybody.” I stuck the sword in the ground and dragged both of them into enormous hugs so I could mumble, “And thanks for saving my ass tonight. How’d you all get here? I mean, Suzy, if you called the Hunt, I can see them bringing you, but…”
She shrugged, characteristic teenage abrogation of responsibility. “Captain Morrison was there, and he told Grandfather that we needed to get Detective Holliday if any of us were going to come out of this alive.”
I twisted to give Morrison’s shoulders an astonished look. “Cernunnos listened to Morrison?”
“Well, I had to tell Grandfather he should, but then he did.”
My grin turned, very briefly, into a giggle. Not even the Horned God of the Hunt could stand before the Mighty Morrison. I felt better about, well, everything. “Thank you,” I said again. “Thank you all.”