by C. E. Murphy
“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.”
I never knew if he could. He winked out and a little girl of around ten or eleven took his place. She wore her hair in braids and had her arms folded over her chest, but a smile split her face when our gazes met. She waved, cheery little action, and then, like Jason, disappeared.
I spluttered a wordless question, but a gasp of raven wings burst around me, and I fell back into my own life, my own body and my own world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The little girl’s image danced behind my eyes as I shook off travel fatigue, or whatever it was called when a person goes zipping through different levels of reality. I’d never seen the girl before, but she’d felt familiar. An odd little hitch came into my breath as I frowned at where the cauldron used to be. Somebody had, at some point, put a warding on that thing, one that kept its power from leaking all over the world as it was moved from place to place. An eleven-year-old girl seemed unlikely, but I’d just finished telling Jason Chan about tricksters. Just because I was seeing a kid didn’t mean that’s what it really was.
She’d felt friendly. I decided to take blessings where I could find them, made a note to myself to look up creatures who could bind ancient evils and who liked presenting themselves as children, and turned my attention back to my audience. I didn’t normally wake up to quite such a large one. Billy and Gary looked relieved I’d woken up, but Sonata’s mouth was pursed. “You didn’t need to interfere. He was willing to cross over.”
The woman deserved an explanation. Intellectually, I understood that. She hadn’t been there for the follow-up fiasco with Matilda. Still, explaining seemed like so damn much effort that my intellect threw up its metaphorical hands and stomped off in a fit of pique. Abandoned by it, all I could do was drop my face into my hands, exhale and eventually say, “I know. Sorry.”
It took effort to lift my head again, and my gaze strayed to my watch when I did. A quarter to nine. If things went badly, I had a maximum of three hours and fifteen minutes to live. Not a cheering thought. “Jason’s migraines got worse around the cauldron. I think he was seeing the binding spell that kept its magic from leaking out like it’s done now. Billy, this isn’t your field any more than it’s mine, but who the hell can create something like that? A piece of tied-off magic that holds another magic inside? Would it be a kid?”
“Culturally speaking,” Sandburg volunteered unexpectedly, “the cauldron would belong to one such as the Morrigan, the threefold goddess of war, knowledge and death. There are no stories of it being in her domain, but given her status in the Celtic cycle, I would consider it hers. Her antithesis would be Brigid, the goddess of healing, birth and learning. Anthropologically, I assume she would be one of the few to hold sufficient opposing magic to bind a death cauldron.”
He glanced at the rest of us, who to a man sat silent with stupefaction, and wet his lips. “That is, assuming you were taking the myths and legends of old as writ, which under the circumstances, it seems you are.”
My neck creaked as I glanced toward Gary. “Remind me to keep a cultural anthropologist handy for, you know. Everything.” He waggled his eyebrows and I turned my attention back to Sandburg, trying not to stare. Trying not to stare at him, and trying not to stare at the museum’s marble floor, where Jason Chan’s lifeblood had been smeared in a circle around the cauldron. “Okay. Two more questions. One—could you in theory break down a ward put in place by somebody like Brigid by doing a blood sacrifice in someone else’s name?”
Sandburg opened his mouth and closed it again, looking around at the rest of us like he was just realizing this wasn’t a game. “I’d think a single sacrifice would lack the necessary power. Maybe a single willing sacrifice, because it’s assumed
willing sacrifices have more…”
“Mojo,” I supplied into his silence. “I think we can trust Jason wasn’t a willing sacrifice. So it’d take more than one?” I didn’t want to say Redding’s name aloud, as if doing so would spell his doom. Except Suzy said he wasn’t dead yet, so he hadn’t been sacrificed to free the cauldron.
“If I were participating in a ritual to break a goddess’s binding, I would probably spend years building the groundwork.” Sandburg spoke very carefully, an awareness that he was offering us the rope to hang him with in his words. “I would wait for an opportune date, one associated with my patron, and I would make repeated offerings in order to weaken the spell so that at the appropriate hour a final sacrifice would shatter it.” His voice tensed, gaze jumping from me to Billy and back again. “I, though, would be acting and speaking metaphorically. You understand that, don’t you? This is…hypothetical.”
“Hypothetical but useful.” I thought of the pigtailed little girl I’d seen once or twice, and drew a deep breath. “Second question. Would a goddess show herself in the form of a child? A little girl?”
“A maiden form is usually represented as older, a young woman rather than a little girl. That said…” Sandburg relaxed marginally as neither Billy nor I leaped up to slap cuffs on him. “Who’s to stop a goddess from appearing any way she wants?”
A tiny surge of relief cleared my blood and my thoughts. “That’s awesome. Anybody know how to summon a goddess and ask for her help in laying the smackdown on her enemy’s cauldron?”
“Not her enemy.” Sandburg regained a shred more equilibrium and sniffed a bit prissily. “Her opposite. Two beings at diametrical points of a power structure aren’t inherently antagonistic. They can merely be balancing forces, one capable of growing too powerful without the other’s influence. And no,” he added as we all went back to staring at him, “I don’t know how to summon Brigid. It appears that would be your domain.” A small circle of his hand indicated he meant all of us when he said your.
“Right,” I said after a minute. “I guess it is.” The problem was, I only knew one person who did goddess-magic, and that was a witch for whom I’d almost ended the world a few months ago. She wasn’t exactly high on my list of people I wanted to contact again, and even if I’d been willing, I didn’t know if her goddess was the same as the one I needed here and now. I desperately wanted a handbook that cross-referenced things like worldwide names for the gods and goddesses whose domains were more or less the same. If there was any kind of justice in the world, they’d be different names for the same being, though I didn’t know why there should start being justice at this late date. Cernunnos and Herne were the same guy by a lot of people’s reckoning, but I had empirical evidence to the contrary. Still, as a research tool, it’d be very handy. Somebody’d probably written one. I’d have to search Amazon, assuming I lived through the next three hours and twelve minutes.
Out loud, and in an attempt to shut off the free association my brain had tumbled into, I said, “You’re taking this well.”
Sandburg gave me a small smile. “I’m really not.”
Oh. Apparently my brain should’ve just kept going with the research thing. Billy, sounding like the voice of grim patience, said, “Did you get anything off Chan?”
“Only that his migraines got worse around the cauldron, right up until the night he died.” I outlined what Jason’d told me about the encroaching darkness he’d noticed, then spread my hands. “Short of calling up a goddess, I don’t know what to do. And I don’t have 1–800-GODDESS preprogrammed into my phone.”
I got a round of dry looks. Okay, okay, I guessed I didn’t need it preprogrammed if I could spell “goddess,” but jeez, tough crowd. Billy, though, broke my discomfort by muttering, “Melinda does.”
“You cannot seriously be suggesting we get your pregnant wife involved in a death-cauldron scenario.” I spoke before thinking, but even if I’d thinked, I’d have said it anyway. Melinda’d had a traumatic enough pregnancy, thanks to me. Adding more stress to the final week of waddling was the last thing I wanted to do, even if the rational part of me recognized it was Mel’s choice. This was not about rationality. This was about Joanne Walker, Reluctant Shaman, getting all puffed up and out of sorts over the idea of her friends diving headlong into trouble just because she was in the middle of it herself.
In Billy’s defense, he didn’t look thrilled about the idea himself. On the other hand, that didn’t stop him from saying, “Know anybody else on speaking terms with a goddess?”
“I don’t,” Gary said, “but if you’re offerin’ introductions, that’s a social class I ain’t familiar with.”
I glowered at him. “You’re not helping.” He gave me a toothy white grin with no repentance in it at all. Sandburg watched the three of us like we were the final match in an exceedingly complex game of Ping-Pong. “Sonata, tell me you’ve got another solution. Any other solution.”
She shook her head. “My strengths lie in communicating with the dead, Joanne. I have no special relationship with any god.”
I could feel the enamel on my molars wearing thin. A Herculean effort unclenched them just far enough to grate, “This goddess Mel’s on speaking terms with…Is she on speaking terms with her?” I nearly backed up to try vocally capitalizing the “she” in that sentence, then decided if Cernunnos didn’t get a capital H when I referred to him as “he,” then a goddess didn’t get one, either. Not from me, anyway.
Besides, Billy followed my pronouns easily enough, shrugging a shoulder in response. “She says she does. I see dead people and my police partner heals with a touch. Who am I to argue?”
There was a certain logic to that. Not an irrefutable logic, perhaps, but I didn’t think I had the moral high ground to refute it. Bizarrely, that reminded me of Morrison’s dyed hair, and therefore of Morrison, and I spent a few seconds wondering what he’d do in my position.
Truth was, he’d do what he already had done: he’d use the resources available to him, whether he liked it or not. Billy and I lived eyeball deep in a paranormal world, so Morrison’d set us loose to play cop in that world because we were the only ones who could. If asking Melinda Holliday to chat up her patron goddess was the surest bead we had on finding the cauldron, then he’d already be halfway to their house and annoyed at me for wasting time.
Even in my hypothetical situations, he ended up annoyed with me. It was good there were some constants in the universe. Time flowed in one direction, light traveled at 9.46 trillion kilometers per year, and Captain Michael Morrison was always irritated with me. I sighed. “All right. Okay. You haven’t installed a pool at your house, have you, Billy?”
He eyeballed me. “Since you came over three weeks ago? No.”
“Just making sure.” At least I wasn’t going to bring down death and destruction on their home again. Suzy’s premonition had been of somewhere else.
Gosh. What a relief.
I shoved the thought away by jamming my fingers through my hair. “Does Mel need advance notice? Should we call ahead?” I got to my feet as I spoke. Everyone else followed suit, Gary with my drum tucked carefully under his arm. Sandburg stole glances between all of us, and I wondered what he was thinking. Possibly that we were equal parts fascinating and alarming, which was a verdict even I could get behind.
Billy took his phone off his belt, nodding. “I’ll let her know. Mr. Sandburg, thank you for grace under pressure, and I’m sorry if this was bewildering. I’ll try to explain it sometime, if you like, but in the meantime, if Sonata doesn’t mind, maybe you could drive her home?” He gave Sonny an apologetic look that she brushed off. Sandburg looked between him and Sonata, and then, evidently deducing he could be the heroic gentleman of the hour, offered the medium his arm. We all trooped out after them, Billy on the phone to Melinda as Sandburg locked up behind us. I hoped I’d never see the inside of the MoCA again, at least not as anything other than a tourist destination.
Some of my stea
m had bled off. I drove to Billy’s house without breaking many speed limits or giving Gary another heart attack. Billy, presumably wise in the ways of neighborhood shortcuts, managed to get home just before us, so he was the one to initially greet Melinda. She stood in their doorway, arms akimbo to her enormous tummy, and nerves surged through me all over again. I didn’t care if it was the only viable choice. I didn’t like asking Mel to be searching out death magic when she was only a few days away from giving birth. It seemed like too much could go wrong.
“My goddess is not Brigid,” she said softly, as soon as we were within earshot. “She may not be willing to help. She may not be able to. But the downstairs is ready. Eric wants you to come kiss him good-night,” she added to Billy. My partner smiled and kissed her first, then went upstairs to look in on his kids while Melinda ushered Gary and me downstairs.
I’d been in the Hollidays’ home dozens of times, and in the daylight basement half a dozen times, usually chasing the younger kids around the house in a madcap game of tag. It was fully the size of the rest of the house, with a laundry room adjacent to a large playroom. If I had four kids and Seattle’s rainy winters, I’d have wanted a room that size to keep my children entertained in, too. Especially since there was a door at the top of the stairs that could be closed, isolating piercing shrieks from the rest of the house.
There were several other doors off the playroom, none of which I’d ever really thought about before. One stood open now, the scent of fresh paint emanating from it. I peeked in, then lifted a curious eyebrow at Melinda. “It’ll be Robert’s new room,” she said with a degree of regret. “He’s old enough not to have to share with Eric, and with the new baby we won’t all fit upstairs anymore. Clara’s agitating to move down here, too, now. They’re growing up.”