“I can’t get through.” Obviously. “He put up some kind of firewall.”
“A firewall.”
“Yeah, you know. To keep unfriendlies out of your computer network?”
“I know what a firewall is, Joanie. I’m just questioning your usage. How come it let me through, if it’s a firewall?”
I lifted my eyebrows at him. “It doesn’t recognize you as an unfriendly. It’s programmed for me.” It was a lot easier to think in terms of computer protocols than magic. I thought I might be on to something here.
“Right. So can you still do the thing you were going to do?”
I pursed my lips and looked through the invisible barrier. “One way to find out.” The core of power in me was waking up, the wall providing some kind of challenge it felt ready to stand up to. I was pretty sure it was a false high, but I was willing to take it.
“Last time I did this,” I said, more to myself than Billy, “it didn’t actually do a damned bit of good.”
“You’re older, wiser, and stronger now.” There was an unexpected resonance to Billy’s voice, a depth of faith that I knew full well I didn’t deserve. Still, it made me straighten my shoulders and drag in a deep breath of cold air. I closed my eyes momentarily, feeling the steam from my breath beading into water on my eyelashes.
When I opened them again, I wasn’t quite in my own body anymore. The core of silver-blue energy was alive inside me, pushing me out as though there wasn’t enough room for the two of us in this town. For a moment I felt like I was being given a gift I didn’t really deserve: I hadn’t done any of the training Coyote thought I should, and I wasn’t sure I ought to be able to slip out of my body so easily.
The flip side to that, equally frightening, was that if I could do it without any training, then maybe he was right, and it really was something I should be doing with my life. I didn’t like that possibility any better at all.
Right in front of me, the Blade’s firewall glimmered dark red, like blood seeping out from the heart of the world. It cut off my ability to see anything inside it with more than ordinary eyes. I turned my head very slowly, unsure if my body was doing the same thing, but afraid to move too quickly for fear of jarring myself out of the double vision. Beyond the firewall, the world was full of neon colors, pulses of life that looked like a kid with fingerpaints had gone wild. Billy was just to my right, a swirling ball of orange and fuchsia energy held in his hands. I whispered, “Thanks,” and though I was pretty sure I hadn’t said it out loud, he crooked a grin and nodded his head once in acknowledgment. I reached out for his colors, calling them to me as politely as I could. They leaped out of his hands, whirling together like agitated kittens, and spun into the silver and blue core of me.
I felt, instantly, a dozen times stronger. My mind cleared, focus spilling through my limbs as if the blood had just remembered that it was supposed to be running. I didn’t expect the sudden boost in clarity. It suggested my power really hadn’t recovered from the run-in with the Blade that morning. Or almost thirty years ago. Whichever. The point was, if Billy’s energy was bringing the world into that much sharper relief, I was even more tapped than I’d thought.
Buoyed by his dancing fuchsia and brilliant orange, I spread my hands, sending tentacles of power darting over the Blade’s shield. Silver slithered over red, trailing my and Billy’s colors like banners, testing and tracing the barrier. I went up, not around, looking for weak points that would allow me to hack into the system.
Giggling while out of body was an interesting experience. It felt like champagne bubbles in my nose and fingertips, little sparkles of glee that didn’t require containment.
As if in response to my laughter, the red wall faltered.
My giggles cut off as I jumped to take advantage of the weakness, a thin spot in the barrier that began to strengthen again even as I slid threads of power into it. I envisioned taloned nails that could grasp and tear more efficiently than my own, and worried at the spot like a determined rodent. I found myself grinning again, wondering what Coyote would think of me throwing over the car analogy in favor of using psychic rats to claw my way through a magical firewall. Even as I grinned, a silver tendril punched its way through the wall. Other colors, Billy’s and mine both, leaped to the spot, squirming through and braiding together to strengthen each other without ever blending or losing any of their own distinctive coherence.
My hands lifted of their own accord, making claws that wrenched apart from one another, as though prying open a bear trap. The wall above me groaned and then tore, great jagged chunks ripping free with the same metal-on-metal shrieks I’d encountered that morning.
I was abruptly very cold, sweat standing out on my face and beading into my eyes. A dispassionate part of my mind suggested shock? and for a dizzying moment I considered stopping before I found myself facefirst in a snowbank, dying of exposure. The power I was using gasped and shriveled, the jaws I’d forced open in the red wall beginning to crash shut again. My knees gave out and I dropped to the snow. The chill helped me focus, and I used the energy that had been keeping me on my feet to try to keep the wall torn asunder. It had life of its own, forced and vicious, with no purpose beyond keeping me out. Destroying me, if it could.
And it was going to. I crumpled farther into the snow, pressure bearing down on my weakening breach in the wall like so much newspaper. I knotted my fingers in snow, feeling icy chunks bite into the lines of my un-gloved hand and then melt into bone-aching cold. I was going to be pulverized by someone who wasn’t even there. What an embarrassing way to die.
At least Morrison wasn’t there to see it. For a moment I went in a mental circle, annoyed that that was my last thought, then realizing it couldn’t be, because this was my last thought—
Power slammed into me, drawn from a depth that I could barely fathom. Deep purple, burnt sienna—Billy’s colors, but at their most profound. I could feel the love he drew on, lacing his colors with such gladness I was happy to stop breathing, so long as I could do it for them—
I didn’t come to my feet. My body was irrelevant, left behind as I sprang forward on the force of the power Billy gave to me, unstinting. I slammed my fingers, all swirled with dominant purple, into the barely existent crack—all that was left of my opening in the wall—and tore it apart.
Redness shattered all around me, breaking in huge chunks of raw-edged power that collapsed into fragments as they hit the ground. I boiled through the opening and stood against the waves of blood rage that had gone into the killings. The bodies were gone, but the black power that linked one woman to another was still there, seeped in the earth beneath the snow like their blood. I could see lines that hadn’t been there the day before—or that I hadn’t been strong enough to see. Billy’s outpouring of energy made my skin tingle, even if I’d left my actual body behind.
He can’t keep this up forever, Joanne. Stop fucking around. Did other people have little voices in their heads that said things like that? I could stretch myself out a little and touch a hundred thousand minds in Seattle just to find out, but I was afraid the answer would be no. I refrained, instead focusing on the thin lines rising up from each of the three points where the women had died.
They came together in thready blackness, like oil-smeared string that glimmered and twisted with unhealthy light, making three points of a pyramid. They joined at the apex and braided together, reaching higher until the braid grew watery and distant. I could see it cut through the clouds and into the blueness of the sky beyond, but it faded before it reached the dark curve of space above the world. I was almost certain it faded, not that my vision was failing. The power diamond wasn’t complete. The Blade needed one more body to finish building his stairway to heaven. That was the good news.
The bad news was it obviously didn’t matter that the bodies themselves were gone. The power their deaths had bought was there, seared into the ground. Taking the three women away from the park hadn’t broken the spell, and I wasn’t s
ure what would.
The worst news was I could only think of one way to find out. The rich colors of Billy’s power hadn’t faded at all, memories coalescing around me: moments of love, laughing until the tears came; moments of holding sick children, afraid of what the night might bring. The bright spark of his wife’s smile; the open acknowledgment that his girls had him wrapped around their little fingers, that his boys made him puff up with a fatherly pride he felt a little silly about, in this enlightened day and age.
What he was giving me was the part of him that would never, could never, give up. It was his center, his family, the core of all his strength, and just as surely, the center of all his weaknesses. He embraced every bit of it, flinging it toward me with everything he had, giving me the power to reach all the way to the stars. He knew what he was doing: he could protect himself from the lethal drain but chose not to. Instead he offered up power far beyond the limits of safety. I could take it and follow the Blade’s black thread into the heart of its darkness, and learn what lay behind him.
This morning and almost thirty years ago, my mother had had the same choice.
I fell back into my body with a jolt so hard it made my teeth ache, refusing the maelstrom of power offered to me by my friend. Refusing to take what he would give until the moment his system went into critical failure. I wouldn’t take it, not even to fight the thing that wielded the murderous Blade.
Weak with exhaustion, I was still able to turn in time to catch Billy as he fell, the very life of him drained almost to the sticking point.
The earth itself had power to spare, a thin green-and-blue flow far beneath its frozen surface. I reached for it with a worn-out plea, dragging the offered trickles of energy up through the snow and into myself. I couldn’t reach even as far as the scattered trees, much less beyond the park’s boundaries to beg for some of Seattle’s teeming life energy. I had to wait, bent over Billy’s chilled form, drawing in tiny spurts of strength until the swirling core of silver-blue inside me gave a little groan, and let power flow into my hands.
I fell back on the analogies I knew best. Billy’s battery was drained and needed a jump. The thought of jumping Billy made me burble a snicker. His wife would beat me up.
The logical side of my mind said that if part of a person was the battery, it would probably be his mind. My hands drifted over Billy’s heart without paying any attention to the logical part of my mind. I actually made little pinchers of my fingers, like jumper-cable heads, and clumsily stabbed one hand against my own heart, the other staying over Billy’s.
It was a long and slow transfer of strength, my eyes half-shut and my head bowed over his. I was gaining very little for myself; what I could draw from the frozen ground beneath the snow I simply siphoned into Billy. His color improved gradually and he finally chuckled, more shaking his body than sounding in my ears. “Think we can walk out of here if we lean on each other?”
“Mngrnf.” I thought that was supposed to be “maybe.” Billy seemed to understand, and we took a couple of long minutes to climb to our feet, giggling with exhausted clumsiness.
“You find anything out?” he asked once we were both on our feet.
“Yeah.” I tried out this whole walking thing, one shaky step. I could feel weary relief spill through him and into me.
“What?” His first step wasn’t any steadier than mine. I smiled wearily and pulled myself up a little straighter, letting him lean on me.
“I found out I’ve got the best friends in the world. C’mon. Let’s go, Holliday. Your wife’s expecting us for dinner.”
9
“I swear on my wife’s grave.” Gary herded me up the stairs to Billy’s front door, maneuvering Billy into line behind me. Mel stood in the open doorway, looking bemused. Gary spoke to her, not to me or Billy, which was just as well, because we’d gone well past punch-drunk sometime in the past hour of work and were howling with laughter every time anybody moved. “I swear on Annie’s grave,” Gary repeated to Mel, “this ain’t my fault. They were like this when I picked ’em up at the station.”
“I’d ask why Billy wasn’t driving,” Melinda said, getting out of her husband’s way as he snickered and staggered through the door, “but I think I see why. I’m Melinda Holliday.” She threaded a hand between me and Billy to shake Gary’s, then fixed me with a gimlet eye. “Have you two been out drinking, Joanie?”
An eruption of giggles escaped through my nose and squirted tears from my eyes. I clapped both hands over my mouth and tried to wiggle a finger up to clear my eyes. “No. Swear to God. Hi, Mel.” I bent to give her a hug, hoping I wouldn’t lose my balance in doing so. She was nearly an entire foot shorter than I was and better dressed than anybody I’d ever met, including Billy. “This’s my friend Gary. Gary Muldoon. He,” I said extravagantly, “is a hero.”
“Where ‘hero’ equates to ‘designated driver’?” Melinda asked archly. “Get in here, all of you.” She sounded like she was herding cats, or her four children. We all straightened up and scurried inside to the best of our ability, more obediently than either cats or her kids would have done.
“Jooooooaaaaanne!”
That was the last thing I heard before I went down in a pile of elbows and knees and squirming bodies. “Oh, sure,” I heard Billy say, somewhere above my head. “Joanie gets all the hugs, but your old man gets nothing?”
“We see you all the time, Dad,” a voice from the pile of squirmy people on top of me pointed out. The oldest kid—Robert-who-didn’t-like-to-be-called-Bobby, that-was-a-little-boy’s-name—extracted himself from the pile to give Billy a proper hug. He was eleven, not quite old enough to have too much dignity to show such blatant affection.
That left two kids squishing me, and one toddler slapping his barefoot way down the hall with the clear intention of finishing off the dog pile. Melinda scooped that one up, eliciting a howl of dismay while the girls, Jacquie and Clara, clambered off me, pulled me to my feet, and attached themselves to my sides like leeches. “Joanne, we haven’t seen you since forever…how come you don’t come over more often…did I show you my friendship pins…no I want to show her my Xbox it’s cooler than the dumb pins—”
I didn’t even know which of them wanted to show me what, but I promised, as loudly as I could, that I wanted to see both the pins and the Xbox and anything else they had to show me, which satisfied Clara, who released me and went tearing off down the hall shouting about the computer games. I grinned after her and gave Jacquie an extra hug. She beamed and clung to my side even more enthusiastically. I had no idea why they liked me so much, but I adored them and it made me feel I’d done something right in a prior life.
Except, the annoying little voice in my head said, brightly, you haven’t had any. That’s what Coyote told you, remember?
I told the annoying voice to shut up and tried to get my boots off without letting go of Jacquie. It was partly self-preservation; I still wasn’t doing so well at the whole standing-on-my-own thing, and neither, it seemed, was Billy, who leaned against the now-closed door and smiled wearily. This was what he needed more than any power I could have jumped his battery with: the rambunctious noise and love of his family.
Erik, the toddler, yowled, “Dooowwn!” and then added, in a snuffle, “Pease?” Melinda laughed and put him down. He crawled over to my feet through the snow we’d tracked in and helpfully began yanking on my shoelaces.
I’d been ushered out of the hall and into the kitchen, and had a glass of wine in my hand before I was entirely sure I’d gotten my boots off. Erik came trundling after us with one of the boots wrapped in his arms, which I took as more or less a good sign. Mel was exchanging pleasantries about it being nice to meet you with Gary, who scooped Jacquie—she was only five—off the floor and turned her upside down. Jacquie shrieked with unholy glee, narrowly missing kicking Gary in the nose. For an old guy with no kids of his own, he ducked well.
The first sip of wine hit me behind the eyes like a bowling ball. I let slip
a startled giggle and lifted the glass to peer at it, as if I might see a miniature bottle of whiskey hidden in the rich dark liquid.
“Are you all right, Joanne?” Mel somehow heard my giggle through the general noise and turned to look at me, her eyebrows lifted and a teasing smile in place. “What have you and Bill been up to?”
“All kinds of weird sh—tuff.” I caught myself just in time, but Robert, sitting on the counter where he wasn’t supposed to be, smirked and rolled his eyes as if to say, grown-ups. Mel, without having to look his way, said, “Off the counter, Rob. Go set the table,” which was apparently his punishment for thinking himself superior to adults. He thumped down with another eye-roll and I winked at him in sympathy as he skulked into the dining room.
“We’ve been misbehaving horribly,” I assured Mel. “I’ll tell you about it after dinner.”
“You’d better. I get huffy when strange women bring my husband home acting drunk on holidays.”
“I’m not that strange,” I protested. She laughed and went to open the kitchen window, sending a blast of cooler air into the hot room. I stepped closer to it, taking a deep breath as I leaned over the sink and peered at their backyard. It looked like a Thomas Kincaid painting, down to giant snowmen and half-buried swing sets. Moonlight turned it all purpley-blue. I lifted a toast to the man in the moon, the hard edges of his full disc reddened and mellowed by the wine in my glass.
“You’re pretty strange, Jo,” Gary said.
I looked back over my shoulder. “You’re not helping.”
He shrugged, grinning, and turned to Melinda. “Anything I can do to help, ma’am?”
“You could start by not calling me ‘ma’am,’” Melinda suggested. I shook my head.
“Don’t say that. He’ll start calling you ‘dame’ and ‘lady’ and ‘broad’ if you’re not careful.”
“It’s parta my charm,” Gary said. I laughed.
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