by C. E. Murphy
Which was exactly what the wendigo was thinking. I picked up a pillow and hit myself in the head with it a few times, much to the bemusement of the men. I said, “Nevermind, forget it,” into the pillow, then dropped it and scrubbed my hands through my hair. “Okay, if we have to do this thing, why don’t we get it done so we can hit the hotel restaurant before it closes? I’m going to become very unreasonable if I don’t get to eat until tomorrow.”
Coyote, sotto voce but not very, said, “As opposed to how she usually is?” to Gary, who snorted laughter.
I hit them both with the pillow. “I don’t know if you have any bright ideas, Ro, but I do.” His eyebrows shot up skeptically, which I didn’t think was very nice. Justified, maybe, but not very nice. “Soul retrieval happens in the Lower World, right? And it’s dangerous for everybody. So we’re going to want as much protection as we can get on every level.”
He said, “Okay,” in a dubious tone which suggested I was making sense but that he didn’t quite believe I could be.
I got no respect. Fine. I was just going to have to be right. That would show him. “So we’re going to want a power circle, and I think it needs to be drawn outside in the snow.”
Coyote drew breath like he was going to argue, then let it out in a slow dismayed sound. “I think you’re right.”
“I think she better have some kinda good frostbite cure ready. Are you two nuts? It’s ten degrees and fallin’ out there, not to mention there’s a man-eatin’ monster roamin’ around.”
“I can handle the frostbite,” I said with a blithe confidence I hadn’t had a few hours ago. “And luring the man-eating monster out is kind of the point. Know anything about trapping demons in a power circle, Coyote? I figure if we limit its range of motion we’re going to be in better shape than if it’s able to run free. What happens if someone doesn’t want his soul retrieved?”
“Ever tried picking two cats up out of a fight?”
“Er, no.”
“Me either, but that’s about what it sounds and looks like. Only the cats are as big as you are, in this case.”
Whatever confidence I’d had turned tail and ran. “I definitely think a power circle is in order.”
“You going to build it?”
I stood up, trying to look and sound like I knew what I was doing. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We tromped down to the hotel lobby armed for battle, which was to say bundled up like snowmen and Gary carting my drum in a pack over his shoulder. The lobby was deserted except for one floppy-haired desk attendant who raised his eyes despondently when we came in. “Checking out?”
I said, “Not even metaphorically,” cheerfully, hoping to counter his Eeyore impression, but he looked at me with the emo gaze of a youth for whom all hope is gone. No sense of humor at all. I muttered, “Right, then,” under my breath, and tried again. “We’re just going out for a moonlight hike. We’ll be back in a few hours. Why, have a lot of people left?”
“Everybody but the federal agents and you.” The lobby wasn’t deserted after all. Laurie Corvallis had been hidden in one of the chairs, its back to the front desk, but giving her a line of sight to the front door. She scooted the chair so she could see me, and so I could see her camera guy in the next chair beyond her. “Interesting decision,” she said. “Going hiking out in the mountains in the middle of the night with a killer around.”
“I’m an interesting person.” I turned to the emo desk attendant. “I’ll give you a hundred-dollar tip if you can keep her from following us.”
Gary muttered, “Since when do you have a hundred bucks to be throwing around?” and I elbowed him. He grunted, but the kid missed it, his dull gaze lighting up as he looked at Corvallis.
She gave him one of her devastating barracuda smiles, and he shrank back behind the desk. “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t stop the guests from coming and going.”
“I can.” Sara Buchanan—I had to stop thinking of her that way—came down the stairs in a thump of boots. “No one’s going out there without my authorization. Joanne, one of my men didn’t come back from the crime scene this afternoon.”
“Shit.”
“Shit? What does shit mean?”
I bit back a scatological explanation, pretty sure she wouldn’t be amused. “It means he’s probably dead. I’m sorry.”
I had to hand it to her: she didn’t even blink. “Probably?”
“Only one person’s survived one of these attacks, and she…” Sudden hope seized my heart. The Sight flashed on, sending the whole room into surreal bright colors. Corvallis was about to fall out of her chair, she was so eager to hear what I had to say. Her aura stretched toward me like the borealis reaching for earth, like it would find the culmination of its being in touching me. Sara was tightly wound caution, afraid even to hope. Coyote blared with an unexpected combination of professionalism and awe, like he had a job to do but was a little overwhelmed. It was disconcerting to realize the awe was inspired by me. I was a mess, not somebody who should be able to impress a shaman with a whole lifetime’s study behind him.
Gary, on the other hand, was his usual solid reliable eight-cylinder self. There was a fight out there and he was willing to take it on. I owed him more than I’d ever be able to express.
The desk attendant maintained his bored above-it-all expression, but his aura leaped and jumped with excitement. He didn’t know what was going on, but he felt like he was a part of something big. I wanted to either pat him on the head or send him home to safety, maybe both, and fought back the snickering urge to do so. That wasn’t in my bizarre job description.
Healing and protecting were, though, and everyone in the room except the desk attendant had traces of my magic lingering against their skin, just like Mandy Tiller had. I pressed my eyes closed, still able to See everyone in the room, and said, “Your guy, Sara. He was with us this afternoon?”
“We all were.”
“Okay.” I made myself meet her gaze. “Then maybe there’s a very small chance he’s still alive. He was there when I…” Corvallis was still leaning out of her chair, desperate to hear what could be heard. I said a word nice girls shouldn’t know, then repeated it more loudly.
There was just no way this was going to end well. Short of clobbering her, which would get me up on assault charges, I couldn’t see how to get rid of Corvallis. On the other hand, I had no doubt she would happily do a story on the Seattle Police Department’s very own magic-using detective, and make me look like a complete fool.
Oddly enough, I didn’t mind that. I was a believer these days, not because I particularly wanted to be, but because the world wouldn’t have it any other way. The world, though, wasn’t giving object lessons to most of its citizens. Even if Corvallis could be persuaded to do the most sympathetic possible story—which she wouldn’t, because her point would be to make me look like an idiot, not to make herself look like a believer—I was going to come across as a complete kook. That was okay. I’d never wanted to make other people accept that magic was real. It was better if they just thought I was crazy. Hopefully the harmless kind of crazy, but crazy either way.
What I couldn’t abide was the backlash Morrison would get. He couldn’t come out of this alive. Either he knew he’d hired a detective who thought she worked magic, or he didn’t. If he knew, I’d goddamned well better be the harmless kind of crazy, because otherwise my boss’s neck was on the chopping block. And the truth was, people ended up dead around me a lot. Mostly they were bad guys, but not always. Marie D’Ambra and Henrietta Potter hadn’t been bad guys. Neither had Colin Johannson, and Faye Kirkland had been…complicated. I knew the truth behind all of those stories, but on the surface, put those things together and I didn’t look harmless at all.
And if Morrison didn’t know he’d hired a dangerous detective who thought she could do magic, well, then, he was incompetent. Frankly, I’d prefer to force the world to believe in magic than to let them think my b
oss wasn’t good at his job.
Sara folded her arms, waiting with impatience that wasn’t so much ill-concealed as worn on her sleeve. She was my out: a federal agent in a country besieged with the Patriot Act. She could get Corvallis out of my hair, off my back, and out from under my feet, which was about as thorough a clichéd removal as I could come up with. And she would, too. Not because we were old high school buddies and not because she believed in magic, but because she wanted her man back, and if I said Corvallis couldn’t be there or I couldn’t get him back, Corvallis would be out on her ear faster than a fast thing.
And then the story would be about SPD Detective Joanne Walker getting a federal agent to oust a local news reporter from the heart of the action. The investigation would be about what I was hiding, and in the end, it would come out exactly the same way. Maybe magic wouldn’t be involved, but the way people found themselves dead after not very long in my presence would be more than enough to screw me over and nail Morrison in the process.
Rock, meet hard place. I exhaled and finished my sentence: “He was there when I shielded everyone this afternoon. You have vestiges of the shielding clinging to you. The only person who’s survived this thing did, too. It might not be enough, Sara.”
She nodded once, sharply. “It’s more than I’ve got right now. The rest of us will break up into teams of three to search—”
“Don’t be stupid.” That was probably not the most politic thing I could’ve said, and it wasn’t likely to earn points for honesty, either. I barreled on before Sara had much chance to protest. “I can barely keep this thing off me. You saw how little effect bullets had. Everybody, and I mean you when I say that, is going to be a lot safer if you stay inside. The fact that your guy’s gone missing should tell you that.” My stomach lurched. “He was outside when he went missing, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was. I have people on patrol, Joanne. I can’t leave this thing—”
“You have to. Sara, you can’t go out there—”
“Yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Yes I can!”
“No you ca—” Wow. We were, like, six. Clearly I was going to have to do something drastic for her own good. “Okay, fine.”
I punched her in the jaw.
The Sara I knew would’ve dropped like a hot potato. Sadly for me, that girl had been a decade plus some federal training ago. Her head snapped to the right and tears glassed her eyes, but she didn’t so much as stagger, much less fall. After a couple very long seconds she cranked her face back around to look at me, a red mark blossoming on her chin.
The emo desk attendant breathed, “Oh, this is gonna be good,” and Coyote said “Ten bucks on the blonde,” loudly enough for me to hear. Gary, wisely, didn’t respond, only shuffled backward, getting out of the way.
Sara spun around and smashed a booted heel into my ribs.
———
I bet somewhere there was a really important law about not hitting federal agents. I bet there was an equally important one about federal agents only using necessary force. Lucky for Sara, my big poofy winter coat cushioned so much of the kick that she had all kinds of excuse to keep right on being forceful. I slammed into the registration desk, not quite winded, and she came after me with gut punches. I threw an elbow and hit her in the face. Padded or not, elbows were pointy, and she fell back with tears streaming down her cheeks. I swung around to put my weight on the desk, lifted both feet, and kicked her in the chest.
She went flying backward, slamming into one of the lobby chairs with a satisfying crash, and she came up with a girl-gladiator expression that belied her tears. That was okay. I knew they weren’t oh-ow-woe-is-me tears. They were merely the by-product of being hit in the face twice. If I’d hoped that was enough to take her down—
Okay, realistically, although I’d thought the first punch might take her down, we weren’t really hitting each other over the topic of who was or was not going out into the night to fight the monsters. The juvenile truth of the matter was I’d hit her mostly because Lucas had kept in touch with her after he left Qualla Boundary, and I was pretty sure she retaliated because I’d slept with him in the first place. Emotional maturity was overrated, anyway. I didn’t think fighting over a boy was usually quite this literal, but right then it felt kind of good, so I didn’t care. It’d been a long time coming.
All that introspection took place while Sara shoved herself out of the chair and rushed me. I waited until the last possible second and stepped aside, hoping for a real Three Stooges moment, but instead of bashing her head into the registration desk she flicked a hand out and caught me in the throat with its stiffened edge.
I went down clawing at my throat as I gagged for air. A tiny oxygen-deprived part of my brain thought to heal myself, and the power flat-out deserted me, which I no doubt richly deserved. Sara kicked me over and nudged my hands out of the way with her toe so she could put a booted foot on my throat. Then, with all the grace and time in the world, she withdrew her duty weapon and pointed it between my eyes.
I had never actually been at the business end of a .45 before. It turned out the scenes in films where the relatively small muzzle of a gun suddenly looked bigger than God Himself were pretty accurate. I didn’t think she was really going to shoot me, but that was less reassuring than it might’ve been. I wheezed, “Okay. You win. You can come hunting with me,” and put my hands above my head.
“Do you know what the penalty for assaulting a federal officer is, Joanne?”
“Two weeks’ detention after school and a stern warning from the principal?”
Sara stared at me, and for a horrible moment I thought maybe I’d been the only one fighting over Lucas. That was bad, especially after I’d been all high-horse about her attitude earlier. But after a few more seconds she lowered her weapon a few inches and said, “Yeah. Something like that. Are we even?”
“No. I think you won across the board.”
She pursed her lips, glanced skyward, and shrugged her eyebrows in a silent consideration that said, essentially, hmm, well gosh, yeah, you’re right, I did. Words were overrated. Sometimes faces could say everything necessary. Hers also said I’d probably broken her nose, given how it was swollen and bleeding. The fact that she was still making expressions around it suggested some nerve damage, too, because otherwise it would’ve hurt too much. I put my hand up, just curious, and she put the gun away to pull me to my feet. I said, “Thanks. This is going to hurt like a son of a bitch,” and pulled her nose straight with no other warning.
Her pained howl faded into a surprised squeak as I pulsed healing power right behind that yank. Fender bender, nothing worse, but I didn’t have to go through the mental gymnastics of pounding the dents out. Her bruising faded, and when a little part of me wanted to leave a hint of yellow behind, Coyote hit me on the back of my head like he knew what I was thinking. He probably did, since he’d taught me a lot of what I knew.
Sara prodded her nose cautiously when I dropped my hand. “How the hell…?”
“It’s easier when you don’t know it’s going to happen. There’s no disbelief for me to fight. Healing’s easy.” I shrugged uncomfortably. “The body wants to be put right. I’m just speeding it along. Sorry about your nose.”
She wriggled its tip with a finger. “I guess there’s nothing to be sorry for. If you ever hit me again, Joanne…”
“Yeah, I know, straight to the principal’s office with me.” I was painfully aware of—well, several things, actually, ranging from my ribs to my kidneys to my throat, but mostly of Laurie Corvallis, who was on her feet. Her hands were working like she wanted to grab something but couldn’t quite manage, and I felt a rare bolt of compassion. My world just didn’t make any sense from the outside. I wondered if she would go away if I explained I was just trying to keep her out of a situation that she would never comprehend.
Probably not. For one, with the way my luck ran, it would turn out she was much more open t
o the possibility of and interested in the dynamics of magic than I was. For two, I suspected any time she was told “You wouldn’t understand,” it made her that much more determined to get to the guts of the thing, whatever it was.
I turned away, hoping out of sight was out of mind. That struck me as a good argument to keep people safe, and I pleaded my case to Sara. “You’re the head of the squad, I get that. You have to go. Fine. But will you at least not send teams out? I can only be reasonably sure of protecting the people who are actually with me. I don’t want you to lose anybody else.”
“Wait a minute.” Corvallis found her nerve and stalked over, catching my arm. “Wait a minute. What did I just see there? Her nose was broken.“
I should have hit her, not Sara. It took a count of ten before I was confident I wouldn’t rectify my mistake. She’d spent the afternoon watching people wrestle with a wendigo, but she was impressed by a broken nose getting unbroken. On the other hand, even I’d had a hard time seeing the wendigo with the Sight going full blazes. A healed nose was probably easier to both see and comprehend than a half-visible fight with a monster that couldn’t be defined. I pulled my best smile out and presented it to her, not caring that it felt more like a death’s head rictus than a real smile. “What’d I tell you during the blue flu?”
She reared back on her heels almost as if I had hit her, eyebrows drawing down. It took less than a heartbeat for her to answer: “You said it was magic.”
“There you go, then.” Sudden childish curiosity rose in me. “Tell you what, Laurie. Why don’t you just go to sleep?”
Corvallis’s eyes rolled up and she dropped to the floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I made it there a nanosecond before she did, but only because I was expecting her to fall. It was almost impossible to catch somebody if they really did drop into a dead faint, despite conventions of romantic literature. There was no swaying or fluttering involved, just collapse, and I’d have felt moderately bad if Corvallis had chipped a tooth on the hard floor because I put her to sleep while she was standing up.