Demon Hunts wp-5

by C. E. Murphy

  For a couple seconds I stared at him in bewilderment, then swore under my breath and pinched the bridge of my nose, deliberately hiding my eyes. Whoever’d had the bright idea of tying a physiological change to magic use was an idiot. “I’m a shaman, and I do have good vision, I can See things-”

  I dropped my hand again, scowling, and his aura flared up into something more normal. The distrust fell out, replaced by a different kind of discomfort, like he’d gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I blinked at that for a moment, trying to understand it, and it abruptly came clear.

  He wasn’t supposed to be there, in much the same way I wasn’t. I smiled crookedly. “For example, I can See that you’re lying, aren’t you? You’re not really a Fed.”

  His jaw tightened, not quite guilty, not quite defiant. “Yeah, well, not a Fed doesn’t mean not supposed to be here. We didn’t expect the real ones to get here so fast.”

  Auras made pretty good lie detectors, and what he said was absolutely true. He didn’t have power, not like Coyote, not like me. Not even like Billy, but he still knew the score. He knew there were things that went bump in the night, and I was pretty damned sure that he bumped back.

  Somehow that made my whole day, my whole world, a better place. I didn’t know why. It just came as a load off my shoulders, a huge shocking relief that there were other people out there fighting the monsters. I mean, I’d kind of known there had to be, but I’d never expected to randomly encounter any of them while on the job. My mouth bypassed every mental roadblock I’d ever had and said, quietly, “We think it’s a wendigo.”

  In any sane world, those weren’t words to inspire a crooked little smile at one corner of his mouth, but one appeared. “Yeah, we know. We were heading into Seattle when the police scanner mentioned the kill up here. It’s got the earmarks.”

  “More like the tooth marks.”

  His smile opened up to full-fledged. I had the nigh-irresistible urge to take him home and feed him. Instead, grinning back, I jerked my thumb toward the road. “Look, why don’t you get out of here before somebody figures out you’re not really with the Feds. At least I’ve got a genuine badge to wave. We’ve got this one under control.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, we’re cool. Thanks.”

  “Figures. I meet a hot chick out hunting and she’s already got a team.” He blasted a piercing whistle that made both the tall not-a-Fed guy and the actual agent down by the body turn around. The man headed toward us, but my new pal swung his finger in a lasso and threw the motion down the road, and his friend took a sharp turn that way.

  The woman stood up and I muttered, “Better scram.”

  “Scrammin’.” He gave me another take-him-home-and-feed-him grin, then jogged after the taller guy, boots squeaking against the snow. Coyote and Gary shot curious looks after them, then at me, before the female agent reached my side.

  “Is there a problem with my men? Who are y-” She swallowed the question, staring up at me, then yanked her hat off, like it would help her see me better. Dark honey hair collapsed around her shoulders in classic salon-commercial style, but there was nothing particularly inviting about her expression. “Joanne?”

  There’d been a lot of things I wanted to leave east of the Mississippi. The woman standing in front of me had been one of them. We’d been best friends for about thirty seconds, about a million years ago, and it had gone all to hell over a boy. I scraped a few brain cells together and managed, eventually, to produce a witty response no doubt years in the making:

  “Hi, Sara.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “What are you doing here, Joanne? Where’d you send my men?”

  “Your m-what’m I-what’re you doing here? I live in Seattle. Don’t tell me you live in Seattle. Your men? Really?” I turned to look after the duo beating feet down the road. “You brought them in?”

  “No, they were here when I arrived, but I’ve got rank. What’re you-”

  I pulled out my SPD badge again and earned a credible sneer from the woman who’d once been my best friend. I said, “Oh come on now,” sort of vaguely. “Don’t tell me you’re going to play that whole federal/state jurisdiction superiority thing.”

  “Not as long as you stay out of my way.”

  That had a peculiarly school-yard ring to it. I stood there watching snow melt in Sara’s hair and reeling at the idea that we hadn’t moved past that. I mean, I was no great shakes in terms of emotional maturity, but dwelling on rivalries that had exploded almost fifteen years earlier seemed a little much. It didn’t mean I wanted to be bosom buddies again, but I could hardly fathom getting in jurisdictional fights because I’d nailed the boy she’d wanted in high school.

  Coyote, a bit diffidently and from a safe distance, said, “You two know each other?”

  I said, “Yes,” and Sara said, “No,” at the same time, and Coyote looked like he wished he hadn’t asked. I said, “Yes,” again more firmly. “We went to high school together. This is Sara Buch-”

  “Isaac.”

  I wasn’t moving, but my feet slipped anyway. I lurched upright again, clutching the air for support, and turned goggly eyes on Sara. “You’re kidding. The same-?”

  She drew herself up, all but hissing. She was taller than she’d been in school, though still quite a lot shorter than I was. I’d thought she was beautiful, back then. She’d grown up just as pretty, except for the pinch of anger between her eyebrows. She’d been buckwheat blonde in school, but the dark honey tones suited her better, playing up her cheekbones and skin tones. “Yes, the same Isaac. Just because you got everything you wanted in high school doesn’t mean you-”

  I lost the rest of what she said to gales of laughter. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes went bright, making her even prettier, but I couldn’t stop laughing. I doubled over, still whooping, and finally braced my hands on my thighs so I could peer up at her. “I’m sorry. Are you serious? You really think I wanted to get pregnant and have twins at fifteen? I just wanted him to like me, Sara, and I was a moron. You said you didn’t like him. I swear to God, I had no idea you were just playing it cool. I wasn’t that good at reading people. I’d never had a real girlfriend before, with Dad moving us around all the time. I swear I didn’t get it. I tried telling you this back then. I’m really sorry. I had no idea.” I straightened up and offered a hand in peace. Handshakes were formal gestures, but I’d never felt like I was participating in ritual before when I initiated one. I’d been wanting to say that for a long time.

  Sara didn’t look like she’d been waiting to hear it a long time. “Oh, I’m not just talking about Lucas. It was you and that stupid drum you were so proud of, you and all your stories from all over the place, like you were some kind of hot shit because you’d traveled-”

  I had never previously experienced the phrase my head was spinning in a literal sense, but I began to feel as if someone had taken a stick and was liberally stirring my brains. The world went zipping to the left and I clutched my skull with both hands, trying to steady it. “Wow. You’re serious. That’s…really not how I meant to come across.”

  If I’d meant anything, it had been to keep people from picking on me. I recognized now that I’d had a massive chip on my shoulder. I could see how it could’ve come across as arrogance, but the idea was-to me, anyway-laughable. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be a prick.”

  “Like it matters now.”

  Apparently it did, but I was smart enough not to say that. The smart part of me, in fact, thought I should maybe focus on the dead person a couple dozen feet away so that we could sort out what could be sorted, and then go inside and have Irish coffees to ward off the cold. The teenage girl inside me, though, said, “But he went back to Canada. How’d you guys get back in touch?”

  Sara’s pretty face went shifty. “We never lost touch. We wrote letters after he went home.”

  All the air whooshed out of me like I’d taken a solid gut-punch to the diaphragm. It wouldn’t u
nknot enough for me to inhale again, even when I hunched over, trying to find a little more room to exhale so I could convince the whole breathing process to restart properly.

  I hadn’t really blamed Lucas for leaving. I’d never been sure that he wasn’t supposed to be in North Carolina for just the one semester anyway, since he’d left at Christmas, which was a perfectly reasonable time to go back home. It also meant he was gone weeks before I’d started to visibly show, and because teenagers frequently aren’t too smart, very few people had bandied his name around as the possible partner to my predicament. Nobody counted backward to figure out when the deed was done; they just gossiped and suggested names of boys I had no interest in. Sara and Lucas were the only two who actually knew. The idea that he’d just walked away, disappeared entirely, was one I was okay with. My mother had done more or less the same thing with me.

  Somehow him walking away from me and keeping in touch with Sara was a whole lot less okay. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to cry or throw up. So much for emotional maturity.

  I don’t know what Sara saw in my face, but it apparently fed whatever jealous beast she’d been keeping in her heart all these years, because what I saw in hers was a flash of triumph. Revenge, best served cold. I’d never cried over that particular fiasco in my life. For the first time I wanted to. Might have, if I could’ve gotten the breath, but my head was starting to hurt from a lack of oxygen, and my belly still wouldn’t unknot.

  Coyote put his hand on my shoulder, and a pulse of dry desert air rolled through me. It unwound my stomach, letting me catch a breath and pull myself upright, and warmed my extremities a smidge. I’d given people little hits like that, but I’d never received one. It felt good, all strengthening and compassionate. I hoped that’s what it was like when I was the healer, rather than the healed.

  Once I was stable, Coyote put his hand out. Sara took it, which she hadn’t done with me. “It’s nice to meet you, Agent Isaac. I’m Cyrano Bia, and this is Gary Muldoon. We need to take a look at your victim.”

  “Seattle Police Department hasn’t got jurisdiction here.”

  “That’s okay,” Coyote said easily. “We’re not police.” He stepped over the police line and ambled toward the body without waiting for a response. Sara shot me a withering look and went after him.

  In most ways, that was helpful. It meant I could shake off astonishment and take a look at the marked earth again. Or it would have if I was the kind of person who had her shit that much together, but I never had, still didn’t, and probably never would. Gary came up beside me and said, “Jo?” as tentatively as I’d ever heard him speak.

  “Later, okay? I…later.”

  “Arright.” The big old cab driver put an arm around my shoulders, squeezed carefully, and let go again. “See anything out there?”

  Every answer I wanted to give revolved around Sara Isaac, formerly Buchanan, and the one-up she’d just pulled on me. I thought I would’ve been pleased, honestly. If she and Lucas had just managed to end up together, I would’ve thought it was kind of cool. Finding out they’d never lost touch was manifestly not cool, and I pretty much wanted to bury myself in snow and let the cold numb me while I worked myself up to dealing with it.

  If I’d learned anything in the last year, it was that the world very rarely put itself on pause to let people cope. “It’s getting realer,” I said quietly. “When I faced it in Olympia Park it made marks in the snow, and now, here…there’s blood on the snow down there. I can still see where it left prints on the earth, but it’s getting realer.”

  “What is?” Laurie Corvallis had disappeared for a few minutes, maybe chasing the false Feds down, but she was back, and had been long enough to hear my faltering explanation. “How can something not real be doing this?”

  “Do you believe in God, lady?” Gary asked unexpectedly. Corvallis looked around like she thought he must be talking to someone else, then wrinkled her eyebrows at me. I shrugged and tipped my head, inviting her to answer. I certainly wasn’t going to. “Angels?” Gary asked. “Demons?”

  “I believe there are good people and bad people and that there’s some of both in everybody. I believe the world’s got a lot of power to fuck us up.” It was the second time she’d sworn, and I glanced toward her camera guy to see if he was recording. The little green light blipped at me, but presumably the whole thing would be edited for PG viewing. “Are you saying this is a demon?” She sounded skeptical in a sell-me-the-story way: not like she unconditionally disbelieved, but like she wasn’t going to accept wooden nickels.

  Gary shook his head. “Nah. Just curious. Wondered if that reporter’s mind of yours kept itself open or if you made up your mind before you went in.”

  I heard myself say, “It’s a spirit,” and wondered what exactly I thought I was going to accomplish by telling Laurie Corvallis our hypothesis. “A very angry, hungry spirit who’s either being controlled by, or who is, someone powerful. I’m sure you know there’s been no blood at any of the scenes. I’m afraid the thing has been feeding psychically, maybe trying to strengthen or create a physical body. The stronger it gets the more it takes on the ability to chow down mass in the real world, which is why this one’s messier. I don’t know how bad it’ll get if we don’t stop it.”

  Corvallis’s gape became a sharp scowl. “No wonder Morrison doesn’t want you talking to me.” She climbed over the police tape and stomped through the snow toward the body, cameraman trailing behind her.

  I pursed my lips, watching them go. “Next time I wonder why I don’t just tell people the truth, remind me of this.”

  “Doll, I didn’t know you ever wondered that.”

  “Not often, and now I know why.” Coyote, Corvallis and the cameraman were being hustled away from the murder site, none of them looking happy about it. Given the increasing number of FBI agents and forensics experts appearing on the scene, I thought they should be grateful none of us had been arrested yet. Sara was glaring at me from the dip where the body had been found, like the reporter and the nosy Indian were my fault. I shrugged and slipped my way back down toward the road, waiting for them to catch up.

  “They’re not going to recognize it as the same killer,” Coyote said as soon as he did. “I got close enough to look at the cusp marks. It’s more like a wild animal. That, and there’s blood this time, and pieces of torn flesh in the snow around the body. It’s getting more savage.”

  Corvallis all but lit up and pulled a sleek phone from the pocket of her coat. “A copycat killer? We can call it mountain madness. Christmas killer? No, that’s been done.” She hurried ahead of us, shaking her phone like that would help her pick up a signal.

  Gary chuckled in her wake. “Think she ever met a story she couldn’t tackle?”

  “I think she’s going to if she stays out here.” I stopped in the snow and Coyote knocked me into motion again. “Ow. Look, I don’t know if you saw anything, Ro, but-”

  “Do you have to do that?”

  “You call me Jo, I get to call you Ro.”

  “I like Coyote better.”

  “You don’t look so much like a coyote in the real world. Did you see anything?”

  He bared his teeth at me, the expression surprisingly close to that of his coyote-form self, then shook it off in much the same way I’d seen him do on the astral plane. “Aside from a body that doesn’t fit the physical signs of the other murders, no. It is the wendigo,” he said, like I’d been going to argue. “There’s no hint of soul left to the corpse at all. Like Mandy was.” His mouth thinned, eyes gone grim. “But much too late to save her.”

  “I believe you. I think every time it feeds it’s getting more distorted.” I puffed my cheeks and followed Corvallis down the mountain listlessly. “The bite marks on Charlie Groleski were rounder than the ones on Karin Newcomb. If it had managed to take Mandy out, it might’ve looked like a different case, too. Wait, what are we doing?” I stopped following Corvallis and frowned. “We’re going the wrong way. Its track
s went up the mountain. We should get them out of here, but we should stay.”

  Gary, in a low rumble, said, “‘Should’ is one of those funny words that don’t mean what you think it means,” and pointed behind us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A shadow paced on the snow, clearly watching us. Tooth and claw and red raging eyes; the rest was white and translucent and almost impossible to see. The Sight snapped on, making it more visible, though I instantly wished it hadn’t.

  Rivulets of blood dripped and flowed from its teeth, never falling far enough to stain the snow. Its claws were tangled with shredded souls. The tatters could have been anything from cobweb to gauze, fragile against the beast’s bulk, but the healer’s magic within me knew I was seeing the last vestiges of what had once been human beings. It was all much, much more clear than it had been on the mountain yesterday morning. Clearer, even, than it had been on Mandy’s rooftop the evening before. I had the gut-sinking feeling that having sized me up, it had decided it was time to get serious about manifesting in the real world.

  It was still nominally manlike, in that it had arms and legs, but its shoulders and neck had disappeared into a massive head with a wide-gaping, grinning mouth. Even the humanoid features were stunted: the arms were short, the chest incredibly thick, the legs seeming too small to carry its weight.

  It stank. From thirty yards away, it smelled of rotten meat and offal. It had smelled like roses yesterday, by comparison. The transition toward more real wasn’t doing it any favors.

  Very, very quietly, I said, “Gary, what do you see?”

  He said, “A bear,” in a way that let me understand how utterly inadequate, how completely wrong, the description was, and yet that it was the best he could do. It was no more bearlike than I was, but with its shifting, fluid white form almost impossible to focus on, I thought bear was as close as any non-magically-gifted person was going to get.