by C. E. Murphy
“Don’t look so surprised, Jo. How many times do I gotta tell you, old dogs learn a trick or two along the way?” His voice was a delicious rumble, not quite what I was used to hearing, but then, I’d never heard someone’s voice from inside his own head before.
“Gary?”
He glanced down at himself, then spread his hands in a wide-shouldered shrug. “Guess how we see ourselves never really changes. What, it’s that bad?” His grin was familiar, self-deprecating and crooked.
“Bad? No, jeez, bad? You’re gorgeous.” He wasn’t exactly gorgeous, not in a movie-star sense, but he was a whole lot better than “not bad.” The Hemingway look hadn’t settled in yet; that was more an effect of age than his own bone structure. I gazed up at him, completely besotted.
“And you’re tall,” I added faintly. He was taller than me back in the real world, too, but the internal Gary was still young, and age hadn’t taken any height from him yet. And maybe, just maybe, he was a little bit better than the reality had ever been. I grinned at him dippily. He grinned back, pleased as the cat who stole the cream. I was suddenly terribly, terribly envious of his wife, Annie, who would’ve known him when he was the handsome cock of the walk I saw now. It was easy to see them dancing together, him in uniform and her in one of the full-skirted party dresses worn during the war. For a moment I tried putting myself in her place, then let it go in another little wash of envy.
“You sayin‘ I wasn’t always?” he teased.
I actually blushed. “Which, gorgeous, or tall?” That didn’t help any. Gary laughed out loud, and I blushed harder. “This is your garden?” I blurted, gesturing around before stepping away to take a look. I hoped investigating would keep me from fluttering at the old man.
It wasn’t a measly garden. It was an entire inner landscape, forests that went on farther than I’d ever be able to explore. It was lush and startlingly healthy, given that the man had just had a heart attack. It was like the attack had come out of nowhere: there was nothing hinting at it in his garden. No dead trees thinned the forest, and everywhere I looked the earth was soft and rich and mossy. I could hear water running, and I felt envy all over again.
“I thought I was going to bring you to my garden.” I folded my arms around myself, looking through the trees until the distance became a green blur. “This is…a better place.”
“Jo.” Gary put his hands on my shoulders, standing just a few inches behind me. His hands were warm and big enough to make me feel small. “Different don’t mean better. I’m an old man, and this place has taken a lotta years of living to build. You gotta let the sunshine in, sweetheart. Nothing can grow in the fog.”
“I thought I was supposed to be here to help you.” My voice was tight, though I tried to put a smile in it. It must’ve worked: Gary chuckled and stepped a little closer, putting his arms around my waist. I held my breath until he poked me in the ribs and I let out a laugh that verged on tears.
“Maybe it’s all one and the same, darlin‘. We got some time.”
I turned around in his arms to hug him, and maybe to hide the tendency for tears against his chest. “Plenty of time,” I promised in a hoarse voice. My tortoise passenger had already left me, making its own slow way through the mossy forest toward the river. “Lots of time,” I repeated, and Gary tightened his arms around my shoulders like a promise in return.
Chapter Seventeen
I left the hospital feeling a bit lighter of heart, Gary’s semi-outraged protest at being protected by a tortoise still ringing in my ears. I’d pointed out tortoises lived a hundred and fifty years, which had silenced him into a slow grin that reminded me of the garden Gary. It was almost as if I was a competent human being.
Of course, a competent human being would have already told Morrison that Cassandra Tucker had apparently died of a heart defect aggravated by the use of magic, but I hadn’t found it in myself to try. I didn’t know which was worse: him believing me, or not. Either way, I could put it off a little longer, because I still had an afternoon beat to walk.
The heat was making people either crabby or listless. I busted up more than one burgeoning fight on the Ave, glad I wasn’t working someplace more dangerous. My vision behaved itself all afternoon, and between that and Gary, I genuinely felt up to attending the coven event that evening. I went back to the precinct building to clock out and to shower, too disgusting with sweat to wait until I went home. My equipment bag had shorts and a tank top, far more suited to the weather than wool pants and a cotton shirt. I jogged out of the building with my duffel slung over my shoulder, thinking about running home to start laundry before I met up with the coven.
“Walker!”
I turned warily. Morrison shouting for me wasn’t usually a good sign. Especially since he should’ve gone home by now. Especially since I’d been avoiding him all day, and the sound of his voice was a sharp reminder I’d been expecting him to show up and rescue me from the desert.
He looked tired, not much like a desert-searching hero, and not much like he wanted to talk to me. Neither of those was unusual, but I was oddly disappointed. After all, if he was going to feature heavily in my subconscious fantasies, the least he could do was be pleased about seeing me. Not that I had the slightest intention of telling him he was apparently my own personal champion. And not that he’d arrived on the scene to rescue me, which sort of annoyed me when I thought about it.
I slung my duffel over my back, holding on to the strap with two fingers, as if the oversized action would force my internal nattering out of mind. Morrison really did look tired, or maybe angry, his mouth a thin line and blue eyes squinted against the sun. I should’ve been used to him looking irritated, but the underlying weariness sent a pang of compassion through me. “Everything okay, Captain?”
He cut off whatever he was about to say and eyed me suspiciously for a few seconds. I tried to keep my expression neutral: no, boss, I really mean it. Is everything okay? He’d never believe it.
“Yeah,” he said after enough time that I wondered if he was going to answer at all. “Tomorrow—”
I got ready to blow up. Tomorrow was my day off. “—is Cassandra Tucker’s funeral,” he said. I choked on my own indignation and stared at him as he concluded, “I thought you might want to go.”
I wet my lips and looked around, anywhere but at my captain, so that I could work off being embarrassed over my near blowup. “Thank you,” I finally said, awkwardly. “I really appreciate that. Look, does that mean they know what happened to her? Because—”
“Congenital heart defect,” he said shortly. “No murder investigation. I assume you didn’t get anything from your…sources.”
For some reason, it didn’t make me at all happy to have Virissong’s explanation verified by a coroner. I stared at Morrison for a long time without really seeing him, then wet my lips. “Nothing substantially different.”
“Substantially?”
I should have known better than to put an adverb into my response. I wet my lips again and shook my head. “Someone thought it was brought on by an overload of…” I felt like Michael Keaton trying to tell Kim Basinger his secret. If Morrison would only turn around so I couldn’t see his face, I was sure I could finish saying, “Doing magic.” What I said instead was, “It doesn’t really matter, does it? The cops and the freaks are in agreement on this one.”
Morrison’s expression had gone sour as I approached the end of my first explanation, as if he knew perfectly well what I wasn’t saying. Then it changed from sour to genuinely disapproving, and I had to stop myself from backing up a step. “Don’t do that,” he said.
I hadn’t moved. “Don’t do what?”
“Belittle yourself. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
I gaped at him. “I’m sorry, Cap, but when did you get on the it’s-okay-for-Joanne-to-be-a-super-shamanic-weirdo bandwagon?”
“I didn’t,” he said very evenly. “I don’t like what you can do at all. But I like you setting yours
elf up for the sucker punch even less. It’s degrading, and you’re better than that. I won’t tolerate it.”
I felt like my world had taken a sharp swerve and dip to the left. “Morrison, you rag on me all the time.” He did. He said I was a pain in the ass, which was true, and to not darken his doorstep again, which I always did, and a variety of other blustery you bother me sorts of comments.
But I couldn’t think of one single time where he’d outright insulted me, or anyone else, for that matter. I stared at him some more, trying to fit that piece of information into the Morrison-shaped prejudices I carried around, and then looked at a wall and reached for safer ground. “Do you know when and where Cassandra’s funeral is?”
“I do,” he said, still very evenly, as if the last bit of conversation hadn’t happened. “I’m going. Should I pick you up?”
My gaze snapped back to him. “You’re going?”
“We were the first two officers on the scene, Walker. I visited her mother.” Morrison’s voice was strained. I found myself staring at him again.
“Jesus, Cap. Shouldn’t the UW police have done that? I mean, not your juris—”
“I was the ranking officer,” he said. “It was my duty.”
My vision didn’t go all inverted again, but rather, for an instant, I saw with extreme clarity. The worst job anybody could have is telling a parent that her child is dead.
Morrison’d done it to spare somebody else having to.
Color burned along my jaw and up into my cheekbones and ears, a bewildering rush of pride to be working for this particular police captain. I swallowed and straightened my shoulders. “What time should I be ready?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Morrison relaxed almost imperceptibly. “Nine-thirty. Funeral’s at ten.”
“I’ll be ready. Morrison?”
Morrison, already turning away, went still, and looked at me like he expected the other shoe to drop.
“Thanks.”
For a few seconds he looked as if he was waiting for the follow-up smart-ass remark. Then he nodded, a short, sharp motion, and walked away.
* * * *
Sunday, June 19, 7:14p.m.
There was no time to get laundry started. I dashed to campus, stopping at the pizzeria to buy two slices of pepperoni and olive pizza. They offered me a soda large enough to swim in for a mere sixty cents more. Being a red-blooded American, I bought it and had vague guilty thoughts about exercise.
I was still licking pizza grease off my fingers when I ducked into the room the coven had been held in two nights earlier. Contrary to the smoky gloom of that night, it was bright and well lit and distinctly empty of both torches and witches. I said, “Um,” out loud to the empty room, and stood there with my soda feeling a little foolish. That was me, Joanne Walker, the world’s sneakiest undercover cop. Not that I was undercover, because Morrison had given me permission to case these people, although I suspected I might be going further than he meant me to. It didn’t matter. This was all on my own time.
Just like Cassandra Tucker’s funeral would be.
“I thought you’d be here,” Faye said from behind me. I flinched two inches to the left and whipped around, wishing I had something dangerous and sexy in my hand instead of a sixty-four ounce soda cup. My vision blurred again for the first time since I’d seen Gary, fluorescent lights above me twisting into purple streaks, and I pressed the heel of one hand against my left eye. I could feel the under-the-skin sunburn again, as if coming out of the daylight had made it more intense.
“Sorry,” Faye said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Are you sure?” I asked petulantly. She smiled as I peeled one eye open to look at her. The light stabilized and I cautiously removed my hand from my other eye.
“Of course. I didn’t have your number to call, and you weren’t with us last night so you couldn’t know that we don’t usually meet in the same place twice in a row. I thought I’d drop by and get you.”
“I’m in the phone book.” I still sounded tetchy. Faye looked surprised.
“I didn’t think of it.”
I muttered, “Of course not,” and came back to the door, slurping my soda. “Where’re we going?”
“Ravenna Park.”
I blinked. “Not on campus?” Ah, yes. A brilliant deduction. “Won’t the park be busy?”
Faye herded me out of the room. “D’you have a car? I don’t. It’ll be busy, but no one will notice us.”
“Yeah, in the south lot. They won’t?”
Faye shrugged. “People look around magic a lot. I don’t know why. It’s like a big blind spot in humanity.” She beamed suddenly. “But we’re going to change that, Joanne. We’re going to make a real difference in the world. Starting tonight.”
There are certain phrases people like to hear. Mechanics, for example, are fond of, “The transmission’s okay, so the insurance company says fix it instead of totaling it out.” At least, they are if they don’t work for a cop shop that pays the same amount no matter how much work you do or don’t do, which wasn’t the point. “Elise will make tamales if you come over and look at the Eagle,” was another nice one, although possibly that only got mileage from mechanics who knew my friend Bruce. And every mechanic I knew liked, “She’s a beauty. Did you do the work yourself?”
That was not what Faye said when she saw Petite. Faye squealed, “Oooh, purple!” and leaned over the hood to see if she could see her reflection in the gilt-flecked finish. She could, in fact: I’d spent a lot of hours working depth into the rich paint, but the usual rush of smug pride wasn’t available with this go-around of appreciation.
I was too busy thinking about phrases that cops didn’t like.
“Starting tonight” was way up there, particularly when the cop in question thought she had another three days before the big bang. I drove down to Ravenna Park without listening to Faye’s chipper conversation, cranky at the inverted light and how much attention I had to pay to driving. It was probably a bad sign I didn’t normally pay that much attention to driving, but I was in no mood to think about that.
Tonight was a lot sooner than I wanted to participate in anything. I was working myself up to doing it, but I’d thought I had a few more days. Part of me wanted to just not show up. From what Faye and the others had said, without me they might not have enough power to pull their stunt off.
But every time I thought about doing that, an image of Colin, whose cancer I didn’t know how to heal, flashed behind my eyes. Virissong might be able to pull off what I couldn’t, and I wasn’t sure I had the right to stand in the way of that happening. Not just for Colin, but for the whole overheated Seattle metropolitan area, and maybe the world.
I pulled into the lot at the north end of the park, still uncomfortable, and reached over to lock Faye’s door before getting out of the car. “Lead on, Macduff.”
Faye gave me a look of complete incomprehension. I rolled my eyes. “Never mind. Let’s just go.”
A stream large enough to be considered a river in some parts of the country ran through Ravenna Park. People were strewn along the banks, kids shrieking happily as they played in the water. I had no idea how a coven meeting was going to proceed undisturbed. I envisioned small children dashing through the sacred circle, then wondered if they’d be able to, or if there’d be some sort of mystical force field that they’d bounce off. The thought cheered me and I stuffed my hands in my pockets, whistling jauntily as I strode along behind Faye.
“Please don’t,” she said.
“Mmm?”
“Whistle. Please don’t whistle. Whistling brings down the walls between this world and the next.”
I stopped midwhistle, my mouth pursed. “You’re kidding.”
She glanced over her shoulder at me. “No. The tonal qualities and pitch are a bridge between worlds.”
“Fascinating. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do?”
Faye sighed, developing the very patient tone that is
n’t. “Yes, of course. But we want it to be controlled, Joanne. Bridging worlds isn’t something that should be done lightly, and you’ve felt the kind of power we’re dealing with.”
That much, at least, was true. I stopped arguing and whistling both, and slunk along like a properly chastised new coven member.
Well, I would’ve if I could’ve kept my mouth shut for more than three steps. “What d’you mean, we’re starting to change the world tonight?”
Faye looked over her shoulder again, dimpled, and fell into stride with me. “The world has to be prepared for Virissong’s arrival,” she explained. “Tonight we’ll begin to thin the walls, and over the next few days humanity will become accustomed to the otherworld mixing with this one again.”
“It will?” My eyebrows climbed. “Humanity takes longer than a few days to get used to most things, Faye.”
“There’s a core of belief in all of us,” she said airily. “All we’re going to do is let the world start looking like that core expects it to.”
Several things, the nicest of which was, “Isn’t that a little naive?” went through my mind. I didn’t know I’d said it out loud until Faye gave me a dirty look.
“Maybe, but haven’t you always wanted to live in a world where magic was real?”
I was so startled I laughed out loud, a sharp derisive bark. Faye’s expression skidded into insulted anger and she tossed her hair, flouncing ahead of me. “Crap. Faye, wait up.” I jogged a few steps to catch up with her, then had to lengthen my stride to stay in step. Given the height advantage I had, that was a little embarrassing, but I did it anyway.
“Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. The truth is, no, I’ve never wanted to live in a world with magic. I like my world to make sense. I hate this mucking with magic thing.”
Faye whirled on me, eyes bright with emotion. “But you’re really powerful, Joanne! How can you say that? We all felt it, the power you command. You could change the world.”