Thunderbird Falls twp-2

by C. E. Murphy

  I dropped my fingers to look at him. “Because you told me specifically to stay away from this case, and whether you believe it or not, I’m actually trying to follow orders. Except the case may not want to stay away from me.”

  “A case,” Morrison said through his teeth, “is not something that makes choices about who it’s assigned to, Walker.”

  “No, sir, not normally.” I’d spent the better part of the day since encountering Faye trying to find a way around having this conversation with Morrison. The only alternatives I could come up with were considerably worse than having it. Somehow the inevitability made me less antagonistic than I usually would have been. “But under the circumstances, I don’t really think it’s coincidence that this girl came to me.”

  “Under what circumstances?”

  I turned my hands palm-up, a shrug, and said, “Me.”

  Tension spilled through Morrison’s expression, aging him years in a few seconds. I looked away, uncomfortable with seeing him look so defeated. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he said, but we both knew the growl in his voice was only for show. I pressed my lips together, daring to glance back at him, but only for a moment. He still looked aged and unhappy.

  “It means something’s wrong with Cassandra Tucker’s death, sir.” I really didn’t want to sayI think magic may have been involved, sir, and I was pretty sure Morrison didn’t want me to say it, either.

  He didn’t let the possibility of clarification linger on the air, snapping, “Of course something’s wrong. She was twenty years old and ended up dead in a locker room. There’s nothing right about it.”

  “That’s not what I mean, Captain.” I didn’t want to push it any more than that, but I felt like I had to at least say that much. “I’d like your permission to go talk to her friends.”

  He gave me a baleful glare. “Are you going to do it anyway?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “but at least I’m trying to be aboveboard here, Morrison. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  He sighed explosively. “They’re doing an autopsy. It’s being investigated as a homicide. Right now that’s all I know.” He clenched his jaw, muscle working. “Get back to me if you learn anything.”

  I said, “Yes, sir,” and got the hell out of his office before we were forced to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

  Friday, June 17, 7:25p.m.

  The graduate library’s reading room was dim and dark, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that the dimness came not from clouds overhead, but from smoky torches that couldn’t possibly meet fire code. I hung in the doorway, squinting into smoke and trying to get the lay of the land before anyone noticed me, but Faye clapped her hands, letting out a squeal of delight. “You came! I knew you’d come! This is Joanne Walker, everyone. She’s the one I dreamed about.” Her voice lowered portentously with the last several words, but I was the only one who seemed to notice.

  The rest of the group took Faye’s lead, climbing to their feet and encircling me. There were eleven or twelve of them, all of them smiling politely and offering me their hands to shake. With the exception of a man and a woman both in their fifties, and another man in his thirties, the median age of the gathered group appeared somewhere below the legal drinking age.

  I said, “Um, thank you,” with every handshake and introduction and welcome, a little taken aback. I wished I’d brought along a tape recorder so I could be sure of everyone’s names. Faye hadn’t turned up a police record—not even so much as a driver’s license—but I wasn’t above doing a quick investigation on all her friends, too. When everyone was done greeting me and I’d forgotten most of the names already, I asked, “Faye told you why I was coming here tonight, right?”

  They all exchanged glances, amusement suddenly coloring the air. “Of course,” one of the young men said. He was Garth; I remembered that because he didn’t look at all like Garth Brooks. Maybe it wasn’t the greatest mnemonic device ever, but it worked for me. Garth-not-Brooks went on, “She dreamed that you would come to lend us your power. With Cassie’s death—” A ripple of pain, tangible, went through the little gathered crowd. I drew in a sharp breath, pushing their loss away long enough to get through the conversation, at least. It was possible I could do something later to ease the sharpness of grief, but I thought it was a bad idea. Only a day after Cassandra Tucker’s death, none of them would have had the time to work through it naturally. Mucking about with it at this stage struck me as premature.

  Maybe I was learning something after all.

  While I was thinking all that. Garth continued, “—we don’t have a Mother anymore. You must be her—Faye dreamed you.”

  “A mother? I don’t know what you’re tal—”

  There are phrases that I never think describe a real feeling until I experience them myself. “The words turned to dust in my mouth,” was a new one on me, but it happened. My saliva shriveled up, leaving my tongue feeling thick and dry. My throat constricted, and the taste of ashes, flat and sticky, filled my mouth. I choked and coughed, and one of the young men leaped up and got me a cup of water. Faye hovered at my side, patting my back in concern as I drank. It still took a few long moments before I was able to croak, “Mother. Maiden. Crone.” The older woman’s mouth twisted wryly as I said the third word.

  “You’re a coven.”

  If I expected this to come across as an earth-shattering revelation, I was badly disappointed. Everyone exchanged glances again, and Faye laughed, a bright musical sound in the gloomy hall. “Well, yes. What did you think?”

  My voice rose and cracked. “I thought you were going to give me any information you might have about your friend Cassie’s death. That’s what we discussed this morning.”

  Faye went from laughter to kicked puppy dog, her brown eyes mournful. “And I told you I didn’t think we’d be able to help you very much, but you promised to come anyway. I told you,” she said, eager again, “we need you. You must be the Mother. I dreamed you and you were there, and you have power, and we don’t have anybody else for the part. There are already eleven of us, and you’re the twelfth. Youmust be the Mother.”

  “I thought a full coven had thirteen.” I let the words come as a barrier to thought, but it didn’t work.

  Two children.From my womb untimely rip’d. I closed my eyes. They’d come early, but twins often do. Neither was strong as they lay together, fragile and tiny. The girl’s last breath seemed to strengthen her brother.

  Somewhere in the distance, I heard Faye explaining thathe, whoeverhe was, was the thirteenth. He led and completed the coven, and there were twelve of us, so I must be the Mother.

  Adoption papers signed and the boy—Aidan, though I expected his adoptive parents would change his name—taken away. I knew who his new parents were; the Eastern Cherokee Nation simply wasn’t that big. But I was only fifteen, and I never saw him again. I stared into my water glass, shivering and unwilling to meet anyone’s eyes.

  “She’s the Mother,” the Crone said. I felt the older woman’s hand brush my hair. “Leave her alone. She’ll be all right. Come.” She urged me to my feet. “Come and rest a while.”

  “Faye doesn’t mean to be insensitive,” she said a moment later, when I was safely tucked into a nook in the wall, invisible from the rest of the coven. “She’s just very young. I’m Marcia. I know there were a lot of names to remember.”

  “There were. Thanks.” I glanced up at her, trying to get a feel for her.

  She was reasonably tall and attractive, threads of gray through brown hair and wrinkles settling in around her eyes. She could stand to lose fifteen or twenty pounds, but carried the weight comfortably, letting it round her cheeks where age had begun to take the flesh away. There was a sense of strength, of connectedness, about her. “Are you a witch?”

  She smiled, thin and only a little amused. “Are you?”

  “I don’t think so.” I had no idea, really. I just assumed Coyote would’ve called me a witch if that’
s what he’d woken up in me. “If I’m not a witch, I can’t do you any good, can I?”

  Marcia’s smile grew, spreading through her voice. “You might be able to. Witchcraft is spellcrafting. We use one kind of spell to call up power that Gaia, the goddess Earth, lends us, and another kind to focus that power and create with it. Spells and witchcraft can be learned.”

  “What kind of spells? I don’t think I do spells.” I knew I could borrow power from people and objects if my own wasn’t enough, and drumming was a sort of ritual to get myself into the mindset, but Marcia sounded like she was talking about something else entirely.

  “The basic tenement of witchcraft isdo what thou wilt, an’ it harm none,” Marcia said. “We try to use spells to create, to heal, and to nurture.”

  I could get with the healing. I knew something about that. “Create and heal and nurture what?”

  Marcia smiled, almost impishly. “The world.”

  A startled laugh burst from my throat. “That’s a tall order, Marcia.” My laughter faded as I remembered that six months ago I’d thought it was a tall orderI might be up to accomplishing. If not the world, Seattle, at least. “You think you can do that?” I asked, more subdued.

  “We do. Beginning with this heat wave. It’s not natural, no more than the long winter was. Maybe you’ve sensed that, too.”

  A chill that had nothing to with the air-conditioning settled over me and sank into my stomach, making the power centered there flutter and dip. “Yeah,” I said in a low voice. “I’ve gotten that idea. You think your spellcrafting can help fix it?” I was beginning to think I lived in a world in which there were no coincidences. The universe appeared to be lining up the support I needed to deal with the heat wave. Unless I wanted to turn my back on it all, the spirit horse was probably right and I’d better accept what was being offered.

  Nobody said anything aboutliking it, though. The bitchy little thought hung around the edges of my mind and I gritted my teeth against it. At some point I was going to have to come to terms with all this, and whining incessantly wasn’t going to win me any friends. More to the point, it was starting to annoyme, and I had to live with me all the time. I preferred it when I got along with myself.

  “It can,” Marcia said with utmost confidence, but then she faltered. “It could have,” she corrected, “but we do desperately need a Mother figure, Joanne. Cassandra took that role, but now…”

  I remembered the picture of the little girl in Cassie’s wallet, and nodded, then looked up, a sick feeling gurgling in my gut. “When did Faye dream about me?”

  Marcia’s eyebrows drew down. “She only told us about the dream this evening, before you arrived. Why?”

  My shoulders relaxed. “Nothing. Just an ugly thought.”

  It must have shown in my face, because Marcia’s eyes widened with surprise I thought genuine. Her pupils dilated, color gone from her cheeks, and she shook her head, the action verging on violence. “We would have succeeded with Cassie in place, Joanne. No one would do something like this in order to replace her with you. It couldn’t be hidden from the coven. Our power would be forever tainted, and anything we tried would go terribly wrong, or fail entirely.”

  I got to my feet, shaking my head. “I hope you’re right.”

  “Join us in tonight’s ceremony,” Marcia suggested, voice caught somewhere between rigidity and hope. “It’ll prove our innocence to you.”

  I sighed and nodded. “Yeah. All right. I’m still going to have to talk to everyone about whether Cassandra had any enemies, even if you’re all pure as the driven snow.” Telling Morrison I’d eliminated people as possible murderers via psychic investigation was not going to go over well.

  “The police have already done that,” Marcia said.

  “Oh.” I wanted to sayI am the police, but I was only here on Morrison’s forbearance, and the elephant we’d been ignoring was the fact that psychically was exactly how I was most useful in this investigation. That made me feel a little bit better, so I lifted my chin, put on a stiff upper lip, and went to participate in my very first witchcraft session.

  I was marked with red wine, a circle written on my shoulder by Faye’s determined finger. The wine symbolized a woman’s first blood and the blood of childbirth, they told me, and the circle represented the full moon, the sign of the Mother. Marcia wrote a crescent moon, waxing, onto Faye’s shoulder, and reluctantly, I completed the ritual by writing a crescent moon waning onto Marcia’s.

  We stepped together in the center of a circle of coven members, standing back to back and shoulder to shoulder. My right shoulder, inscribed with the full moon, pressed against Marcia’s left, Faye’s right shoulder with her crescent moon against my left shoulder. Marcia took one more small step backward, pressing her right shoulder against Faye’s left, and power, like an electric current, slammed through me.

  We made a tiny triangle with our backs to one another, a small empty space between us. In that space, light shot up, crashing into the ceiling like it would burst through and illuminate the world. I heard Marcia and Faye’s indrawn breath, sharp as my own, and from the coven came whispers of awe.

  I tingled. From my toes to the top of my head, I tingled, light coursing through me until I thought it would pour out my fingers and eyes. My hair felt as if it was standing on end, waving in the air of its own accord. I cranked my head up by degrees, looking up into the light.

  It spilled across the ceiling, pooling outward like water meeting resistance. It rippled toward the walls, pure and white, then slithered down them, coating the room in brilliance. It made the air cleaner, so fresh and cold that it hurt to breathe in.Like knives in my lungs, I thought, then laughed without humor. I knew what a knife in the lung felt like, and it was nothing like this.

  The laugh reverberated through the light, bouncing and waving. A few of the coven glanced at me and the white light flexed outward, testing its limits. That brought the coven’s attention back to it, and the containment field that lined the room strengthened again. At least, that’s what I thought was happening. I couldn’t see the coven’s power the way I could usually see my own, but the light washed farther down the walls and crept across the magically reinforced floor, moving in toward us. I watched it, mesmerized, as it swept over the outer ring of witches, glazing them in shimmering waves.

  It reached my feet, and began to climb up my body. Clarity ripped through me, pulling me apart on the cellular level, exposing everything I’d ever hidden away. It snuggled into my core, warm and reassuring, and dug through me like a rat scrabbling for food, tearing away layers of old pain and joy indiscriminately. My body felt lighter than air, like a deep breath would launch me into the sky, and my head fell back, exposing my throat to the white light.

  A sense of exultation and glee swept through me, settling in my bones. It crowed, smug and powerful, then hissed, “Yesss!” in such deep-voiced satisfaction that it rumbled through my stomach, making me sick.

  I jerked convulsively, breaking contact with Faye and Marcia. The light disappeared with a silence that was louder than sound, and I fell to my knees, barely locking my arms in time to keep from meeting the floor with my face.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Did you see him?” The question was delivered zealously, before I even pushed back to my heels.

  “Did you see him?” Garth asked again, avidly. I heard a “Shh!” and the distinct sound of someone elbowing his ribs. I hadn’t known, until that moment, that rib-elbowing had a specific sound.

  “Leave her alone,” followed the shushing. Faye. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I shook my head, trying to clear it, then sat back on my heels, looking up.

  Eleven worried faces peered down at me. I couldn’t help it: I giggled. Half the faces exchanged worried for offended, and the other half for relieved. “I’m fine,” I repeated.

  “What happened?” someone chirruped, full of hope and curiosity. I thought his name was Sam. He looked like an underwear model
, with full pouty lips and long eyelashes.

  “You guys didn’t hear him?”

  They all looked back and forth at one another, above me. I’d never seen so many chins in my life. “No.” Marcia spoke for all of them, and they all looked back down at me.

  “He guides us,” Faye gushed, “but we rarely hear his voice. You are blessed among us, Joanne!”

  Hoo boy.

  “All he said was yes,” I said. “I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Who is he?”

  “Our master. Our guide,” Garth said reverently. I groaned and sat up, putting my hand over my nose.

  “His name is Virissong,” Marcia offered. “He’s our thirteenth.”

  “Doesn’t that mean he should be here?”

  Marcia sat down beside me. The others took their cue from her and settled down all around me. I felt like the main attraction at P. T. Barnum. “He’s caught between worlds,” she explained. “We’re working on a spell to free him.”

  “Uh-huh. Why?”

  “As a beginning to restoring balance to this world,” Marcia said with utmost confidence. “His power will help guide us.”

  I sort of thought that kind of power might just bowl them over. “Does that happen every time you get all shoulder to shoulder?”

  Faye and Marcia locked gazes for a moment before Marcia looked back at me. “I’ve never joined with a Maiden and Mother with that intensity. I believe Virissong chose very well when he guided Faye to you.”

  That was all well and good for their Virissong, but it wasn’t any use at all to the police department. I was afraid the whole visit with the coven, while literally enlightening, had been a complete waste of time. Either they were all very good liars both verbally and magically, or there wasn’t anything here. I hadn’t felt anything wrong in the power that had contained the white light, and I thought I could recognize a taint if it was there. More to the point, I was pretty sure Marcia could, and I didn’t think she’d protect somebody who’d murdered Cassie.

  I sighed, and let myself get drawn into my own curiosity about the surge of light and power we’d felt. Marcia’d been very specific, so I asked, “What happens when the male aspect calls the magic?” Male aspect. I was so proud of myself. I could sound New Agey with the best of them.