by C. E. Murphy
The waterfall was broad and enthusiastic, tumbling down noisily and creating the stream my hand had discovered. I wondered if they’d let me call it Jo’s Hand Stream. Probably not. That was okay. It was a terrible name. I sat back on my heels, cautiously, and stared. The sun was rising, painting the falls and the lake behind them a startling gold color. I had no sense of how long I’d been out, or how long the ritual the night before had gone on.
“Oh, Jesus.” I staggered to my feet before consulting my body on whether it was a good idea or not. It wasn’t an impossible feat, but I hung on my fallen tree for a few moments, trying to regain my sense of balance. The coven must have been caught in the earthquake just as I’d been. If any of them were still alive, I had to find them and get help.
“Jesus Christ, there’s somebody over there. Hey. Hey! Lady! Are you okay?”
I wobbled around, trying to place the speaker over the sound of the waterfall. A man a few years older than I was appeared from around one of the tall earth humps, leaping gingerly over the stream and approaching me. “Hey, are you all right?”
“I’m not dead,” I offered. The guy split a grin and jumped over another stream rivulet.
“Well, thank God. We didn’t expect to find anybody alive down here.”
My stomach fell through my feet. “You’ve found dead people?”
“Not so far. It’s a goddamned miracle. Usually this time of year the parks are all madhouses, but it’s so damned hot everybody’s been at home with their air-conditioning.” His expression darkened. He had sandy hair and blue eyes and the complexion of someone who spent a lot of time outdoors. “Not that that hasn’t caused its own problems with this quake.”
“What time did it hit?”
“‘Bout ten o’clock last night. 6.2 on the Richter. You don’t remember?”
“I got hit by a tree.” My voice scraped and I coughed, trying to swallow the dryness away. “I don’t remember much after that.”
“Well, you’re goddamned lucky,” he opined. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital, get you checked over. You know your name?”
I blinked at him. “Yeah.” He waited, and I blinked some more before startling. “Oh! It’s Joanne. Joanne Walker.”
He stuck his hand out. “My name’s Crowder. Geologist.”
“Is ‘Geologist’ your first or last name?” I cracked a little grin as I shook his hand. He laughed.
“David Crowder, geologist. Damn, you are one lucky woman. C’mon. Let’s get you out of here. Hey! Ricky! C’mon, help me get Miss Walker out of here! Somebody call an ambulance!”
“I don’t need one,” I protested. “As long as my car’s still there. Oh God.” Panic hit the pit of my stomach again. “Is it? Is the parking lot still there?”
Crowder hesitated. “Kinda. There are islands of it. What do you drive?”
I swallowed and knotted my hands into fists. My left hand suddenly cramped and split through the mud, starting to bleed again, and I fought back tears of pain and dismay. “A Mustang. A purple 1969 Mustang. License plates say PETITE.”
Dismay washed over Crowder’s face and he took a step back like I might kill the messenger. “I saw it tail-down in one of the crevasses. Looked like the back end got pretty badly crunched. We called it in. I’m sorry.”
White rose up over my vision for a few seconds, static hissing in my ears. “How badly crunched?” My voice was hollow, and I don’t think I expected Crowder to give me a real answer. The words just came out as an effort to not start screaming. “Were there any other cars up there?” My hands were cold and my stomach cramped, making something go wrong with my eyesight. More wrong than usual: it was all blurry and stinging, the itch of unshed tears. I could handle pretty much anything, but not my car being destroyed. Between that and Gary I thought I might just throw up.
Crowder took my elbow and started leading me out of the mess that used to be a park. “I bet you can get it fixed.” His encouraging words could’ve been coming from several light-years away. My head rang until I was dizzy, tipping over as I tried to put my feet on solid ground. “Might cost a bundle, but it can probably be winched out, or maybe helicoptered, and then you can really see the damage. But that solid steel frame’ll keep it from being smashed up as some of the others up there, right? You’re the first person we’ve found down here,” he added, clearly hoping to change the subject. “Were you down here with anybody?”
“Some friends.” My answer was low and fuzzy to my own ears, like somebody’d sucked all the life out of me. “I don’t know what happened to them. I’m not sure when they left. Is there a search and rescue team out here?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m part of it. You, ah, not sure when they left, huh?”
Oh, for God’s sake. He thought we’d been doing drugs or something. I put my teeth together against a flare of rage that had more to do with my car than his assumption. “I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the time. No funny business going on. I’m a cop.”
“Oh, no shit. You work in the North Precinct?”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “No wonder what?”
“When we called in your car the dispatcher got a little freaked out. Said she had to verify it and she’d get back to us, but—”
“—but they recognized her. A lot of people know Petite.” I groaned and closed my eyes, then opened them again swiftly, not trusting the ground or my feet. My left hand was still clenched in a fist. I didn’t want to drip blood all over everything and have Crowder insist I go to a hospital. I wanted to look at the injury first and see if I could fix myself, preferably without a repeat of last night’s heat-intense performance. I wanted to curl up in Petite’s bucket seats and sob, too, but I didn’t think I was going to get much of what I wanted. “I’ll call them when we get up there.”
“C’mon, this way.” Crowder led me through a ravine of sharp drops and inclines, ushering me up a hill that I tried climbing without using my left hand. He noticed and stopped me, putting his hand out for mine. I sighed and opened my palm.
Blood seeped through cracks of mud, dripping off the back of my hand. It only hurt on a dull, ignorable level, but Crowder hissed dismay and yanked a handkerchief out of a pocket. “It’s clean,” he promised as he wrapped it around my hand. “That looks deep. You’re gonna need to get it looked at.”
“I know. I will. I just want to get to my car and go home and call my friends and make sure everybody’s okay first. How…is the city okay? I mean, are people…dead?”
“Some injuries.” Crowder started up the hill again. “A handful of heart attacks, a couple dozen women going into labor, that kinda thing. It happens, when there’s an earthquake. Lotta property damage, but it’s pretty localized. Weird behavior. That Corvalis woman on Channel Two is trying like mad to tie it together to the aurora the other night. Swear to God, those people, making news when there’s so much real stuff to report. Here you go, just over the guard rail here.” He boosted me up and I swung my leg over the railing, trying not to think about whether there was a connection between the aurora and the earthquake. People don’t cause earthquakes. It was a ludicrous idea. Of course, people don’t cause massive auroras to come sweeping down, either, and I knew perfectly well the coven and I had been responsible for that, even if the interpretation was wrong.
The parking lot was a disaster. Petite’s nose poked up out of a ditch several yards away. Between me and her, there were pits of earth that had opened up or split apart. The car Garth had driven was stuck halfway in one of the pits. It’d be okay if it could be winched out. I jumped a crack in the earth and hurried toward Petite, swallowing against sickness as I looked down into the crevasse at her smashed back end. She was a heavy vehicle, but Crowder was right about the steel frame. Even from above I could tell that the damage was probably more to the tail lights and back fender than to the body. I couldn’t, at least, see any wrinkles in her body, which didn’t necessa
rily mean they weren’t there. I was going to have to find a way to get her out of there and into a garage where I could really survey the damage. My hands were shaking and my throat was tight. I didn’t want to burst into tears in front of the helpful geologist, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stop myself. I turned my back on him deliberately and knelt by Petite’s front end, putting my forehead against the wheel still hooked over the broken earth. “I am so sorry, baby. I’ll get you out of here and I’ll get you fixed up, okay? And then we’ll go on a really nice long drive out to Utah where we can go super fast on the salt flats. That’ll be fun, right, sweetheart? I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”
“Miss Walker?” Crowder’s diffident voice came from behind me, a polite intrusion. I looked up, swallowing back the tightness in my throat, expecting the geologist to be offering some kind of sympathy or suggestion.
What I found instead was Morrison vaulting the parking lot gates and coming at a run toward me and my car.
CHAPTER 25
Morrison had me by the shoulders before I had time to think through the idea of hiding. His grip was hard enough to hurt, although I noticed the skin-tenderness of the sunburn was gone. He had the slight height advantage even though he was out of uniform, and for a few seconds he stared down at me as if making sure I was real. Then he shook me, let go of my shoulders, and started yelling.
I didn’t listen. I just looked up at him, trying not to smile. He would have gotten up at five in the morning for a report that any of his officers was missing. I knew that. What I hadn’t known was he’d get up if the officer in question was me. I wrapped my filthy arms around my ribs and watched him rant. Crowder hovered nervously on the next island over, trying to decide if he should interfere. I hoped he didn’t. I’d never felt so warm and fuzzy at receiving a dressing-down. When Morrison finally paused for breath I said, “Thanks, Captain.”
He didn’t start up again. Instead he pulled his mouth long, scowled, and gave me a curt nod. Then he turned away, jumping to Crowder’s asphalt island with more grace than I would’ve expected from him, and offered the geologist his hand. “Thanks for finding my officer. I’m Captain Michael Morrison, SPD, North Precinct.”
“Well, she was up on her feet already when I found her. She would’ve been just fine even without us.” Crowder shook Morrison’s hand. “David Crowder. Pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m glad to say it looks like Officer Walker was the only person caught in the park last night. Looks like we may have no casualties from the event itself. We’ve been very lucky.”
I closed my eyes and leaned on Petite’s upended nose. No one in the coven had mentioned earthquakes accompanying the body-to-earth ritual. I wondered if they hadn’t known, or if it had been an error. I was hoping for an error. Knowing you were going to set off a 6.2 quake and opting to stay in a populated area was criminal, not that there was the slightest chance they’d—we’d—ever be prosecuted for it.
And I wondered if it had worked. From what I understood, there ought to be all sorts of strange and mystical creatures wandering Seattle’s streets now, but Morrison hadn’t mentioned any while he was yelling at me. I’d have to find Faye or one of the others.
Or, I supposed, I’d have to go look for myself. I opened my eyes again and studied the parking lot without seeing it, trying to figure out how long it would take to get Petite out of there. I didn’t want to leave her, not with the lake pouring a new stream into the neighborhood. I was afraid the exposed earth would be cut away and she’d fall.
“What happened, Walker?”
I jostled myself out of studying the parking lot and looked back at Morrison, who’d rejoined me while I wasn’t watching. “Sir?”
“What happened out here last night? What were you doing here? And have you been tanning?” He was getting over his relief that I was alive and was becoming more interested in the bones of the matter, which probably meant in relatively short order he’d be yelling at me again.
I looked down at myself. My vision behaved itself for once and I realized the sunburn had done more than come to the surface. It’d already peeled, or the mystical equivalent thereof I was brown, tanner than I could ever remember seeing myself. I resisted the urge to peer down my shirt to see if I was tan all over. I hadn’t been naked in the desert of my mind, but I wasn’t at all sure a sunburn like the one I’d gotten there would care about clothes. I suspected there were no tan lines.
“I was meeting Faye. The girl from Cassandra’s funeral.” It wasn’t exactly a lie. I didn’t think Morrison cared all that much about whether I’d been tanning, so I skipped that part.
“Walker, I thought I told you to leave it alone.” He didn’t sound exasperated, much less surprised. More like resigned.
“Yeah.” I looked away. “Meeting her was set up before you told me that.”
“What were you seeing her for?”
“…she was working on a project with Cassandra before she died. She thought I might be able to help out with it.” Again, not exactly a lie. I was pretty sure Morrison would be happier if I didn’t tell him Cassie was part of a coven and I was taking her place. My vision swam to inverted again, giving me a sudden headache as the rising sun turned black. I winced and put my hand against my temple. Morrison reached out and caught my wrist, turning my palm up.
“What happened?”
I stared at Crowder’s bloody handkerchief wrapped around my hand and sagged. “I was gouged. It was kind of a rough night.”
“So I see. You need to get cleaned up and get this looked at. My car’s up at the head of the street. You’re not getting yours out of here without a helicopter.”
I clenched my jaw against dismay and patted Petite’s nose carefully. “It’s okay, baby. I’ll figure out how to get you out of here.” I didn’t think I’d spoken loudly enough for Morrison to hear, even though he was barely two feet away from me. The look he gave me said he had.
“What is it with you and cars, Walker?”
“They’re easier than people.” I tugged my hand out of Morrison’s grip, trying to be gentle enough about it that it wouldn’t seem rude. He let me go without a fuss. I felt him watching me as I hopped to another broken island. After a few seconds he followed me.
We walked in silence up to the head of the road, jumping over broken land where we needed to. I felt like I should say something just to fill up the quiet between us, but I had no idea how to make small talk with Morrison. He pulled ahead of me by a couple of steps and my mouth asked, “How old are you, Morrison?” without consulting my brain about it first.
Morrison threw a startled look over his shoulder. “What? Thirty-eight. Why?”
“Faye wanted to know.”
“I don’t need setting up with a girl half my age, Walker.” Morrison pulled ahead of me again, leaving me blinking at his shoulders. There wasn’t, as far as I knew, a Mrs. Morrison. He didn’t wear a wedding band, and he seemed the type. I reengaged my brain before it asked him any more questions, and scowled at my feet as I followed him. My hands wanted to go into my pockets, but my left hand kept screeching protest. In order to give myself something to do, I caught up with Morrison, matching my pace to his.
“How old are you?”
“What?” I missed a step, caught my toes on broken earth, and regained my balance before Morrison had time to help me, which I wasn’t sure he would.
“How old are you?” he repeated with a reasonable degree of patience.
“Isn’t that kind of thing on my official records?”
“Yeah, but so’s ‘Joanne Walker.’”
I pursed my lips. “A very palpable hit. Twenty-seven.” I hesitated. “Did you look?”
“At your records? Yes. They’re all under Walker. Why?” Morrison didn’t sound even slightly apologetic. I wouldn’t have either, in his position.
I shrugged. “Defining myself by my own rules, I guess.”
“There’s no paperwork filed for an official change of name.”
“You
did your homework, didn’t you?” I shrugged again. Morrison’s car was at the head of a cross street, parked just before a dark crack in the road. “I didn’t feel like I needed to, I guess. I broke into my school computer to change my last name toWalker on the transcripts and never had a problem with the university systems, so why bother with the paperwork.” I was pretty sure the statute of limitations on hacking my own transcripts was long past. I hoped so. Morrison would probably arrest me if it weren’t. He lifted an eyebrow at me, then nodded at the car. I jumped the crevasse—it was deeper than I expected, probably six feet—and waited for him to unlock the doors. He was already on the radio, reporting me as alive and well, when I crawled in. There were actually cheers from the dispatch room. I felt my cheeks sting with color, and stared out the window. The sunlight, still inverted in my vision, bled silver and black over the horizon as it climbed. “Crap.”
Morrison glanced at me as he put the car in drive. “What?”
“I’m late for a meeting.”
“It’s six in the morning.”
“I know. Can you just drive me home?”
Morrison’s silence was profound before curiosity got the better of him. “You’ve got a 6:00 a.m. date at home?”
I slumped in my seat. “Yeah. You know. That boyfriend you didn’t believe in.”
Morrison snorted. I guessed he still didn’t believe. “You need to get that hand looked at.”
“I need a shower. If I can’t fix it I’ll go to the ER.”
“If you can’t fix it.” The skepticism in Morrison’s voice was thin. He’d watched me recover from impossible injuries enough times to know I could do it, even if he didn’t want to believe it. I felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for him.
I pushed myself up in the seat, toes pressed against the back of the footwell. “Forget I said anything.”