by C. E. Murphy
“I said you sound pretty confident that this sleeping sickness is caused by an it.” There was nothing at all about his phrasing that made it a question, but it was one. I nodded and my eyes came open whether I wanted them to or not. There was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock on one of the bookshelves in Morrison’s office; I stared at its slim glass form and the seconds ticking away as I answered.
“You remember when the lights went out in January?”
“As if I could forget.”
I ignored his tone and shrugged at the clock. “I really screwed up with that. I guess it was kind of like using a bulldozer to swat a fly. It sent…” My hand lifted and made a wave in the air, all of its own accord. “Ripples. All those snowstorms. The heat wave.”
“You’re telling me you can affect weather patterns, Walker?” Morrison sounded rightfully disbelieving. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, fingers cool against the corners of my eyes.
“You know, sir, if I could summon a little thundercloud above your head to prove myself, I’d do it, but I don’t think I could even if it’d help anything. That’s…” I struggled for a word, and the only one I could come up with was, “magic. Making something out of nothing. I can’t do that. All I can do is manipulate what’s there, move energy and shape it some, and if I do it badly, we get snowstorms and heat waves and thunderbirds, oh my. I don’t know. Maybe I could make a ministorm above your head if I had the training. I don’t.” I dropped my hand and went back to staring at the clock, then at the calendars above it. Three of them, turned to the past, present and upcoming months. All three were covered in Morrison’s handwriting, tiny but readable. I talked to the fine print, pretending my boss wasn’t really in the room.
“Everything that happened a couple weeks ago, all that stuff with Colin Johannsen and Faye Kirkland. It got started because I should’ve started out years ago as a firecracker, and instead I showed up a decade too late as an atom bomb. It was like I threw up a big red arrow in the sky pointing to me and saying, ’Stupid newbie on the astral scene, please use and abuse to your heart’s content.’” I had never once put all this into words, and I was pretty sure there were better people to be telling it to than Morrison. On the other hand, Gary and Coyote both basically understood the problem already, and right then I couldn’t think of anybody else who might need to understand it more than my boss.
“I thought everything I’d screwed up had been fixed on the solstice, but I guess not. Whatever’s putting people to sleep, I woke it up, and now it’s hunting and I’ve still got that arrow blinking over my head.” That sounded like I was completely concerned with myself, which was bitterly untrue.
I drew in a breath to try rephrasing, and Morrison interrupted with, “A decade ago.”
It was very nearly the last thing I expected him to say. For all I didn’t want to, I found myself looking at Morrison, who had an expression of cautious restraint pulled tight across his face. It was so careful it was clear he was asking a question, and that question told me just how detailed the research he’d done on me when I’d let slip my full original name. Captain Michael Morrison knew something about me I didn’t want anybody to know, something I’d thought nobody outside of Qualla Boundary knew. My jaw and my stomach both tightened.
“Close enough.”
“All right,” he said after a long time. “I’m taking you off street beat, Walker. God knows I need you out there, but if my people are going down because of something only you can stop, then that’s what your assignment is. Get. Go save the world, however you have to do it.” He sat down at his desk, looking worn to the bone.
He hadn’t said because of something you did, which was far more than I deserved. But because it was Morrison, I had to ask: “You believe me?”
“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, Walker. Just get out of here and find a way to keep my people safe. Go.”
I went.
CHAPTER 14
I wish I could say I went boldly forth with a plan in mind, but what I really did was go to the locker room and change into my regular clothes. I wasn’t going to be doing police work, and although the heat wave had broken, it was still in the eighties. Jeans and a T-shirt sounded a lot more pleasant for tromping around in than my uniform. I went out into the July morning with my head down and my eyes squinted against sunlight bouncing off the asphalt. Such diligent concentration on my feet led me over to Petite, and to a bright, semifamiliar voice saying, “Officer Walker. You don’t look like you’re on shift.”
I felt distinctly deer-in-headlights as I looked up to see Laura Corvallis perched in the open sliding door of her news van, a gotcha smile pasted across her face. It took everything I had not to break into a panicked run back toward the precinct building. “Ms. Corvallis. I thought you’d be at the studio getting your tape ready.”
“Oh, we don’t air until six. I’m looking for some human interest sides of the Blue Flu story. Captain Morrison’s got a real knack for looking handsome and not answering questions.”
I let out a little breath of laughter. “Yeah.” Crap. That was a bad confession to make. I didn’t want to build any sort of camaraderie with a news reporter. I bit my tongue so I couldn’t say anything else, unbit it and added, “That’s his job,” which I hoped would mitigate my agreement that my boss was handsome, and dug Petite’s keys out of my pocket.
“So I thought you had to go to work,” Corvallis said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the day off, with a quarter of the workforce out.” Her voice was full of polite curiosity, but I glanced up through my eyebrows as I unlocked Petite’s door, and saw the dark glitter of a hungry hunter in her gaze.
“Ms. Corvallis, that sounds like a good idea. I won’t tell you anything.” I smiled, winked and got into Petite before she had time for a rebuttal. Cranking the engine made a satisfying lot of noise that drowned out any chance of me hearing her follow-up, and I pulled out of the parking lot feeling like I’d gotten a reprieve. Morrison had given me rope to hang myself with. I wasn’t eager to use it explaining why I’d ended up on the evening news babbling about Laura Corvallis’s poorly named Blue Flu.
About three blocks farther on I realized the news van was following me.
I pulled into a drive-thru, mostly to waste a few minutes and see if the van was actually following me. I emerged from the other side with a burger I didn’t really want and a bag of fries that would kick off a month-long craving for more if I gave into their evil seductive ways. The Channel Two van was waiting in the parking lot, so I pulled up alongside it and rolled down my window. “Want a burger?”
Corvallis was in the passenger seat, grinning at me. “No, thanks.”
“Hey! Yeah, if you’re giving it up!” The cameraman-cum-driver leaned across her, looking eager. I handed the food over, figuring the best way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, and I might need a friend on the news team if Corvallis was going to insist on following me.
I was trying not to think too hard about a reporter following me. I barely had any idea what I was going to do even without a monkey wrench in the works, and the only thing I could think of that would make it worse was broadcasting my bizarre talents on local TV. In the best-case scenario, nobody would believe her. In the worst, they would, and I’d be like Christ in the temple.
Which was not to say I was Christ-like in any way. Gah. I put on the nicest smile I could, trying to rid myself of the thought. “Are you following me, Ms. Corvallis?”
“As a matter of fact, I am.”
Outright honesty had not been the response I was expecting. I blinked up at the woman. “Why?”
“It strikes me you’ve been involved in some interesting events the past few months.” She smiled at me. I didn’t like it, and did my best blank expression. It usually worked to irritate and distract Morrison.
It didn’t work on Laurie Corvallis. “An officer—not a detective, just an officer—at the Blanchet High murder scene. Immediately after that you were on the list of approv
ed visitors for Henrietta Potter. Mrs. Potter died quite violently, didn’t she?”
A bolt of cold loss shot right through the flutter of power behind my breastbone, making bile rise up in my stomach. For an instant I was desperately grateful I hadn’t eaten the food I’d bought, or I’d be revisiting Erik’s early-morning sickness right there in my car. The smell of vomit lingered in leather forever, too. I shuddered the feeling away, knowing Corvallis was watching my reaction with professional interest. I’d barely known Henrietta Potter, but I’d liked her enormously. Her sudden, violent death had shocked me to the core. “Yeah,” I managed. “She did.”
“Then your name came up during the police investigation of Faye Kirkland’s death,” Corvallis went on conversationally. I inhaled through my nose, long slow breath.
“That was weeks ago. Why are you following me now?”
“Well, the third time’s the charm, Officer Walker. I see you going into the precinct building, saying you’re on your way to work on a day when a quarter of the North Precinct police force has been admitted to the hospital, and half an hour later you’re walking out, still in civilian clothes and getting in your—” she broke off to consider Petite briefly, then gave me a quick grin “—shiny Mustang.” The smile faded into something more predatory. “And I start putting all these little strange things together, and I start to think maybe I have a story here.”
Nausea kept burning in my belly, churning up until it felt as if it was encouraging my heartbeat to rattle too fast. My fingertips were cold and my cheeks were hot, physical reactions to what I thought was best referred to as blind, screaming panic. I wanted Laurie Corvallis to go away, far away, from my weird little life, and to never come near me again.
Saying that, of course, would pretty much guarantee she’d be on my back like black on night. I gave her a rueful little smile that I hoped hid the ninety-mile-an-hour pulse in my throat, and managed to keep my voice steady as I said, “Ms. Corvallis, if you really want to investigate me, I can’t stop you, but you’re going to be disappointed. I’m not a very interesting person. As for being at work, I have some personal things to take care of today. I just needed to stop by the station to talk to a couple of people.” I wasn’t a very good liar, and hoped that was close enough to the truth to hide it.
Interest glittered in the reporter’s eyes. “And you weren’t pressed into service, given the situation?”
I tipped my chin down and looked up at her through my eyebrows. “A lot of people are out on sick leave, Ms. Corvallis, but we usually do get paid for sick leave. The department doesn’t have a lot of money for overtime. Sorry to disappoint you.”
Corvallis pursed her lips, looking as though she was in fact disappointed. “You’re lying to me, Officer Walker. You said you had to get to work, when we spoke in the parking lot.”
I stared at her. First, how she remembered exactly what I said was beyond me. Second, “Do people typically say, ’Please excuse me, but I’ve got to run inside and talk to a couple of people before I leave and go about my day’ to you when they’re heading into their work building, Ms. Corvallis?” Sure, I was lying now, but now I had a moral high horse that made it easier.
“People often find being very specific in what they say to a news reporter is a good idea.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said in genuine, pointed incredulity. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Ms. Corvallis, I’ve got some personal business to take care of.” I clipped the words off and she smiled at me.
“I hope you’re telling me the truth, Officer Walker. I’ll find out if you’re not.”
“I’m sure you will.” I bared my teeth at her, which was as close as I could get to a smile, waved goodbye at the driver, who lifted the half-eaten burger in salutation, and backed out of the parking lot to drive home with shaking hands.
Wednesday, July 6, 2:20 p.m.
By the time I got there I at least had a plan. I had no illusions that it was a good plan, but at least it was a plan, and that was better than sitting around with fast-food coffee going sour in my stomach, worrying about Billy and Mel and a whole lot of other friends. I turned my computer on and prayed the gods of the Internet would have some answers for me.
They didn’t. Mystical sleeping sicknesses and the Net turned out to have little in common, although I did learn more than I ever wanted to know about African trypanosomiasis. The only references that covered both sleeping sicknesses and mysticism were stories about African evil spirits who’d turned into the mosquitoes that carried the disease. It was a long shot, especially since there just weren’t that many mosquitoes in downtown Seattle parks. On the other hand, these evil spirits were evidently sensitive to topaz, so if I got really desperate I could always start collecting topaz and hand it out to people.
Actually, that didn’t sound like a bad idea, which in and of itself made me wince. I hoped I wasn’t going to turn into one of those New Agers with the frizzy hair and the gypsy skirts. I punched in a search on topaz’s inherent qualities and came up with an Indian—the subcontinent, not the Native Americans—belief that it helped bring good dreams and peaceful sleep. Between that and the evil spirits, handing out chunks of it sounded like an actively good idea. I couldn’t believe I’d fallen so far, and at the same time I was incredibly relieved to come across something that might help.
I took a deep breath, accepted my doom and Googled “magic sleep,” which turned out to be just the ticket for a Dungeons & Dragons cleric in search of spell statistics. I put my forehead down on the keyboard, depressing keys until they started a long painful beep.
The sound was enough to send me shoving away from my desk purposefully, gripped with the determination to do something, even if it was stupid. I drove Petite down to East Asian Imports, the incense-filled shop I’d met Faye Kirkland at only three weeks earlier, and bought every piece of topaz they had. Half an hour later, my pockets full of rocks, I marched into the precinct building, a woman on a mission.
Morrison was the first stop on my mission, and he wasn’t there. That took the wind out of my ambition and I stood there staring at his desk for a while, relief warring with disappointment. He was the hardest person to talk to, so I wanted to get it over with. On the other hand, more sympathetic ears might make it easier to work my way up to him. I went back to Missing Persons, a flawed piece of stone clutched in my hand.
I didn’t like the Missing Persons office. It always seemed cold, even in July, and the door stuck, making a draft that riffled all tidy rows of photographs and vital statistics that lined the walls. I thought it sounded like the lost whispering for help, and found it overwhelmingly depressing. Homicide was bad, with all its raw violence floating at the surface, but Missing Persons was worse. It had the tang of hope sullied by desolation, the knowledge that every day a case wasn’t closed meant it was that much less likely there would ever be a happy ending. Murder was concrete; it made an end to things. Hope could hang on like a bitch.
“You always get that look when you come in here.” Jen Gonzales, the woman I was in search of, came out from one of the inner offices, offering her hand to shake. I put mine in it automatically, her fingers startlingly warm in the perceived chill of the office.
“Hi, Jen. What look?”
“Makes your eyes sad, and no offense, Joanie, but a lot of the time you don’t have the happiest eyes, anyway.” Jen had a faint Spanish accent and always shook hands when people came into her office. It’d finally struck me that doing so might give her a better sense of the people she was meeting, and their emotional state, than anything else could. The one time I’d asked she’d brushed it off.
But she’d been one of the people who had known how to focus her energy and offer it up like she’d been trained in it when I’d faced down Cernunnos in the precinct’s garage. I rubbed my thumb over the topaz, watching it more than her. “This sleeping thing,” I said after a minute. “It’s not a virus or anything. It’s…” I gritted my teeth and scowled at Jen’s knees, worki
ng myself up to what I needed to say. “You’ve got the same kind of talent Billy does, the ability to focus your energy.”
I dared a glance through my eyebrows to find Jen ghosting a smile at me. My shoulders relaxed marginally and I sighed. “Yeah. This thing hit Billy first, and then Mel before it started spreading like wildfire. I don’t know what this morning’s explosion’s about, but I think it might be a good idea for people who’ve linked up with me to keep their heads down, if they’re still awake.” I presented the piece of topaz, my hand palm-up. “The only thing I’ve been able to find so far that might help is topaz. It’s supposed to be protection against non-viral sleeping sicknesses.”
That was playing fast and loose with the truth on a lot of levels, but Jen probably didn’t need to know about the evil African spirits, and it was a lot easier to say “non-viral” than “mystical.” Even as I said it I felt like I was trying to cheat my way out of admitting what was going on. I wondered if it’d ever be easy for me to admit, “Yeah, it’s magical in origin,” and didn’t know if it’d be better or worse if it was easy. I lifted my hand a little, offering Jen the topaz. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but you might want to hang on to this.”
Jen picked the stone up without touching my skin, lifting it to examine its clarity. There wasn’t much; smoke and scars filled the golden stone, which was the only reason I’d been able to afford a box of the stuff. As far as semiprecious jewels went, topaz wasn’t expensive, but gem-quality rocks would’ve put me back more credit than I had. Just watching her fold it into her pocket made me feel a little better. The stones had only been in my possession a few minutes, but I really wanted them to offer some protection, and maybe that in itself would do some good. So, I thought, would the bearer believing in its power.