by C. E. Murphy
“You could have gotten yourself killed, Billy.”
“All in the line of duty, ma’am.” His humor fell flat and he shrugged. “The important thing is that I didn’t. You got here in time. I knew you would.” He looked me up and down again, then lifted his eyebrows. “Nice coat.”
A laugh barked out and despite everything I took a step back and twirled so the split skirt flared. “Isn’t it? I’m a hero.” I stopped spinning before I got dizzy, and frowned at Billy. “I meant it. Go home, gather the family and get into Mel’s sanctuary. Keep the kids safe. He’s going to be looking for a host, and your children are...”
“Talented,” Billy offered, and half smiled. “They’re already there, Joanie. Mel woke us all up hours ago and brought us downstairs. I only left when the call came in about the murders.”
“That was exactly the dumb thing to do.”
“Maybe, but would you expect me to do anything else?”
“No.” I folded my fingers over my lips, wanting to ask how Mel had known, but Melinda Holliday wasn’t like anybody else I’d met on my spiritual journey. She said she wasn’t a witch, only a wise woman like her grandmother, but whatever she was, I was damned glad for her wisdom. “Okay. I need you to go hunting, then. I need you to find Raven Mocker for me.” Slightly too late I remembered Billy hadn’t been there for the mess in the Qualla, and tried again. “Mark Bragg. We’re looking for Mark Bragg. I expect he’s on his way into Seattle, maybe on a chartered flight or by car or train.”
“Mark Bra—” I watched Billy swallow a dozen questions and change them all to, “I can’t track magic, Walker.”
“Neither can I, but Suzanne can, and Laurie Corvallis—” The penny finally dropped. I’d been wrong. Laurie could be of help. I smacked my forehead and shouted, “Laurie! C’mere, I need you to be a famous news reporter for me!”
“Jo...” Coyote’s voice broke on the one syllable.
Stomach cold with dread, I turned my attention on the three I’d left behind. Coyote’s back was to me as he crouched across from Suzy, whose knotted and bloody hands were pressed against her mouth.
Between them, Laurie Corvallis lay dead.
Chapter Fifteen
It was not the kind of dead one could mistake for anything else. Her right side had been ripped out, red blood darker than her crimson shirt, dying it a dreadful shade. Viscera stained the ground beneath her, and as I tore my gaze away, I saw her wide-open staring eyes instead. Her color was already fading, waxy tones setting in, and makeup I hadn’t even noticed before looked garish against her skin.
It had been less than five minutes since I’d left them behind. I was sure it had not yet been five minutes, and in that time my worst fears had come to fruition. I stood and stared, unable to think beyond that flat fact: I had failed. At the very least I’d failed Laurie, and it was fast becoming clear I’d failed somebody else, too.
“I looked to see if I could help you,” Coyote whispered. “When I looked back—”
“No! No! No, I didn’t, I couldn’t, I didn’t, Joanne, I didn’t, I swear I didn’t, I couldn’t—!” Suzy’s hysteria came on in sudden words at high pitch. Her green aura burned so brilliantly I winced away, shutting the Sight off out of self-preservation.
“I was too late.” Coyote sounded as bewildered as I felt. “Her soul, it was already...gone. I don’t even know if I could have healed a wound this bad, but I couldn’t even try....”
“Not unless you can create a liver wholesale.”
Coyote bowed his head and put his hands—as bloody and messy as Suzy’s—against the earth, his head lowered in despair. I wanted to reassure him. I wasn’t sure even I could create organs from thin air, and even if I could, it had still been too late for Laurie the moment I’d turned my back on them.
Suzy had told me. She’d warned me. Black magic getting inside her magic. The leanansidhe backing off. I’d trusted her too much because I knew her so well. Or I thought I did, anyway. I’d trusted her, when instead I should have isolated her and made working the darkness out of her my first priority.
“How did you get here so fast?” I asked her dully. Not her. Raven Mocker, the thing inside her. And then I had the answer, as quickly as I’d asked.
Her friends had summoned her. Summoned an earth magic, and gotten Suzy for their efforts. But a dark thing had come along, too. Suzy had told me she’d fought it, but that it had gotten inside her magic. The Master would be a fool to not take advantage of that kind of magic working, and while I didn’t think of him as an earth magic, death, whether I liked it or not, was part of this earth.
I whispered, “Power and corruption,” and looked at Annie, huddled on the ground. “Billy, Morrison? Gary? Take Annie away from here. Take her to Mel, I guess, if Melinda’s goddess will help hold a circle to keep her in. Call and ask her to ask her first, because I don’t want less than god-level power between Annie and your children. Right now, don’t let her touch Suzanne. Suzy’s got the power, Annie’s corrupted. We can’t let them come in contact.”
Morrison, despite being the smallest of the three men, crouched to lift Annie. “What happens if they do?”
“I don’t know. Bad things.”
Coyote, suddenly even more strained, called, “Joanne?” and pointed east. I turned, saw nothing, remembered I’d let the Sight slip off, and triggered it again.
The column of power rising from Thunderbird Falls was black as pitch, and raining midnight over midday Seattle.
“Jesus wept.” I’d only encountered that phrase recently, while in Ireland, but I felt it had the appropriate grim depth to it.
“Walker?”
I loved how Morrison could put entire volumes of questions into one word. It was an amazing talent. It might have been nicer if the word wasn’t usually my name, but it was amazing anyway. I followed that thought all the way to the end, because it was stupid and pointless and not thinking about Laurie, whose death was going to hit me hard any minute now. If I kept talking and thinking with deliberate calm, I might get through it. “I cannot catch an even break. The leanansidhe let the power she’d taken from the murders go. It’s back at Thunderbird Falls, and it’s turning the city into an oil slick. People are going to start dying. God forbid it should get into the weather front. The whole coast will turn to chaos.”
“Can that happen? Why would she do that? Why would they go back?”
Billy beat me to the answer, at least for part of it. “It wouldn’t be their decision, Captain. Ghosts are usually tied to the place they died, especially murder victims. It’s why I’ve always needed to go to a crime scene to talk to them. It takes a lot of strength to call them away from their deathbeds.”
“She has a body now,” I said to the other part of the question. “Annie’s body. She’s finally where she was aiming for. So in terms of wreaking havoc, letting the coven’s spirits return to where they died and continue to poison the system is worth more than amalgamating power for herself. None of this is about power for her, remember. The Master has always needed someone to feed him. He’s going to get more strength from this rain than she could give him by herself. She can’t get to everybody in the city. The state. This can.”
“It’s not raining, Walker.”
“But it is.” I turned my palms up, watching black dust gather. “We’re breathing it in right now. I don’t know what it’s going to do, but for God’s sake, if you start to feel aggressive or angry, try really hard to stop and think about what’s driving it.”
“Can you keep it out of us?”
I started to say yes, then looked at Annie, a boneless lump in his arms, and then at Suzy, whose single burst of petrified terror had been silenced behind her bloody hands. “No. Not...not and fight, Morrison. And I have to fight.”
“Walker.”
I heard a hundred things in my name again, and tried to close myself off to them. Morrison wouldn’t—couldn’t—let that happen. “She’s only a kid, Walker.”
“I know.�
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Suzy’s eyes were huge with fear, but she hadn’t run. I thought Raven Mocker would be smart enough to run, but then, if Raven Mocker and the leanansidhe had some kind of ritual they needed to do, of course she wasn’t going to run while Annie was still here. She. I’d been so certain they needed a male and female, after seeing Raven Mocker take Danny.
Briefly, tiredly, I wondered what had happened to Mark Bragg, and then the earth tore apart under my feet.
Flight was not on my list of awesome powers. My coat flared up behind my head like a cape, but only because I, like everybody else, was falling. Falling a long way: the ground kept tearing apart beneath us, loam and stone and roots ripping to pieces. The earth howled in the small bones of my ears, the shimmering blue life that ran through it under attack. I shouted and blasted downward with healing magic, trying to stop the wrenching quake. An instant later I hit bottom, first among a rain of men. Morrison, somehow, still held Annie in his arms, though he wasn’t on his feet when he landed.
The black dust fell past us and squirmed into the earth, digging deeper in a bizarrely familiar way. It came to me after a few breathless seconds. I turned and drove my fist into the soft surrounding ground, bellowing with frustration. “It’s just like the stuff that fell at Halloween! God damn it, if zombies start rising again—” There was nowhere to go with that. If zombies started rising again, I’d have to find some way to deal with them, even if they creeped me the hell out.
“All the stops,” I said in an almost normal tone, although I lost the handle on that again almost immediately. “He’s pulling out all the stops at once. I mean, of course he is, but Jesus Christ, I barely handled most of this crap the first time around when it was coming at me one at a time. I might be more cohesive, no, amalgamated, uh, consolidated—” God, I hated it when a rant got derailed by my mental thesaurus coming up short on the word I wanted. “I might have my shit together now,” I finally shouted in frustration, “but I’m sorry, that just does not equip me for every single damned thing getting in my face at once!”
“Look at it this way, doll,” Gary said into my shouts. “At least there probably aren’t gonna be any werewolves this time. Now are you gonna get us out of here, or what?”
I bared my teeth at him, but he’d taken the wind from my sails. The five of us—me, him, Morrison, Annie and Billy—were separated from Suzy, Coyote and Laurie’s body by a heave of earth. For a few sick seconds I contemplated what danger Coyote might be in, but the truth was, he was a lot better equipped to face Raven Mocker than Laurie had been. I was going to have to trust him to hold on for a few minutes. Hopeful, I knelt and put a palm on the ground, imagining I could lift it back up to ball field height where it belonged.
My brain fritzed out at the idea. It shouldn’t have: I had done far more unlikely things. But somewhere in it, a spark went, You’re a healer, not an earth-shaper, and the all-important belief that I could guttered out and left us at the bottom of a twenty-foot pit.
Worse, though, I felt the black dust working its way deeper into the soil. Not just here, but all across Seattle, where rents had opened in the earth, leaving it vulnerable. I could See it starting to happen: black magic reaching for cracks and fissures in the bedrock. The coven and I had opened caves beneath Seattle, caves I’d only recently re-sealed. The Master’s magic was looking for something much deeper than that, looking for a way to work its way down into the fault line that ran from Alaska to California.
A chill numbed me as the potential ramifications of that raced ahead of me. A normal earthquake lasted seconds or minutes. One backed by black magic could last hours. The San Andreas Fault was one side of the Pacific Ring of Fire. If the Master dug deep enough, he could sink, shatter or burn half the world away.
That sounded exactly like something a death power would thrive on.
All of a sudden the conviction that we were utterly fucked if I didn’t get us out of this hole overwhelmed any lack of confidence I might have had. Magic surged through me, throwing us upward again. I held on to it as long as I could, trying desperately to reach out to other damage in the area. I sent healing magic chasing the black dust, and all too quickly realized I might be able to burn it out, but that I’d exhaust myself in the effort. The big bad needed to be dealt with before fixing the damage became practical.
“Go,” I ordered as we regained our feet. “Get Annie out of here. Billy—”
He shook his head, cell phone in hand. “No reception.”
“We’re in the middle of a damned ball field! I can practically see satellites from here—!” I yanked my phone out, too, determined Billy was right, not that I’d really doubted him, and in a fit of rage flung my phone halfway across the field. “Magic is not supposed to screw up technology!”
Morrison, accepting Gary’s hand on his elbow to help him up—he still had Annie cradled safely in his arms—muttered, “Magic seems exactly like something that would make technology stop working. Walker—”
“I know. You don’t want to leave me. But—”
An explosion of power threw us all to the ground. Earth splattered everywhere, carried on shards of green magic sharp and particular enough to linger where they struck the earth. One slammed past my right cheek, so close I felt a sting. When I touched it, blood came away. I sat up, head pounding, and was knocked onto my back again as another explosion rocked the air. Dune and blue this time, which made no sense at all. Coyote couldn’t fight with his magic. It would turn on him, as mine used to do to me.
Green shattered against his multivariegated shields and I decided to put my prejudices aside for the moment. Maybe too much exposure to me had changed his abilities, or maybe even healer’s magic was willing to play hardball if the only other choice was dying.
Suzy’s next strike was so bright I shut the Sight off to save my eyesight. I still saw it, and a quick look around at Gary and Morrison said they did, too. Huge magic tended to have a visual component, but at least it wasn’t eye-bleedingly brilliant through normal vision. I got up for the third time and, once on my feet, finally got a sense of what my friends must see when they watched me in battle.
Coyote and Suzanne went at it like hyenas fighting over Laurie’s body, magic boiling in their cores. Coyote’s shields were a desert sandstorm, so full of speed and danger they blocked out the light. Within them, he crouched and hunched and slunk like his animal namesake, seeking a place to strike from. When he did strike, it was with clear blue magic, the shade I thought of as healing color. It became a weapon, though it shouldn’t have been able to, and all I could wonder was how pure the intent had to be, for him to turn healing magic into a throwing star.
Into a thousand of them, spinning and sparking through the air. Most hit Suzy’s ferociously green shields and exploded, another air-smashing blowout that rocked me on my feet. A few got through, maybe hitting places where the blue magic’s impact had weakened the shields. One or two of those survived long enough to plunge into Suzy’s skin, and those were absorbed with no obvious effect. Well, no, there was one effect: she smiled, the same wild, sharp smile that Cernunnos owned, and then she drew a sword.
My sword was a real thing. A magic thing, but real: it was forged of silver and I had taken it from a god’s hand. Suzy’s blade was pure power, green godling magic given edges. I recognized the shape of it, too: short and elegantly crude, like the blade her grandfather had carried since I took the rapier from him. Suzy was a modern teen, not, I imagined, trained in weapons at all, never mind swords. But she held the thing like she knew what to do with it, and when she ran at Coyote to swing the blade, she never exposed her body to attack. She moved sideways, she slithered, she slipped and she struck so hard the conflicting magics rang like bells.
As the reverberations washed over us, Coyote changed. One moment he was a man, the next, a golden-eyed coyote. He darted in, foregoing a man’s fighting technique for a canine’s. Suzy’s sword disappeared barely in time to reform as shields: Coyote’s teeth scraped so clos
e to her hamstring that her jeans tore. I saw green pressed against her skin, protecting her from his bite. She flung herself away, onto the ground. Coyote pounced, and in the moment he was airborne, Suzy flipped onto her back. She caught him in the ribs with her long legs and threw him over her head, powering the thrust with magic. He flew, yelping, and Suzy came to her feet with her hair flying and eyes blazing. “Joanne! Do something!”
I startled all the way to my bones, so rapt in the fight it hadn’t occurred to me that I should interfere.
Before I could, Annie awakened with a surge and raked clawed fingers across Morrison’s face.
Chapter Sixteen
Morrison shouted and nearly dropped the woman. Nearly. I would have, but he was far too much the cop to let her go. He did try to grab her clawing fingers. Given the tears streaming from his eyes, I doubted he could see well enough to catch them, and leaped to help.
Annie wrapped one arm around Morrison’s neck like a long-lost lover, then hefted herself up and bashed her forehead against the bridge of his nose. He shouted again and, to my never-ending admiration, tightened his grip instead of letting her go. Annie raked his face again before I caught her arm. She flung herself in my direction, trying to unbalance Morrison. He staggered but kept his feet and I got my arm around Annie’s upper arms, pinning them down. She thrashed like a wildcat, black eyes open wide, head thrown back and almost visible rage pouring from her throat as she screamed.
Gary shoved himself between me and Morrison and slid his arm around Annie’s throat. In slightly less than ten seconds, she collapsed again, limp and fragile-looking. Gary threw himself away from us like he’d murdered somebody and covered his face with his hands. I said his name helplessly, but he just shook his head, despair rolling off him.