by C. E. Murphy
“Joanne!” That was Suzy again, panic turning her voice thready. I spun around in time to watch Coyote come back from his tumble in a long low leap that brought Suzy to the ground. Her magic flared, green and then midnight-black. As the blackness took over, the much-abused earth opened around her and swallowed her down, leaving Coyote snapping sharp teeth on torn grass instead of her throat. He snarled, shook himself all over and stood on his hind legs, which looked very strange.
It looked even stranger when between one step and the next he became human again, his long black hair disarrayed. “I can’t go through the earth like she’s doing, Jo. You have to go after her.”
“I can’t—” Well, yes, I could. I’d just done it. I shook my head anyway. “She’s got to surface again, and she’s going to do it where Annie is. Billy—” I couldn’t possibly send Annie to his house knowing Suzy would be looking for Annie. “Dammit. Change of plans.” I wheeled, looking over the landscape like it would give me answers. Mostly to myself, I said, “The smart thing would be to take it out of the city, somewhere remote where there aren’t many people to get hurt, but this damned rain—”
As if I’d conjured it, real rain began to fall, massive cold drops that came from clouds I hadn’t noticed gathering. Once I looked up I didn’t know how I’d missed them; they looked like Armageddon rolling in, almost black as they narrowed the horizons to touchable distances. Reluctantly, I brought the Sight to the fore again, unsurprised to see stains of corruption swelling the clouds. Every raindrop drove black dust into the ground or tried to force it into our skin. I pulled shields over us all, making a little dome of dryness in the heart of a building storm.
Sonata and the other mediums who’d been drawn to the site were gone. So, I realized, was Laurie’s body. I hoped the mediums had fled, rather than been buried, which is what I imagined had happened to Laurie. I stared at where her body had been, at where black raindrops crashed violently against the soil, and I thought again of zombies. I was not up for another bout with the walking dead, especially if the walker was someone I knew.
Billy cleared his throat. I glanced at him and discovered everybody was waiting on me. I’d forgotten I’d even been talking, so it took a moment to gather myself again. When I did, it wasn’t to speak. Instead I lifted my hand to Morrison’s face, soothing away the scratches and welts from Annie’s attack. His eyes stopped watering and a faint look of amazement ran over his features. I’d never healed him before. Turned him into a wolf a few times, yes, but never used the base component of my magic. My voice cracked. “Better?”
He nodded and I smiled. It didn’t last, but at least it happened. Then I looked back to the close horizons, still searching for answers there. “I haven’t done the things I should. I’m sure I should have made a...a sacred place for myself. Somewhere I could go now, knowing it had power built up that might help us. The falls were as close to that as I had, and the Master got to them already. Everywhere else is so...populated. The troll, my apartment building, Pike Place Market...”
“Seattle’s your sacred space, doll.” Gary sounded exhausted. “I been watchin’ you run hell-bent for leather all over this city for the past year. You don’t got any one place because you belong everywhere. That said, there’s only one image that matters in the skyline, sweetheart.”
“The Space Needle.” I’d been trying not to think of it at all, because Gary was right. I hadn’t just started this ride there in a lot of ways. I’d come to use it as a place to center myself and get a look at what was going down in my city. “But do you know how many tourists are there every day, Gary?”
“We’ll take care of that.” Morrison, still holding Annie as if she was weightless, turned to Billy. “You drove your squad car over?” At Billy’s nod, he continued, “Go see if the radios are working. Talk to the West Precinct. Tell them we have to shut the Seattle Center down.” He glanced at me. “If Walker’s right about this rain, there might be enough trouble on the streets already to justify it, but if she’s not...talk to the captain. Say we’ve heard from a local resource, a geologist, that these tremors are running so deep he’s concerned about the Needle’s stability.”
He turned toward me. “You know a geologist, right? Crowder, the guy who found you when the falls were born. Can you get him to back us up on this story?”
“We’re not exactly close personal friends, Morrison. He might back us up, but how am I supposed to call him?” I went to take my cell phone out and wave its lack of functionality at him in a demonstrative manner, and remembered I’d thrown it into the field somewhere. “Shit.”
Morrison actually looked relieved at the reminder. “Good. Then nobody’s likely to be able to contradict us until it’s too late.”
“I find it more comforting when you’re not devious,” I informed him, but I had to agree it was a story we might be able to sell. I was still trying to come up with a better one when Billy shrugged his shoulder holster off and offered it to Morrison, whose eyebrows bent inward.
“I’ve got a backup weapon in the car,” Billy said. “You’re in a rental and haven’t been home since you got back from North Carolina, have you? I didn’t think so. Take the gun. You might need it.” Morrison nodded and Billy helped him slide the holster on without dropping Annie.
I admired both of them for their practical streaks, and addressed Billy. “I don’t suppose you’ll go home and hide after you radio this in, will you?”
“Do you really have to ask?”
I sighed. “All right. Let’s go.”
“What about...?” Coyote gestured to where Suzy and presumably Laurie were buried.
“We have Annie. She’ll follow us.”
“What if she hunts along the way?”
“Then people are going to die, so it would probably be good if we got our asses in gear and move to territory we choose for the big fight. So far we’ve been running like hell in the wake of the Master’s messes. I’m ready to take a stand. Can we go now?”
“I just don’t like leaving this place unprotected.”
“Then stay here, Cyrano. I’ve got no other resources right now.” Frustrated and hurting, I stomped past him, bringing my dome shield with me. Everybody but Coyote scurried along. When I looked back, he had knelt to put his hands on the ground, and was already drenched from the downpour. His expression was precisely that of a wet dog’s. An angry wet dog’s, as another tremor rattled the earth. I waved as Billy split off to go to his squad car, and the rest of us ran for Morrison’s rental. I was taking the keys out of Morrison’s front pocket, something that under different circumstances could have been quite entertaining, when Coyote called, “Wait up, I’m coming with you.”
My shoulders dropped with relief. I did not want to do this without Coyote at my side. He jogged up, took a look at me squirming around in Morrison’s pockets, and volunteered, “I’ll hold her,” with a nod at Annie.
Morrison shook his head. “I’ve got her, thanks. Walker, you drive.”
“Words you will live by for the rest of your days,” I told him, and got a faint smile for my efforts as we got into the car. Coyote took shotgun while Gary and Morrison tucked Annie into the backseat and buckled in on either side of her. As I backed out of the parking lot, Billy pointed at his squad car’s radio and gave me a thumbs-up. “Radio’s working,” I reported. “Let’s hope the West Precinct captain is feeling obliging.”
We weren’t a quarter mile out of the park when it became clear he probably would be. A Tripoli cab was halfway into a ditch that hadn’t been there when we drove in. I pulled over and jumped out to find a soaking-wet man in his late thirties crouched on the vehicle’s far side, examining the damage. I said, “Oh, God,” by way of introduction. “Did Keith send you? I’m Joanne.”
His eyebrows, well-groomed if wet, went up and he stood to offer me a hand to shake. “I am Keith. Nice to finally meet you in person. Thanks for all the flowers.”
I grinned weakly. “Looks like I’m going to owe you s
ome more. Are you okay?”
“Sure, fine, for a guy who was driving when the road opened up under him. Don’t think I’m going to be much help ferrying your crew around, though.”
“It’s okay. There...aren’t as many of us as there were.”
Dismay darted across his face, creasing lines that were deep enough to make me revise his age up a decade or more. “Earthquakes get somebody?”
“Yeah.” It was easier than explaining the truth. “Look, Keith, get in the cab and stay there until somebody radios you, okay? This rain isn’t good to be out in.”
He cleared his throat. “We’re not getting rained on right now.”
I looked up, discovering I’d brought the dome shield up automatically when I got out of the car. “Ah. Yes. So we’re not. All the better, then. Turn the heat on so you don’t die of exposure, and stay safe.”
Keith leaned past me to look into the rental. I glanced back to see Gary wave a greeting, then caught Keith’s questioning expression that clearly sought Gary’s guidance on whether he should listen to me or not. Gary nodded. Keith made a surprised sound. “All right. Be careful on the roads. They’re a mess. People are abandoning their cars to get indoors.” He got back into the cab, saying, “Don’t forget those flowers,” as he closed the door.
I breathed, “I won’t,” as I got back in my own vehicle. Another tremor hit as I did, asphalt groaning beneath us. I gunned the car, hoping I wasn’t gunning us straight into a pit. I wasn’t, nor did one open behind us, but my heartbeat stayed uncomfortably elevated for the next several minutes.
Keith hadn’t been kidding. There were cars everywhere, lots of them in potholes and ditches or driven up over meridians and sidewalks that had suddenly lurched into the road before them. Some people were sticking it out with their cars, but far more of them were abandoned. It looked like a post-collapse apocalypse scene from a movie, and the bad stuff had hardly gotten started.
It got much, much worse as we approached downtown. So bad that none of us wanted to speak, just stared out the window with haunted gazes. Seattle was a hilly city. There were pileups at the bottoms of many of those hills, like the earth had shrugged all the cars off and sent them flying to land as they pleased. It reminded me of the slick snow days we’d seen more and more of recently. Every time one came along, it was like nobody had ever driven on snow before and had to make all the same mistakes over again before they could stop sliding around, rear-ending and piling up. The streets looked like that now, but worse. Sirens were clearly audible, louder than usual because so many engines were stilled. Even the emergency vehicles, though, were having a bad time of it: we passed one fire engine winching another one out of a crevasse while paramedics double-timed it away from the trucks to approach a particularly bad pileup down the block.
Police began appearing in greater numbers as we crept along. I saw acts of violence between cops and citizens that made me hiss and made Morrison swear. People climbed through shattered store windows, carrying loot, which seemed remarkably opportunistic. It hadn’t been that long since the massacre at the falls. I glanced at the car’s clock to be sure of that, and was right: it was barely 5:00 p.m. Only three hours had passed.
The last hour of that, though, a contaminated rain had been beating the city with black magic conjured by death on wings, and it had never taken all that much to turn a crowd into a mob anyway. “Screw it,” I said abruptly. “It’ll be faster to walk from here.”
“It’s another two miles to the Seattle Center, Walker. Are you going to carry Annie?”
“Do you want me to?” I killed the engine and got out. Rain slapped my shields as I extended them over the car. “Come on. We should move as fast as we can.”
“Through these crowds?” Coyote asked dubiously as he climbed out. “They’ll hold us back, especially since—” He glanced at Morrison.
“Since he looks like a cop? Well, they can’t hold us if they can’t see us. Where’s Billy?”
“I lost track of his squad car a while back,” Morrison reported. “There was a bad wreck. It looked like he pulled off to help.”
Maybe he’d be smart and go home after that. If not, well, he knew where we were going. I put my arms out to Morrison, offering to take Annie. He gave me a dirty look and hefted her himself, though in a fireman’s carry rather than the more graceful bride’s carry he’d been using. Gary protested and subsided in almost the same breath, making my heart ache, and collected my drum from the rental’s trunk instead. I fell into step with him and put my hand in his. “Hey. How’re you holding up?”
“Tell you what, doll, if you hadn’t healed up my heart last year, no way I’d be survivin’ this.” He put both of our hands over his heart. “And I ain’t talkin’ about just the magic, Jo. What about you?”
“The same. On all counts, Gary. I couldn’t have made it this far without you. I’m so sorry. This isn’t what I hoped would happen when I got to the hospital last night.”
“Darlin’, it ain’t nothin’ any of us hoped for, but we all knew it was coming down the line.”
“It wasn’t supposed to involve your wife.”
“It was never not gonna. We just didn’t know it.”
“You realize that sounds like something I would say.”
To my surprise, a broad grin flashed across Gary’s face. “Yeah, doll. I thought about that more than once, riding with Horns. I get it better now,” he said more solemnly. “Why it’s so damn hard for you to talk about the magic, even when you’re talkin’ to folks who know and trust you. It don’t matter how real you know it is. It sounds crazy comin’ out of your mouth. And it gets worse when you’re talkin’ about the time line changing, about things you remember one way when they happened another.”
“Think there’s a support group? Time Travelers Anonymous?” I focused on the street ahead of us for a moment, watching people brush to the sides of my shields without realizing they were doing it. We were alone, a little army of magic in the heart of a mundane world. It was liberating and alienating all at once. “Time travel sounds so freaking cool. ‘Go anywhere, see anything, change the world!’ But the world doesn’t like being changed.”
“And I did change it, doll.” Gary took a deep, uncertain breath. “Can’t help wonderin’ if that means I brought this down on us. If I hadn’t fought for Annie—”
“Then you wouldn’t be the man she and I both adore,” I interrupted. “I mean, damn, Gary, you challenged death and time itself for love. That’s...that’s amazing. That’s everything. That’s love conquering all.”
“Hah. Horns said the same thing. Guess he’d know,” Gary said more softly. “Guess he’s been around long enough to know what endures.”
“So listen to the god,” I suggested, then sighed. “Besides, you said it yourself. Annie was always going to be involved. Lives don’t go along without touching each other, do they? So if your life and mine were ever going to get involved, maybe the rest of it was going to happen, too. And you said it was like a fog lifting from the real memories. I don’t think you changed most of the time line, Gary. I think the Master clouded the truth in hopes that you not knowing what had happened would weaken you enough that he could get to Annie one last time without interference. I don’t think even he can yank one time line out of place and replace it with another that thoroughly.”
“Why doncha think so?”
“Because he’d have done it with me and made sure I never survived to be born, if he could’ve.”
Gary went quiet a minute. “Pretty good argument, doll.”
I took a bow as we walked. “Thank you. I do my best.”
Gary started to smile, but before he got anywhere near done with it, a building fell down in front of us.
Chapter Seventeen
Dust rose like a wall, black-spattered and vindictive. It swept around us, my shields thoroughly in place even as screams filled the air. Glass rained, dull and ugly in the dust and downpour. Metal twisted and shrieked as more of the buil
ding came down, and as I watched, bricks imploded under the strain of falling struts. The ground continued to shake, great rolling waves that could have been further earthquakes or could have simply been impact upon impact as twenty stories came down on the street.
I could not imagine how many people had just died. Dozens, maybe hundreds: the street had been busy with looters, refugees, families trying to work their way out of the shock-ridden city center. A second rush of filler, dust, brick, things I didn’t know the name of, came rumbling down. I threw shields as widely as I could, trying to protect those who were still unharmed, then fell back as far as I dared, trying to assess the damage.
I couldn’t, not from where I stood. I put my hand on Gary’s arm. “Don’t let me fall down.”
“Eh?” He slid his arm around my waist, though, and I tried something I’d never really done deliberately: I shot out of my body, not in search of an astral plane, but just to have a look at this one, to see what we were facing.
From a vantage of a couple hundred feet, seen with the Sight, it looked far worse than my piddly imagination had envisioned. Buildings by their nature glowed with green intent, protective, comforting; they knew their duty in shielding men and beasts from nature’s crueler elements.
The building just in front of us, and half a dozen more all the way down the street, were ripped and torn apart not just physically, but spiritually. Their steadfast green bled red and orange with pain and tinted toward black despair. They had failed their people: they had fallen, and in falling, taken lives. That was not their purpose, and for all that they weren’t sentient, their spirits still felt the pain of failure.
Below those shards of pain lay the living heartbeats of people trapped within broken bits of building. Some flickered and went out as I watched, and more flared with fear when another quake rattled more debris down. Half a block lay beneath the fallen buildings, and more people than I could count.
I snapped back to my body with tears running down my face. “I can See them, Gary. If I could only change this stuff, if I was strong enough—” I remembered my father walking through a blood rain that turned to rose petals under the force of his will, and extended my hands.