Walking Dead
C.E. Murphy
For once, Joanne Walker's not out to save the world. She's come to terms with the host of shamanic powers she's been given, her job as a police detective has been relatively calm, and she's got a love life for the first time in memory. Not bad for a woman who started out the year mostly dead. But it's Halloween, and the undead have just crashed Joanne's party.Now, with her mentor Coyote still missing, she has to figure out how to break the spell that has let the ghosts, zombies and even the Wild Hunt come back. Unfortunately, there's no shamanic handbook explaining how to deal with the walking dead. And if they have anything to say about it–which they do –no one's getting out of there alive.
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and her books
The Negotiator
Hands of Flame
“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
House of Cards
“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”
—Locus
“The second title in Murphy’s Negotiator series is every bit as interesting and fun as the first. Margrit is a fascinatingly complex heroine who doesn’t shy away from making difficult choices.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Heart of Stone
“[An] exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fascinating new series…as usual, Murphy delivers interesting worldbuilding and magical systems, believable and sympathetic characters and a compelling story told at a breakneck pace.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
The Walker Papers
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Thunderbird Falls
“Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.”
—Award-winning author Charles de Lint
“The breakneck pace keeps things moving…helping make this one of the most involving and entertaining new supernatural mystery series in an increasingly crowded field.”
—Locus
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, author of The Dresden Files series
“C.E. Murphy has written a spellbinding and enthralling urban fantasy in the tradition of Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey.”
—The Best Reviews
“Tightly plotted and nicely paced, Murphy’s latest has a world in which ancient and modern magic fuse almost seamlessly…Fans of urban fantasy are sure to enjoy this first book in what looks to be an exciting new series.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
[nominee for Reviewer’s Choice Best Modern Fantasy]
C.E. Murphy
Walking Dead
BOOK FOUR: THE WALKER PAPERS
AUTHOR NOTE
Welcome back to the Walker Papers!
It’s been five books in two different series and a handful of short stories and comic scripts for me since I’ve written a Joanne Walker story. That made coming back to Jo and her world a little strange—would I still know how to write her?
Some things, it seems, are like falling off a bicycle. I hope you enjoy the return to the Walker Papers as much as I have, and by the way, if you haven’t, stop by my Web site, http://cemurphy.net, and read “Rabbit Tricks,” a Walker Papers short story that fits between Coyote Dreams and this book.
Catie
This one’s for Frank Darcy,
who taught us all to raise a glass to life
Acknowledgments:
Sarah Palmero, Nicholas Whyte, Paul Knappenberger (better known as “Trent” in these acknowledgment pages), Cameron Banks and Katrina Lehto read early drafts of this book in hopes of helping come up with a title, and, since they were doing that anyway, gave some helpful feedback on the shape of the story. If I missed anybody in that list, I beg forgiveness, but I think it was just those five. Also, Laura “Soapturtle” Denson helped me keep my blog software up-to-date when I had no brain left for such things myself. Thank you all tremendously.
There are the usual suspects who need thanking: my husband Ted, who does a remarkable job of maintaining sanity when I’m in the worst of writer-modes, and both my agent Jennifer Jackson and my editor, Mary Theresa Hussey, who inevitably make my books more worth reading. Cover artist Hugh Syme and Harlequin art-department wizards Kathleen Oudit and Fion Ngan also have my undying gratitude for giving me such a beautiful, beautiful book.
I would also like to thank the dozens of people who kept e-mailing me to ask if there was going to be another Walker Papers novel, and when it would be out. Here you go!
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER ONE
Saturday, October 29, 9:45 p.m.
My wig itched like a son of a bitch.
I wanted to say I didn’t know how I’d gotten myself into it, but the truth was, I knew exactly how I had: Phoebe Kostelis, normally my fencing teacher. Tonight, however, she played the part of my short Sapphic sidekick, working the crowd outside the party hall like she’d been born to it. They looked happy to be worked, since she wore only slightly more clothing than I did and had a body that even I coveted in a strictly Platonic sense.
I hadn’t thought this much about ancient Greeks since college, which probably meant I wasn’t having enough fun. Phoebe, on the other hand, was having a blast, wheezing with laughter as she clutched the arm of a cop I didn’t know. At least, I thought he was a cop: he was dressed as one, anyway.
But then, Phoebe was dressed in a scrap of cloth wrapped around her breasts, a very short skirt and a blond wig that suited her even more poorly than long hair suited me. At least my wig and my natural hair color were the same: black. Phoebe’s hair was also black, and being blond did her olive complexion no favors. On the other hand, she was having fun, though I wasn’t convinced it was more fun than she’d have as a brunette. It didn’t matter either way, as long as she kept everybody’s attention off me.
I should have known better than to let her choose my Halloween costume. The last time she’d dressed me I’d ended up in an itty-bitty gold-lamé shirt, and jeans that stopped somewhere several miles south of my navel. This time she’d put me in a midriff-baring, boob-enhancing, hip-riding leather-pleated-skirt thing with ass-kicking boots and a variety of increasingly useless-looking weapons. I’d flat-out refused to wear it without a mask. Phoebe insisted that particular outfit didn’t have a mask. I insisted there was no way on this earth she could get me out of the house with my face—not to mention other body parts unfamiliar with seeing the light—showing. She’d finally given in and provided me with a golden mask “from season six” that left my mouth and jaw exposed, but hid more recognizable features, like my slightly too-beaky nose. Between it and the wig, I hoped nobody would know it was me.
I walked through the doors a few feet behind Phoebe, who cleared the way with a quarterstaff taller than she was. I didn’t really think she needed the quarterstaff: one glower from beneath Phoebe’s Frida Kahlo eyebrow was enough to quell me, and I had an eight-inch-height advantage over her.
Of course, it was a party, which meant the glower wasn’t really in place. Instead of skedaddling, people grinned, and then they got a load of me. A wolf whistle broke out, followed by a smattering of applause and a cheerfully bellowed, “Damn, Joanne, your legs go all the way up, don’t they?”
So much for not being recognized. I had a peace-knotted sword on one hip and a round yin-yang thing on the other. I loosened the yin-yang and shook it threateningly, but no one looked even slightly threatened. Someone did start a betting pool on whether Phoebe or I would win a fight. I put ten dollars on Phoebe and made my way farther into the room.
The noise was astonishing. Phoebe and I had been there all afternoon setting up, only leaving an hour or so earlier to go change into our costumes. Since then, an easy two hundred people had jammed into a hall meant for maybe a hundred and fifty, and enough of them were cops that somebody really should’ve taken the moral high ground and called the fire marshal. Instead, people were dancing, laughing, shouting at each other, waving red cups of cheap party drinks in the air and generally looking as if they were having a good time. I’d never helped throw a party before, much less one people came to by the hundreds. I felt all proud, and felt even better when Thor the Thunder God came through the crowd to stop in front of me with a smile. “Can I get you a drink?”
I looked him up and down, like he had to pass muster before I decided he was worthy of fetching refreshments. He did. In fact, at a guess, there was nobody more mustery at the party. He wore a tight-fitting sleeveless blue shirt with half a dozen shimmering circles set in two rows down his front, and jeans, which made him a rather modern god. Still, the loose blond hair and the goatee he’d grown out over the last few months went a long way toward the look. So did the sledgehammer he’d strapped across his back. It looked like a much more effective weapon than either of the ones I was carrying, and I was briefly jealous. He’d forgone a traditional Viking helmet, but since the man looked like Thor in his day-to-day life, he really didn’t need it to pull off the costume. His smile broadened, becoming more godlike as he looked me up and down in turn. “I thought you didn’t do Halloween.”
“I thought so, too,” I said dryly. “Phoebe thought otherwise.” I tugged the mask off and rubbed my nose. If people were going to insist on knowing who I was, at least I could indulge in breathing. Besides, I’d been kidding myself about being unrecognizable. Phoebe’d chosen the outfit because I had the physical stature for it: in bare feet I stood half an inch under six feet tall, and had the breadth of shoulder that came with working on cars most of my life. Or, I guessed, if I was going to stay in character, with swinging a sword all my life. I’d actually only been doing that for about six months, which was a lot more than I’d ever imagined doing. Anyway, Seattle’s North Precinct police department wasn’t littered with women my height, so even though the point of a costume party was disguise, I probably would have had to arrive as a short bald man to actually be mistaken for someone other than myself.
Thor was still grinning at me. “I think this is one matchup they never had on the show. We should get our picture taken.”
“You’re seriously deluded if you think I’m going to let anybody take my picture in this getup.” Thor waved at somebody as I spoke, then turned me around. A flash went off in our faces and I tried to lurch two directions at once: toward the camera to destroy it, and toward Thor, possibly to destroy him, too. Our photographer squeezed away through the crowd, leaving me to bonk my head on Thor’s shoulder and groan. “Thanks a lot. Anyway, I never saw the show. Why would she be running around with Thor? I thought she was, like, Greek.”
“How could you have never seen it?” Thor asked incredulously. “Don’t you ever just turn the TV on and watch whatever’s on?”
I shrugged. “Not really, unless I catch a Law & Order marathon. I don’t watch a lot of fantasy shows.”
“Mmmph.” He considered me a moment. “Maybe I wouldn’t, either, if I were you. You want that drink?”
All of a sudden, I did. Thor’s reminder wasn’t enough to get my panties in a bunch the way it would’ve a few months ago—which was good, since there was no way to discreetly debunch panties under my teeny-weeny skirt—but an out-loud mention in public was a tad on the overwhelming side. Overwhelmed must’ve shown in my face, because Thor pushed off through the crowd, people making way for the thunder god without thinking about it.
A dippy little grin edged its way across my face as I watched him go. He was a good guy, probably better than I deserved. Certainly better than I’d treated him as when we’d first met and I’d saddled him with the Thor nickname. I mean, yeah, he was tall and blond and gorgeous and had shoulders slightly wider than the Grand Canyon, but I’d been pissed off that he’d replaced me as a mechanic at the cop chop shop, and had given myself license to call him whatever I wanted.
I’d been, if you wanted to get right down to it, a bit of an asshole. I hoped I was starting to improve, but in the meantime, Thor—whose real name was Edward—had admitted that as nicknames went, Thor wasn’t bad. I wouldn’t have expected him to put on a costume and run with it, but people surprised me all the time. Sometimes I surprised even myself.
Like now. I popped up on my toes to gain another inch in height, and for once I ran with it and gave myself permission to see a little more clearly.
Not just see, but See. Edward had an aura that suited the nickname I’d given him: it was all stormy grays and blues, with shattered bits of white crashing through it. He was, by nature, good-humored, and those sparks of brilliance were usually wit, but I expected if he got his dander up, they’d be as deadly as the lightning Thor was supposed to be able to call.
For a few seconds, the entire room danced with light. Everyone was in high spirits, obvious from not only the laughter and ribald teasing, but the warmth and camaraderie of people feeding each other’s energy and keeping it going in a positive cycle. It felt good to revel in that energy, but watching it constantly made the real world harder to see, and despite it all, I still preferred the real world.
It’d been nearly a year since I’d been laid out in a parking lot with a sword in my lung and a smirking coyote offering me the choice between death or life as a shaman. In all my waking hours I’d never thought of wanting any kind of mystical gifts or healing powers, but I’d wanted to die even less. It had occurred to me once or twice since then that even in the absolute worst of circumstances, there were choices to be made. The sticky bit was that we tend to think of choices as being one good thing versus one bad thing. When the available options all suck, you took the one you could live with.
In my case, that was a very literal what I could live with. It’d taken me the better part of six months to chin up to the responsibilities I’d agreed to, and finally doing so had changed the shape of my life. Now the least of my esoteric skills was turning second sight on and off, letting me see more deeply into people without so much as a blink.
A party was not the time to be dwelling on my unnatural skill set. I did blink, even if it wasn’t necessary, to clear away the glimmering colors, and moved to lose myself in the crowd. Edward would be able to find me; I was taller than almost everyone in the room, and he was taller than I was. I squirmed by a pair of clowns whose eyes were on the level with my breasts. The one with his nose in my cleavage looked entirely too pleased. I threatened him with the yin-yang thing and his companion had the good sense to turn his face away. I moved in the other direction, hiding a laugh. Being amused by people ogling my chest seemed out of character for my leather-clad persona, never mind me.
A big chunk of a man in a blue satin evening gown with a matching bolero jacket edged through the crush, trying not to step on anyone. I escaped the clowns and waved my mask in greeting. “Hey, Billy. You look great.”
Billy Holliday, paranormal detective extraordinaire—he saw dead people—my work partner, and overall one of the solid, reliable linchpins of my life, looked me up and down and said, “You look surprisingly naked.”
I covered my bare stomach with the mask and wondered if a blush could start as low as the xyphoid process. It felt like it. “I don’t think that was the response I was looking for.”
Billy, without a hint of genuine repentance, said, “Sorry,” as his wife appeared at his elbow. “I’ve just never seen you quite so, um.”
Quite so um. There were probably worse compliments a girl could get, but overall I think I’d have preferred better. Then again, married men probably weren’t supposed to open with a salvo of you’re surprisingly naked to begin with, so maybe I should take what I could get.
“Bill, you’re not supposed to let the pregnant wife get lost in the madhouse.” Melinda Holliday stood a full foot shorter than her husband, and wore a velvet tuxedo that properly squired his evening gown. Wonderfully long tails nearly dragged on the floor, and she adjusted a cummerbund stretched over a very round belly as she examined me. “Joanie. You look…”
I sighed. “Surprisingly naked?”
“Well,” she said cheerfully, “yes. Fantastic, actually, but surprisingly naked. Who convinced you to wear that?”
I said, “Phoebe,” in a voice that I hoped spelled her doom.
Melinda laughed, which boded poorly for my doom voice. “Half the force will thank her for it. Have you seen Michael?”
“Michael? Morrison?” I didn’t know a lot of other Michaels, but I never thought of my boss by his first name, and found it bewildering that Melinda did. “Morrison’s at my party?” I had a fair amount of experience with the world ending. None of it had looked anything like a costume party, or else I’d have put Morrison’s attendance down as a sure sign of the apocalypse.
Melinda’s eyebrows shot up. “You invited him, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t think he’d come!” Curiosity got the better of me as I craned my neck to look around. “What’s he dressed as?”
“A cop, of course.” Melinda sounded delighted.
I squinted. “He is a cop. That’s not a costume. Unless he’s in uniform, but that’s cheating.”
Billy, sounding every bit as pleased as Melinda, said, “Oh, he’s in costume.” I turned my squint on him, then peered around again. Morrison typically wore suits, except for when protocol demanded he pull out the full captain’s dress uniform. I hadn’t seen him in that since a funeral in June, and while he’d looked as handsome and solemn and reliable as a police captain should, I didn’t think he should get away with it as a Halloween costume. Especially when I’d let Phoebe put me into some strategic bits of leather and a sword. I’d have died of hypothermia if the party wasn’t a success.
Thor reappeared, bearing drinks and a look of amusement. “Have you seen the captain?”
“I don’t even believe he’s here.” I took one of the plastic cups he offered and sniffed its contents—pink and foamy—suspiciously. “What is this?”
“I didn’t ask. There were two choices. One involved dunking my head and apples. I took this one.” He took a sip of his own drink cautiously, then made a moue. “Typical fruit-drink-and-soda party stuff.”
Reassured, I took a sip, then coughed, eyes tearing. “You forgot to mention heavily spiked.” I blinked tears away, then took another sip more carefully. Woo. Worse than the Johnnie Walker I’d gotten wasted on a few months ago. At least I expected that to knock me senseless.
Melinda heaved a melodramatic sigh. “Do they have anything nonalcoholic?”
“They better. I told Phoebe we had minors attending the party.” I nodded at Melinda’s belly. “You look ready to pop.”
“I was ready to pop three weeks ago. I’ve forgotten what my feet look like. My children have taken to calling me El Blobbo.”
“They have not,” Billy said equitably. Melinda beamed at him and he said, “They call her La Blobbacita,” which earned him a sudden reversal of the beam into a credibly injured pout.
“When’s the big day?” Thor took a swig of the pink drink and made a face.
Melinda let go of her pout to sigh gustily. “November sixth.”
“Well, that’s not too bad, right? Only another week.”
Spoken, I thought, like somebody who’s never been pregnant. I didn’t say it out loud because it opened up a whole bunch of questions I had no desire to answer, but the look Mel gave him pretty much said what I didn’t.
Billy grinned. “She’s doing jumping jacks every morning to try to hurry things along.” He bent to give her a kiss, promised, “I’ll find you a drink,” and cleared a path through the crowd. Evening gown or no, he was by far a big enough guy to do that easily, though it closed up behind him again.
Melinda, beaming, called, “My hero,” after him, then folded her arms across the top of her tummy and looked around. “Good party, Joanne.”
“Thank you. From shut-in recluse mechanic to partying shamanic police detective within a year. You too can get on this ride if you’re over this tall.” I waved a hand near the top of my head, then took another hasty swallow of my drink. Apparently it was more potent than I’d realized, if it was taking me from wanting a drink so I didn’t have to think about my mystical power set to babbling about it.
Melinda, bless her, snorted and stood on her toes in an attempt to reach the required height, while Edward leaned forward to knock his forehead against the side of my still-lifted hand. He had a good three inches in height over me, and his voice dropped somewhere around his, um, knees, as he murmured, “I wouldn’t mind getting on that ride.”
This time I was sure a blush could start around the xyphoid process. His smile turned into a grin and he watched that blush go all the way down, which only served to enhance it. I whispered, “Stop that,” but not with any particular conviction.
He brought his gaze back up to my face and leered, then laughed and stepped in against me. I elbowed him with even less conviction than I’d scolded. He slid an arm around my waist, looking pleased with himself. “You brought it up, so now I get to ask something I’ve been dying to.”
I said, “No dying,” semi-automatically. Too many people around me had died, or had had alarmingly close calls, this past year. I didn’t like even joking about it.
Apology flashed through his blue eyes and he nodded, but he went ahead and asked, “Halloween’s a spooky time of year. Does it kick things into overtime?”
I frowned, first at my drink, then at my date. “Why? Have I been acting weird lately?”
He and Melinda said, “No more than usual,” in tandem, and he laughed as Melinda presented a high five for him to match. “Nah. I was just curious, and you don’t usually bring it up, so I thought I’d seize the opportunity.”
“That’s not all you’ve seized.” Billy presented a cup of water over Melinda’s shoulder. She waddled around to give him a kiss of thanks, and he smiled broadly before remembering he was haranguing Thor. “Is this guy bothering you, Joanie?”
“Terribly. Help, help.” I made a feeble attempt to escape, then blew a raspberry and leaned against Thor. “I haven’t noticed any correlation between the time of year and the amount of weird in my life, no. Get back to me in five years and I might have a better…what do you call it.”
“Survey sample?” Melinda suggested.
“Yeah, something like that. But I don’t think it fluxes and rises with the time of year. I mean, what kind of mystical portent does the second week of July have?” Actually, everything that’d happened in July had been entirely my fault, not some kind of magic cosmic conjunction. I didn’t feel it necessary to mention that aloud.
“Well,” Thor said, “it had enough mystical portent to make me ask you out. That’s got to count for something.”
“No,” Melinda said dryly, “what’s mystical is she said yes.”
“I had to. It was Alan Claussen’s band. I like them.” I actually scraped up a few lines of lyrics, half singing, “Ill met by moonlight, first kiss, stolen late at night,” which got a round of applause from Melinda as Thor staggered back as far as the press of people would let him, a hand over his heart.
“I see how it is. I’m only wanted for my concert tickets.”
I patted his shoulder, since he’d only escaped to about eighteen inches away. “Your concert tickets and your uncanny talent under the hood. There are worse things a guy could be wanted for.”
Too late, I realized the error of my phrasing, and raised my voice to say, “He’s a mechanic! I’m a mechanic! I like guys who are good with cars!” over Billy and Melinda’s synchronized “OooOOooh!”
“The lady,” Thor said cheerfully, “doth protest too much. You’re not helping yourself.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” I was too pink cheeked and laughing to get myself out of that alive anyway, so I took a swallow of my fizzy drink and reveled in the sheer simple fun of being teased by my friends.
“Jo!” Phoebe squished through the crowd and seized my arm. I straightened away from Edward, and Phoebe shook me. I went agglty while she said, “You have so got to get a load of your boss,” and swung me around to face the door. Still rattling, I looked for Morrison and whatever costume had everybody I knew insisting I needed to see him.
Instead, the doors flew open and an entire cadre of zombies lurched through them.
CHAPTER TWO
It said something very disturbing about what I’d come to consider a normal life that the first thing I did was reach for the sword on my hip. The peace knot held, which gave me enough time to remember that this was a Halloween party, and that hordes of undead weren’t unexpected at such festivities.
Still, loosening my fingers from the sword’s hilt took more effort than it should’ve. Phoebe, more or less under my elbow, said, “Well?” in such obvious delight that I scowled at her, then looked back at the zombies.
“What? Morrison’s a zombie?”
“No!” She thrust a finger out, pointing dramatically. I followed the line of her arm and still didn’t see my boss. There were a pair of cross-dressed hippies, an Elvira being hit on by an exceptionally sleazy-looking vampire, an ’80s Miami Vice look-alike and what appeared—from various blue skin, white hair and black leather costumes—to be the entire cast of a science-fiction show, but Morrison’s distinctive silvering hair wasn’t visible anywhere. I shot Phoebe an irritated look, opened my mouth to speak, and my gaze snapped back to Don Johnson without consulting my brain.
“Oh my God.”
Morrison turned around at my high-pitched exclamation, and Melinda, gleefully, said, “Told you he was a cop.”
I made a gurgling noise deep in my throat.
He had it all: the gradated cop sunglasses, which were not at all the right shape for his face; the pastel-pink shirt, unbuttoned far enough to show the world that Morrison had a very nice chest with what appeared to be the ideal amount of coarse, graying hair. The white blazer thrown over his shirt matched pale slacks and he wore loafers without socks. I stared at his feet, trying to wrap my mind around Morrison being that casual, then brought my gaze back up to the crowning horror.
“What did you do to your hair?”
Self-conscious wasn’t a look I was accustomed to seeing on Captain Michael Morrison. He touched his head, then glowered at me. “What’d you do to yours?” “It’s a wig!”
At a loss for moral high ground wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on him, either. “It’s temporary,” he muttered.
I laughed, and, without thinking, slid my fingers through the tidy brown cut. It wasn’t a bad color. I just thought of the silver hair and the damn blue eyes as part and parcel of Morrison’s aging-superhero look. Changing the hair made him look younger and more human. “You’ve even got stubble.” Stubble no more belonged in Morrison’s universe than, say, animistic-based shamanic magic did. It didn’t stop either of those things from being in his universe, but they didn’t belong. “Look at you, Morrison.”
Instead, he looked at me, which made me notice I still had my fingers in his hair.
I said, “Shit,” and pulled my hand back, focusing on his shoulder while I tried not to blush. It didn’t work, and the best I could do was hope nobody called me on it. Hoping nobody’d noticed I’d been feeling up Morrison’s head was asking too much. “Sorry. Is, uh, is that the color it used to be?”
“It was blond.”
“Really?” Silver-shot suited him, and I couldn’t imagine him with anything else. Even seeing it, I couldn’t quite imagine it.
“Really,” he said with a hint of amusement, then helped me get my footing back by saying, “Look at you, Detective.”
I regained enough equanimity to give him a severe look. “I’m a princess warrior. You’re the detective here, Captain.”
“I’m in disguise,” he told me. “You’re not supposed to call me captain.” He hesitated a moment, looking a couple inches up at me. My boots were heeled, giving me a rare height advantage. Unshod, Morrison and I were the same height down to the half inch, and I’d been known to wear heels just for the satisfaction of looking down on him. Not recently, though, so finding myself taller than he was disconcerting.
He let his hesitation out in a breath, said, “Looks like a good party, Walker. Thanks for inviting me,” and reached past me to accept a drink from somebody.
I stayed where I was a few seconds too long, convinced he’d been going to say something else entirely and still waiting for him to say it. Morrison, and the party, moved on, leaving me wondering just what it was I’d thought he’d been going to say, and what I thought I’d have said in return. Not that long ago Morrison and I had had a wholly antagonistic relationship. Like everything else in my life, it’d gotten more complicated lately.
No, that wasn’t true. We’d drawn some lines in the sand, the captain and I, that was all. I, had drawn a line in the sand. I’d taken a promotion to detective instead of taking a chance on something else entirely, and Morrison respected the decision I’d made. Which meant whatever it was I thought he’d been going to say, he wouldn’t have, and I needed to stop worrying about it.
I nodded, a too-visible acknowledgment that I’d given myself a firm talking-to, and turned around to find all my friends looking as if there were many, many unspeakably interesting things going on in their minds, and as if they would all very much like to speak them. Even Thor had a hint of that look about him, and while picking up on subtle social clues wasn’t my strong point, I was pretty sure the guy who was more or less my boyfriend wasn’t supposed to look like that with regards to me having a conversation with another man.
He, however, was also the only one who put aside that gossipy look and offered me a hand. “I have it on pretty good authority you can dance.”
“I have it on better authority that I’m an embarrassment on the dance floor.” I put my hand into his anyway and he tugged me through the crowd to a space where the pressed bodies played against each other in more graceful rhythms. Music dominated that corner of the room, compliments of someone willing to play the parts of both Frankenstein’s monster and DJ at Phoebe’s party. It was her party; the fact that I’d invited half the police department and they’d showed up didn’t make it any less hers. I wouldn’t have known where to start in renting a hall or getting a caterer, but providing a significant portion of the guests defined me as co-host. The dance floor was a bit less crowded than the rest of the room, and I alternated between taking cues from Thor—I really wasn’t a very good dancer, but I could manage to follow a lead, at least some of the time—and watching the room.
People were having fun. At my party. I imagined telling my fifteen year old self that a dozen years later she’d be what she’d have called popular, back in the day, and knew she’d never believe me. I didn’t quite believe it myself. On the other hand, my plastic cup full of foamy pink stuff was gone, and having a cup of heavily spiked punch inside me made it easier to believe almost anything. I said, “Six impossible things before breakfast,” aloud, and when Thor crinkled his eyebrows at me, snorted. “I need another drink. Water this time. Oi.”
“The bar’s over by the dunk tank. Lead on, MacDuff.”
“That’s lay on,” I said, suddenly cheerful. A man who was into cars and misquoted Shakespeare was a good guy to be dating. I squirmed forward through the crowd.
Squishing through partygoers was good for my ego. People who could barely move in the crush did double takes and stepped back to admire the whole costume. I heard an “Ow!” and Thor’s innocent whistle, like he’d maybe prevented a wandering hand from copping a feel. Overprotective boyfriends should probably be scolded, but instead I grinned and looked back to thank him even as I kept pressing forward.
All of a sudden the crowd disappeared around me, sending me stumbling. Thor let go of my hand, which didn’t help at all, and I caught myself on the edge of a cauldron.
I said something clever like, “Buh?” and got a laugh for it, but I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t remember us ordering up a gigantic pot—and it was gigantic, coming halfway up my thigh and an easy four feet across at its bulge—but Phoebe stood on its other side, looking pleased with herself.
Nervous instinct made me glance around for a third witch. I’d spent a bit of time in a coven, and had absolutely no doubt of their goddess-granted earth power, but I didn’t have any particular need to hoe that row again, particularly at a party. To my relief, it appeared that it was just Phoebe, me and the cauldron at center stage. I knew I wasn’t a witch and I was pretty sure Phoebe wasn’t, so I straightened up and dusted my hands against my skirt, all take-charge and businesslike. The minor detail of not knowing what business made me stage-whisper, “Are we boiling somebody for dinner, then?” across the cauldron.
“Sure! Boil, boil, toil and trouble!”
Nobody ever got that line right. I muttered, “It’s ‘double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,’” and the cauldron erupted.
My first thought, through the green smoke and the coughing and hacking, was that I really should’ve been allowed to complete the couplet and set the charm before anything exciting like an explosion happened. My second was to notice that the shrieks around me were turning to laughter, and my third was to notice I didn’t seem to be missing any body parts. In the grand scheme of things, that was good.
The undead rising gracefully from the cauldron were less good. There was something inhuman about the way they came up: smooth, effortless, as if they floated instead of climbed like normal human beings. They didn’t seem to be intent on flinging themselves at anyone in search of human flesh, but rather twined around one another, sensual in every move.
I didn’t especially like horror movies, but I was fairly certain your average zombie didn’t have abs of steel, or an ability to undulate the way the pair in the cauldron did. Zombies were more about body parts dropping off than rhythmic motions. I held off panic another few seconds, giving reality just enough time to set in.
Under the gray-green skin makeup and the extremely well-done painted-on innards rotting out, the couple in the cauldron were pretty much beautiful. The Sight swam into place, assuring me that nothing was untoward about their psychic presences, and swam out again, leaving me to see with normal eyes and grasp that the duo were, in fact, exotic-dancer gorgeous.
The music took a turn toward a spooky bump and grind, and they moved to it, nothing alarming in their dance, except that I was four inches away from pelvic thrusts. The pelvises in question moved higher, the dancers still rising toward the ceiling with inexplicable smoothness. I admired an especially nice pair of thighs before Phoebe lifted her hands to clap and hoot and sway along with the music.
As if she’d given the crowd permission, other people joined in, laughter turning to shouts and cheers of approval. A ripple effect went through the party hall, overhead lights shutting down while black lights and tiny, brightly colored spotlights sprayed across the teeming masses. The dancing zombies’ knees came into my view and a solid click sounded, finally explaining how they were rising so smoothly: the cauldron was fitted with a rising platform. I gave it a weak smile and turned back toward the crowd, looking for Thor.
He was there with a smile that turned concerned. “Joanie?”
“My imagination’s working overtime. Can we get out of here for a minute?” Even wearing as little as I was, my skin was sticky and overheated. Goose bumps washed over my arms in chills that counteracted the heat, and the hot-to-cold flashes made my tummy twist uncomfortably. The air thickened too much to breathe, full of body heat and scents ranging from heavy makeup to perfume to sweat. “I’m not used to this many people.”
“Yeah, no problem.” He went all big and solid and masculine, putting an arm around my waist and his presence somehow enlarging, so the crowd fell back from around us. The claustrophobic heat faded a little and I dragged in a grateful breath of slightly cooler air, feeling like I could make it outside to silence and safety.
That was when the screaming started.
CHAPTER THREE
In the future when I’ve got a bad feeling, it would behoove me to remember that, having been granted phenomenal cosmic powers, it’s okay to trust myself when something seems off. I froze, in the sense of icicles down the backbone and prickles on the skin, but otherwise not as literally as I’d have liked. Almost before the shrieks became more than passionately indrawn breaths, I was turning, not wanting to see what was going on behind me but even less able to ignore it.
The cauldron dancers were rigid, all the grace and beauty flown out of their bodies. The part of me that didn’t know anything at all about medical diagnoses immediately decided it was a petit mal seizure, with their eyes rolled to white and their teeth bared by lips stretched thin and bloodless. Their hands were clawed and every muscle trembled with strain. Cords stood out in their throats as they screamed, and even those sounds were shadows of what they should have been, given the effort their bodies were expending.
The part of me that knew better than to try to diagnose medical conditions with a degree in English and a few too many television dramas tore away the real world and gave me the lowdown on what I could do to help. At least, that’s what it was supposed to do. The first part worked, anyway.
Their auras gave me nothing. They were spiky with distress, the reds and oranges of earlier delight now bleeding dark and terrified: sickly shades with the enormous strength of fear behind them.
Thin gray film rose out of the cauldron, sucking itself skintight against the dancers’ contours beneath their clothes. I had the impression I’d been granted X-ray vision—or maybe M-ray vision, Magic-Ray—as the Sight ignored what they were wearing and honed in on the stuff racing over them, providing me with a totally non-titillating examination of their bodies.
It was even money on whether the spasms were from being cling-wrapped tightly enough to send them into some kind of hind-brain attempt to throw it off, or if the murk was actually invading their bodies. It had already crawled to their chests and throats and sluiced toward their gaping mouths, and I had no freaking clue what it might be.
A smart doctor—maybe a smart shaman—would diagnose the damn problem first, but apparently the whole warrior-princess costume obliterated any kind of rational thought I might’ve indulged in. I vaulted onto the cauldron with a yell and slapped my hands over their mouths just before the gray stuff slipped over their lips and down their throats.
About six things happened at once.
First off, somewhere way in the distance, I heard Billy Holliday bellowing, “Joanne Walker, what in holy living hell!?” As far as I was concerned, that pretty much made up the soundtrack for everything else that happened. Time stretched, extending into slow moments that crystallized everything around me into clarity and allowed me to discard that which was unimportant. On reflection, that included music, calls to 911, some shouting and the start of a stampede, but right then, those seven words made up the walls of the world for a brief and horribly long eternity.
The good news was that the gray film leaped off the dancers, who collapsed out from under my hands. The bad news was, it leaped from them to me, and I had a sudden intimate understanding of just what they’d been enduring.
Enduring. There’s a funny choice of words. It’s not one I’d think would apply to a scenario that couldn’t have lasted longer than five seconds, but under the film’s tenterhooks it was the only one that seemed appropriate.
It was trying to get in, trying to invade. I felt my muscles seize and bunch and rattle in just the way the dancers’ had, a million pinpricks of ice jabbing under my skin and trying to work their way beneath. I’d never been flayed and wasn’t eager to try it, but I thought it might feel like this: burning pain that did its best to defy words and to turn me into nothing more than a scream.
A scream. Screaming was bad. Not because I didn’t deserve to, because anybody being flayed probably deserves to scream, but because the stuff had a purpose, and thwarting flaying gray film was a worthy goal. I snapped my mouth shut and rolled my lips in, biting their insides to keep myself from indulging in the scream that would let the stuff in. Then I wondered if my nose was enough of an access point to let it in, and how I was going to breathe if I needed to pinch my nostrils shut, too.
Then again, if the hurting didn’t stop soon, I wasn’t going to care much about breathing. More or less reassured by the thought, I stopped worrying about it. Look, logic in the face of excruciating pain isn’t one of my strong points. It worked for me, which was all that mattered. Meantime, my stomach, eager to add its opinion on agony, violently rejected the fizzy pink drink I’d indulged in earlier.
It was significantly worse coming up than it’d been going down, and it hadn’t been good to begin with. Human nature trumped scary crawling gray stuff and I doubled over, expelling bright pink spew. The film retreated, apparently as disgusted by Technicolor vomit as I was. The lack of pain left me astonishingly clear-headed.
Clear-headed enough to see that more of the gray fog was bubbling up from the cauldron and flowing over its edges, hurrying toward the partygoers.
Toward people I’d invited to come have a good time tonight.
I forgot that I was probably the only one in the room who could see the goo. Forgot that I’d jumped up onto the cauldron like a madwoman and the two people I’d touched had collapsed, which, by any coherent standard, suggested I was dangerous. Forgot that my own magic had a visible component, and that I was in the middle of a very public place.
Or maybe I didn’t forget. Maybe I just didn’t care, because I’d had enough of innocent bystanders getting run over on my watch. Agony fled my bones, chased out by fury, and I smashed through sickness to call up the healing magic that was my heritage. I had no idea what I was up against, but that’d never stopped me before. Better to turn myself into a super-size McSnack for gray ooze than to let anybody else get eaten.
Silver power surged, its brilliant blue highlights making me feel like an electrical conduit. I could See it, blazing with righteous anger, and while I still couldn’t hear much beyond Billy’s shout, I’m pretty sure that was when the stampede started. Anybody in their right mind wanted to get the hell away from me. For a room as crowded as that one, it was amazing how everybody managed to jump back two feet and leave a circle of emptiness around me.
At least, I thought it was them lurching back. I had a certain amount of success with the idea of capturing things in nets, but a net wasn’t going to hold goop in. I went the bubble-boy route, sending a physical flare of magic from my core into a sphere around me. It was wholly possible that I shoved everybody out of my way, although I didn’t think that was very polite and shamany. Then again, a dead shaman had told me I’d walk a warrior’s path, so maybe I had license to metaphysically bludgeon people once in a while.
Either way, they were a bit farther out of harm’s way, and the cauldron-born ichor ran up against my sphere and began crawling upward, looking for egress and finding none. I figured it would take about two seconds before it reached the top and started dripping down on me. That meant I had about a second and a half to come up with a brilliant plan to stop it.
Time resumed its normal pace, two seconds blew by, and I was screwed.
There’s nothing especially attractive about shrieking like a little kid and curling up in a ball with your hands over your head, but that’s what I did. I didn’t want to face that skin-peeling sensation again. Even the idea made my eyes hot with tears, and if falling down and sobbing kept it away from me for another half second, I wasn’t too proud to grovel.
More than that went by before I realized my skin wasn’t being pulled off. I peeked through my fingers at the shell I’d built around myself and the cauldron.
Man. I had no idea what it looked like from the outside, but from within, it looked like a Gaussian blur of hell. Formless gray surged and slid around me, a relentless ocean of potential danger and pain. Color bled in, but only at the corners of my eyes: if I jerked to look straight on at it, red and black faded away, as if something living didn’t want to meet my gaze. Thin, bonelike hooks scratched at my arms and flinched back again. A sound crept in behind the small bones of my ears, something high and lost that reminded me of the banshee.
It made shapes out of the mist, emaciated wavering things with gaping eyes and mouths. They had the weight of age to them, pressing down on me as if, if they couldn’t scrape their way in through my skin, they’d crush me into component parts that could be absorbed into the gray.
A little belatedly, it occurred to me to wonder why they weren’t scraping their way inside my skin, and I stopped peeking through my hands to look at my fingers.
Seeing through your own skin is a bizarre effect. When my magic had first broken loose, there’d been so much to burn off I’d seen my flesh and blood as rainbows, shimmering with power. Over time that variety had faded to the silver and blue that I now considered to be mine, and right now that was what I saw: oil-slick pools of color burning in my veins and swimming through my muscles. All that magic had once been knotted up under my breastbone, making me sick with the need to act, but it’d become a much more integral part of me, almost always active to some degree, and ready to be called on in its full strength when I needed it.
Offhand, I guessed the gray slime wasn’t down with shamanic power, and that a human body rife with it wasn’t an appealing host. It had likely dared to attack me in the first place because I hadn’t called my power up actively: now that I’d turned it on, I was unfriendly territory. That suggested I was probably dealing with some kind of death magic, because while shamanism had as much to do with death as life, I was coming to think of it as a more or less inherently life-positive kind of magic. Though if I found myself using phrases like life-positive very often I was going to have to life-negative myself out of humiliation. Nobody says things like that. Jeez.
The point, though, was that if the nasty gray slime couldn’t get a foothold in me when I was topped up with blue glowy lifey goodness, then it probably had a big fat hold on death itself. In fact, me being a poor host was, in every aspect but one, excellent. It meant the bubble of power would keep the stuff in, and that I’d be perfectly safe as long as I could maintain it.
And therein lay the flaw. I’d been in the midst of a hideous gray blur for less than a minute and I was already eager to get out. I still didn’t have any idea how. This kind of thing wasn’t covered in the shamanic handbook. In fact, nobody’d given me a handbook, an oversight I felt was increasingly gross as I stumbled along this path.
Well, said a little voice inside my head, you might not know how to get out, but you don’t actually have to be stuck in the gray, you know.
I hated that voice. It sounded just like me being sarcastic, which was bad enough, but it also usually had a very good point, which only added insult to injury. I was pretty sure everybody had a voice that made snide comments and that I’d had one before my world went magical and mystical, but I couldn’t remember for sure. I was afraid to ask anybody else in case they said no. Being a shaman was challenging enough. Being an actually insane shaman would just suck.
Teeth clenched against mumbling imprecations at a voice in my head, I let go of the Sight so I could, well, see.
Only when the gray faded did I realize how weird it was I hadn’t been able to See beyond it. Usually the Sight gave me layers upon layers: I’d looked through half of Seattle in the past, buildings becoming strong semi-visible constructs of pride and place, things that knew what they were meant to do and glad to do it. People were brilliant spots of color, and highways black-and-blue jagged smears across a natural landscape. Other living things, trees particularly, were incredible with their light, but none of it blocked each other out like the gray film had done. I’d really only encountered something like that once, when a demi-god was trying to hide his exact location from me. It’d worked, and if that meant the cauldron was pouring cranky demi-gods out into my Halloween party I was going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with the management. Never mind that I had no idea who or what might constitute The Management in the complex spiritual world I’d been introduced to. I’d complain to it anyway. No fear, that’s me.
No fear, or no sense. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
My sphere glimmered at a diameter too great for me to touch with spread arms. Even without the Sight it was visible to me, and by the way people were scurrying for the doors, I guessed they could see it, too. I had to look bizarre, wearing that ridiculous costume and crouched in the midst of a shimmering ball of light.
Actually, I thought I might look kind of awesomely dramatic and theatrical, at least if I wasn’t cowering. I straightened my shoulders, lifted my chin and put my fingertips against the cauldron’s platform floor. I had no idea what other people thought, but it gave me an absurd burst of confidence, and an idiotic smile bloomed across my face. If that’s what being an action hero feels like, sign me up.
Most everybody around me was moving away. From my action-hero pose I saw Thor and Phoebe holding their ground, though Phoebe’s jaw was dropped and she held her quarterstaff as if she wanted to use it. I wished my sword wasn’t peace knotted, then wished it was real, then felt a chill rush over my skin and knew that if I needed a blade to fight the mist, I’d have one. I’d earned or been given all the elements that made up sword and shield and armor, and even if I wasn’t carrying them, they were an indelible part of my shamanic gifts now.
More certain of myself, I stood up to draw a silver rapier from the ether. I’d done it in the astral plains, and though the physical blade had been lying safe at home under my bed, its presence had been as real as anything else in the world between this one and the next. I was serenely sure I could reach through the intervening space in the real world, too, and have the sword I’d taken from a god materialize in my hand.
Billy Holliday burst through the mass of people running the other way and shouted, “Joanne, don’t!”
All of my serene confidence exploded into little tiny bits. My fingers spasmed open, loosing any hope I had of seizing my sword, and the Sight flashed back on to give me a visual on the hair-raising sensation that the mist thought I’d shown weakness. Indeed, the sound-induced figures in the fog surged, clawing at my power, trying to break it apart so they could get inside me. The rest of the world went away, blocked out by the gray, and my heart seized up with the clenching panic of trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, or had been about to do wrong, that made Billy yell at me. Dammit, every time I thought I was getting a handle on things it turned out I was wrong. I’d have done anything to have Coyote and his lectures and interminable practice sessions back.
Billy said, “Don’t move,” and I knew from the sound of his voice that his teeth were clenched. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or to Phoebe and Thor, but I thought maybe I’d just do what he said and find out why later. A moment later he stepped through the barrier of my power into the midst of the gray, and gave me a grim nod of approval.
Now, the sphere was meant to keep things in, not out, and if anybody could walk through my defenses it would be Billy, who’d shared enough psychic intimacies with me that if Melinda was the jealous type we’d both be in real trouble. I still wouldn’t have expected him to do that in a million years. A combined demand of what are you doing? and get out of here! and how did you do that? came out as “Wblrdt,” and Billy, to my utter shock, snapped, “Shut up, Joanne.”
There were things I’d come to expect from William Robert Holliday. He’d turn up to off-duty events in women’s clothes, for example. Tonight’s ball gown wasn’t an outrageous costume choice, overlooking the detail that Billy, like most people, didn’t often have a chance to indulge in formal wear. So I expected that. I also expected him to take the mystical more seriously than I was constitutionally capable of doing. He was a True Believer, and had been since childhood when he started seeing ghosts after his older sister’s death by drowning. I used to give him hell about it. Now I was grateful for his calm solid presence when the world went wacky.
And despite all the grief I’d given him, he’d never once responded with the kind of comeback I deserved, not even an I told you so when I found myself faced with irrefutable proof that the world contained a lot more than met the eye. I couldn’t remember him ever telling anybody to shut up, much less me in the midst of a paranormal crisis.
I’d been functioning on “act now, think later,” which had, as a rule, worked for me so far.
Now I was scared.
CHAPTER FOUR
My obvious impulse was to hiss, “What can I do?” but I’d just been told both to shut up and to not draw a blade on the mist. That left me with a big fat nothing in the easy-choices department, and every inch of my body was cold with indecision and worry. Moreover, I didn’t take it as a good sign that the ooze slicked away from me and swirled around Billy, nibbling at the orange-and-fuchsia colors that made up his aura. They were as steady as I’d ever seen them, nothing in his psychic presence suggesting distress, but it bothered the hell out of me. I was supposed to take on all mystical comers, not let my friends step up and do the job.
Unless, of course, my friends had a better idea of what to do, in which case I should get over myself and help somehow, albeit without asking aloud what might be useful. Billy was almost obscured by the mist, nearly all of it having drifted from the perimeter of my sphere to surround him. My heart took up residence in my stomach and churned the remaining pink drink. I closed my lips on a vile-tasting burp and gave Billy five more seconds to tell me what to do before I went Grecian on the gray stuff’s ass.
Billy said, “You don’t belong here,” so gently I flinched, first out of surprise at hearing his voice and then from childish insult. I wasn’t the world’s greatest shaman or anything, but I was doing my best. His vote of confidence meant a lot. Having it dismissed cut my legs out from under me.
“You should be resting.” His colors strengthened, coming through the mist more strongly, like he was putting energy into what he was saying. Exactly like that, actually: from three feet away I felt soothed. Even the sweat beading under my wig and trickling against my scalp stopped itching so much. “I know it’s easy to travel at this time of year, and that you miss your bodies, but they’re gone. Long gone.” Strain showed in his voice, and I finally clued in.
“It’s dead people!”
The mist whipped away from Billy and surged at me, a high-pitched whine suddenly loud enough to make my eardrums ache. The gaping eyes and howling mouths came clearer to me, much clearer as one of the ghosts came at me like it wanted a kiss. Dull cold slid along my cheekbones, fingering a scar on one. I shuddered and stepped back, finding the edge of the cauldron with my heel.
“Joanie, stay still.” Billy’s voice was cold as the dead’s.
I whispered, “They can’t get at me. They don’t like my magic. Just tell me how to banish them and get out of here.”
“Joanne.” Billy had four kids and a fifth on the way, but I’d never heard him employ a Daddy Voice before. Part of me seized up with resentment. My own father and I had an atheistic relationship, which is to say, he’d never quite believed he’d ended up with a child at all. I generally disliked anything that reminded me of that.
The rest of me just seized up because that’s what instinct tells people to do when they hear a Daddy Voice. I stared at Billy, who kept his attention on the mist and spoke through his teeth. “They don’t have to get in you. The longer you’re around them, the more they latch on. The more you move, the more they notice you. The louder you are, the faster they come to you. So shut up.”
I really, really wanted to do what I was told, but his volume had increased all the way through that, and by the time he was done, the party hall was visible again. My sphere contained a cauldron, me and a dense, almost-black cloud where Billy stood. There was no way I was letting him face that alone. I jumped down from the cauldron, took a quick look at the room beyond my sphere—it had cleared out, only Thor and Phoebe immediately visible—and forged into the dark fog that surrounded my friend.
His voice wrapped around me immediately, soft and cajoling, full of sympathy but very firm: he knew I was confused, that I was lost, that I didn’t understand what was happening. All of that was absolutely true, so for a second I thought he was talking to me. At least the mist hid my blush when I figured out that no, he was still talking to the gray goop, and continued to in a gentle murmur. He knew he was a cipher, strange to the living world but safe to the dead, and that his presence gave them comfort.
Comforted wasn’t the word I’d use for the agitation I felt in the fog. It—they—were becoming clearer to me now, easier to read, as though they were remembering more and more of what it was to be human. I could tell at least a few men from women, though the greater part of the mist was still formless, maybe having left their bodies behind so long ago they had no memory of a shape to fill.
I had met the newly dead before, but it was no preparation for meeting the oldly dead. The newly dead, at least the ones I’d met, were pretty cool and collected. It may have helped that they’d mostly been shamans themselves—in fact, the one newly dead girl I’d met who hadn’t been a shaman had been pretty confused, now that I thought about it—but they’d had a sense of purpose and of self, and knew they only had a limited amount of time to impart information to me before they moved on.
The cauldron ghosts had only hate and fear to hold on to. They desired; oh, how they desired. They wanted flesh forms. They wanted vengeance. They wanted freedom, and would do whatever they could to obtain it. Thieving a body from a living soul would do: that’s what the dancers would have provided, if I hadn’t been there. I got a—no pun intended—ghost of an idea of how schizophrenic the dancers would have become, fighting for their own bodies with a plethora of spirits all determined to become the sole resident of their lithe forms. Only the strongest of the invaders would survive, but a few of the jettisoned others would cling to the surface, hoping for a chance to wrest control away. Even from without, their angry will could affect what a host body might do.
And right now they were trying to get inside Billy.
Not all of them. Some were listening to his voice, hearing the guidance he offered them. Those few could be put to rest, maybe because they were too tired of fighting to survive, maybe because they’d forgotten what they were fighting for. A few bits of mist separated from the dark cloud and dissipated, and I imagined I heard a sigh of relief. I shivered and wished them a good journey, wherever they might be going. Maybe to start again; a while ago Coyote’d told me that souls reincarnate. There weren’t that many new ones, although apparently I’d been mixed up fresh: no history of mistakes to weigh me down, but as he’d said, no history of learning experiences to buoy me up, either. But these ones had held on to this world, to their most recent bodies, to something, so long that they’d lost cohesion. They were still energy, the way that spark that made life inside things was energy, but all that was left in them was a craving for a new body.
I couldn’t help wondering if there were enough souls waiting to be reborn to fill all the people in the world, or if tortured ghosts like these left a handful of babies born empty every day. I hoped not. God, I hoped not, but just the idea opened a white-hot door inside me, through which poured the intention to help.
To my complete horror, the mist gave a sonic cry able to scour flesh from bone, and twisted toward that brightness.
The thinnest of it came first, like I’d put up a magnet that pulled filaments toward me. The weakest ghosts didn’t have enough weight to remain firm, and flew through that burning door inside a blink. They hit a flash point as they went, turning from mist to flame and leaving marks on my soul, like the memory of paper curling and drifting to the ground. Stronger spirits, carrying more resistance, followed more reluctantly, but an unburdened sense of relief swept me as some of them passed through into the brilliance. Once or twice an afterimage caught behind my eyes, like the echo of the life that had kept them there. I clung to those, and lost them even as I did: they left nothing, when they burned.
Murk slammed against the door in my mind and filled it, bellowing rage and refusal. The light faded away, blocked by a determination to hold on. Relief left me, joy left me; hell, even my power left me, slamming itself between the blackness and the white door in my mind. Triumph and fury sluiced through me in equal parts before the darkness fell away, and I had the shuddering sensation of a narrow escape. I mumbled, “Idiot,” and staggered a couple of steps before cranking my head up to see how the party fared.
My sphere of protective magic was gone, eaten up by the retreat my power had staged. So was most of the mist, though a few dark clouds still clung to Billy, trailing him like residue from a smoke machine. Thor and Phoebe were still there, and the DJ’s station blared “The Monster Mash,” but the room, so crowded only a minute or two ago, now held only hangers-on, the moral equivalent of ambulance chasers, all staying a safe distance from the center of activity.
Phoebe said what everybody, including those who’d fled, was presumably thinking: “What in hell was that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” I dropped to my knees, then leaned forward on my palms, gasping against the impulse to upchuck again. I could feel ghostly willpower dissolving inside me, resistance to passing on drifting into ash in my bloodstream. More, I could feel the tremendous black weight of the one who’d blocked the door, and the protests of those who’d been left on the wrong side. I curled down even farther, hands made into fists that I rested my forehead against. I felt like crying, and I wasn’t sure why.
Billy put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back until I was sitting on my heels. His gaze was worried but calm, far more reassuring than the wide-eyed hollow look I felt aging my own face. “I haven’t got your Sight,” he said quietly. I could tell he was making his voice a lifeline, something stable to hang on to. Grateful tears welled up in my eyes. “All I see are the ghosts, Joanie, so I don’t know what happened. Tell me what you did. It’s going to be fine.”
“She gave them the light,” Melinda said out of nowhere. A twitch of conflicted gladness ran through me. I didn’t want Melinda and her soon-to-be-born daughter anywhere near the dark magic flowing around me, but it was nice that my friends hadn’t abandoned me when the smart money was on getting the hell out of there. “She opened a door to the light and guided them home.”
“No.” My mouth tasted terrible. I wiped a hand across it, but kept my gaze on Billy, who seemed solid and reassuring and safe. “I mean, maybe, but I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to tell them I would help. Going into the light, that’s just a load of crap—” confidence failed me “—isn’t it?”
“A door.” Billy’s voice was terribly controlled, the kind of control that said unadulterated panic was one very fine line away from where he stood. “Joanne, listen to me. This is important. I know you use a garden as a metaphor for your soul. How do you enter the garden?”
I stared at him without comprehension for a couple seconds. I’d thrust my imagery of a garden on him when I was trying to heal him from a magically induced coma, but I’d had no idea it’d left him with an idea of my psychic set-up. I was beginning to think Billy Holliday could be very, very dangerous to me, if he chose to be.
“A rabbit hole,” I finally croaked. “I almost always go in by a rabbit hole. Or a mole hole. I was a badger once.”
Billy’s shoulders relaxed fractionally. “All right. You’re going to need to do a spirit journey and make sure that you didn’t let the ghosts into your garden, but usually the mind sets up fail-safes. If you enter through the earth then probably the door didn’t lead inside you.”
“There’s a door inside my garden,” I said inanely. “But it leads to where people go when they’re dying.” It led to where I went when I was dying, anyway. “I don’t use it. Much.”
Melinda and Billy exchanged a glance that told me I didn’t want to know what they were thinking. Instead of asking, I looked back at the cauldron, and noticed a leg sticking out from behind it. I crawled over and found both the dancers sprawled on the floor, breathing shallowly. I dropped my head, watching long hair brush my elbows. “Crap. I thought somebody would’ve gotten them out of here. I’m gonna need to…” I put a hand out, calling up silver-blue power, and Melinda came around the cauldron to crouch and catch my wrist. “You can’t.”
“I can’t? Why not? I think I can.” I was a little engine that could. I tried to shake her off, though not very hard, for fear she’d weeble and wobble and then fall down.
“You need to check for ghost riders first. If any of them slipped into your garden, or are waiting on the other side of that door, they’ll follow your power right back into these kids. Call 911 instead.”
I lowered my hand, but kept looking at her. There were about eleven things I needed to do—make sure the bad things were gone, make sure the dancers were okay, come up with some kind of excuse for the partygoers, just for starters—but for a few long seconds all of that faded away while I stared at my friend.
I knew Melinda referred to her god in the feminine, and that she knew what a coven needed to be whole. I knew she and Billy had met fifteen or so years ago at a conference about the paranormal, and that her oldest son was casually confident about his own sensitivity to things that were Other. “You and Billy, Mel, where did you come from? You know all this stuff, you’re so sure of yourselves, and I’m…” I gestured at myself. I was a twenty-seven-year-old cop in a leather bondage outfit, beleaguered by a destiny I could barely wrap my mind around, that gesture said. “I mean, did you want this to be real and just went and figured out that it was?”
Melinda’s smile held real sympathy. “I’ll tell you about my grandma someday, okay? They chased her over the border to keep her from hexing a bad man’s cattle.”
Phoebe, over our heads, said in a very small tight voice, “What exactly is ‘this’ that we may or may not want to be real?”
I looked up to find her still clutching her quarterstaff. Edward was just behind her, looking as if he wanted to hug me and wasn’t yet sure that it was safe. I sighed and thumped down on my butt, drew my shins up and looped my arms around them. Too late, it occurred to me that my skirt was indecently short and I was probably flashing my panties to anyone who wanted to take a look. I groaned and dropped my forehead against my knees, wishing I still had my mask so I could pretend I was someone else showing off their undies, but I’d lost it sometime earlier. Maybe at the same time I’d drained the drink without noticing. I kind of wanted another one just then. “You remember that lung surgery I told you about when I started taking fencing lessons from you, Pheeb?”
“Yeah. You kept rubbing your breastbone. You said it was a genetic thing, not lung cancer.”
The reminder made me want to rub that spot again. “I may have been a little misleading.”
“She got stabbed through the chest with a rapier,” Billy said, which was nice of him, because I wasn’t very good at this confession. Of course, if my friends kept letting me off the hook, I wouldn’t get any better at it.
Phoebe’s silence rang out a few long seconds. “Don’t any of the rest of you take this wrong, but I’ve seen you naked, Jo. You don’t have a scar.”
“I healed it.” That came out surprisingly easily. “That genetic condition, it’s…I’m a shaman. I can do magic.” I looked up, because suddenly it was worse to imagine her expression than to actually see it.
She had that tremendously neutral look people get when they’re trying to be polite about hearing something so outrageous they can’t believe it’s been said. She also had a stranglehold on her staff, knuckles practically glowing white.
I winced. “Healing’s easiest, but I can send my spirit to the astral plain, and between what a lot of Native American mythology calls the Upper and Lower Worlds. Earth is the Middle World.” I brightened a little, distracted by the details of my studies. “Actually, that’s really pretty Norse, too. That kind of world structure is more common than you’d…” Phoebe’s expression was getting more strained. I was not helping my case by lecturing. “You remember the dead girl in the locker room? Cassandra Tucker? You couldn’t get me to respond after we found her, even though I looked like I was awake. I’d gone to the astral plain to see if I could find her ghost and talk to her, but instead I got caught and was bargaining…with a giant…snake…”
I put my hands over my face. I was doing my best, but it sounded ridiculous. I honestly had no idea how to present my life in terms that didn’t sound insane, and I was once more incredibly grateful for the handful of friends who either believed to begin with, or who, in the face of irrefutable evidence, ground their teeth and accepted that my wonky reality was in fact real. Demonstration was the only possible way I could convince anyone I was on the level, because telling them made me sound like a lunatic. I mean, really. Bargaining with giant snakes? I looked up again.
Phoebe’s eyebrow was beetled. “Morrison got you to wake up.”
I nearly groaned. None of the rest of them had known that, and Melinda’s face brightened with interest. “I’ve known him for years. I’d only known you a few months. He had a more…”
“Intimate connection with you?” Melinda chirruped.
I muttered, “I’m sure the same thing would’ve happened if Billy’d been there to wake me up.”
Melinda widened her eyes and nodded sagely. I refused to look at Edward, afraid doing so would somehow seem guilty. Instead, I locked my arms around my shins and scowled at Phoebe’s knees. “You remember when the lights went out in January? Whole city blacked out for a few hours?”
“…yeah.”
“That was me. I was, uh, fighting a god. Then when I passed out at the dance club in July, that was kind of the aftermath. Mark was sort of possessed by a god. A different one.”
“A god. Two gods.”
My shoulders slumped. “Yeah.”
Billy, mildly, said, “She’s telling the truth.”
Phoebe eyed him, but before she spoke, Thor said, “So what just happened here?”
Billy, Melinda and I all said, “Ghosts,” at the same time.
Phoebe threw her hands up, turned around and walked out.
I crashed my forehead against my knees. “That went well.”
Thor crouched beside me and the sleeping dancers, jerking his thumb after Phoebe. “Want me to…?”
“No. I’ll try to talk to her tomorrow.” I pressed my eyes shut, then exhaled noisily. “Did somebody call the paramedics?”
“I did.” Morrison spoke so unexpectedly I flinched all the way to my feet, gaping across the cauldron at him. He’d taken his Don Johnson sunglasses off and was frowning. “They’ll be here in a couple minutes. You okay, Walker?”
I was better than okay. My chest was tight and my eyes were hot and so was my face, for that matter, but it turned out that for some reason, I was absolutely great. “I thought you’d left with the rest of the smart people.”
His frown reversed itself, but only at one corner of his mouth. “Not when my people are in trouble. You okay?”
“Yeah.” I pulled a tentative little smile up and nodded. “Yeah, I’m good, Captain. Thanks.”
Morrison nodded, then glanced at Thor, who’d stood up beside me and was hovering protectively. “Take care of her, Johnson.”
Edward slipped his hand against my waist. “I’m trying, sir. She’s stubborn.”
Morrison, dryly, said, “Really. I hadn’t noticed. The paramedics are going to want to talk to you, Walker, so don’t go far, but you look like you could use some air. Holliday and I will hold down the fort.”
I said, “Thanks,” again, and Thor shuffled me past the cauldron and the captain toward the door. I broke every rule in the book and looked over my shoulder as we walked out. I knew it was a bad idea. I’d only be disappointed when Morrison’d already turned away.
He hadn’t. He nodded just slightly when my gaze found his, and I went out into the crisp October night wondering what it was I’d hoped to get from that momentary meeting of eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
Thor slid his arm around my shoulders, surprising me with his warmth. He was wearing more than I was, true, but I’d have had to lie on the beach for six hours to radiate that much heat. He guided me through the lingering crowd—there were quite a few of them, given that it was only about forty degrees—and when we were a decent ways down the street, said, “I guess we’re okay.”
“Okay” wasn’t one of the words I’d have chosen for much of anything right then. “We are?”
“Yeah, you know. Coworkers dating and all that. Gets frowned on, but the captain looked okay with it.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what I thought of Morrison being okay with me dating. I mean, obviously he shouldn’t think anything of it, and I shouldn’t think of him thinking anything, but—I cut myself off before I got caught in a recursive loop and said, “I guess so. How many people are staring at me?”
He twisted to look over our shoulders, then came back to me with a grin. “About thirty. Should we give them something to look at?”
“I think they’ve already got something.” That sounded meaner than I meant it to and I gave him a lopsided smile of apology. I wasn’t very good at having a boyfriend.
He squeezed my shoulders and put a kiss on my forehead. “You’re not a freak show, Joanne. Don’t worry about them.”
My smile got less lopsided. “Yes, I am, but thanks. And thanks for staying, back there. I appreciate it. It was probably dumb and dangerous, but I appreciate it.”
“You really know how to lay on a compliment, Walker.” Thor sounded like Morrison, all dry and faintly amused. I made a face and he laughed before his expression faded into something more serious. “I can’t run out when things get weird or dangerous if we’re going to make this work. I want to be there to help. To keep you safe.”
Warm fuzzies collided with bemusement to give me indigestion. “It’s hard to keep me safe from things you can’t see. I don’t need that much protecting.” It was true. Typically, what I needed was information, which—much as he might want to—I doubted Thor was in any position to provide. On the other hand, he really was making an effort to fit in to my life, and I didn’t want to push him out just because the dangers I generally faced were one step removed from the reality he was grounded in. I nudged my hip against his, hoping I hadn’t sounded ungrateful and that I didn’t now sound patronizing: “But if I run up against Loki, you’re the first one I’m calling, okay?”
“Sounds like a date, especially if you’re going to wear that costume when you start fighting gods.”
I said, “I’m usually in jeans and a sweater,” without thinking, and he looked a little nonplussed. See, this was the problem with starting to accept my own surreality. It made me say things that sounded as if they’d been brought to you by the new brand of azure giraffe.
Sirens and flashing lights heralded the ambulance’s arrival. I stopped beneath a leafless tree, trying to avoid drops of water from its black branches, and watched paramedics jump out of the vehicle and run into the hall. “I should go back.”
“To give a report or to help?”
Only half listening, I said, “Yeah,” and Thor slid his hand to mine and tugged my fingers, a shy and sort of charmingly little-boy action.
“You heard the Hollidays. You need to check for—”
“Ghost riders,” I supplied, then ground my teeth. “Yeah. Okay, so to give a report, then, though I don’t know what I’m going to say. Still, I…” I turned away, but Thor caught my hand a little harder and pulled me back. I looked up, surprised, to find his expression much like the gesture had been: shy and sort of charmingly hopeful.
“It’s a kind of spirit quest, right? You’ve got that drum. Do you need somebody to play it for you?”
My heart and stomach took a quick drop toward my feet and left my cheeks burning. The question itself was fairly innocuous, but what lay under it ran a hell of a lot deeper. Thor had seen the skin drum that held place of pride on my bedroom dresser, and I’d seen his curious gaze linger on it more than once. He’d never touched it, apparently—and correctly—regarding doing so as an intimacy he hadn’t yet been granted.
In fact, since my powers were so rudely awakened, only three people’d touched that drum: me, my friend Gary—who’d been invited to do so long before I considered using the drum as an intimacy at all—and Morrison, whose touch on the painted leather might have been fire on my skin. Part of me didn’t want Thor touching the drum because it might not have that same sensual, completed feeling when he did.
The other part of me wasn’t ready for him to handle it in case it did.
He didn’t know that. He didn’t have to. What he did know was the drum, and the out-of-body experiences it sent me on, were important, and that he hadn’t yet been invited to participate in that. It was a glass wall, invisible but holding us apart, and all my rational bits thought I probably wasn’t being fair.
My less rational bits—like my heart and stomach, which both still felt as if they’d fallen into the southern hemisphere—didn’t give a damn about fair. They were worried about the right choice, and the lurchy feeling they left me with was way too much like a fifteen-year-old girl going against her smarts and having sex with a boy in hopes of getting him to like her. I’d been there, done that, got a lot more than a T-shirt, and like I said, I do at least try to make new mistakes. Edward was a great guy, but I wasn’t anything like ready to ask him to drum me under on a spirit quest.
And he was a great guy, so as my heart resumed its regular place in my chest cavity, guilt swam in to fill the empty spots it’d left. There was no way out. I liked him too much to want to hurt him, but I couldn’t give him what he was asking for, so of course he’d be hurt—not angry, because he was too decent for that, but disappointed, at least—and so up came the guilt, which made me think maybe I should, you know, go ahead and do what he asked anyway, and…
I didn’t know if men ever went through that kind of thought process, but this was one of those emotional hatchet-job moments where I couldn’t help thinking that being a woman really sucked.
And Thor, who really was a decent guy, didn’t make me fumble my way through an apology. He just studied me while my face went stricken, then sighed quietly and nodded. “Maybe next time.” He squeezed my fingers, then glanced toward the party hall and the paramedics. “Let’s go see if they need your report, huh?”
“Edward.” I didn’t often use his real name, so he was looking back even before I pulled him to a stop, determined not to utterly blow a good thing. “I like you.” Those were pretty simple words. It didn’t follow that saying them should come out all shaky and nervous. “I like you a lot. This thing with the drumming, it’s not…it’s not because I don’t like you or I don’t trust you.”
His eyebrows went up a little. “I like you, too, but you don’t trust one of us, Joanie. I’m willing to bet on it being you, at least for a while.”
I followed him back to the party hall, well and truly subdued.
The dancers were whisked away to the hospital suffering from severe electrolyte imbalances, which my mind insisted on processing as “severe acolyte imbalances.” Once I’d been assured they’d be okay, I kept snickering at visions of little hooded figures singing Gregorian chants and stumbling around like drunkards. Thor looked askance at me, but apparently the joke lost something in the telling.
My report, like everyone else’s, was all but useless, though in my case I had to explain why I’d clapped my hands over their mouths. A fumbling story about being afraid they’d bite their tongues got me more or less off the hook. Once the paramedics were gone, a startling number of people came back in to the party, but I gave Thor a kiss and slunk out to my car with every intention of heading home.
Billy tapped on Petite’s window, catching me wriggling around trying to get my stupid little skirt far enough under my butt and thighs to provide some kind of barrier between bare skin and clammy leather seats. Petite was a beautiful car, the unquestionable love of my life, but she had a definite opinion about somebody wearing the kind of outfit I had on and sitting in her. My back stuck to the seat, too, and sent goose bumps all over me. I peeled away and rolled the window down. “Was I speeding, Officer?”
“It looked like you were doing something a lot more illicit than speeding, but Johnson’s still inside. You heading home?”
“I think I’ve had enough partying for one night.”
“I’d agree, except for two things.” Billy leaned against Petite’s roof and looked down at me. “First, I want to be there when you go checking for ghost riders, because you’re not equipped to deal with them. They’re more my specialty.”
I opened my mouth to argue, considered his point and skipped the argument. “Fair enough. And?”
“And Phoebe’s already gone, so Mel wanted me to make sure you realize that means you’re the only host left for this party.”
I put my hands on the steering wheel and stared straight ahead for a minute. “I hate my life.”
“No, you don’t.” Billy pulled Petite’s door open and offered me a hand. “C’mon. Mel and Johnson and I will stay late and help you clean up, and then we can get you cleared for duty.”
“Everybody’s going to stare at me if I go back in there.”
“They’d stare at anybody who was as much of a long tall drink of water as you are in that outfit.”
I cricked my neck and eyed him. “Did your wife send you out here to flatter me, Mr. Holliday?”
“My wife sent me out here to take whatever measures necessary to make sure she wasn’t the one left cleaning up your party alone. Flattery first. Next I throw you over my shoulder and carry you back in. Your choice.”
“All right.” I kicked long bare legs out of the car and stood up. Hey, if he was going to make tall-drink-of-water comments, I was going to admire myself a little. “But if anything else out of the ordinary happens, I’m leaving. I’ll just pay the damn fee for having the owners clean the place tomorrow.”
I should have defined out of the ordinary.
It turned out worrying about my behavior had been pointless. Apparently most people thought leaping up onto the cauldron to help the dancers was kind of heroic, and enough alcohol had been imbibed that the light show around me had been largely written off as just that: a light show. There was a lesson to be learned from that, though by now I should’ve already learned it.
People were good at explaining away things that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Over the summer I’d been worried that I was foisting magic onto a world that didn’t want it, but really, the handful of people who did want it believed, and the rest let themselves forget. A newly born waterfall at the end of Lake Washington had been given the name Thunderbird Falls after half the city’d seen, well, a thunderbird fall into the lake. By the end of August, though, if anybody mentioned the gigantic golden bird at all, they remembered the astonishing cloud formations and sunset that night. I shouldn’t have worried, not then and not now.
By midnight nearly everyone had come back to the party, even Phoebe, who ran a masquerade competition as if nothing untoward had happened. I won a “Best Abs” prize that I don’t think had been on the original list of awards to be given out, and the department-heavy attendees made Morrison walk the stage three times before razzing him off with cheers and laughter. A bunch of people told me I’d done good, trying to help the dancers, and a bunch more dragged me onto the dance floor or stole me away from Thor for the space of a song. The booze ran out before the music did, and there were maybe fifty people left, almost all of them dancers not quite willing to go home, when Morrison tapped Thor on the shoulder and asked to cut in.
See, I knew I should’ve defined out of the ordinary. Thor bowed out and tried to steal Phoebe from a natural blonde who didn’t want to give up her dance partner. He ended up sandwiched between both of them, and I grinned before Morrison put his hands on my waist and took up all my attention.
He said, “Sorry,” perfunctorily. “I could’ve waited for faster music, but I wanted to talk to you.”
I flailed a bit and put my hands on his shoulders, which were considerably more covered than my waist was. In fact, although I hadn’t thought anything of it when Thor’s hands had been in the same place, I suddenly wanted to hitch my skirt up off my hips and settle it safely around my waist, where a proper skirt belonged. Except then my very short skirt would have become completely indecent, which wasn’t a win at all.
Or maybe it was. I guess it depended on who you asked.
In an attempt to shut my brain up, I stuck my jaw out too far and bared my lower teeth, making a llama face. It was sufficiently embarrassing to take my mind off my skirt, so after holding it a couple of seconds I trusted myself enough to say, “No problem. What’s wrong?”
Up. I should’ve said what’s up, not what’s wrong. Still, pretty much any time Morrison wanted to talk to me, something was wrong. His hands were warm, warmer than Edward’s, and he smelled good. Like Old Spice, which I doubted was a Miami Vice cologne. And I was taller than he was, which reminded me of the clowns with their noses in my cleavage, although Morrison would have to look down to do that.
I made another llama face.
Evidently weird faces weren’t enough to throw my boss off his game. “What happened earlier?”
“A bunch of angry ghosts spilled through the cauldron and tried to take over those kids.” I said it without missing a beat. Somewhere along the line I’d decided to play it straight with Morrison. He didn’t like my powers any more than I did, but he accepted I had something extraordinary going on, and if he couldn’t deny it, he could at least do his best to make use of it. He’d made me a detective and partnered me with Billy so we could deal with abnormal cases when they came along, and what he was really asking right now was whether one had just fallen into our laps. “I don’t know how or why. I think Billy and I chased most of them off, but he’s still got some stubborn ones hanging around him and I might’ve let some latch on to me. We’re going back to my apartment after we clean up here to check and give me the all-clear.”
A bunch of minute things happened in Morrison’s expression. Most of them had to do with tension and resignation, and said he’d asked and therefore deserved to get whatever outlandish answer I gave him. My face crumpled with apology. “Sorry. It’s all I’ve got. Billy didn’t seem to know what was happening, either, so—”
Morrison said, “Walker,” making it sound very much like Billy’s shut up from earlier, so I did. Morrison nodded, and that quick array of tiny changes flashed across his face again before he said, carefully, “Holliday’ll watch out for you.”
“Sure, he always does. I mean, I don’t know, I guess…” I frowned at Morrison’s brown hair, caught up in logistics. “It’s going to be four in the morning before we get out of here. I can’t really call Gary and ask him to drum me under, but Billy never has, and besides that he’s going to have to go with me. I guess Mel, but—”
Morrison said, “Walker,” again, and I clued in with a physical lurch that turned my ankle. Morrison’s hands tightened on my waist. For an instant we were frozen in an awkward noir pose, the sort where the hero seizes the heroine’s arms and pulls her close before kissing her like she’s the most exasperating woman on earth. Except I was much too tall to be a noir heroine, even bent awkwardly while I tried to get my foot back under me, and for all the intensity of those old-movie poses, they never seemed to really have much in the way of bodies pressed together. There was body-pressing going on here. There had to be: Morrison’d braced me against himself so I didn’t topple over entirely.
He did not, however, look as though he’d like to kiss me. He looked as if I’d stepped on his foot, and like whatever had prompted him to say my name had been a bad idea.
Intuition and me weren’t the closest of friends, but I was still following the thought that’d led to my collapse. Morrison hadn’t been asking if Billy would take care of me. He’d been asking if I needed him to. Bubbling gladness spilled through me, as though he’d offered an answer to problems I didn’t even know I had. I wanted to hug him, or bury my nose in his neck, or something else unseemingly physical. I held it back to an idiotic beam and blurted, “Shit, I’m sorry, yes, that’d be—”
Morrison put me back on my feet and I looked over his shoulder to see Thor. Guilt that had gone passive surged back to life and my smile crumbled. Everything crumbled: I felt like I was shrinking, delight draining out and leaving bone-deep regret. I’d shut Thor down a few hours ago when he’d had the courage to ask if he could help, and jumping at the chance to put Morrison in his place, especially when the captain had been so circumspect in asking, seemed like a particular and special brand of cruelty. Thor’d been right: I didn’t trust one of us in our pairing, and the fact that Morrison’s offer sent my heart soaring where Thor’s sent it plummeting didn’t bode well for which one I didn’t trust, after all.
Morrison turned us both so he could see where I was looking. His hands loosened abruptly and he fell back half a step, making room for the Holy Spirit between us. He took a breath and I knew, I just knew, he was going to issue a retraction. I grabbed his lapels hard enough that my hands ached from it, and he exhaled, words lost in surprise.
“I…” I wanted to say a million things. Most of them didn’t seem especially appropriate. I held on to his lapels for a moment longer, then let go and smoothed them, like doing so would help me keep my voice moderate. “I would be a lot more comfortable with you drumming me under than with calling Gary in the middle of the night and asking him to come over.”
There. That sounded very reasonable. It didn’t touch on why I wasn’t having Thor do it, because that was none of Morrison’s business. It didn’t focus on the fact that Melinda would no doubt be perfectly fine drumming me under. It was also utterly true. I’d rather have Morrison, who was already awake, lend a hand, than get a seventy-three-year-old out of bed and ask him to help.
It in no way told Morrison, or let me acknowledge, that when my captain picked up that drum of mine, I felt magic.
Christ, I was doomed.
CHAPTER SIX
Phoebe and Morrison and half a dozen other lag-behinds stayed to help clean up, so we were out of there by half past three. Phoebe’d come over with me, but her eyes skittered away and she hailed someone else for a ride home. Worse, for the first time since I’d known her, she didn’t remind me of our upcoming fencing lesson. Thor snaked his arms around me for a hug. “She’ll come around. Give her a little time.”
“To get used to me sounding like a lunatic?” I gave him a wan smile and glanced toward Petite. “I’m going to go home and get this ghost thing sorted out, okay?”
“Sure. Call me in the morning and let me know you’re all right.” If he resented being kept away, he did a good job of hiding it. I felt guilty all over again. Relationships were complicated. No wonder I’d stayed away from them all this time.
Amazing how the human mind will let a person rearrange facts to suit her. That phrasing made it sound as if I’d made a deliberate choice to not get seriously involved with anybody since at least college. But if I was serious about the new Joanne-faces-reality lifestyle, it would be somewhat more accurate to say I’d buried my head in the sand and gone “LA LA LA LA LA” to drown out any possible chance of having to deal with romantic entanglements. Emotionally stunted, that was me. At least I had nice long legs to make up for it.
I nodded a promise to call, and Thor peeled off in his monster Chevy truck. It was black and chromey and had the worst gas mileage of anything this side of a Hummer, but it was also short-circuit-the-brain sexy, and I had a terrible soft spot for it. The wheels were three feet tall, and stepping up to the running board and the driver’s seat proved Thor had some nice long legs his own self. I felt that same dippy little grin from earlier crawl into place. A girl could do a whole lot worse than her own personal Norse god.
He roared off, exposing Morrison getting into his top-safety-rated Toyota Avalon.
I burst out laughing. Morrison looked up—so did the Hollidays, for that matter—and I waved them all off and climbed into Petite, still grinning. If I didn’t need my psyche examined, I’d have put my sweet little Mustang in gear and chased Thor down the road. Emotionally stunted or not, at least I could tell when a guy’s car sense coincided with mine, and Morrison’s never would. I reminded myself to give Thor an extra kiss next time I saw him, and drove home to find out what it was like to be part of a genuine ghost story.
Melinda looked like she’d swallow her tongue when Morrison pulled in to my apartment-building parking lot as I climbed out of my car. I locked Petite, patted her purple roof and said, “I thought if we were going ghost hunting it might be good to have somebody who’d done it before drum me under,” all breezy-like, as if it was no big deal. The weird thing was, right then it didn’t seem like one.
Melinda unswallowed her tongue, coughed, “Sure,” and gave Morrison a sunny smile. I figured stronger men than he could be hornswoggled by that smile. Billy wasn’t bad-looking, but his wife was a knockout. If I ever needed to be a five-foot-two Hispanic woman, I wanted to be Melinda. Also, she could and did say, “Hello, Michael,” like it was a normal thing to do, whereas I still couldn’t imagine calling my boss by his given name. “I might’ve made Billy drive me home if I’d known you’d be here.”
Morrison and I exchanged glances. It’d seemed awkward to me to mention he was coming over when I’d sent my boyfriend home, and I have no idea what he thought. Telepathy ought to come standard with psychic talents, although if I put any actual consideration into that, it sounded like a really bad idea. Morrison said, “I’m sure Walker will lend you her bed if you want to take a nap,” and I gave a feeble nod of agreement that Melinda brushed off, clearly not too worried about it.
Billy gave first Morrison, then me, looks that said volumes, but kept his mouth shut. I made them climb all five flights of stairs to my apartment out of cheerful vindictiveness and the knowledge that the building’s ancient elevator was both astonishingly slow and incredibly noisy. Only very drunk college students or heavily laden tenants used it, and the former had been known to fall asleep in front of its doors waiting for it to arrive.
Poor Melinda was pink cheeked and puffing by the time we reached my apartment. I had the grace to be ashamed of myself, but she flopped down on the couch and wheezed, “I’ll try anything to go into labor. I could’ve protested in the lobby.”
I scurried to get her a glass of water, and by the time I got back everybody looked comfortably positioned to perform a spirit journey. Billy was across from his wife on the couch, and Morrison’d taken up the entirety of the love seat, looking larger than life and extremely cinematic in his ridiculous pink shirt and pale loafers. I said, “I hope that stuff washes out of your hair fast. I have to change clothes,” like they were related comments, and retreated to my bedroom. Back in January I’d discovered a draft blew in under the front door. No way was I sitting on the floor dressed in nothing more than a handful of leather bits.
Changing clothes also gave me a minute in private to nerve myself up to handing the drum over to Morrison. I pulled on sweats and a warm shirt, took my contacts out and washed away the kohl eyeliner before putting my glasses on. The woman in the mirror was unfamiliar, straight black hair falling around her face and catching in the glasses’ earpieces. I pulled the wig off, dropped it on the toilet, and scrubbed my fingers through my hair, creating short messy spikes that made me look more like myself. The warrior princess was gone. It was just me, Joanne Walker, and I couldn’t help thinking the other reflection made a much better hero type than I did. For one thing, anybody willing to run around in that outfit had metaphorical balls of solid steel, whereas I only had an uncanny ability to keep staggering forward despite panic and uncertainty.
A bubble of warmth erupted in my belly, a reminder that I had a little more than a knack for keeping on against impossible odds. The damn magic could be comforting, sometimes.
It could also be bossy. I got my drum off my bureau and stood with it for a moment, running my fingers over its dyed surface. A raven’s wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake. Their bright colors were unchanged after half a lifetime, but the wolf looked smeared, as if the drum’s surface had gotten wet. I wiped my fingers against it gingerly, worry making a pit of sickness in my belly. It didn’t blur any further, and there was nothing in the leather’s tension that suggested it had been soaked or damaged. For the first time I wondered if the figure was supposed to be a coyote, not a wolf, and if the smearing had something to do with my mentor’s death. The sickness in my stomach turned to tears burning my eyes, and I clenched my fingers around the drum’s edge, bone and leather denting my flesh. The polished beads that dangled from crossed lengths of leather holding the skin tight against its frame rattled, strain in my hands translating to the drum. It had been a gift for my fifteenth birthday, overwhelming and bewildering: I’d had no waking recollection of the dream-borne shamanic training I was undergoing. The drum was the first thing I’d ever had that made me feel welcome among what were technically, if not emotionally, my people.
My father was about as full-blooded Cherokee as you got in this day and age, and had been born with a wanderlust that’d sent him away from North Carolina and the Eastern tribe as a young man. He’d met my mother in New York, and she’d brought me to him when I was three months old. I took after her in most ways: fair skin and a smattering of freckles, green eyes and black hair, though hers had waves and mine was unrelentingly straight. In color, I looked Irish. In black and white, my bone structure stood out, and I was clearly Native American. The thing is, despite truisms like kids don’t see shades of gray, what they saw when Dad took me home to Qualla Boundary was a tall gangly white girl with a perpetual chip on her shoulder. It wasn’t their fault. It was how I’d seen myself, even though I’d been the one who insisted on settling down somewhere so I could go to high school in one place.
I don’t think my father’d ever intended to go back to the Carolinas, but that was where he took me. We’d gotten by, me with an eternal defiant scowl and Dad with the air of always waiting to leave again. I didn’t know if he was still there. I hadn’t talked to him in years.
The more I looked back and thought about it, the more I knew my exile’d been largely self-imposed. My first memories were of Dad’s big old boat of a Cadillac driving across the country, and my favorite memories were those of him teaching me how to work on that car, and then all the others that came along. We’d rarely stayed in any town long enough for me to make friends at the schools I’d gone to—six weeks here, six weeks there didn’t do the job—and by the time we went to Qualla Boundary I had a hate-on at the world. It hadn’t wanted me, so I didn’t want it.
Truth was, in most ways, I’d only just started getting over that. I touched the smeary colors on my drum again, and, assured that it at least wasn’t going to rupture if Morrison used it, took it out to the living room. Morrison stood up to take it from me, which seemed oddly respectful. I didn’t know how to tell him I appreciated the gesture, and instead tried to steel myself against the vicarious thrill I expected when he took it.
To my supreme disappointment, I got nothing. Maybe I’d steeled myself too well. We both held on to the drum for a second, before Morrison said, “Stick?” in a tone that suggested maybe I wasn’t too bright. I let go with a curse and went back for the drumstick, brushing my fingers against its cranberry-red rabbit-fur end before handing it over to my boss with far less expectation of getting a buzz. I didn’t get one then, either, and sat down on the floor, telling myself I shouldn’t be sullen.
Billy groaned. “Do we have to be on the floor?”
I blinked up at him. “I don’t know. Do you even have to be in the same place I am? I don’t really know what your plan is.”
“You’ve never journeyed inside with anyone?”
“Is that a question that should be asked in polite company?”
Melinda laughed. “Good thing we’re not polite company.”
I wrinkled my nose at her, then shrugged at Billy. “Everybody who’s turned up has just been there. I never invited anyone. I’ve done it the other way, kind of. Been invited in, or sort of fallen in.” From the corner of my eye I saw Morrison’s expression grow increasingly strained, and guilty recollection sizzled through me. “Or barged in.”
Billy frowned. “You need to work on your sense of personal boundaries.”
Guilt crashed right over into irritation. He was no doubt right, but this was a lousy time to bring it up. “I’m under the impression that I need to make sure my brain isn’t haunted. Can we maybe worry about my crappy people skills later?”
Morrison said, “If I start beating this thing will they stop arguing?” to Melinda, and without further ado, did.
My world flipped upside down.
It might’ve been technically more accurate to say I flipped upside down. Or that I turned inside out. Either way, the floor went from below me to above me, leaving me sitting cross-legged on a roof of the earth with a tunnel burrowing down below me. I stayed there a couple of seconds, taken aback at how quickly the transition had happened. I knew Morrison could send me to other planes of existence with a touc…There was no way to get out of that sentence alive. The point was, he helped my transition from one world to another, but even so, I was used to the drumming settling into my skin before it transported me elsewhere. Just blinking from one world to another was disconcerting.
Billy presumably wouldn’t have such a dramatically quick crossover, but that didn’t mean I should stick—so to speak—around on the roof of the earth. I pushed off the ground and dived into the tunnel, squirming my way deeper. Almost instantly, I wasn’t me any longer, not the way I think of myself, person-shaped with two legs and a torso and arms and a head. Industrious paws dug at the earth instead, pushing it aside with far more skill than my weak human hands could’ve done. I wasn’t sure what I was; rodents weren’t much for external awareness of what they looked like, but at least I was efficient.
I popped through to a sunlit garden in record time and staggered around on four feet, getting my bearings. A good shake got dirt out of my fur, and another one whisked me into my usual shape. I thought someday I might, like, get to just walk through a tunnel big enough to hold me, but so far when I’d come into my garden it’d mostly been as one form of vermin or another.
That was a thought I definitely didn’t want to pursue. Instead I lifted a hand to block glare—apparently nobody’d told my inner sanctuary that it was four in the morning—and had a look around.
When I’d first come to this place, it was the most rigid, well-defined little plot of land I’d ever seen. The grass had been mown to a millimeter height, so dry and sparse the ground could be seen between blades. The benches had been austere, uncomfortable things, and the pathways had been narrow and very straight. A pond at the northern end had been shallow with a trickle feeding it, and the sky had been gray. In my defense, I’d been dying at the time, but anybody looking around might’ve guessed I’d been dead a long time already.
It’d gotten a lot better since then. It had nothing on some of the lush landscapes I’d seen representing my friends’ souls, but there was some life there now. Moss grew on what had been stark walls, wearing down at their edges. The desperately precise footpaths were buckling a little as roots began to grow under them, and stone benches had turned to wood, far more inviting. The grass was richer in color and in amount, and no longer kept to a uniform height. There were even places along the walls where it’d grown into tall fat bunches with thick roots that would be difficult to loosen if I wanted to tidy up. The waterfall and pond bubbled cheerfully, and I could no longer see the distant southern end, where mist and trees obscured a door into the land of the dying. It was an altogether nicer place to be, and I was as proud as I was relieved.
Now, if I only had any idea how to let somebody else in. Coyote’d waltzed in and out as though it was his own territory, and the only other person who’d visited had taken advantage of my lousy shields and slipped in like a snake. My own pride wanted to make a better invitation to Billy than that, especially after he’d wounded it with his personal-boundaries comment. I wanted to prove myself.
I’d cobbled together my idea of proper shielding from Star Trek, and insofar as I imagined them at all, I imagined them rather like a big blue pearly bubble surrounding me and my garden. Presumably phasers set on “stun” wouldn’t break through, and I trusted Billy wouldn’t be shooting to kill. I curled my fingers in the grass, admiring how it was long enough to grasp, and tried to make a Billy-shaped hole in the pearlescent glow.
Billy-shaped, to me, meant a mix of a minivan and a police car. I liked vehicle metaphors, but usually I didn’t get mash-ups. Melinda was a hundred percent minivan. Morrison was that damn gold safety-rated Toyota. I was Petite, which didn’t work all that well if I thought too deeply about it, because a 1969 Mustang was a much sexier car than I was a person. Still, if anything’d been my heart and soul over the last decade, it was the purple Boss 302 I’d put everything into since I bought her out of somebody’s barn. Even then, she’d been in better shape than I was, but like it or lump it, she was the shape of me in my head. Billy, though, got mixed up between the professional detective and the family man, at least when I thought of him. His own sense of himself, in car terms, had been more minivan.
An image formed within the shape of the doorway I was trying to make for Billy. It wasn’t him: it was slighter and somehow more ethereal or feminine, though it shared the same general sense of gentle kindness I thought of being an inextricable aspect of my partner. I blinked, but it was gone before I’d even completed the action, so barely there I wasn’t sure I’d seen it at all. I looked around, trying to find it again, and didn’t notice Billy walking in. My first clue I had a visitor was his, “Huh,” as he looked around.
Presumably “huh” wasn’t supposed to get my back up, but it did. “What’s that mean?”
“Tidier than I expected, that’s all.” He gave me a quick smile, and I blinked a few times, adjusting my mental picture of Billy to match his own.
They weren’t violently different. He looked younger and slimmer in his astral projection, but I thought most people did. He also looked more delicate. Not fragile by any stretch of the imagination, but less burly than the guy I saw every day, and not in a way that a lower body weight accounted for. It was a more feminine aspect than I’d expected, despite knowing he often wore women’s clothes off duty. He wasn’t now, but his clothes were soft: a silk shirt with discreet poet’s ruffles, and pants loose enough to flow with his movements. My long-standing theory had always been that Billy cross-dressed to exact revenge against parents who gave him the unfortunate nickname of Billy when their last name was Holliday, but seeing his mental image told me just what a jerk I was for being a smart-ass, even if I’d kept it to myself. I wondered briefly what I looked like to him, and decided not to ask. People contained multitudes. Apparently I contained multitudes of buttheads. I didn’t want to know what that looked like.
“It’s messier than it used to be.” I got up and gestured toward the far end of the garden. “The door’s down there. If I’ve got ghost riders, would they be hanging around the gate to death’s country?”
“They’d probably be trying to get away from it.” Billy slid his hands into his pockets and wandered down one of the pathways. My shoes vanished, leaving me to wiggle my toes in fresh grass as I walked beside him. “There were some things I wanted to tell you before Morrison drummed you under. Do you always go under that fast?”
“No.” I left it at that. Anything more invited too many questions. They were probably all being asked anyway, what with Morrison volunteering to play little drummer boy, but at least I could pretend that wasn’t beyond the norm.
Billy arched an eyebrow, then visibly put curiosity aside. “Right. Okay. My window for seeing ghosts is forty-eight hours, maximum. The gift doesn’t run deep enough to see beyond that.”
“Except your sister.”
He gave me a sharp look. Not disapproving, just sharp. “Yeah. But blood’s thicker than water, and Caroline and I were close.” The air cooled, thin fog pooling around us as we walked down to the foot of my garden. This was my favorite part of it, new and full of promise. Ivy hung over the walls, making it look much lusher than the northern end, and I hoped the walls would keep fading farther and farther back, giving me more to explore. “My point,” Billy said, “is that the cauldron ghosts were all older than that, so we’re dealing with something I don’t have much experience with.”
“When you say ‘much’ you mean ‘any,’ right?”
He gave me that look again, though it was softened by the fog. “No, I mean ‘much’ because Caro is—was—an exception. If it turns out you’ve got a rider, I want you to step back and let me deal with it. Get out of here if I tell you to.”
“Are you nuts?”
Billy stopped and looked down at me. Even with the delicacy added to his makeup, he was still bigger than I was. I quelled the urge to make myself a little taller in the garden of my mind, so I could measure up to the visitors. “If you’ve got a rider, it’s someone or something strong enough to get a toehold in somebody brimming with shamanic magic. With life magic, Joanne. Of the two of us, if one is going to be possessed, it’s a lot less dangerous for everybody if it’s me.”
There was a certain irrefutable logic to that. “What if you do get possessed? What do I do?”
“Get a priest and perform an exorcism.” Amusement creased Billy’s face at my expression. “I mean it. It’s a violent way to send them over, and it’d be my last choice, but—well, you could say if it does happen, it is my last choice. Don’t worry. It’s not likely to happen.”
“That doesn’t reassure me at all.” I forged ahead and crouched to pull the door key out from a little hole dug in the earth. A robin cheeped and I smiled, happy it was there. My garden wasn’t exactly overflowing with wildlife, but there ought to be a robin to go with the hidden key to a secret door. “If we open the door and there’s nothing there, I’m in the clear, right? I mean, if I’ve got a door between life and death, and that’s where ghosts stay, then they should be here if they’re here at all.”
“Right.” Billy took the key and I lifted ivy away from the door, sending a cool green scent across us. He fit the key into the lock and I held my breath.
“You said there were a couple of things you wanted to tell me. Did we cover them all?” Billy nodded and pushed the door open. It rasped with the sound of reluctant-to-move stone, and I turned on the Sight, more than half-fearful of what I’d see.
Nothing lay beyond the door except the enormous crater that had always been there. I exhaled noisily and shot a grateful look toward the crater’s far-off rim. “Are we good?”
“No.” Billy’s voice sounded worse than the scraping door. I jerked to see his face graying and his jaw tense with concentration. He whispered, “Close the door,” and I yanked it shut, but the tension didn’t leave his face. He bared his teeth in a grimace of apology, and breathed, “Sorry, Joanie. I think I’m out of my league.”
His eyes flooded black, then went hollow and gray, and the thing looking out at me was suddenly no longer Billy Holliday.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Too many late-night horror movies, or maybe just a sudden overweening burst of confidence made me leap forward. I clapped my hand to Billy’s forehead, and, with all the conviction of a revival-tent preacher, shrieked, “Demon of hell, I abjure thee!”
It would’ve been very dramatic if it had worked.
Sadly for all involved—except, I supposed, the unabjured demon of hell—Billy’s jaw dropped and he let out a dry horrible laugh that sounded like a windup doll’s little windup gears sheering out. It wasn’t a human sound at all, and shouldn’t have been able to come from his throat.
I was pretty sure this was the point at which Billy would be telling me to run, if he were in a position to do so. That left me with a conundrum: do what I knew he’d tell me to, or stay and fight for my friend.
Okay, it wasn’t really much of a conundrum at all. I reached deep and seized hold of my magic as solidly as I knew how. It flared through me, and even here in my garden—maybe especially here in my garden—I felt myself go all see-through and powered up, magic flowing in my veins like blood. The light mist that covered this end of the garden burned away in blue heat, and sunlight flooded down on me and the thing that wasn’t Billy.
It was trying to re-form his idea of himself. His skin bulged and split and came together again, mutating grotesquely. Brief glimpses of cadaverous faces melted into view, then snapped back again. His body weight changed, always turning emaciated before he pulled it toward his own more solid shape. Either the dead didn’t have great body images or I was dealing with a supermodel’s ghost. The second idea was more entertaining, but I’d put money on the former.
My fingertips were actually digging into his skull, like I was grabbing Play-Doh that’d been left out in the air too long. Flesh rupturing and reshaping under my palm felt like giant boils being lanced and rebuilding with living intent. It was utterly disgusting.
It was also, in those terms, a sickness, and sickness, I could deal with. Boils were poison, poison was something that didn’t belong in the system…in vehicle terms, that meant water in the gas tank.
I’d used the idea before to drive venom from a thunderbird’s veins. Water was heavier than gas, but in my analogy the healthy material was the weightier, mostly because it was easier to visualize pushing scuzz off the top than off the bottom. I wasn’t, after all, actually draining a gas tank.
I dug my fingers deeper into Billy’s squishy skull and poured silver-blue magic into him through those indentations. To my surprise, he acquiesced, ceasing his fight and permitting me to take it up. For an eternal instant he folded himself away, leaving nothing but my magic and the ghost rider in an echo of Billy’s thought of himself.
The ghost scrabbled, fingertips scraping off my magic like it was made of glass, impenetrable to its touch. With Billy, it had been able to sink through, permeating all the parts of him. But magic became the water in the tank, too heavy for it to invade. Fear and fury whipped it around, but it didn’t dare leave the sanctuary of Billy’s thought-form; without it, the ghost had nothing, no shape, no hope of surviving, and it wanted to live more than anything.
Me, I wanted Billy to live.
My imagery seemed juvenile, and I was glad nobody else could see it. Blue magic filled Billy’s lower half, just like he really was a gas tank, and the raging ghost swirled around his torso, a corrosive material that didn’t belong. All I did, really, was let the magic rise, giving the ghost nowhere it could fit, and it spilled out with a scream.
I clawed my free hand into the mist that poured free, holding it with magic that I retracted, carefully, from Billy. It felt slow, because I was reluctant to abandon his thought-self until I knew he still had enough handle on himself to re-form properly. If he lost his sense of self I had a much bigger problem on my hands than what to do with a temperamental ghost. But he unfolded from whatever pocket he’d retreated to when I took over, and the idea of him stabilized with relieving rapidity. None of it took as long as an indrawn breath, but it seemed like much longer. Things that were important usually did.
As the magic spilled out of him, it wrapped around my captive ghost in a kind of safety net. It couldn’t get into me, but I figured it couldn’t dissipate, either, if I held it within a bubble of magic, and if it wanted to live, then within my power was better than nothing. And if I was going to find out what else it wanted, then it needed a voice, and neither nets nor bubbles could give it one.
I entirely blamed my subconscious for what happened next.
Magic took shape low to the ground, coalescing what I recognized far too early as a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am. The color was wrong, of course, because while my subconscious was a smart-ass, my magic was apparently content with remaining silver-blue. The ghost’s dark gray roiled beneath the car’s surface, making the “paint” seem changeable, even more so than Petite’s carefully crafted purple. I put a hand over my face and dared a glance at Billy through my fingers. He was still pale, which was understandable: I doubted being possessed was a nice experience. But he’d fit back into his image of himself solidly enough, and looked, perhaps, a little more burly now, as though he’d beefed up the mental image to fight all comers. I didn’t blame him.
He was also staring at the translucent car in my garden with a fair degree of disbelief while the corner of his mouth quirked. “So,” he said in a voice so very neutral it didn’t hide a bit of his amusement. “Was Michael Knight your first crush?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” The car had been my first crush, but I was hardly about to admit that out loud. I was never, ever going to live this down as it was. I dropped my hand to the Trans Am’s roof, rallied myself to magnificently ignore Billy and said, “You can speak now.”
“S-s-speeaaaak!” Rage and desperation filled the drawn-out plea, spoken as though the thing had long since forgotten words and was drawing their shape from, oh, say, a logic-module voice synthesizer. Or maybe it was just echoing me.
“Who are you? What do you want? Why’d you fight against crossing over? I—”
“Joanie.” Billy sounded tired but droll. “Maybe I should conduct the interview.” He crouched in front of the Trans Am’s hood and put his hands on it, evidently trusting that the magic I’d called up was going to prevent a second round of Billy Becomes Lunch. “There are at least three of you,” he murmured. His self-image softened again, which I thought was fascinating. Next thing I knew I’d be wearing that leather getup when I wanted to be a tough girl on the psychic level.
“Three? How do you know? I—”
He gave me a quelling look. “The color, for one thing. Individual spirits turn pale gray as they fade away. Age doesn’t blacken them. They have to be united somehow, to get that dark.”
“Evil spirits aren’t automatically black?”
He gave me another look. “This isn’t the best time for a crash course in ghost identification.”
I thought it was the perfect time, but I also saw his point. I bit my tongue against asking more questions, and he added, “Besides, I had them in me for a minute there. I might be out of my league, but at least I can tell when I’m dealing with more than one ghost.”
I unbit my tongue. “If you’re out of your league shouldn’t I—” He didn’t have to say anything this time. I bit my tongue again and Billy turned his attention back to the Trans Am. All the color had pressed up against the vehicle’s nose, under his hands, like it was trying to get out. In fact, I could feel it trying to get to him, but it was a minor nuisance, like a dull itch. I’d have to be rendered unconscious to loosen the hold I had on the ghosts, and I wasn’t sure even that would do it.
“Something’s holding you,” Billy murmured. “Something strong enough to tie you all together. Family?”
“N-n-n-noooo.” The cry sounded like a wailing child, angry and full of uncertainty. Unexpected sympathy lurched in my heart. Things trying to take over my friends were inherently bad, but lost things trying to find a way home were merely pathetic. I liked the idea of helping a lot more than banishing.
“The way you died, then.” There was sorrow and certainty in Billy’s gentle voice, like he was trying not to upset the already unhappy child. He whispered, “Shh, shh,” to the uprise of misery that vibrated through the car, and I winced on behalf of the Trans Am’s windows. It was magical, and the windows would hold because I wanted them to, but Ella Fitzgerald had nothing on the pitch the ghosts reached. “Violent death,” Billy guessed softly and, this time to me, said, “It’s what holds most spirits beyond their time.”
Nervously, because I wasn’t certain I was allowed to say anything, I asked, “How long would they usually stay? You see them all the time….”
“Not all the time. Just with murders. With an ordinary death, illness or age, they fade away as soon as the body dies unless they have some need for closure that’s not related to their deaths. If they’re victims of abuse, for example, or once in a while if they feel someone they love is in need of help or comfort they’ll stay. There are people who say they feel the dead with them, even years after they’ve crossed over.” He glanced at me. “Most of them are kooks, but some of them really do have spirits who stay with them, like Caroline did with me. There are mediums who can communicate with the long-dead, but my ability is shorter-term.”
Beneath his quiet speech, the ghosts in the car twisted and howled, clearly too agitated by his question to give a straight answer. He ran his hand over the car’s hood, soothing motion, but they still screamed and battered themselves against the cage my magic made. Billy ignored them, giving me more of that crash course in ghost investigations after all. I thought it gave the spirits something audibly soothing to latch on to as much as it educated me. “Even with a lot of violent death, like car wrecks, the spirit usually only takes a few hours, a couple of days at most, before it lets go. They usually have a sense of self still when that happens. Forms that you’d recognize as human, the ability to communicate.”
He turned his attention back to the car. “These ones are old, Joanne. There’s almost nothing left to them than the need to survive and earn vengeance. It’s all right,” he murmured, clearly no longer talking to me. Compassion deepened his voice, turning him into a gentle bear of a man, and tears stung my nose. I didn’t think I had that depth of kindness in me. “I’m here to listen and to help. When you’re ready you can tell me what you have to say.”
Maybe it was worse for them to fear they might lose Billy’s attention than to contemplate their stories, because despite his assurance he’d stay, their cries stopped and their halting, miserable voice searched for words. “S-s-s-sown, all s-sown.”
“What,” I said, “you reap what you sow? Does that mean you were murdered because you’d been murderers yourselves?”
Billy, over outraged spiritual screams, said, “You’re really not helping,” and I had the grace to feel a little abashed, especially since I’d just been admiring his compassion. “She won’t say anything else,” he told the Trans Am, and the steely note in his voice suggested to me that I’d really better not. I had vulnerable points Billy didn’t know about, but he had enough of a grip on some that I probably didn’t want to get in a fight with him, not even when I theoretically had the home-team advantage. He said, “Sown,” when the ghosts had quieted and it seemed likely I wasn’t going to open my mouth again. I could almost hear the gears grinding in his head as he worked through the possibilities of that word: “Buried in fields, or dismembered and scattered across fields? I wonder what was beneath that party hall fifty or a hundred years ago.”
Frustrated rage gave the ghostly shrieks a new edge: “S-s-sown! All sown!” They swirled away from Billy’s hands, filling the Trans Am with agitated gray, and beat at its windows and roof with blows that felt, to me, like human hands. I shuddered and told myself I was anthropomorphizing. These things hadn’t been human in a long time.
They came back to Billy, and this time I could see I wasn’t forcing human aspects onto nebulous bits of ether. Bony hands spread against the inside of the hood, matching Billy’s, pressing like they’d reach through and slide their fingers through his. Their screams faded, turning into desperate intensity as they tried for words that had faded from their consciousness a long time ago. “Sown d-d-dead. Dead.”
Way in the back of my brain, a penny dropped, and my mouth said, “Sown dead. Sowen, the day of the dead. Samhain,” without filtering it through the active thought process in my mind. It was just as well: if I’d thought about it, I’d have never figured it out. Samhain was the Irish new year, falling on the same date as the western Halloween, and the next day was, in plenty of cultures, the day of the dead. I’d learned all about it from a precognitive anthropologist who’d predicted my death wrongly, and her own with depressing accuracy. To the English-reading eye, the word looked like it should be pronounced Sam-hayn, but in Irish, it was Sowen. “They all died at Halloween.”
The ghosts erupted in a shriek of triumph, and Billy twisted to give me a good hard look before he said, “Nice job,” without a hint of begrudgement. I didn’t quite know what the look was for. It sort of made me feel as if I’d been holding out on having an encyclopedia of arcane knowledge to draw from, but I really didn’t. I knew more than I had a year ago, but that wasn’t saying much.
“It’s a pattern.” Billy was still looking at me, though the way his voice went calm suggested he was speaking to the ghosts. “It gives us a place to start. I want to make you an offer.” He turned his attention back to the Trans Am. Faces were beginning to appear beneath the translucent hood. Not fully fleshed human faces, but something more than skulls. They reminded me unpleasantly of The Scream painting.
“We’ll find your bodies, if we can. We’ll find your killer, if we can. But I don’t have the skill, even here, to draw your memories out clearly enough to learn everything we can from you.” Billy sounded utterly at home with his talent’s boundaries. I envied that, not because I wanted more power, but because I didn’t know where the edges of mine lay. I’d read often enough that if you argue for your limitations, then sure enough, they’re yours, but that wasn’t what I heard in Billy’s voice, or saw in the image of himself. He’d had most of a lifetime to learn what he could and couldn’t do. The window in which he could see the dead had extended bit by bit over the years. In another thirty, he might be able to talk to ghosts a week dead instead of just a couple of days, but maybe not, too. Either way, I didn’t get the sense he rested on his laurels, only that he accepted what his gifts were.
It wasn’t a bad lesson for me to learn. Man, I was getting all mature and stuff. That couldn’t be good for a person. Fortunately, the only person on hand to notice my leaps and bounds of maturity was Billy, and he was still talking to the ghosts. I rewound what he’d been saying—surprisingly easy, within the confines of my garden—and said, “Oh, no way, no how, hell no,” to what memory informed me he’d suggested.
“I don’t see much other choice.” Billy stood up and faced me, broad arms folded over his chest. “They’ve got enough presence and opinion that they refused to cross through that door when you opened it, and I don’t have the ability to usher them through. We need a much stronger medium for that, or to resolve their murders so they’ve got nothing left to hang on to.”
“Yeah, but—”
He shook his head. “You can’t risk having them here. One healing trance and they’ll make a run for the short route out of imprisonment here and into someone else’s body.”
“I’ve got them pretty well wrapped up here!” I gestured toward the Trans Am.
Billy quirked an eyebrow. “Can you maintain that 24/7? Can you hold them apart from any healing you need to do? I watched how you pushed them out of me, Joanie. Eviction, then capture. You weren’t splitting your concentration.”
“Okay, yeah, but—”
“If I make them my riders voluntarily, it reduces their potential control, and right now they’re willing to try it.”
“The words right now in that sentence concern me, Billy. What if they change their minds? And you already have riders from the party. Not all of them detached from you.” I looked around a little wildly, now that I’d remembered that. “Why don’t I see them here?”
“They’re not part of my self-image.”
Indignant, I pointed at the gray mist inside the Trans Am. “They’re not part of mine, either!”
“No,” Billy said with exasperated patience, “but you opened up a door in your mind and invited dozens of spirits to pass through. The ones that refused to pass on didn’t get rejected, just trapped. You said you’d had uninvited visitors before. Well, you more or less invited these ones. They’re here whether you imagine them to be or not.”
That made an irritating amount of sense. I glowered. “I still think it’s a really bad idea for you to play host to a bunch of ectoplasmic parasites.”
“I agree.” Billy breathed a quiet laugh as bewilderment smeared across my face. “It’s dangerous. But I think it’s less dangerous than leaving them here. If you dissolve the car—” His mouth suddenly contorted as he tried not to laugh.
“The car just happened! I needed something the ghosts could communicate through, and he can talk! It’s not my fault!”
“He,” Billy said, and gave up trying not to laugh. My ears burned red and he whooped until tears came to his eyes, finally promising, “It’s completely you,” as he wiped moisture away. “Release them from the car and they’ll come to me. It’ll be fine.”
I folded my arms, half sulking at being teased and half genuinely reluctant. I only had one argument to dissuade him, and I didn’t like it much. On the other hand, but besides being persuasive, it struck me as a genuine concern. “Okay. Look. We know I can keep them locked in, if necessary. Can you? Because…what happens if one of these things changes its mind about hanging around on you, and latches on to the baby when it’s born?”
I’d never seen Billy get so grim, which told me I was right: it was a legitimate danger. “We just won’t let that happen.”
“If Mel goes into labor before we get this thing resolved,” I said very steadily, “I’m taking the ghosts back. I don’t care what the other risks are.”
“Yeah.” Billy nodded, small tense motion that wasn’t like him. “Yeah, okay. It’s a deal.”
We shook on it, and I released the Trans Am thought-form to infect Billy with the vengeful dead.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It jolted us out of my garden, me blinking the Sight on as soon as I realized we were back in the real world. Morrison stopped drumming, but his hand remained raised, ready to strike the drum again if necessary. His aura hadn’t changed much since the last time he’d done this: it was still filled with rough edges of discomfort, purple and blue rubbing against each other wrong, but not badly enough to connote anger or fear. All too aware of the statement’s inaccuracy, I said, “We’re good,” and Morrison lowered the drumstick to wait on those of us with more esoteric skills to tell him what had happened.
Billy’s colors were grayed out, filmed over by his ghost riders. I could see varying shades, half a dozen or more soiling his presence. They amalgamated, darkening, and I imagined the ones he’d picked up in my garden were communicating Billy’s offer of help to those he’d carried from the party himself.
Either that or they were staging a hostile takeover, the thought of which didn’t reassure me at all. Mel sat up straight, her aura going bright with concern, though her daughter’s was rosy pink and serene with sleep. “What did you do to Bill?”
“Walker?” That was Morrison, a warning note in his voice before I had a chance to say anything. Then Billy spoke, and I was grateful, because anything I could say would sound like I was trying to fob off responsibility. It was his idea just didn’t cut it, even if it was true.
“It was my idea.” Billy lifted his head wearily. His eyes were dull. “The hauntings that held on to Joanne were old murder cases, and I promised we’d get them to a stronger medium to see if we could help.”
“A medium?” Morrison managed to keep the derision out of his voice, but he couldn’t bury the disbelief.
Billy swung his head toward the captain, the motion too heavy, like he didn’t have proper control of his actions. “It’s what I am, Captain. I communicate with the dead.” He didn’t exactly sound challenging, but there was a note of undeterrable conviction in his words. I knew Morrison was aware Billy had an affiliation for the weird that allowed his homicide cases to be solved in record time. That was why he’d partnered us. Still, from their expressions, it was safe to say they’d never discussed it over a beer.
After a few seconds Morrison bared his teeth, though the look came and went so fast I couldn’t have sworn I’d seen it. “Medium,” he said, and if I wasn’t sure his teeth had been bared, I was positive they were now clenched. “Shaman.” He scowled at Melinda. “Anything weird you want to put a label on?”
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