Spirit Dances
C.E. Murphy
For Seattle detective Joanne Walker, spring is about new beginnings: She’s mastered her shamanic abilities (mostly); survived a cannibalistic serial killer (barely); and now she’s facing the biggest challenge of her career–attending a dance concert with her sexy boss, Captain Michael Morrison.But when the performance–billed as transformative–actually changes her into a coyote, she and Morrison have bigger things to deal with…. And there's more. Homeless people are disappearing, a mystical murder puts Joanne way out of her jurisdiction and with the full moon coming on, it's looking like the killer is a creature that can't possibly exist.But Jo could probably handle all of that, if one ordinary homicide hadn't pushed her to the very edge…. Cop or shaman? The choice isn't easy. But it's one she just might have to make….
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and The Walker Papers series:
Urban Shaman
“A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist,
magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”
—Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series
Thunderbird Falls
“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
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a
compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and
successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—RT Book Reviews
Walking Dead
“Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping,
well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—
and stubborn—shaman.”
—RT Book Reviews
Demon Hunts
“Murphy carefully crafts her scenes and I felt every gust of wind
through the crispy frosted trees…. I am heartily looking forward
to further volumes.”
—The Discriminating Fangirl
Spirit Dances
Book Six: The Walker Papers
C. E. Murphy
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This one is for Matrice,
who has been waiting for it for a long, long time :)
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 THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER ONE
FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 8:34 A.M.
“Walker, Holliday, you’re up. Homicide in Ballard, probably domestic violence. Be there yesterday.” A set of sedan keys flew across the room at my head. I caught them painlessly, only because I’d just come in the door and hadn’t yet taken my gloves off. The guy who’d thrown them at me—our lieutenant, Braxton, who was decent, hardworking, and who never impinged on my consciousness for a single moment beyond those I spent following his direct commands—jerked his jaw at the door, indicating we should already be gone. I did a quick dance of shedding my coat, shrugging on my duty weapon—an item which, like Braxton, lay outside my realm of active awareness except when I was actually at work—and pulling the coat back on before my partner made it to the door.
Because my desk was three steps from the door, I got there first, and that meant I won: I got to drive. After nine months of that game, I wasn’t sure why we bothered, be cause neither of us pretended Billy was the better driver. Not that he was a bad driver, mind you. It’s just that it was the only class at the academy I’d been too proud to come in anything but first.
He caught up to me and muttered, “I hate domestic cases,” as we headed out the door.
“I know.” Nobody liked them, which was part of why Billy and I were up on this one. Braxton tried to rotate the DV cases through the whole Homicide team, because under the best of circumstances, they were emotionally messy, and under the worst—which was more usual—cops ended up the bad guys no matter what they did. “Could be worse. At least a murder means there won’t be an outraged spouse trying to beat us off because her partner didn’t really do anything wrong.”
“Walker, are you seriously telling me murder is preferable to a live victim who doesn’t want to press charges?”
“That wasn’t what I meant.” It was, however, kind of what I’d said. No wonder I let Billy do most of the talking at crime scenes. We drove over to Ballard while Dispatch offered a few more details on the homicide we were approaching. There was a pattern of abuse in the family, instigated by the wife, one Patricia “Patty” Raleigh, against whom the city had twice pressed charges. She’d done anger management courses and then a short stint in jail. We weren’t sure yet if it was herself or her husband, Nathan, or possibly both, who was the victim: one of their children had run out of the house, bloody and screaming hysterically about Mommy and Daddy being dead. The neighbor had called it in.
Billy left his coffee untouched as the information came in, muscle in his jaw bulging like flexible stone. “I hate domestic cases.”
“I know.” There was nothing else to say. I pulled up along the curb in front of the Raleighs’ ranch-style home a few minutes later, and we got out of the car. It wasn’t a wealthy part of the city, the houses mostly from the fifties and sixties. They tended to look careworn, with sagging fences, older tricycles and swing sets in small front yards. A few houses stood out as having been renovated: fresh paint, new roofs, lawns trim and shipshape even though winter was only just letting go its grip.
The Raleighs’ house wasn’t one of those. I glanced over it, then met the eyes of a broad-boned black woman standing in the next yard over. She had two kids with her, both white, both huddled against her strong form. Her hands were on their chests, over their hearts: protective, like a mama bear. She was probably the neighbor who’d called in the 273D, and the kids were probably Nathan and Patty Raleigh’s. I nodded to her once and she nodded back, then retreated to her front porch, taking the kids with her. She’d been letting us know where they were, and now planned to stay out of the way until we needed them and her. Most people intimately involved with a murder weren’t that clearheaded. I chalked it up to equal likelihoods that she was involved or that she was very sensible, and followed Billy up the driveway to the house.
He paused at the door, an eyebrow lifted at me. I gave him a nod much like I’d just given the neighbor, then let the Sight filter over my normal vision.
Truth was, though normal investigative homicides like this one made up the bulk of our work, Billy and I weren’t partnered because we were good at solving run-of-the-mill cases. We were partners because he saw dead people and I was a shaman. A healer, basically, though I had a wider range of talents than that. Together we made up Seattle’s one and only paranormal detective team, and even on a mundane case, there was no reason to let our esoteric skills go to waste.
The world viewed with the Sight was something of a wonder to behold. Everything shone with purpose, rich aura colors making light of the most ordinary objects. Newly budding leaves on trees thrummed with brilliant blue-green threads that would become bluer as they grew, until they were vibrant with life pouring through them. Houses, buildings and fences tended to radiate a resolute green, a pride in protecting the things they held. Everything, living or in animate, had purpose, and I could See that purpose when I looked with shamanic eyes.
I could also See people’s auras, even through walls, which was unusually handy in clearing a house for entry. There was nothing living inside the Raleighs’ house, though a bright orange shimmer said a housecat was probably in the back yard hunting early-season bugs. A crawl space beneath the house would’ve been a better choice for the cat: plastic tarp down there kept the earth warm and I could See the squirms of potato bugs and other such small things doing whatever it was bugs did. The attic was quieter than that, not so much as a squirrel hiding out. I nodded to give Billy the all-clear.
He knocked anyway, as was polite, and introduced us loudly before trying the doorknob. It turned, to neither of our surprise: if the kids had come running out, they weren’t very likely to have stopped and locked the door behind them. And an inSightful all-clear or not, we both went in like we were entering hostile territory, because God forbid I should be wrong and we should fail to follow protocol. Our boss—Morrison, the precinct captain, not Baxter-the-forgettable—would rip us apart if we did.
Nathan Raleigh was just inside the door, a late, macabre addition to an otherwise low-key, attractive living room. He hadn’t been dead all that long. His color was still fading, but there was a remarkable amount of blood soaking into the pale blue carpet. Billy and I exchanged glances, then Billy tipped his head to the left, indicating he’d check out the room through the next doorway, barely two steps away. I nodded and edged forward just far enough to keep an eye on him. There was a short hallway in front of us, down which I guessed were bedrooms, which I couldn’t let go uncovered while he checked out the open-plan kitchen and second living room to our left.
He said, “Clear,” after a few seconds. “Doorway to my right.”
“One to my left here, too.” We knocked our respective doors open, winding up on opposite ends of a T-shaped bathroom, guns pointed at each other. Billy crooked a faint grin, then stepped into the top of the T, putting himself exactly opposite me.
A short brunette woman came through the door behind him, a nail-spiked baseball bat already descending toward his skull.
I shot her.
CHAPTER TWO
Time slowed down in crises, for me. I wasn’t sure it was possible to drop into actual bullet-time, like in The Matrix, but I swore I saw the bullet’s spin and the percussion blast as it slammed into Patricia Raleigh’s right shoulder. Blood misted out. She screamed. The bat’s downward momentum was knocked far enough askew to no longer threaten Billy. He hit the deck anyway, flipping on his back to bring his weapon up defensively, finger still on the trigger-guard.
Mine was still squeezing the trigger. My throat hurt, though I couldn’t remember yelling. I knew I should have. Drop your weapon! or Police! or something like that. Maybe I’d said both. In protocol terms, it mattered. It mattered very much. In real-world terms, it mattered a lot less: my partner had been under attack, and shouting was never going to stop the bat from bashing into him. One shot, a good one, had been enough. Good thing, too. I’d never shot another human being before. I wasn’t sure I could do it again, even for a double-tap to make certain Billy would remain safe.
Patty Raleigh staggered a few steps backward and fell over.
My belly erupted with pain, diamond claws digging in and hauling my insides apart as the core of my magic went to war with what I’d just done. I dropped my gun and limped forward, one arm curled over my stomach. I paused next to Billy, who hadn’t yet moved, cords standing out in his neck and breath coming hard. He jerked his gaze to me, then nodded, one sharp movement to say he was okay. Nausea that I interpreted as relief swept through the pain in my gut, and I kicked Patty Raleigh’s baseball bat—it was already bloodied, the nail thick with matter I didn’t want to examine—farther away before kneeling at her side.
There was no exit wound spilling blood onto her pale blue carpet, which meant the bullet had lodged in her right clavicle. A very good shot, then, because the impact and lodgment would have knocked her farther off balance than a clear shot through the muscle would have. In terms of preventing a nail from taking up residence in Billy’s head, I couldn’t have done better without killing her.
Which I hadn’t. She was still breathing, though the inhalations were shallow and shocky, and her eyes were glazed with pain. The wound technically wasn’t life-threatening, but that made less difference than people thought, with shooting victims. Shock or sepsis did them in. The human body was not meant to stop small metal objects traveling at 850 feet per second, and tended to react poorly. Patty Raleigh might very well die with me kneeling beside her.
Of course, I could prevent that from happening. Or at least, I could in theory prevent it. My stomach was still a mass of twisting pain, every bit of magic I’d ever commanded turning black and red with its own kind of septic shock. My fingers were too thick to bend, my hands frozen and stiff. I put one on Raleigh’s shoulder and applied pressure, disquieted at the heat of her blood. She gurgled, more disturbing than a scream, and I thought if anything should unlock the healing magic I carried within me, it should be that sound.
Nothing happened, not a rush of instantaneous healing, not even the far more familiar layered vehicle body work that I’d used as my healing imagery for most of a year. I was no more use than any ordinary person, putting pressure on a bleeding wound. “Billy.”
He started talking as I said his name, calling in the shooting, requesting an ambulance, requesting backup: all the things I’d been going to ask him to do. Intellectually I knew he was on the ball, that it had been barely ten seconds since Patricia Raleigh had swung the bat at his head, but I felt encased in ice, like everything was still happening at a glacial pace. Shock, just like Raleigh was in.
Billy said, “Don’t move,” to me, and went to clear the rest of the house. I should have thought of that. I should have thought of a lot, except I couldn’t think of what else I might have done. Patty hadn’t been in the house—hadn’t been on the property—when I’d examined it psychically. Either that or she could batten down her aura like nobody I’d ever met, but I really didn’t think so.
There was an open sliding glass door beside us, making up the back wall of the living room. She’d clearly come through it, but where she’d been before that, I had no idea. The cat I’d Seen was still pouncing around the backyard, intent on capturing a moth.
“Clear.” Billy came back from the bedrooms and crouched beside me, face grim with concern. “You okay, Walker?”
“Yes. No. I can’t heal her.”
To my utter surprise, he touched my right cheek. I had a scar there, thin and mostly invisible, a remnant and reminder of the day my shamanic powers had exploded to life. “You couldn’t heal this, either. Some things aren’t meant to be fixed.”
“But I did this.” My belly cramped again and the words came out tiny and painful.
“Maybe that’s why you can’t undo it. The paramedics will be here in a few minutes.” He was silent a few seconds, then put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing. “You saved my life.”
I wanted to make a joke. Just a small one, something about I had to or your wife would kill me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t at all. I only nodded, a jerky little motion like he’d given me a minute earlier. He offered a heartbreaking smile in return, like he understood exactly what I couldn’t say. “Keep pressure on that wound until the ambulance arrives.”
It was a very sensible order. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something, when we both knew the truth was I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. If I’d had to, yeah, probably. But short of somebody else coming out of the woodwork to kill Billy, no, I was stuck there on my knees next to Patricia Raleigh for the interim. I nodded again, and Billy went to the front door to await an onslaught of cops, paramedics, forensic examiners and, inevitably, Michael Morrison, captain of the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct, and our boss.
I was sitting on the front steps, holding gun and badge loosely in my hands, when he came up the driveway. Any cop involved in a shooting had an automatic three-day suspension, so Morrison didn’t have to ask: I just handed the weapon and badge over. Patty Raleigh’s blood was under my fingernails, and Morrison noticed it as he accepted them. He checked the chamber and magazine—I’d already unloaded it—then tucked the gun into an empty holster under his suit jacket before asking, “What happened?”
I knew I should probably stand up and make a brisk report, but instead I stayed seated and outlined the incident in as few words as possible, mostly staring at Morrison’s belt while I did so. “Paramedics took Raleigh away about three minutes ago. She’ll probably live. Billy’s, uh. He’s inside, heading up the investigation on Nathan Raleigh. He thought it was better if I…”
Morrison nodded, only partially visible from my viewpoint angle. Then he sat down beside me, wooden porch creaking with his weight. “So what happened?”
I looked sideways at him. He wasn’t looking at me, gaze focused on the fence or the street beyond it, but he didn’t have to be looking my way for me to feel the weight of his concern or his determination to get an answer. I put my hands over my face, realized they smelled like blood, and dropped them again to stare at the street just like Morrison was doing. “I couldn’t heal her. I couldn’t…”
“I’ve seen you use shields to protect people. Why didn’t you stop her that way? Put one up around Holliday?”
Christ. Morrison, who liked magic even less than I did, would still be a better practitioner than I was. “I didn’t think of it. This wasn’t a paranormal case. It was a domestic homicide. I don’t usually bring the whole shooting match to the day job. She was there, she had a weapon, I had a weapon, I shot her. And now my gut feels like I ate a box of fishhooks and the healing won’t respond. And if I was anybody else you wouldn’t be wondering why I used my Glock .40 instead of magic.”
“That’s true. But you’re not anybody else.” Morrison exhaled, and I dropped my head again, though I kept my fingers laced together in front of my knees, not wanting to breathe in the scent of blood a second time. He was right. I wasn’t certain he was unconditionally right, but the power within me had always put forth some pretty clear ideas on what I should and shouldn’t do. The wrenching pain in my stomach and the lack of response from the magic both told me flat-out I’d chosen poorly.
“I’m supposed to be on a warrior’s path, you know that?” I asked the stairs beneath my feet. Morrison didn’t know, because I’d never discussed it with him. I didn’t discuss it with many people, much less the boss with whom I had, until quite recently, had a distinctly antagonistic relationship. “That’s what I was told right when all this started. That I was a healer on a warrior’s path. That I was going to have to fight to make things right. But there’s no memo. There’s no handbook saying ‘these are the circumstances you get to fight in.’ Instead what happens is something like today. Or back with the goddamned zombies. God, I hate zombies. Anyway, I always find out the hard way that I can’t use the magic offensively or it craps out on me. Now it turns out if I use ordinary real-world physical force on ordinary real-world people, I get bit in the ass for that, too. I know you don’t think I’m the greatest cop in the world, but I followed protocol. I did the right thing in police terms to protect my partner. Didn’t I?”
My voice got small as I recognized there were probably a million people it’d be better to say this to than Morrison. Unlucky for him, he was the one who’d asked what had happened, and unlike the psychologist I knew I’d have to talk to later, he was aware of and believed in—however reluctantly—the occult side of my life.
“There’ll be an investigation before I can properly answer that, Walker,” he said with unusual gentleness. I put my face in my hands again after all, holding my breath to avoid the smell of blood, and startled when he touched my shoulder. “But yes, it sounds like you did.” His voice went wry. “And no one else will be asking why you didn’t use a magic shield instead of a gun. I just wondered.”
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to think of the magic first, Morrison. Most cases don’t need it. I’m…” I trailed off with no real idea of what I wanted to say, and Morrison got to his feet.
“You’re officially suspended from duty pending an investigation into this shooting, Walker. A minimum of three days. Thanks for not making that difficult. You have an appointment with the psychologist at one. Get somebody to bring you back to the precinct building and get cleaned up. I want to see you when you’re done talking with her.”
I whispered, “Yes, sir,” and went to do as I was told.
Being suspended from duty for three days almost certainly meant “go home once you’re cleaned up,” but although I only lived a few miles from the precinct building, back-and-forthing seemed like a waste of time. I had clothes at work—the blue polyester pants and button-down shirt that were ubiquitous to police officers everywhere—so I showered, put them on and went back to my desk in Homicide. There was paperwork to do, not just for the morning: there was always paperwork to catch up on. It was a damned sight better to work than sit at home and brood. One of the other detectives came by to offer me a green armband, which was his way of offering sympathy for the morning’s incident without making a fuss about it. I put the armband on, glad not to have gotten pinched, and spent the next three hours writing reports, filling out forms and trying hard not to think about Patricia Raleigh’s glassy stare and short, shallow breaths. Mostly it worked, except when I had to write the actual incident report, and then I sat there a long time, wondering why I hadn’t responded the way Morrison suggested I should have.
Well, no. Not really wondering. I’d gone to the police academy, and though there’d been three solid years of working for the department as a mechanic before I became a cop, at the end of the day, I’d been trained to react the way I had. A couple of times during the academy I’d awakened from dreams I didn’t remember, kneeling in the middle of my bed in a firing position. That kind of training became hardwiring, and nothing I’d done in the past fifteen months had driven magic-using responses that deep into my brain. There was, as far as I knew, no such thing as shamanic boot camp, much as I could use it.
Knives prickled at my gut again, suggesting that I really could use a shamanic boot camp, or something else that forced me to react with magic first and brute force later. Either that or it was sheer nervousness, as it was a few minutes to one and I had an appointment with a shrink. I abandoned my desk and went upstairs to her office, heart hammering and hands cold for the second time that day. I’d met the psychologist, talked with her a few times, but never officially, and for some reason it was terrifying.
She took one look at my expression when I came in and said, “Don’t worry, everybody feels that way the first time. I promise it won’t hurt a bit. Louise Caldwell, not that you don’t know that.” She offered a hand, I shook it, and we both sat down as she asked, “How’re you doing?”
“Been better.” A shrink probably expected a deeper, more profound answer than that. I held my breath, sought something more profound and came up with the same thing again, this time as a shaky laugh on an exhalation: “Yeah. Been better.”
“Good,” she said crisply. “You’d be surprised how many people walk through that door after shooting someone and say they’re just fine. Did you have a choice?”
I blinked, taken aback at the no-nonsense approach. I thought psychologists were supposed to pussyfoot around things. Not that Dr. Caldwell looked like the pussyfooting sort: she was in her late forties, gray streaks at her temples probably indicative of carefully dyed hair, and dressed in a well-tailored suit that gave an impression of seriousness. I cleared my throat, wondered if that came across as hesitating and shook my head. “I really don’t think so. There was no warning. Detective Holliday stepped into the bathroom and she was behind him, already swinging the bat. If I hadn’t reacted immediately he would be badly injured, maybe dead.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“I’d sure as hell rather have shot her than have Billy be in the hospital! Especially since she’s not dead.” I cleared my throat again, pretty certain that was entirely the wrong thing to say, but faint humor flickered across Dr. Caldwell’s face.
“That’s a comparatively healthy attitude, Detective. It’s easy, in a bad situation, to accept only blame instead of seeing the other potential side of the scenario. As you say, she isn’t dead. Was that a deliberate choice?”
“No. It was just the clearest shot I had, her right shoulder. Billy dropped, but I didn’t double-tap. That…that was deliberate. Kind of. I don’t know if I could’ve shot a second time.” I looked away from her, focusing on one of half a dozen framed certificates on the wall, and much more quietly said, “I could have if she’d kept coming. I would have. I don’t think I knew that until right now.”
My stomach twisted again, glass shards jabbing at me, but somehow the knowledge made me feel better in a completely screwed-up way. Police officers almost never had to shoot anyone in the line of duty even once, much less twice, but I was darkly certain I could do it again if I had to. I didn’t want to, but there was probably something wrong with somebody who wanted to go around shooting people. I relaxed a little and Caldwell saw it, but apparently it was okay. She kept me there for over an hour, asking questions that eventually had me weary to the bone, but I walked out feeling like I hadn’t completely fucked up, either at the scene that morning or there in her office. I had no idea what she would tell Morrison, but I was too tired to worry about it.
I went by his office as instructed, but he wasn’t there. I dropped off my incident report, then went back upstairs to Homicide to collect my coat. At some point “suspended from duty” had to mean “go home,” and I was emotionally wrung out enough to decide that point was now. Morrison could kill me for disobeying the come-see-me order later, after I’d napped. Coat in hand, I waved a short goodbye to the rest of the team and headed for the door.
It cracked open before I got there, revealing a sliver of a woman in her fifties. She had an exceedingly mild blue gaze and short hair that had at one time been blond, but had since gone dirty yellow. She was dressed eclectically in a long skirt, a wool overcoat with a reflective vest over it and combat boots. There was a sparkly green shamrock pinned to the vest. On someone else, the whole outfit could’ve been deliberate eccentricity. On her it looked like the Army-Navy surplus store.
I fumbled to make sure my own green armband was in place as I tugged the door all the way open. “Oh, hi, sorry, come on in. I’m Detective Walker. Can I help you?”
“Detective Joanne Walker?”
I looked over my shoulder like I expected another Detective Joanne Walker to have appeared, then shook myself and looked back. “That’s me. Can I help you?”
A smile rushed across her face and took ten years off her age. “My name is Rita Wagner. You saved my life.”
CHAPTER THREE
There was nothing like a statement of that nature to take one’s mind off the problems at hand, especially when the problem at hand was nearly the polar opposite. My brain dropped out of the slightly shocky slow motion it had been lingering in all day and surged into its more usual mouthy overdrive.
I had done a variety of remarkable things over the past year. Many of them had involved saving peoples’ lives, although most of the time they had looked more like shutting down Seattle’s power, rearranging the Lake Washington landscape, or wrestling monsters of differing sizes and shapes. In the handful of cases where I’d actively saved someone, I usually knew what they looked like.
I’d never seen this woman before in my life. I was searching for a nice way to say that when she continued, “You probably don’t remember. Officer Ray Campbell told me it was you, though, who got the ambulance there in time to sa—”
She kept going, but I said, “Oh! You’re the troll lady!” over her, and only too late realized how awful that sounded. I didn’t mean it badly. It was just that she’d gotten in trouble down by the Fremont Troll, one of Seattle’s more charming landmarks, and I’d never learned her name. I’d only saved her life. I’d been three miles away at the top of the Space Needle, looking for something else entirely, when I’d Seen a flare of rage and violence in Seattle’s city-wide aura. Because of that, the cops had gotten there before aggravated assault turned to murder in the third degree.
She was still smiling. “I am. I’m the troll lady. I know it’s been months, Detective Walker, but I wanted to thank you. I—”
Feeling a little desperate, like I’d become a bad host by way of not recognizing the troll lady, I blurted, “Would you like to sit down?” with too much emphasis on the last two words. I sounded like something dire would happen if she didn’t. A wince crawled over my whole body, caving my shoulders, and I tried for a more modulated tone: “Or go for coffee or something? I mean, it’s great to meet you, but the department’s not very comfortable, we could take a few minutes to talk, we—” I wished someone would come along and stuff a sock in my mouth.
Instead Rita gave me another astonishing smile. It really did take years off her face, and I wondered if she was a hard forty-something instead of the fifties I’d originally pegged her as. “If you have time, I’d like to have coffee. You don’t know me, but I feel like I owe you something. At least a cup of coffee.”
I said, “You don’t,” under my breath, but it didn’t matter to either of us whether she legitimately owed me something or not. I was grateful as hell to get hit in the face with evidence of having done well, and even if I hadn’t been, I also wasn’t callous enough to say “Just doing my job.” Even if that was true, when you’d saved someone’s life, regardless of the madcap fashion, there was an element to it that ran deeper than just doing the job. Humans were like that. We needed connections and stories to make sense of the world, and Rita Wagner had become part of my story. “There’s a terrific coffee shop up the block.”
“The Missing O? I saw it, but I thought it was a doughnut shop.”
I tugged my coat on, hiding the green armband. “It is, but it has good coffee, too, and we call it a coffee shop as to not perpetuate the stereotype of cops and doughnuts.” My indulgence in the stereotype, now that I thought about it, was probably responsible for five or so pounds that had crept up on me the last few months. I made a note to buy vegetables, even though I knew they’d end up melting into brown slime in my fridge’s fruit bin, and held the door for Rita. We escaped the precinct building a minute later, me holding the door for her again. “Not to be rude, but why now?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d like me very much straight off,” she said forthrightly. I did a classic double-take, the second glance offering me a glimpse at her aura as the Sight washed on without my conscious command. That, as much as her mood-altering arrival, was a relief: the soured magic inside me wasn’t so intent on punishing me for my misdeeds that I couldn’t use the Sight. Rita’s colors were mostly brown, earthy and steady, with prickles of yellow poking through. The prickles were nervousness: she was afraid I’d judge her. Or maybe that I’d judge who she’d been three months ago.
It clearly wasn’t necessary. She was doing a fine job of bringing down judgment on herself. I said, “Why not?” with genuine curiosity, though I already had a pretty good idea of the answer.
“I was a drunk living rough and fighting over booze and drugs. I smelled like beer and piss and figured I’d die soon and nobody would care.”
I said, “Someone always cares,” very softly, though I was sadly aware it wasn’t quite true. Still, Rita gave me a quick look that turned into another one of her de-aging smiles. For someone who’d been living on the brink of extinction only a few months earlier, she sure seemed to smile a lot.
Then again, maybe she had reason. “I wouldn’t have agreed with you, the day I got stabbed. I’d have said nobody ever cares. I had blood leaking through my fingers. I could see it freezing on the ice. I knew I was dying, Detective Walker, and I figured that made me one less problem in the world.”
We reached The Missing O as she said that, leaving a nice dramatic moment to pick up from once we’d ordered coffee and doughnuts. Or, more accurately, a hot chocolate with mint for me, pumpkin-spiced tea for her and frosting-covered cinnamon doughnuts called pershings, which were as big as my head, for both of us. Mindful of being in polite company, which was to say someone who didn’t put up with me daily, I tried very hard not to lick the frosting off my pershing like a six-year-old while Rita picked up her story again.
“I still have dreams about the ambulance. All the sirens and lights. I was bleeding a lot and it all seemed loud and bright and I got the idea it was God sending angels to say ‘Not this one, not yet.’” She picked up her tea, hiding behind it as she gave me a wary, hopeful look. “Does that sound crazy?”
Thoughtful as always, I said, “Yes,” then made a face. “Sorry. I’ve heard much crazier things.” I’d done much crazier things, but I didn’t want to get into that. “They say God works in mysterious ways. Ambulances and cops aren’t even all that mysterious, when you get right down to it.”
Her eyebrows, which were almost nonexistent, twitched up. “Do you believe in God?”
Man. There was a question I didn’t want to contemplate, much less give an answer to. I exhaled noisily into my hot chocolate and stared at my doughnut for a while. “Not by nature, no. But there’s a lot more out there than is dreamt of in my philosophy. I know that for a fact.” Because fifteen months ago I hadn’t believed in magic at all, and these days I was a regular practitioner. Which was something else I wasn’t about to lay out for Rita Wagner.
“Me either. Not by nature. If I believed in God at all, it was to have someone to blame. But Officer Campbell said you’d called in the attack before you even got there, and that sounds a lot like a miracle to me. I thought if somebody’s putting out a miracle for me then maybe I’d better get my shit together. The hospital got me into an AA program and I’m doing volunteer work at a shelter.” She finally put her tea down, though she kept her hands wrapped around the cup. Her fingers were thin and sallow, like they’d been frostbitten. “So I thought now was a good time to see you. I thought now you could be glad you saved me.”
Hot chocolate went down the wrong way and I coughed. “I was pretty glad before.” My boss and partner had been gladder. I’d been too fixated on the thing I’d been trying, and failing, to do, to be sufficiently impressed with myself for saving someone from halfway across the city. Yet another data point Rita Wagner probably didn’t need to know. I chewed my lower lip, not wanting to be condescending. “You didn’t have to do all this to make a good impression, but I’m glad you did. You’re kind of amazing, Rita. Maybe I saved your life, but you’re the one turning it around. That’s huge. You should be proud. I am. Is it okay if I say that?”
Pleasure swept her face, like I’d given her some kind of benediction she’d been hoping for. “It’s okay.”
It struck me that Rita was a very lonely woman, and that I might be the only person to whom she could hold herself accountable. I had issues of my own galore, even overlooking the shooting. The idea that I could be someone else’s lifeline back into society would be laughable, if it weren’t also so sad. “Well, then, I’m proud of you. Where do you volunteer?”
“At Solid Ground, downtown. At their new soup kitchen off Pioneer Square, mostly, but that’s the other reason I wanted to visit you now. They just did one of their fundraising drives and had a lot of people with money at their headquarters last week. The volunteers got prizes drawn out of a hat, and I, well, I can’t use mine, so I thought…I thought I could say thank you by giving it to you.” She dug into the pocket of her wool overcoat and came out with a small brown envelope which she pushed across the table to me. “They’re tickets. To a dance performance. Native American dancers, they’re on tour. I didn’t know it before I saw you, but you’re Indian, aren’t you? Maybe you’ll like it.”
My gaze ping-ponged between the envelope and Rita, astonishment at the gift warring with astonishment at what she said. “My dad’s Cherokee, yeah. Hardly anybody sees that in me. My coloring’s all wrong.” I had Dad’s black hair, but I’d gotten sunburnable pale skin and green eyes from my Irish mother, and people rarely saw past that to notice my bone structure. In black and white, I looked Indian. In color, I looked Irish. “Um. God, Rita. I’m not sure I can accept these. I mean, like, legally, ethically, all of that. I had to make the lady who runs my favorite Chinese restaurant stop giving me free food when I became a cop…”
“Take them.” She patted the envelope, then pulled her hands away. “I really can’t use them, percussion makes me crazy. If you can’t use them yourself, you probably know more people who could than I do.” She made a small gesture at herself and added, “Most of the people I know wouldn’t pass the dress code.”
I smiled. “You’re assuming I’ve got something nicer to wear than what I’ve got on.” I did, but even my polyester pants were probably more suitable to an evening out than Rita’s blaze-yellow safety jacket. On the other hand, this was the Pacific Northwest. I doubted they’d throw her out if she turned up in it. I picked up the tickets and tapped them against the table, then nodded and tucked them in my coat pocket. I was sure Morrison wouldn’t approve, but I didn’t want to insult the woman. I’d go back to the office and skulk around until he showed up so I could ask him what to do about them, out of Rita’s sight and hearing. For the moment I said, “Thank you. It’s not at all necessary, you know that, right? But thank you.”
“I know. But I can’t use them, and it made an excuse to meet you.”
She had a smile to break my heart. I wondered what her story was, and couldn’t think of a way to ask without seeming rude. We chatted a few minutes longer, then at the same time glanced toward the clock on the O’s back wall and said, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get back.”
I grinned, and Rita added, “The shelter starts serving dinner at four and I help cook, so I need to catch a bus back downtown. I hope you go to the concert, Detective. And thank you for letting me meet with you.”
I shook my head. “Thanks for coming up. We don’t usually get visitors who are just coming to say hi. Usually something terrible’s happened. It’s nice to see something wonderful happening instead.” Especially after today, but that was yet another thing she didn’t need to know. We got up and I figured if I was going back to the office, I might as well return bearing gifts. I ordered Morrison what the menu called a St. Patrick’s Day Latte, and examined the doughnut cabinet, which had an array of mint-to pine-green frosted doughnuts lined up by hue.
The drink that came back was swamp-green and decidedly nasty-looking. Rita gave it, then the doughnut cabinet, a considering look, then smiled at me. “I’ll go catch my bus while you decide if you’re brave enough to bring someone that horrid-looking drink or make people break a bunch of Lenten promises with those doughnuts. It was nice to meet you, Detective Walker.”
“I think I’ll do both.” I ordered one of each shade of doughnut and waved goodbye at Rita at the same time. “It was nice to meet you, too. Visit again sometime, okay?” She nodded on her way out the door, and a couple minutes later we waved again as I hurried past the bus stop back to the precinct building.
Billy had returned by the time I got back and took the latte with a suspicious sniff. I’d meant it for Morrison, but Billy’s grimace after taking a sip made me just as glad he’d swiped it instead. The rest of the Homicide detectives swarmed the doughnut box like a pack of wolves, and I retreated to Morrison’s office, ticket envelope held between my fingers like it might bite.
He was concentrating on paperwork, which gave me a moment to stare at the top of his head and get my nerve up.
I usually thought of him as silvering, but looking at the top of his head made it clear he was really just silver. He wasn’t that old, not yet forty. I wondered when he’d started going gray. Not that it mattered. It looked good on him, playing into the whole aging-superhero look that I thought of as being his thing.
I rattled myself and tapped on his door. Morrison glanced up, curiosity sliding across his face. “You look nervous, Walker. Caldwell said the interview went well. What’s wrong?”
“You said to come by, and besides, I have a ques…” My knees buckled a little as my brain caught up to what he’d said. I caught myself on the door frame. “She said that?”
Morrison elevated an eyebrow. “Did you think other wise?”
“Morrison, I’ve never shot…” I closed the door behind me and sat down, probably signaling to everyone in the open office area outside that I was in trouble again, but for once I didn’t care, possibly because for once I wasn’t actually in trouble. “I’ve never shot anyone before,” I said quietly. “I’ve never spent any significant time talking to a shrink. I had no idea if it went badly or well.”
“I’ve talked to Holliday and Caldwell. They’re both working up their reports, and I saw you already dropped yours off. It was a shit situation, Detective, and from what I’m seeing so far you handled it as well as you could’ve.”
“Even…” I waved a hand, encompassing the whole magical aspect of my skill set which I’d utterly failed to use.
“As you said, if it was anyone else, I wouldn’t even have asked. I shouldn’t have asked you. You did what I’d expect any detective to do when her partner was in danger. The suspension is still in effect,” he warned me. “I can’t do anything about that.”
“No, I know, it’s fine. It’s standard procedure. I just…” The last word came out as a shuddering breath and I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying not to let stinging tears overwhelm me. My hands smelled like maple frosting and cinnamon now, a vast improvement over the pre-shower scent of blood. “Sorry. I’m a little up and down. I just, I feel like I made the right choices, but it helps to hear you say that, sir. Thank you. And if there’s anything else I need to do or not do while the incident is being looked into…”
“Just keep your nose clean. You can manage that for three days, right?”
I groaned and pushed the envelope across his desk at him. “I don’t know. Tell me if this qualifies. The woman whose life I saved down at the Fremont Troll in December just gave me these.”
Morrison shook the tickets free of the envelope before eyeing me. “Dance concert tickets?”
“She won them at a…” It didn’t matter. “She gave them to me as a way of saying thank you. I told her she didn’t have to, but she insisted and I didn’t want to insult her and I didn’t know if it was like an ethical breach to take them so, well, I just thought I should take them and then come ask you—”
“Ask what?” Morrison said in amazement, interrupting my breathless explanation. “If I wanted to go with you?”
“—er.” For an excruciatingly long moment that was all I could think to say. Long enough that Morrison figured out that wasn’t at all what I’d meant to ask, and began to look uncomfortable. I followed up my initial witty “er” with a salvo of, “Uh,” then rubbed my nose ferociously. “Actually I’d been going to ask if it was an ethical breach or if it was okay for me to take them. But now that you mention it, um, there’s only two tickets so I can’t invite Billy and Melinda along, and Gary’s out of town, so if it’s okay for me to accept them, um, well. Would you…like to go with me?”
Someone with a modicum of cool wouldn’t have put all the emphasis on like. Sadly, I was not that person. The way I asked it sounded as if the idea that Morrison might want to go out with me was only slightly less unlikely than, say, the idea that a Hollywood producer might walk into the precinct building and randomly choose me to be the next twenty-million-dollar star.
For a few seconds I waited for a Hollywood producer to walk into the room, but it didn’t happen. Instead Morrison glanced at the tickets again, then shrugged. “I don’t have anything planned for tonight, and God knows you probably need some kind of distraction. Just log the tickets as a gift, and if the woman ever needs anything else from you make sure every second of your interactions are observed.”
“Yes, sir.” He could’ve been suggesting I take a long walk off a short pier, for all I was comprehending. I took the tickets back, got up, made it to the door, and said, “Er,” for the second time in our conversation. “Should I pick you up…?”
There was no chance on earth he would agree. My car was a 1969 Mustang named Petite who clocked over a hundred and ninety miles an hour. His was a nameless 2003 Toyota Avalon with the highest safety rating in its class. Ne’er the twain should meet.
Morrison’s expression, almost without changing, suggested the idea was so outrageous it stretched all the way to funny. “I don’t think so, Walker.”
“Well, then, we’ll have to meet there, because I have my pride.” And my smarts. Petite would never forgive me for tarting around with an Avalon. She knew these things.
Minute laugh lines crinkled around Morrison’s blue eyes. “Fair enough. I’ll see you at a quarter to eight, then. Go home and get some rest.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I scurried back up to Homicide, where, fortunately, all the doughnuts had already been eaten. I’d have gone on a panic-inspired binge if they hadn’t been. Instead I seized Billy’s arm and hauled him off to the broom closet which doubled as a crash pad for cops whose shifts had gone on too long.
He came along willingly enough, though he did say, “Do I need to tell Melinda you’re dragging me off to bed?” as I banged the closet door open and propelled him inside.
“Please don’t. She may be little, but she be fierce, and she’d kick my ass. Billy, something has gone terribly wrong. Somebody gave me concert tickets and now I’ve got a…a… like a date with Morrison!”
My partner was a steady soul. A good man. The sort, in fact, who could walk away from nearly getting a nail through the skull and still remain a bastion of calm. I was sure he, too, had seen Dr. Caldwell this afternoon, but there was nothing in his demeanor which suggested he’d had a bad day. That’s how glued-together he was.
So I hardly expected him to fall into a fit of what could only be called giggles, even if men who stood well over six feet tall were not normally prone to giggling. Offended, I stared at him, which upgraded his giggles to whoops. He staggered back, sat on the army-corners bed and leaned against the far wall while gales of laughter shook his body. It took over a minute for him to catch his breath, and I thought perhaps he was just a leeeettle more on edge about the morning’s events than he’d been letting on. Still, it was with genuine merriment that he said, “Sorry, Joanie, it’s just that when something’s gone wrong around you it usually runs to the apocalyptic. The captain having a date, even with you, probably isn’t a sign of the end times. Besides, isn’t it about time?”
My head heated up. I hated to think what color my cheeks were. “It’s not that kind of date!”
“Of course it is.” Billy wiped his eyes, looking as happy as I’d ever seen him. “For one thing, if you didn’t think it was, you wouldn’t be having a meltdown.”
“Billy, he’s my boss! Our boss!” Which, while true, had hardly stopped me from slowly falling for the man. I really didn’t know when it had happened.
Just because I didn’t know when it had happened, however, didn’t mean every single person I knew hadn’t noticed it happening. In fact, they’d all clued in ages before I did, which was its own kind of humiliating. I sank down on the bed beside Billy and mumbled, “It was his stupid idea,” into my hands.
Billy patted my shoulder and did a credible job of not sounding too interested in the details. “Really? Morrison asked you out?”
“Well, sort of!” I knew he was going to go home and gleefully tell Melinda everything, but I explained the awful scene in Morrison’s office anyway.
Billy manfully didn’t start giggling again. “He likes you, you know.”
“I drive him insane.”
“Which doesn’t negate the point. Look, Walker.” Billy knocked his shoulder against mine. “Just go and have a good time. A date is not the end of the world.”
“It is if I don’t have anything to wear!” Oh, God. I was turning into a stereotypical female before my very own eyes.
Billy choked on another laugh. “Call Phoebe. She likes dressing you.”
I opened my mouth to argue, then slumped. My friend Phoebe was a fencing teacher by vocation, but a fashionista in her heart of hearts. Tall, generally slender me was her idea of a perfect model. She loved dressing me up. Moreover, she had vastly better taste in clothes and style than I did, and I had the entire remainder of the afternoon, thanks to the suspension of duty. There was no chance she couldn’t make me presentable. “Okay, but I’m blaming you if this is a disaster.”
“It won’t be a disaster.”
That was our cue to leave the broom closet, but I only nodded moodily and sat there, slouched, for a minute before nerving myself up to say, “So how’re you doing?” in a much more subdued tone.
Billy pushed out a huge breath of air and said, “Okay,” after a while. “You?”
I bobbed my head around in a noncommittal okay of my own. “I haven’t heard how she is, yet.”
“Stable. She’s going to be fine. You did good, Joanie. The neighbor—not the one with the kids—said he thought she’d been hiding in their doghouse.”
“Big dog.”
“German shepherd.”
That was big enough, all right. “How’d she get into the yard?”
“Hole in the fence. The kids use it to go back and forth to play.”
I said, “Shit,” and put my face in my hands. “I should’ve looked beyond the Raleigh property. I’m sorry, Billy.”
“We weren’t supposed to be checking out anybody else’s property. You did fine. You saved my life.”
This time I managed the tiny joke I’d been reaching for earlier: “Had to. Who else on the force is going to put up with my bizarre life?”
He knocked his shoulder against mine again, a familiar and comforting action. “Nobody, that’s who. Don’t think I don’t know it.”
I wobbled from the impact. “Don’t think I don’t.” I had, for most of the four years we’d known each other, given him endless hell about his belief in the paranormal, right up until the paranormal came and bit me on the ass. Since then he’d put up with my shenanigans, held his tongue time and again and generally been as stalwart a companion as a girl could ask for. Nobody would have treated me as well as he did, past, present or future. I didn’t deserve him, but I was grateful as hell to have him. “You call Mel yet?”
“No. Morrison’s sent me home for the afternoon, soon as I get my report in. I thought it’d be better to talk to her face-to-face. She can’t panic about me being dead if I’m standing right there.”
“As long as the news isn’t reporting a North Precinct cop involved in a shooting incident yet, that’s probably a good idea.”
Billy looked pained and stood up. “I better check on that. You heading out?”
“Yeah. To let Phoebe dress me, I guess.”
My partner grinned. “Get a photo. ’Cause I promise, it won’t be a disaster.”
FRIDAY, MARCH 17, 7:53 P.M.
It wasn’t a disaster.
Phoebe had slicked my short hair back in that wet look that either really works or really doesn’t. To my surprise, it worked: without any bits of hair to soften them, my cheekbones looked sculpted. Then she’d applied just enough makeup to smooth my skin and emphasize my eyes, so I almost didn’t look like I was wearing makeup, a trick I’d never myself learned. At my insistence, she’d left my eclectic jewelry—ivory coyote earrings, a silver choker necklace and a copper bracelet—alone.
The jewelry, though, was the only decision I could pretend was my own. I wouldn’t have dared put me into a forest-green velvet sheath that bared my broad shoulders and made my waist look improbably small. Also, any dress I would have chosen would’ve come to my ankles, whereas this one stopped somewhere just beyond fingertip-length. My legs were long to begin with. A dress that quit that far above my feet, coupled with three-inch strappy gold heels, made them go on forever. Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I didn’t know who I was, which made me accept the possibility that I was smokin’ hot. I owed Phoebe one.
The advantage to being a smidge under six feet tall in bare feet was that if I wore three-inch heels, there was almost no one I couldn’t see over. Beautifully dressed theater-goers milled around me and I stared over their heads, watching the front doors. In another two minutes I was leaving. The insurance I’d taken out on my nerves to make myself leave the apartment in my fancy new dress didn’t cover being stood up. It wasn’t a scenario I’d even considered.
Anticipated humiliation was getting my heart rate up when Morrison walked in. I’d never seen him in a tux. In fact, of all the people I interacted with regularly, the only one I’d seen in a tux was Billy’s wife Melinda. She’d been nine months pregnant and cute in a penguinlike way.
I had, therefore, kind of forgotten that men tended to be more devastating than cute in a tuxedo. Particularly if they looked comfortable in one, which Morrison did. It got a whole James Bond thing going, like he was slightly ruffled because he’d stopped to casually beat up forty-seven bad guys on his way to meet the girl.
Maybe that’s why he was late.
He saw me from across the room, which would have sounded a lot more romantic if I didn’t tower over everyone around me. We nodded at each other and I let him come to me, based on me being much closer to the theater doors than he was. It took him a minute to get to me, during which time I watched a couple dozen admiring women, and at least two equally admiring men, shift slightly so they could get a better look as he passed. I gave myself two points for having the best-looking date at the theater. Then I gave him two points for having a none-too-shabby date himself, when some of those lingering glances followed his trajectory and came to land, with hints of bitterness or approval, on me.
He had a shamrock pinned to his lapel. I touched it with a fingertip. “I think that’s cheating. You’re supposed to wear green, not be nominally adorned by it.”
“Are you going to pinch me?”
“Would I get fired?”
Morrison laughed aloud, which I didn’t think I’d ever heard him do before. While I gaped, he offered me his elbow. “Don’t risk it. You clean up good, Walker.”
“You’re not half bad yourself, sir.” I tucked my hand into his elbow and, unable to resist, added, “Except unusually short.”
“You didn’t warn me you were wearing platform heels.”
“If I was wearing platform heels your nose would be in my clea—” I cleared my throat, and Morrison, God bless him, slid a glance at the half-mentioned décolletage. We were exactly the same height, he and I, and in police-issue shoes neither of us ever had the height advantage. Back when we were still pissing in each other’s cereal for the crime of existing, I’d been known to wear extra-stompy thick-soled boots for the sheer glee of looking down on him. In retrospect, which I was only applying right now at this very moment, it had never seemed to bother him at all. “Right. Rented tux?”
“Will it damage your perception of me if I say I own it?” Morrison guided me to the theater doors, where I handed over the tickets, and then he walked me down the long aisle as though he had a great deal of practice at it. I, who wore heels seldomly, clung to him like an ingénue and couldn’t answer the question until he had me safely seated.
Then I couldn’t answer it anyway, because I was too busy gazing around the theater. We were twelve rows from center stage, just where the seating’s rake started to pick up speed. “Holy crap, these seats are fabulous. I’m going to have to go down to Solid Ground and thank Rita again. Wow.”
Morrison agreed, “Not bad,” and settled down to glance through the program, which gave me a few seconds to examine him surreptitiously. I always thought he looked like an aging superhero with his silvering hair and blue eyes and strong build, but in the tux, man, there was no aging about him. He just looked like a superhero. Not that most of them wore tuxedos, but that wasn’t the point. When he glanced at me, an eyebrow elevated—I wasn’t all that surreptitious, apparently—I blurted, “It doesn’t. Damage my perception of you. Owning a tux, I mean. You probably do this kind of thing all the time. Isn’t a lot of being a captain political?”
Morrison looked at me long enough that I began to feel like maybe my scattering of freckles had turned green to match the dress. All he said, though, was, “Enough to warrant a tuxedo, yes.” Then he smiled, which was about as accustomed an expression as his laugh earlier had been. It looked good on him. It looked very good on him. Brightened up his blue eyes and made him seem younger than his silvering hair suggested he was. “And you? What about the dress? I didn’t know your legs were that long, Walker.”
That was patently untrue. I had worn a much shorter skirt to the Halloween party I’d thrown, and Morrison had definitely seen me that night. He’d even danced with me. I opened my mouth to say that, and for once realized ahead of time that it was a completely inappropriate response to what amounted to a compliment from my boss. I managed to say, “Thanks,” without strangling on my tongue, then brushed my palm over the velvet’s nape. “Ha. No. I mean, it’s not rented, but it’s a very expensive dress to hang in the back of my closet for the rest of my life. If I’m lucky, Phoebe will get married or something before I’m too old to wear it so it’ll get taken out a second time.” God, I was talking and I couldn’t shut up. I seized the program from Morrison, willing to start gnawing on it to give my mouth something else to do.
“I never really thought that was fair. Men rent tuxedos, but women have to buy their formal wear. It’s like haircuts. Your hair isn’t that much longer than mine, but I bet you pay three times as much to get it cut.”
“Actually I go to a barber who cuts it for seven-fifty.” I grinned as Morrison shot me a look comprised equal parts of astonishment and impressed-ness. “What? I’ve been going to him since college. I’m not going to pay fifty dollars for a haircut, and if he screws up, which he never has, hair’s not like a leg. It grows back.”
“So it does.” He took the program back from me—at least I was only bending it, not chewing on it—and flipped through it without really looking. “Know anything about this group?”
“Just what I read on their website. Native American group on tour, doing a kind of ghost dance. Supposed to be pretty uplifting.”
“You, ah…” Morrison, who had been doing so well at the casual conversation thing I’d mostly forgotten to be an idiot, lost his cool with a cautious glance toward me.
All of a sudden I wondered how much of how he was acting was just that—an act—to give me a comparatively stable evening after a bad day. It was a depressing thought, and I seized on his failure to finish a sentence a little desperately, just to keep the conversation going. “Me ah what?”
“Is the ghost dance something you’re familiar with?”
Half a dozen answers, ranging from amused to annoyed, vied for a chance to answer that. I went with dry academia, mostly because I didn’t think Morrison expected it. “The ghost dance was invented in the late 1880s by a spiritual leader who’d had a vision. It caught on and spread around the western U.S. for a while. It’s supposed to help assure worldly happiness and make the time until you see your dearly departed again seem less awful.”
Morrison’s eyes widened in respect, at which point I couldn’t keep a straight face anymore. “Sorry. I only know any of this because they had an article about it on their website this afternoon. It’s not automagic shamanistic mojo knowledge.”
“Automagic?”
“Matic. Automatic. Anyway,” I said a little too loudly, particularly in view of the fact that the lights were dimming and everybody was settling into their seats and into silence to await the performance. A few people looked around at me and I covered my face with one hand, mumbling, “Anyway, it’s just research, nothing strange,” into my palm.
Morrison murmured, “Just as well,” and pulled my hand down so I was watching when the lights slammed up and movement exploded across the stage.
A woman garbed in gold literally flew on. Her costume trailed glittering feathers from the arms, her body arched forward like a bird facing the wind. There were no wires, though the height and length of her leap said there had to be: I couldn’t imagine how anyone might have thrown her so far. She was caught by two men who appeared from the wings at the last possible moment, eliciting a gasp from the audience. With no recovery time at all, they flung her skyward again, back across the stage, and the theater’s silence was filled with an eagle’s call.
Every hair on my body stood up and I shuddered violently, thrown viscerally into memory. She was the thunderbird, the giant golden eagle, enemy of the serpent and an archetypical character of Native American mythology. I had, months ago, been briefly claimed by a thunderbird. This woman’s dance, her freedom of spirit and her raw unadulterated strength, her utter confidence in herself and in the men—four, now—who threw her across the stage and captured her safely again, embodied the power and certainty the mythical beast had imbued me with.
There was no music, even as the dance progressed, only the eagle’s cry and a sometimes lonely howl of wind that matched her fall or rise as her partners gave her wings. A fifth man came onstage, sinuous, winding, dangerous. Panic struck me through the heart, knowing what would come next. They fought, the thunderbird and the serpent, and in the end died together, tangled in eternity. I was on the edge of my seat by then, fingers digging into the seat-back in front of me, and when the drums began for the next piece, I was lost.
None of the dances were entirely traditional Native American. They all incorporated Western dance styles, throws and leaps and lifts mixed with atonal harmonies and storytelling hands, but it resonated. The drums themselves could have carried me to another world—I had one myself, which had been given to me with the express purpose of doing just that—but the dancers brought it to another level, generating so much energy I could feel it buzzing against my skin. I kept my vision resolutely in this world. I could easily have watched their auras, watched the auditorium fill with the power they were dancing up, but I wanted to see them, to revel in the beauty of humanity in motion. I could get tickets to another performance and watch them on a mystical level then, if I wanted to.
A wonderful formality came over them as they began the last dance. They came out of the wings in costumes unlike any they’d worn yet, five of them painted and dressed as totem poles, with another five in black and the final five wearing ferocious animal face paint and wigs. Bear, raven, coyote, rabbit, whale, dancing and weaving together with foot-stomping excitement. My heart raced like I was up there myself, putting everything I had into the performance as I watched them dance the story of a single man who came into the spirit world and learned the ways of the beasts. The rabbit taught him speed, the bear, strength. The coyote taught him cleverness and the raven taught him joy, and the smiling whale oversaw wisdom. He took it all into him self, and the totems grew taller, the masked dancers astride the shoulders of their black-clad partners, and the totems in front of them to make the illusion of height and continuity. Energy poured from them, virtually lighting the theater even without the benefit of my second Sight turned on.
Then the solitary dancer went to each of the totems, and was blessed by them, taking on their aspect. I couldn’t explain how he did it, but he became the bear when the bear totem touched his head: he filled with strength and size and danced a bear dance across the stage, catching salmon and eating berries and slumbering through winter before the raven touched him, and he became a creature of sky and scavenging and sledding on snow. He—they—were astonishing, transforming with each touch, and in doing so giving honor to the world that man had come from, and so often ignored. My chest ached with breathless tears, with admiration for their skill and with joy for the strength they offered to the audience. It seemed impossible that anyone should watch their performance and be unmoved.
And I was right, because as the lights came down, the audience surged to its feet, shouting, clapping, whistling, stomping their feet. Everyone around me except Morrison and myself, because he caught my shoulder as I started to stand, and kept me in my seat with an urgently whispered, “Walker!”
Bewildered, I turned to him with a protest forming, but he caught my wrist and yanked my hand up, putting it in my line of vision.
Putting a clearly defined coyote’s paw in my line of vision.
CHAPTER FIVE
My yelp was drowned beneath the cheering and applause from those around us. Just as well: it sounded suspiciously like a coyote’s cry. I yanked my hand from Morrison’s grip to press it against my throat.
It felt like my hand. It felt perfectly normal, aside from the residual power of the dance still playing my skin. Morrison, wearing the most stricken expression I’d ever seen, shrugged out of his tuxedo jacket and draped it around my shoulders, hiding my entire torso. Hiding my paws. I thrust a foot out to stare at it, but my legs were unaltered. Just ordinary human feet in expensive sandals.
I wasn’t one who typically cared for being manhandled, but I was just as glad when Morrison caught my elbow and levered me to my feet and down the aisle, muttering apologies to the still-applauding patrons upon whose toes we trod.
My shoes, the cause of so much caution earlier, didn’t stymie me at all now that I needed to run for the doors. Here I’d always thought women in the movies who ran in their heels were just managing a lucky take. Turned out it could be done, if necessary.
To my dismay, the ushers held the theater doors open behind us. In terms of fire code that was no doubt the right thing to do, but in terms of getting me away from the roiling energy the dancers had called up, it was no good at all. I whispered, “Out, out, out, get me out of the building, just get me out,” like it was a mantra to keep me safe, and Morrison did so, hustling me ahead of the breaking-up crowd.
The crisp March night air knocked away the sensation of power crawling over my skin. I sagged, willing to stop right there, but Morrison tugged me farther down the street, well away from the smokers who filed out after us. Half a block from the theater he sat me down on a short wall and crouched in front of me, working hard to watch my eyes instead of my hands. “You all right, Walker?”
I shivered my hands out from inside his jacket. They still felt normal, but they were tawny gold and fur-ruffed, pads where my palms belonged and black claws where I was meant to have fingernails. All the times I’d changed shape when scrambling to my garden—into the private center part of me that reflected my soul—I’d known my psychic shape had changed, but it had always felt the same. I’d also known it was only my psychic self changing, not my physical form.
This was definitely physical. And of all the people in the world to lose control in front of, I’d chosen my boss. I had half a dozen friends who would take it in stride, but no, I had to go all magic-freaky on the one guy who was about as enthusiastic about my esoteric skills as I’d once been.
The paws were wavering, my fingers starting to show through as fur faded. It wasn’t me undoing the magic; in fact, given how hard I was focusing on the horrible fact that I was turning into a dog, it was a miracle the magic was letting loose at all. But I was outside the dancers’ sphere of influence, away from the power of their dance and reverting back to normal. There was no pain or discomfort, just a gradual slip back to normality, though when my fingers had returned, I still had the distinct, uncomfortable feeling that it would only take a moment’s concentration to bring the paws back.
My skin didn’t tingle with the dancers’ energy anymore, but the core of magic inside me felt replenished. Or, if not replenished, at least a whole lot more willing to play ball than it had been since that morning. It felt like my reserves had been topped up and were bursting the dam, ready for use and impatient for me to do so.
Morrison’s shoulders dropped about four inches when my ordinary hands peeked out from his jacket. He closed his eyes for a full five seconds, breathing carefully through his nostrils, then looked at me again. “What the hell was that?”
I laughed, a high trill of unhappy sound, and pulled the jacket up around my head to hide in it. It smelled good, like Morrison. Just a hint of old-fashioned cologne, nothing trendy or high-priced. I breathed it in for a few moments, trying to regain my equilibrium and trying not to think about Morrison or his cologne being aspects which could allow me to regain it. After what seemed like forever, but probably wasn’t, I whispered, “Coyote’s been telling me all along that shapeshifting was something I could do in the real world.”
“Sha…” Something about the way Morrison said half a syllable tidily filled in everything that might have followed it. It went something like this: “Shapeshifting? Are you insane, Walker? People don’t shapeshift!” followed hard by except she was just shifting shape in front of me, and I’m not stupid enough to disbelieve that after everything I’ve seen her do the last year, all of which I heard clearly enough that I actually said, “You’re not stupid at all,” in response, and made myself meet his gaze.
For a man who’d just hauled his date out of the theater because she was changing form, he looked remarkably calm. Slightly amused, even, though he said, “Thanks,” with perfect solemnity. “What happened in there?”
“Couldn’t you feel it? The energy they were putting out?”
He shook his head, though his mouth said, “Sure, performers do that. I’ve never seen anybody…”
“Get hairy?” I volunteered weakly. His lips twitched and a tremulous smile of my own shook some of my nerves loose. “It was more than just a performance, boss. They were channeling real power. They were…making magic.” I’d never thought about where the magic came from, not clearly, but I’d experienced similar rushes of power on much smaller scales. My drum could fill me up that way, but never until I overflowed so strongly that it started manifesting in physical changes. The dancers had created something new and strong that hadn’t been there before, something powerful enough to affect me. “You really didn’t feel anything? Nothing like…like your skin was going to come flying apart? You must have. Everybody did. The way the audience came to its feet…”
“I saw a hell of a performance, Walker. The kind that makes you want to cheer, sure, but something bigger happened to you, or we’d all be running around howling by now.”
I blinked at him, then laughed. “You’d make a pretty werewolf, boss. With your silver hair and blue eyes? The girl wolves would be, I don’t know, whatever girl wolves do. Panting after you.” Morrison snorted, and I didn’t want to tell him “panting after you” was a damned sight better than suggesting they’d be sniffing around his hindquarters, which had been the first thing that came to mind.
Somehow, though, his pragmatism made me feel better. I got to my feet and he straightened out of his crouch, looking like he wasn’t sure if he should offer support again. “I’m okay. Boss, somebody in there, the choreographer, one of the dancers, maybe a bunch of them, but somebody in there is like me. That dance, the last one, the shapeshifter’s dance… that had intent in it. I don’t know if it was just the storytelling or if they’ve got something else going on in there, but they were working so much power with so much discipline that it affected me. I’ve got to talk to them.” I’d started walking back to the theater without noticing. Morrison caught up and touched my arm, slowing me enough to notice his expression of concern.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
“Not even slightly.” I wrapped my arms around myself, hugging Morrison’s jacket to me, and stopped where I was, still a good distance from the theater. I watched it, not my boss, while I spoke. “But I can’t stand not knowing what happened, or how or why, and at least when I go back in there I’ll be a little more prepared. And if I go right now, without thinking about any of this too hard, I don’t have to admit that I’m completely horrified and embarrassed that I lost control of my stupid magic and started changing into a dog in front of you.”
Morrison, unexpectedly, said, “Coyotes aren’t dogs,” and I laughed out loud. He said, “What? They’re not!” and I laughed again.
“I know, but Coyote says that all the time. I never expected to hear you say it. I’ll have to tell him you said it.” Coyote was my mentor, another shaman whom I’d thought for years was actually a spirit, because I saw him most often as a golden-eyed coyote. I never tired of referring to him as a dog, mostly because it annoyed him so much. He was also potentially a whole lot more than just a mentor, and it occurred to me he might not like Morrison treading on his I’m-not-a-dog territory.
A frown appeared between Morrison’s eyebrows, making me think maybe he didn’t like being compared to Coyote in any way, either. I wondered if men made everybody’s lives complicated or if I was just unusually incompetent in that field. All he said, though, was, “Just tell me if we need to get out of there, all right, Walker?”
I nodded. “I will, but you might be more likely to notice than I am. I didn’t feel myself changing.”
“I’ll keep an eye on you.” Morrison headed toward the theater, only turning back when he realized I wasn’t following. “Walker?”
“Why aren’t you freaking out?” God, of all the graceful questions I could’ve asked. I put a palm to my forehead, searching for a better way to phrase it, but Morrison chuckled.
“I’ve run out of freak, Walker. When it comes to you and Holliday, there’s no barometer. Every time I think I’ve seen or heard the strangest thing you could possibly come up with, you trump it. Besides, if somebody else in there had noticed what was happening, you’d have been in a world of trouble. I don’t care how weird you get. You’re one of my officers. I’m not going to let you down, not if I can help it.”
In other words, if anybody under his command had suddenly started turning into a coyote, he’d have hustled them out of public view and worried about the details later.
I wasn’t getting preferential treatment. That sort of made me feel better, but only sort of.
Mostly what it did was remind me what a decent person my boss was. He’d gone out of his way for me more than once, even when we were barely on speaking terms. I shouldn’t be surprised that he could handle a little something like me shapeshifting, but I was. I fumbled around for a way to express that, and finally settled on a wholly inadequate, “Thank you.”
Morrison crooked a smile. “Come on, Walker. The show’s about to start again.”
I didn’t enjoy the opening of the second act nearly as much. Not because it wasn’t as good, but because I was concentrating so hard on not getting lost in the power the dancers generated that I couldn’t get lost in the stories they told, either. Morrison leaned over at one point and whispered, “Relax,” but that was easy for him to say. He wasn’t in any danger of sucking up so much magic he would start changing shape. I wondered if I’d have been so vulnerable if it hadn’t already been an emotionally traumatizing day.
Not that it mattered. After a while, it became clear I wasn’t going to slide down that slippery path again. Where the first part had begun with the thunderbird and climaxed with the shapeshifter’s dance, the second opened with a piece that felt more familiar to me. I’d done spirit quests a-plenty over the past year, and the dancers called up the wonder of drifting in darkness as power animals came to examine, consider and eventually to choose. I half expected the audience to start exclaiming over their own spirit guides appearing, and even stole a glance at Morrison to see if he had been granted a vision by the dancers’ skill.
He was watching me, not the stage. I muttered, “I’m fine,” and turned my attention back to the show.
Their second dance tread more territory I recognized. The lights went hard red and yellow, making the stage a rough approximation of the Lower World, a place inhabited by demons and gods. One of the dancers became lost in that world, only to be found by the newly-spirit-guided lead from the previous dance. By the end of the third piece I knew where they were going, because I’d walked the path myself. The first act had followed a shaman’s journey as a shapeshifter, something totally outside my own experience. The second, though, was unquestionably the healer’s path. I was sure the final piece would be the ghost dance, and I knew exactly what to expect of it.
A shaman could, in theory, affect a full-blown healing with the force of his will alone. It required belief on the part of the one being healed, as well, but extraordinary things could happen if both parties were utterly confident in the outcome. I’d only experienced it on a minor level myself, though I knew the power to heal completely lay within me.
I was willing to bet it lay within the dancers, too. Not exactly as I experienced it, maybe, because my magic was largely internal, and they were unquestionably creating something external. My magic wasn’t something that caught others up in it, not the way a dance performance did. I couldn’t imagine a better way to draw people into the necessary mindset for healing to succeed than with a completely captivating dance. It didn’t have to be active belief—fully healing unconscious people was much easier than healing someone who was awake—but the dances could lower defenses, make people susceptible to a healing power they might not even realize existed.
All of a sudden I understood the glowing reviews they’d received all around the country. Everyone, from the man on the street to the most jaded critic, had mentioned feeling lighter, happier, healthier, when they’d left the show. I’d read no reports of miraculous recoveries from terrible illnesses, but that made threefold sense: first, someone that sick might well not be at a dance performance, and second, even if they were, the chances of associating recovery with a theatrical show were slim to none. Third, while I had very little doubt the dancers could affect healing, dissipating it over hundreds of audience members might weaken it enough that no single individual would benefit one hundred percent from the magic.
Never mind that I didn’t believe that last at all. Those who were most captivated would probably benefit the most strongly. It wasn’t impossible that a terminally ill patient caught up in the ghost dance would be healed, while the people around her, too concerned for her health to entirely focus on the dance, would only feel a brief lifting of their worry.
Entranced by the thought, I closed my eyes against the dancers themselves and opened my senses to the audience around me. I’d never tried this before. Generally speaking, the idea of opening myself up to the pain, exhaustion and illness of hundreds of people at once wasn’t high on my list of things that sounded like fun. On the other hand, doing it in the midst of a performance was probably as good a time as any I could try: most people would be thinking about it instead of focusing on their aches and weariness, which had to lighten the burden a little. I hoped.
Viewed through the Sight, the dancers on stage nearly overwhelmed their audience. People generally had two dominant colors to their auras, but at the moment the dancers each blazed with singular hues. That was a mark of focus, of giving everything they had to the moment, and it was wonderful to behold. I’d never seen so much energy focused together, vibrant shades of many colors giving and taking, aware of each other and building to create a whole out of their many pieces. I had, a few times, asked my friends to lend me strength to fight with. Their best efforts looked paltry compared to the dancers’.
I shivered and turned my face away from the stage. Eyes closed or not, I could still See them too clearly to gauge the audience unless I directed my unseeing gaze elsewhere.
Onto Morrison, in this case. I saw a red streak of concern leap in the rich blue and purple that was his usual aura, and put a hand on his arm in reassurance. Surprise spiked through him, then was tamped down so solidly it made me smile. I was glad he was there: he was a gauge to judge everyone else against. I knew what his colors should look like, even when he was intent on something.
He also gave me something familiar to focus on until I could disengage the dancers’ radiating presence from the audience. It was harder than I expected: they wanted to be the center of attention. They were, in fact, giving being the center of attention everything they had, and there was a feedback loop going on: they wanted attention, the audience was providing it, I got sucked into what the audience was watching….
I actually had to open my eyes and blink furiously at Morrison before I could disconnect myself from the loop. His eyebrows wrinkled and I said, “Keep looking at me,” which made his eyebrows convert to question-arches, but he did as I asked. I closed my eyes again, safe in his gaze, and that time was able to slip beyond the dancers’ pull to properly see the audience.
They were, by and large, healthy people. A head cold here, a migraine there, the latter exacerbated by the drums, but the woman was determined to stay for the whole show, someone with a broken arm, a sprained ankle…minor discomforts, in the scheme of things. Only a dozen or so had darker shadows riding their auras. Some of them were grieving and unable to push it away for the space of an evening’s performance. Others were ill: cancers making black spots in auras or chemotherapy leaving irradiated stains. One woman almost certainly wouldn’t know yet that there was a spot in her breast which glowed an unhealthy pink to my Sight, like the awareness campaign had colored my perception of the illness itself. I didn’t care what else happened: I would find her after the show and if I couldn’t heal her myself, I would tell her to go to a doctor. She’d think I was insane, but that didn’t matter as long as she went.
I let the Sight go, not exactly reluctantly. Looking into humanity’s illnesses wasn’t enjoyable, but I’d be able to look at them again when the dancers were done and see if any difference had been made. I was certain that if I caught their power at its apex and directed it, I could make a world of difference to the genuinely sick people in the room. But I had no idea if the dancers had a specific manner of releasing the magic they were creating, assuming they even knew they were doing it. If they did, I couldn’t risk screwing it up by taking over. If they didn’t, there would almost certainly be enough residual power during the curtain call that I could shape it without damaging the dancers.
Morrison was still watching me. I shook my head, whispered, “I’m okay. This one’s about healing, not transformation,” and settled down, much more relaxed, to watch the performance. They moved from one dance to another, until the last piece, their ghost dance, began on a barely backlit stage.
They’d foregone traditional costuming throughout almost the whole program, and the ghost dance was no exception. The men and women who rose up were ethereal, garbed in gray and white. Only the lead dancer wore red and black and yellow, making her lively and vibrant amongst the ghosts. They each told their stories, tales of life and happiness and sorrow and death, and in doing so gave her the strength to live her own life with grace and charity.
More than that, though, viewed with the Sight, they were preparing her, and themselves, for the dance’s final moments. Energy coiled inside each of the dancers, ready to be released. I leaned forward with my breath held, waiting for the climactic finale and the vast outpouring of healing power I anticipated.
It happened so quickly I lost what breath I held. A surge hit the lead dancer, magic so blended it was incandescent white. She spun to face the audience a final time, arms spread in an open embrace so crisp I could see the design behind it, the intention to throw all that strength and beauty out to the audience.
Instead the magic sucked upward out of her body in a bleak whirlpool, and she collapsed on the stage in silence.
CHAPTER SIX
The audience gasped, not sure whether they’d seen something deliberate or tragic. I popped to my feet, wanting to rush the stage, and Morrison followed my lead.
Everybody else took it as the surge into a standing ovation, and people came to their feet all around us, cheering and shouting and applauding. Panic flared across the stage, the dancers at a loss until one of the men stepped forward to collect the woman who’d fallen. Her boneless form in his arms, he turned to the audience and led a troupe-wide curtain call. Fixed smiles looked like rictuses to me, but I could almost hear the axiom driving them: the show must go on. The audience was still going wild when they withdrew, and I knew they wouldn’t return for a second bow.
“What’s going on, Walker?” Morrison’s voice was pitched below the exuberant audience’s catcalls.
I flinched, becoming aware I was straining forward like I’d start climbing over seats and people to reach the stage. In fact, the only thing stopping me was Morrison’s viselike grip on my elbow, which I only noticed belatedly, despite the fact that once I noticed, I realized it was cutting off circulation. “Remember what happened to Billy in July? How he went to sleep because something was draining the life force out of him?”
Poor Morrison gritted his teeth and nodded. I’d explained it all at the time, but there wasn’t much in the way of actual physical evidence for things like that. He believed me, but he didn’t like it.
“Something like that just happened to her, except she’d gathered up all the focused power the dancers were creating. That kind of drain might have killed her, Morrison. I have to get up there!” And there was no way to do it. The aisles were already full in the way theaters always managed the moment a performance ended, even when the audience was going nuts with applause. I was sure it violated some law of physics.
Morrison gave me one brief, searching look, then, as far as I could tell, employed some kind of secret law-enforcement signal code that I wasn’t yet privy to. Within seconds we were in the aisle, Morrison with his badge out as he politely but firmly created a path to the stage. Rubberneckers realizing something was wrong started to clog up the aisle, but somehow Morrison kept being right between me and them, full of professional apology as he got people out of my way. I wanted to kiss the man.
We reached the stage and he did a two-step that landed him behind me. I went to vault up, not sure my dress would survive it, and to my astonishment, Morrison caught my waist and simply dead-lifted me up.
I weighed in at about one sixty-five, which was by no means the featherweight division. I also had very long legs, made longer still by my goddamned high heels. I wouldn’t have thought anybody could lift me four feet straight into the air so smoothly I barely knew what was happening until my feet hit the stage. I stumbled out of pure amazement, and Morrison, who vaulted up after me, offered a briefly steadying hand before we both ran for backstage.
The whole cast was gathered around the fallen woman. Their auras were painful with worry, shooting spikes that made my head hurt. Every one of them looked drained physically, emotionally and spiritually, which made sense. Not only had they danced their hearts out, but the power they’d been offering to their lead dancer had gotten sucked out in a way it was never meant to be taken. I was surprised they were still all on their feet, metaphorically speaking.
A few of them glanced up as Morrison and I came through the wings. They were obviously expecting someone. Paramedics, maybe. Morrison said, “Police,” at the same time I said, “I’m a healer.”
For maybe the first time in my life, nobody looked any more surprised at the one statement than the other. In fact, a couple of them just got out of my way, clearing a path to the dancer’s side. Morrison walked away as I knelt next to her, and I half heard him talking to stagehands, asking them to set up a barrier and refuse all nonofficial personnel access to the backstage area.
The dancer wasn’t breathing. I’d known that on some level, right from the moment she’d collapsed. There were signs of fresh bruising on her chest, like they’d failed at CPR. “What’s her name?”
Someone said, “Naomi Allison.”
I whispered, “C’mon, Naomi,” put my hand over her heart, and went searching for her soul.
Like the breath from her body, it was gone. Not almost-gone, not hanging on in hopes of rescue, but somewhere beyond the veil of death. There was no hint of life to her body, no aura clinging to her skin, no spark buried somewhere deep inside. If life essence was something that could be held in a pool, it was like someone had reached in and with one giant handful, emptied every drop. I had a whole shiny range of esoteric powers, but seeing ghosts didn’t rank among them. I was pretty certain if Billy were here, he’d already be talking to Naomi’s crossed-over self.
I’d never brought anyone back from the dead before. I’d managed to bring people back from mostly dead a couple of times, but not from genuinely, full-stop dead. I wasn’t actually sure it was possible.
From the outside—which was to say, from anyone who hadn’t been watching with my second Sight’s point of view—I thought her death must look like a heart attack. There was no other even vaguely feasible explanation for it. Of course, with my hand over her heart and my magic opened up, I could tell that there was no damage at all to her heart muscle. Nor were there any brain clots or embolisms or other physical symptoms that might explain a phenomenally fit woman in her early thirties suddenly dropping dead.
On the other hand, there was nothing physically wrong with her, except the part where she was dead. If I could manage to catch her soul before it slipped away entirely, maybe I could bind them back together. Unfortunately, since I couldn’t see or communicate with ghosts, that really only left me one place to go.
I called it the Dead Zone, and the first time I’d gone there chasing a wayward soul, I’d very nearly gotten myself and someone I loved killed. But I was a little better prepared these days. It didn’t take much to let myself slide free of my body, not with the amount of power I’d taken in from the dancers. Not so long ago, that would have bothered me. I liked being connected to the world. The idea that I could slip into a black empty place just a finger-length smaller than infinity would have scared the crap out of me. Tonight, though, I was glad I didn’t have to push myself through rituals to make it work. If Naomi Allison had any chance for life, she needed me to be as quick as I possibly could be.
The Dead Zone really was impossibly, hideously large. I always felt like it presented itself that way semi-consciously, as if to make me aware of just how tiny I was. A speck of insignificance on an endless black plain: that was me in the Dead Zone.
I took a breath of cold still air and called, “Raven, guide me?” into the Dead Zone’s infinite curve.
For a few moments silence greeted me, and I wondered if I hadn’t left enough shiny food out for my spirit guide lately. He had a weakness for Pop-Tarts—a weakness I shared, in fact, although I liked the fakey white frosting and he liked the flimsy tinfoil wrappers. I’d gotten much, much better about leaving him treats and generally trying to be appreciative since he’d hauled my ass out of a scary spiritual snowstorm, but I still probably wasn’t the world’s most grateful shaman.
His wings cut across the silence of the Dead Zone like the air was frozen, a whish-whish of sound that settled calmness around my heart. He plonked onto my shoulder and stuck his beak in my hair, pulling it, and I turned my face to grin into his feathery chest. “Hey, Raven. Thank you. I’m looking for a dead woman. A dancer. Naomi Allison. She…understood magic,” I said after a moment’s consideration. “Can you help me find her? You’re a lot cleverer at navigating the dead places than I am.”
Raven let go a caw that sounded ridiculously proud, and beat his wings in the air. Or against my head, more accurately, but I wasn’t going to complain, because as he did so, the Dead Zone changed.
I’d been flattering the bird outrageously, but I wasn’t lying. He walked a line between the living and the dead that I could never do without his help and guidance. Through his eyes, the Dead Zone became manageable: still terribly large, but traversable. Rivers appeared, some with boats full of the dead drifting down them, others broad and wide with ferrymen poling coin-eyed corpses across. Grim reapers, ranging in form from beautiful, gentle creatures to the scythe-bearing hooded thing of nightmares, led ghosts across the realm, bringing them from their mortal lives to something beyond. The Dead Zone was a transitory place, somewhere people lingered only briefly.
And I, as a living thing, had no business there. The dead and their masters could be drawn to the living, and when they were, they tended to want to consume it. Without Raven’s presence, I was alarmingly vulnerable. With it, I merely wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I said, “Naomi Allison,” aloud, and waited to see if reverberations touched any single soul in particular.
I couldn’t see it, if they did. Raven, though, gave an excited quark and dug his claws into my shoulder, wings smacking my head to urge me forward. He didn’t weigh very much, but his wingspan was more than two feet across, and he hit hard. I made a feeble sound of protest, but broke into a run. There wasn’t much point in asking for his help and then sulking when he smacked me around so I’d notice it.
I didn’t think of the Dead Zone as having any features like hills or plains, but we crested a hill and I skidded to a stop looking down on a ghost dance somewhat more literal than the one at the theater. This one, for example, was being performed by actual ghosts.
And Naomi Allison was at its heart. She wasn’t dancing, only standing as she had been in the last moments of the theatrical performance, like she was waiting to take in all the power the others were building for her. Their dance was silent, with neither song nor drums, but somehow I could still hear both of those things in the small bones of my ears. Noiseless chanting grew in strength, reverberating around the Dead Zone and warning that my time was growing short.
I let out a yell and slid down the hill, disrupting ghosts that were barely more than mist on my skin, raising hairs against a chill. They dissipated into nothingness as I brushed by, but others—or maybe the same ones, hell if I could tell— appeared and continued the dance. There was a different sort of feel to the Dead Zone dance. It lacked the real world’s vibrancy and sense of life, reaching beyond it to attain acceptance that had an urgency all of its own.
I recognized the difference only a few steps from Naomi’s side, and knew then that I was already too late.
The soundless music stopped in a shout. Naomi’s smile was brief, breathless, incandescent: all the things it should have been in the last moment of her dance at the theater. Power rushed her, but not the healing magic her troupe had built. This was the last push to take her over to the other side.
And like that, she was gone.
I gasped, a hard sound that hurt my throat, and to my horror, the dancers turned to me. Made me the centerpiece of their dance, the recipient of their next push. The raven on my shoulder flapped his wings like a mad thing, as if he could fly us both out of there.
Which he probably could, actually. He’d done it before. But given that I was in full agreement with him as to the importance of skedaddling, I thought this time I could do us both a favor and use my nice long legs to run like hell.
I ran all the way out of the Dead Zone, and awakened slumped over Naomi Allison’s unmoving body.
The worst part was watching hope fade from everyone’s eyes as I looked up. Some of them were already crying. Others had been hanging on until I shook my head, and emptiness filled their faces. I said, “I’m sorry. She was already gone,” very quietly, and at more or less the same time people in the background began shouting about paramedics and please get out of the way and emergency action.
I got up awkwardly. My knees were bright red from kneeling on the floor, and though I didn’t think I’d been there very long, my feet had gone to sleep. I opened a thread of healing power within myself, trying to encourage blood flow to return, then had to clench a hand in the nearby curtain to keep myself from doing a dance of oh, God, ow, my feet are waking up ow, ow, ow.
One of the paramedics frowned at me, which was question enough. He wanted to know what a theater patron was doing backstage bending over the dead woman. He obviously hoped I was a doctor.
I said, “Police.” His expression cleared and he turned his full attention to Naomi, shooing the dancers back to give his coworkers room to do their jobs. I watched bleakly, hoping for a miracle I was quite certain wouldn’t manifest.
“Walker?” Morrison appeared at my side and I had the weary impulse to bury my face in his shoulder. Maybe there was some universe out there where I was five foot six and that would’ve been charming, but as it was, I’d have to stoop. Even if it weren’t professionally inappropriate, it would just look wrong.
“They’ll have to call it heart failure,” I said softly. Very softly, because I didn’t want anyone else to overhear me. “I don’t know what else they can call it. But she was murdered, Captain. I’m sure of it. And I’m probably the only cop in the city who might have a chance at figuring out by whom.”
“What about Holliday?”
My partner, after all, was the one who saw ghosts. Murdered ghosts, which would make Naomi Allison a prime target for him to talk to, if she hadn’t already scurried off to the Great Beyond. I shook my head. “He’s good with violent deaths. This was close enough to natural I don’t think her soul even considered sticking around. I’m sure he’ll be able to help, but…”
Morrison sounded like he’d rather be shouting. “Murder is never close to natural, Walker.”
“Tell that to King George.” I sighed as Morrison’s ears turned red, sure sign he was working hard not to yell. “George the Third of England may have been poisoned with arsenic so slowly over so many years it looked like a natural descent into madness and death. His spirit wouldn’t have known to hang around hoping to be avenged any more than Naomi Allison’s might’ve.”
“How do you know this, Walker?”
I wasn’t sure if it was exasperation or incredulity in Morrison’s voice. “How do I know about King George or how do I know ab—”
“About King George!”
“I don’t know, Morrison. I read it somewhere. Saw it on the Discovery Channel. Something. The point is—”
“The point is you tried to help Naomi.” A third person interrupted, the man from the troupe who’d carried Naomi’s body offstage. He was, at a glance, more Native American than me, with coppery skin tones and dark brown eyes. He was also wound as tightly as anyone I’d ever seen, exacting enormous control over his emotions. I wanted to hug him, just to offer him a release, but I doubted he’d appreciate the effort right then. He was probably doing his best to hold himself together for the troupe. “Thank you for that. I’m Jim Littlefoot.”
I couldn’t help it. I looked at his feet. He made a sound that said everybody did that, and offered his hand as I looked back up. “Naomi’s older sister Rebecca and I founded this troupe a few years ago. She’s the one holding Naomi now. You said you were a healer.”
“Not much of one today,” I said unhappily. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Littlefoot. She was gone before I could do anything.”
“She was gone before you got to her,” Littlefoot said very steadily. “We all felt it, Ms….?”
“W-w-wah, Walk. Er.” I knew my last name. I really did. It was just that the one on my birth certificate and the one I used in day-to-day life weren’t the same. I had, over the past decade, chosen to use the former about six times, and I was in no way prepared for the impulse to use it now. “Uh. Walker. Detective Joanne Walker. This is, uh. This is my boss, Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department.” I gestured to Morrison, who stared at me so hard I thought my hair might light on fire. He knew the other name, the one I’d inherited from my Cherokee father, and he clearly recognized I’d just had the impulse to use it. I was going to get grilled later for that. Well, fair enough. I kind of wanted to grill myself. Maybe with a nice teriyaki sauce.
Standing eight feet from a dead woman while talking to someone who’d been closer to her was not the time or place to notice a growing hunger in my tummy. Jim Littlefoot shook Morrison’s hand, but turned his attention back to me.
“What kind of training do you have?”
“Shamanic. Your first act nearly turned me into a coyote.”
Wow. I hadn’t meant to say that, either. I hastily withdrew into myself for a moment, imagining my greening garden, then reinforcing the shimmering silver-blue shields that kept it safe from outside intruders. With no offense meant to Mr. Littlefoot, people who made me blurt details about a magic I preferred to keep quiet could be highly dangerous. I’d found that out the hard way. It wasn’t a road I wanted to go down again.
A mixture of curiosity and apology came into Littlefoot’s eyes. “It’s meant to prepare the audience for a transformative experience in the second act, not literally change people. I’m sorry.”
“I know. It wasn’t your fault. It’s just the amount of po…” My brain caught up to what he was saying. “So it’s deliberate. I mean, it had to be, with the amount of power you were generating, with the focus, but—but you do know what you’re doing. What you’re creating.”
A fleeting smile crossed his face. “We do. We spent nearly two years perfecting these pieces, getting the right dancers, before we took it on the road. Even one cynic among the troupe can destroy the synergy. It hasn’t been an easy program to develop.”
“How long have you been touring?”
“Since last September. We wrap up in May in Chicago.” Littlefoot cast a glance over his shoulder, then looked back at me with his mouth a thin unhappy line. “Or that had been the plan. I don’t know what we’ll do now.”
“Since September.” Dismay coiled through me, cool and loathsome. “So this attack could have be—”
Littlefoot interrupted, “Attack?” and paled, like he hadn’t thought through all the possibilities behind Naomi’s death.
I said, “I’m sorry,” and turned to my boss. “This could have been months in the planning, Captain. Can we get the list of credit-card purchases for the tickets to tonight’s show? The theater was packed, there must’ve been five hundred people here, but it’s a place to start investigating.”
“Walker.” Morrison drew me back a step, though it wasn’t really an attempt to take me out of Jim Littlefoot’s hearing range. “You already said they’re not going to find anything to provoke a murder investigation. She’ll be autopsied, I’m sure, but—”
“Are you really going to tell me not to investigate this, boss?” I took a breath, steadying myself. “Do you really think I’ll listen if you do? Because I—I need to, Captain.”
Morrison’s expression softened just slightly. I sort of felt like I’d thrown a low blow, given the circumstances of the day, but I was willing to take any bend I could get.
“Hey.” One of the paramedics lifted his voice, clearly not talking to us, but garnering our attention anyway. I was just as glad: backstage at the theater probably wasn’t the place to argue with Morrison over what my duties as one of Seattle’s only paranormal police detectives entailed. Then the paramedic uttered seven little words that invalidated my concerns about being allowed to investigate.
“Hey,” he said, “don’t you think this looks weird?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
There were puncture wounds over Naomi Allison’s heart. Five of them in an arc of about two hundred and forty degrees, like somebody had sunk extremely pointy fingernails into her flesh. They got worse as we watched, deepening until her chest started to cave in.
Morrison drew breath to speak and I snapped a hand up, fingers rigid, to silence him. To my astonishment, it worked, though I’d probably pay the price later. But I had a good idea of what he’d been going to say—something along the lines of “No signs of murder, Walker?”—and I was a lot more interested in watching Naomi’s degradation than I was in being scolded.
Besides, I’d been right. When I’d said there were no obvious signs of foul play, there hadn’t been. That, however, had been a whole two minutes earlier, and lots could change in two minutes. I’d gone from being a mechanic to a shaman in that time. Stranger things could happen. Around me, they usually did.
“It’s a physical manifestation of the power drain. Somebody sucked the energy out of her so fast it’s taken a couple minutes for the corporeal damage to catch up. But I bet dollars to doughnuts there’s somebody out there whose visualization on this is ripping her heart out.” I put my fingertips over the wounds, which were now deep enough to start bending around the heart. There was very little blood, given the depth and the fact that I could see torn arteries. Postmortem injuries were like that. No heartbeat to pump the blood, so the best it could do on its own was ooze and pool.
Jim Littlefoot said, “Why?”, the paramedic said, “What the hell are you talking about?” and Morrison, in a low, dangerous voice I’d become accustomed to, said, “Walker…” all at more or less the same time. I ignored the latter two and shook my head at Littlefoot.
“It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s the power you’re generating. Someone wants it, and they’re using the idea of the heart as the soul’s center to focus their desire. They weren’t after Naomi. This would have happened to whoever was the lead dancer tonight.” It was so clear to me I could almost See it, though the Sight itself wasn’t offering much. I was a day late and a dollar short: if I’d chased the black whirlpool of magic when it had fled Naomi’s body, I might have followed it back to the perpetrator.
But it hadn’t even occurred to me. My only thought had been getting on stage and trying to heal the fallen dancer. I was hell on wheels at second-guessing myself, but for once I wasn’t convinced I’d made the wrong decision. Nobody, not even Coyote, had suggested it was within my power to split my focus in two completely different directions, physically attending to a healing while spiritually charging off for a fight. I’d made my choice. I would have to live with it, even if Naomi Allison hadn’t.
“Can you tell who’s responsible?” Littlefoot’s voice, like Morrison’s, was low, but not with warning or anger. With despair, and I had no good answer for him.
“I’d be looking for someone overflowing with power, but anybody in the theater—” I broke off. If the ghost dance had worked properly, if Naomi had been permitted to release the magic into the audience, then everyone would be glowy and happy, but she hadn’t. Only the spirit thief would be boiling over now, assuming he was in the theater at all. I looked at Morrison, who shook his head, but turned and left the backstage with purposeful strides. It was almost certainly far too late already to corral the audience so I could look them over, but he was going to try. I thought of the woman with the lump in her breast and a wave of sick concern broke over me, even though it was so far out of my control that worrying about it was ludicrous.
That was probably why it bothered me. Easier to focus on the details or the impossible than what was right in front of me. Hell, I’d spent half the day doing that deliberately. I said, “Stop anybody you can at this point, okay? I’ll take a look at them, and if we can get the credit card sales, well, at least it’s someth…” to Morrison’s retreating back, and “Oh. Oh, God, gross,” to the dead woman in front of me.
Naomi’s heart shuddered, sharp tooth marks tearing flesh, and an entire bite disappeared as we watched. Then another, then a third, and the heart was gone, gulped away. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth, gagging. The paramedic didn’t fare so well, and lurched a few feet away to empty his stomach. Naomi convulsed once more, then went still. Littlefoot turned an unblinking gaze on me, tears draining down his cheeks. All I could do was whisper, “I’m sorry. It’s over now.”
That much, at least, I was sure of. The bodily attack had finished catching up to the magical, as if time had slid slightly out of sync. I didn’t think that was it, not really. It was just that the psychic attack was so virulent it had taken Naomi’s life before the physical could have its turn. At least there’d been no agony, this way. It had been over the moment power whirlpooled out of her.
Littlefoot nodded, lips tight. “Can you find what did this?”
“Yeah. I’ll find it, and I’ll stop it.” I had no idea how, but I was pretty confident I could. “Your people all look exhausted, Jim. They won’t want to, but make sure they eat, okay? What happened to them is a lot more than coming down after a show. All that energy they were supposed to throw out to the audience should have come back to them in a way, and instead it’s been stolen. Even if your friend hadn’t died, they’d be a lot more drained than usual. A drum circle wouldn’t hurt, something to replenish them a little. In fact, I’ll come back later to lead one, if you want.”
I had no idea who I was, making an offer like that. The Joanne Walker of fifteen months ago wouldn’t have thought of it, much less genuinely meant it. Littlefoot made a motion of agreement, but asked, “Later?” in a way that put a lot more questions into the word than seemed possible.
“I need to check whatever’s left of the audience, just in case the killer is here. If he’s not, I want to take a look over the city and see if I can find a flare where there’s too much power. And I have to figure out what did this, if I can. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before.”
Littlefoot started to speak, then let it go in a rush of breath. The second try worked better: “We’ll gather a drum circle. Don’t feel obliged to come back. I think you have enough to do already.”
I got to my feet, touching his shoulder as I did so. It was rock solid, dancer-trained strength knotted into tension. I gathered a pulse of healing power, magic warm and comforting in my belly before I released it into Littlefoot. Experience said he should relax, at least a modicum; that the influx of strength and calm would help even if he wasn’t aware it had arrived. I might as well have been trying to heal a rock, for all the difference it made in his anxiety levels. That didn’t actually bode so well for me helping out in a drum circle, so although I meant it when I said, “It’s not an obligation,” the feeling of obligation lessened some.
He nodded and I stepped back, finally giving him and ultimately his people the space they were going to need. “If any of you know anything about shielding, that would be best. Keep what you do internal, just for the troupe. You usually only do one performance a day, right? So if whoever’s behind this has been watching you, he’s probably not going to be looking for a second hit right away, but there’s no sense in offering him an easy target.” Not when I had every intention of offering up a much harder target.
Me.
Morrison had done a hell of a job corralling the audience, given the late start he’d had. There were probably three hundred people still in the lobby, and security guards at the doors chitchatting politely with men and women who didn’t seem too terribly eager to escape, anyway. Human nature, I guessed; they probably wanted to be among the first to know what had happened, all the better to gossip about in the morning.
Lots and lots of them turned my way when I came out of the theater, their auras spiking with curiosity. With the weight of their interest, I realized that between my height, the form-fitting green dress and the fact I’d run up on stage seconds after Naomi collapsed, I was probably pretty recognizable. Sneaking out a side door or up to the mezzanine floor to peek at the crowd might’ve been smarter, but smart wasn’t so much my stock in trade.
Not mostly, anyway. I was smart enough to not say “She’s dead,” which was sort of my first impulse. Even when people started asking, I kept my mouth shut and just looked over them, grateful that the strappy heels meant I could see virtually everybody.
Nobody had the mark of a killer. Auras were rife with nosy interest and concern, with boredom, with amorous intentions and chilly brush-offs, but no one was burgeoning with the kind of energy the killer had stolen. I sighed, singled Morrison out of the crowd—he was at one of the doors, badge on display as he smiled at a redhead at least ten years older than he was—and made my way through the gathering to his side. “Can I talk to you privately, boss?”
The redhead’s expression flashed from a downright sulk at my interruption all the way to smug delight as I finished with the word boss. She actually tucked a card into his lapel as he backsided the door open and gestured me through. I couldn’t help stealing another look at her as Morrison followed me, and my big mouth said, “You like redheads, huh?” without consulting me on the topic first.
Morrison looked back at her, too, then at me. “What makes you say that?”
“Oh, Barbara Bragg was a redhead, and now her. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” Rita Wagner had asked if I believed in God. I thought a kind God would probably strike me dead right then just to save me from myself. Since nobody did, I chalked one up in the “not so much” column, and tried to shrug off the conversation causally.
Morrison was amenable enough to shrugging it off, though he said, “Maybe redheads like me,” before a considerably more relevant, and much more Morrison-like, “What happened after I left?”
“Whatever attacked Naomi ate her heart.” I was horrified at how steadily that came out.
Morrison’s eyes popped. “What is it with you and bodies getting eaten lately, Walker? Is it another wendigo?”
“No.” I had plenty more to say than just a categorical denial, but it struck me again that Morrison had been bizarrely normal all day. Normal like a normal person, not normal like my boss, which was a much more antagonistic kind of normal than normal-normal was. I knew why: he was going easy on me because of the shooting, which meant he really didn’t think I’d screwed up. I was glad of that, but he was shooting so straight I thought maybe inadvertently asking him on a date hadn’t been a mistake after all. I didn’t know what it meant if it wasn’t a mistake.
And it didn’t matter very much right then. Morrison’s expression descended toward its more-usual exasperation the longer I didn’t answer the question. I spewed a more detailed answer, hoping to get the more genial Morrison back as a reward. “The wendigo was eating souls, but I was able to track Naomi’s into the Dead Zone. Whatever attacked her was just after the energy she’d collected. It’s a completely different M.O.”
“And the heart?”
“The wendigo wasn’t after viscera. It was chewing the external flesh, trying to re-establish a body for itself. No, this is different, Morrison. I’m sure the heart was the focal point for whatever magic was used to strip Naomi of all that energy.” I put a fist over my own heart. “It’s what we perceive as the center of our emotions. I mean, we say we mean things from the heart, we suffer heartache, we pledge our hearts, we wear our hearts on our sleeves. The only other organ we assign as much importance to is the brain, except brain-dead bodies can be kept alive if the heart continues pumping and not the other way around. The heart is our core, the perfect and obvious point to attack if you’re trying to collect the emotional and spiritual power of an individual. If I was going to try something like that—”
“Which you wouldn’t.”
I broke off, gaping. “No, because I’m not insane. I mean, I couldn’t, this is black magic, it’s sorcery, not shamanism, I’d be—I mean, Jesus Christ, Morrison, of course not! What the hell?”
His nostrils flared and words came through pinched lips: “You have a track record of doing incredibly stupid things in an attempt to figure out who or what your adversary is. Reverse engineering something like this sounds right up your alley.”
Righteous indignation bubbled up and spilled over into splutters. Splutters only, because he was right. It did sound like exactly the kind of moronic thing I’d try.
This did not seem like a good time to explain my plan had actually been more along the lines of throwing down a big shiny gauntlet of my own power in an attempt to get the killer’s attention, even though in comparison to Morrison’s fears, it seemed very mild and practical. Instead I collected my splutters into words. “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I think my magic would cut out on me. It has definite opinions about what I’m allowed to do with it. I mean, it went flat this morning, and that whole scenario was a hundred percent mundane, no paranormal activity involved. I’m pretty sure eating people’s hearts, even with the best of intentions, is right out.”
Morrison harrumphed, apparently satisfied, and I tried to gather my derailed thoughts. “If I was going to try something like that, which I’m not, I would use representational magic. Like voodoo, where you use a doll to—right, you know what voodoo is. Only instead of a doll I’d use a candy heart, or something. I’d devour it—would you stop looking at me like that?”
“I was wrong,” Morrison said in a deadly tone. “I thought I was all out of freak, but listening to one of my detectives discussing devouring hearts while dressed to kill pushes the limits. Skip to the end game, Walker. I can’t take much more of this.”
Probably the “dressed to kill” bit wasn’t supposed to make me grin, so I tried to keep it to a tiny smile, and looked somewhere else so meeting Morrison’s eyes wouldn’t loosen the expression into full-blown idiocy. I could be such a girl sometimes that I wanted to kick myself. Fortunately there were several dozen people still outside the theater, hanging around muttering quietly and eyeing the lobby in hopes of someone coming out with answers. They gave me something to focus on while I gave Morrison his end game. “Eating the representational heart would give me the physical and emotional target to draw down the power. Once the power drain was complete, destroying the actual heart would sever any link between myself and the body. There’s nothing left, no representational evidence, no physical evidence, no psychic residue. Excuse me. I have to go cop a feel on a pretty woman.”
Morrison said, “You what?” in the sort of resigned tone that indicated he’d never keep up with my inconstant ways, and stayed where he was while I hurried across the theater patio.
The cancer-infected woman I’d noticed in the theater was tall, maybe five foot nine, but she wore flats, so I towered over her as I tapped her shoulder. She turned from her friends, an eyebrow arched curiously, and looked me up and down. I did the same, because the word statuesque could have been coined just for her. Valkyries of yore wanted to look like this woman: broad-shouldered, generously endowed, long legs and a mass of genuinely golden hair that I didn’t think came out of a bottle. Her eyes were brown, which surprised me: I almost expected them to be as yellow as her hair. If she’d had a hint of a tan, the snug goldenrod dress she wore would have made her look like a giant banana, but she was so fair-skinned I couldn’t even find any freckles. She was about thirty-five, and aside from that touch of malignant pink in her breast, literally glowed with health. I wished everybody—including myself—had her level of fitness, and said, a bit rashly, “Hi. Do you believe in magic?”
“I don’t know about magic, but if you’re about to ask me on a date, I’ll believe in miracles,” she offered.
Apparently she had the confidence necessary for the bright-colored dress, too, and for a moment I genuinely regretted my limited palate of sexual preferences. “I’m sorry. I wish I was. Instead I’m going to say something really, really weird, and I hope you’ll believe me.”
She arched an eyebrow, looked over her shoulder at her friends, then faced me again, arms folded under her breasts. It was closed-off body language, but she contradicted it by putting her weight on one leg, hip cocked out and the other foot angled sideways to indicate a degree of willingness to listen. I had clearly been a detective too long, if I was studying her body language that carefully, but she took my mind off it by using her language-language, too: “If this is the ‘you should be a model’ speech, I’ve heard it before.”
“It’s much weirder than that. I’d like to hold your hands for a minute or two.”
Her other eyebrow skyrocketed up to match the first. “Are you sure you’re not asking me out?”
“Sadly, yes. I’d rather explain afterward, if that’s okay.”
She oofed as one of her friends elbowed her in the ribs and made a ribald comment, but she put her hands out. I took them, but she made like it was all her idea, grasping mine firmly. Her hands were rough, as if she worked with chemicals or just did fifty pull-ups on an iron bar every day. “You work out?”
“Enough to get noticed, I guess.” A glow of pleasure erupted from her, turning her dominant-yellow aura as brilliant a goldenrod as her dress, and putting her in exactly the kind of mental place I wanted her in. Overlooking the morning’s mess-up, I’d been able to heal people with a drawn-out vehicle analogy for most of the past year, aligning aliments to my mechanic’s trade knowledge. More recently, though, I’d stepped it up a notch, and could affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. It helped enormously, though, if my patient was receptive. Joyful and full of self-confidence was just about as positive and receptive a mental space as I could ask for.
She said something I didn’t hear as my attention went internal. My power leaped to life, no longer reluctant as it had been that morning. It felt like it was making up for lost time, or more likely, making up for the choice I’d made that morning. I didn’t exactly feel guilty, but I did feel like it would take a lot of healing people before I balanced out gunning one down.
Silver and blue magic, topped up and bubbling over from the energy the dancers had put out, was eager to go where I focused it. I’d never had a target like this one: no more than a handful of cells, lethal pink, unwelcome but unstoppable in the host body.
Habit lingered. It was easy to think of those few sick cells as tiny rust spots that needed sanding, polishing and repainting so they wouldn’t spread to the body around them. The real difference to me was not going through those steps. Once the analogy popped into mind, the work was done between one thought and the next.
What I didn’t expect was the staggering whirl of magic that surged toward the deadly pink cells, obliterating them. But it didn’t stop there. Time tunneled forward like a bad 3-D effect, showing me much paler pink cells, like ghosts of futures yet to come. Those cells multiplied, became blotches, became lumps, became masses, metastasizing and spreading. Healing magic charged headlong into the future-that-could-be, tearing sickness apart and leaving healthy flesh in its wake. It ran all the way through the cycle of disease, destroying it not just now, but all its potential in the future. I caught a glimpse of a double helix, of an off-shoot ladder rung that didn’t belong, and felt my magic gather itself, preparing to fix that, too.
Panic spurted through me and I clawed the magic back. It hesitated, still focused on that genetic anomaly, then rolled back into me, so drained I could barely feel its presence. Time wound backward, landing me back into the here and now, where my knees buckled. The woman’s grip on my hands kept me upright, but she let go, obviously feeling the flux of power. “What the—what’d you do?”
“Removed some rust.” My throat was dry. I coughed and tried again, but shivers wracked me so hard I could hardly focus on the woman before me. Her aura was no longer marred by the scant touch of unhealthy pink, but even my grip on the Sight faded as I reached feebly for something to lean on. She was the only thing available, and to my relief she put her hand out again, strong fingers banding around my arm.
“Are you all right?” Her voice was pitched high with concern.
I managed a nod. The cancer hadn’t spread, but the amount of magic bent to finding and destroying those sick cells offered a warning: potentially terminal illness, even if it hadn’t come anywhere near actually terminal, was not something to mess with lightly. I had the ugly feeling I could have easily killed myself with that unconsidered effort. Walking blithely through cancer wards and laying on hands was clearly not going to be an option.
“What’d you do?” she asked again, this time more mystified than alarmed. “I feel like champagne. Bubbly inside.”
“Do me a favor.” I sounded like I’d drunk a cupful of sand. “Go to the doctor. Get a mammogram. Just to be sure.”
She went white, long rangy lines going rigid. “You don’t think…?”
“No.” Not anymore, but that didn’t seem like a useful thing to say. The image of the distorted double helix popped up again and I crushed my eyes shut, wishing I’d dared try shaving that wrongness away. There were at least two good reasons not to have: one, I didn’t know what the long-term ramifications for her genetics would be if I had, and two, I thought I was lucky to not already be dead. Rewriting DNA was not in the game plan. “Just go to the doctor to be sure, okay? Please? Get one of those genetic tests, if you can, to see if you’ve got a predilection for the disease.”
She relaxed incrementally at the reassurance, then frowned again. “I will. But what did you do? Who are you?”
“I’m a healer.” It sounded absurd, but I was too tired to come up with something clever. No healing I’d done had ever wiped me out so badly. I was going to have to talk to Coyote about tempering the magic so I didn’t kill myself while doing my duties. “I’m a healer, and I think you’ll be okay now, but go to a doctor anyway. Please?”
“A healer.” Befuddlement darkened her eyes and she caught my arm. “Really? That—it sounds like bullshit, but I feel…people like you exist? For real?”
I breathed a tiny laugh. “For real. But you’ll go to a doctor anyway, right? Please?”
“I will.” She didn’t let go of my arm, though, expression searching mine. “But I’d like to see you again, too. Just to be sure. Would that be okay?”
God. It was considerably more bizarre to have someone believe me than not. I smiled, wishing I was more comfortable with being someone’s hero, and nodded. “My name’s Joanne Walker. I work for the Seattle Police Department, so I’m not hard to find. Give me a call sometime, if you want. That would be fine. But, um, don’t noise this around, okay? Faith healing isn’t exactly on my résumé.”
She finally let me go, glancing at her own hands in embarrassment. “Right, no, of course I won’t. And I will call. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so pushy. I just never felt anything like that before, and now you say I had cancer and it’s gone and—” She broke off, took a deep breath, and repeated, “Sorry. Sorry, Miss Walker. I’ll call you.” She glanced in the direction I’d been trying to go, toward Morrison, and tilted her head curiously. I sort of shrugged, and she got a small, crooked smile. “Nice.”
It was an assessment I couldn’t argue with. I smiled a bit in return, nodded and wobbled back to the theater building where I could lean on a wall.
Morrison joined me, breath drawn to ask a question, but I shook my head. Something was nosing at my exhausted magic, like a dog that had found something interestingly stinky to explore. It was a new sensation, and it withdrew as I reached inside myself to scrape together enough power to create shields. Withdrew, nosed the shields themselves, then disappeared entirely, leaving behind only a fading sense of inquisitiveness and a faint but familiar tugging in my belly, fishhooks pulling me toward some kind of encounter.
Every part of me wanted that sensation to be nothing more than my imagination. Failing that, I liked the idea of it being a good guy recently come to Seattle and just discovering there were other people of power hanging out in town. There’d been no sense of malice or danger from the feeling, just interest.
Nothing in the past fifteen months, though, had given me any reason to believe the happy fluffy bunny scenario. I was dead sure that I’d gotten the killer’s attention.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Talk to me, Walker. You look like a ghost.” Morrison ducked his head so he could catch my gaze and bring it up, which was surprising enough that it worked.
For a second, anyway. The pedantic part of me then couldn’t help looking over myself, wondering if I really did look like a ghost. Not really: they tended to be more transparent and monochromatic than I was, though I had to give Morrison the nod for my color being off. “Sorry. That woman had breast cancer. Healing it wiped me out.”
“You can…” Morrison sounded like he was about to swallow his tongue. “You can do that?”
“Apparently. I’m also thinking it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, not unless I want to kill myself. There’s probably a better way, maybe if I set up a healing circle, a drum…” I trailed off, letting the building hold me up as I looked toward the theater inside. “Like what they were doing. Creating a controlled center of power. I’ll work it out later. Long-term project.”
One side of Morrison’s mouth curled up. “You’ve changed.”
I blinked back toward him. “Really?” It was a stupid question. I knew he was right. Still, having him come out and say it warranted a slightly incredulous response.
My stupidity didn’t seem to bother him, as he simply nodded instead of calling me out on it. “You’re a lot more confident.”
“I was always confident.” About cars.
For some reason I didn’t have to say the last two words aloud. Morrison managed to hear them anyway, or at least I hoped that was what he was responding to as the rest of his mouth joined the smile. “No, Walker. You were arrogant. You probably still are, but confidence sits better. I think even three months ago you wouldn’t have been standing here telling me flat-out this thing wasn’t a wendigo or that you could heal terminal illnesses but thought you needed a focal point. The whole thing would have embarrassed you.”
Now the corner of my mouth turned up. “And it would’ve pissed you off. Sir.”
“My mother likes to say ‘a body can get used to anything, even being hanged, as the Irishman said.’”
I laughed, then became more solemn. “Oh, great. I don’t know, Morrison. I’ve screwed up so much. So many people’ve gotten hurt. I had to get over myself. And…”
His eyebrow twitched upward and I found myself at a loss. I’d been going to say “Coyote coming back really helped,” which was true, but which was also suddenly something I really didn’t want to say to Morrison. Not when we were getting along so well. So what came out of my mouth was unexpected, if heartfelt: “And you helped. No matter how much you didn’t like it, you took this talent of mine in stride way before I did. It’s been a year now, you know? Since the banshee? A year almost to the day. And you were the one who pulled me onto that case, because you accepted I had a potentially useful skill set whether you understood it or not. So I owe you a lot, boss. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” There was a momentary pause while we were both uncomfortable with all of that before Morrison got another very slight smile, this one sly. “Or were you just saying all that to soften me up for something I’m not going to like?”
I groaned. “No, not on purpose, but now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure I got the killer’s attention when I healed that woman.”
Morrison’s good humor drained away, leaving him to study me as though I was some kind of new and especially nasty stain on his shoe. “Take a walk with me, Detective.”
That couldn’t be good. I fell into step with him, arms wrapped around myself. Sleeveless velvet sheath dresses were very sexy, but not at all warm, and I’d left my coat in Petite for dramatic effect. Women weren’t too bright sometimes. We got a little distance from the theater before Morrison said, “You remember you’re suspended from duty, right?”
“The theater’s not in our jurisdiction anyway. It all works out,” I said flippantly. “It’s not like either thing is going to stop me from investigating.”
He glowered at me, but it was a resigned sort of glower. “I know. Walker, what do you mean, you got his attention? From what you’ve said, from what I’ve seen, you’ve been throwing power around Seattle for the last year like Jackson Pollock threw paint, and this guy only just now notices you? Explain that to me.”
We hadn’t gotten more than fifty feet away from the theater, but I stopped to goggle at my boss. Never mind women not being too bright. I clearly wasn’t too bright.
There was no need to damn my entire gender just because I was a moron. I tented my hands over my nose and mouth, stared at Morrison over my fingertips and finally said, “I can’t. Not unless it’s someone brand-new to the Pacific Northwest, but if it is, I don’t know why he’d choose here to make his attack. I’d want to work from comfortable territory, myself.”
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