The Walker Papers

Chapter Six

Saturday, April 1, 2:02 p.m.

If Suzy hadn’t been holding on, I’d have fallen. As it was, the world didn’t gray out: it went black. Not a dizzy sort of black. Dark magic sort of black, swirling up to eat at the auras I was half aware of seeing. Snipping away at Morrison’s purples and blues, drinking greedily at Suzy’s blaze green. I shouted, a hoarse hurtful sound.

Black spilled away under a rush of my own magic, gunmetal pushing back at the darkness. I swung around, out of Suzy’s grip, until I faced Lake Washington. Until I faced Thunderbird Falls, which had been a bastion of white magic in Seattle. I could always See the falls. Power shot upward from it, white magic full of faint rainbow hues that eventually crashed against the clear blue sky or thick gray clouds, and spilled back down over Seattle, bringing a bit more pleasantry and generosity than had been there before. That was a gift of the good-hearted and good-willed New-Agey types in Seattle, by the covens and the other folk who had been drawn to the falls. Their difficult birth had rearranged Seattle’s landscape, but it had been turned into a good thing.

And now it was dying.

Ichor oozed upward through the column of white magic, its stain growing exponentially. The faint rainbow tints tainted to oil slicks instead, white shading to shades of gray. I could See perfectly well that it still reached for the sky, but it felt heavier, like the darkness was dragging it down. Like it would be happier buried in the earth, though I didn’t know if that was true. It seemed to me that if the white magic could rain cheer and contentment down on people, that black magic raining doom and misery would be right up the Master’s alley.

On the other hand, the vicious truth was I didn’t yet know the Master’s endgame. I was good at self-aggrandizing, but I seriously doubted his entire goal was to obliterate me and my friends. It was definitely on his to-do list, because we were a constant pain in his ass, but I didn’t think he would call it done and dusted the moment I was a smear on the pavement. In fact, if I thought that, I might’ve even been willing to become that smear just to offer everybody else a get-out-of-jail-free card. But no, it wasn’t going to work that way, and while I was acknowledging that, my feet headed toward the elevators at top speed.

I didn’t get twenty feet before I lurched to a halt again. Morrison just about ran me down. “Walker?”

“I can’t go without Annie.” My legs trembled with indecision. “I mean, I really—if I can only keep Suzy safe by keeping her with me, and Annie’s still got the sickness in her—”

“Walker, the hospital is not going to let you walk out of here with a seventy-six-year-old woman who has just awoken from a coma after mysteriously returning from death.”

“I could make us invisible.”

“You can do that?” Suzy’s voice popped into the shrill register only attainable by a teenage girl in full-on thrill mode. “Can I do that?”

I spared half a second to imagine what I would have done as a teen with the ability to turn invisible and said, “No,” without really caring if it was true. Suzy drooped and fell back a couple steps as I twitched, trying to decide which way to go. “I can’t go without Annie, Morrison. I can’t leave her here without protection. Or if it comes to it, I can’t leave Gary here without protection from her. I have to get her. Look, just—just go without me, okay? Go, and I’ll try to get the doctors to understand—”

“Walker, I can’t go without you!”

That was so preposterous I stopped trembling and gaped at Morrison. He passed a hand through his silver hair. “A mass murder at Thunderbird Falls is your department, Walker. Whatever’s happened there, you’re going to need to see it. I can’t give you what you’re going to need in a written report. You have to see it. To See it. The sooner, the better, right? Because magic doesn’t linger and you can’t track it.”

I stared at him a long moment or two, wondering when he’d become such an expert on magic. Over the past fifteen months, obviously, but it still jarred me to hear him say such things outright. “Yes. Yeah. You’re right. I just—”

A door down the hall behind us banged open. Morrison and I both flinched, reaching for duty weapons neither of us were carrying. A few seconds later, Suzy, now wearing a light blue T-shirt, sailed past, balanced on the back lower frame of a wheelchair occupied by a small figure in a gray hoodie. “Taking Grandma for her walk!” she caroled as they swept past the nurses’ station two dozen feet ahead of us. “We’ll be back in twenty minutes!”

“Get off that wheelchair, young lady!” somebody bellowed after her. Suzy jumped off the frame and ushered the wheelchair into an open elevator before anybody had time to stop her. The doors slid closed, leaving me and Morrison goggling down the hall.

Gary, shrugging on a Windbreaker and carrying my drum in one hand, lumbered up to us. “I hear we got places to be, doll.” He sounded more like his old self. I stared at him without much comprehension, too, until he swung a finger, lassolike, and pointed it toward the elevators. “That girl’s gonna be out the front door in three minutes, Jo. We goin’, or what?”

“Yes! Yeah! We’re going. We’re...going.” I jolted into motion with the first word, and tried not to let my feet slow down as I stuttered toward the end of the sentence. Morrison, marching alongside me, was as apoplectic as he ever had been when facing down the curves my life threw at him. Gary, however, had a grin that looked fit to beat the devil.

Since that was kind of what we had to do, it gave me heart. The three of us got in another elevator and followed Suzy out of the hospital. Nobody gave any of us a second look: there were plenty of other patients in wheelchairs or on crutches, making slow rounds over the hospital grounds. Morrison broke into a jog, gaining ground on us before disappearing into the parking lot. When we were as far away from the hospital front doors as we could get, he appeared in our rented car.

Annie Muldoon clambered inside the car and threw her hood back to reveal a delighted smile. “I always wanted to ride in a getaway car! I apologize, Captain Morrison, for putting you in this awkward position. I’m grateful for your assistance.”

Suzy flung herself into the far passenger’s side of the car, catching Morrison’s look of bewilderment. “I explained everything to Grandma, I mean, Mrs. Muldoon, on the way out.”

Morrison breathed, “I sincerely doubt that,” and Suzy huffed in exasperation.

“I explained enough. She knows who you are.”

“And I appreciate the difficulty of your situation,” Annie said. By that time we were all in the car, me riding shotgun after Gary and I had engaged in a silent discussion-slash-argument about whether he or I would take it. In the end he’d pointed ferociously at Annie, indicating he was not moving an inch farther from her side than necessary. I put my drum in the trunk and got in the front passenger seat.

“Mrs. Muldoon, I’m not sure even I appreciate the difficulty of my situation right now.” That said, Morrison put the car in Drive and peeled out of the parking lot. “Walker, call Dispatch. Tell them to put out an APB that I am in a rented blue Toyota Avalon, license plate number CTAK3887—”

“You know the car’s license plate number?” I asked in admiring astonishment.

Morrison’s lifted eyebrow suggested he memorized the plates of every vehicle he ever got in, no matter how little time he expected to spend in it. “And that I am approaching Thunderbird Falls from the southwest, at as high a speed as I can manage. This vehicle is not to be stopped for traffic violations.”

Morrison was going to rack up traffic violations on my behalf. I’d never heard anything half so sexy in my life. I put the call in and gasped gladly when I recognized the dispatcher who picked up: my old friend Bruce. “I’ll see if I can get any squad cars to clear some streets for you,” he offered without missing a beat. “Where are you coming from, exactly?”

I told him, finishing with, “If I could cook I’d make you and Elise the best meal you’d ever had, in thanks.”

“I can cook,” Annie put in.

I laughed, relaying the offer, although not who it was from. Bruce counter-offered with a cook-off, his wife’s tamales against the best Annie could come up with, and then got serious again. “I can get you a police escort starting in about fifteen blocks. I’ve got other cars moving to clear the road ahead of you, but with the escort you’ll have sirens. Be careful, Joanie.”

“It’s Jo, now. And we will be.” I hung up, gave Morrison the down-low and spent the next seven minutes trying not to shriek with speed-demon joy as my staid, steady boss took corners too fast, blew traffic lights, rode the meridian and braked hard from accelerations.

Annie, in the back middle seat, bounced and clapped her hands when the escort, sirens wailing and lights flashing, joined us. I burst out laughing, and Suzy had her knuckles in her mouth, trying to hold back squeals. “Wonder if this is what the president feels like,” Gary rumbled.

Morrison shot him one short look in the rearview mirror before bringing his attention back to the road. “The president doesn’t usually travel this fast in land vehicles. This better get us there in time, Walker.”

That cut the legs right out from under my glee. There was no in time: people were already dead. But if I could work a power circle, at least maybe I could contain the black magic swallowing up the falls’ power, and if we were incredibly lucky, maybe we could snare the murderer.

Chances were not good that we’d be incredibly lucky.

With the police escort, we got to the falls in record time. I was out of the car before Morrison had finished pulling into a parking space, but somehow he was still only two steps behind me. I half noticed Gary getting out with Annie and Suzy, but he drew them away from the crime scene that Morrison and I ran for. I was grateful for that: Annie might’ve been a nurse, but Suzy was just a kid, and she didn’t need to see the horror smeared across the beach.

I didn’t count them. I just saw that there were lots, and mentally leaped to the number: thirteen. A coven. A coven meant they all had at least some tiny flush of magical talent. That had to be the ultimate murder prize for the Master. That had to help him to no end. No wonder the falls’ magic was so badly damaged, and no wonder it kept getting worse. I was willing to bet these people had been pouring their hearts and souls into that power right up to the moment of their deaths.

And they weren’t just dead. They’d had their hearts ripped out, every single one of them. Their ribs were broken outward like someone had shoved a hand through their backs and emerged clutching the hardest-working muscle in the body. The blood sprays looked like that, too, easily visible because the victims were all flat on their backs in a perfect circle, as if something very startling had leaped from the earth at their center and the surprise had knocked them all over backward. The blood looked like their hearts had been ripped out after that, like the same something had then come up through their spines and taken the hearts skyward. I shuddered, unable to drag my gaze from the red gaping holes in their chests.

Peripherally, I knew mundane things were going on. Morrison had left me standing stock-still a stone’s throw from the bodies, and was taking charge of the gathering cops, medical teams and, God forbid, reporters. His calm took some of the edge off rising hysteria, though I Saw glimpses of anger and shock sparking through his aura. Eyewitnesses were babbling stories to anyone who would listen, including others who had been there. Some of them were arguing with one another. Pale-faced cops were trying to take down the comments without looking at the bodies, and I saw my friend Heather Fagan, head of the North Precinct’s forensics team, cross under the police tape with her mouth set in a thin grim line. All of this activity was going on around me, and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t bring myself to look at the faces I was holding out of focus because I was afraid of what I would see.

Afraid it would be worse than blood and bone and viscera spattered across a sand-addled shore. The horribleness of that made me breathe a sharp laugh, which in turn let me close my eyes. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I’d be able to look elsewhere when I opened them again. I did that on purpose, with them still closed: moved my gaze, pointed it in the direction of faces, not bodies. It still took turning my hands into fists to make me open my eyes again.

The first face I saw was a young man. Early twenties, nice-looking, familiar.

“Garth.” The name didn’t make it past my throat. Didn’t even shape my lips as my stomach dropped and left a wake of ice where it had been. Garth Johannsen, Colin’s older brother. Colin, who had played host to a dark sorcerer and paid for it with his life in the battle that had birthed Thunderbird Falls. I thought Garth had gotten out of the Magic Seattle scene. It looked like he’d gotten back in.

I knew the other faces, too. Duane, the very decent guy whose blood I’d shared in a rather literally minded ritual. Thomas, their Elder, the male counterpart to the Crone. Roxie, who’d been as cute as her name.

But I’d been wrong. I’d misjudged in my counting. There weren’t thirteen bodies. There were twelve.

Marcia Williams, the coven’s leader, was missing.

Chapter Seven

“When?” My question rasped beneath the general babble, not loud enough to gain anyone’s attention. I cleared my throat and tried again. “When? When exactly did this happen?”

Two dozen witnesses turned my way with two dozen answers. Well, no, more like with about four answers, the majority of which were 1:53 p.m. I took that as the median and hobbled a few steps away from the bodies. “Morrison? Michael?”

He turned his head half an inch at his surname, indicating he’d heard me, but when I used his first name he came around full circle, eyes dark with concern. “What is it, Walker?”

“What time exactly did Annie wake up?”

“One fifty-three.”

Of course. I would trust Morrison to know the precise moment that the world planned to end, so I had no doubt at all he was right. I pressed my fingertips into the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t wearing glasses. I hadn’t been wearing them for a while, but the world wasn’t in soft focus. I wondered, briefly, if all the shape-shifting had fixed my vision, then let it go, because there were far more important things to think about. Like, “Then we have a problem.”

If Morrison was the kind of person to give me a no shit look, that would have been the time to do it. Instead, a thread of tension knotted his aura and his shoulders, but so subtly I wasn’t certain anybody else could see it. “Another problem?”

“One to discuss in private.”

A line appeared between his eyebrows. He said, “One moment,” to the cop he’d been talking to and gestured for me to lead the way.

I took us several steps away. “Witnesses say this went down at 1:53, Morrison.”

“I know. What does tha—” He closed his eyes momentarily before regarding me steadily. “Walker, I want you to tell me there’s no connection between Annie’s revival and...this.”

“I want to tell Annie that.”

I knew Morrison could lose control. I’d seen him blow his top any number of times. I was usually the cause, in fact. But when it came down to the job, the man kept his cool better than anyone I’d ever known. Silence stretched for five heartbeats before he said, “Then tell me what happened.”

“When I went in for Annie—” I broke off, uncertain if that made sense to anyone but me. Morrison nodded, indicating I should continue. “When I went in, the thing coming for her—for her soul, her life essence—it had a sense of urgency. It felt like the Raven Mocker coming into the world. Like it was being birthed but it—” I faltered, then said it all in a rush. “Like it needed a body to be born into. Like Annie was meant to be its host. And when I rescued her...”

“...it found somewhere else to go. Instantaneously? Is that possible?”

I looked toward the bodies, back at Morrison, and shrugged. “At a guess, I’d say yes. They were using magic right then, so they were primed, and...” I exhaled until my lungs were as empty as I could make them, then inhaled until tears prickled my eyes. “And they were marked, I bet. Somehow. Because this is the coven I worked with last July, Morrison. I knew these people. I worked magic with them, and that...might have made them susceptible. It all comes around.” I felt very tired suddenly, a bone weariness that had nothing to do with too little sleep and a lot to do with sorrow and regret.

Morrison’s voice gentled. “It isn’t your fault, Walker.”

I sighed. “Not in so many words, no, but even so. It’s coming to an end.” I said that for myself as much as him, because I couldn’t bear the idea of my associates dying for the folly of having met me.

“Yes.” There was a strange note in that word.

My eyebrows furled. “You can’t possibly be sorry about that, Morrison. This hasn’t exactly been a hayride for you.”

“Or for any of us. No, I just wondered, for a moment—” He broke off and shook his head, leaving me scowling at him in perplexity.

“Boss, look, if I’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that if you’ve got something to say you should probably get it off your chest, because who knows if you’re going to get another chance.”

“‘Boss?’”

I rolled my eyes. “Old habits. Morrison. Mike. Whatever. What’s wrong?”

The corner of his mouth quirked. “‘Mike.’ ‘Boss’ may be easier to take than that. A maudlin thought, Walker, and not one appropriate to the circumstances. I wondered if you would still need or want me when this is over.”

The man’s vulnerabilities rose at the weirdest time. There was absolutely nothing I could say to that, so I stepped forward, slid my fingers into his short silver hair and gave him a knee-weakening kiss right there in front of God and everybody.

Morrison said something like, “Asllfmph,” against my mouth, and was scarlet over every inch of visible skin when I finally released him. I put my fingertip against his lips, whispered, “Don’t be silly,” and kissed my finger away, too. “Now we should get back to business.”

Somewhere in that last word the surrounding silence made itself noticed to me. I pursed my lips, practically certain I didn’t want to look around, but of course I did, anyway.

The whole crime scene had come to a halt. Everybody—cops, forensics, witnesses—was staring at us. It even felt like the sucking darkness in the falls’ power had paused to gape at our inappropriate public display of affection.

“Sorry.” My grin and my blush were running even odds as to which would split my head first. I flapped my hand at our observers. “As you were.”

Throats cleared, gazes averted, people shuffled, and within a few seconds everybody was back to the duties of the moment. Morrison, still red around the collar, muttered, “You have no sense of decorum, Walker,” but didn’t sound as put out as I thought he was trying to.

I smiled at him. “I know. It’s part of what you find so appealing about me. That totally blew the office betting pool, though. No way we can rig it now. Come on.” I took his hand and pulled him a few steps back toward the cop he’d been talking to. “Let’s get back to work.”

“Wait. Walker, a dozen supernatural deaths in broad daylight. How—?”

“I think that mostly depends on Heather.” I squinted toward the lead forensics officer, whose crouched form was silhouetted by sunlight bouncing off the lake. “And whoever is the medical examiner, I guess, because the only logical, real-world way this happened was with some kind of tiny rigged explosives, worn either voluntarily or planted on the coven.”

“Explosives of which they will find no physical evidence.”

I had to love a man who didn’t end sentences with prepositions. “Right. It’s a pretty good cover story for the press, though. I mean, I don’t like it, because it feeds right into the whole Wiccans as crazy cult types, but most people would accept it.”

Morrison sighed, looking out at the lake. “Last time something went down at Thunderbird Falls you gave me a plausible line for it, too. Is that the line you want—” His teeth clenched, and I couldn’t blame him one bit.

“I don’t want you to give them any line, Morrison. I’ll go talk to Heather and I’ll talk with the M.E. This kind of spin isn’t something you should be handling. Let the flack fall on me. I’ve been a problem employee all along.”

“You quit two weeks ago.”

I kept forgetting that. My whole face wrinkled up, not at the reminder, but because it meant my only viable excuses to be here were either magic-related, or because I was Morrison’s girlfriend. Neither was going to go over spectacularly well with the top brass.

I put that on a mental shelf to worry about later. “So I did, which means any weirdness can be laid squarely at my feet and the emphasis can be on me no longer being a cop.”

“The reasons for which are now murky, since half of Seattle just saw us kissing.”

“Dammit, Morrison, I was trying to reassure you in a way I thought you’d believe. I wasn’t thinking about the consequences.” I clearly should have been, but as was usual with me and thinking, I was applying it too little and too late. “The good news is there’s so much magic whirling around here right now that everything’s going to be a fog for most of these people, so let’s not worry about it. I’m going to go talk to Heather. You go...do your thing.” As he strode off, I realized his thing, at the moment, was taking the lead on this investigation. Police captains weren’t generally supposed to do that, but he was certainly the ranking officer on the scene, and he had a vested interest in getting my mess cleaned up.

Forget whether I was going to want him when this was over. He’d be crazy to still want me. I sighed—I seemed to be doing that a lot—and worked my way around the bloody circle to approach Heather Fagan.

She stopped me with an upraised palm as I made to step over the police line. “You’ve already been in here, haven’t you?”

“Yeah. Over there, next to Garth. I’ll give the guys my shoe information.” I lifted a foot and wiggled it a little.

“Garth. You know these people?” Heather put her hands on her thighs and pushed out of her crouch. “Is this going to turn out like the Ravenna Park death?”

“Yes.”

“So I’m not going to get any answers I like. And maybe not any at all.”

“Right.”

Heather gave me a flat look. “What is it with you?”

“...I’m a shaman, and this sort of crap has been following me around for about a year. It’s almost over now.”

She stared at me a couple of seconds, and I wondered if lying would have been the better tactic after all. Not that she would have believed a lie, either. But she didn’t call me on it, only snorted. “Over. Malarkey. Fine. I’ll make sure Sandra is the M.E. on this. She’ll find whatever is necessary to make this story bearable to the general public. Who’s your lead detective?”

I looked over my shoulder toward Morrison, but I knew the answer. “Billy Holliday. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“Holliday. Of course. The one guy weirder than you are. And the one guy you can trust to help cover this up.”

“Just like you’re about to do.” I wanted to be very clear on that. Heather thrust her jaw out, but nodded. I couldn’t help asking, “Why?”

“Because I can’t do my job if I have tabloid reporters breathing down my neck demanding to know the real story when I can’t provide a rational and logical explanation for something like this.”

“What if there isn’t one?”

Heather pressed her lips together so hard they disappeared into a thin white line before she spoke. “My niece works in a morgue. Last Halloween she dismembered an animated dead body with a scalpel.”

“Holy crap! About yay tall,” I said, waving my hand at about shoulder height, “wears her hair in a braid? I met her! She’s your niece?”

I received another flat look for my enthusiasm. “Cindy wanted to talk about it. I wanted to forget everything that had happened that night, but Cindy wouldn’t let it go. Two months later, a bunch of frozen bodies shriveled up and turned to dust in the morgue while I was watching.”

That wasn’t strictly true. I, in fact, had been watching at the time. But I was willing to give Heather the poetic license here, since I was certain she felt like it had happened on her watch, if not under her very gaze. “Cindy wouldn’t let that go, either, and she wouldn’t let me let it go. Ever since then I’ve been seeing things I don’t remember noticing, or wanting to think about, before.

“This—” and she jabbed a finger toward the bodies with a certain vicious frustration “—is one of them. I don’t want to think there’s no rational explanation, Detective Walker. I’ve always believed there is one for everything. But I see you here, and I think about Cindy carving up zombies, and freeze-dried bodies, and facing a dozen dead people with no instantly obvious cause of death—” her lip curled, because burst chests and missing hearts were pretty obviously the cause of death, but I knew what she meant “—and I know the only answer I’m going to get is going to be unsatisfactory, so I would rather provide a rational lie on a police report than leave an entire city of people terrified that if they come down to Lake Washington for an afternoon at the waterfall, their hearts are going to explode out of their bodies!”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Be sorry for their families, who are probably going to spend the rest of their lives struggling to understand the lies we tell them.”

“If, when this is over, the truth is easier to believe, I’ll tell them the truth.” It wasn’t much, but it was the best I could offer.

Heather’s eyes narrowed. “If the truth is easier to believe than the lie?”

“No. If the truth is easier to believe than it is now.” Because if we won, I wondered if it might not be. One way or another, there was going to be a lot of magic released into the world. Maybe it would be easier to tell grieving families it had killed their loved ones, instead of letting them believe they had either been forced, or had chosen, to die in an inexplicable cult death at the foot of a newborn waterfall. “I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Heather, I know this sucks, so...thank you.”

“You want to thank me, you...” She hesitated, eyes searching my face. “You go talk to Cindy when this is over. Because if she can’t let this thing go, the thing with zombies and...this...” she said with an unhappy look at the bodies, before sharpening her gaze on me again. “If she can’t let it go, then I don’t want her exploring it by herself. I want her to have a teacher, somebody I know and trust. I don’t want to be standing over her body like this someday because she took a wrong turn.”

An ache filled my chest. I tried to breathe it away and couldn’t catch air at all, only made a small hiccuping sound and nodded. “I will. I promise.”

“Good. Thank you.” Heather turned away, going back to her job like none of our conversation had happened. Maybe she wished it hadn’t. I managed to draw a shuddering breath and stumbled away, confused and touched and frightened by her trust in me. I hoped I could be the guide Cindy needed. I hoped I could be the guide any of the kids I’d met needed: Cindy, my cousin Caitríona, Suzanne Quinley...even the Holliday kids, though them to a lesser degree, since they had their parents, who were far more stable than I was.

I was still fumbling with the idea of being a teacher when Marcia Williams rose out of the earth and backhanded me.