Shaman Rises (The Walker Papers) (12 page)

Chapter Eleven

I stood there stunned for an embarrassingly long time, gaping at where she’d walked away. She shouldn’t have been able to. The circle was a keep-things-in circle, meant to contain the power of the falls.

It came clear to me in slow, agonizing heartbeats.

I’d had her. God damn it, I’d had her. When she’d hit me and I’d pulled her into the Lower World, it had disembodied her. Now with this stupid-ass stunt, I’d poured enough anger and fear into the circle to reincorporate her. And she’d taken all that emotion,
my
emotion, and walked out of
my
circle because she tasted of
me.

I’d walked right into the Master’s trap. Forget rage. I bordered on despair, my power circle faltering as the magic sustaining it shriveled with horror. I had made everything worse. Again. I mean,
maybe
Morrison was just outside the circle, had noticed Marcia walking away and had shot her dead, but I couldn’t hear the echoes of a gunshot and I doubted a bullet would take her down anyway.

I gave up the circle, letting it go with no ceremony at all, and collapsed to my knees in the waterfall. That was a terrible idea: freezing water splashed to my armpits as it rushed by, no more caring of my presence than of the rocks it also passed over. Hypothermia would not help matters, but I couldn’t get myself to move. I was probably less danger to the world as a frozen lump in a stream than fighting this battle, if my method of fighting was to give the bad guys a leg up in getting a foothold here. The Sight had slid off when I dropped, and I looked over Lake Washington as if I’d never seen it before. The water was hard and blue, with white light bouncing off to half blind me. Sunlight warmed my hair enough to contrast with the iciness of my skin. I lifted one hand to put it in my hair, hoping to warm my fingers, but instead cold water drizzled down my neck and made me even colder. Things were not going as I’d planned. I sat there awhile, trying to figure out what to do next.

“You fell.” Coyote and Morrison were both there, gazes concerned and hands extended. I looked at them dully, then put my hands in theirs.

It was about as much as my water-laden, half-frozen muscles could manage. They had to pull me to my feet, and even so, I fell, soaking Morrison almost as badly as I was drenched when he caught me. We got out of the waterfall’s stream and Coyote slung his leather coat over my shoulders. Its warmth made me start shivering violently. He said, “Jo,” in a perfect blend of exasperation and worry.

Desert heat rolled over me, a light touch of his healing power sinking into my bones and driving the chill from my body. It did squat-all to dry me off, but after several seconds I regained enough motor control to squirm out of my coat and start wringing it. It hadn’t gotten wet when I’d fallen in a river in North Carolina. Apparently I’d spilled enough magic just now that my subconscious couldn’t cope with details like that. Coyote took the coat and began wringing it himself so I could rub my chest instead. “Th-thanks.”

Morrison stepped up to wrap his arms around me. His body temperature felt like it was about five hundred degrees, compared to mine. I expected to see steam rise where we touched as I huddled against him gratefully. “You fell,” he repeated. “What happened?”

“Everybody’s okay?” I whispered. “The shields held, Coyote? Nobody attacked?”

“Attacked? No. You did it.” Coyote was hushed with awe. “You did it, Jo. I didn’t think you could.”

“I did what? I let Marcia walk right out? Yeah. Yay. Good job me.”

They both stared at me, blue eyes and gold equally befuddled. Coyote nodded toward the falls. “No, you
did
it. You cleansed the magic here.”

I stared back at them, uncomprehending. It took a while to think to use the Sight, to look beyond them at the column of magic rising from Thunderbird Falls.

It was white again, the taint entirely vanished. Morrison must have seen recognition of the fact in my face, because he gave a sudden grin and clapped my shoulder. “I knew you could do it, Walker.”

“No.” I sounded faint. “No, I mean, maybe I did, but I didn’t. If the dark magic is gone it’s because she needed it to reincorporate. Like the wraiths feeding Raven Mocker’s arrival, Morrison. Oh, we struck a blow, maybe,” I said bitterly. “Two of them. We took Annie back first and then we knocked the leanansidhe out of Marcia, probably because it wasn’t as firmly embedded in Marcia as it would’ve been in Annie. But then I built it a nice big circle to suck power from and filled it up with my own hate and now she’s out there again and it’s all my fault.”

I was proud of myself. I’d come a long way in the past fifteen months. When this started, those last three words would have been pure snivel. Now they were grim acceptance. I felt Coyote and Morrison exchanging glances, and by some arcane male signaling, it was apparently decided that Morrison should speak. “Walker, Marcia Williams’s body is down there by the falls. The paramedics have been working on her since you and she crashed together. Remember? They declared her while you were up here.”

“...the leanansidhe didn’t take the body back?”

Morrison shook his head. Hope lit and fizzled in me all at once and I had to repeat myself to even start believing it. “You mean she didn’t reincorporate?”

Carefully, like he thought I had perhaps dropped forty or so IQ points along the way, Morrison echoed, “She didn’t reincorporate, Walker.”

I swayed, running through the implications of that, half-aloud. “So that’s good, then. Because it means she’s just a malevolent spirit right now. And it’s bad, because it means that she needs a body. Oh, God.” I straightened up, all malaise burning away. “Malevolent spirits. Any of the mediums in Seattle could be vulnerable, Morrison.
Billy.
Have you heard anything from Billy since this started?”

“He’s on his way down here now.”

“No. Not here. Not—agh! You left Suzy and Annie alone!” I shook the men off and ran for the bluff, which was another of those things I didn’t think through so well. Lucky for me, I didn’t have enough momentum to really fly off the fifteen-foot-high cliff face, and mostly only slid and crashed my way down its rough slope. I looked like a mud bunny when I hit the bottom, water and soft dirt caking most of my body. I wiped my face clean as I ran for the Muldoons and Suzy, and concluded from Suzy’s sudden burst of laughter upon my arrival that I hadn’t done a very good job. She clapped her hands over her mouth apologetically. I smeared more muck around, sighed and gave up. “Are you all right?”

“She came at us.” Suzy’s humor fell away like it had never existed. She tapped her temple. “I Saw her, silver against the black, and I got between her and Annie. She wanted me. It was like I felt her tasting the green inside me, but I braced myself and she hit the black first and...it was like it scared her, Ms. Walker. She ran. Away,” she added as my gaze went to Annie. “That way.” She pointed west, which brought my attention back to her.

“Can you track magic?”

Suzy’s eyebrows turned quizzical. “Track it?”

“See where it’s going, or gone. Like it’s left a trail?”

Her eyebrows dropped, and beneath them her expression became nonplussed. “Sure. Can’t you?”

“...no. No, I can’t.”

She brightened up like I’d given her a pony. “Really? I can do something you can’t? That’s cool! I wonder why!”

Gary cleared his throat with a rumble. “I’m guessing it’s ’cause it’s your grandpa who’s the god of the Wild Hunt, sweetheart. Wouldn’t be much of a hunter if he couldn’t track something. Maybe it came down through the genes.”

That made such perfect sense I wanted to kick myself for not dragging Suzy in on a couple of cases where tracking magic would have been really, really handy. Like with the windigo. Or the werewolf. Then I reminded myself she was fifteen and hauling her out on police-turned-magic cases would probably be illegal, never mind the obvious dangers. On the other hand, she was here now and I already had to keep her in sight so I could keep her safe, so I might as well take advantage. “Can you See where she’s
going?
Or if she’s stopped anywhere, or—”

Suzy’s scleras blazed green as she ignited her power. “A park. A baseball par—oh!” The fire in her eyes shut down, fear replacing brilliant color. “I felt it, Ms. Walker. The black. It...” She shuddered and wrapped her arms around herself, looking exactly like the lost little girl she’d been when we first met. “It surged when I used my magic. It was trying to get deeper in. I don’t want to use it again.”

“You don’t have to.” I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed, forgetting I was covered in wet mud. She made an excellent “Blee!” face and tried to cringe away politely. I said, “Oh, God, sorry,” and tried brushing muck off her, only to compound the problem. I knew I was making it worse, but I still couldn’t stop myself until I took a deep breath and physically stepped back. It didn’t take a genius to interpret my frantic attempts to tidy Suzy as apology for messing up with the leanansidhe. Once I was far enough away that I couldn’t spontaneously begin my grooming efforts again, I said, “Woodland Park. It’s got to be. It’s still a black mark on Seattle’s psyscape.”

Morrison and Coyote, the latter carrying my trench, joined us again just in time to hear me say the last few words. Morrison gave me exactly the look I deserved for coining a word like
psyscape,
but it got across what I needed it to. “If I’d known that was going to be an issue I’d have asked Melinda to wash it. All right. I guess that’s where we’re going, then.”

“You might want a shower first, Walker.”

For a moment I worked on twisting that around until it sounded like an invitation, but Morrison’s tone kind of forbade that. I made a face. “I’m pretty sure the Master isn’t going to care if I’m fresh and lemon-scented, Morrison.”

“Probably not, but you rolled through something unfortunate on your way down, and if you want the rest of us to put up with you all day, you need a shower.”

Oh. And I’d smeared it on Suzy, too. I pulled a wan smile together. “At least the car’s a rental?”

“I knew it!” A triumphant voice pierced not only our discussion, but the general background noise of cops doing their job at a crime scene.

My spine went rigid as an iron bar. The voice approached, exultation increasing as it got closer. “I
knew
you had to be involved. First a woman returns from the dead at Seattle General, then a mass murder at Thunderbird Falls? Joanne Walker
had
to be here. I knew it!” The voice stopped behind me, then said, “What have you been rolling in, Detective Walker?” with distinct distaste.

I sighed. “I’m trying not to think about that, Ms. Corvallis. And it’s just Joanne now. I left the department a couple of weeks ago.” I turned to face Laurie Corvallis, Channel Two news reporter, as I spoke.

She looked like she’d been put on this earth as a compare-and-contrast to Joanne Walker. Like me, Laurie was of mixed ethnic background, only she was petite and striking, light blue eyes emphasized by warm brown skin tones and long black hair. She was also possessed of an impeccable dress sense, a sleek trench coat open to reveal a blouse just red enough to be stunning without seeming aggressive, and a genuinely terrific knee-length black wiggle skirt. I supposed I’d want to be dressed to the nines, too, if I was likely to be broadcast on national news at any moment.

Speaking of which, her cameraman, whose name I’d never learned, was a few steps behind her. He tilted his head out from behind the camera in greeting, then went back to looking through the lens. I wondered if he became detached from the world, watching it through a camera lens all the time, but it didn’t seem like the time to ask. “I hear you’re coming up in the world, Laurie. Congratulations. But there’s no story here for you.”

“Oh, there’s a story, all right. I’ll just never be able to tell it.” Her appraising gaze swept everybody with me, lingering on Annie.

“Then why bother? You gave me the windigo footage.”

Laurie glanced back at me, almost surprised. “Because it’s my job to find out what’s going on, Dete—you quit?”

“Being a shaman and being a cop were becoming mutually incompatible.”

Sounding not at all professional or predatory, Laurie said, “Wow. Sorry to hear that. Ray said you were turning into a good cop. I wonder why he didn’t mention you leaving.”

“You’re still dating Ray?”

“None of your business.” The response was snappy, but she smiled, so I figured they were still dating. That was kinda cool. Ray was one of my coworkers, a fireplug of a man who seemed way below Laurie’s league. On the other hand, he was obviously discreet, if he hadn’t mentioned that particular bit of office gossip to his girlfriend the reporter, and a reporter would probably appreciate discretion in a partner. I hoped they lived happily ever after.

Laurie, sharing none of my sentiment, picked up where she’d interrupted herself. “It’s my job to find out the heart of the story, Joanne. It’s not about telling it, or not always. It’s about knowing.”

“You should’ve been a spy.”

“I said
not always.
” Laurie Corvallis actually sparkled, nearly winking, as she said that, and then her sparkles turned diamond-hard. “So I’ll be coming with you.”

“...okay.”

Identical squawks of protest rose from several throats. I focused on Morrison, who had the most real-world authority of our gathering. “Look, we can spend a lot of time and energy arguing with her, and have her follow us anyway, or we can take her along, keep an eye on her, and let her help us keep an eye on each other.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“I’m an investigative reporter, Captain. I do danger with lunch.”

“She was awesome with the wendi...” I had no idea why I was trying to convince Morrison. It wasn’t his decision. It wasn’t even my decision. I knew Laurie well enough to understand it was hers alone. “Well, anyway, I’m going home to take the world’s fastest shower. Maybe we should all get into Laurie’s news van. There’s probably something metal I can sit on and not stink up, in there.”

The cameraman emerged from behind the camera again, this time with an expression of dismay, but Laurie’s satisfaction trumped it. “Great idea. I’ll start my interviews while he drives. Mrs. Muldoon, I’d like to start with you. What’s it like coming back from the dead?”