Demon Hunts

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I had to give Corvallis credit for chutzpah, anyway. She was easily the least physically threatening of the four of us, but she was quick on her feet, and got in the park ranger's face first. The poor woman took a breath to argue and the rest of us went galloping by like wolves to the slaughter.

I don't know what I was expecting. A gnawed-on body spread all over the parking lot, maybe, staining the snow red and fixing nightmares in holiday-makers minds for the rest of their lives. If I'd taken half a second to think I'd have known there'd be no such scene. If nothing else, we had yet to encounter a victim who'd actually been allowed to bleed out.

The only saving grace was Coyote and Gary both looked like they'd had expectations similar to mine. Coyote glowered around, dumbfounded, then turned on his heel to face me. "We're going to need to find out where the body is. The faster I can get to one and take a look, the more likely I am to be able to track it."

A sting of possessive envy caught me in the gut and left me trying to catch my breath. For months I'd been wishing Coyote was on hand, metaphysically speaking, to show me the path. To take responsibility. Now, finally, he was, and I had the un-charitable thought that this was my territory, my game, and I should be the one taking charge.

I had the unpleasant sensation that I now knew just exactly how Morrison had felt a few hours earlier.

"I almost had it yesterday. Before we saved Mandy." I was trying really hard not to sound petulant. Judging from Gary's carefully neutral expression, I wasn't succeeding.

"Almost had it how?" Coyote either didn't care about or hadn't noticed my churlish tone. I wasn't sure what I thought of that, either. It was good, of course, except it sort of meant he either wasn't listening, or was blowing me off.

God, if I was going around in circles like that I'd blow me off, too. Exasperated with myself, I threw my head back and glared at the sky until I felt some modicum of rationality return. "I'd been about to follow it across the astral plane when—" When Morrison touched me and woke me up. I was glad for the cold. It made a legitimate excuse for my face to be pink. "When I got pulled back to the normal world. You showed up a minute later."

"What were you going to do when you found it?" The way he asked wasn't a good sign. It suggested I'd screwed up beyond belief without even knowing it. Given that that had been my modus operandi for most of the last year, it was a perfectly legitimate assumption, but it didn't sit well. I hunched my shoulders and turned my scowl at the snow.

"I was going to kick its ass. I don't know, Ro." I'd barely ever called him Cyrano, much less shortened it to "Ro," but it rhymed and I was childishly pleased with that. "I hadn't thought that far ahead."

"You've got to start." Now he was the stern, slightly worried teacher. I had no idea how he fit so many personalities into so few words, or so little time. "The astral plane's an incredibly dangerous place to take on a wendigo, Jo. It's its home turf. Out there it'd be simple for it to cut you away from your body, and for something like this creature, you'd be a seven-course meal. You can't afford that kind of mistake."

"Well, how was I supposed to know? It's not like you left me a shaman's primer to study! There's no fricking handbook for all of this! I'm doing my goddamned best!" Frustrated, I scooped up a handful of snow and whipped around to fling it across the parking lot with as much strength as I could muster.

It hit the defenseless Impala, twenty feet away. I said, "Fuck," and went to wipe the marks of my temper tantrum away.

Coyote, very mildly, asked, "Would you have felt that bad if you'd hit me?"

"No." A better person than I would've apologized, but I was by definition not that person. "C'mon. Let's go find the body."

"I'll tell you where it is," Laurie Corvallis said from behind me, "but you have to take me with you."

I was really beginning to hate how she kept doing that, turning up behind me or off to one side with a pithy statement and a microphone. I snapped, "No," and then because I was stupid, added, "How do you know where it is?"

The park ranger came out of the inn looking a little like she'd been bulldozed, saw us, shook herself, and put purpose in her stride as she approached. I said, "Ah," under my breath, and turned back to Corvallis. "Why is this turning into a you'll-tag-along instead of us trying to sneak after you while you go get your story?"

She studied me for a long moment, during which the park ranger reached us and began, firmly, insisting that we return to the lodge, everything was under control, but it was imperative that we not be outdoors for the immediate future. I made accommodating noises and didn't move. Corvallis just ignored the woman entirely, no more interested in her than she might've been in a silent rock face. Eventually the ranger faltered, then went to try her spiel on Coyote and Gary.

Only when she was gone did Corvallis say, "Inexplicable things happen around you, Detective Walker. Inexplicable, dangerous things. We both know there's a story there, and someday I'm going to get it. But let's pretend for a minute that I'm not after that right now."

I rocked back, bemused at her frankness. "Okay…?"

"My job is to go somewhere and learn more about the situation. The best way to do that is to make some kind of connection with the people I'm investigating. Sometimes it's dangerous. I've done gangland exposé pieces, I've gone to the Middle East, I've—"

"I watch the news, Laurie. I don't need your résumé."

She shrugged her eyebrows, a more ordinary expression than I was used to seeing from her. "The point is, when you're following a story into a world you don't know a lot about, you try to make friends, or at least allies, with somebody who can show you the ropes. Somebody who's going to offer a degree of protection, because they've got a vested interest in the story being presented."

"And then you hang them out to dry."

"Less often than you think. You can't keep going into investigative situations and expecting to get your story, your truth, if you've built a reputation for selling out the people who open their doors to you."

"My door is not open to you, Corvallis."

"But it is. You have no idea how much research I've done on you, Siobhán."

Nausea ruptured inside me, backwash of acid climbing up my throat. Siobhán was the name my mother'd given me at birth. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad took one look at Siobhán, determined nobody in America was ever going to say it correctly, and gave me a whole different use-name, Joanne. Technically it was an Anglicization, as Siobhán more or less translated as Joanne, but nobody could tell that by looking at it.

I'd abandoned Walkingstick of my own accord, the day I graduated high school. It hadn't been much of a trick to hack the school records so I was Joanne Walker on them, and that's the name I'd used for more than ten years. I'd always known the full name was out there if somebody wanted to research it—Morrison had—but I'd never imagined anybody would want to. Moreover, recently I'd become aware of the power of true names, which made me particularly uncomfortable with anybody bandying mine about.

If Corvallis knew my full name, she certainly knew plenty of other things about me that I'd left, deliberately, on the eastern side of the Mississippi. I wanted them to stay there. I might've been growing up and getting in tune with myself and other garbage like that, but there was plenty I planned on leaving alone.

And Laurie Corvallis wasn't going to let that happen.

Carefully—very carefully, because I was honestly afraid of what I might do if I let go—I triggered the Sight. I did it because I wanted to see her aura, to see if I could read her intentions, and I did it forgetting that it made my eyes change color. Hazel to gold; I'd watched it happen in Coyote's eyes, and once in Billy's when I'd lent him the ability to See. I thought it wasn't half as disturbing as the blind bone-white that rolled over the eyes of people who could see the future.

Judging from how Corvallis blanched, it was disturbing enough. Her aura was yellow, incredibly clear and tightly focused, and for the second time I had to give her credit for cajones. Spikes of red panic, every bit as clear as the yellow, shot through her aura and made loops as she sucked them back down, controlling them. Her whole body was rigid, blue eyes round and lips pale, but shots of green rushed across her aura, like she was recording every second of her emotion. Recording it, mastering it, ultimately subsuming it: her whole range of flipping out lasted about a nanosecond, and then she was back to clear yellow.

And almost all I could read out of that was ambition. No urge to hurt people, but no particular desire not to, either. She wanted one thing above all else: the story. Maybe other things came to the fore when she was off duty, but I'd never seen her anything but on. I closed my eyes, letting the Sight go. "Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."

She scoffed. "You didn't scare me."

I opened my eyes again, concentrating on not letting the Sight filter my vision. Concentrating on my eyes staying the color they belonged. "Yes. I did."

Discomfort flickered across her face and, like her spurt of panic, was buried. "So we have a deal? I go with you to check out the body?"

A tiny bubble of amusement burst inside me, replacing the acid burn of sickness. "You think you're blackmailing me? Corvallis, the important people in my life—and that includes Captain Morrison, in terms of job security, in case you're wondering—already have the information you've dug up. There's no bandage to rip off. There's no wound to expose." That wasn't entirely accurate, but it was close enough to take the wind out of her sails. I hoped. "You still haven't told me why you're even making the offer. Is it to get a chance at that story you think I'm hiding?"

She gave me a long look that I interpreted as "Your eyes just changed color and you're still pretending there's no story there?" but what she said aloud was, "You've walked away from some extraordinary events, Detective. I want the Slaughterer story, but I'm not stupid. This guy's dangerous. I don't want to put myself on the line without some kind of backup, and you strike me as the right kind."

"Now, see, wouldn't it have just been easier to say that in the first place?"

"You wouldn't have agreed."

"Corvallis, the only reason I'm agreeing now is it's faster to hitch along with you than to go find out on my own where the victim is." I turned my wrist up, glancing at where my watch was hidden beneath the weight of my winter coat. "Or it would've been five minutes ago, anyway. The body's getting cold. We need to go."

The FBI had gotten there before us.

I didn't know why I was surprised. Up until that morning, all the bodies had been found within the greater Seattle area jurisdiction, but these last two were on federal parkland. It was their case now, which meant I was going to have to avoid explaining the truth to a whole new branch of law enforcement. Other people had to worry about whether they'd remembered to feed the cat. I got to worry about telling lies to people who could throw me in jail for it.

There were only three agents, though I was sure there were more on the way. One, a woman, was down beside a body we were no doubt not allowed to see. The other two were men, one of whom was really tall and the other of whom was really cute. I waved at, and stomped toward, the cute one, while Corvallis and her camera guy, who'd joined us before we left the lodge, headed for the tall one. Coyote and Gary exchanged glances and stayed where they were. I thought Coyote should've tried to go chat up the woman, but she was on the other side of yellow cordoning tape, and he had no badge to legitimize himself.

I waved my SPD badge at the cute Fed, then left my hand up, palm toward him, in apology. "I know, I'm way out of my jurisdiction, but I've been on this case for weeks, and the last body before the ones up here was found in the park across from my apartment. I want to do what I can."

He jerked his thumb toward the woman. "Hey, I don't care if you're here. Just don't cross her, man. Can I help you?"

"Yeah, maybe. Are there any tracks?" I turned on the Sight and stood on my toes to look over his shoulder, which only caused me to sink into the snow. It was compacted from traffic, but not that much. I wished I still had Mandy's snowshoes.

There were marks deep under the snow, against the surface of the buried earth, but for the first time I could see indentations in the snow, too. They were barely there, like bird tracks, and my eyes crossed as I tried to See them more clearly. "Holy crap, there are."

"You've got real good vision." The Fed sounded less than thrilled, and I glanced back at him. His aura was flat and wary, like I'd done something unexpected and definitely not right. His voice dropped to a warning tone: "What are you?"

For a couple seconds I stared at him in bewilderment, then swore under my breath and pinched the bridge of my nose, deliberately hiding my eyes. Whoever'd had the bright idea of tying a physiological change to magic use was an idiot. "I'm a shaman, and I do have good vision, I can See things—"

I dropped my hand again, scowling, and his aura flared up into something more normal. The distrust fell out, replaced by a different kind of discomfort, like he'd gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I blinked at that for a moment, trying to understand it, and it abruptly came clear.

He wasn't supposed to be there, in much the same way I wasn't. I smiled crookedly. "For example, I can See that you're lying, aren't you? You're not really a Fed."

His jaw tightened, not quite guilty, not quite defiant. "Yeah, well, not a Fed doesn't mean not supposed to be here. We didn't expect the real ones to get here so fast."

Auras made pretty good lie detectors, and what he said was absolutely true. He didn't have power, not like Coyote, not like me. Not even like Billy, but he still knew the score. He knew there were things that went bump in the night, and I was pretty damned sure that he bumped back.

Somehow that made my whole day, my whole world, a better place. I didn't know why. It just came as a load off my shoulders, a huge shocking relief that there were other people out there fighting the monsters. I mean, I'd kind of known there had to be, but I'd never expected to randomly encounter any of them while on the job. My mouth bypassed every mental roadblock I'd ever had and said, quietly, "We think it's a wendigo."

In any sane world, those weren't words to inspire a crooked little smile at one corner of his mouth, but one appeared. "Yeah, we know. We were heading into Seattle when the police scanner mentioned the kill up here. It's got the earmarks."

"More like the tooth marks."

His smile opened up to full-fledged. I had the nigh-irresistible urge to take him home and feed him. Instead, grinning back, I jerked my thumb toward the road. "Look, why don't you get out of here before somebody figures out you're not really with the Feds. At least I've got a genuine badge to wave. We've got this one under control."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, we're cool. Thanks."

"Figures. I meet a hot chick out hunting and she's already got a team." He blasted a piercing whistle that made both the tall not-a-Fed guy and the actual agent down by the body turn around. The man headed toward us, but my new pal swung his finger in a lasso and threw the motion down the road, and his friend took a sharp turn that way.

The woman stood up and I muttered, "Better scram."

"Scrammin'." He gave me another take-him-home-and-feed-him grin, then jogged after the taller guy, boots squeaking against the snow. Coyote and Gary shot curious looks after them, then at me, before the female agent reached my side.

"Is there a problem with my men? Who are y—" She swallowed the question, staring up at me, then yanked her hat off, like it would help her see me better. Dark honey hair collapsed around her shoulders in classic salon-commercial style, but there was nothing particularly inviting about her expression. "Joanne?"

There'd been a lot of things I wanted to leave east of the Mississippi. The woman standing in front of me had been one of them. We'd been best friends for about thirty seconds, about a million years ago, and it had gone all to hell over a boy. I scraped a few brain cells together and managed, eventually, to produce a witty response no doubt years in the making:

"Hi, Sara."