Downpour

TWENTY-THREE

This time the ground was normal gravel and mud, and it stuck to my jeans and the side of my coat where I fell into it. I lay for a moment in the rain, blinking, sucking in wet, cold air that tasted like winter fir and cedar. “Get up,” I muttered to myself, as much to test my ears as to reclaim normalcy. I didn’t need to be soaked again; I had a lot of discontent to sow and I couldn’t get it done if I had to waste time finding more dry clothes.

I picked myself up and leaned against an alder that gave a little under my weight. I turned and glanced at the tree, seeing a swirl of green energy around it and a pair of small hazel eyes that blinked between pale bark lids.

The shadow visage startled me. “I’m sorry,” I said, starting to step away.

A breeze without origin pushed a slim branch across me and twigs brushed against my chest and arms, dusting off the muck that had stuck to me. “Slaves yearn for freedom,” the breeze whispered and creaked on the tree boughs.

The rogue wind eased and the branches rose away, giving me a clear path back to the gatehouse where I’d left the Rover. I took a step out onto the road and turned back to look at the trees. In the mist and rain, shapes flickered, almost recognizable, then fell away. I could still hear the crackle of fire’s memory and the discordant strains of the organ and Beauty weaving together; I could still smell the ash on the breeze and the crawling things in the loam, but they lay at a distance. A safe one, I hoped. I nodded at the trees. “I’ll do what I can.”

A deer walked across the road, paused to glance at me, then bounded away, its hooves breaking through old wood and frost-burned bracken, cracking words into the air. “Do. More.”

I shivered as the forest went still and I looked around, expecting something more. But except for the feeling that I was watched on every side, that was all.

Then the rain came harder on the road, beating drums on leaf and limb. I turned up my coat collar, kept my mouth shut, and started up the road to the truck.

They say nature is a mother, and they’re right about that. Now I was being bullied by trees. I would have grumbled, but it seemed a bad idea.

I spotted Jin lurking under the roof of the guard shack, huddling from the rain to keep his suit dry. I motioned for him to come with me to the Rover, but he frowned at the rain and shook his head. Goody—now the demon was feeling prissy. I went to the back of the truck and rummaged for a minute. I find umbrellas impractical most of the time in Seattle, but I had one. I found mine and a hat with a brim, which I crammed onto my head before taking the umbrella back to Jin.

I held it out. “Come on. I want to talk to Costigan before his zombies wake up.”

Jin popped the umbrella open and grinned at it. “You should talk to Willow first.”

“Why?”

He kept grinning but didn’t say anything.

I sighed, annoyed but resigned. It was getting late, and I’d have preferred to get to Costigan today, but if I had to wait for another day, so be it. “Where is she?”

“Tragedy Graveyard.”

The tiny cemetery was in Beaver, behind the old schoolhouse that no one had used in ages. The drive took us most of the way to Forks. I knew I wasn’t likely to get back to Lake Crescent before the sun went down; I only hoped whatever Willow could tell me would be worth it.

The rain was lighter in Beaver, but Jin clung to the umbrella as if we were stepping out into a monsoon. I made do with the hat, hoping to avoid getting any wetter where it really mattered. I had parked the truck in a patch of weedy gravel off the road that served as a parking lot beside the old school, and the demon and I walked around to the back of the rickety nineteenth-century building. A haunting melody whispered on the wind, twining strange rills and falls through the Grey as we entered the cemetery.

It wasn’t much to look at—a sad collection of wooden crosses and slabs inside a hastily erected fence. There were thirteen graves and the markers were of a more recent vintage than the bodies under them—probably put up by a local group to ensure the dead weren’t forgotten completely. Most of the markers were too weathered to read, but I didn’t need to; the ghosts that lingered in the cemetery hovered around their graves like frightened tourists guarding their luggage. At one site, I saw a woman huddling over a child in her lap, crying eternally. Beyond the mother and her dead baby, we passed a group of four ghosts squabbling in thin voices. The shades of three men had gathered around the ghost of a pretty young woman. They were dressed like early settlers and each of the men tried to grab onto the woman and pull her to him. She smiled at each one, a horrible wound in her throat opening to gush blood every time she turned. They didn’t seem to care. Each one yanked at the woman’s arm in turn, shouting at the others, “Rose is mine!”

“She’s mine!”

“Mine!”

“You’re all stupid,” Jin jeered at them. “She killed you all,” he added, and laughed.

I grabbed his sleeve. “She killed them? She’s the one with the neck smile.”

“It’s her fault they’re all dead, the selfish little trollop. See, that one,” he explained, pointing at the shortest of the male ghosts, a rough, bearded man with a shotgun in one hand, “killed her husband, that one”—he pointed at the tallest ghost—“because he wanted to marry her himself and she told him she was so horribly unhappy with her husband and her little cabin by the lake. Boo hoo. So sad.”

“What about the other guy?”

“That’s the lover she took while the ugly one was working to make enough money to convince Rose to marry him. When he found out what she was doing, the ugly one borrowed a boat and some guns and rowed across the lake—”

“Lake Crescent?”

“No. Lake Pleasant,” he said, waving vaguely west. “He rowed over to her house, caught her lover in the outhouse, and shot him. Then he broke into the cabin and cut her throat. And then when he was rowing back home, he felt such remorse that he decided to shoot himself with that shotgun. But first he sat there on the lake and wrote it all down and apologized to the friend he’d stolen the boat and guns from. Idiots,” he added, grinning. “If they were Chinese, they’d all be in Diyu for being lustful, greedy morons.”

“Like you?”

He sniffed and turned his head. “There’s Willow,” he said, leading me away, toward the whisper of sound that haunted the graveyard as much as any ghost.

Under one of the few trees, Willow, wearing her dark loose-fitting dress, crouched next to a grave, singing under her breath. I could see her bare toes peeping out from under her hem as she used a small knife to scrape something from the edges of the one stone marker in the whole graveyard into her cupped hand.

She stopped singing, but she didn’t look up as we drew near and paused beside her. The sound of rain seemed too loud now. “So,” she said, “you’ve seen the ley weaver. Now what do you think?”

“That the lake has a problem.”

“Didn’t I say so?”

“Not exactly.” I looked at the green-gray grit collecting in the palm of her hand as she scraped away the lichen that had grown on the small headstone.

She turned her head to glance at me and I saw her eyelids were red and swollen. She moved her hand a little toward me. “Grave mold.” She put down the knife and picked up a small cotton drawstring bag that lay on the hem of her dress. Then she dumped the scraped lichen into it and pulled the bag closed before picking up another. She returned to the knife with her free hand and used the point to pick at the ground along the edge of the marker, scooping up the driest bits of dirt and dumping them into the new bag before tying that off, too.

“Graveyard dust?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Who’s it for?” I had no idea what she was making, but I could guess it was some of the kitchen magic Mara had talked about; some kind of hoodoo or trick, in this case to do someone harm with the threat of the grave.

She stabbed the blade at my nearest hand and I barely jumped out of the way. Willow snickered at me. “I’m going to get whoever killed Alan.”

“Do you know who it was, then?”

“No. But I can find out.”

“How?”

She didn’t reply, just kept at her task.

“How did you know Strother? Not just as a cop. You know him better than that,” I said.

She made a noncommittal head wag. “Around.”

I pushed on her and wasn’t quite surprised when I felt her energy wriggle away from mine. She was stronger than she looked and I was tired. I sighed. “You were friends. Weren’t you? He had to do his duty, but you were still . . . friendly at least. So you must have met him before you got into trouble.”

She made a soft snorting noise that might have been sadness as much as dismissal. “We got into trouble together, to begin with. White boy from the rez, bad girl from the lake, hanging out in the hills, smoking weed.” She cut me a sideways glance, wanting to see my reaction. “Ridenour caught us. We were fifteen, so off to juvie. No record. Alan went straight. I just stayed bent.”

I imagined them as teenagers, outcasts together, lying in the sun on the mountainside and laughing at everything while they had the chance. I could see how Ridenour’s animosity toward them had grown from that little seed of rebellion. Strother had toed the line afterward, but Ridenour probably had never trusted him—handing him the investigation of Leung’s death had been a kind of dare to see where Strother’s loyalty really lay. Willow, of course, hadn’t even tried and had probably thrown her wild ways in the ranger’s face at every opportunity, making friends with his fox-wife and flouting the law until she broke one in an unforgivable way. I wondered why she’d shot the telephone lineman—if she’d really done it—but I didn’t think she’d tell me.

“Did you go back to school afterward?” I asked.

I guess that wasn’t what she’d expected. She turned her gaze away. “No. I had other things to look after.” She glared at Jin, who made a face at her.

She wasn’t scraping or digging anymore, but she stayed crouched down on the ground, not looking at me, letting the silence grow longer.

Maybe it was the place, or maybe it was Willow, but I felt heavy and bleak standing there. “You know that whoever killed Strother probably killed your father, too.”

She nodded.

“Did you use the circle near your dad’s house?”

“No,” she replied, her voice sharp with old resentment. “That was Jonah’s circle, then. I wasn’t old enough to use it. Once you broke it, I sent Jin to clean it up.”

“Why didn’t you do it yourself?”

She made a noise in the back of her throat. “I never learned to write enough Chinese to claim it. It was my mother’s first. Someone stole it after Jonah”—she gave Jin a hard look—“after Jonah was gone.”

“How old were you then? When he died?”

“Twelve. My mother had started teaching me the Tao Chiao and the characters when I was five, but she died of cancer on my birthday in 1990—I was eight. Jonah wouldn’t teach me more.” She made a face. “He said I was a child.”

“What about Jewel?”

“She’s too high and mighty to stoop.” Her voice dripped bitterness so thick even the ghosts turned toward her. “She was busy building her house on the lake. I taught myself.”

“Your brother died . . . when?”

Jin growled at me, but Willow flicked a gesture at him and he shut up. “It was Spring Moon in 1994. When Jin came. Mid-February. A dog year.”

Spring Moon was what I thought of as Chinese New Year. It would have been a powerful time of year to be casting spells—and a stupid one if you weren’t as much in control as you thought. Jin had come through and eaten him, so Jonah Leung hadn’t brought Ridenour’s fox-wife into the world and neither had Willow. Once again, there was someone else at work. Not the ley weaver . . . Costigan? Jewel? Someone I didn’t yet know?

I crouched down next to Willow to think. It was an uncomfortable position—something cold and hungry drew at my energy as I came closer to the surface of the grave while the drizzling rain worked through the trees to chill my back. I touched the headstone and the sensation pulled away like a scalded hand from a stove. That explained the stone and why Willow gathered the ingredients for her vengeance here—something bitter and full of spite lay under it.

“You said order was broken in 1989. Did that have something to do with your mother’s death?”

“I don’t know. She was a happy creature. And then she was sick. As if the magic had suddenly poisoned her. She died so swiftly, they barely knew what killed her. Jewel and Jonah were already fighting—they never liked each other. She married Newman because he owned the land over the nexus and she left the rest of us alone.”

“What else happened in 1989? What made the magic change?”

“I wish I knew.”

“That must have been when the anchor got loose. . . .”

Her glance was sharp. “Anchor? Someone pulled an anchor out of the lake?” she demanded.

I was startled: I had thought she was one of the anchors.... Obviously I’d gotten the wrong end of that stick.

“You didn’t know.”

“No!” She was on her feet so fast, I didn’t see her get up. She darted across the graveyard and I started after her.

“Willow!” I shouted, but I got only a few steps before something yanked my feet out from under me and I sprawled across the nearest graves. The ghosts pounced on me and I heard Jin giggling as he ran after Willow. I cursed him under my breath as I fought off the vicious, incorporeal hands that tore through me.

I tried to yank a shield between myself and the ghosts, but I couldn’t keep it in place and get to my feet at the same time. I’d already lost sight of Jin and Willow, so I gave up trying to follow them and concentrated on getting away from the ghosts of Tragedy Graveyard.

They had no flesh to push through, and their structures weren’t like the spells that had animated the ley weaver’s hands. I pushed at them, but my hands went through their forms without resistance. I’d pulled the hand-spiders apart, but I couldn’t even grab ahold of these, much less tear them apart. I had dismissed a ghost before, on an airplane, just swept it aside and it vanished....

I tried the flicking gesture that had sent my dead cousin away; the ghost nearest to my hand wafted backward, losing shape for an instant before it surged back together and wound itself again around my body.

“Damn you,” I spat.

I repeated the gesture, shoving outward violently, pushing the Grey the same way I’d slammed my force against it to bowl Jin backward. This time the flash was smaller, absorbed by the mist-shapes of the ghosts, but the forms and their tangled energies burst and scattered like leaves before an autumn gust until there were none left that menaced me. For an ire-filled moment, I considered blowing away the rest, just to be thorough, but they hadn’t come for me and most were nothing more sinister than loops of memory, replaying their misery endlessly. And even as I contemplated it, I could see the air and Grey matter moving in the distance; the ghosts would come back, however slowly. It appeared I hadn’t just lost something when I’d died—I’d gained a new trick, or accidentally applied an old one in a new way. I wasn’t limited to pulling things apart. I couldn’t make something out of the Grey or its energy, but I could push it around and pull on its lighter threads. But it did leave me feeling a little as if I’d been standing under a giant bell as it tolled.

I made my way back to the Rover, stumbling a bit on the wet, uneven ground and cursing Jin still more for stealing my umbrella, which would have been a useful prop against the fatigue that weighted my limbs after fighting first the ley weaver’s hands and then the cemetery’s ghosts. I needed to catch my breath and restore my energy. I’d hoped to talk to Elias Costigan before the sun went down, but the drive back from Beaver along the twisting thread of Highway 101 would take forty minutes and I’d arrive exhausted just as his powers were rising for the day.

I needed to regroup and think. And the closest place was Forks, just a few more miles down the road away from Port Angeles. Frustrated, I climbed into the Rover and headed for the once-sleepy little lumber town that had become a tourist mecca for dewy-eyed girls with vampire crushes.