Downpour

EPILOGUE

You never would have known there had been a magical battle on the lake if you hadn’t been in it. The shore looked a little storm ravaged and the Newmans’ house needed some new glass the next time I saw it in daylight, but there was nothing you couldn’t explain as the action of unpredictably bad weather. Faith and Ridenour had spent a long night pursuing Darin Shea in the downpour and wind until they found him lying on the porch of Steven Leung’s little house on Lake Sutherland, barely breathing and blue in the face from hypothermia.

They would have found him dead if Willow had had her way. In spite of our mutual dousing in Lake Crescent, she seemed to feel no ill effects—which I credited to the restoration of the nexus’s proper position and structure. I was sure I’d never be warm again.

She had insisted on going back to her parents’ house before going anywhere else and she didn’t seem surprised to encounter Shea, still upright and still angry as hell, when we arrived. Like the rest of the lake’s magic stealers, his powers had been drastically reduced, so he’d lunged at her. She’d sidestepped him with no real effort. Then she’d tightened the grip of the curse she’d laid on him and he went to his knees.

Willow leaned down and, drawing her fingers over his face, plucked away the violet and gray cowl of his stolen and patchwork magic. “Powerless,” she whispered to him. “I’m still working on the ‘die screaming’ part.”

She drew something in chalk on the door of the house and led us away, leaving Shea where Faith and Ridenour found him an hour later.

We’d sat in an all-night restaurant by the ferry dock in Port Angeles for a while, waiting for me to warm up and trying to put the whole mess together. Willow explained how she’d found Faith and told him most of the truth about shooting Timothy Scott—as I’d guessed, she’d thought he was the one who’d stolen control of her mother’s spell circle, but she’d only said “thief ” to Faith, and nothing about what had really been stolen. Then she’d told him what I’d put together about Shea. Faith wasn’t too keen on the “mumbo jumbo” part of the explanation—as he called it—but he’d believed her enough to hand over the anchor stone and drive to the Newmans’ house with her. Willow had circumvented the need for a warrant by breaking in to Shea’s truck right in front of Faith. He’d tried to arrest her, but the license plate was in plain sight.

Anyone could see there was no place for Willow to have concealed the large metal rectangle in her thin dress, so Faith was left to conclude it had been there all along. He’d gone with Willow into the house just in time to hear me saying true—if crazy-sounding—things about how and why Shea had done what he’d done. That was all Faith had needed.

Faith never did feel quite comfortable with all the weird things he’d seen and heard, but he still put together a fine case against Shea, making the magic out to be a figment of everyone’s cabin-crazy imaginations. The last time I talked to him, he was back out with his old partner and his dog, investigating bodies that floated in on the U.S. side of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and he liked that fine, thank you.

By the time things were straightened out at the sheriff’s station and Shea was judged well enough to be in jail instead of the hospital, Faith had tracked down Shea’s real identity from fingerprints and other evidence found in his truck. It wasn’t any nicer than his fake one. Theft, burglary, assault, and fraud were all frequent charges on the list Faith compiled from records in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, North Carolina, and Oregon—places Shea had passed through in his younger days or retreated to in the summers when Lake Crescent was too populated for his taste. He hadn’t started out as cruel and calculating, but he’d become callous as he edged closer to real power. By the time the Clallam County prosecutor’s office had built a case they liked enough to take to court, Shea confessed from sheer vanity and frustrated the lawyers who’d worked so hard.

Speaking of lawyers, as soon as I could, I’d called Nan Grover and told her her witness was a murderer who wasn’t quite mentally stable, considering he claimed to be a sorcerer. I don’t think she minded losing him on the stand so much as she hated having her case unbalanced. She even paid my expenses, though I said she didn’t need to, and passed along a message from Solis: He’d asked her to tell me that he’d closed the file on Will Novak without arresting anyone—it was just another sad disappearance of a sick man and Michael was free to go back to England, if he wanted. And I assume he did.

The night of the storm, Geoff Newman had driven his wife and unwilling passenger to the hospital in Port Angeles. Elias Costigan was too sick to move by the time they arrived, and died in the hospital two days after he was admitted. No one could really say which of the many diseases they identified had finally killed him, though they absolved us all of duct taping him to death. Faith claimed it was “old age and being bug-nuts crazy.” Jewel had been told she couldn’t return to her house until her condition was stabilized. So far as I know, she never has gone back to Blood Lake. Willow has.

Of the ley weaver, Willow claims never to have seen another trace. I doubt her story, but not to her face. I have no idea what the creature was or where it came from, and I hope I never see it again; I have no desire to be part of its next “work of art.”

Ridenour requested a transfer out of the Olympic National Forest. I don’t know where he went, but he went fast.

In spite of having unnaturally good health most of the time, I caught the worst cold of my life and stayed in bed for a week—not alone, of course. Sometime in the middle of that week, Quinton and I lay together, staring at the ceiling while the ferret romped over our bellies, chuckling to herself.

Quinton took my hand a little tentatively. “Are you thinking about what Willow said?”

I nodded. It was still a little eerie the way we sometimes knew what the other was feeling or thinking or if the other was hurting. The sensation of connection wasn’t as strong as it had been and I could barely feel it at all when Quinton wasn’t right next to me, but it was undeniably there, if fading slowly.

“Yeah.”

“Do you . . . wish it hadn’t happened?”

“No. I’m just not sure we should let it remain.”

“Why? Most people in love don’t have this kind of connection. Is it the ‘in love’ part that worries you?”

“It’s the ‘hurting you’ part that scares the living hell out of me,” I confessed. “I have been taking you and my friends for granted and causing all kinds of harm and upset by that. Phoebe’s pretty much not talking to me and the Danzigers are friendly enough, but I can tell they’re more wary around me than they used to be. That’s all bad enough, but I hurt you when I died and I can’t stand the thought of hurting you again—especially by some magical remote control because of this . . . tie between us. Even if it’s not anything as dramatic as getting shot, I’m not going to live a quiet, safe life. Terrible things are going to keep on happening around me because . . . that’s part of my job—both jobs. I’m a walking time bomb of pain for you. Will couldn’t even handle the idea. You’ll have to live with the reality.”

“I’m not Will.”

“I know that, but—”

“Harper, you think you have to save the world, that you have to be responsible for more than any person should have to bear.”

“I do have to save the world . . . once in a while. Or just a lake full of crazy people.”

“All right, that’s true. It does go with the job. But it isn’t ever going to be easy, even if you only had to save the loonies from themselves. Isn’t it going to be easier with someone who can help you stand up to it? You know, suffer the slings and arrows and all that jazz?”

“But they aren’t your slings and arrows. They’re just mine.”

He rolled on his side and scooped me closer, displacing the ferret, who tumbled onto the floor and bounced around in tiny fury while we ignored her. “Sweetheart, your slings and arrows are always going to be mine, too. It would be that way even if you were just an ordinary person with an ordinary job. I love you, and that goes with the territory. What if it were me? What if it were my crazy job that hurt and raged and flung us against the rocks? Would you want to not know, to not help me get through it?”

“No!” I replied, outraged that he’d even ask.

“It’s safer,” he offered. “It doesn’t hurt so much. . . .”

“I don’t care about that. People have hurt me, knocked me down, dragged me down, torn me up long before I ever met a monster or a ghost or a lake full of magic. I can manage that. I can manage to keep getting up when it’s just me who’s been knocked down. But when it’s you, I—”

He put his fingers across my mouth. “You don’t have to pick me up. I’ll get up on my own. Right next to you. Every time.”

“Every time?”

“Yep.”

“Even if I have trouble getting up? Even if it hurts so bad you don’t even want to?”

“Even if.” He kissed my nose. “Because you’d do the same for me.”

I blinked at him and a tickle of joy expanded inside me, pushing happy tears over my lashes. “Yes, I would,” I replied. “Even if.”