Shaman Rises

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.