Walking Dead

CHAPTER 16

I didn’t know what it was about magic that made people’s eyes go funky. The first precognitive I’d known had done the same trick, and then color had bled back in, turning the irises black with hints of blue and gold around where the pupil ought to be. Suzanne’s did that, too, only with green instead of blue. Mine apparently went gold when I used the Sight, and so had Billy’s. Weirdly, I didn’t remember the coven’s collective eyes changing color when they called up earth magic. A half-formed idea that the power’s source dictated the change settled in my brain and faded out. It hardly mattered right now. I could pursue it when I wasn’t asking a teenager to see the future on my behalf.

The clever part of me thought it’d be safer not to use the Sight on a girl reaching for the future, especially one who burned as brightly as she did by nature. The less clever part gave over to it without much consideration. Maybe it was human curiosity; maybe it was the shaman in me, hoping I could somehow help or guide her. Either way, the Sight flickered on in the same breath that Suzanne’s eyes went white, and for a little while, the whole universe stopped.

She blazed. My God, she blazed, emerald fire pouring off her so hot it turned white at its edges. The world bent toward her as though she’d become a gravity center, pulling everything askew. My breath, light stuff that it was, had no chance, and my heart began to ache as my lungs emptied. The sunspots and flares I’d seen earlier cut through time in all directions, lashing out and hauling fragments of—

Of not just the future, but possible futures. All of them, and all the possible pasts, with every decision made and every path not taken highlighted with chance and choice. Boundless chaos and unavoidable pattern tumbled together, overwhelming and inevitable all at once. Suzanne was concentrating on me, and I on her, and with both of us bound together by magic and intent, I Saw every life I might have ever led.

Moving forward from this moment, spilling literally no more than a few days into the future: Thor on his knee with a diamond ring and a nervous smile, accompanied by a rough “I thought I was going to lose you, Joanne. I’d rather not do that.” Chance and choice rushed forward from there, brief examination of a surprisingly ordinary life filled with neither great regret nor great joy, making it an easy calm course to follow. A dozen similar futures splintered around that, some taking longer to come to fruition, but all of them gentle lives, quiet paths as I helped the people around me in small ways. Making a difference without risking myself: that was the core of who I became in those worlds. I had someone to go home to, something to lose, and never strayed so far as to lose him.

My heart twisted, longing for that comfort, but at the same time those futures turned ephemeral, fading away. I’d already chosen a harder road, and the ease of a tranquil family life seemed very far away.

Backward, but not very far: Morrison standing under the July sun in his T-shirt and dark shades, arms folded over his chest as he asked, “Would you take a promotion?”

And that time, in that future-past, I whispered, “No,” closing the door on an investigative position in the force and opening one that let Captain Michael Morrison tug his shades off, stare at me incredulously, then pull me into an abrupt hug that felt as bewilderingly wrong as it did fundamentally right.

Sideways: a young man with my eyes and his father’s straight nose looked at me with utter exasperation, and that was a future that sprang up no matter what path I followed. In one branching past, I stayed in Qualla Boundary and raised my son; in one splintering future I met him again, and either way, he was a teen and I was his exasperating progenitor.

Back, back so far it wasn’t about me anymore, but my parents. Sheila Anne MacNamarra brought a three-month-old baby girl to Joseph Leroy Walkingstick, and her ruthless ability to make hard choices melted under his quick warm smile. I spirit-walked at four, in that future-past, and my imaginary friends weren’t; they were only invisible to most people. I knew Coyote for what he was, then, and the laughing girl I was got on a Greyhound bus to visit him in Nevada the summer I turned fifteen.

And some things were fated, it seemed, because that me got pregnant, too, but when her Coyote lover found out, he came east to Carolina and it was a cheerful pair of young idiots who got married at the winter solstice. They should have been broken, so badly broken, but instead when the twins came early, Ayita, the baby girl born first with so little strength, survived thanks to the healing magic that bloomed in both her parents. Aidan, always stronger, lived as well, and that future-past, in its way, came around to the exasperated teenage boy again. This time, though, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his equally exasperated sister.

Right there, right now, in the real world, fire scalded my cheeks, thin lines of heat and regret for a life I’d never so much as imagined. But then Morrison was there again, in another future I might never see, roaring like a bull as he stood his ground and fired his gun once, twice, again, until the clip emptied and he flipped it around to pistol-whip whatever was coming at him. Gary was there, too, a big old man with linebacker shoulders, crashing forward against a fog of darkness, and I knew that the woman I’d become wouldn’t have wanted to miss those two, not for anything in this world, and maybe not even for anything in any other world, either.

I couldn’t see far enough down any one path to know if the girl who’d married Coyote would’ve been there to fight Herne or stop a banshee. Maybe she just would’ve had different battles to face, and the lives I’d disrupted, failed, or saved here in Seattle would never have been bent out of shape. Maybe there were paths I could’ve taken, that my parents could’ve taken, that would’ve let everybody come out alive.

But maybe, just maybe, I was who and where and what I needed to be. Maybe all the prices that had been paid were nothing more than part of the high cost of living. For all my bitching and complaining, my life was turning out okay. Too much time spent mourning what might have been seemed like a reliable way to let bad guys latch on to me and push me toward mistakes.

Another future-past whipped around me: a recognizable me, the Joanne Walker we all knew and loved, with almost all her same history in place, standing in Seattle’s heart like she belonged there. Only one anomaly ran through her life, compared to mine: the boy was at her side, and always had been, not given up for adoption as I’d done. Magic snapped around me, blue and silver and brilliant, but the boy had his arms folded, boredom writ large through his body language.

I said, “Aidan,” out loud, and with the sound of my voice the myriad futures and pasts shivered to a stop. I caught a glimpse of a classroom, and of a kid in a vampire costume bent over a school desk. He lifted his head when I spoke, curiosity filtering though his expression as he twisted around, as if he’d heard someone behind him speak his name.

Across bent space and time and three thousand miles, I met my eleven-year-old son’s eyes and said, idiotically, “I really hope there’s no such thing as vampires.”

Aidan rolled his eyes, settling into that already-familiar look of exasperation, and went back to his schoolwork.

Suzanne whispered, “Here,” with such concentration it pulled me away from regarding all my possibilities. They lashed away from me, whipcords coming unbound and cracking the air with uncontrolled sonic snaps. I flinched at each sound, but Suzy turned blind eyes on them, confidence in the set of her jaw, and a lifetime of maybes braided together into a bolt of white that struck a thin true line going forward. Chaos receded, a lesser thing than Suzanne’s will, but despite the thread’s brilliance, when I tried to follow it forward, I met resistance. More than resistance: I was simply forbidden that path.

True future, the usually snarky part of my brain whispered. Whatever lay on the other end of that bright line, I wasn’t allowed to see it because it was my true future, and no one could walk that more than once. I didn’t know where that piece of information had come from, but it was wreathed in certainty.

Suzanne, though, wasn’t similarly constrained. For one, it wasn’t her thread to follow. For two, I wasn’t sure middling details like not being allowed to see your own future applied to the grandchildren of deities. “We’re outdoors,” she said in a shaking voice. “At a house. A home. There’s a swimming pool with children’s toys beside it. The moon is overhead, reflected in the water.”

I shot a convulsive glance skyward. It’d been gray and drizzly for days, and the overcast sky gave no particular hint of wanting to clear. Even with the Sight turned to it, all I saw were heavy clouds ready to release another torrent of rain. Oddly enough, that cheered me. Maybe Suzy had the day wrong.

Because it was so easy to mistake Halloween, when people dressed up as monsters, for any other day of the year, when they mostly kept the monsters inside. For a few seconds I was tempted to go home and put on my silly leather costume. Everybody knew she was one of the good guys, and wearing a nice obvious tag like that seemed like a good idea.

“What else?” I spoke as much to guide myself as Suzy. She probably needed it less than I did, but she jolted regardless, as though she’d forgotten I was there. Maybe she had. After all, she was the one looking into a future that didn’t yet exist. I’d think that could distract a person but good.

“Detective Holliday is shouting. Shouting at you. The cauldron is on fire—no, steaming, just steaming, and you—y’know,” she said, suddenly sounding much more like an ordinary teenage girl. “It’s really not much of a cauldron. It’s just a big barrel.”

The very pragmatic side of me said, “Well, you have to admit that ‘Matholwch’s Barrel’ sounds a lot less impressive than ‘Matholwch’s Cauldron.’ ‘The Barrel of Death’? ‘The Black Barrel’? One sounds like it’ll just roll over you, and the other sounds like some kind of fairy tale.” Of course, fairy tales didn’t used to be for children. Before I said that last bit aloud, Suzy laughed, and the lancing brilliance faded from her aura to leave her with the sunspots and solar flares that were a natural part of who she was.

Pale hair curtained her face as she ducked her head, laughter fading into apology. “I lost it there at the end, when I looked at the barrel. I’m not very good at holding on.”

“Good grief, kid. You gave me plenty to go on. Somebody with kids has stolen the cauldron.” That seemed especially awful, somehow, and I sketched past it with a wink. “That, and this all goes down outdoors next to a swimming pool. So if I stay inside all night I should be fine.”

“Then maybe we should go inside.”

Retreating to an indoor sanctuary hadn’t even occurred to me. Suzy was clearly much better at this whole Practical Applications of Saving the World than I was. I got up and collected my rock-salt shotgun, making certain it wasn’t primed before putting it over my shoulder and turning back to Suzanne with a swagger. “Well, li’l lady, Ah reckon that thar’s jist about the best ahdea Ah’ve heard awl day.”

Suzy’s giggle turned into an undignified snort that, in turn, became a blush. Ah, yes, being fourteen, when the most absurd things could haunt you to your grave. I had occasional moments of if I only knew then what I know now, but mostly trading in on those didn’t seem worth having to be a teenager again.

All the memories of might-have-beens rushed up around me for a moment, throwing me off. Some of those possible pasts might have been worth taking a second run at it, especially if I did know then what I knew now. The happy me, the one who’d had an oddball but stable family, would have been worth it.

For an instant, that life flashed even further forward, so vivid and unexpected I didn’t know if it was Suzanne’s precognition showing me another splinter, or if it was my own imagination running amok. The future affected the past: Sheila MacNamarra wasn’t dead in that world, and I’d never moved to Seattle. But I did come, on January third of this very year, and got into a taxi and asked the gray-eyed, white-toothed old driver to take me to a church on Aurora Boulevard. Marie d’Ambra lived in that world, as did so many others who’d been badly served by my incompetence in this one. That Joanne was so much better than I was. So much more in control, so much more centered and more stable.

And so when the battle was won and she walked around a corner near the police station to bump into a silvering, blue-eyed man of exactly her height, she knew so much more clearly what she’d lost. My hands hurt with the pulse of recognition at what she didn’t have, physical ache cutting across alternate worlds to knife my breath away and take the strength from my legs.

I didn’t imagine that that Joanne Walker, who called herself Siobhán Walkingstick, had ever told her Coyote husband how she’d kissed a stranger in the street and walked away from him with tears on her face. I did imagine that that Morrison wondered, time and again for the rest of his life, what the hell had happened that day. I knew, clear as if I’d lived it myself, that the Siobhán of that possible future-past spent many more long hours staring through a crack in time at the world I came from than I would spend reaching for hers. Happy was easy. Whatever I got out of my life, I was going to have to work for, and that made it all the more worth having.

God, I’d turned into Dostoyevsky. I liked the Russian writers, but that didn’t mean I had to embrace their dour viewpoint. I shivered, trying to shake off the ache shared with a me from another world, and pulled together a lopsided smile for the still pink-cheeked Suzanne. Time was funny stuff, dragging you through a whole lifetime in the space of a teenager’s blush.

Time was funny stuff, indeed. I drew breath to speak, and something incremental and almost unseeable happened in Suzy’s face. I didn’t have time to see it, not in any way that could be broken down and made sense of, but I saw it anyway: how the corners of her eyes, crinkled with embarrassment, widened fractionally; how the embarrassed smile just barely began to change shape. One of the articles we’d read in the academy talked about how the human face can telegraph tremendous emotion in such fine detail that our forebrains completely miss it. A few really good cops trust their hind brains, and can read the most minute expressions so well it might as well be telepathy.

I didn’t know if I was a good cop or just getting to be a decent shaman. Either way, I swung away from Suzy long before even her aura started to shout alarm, and had the shotgun cocked and ready to blast before I knew what I was facing.

A cadaverous Matilda Whitehead stood before me.

No doubt attempting a dialogue would have been the morally superior course of action. Me, I went “AAAAGH!” and pulled the trigger a couple times, forgetting to re-cock the gun in between. Rock salt exploded out the first time, and nothing, of course, happened the second. I remembered to cock it again, but Matilda staggered back far enough that I didn’t pull the trigger a third time. Instead I stood there panting, trying to figure out what the hell a ghost was doing in corporeal form, and how it’d snuck up on me. There weren’t any freshly opened graves, and even if there had been, my rain of holy water should’ve done the trick. And even if there had been, again, Matilda Whitehead shouldn’t have come out of one. She’d gone missing a century ago, the body never found. I seriously doubted I’d just happened on her grave site.

Her body was stitching itself back together, not in any human fashion, but with little sparks of brightness that zotted from one wound’s edge to another, pulling flesh behind it. It was a special sort of awful, and I locked my knees to keep from staggering myself. I was pretty sure there were more important things to do than pass out, like wonder, once more, how a ghost had become corporeal. As far as I knew, that didn’t happen. I mean, apparently it did, because it was, but it wasn’t supposed to happen. Matilda Whitehead was not supposed to be standing in front of me, nasty lime aura overflowing a body too gaunt and inhuman to be recognizable as a specific person. Wherever she’d gotten the body, it was in lousy condition.

A layer of muscle and fat blopped out of the skeletal form as I thought that, making her a tiny bit less horrible to look on. Dizzying exhaustion swept me, and the instinctive part of my brain suggested I pull the shotgun trigger again. I did. Matilda screamed. More sparks flew, trying desperately to repair the damage I’d done. The books said salt banished ghosts. They didn’t say anything about the ghosts hanging around to do a frantic patch-up job.

A piston fired way at the back of my brain. Morbid curiosity made me fire the gun again. Matilda collapsed to her knees.

So did I.

The phrase fuck a duck sprang to mind. I set the shotgun butt into the ground and leaned on it, trying like hell not to topple over as I dragged in a long slow breath through my nostrils. “Suzy, I think you’d better get out of here. Walk, please. Casually. I don’t think that thing’s fast, but I’d rather not have you running.” And looking like prey was how that sentence finished, but I didn’t want to put the idea into her head. Either “her,” for that matter, just in case Matilda hadn’t already decided Suzanne would be a nice tender juicy morsel.

I’d checked the garden. I’d checked the Dead Zone. Billy and Sonata had both cleared me. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the last vestiges of a furious dying spirit might have managed to dive inside my magic, hiding in the very core of the healing power I had to offer. I hadn’t looked there, and life magic had apparently been enough to shield her from Sonata’s eyes.

Life magic, with enough outraged will behind it, was also apparently enough to create a thought-form body for a vengeful spirit to inhabit. I was goddamn lucky that the thing seemed to need active, not latent, power to feed on, or I might very well have woken up dead today.

Suzanne, bravely, if not wisely, didn’t run. She screamed for help, which seemed like the other sensible option. Nobody would answer, but that didn’t make it any less sensible. I might’ve joined her, if I’d had the breath to spare. Mine was all taken up with pushing myself to my feet again.

Fifteen feet away, Matilda did the same thing. I lifted the shotgun, but even doing so, knew it was a stopgap measure. I’d completely cut my access to my power once before, in order to keep a bad guy from gobbling up Morrison’s life force. I was pretty certain I’d have to do the same thing in order to cut Matilda’s lifeline. The problem—there was always a problem—was I didn’t know how long she’d survive once she was cut off, and I didn’t know how fast she could move. In her shoes—well, okay, in her bony rigid bare feet—I wouldn’t go for me. I’d go after Suzy. So I didn’t dare try it until Suzy was safe, and she, bless her pointy little head, was still screaming for help. I really didn’t want to shoot Matilda again and suffer the knockback myself, but she started forward and I cocked the shotgun, not sure I’d have a choice. “Suzy, please, please, please get out of here. I can’t fight this thing until I know you’re out of reach.”

She gulped her last scream and scurried away. Matilda’s head snapped after the motion. Bloodless lips pulled back from gumless teeth, rictus of a smile, and she leaped toward Suzanne with all the speed I feared she might be hiding. I pulled the trigger and rock salt knocked her from the air.

Weariness lashed back at me, no physical injury, just another announcement that my power took a beating every time I blew holes in the living ghost. I managed to keep my feet that time and lurched forward, zombie-like myself, to stand over Matilda’s healing body and prepare another shot.

Above me, the cloudy sky tore asunder with a rip of lightning and a roll of thunder. I flinched back a few steps, gaze yanked upward as thunder turned to the pounding of hooves, broken by the long cold call of a hunter’s horn. Cawing rooks poured out of the wound in the sky, and a howling pack of white hounds, their ears tipped in red, gave chase. Finally, behind them all, thirteen riders, led by a child but commanded by a deity, crashed down toward us on a thin beam of sun.

Someone had answered Suzy after all.