Walking Dead

CHAPTER 24

The little girl’s image danced behind my eyes as I shook off travel fatigue, or whatever it was called when a person goes zipping through different levels of reality. I’d never seen the girl before, but she’d felt familiar. An odd little hitch came into my breath as I frowned at where the cauldron used to be. Somebody had, at some point, put a warding on that thing, one that kept its power from leaking all over the world as it was moved from place to place. An eleven-year-old girl seemed unlikely, but I’d just finished telling Jason Chan about tricksters. Just because I was seeing a kid didn’t mean that’s what it really was.

She’d felt friendly. I decided to take blessings where I could find them, made a note to myself to look up creatures who could bind ancient evils and who liked presenting themselves as children, and turned my attention back to my audience. I didn’t normally wake up to quite such a large one. Billy and Gary looked relieved I’d woken up, but Sonata’s mouth was pursed. “You didn’t need to interfere. He was willing to cross over.”

The woman deserved an explanation. Intellectually, I understood that. She hadn’t been there for the follow-up fiasco with Matilda. Still, explaining seemed like so damn much effort that my intellect threw up its metaphorical hands and stomped off in a fit of pique. Abandoned by it, all I could do was drop my face into my hands, exhale and eventually say, “I know. Sorry.”

It took effort to lift my head again, and my gaze strayed to my watch when I did. A quarter to nine. If things went badly, I had a maximum of three hours and fifteen minutes to live. Not a cheering thought. “Jason’s migraines got worse around the cauldron. I think he was seeing the binding spell that kept its magic from leaking out like it’s done now. Billy, this isn’t your field any more than it’s mine, but who the hell can create something like that? A piece of tied-off magic that holds another magic inside? Would it be a kid?”

“Culturally speaking,” Sandburg volunteered unexpectedly, “the cauldron would belong to one such as the Morrigan, the threefold goddess of war, knowledge and death. There are no stories of it being in her domain, but given her status in the Celtic cycle, I would consider it hers. Her antithesis would be Brigid, the goddess of healing, birth and learning. Anthropologically, I assume she would be one of the few to hold sufficient opposing magic to bind a death cauldron.”

He glanced at the rest of us, who to a man sat silent with stupefaction, and wet his lips. “That is, assuming you were taking the myths and legends of old as writ, which under the circumstances, it seems you are.”

My neck creaked as I glanced toward Gary. “Remind me to keep a cultural anthropologist handy for, you know. Everything.” He waggled his eyebrows and I turned my attention back to Sandburg, trying not to stare. Trying not to stare at him, and trying not to stare at the museum’s marble floor, where Jason Chan’s lifeblood had been smeared in a circle around the cauldron. “Okay. Two more questions. One—could you in theory break down a ward put in place by somebody like Brigid by doing a blood sacrifice in someone else’s name?”

Sandburg opened his mouth and closed it again, looking around at the rest of us like he was just realizing this wasn’t a game. “I’d think a single sacrifice would lack the necessary power. Maybe a single willing sacrifice, because it’s assumed willing sacrifices have more…”

“Mojo,” I supplied into his silence. “I think we can trust Jason wasn’t a willing sacrifice. So it’d take more than one?” I didn’t want to say Redding’s name aloud, as if doing so would spell his doom. Except Suzy said he wasn’t dead yet, so he hadn’t been sacrificed to free the cauldron.

“If I were participating in a ritual to break a goddess’s binding, I would probably spend years building the groundwork.” Sandburg spoke very carefully, an awareness that he was offering us the rope to hang him with in his words. “I would wait for an opportune date, one associated with my patron, and I would make repeated offerings in order to weaken the spell so that at the appropriate hour a final sacrifice would shatter it.” His voice tensed, gaze jumping from me to Billy and back again. “I, though, would be acting and speaking metaphorically. You understand that, don’t you? This is…hypothetical.”

“Hypothetical but useful.” I thought of the pigtailed little girl I’d seen once or twice, and drew a deep breath. “Second question. Would a goddess show herself in the form of a child? A little girl?”

“A maiden form is usually represented as older, a young woman rather than a little girl. That said…” Sandburg relaxed marginally as neither Billy nor I leaped up to slap cuffs on him. “Who’s to stop a goddess from appearing any way she wants?”

A tiny surge of relief cleared my blood and my thoughts. “That’s awesome. Anybody know how to summon a goddess and ask for her help in laying the smackdown on her enemy’s cauldron?”

“Not her enemy.” Sandburg regained a shred more equilibrium and sniffed a bit prissily. “Her opposite. Two beings at diametrical points of a power structure aren’t inherently antagonistic. They can merely be balancing forces, one capable of growing too powerful without the other’s influence. And no,” he added as we all went back to staring at him, “I don’t know how to summon Brigid. It appears that would be your domain.” A small circle of his hand indicated he meant all of us when he said your.

“Right,” I said after a minute. “I guess it is.” The problem was, I only knew one person who did goddess-magic, and that was a witch for whom I’d almost ended the world a few months ago. She wasn’t exactly high on my list of people I wanted to contact again, and even if I’d been willing, I didn’t know if her goddess was the same as the one I needed here and now. I desperately wanted a handbook that cross-referenced things like worldwide names for the gods and goddesses whose domains were more or less the same. If there was any kind of justice in the world, they’d be different names for the same being, though I didn’t know why there should start being justice at this late date. Cernunnos and Herne were the same guy by a lot of people’s reckoning, but I had empirical evidence to the contrary. Still, as a research tool, it’d be very handy. Somebody’d probably written one. I’d have to search Amazon, assuming I lived through the next three hours and twelve minutes.

Out loud, and in an attempt to shut off the free association my brain had tumbled into, I said, “You’re taking this well.”

Sandburg gave me a small smile. “I’m really not.”

Oh. Apparently my brain should’ve just kept going with the research thing. Billy, sounding like the voice of grim patience, said, “Did you get anything off Chan?”

“Only that his migraines got worse around the cauldron, right up until the night he died.” I outlined what Jason’d told me about the encroaching darkness he’d noticed, then spread my hands. “Short of calling up a goddess, I don’t know what to do. And I don’t have 1–800-GODDESS preprogrammed into my phone.”

I got a round of dry looks. Okay, okay, I guessed I didn’t need it preprogrammed if I could spell “goddess,” but jeez, tough crowd. Billy, though, broke my discomfort by muttering, “Melinda does.”

“You cannot seriously be suggesting we get your pregnant wife involved in a death-cauldron scenario.” I spoke before thinking, but even if I’d thinked, I’d have said it anyway. Melinda’d had a traumatic enough pregnancy, thanks to me. Adding more stress to the final week of waddling was the last thing I wanted to do, even if the rational part of me recognized it was Mel’s choice. This was not about rationality. This was about Joanne Walker, Reluctant Shaman, getting all puffed up and out of sorts over the idea of her friends diving headlong into trouble just because she was in the middle of it herself.

In Billy’s defense, he didn’t look thrilled about the idea himself. On the other hand, that didn’t stop him from saying, “Know anybody else on speaking terms with a goddess?”

“I don’t,” Gary said, “but if you’re offerin’ introductions, that’s a social class I ain’t familiar with.”

I glowered at him. “You’re not helping.” He gave me a toothy white grin with no repentance in it at all. Sandburg watched the three of us like we were the final match in an exceedingly complex game of Ping-Pong. “Sonata, tell me you’ve got another solution. Any other solution.”

She shook her head. “My strengths lie in communicating with the dead, Joanne. I have no special relationship with any god.”

I could feel the enamel on my molars wearing thin. A Herculean effort unclenched them just far enough to grate, “This goddess Mel’s on speaking terms with…Is she on speaking terms with her?” I nearly backed up to try vocally capitalizing the “she” in that sentence, then decided if Cernunnos didn’t get a capital H when I referred to him as “he,” then a goddess didn’t get one, either. Not from me, anyway.

Besides, Billy followed my pronouns easily enough, shrugging a shoulder in response. “She says she does. I see dead people and my police partner heals with a touch. Who am I to argue?”

There was a certain logic to that. Not an irrefutable logic, perhaps, but I didn’t think I had the moral high ground to refute it. Bizarrely, that reminded me of Morrison’s dyed hair, and therefore of Morrison, and I spent a few seconds wondering what he’d do in my position.

Truth was, he’d do what he already had done: he’d use the resources available to him, whether he liked it or not. Billy and I lived eyeball deep in a paranormal world, so Morrison’d set us loose to play cop in that world because we were the only ones who could. If asking Melinda Holliday to chat up her patron goddess was the surest bead we had on finding the cauldron, then he’d already be halfway to their house and annoyed at me for wasting time.

Even in my hypothetical situations, he ended up annoyed with me. It was good there were some constants in the universe. Time flowed in one direction, light traveled at 9.46 trillion kilometers per year, and Captain Michael Morrison was always irritated with me. I sighed. “All right. Okay. You haven’t installed a pool at your house, have you, Billy?”

He eyeballed me. “Since you came over three weeks ago? No.”

“Just making sure.” At least I wasn’t going to bring down death and destruction on their home again. Suzy’s premonition had been of somewhere else.

Gosh. What a relief.

I shoved the thought away by jamming my fingers through my hair. “Does Mel need advance notice? Should we call ahead?” I got to my feet as I spoke. Everyone else followed suit, Gary with my drum tucked carefully under his arm. Sandburg stole glances between all of us, and I wondered what he was thinking. Possibly that we were equal parts fascinating and alarming, which was a verdict even I could get behind.

Billy took his phone off his belt, nodding. “I’ll let her know. Mr. Sandburg, thank you for grace under pressure, and I’m sorry if this was bewildering. I’ll try to explain it sometime, if you like, but in the meantime, if Sonata doesn’t mind, maybe you could drive her home?” He gave Sonny an apologetic look that she brushed off. Sandburg looked between him and Sonata, and then, evidently deducing he could be the heroic gentleman of the hour, offered the medium his arm. We all trooped out after them, Billy on the phone to Melinda as Sandburg locked up behind us. I hoped I’d never see the inside of the MoCA again, at least not as anything other than a tourist destination.

Some of my steam had bled off. I drove to Billy’s house without breaking many speed limits or giving Gary another heart attack. Billy, presumably wise in the ways of neighborhood shortcuts, managed to get home just before us, so he was the one to initially greet Melinda. She stood in their doorway, arms akimbo to her enormous tummy, and nerves surged through me all over again. I didn’t care if it was the only viable choice. I didn’t like asking Mel to be searching out death magic when she was only a few days away from giving birth. It seemed like too much could go wrong.

“My goddess is not Brigid,” she said softly, as soon as we were within earshot. “She may not be willing to help. She may not be able to. But the downstairs is ready. Eric wants you to come kiss him good-night,” she added to Billy. My partner smiled and kissed her first, then went upstairs to look in on his kids while Melinda ushered Gary and me downstairs.

I’d been in the Hollidays’ home dozens of times, and in the daylight basement half a dozen times, usually chasing the younger kids around the house in a madcap game of tag. It was fully the size of the rest of the house, with a laundry room adjacent to a large playroom. If I had four kids and Seattle’s rainy winters, I’d have wanted a room that size to keep my children entertained in, too. Especially since there was a door at the top of the stairs that could be closed, isolating piercing shrieks from the rest of the house.

There were several other doors off the playroom, none of which I’d ever really thought about before. One stood open now, the scent of fresh paint emanating from it. I peeked in, then lifted a curious eyebrow at Melinda. “It’ll be Robert’s new room,” she said with a degree of regret. “He’s old enough not to have to share with Eric, and with the new baby we won’t all fit upstairs anymore. Clara’s agitating to move down here, too, now. They’re growing up.”

“You going to let her?”

“Oh, probably. It’ll make Robert feel less alone, and she’s not old enough to think of having boys sneak in through her window yet.” Melinda made a face and opened a door at the opposite end of the playroom. “I hope. Come, this is my room.”

Gary breathed, “Sure is,” as he stepped in, and I couldn’t help but agree with him. Dozens of low-burning candles sat on small tables, illuminating the room. The floor was concrete and littered with brightly colored pillows made out of fabric ranging from rough satin to raw cotton. Rosaries and Stars of David hung from the walls, and a chalk drawing glowed on the concrete floor. I took a breath to comment, and instead inhaled a lungful of delicate sweet air. I’d never thought of Melinda having any particular scent, but the light perfume smelled like her, and was just enough to wash away the smell of candle wax and flame.

“Vallesia,” she said. I blinked and she smiled. “People always ask what flower it is. It grows in Mexico. My grandmother loved it.”

“Your grandma had good taste.”

Amusement danced in Mel’s eyes. “Or a good sense of smell.”

Gary chortled. I made a face. Melinda, pleased, walked around the perimeter of the room, lighting a handful of candles that had been blown out when the door opened. I came farther in, stopping at the edge of the chalk outline. “I don’t know what I expected,” I said after a minute, “but this isn’t it.”

“You expected a pentagram,” Melinda said amiably. “It’s the only power circle anybody ever uses on television, but it’s not the only one available to us. You should know that, Joanne.”

I closed my hand over the necklace pendant at the hollow of my throat. “I guess I should.”

The drawing inscribed on her temple floor—because that was the only word I could use for the room, temple—was the same quartered circle I wore. It was a symbol used by both sides of my disparate heritage: for the Cherokee it was a power circle, embodying the directions, the elements and the shape of the world. Actually, as far as I could tell, it represented exactly the same things for the Irish, though it had also been adopted as a particularly Celtic symbol of Christianity. My mother’s grave was marked with a Celtic cross, as were many others far older than hers. “What does it do?”

Melinda shrugged. “Protects. Captures. Honors. The same thing the pentagram does, really. They call the pentagram the devil’s circle, but it’s only a symbol. This one could be used for corruption, too. Anything can be, and almost nothing is so weighted by external perception that it leans toward good or evil on its own.”

“Almost nothing?” That was Gary, asking the question I wanted to. I sort of felt like I should know this one.

“Traditional Christian crosses, Stars of David, the star and crescent.” A smile flashed across Melinda’s face. “Buddha statues. Even with so much religious strife and conflict in the world, those symbols are nearly impossible to use as focal points for wicked things. It’s why they’re reversed in so many hate rituals, the cross upside down, the star with its point toward the ground.” She wobbled a hand. “Not that the Star of David can be reversed, but a true devil’s circle puts the spire of a five-point star at the bottom. It’s only by altering their aspects somehow that darker magics can gain a hold on them.”

“What about people who do evil in the name of those symbols without reversing them? How can they do that without staining the original?” I had never thought about any of this. I was a little in awe that Melinda had.

“They can’t.” She shrugged. “But through the millennia, there have been more good people, with good hearts and good faith, who have stood beneath these shapes and put their trust in them, than there have been evil. Sometimes the balance comes very close. A token of peace can be corrupted in a single generation, if enough people come to see it as a representation of evil.”

“The swastika,” Gary said. Melinda nodded, and a sort of guilty surge of relief raced through me. That one, at least, I knew. It had been a symbol of healing, kind of an ancient Red Cross, and now it was the universally recognized sign of one of the worst evils man had ever done. If there was ever a symbol that needed rehabilitating, the swastika was it, but I wasn’t sure it should be. Maybe it was better to have it always raise hairs on the arms and give a prickle of discomfort, to remind us of how badly we could go wrong.

Billy came down the stairs, surprisingly light-footed for a guy as heavy as he was. “Robert wheedled another half hour of reading time out of me. The rest of them are asleep.”

“Robert would’ve read for another half hour whether you gave him permission or not.” Melinda smiled and stood on her toes to kiss her husband, who grinned.

“I know, but now he feels like we’ve entered a conspiracy. It’s a male-bonding thing.”

Mel rolled her eyes in my direction, then tipped her head at the door. I shut it. The room warmed up noticeably within a few seconds. Maybe sweating was an important part of summoning a goddess, although that sent my mind down paths I didn’t think it should follow. I mean, candlelight, sweat and deity-summoning all went together if you were summoning a particular sort of goddess, but Mel’d never mentioned being a disciple of Aphrodite. Of course, she’d never mentioned being anybody’s disciple, so what the hell did I know?

“Since we have four of us, we might as well make use of that. Two men and two women.” Mel dimpled. “That works out well.”

Gary and I exchanged glances. “I keep telling people it’s not like that, but nobody believes me.”

“I don’t tell ’em any such thing. Who’m I to shatter their illusions, ’specially when their illusions set me up with a pretty girl?”

“You could do worse,” Mel told me. “I mean, not that you’ve done badly with Edward.”

The smile that’d come up at Gary’s flattery fell away again while Billy made a small no! stop! gesture toward Mel that I probably wasn’t supposed to see. She looked between us in bewilderment. I muttered, “Yeah, that thing with Thor didn’t turn out so well in the end. We broke up tonight.” Chasing ghosts and cauldrons was a pretty good distraction, but the reminder made me want to crawl in a hole and pull the earth over my head for a while.

Dismay washed over Melinda’s face. “Oh, Joanne. I’m sorry. I didn’t know. What happened?”

“It…” Pulling the world over my head wasn’t going to work, and I had more important things to do than dwell. “It doesn’t really matter very much right now. Let’s deal with the zombie-producing cauldron first.” I caught Gary’s frown and exhaled in exasperation. “Look, teacher-man, I know you don’t like me running away from problems, and I promise I’ll get all maudlin and heartbroken tomorrow, okay? This is more important.” While that was true, it didn’t stop my head from stuffing up like somebody’d filled it with cotton bandages. I snorted snot into a thick murky sinus cavity and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Yeah, that was me, Joanne Walker, Tough Girl. “What do we need to do, Mel?”

She said, “Choose a direction,” and while she was probably talking to all of us, I said, “North,” without thinking about it, which made her smile. Defensive, I said, “What?” and her smile broadened.

“Nothing. It’s just that north is the direction usually associated with finding wisdom.”

Oh, God. My esoteric self was making Meaningful Choices in the midst of my minor emotional breakdown. I hoped the Maker of the world, or whoever’d mixed me up, found that kind of thing amusing, because I didn’t. Melinda pointed to the bar of the circle that pointed north, and I stomped over to it and folded my arms like a sulking child. Which I was.

“East,” Gary said, and I couldn’t help notice that when we were both facing the center of the circle, that put him on my left, beside my heart. Apparently not even the universe believed it wasn’t like that. Jeez.

Melinda was smiling again. “Sunrise, the opening of the ways, the opening of the heart. Bill, I think you’d better take west. It’ll balance us man and woman, and you can be the guide to closing what Gary’s opened.” She stepped up to the circle directly across from me, and power danced over my skin as Billy took his place to my right.

“I thought we were going ask a goddess for help,” I said uncomfortably. “How come this feels a little too much like it’s about me?” I didn’t think I was being egocentric, not when Melinda’d arranged the circle around my initial choice.

“You’re the strongest of us.” Somehow Melinda managed to be reassuring, placating and teasing all at once. “Besides, I could have come up with something equally impressive-sounding if Gary’d chosen somewhere else. Youth to age, if he’d taken the south, man to wife if Billy and I were facing each other. Want me to go on?”

A blush curdled my cheeks. “That’s okay, thanks. What now?”

“We may as well sit down. This can take a while.” Melinda did as she suggested, tugging a pillow beneath herself. Gary and Billy followed suit, but I froze halfway into my own crouch.

Light shimmered at the heart of Melinda’s power circle before she even began speaking, so faint I called up the Sight in hopes of seeing more clearly. For long seconds nothing resolved, only scattered bits of brilliance, like the last rays of sunset on the water. Without really thinking, I knelt and put my fingertips on the chalk outline. Magic sparked as if I’d touched a live wire, a gentle shock that pulled silver-blue power from me. It bolted around the circle, hiccuping with recognition as it touched first Gary and Billy, then whisked around to greet Melinda and meet itself.

Silver shot up, crashing into the ceiling. I looked up for the first time, finding another circle inscribed above us, capturing the magic that poured out of me. A nattering little part of my mind thought I should be afraid: spilling power like that was usually a bad sign. This time, though, it felt more like healing; like it had when I’d tried to breathe life back into Cernunnos’s forest, or like when I shared a bit of my own strength with Gary to shore up his weakened heart. Encouraged, I leaned in to it, pressing my fingers against the concrete.

Magic cracked, an audible sound of thunder, and slammed through the quartered cross. Hints of color that weren’t mine danced in the silver and blue: fuchsia and orange, rose-pink and yellow, and a deeper silver that was somehow different from my own, carrying more weight and confidence with it. The effect was a gorgeous cascade that made auroras pale by comparison.

And something at the heart of it was desperately trying to break through. The nattering voice at the back of my head cried another warning, but something familiar rippled through the encroaching presence: the cool touch of mist, the scent of rich earth, a soft crystalline laughter from an unearthly throat. I breathed, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Power spiked, almost all of it my own, but bits and pieces fed in by my friends. Their trust burgeoned in me, and I lent that to the blazing circle, offering a safe refuge for the traveler.

The boy Rider appeared, pale and disheveled and without his mare. Without the Hunt, for that matter, and, as I frowned at him more carefully, it started to look like he was without mass or physical presence, either. He whispered, “We bring death where we ride, and now death itself has called us to it. Follow me, gwyld. Follow me if you can.”

He winked out, leaving only a glimmer of starlight behind.