Downpour (44 page)

“Just get back in the boat,” I snapped, pushing her away and waving at Quinton to haul her in.

Willow made a weak noise of protest, but Quinton was already reeling her back in. In the clouds, the two lightning fish fought and squabbled over the anchor stone, lashing at each other with their tails and lighting up the clouds with their fury.

I was barely warm enough to keep treading water myself, but I caught my breath and gathered my strength. Then I
pushed
. I shoved as hard on the boiling energy of the Grey as I could, thrusting it downward to the broken waveguide of the lake, hoping, praying even, that it would work.

Bright green light pulsed in a hard, straight line from the water below me and shouted into the sky, knocking the battling lightning fish across the storm like jackstraws. The first dragon spun in the air, spiraling like a falling maple seed, the stone singing in its mouth and shining the same bright green. The lightning fish dove toward the water again as if the line of energy below were pulling it down.

Then it spat the stone out. The light seemed to snatch the tumbling rock and drag it into the depths, the sound of the two songs forming a single soul-shaking note that boomed into the air and then faded into the depths.

The light ebbed down, the screams of the lightning fish receding as the storm eased and the clouds drifted open enough to let ordinary moonlight slice onto the suddenly becalmed surface of the dark lake. The silence breathed around me and I shut my eyes a moment. There were no wild streamers of energy or pools of magic screeching into the sky, no piercing red light from Beauty, just the moon and the distant lap of the lake on the shore.

And the burble of the outboard engine drawing closer.

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EPILOGUE

Y
ou 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.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I seem to take liberties with real places. In this case, although Lake Crescent, Lake Sutherland, and the surrounding areas and landmarks do in fact exist exactly as and where I described them in the text, they never were referred to as “Sunset Lakes” or “Blood Lake.” I made up these nicknames to serve my story. And the houses at East Beach and Devil’s Punch Bowl that I described do not—and never have—existed.

The town of Beaver, with its “Tragedy Graveyard,” is real, and so is the fire that destroyed the Sol Duc Hot Springs resort in 1916 while the automatic organ in the ballroom played Beethoven’s Funeral March endlessly until it, too, burned to the ground.

As fantastic as it sounds, the story of Hallie Latham Illingworth and her death and bizarre reappearance is also true. Strangely enough, I discovered that I had a glancing connection to the story of Hallie: Her murderous husband was arrested in Long Beach, California, which is where I attended college and where I first heard about—but dismissed as too weird—the arrest and trial of Monty Illingworth. So you never can tell what will turn out to be of use—save those newspaper clippings!

I culled a lot of my background history from the archives of the Clallam County Historical Society. Alas, some of the most interesting bits of Clallam County history didn’t fit in the tale I was trying to tell—the full story of Anna Petrovna, for instance, or the real-life horrors of Starvation Heights—so I guess I’ll have to save them for another book. I owe the ladies in the archive endless thanks for their time, patience, and tales—including some about the ghostly orbs that are occasionally seen floating through their own haunted school building.

I also took huge liberties with the investigation of crimes on federal park property and with the administrative structure of the park service in the interest of both a better story and a lot less faffing about with details that would make the story needlessly complicated. I hope the park and forestry services will forgive me. On the other hand, Clallam County does have a renowned K-9 investigative unit that has often worked closely with the Canadian authorities. Also, the “floating feet” is a true story. And the rangers at Hurricane Ridge were quite friendly and have no idea how I abused their very nice visitor’s center with bears and demons. If they knew what I was planning, they probably wouldn’t have let me in. If you visit Olympic National Park, be sure to drop in and check out the place.

If you have noticed that some things about this story seem a little familiar, they probably are. I leaned heavily on Dashiell Hammett’s book
Red Harvest
for the basic plot structure—which he stole from previous authors, so I figured he couldn’t complain, not least of all because he’s been dead for quite a while.

I suspect I got a lot of details about hoodoo, Voodoo, Chinese demons, and geology wrong, since I am not an expert and become a gifted amateur only for a limited time during the writing of these books. I also have used the names of real people with their permission, but the characters I’ve created around them have no relationship to, nor are they meant as reflections or comments on, any real people, living or dead. Whatever I got wrong, wherever I went astray, it was an honest mistake and not an act of malice or the fault of those who gave me help, advice, or coffee.