Shaman Rises (The Walker Papers) (6 page)

And the truth was, the body he’d taken for Raven Maker was second best. I wasn’t kidding myself. Odds of the Master sticking with Raven Mocker’s original host body, a guy named Danny whom I’d known as a kid, were vanishingly rare. Annie had called him a vampire, and there were two things I was certain vampires did: kill people, and make more like themselves.

And into that, Annie Muldoon had shown up. Honestly, on every level, I knew the smart thing to do would be to cut the last threads holding Annie to life, and to let her go free. I was pretty certain her soul, if not her body, could escape the Master’s claws now. There were shadows inside her, thrown into sharp relief by the sword’s brilliance, but they were nothing like the weight of sickness that had brought her to—and beyond—death’s door. They were a toehold, a place to start again, not something to forever condemn her soul. I
should,
on any kind of smart bet, let her go now.

I was demonstrably not the type to take a smart bet. Not when faced with the woman Gary and Cernunnos had bent time to bring to me for healing. Not, when I got down to the crux of the matter, when faced with any kind of impossible odds and the slightest chance of setting them right.

“We have to go up,” I said quietly. “Right into the maw. It’s been chewing its way down through your garden—your soul—to the core of your being. Cernunnos has been protecting you, and that gave me a chance to burn most of the sickness out. But we’ve got to take it back, Annie. We’ve got to take your garden back. We have to go through the darkness to come out the other side.”

Annie took the shallowest breath possible around the rapier’s blade, just enough for a weak question. “How?”

“With this.” I nodded at the sword, not wanting to wiggle it and hurt her. Not that it
should
hurt, but wiggling it just seemed cruel. “It’ll be just as much of a shock coming out as it was going in, but it’s going to be carrying some of your essence, too, when it comes out. Between you, me and it, we’re going to punch right through to the Middle World. We’re going home, Annie. I’m bringing you back to Gary.”

I yanked the sword out before she had time to brace herself.

Power cracked open the sky. My power, Annie’s power, Cernunnos’s, maybe a touch of Nuada’s, too. Cumulative white magic for the second time in a morning, this time born from within. Far above us, far beyond the edge of the cliff I’d dived off—a cliff now illuminated by roaring magic—far up there, the blackened and corrupt roof of Annie’s garden suddenly shone, sloughing off the first sheen of dark magic. I wrapped my arm around Annie’s waist like I was Errol Flynn and she was Olivia de Havilland, snugging her against my body. The roaring power focused by the sword contracted, swinging us in a cinematic arc toward the breaking sky.

Annie finally did shriek, laughter coming out as a high-pitched shout. That
had
to be a good way to start back on the road home, with laughter and excitement. I focused on it, adding it to the upswelling of magic, and chunks of blackened sky started to fall away. We leaned together, swinging around them, always climbing, scrambling, hurrying upward. There was no vortex left, its spidery legs withdrawn or so quashed within Annie’s body and soul that it had no strength to stop us. Part of me thought,
It can’t be this easy,
and the rest of me, sounding rather like that little voice that had recently slipped away, said,
What the hell about any of the past year has been
easy?

We ricocheted past the cliff edge I’d leaped off, still careening upward. Above us, not nearly so far above us anymore, the sky split the width of a hair, then broke apart to let a torrent of white magic come pounding in.

It fell around us like rain, bringing Annie’s garden back to life where it touched down. It streamed across our bodies, pounding at the wealth of green power that Cernunnos had left around Annie. Her own aura began to emerge, rich with age and deep copper in color. It complemented the remaining green wonderfully, but it complemented something else even more: the silver that began shivering out of the falling magic. Gary’s silver, the solid rumbling V8-engine strength of his soul coming to help his wife find her way home again.

Annie’s aura went from emergent to radiant in a heartbeat, pouring the warmth of life up and out. It caught in the rain of white magic and spilled back down again, reviving her garden further, until we rushed through the crack in the sky back into the Middle World.

We actually slammed into the hospital room ceiling before bouncing back to our bodies again. I sat up straight, rubbing my nose. Just within my vision, beyond the shadow of my fingertips, Annie took a sharp, soft breath of her own, not dictated by the ventilator’s steady rhythm. Everything else in the room went silent, even the beeping of the monitors. Or maybe not; maybe the next moment happened fast and only seemed to stretch an impossibly long time. It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter, because Annie Marie Muldoon opened her eyes and smiled at her husband. “Hello, sweetheart.”

Chapter Five

Color drained from Gary’s face. From his hands, too: I could see them whiten around where they held Annie’s, and I bet they were suddenly icy to the touch. Annie squeezed his fingers gently, still smiling. “It’s me. I think it’s me. I think your Joanne wouldn’t have let me come back, if I wasn’t me anymore.”

Gary shot me a harder look than he’d ever given me before, like for a moment he couldn’t forgive me for the idea of not bringing her back. I kind of couldn’t blame him, even though his protectiveness came after the fact. He caught up to that realization a moment later and turned his attention back to Annie. His hands were shaking as he lifted her fingers to his mouth, and though he tried a couple of times, he couldn’t make it all the way to words.

That was okay, because Annie seemed to have some. Her voice was warm and steady, comforting, even though she was the one newly back from the dead and could be expected to be at loose ends. But then, she’d been a nurse. Maybe that helped. Or maybe it was easier to come back from the dead than to have mourned and moved on, only then to be presented with a bona fide miracle. “It’s still there. I can still feel it inside me, making my lungs feel heavy. It wants out. I won’t let it,” she said with perfect equanimity. “I’ll die first. I already did once.”

“You won’t have to.” I sounded just as calm, just as resolved. Annie gave me a brief smile. Gary didn’t. I wasn’t even certain he was breathing.

“I’m sure you’re right, Joanne. Now.” Her smile turned stern, though there was a suspicious spark of brightness behind her emerald eyes. She turned all of that stern amusement on her husband, and flicked one eyebrow high up on her forehead. “
Imelda,
Gary? Is there something I should know about Imelda Welch from Kansas?”

Gary’s mouth fell open, a blush curdling his face. His jaw flapped a few times and a wheeze emerged. I peered between them, nigh unto bursting with curiosity. Finally his wheeze became a breathless grunt, which he followed up by seizing Annie in his arms and burying his face in her shoulder.

For a woman just back from the dead, she looked to have a hell of a grip as she knotted her own arms around Gary and held on tight. For a while neither of them were coherent, mumbles and breaths of laughter interspersed with caught gasps of sobs. I sat there smiling idiotically, tears running unheeded down my face, until it finally occurred to me that they might want a little privacy. My knees were wobbly when I stood, but Morrison was there, his own face as unabashedly wet as mine. He drew me across the room, then murmured, “Imelda?” so quietly that I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t been wondering the same thing. I shrugged and tugged him a step or two closer to the door. We could hang out in the hall for a while, until Gary was ready to come get us. Morrison glanced back at the Muldoons one more time, a blinding smile appearing on his features. As we stepped out of the room, he took a deep breath. “Did you see them? Walker, I want to ask you—”

His question fell into startled silence as the door closed behind us. I blinked tears away, still smiling at him, then followed his uncertain gaze.

Suzanne Quinley, granddaughter of a god, sat on a bench across the hall.

She glanced up as the door closed behind us, looking lost in a massive gray hoodie and skinny blue jeans. Her long legs were drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, making her all elbows and knees. Ethereal elbows and knees, though, even disguised by the hoodie. She was slim-built with fine bones, and her wheat-pale straight hair still curtained her features.

When she looked up, I thought it was just as well that her hair often hid her face. Her eyes were so green, so vivid and sharp, that they seemed to be the only living, human thing about her. Therein lay the irony, of course, because she’d gotten that stunning gaze from her immortal grandfather, Cernunnos, god of the Wild Hunt.

Cernunnos, whose power I’d just been messing with in the room behind me. My voice broke as I blurted, “Suzy? Is everything okay?”

For a girl who was all elbows and knees, she unwound with surprising grace and flung herself the short distance across the hall into my arms. I grunted and fell back a step. Morrison caught our weight and straightened us up while Suzy clung to my ribs like a hungry leech. “I knew if I came here I’d find you!”

Last time Suzanne Quinley had said something of that sort to me, she’d been coming to warn me that she’d had visions of my death. Shortly thereafter we’d fought zombies together, a scene which had left me whimpering and sniveling like a child. I did
not
want to reenact any of that, but it was a little hard to say,
Augh! Get off me, kid!
without causing offense. “What’s wrong, Suze? What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”

Suzy pulled out of my arms with an expression not dissimilar to Annie’s when she’d mentioned the spirit cheetah. Except I’d had warning about the spirit cat, but had none at all for Suzy’s exasperated reply. “It’s two in the afternoon. And my best friend, Kiseko, and her boyfriend, Robert Holliday, magicked me here from Olympia last night.”

“Rob—” My tongue and brain got all tangled up trying to decide which of those things I should latch on to. Being an honorary aunt of the boy in question, the second bit won. “Robert has a girlfriend?”

Suzy rolled her eyes as only a fifteen-year-old could. “Kiseko says not, but yeah, right. Anyway, they
magicked
me, Detective Walker, isn’t that more important?”

“Ah. Um. Not ‘Detective’ anymore. I’m just plain old Joanne. How did they...magic you? It’s two in the afternoon? What?” I had the terrible idea I was so far behind that I’d never catch up, and I was kind of afraid to even try. Even so, I looked to Morrison for confirmation about that last, and he nodded. I held up a palm, silencing Suzanne for a few seconds, and said, “It’s
two
in the
afternoon?
It was midnight—!”

“You were under for twelve hours, Walker. More than twelve hours. Muldoon and I were—” Morrison took a sharp, deep breath, then abruptly pulled me into a hug. “I was starting to wonder if you were coming back, Walker.”

Muffled by his shoulder, I said, “I did. I always will. I’m sorry. Twelve
hours?
” Now that I knew half a day had passed I was suddenly incredibly thirsty and a bit woobly of knee. “I’ve never been under that long before. It didn’t feel that long. It felt...” It had felt like minutes, just as it always did. But it had been a hell of a lot of untangling and wrangling in there, and what I knew about more traditional shamanic healings didn’t generally suggest they happened in the blink of an eye that I was accustomed to. I’d apparently just about met my match, which wasn’t exactly a shocker. The Master had been my match—more than my match—all along. “How did you keep the hospital staff off us?”

Morrison grunted, a sound which may have been intended as a distant cousin to laughter. “Muldoon went off on a tear about freedom of religion and infringement of civil rights. They cited the patient’s rights and their own obligations and threatened to call the police. Finding out my rank took the wind out of their sails. Aside from checking her vitals they left us alone after that.”

“Jesus,”
I said, heartfelt, and Morrison tightened his arms around me.

“Don’t do that again, Walker. Try not to do that again.”

“I’ll try.”

“A-
hem.
” Suzy drew our attention back to her, and I couldn’t decide if her tone of offense was for us ignoring her or for what her friends had done. “They
called
me. Like I was a magic
dog
or something. And then...” Offense flew out the window, replaced by a shiftiness that had no business on a face as young and innocent as Suzanne’s. Never mind that she’d pretty well lost any innocence the day we’d met, when her adoptive parents had been murdered by her birth father, whom I had then run through with a sword. “Then some things happened. But that’s not important right now!”

Some things happened
was not a phrase I wanted to consider too deeply when discussing two teenage girls and a teenage boy as participants. Morrison the police captain, however, had no compunction against it at all. “What kinds of things, Suzanne?”

Suzy blinked and turned scarlet from the collar of her shirt up. “Oh. My. God. Not those kinds of things. Omigod. No, it was magic stuff, not—omigod.”

The poor kid was fit to die of mortification. Morrison, who could not be embarrassed on such, or perhaps any, topics, studied her momentarily like he was deciding whether she was telling the truth. She kept blushing a flaming blush until he nodded with satisfaction and gave her a brief, reassuring smile. I wasn’t nearly that good a person, and merely tried not to laugh. “Okay, so it wasn’t that kind of stuff. What kind of magic stuff?”

“It was like stuff with...I don’t know, it was kind of creepy. But I’ve been having visions since then, or I haven’t been, and that’s the important part, Dete—uh, Ms. Walker.”

All my laughter dried up. “Visions of what?”

“I don’t know!” The last word was nearly a wail. Suzy collapsed back onto the bench, shoulders slumped, elegant fingers dangling between her legs. “I don’t know. Darkness, but not like nighttime. It’s alive, it’s...it’s greedy. It’s...it’s fighting the green,” she said in obvious embarrassment, though I had no idea what she was embarrassed about. “It wants something. It wants something really important, and I can’t See what.”

I exhaled noisily. “It’s the thing that made the cauldron, Suzy. It’s the Master. And he probably wants me.”

“I don’t think so. It more like he wants...me.”

My teeth clicked together and a hole opened up in my heart. There were a lot of reasons I could imagine something dark wanting Suzy. “Maybe we better go back to ‘what kind of magic stuff?’”

Suzanne sighed deeply enough that I thought I’d better go sit next to her. That kind of sigh preceded long stories, in my experience. But all she said was, “Kiseko was trying to raise an earth element, and she got me. I guess that kind of makes sense, but whatever. Anyway, when, or once, I came through, so did something else. And it felt...bad. And I fought it, and I won, but it, like, leaked oil inside my head. All I can see is the darkness, futures where everything has gone dark. That, and green. And I’m green, Detec—Ms. Walker. Ms. Walker.”

“You can call me Joanne.”

Suzy hesitated. “I don’t think so. My aunt would
look
at me. But thanks. Anyway, it’s like I feel all these dark futures in my head, Ms. Walker, and...and they
want
something. Something that’ll help them come true.” She swallowed. “I’m afraid it’s me.”

“Then we won’t let that happen.” I sat down beside her, put my arm around her shoulders, tugged her closer to me, and did my best to sound like a confident, reassuring grown-up. “It’ll be fine, Suzy. I promise.”

She sighed again and leaned on me. Morrison, still standing across the hall, got an oddly soft expression, then looked away with a smile. I decided not to read anything into that, because I was pretty sure it crossed into territory I wasn’t yet prepared to tread. “How long has this been going on, Suze?”

“Since last night? They only just summoned me.”

I closed my eyes, mumbling, “I’m going to have to tell Billy his son is summoning people. That’s not going to go over well.” Then my eyes popped open again. “Wait, last night? How did you even know I was here?”

“Every paper in Seattle is talking about the woman who came back from the dead. Where else would you be?”

“North Carolina,” I said dryly. “That’s where I was until...” I paused to adjust my mental time line. “Until last night. Wait, does that mean it’s April first? This is all a pretty crappy idea of an April Fools’ joke.”

Morrison didn’t even crack a smile, and Suzy kind of slumped in defeat. Apparently it was a crappy enough April Fools’ joke that it wasn’t even worth commenting on.

Staring at her toes, Suzy mumbled, “Well, I just, I mean, I thought you’d be here.”

“How does anybody even know about Annie? It shouldn’t be in the papers. I’d think the hospital would be trying to keep it quiet.”

“That Channel Two reporter got hold of it. The pretty one. She was covering some other story at the hospital and heard people talking about this old woman who turned up out of nowhere. So she turned the story into an exposé on the carelessness of the Seattle hospital systems. She was on the national news last night.”

I groaned and sat forward to put my face in my hands. “Laurie Corvallis? God, the national news? That’s got to thrill her right down to her cold-blooded toes. How much you want to bet she parlays this into an anchor position somehow?”

“That’s a bet I wouldn’t take,” Morrison answered. I smiled in admiration of his wisdom while Suzy peered between us.

“We’ve met Laurie Corvallis,” I explained. “Frankly, we’re lucky she’s only doing an exposé on the hospital system, not trying to shine light on the magical aspects of the world. Believe me, if she thought there was anything hinky about this, and that she could make a story of it that people would believe, she’d be all over that like white on snow.”

“Hinky.” Suzy wrinkled her nose dubiously. “Did she really just say
hinky?
”

“I’ve learned to think of her verbal tics as part of her charm,” Morrison said, straight-faced enough that I thought I should be offended. Then he cracked a grin and Suzy let go a relieved little burst of giggles, like she’d desperately needed the pressure release. Morrison was
much
better at kids than I was.

Of course, I was pretty certain giant squid were better at kids than me. That was good. Under the circumstances, somebody needed to be. I drew my tattered dignity around myself and sniffed. “If you’re quite finished making fun of me...?”

Suzy giggled again, which pleased me. I squeezed her shoulders. “Okay. First—wait. First, does your aunt know you’re here, this time?” Much to my relief, she nodded. “Good. Wait. How? If you got magicked—never mind. You promise she knows?” Suzy nodded again and I struggled past all the hows and whys to focus on the important part. “In that case, I’m basically not letting you out of my sight until this is over, okay? I can keep you safe if we’re together.”