Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 35

Wednesday, June 22, 8:25 a. m.

I must have slept, because the next thing I remembered was Billy’s hand on my shoulder as he said, “It’s all right, Joanie. We’ve got him.”

The sun was higher in the sky, and the entire coven, including Melinda, was there. Billy wasn’t the only police officer, and someone had already called an ambulance. I didn’t want to look at any of them, but I couldn’t look away from Garth. He looked older and much more haggard, bags under his eyes that spoke both of sorrow and exhaustion.

But the worst of it was what he said. He met my eyes, then looked away, watching them take his brother’s body to the ambulance, and echoed Colin’s opinion: “It beats the cancer ward.”

Knots twisted in my stomach, until I couldn’t tell if I wanted or dreaded forgiveness. But I still had to say I was sorry. I’d fucked up so badly. “Garth,” I whispered.

“Don’t.” His answer snapped out, hard enough to be a blow. I flinched and closed my eyes, glad for the pain. “Don’t,” he said again. Controlled emotion bled through his voice, anger and despair. “Just…don’t.”

I lowered my chin to my chest and pressed my lips together, nodding. I felt Billy’s hand on my shoulder again, then heard him say, “C’mon, let’s get her to the hospital, too.”

“I’m fine,” I said very quietly. I was not fine. Two people had died because I’d screwed up, and a third almost had. I wasn’t sure I could face Gary again. I couldn’t bear the idea of facing Morrison. And Coyote might have abandoned me for good, which I couldn’t blame him for.

All of which was why I got to my feet and went with Billy to the hospital. I didn’t care if anybody else might be able to forgive me. I was not going to let myself off the hook.

The radio on the drive over said the heat wave had broken, that a cooler front was moving in. It coincided with the end of the global warming symposium, a fact which the commentator clearly thought had meaning, because he repeated it twice with a sort of nudge-nudge-wink-wink delivery. In more local news, there was already a petition to the city to leave the new Lake Washington waterfall in place. They were calling it Thunderbird Falls. The battle over the lake hadn’t gone unnoticed.

I wasn’t sure I was happy with that. It seemed harsh enough that the people I knew well were being made to accept magic into their daily lives, whether they wanted it or not. Now the things I’d done were becoming a real part of the world as total strangers knew it. I already knew there was no going back, but I honestly hadn’t thought I might push a whole city toward believing the monsters under the bed were real. I unfocused my eyes, feeling so disconnected that it was easy to let second sight slide over my normal, fuzzy vision.

The wrongness in the air was gone, the dark twist of power that had lain over Seattle for months dissipated. It felt and looked healthier, the murky colors washed clean again. I knew I hadn’t fixed that on my own. The thunderbird had cleared the air, and if I’d had any part in it, it was in being the Wakinyan’s conduit. I wasn’t about to take credit for it. I kept the double vision on all the way to the hospital, feeling like it might be at least a step toward using my gifts more reliably.

I was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, my feet dangling toward the floor, when Morrison said, “Walker,” from the doorway. My fingers clenched on the mattress as I looked up.

“Captain. Didn’t think I’d see you.” The desert-inspired suntan was still with me, but it didn’t hide the whiteness of my knuckles as I squeezed the mattress.

“Thought you wouldn’t, or hoped you wouldn’t?” He came into the room and pulled a stool up to lean against, arms folded across his chest. I shook my head.

“Thought I was going to come see you after they let me out of here.”

“They going to do that?”

I shrugged one shoulder, watching his shoes. They were black polished leather, and considerably safer to look at than his eyes. “Nothing wrong with me that some sleep won’t cure.” Nothing physically, anyway. I swallowed and made myself look up. Morrison was frowning at me. At least some things never changed. “Captain, I—”

“Every single one of your buddies,” Morrison interrupted, loudly, “says that in the middle of a solstice party last night, Faye Kirkland flipped out, confessed to murdering Cassandra Tucker, and in a fit of regret killed herself. Everyone,” he repeated, “told me the same story. Including Melinda Holliday. They also said that Colin Johannsen, who was dying of cancer, left the hospital for a few hours and opted to drown himself in Lake Washington rather than return for further treatments.”

I stared at him. Morrison stared back, gimlet gaze. “Is that what happened, Officer Walker?”

The incredible thing was that it was the only possible real-world spin that could be put on what had really happened. I wet my lips and kept staring at him for what felt like a very long time, before straightening my spine and saying, “No, sir.”

There was not a single hint of surprise in Morrison’s blue eyes. “Would anyone with two rational brain cells to rub together believe what really did happen?”

I closed my eyes and lifted my eyebrows a little. “No, sir.”

Morrison inhaled such a long deep breath that I opened my eyes again, half-expecting to see that he’d expanded like a puffer fish. He hadn’t. He let the breath out with equal deliberation, glowering at me. “Is their explanation a reasonable facsimile of what did happen?”

“Yes, sir.” My voice was so soft even I could barely hear it. “Faye did kill herself. I couldn’t stop her. I tried, but…” I looked down at my hands, thinking of the passion that had driven Faye to refuse the healing I’d offered. “And Colin did choose to not go back to the hospital.” It was absolutely true. It was absolutely deceptive.

“I hate this, Walker.”

“I know. I’m sorry.” I looked up again. “Am I…” I didn’t know how you busted a foot patrol cop back to anything. Maybe it meant desk duty. I didn’t want to put the idea in Morrison’s head. “…busted back to being a mechanic?”

“That what you want?”

Christ. Moment of truth. I wet my lips again and shook my head. “No, sir.” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that out loud to Morrison.

A very faint glint of satisfaction came into Morrison’s eyes and he exhaled again, noisily. “Then you’re still stuck with foot patrol.” He pushed off the stool, looming over me. “There’s somebody here who wanted to see you when I was done with you. I expect you at work tomorrow, Walker.” He stalked out, the door slowly closing behind him.

I tightened all the muscles in my stomach, internal support to help me face the person I expected to walk through the door next. But it wasn’t Gary at all. It was a tall, pretty woman I didn’t recognize, holding the hand of a six-year-old girl whose eyes were big with interest. “Ashley heard on the radio this morning that Officer Joanne Walker had been brought to the hospital,” the woman said. “She wanted to come by and make sure you were all right.”

I blinked at them both without comprehension, until recognition smacked me so hard that I bounced off the bed. “Oh! Oh! It’s Allison, right? Allison and Ashley Hampton. I didn’t recognize you awake, Ashley.” I grinned and knelt down, putting myself on a level with the little girl. “Thanks for coming to check on me. How’re you feeling?”

The girl’s grin exploded with pure happiness and she stepped forward to give me a hug. “I’m glad you’re okay! I was worried.” She was strong and warm and smelled like clean kid, the heat-induced clamminess long since banished. “Mommy said you made me better!”

Ms. Hampton chuckled. “I’ve told her how you called the ambulance about fifty times in the last few days. She thinks you’re a superhero.” There was almost an apology in the woman’s wry voice. “She insisted we come visit.”

“I’m glad you did,” I said, muffled against Ashley’s shoulder. “It means a lot.” It was one little reminder of something I hadn’t screwed up, and right now I needed it more than I liked to admit. I set Ashley back a few inches so I could grin at her again, hoping the smile wasn’t too watery. “I feel a lot better now that you’ve come to visit me,” I told her, with complete sincerity. “Thank you.”

She wriggled. “You’re welcome. I’m gonna be a policeman when I grow up, too.”

“Yeah?” I was going to get all sniffly any second here. I grinned wider, trying not to leak tears. “Maybe, if it’s okay with your Mom, I can show you some of the police station sometime. You can be just like a real grown-up officer. How’d that be?”

Ashley’s eyes widened and she spun around on her heel to look up at Allison Hampton. “Please, Mommy?”

Allison laughed. “We’ll talk about it, baby. But now we have to leave Officer Walker alone. Mommy has to get to work.”

“Aww.” The kid said it, but I felt it too. But then Ashley turned around and hugged me again, and said, sternly, “You better take care of yourself, Ossifer—Officer Walker.”

I grinned as brightly as I could. “I will, Ashley. Thanks.”

Going to see Gary was a little easier after Ashley’s visit. I climbed the stairs so it’d take longer, stopping to look out windows at the damage done to Seattle’s streets by rampaging mythical wildlife over the last twenty-four hours. Everything was in soft focus because my contacts had washed out. It wasn’t enough to hide the mess, but it took some of the edge off.

Gary was charming a nurse half his age into letting him walk out the hospital doors under his own power when I showed up in his room. The woman look flustered and blushed when I knocked on the door, and made him sit in the wheelchair whether he liked it or not. “Hospital policy,” she said firmly, and I grinned as she beat a hasty retreat.

“You don’t look so good, Jo,” Gary said as soon as the door whispered shut behind her. I let out a half laugh, mostly breath, and came into the room to give him a brief hug.

“You’re the one leaving the hospital a few days after a heart attack and I don’t look so good?”

“I,” Gary proclaimed, “am fit as a fiddle. What in hell happened to you?” He got out of the wheelchair so he could frown down at me in concern.

I put my fingertips on his chest, cautiously calling for the power that lay inside me. It jumped as readily as it had when I’d healed Ashley, silver warmth spilling through my fingers to explore his arteries and heart muscle. There was no blockage anywhere, though I could feel that the muscle itself was wearier than it should have been. I still didn’t know how to fix that, but I was going to learn. I left another little glimmering ball of energy behind and dropped my hand. Gary watched with fascination and I smiled a little. “Is that the doctor’s diagnosis? Fit as a fiddle?”

“Pretty much, yeah. They got no idea why I had a heart attack. You’re avoidin’ the question, Jo.”

“I know.” I sat down on the edge of his bed and Gary leaned next to me, bumping his shoulder against mine. I leaned my head toward his and worked up the courage to say, “You’re here because of me, Gary. You weren’t supposed to have a heart attack. Somebody got to me through you, because I haven’t been taking this seriously enough.”

“You’re nuts,” Gary said. I shook my head.

“I’m not. One of the coven had a knack for messing up people’s hearts. She attacked you with a spell.” Once upon a time I wouldn’t have been able to say that without either snorting derisively or wincing. Right now I was too low to do either. “Right at the same time that the bad guy was lying to me,” I whispered. “You had a heart attack so I’d be distracted and wouldn’t question what I’d been told. And it worked, Gary. I screwed up so bad I almost got you killed.”

“Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, darlin’.” Gary put his arm around my shoulders and tucked me against his side, feeling absurdly strong for a man who was a few days out from death’s door. “You gonna make the same mistake again?”

“No.” I sounded like a little kid, my voice nothing more than a tiny, tearful squeak. Gary put his cheek against the top of my head.

“I know this ain’t easy for you, Jo. You got all this new stuff inside you pushin’ you one way, and all the old stuff pushin’ back. But I told you this before and I’ll tell you again: you got the ability to help people, and you can either keep screwin’ around and pretending it ain’t there, or you can stop bitching and do somethin’ about it. Maybe it just needed to hit real close to home before you started understanding that. In that case, I figure a few days in a hospital flirtin’ with pretty nurses is getting off cheap. You gotta remember I’m an old man, Jo. My kind don’t last forever. I kinda like the idea of having some purpose to my death, if I gotta go.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” I said in a tight voice. “Except into that wheelchair and then home. I can’t afford to lose you.”

“Yeah?” He sounded pleased. “Why’s that?”

I managed a smile up at him. “Because I’ve still got way too much to learn from you.”

Gary flashed me a grin full of bright white teeth. “What, now you think I’m a teacher or somethin’?”

My smile got more solid. “I think I don’t believe much in coincidence anymore. I think I got into your cab that morning for a reason. Maybe it was just that you drive like a bat out of hell and I needed to be somewhere fast, but I think there’s more to it than that.”

“Pshaw,” Gary said cheerfully. He actually said “pshaw.” I didn’t think people said words like that. “Now you’re just buttering me up.”

“Yeah.” I grinned and patted the handle of the wheelchair. “C’mon, let’s go home. I’ll make you some nice tofu and wheat toast for breakfast.”

Gary clutched his chest, sheer horror descending on his face as he sat. “What are you, crazy, lady? You tryin’ to kill me or something? Tofu? You just did somethin’,” he accused. “Put some kinda tingle on my heart. If that don’t earn me bacon and eggs, then life ain’t worth livin’.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bacon and eggs. But only if I get to ride the wheelchair like it’s a shopping cart.”

“You got yourself a deal, lady.”

We charged out of the room, me balanced precariously on the chair’s frame, and broke for the hospital doors with the horrified staff chasing after us.