Shaman Rises

Chapter Fourteen

Shocking white pain blinded me for just an instant. I howled like—well, like a banshee, but under the circumstances I wished I could have thought of a different howling thing. At any rate, I howled and clapped my hands to my nose, astonished at the power of Annie’s punch, and sent magic sizzling through my own face to clear the pain away.

By that time Annie had put on a burst of speed that somebody recently off her deathbed shouldn’t have been able to manage. My shriek of horror sounded high-pitched and girlish above Gary’s heart-wrenching bellow. He and Morrison were in motion already, too, but the linebacker and the cop were never going to catch the small woman running pell-mell toward her doom. I gathered every spare wisp of magic in me, knitted it together and threw a net.

Violently green magic, a fire-green blaze, burned my net away before it came near Annie. I whirled on Suzy, whose colorless face vindicated my suspicions. “It wasn’t me,” she protested, voice rising. “It wasn’t me?”

A string of invective tore from my throat. “Coyote! Laurie! Do—do something about her!” I spun away from the girl again, launching myself into a flat-out run that had no more chance of catching Annie than Gary or Morrison did.

The leanansidhe, unconstrained by middling details of physicality, whipped around, closing the distance between herself and Annie at a literally inhuman speed. Way too late I remembered I had that trick in my own repertoire, and shrieked Renee! inside my skull.

Rattler, not Renee, answered with a burst of snake-speed that drove me forward so fast I felt like my mind was being left behind. Back there, trying to catch up, it remembered that a cheetah had come to Annie when she’d done her spirit quest. That made her astonishing quickness comprehensible, at least to somebody moving with a snake’s striking speed.

Unfortunately, the cheetah had a head start, and Renee didn’t slip me between seconds this time. Maybe a dreadful, ungrateful part of me would rather Annie took on the leanansidhe than myself, although I really hoped I was a better person than that. Maybe too much of my magic was already tangled up in trying to shield the dozens of mediums. If so, I was starting to hate discovering I had limitations, even if they lay in a range that most adepts would consider stupendous.

I passed Gary and Morrison and was barely ten steps from Annie when the leanansidhe took her.

It hit her in the spine, smashing her to the ground. Furrows kicked up where her hands hit, old grass and dark earth startled at the disruption. Her back arched in the shape of a scream, though no sound escaped her. Blackness erupted in her lungs, the same darkness we’d fought so hard to eliminate. It flowed through her like blood, coloring her skin where thin veins lay near the surface. I hoped like hell it was just the Sight showing me that, that Gary couldn’t see it, too. Another convulsion rocked her and she did scream, a tired and weak sound, like she’d been fighting a battle too long already.

Gary fell to his knees, roaring with rage and grief. The Annie-thing twisted to show black, black eyes, and with a terrible smile stretching her mouth. “The body is weak, sure and so. Not the host my master wished for me. Not what he’d prepared, no, but oh, his taste is inside her, and she will grow strong again with my spirit.”

Then the horror of her mouth contorted, a visible struggle beneath her very skin. Her eyes filtered from black to fiery green and back again, before the green dominated a few desperate seconds. “Weak so she has to concentrate to keep me alive, Joanne. Weak because if she lets me die her master can’t come through. Corruption or strength, and I have neither. Kill me now, Joanne. Kill me while I can give you the chance.”

She was right. I knew she was right, and, knowing it, I stalked forward. Gary screamed, coming to his feet in a run. Morrison slammed into him, tackling him to the ground. Dirt and grass flew as they fought. Annie allowed herself one anguished glance, then returned her gaze to me. “I’ve been dead all this time anyway, Joanne. I’m not afraid. Promise me—”

I nodded, took my final step in to her, spun and delivered a roundhouse kick to the side of her head. She didn’t even have time to look surprised as she collapsed. Panting like I’d run a sprint, I stood over her unconscious body and whispered, “Absolutely not.”

Gary bashed into my side like a SCUD, and as I hit the ground I felt a pained ghost of amusement. My head bounced off the earth, less agonizing than smashing into a diner wall, but the whole thing had a familiar ring to it. A ring that was currently in my ears, and only barely quieter than Gary’s grunt of angry confusion. I pushed, trying to dislodge him, and he half sat up, bushy eyebrows beetled over storm-dark eyes. When I had enough breath to speak, I said, “You didn’t really think I was going to kill your wife, did you, Gary?”

He sat back on his heels, hands pressed fingers-inward on his thighs, and lowered his white-haired head. I admired the old guy’s flexibility: he was wearing jeans, which were never the easiest thing to kneel in, but he didn’t seem to be suffering the instant lack of circulation to the legs that I always got in that position. After a few seconds he looked up, face bleak. “Thing was, I wasn’t sure you shouldn’t, doll. But didja have to kick her?”

Speaking of which, I crawled the foot and a half to Annie and turned her head carefully. A rather horrible bruise was forming, but my healer’s magic didn’t warn of any real damage. My own head dropped and I sighed. “Yeah, I kinda did. Not just because turnabout is fair play, either. Back in the Qualla everything I threw at the wraiths and Raven Mocker just made them stronger. They kept drinking up my power like I’d turned on a soda fountain. This thing—”

Gary growled, which I thought was patently unfair, since two seconds ago even he’d confessed to not quite trusting Annie. “The thing in Annie,” I corrected myself as patiently as I could. “It appears to be of the same nature. It’s trying like hell to swallow as much power as it can, so I was afraid to try knocking her out with magic.”

“Sorry.” Morrison appeared with the incongruous word. I blinked at him and he rubbed his jaw, eyeing Gary. “He got away. Sorry.”

Apparently I’d missed a fine bout of fisticuffs in the seven seconds I’d been beating up Annie. “It’s okay. He hits like a pile driver.”

“Yes, but—” Morrison shut his mouth on the protest, which I suspected had something to do with masculine pride and thirty-plus years of age difference between himself and the man who’d just taken him in a fistfight.

“The point,” I said, raising my voice as if I could make sense of the world if only I was loud enough, “the point is that if we can keep Annie unconscious until we figure out how to disinfect her, we might have a fighting chance. She says the Master needs a fema...” I stared down at Annie’s unconscious self with dismay. The Master had taken Danny and then Mark for Raven Mocker, and needed a woman to host the leanansidhe. There was an obvious conclusion there, but this, I felt, was not an Occam’s razor moment. He would not have groomed an old lady if he intended to get himself a host the old-fashioned way, and besides, I couldn’t really see him patiently waiting nine months to be born into this world.

On the other hand, a baby couldn’t fight him off, and that might offer him a truly staggering amount of power. “Billy?” My voice was low enough to scratch, and I was half surprised that Billy responded.

He wasn’t even all that far away, it turned out. A lot had been going on in the few seconds I’d been dealing with Annie. He’d gotten up from his breather and come to join us, though from the way his attention kept scattering back to the shielded mediums, I could see his concerns were divided. That was good, because I didn’t feel like I had enough spoons to be keeping tabs on everyone. “Billy, go home and get into Melinda’s sanctuary. Raise the walls, ask her goddess for every damned bit of help she’ll give, and keep your children safe.”

That took his attention off the mediums. Well, sort of. He said, “I think you can let them go now. I think you’ve trapped the malevolent spirit,” in a peculiarly gentle tone.

To my complete embarrassment, my eyes filled with tears. It had been two hard weeks since I’d seen Billy, and practically the last thing that had happened when I’d last seen him was he’d been attacked by somebody I subsequently shot. I hadn’t killed the shooter, but right then, with Billy’s gentle voice offering me a moment to relax, the raging conviction that I would have killed her, that I’d do it again a hundred times to keep my friend and partner alive, was totally overwhelming. I actually did what he told me to and released the shields that—as it turned out—weren’t just protecting the mediums, but at this point were holding them physically in place.

The sense of relief from them, and the rush of power back into me, was palpable. I staggered the few steps to Billy and wrapped him in a hug. “Hi.”

Billy Holliday, like Gary, was taller than I was. With my face ducked against his shoulder, it wasn’t hard for him to put his chin on top of my head as he squeezed me. “Hi. I can’t believe you left me in the lurch, Walker. I can’t believe you quit the day after I almost got killed.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay.” Billy set me back, hands on my shoulders as he examined me. “You okay? You look...”

Behind us, Morrison muttered, “After the rants he’s been unleashing on the Homicide department the past couple weeks, I thought he’d blister her skin off,” to Gary.

Billy ignored him while I waited for the verdict on how I looked. “Tired,” he said after a minute, “but whole. You look good, Walker. Are you good?”

“I’m good.” It was true. “A lot’s happened. I don’t have time to tell you about any of it. How did you know to come here, Billy? Morrison said you were heading for the falls.”

“Sonny called.” He tipped his head toward the mediums, who were gathering together in tears and hugs, supporting one another. I saw Sonata Smith’s head among them, and wondered if everyone who’d ever met me would end up eyeball-deep in this mess. “She said she couldn’t stop herself from coming here. When I got here there were a couple dozen of them already, struggling not to cross into the diamond. When I realized they were all women I bet on being safe myself and came in to hold the line for them.”

“You could have gotten yourself killed, Billy.”

“All in the line of duty, ma’am.” His humor fell flat and he shrugged. “The important thing is that I didn’t. You got here in time. I knew you would.” He looked me up and down again, then lifted his eyebrows. “Nice coat.”

A laugh barked out and despite everything I took a step back and twirled so the split skirt flared. “Isn’t it? I’m a hero.” I stopped spinning before I got dizzy, and frowned at Billy. “I meant it. Go home, gather the family and get into Mel’s sanctuary. Keep the kids safe. He’s going to be looking for a host, and your children are...”

“Talented,” Billy offered, and half smiled. “They’re already there, Joanie. Mel woke us all up hours ago and brought us downstairs. I only left when the call came in about the murders.”

“That was exactly the dumb thing to do.”

“Maybe, but would you expect me to do anything else?”

“No.” I folded my fingers over my lips, wanting to ask how Mel had known, but Melinda Holliday wasn’t like anybody else I’d met on my spiritual journey. She said she wasn’t a witch, only a wise woman like her grandmother, but whatever she was, I was damned glad for her wisdom. “Okay. I need you to go hunting, then. I need you to find Raven Mocker for me.” Slightly too late I remembered Billy hadn’t been there for the mess in the Qualla, and tried again. “Mark Bragg. We’re looking for Mark Bragg. I expect he’s on his way into Seattle, maybe on a chartered flight or by car or train.”

“Mark Bra—” I watched Billy swallow a dozen questions and change them all to, “I can’t track magic, Walker.”

“Neither can I, but Suzanne can, and Laurie Corvallis—” The penny finally dropped. I’d been wrong. Laurie could be of help. I smacked my forehead and shouted, “Laurie! C’mere, I need you to be a famous news reporter for me!”

“Jo...” Coyote’s voice broke on the one syllable.

Stomach cold with dread, I turned my attention on the three I’d left behind. Coyote’s back was to me as he crouched across from Suzy, whose knotted and bloody hands were pressed against her mouth.

Between them, Laurie Corvallis lay dead.