Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 22

Monday, June 20, 6:45p.m.

By the time I went to the coven meeting I was in as bad a mood as I could remember, including all the sulking teenage funks I’d tried to wipe from my memory. I’d spent most of the afternoon trying to find Coyote through one inner landscape or another, and instead had barely been able to get out of my own body for more than a few seconds at a time. I hadn’t even made it to my own garden, and that just seemed like bad news all around. I imagined thunderstorms going on there, and thought that would be a relief, compared to the day’s heat.

I put Petite through her paces, revving the engine and taking corners much too fast.

People honked and shouted and swore like they’d been doing all day, but now they were shouting at me. I knew I was being an asshole. I just didn’t care very much.

I also had no clue where I was going. I finally slammed Petite into a parking place at Faye’s apartment complex and stomped up the stairs to find her.

I found a note on the door instead, directing me to where the coven was meeting. Apparently I was predictable. That pissed me off, too. Maybe I could go find Morrison and get him to kick me a few times, just to round everything out a bit. I stomped back down to Petite and drove over to Lake Washington, ripping up the long stretch of road on its western side without hitting red lights or getting caught by ticket-happy cops. The shadows among the overhanging trees were peculiarly bright, letting me see the shapes of cars pulling down side roads as dark blotches that were easy to avoid. If my infuriatingly reversed vision kept up, at least it’d make nighttime and winter driving easier.

I peeled into the Matthews Beach Park parking lot at a dangerous but pleasing speed, and braked hard. Despite the heat—or maybe because of it—there were surprisingly few cars there. I was comparatively early today, because most of the coven were gathered together at one end of the parking lot instead of already getting ready to do their thing. Only comparatively early, though, because as I got out of the car and glanced them over, it was clear that they were only missing me and Garth.

Several of them were still dressed in the somber funeral colors from that morning, Marcia included. She looked at my shorts and tank top disapprovingly. “I didn’t work today,” I said, feeling obliged to make excuses. “It was too hot to wear real clothes.” Marcia’s mouth drew down and she nodded. That’s me, Joanne Walker, social faux pas in the flesh. I muttered under my breath and went to sit on a too-hot concrete parking bumper where my bad mood wouldn’t spread.

It looked like it was too late. Everyone was long-faced and grumpy. The good-natured lightness that had been a part of the coven’s makeup, even with Cassie’s death hanging over them, had been eaten away. They were standing together, clearly all part of one group, but there was a lot of distance between shoulders, and most people had their arms folded or hands stuffed in their pockets in very distinct keep-away body language. Even Faye’s typical golden retriever look was dampened by the heat, although she was moving from one person to another, trying to strike up conversations. Every time someone scowled and looked away, she looked a little more miserable. I felt sorry for her, even when I tried to be annoyed about her driving Petite. “Hey, Faye.”

She lit up like a puppy who thought it was going to get a treat and scampered over as I said, “Sorry I yelled at you this morning.” It was possibly the surliest apology in the history of the universe, but the tone didn’t seem to put Faye off.

“It’s okay. It was a tough night for all of us. Thanks for coming to the funeral this morning. That was your boss, huh?”

I bit my tongue until I was sure the impulse to snark at her had passed. I had, after all, told her Morrison was my boss. “Yeah,” I said after a few long moments, as evenly as I could.

“He’s kind of handsome, isn’t he?”

“Is he? I don’t know.” I did know. A man I was inclined to describe as an aging superhero almost had to be handsome. But the phraseology let me work my way around the admission that Morrison was a handsome man without actually having to say it out loud. Or think it, for that matter.

“Well, he’s awfullyold,” Faye allowed. “I mean, he’s what, like forty?”

I almost laughed. It hadn’t been that long ago when I thought forty was pretty old, too, and I wasn’t sure exactly when the idea that it wasn’t had settled in my mind. Or when eighteen-year-olds started looking like kids, for that matter. “Late thirties, anyway.”

“Old,” Faye agreed, nodding. “Too bad.”

“Why? Is he your type?”

“Ew!” She leaned back, stretching her mouth in horror. “I was thinking you could date him, jeez.”

“Me? He’s my boss, Faye.”

“So? Like people don’t have work relationships?”

“I don’t,” I said firmly. Then, hoping to sidetrack her, I asked, “Where’s Garth?”

“I don’t know where he is.” For the first time, I saw Faye look a little uncertain. Then it cleared, replaced by the sunny look. “But he’ll be here. He’s never let us down. Tonight we give the spirits body. He won’t want to miss that.”

“All those things we let loose last night? Body like real physical body? So there’ll be monsters tromping around?”

“Magic,” Faye corrected me, happily. “Magic, finally returned to the world.”

“Only Seattle, for the moment,” Marcia said above me. I looked up, watching her colors inverse. I was getting used to it. I almost couldn’t tell what was the right color and what wasn’t anymore, except I was pretty sure the frosted ends of Marcia’s hair hadn’t glowed purple when I first met her.

“Only Seattle?”

“We still give the spirits their strength in roaming this world,” Marcia said. “We’re still their link, and so for now they can’t travel far from us. When Virissong himself has crossed back into our realm, then they’ll be free and the world will share what Seattle has already come to know. That’s tomorrow night, the final binding of the spirits to their bodies. That’ll bring Virissong to us in his whole and complete form. And it may take some time,” she admitted. “Even when we’ve brought him across, it’ll take a while for him to regain his full strength. He’s been away from this world a long time.”

“Yeah.” I suddenly felt much better. Seattle was a tangible scale. Knowing the light show and the spirits were confined to the immediate area was surprisingly reassuring. The coven held enough power to clean up any messes that went wrong, in a Seattle-sized scale. Hell,I held enough power, if it came down to it, although I didn’t like thinking that way. It made goose bumps run up and down my arms, and made my stomach queasy. Still, I thought it was true.

And no matter how I tried, I didn’t truly believe Virissong was up to no good. He was tremendously powerful, but I’d spoken with him and shared memories with him, and his desire to help his people three thousand years ago had been a genuine one. Tangled with ambition, maybe, but there wasn’t anything wrong with a little ambition. Without it, he wouldn’t still want to try to savethis world, the one I lived in now. The one I’d screwed up.

I stood up, abruptly bubbling with energy. The oppressive heat seemed to fade away a little. “All right,” I said. The enthusiasm in my voice wasn’t forced, and it surprised not just me, but several others of the coven, who all looked toward me as if I’d sprouted wings. “Let’s go ahead and shake this city around a little. Do we need a fire like we did last night? We can get that started so it’ll be ready when Garth gets here.”

My ears began to burn and itch in the silence that followed. Faye and Marcia glanced at each other, then at everyone else, then at the trees—everywhere, in fact, but at me.

“What? What’d I say?”

Faye cleared her throat delicately. “We need a fire, but it isn’t the same kind of ritual.”

“Well, then, what is it? Do we all get naked and dance around trees and yodel to the moon this time? This is all new to me, guys. I don’t know wh—” It took that long for the slight smiles to register in my mind. The smiles that had started with “get naked.” “Uh,” I said, very loudly in the faintly grinning silence. “Uh. Guys?”

“It’s a ritual of body.” Faye’s eyes were very, very wide. So wide, in fact, that I suspected she was holding them that way deliberately, to keep herself from laughing. “It’s a, um…”

“Sexual ritual,” Marcia said dryly. Faye blushed. I backed up so fast I fell over.

“What? A what? Awhat?”

“Performed specifically by the Mother and the Father,” Marcia went on. I shot one horrified look at the Father—I couldn’t even remember his name—and was offended to see that he looked just as dismayed, if less surprised, as I felt. Then I remembered I didn’t care if he didn’t want to have sex with me, because, “I am not having sex with him!” Pause. “No offense.”

He waved his hand in an understanding gesture, his expression bordering on strangled. I scrambled to my feet and put my hands on my hips. “No way, no how, noway—”

“But you must,” Marcia protested.

I overrode her, my voice getting louder and louder as I repeated, “No way, nohow, no WAY—!” It wasn’t the most eloquent argument I’d ever made, but it was right up there in the running for most heartfelt.

Garth pulled into the parking lot before we went through another iteration. We all broke off to watch him park. He tumbled out of the car nearly before the ignition was off, taking a dozen long steps to me.

I had never actually been swept off my feet before. Garth, who didn’t have the height advantage, managed it. He lifted me off my feet and spun me around in such a tremendous hug that my back popped. I staggered when he put me down, and he grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me. I gaped while the coven members laughed and broke into applause. “The part of the Father will be played by Garth tonight,” someone said in a dry, amused tone. Garth picked me up and spun me around again.

“They say they’ve never seen anything like it.” His grip on my shoulders hurt, when he put me down the second time. He shook me, a little vibration that felt like it wanted to explode into enthusiastic violence. “It’s like all his healthy cells finally noticed the cancer and are all like, ‘What’s this bullshit going on?’ They’re tearing it apart, Joanne. He’s getting better!”

More applause erupted around us. The coven moved in like a swarm of bees, hugging and back-patting and cheering, getting close and making contact despite the sticky heat. I stood there staring at Garth, feeling a slow, crooked smile start to work its way across my face. “Seriously?” I asked beneath the coven’s happy babble. Garth nodded so hard I thought his head might pop off.

“You should see him, Joanne. You’ve got to come see him as soon as we’re done here tonight. You won’t recognize him.”

“I will,” I promised. “I will, as soon as—I amnot having sex with him!”

Garth’s jaw dropped in horrified astonishment, eyes going round. “NotColin,” I said impatiently. “—the Father.” Crap. I still couldn’t remember his name.

“Duane,” he offered.

“Duane! I amnot having sex with Duane!”

“Joanne, can’t we discuss this reasonably? It’s an act of sharing and—” Marcia honestly sounded like she expected to get her own way. I set my jaw and dug my heels into the ground.

“No. No, we can’t. I appreciate that there’s power in sex, okay? I even appreciate that we’re trying to save the world, here. And you know what? I can even appreciate that maybe Cassandra was willing to go through with this, but I’m guessing sheknew Duane here. How long’d she been with the coven?”

The corners of Marcia’s mouth pulled down. “Two years.”

“And Duane?”

“We only brought this coven together a year ago,” Duane said. “I used to work with an all-male coven. Still, you’re right. We’d discussed this ritual pretty thoroughly and had worked out our discomfort. Marcia, you know it’s not going to work with unwilling participants anyway. I’m not any more comfortable with this than Joanne is. No offense,” he said back to me, and I waved it off just like he had.

“Nothing else has the required power.” Marcia kept frowning. “Have we come this far to turn back now?”

“I amnot,” I said adamantly, “having sex with Duane. I’m sorry if I’m screwing up your ritual, but there are limits. We’re going to have to find another way.”

“There is another way.” Faye’s voice was deep and hollow. We all turned to stare at her, alarmed sounds erupting from everyone’s throats. Her eyes were rolled back in her head, glowing bright black in my frustrating vision. “He guides me.” She sounded like her tongue had fallen back into her throat, making her words thick and glottal. “We have to hurry.”

“Shouldn’t we call an ambulance or something?” I asked nervously. No one paid me any heed. Marcia and Garth stepped forward to take Faye’s elbow, leading her around a parking bumper and toward the woods. The rest of the coven flowed around them, hurrying forward until I was the only one left in the parking lot. At the last moment Duane turned back, expression curious. “Aren’t you coming?”

I flung my hands up. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. Wait up.” I jogged over asphalt and caught up with him, walking into the woods with everyone else.

It took absurdly little time for the fire to build up. It was as if the branches sucked the heat right out of the air and turned it into flame. Well, it was like that except the air certainly didn’t get any cooler, and the fire’s dry crackle didn’t seem to wipe any of the mugginess from the air. I felt like somebody’d wrapped my head in a wet wool blanket and put me down to roast.

Faye was still functioning with her eyes rolled back in her head, bright blackness tracking like she could see. I was the only one who seemed disturbed by it, which struck me as wrong. How did people get used to weirdness being an ordinary part of their everyday lives?

By accepting. I puffed out my cheeks until air squeaked through my lips, and sat down on a log to wait out the preparations.

Five of the coven members, including Garth, had finished drawing a tremendously large circle around the fire. Where trees intersected the circle, they’d stopped and spoken with the tree before doing what looked like drawing a thread through a needle, where the tree was the needle and the circle, the thread. It was extremely polite. I had the peculiar feeling I could feel the trees’ pleasure at being asked to take part in the ritual. I wondered if anybody’d asked the branches in the fire if they’d like to be burned. Probably.

They stood at five points. It didn’t take a genius to figure out they were the points of a pentagram. I worried my bottom lip, thought of heeding my teacher and accepting and honoring, and tried to see. Rather: to See.

I wasn’t very good at it. I didn’t know if it was my own reluctance, or if it was that they practiced a different kind of magic, or if it was something else entirely. If I stared at the fire and unfocused my eyes, I could almost see the lines of power misting up like gray fog between the five points of the pentagram. They came up one at a time, from Garth to Roxie, behind my left shoulder, then to Sam the underwear model off in front of my right shoulder. Five lines, all of them nearly touching the fire, making it the pentagram’s heart. The five creators murmured a binding spell—I assumed it was a binding spell, and tried not to wonder where that particular bit of knowledge had swum up from—and then stepped away from their points in the circle, the pentagram completed.

The circle itself shimmered very faintly, just like the air had been doing all day with heat. It had a sense of purpose to it: the intent to disguise, although not to hide entirely. To an outsider, it would look like more trees and grass, as if the circle were reflecting the natural state around it. I knew if I left the circle now, I’d be able to see them, because I knew they were there, but random passersby wouldn’t see any more than I had last night. No wonder the coven preferred to meet outdoors. The illusion wouldn’t work nearly as well inside.

“We’re ready.”

I startled out of my contemplation of the circle and got to my feet. The rest of the six stood together, Faye pointed in slightly the wrong direction, her rolled-back eyes wide. I fought off a shudder and shoved my hands in my pockets. “Okay, so what do we do?”

Marcia frowned at me. She was good at that. Very imposing. I hunched my shoulders and felt a little smaller. “Do you agree to partake in this ritual willingly, Joanne?” Beside her, the Elder asked Duane the same question. He said yes. I squinted.

“There’s no sex, right?”

Everyone but Faye looked exasperated at me. Faye looked exasperated at something over my left shoulder. I stuck my jaw out, stubborn. I wanted a guarantee on this one before I went through with it. Marcia sighed rather dramatically.

“There is no sex.”

“Okay. I agree, then. But no sex.”

“Give me your hand.”

I eyed Duane, who put his own hand out to the Elder without a fuss. I shrugged and put my hand out, too. “Okay.”

Marcia sliced her fingernails against my palm and laid the flesh open to the bone.