Kat Richardson: Downpour

I wrapped the sodden scarf through the front straps of Willow’s life preserver and tied her to the ring as it floated by again. She held on to me with sudden strength. “Bring it back. Make it sing again,” she croaked, barely intelligibly from between stiff blue lips.

“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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You 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.