C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

Coyote, Gary, Laurie Corvallis and I all ran for the door.

I had to give Corvallis credit for chutzpah, anyway. She was easily the least physically threatening of the four of us, but she was quick on her feet, and got in the park ranger's face first. The poor woman took a breath to argue and the rest of us went galloping by like wolves to the slaughter.

I don't know what I was expecting. A gnawed-on body spread all over the parking lot, maybe, staining the snow red and fixing nightmares in holiday-makers minds for the rest of their lives. If I'd taken half a second to think I'd have known there'd be no such scene. If nothing else, we had yet to encounter a victim who'd actually been allowed to bleed out.

The only saving grace was Coyote and Gary both looked like they'd had expectations similar to mine. Coyote glowered around, dumbfounded, then turned on his heel to face me. "We're going to need to find out where the body is. The faster I can get to one and take a look, the more likely I am to be able to track it."

A sting of possessive envy caught me in the gut and left me trying to catch my breath. For months I'd been wishing Coyote was on hand, metaphysically speaking, to show me the path. To take responsibility. Now, finally, he was, and I had the un-charitable thought that this was my territory, my game, and I should be the one taking charge.

I had the unpleasant sensation that I now knew just exactly how Morrison had felt a few hours earlier.

"I almost had it yesterday. Before we saved Mandy." I was trying really hard not to sound petulant. Judging from Gary's carefully neutral expression, I wasn't succeeding.

"Almost had it how?" Coyote either didn't care about or hadn't noticed my churlish tone. I wasn't sure what I thought of that, either. It was good, of course, except it sort of meant he either wasn't listening, or was blowing me off.

God, if I was going around in circles like that I'd blow me off, too. Exasperated with myself, I threw my head back and glared at the sky until I felt some modicum of rationality return. "I'd been about to follow it across the astral plane when—" When Morrison touched me and woke me up. I was glad for the cold. It made a legitimate excuse for my face to be pink. "When I got pulled back to the normal world. You showed up a minute later."

"What were you going to do when you found it?" The way he asked wasn't a good sign. It suggested I'd screwed up beyond belief without even knowing it. Given that that had been my modus operandi for most of the last year, it was a perfectly legitimate assumption, but it didn't sit well. I hunched my shoulders and turned my scowl at the snow.

"I was going to kick its ass. I don't know, Ro." I'd barely ever called him Cyrano, much less shortened it to "Ro," but it rhymed and I was childishly pleased with that. "I hadn't thought that far ahead."

"You've got to start." Now he was the stern, slightly worried teacher. I had no idea how he fit so many personalities into so few words, or so little time. "The astral plane's an incredibly dangerous place to take on a wendigo, Jo. It's its home turf. Out there it'd be simple for it to cut you away from your body, and for something like this creature, you'd be a seven-course meal. You can't afford that kind of mistake."

"Well, how was I supposed to know? It's not like you left me a shaman's primer to study! There's no fricking handbook for all of this! I'm doing my goddamned best!" Frustrated, I scooped up a handful of snow and whipped around to fling it across the parking lot with as much strength as I could muster.

It hit the defenseless Impala, twenty feet away. I said, "Fuck," and went to wipe the marks of my temper tantrum away.

Coyote, very mildly, asked, "Would you have felt that bad if you'd hit me?"

"No." A better person than I would've apologized, but I was by definition not that person. "C'mon. Let's go find the body."

"I'll tell you where it is," Laurie Corvallis said from behind me, "but you have to take me with you."

I was really beginning to hate how she kept doing that, turning up behind me or off to one side with a pithy statement and a microphone. I snapped, "No," and then because I was stupid, added, "How do you know where it is?"

The park ranger came out of the inn looking a little like she'd been bulldozed, saw us, shook herself, and put purpose in her stride as she approached. I said, "Ah," under my breath, and turned back to Corvallis. "Why is this turning into a you'll-tag-along instead of us trying to sneak after you while you go get your story?"

She studied me for a long moment, during which the park ranger reached us and began, firmly, insisting that we return to the lodge, everything was under control, but it was imperative that we not be outdoors for the immediate future. I made accommodating noises and didn't move. Corvallis just ignored the woman entirely, no more interested in her than she might've been in a silent rock face. Eventually the ranger faltered, then went to try her spiel on Coyote and Gary.

Only when she was gone did Corvallis say, "Inexplicable things happen around you, Detective Walker. Inexplicable, dangerous things. We both know there's a story there, and someday I'm going to get it. But let's pretend for a minute that I'm not after that right now."

I rocked back, bemused at her frankness. "Okay…?"

"My job is to go somewhere and learn more about the situation. The best way to do that is to make some kind of connection with the people I'm investigating. Sometimes it's dangerous. I've done gangland exposé pieces, I've gone to the Middle East, I've—"

"I watch the news, Laurie. I don't need your résumé."

She shrugged her eyebrows, a more ordinary expression than I was used to seeing from her. "The point is, when you're following a story into a world you don't know a lot about, you try to make friends, or at least allies, with somebody who can show you the ropes. Somebody who's going to offer a degree of protection, because they've got a vested interest in the story being presented."

"And then you hang them out to dry."

"Less often than you think. You can't keep going into investigative situations and expecting to get your story, your truth, if you've built a reputation for selling out the people who open their doors to you."

"My door is not open to you, Corvallis."

"But it is. You have no idea how much research I've done on you, Siobhán."

Nausea ruptured inside me, backwash of acid climbing up my throat. Siobhán was the name my mother'd given me at birth. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad took one look at Siobhán, determined nobody in America was ever going to say it correctly, and gave me a whole different use-name, Joanne. Technically it was an Anglicization, as Siobhán more or less translated as Joanne, but nobody could tell that by looking at it.

I'd abandoned Walkingstick of my own accord, the day I graduated high school. It hadn't been much of a trick to hack the school records so I was Joanne Walker on them, and that's the name I'd used for more than ten years. I'd always known the full name was out there if somebody wanted to research it—Morrison had—but I'd never imagined anybody would want to. Moreover, recently I'd become aware of the power of true names, which made me particularly uncomfortable with anybody bandying mine about.

If Corvallis knew my full name, she certainly knew plenty of other things about me that I'd left, deliberately, on the eastern side of the Mississippi. I wanted them to stay there. I might've been growing up and getting in tune with myself and other garbage like that, but there was plenty I planned on leaving alone.

And Laurie Corvallis wasn't going to let that happen.