C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

I turned away, hoping out of sight was out of mind. That struck me as a good argument to keep people safe, and I pleaded my case to Sara. "You're the head of the squad, I get that. You have to go. Fine. But will you at least not send teams out? I can only be reasonably sure of protecting the people who are actually with me. I don't want you to lose anybody else."

"Wait a minute." Corvallis found her nerve and stalked over, catching my arm. "Wait a minute. What did I just see there? Her nose was broken. "

I should have hit her, not Sara. It took a count of ten before I was confident I wouldn't rectify my mistake. She'd spent the afternoon watching people wrestle with a wendigo, but she was impressed by a broken nose getting unbroken. On the other hand, even I'd had a hard time seeing the wendigo with the Sight going full blazes. A healed nose was probably easier to both see and comprehend than a half-visible fight with a monster that couldn't be defined. I pulled my best smile out and presented it to her, not caring that it felt more like a death's head rictus than a real smile. "What'd I tell you during the blue flu?"

She reared back on her heels almost as if I had hit her, eyebrows drawing down. It took less than a heartbeat for her to answer: "You said it was magic."

"There you go, then." Sudden childish curiosity rose in me. "Tell you what, Laurie. Why don't you just go to sleep?"

Corvallis's eyes rolled up and she dropped to the floor.

I made it there a nanosecond before she did, but only because I was expecting her to fall. It was almost impossible to catch somebody if they really did drop into a dead faint, despite conventions of romantic literature. There was no swaying or fluttering involved, just collapse, and I'd have felt moderately bad if Corvallis had chipped a tooth on the hard floor because I put her to sleep while she was standing up.

I looked up to a ring of astonished faces. Mostly astonished. Gary and Sara and the emo kid and the cameraman were astonished. Coyote, however, was pissed. I said, "I didn't know it would work," feebly, but despite it being true it also clearly didn't hold any water.

"It shouldn't have. Even if it should have, you shouldn't have done it." He knelt at Corvallis's other side, his eyes flooding to gold, and a twinge of guilt stung me.

"She's fine. She's just sleeping. Look, Ro, what was I supposed to do? How the hell are we supposed to go wendigo-hunting with a news reporter on our asses? Besides, I didn't know it would work!"

I hadn't known. But I'd been pretty sure. Sleep was a healing agent, but more to the point, my magic hadn't retreated at the idea. It was very good about letting me know when I'd pushed the boundaries, so while knocking Corvallis out might've been morally gray in Coyote's terms, it was free and clear in mine. I was tempted to try it on Sara, too, partly for her safety and partly to see how far I could push my magic before it got annoyed with me and stopped playing.

That didn't really seem like a very good idea, once I'd thought about it. I nudged Coyote away and scooped Corvallis up, a feat which took more grunting than I'd anticipated. I was strong, but she was solid. I turned with my armful of reporter and handed her to the camera guy. "I'm sure the desk attendant will open her room for you."

He grunted, too, and eyed me over Corvallis's sleeping form. "She's gonna kill you when she wakes up. You know that, right?"

"Yep. But at least she won't have gotten eaten."

Apparently I made a convincing argument, because he shrugged at the emo kid, who mumbled, "Room number?" and scrambled for a key. They headed down the hall a few seconds later, but the camera guy glanced back.

"Hey. How'd you do this, anyway?"

I sighed, exasperated that the truth would never be enough. Ah, how the mighty had fallen. I said, "Hypnosis," which sounded just about as unlikely as magic, to me, but he said, "Huh," nodded, and went on his way.

Coyote got to his feet, eyes still golden in a bleak face. "We need to talk."

"We need to go hunting." I said it as gently as I could, but he grabbed my arm, much harder than Corvallis had, when I stepped by. I looked at his hand, then at him, and was just as glad when he let go. I'd already been in one fight in the past ten minutes, and he'd never forgive me for kicking his ass.

"We need to talk, Jo."

"'Jo,'" Sara put in, remarkably lightly. "She never used to let anybody call her that. It's her dad's name. She hated being called by it." She had Coyote's attention, a feat I wouldn't have put money on anybody accomplishing just then. I remembered the smile she used on him. It had worked on guys in high school, too, as had the touch to his arm. "Look," she said quietly. "I don't doubt that Joanne needs a good reaming, but I've got a man out there and he might still be alive. Can it wait?"

Not exactly the argument I'd have used, although I had to admit overall it was a pretty good one. It put Coyote in the right. Men liked that.

Okay, I didn't know anybody who didn't like that. He let out a long angry breath interspersed with a glare at me, but he nodded at Sara. "Yeah. It can wait."

"Thank you." Sara went from being soft and needy to tough and commanding inside the blink of an eye. "Then let's get going. I don't think we've got a lot of time."

She outfitted us all with FBI-marked snowshoes and reflective jackets, the latter of which Gary looked childishly pleased with. I let him fall back to walk with Coyote and took the lead with Sara, mostly because I was trying to avoid my mentor. It also let me drop my voice and say, on a frosty breath, "You're taking this all very well."

Sara shook her head, little more than a shadow in the dark. "I'm not. You haven't changed, that's all. You still hit things when you get pissed and you still think the world's full of mystical crap only you can see. What's to take?"

If she was right I was going to spend the next three months in a depressive funk. I thought I'd changed rather radically in the past year or so. "You know, I really don't remember that. Being into magic when I was a teenager."

She shot me a disbelieving look. "Seriously? You don't remember making me do a drum circle with you?"

"Not at al—oh, God. Maybe." I put the heels of my hands against my temples, a sluggish memory rising. "Maybe. Yeah. Right after I got my drum." Shaky relief slipped through me. I was pretty certain I hadn't been freaky into the magic thing, despite Sara's recollection. I had, though, been very excited about the drum, and maybe a little desperate to share it with someone. "You thought I was insane."

"You were trying to find my spirit animal." Sara glanced away again. "I even almost thought it was going to work. That it might make me more like you."

"Like me?" I said incredulously. "I wanted to be like you. Pretty. Smart. Everybody liked you. I was all elbows and knees."

"No, you were tall and strong, and you'd seen the whole country. I thought you were cool." That was a whole different slant on what she'd said earlier, and it gave me a little hope that maybe we had been friends after all. It shouldn't matter, but somehow it did. "I mean, you were a jerk," she added, "but man, you were brave. Never backed down from a fight, even after—" Whatever opening-up she'd been about to do, it shut down hard, with Lucas Isaac between us like he'd always been.

My shoulders slumped. "Well, it turned out I was right about the world being full of mystical crap only I can see, anyway. I'm sorry about the rest of it, Sara. I really am."

"Yeah, well, like I said. Nothing's changed. When we were kids you drummed up a badger and I couldn't explain it. Today you say there's a wendigo and I sure as hell can't say you're wrong, so there you are. Where Joanne Walker goes, so do outrageous answers."