C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

Actually, aurawise, she looked fine. Tired: the yellows and reds weren’t as bright, but they didn’t look sickly, and Matilda’s ghostly green had faded entirely. “She’s just sleeping. Billy, am I clear to…?” I glanced his way, studying his aura for shadows and finding none.

“Sonny could tell you better than I can.” Billy frowned at the sleeping medium. “I think they’re gone.”

I nodded, turning back to Sonata. Light and warmth balled in my hand, healing magic at its most simple and comforting. It dropped into Sonata’s chest, and though her breathing hadn’t been strained, it eased a little. She turned her face against Patrick’s chest and settled in, like a child seeking protection. His aura flared, white going hard and bright. The Sight winked off, sparing me a headache. “She’ll be fine. Give her a few minutes and you can wake her up.”

“Thank you.” It was effectively a dismissal. I got to my feet and went back to Billy, whose frown had deepened.

“I thought you couldn’t see them.”

“I can’t. Usually. I think it’s the cauldron.” I pinched the bridge of my nose and wished I was wearing my glasses so I could take them off and clean them; anything that would give me something to do while I tried to sort my thoughts into language. “I think Matilda might have tried jumping into me. I didn’t see her go through the Dead Zone, and I cleaned my garden as best I could and can’t see her, but…”

Sonata inhaled a soft waking-up breath. Billy and I darted to Patrick’s side, so we were all sort of hovering above Sonny when she opened her eyes. She looked from face to face, eyebrows rising. “That bad, was it?”

“Yoda she’s become. In trouble we all are.” The Sight came back on, assuring me that her colors were steady and strong. “You’ll be okay.”

“And will you?” Sonata’s eyebrows rose and she gave me a curious glance that went on to become a careful study. “She leaped for you, didn’t she? But I don’t see any traces of her riding you. The exorcism may have worked. Did you learn anything from her?”

I exhaled, glad she’d given me an all-clear. “A little. We need to be looking for a murder or missing person in the year 2000. That’ll give us…”

The truth was, I wasn’t sure what it would give us, but I hoped it would be a tie to the cauldron. I’d feel like a prize fool if this wasn’t all somehow intertwined.

“The captain’s not going to be thrilled with us digging up cold cases when we’ve got a hot one on our hands.” Billy offered Sonata a hand, but it was Patrick who helped her to her feet. She leaned on him and he kissed her temple, earning a brief, weary smile from the older woman. I re-revised my estimation of Patrick’s position in Sonata’s life. Exorcist, yes, boytoy, no, but they had something most people didn’t manage to share with people of their own generation, much less with somebody three decades their senior or junior. The two of them made my nose all stuffy and my eyes sting, and reminded me I hadn’t talked to Gary in a couple of days.

I rubbed my nose surreptitiously and cast a shrug in Billy’s direction. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll have caught the guy. Maybe all we’ll need to do is a jailhouse interview.” Because the odds of having caught somebody who’d been murdering people every fifty years for at least the last two centuries were so high. I wondered what a two-hundred-year-old killer looked like. Maybe the murders were part of a fountain-of-youth ritual, but the idea of a wrinkly bag of bones slicing people up was both funnier and scarier.

Billy gave me a look that said more or less all those things, except maybe without the bag-of-bones part, then turned his attention back to the medium and her exorcist. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll be fine after a stiff drink or two.” Sonata quirked a smile and stepped out of Patrick’s embrace to give Billy a hug, then to shake my hand. “I’m sorry I wasn’t more help. That doesn’t happen very often.”

“You not being helpful, or insane ghosts taking over your body?” Sometimes my mouth said things even my brain wished it didn’t. I pulled my tongue back under control and added, “You were helpful. We know more than we did before. Thank you.”

Sonata said, “You’re welcome,” with a hint of dryness that turned considering as she went on. “Neither happens often. Even angry spirits usually want resolution more than corporeal form, and offer all the information they can. This one…”

Her gaze went to Patrick, and he said, “Matilda,” with the ease of long understanding. Sonata mouthed the name, then turned back to me.

“When the sessions are over all I remember are impressions. Usually I feel drained, like I’ve spilled my soul, and I’m left with a sense of relief and sometimes gratitude.” She pressed a hand over her stomach, eyes closed, as if she reached for the memory of a dream. “I can feel fear and rage distantly now. From the exorcism, I think, but below that, further away…Matilda didn’t have a need to share her troubles as most restless spirits do. There was too much control in her, and that…” Her eyes opened again, gaze frank and direct on mine. “That’s not usual. That may well be something beyond her, controlling her. Be careful, Detective Walker.”

I opened my mouth for a flippant “I always am,” realized that wasn’t true, and instead said, “I will be. Thanks,” more subduedly than usual. Everybody exchanged a second round of goodbyes, and I got halfway out the door before my question from earlier popped into my head. I turned back to Sonata and Patrick, earning a mutter from Billy as I did so. “Sorry. One more thing. Do you guys know if there’s such a thing as a magical-items black market?”

“Of course there is. The darker the art, the blacker the market.” Sonata frowned. “Why do you ask?”

I lifted a finger, heading off her question with another of my own. “I know you do ghosts, not auras, but can an aura lie?”

Billy shouldered back in. “Mel’d say yes. That an aura can be tricked the same way a lie detector can be. With enough physical or emotional control, everything might read positive or negative on the polygraph, but you wouldn’t be able to tell what parts of it were true or false because it all read the same. Why?”

I wiped my hand over my mouth, remembering Sandburg’s steady, calm aura. “I was just thinking that if I was looking to move a big-ticket item on a black market, one way to distract from what I was doing would be to have a couple people turn up missing or dead. Sonata, do you know anybody who might deal in…?”

The medium drew herself up primly. “I don’t associate with that kind of person.” After a moment she relented, turning a palm skyward. “I can ask in a few places. Probably better for me to ask than to have police nosing around.”

“Thank you.” We did another round-robin of goodbyes, and this time got the door closed behind us before Billy said, “You’re back to Sandburg, then?”

“Him or Redding, but out of the two, the cultural anthropologist fascinated by ancient legends of magic seems the more obvious option.” I climbed into the car and Billy got in the other side, both of us sitting in silence for a moment. Eventually I said, “You take me to the nicest places. Murder scenes. Séances. And without even buying me dinner first.”

He snorted and jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating we should get going. “I’ll stop in the station and set up a search on unsolved cases from Y2K. Maybe we’ll get a hit.”

“Yeah.” I had a thought I didn’t like. It took the whole drive to nerve myself up to speaking. Even then, when we got back to the precinct building and I’d killed the ignition, I had to lean forward and hang on to the steering wheel before I could manage words. “Mugwitch’s cauldron’s been buried somewhere in Ireland for centuries, right?”