C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

Cauldron mist hung above the graveyard like soot, fine black particles drifting against one another with barely enough weight to pull them earthward. Looking at it with the Sight, it seemed like I shouldn’t be able to breathe easily, but it didn’t cling in my throat or chest. Not now, at least. I wasn’t sure what happened when the sun went down and it became Halloween night, and I didn’t much want to find out.

I found a patch of darkness, popped the top of my squeeze bottle and spun around, spraying water in a circle around me. Heavy droplets spattered, gems of light against the black fog. Where they collided, the mist was absorbed and fell to the ground, nothing more than water, all the darkness washed away. Tiny threads of steam hissed up from the grass, then faded, leaving a smell of springtime, which was to say, rotted earth turning new again.

That was it, the sum total of my plan. Much like Richard Feynman, I’d felt it wiser to experiment without an audience before wowing the world with the shamanistic equivalent of a glass of ice water, an O-ring and my brilliance. I capered in a little dance and shook my shotgun at the sky, then sprayed another circle of holy water to watch the mist fail beneath it.

I didn’t know whose belief made it work. I had theories, which had been enough to send me out to try. Holy water was new magic, which was to say it had been recently blessed, not that the idea of holy water was new. That meant it had the strength of youth, which didn’t necessarily trump the treachery of old magic, but combined with my expectation of causing change, and maybe with the God in whose name the water had been blessed favoring life over death—it had been worth a shot, and whatever the reason, whatever the combination, it had worked.

Now all I needed to do was hose down every graveyard and morgue in Seattle with holy water before sunset. No problem. I had another plan. Ablaze with triumph, I sprayed the rest of the water around, then pulled my phone out of my pocket and laboriously dialed Billy’s number. I had the phone to my ear and was drawing breath to make outlandish requests, when a semi-familiar girl’s voice said, “Officer Walker?”

I very nearly jumped out of my skin, and given my particular talents and proclivities, that phrase could take on an unfortunate reality. Fortunately for both of us, I merely jolted around guiltily to see who’d caught me spraying a bottle of water over gravestones. I didn’t think I could get nailed for vandalism, but I could certainly be run up a flagpole as a disgrace to the department. Morrison would love that.

The green-eyed girl standing a few yards away didn’t look inclined to turn me in. In fact, she mostly looked lost, and maybe like she wasn’t quite human, with her wraith-pale skin and wheat-colored hair. The sneakers and jeans and high-school letterman’s jacket were all a bit more prosaic and grounding, but in fact, she wasn’t quite human, and I knew it. My voice went up two registers. “Suzanne?”

Relief swept the girl’s face and she ran forward to hug me, hanging on like I was the last lifeline on the Titanic. Bewildered, I dumped the shotgun and put my arms around her. “You’re okay, Suzanne. I’ve got you. It’s okay now.”

I had no idea what was okay, and really, if she was here looking for me, it probably wasn’t okay at all. That, however, didn’t seem like the appropriate thing to say. Suzanne Quinley’s parents had died horribly ten months earlier, and I’d been too late to save them. She’d almost had her soul stolen away by a vengeful demi-god herself, but I’d gotten there in time for that. The aftermath had sorted out that she was the granddaughter of a god, and even looking at her with ordinary eyes showed me an ethereal air. I had no idea what she would look like with the Sight, and wasn’t ready to find out. I said, “You’re okay,” again, then carefully disengaged her from the hug and put her back a step, my hands on her shoulders. “What are you doing here, Suzy? You should be in Spokane. Is everything okay with your aunt?”

Suzy whispered, “Olympia,” and I felt like a cad. One little girl mixed up with my first big encounter with the paranormal, and I couldn’t even remember where she’d gone to live after her parents were murdered. “My aunt’s okay. I came to find you.”

“How come?” I didn’t think of myself as especially good with kids, even if the kid in question was pushing adulthood. I nudged Suzy toward one of the graveyard benches and put my arm around her shoulders when we sat. “How did you find me? This isn’t where I usually hang out.”

“I knew you’d be here.” The poor girl sounded as if she’d been crying for a week, all stuffed up and exhausted. I hugged her harder, and she thunked her head against my shoulder like I was some kind of reliable support. I put my chin on her head and tried to figure out what to say. I didn’t want to shatter the illusion, but I also didn’t like the sound of I knew you’d be here. Before I asked, she sighed miserably and said, “I know all kinds of stuff about what’s going to happen now.”

“Now. Since January. Since your birthday.”

Suzy nodded and I bit my tongue against a thousand or so questions, instead staring across the graveyard. The Sight had turned off when Suzanne scared me, and the scene looked typical for any rainy October afternoon in a Seattle cemetery. Soft misty light with a few patches of brighter clouds in the sky taunted us with the possibility of sunshine, and headstones sat in innumerable rows, all of them looking quite fierce and protective of their unmoving charges. There was no hint of anything that said the world was other than what it appeared to be. Nothing, at least, except the presence of a fourteen-year-old girl who should’ve been in school sixty miles away. I said, “Okay,” without especial enthusiasm, and the Sight slipped back on.

We sat on the edge of a messy circle of clean air, cauldron mist beaten down by my rainfall of holy water. Three minutes ago I’d been sure my clever trick had worked. Now I hoped I hadn’t just hurried things along, though the rich warm colors of the earth around us didn’t look like they were being in any way impugned upon by dark magic. The headstones were protective of their dead, imbued with their own rocky strength and purpose, but it wasn’t the kind of presence that could fight back, if bodies should start rising. The earth could fight for itself if necessary, but people like me were supposed to come to the game on its behalf. Shamans had willpower; the earth didn’t, exactly. It had an implacable sense of being, but it wasn’t conscious the way animals were, and if something hurt it badly enough for it to fight back—well, we called those things acts of God, or climate change, and were little more than frantic parasites trying to stay alive under a planetary version of warfare.

It was a nice little philosophical consideration, and it let me not look at Suzy for a while. But that was what I’d called the Sight up for, so I sat back to take a good look at her.

I’d never really looked at her grandfather with the Sight. Doing so was rubbing grease on a fat pig’s ass: he was so astonishing by nature that I imagined he’d burn my eyes out if viewed with magical vision. And if Suzanne was any indication, I was painfully right in that assessment.

She burned. Not like Sonata’s friend Patrick, whose serenity was a bastion of warmth and comfort, but like moonlight, bright enough to warn that she reflected a far greater glory. She was young, very young, and the brilliance would only grow as she aged. Loops and flares, like sunspots, already rippled across her aura. Rippled across her skin, in a way that auras didn’t. Power was a part of her, but not like it was part of me. At the end of the day my magic, no matter how strong it might be, was only human. Suzanne’s was tempered by her mortal blood, but its core was raw and chaotic. She was unbound by time, and I Saw spikes shooting off her, reaching into the future and snapping back again to give her the precognition that had brought her to me. They came as dreams and visions, interpreted by a mind that was, in most ways, only a girl’s.