C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

In most ways. Looking at her, I knew I could perhaps save the world, or at least parts of it, when I was at full power.

Suzanne Quinley could destroy it.

That seemed like a hell of a burden to lay on a kid. I put my arm around her shoulder again and tugged her back against me, my chin on her head once more. “Does everything you see come true?”

“Yeah. Everywhere.” She slumped against me. “I thought I was going crazy. But then I had a dream about a soldier from Olympia dying, and two days later it was in the papers. I started checking Googe things, and then I…stopped.”

“Oh, God. I would have, too.” It was bad enough to be playing catch-up all the time. I couldn’t imagine how much it would suck to see the future and be unable to stop what was going to happen. “I’m sorry, Suzy. I might be able to help.”

There went my mouth, haring off making promises my brain didn’t know if it could keep. But really, even if she was of immortal descent, she was still a human girl, and human minds weren’t meant to be unstuck in time. I might be able to heal that rift in her mind, or at least help her learn some control.

I was getting big for my britches. I barely had a handle on my own magic, and there I was thinking I could help other people learn to manage theirs. On the other hand, they said teaching is the best way to learn, so trying couldn’t hurt. Much.

“Could you?” Hope spilled through her voice and I squeezed her shoulders.

“I can sure try.” The promise ended with a loud rumble from my stomach. I’d had lunch at the Space Needle, but apparently all the acid caffeine had dissolved it. “But first things first. When did you eat last?”

“This morning.” Suzy’s tummy rumbled, too.

I pulled together a weak smile and tugged her to her feet. “There’s a Denny’s a few blocks away. Let me buy you lunch, and you can tell me what’s been going on.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She looked up through a curtain of thin blond hair. “I don’t think we have very much time. I came to find you because I’ve been having nightmares, Officer Walker. Nightmares about a, a—” She made a circle with her hands, uncertainty darkening her pale features. “A huge black barrel. But not a barrel, a—a something else, there’s a name for it—”

I dropped my chin to my chest, eyes closed to summon the strength to say, “Cauldron?”

“Yeah! I couldn’t think of the word.” Suzanne lit up vocally and I glanced at her, but her pleasure slipped away as fast as it had arrived. “Nightmares about a cauldron, and about you dying in it.”

After the third or fourth prediction of my death, it seemed like it should become old hat and that I wouldn’t worry about it. It turned out it was still a brand-new hat, though, because even having survived my death several times now, cold slammed through my blood like an arctic wind. The breath ran out of me in a huh, and for a moment the world went dark, Suzanne the solitary pinpoint of light to guide me home again.

Truth was, she looked worse than I felt. I shoved a hand at my hair and clobbered myself on the head with my water bottle, which was sufficiently humiliating as to push away mindless terror with a high-pitched chuckle. I brought my voice back down to a more normal range. “I’ve heard that before, and I’m still standing. Don’t worry, Suzy. It’ll be okay.”

“You don’t believe me. Nobody does. I thought you would.” The poor thing deflated. I’d have needed a bulldozer to make her any flatter. I put my hands on her shoulders again, trying to get her to look up. When she finally did, I pulled a smile from somewhere, and actually kind of bought into it myself.

“I do believe you. When the grandchildren of gods drop by to make dire predictions, I listen.” Oh, lordy, if the me a year ago could’ve heard me now, she’d take the shotgun I’d abandoned and whack me over the head with it. I even had sympathy for that me wanting to do so. But at this point if a precognitive teenager turned up to tell me I was going to die, well, I was a slow learner, but not that slow. “This is probably the last question you want me to ask, but do you have any idea when?”

“Halloween,” Suzanne whispered. “Today.”

On the positive side, I’d gotten through more than half the hours allotted to Halloween already, and I wasn’t dead yet. On the negative, that meant the next ten hours could be very hairy. I looked at my watch. The next ten hours, eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to be exact. It struck me that I’d be better off wearing the copper bracelet my father’d given me than the watch. I wondered if I could to go home and get it, or if moving would alert the universe that I was now worthy of hunting. I sort of didn’t want to, just in case.

Poor Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears while I stood there chasing idiotic thoughts around in a circle in my mind. I sat back down and squeezed her shoulders. “It’ll be okay. There’s a lot of daylight left to burn. Was it nighttime in the vision?”

“Um.” Her voice cracked on the single syllable, but she nodded. “It was—there were—” She dragged in a deep breath and straightened her spine. She was tall, though she probably wouldn’t grow up to rival my height. Still, I sat up straighter, too, hoping it was for sorority and not machismo. “There are a lot of people in the vision. Most of them are shouting your name.”

A trickle of curiosity slipped down my gullet and took up place in my diaphragm, cold and bright. “What name, exactly?”

“Joanne, Officer Walker, things like that. I don’t really remember. I just remember that you go into the cauldron.”

“Ah.” The spot of curiosity turned warm, as if satisfied, and I put my head in my hands. “That’s okay, then. It’ll be okay.”

Relief broke Suzanne’s voice: “It will be?”

I nodded into my hands. “Yeah. It will. I promise.” Joanne Walker could die in the cauldron, and all it would be was a shedding of another skin.

Because my name wasn’t Joanne Walker.

Oh, I responded to it, certainly, the same way I responded to e-mail sent to petiteboss1969@gmail.com, but that didn’t make it my name. My birth certificate read Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, which was pronounced Shevaun Grania, not Seeohbawn Grainy. I’d looked up the pronunciations dozens of times and still didn’t quite believe it. My father had taken one look at the Irish mess bestowed on me by my mother, and anglicized it as he saw fit. I’d been Joanne my entire life, and I’d changed my last name from Walkingstick to Walker the day I graduated high school and left my Cherokee heritage behind. Two people besides me knew my real name, and I hadn’t talked to my father in years.

The other was—inevitably—Morrison. I’d confessed the truth once without meaning to, and later in far more detail while trying to save his life. Names—and truth, it turned out—had power. I’d managed to get Morrison out of trouble, but if I had to stand back and look at it, I could see how somebody might consider Joanne Walker to be a mask. She was a hell of a lot more real than Siobhán Walkingstick, who, as far as I was concerned, barely existed, but the shamanic world might well consider her to be a construct sheltering my core.

I really didn’t want to give Joanne up, but part of me saw a big fat sign of inevitability hanging over my head. She could die and leave Siobhán in her place, and I suspected the result would be nothing more—or less—than my skill ratcheting up another notch. That was shamanism: that was change.

One thing was for sure, though. I didn’t care how burned-down-to-essentials I got: I wasn’t going to start using Siobhán in day-to-day life. Scary stuff happened when people got ahold of my real name, and no way was I signing up for that kind of grief on a daily basis.