C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

I couldn’t see far enough down any one path to know if the girl who’d married Coyote would’ve been there to fight Herne or stop a banshee. Maybe she just would’ve had different battles to face, and the lives I’d disrupted, failed, or saved here in Seattle would never have been bent out of shape. Maybe there were paths I could’ve taken, that my parents could’ve taken, that would’ve let everybody come out alive.

But maybe, just maybe, I was who and where and what I needed to be. Maybe all the prices that had been paid were nothing more than part of the high cost of living. For all my bitching and complaining, my life was turning out okay. Too much time spent mourning what might have been seemed like a reliable way to let bad guys latch on to me and push me toward mistakes.

Another future-past whipped around me: a recognizable me , the Joanne Walker we all knew and loved, with almost all her same history in place, standing in Seattle’s heart like she belonged there. Only one anomaly ran through her life, compared to mine: the boy was at her side, and always had been, not given up for adoption as I’d done. Magic snapped around me, blue and silver and brilliant, but the boy had his arms folded, boredom writ large through his body language.

I said, “Aidan,” out loud, and with the sound of my voice the myriad futures and pasts shivered to a stop. I caught a glimpse of a classroom, and of a kid in a vampire costume bent over a school desk. He lifted his head when I spoke, curiosity filtering though his expression as he twisted around, as if he’d heard someone behind him speak his name.

Across bent space and time and three thousand miles, I met my eleven-year-old son’s eyes and said, idiotically, “I really hope there’s no such thing as vampires.”

Aidan rolled his eyes, settling into that already-familiar look of exasperation, and went back to his schoolwork.

Suzanne whispered, “Here,” with such concentration it pulled me away from regarding all my possibilities. They lashed away from me, whipcords coming unbound and cracking the air with uncontrolled sonic snaps. I flinched at each sound, but Suzy turned blind eyes on them, confidence in the set of her jaw, and a lifetime of maybes braided together into a bolt of white that struck a thin true line going forward. Chaos receded, a lesser thing than Suzanne’s will, but despite the thread’s brilliance, when I tried to follow it forward, I met resistance. More than resistance: I was simply forbidden that path.

True future, the usually snarky part of my brain whispered. Whatever lay on the other end of that bright line, I wasn’t allowed to see it because it was my true future, and no one could walk that more than once. I didn’t know where that piece of information had come from, but it was wreathed in certainty.

Suzanne, though, wasn’t similarly constrained. For one, it wasn’t her thread to follow. For two, I wasn’t sure middling details like not being allowed to see your own future applied to the grandchildren of deities. “We’re outdoors,” she said in a shaking voice. “At a house. A home. There’s a swimming pool with children’s toys beside it. The moon is overhead, reflected in the water.”

I shot a convulsive glance skyward. It’d been gray and drizzly for days, and the overcast sky gave no particular hint of wanting to clear. Even with the Sight turned to it, all I saw were heavy clouds ready to release another torrent of rain. Oddly enough, that cheered me. Maybe Suzy had the day wrong.

Because it was so easy to mistake Halloween, when people dressed up as monsters, for any other day of the year, when they mostly kept the monsters inside. For a few seconds I was tempted to go home and put on my silly leather costume. Everybody knew she was one of the good guys, and wearing a nice obvious tag like that seemed like a good idea.

“What else?” I spoke as much to guide myself as Suzy. She probably needed it less than I did, but she jolted regardless, as though she’d forgotten I was there. Maybe she had. After all, she was the one looking into a future that didn’t yet exist. I’d think that could distract a person but good.

“Detective Holliday is shouting. Shouting at you. The cauldron is on fire—no, steaming, just steaming, and you—y’know,” she said, suddenly sounding much more like an ordinary teenage girl. “It’s really not much of a cauldron. It’s just a big barrel.”

The very pragmatic side of me said, “Well, you have to admit that ‘Matholwch’s Barrel’ sounds a lot less impressive than ‘Matholwch’s Cauldron.’ ‘The Barrel of Death’? ‘The Black Barrel’? One sounds like it’ll just roll over you, and the other sounds like some kind of fairy tale.” Of course, fairy tales didn’t used to be for children. Before I said that last bit aloud, Suzy laughed, and the lancing brilliance faded from her aura to leave her with the sunspots and solar flares that were a natural part of who she was.

Pale hair curtained her face as she ducked her head, laughter fading into apology. “I lost it there at the end, when I looked at the barrel. I’m not very good at holding on.”

“Good grief, kid. You gave me plenty to go on. Somebody with kids has stolen the cauldron.” That seemed especially awful, somehow, and I sketched past it with a wink. “That, and this all goes down outdoors next to a swimming pool. So if I stay inside all night I should be fine.”

“Then maybe we should go inside.”

Retreating to an indoor sanctuary hadn’t even occurred to me. Suzy was clearly much better at this whole Practical Applications of Saving the World than I was. I got up and collected my rock-salt shotgun, making certain it wasn’t primed before putting it over my shoulder and turning back to Suzanne with a swagger. “Well, li’l lady, Ah reckon that thar’s jist about the best ahdea Ah’ve heard awl day.”

Suzy’s giggle turned into an undignified snort that, in turn, became a blush. Ah, yes, being fourteen, when the most absurd things could haunt you to your grave. I had occasional moments of if I only knew then what I know now, but mostly trading in on those didn’t seem worth having to be a teenager again.

All the memories of might-have-beens rushed up around me for a moment, throwing me off. Some of those possible pasts might have been worth taking a second run at it, especially if I did know then what I knew now. The happy me, the one who’d had an oddball but stable family, would have been worth it.

For an instant, that life flashed even further forward, so vivid and unexpected I didn’t know if it was Suzanne’s precognition showing me another splinter, or if it was my own imagination running amok. The future affected the past: Sheila MacNamarra wasn’t dead in that world, and I’d never moved to Seattle. But I did come, on January third of this very year, and got into a taxi and asked the gray-eyed, white-toothed old driver to take me to a church on Aurora Boulevard. Marie d’Ambra lived in that world, as did so many others who’d been badly served by my incompetence in this one. That Joanne was so much better than I was. So much more in control, so much more centered and more stable.

And so when the battle was won and she walked around a corner near the police station to bump into a silvering, blue-eyed man of exactly her height, she knew so much more clearly what she’d lost. My hands hurt with the pulse of recognition at what she didn’t have, physical ache cutting across alternate worlds to knife my breath away and take the strength from my legs.

I didn’t imagine that that Joanne Walker, who called herself Siobhán Walkingstick, had ever told her Coyote husband how she’d kissed a stranger in the street and walked away from him with tears on her face. I did imagine that that Morrison wondered, time and again for the rest of his life, what the hell had happened that day. I knew, clear as if I’d lived it myself, that the Siobhán of that possible future-past spent many more long hours staring through a crack in time at the world I came from than I would spend reaching for hers. Happy was easy. Whatever I got out of my life, I was going to have to work for, and that made it all the more worth having.