C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

God, I’d turned into Dostoyevsky. I liked the Russian writers, but that didn’t mean I had to embrace their dour viewpoint. I shivered, trying to shake off the ache shared with a me from another world, and pulled together a lopsided smile for the still pink-cheeked Suzanne. Time was funny stuff, dragging you through a whole lifetime in the space of a teenager’s blush.

Time was funny stuff, indeed. I drew breath to speak, and something incremental and almost unseeable happened in Suzy’s face. I didn’t have time to see it, not in any way that could be broken down and made sense of, but I saw it anyway: how the corners of her eyes, crinkled with embarrassment, widened fractionally; how the embarrassed smile just barely began to change shape. One of the articles we’d read in the academy talked about how the human face can telegraph tremendous emotion in such fine detail that our forebrains completely miss it. A few really good cops trust their hind brains, and can read the most minute expressions so well it might as well be telepathy.

I didn’t know if I was a good cop or just getting to be a decent shaman. Either way, I swung away from Suzy long before even her aura started to shout alarm, and had the shotgun cocked and ready to blast before I knew what I was facing.

A cadaverous Matilda Whitehead stood before me.

No doubt attempting a dialogue would have been the morally superior course of action. Me, I went “AAAAGH!” and pulled the trigger a couple times, forgetting to re-cock the gun in between. Rock salt exploded out the first time, and nothing, of course, happened the second. I remembered to cock it again, but Matilda staggered back far enough that I didn’t pull the trigger a third time. Instead I stood there panting, trying to figure out what the hell a ghost was doing in corporeal form, and how it’d snuck up on me. There weren’t any freshly opened graves, and even if there had been, my rain of holy water should’ve done the trick. And even if there had been, again, Matilda Whitehead shouldn’t have come out of one. She’d gone missing a century ago, the body never found. I seriously doubted I’d just happened on her grave site.

Her body was stitching itself back together, not in any human fashion, but with little sparks of brightness that zotted from one wound’s edge to another, pulling flesh behind it. It was a special sort of awful, and I locked my knees to keep from staggering myself. I was pretty sure there were more important things to do than pass out, like wonder, once more, how a ghost had become corporeal. As far as I knew, that didn’t happen. I mean, apparently it did, because it was, but it wasn’t supposed to happen. Matilda Whitehead was not supposed to be standing in front of me, nasty lime aura overflowing a body too gaunt and inhuman to be recognizable as a specific person. Wherever she’d gotten the body, it was in lousy condition.

A layer of muscle and fat blopped out of the skeletal form as I thought that, making her a tiny bit less horrible to look on. Dizzying exhaustion swept me, and the instinctive part of my brain suggested I pull the shotgun trigger again. I did. Matilda screamed. More sparks flew, trying desperately to repair the damage I’d done. The books said salt banished ghosts. They didn’t say anything about the ghosts hanging around to do a frantic patch-up job.

A piston fired way at the back of my brain. Morbid curiosity made me fire the gun again. Matilda collapsed to her knees.

So did I.

The phrase fuck a duck sprang to mind. I set the shotgun butt into the ground and leaned on it, trying like hell not to topple over as I dragged in a long slow breath through my nostrils. “Suzy, I think you’d better get out of here. Walk, please. Casually. I don’t think that thing’s fast, but I’d rather not have you running.” And looking like prey was how that sentence finished, but I didn’t want to put the idea into her head. Either “her,” for that matter, just in case Matilda hadn’t already decided Suzanne would be a nice tender juicy morsel.

I’d checked the garden. I’d checked the Dead Zone. Billy and Sonata had both cleared me. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the last vestiges of a furious dying spirit might have managed to dive inside my magic, hiding in the very core of the healing power I had to offer. I hadn’t looked there, and life magic had apparently been enough to shield her from Sonata’s eyes.

Life magic, with enough outraged will behind it, was also apparently enough to create a thought-form body for a vengeful spirit to inhabit. I was goddamn lucky that the thing seemed to need active, not latent, power to feed on, or I might very well have woken up dead today.

Suzanne, bravely, if not wisely, didn’t run. She screamed for help, which seemed like the other sensible option. Nobody would answer, but that didn’t make it any less sensible. I might’ve joined her, if I’d had the breath to spare. Mine was all taken up with pushing myself to my feet again.

Fifteen feet away, Matilda did the same thing. I lifted the shotgun, but even doing so, knew it was a stopgap measure. I’d completely cut my access to my power once before, in order to keep a bad guy from gobbling up Morrison’s life force. I was pretty certain I’d have to do the same thing in order to cut Matilda’s lifeline. The problem—there was always a problem—was I didn’t know how long she’d survive once she was cut off, and I didn’t know how fast she could move. In her shoes—well, okay, in her bony rigid bare feet—I wouldn’t go for me. I’d go after Suzy. So I didn’t dare try it until Suzy was safe, and she, bless her pointy little head, was still screaming for help. I really didn’t want to shoot Matilda again and suffer the knockback myself, but she started forward and I cocked the shotgun, not sure I’d have a choice. “Suzy, please, please, please get out of here. I can’t fight this thing until I know you’re out of reach.”

She gulped her last scream and scurried away. Matilda’s head snapped after the motion. Bloodless lips pulled back from gumless teeth, rictus of a smile, and she leaped toward Suzanne with all the speed I feared she might be hiding. I pulled the trigger and rock salt knocked her from the air.

Weariness lashed back at me, no physical injury, just another announcement that my power took a beating every time I blew holes in the living ghost. I managed to keep my feet that time and lurched forward, zombie-like myself, to stand over Matilda’s healing body and prepare another shot.

Above me, the cloudy sky tore asunder with a rip of lightning and a roll of thunder. I flinched back a few steps, gaze yanked upward as thunder turned to the pounding of hooves, broken by the long cold call of a hunter’s horn. Cawing rooks poured out of the wound in the sky, and a howling pack of white hounds, their ears tipped in red, gave chase. Finally, behind them all, thirteen riders, led by a child but commanded by a deity, crashed down toward us on a thin beam of sun.

Someone had answered Suzy after all.

I had a problem with the Horned God of the Hunt: I quite simply couldn’t take my eyes off him. I’d never been able to, not from the first moment he’d roared into my life, a living thing of liquid silver and burning green. Nothing had changed since then, not his anger, not his strength, not his beauty, and not my ability to be anything other than stunned by him, either.

He came at me like a flash flood, hugged close to his mercury-hued horse. They were larger than life, the pair of them, magical creatures poured from molds that humanity only dreamed of. Nearly all I could see of the god was his wildfire green eyes, blazing with intent that was wholly focused on me. Everything else about him was a blur, written in by my memory: the starlight-spattered brown hair, the terrible sharp widow’s peak it fell back from and the distorted bone at his temples that would give birth to the magnificent antlers he was named for. His body was slender now, not yet changed to bear the weight of a too-heavy head, and his clothes were living silver, flowing and caressing. I’d seen otherworldly beauty time and again in the past year as I’d raced through one madcap adventure after another, but nothing held a candle to the Horned God. Like an idiot, I found myself smiling at his approach.