C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

“Help me find Billy?”

My raven companion leaped off my shoulder and winged its way through the starless void. The half shadows of passing mortality faded with its departure, leaving me alone in a zone grown smaller but no less mysterious.

What felt like a heartbeat later, but had to have been longer, given the distance the raven had traveled, it let forth an excited caw and spun around on a wingtip. I took a single step and joined it, trying not to gape at the space I’d crossed. It settled down on my shoulder again, and clarity washed over my vision again.

Billy rode on the river, one of many in a long flat boat poled by a man with coins for eyes. I caught his shoulders—Billy’s, not the boatman’s—and he turned an uninterested gaze on me. I swallowed, suddenly nervous. The raven dug its claws into my shoulder reassuringly, making me wince. “Ow. Hey. Hey, Billy. It’s me, Joanie. Joanne,” I corrected myself, then wrinkled my face and leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

“It’s me, Joanne, except you kind of deserve better than that, don’t you. My name’s Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, and you’re my partner in defeating crime, and I’m hoping you don’t really want to take this path just yet.”

He stayed still, not responding. I sat back, lower lip in my teeth. “Come on, Billy. I can take you home. If you think this might not be your time, c’mon and listen to me. We’ll get through this. Caroline didn’t finally let go just to have you join her right away. You must know that.”

His pupils dilated at his sister’s name. Relieved laughter gasped through me. “Yeah. You remember Caro, Billy. She’s been watching out for you all this time. You know what she’s done to protect you. You know she didn’t do it just so you could give up and die. Come on. Come home with me, Billy. You need to get back to Melinda and the kids. Remember them? Robert and Clara and Jackie and Eric? The new one on the way? You remember.”

His gaze got clearer with every name. The raven’s claws tightened again and it plucked a strand of my hair out, making me yelp. The sharp sound got an uncertain laugh from my partner, whose eyebrows drew down after a few seconds. “Joanie? Is that a raven on your shoulder?”

“Yeah,” I said, back in the real world. Billy dragged in a sharp breath all on his own, sending Morrison and Gary back a few feet in relief and surprise. “Yeah,” I said again. “It is. Welcome back to the world of the living, Detective Holliday. I think I’m gonna have to do a spirit quest for you, man. Find some kind of totem animal willing to keep you out of trouble when you’re hanging around me.”

Billy closed his eyes and lay there for a minute, looking and sounding like all he was doing was practicing breathing. Then he said, “That sounds like a good idea. Shouldn’t I be dead?” in a very calm voice.

I knew that voice. It was the one I used when I was trying really hard not to panic. “Not for lack of trying on your part. I took it up with the management.” I put my hand over his heart, calling a whisper of healing magic to make certain of its steadiness. It felt tired, which I could certainly appreciate, but his aura was strong enough, and I slipped a bit of magic under his skin, hoping it would help.

His breathing got easier and he lay there another minute, staring at the sky. For a scene as chaotic as Redding’s backyard had been a few minutes earlier, it was incredibly quiet now. The moonlight and water were peaceable, and not even Morrison had anything to say. Finally Billy said, “Thanks.” Three sets of hands reached out to help him as he sat up. He said, “Thanks,” again, and we all flinched back about five feet when his cell phone rang.

“It’s five minutes past twelve,” I said in astonishment. “Who’s calling you?”

He found his phone, paled in its blue screenlight, said, “Mel,” and answered with a hurried “Mel? Is everything—What? Right now? Oh, hell. No, I’m—No, Mel, this isn’t a good—”

“Holliday,” Morrison said in disbelief. “If that’s your wife telling you she’s giving birth, you had better not be about to tell her this isn’t a good time.”

Billy’s mouth snapped shut. His gaze shifted from me to Morrison to Gary, then back to the captain, and he cleared his throat. “Call an ambulance. I’ll meet you at the hospital. I love you, Melinda.” He hung up with a look of tortured apology that Morrison made another disbelieving sound at.

“Go. For God’s sake, Holliday, go. Your wife is giving birth. If you’re strong enough, get out of here. We can wrap this up without you.”

Billy retained the apologetic look another few seconds. “I’m fine. I shouldn’t be, but I’m fine.”

“That happens a lot around Walker. Go on, Detective.” An unexpected smile slipped over Morrison’s face. “And congratulations.”

Billy’s expression faded from apologetic to shocked, then took a sharp right turn toward thrilled. “Thanks, Captain.” He scrambled to his feet and tore out of Redding’s yard like his tail was on fire.

I pursed my lips. “How’s he going to get to the hospital? You didn’t exactly come in on normal channels.”

Morrison looked pained. “The department’ll pick him up if he’s got enough sense to call it in.” He took his cell phone out and made the call himself, requesting a second squad car for himself. “Walker, do we have any concrete evidence on this guy?”

This guy was Redding, who’d crawled to his dead family and lay still among them. Very still: entirely too still, in fact. I jerked a few steps toward him, then ran the rest of the way, dropping to my knees to put a hand over his chest. Neither heartbeat nor breath stirred, and blue magic flared, instinctively rising to the challenge of forcing life back into a broken body.

I turned my gaze toward Morrison. “I think he’s had a heart attack. Um. Should I…?”

“Can you?”

“Yes.” Tired confidence filled me. “Yes. I can save him. He can stand trial for trying to kill me. For killing Jason Chan, probably. For—”

Suzy quietly said, “There are bodies buried beneath the swimming pool. I can see police officers digging them up. I can see—” She blanched and shivered. “I can see the rituals he tried to bring them back. I can see his anger, his despair. He needed the cauldron. Nothing else had the power, but he kept trying. He has a lot to answer for.”

I rolled my lips in, then nodded. “There’s your evidence, sir, and it’ll go down a whole lot better than attempted murder when I don’t have a scar on me to prove I was attacked. Or we could just…”

Morrison’s silence didn’t last that long: it couldn’t, not when a man’s life was in the balance and every second counted toward brain functionality. But it seemed like a long time indeed before my captain exhaled and said, “Do what you think’s best, Walker. This one’s your call.” He turned away, deliberately leaving me to Redding and my own decision.

I looked down at the four bodies surrounding me. Three broke and shrank as I watched, and the fourth was achingly whole beside them. Whole, and yet what was inside him was more badly distorted than even the rapidly decaying family around him.

I could bring him back. Make him stand trial; make him answer for murders whose resolution might close heartbreaking chapters in strangers’ lives. I could make him face a world in which he’d failed in a mission of such desperate love that it had taken him across centuries and driven him to commit horrendous crimes. I could force him to live with a broken heart, maybe with a broken mind, until death came to his door again. I could make him face the faces of those whose families he’d murdered, and could hope he would pay a price in guilt every day for the rest of his life.