C.E. Murphy - Shaman Rises

“That’s a bet I wouldn’t take,” Morrison answered. I smiled in admiration of his wisdom while Suzy peered between us.

“We’ve met Laurie Corvallis,” I explained. “Frankly, we’re lucky she’s only doing an exposé on the hospital system, not trying to shine light on the magical aspects of the world. Believe me, if she thought there was anything hinky about this, and that she could make a story of it that people would believe, she’d be all over that like white on snow.”

“Hinky.” Suzy wrinkled her nose dubiously. “Did she really just say hinky?”

“I’ve learned to think of her verbal tics as part of her charm,” Morrison said, straight-faced enough that I thought I should be offended. Then he cracked a grin and Suzy let go a relieved little burst of giggles, like she’d desperately needed the pressure release. Morrison was much better at kids than I was.

Of course, I was pretty certain giant squid were better at kids than me. That was good. Under the circumstances, somebody needed to be. I drew my tattered dignity around myself and sniffed. “If you’re quite finished making fun of me...?”

Suzy giggled again, which pleased me. I squeezed her shoulders. “Okay. First—wait. First, does your aunt know you’re here, this time?” Much to my relief, she nodded. “Good. Wait. How? If you got magicked—never mind. You promise she knows?” Suzy nodded again and I struggled past all the hows and whys to focus on the important part. “In that case, I’m basically not letting you out of my sight until this is over, okay? I can keep you safe if we’re together.”

It occurred to me that I needed to tell Annie Muldoon the same thing, and that I’d just left her all alone with Gary. My stomach turned upside down and I got up awkwardly, limbs no longer responding the way they should. Annie had said vampires were real. And Annie was back from the dead. I wobbled over to the room door and peered through the window.

My knees weakened. I put my hand on the doorknob for support, and my forehead against the window. They were fine. Holding hands, foreheads pressed together, looking for all the world like wrinkly teenagers in the throes of puppy love.

“Walker?”

“I just had an ugly thought. Never mind. It’s okay.” I sounded like I’d swallowed a rasp. Morrison and Suzy—she’d gotten up when I did, though I hadn’t really noticed in the moment—came to frown through the window. Morrison’s frown cleared a bit as he saw the lovebirds, then deepened again when he looked back at me. I gave him my best sick smile. “You could maybe say I trust her about as far as I could throw her.”

“She’s pretty little, and you’re pretty strong,” Suzy said thoughtfully. “I bet you could throw her quite a ways, if you got a good grip. Like the back of her pants and her collar, maybe.”

She blinked at us with such innocence in her big green eyes that we both laughed. She brightened, making me realize she’d been trying hard to break the tension, just as Morrison had done for her. Poor kid shouldn’t have to be the grown-up. I tugged a lock of her pale hair in thanks, then lifted my eyebrows. “You’re probably right, at that. I could probably even chuck you a fair distance.”

A spark of teen wickedness sparked in her eyes. “Just try.”

I lunged for her and she shrieked, fleeing down the hall. I gave a half-voiced roar and chased her a few yards while Morrison said, “Walker,” in despair. I looked back at him with a grin and he presented me with a weak version of the Almighty Morrison glare that used to have me quaking in my shoes. Even that was interrupted by his phone ringing, so he turned away and I went back to chasing Suzy down the hall until a nurse gave us both scathing looks. We scurried back toward Morrison, both of us trying not to giggle.

Morrison’s expression shut down my laughter. Suzy put her arms around my ribs like a much younger kid and huddled under my arm, both of us listening to Morrison’s grunted responses and a handful of short sentences before he snapped his phone shut and met my eyes.

“There’s just been a mass murder at Thunderbird Falls.”

Chapter Six Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Acknowledgments Copyright

Saturday, April 1, 2:02 p.m.

If Suzy hadn’t been holding on, I’d have fallen. As it was, the world didn’t gray out: it went black. Not a dizzy sort of black. Dark magic sort of black, swirling up to eat at the auras I was half aware of seeing. Snipping away at Morrison’s purples and blues, drinking greedily at Suzy’s blaze green. I shouted, a hoarse hurtful sound.

Black spilled away under a rush of my own magic, gunmetal pushing back at the darkness. I swung around, out of Suzy’s grip, until I faced Lake Washington. Until I faced Thunderbird Falls, which had been a bastion of white magic in Seattle. I could always See the falls. Power shot upward from it, white magic full of faint rainbow hues that eventually crashed against the clear blue sky or thick gray clouds, and spilled back down over Seattle, bringing a bit more pleasantry and generosity than had been there before. That was a gift of the good-hearted and good-willed New-Agey types in Seattle, by the covens and the other folk who had been drawn to the falls. Their difficult birth had rearranged Seattle’s landscape, but it had been turned into a good thing.

And now it was dying.

Ichor oozed upward through the column of white magic, its stain growing exponentially. The faint rainbow tints tainted to oil slicks instead, white shading to shades of gray. I could See perfectly well that it still reached for the sky, but it felt heavier, like the darkness was dragging it down. Like it would be happier buried in the earth, though I didn’t know if that was true. It seemed to me that if the white magic could rain cheer and contentment down on people, that black magic raining doom and misery would be right up the Master’s alley.

On the other hand, the vicious truth was I didn’t yet know the Master’s endgame. I was good at self-aggrandizing, but I seriously doubted his entire goal was to obliterate me and my friends. It was definitely on his to-do list, because we were a constant pain in his ass, but I didn’t think he would call it done and dusted the moment I was a smear on the pavement. In fact, if I thought that, I might’ve even been willing to become that smear just to offer everybody else a get-out-of-jail-free card. But no, it wasn’t going to work that way, and while I was acknowledging that, my feet headed toward the elevators at top speed.

I didn’t get twenty feet before I lurched to a halt again. Morrison just about ran me down. “Walker?”

“I can’t go without Annie.” My legs trembled with indecision. “I mean, I really—if I can only keep Suzy safe by keeping her with me, and Annie’s still got the sickness in her—”

“Walker, the hospital is not going to let you walk out of here with a seventy-six-year-old woman who has just awoken from a coma after mysteriously returning from death.”

“I could make us invisible.”

“You can do that?” Suzy’s voice popped into the shrill register only attainable by a teenage girl in full-on thrill mode. “Can I do that?”

I spared half a second to imagine what I would have done as a teen with the ability to turn invisible and said, “No,” without really caring if it was true. Suzy drooped and fell back a couple steps as I twitched, trying to decide which way to go. “I can’t go without Annie, Morrison. I can’t leave her here without protection. Or if it comes to it, I can’t leave Gary here without protection from her. I have to get her. Look, just—just go without me, okay? Go, and I’ll try to get the doctors to understand—”