C.E. Murphy – Demon Hunts (страница 10)

“So,” I said much more quietly, “am I.”

I hadn’t been using the Sight, mostly because it’d shown me nothing useful when we’d come across the bodies in the first place. I let it slip over my vision now, and watched a trail of red and yellow sparks follow Dr. Reynolds out of the morgue. I’d heard guys on the force call her a spitfire, and thought her aura colors reinforced that.

To my dismay, hers was the only aura I got a read on. There were no hints of dark magic clinging to the disintegrating bodies. They just looked dead. I glanced at Billy just to make sure my mojo was working, and got a reassuring flare of his orange and fuchsia colors. Well, reassuring in that I wasn’t defective. Less reassuring in that I was still batting zero in the paranormal detecting ballpark. “Morrison’s not going to like this.”

Worry sharpened Billy’s voice: “Not going to like what? What do you see?”

“Nothing.” I leaned against the nearest non-body-carrying slab and pulled my mask down. “You don’t need that thing. There’s nothing more dangerous there than any long-dead body might be carrying.”

Billy tugged his own mask down. “Like bubonic plague, you mean?”

I snorted, waving him off. “They’re not that long dead. And besides, aren’t most of the annual cases of plague in this country in, like, Arizona? No, what Morrison’s not going to like is I’m still not getting anything. If they weren’t falling apart like rotting…” I couldn’t think of anything that fell apart like they were doing, and finished, “…corpses,” lamely. “Anyway, I’d just think it was natural if it wasn’t happening so fast. I don’t like to go back to the captain with nothing.”

“None of us do.”

“Yeah, but…” There was nothing to say after that, because the sentence would end “but you don’t have a crush on him,” if I was being flippant, and with the same sentiment expressed in weightier terms if I was being brave. I wasn’t brave. Or flippant, for that matter, because even though it was an embarrassingly open secret, I wasn’t actually in the habit of going around admitting I’d sort of fallen for my captain. I didn’t even like admitting it to myself.

Billy, who was a better man than I, said, “So how do we find something to go to him with?” instead of taking the opportunity to razz me.

“I have two ideas. Do you want to hear the one you’ll be okay with or the one you’ll hate first?”

He stared at me. “If I say the one I’m okay with, is there any chance I won’t have to hear the one I’ll hate?”

I held my fingers an inch apart. “A little one.”

“Let’s go with that, then.” He folded his arms across his chest and glowered at me, which would have been thoroughly intimidating if I was one of his children.

“Okay. We go talk to your friend Sonata and see if she’s in tune enough with the dead to get a rise out of any of our murder victims. We also find out if she knows anybody who can diagnose a decomposition like this one, because it’s obviously not natural. Then we go to Morrison with whatever we’ve learned.”

“This is the better idea? Share case details with someone outside the force? How much will I not like the other one?”

“A lot.” I tilted my head toward the door. “So shall we go talk to Sonny?”

Sonata Smith outclassed Billy by a mile in the rank of speaks-with-the-dead. She was in her sixties and lived in a gorgeous old Victorian up on Capitol Hill, exactly the kind of house I’d imagine a medium lived in. That, though, was the end of where she conceded to meet my expectations. Her séance partner was a surfer-boy-looking former theology student in his early thirties, and she liked wearing violent comic book T-shirts, neither of which seemed very peaceable and medium-like to me. On the other hand, Billy was a six-foot-two police detective with a fondness for yellow sundresses, so I should’ve known better than to try to lay expectations on what constituted typical behavior for a medium. Or anybody else, probably.

Either way, Sonny was one of the relatively few Magic Seattle people I knew, and pretty much the only one I trusted besides Billy and Melinda. Left to my own devices, I’d managed to meet up with entirely the wrong crowd, so I was happy to lean on Billy’s expertise instead of my own shaky judgment.

We’d called ahead, but Sonny still pursed her lips as if we were unexpected when she answered the door. After a moment she rearranged the expression into a smile and said, “William, Joanne, come in,” and stepped aside. We got about two steps past the threshold before she said, “I take it this is about the murders. Can I get you some tea?”

Billy and I exchanged looks, and I put on a patently fakey smile. “At least Morrison can’t be pissed if everybody’s already talking about them, right?”

“Not everyone,” Sonata said. “Just that awful woman on Channel Two. She broke the story this morning. The Seattle Slaughterer, they’re calling him.”

I winced from the bottom of my soul all the way out. Billy groaned. “Tea would be great, Sonny. Green tea is supposed to be good for you, right? Would enough of it make somebody invulnerable? Because Joanie’s going to need it.” He followed Sonata into the kitchen, and I trailed along behind, wondering how many different ways Morrison was going to kill me. I’d gotten up to four highly creative ways to die before Sonata got us seated at the table and put a kettle on to boil.

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I don’t know of anything that’s that good for you.”

Billy, more cheerfully than I thought was appropriate, said, “You’re dead,” to me.

I dropped my forehead to the table and said, “Maybe not,” words muffled by the shining wood. It smelled faintly of lemon Pledge, old and familiar. “Neither of us can pick up anything at all from the bodies we’re finding, Sonny. Even the one this morning didn’t have a ghost lingering, and she was freshly dead. I was thinking maybe if you gave it a shot, or if you knew somebody who could…” I peeked up, trying for convincing puppy-dog eyes.

Sonata looked unmoved, not even blinking when the kettle suddenly whistled. She let it go on, piercing the air, and finally shook her head. “I know who should be able to help.”

I sat up, hope surging in my chest as Sonata went to take the kettle off. “Who?”

She turned her profile to me, concern thinning her lips. “Joanne, it should be you.”

CHAPTER SIX

The kettle’s whistle faded into a rush of staticky background noise that lingered underneath, then swallowed, Sonata’s words. I was vaguely aware of Billy’s grimace, but mostly I was paying attention to the hiss between my ears and the abiding feeling that I should have expected Sonata to say something like that.

Three or four thousand self-directed recriminations lined up to pile themselves on me. If I hadn’t done this, if I’d only done that—I had a list of mistakes longer than my arm. It was all too easy to believe that by foundering around as I’d done the past year, I’d missed the mark on where I was supposed to be standing. Back in January, when everything had started and I’d been burning with power released after years of imprisonment, there’d been one brief and kind of glorious moment when I’d believed I could save, or heal or protect the whole city of Seattle. I’d lost most of that confidence while struggling to learn about my talents, but apparently I hadn’t lost the sensation that I should be able to do something like that. That I should, in essence, be so much better than I was.

Memory caught me in the gut, a visceral recollection of an alternate timeline I’d briefly been given viewing access to. There’d been a woman a lot like me in that other world, only she had her shit together. She had a life, a family, friends and she would have known how to hunt down whoever was killing and snacking on Seattleites. For a moment I ached with the regret of not being her.

But—and this was the crux, and always would be—she had never chosen to come live in Seattle. Whatever battles she had to fight, they were somewhere else, with someone else. This was the path I was on, and if I’d screwed up, well, that was life. I was finally starting to wrap my mind around the idea of making things better in the future instead of beating myself up for things that had gone wrong in the past. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it had to be enough.

I spread my fingers wide on the shining kitchen table, and made my voice louder than the blood rushing in my ears. The moment of believing I could protect Seattle came back to me, but like through a fun-house mirror: it was a little too far away, a little too distant to feel real. “You’re probably right. It probably should be me. Here’s the thing, though, Sonny. I hardly even know what that means. Can you…” I got up, suddenly unable to hold still, and stalked across the kitchen, trying not to look at either Billy or Sonata.

“Can you tell me what’s missing? What…what I should be? God, what a stupid question. It’s just that I’m so far behind the curve I can’t even see it. I don’t know what’s wrong, much less how to fix it. If I can understand…” I spread my hands again, this time against the air, and made myself meet the others’ eyes. “Some hero I am, but right now I don’t have any idea where to start.”