C.E. Murphy – Demon Hunts (страница 11)

Tension turned to uncomfortable sympathy in Sonata’s gaze. “For what it’s worth, Joanne, it wasn’t until I met you that I began to understand, myself. William…?”

Billy shook his head. “I’m not part of the scene like you are, Sonny, you know that. For me it’s mostly what I can do through the job. You’re my one real contact with the world.”

“Why is that?” I interrupted, genuinely surprised. “You’re like a true believer, Billy. Why aren’t you neck-deep in it?”

“Mostly because of Brad.”

“Oh.” I wished I hadn’t asked. Doctor Bradley Holliday was Billy’s older brother. They’d had a sister, too, Caroline, who’d been between them in age, but she’d drowned in an accident when she was eleven. Her bond with Billy had kept her ghost at his side for thirty years, and that had driven a wedge between the brothers. I wasn’t certain whether it was envy or anger or some combination thereof, but Brad had never taken to the paranormal the way Billy had. It’d never occurred to me that maybe Billy hadn’t embraced it as much as he’d have liked, in order to keep a degree of peace in the family.

Or maybe he’d embraced it just as much as he needed to. I knew he and Melinda had met at a conference about the paranormal. Fifteen years and five kids later it didn’t look, from the outside, like he was missing too much.

“We had a disaster last year,” Sonata said quietly. “Within the community, at least, it was a disaster. This city had a number of genuinely powerful protectors, Joanne. Shamans, mostly. People who mitigated the world’s effects, both meteorological and anthropological.” A brief sad smile turned one corner of her mouth. “They were one of the reasons Seattle had a reputation as a good place to live.”

A space in my belly turned hollow and worried. “They all died, right? Hester and Jackson and…”

Pure surprise wiped Sonata’s sorrow away. “That’s right. You knew them? Roger and Adina and Sam?”

I sat again, suddenly weary. “I met them. I met them after they died.” They, as much as Coyote, had set me on a shaman’s path.

Sonata, who communed with the dead, didn’t even blink at that confession. Instead she said, “A few others left, after the murders. They were afraid, and that fear poisoned their ability to help the city, so maybe it was the right choice. But it left Seattle vulnerable. I thought we would have to simply work it out, that we’d eventually draw new talent back to us. But then I met you.”

“And you realized the new talent was here in a shiny incompetent package.”

Sonata pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t have put it that way. You’re not incompetent, merely…”

“Uneducated.” Really, not even I thought I was genuinely incompetent, not anymore. When push came to shove I had so far managed to get the job done, so I probably wasn’t actually incompetent. Inept, inexperienced, ill-equipped, yes, but those all had a little less sting than incompetency. “How can you tell I’m supposed to be the one who steps up? How can you tell I’m worth half a dozen other shamans?”

“You single-handedly destroyed the black cauldron.”

I wet my lips and caught Billy’s gaze. “That wasn’t technically me.”

To my surprise, he shook his head. “Sonata’s right, Joanie. That was pretty close to impossible. The cauldron was hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old, and imbued with enough magic that it essentially had a life of its own. You know what getting near it felt like.”

I did. It was seductive, calling me home to a promise of rest and peace. Not even gods were immune to its song. But I clung to a stubborn thread of denial. “Billy, I didn’t destroy it. You know that.”

“I know that over the cauldron’s whole history there are stories of people trying to break it. In all that time, you were the only one who pulled all the right elements to her so that it could be shattered. It wasn’t your sacrifice, but I think it was your presence as a nexus that made it possible.”

I wailed, “But what if I’d moved to Chattanooga?” and they both looked at me before Sonata laughed.

“Then perhaps the cauldron would have gone to Chattanooga. You’ll drive yourself crazy if you start wondering down those lines, Joanne. We can’t know what might have been.”

I thought of the alternate self whose life I’d seen glimpses of, and clamped my mouth shut on an I can. It hadn’t, after all, been my talent that let me see a dozen different timelines. “Okay. One more stupid question, and then I promise to go…” Save the world seemed a little melodramatic, so I went with “stop the killer,” and added, “somehow,” under my breath.

Out loud, I said, “Does every city have a group of shamans like Seattle did? People who try to protect the place?”

“Many do. There are…” Sonata sighed and went back to the counter, brewing the tea that had been abandoned. “There are both more and fewer shamans, or adepts of any kind, than there have ever been, Joanne. More, because there are more people than ever before. Fewer, because…”

“Because there are more people than ever before.” I mooshed a hand over my face. “Five hundred years ago there’d have been a shaman in every tribe, maybe. One person for a few hundred, maybe a few thousand, individuals. Now there’re billions of people, and any given shaman has tens of thousands to tend to. Right?”

“In essence.”

I blew a raspberry. “Why aren’t there more…adepts?” I liked that word better than “magic users”, probably because people could be adept at lots of things and I could at least pretend I wasn’t talking about the impossible as if it were ordinary. The whole train of thought led me to snort at my own question before anyone had time to answer. “Like Joanne the Unbeliever has to ask.”

“It’s partly an artifact of the era,” Sonata agreed, then glanced at Billy, who looked uncomfortable. I sat up straighter, ping-ponging my gaze between them, and Sonata sighed again. “The last twelve months have been hard on the magic world, Joanne. More of us have died than usual. It’s like a catalyst was set.”

Oh, God. I said, “Was that catalyst me?” in a small voice, and to my undying relief, Sonata’s frown turned into a quick shake of her head.

“I don’t think so. I could be wrong,” she amended hastily, “but you strike me as the response, Joanne. When I look at you I see the answer to, not the start of, the troubles.”

The hollow place in my belly came back. My brain disengaged from my mouth and went distant, surprised to hear the question I voiced: “Do you know an Irish woman called Sheila MacNamarra?”

Sonata’s eyebrows went up. “Should I?”

“I don’t know. She was an…adept. As far as I can tell, she spent her whole life fighting—” I broke off, looking for a less dramatic phrase than what leaped to mind, then shrugged and used it anyway. “Fighting the forces of darkness. She went up against the Master, the one who created the cauldron. More than once, even. I think that was sort of what she…did.”

Recognition woke in Sonata’s eyes. “The Irish mage. I know of her. I didn’t know her name.”

My heart leaped and a fist closed around it all at once, sending a painful jolt through my chest. “You’ve heard of her? What do you know about her?”

Because what I knew about Sheila MacNamarra was embarrassingly limited. She liked Altoids; that was almost the sum total of what I’d learned about her in four months of traveling at her side. It was only after she died that I discovered she was an adept of no small talent, and that she’d spent her life fighting against—to put it extravagantly but accurately—the forces of darkness.

It was only after she died that I learned how far she’d gone to protect me.

Sonata was nodding. “I know of her as a power, yes. We don’t use names often, Joanne. You should know that by now. And mages are by their nature reclusive. As far as I know, no one’s seen the Irish mage outside of her homeland in decades. I’ve never even heard of anyone going to study with her, which is a little unusual. I don’t know if she has any protégés.”

“One,” I said. “In a manner of speaking.”

It would have taken a dolt to miss the implications, and while Sonata was a bit of a long-haired hippy freak, she was by no means stupid. She sharpened her gaze on me, eyebrows shooting up again, this time making a question all of their own.

“She was my mother,” I said tiredly, “and she died a year ago tomorrow.”

I didn’t typically think of myself as an emotional lightweight. I didn’t tear up at Hallmark commercials, although extreme vehicle makeover shows could get me. I had a secret stash of romance novels that didn’t fit my girl-mechanic image, but even when they got angsty I didn’t sniffle over them. I had not, in fact, cried when my mother died. I’d barely known her, and I hadn’t liked her very much. But for some reason my throat got painfully tight and my nose stuffed up as I made my announcement.

Billy and Sonata were conspicuously silent, for which I was grateful. After a couple deep breaths I regained enough equilibrium to say, “She gave me to my dad when I was just a baby, because she had to keep fighting the Master.” That was so inaccurate as to be an outright lie, but I didn’t feel like getting into the complex time-slip that had happened both nine months and almost thirty years ago in my personal timeline. “Would her death be enough to start messing up the balance? Was she that big a gun?”