“David Crowder, geologist. Damn, you are one lucky woman. C’mon. Let’s get you out of here. Hey! Ricky! C’mon, help me get Miss Walker out of here! Somebody call an ambulance!”
“I don’t need one,” I protested. “As long as my car’s still there. Oh God.” Panic hit the pit of my stomach again. “Is it? Is the parking lot still there?”
Crowder hesitated. “Kinda. There are islands of it. What do you drive?”
I swallowed and knotted my hands into fists. My left hand suddenly cramped and split through the mud, starting to bleed again, and I fought back tears of pain and dismay. “A Mustang. A purple 1969 Mustang. License plates say PETITE.”
Dismay washed over Crowder’s face and he took a step back like I might kill the messenger. “I saw it tail- down in one of the crevasses. Looked like the back end got pretty badly crunched. We called it in. I’m sorry.”
White rose up over my vision for a few seconds, static hissing in my ears. “How badly crunched?” My voice was hollow, and I don’t think I expected Crowder to give me a real answer. The words just came out as an effort to not start screaming. “Were there any other cars up there?” My hands were cold and my stomach cramped, making something go wrong with my eyesight. More wrong than usual: it was all blurry and stinging, the itch of unshed tears. I could handle pretty much anything, but not my car being destroyed. Between that and Gary I thought I might just throw up.
Crowder took my elbow and started leading me out of the mess that used to be a park. “I bet you can get it fixed.” His encouraging words could’ve been coming from several light-years away. My head rang until I was dizzy, tipping over as I tried to put my feet on solid ground. “Might cost a bundle, but it can probably be winched out, or maybe helicoptered, and then you can really see the damage. But that solid steel frame’ll keep it from being smashed up as some of the others up there, right? You’re the first person we’ve found down here,” he added, clearly hoping to change the subject. “Were you down here with anybody?”
“Some friends.” My answer was low and fuzzy to my own ears, like somebody’d sucked all the life out of me. “I don’t know what happened to them. I’m not sure when they left. Is there a search and rescue team out here?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m part of it. You, ah, not sure when they left, huh?”
Oh, for God’s sake. He thought we’d been doing drugs or something. I put my teeth together against a flare of rage that had more to do with my car than his assumption. “I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the time. No funny business going on. I’m a cop.”
“Oh, no shit. You work in the North Precinct?”
“Yeah.”
“No wonder.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. “No wonder what?”
“When we called in your car the dispatcher got a little freaked out. Said she had to verify it and she’d get back to us, but—”
“—but they recognized her. A lot of people know Petite.” I groaned and closed my eyes, then opened them again swiftly, not trusting the ground or my feet. My left hand was still clenched in a fist. I didn’t want to drip blood all over everything and have Crowder insist I go to a hospital. I wanted to look at the injury first and see if I could fix myself, preferably without a repeat of last night’s heat-intense performance. I wanted to curl up in Petite’s bucket seats and sob, too, but I didn’t think I was going to get much of what I wanted. “I’ll call them when we get up there.”
“C’mon, this way.” Crowder led me through a ravine of sharp drops and inclines, ushering me up a hill that I tried climbing without using my left hand. He noticed and stopped me, putting his hand out for mine. I sighed and opened my palm.
Blood seeped through cracks of mud, dripping off the back of my hand. It only hurt on a dull, ignorable level, but Crowder hissed dismay and yanked a handkerchief out of a pocket. “It’s clean,” he promised as he wrapped it around my hand. “That looks deep. You’re gonna need to get it looked at.”
“I know. I will. I just want to get to my car and go home and call my friends and make sure everybody’s okay first. How…is the city okay? I mean, are people…dead?”
“Some injuries.” Crowder started up the hill again. “A handful of heart attacks, a couple dozen women going into labor, that kinda thing. It happens, when there’s an earthquake. Lotta property damage, but it’s pretty localized. Weird behavior. That Corvalis woman on Channel Two is trying like mad to tie it together to the aurora the other night. Swear to God, those people, making news when there’s so much real stuff to report. Here you go, just over the guard rail here.” He boosted me up and I swung my leg over the railing, trying not to think about whether there was a connection between the aurora and the earthquake. People don’t cause earthquakes. It was a ludicrous idea. Of course, people don’t cause massive auroras to come sweeping down, either, and I knew perfectly well the coven and I had been responsible for that, even if the interpretation was wrong.
The parking lot was a disaster. Petite’s nose poked up out of a ditch several yards away. Between me and her, there were pits of earth that had opened up or split apart. The car Garth had driven was stuck halfway in one of the pits. It’d be okay if it could be winched out. I jumped a crack in the earth and hurried toward Petite, swallowing against sickness as I looked down into the crevasse at her smashed back end. She was a heavy vehicle, but Crowder was right about the steel frame. Even from above I could tell that the damage was probably more to the tail lights and back fender than to the body. I couldn’t, at least,
“Miss Walker?” Crowder’s diffident voice came from behind me, a polite intrusion. I looked up, swallowing back the tightness in my throat, expecting the geologist to be offering some kind of sympathy or suggestion.
What I found instead was Morrison vaulting the parking lot gates and coming at a run toward me and my car.
CHAPTER 25
Morrison had me by the shoulders before I had time to think through the idea of hiding. His grip was hard enough to hurt, although I noticed the skin-tenderness of the sunburn was gone. He had the slight height advantage even though he was out of uniform, and for a few seconds he stared down at me as if making sure I was real. Then he shook me, let go of my shoulders, and started yelling.
I didn’t listen. I just looked up at him, trying not to smile. He would have gotten up at five in the morning for a report that any of his officers was missing. I knew that. What I hadn’t known was he’d get up if the officer in question was me. I wrapped my filthy arms around my ribs and watched him rant. Crowder hovered nervously on the next island over, trying to decide if he should interfere. I hoped he didn’t. I’d never felt so warm and fuzzy at receiving a dressing-down. When Morrison finally paused for breath I said, “Thanks, Captain.”
He didn’t start up again. Instead he pulled his mouth long, scowled, and gave me a curt nod. Then he turned away, jumping to Crowder’s asphalt island with more grace than I would’ve expected from him, and offered the geologist his hand. “Thanks for finding my officer. I’m Captain Michael Morrison, SPD, North Precinct.”
“Well, she was up on her feet already when I found her. She would’ve been just fine even without us.” Crowder shook Morrison’s hand. “David Crowder. Pleasure to meet you, sir. I’m glad to say it looks like Officer Walker was the only person caught in the park last night. Looks like we may have no casualties from the event itself. We’ve been very lucky.”
I closed my eyes and leaned on Petite’s upended nose. No one in the coven had mentioned earthquakes accompanying the body-to-earth ritual. I wondered if they hadn’t known, or if it had been an error. I was hoping for an error. Knowing you were going to set off a 6.2 quake and opting to stay in a populated area was criminal, not that there was the slightest chance they’d—we’d—ever be prosecuted for it.
