silver-blue spray swished over my vision, just like wiper fluid. I closed my eyes against the brightness and a perceived sting and, without really meaning to, envisioned windshield wipers swooping the liquid away, leaving my vision clear. The sting faded and I opened my eyes again.
The world was beautiful. Even the gray sky glimmered with light, sparks of water shimmering above me. As I brought my gaze down, trees whose branches were weighted with snow flickered with the greenness of waiting life, only cold and dead to the mundane eye. Sap waited to rise, leaves prepared to bud, all a promise of explosive activity the moment winter let go its hold. The chain-link fences that surrounded the ball field had their own resolute purpose, created and placed to do a specific thing. A distinct sensation of pride in doing the job emanated from them.
The people on the field radiated different energy, swirling colors that bespoke worry or fear or determination, the rough shapes of their personalities hammering into me and leaving nothing taken for granted. I wanted to turn and look at Morrison, to get a sense of him with this other sight I’d called up, but I was afraid if I moved, I’d lose it again. I dropped my gaze to the field itself, still not knowing what I was looking for—
And a wave of maliciousness slammed into me like a tornado. It whipped around the core of power inside me and dug claws in, sharp knife-edges of pain cramping my belly. It sucked the heat out of me, draining the coil of energy in sudden throbs, faster than a heartbeat. My knees crumpled, light-headedness sweeping over me.
Morrison caught me under the arms so easily he might have been waiting for me to fall. I twisted toward him, grabbing his coat as he slid an arm around me more firmly.
“You’re all right.” His voice sounded like it was coming from unreasonably far away, given that I knew he was right behind my ear. “I’ve got you.”
I didn’t want to move, desperately glad for the support he offered, both physical and other. His presence was solid and comforting, a wall of commitment and strength in deep, reassuring purples and blues. I doubted he knew he was projecting his own personal energy in a way that let me borrow some, but I was incredibly grateful for it.
I managed a shaky nod, hanging on to the flow of strength he offered, using it to shore up my own depleted silvers and blues. After a few seconds I was able to get my legs under me again, though Morrison didn’t quite let me go. I locked my knees and made myself turn to look at the field again.
Crimson lines, bleeding with pain and rage, flowed up from the field, following the lines of the baseball diamond. Points of vicious black stabbed behind my eyes, making marks that seemed to shoot up into the sky and fade somewhere beyond the stars. Looking at the field felt like someone was digging talons into my innards, trying to pull them out and bind me to the death that had already been wrought there.
Gary was wrong. There wasn’t a body.
There were three.
CHAPTER 2
“C’mon, Walker. Tell me what you see. Talk to me, Walker.”
“How many have you found?” My voice was groggy, as if I was talking through pea soup. Morrison let out a breath that sounded like it meant to be a curse.
“Just the one. What’re we missing?”
“Two more.” I slid out of his grasp and to the snow-covered bleachers. My jacket wasn’t nearly long enough for sitting on, and cold started seeping through my jeans immediately. “All women. There and there and there.” I pointed blindly at the field, unable to convince myself to lift my eyes and study it again. Not that it would’ve helped: the snow was only snow again, not breathing with its own chaotic pattern of lights. I was just as glad that I couldn’t hang on to the second sight for long. “What the hell made you call me in for this?”
“Holliday.”
That explained a lot. Billy Holliday—besides having one of the more unfortunate names I’d ever encountered—was the department’s number-one Believer. I’d played a mocking Scully to his Mulder until my own sensible world turned upside down. He’d been remarkably kind, all things considered, in not giving me too much shit since then. If something struck him as genuinely abnormal about the murders, it made a certain amount of sense for him to think of me.
God, how I wished he hadn’t. I slumped down, forehead against my knees, which reminded me that I’d smacked my head earlier. I pressed my palm against it, trying—not very hard—to call up just enough of that energy inside me to smooth the bump away. It didn’t work. I was almost grateful. It suggested I wasn’t as completely weird as the past couple of minutes proved me to be. My silence drew on long enough to prompt my boss to keep talking, something I hadn’t intended but for which I was also grateful.
“Some teenagers found the first body. Holliday was on call and when they dug her free—you should probably see for yourself.”
“Do I have to?” My voice was still thin. “I’m a beat cop, Morrison, not a homicide detective.” I’d never wanted to be either, despite having attended the academy. I’d been a mechanic, and the short version was Morrison’d hired my replacement when I had to go overseas for a while. But thanks to my mixed ethnic heritage—I was half Cherokee—I looked too good on the roster to actually fire. Instead, I’d gotten an upgrade from mechanic to actual living breathing cop. Morrison figured—hoped—I’d spit in his face and quit.
I couldn’t stand to give him the satisfaction. Which left me sitting in the snow, whining and praying he’d give me a break.
“You have to.”
So much for praying. I got up, brushed snow off my cold bottom, and stumped down the bleachers.
Billy’d obviously been on duty when the kids called in about the body, because he was wearing sensible shoes. Typically, when he got called unexpectedly he came in wearing a pair of great heels, which I still noticed because he had better taste in shoes than I did. I’d never heard anybody tease him about cross-dressing, partly because he was a hell of a detective, and partly because he was something over six feet tall and looked like he could break you in half. It didn’t hurt that his wife could’ve been Salma Hayek’s slightly more gorgeous sister. At the moment, though, he was wearing regulation boots and crouched over a frozen woman whose insides were no longer in. I stopped several feet back and said, “Jesus,” by way of announcing my arrival.
The woman’s intestines stretched out of her belly and into the snow, ropy frozen lines of blackness buried in the cold. Her stomach had been cut open in an efficient X, and judging from the rictus her face was frozen in, she’d probably been alive when it happened. If it’d been summertime, I probably would have lost my lunch, but the icy strands and beads of cold on her face looked so surreal I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it having been a person once. She looked like a prop on a sound stage for a movie set in the Arctic.
“Hey, Joanie.” Billy was watching the guys from forensics brush snow away from the woman’s body, careful detailed work that gave lie to the fact that the weather had almost certainly destroyed any available evidence. “Glad you could make it.” He pursed his lips and shrugged. “Well.”
“I know what you mean.” I edged a few steps closer, staring down at the woman reluctantly. “Why’d you want me?”
“Look at her.” He shrugged again. “Got ritual murder all over it.”
“Did the dead lady tell you that?”
Billy gave me a dirty look that I deserved. I’d only learned recently that some of his intuitive leaps in homicide cases were courtesy of an occasional ability to converse with ghosts. It was not the kind of thing I was comfortable with, even though—or particularly because—I could now do it myself. “No,” he said. “The physical evidence did. Can you not make jokes right now, Joanie? This woman deserves some respect.”
“These women.” I let out a long exhalation, looking at my feet. “There’s two more. I…saw them.”
Satisfaction showed in Billy’s voice for just an instant. “I knew bringing you in was the right thing to do. You get anything else?”
Creepy-crawlies shivered over my skin, making me even more uncomfortable than a wet butt and dead bodies did by themselves. Billy was much, much easier with weird shit than I was. The shamanic gift that I hated having would have been far better off residing in him. “No. I’m sorry.” I forbore to mention I didn’t have a clue how
