bag bombs with the rest, and don’t answer the door for anybody until morning.”
He stared at me a good long time, then cracked a grin. “Sure you don’t want me to load my shotgun up?”
I wanted it to be funny. I really did. All the funny parts of me, though, shriveled up under how level my voice was: “If you’ve got one, do it. But don’t answer the door.”
Bit by bit, Thor’s smile fell away. “You’re freaking me out, Joanne. What are you talking about? Rock salt?”
“You should be freaked out.” I was freaking myself out. I looked toward the city again, and didn’t need the Sight to remember the slow black rain falling over the graveyards. My stomach jolted again. I closed my fingers against the edge of the table, afraid I might take a dive toward distant death and find that it was nearer and darker than I’d anticipated. “The books say rock salt is good against the undead.”
Technically, they suggested salt was good against spirits, but it couldn’t hurt to have it on hand against other things that went bump in the night. I’d be going back to the station to check out a shotgun myself, because I finally had a real clear short-term goal: do whatever it took to keep that mist from seeping into the graves. Otherwise, that small cold place in my stomach said, there would be dead men walking tonight.
CHAPTER 15
I went back to the station primarily to check a shotgun out of the weapons locker. It took twenty minutes of paperwork and some deeply skeptical expressions when I explained I didn’t need shot, just the gun, so I was still downstairs when Billy called. I put the gun down, promised I’d be back for it, and ran up to Homicide to talk to him in person.
Sonata was with him, looking more out of place in her gypsy skirts at the precinct than she had in her home. She gave me a brief smile that turned to a shake of her head. “There’s hardly a soul in town with any hint or hope of the mystical who hasn’t been by the museum to see that cauldron this month, Joanne, but I haven’t been able to find even one person who was willing to risk stealing it. I talked to two people who had buyers make them an offer, and believe me when I say it wasn’t the kind of money most people can resist. Numbers in the tens of millions.”
“Christ, for that kind of money I’d steal it myself.” I caught Billy’s look and subsided. “So what’s stopping them?”
“That depends on who I talked to.” A grim note came into Sonata’s voice and I had the sudden feeling her
I bit down on that thought, too, gesturing for her to continue. She shook her head again, tiny motion that suggested she didn’t even like talking about the topic. “People that I would consider good guys—” She gave me a sharp glance, like I was about to argue that anybody who stole anything wasn’t a “good guy” to begin with. For once, I hadn’t been going to say a word, and after an instant’s silence she went on. “They wouldn’t touch it because the cauldron’s miasma was so deep. It’s death magic, if not dark magic, and they wouldn’t risk contamination.”
“Can that happen?”
“Maybe. If you believe it can, maybe.”
I nodded, uncomfortable with the idea. I’d brushed by enough darkness already. I didn’t like the thought that some of it might latch on and corrupt me. “And the others?”
Billy folded his arms across his chest, making himself a wall. “This is the part I like. The guys who’d do it for the money and not care about the death magic wouldn’t touch it because of the wards. They were too—”
“Bright,” Sonata finished, when he broke off and glanced at her. “Whatever was holding the cauldron’s magic under wraps was so strong it actually burned when someone with ill intent touched it. That kind of power is magnitudes beyond what most people can imagine, much less command or effect. It’s like giving an infant a baseball bat. The baby can’t even grasp the bat, much less wield it.”
I looked between them. “So somebody who knew what they were doing wouldn’t touch it, and somebody who didn’t, couldn’t?”
“In essence, yes. I wouldn’t know how to begin breaking wards like the ones described.”
“Described? I thought you said everybody in town with an inkling of magic had been by to see it.”
Sonata gave me a strange little smile. “I work with the dead, Joanne. I don’t care for the idea of even observing a monstrosity that’s meant to tear them from their rest and force them to walk in the world again. There are those who would say we need to see evil to recognize it, but I don’t feel there’s any shame in turning my back on it. Sometimes denying a thing can make it lose its power.”
My eyebrows shifted upward. “I guess.” I’d spent too much time the past several months seeing how badly denial worked for me to agree with Sonata’s choice, but it wasn’t mine to make. “Well, okay, thank you. That’s something, at least. The usual suspects aren’t likely to be the right guys this time.” Not that I had any idea, in Magic Seattle terms, who the usual suspects might
“No mystical connections I can find so far, but I’m on my way to see if I can shake anything loose in questioning. You want to come along? You’re the aura reader.”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I’ve got to take care of something else. Call me as soon as you know anything, okay?”
“Yeah. You, too.” Billy waved me off and I ran downstairs to get my gun.
Maybe it was the all-American good ol’ boy in me, but I couldn’t help feeling there was something especially sexy about a chick with a shotgun. I didn’t by nature have a Southern drawl, though I defy anybody who’s lived in the Carolinas for four years to come through it entirely unscathed. Even my father’s accent hadn’t really rubbed off on me, for all that he’d been the one who taught me to talk. I’d spent too much time on the road and heard too many different voices to sound like I was from anywhere in particular.
Walking out of the precinct building with the gun, though, made me want to roll around in being a languid, long tall drink of badass, and there was nothing better than some down-home vocal sugar to complete the picture. My personal sound track switched to a five-beat blues riff, and woe betide anybody who caused those last two da-dums to become the distinctive click of a shotgun cocking.
Plus, it made Daniel Doherty sit up and look nervous, which was a win all on its own. He didn’t have to know the gun was currently unloaded, or that it would only be carrying rock salt when it was. I waved at him, which didn’t seem to reassure him at all, and climbed into Petite, feeling like the sexiest damn thing on earth. Not even stopping at the supermarket to buy five pounds of rock salt was enough to undo my cool. I actually had a plan, and nothing could stop me. The fact that it wasn’t a very good plan pretty much didn’t bother me. It was all I had, so I was going to run with it. I got a squeeze-top bottle of water at the supermarket, too, and drank as much as I could before pouring the rest out Petite’s window.
There was a new chapel outside Crown Hill Cemetery, an addition to what was essentially a neighborhood graveyard. I slipped in, refilled my bottle with water from the font and mumbled an apology to anybody who might be offended. I figured sixteen ounces of borrowed holy water was a much lesser offense than zombies lurching around Seattle.
Man, I was hung up on zombies. So far the cauldron had only stirred ghosts, but I had visions of the undead sluffing around the city, eating brains and dropping body parts as they went. I was willing to err on the side of overkill, having done too little, too late, far too often.
I walked into the cemetery with a shotgun on one hip and a plastic bottle of holy water in the other, and decided I really needed a better costume for this kind of thing than jeans and a sweater. Maybe not the warrior- princess outfit, but something involving a dramatic black coat, at the very least. Or maybe a white one, since I’d been bitching about bad guys skulking around in broody black. I’d hate to be mistaken for one of them.
Cauldron mist hung above the graveyard like soot, fine black particles drifting against one another with
