Walking Dead

CHAPTER 16

I didn’t know what it was about magic that made people’s eyes go funky. The first precognitive I’d known had done the same trick, and then color had bled back in, turning the irises black with hints of blue and gold around where the pupil ought to be. Suzanne’s did that, too, only with green instead of blue. Mine apparently went gold when I used the Sight, and so had Billy’s. Weirdly, I didn’t remember the coven’s collective eyes changing color when they called up earth magic. A half-formed idea that the power’s source dictated the change settled in my brain and faded out. It hardly mattered right now. I could pursue it when I wasn’t asking a teenager to see the future on my behalf.

The clever part of me thought it’d be safer not to use the Sight on a girl reaching for the future, especially one who burned as brightly as she did by nature. The less clever part gave over to it without much consideration. Maybe it was human curiosity; maybe it was the shaman in me, hoping I could somehow help or guide her. Either way, the Sight flickered on in the same breath that Suzanne’s eyes went white, and for a little while, the whole universe stopped.

She blazed. My God, she blazed, emerald fire pouring off her so hot it turned white at its edges. The world bent toward her as though she’d become a gravity center, pulling everything askew. My breath, light stuff that it was, had no chance, and my heart began to ache as my lungs emptied. The sunspots and flares I’d seen earlier cut through time in all directions, lashing out and hauling fragments of—

Of not just the future, but possible futures. All of them, and all the possible pasts, with every decision made and every path not taken highlighted with chance and choice. Boundless chaos and unavoidable pattern tumbled together, overwhelming and inevitable all at once. Suzanne was concentrating on me, and I on her, and with both of us bound together by magic and intent, I Saw every life I might have ever led.

Moving forward from this moment, spilling literally no more than a few days into the future: Thor on his knee with a diamond ring and a nervous smile, accompanied by a rough “I thought I was going to lose you, Joanne. I’d rather not do that.” Chance and choice rushed forward from there, brief examination of a surprisingly ordinary life filled with neither great regret nor great joy, making it an easy calm course to follow. A dozen similar futures splintered around that, some taking longer to come to fruition, but all of them gentle lives, quiet paths as I helped the people around me in small ways. Making a difference without risking myself: that was the core of who I became in those worlds. I had someone to go home to, something to lose, and never strayed so far as to lose him.

My heart twisted, longing for that comfort, but at the same time those futures turned ephemeral, fading away. I’d already chosen a harder road, and the ease of a tranquil family life seemed very far away.

Backward, but not very far: Morrison standing under the July sun in his T-shirt and dark shades, arms folded over his chest as he asked, “Would you take a promotion?”

And that time, in that future-past, I whispered, “No,” closing the door on an investigative position in the force and opening one that let Captain Michael Morrison tug his shades off, stare at me incredulously, then pull me into an abrupt hug that felt as bewilderingly wrong as it did fundamentally right.

Sideways: a young man with my eyes and his father’s straight nose looked at me with utter exasperation, and that was a future that sprang up no matter what path I followed. In one branching past, I stayed in Qualla Boundary and raised my son; in one splintering future I met him again, and either way, he was a teen and I was his exasperating progenitor.

Back, back so far it wasn’t about me anymore, but my parents. Sheila Anne MacNamarra brought a three- month-old baby girl to Joseph Leroy Walkingstick, and her ruthless ability to make hard choices melted under his quick warm smile. I spirit-walked at four, in that future-past, and my imaginary friends weren’t; they were only invisible to most people. I knew Coyote for what he was, then, and the laughing girl I was got on a Greyhound bus to visit him in Nevada the summer I turned fifteen.

And some things were fated, it seemed, because that me got pregnant, too, but when her Coyote lover found out, he came east to Carolina and it was a cheerful pair of young idiots who got married at the winter solstice. They should have been broken, so badly broken, but instead when the twins came early, Ayita, the baby girl born first with so little strength, survived thanks to the healing magic that bloomed in both her parents. Aidan, always stronger, lived as well, and that future-past, in its way, came around to the exasperated teenage boy again. This time, though, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his equally exasperated sister.

Right there, right now, in the real world, fire scalded my cheeks, thin lines of heat and regret for a life I’d never so much as imagined. But then Morrison was there again, in another future I might never see, roaring like a bull as he stood his ground and fired his gun once, twice, again, until the clip emptied and he flipped it around to pistol-whip whatever was coming at him. Gary was there, too, a big old man with linebacker shoulders, crashing forward against a fog of darkness, and I knew that the woman I’d become wouldn’t have wanted to miss those two, not for anything in this world, and maybe not even for anything in any other world, either.

I couldn’t see far enough down any one path to know if the girl who’d married Coyote would’ve been there to fight Herne or stop a banshee. Maybe she just would’ve had different battles to face, and the lives I’d disrupted, failed, or saved here in Seattle would never have been bent out of shape. Maybe there were paths I could’ve taken, that my parents could’ve taken, that would’ve let everybody come out alive.

But maybe, just maybe, I was who and where and what I needed to be. Maybe all the prices that had been paid were nothing more than part of the high cost of living. For all my bitching and complaining, my life was turning out okay. Too much time spent mourning what might have been seemed like a reliable way to let bad guys latch on to me and push me toward mistakes.

Another future-past whipped around me: a recognizable me, the Joanne Walker we all knew and loved, with almost all her same history in place, standing in Seattle’s heart like she belonged there. Only one anomaly ran through her life, compared to mine: the boy was at her side, and always had been, not given up for adoption as I’d done. Magic snapped around me, blue and silver and brilliant, but the boy had his arms folded, boredom writ large through his body language.

I said, “Aidan,” out loud, and with the sound of my voice the myriad futures and pasts shivered to a stop. I caught a glimpse of a classroom, and of a kid in a vampire costume bent over a school desk. He lifted his head when I spoke, curiosity filtering though his expression as he twisted around, as if he’d heard someone behind him speak his name.

Across bent space and time and three thousand miles, I met my eleven-year-old son’s eyes and said, idiotically, “I really hope there’s no such thing as vampires.”

Aidan rolled his eyes, settling into that already-familiar look of exasperation, and went back to his schoolwork.

Suzanne whispered, “Here,” with such concentration it pulled me away from regarding all my possibilities. They lashed away from me, whipcords coming unbound and cracking the air with uncontrolled sonic snaps. I flinched at each sound, but Suzy turned blind eyes on them, confidence in the set of her jaw, and a lifetime of maybes braided together into a bolt of white that struck a thin true line going forward. Chaos receded, a lesser thing than Suzanne’s will, but despite the thread’s brilliance, when I tried to follow it forward, I met resistance. More than resistance: I was simply forbidden that path.

True future, the usually snarky part of my brain whispered. Whatever lay on the other end of that bright line, I wasn’t allowed to see it because it was my true future, and no one could walk that more than once. I didn’t know where that piece of information had come from, but it was wreathed in certainty.

Suzanne, though, wasn’t similarly constrained. For one, it wasn’t her thread to follow. For two, I wasn’t sure middling details like not being allowed to see your own future applied to the grandchildren of deities. “We’re outdoors,” she said in a shaking voice. “At a house. A home. There’s a swimming pool with children’s toys beside it. The moon is overhead, reflected in the water.”

I shot a convulsive glance skyward. It’d been gray and drizzly for days, and the overcast sky gave no particular hint of wanting to clear. Even with the Sight turned to it, all I saw were heavy clouds ready to release another torrent of rain. Oddly enough, that cheered me. Maybe Suzy had the day wrong.

Because it was so easy to mistake Halloween, when people dressed up as monsters, for any other day of