Walking Dead

the year, when they mostly kept the monsters inside. For a few seconds I was tempted to go home and put on my silly leather costume. Everybody knew she was one of the good guys, and wearing a nice obvious tag like that seemed like a good idea.

“What else?” I spoke as much to guide myself as Suzy. She probably needed it less than I did, but she jolted regardless, as though she’d forgotten I was there. Maybe she had. After all, she was the one looking into a future that didn’t yet exist. I’d think that could distract a person but good.

“Detective Holliday is shouting. Shouting at you. The cauldron is on fire—no, steaming, just steaming, and you—y’know,” she said, suddenly sounding much more like an ordinary teenage girl. “It’s really not much of a cauldron. It’s just a big barrel.”

The very pragmatic side of me said, “Well, you have to admit that ‘Matholwch’s Barrel’ sounds a lot less impressive than ‘Matholwch’s Cauldron.’ ‘The Barrel of Death’? ‘The Black Barrel’? One sounds like it’ll just roll over you, and the other sounds like some kind of fairy tale.” Of course, fairy tales didn’t used to be for children. Before I said that last bit aloud, Suzy laughed, and the lancing brilliance faded from her aura to leave her with the sunspots and solar flares that were a natural part of who she was.

Pale hair curtained her face as she ducked her head, laughter fading into apology. “I lost it there at the end, when I looked at the barrel. I’m not very good at holding on.”

“Good grief, kid. You gave me plenty to go on. Somebody with kids has stolen the cauldron.” That seemed especially awful, somehow, and I sketched past it with a wink. “That, and this all goes down outdoors next to a swimming pool. So if I stay inside all night I should be fine.”

“Then maybe we should go inside.”

Retreating to an indoor sanctuary hadn’t even occurred to me. Suzy was clearly much better at this whole Practical Applications of Saving the World than I was. I got up and collected my rock-salt shotgun, making certain it wasn’t primed before putting it over my shoulder and turning back to Suzanne with a swagger. “Well, li’l lady, Ah reckon that thar’s jist about the best ahdea Ah’ve heard awl day.”

Suzy’s giggle turned into an undignified snort that, in turn, became a blush. Ah, yes, being fourteen, when the most absurd things could haunt you to your grave. I had occasional moments of if I only knew then what I know now, but mostly trading in on those didn’t seem worth having to be a teenager again.

All the memories of might-have-beens rushed up around me for a moment, throwing me off. Some of those possible pasts might have been worth taking a second run at it, especially if I did know then what I knew now. The happy me, the one who’d had an oddball but stable family, would have been worth it.

For an instant, that life flashed even further forward, so vivid and unexpected I didn’t know if it was Suzanne’s precognition showing me another splinter, or if it was my own imagination running amok. The future affected the past: Sheila MacNamarra wasn’t dead in that world, and I’d never moved to Seattle. But I did come, on January third of this very year, and got into a taxi and asked the gray-eyed, white-toothed old driver to take me to a church on Aurora Boulevard. Marie d’Ambra lived in that world, as did so many others who’d been badly served by my incompetence in this one. That Joanne was so much better than I was. So much more in control, so much more centered and more stable.

And so when the battle was won and she walked around a corner near the police station to bump into a silvering, blue-eyed man of exactly her height, she knew so much more clearly what she’d lost. My hands hurt with the pulse of recognition at what she didn’t have, physical ache cutting across alternate worlds to knife my breath away and take the strength from my legs.

I didn’t imagine that that Joanne Walker, who called herself Siobhán Walkingstick, had ever told her Coyote husband how she’d kissed a stranger in the street and walked away from him with tears on her face. I did imagine that that Morrison wondered, time and again for the rest of his life, what the hell had happened that day. I knew, clear as if I’d lived it myself, that the Siobhán of that possible future-past spent many more long hours staring through a crack in time at the world I came from than I would spend reaching for hers. Happy was easy. Whatever I got out of my life, I was going to have to work for, and that made it all the more worth having.

God, I’d turned into Dostoyevsky. I liked the Russian writers, but that didn’t mean I had to embrace their dour viewpoint. I shivered, trying to shake off the ache shared with a me from another world, and pulled together a lopsided smile for the still pink-cheeked Suzanne. Time was funny stuff, dragging you through a whole lifetime in the space of a teenager’s blush.

Time was funny stuff, indeed. I drew breath to speak, and something incremental and almost unseeable happened in Suzy’s face. I didn’t have time to see it, not in any way that could be broken down and made sense of, but I saw it anyway: how the corners of her eyes, crinkled with embarrassment, widened fractionally; how the embarrassed smile just barely began to change shape. One of the articles we’d read in the academy talked about how the human face can telegraph tremendous emotion in such fine detail that our forebrains completely miss it. A few really good cops trust their hind brains, and can read the most minute expressions so well it might as well be telepathy.

I didn’t know if I was a good cop or just getting to be a decent shaman. Either way, I swung away from Suzy long before even her aura started to shout alarm, and had the shotgun cocked and ready to blast before I knew what I was facing.

A cadaverous Matilda Whitehead stood before me.

No doubt attempting a dialogue would have been the morally superior course of action. Me, I went “AAAAGH!” and pulled the trigger a couple times, forgetting to re-cock the gun in between. Rock salt exploded out the first time, and nothing, of course, happened the second. I remembered to cock it again, but Matilda staggered back far enough that I didn’t pull the trigger a third time. Instead I stood there panting, trying to figure out what the hell a ghost was doing in corporeal form, and how it’d snuck up on me. There weren’t any freshly opened graves, and even if there had been, my rain of holy water should’ve done the trick. And even if there had been, again, Matilda Whitehead shouldn’t have come out of one. She’d gone missing a century ago, the body never found. I seriously doubted I’d just happened on her grave site.

Her body was stitching itself back together, not in any human fashion, but with little sparks of brightness that zotted from one wound’s edge to another, pulling flesh behind it. It was a special sort of awful, and I locked my knees to keep from staggering myself. I was pretty sure there were more important things to do than pass out, like wonder, once more, how a ghost had become corporeal. As far as I knew, that didn’t happen. I mean, apparently it did, because it was, but it wasn’t supposed to happen. Matilda Whitehead was not supposed to be standing in front of me, nasty lime aura overflowing a body too gaunt and inhuman to be recognizable as a specific person. Wherever she’d gotten the body, it was in lousy condition.

A layer of muscle and fat blopped out of the skeletal form as I thought that, making her a tiny bit less horrible to look on. Dizzying exhaustion swept me, and the instinctive part of my brain suggested I pull the shotgun trigger again. I did. Matilda screamed. More sparks flew, trying desperately to repair the damage I’d done. The books said salt banished ghosts. They didn’t say anything about the ghosts hanging around to do a frantic patch-up job.

A piston fired way at the back of my brain. Morbid curiosity made me fire the gun again. Matilda collapsed to her knees.

So did I.

The phrase fuck a duck sprang to mind. I set the shotgun butt into the ground and leaned on it, trying like hell not to topple over as I dragged in a long slow breath through my nostrils. “Suzy, I think you’d better get out of here. Walk, please. Casually. I don’t think that thing’s fast, but I’d rather not have you running.” And looking like prey was how that sentence finished, but I didn’t want to put the idea into her head. Either “her,” for that matter, just in case Matilda hadn’t already decided Suzanne would be a nice tender juicy morsel.

I’d checked the garden. I’d checked the Dead Zone. Billy and Sonata had both cleared me. But it hadn’t occurred to me that the last vestiges of a furious dying spirit might have managed to dive inside my magic, hiding in the very core of the healing power I had to offer. I hadn’t looked there, and life magic had apparently been enough to shield her from Sonata’s eyes.

Life magic, with enough outraged will behind it, was also apparently enough to create a thought-form body for a vengeful spirit to inhabit. I was goddamn lucky that the thing seemed to need active, not latent, power to