Walking Dead

brightly colored spotlights sprayed across the teeming masses. The dancing zombies’ knees came into my view and a solid click sounded, finally explaining how they were rising so smoothly: the cauldron was fitted with a rising platform. I gave it a weak smile and turned back toward the crowd, looking for Thor.

He was there with a smile that turned concerned. “Joanie?”

“My imagination’s working overtime. Can we get out of here for a minute?” Even wearing as little as I was, my skin was sticky and overheated. Goose bumps washed over my arms in chills that counteracted the heat, and the hot-to-cold flashes made my tummy twist uncomfortably. The air thickened too much to breathe, full of body heat and scents ranging from heavy makeup to perfume to sweat. “I’m not used to this many people.”

“Yeah, no problem.” He went all big and solid and masculine, putting an arm around my waist and his presence somehow enlarging, so the crowd fell back from around us. The claustrophobic heat faded a little and I dragged in a grateful breath of slightly cooler air, feeling like I could make it outside to silence and safety.

That was when the screaming started.

CHAPTER 3

In the future when I’ve got a bad feeling, it would behoove me to remember that, having been granted phenomenal cosmic powers, it’s okay to trust myself when something seems off. I froze, in the sense of icicles down the backbone and prickles on the skin, but otherwise not as literally as I’d have liked. Almost before the shrieks became more than passionately indrawn breaths, I was turning, not wanting to see what was going on behind me but even less able to ignore it.

The cauldron dancers were rigid, all the grace and beauty flown out of their bodies. The part of me that didn’t know anything at all about medical diagnoses immediately decided it was a petit mal seizure, with their eyes rolled to white and their teeth bared by lips stretched thin and bloodless. Their hands were clawed and every muscle trembled with strain. Cords stood out in their throats as they screamed, and even those sounds were shadows of what they should have been, given the effort their bodies were expending.

The part of me that knew better than to try to diagnose medical conditions with a degree in English and a few too many television dramas tore away the real world and gave me the lowdown on what I could do to help. At least, that’s what it was supposed to do. The first part worked, anyway.

Their auras gave me nothing. They were spiky with distress, the reds and oranges of earlier delight now bleeding dark and terrified: sickly shades with the enormous strength of fear behind them.

Thin gray film rose out of the cauldron, sucking itself skintight against the dancers’ contours beneath their clothes. I had the impression I’d been granted X-ray vision—or maybe M-ray vision, Magic-Ray—as the Sight ignored what they were wearing and honed in on the stuff racing over them, providing me with a totally non- titillating examination of their bodies.

It was even money on whether the spasms were from being cling-wrapped tightly enough to send them into some kind of hind-brain attempt to throw it off, or if the murk was actually invading their bodies. It had already crawled to their chests and throats and sluiced toward their gaping mouths, and I had no freaking clue what it might be.

A smart doctor—maybe a smart shaman—would diagnose the damn problem first, but apparently the whole warrior-princess costume obliterated any kind of rational thought I might’ve indulged in. I vaulted onto the cauldron with a yell and slapped my hands over their mouths just before the gray stuff slipped over their lips and down their throats.

About six things happened at once.

First off, somewhere way in the distance, I heard Billy Holliday bellowing, “Joanne Walker, what in holy living hell!?” As far as I was concerned, that pretty much made up the soundtrack for everything else that happened. Time stretched, extending into slow moments that crystallized everything around me into clarity and allowed me to discard that which was unimportant. On reflection, that included music, calls to 911, some shouting and the start of a stampede, but right then, those seven words made up the walls of the world for a brief and horribly long eternity.

The good news was that the gray film leaped off the dancers, who collapsed out from under my hands. The bad news was, it leaped from them to me, and I had a sudden intimate understanding of just what they’d been enduring.

Enduring. There’s a funny choice of words. It’s not one I’d think would apply to a scenario that couldn’t have lasted longer than five seconds, but under the film’s tenterhooks it was the only one that seemed appropriate.

It was trying to get in, trying to invade. I felt my muscles seize and bunch and rattle in just the way the dancers’ had, a million pinpricks of ice jabbing under my skin and trying to work their way beneath. I’d never been flayed and wasn’t eager to try it, but I thought it might feel like this: burning pain that did its best to defy words and to turn me into nothing more than a scream.

A scream. Screaming was bad. Not because I didn’t deserve to, because anybody being flayed probably deserves to scream, but because the stuff had a purpose, and thwarting flaying gray film was a worthy goal. I snapped my mouth shut and rolled my lips in, biting their insides to keep myself from indulging in the scream that would let the stuff in. Then I wondered if my nose was enough of an access point to let it in, and how I was going to breathe if I needed to pinch my nostrils shut, too.

Then again, if the hurting didn’t stop soon, I wasn’t going to care much about breathing. More or less reassured by the thought, I stopped worrying about it. Look, logic in the face of excruciating pain isn’t one of my strong points. It worked for me, which was all that mattered. Meantime, my stomach, eager to add its opinion on agony, violently rejected the fizzy pink drink I’d indulged in earlier.

It was significantly worse coming up than it’d been going down, and it hadn’t been good to begin with. Human nature trumped scary crawling gray stuff and I doubled over, expelling bright pink spew. The film retreated, apparently as disgusted by Technicolor vomit as I was. The lack of pain left me astonishingly clear- headed.

Clear-headed enough to see that more of the gray fog was bubbling up from the cauldron and flowing over its edges, hurrying toward the partygoers.

Toward people I’d invited to come have a good time tonight.

I forgot that I was probably the only one in the room who could see the goo. Forgot that I’d jumped up onto the cauldron like a madwoman and the two people I’d touched had collapsed, which, by any coherent standard, suggested I was dangerous. Forgot that my own magic had a visible component, and that I was in the middle of a very public place.

Or maybe I didn’t forget. Maybe I just didn’t care, because I’d had enough of innocent bystanders getting run over on my watch. Agony fled my bones, chased out by fury, and I smashed through sickness to call up the healing magic that was my heritage. I had no idea what I was up against, but that’d never stopped me before. Better to turn myself into a super-size McSnack for gray ooze than to let anybody else get eaten.

Silver power surged, its brilliant blue highlights making me feel like an electrical conduit. I could See it, blazing with righteous anger, and while I still couldn’t hear much beyond Billy’s shout, I’m pretty sure that was when the stampede started. Anybody in their right mind wanted to get the hell away from me. For a room as crowded as that one, it was amazing how everybody managed to jump back two feet and leave a circle of emptiness around me.

At least, I thought it was them lurching back. I had a certain amount of success with the idea of capturing things in nets, but a net wasn’t going to hold goop in. I went the bubble-boy route, sending a physical flare of magic from my core into a sphere around me. It was wholly possible that I shoved everybody out of my way, although I didn’t think that was very polite and shamany. Then again, a dead shaman had told me I’d walk a warrior’s path, so maybe I had license to metaphysically bludgeon people once in a while.

Either way, they were a bit farther out of harm’s way, and the cauldron-born ichor ran up against my sphere and began crawling upward, looking for egress and finding none. I figured it would take about two seconds before it reached the top and started dripping down on me. That meant I had about a second and a half to come up with