Walking Dead

needed to stick together. We’d say hi when we crossed in the lobby, and if one of us was early—like we’d made it into the other wing before the other one was done—we’d give each other hell. Archie’s a cool old guy. Is he okay?”

“We don’t know yet. I’m sorry.” Jason’d told Billy the same things, but I wrote everything down in my notebook. I wondered again what he’d think if he realized he was dead, but I didn’t want to get into it. I’d thought avoiding the topic of the cauldron with Sandburg had been complicated. At least that hadn’t made me want to apologize.

“So my head was hurting anyway, but now that you asked me to think about it, the lights I’d gotten used to seeing around the cauldron were different. It was like the black in the middle was getting bigger. I radioed Archie and said it was coming to life, like in that movie? I mean, it’s that time of year and everything.” He smiled suddenly. “I’m taking my little sisters trick-or-treating tonight. They’re eleven and fourteen and they’re dressing up as these anime characters. First time I saw them in their costumes I just about locked them in their rooms. My sisters aren’t supposed to look that hot.”

My answering smile didn’t get anywhere near my eyes. I was pretty sure Jason’s sisters weren’t going trick-or-treating, and might never again, with all the associations Halloween would now have for them. “Anyway,” he said, “Redding told me I was an idiot and I kept going on my rounds, but every time I came through there was less light than there’d been. I remember it must’ve been around ten-thirty or eleven that I stopped and really took a good look at it, because I’d never been able to without it making my head hurt more. Then—” A deep frown marred his forehead, and I wished there was a way to head him off. “Then I guess the lights flared up again, because my migraine got a hell of a lot worse. The next thing I really remember is talking to Detective Holliday, and…and then to you.

“Detective Walker, what happened to me?” Jason’s voice got very small, the Dead Zone pulling him impossibly far away, until he was barely more than a dot in my perception. Sonata’d called him close to the living world, and now the dead one was taking him back.

“You were tricked, Jason.” An image of Coyote, my mentor and one of the world’s most famous tricksters, flashed behind my eyes. I’d given Jason a few minutes of real life again, whether I’d meant to or not, and the universe was reordering that, undoing what had been done. Tricksters weren’t kind, but humans learned from them. Learned, or failed to learn at their peril.

If that was what I was on the road to becoming, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. But that was the price I’d paid for my own life, and so if I was to become a trickster, I hoped I could at least manage to leave my fools a little dignity behind. “Something evil tricked you,” I said very quietly. “And now I’ve done it again, to learn what I needed. I’m sorry, Jason Chan. I hope you can forgive me.”

I never knew if he could. He winked out and a little girl of around ten or eleven took his place. She wore her hair in braids and had her arms folded over her chest, but a smile split her face when our gazes met. She waved, cheery little action, and then, like Jason, disappeared.

I spluttered a wordless question, but a gasp of raven wings burst around me, and I fell back into my own life, my own body and my own world.

CHAPTER 24

The little girl’s image danced behind my eyes as I shook off travel fatigue, or whatever it was called when a person goes zipping through different levels of reality. I’d never seen the girl before, but she’d felt familiar. An odd little hitch came into my breath as I frowned at where the cauldron used to be. Somebody had, at some point, put a warding on that thing, one that kept its power from leaking all over the world as it was moved from place to place. An eleven-year-old girl seemed unlikely, but I’d just finished telling Jason Chan about tricksters. Just because I was seeing a kid didn’t mean that’s what it really was.

She’d felt friendly. I decided to take blessings where I could find them, made a note to myself to look up creatures who could bind ancient evils and who liked presenting themselves as children, and turned my attention back to my audience. I didn’t normally wake up to quite such a large one. Billy and Gary looked relieved I’d woken up, but Sonata’s mouth was pursed. “You didn’t need to interfere. He was willing to cross over.”

The woman deserved an explanation. Intellectually, I understood that. She hadn’t been there for the follow-up fiasco with Matilda. Still, explaining seemed like so damn much effort that my intellect threw up its metaphorical hands and stomped off in a fit of pique. Abandoned by it, all I could do was drop my face into my hands, exhale and eventually say, “I know. Sorry.”

It took effort to lift my head again, and my gaze strayed to my watch when I did. A quarter to nine. If things went badly, I had a maximum of three hours and fifteen minutes to live. Not a cheering thought. “Jason’s migraines got worse around the cauldron. I think he was seeing the binding spell that kept its magic from leaking out like it’s done now. Billy, this isn’t your field any more than it’s mine, but who the hell can create something like that? A piece of tied-off magic that holds another magic inside? Would it be a kid?”

“Culturally speaking,” Sandburg volunteered unexpectedly, “the cauldron would belong to one such as the Morrigan, the threefold goddess of war, knowledge and death. There are no stories of it being in her domain, but given her status in the Celtic cycle, I would consider it hers. Her antithesis would be Brigid, the goddess of healing, birth and learning. Anthropologically, I assume she would be one of the few to hold sufficient opposing magic to bind a death cauldron.”

He glanced at the rest of us, who to a man sat silent with stupefaction, and wet his lips. “That is, assuming you were taking the myths and legends of old as writ, which under the circumstances, it seems you are.”

My neck creaked as I glanced toward Gary. “Remind me to keep a cultural anthropologist handy for, you know. Everything.” He waggled his eyebrows and I turned my attention back to Sandburg, trying not to stare. Trying not to stare at him, and trying not to stare at the museum’s marble floor, where Jason Chan’s lifeblood had been smeared in a circle around the cauldron. “Okay. Two more questions. One—could you in theory break down a ward put in place by somebody like Brigid by doing a blood sacrifice in someone else’s name?”

Sandburg opened his mouth and closed it again, looking around at the rest of us like he was just realizing this wasn’t a game. “I’d think a single sacrifice would lack the necessary power. Maybe a single willing sacrifice, because it’s assumed willing sacrifices have more…”

“Mojo,” I supplied into his silence. “I think we can trust Jason wasn’t a willing sacrifice. So it’d take more than one?” I didn’t want to say Redding’s name aloud, as if doing so would spell his doom. Except Suzy said he wasn’t dead yet, so he hadn’t been sacrificed to free the cauldron.

“If I were participating in a ritual to break a goddess’s binding, I would probably spend years building the groundwork.” Sandburg spoke very carefully, an awareness that he was offering us the rope to hang him with in his words. “I would wait for an opportune date, one associated with my patron, and I would make repeated offerings in order to weaken the spell so that at the appropriate hour a final sacrifice would shatter it.” His voice tensed, gaze jumping from me to Billy and back again. “I, though, would be acting and speaking metaphorically. You understand that, don’t you? This is…hypothetical.”

“Hypothetical but useful.” I thought of the pigtailed little girl I’d seen once or twice, and drew a deep breath. “Second question. Would a goddess show herself in the form of a child? A little girl?”

“A maiden form is usually represented as older, a young woman rather than a little girl. That said…” Sandburg relaxed marginally as neither Billy nor I leaped up to slap cuffs on him. “Who’s to stop a goddess from appearing any way she wants?”

A tiny surge of relief cleared my blood and my thoughts. “That’s awesome. Anybody know how to summon a goddess and ask for her help in laying the smackdown on her enemy’s cauldron?”

“Not her enemy.” Sandburg regained a shred more equilibrium and sniffed a bit prissily. “Her opposite. Two beings at diametrical points of a power structure aren’t inherently antagonistic. They can merely be balancing forces, one capable of growing too powerful without the other’s influence. And no,” he added as we all went back to staring at him, “I don’t know how to summon Brigid. It appears that would be your domain.” A small circle of his hand indicated he meant all of us when he said your.

“Right,” I said after a minute. “I guess it is.” The problem was, I only knew one person who did goddess-