Downpour

Willow, of course, hadn’t even tried and had probably thrown her wild ways in the ranger’s face at every opportunity, making friends with his fox-wife and flouting the law until she broke one in an unforgivable way. I wondered why she’d shot the telephone lineman—if she’d really done it—but I didn’t think she’d tell me.

“Did you go back to school afterward?” I asked.

I guess that wasn’t what she’d expected. She turned her gaze away. “No. I had other things to look after.” She glared at Jin, who made a face at her.

She wasn’t scraping or digging anymore, but she stayed crouched down on the ground, not looking at me, letting the silence grow longer.

Maybe it was the place, or maybe it was Willow, but I felt heavy and bleak standing there. “You know that whoever killed Strother probably killed your father, too.”

She nodded.

“Did you use the circle near your dad’s house?”

“No,” she replied, her voice sharp with old resentment. “That was Jonah’s circle, then. I wasn’t old enough to use it. Once you broke it, I sent Jin to clean it up.”

“Why didn’t you do it yourself?”

She made a noise in the back of her throat. “I never learned to write enough Chinese to claim it. It was my mother’s first. Someone stole it after Jonah”—she gave Jin a hard look—“after Jonah was gone.”

“How old were you then? When he died?”

“Twelve. My mother had started teaching me the Tao Chiao and the characters when I was five, but she died of cancer on my birthday in 1990—I was eight. Jonah wouldn’t teach me more.” She made a face. “He said I was a child.”

“What about Jewel?”

“She’s too high and mighty to stoop.” Her voice dripped bitterness so thick even the ghosts turned toward her. “She was busy building her house on the lake. I taught myself.”

“Your brother died . . . when?”

Jin growled at me, but Willow flicked a gesture at him and he shut up. “It was Spring Moon in 1994. When Jin came. Mid-February. A dog year.”

Spring Moon was what I thought of as Chinese New Year. It would have been a powerful time of year to be casting spells—and a stupid one if you weren’t as much in control as you thought. Jin had come through and eaten him, so Jonah Leung hadn’t brought Ridenour’s fox-wife into the world and neither had Willow. Once again, there was someone else at work. Not the ley weaver . . . Costigan? Jewel? Someone I didn’t yet know?

I crouched down next to Willow to think. It was an uncomfortable position—something cold and hungry drew at my energy as I came closer to the surface of the grave while the drizzling rain worked through the trees to chill my back. I touched the headstone and the sensation pulled away like a scalded hand from a stove. That explained the stone and why Willow gathered the ingredients for her vengeance here—something bitter and full of spite lay under it.

“You said order was broken in 1989. Did that have something to do with your mother’s death?”

“I don’t know. She was a happy creature. And then she was sick. As if the magic had suddenly poisoned her. She died so swiftly, they barely knew what killed her. Jewel and Jonah were already fighting—they never liked each other. She married Newman because he owned the land over the nexus and she left the rest of us alone.”

“What else happened in 1989? What made the magic change?”

“I wish I knew.”

“That must have been when the anchor got loose. . . .”

Her glance was sharp. “Anchor? Someone pulled an anchor out of the lake?” she demanded.

I was startled: I had thought she was one of the anchors.... Obviously I’d gotten the wrong end of that stick.

“You didn’t know.”

“No!” She was on her feet so fast, I didn’t see her get up. She darted across the graveyard and I started after her.

“Willow!” I shouted, but I got only a few steps before something yanked my feet out from under me and I sprawled across the nearest graves. The ghosts pounced on me and I heard Jin giggling as he ran after Willow. I cursed him under my breath as I fought off the vicious, incorporeal hands that tore through me.

I tried to yank a shield between myself and the ghosts, but I couldn’t keep it in place and get to my feet at the same time. I’d already lost sight of Jin and Willow, so I gave up trying to follow them and concentrated on getting away from the ghosts of Tragedy Graveyard.

They had no flesh to push through, and their structures weren’t like the spells that had animated the ley weaver’s hands. I pushed at them, but my hands went through their forms without resistance. I’d pulled the hand-spiders apart, but I couldn’t even grab ahold of these, much less tear them apart. I had dismissed a ghost before, on an airplane, just swept it aside and it vanished....

I tried the flicking gesture that had sent my dead cousin away; the ghost nearest to my hand wafted backward, losing shape for an instant before it surged back together and wound itself again around my body.

“Damn you,” I spat.

I repeated the gesture, shoving outward violently, pushing the Grey the same way I’d slammed my force against it to bowl Jin backward. This time the flash was smaller, absorbed by the mist-shapes of the ghosts, but the forms and their tangled energies burst and scattered like leaves before an autumn gust until there were none left that menaced me. For an ire-filled moment, I considered blowing away the rest, just to be thorough, but they hadn’t come for me and most were nothing more sinister than loops of memory, replaying their misery endlessly. And even as I contemplated it, I could see the air and Grey matter moving in the distance; the ghosts would come back, however slowly. It appeared I hadn’t just lost something when I’d died—I’d gained a new trick, or accidentally applied an old one in a new way. I wasn’t limited to pulling things apart. I couldn’t make something out of the Grey or its energy, but I could push it around and pull on its lighter threads. But it did leave me feeling a little as if I’d been standing under a giant bell as it tolled.

I made my way back to the Rover, stumbling a bit on the wet, uneven ground and cursing Jin still more for stealing my umbrella, which would have been a useful prop against the fatigue that weighted my limbs after fighting first the ley weaver’s hands and then the cemetery’s ghosts. I needed to catch my breath and restore my energy. I’d hoped to talk to Elias Costigan before the sun went down, but the drive back from Beaver along the twisting thread of Highway 101 would take forty minutes and I’d arrive exhausted just as his powers were rising for the day.

I needed to regroup and think. And the closest place was Forks, just a few more miles down the road away from Port Angeles. Frustrated, I climbed into the Rover and headed for the once-sleepy little lumber town that had become a tourist mecca for dewy-eyed girls with vampire crushes.

TWENTY-FOUR

Food and a chance to dry out were welcome. While I was wolfing my meal—unladylike of me, but true—I kept turning things over in my head. Aside from the late Jonah Leung, the ley weaver had listed four mages: the nexus, the puppeteer, the child, and the rogue. Including the freaky, inhuman thing as well, that was five, not four as I’d expected. I’d been thinking in terms of four cardinal points and assuming the spell-flingers who occupied each virtual position were the anchors. But going from Willow’s reaction, the anchors were physical objects that lay in the lake itself—or had until one of them had been shifted in 1989, causing the magical energy of the grid at the bottom of the lake to break loose. So in a way, maybe I was right in thinking that Costigan’s house and Jewel’s were now holding down two of the points, but it wasn’t the way the system was supposed to work. What the hell had happened in 1989 and how had it moved the anchor? Surely an anchor was something pretty solid or magically resistant to change, something that probably dated back to whenever the landslide tumbling down Mount Storm King had dammed up the original valley and formed the lakes. It wouldn’t be something easily shoved aside. And where was it, whatever it was? Leung must have had it or had