just disappear.”
Morrison, a few feet away, said, “It?” and Heather drew herself up more stiffly.
I uncradled my hand and pinched the bridge of my nose with those fingers, half surprised they were willing to bend without shattering. “It. Him. Whatever. Billy, have you got…?”
God, how I’d changed. Billy and I usually retreated to The Missing O, a coffee and doughnut shop near the precinct building, to discuss the more unusual aspects of our cases. A few months earlier if anybody had told me I’d ask him straight out, in public, if he was getting a read on a ghost, I’d have sent some nice young men in clean white coats after them. I still wasn’t quite bold enough to spell it out, but none of us—not me, not Billy, not Morrison, and probably not Heather, since Billy’s fondness for the paranormal was legendary in the precinct—needed me to. We all knew what I was asking.
Billy came the long way around the body, his face tight. “Could be that she’s clinging to the location she died in.”
Heather made a disgruntled sound under her breath and walked away. Billy and I watched her, neither of us wanting to look at Morrison as I said, “But you don’t think so.”
“I don’t know.” My partner pulled his hand over his mouth. “I’ve never run into it before. Ghosts are usually tied to their physical forms, so even when the body is dumped they go with it. It could be there’s some kind of trap in place to keep them where they’re dying, though. Maybe…” He shot a guilty look at Morrison, who blew a breath from puffed cheeks.
“Go ahead, Holliday. Let’s hear your supposition.”
“That’s all it is, sir. Conjecture. But this guy is eating, or at least tasting, these bodies. If it’s something that feeds on human souls, then the physical desecration might be secondary to the spiritual one. It could be that chewing the bones is representative of…” He trailed off as Morrison got one of those looks that I recognized as something I usually triggered. It was one part disgust, one part disbelief and one part deliberate patience, all mixed well with resignation.
“Feeds on human souls.”
I said, “We’ve encountered it before, Captain,” in the smallest voice I possessed. Morrison turned his complicated expression on me, and it was all I could do to not dig a toe into the snow. “It’s essentially what Barbara and Mark Bragg were doing, sir, under Begochidi’s influence. Gathering strength by draining human lives. That’s what was putting everyone to sleep in July.”
Morrison looked to the sky, as if beseeching God to give him strength. I peeked at Billy, who shrugged his eyebrows, and we both came to attention as Morrison spoke again. “What I want to know,” he said, “is how I’ve spent twenty years in the force without ever hearing a hypothesis that it feeds on human souls on a case before.”
I didn’t really get the idea he was talking to us. Besides, that wasn’t what he wondered at all. What he really meant was, why was he now hearing that kind of hypothesis, when the world had been a sensible and straightforward place up until about a year ago.
The answer to that, of course, was me. One Joanne Walker, reluctant shaman thrust into a life that walked half a step out of pace with the normal world. Billy’s talents had always helped him solve cases. They hadn’t brought the truly bizarre to the fore. I was the one who fought gods and tangled with demons on the department’s time. I was coming to believe that all of those things—gods, demons, witches, spirits—had always been there, slipping alongside the real world and going more or less unnoticed. Sometimes cases went unsolved, or inexplicably strange things happened in them, but it took a mirror to show most people the explanation for those incomprehensible events.
I was that mirror. Without me, last winter’s ritual murders would have been just that, with no banshee’s head to show as a prize. Without me, no one would have seen a thunderbird battle a serpent over Lake Washington, or gone traipsing through dream worlds to share secret moments in each other’s souls. I’d come around to believing in magic, but forcing those around me to believe, too, wasn’t something I liked at all.
I said, “I’m sorry,” very, very quietly.
“You’re saying that too often lately, Walker.” Morrison shoved his hands into the pockets of his seaman’s coat and hunched his shoulders before letting them fall in a show of having given up the fight. “I called you two in for a reason. I shouldn’t bitch when you do what I brought you in to do. This hypothesis. Tell me how it would work.”
To my dismay, Billy lifted his eyebrows at me. I was the slow kid in class, the one scrambling through years of make-up work. If either of us had an answer, it should be him.
Well, really, I should have one, too. I pushed my hat off and scruffed my fingers through my hair, staring at the dead woman. “If it’s murder by magic, if somebody’s trying to capture souls, then there’s probably some kind of power circle involved.” I shot a quick glance at Billy, who looked approving, and a second one at Morrison, who looked dangerously uncomprehending. “Like people would use in a horror movie,” I said lamely. “A pentagram, for example, but it doesn’t have to be a pentagram. You can use—”
I fumbled at my throat, flipping the thumbnail-sized pendant of my necklace above the collar of my shirt. It was a quartered cross wrapped in a circle, a symbol used by both sides of my heritage. In Ireland, it was the Celtic cross, older than Christianity’s, and for the Cherokee it was the power circle, all the directions encompassed by the universe. “You can use something like this, or probably anything else that’s meaningful to you. A peace symbol, maybe.” My attempt at a smile was met by Morrison’s steely gaze. “Anyway, you create your circle and invoke your patrons and when you’re done you have a sealed area that can either keep things in or out, depending on which you set it up for.” I’d participated in one fairly recently, or I’d have had no idea how to catch a wayward soul.
Morrison stared at me, or possibly at my necklace, for a long moment, then made his voice very steady. “All right. This power circle. Would it leave a mark?”
This time I got my expect-an-answer glance off first, planting it on Billy. His mouth pursed and he shook his head. “It might, but I wouldn’t be able to see it. Jo—”
“I don’t know if I can see residue, but I can check by looking for Mel’s. But if we have murder by magic—” I liked that phrase “—going on, then whatever mark it leaves isn’t going to be anything like Melinda’s. If I can see a shadow cast by hers, maybe I can figure out how to look for its opposite, but I can’t guarantee anything.”
“You have to,” Morrison said. “I’ve got nobody else.”
I breathed a laugh that wasn’t. “So no pressure, then. All right. Okay. I’ll try, Captain. I’ll do my best.”
He gave me a short nod, and I took a few steps back from the dead woman’s body. Police tape rustled against my hips and I turned to duck under it.
Blinding light erupted in my vision, and from out of it came a microphone and a woman’s voice: “Detective Walker. Laurie Corvallis from Channel Two News. I’m sure you remember me. What a delight to find you at the heart of another grotesque crime scene. What would you like to say to our viewers?”
CHAPTER THREE
The first eight or twelve things that sprang to mind were not answers Morrison would approve of. I squinted into the light and managed to pull up a terse smile in lieu
