Mine was still squeezing the trigger. My throat hurt, though I couldn’t remember yelling. I knew I should have. Drop your weapon! or Police! or something like that. Maybe I’d said both. In protocol terms, it mattered. It mattered very much. In real-world terms, it mattered a lot less: my partner had been under attack, and shouting was never going to stop the bat from bashing into him. One shot, a good one, had been enough. Good thing, too. I’d never shot another human being before. I wasn’t sure I could do it again, even for a double-tap to make certain Billy would remain safe.
Patty Raleigh staggered a few steps backward and fell over.
My belly erupted with pain, diamond claws digging in and hauling my insides apart as the core of my magic went to war with what I’d just done. I dropped my gun and limped forward, one arm curled over my stomach. I paused next to Billy, who hadn’t yet moved, cords standing out in his neck and breath coming hard. He jerked his gaze to me, then nodded, one sharp movement to say he was okay. Nausea that I interpreted as relief swept through the pain in my gut, and I kicked Patty Raleigh’s baseball bat—it was already bloodied, the nail thick with matter I didn’t want to examine—farther away before kneeling at her side.
There was no exit wound spilling blood onto her pale blue carpet, which meant the bullet had lodged in her right clavicle. A very good shot, then, because the impact and lodgment would have knocked her farther off balance than a clear shot through the muscle would have. In terms of preventing a nail from taking up residence in Billy’s head, I couldn’t have done better without killing her.
Which I hadn’t. She was still breathing, though the inhalations were shallow and shocky, and her eyes were glazed with pain. The wound technically wasn’t life-threatening, but that made less difference than people thought, with shooting victims. Shock or sepsis did them in. The human body was not meant to stop small metal objects traveling at 850 feet per second, and tended to react poorly. Patty Raleigh might very well die with me kneeling beside her.
Of course, I could prevent that from happening. Or at least, I could in theory prevent it. My stomach was still a mass of twisting pain, every bit of magic I’d ever commanded turning black and red with its own kind of septic shock. My fingers were too thick to bend, my hands frozen and stiff. I put one on Raleigh’s shoulder and applied pressure, disquieted at the heat of her blood. She gurgled, more disturbing than a scream, and I thought if anything should unlock the healing magic I carried within me, it should be that sound.
Nothing happened, not a rush of instantaneous healing, not even the far more familiar layered vehicle body work that I’d used as my healing imagery for most of a year. I was no more use than any ordinary person, putting pressure on a bleeding wound. “Billy.”
He started talking as I said his name, calling in the shooting, requesting an ambulance, requesting backup: all the things I’d been going to ask him to do. Intellectually I knew he was on the ball, that it had been barely ten seconds since Patricia Raleigh had swung the bat at his head, but I felt encased in ice, like everything was still happening at a glacial pace. Shock, just like Raleigh was in.
Billy said, “Don’t move,” to me, and went to clear the rest of the house. I should have thought of that. I should have thought of a lot, except I couldn’t think of what else I might have done. Patty hadn’t been in the house—hadn’t been on the property—when I’d examined it psychically. Either that or she could batten down her aura like nobody I’d ever met, but I really didn’t think so.
There was an open sliding glass door beside us, making up the back wall of the living room. She’d clearly come through it, but where she’d been before that, I had no idea. The cat I’d Seen was still pouncing around the backyard, intent on capturing a moth.
“Clear.” Billy came back from the bedrooms and crouched beside me, face grim with concern. “You okay, Walker?”
“Yes. No. I can’t heal her.”
To my utter surprise, he touched my right cheek. I had a scar there, thin and mostly invisible, a remnant and reminder of the day my shamanic powers had exploded to life. “You couldn’t heal this, either. Some things aren’t meant to be fixed.”
“But I did this.” My belly cramped again and the words came out tiny and painful.
“Maybe that’s why you can’t undo it. The paramedics will be here in a few minutes.” He was silent a few seconds, then put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing. “You saved my life.”
I wanted to make a joke. Just a small one, something about I had to or your wife would kill me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t at all. I only nodded, a jerky little motion like he’d given me a minute earlier. He offered a heartbreaking smile in return, like he understood exactly what I couldn’t say. “Keep pressure on that wound until the ambulance arrives.”
It was a very sensible order. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something, when we both knew the truth was I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. If I’d had to, yeah, probably. But short of somebody else coming out of the woodwork to kill Billy, no, I was stuck there on my knees next to Patricia Raleigh for the interim. I nodded again, and Billy went to the front door to await an onslaught of cops, paramedics, forensic examiners and, inevitably, Michael Morrison, captain of the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct, and our boss.
I was sitting on the front steps, holding gun and badge loosely in my hands, when he came up the driveway. Any cop involved in a shooting had an automatic three-day suspension, so Morrison didn’t have to ask: I just handed the weapon and badge over. Patty Raleigh’s blood was under my fingernails, and Morrison noticed it as he accepted them. He checked the chamber and magazine—I’d already unloaded it—then tucked the gun into an empty holster under his suit jacket before asking, “What happened?”
I knew I should probably stand up and make a brisk report, but instead I stayed seated and outlined the incident in as few words as possible, mostly staring at Morrison’s belt while I did so. “Paramedics took Raleigh away about three minutes ago. She’ll probably live. Billy’s, uh. He’s inside, heading up the investigation on Nathan Raleigh. He thought it was better if I…”
Morrison nodded, only partially visible from my viewpoint angle. Then he sat down beside me, wooden porch creaking with his weight. “So what happened?”
I looked sideways at him. He wasn’t looking at me, gaze focused on the fence or the street beyond it, but he didn’t have to be looking my way for me to feel the weight of his concern or his determination to get an answer. I put my hands over my face, realized they smelled like blood, and dropped them again to stare at the street just like Morrison was doing. “I couldn’t heal her. I couldn’t…”
“I’ve seen you use shields to protect people. Why didn’t you stop her that way? Put one up around Holliday?”
Christ. Morrison, who liked magic even less than I did, would still be a better practitioner than I was. “I didn’t think of it. This wasn’t a paranormal case. It was a domestic homicide. I don’t usually bring the whole shooting match to the day job. She was there, she had a weapon, I had a weapon, I shot her. And now my gut feels like I ate a box of fishhooks and the healing won’t respond. And if I was anybody else you wouldn’t be wondering why I used my Glock .40 instead of magic.”
“That’s true. But you’re not anybody else.” Morrison exhaled, and I dropped my head again, though I kept my fingers laced together in front of my knees, not wanting to breathe in the scent of blood a second time. He was right. I wasn’t certain he was unconditionally right, but the power within me had always put forth some pretty clear ideas on what I should and shouldn’t do. The wrenching pain in my stomach and the lack of response from the magic both told me flat-out I’d chosen poorly.