“I do,” he said, still very evenly, as if the last bit of conversation hadn’t happened. “I’m going. Should I pick you up?”
My gaze snapped back to him. “You’re going?”
“We were the first two officers on the scene, Walker. I visited her mother.” Morrison’s voice was strained. I found myself staring at him again.
“Jesus, Cap. Shouldn’t the UW police have done that? I mean, not your juris—”
“I was the ranking officer,” he said. “It was my duty.”
My vision didn’t go all inverted again, but rather, for an instant, I saw with extreme clarity. The worst job anybody could have is telling a parent that her child is dead.
Morrison’d done it to spare somebody else having to.
Color burned along my jaw and up into my cheekbones and ears, a bewildering rush of pride to be working for this particular police captain. I swallowed and straightened my shoulders. “What time should I be ready?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Morrison relaxed almost imperceptibly. “Nine-thirty. Funeral’s at ten.”
“I’ll be ready. Morrison?”
Morrison, already turning away, went still, and looked at me like he expected the other shoe to drop.
“Thanks.”
For a few seconds he looked as if he was waiting for the follow-up smart-ass remark. Then he nodded, a short, sharp motion, and walked away.
Sunday, June 19, 7:14p.m.
There was no time to get laundry started. I dashed to campus, stopping at the pizzeria to buy two slices of pepperoni and olive pizza. They offered me a soda large enough to swim in for a mere sixty cents more. Being a red-blooded American, I bought it and had vague guilty thoughts about exercise.
I was still licking pizza grease off my fingers when I ducked into the room the coven had been held in two nights earlier. Contrary to the smoky gloom of that night, it was bright and well lit and distinctly empty of both torches and witches. I said, “Um,” out loud to the empty room, and stood there with my soda feeling a little foolish. That was me, Joanne Walker, the world’s sneakiest undercover cop. Not that I was undercover, because Morrison had given me permission to case these people, although I suspected I might be going further than he meant me to. It didn’t matter. This was all on my own time.
Just like Cassandra Tucker’s funeral would be.
“I thought you’d be here,” Faye said from behind me. I flinched two inches to the left and whipped around, wishing I had something dangerous and sexy in my hand instead of a sixty-four ounce soda cup. My vision blurred again for the first time since I’d seen Gary, fluorescent lights above me twisting into purple streaks, and I pressed the heel of one hand against my left eye. I could feel the under-the-skin sunburn again, as if coming out of the daylight had made it more intense.
“Sorry,” Faye said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Are you sure?” I asked petulantly. She smiled as I peeled one eye open to look at her. The light stabilized and I cautiously removed my hand from my other eye.
“Of course. I didn’t have your number to call, and you weren’t with us last night so you couldn’t know that we don’t usually meet in the same place twice in a row. I thought I’d drop by and get you.”
“I’m in the phone book.” I still sounded tetchy. Faye looked surprised.
“I didn’t think of it.”
I muttered, “Of course not,” and came back to the door, slurping my soda. “Where’re we going?”
“Ravenna Park.”
I blinked. “Not on campus?” Ah, yes. A brilliant deduction. “Won’t the park be busy?”
Faye herded me out of the room. “D’you have a car? I don’t. It’ll be busy, but no one will notice us.”
“Yeah, in the south lot. They won’t?”
Faye shrugged. “People look around magic a lot. I don’t know why. It’s like a big blind spot in humanity.” She beamed suddenly. “But we’re going to change that, Joanne. We’re going to make a real difference in the world. Starting tonight.”
There are certain phrases people like to hear. Mechanics, for example, are fond of, “The transmission’s okay, so the insurance company says fix it instead of totaling it out.” At least, they are if they don’t work for a cop shop that pays the same amount no matter how much work you do or don’t do, which wasn’t the point. “Elise will make tamales if you come over and look at the Eagle,” was another nice one, although possibly that only got mileage from mechanics who knew my friend Bruce. And every mechanic I knew liked, “She’s a beauty. Did you do the work yourself?”
That was not what Faye said when she saw Petite. Faye squealed, “Oooh, purple!” and leaned over the hood to see if she could see her reflection in the gilt-flecked finish. She could, in fact: I’d spent a lot of hours working depth into the rich paint, but the usual rush of smug pride wasn’t available with this go-around of appreciation.
I was too busy thinking about phrases that cops didn’t like.
“Starting tonight” was way up there, particularly when the cop in question thought she had another three days before the big bang. I drove down to Ravenna Park without listening to Faye’s chipper conversation, cranky at the inverted light and how much attention I had to pay to driving. It was probably a bad sign I didn’t normally pay that much attention to driving, but I was in no mood to think about that.
Tonight was a lot sooner than I wanted to participate in anything. I was working myself up to doing it, but I’d thought I had a few more days. Part of me wanted to just not show up. From what Faye and the others had said, without me they might not have enough power to pull their stunt off.
But every time I thought about doing that, an image of Colin, whose cancer I didn’t know how to heal, flashed behind my eyes. Virissong might be able to pull off what I couldn’t, and I wasn’t sure I had the right to stand in the way of that happening. Not just for Colin, but for the whole overheated Seattle metropolitan area, and maybe the world.
I pulled into the lot at the north end of the park, still uncomfortable, and reached over to lock Faye’s door before getting out of the car. “Lead on, Macduff.”
Faye gave me a look of complete incomprehension. I rolled my eyes. “Never mind. Let’s just go.”
A stream large enough to be considered a river in some parts of the country ran through Ravenna Park. People were strewn along the banks, kids shrieking happily as they played in the water. I had no idea how a coven meeting was going to proceed undisturbed. I envisioned small children dashing through the sacred circle, then wondered if they’d be able to, or if there’d be some sort of mystical force field that they’d bounce off. The thought cheered me and I stuffed my hands in my pockets, whistling jauntily as I strode along behind Faye.
“Please don’t,” she said.
“Mmm?”
“Whistle. Please don’t whistle. Whistling brings down the walls between this world and the next.”
I stopped midwhistle, my mouth pursed. “You’re kidding.”
She glanced over her shoulder at me. “No. The tonal qualities and pitch are a bridge between worlds.”
“Fascinating. Isn’t that what we’re trying to do?”
Faye sighed, developing the very patient tone that isn’t. “Yes, of course. But we want it to be controlled, Joanne. Bridging worlds isn’t something that should be done lightly, and you’ve felt the kind of power we’re dealing with.”
That much, at least, was true. I stopped arguing and whistling both, and slunk along like a properly chastised new coven member.
Well, I would’ve if I could’ve kept my mouth shut for more than three steps. “What d’you mean, we’re starting to change the world tonight?”
Faye looked over her shoulder again, dimpled, and fell into stride with me. “The world has to be prepared for Virissong’s arrival,” she explained. “Tonight we’ll begin to thin the walls, and over the next few days humanity will become accustomed to the otherworld mixing with this one again.”