Morrison can’t be pissed if everybody’s already talking about them, right?”
“Not everyone,” Sonata said. “Just that awful woman on Channel Two. She broke the story this morning. The Seattle Slaughterer, they’re calling him.”
I winced from the bottom of my soul all the way out. Billy groaned. “Tea would be great, Sonny. Green tea is supposed to be good for you, right? Would enough of it make somebody invulnerable? Because Joanie’s going to need it.” He followed Sonata into the kitchen, and I trailed along behind, wondering how many different ways Morrison was going to kill me. I’d gotten up to four highly creative ways to die before Sonata got us seated at the table and put a kettle on to boil.
“I’m afraid not,” she said. “I don’t know of anything that’s that good for you.”
Billy, more cheerfully than I thought was appropriate, said, “You’re dead,” to me.
I dropped my forehead to the table and said, “Maybe not,” words muffled by the shining wood. It smelled faintly of lemon Pledge, old and familiar. “Neither of us can pick up anything at all from the bodies we’re finding, Sonny. Even the one this morning didn’t have a ghost lingering, and she was freshly dead. I was thinking maybe if you gave it a shot, or if you knew somebody who could…” I peeked up, trying for convincing puppy-dog eyes.
Sonata looked unmoved, not even blinking when the kettle suddenly whistled. She let it go on, piercing the air, and finally shook her head. “I know who should be able to help.”
I sat up, hope surging in my chest as Sonata went to take the kettle off. “Who?”
She turned her profile to me, concern thinning her lips. “Joanne, it should be you.”
CHAPTER SIX
The kettle’s whistle faded into a rush of staticky background noise that lingered underneath, then swallowed, Sonata’s words. I was vaguely aware of Billy’s grimace, but mostly I was paying attention to the hiss between my ears and the abiding feeling that I should have expected Sonata to say something like that.
Three or four thousand self-directed recriminations lined up to pile themselves on me. If I hadn’t done this, if I’d only done that—I had a list of mistakes longer than my arm. It was all too easy to believe that by foundering around as I’d done the past year, I’d missed the mark on where I was supposed to be standing. Back in January, when everything had started and I’d been burning with power released after years of imprisonment, there’d been one brief and kind of glorious moment when I’d believed I could save, or heal or protect the whole city of Seattle. I’d lost most of that confidence while struggling to learn about my talents, but apparently I hadn’t lost the sensation that I should be able to do something like that. That I should, in essence, be so much better than I was.
Memory caught me in the gut, a visceral recollection of an alternate timeline I’d briefly been given viewing access to. There’d been a woman a lot like me in that other world, only she had her shit together. She had a life, a family, friends and she would have known how to hunt down whoever was killing and snacking on Seattleites. For a moment I ached with the regret of not being her.
But—and this was the crux, and always would be—she had never chosen to come live in Seattle. Whatever battles she had to fight, they were somewhere else, with someone else. This was the path I was on, and if I’d screwed up, well, that was life. I was finally starting to wrap my mind around the idea of making things better in the future instead of beating myself up for things that had gone wrong in the past. Maybe it wasn’t much, but it had to be enough.
I spread my fingers wide on the shining kitchen table, and made my voice louder than the blood rushing in my ears. The moment of believing I could protect Seattle came back to me, but like through a fun-house mirror: it was a little too far away, a little too distant to feel real. “You’re probably right. It probably should be me. Here’s the thing, though, Sonny. I hardly even know what that means. Can you…” I got up, suddenly unable to hold still, and stalked across the kitchen, trying not to look at either Billy or Sonata.
“Can you tell me what’s missing? What…what I should be? God, what a stupid question. It’s just that I’m so far behind the curve I can’t even see it. I don’t know what’s wrong, much less how to fix it. If I can understand…” I spread my hands again, this time against the air, and made myself meet the others’ eyes. “Some hero I am, but right now I don’t have any idea where to start.”
Tension turned to uncomfortable sympathy in Sonata’s gaze. “For what it’s worth, Joanne, it wasn’t until I met you that I began to understand, myself. William…?”
Billy shook his head. “I’m not part of the scene like you are, Sonny, you know that. For me it’s mostly what I can do through the job. You’re my one real contact with the world.”
“Why is that?” I interrupted, genuinely surprised. “You’re like a true believer, Billy. Why aren’t you neck-deep in it?”
“Mostly because of Brad.”
“Oh.” I wished I hadn’t asked. Doctor Bradley Holliday was Billy’s older brother. They’d had a sister, too, Caroline, who’d been between them in age, but she’d drowned in an accident when she was eleven. Her bond with Billy had kept her ghost at his side for thirty years, and that had driven a wedge between the brothers. I wasn’t certain whether it was envy or anger or some combination thereof, but Brad had never taken to the paranormal the way Billy had. It’d never occurred to me that maybe Billy hadn’t embraced it as much as he’d have liked, in order to keep a degree of peace in the family.
Or maybe he’d embraced it just as much as he needed to. I knew he and Melinda had met at a conference about the paranormal. Fifteen years and five kids later it didn’t look, from the outside, like he was missing too much.
“We had a disaster last year,” Sonata said quietly. “Within the community, at least, it was a disaster. This city had a number of genuinely powerful protectors, Joanne. Shamans, mostly. People who mitigated the world’s effects, both meteorological and anthropological.” A brief sad smile turned one corner of her mouth. “They were one of the reasons Seattle had a reputation as a good place to live.”
A space in my belly turned hollow and worried. “They all died, right? Hester and Jackson and…”
Pure surprise wiped Sonata’s sorrow away. “That’s right. You knew them? Roger and Adina and Sam?”
I sat again, suddenly weary. “I met them. I met them after they died.” They, as much as Coyote, had set me on a shaman’s path.
Sonata, who communed with the dead, didn’t even blink at that confession. Instead she said, “A few others left, after the murders. They were afraid, and that fear poisoned their ability to help the city, so maybe it was the right choice. But it left Seattle vulnerable. I thought we would have to simply work it out, that we’d eventually draw new talent back to us. But then I met you.”
“And you realized the new talent was here in a shiny incompetent package.”
Sonata pursed her lips. “I wouldn’t have put it that way. You’re not incompetent, merely…”
“Uneducated.” Really, not even I thought I was genuinely incompetent, not anymore. When push came to shove I had so far managed to get the job done, so I probably wasn’t actually incompetent. Inept, inexperienced, ill-equipped, yes, but those all had a little less sting than incompetency. “How can you tell I’m supposed to be the one who steps up? How can you tell I’m worth half a dozen other shamans?”
“You single-handedly destroyed the black cauldron.”
I wet my lips and caught Billy’s gaze. “That wasn’t technically me.”
To my surprise, he shook his head. “Sonata’s right, Joanie. That was pretty close to impossible. The cauldron was hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old, and imbued with enough magic that it essentially had a life