Walking Dead

“Well,” Thor said, “it had enough mystical portent to make me ask you out. That’s got to count for something.”

“No,” Melinda said dryly, “what’s mystical is she said yes.”

“I had to. It was Alan Claussen’s band. I like them.” I actually scraped up a few lines of lyrics, half singing, “Ill met by moonlight, first kiss, stolen late at night,” which got a round of applause from Melinda as Thor staggered back as far as the press of people would let him, a hand over his heart.

“I see how it is. I’m only wanted for my concert tickets.”

I patted his shoulder, since he’d only escaped to about eighteen inches away. “Your concert tickets and your uncanny talent under the hood. There are worse things a guy could be wanted for.”

Too late, I realized the error of my phrasing, and raised my voice to say, “He’s a mechanic! I’m a mechanic! I like guys who are good with cars!” over Billy and Melinda’s synchronized “OooOOooh!”

“The lady,” Thor said cheerfully, “doth protest too much. You’re not helping yourself.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” I was too pink cheeked and laughing to get myself out of that alive anyway, so I took a swallow of my fizzy drink and reveled in the sheer simple fun of being teased by my friends.

“Jo!” Phoebe squished through the crowd and seized my arm. I straightened away from Edward, and Phoebe shook me. I went agglty while she said, “You have so got to get a load of your boss,” and swung me around to face the door. Still rattling, I looked for Morrison and whatever costume had everybody I knew insisting I needed to see him.

Instead, the doors flew open and an entire cadre of zombies lurched through them.

CHAPTER TWO

It said something very disturbing about what I’d come to consider a normal life that the first thing I did was reach for the sword on my hip. The peace knot held, which gave me enough time to remember that this was a Halloween party, and that hordes of undead weren’t unexpected at such festivities.

Still, loosening my fingers from the sword’s hilt took more effort than it should’ve. Phoebe, more or less under my elbow, said, “Well?” in such obvious delight that I scowled at her, then looked back at the zombies.

“What? Morrison’s a zombie?”

“No!” She thrust a finger out, pointing dramatically. I followed the line of her arm and still didn’t see my boss. There were a pair of cross-dressed hippies, an Elvira being hit on by an exceptionally sleazy-looking vampire, an ’80s Miami Vice look-alike and what appeared—from various blue skin, white hair and black leather costumes—to be the entire cast of a science-fiction show, but Morrison’s distinctive silvering hair wasn’t visible anywhere. I shot Phoebe an irritated look, opened my mouth to speak, and my gaze snapped back to Don Johnson without consulting my brain.

“Oh my God.”

Morrison turned around at my high-pitched exclamation, and Melinda, gleefully, said, “Told you he was a cop.”

I made a gurgling noise deep in my throat.

He had it all: the gradated cop sunglasses, which were not at all the right shape for his face; the pastel-pink shirt, unbuttoned far enough to show the world that Morrison had a very nice chest with what appeared to be the ideal amount of coarse, graying hair. The white blazer thrown over his shirt matched pale slacks and he wore loafers without socks. I stared at his feet, trying to wrap my mind around Morrison being that casual, then brought my gaze back up to the crowning horror.

“What did you do to your hair?”

Self-conscious wasn’t a look I was accustomed to seeing on Captain Michael Morrison. He touched his head, then glowered at me. “What’d you do to yours?” “It’s a wig!”

At a loss for moral high ground wasn’t a look I was used to seeing on him, either. “It’s temporary,” he muttered.

I laughed, and, without thinking, slid my fingers through the tidy brown cut. It wasn’t a bad color. I just thought of the silver hair and the damn blue eyes as part and parcel of Morrison’s aging-superhero look. Changing the hair made him look younger and more human. “You’ve even got stubble.” Stubble no more belonged in Morrison’s universe than, say, animistic-based shamanic magic did. It didn’t stop either of those things from being in his universe, but they didn’t belong. “Look at you, Morrison.”

Instead, he looked at me, which made me notice I still had my fingers in his hair.

I said, “Shit,” and pulled my hand back, focusing on his shoulder while I tried not to blush. It didn’t work, and the best I could do was hope nobody called me on it. Hoping nobody’d noticed I’d been feeling up Morrison’s head was asking too much. “Sorry. Is, uh, is that the color it used to be?”

“It was blond.”

“Really?” Silver-shot suited him, and I couldn’t imagine him with anything else. Even seeing it, I couldn’t quite imagine it.

“Really,” he said with a hint of amusement, then helped me get my footing back by saying, “Look at you, Detective.”

I regained enough equanimity to give him a severe look. “I’m a princess warrior. You’re the detective here, Captain.”

“I’m in disguise,” he told me. “You’re not supposed to call me captain.” He hesitated a moment, looking a couple inches up at me. My boots were heeled, giving me a rare height advantage. Unshod, Morrison and I were the same height down to the half inch, and I’d been known to wear heels just for the satisfaction of looking down on him. Not recently, though, so finding myself taller than he was disconcerting.

He let his hesitation out in a breath, said, “Looks like a good party, Walker. Thanks for inviting me,” and reached past me to accept a drink from somebody.

I stayed where I was a few seconds too long, convinced he’d been going to say something else entirely and still waiting for him to say it. Morrison, and the party, moved on, leaving me wondering just what it was I’d thought he’d been going to say, and what I thought I’d have said in return. Not that long ago Morrison and I had had a wholly antagonistic relationship. Like everything else in my life, it’d gotten more complicated lately.

No, that wasn’t true. We’d drawn some lines in the sand, the captain and I, that was all. I, had drawn a line in the sand. I’d taken a promotion to detective instead of taking a chance on something else entirely, and Morrison respected the decision I’d made. Which meant whatever it was I thought he’d been going to say, he wouldn’t have, and I needed to stop worrying about it.

I nodded, a too-visible acknowledgment that I’d given myself a firm talking-to, and turned around to find all my friends looking as if there were many, many unspeakably interesting things going on in their minds, and as if they would all very much like to speak them. Even Thor had a hint of that look about him, and while picking up on subtle social clues wasn’t my strong point, I was pretty sure the guy who was more or less my boyfriend wasn’t supposed to look like that with regards to me having a conversation with another man.

He, however, was also the only one who put aside that gossipy look and offered me a hand. “I have it on pretty good authority you can dance.”

“I have it on better authority that I’m an embarrassment on the dance floor.” I put my hand into his anyway and he tugged me through the crowd to a space where the pressed bodies played against each other in more graceful rhythms. Music dominated that corner of the room, compliments of someone willing to play the parts of both Frankenstein’s monster and DJ at Phoebe’s party. It was her party; the fact that I’d invited half the police department and they’d showed up didn’t make it any less hers. I wouldn’t have known where to start in renting a hall or getting a caterer, but providing a significant portion of the guests defined me as co-host. The dance floor was a bit less crowded than the rest of the room, and I alternated between taking cues from Thor—I really wasn’t a very good dancer, but I could manage to follow a lead, at least some of the time—and watching the room.

People were having fun. At my party. I imagined telling my fifteen year old self that a dozen years later she’d be what she’d have called popular, back in the day, and knew she’d never believe me. I didn’t quite believe it myself. On the other hand, my plastic cup full of foamy pink stuff was gone, and having a cup of heavily spiked punch inside me made it easier to believe almost anything. I said, “Six impossible things before breakfast,” aloud, and when Thor crinkled his eyebrows at me, snorted. “I need another drink. Water this time. Oi.”

“The bar’s over by the dunk tank. Lead on, MacDuff.”

“That’s lay on,” I said, suddenly cheerful. A man who was into cars and misquoted Shakespeare was a good guy to be dating. I squirmed forward through the crowd.

Squishing through partygoers was good for my ego. People who could barely move in the crush did double takes and stepped back to admire the whole costume. I heard an “Ow!” and Thor’s innocent whistle, like he’d maybe prevented a wandering hand from copping a feel. Overprotective boyfriends should probably be scolded, but instead I grinned and looked back to thank him even as I kept pressing forward.

All of a sudden the crowd disappeared around me, sending me stumbling. Thor let go of my hand, which didn’t help at all, and I caught myself on the edge of a cauldron.

I said something clever like, “Buh?” and got a laugh for it, but I was genuinely surprised. I didn’t remember us ordering up a gigantic pot—and it was gigantic, coming halfway up my thigh and an easy four feet across at its bulge—but Phoebe stood on its other side, looking pleased with herself.

Nervous instinct made me glance around for a third witch. I’d spent a bit of time in a coven, and had absolutely no doubt of their goddess-granted earth power, but I didn’t have any particular need to hoe that row again, particularly at a party. To my relief, it appeared that it was just Phoebe, me and the cauldron at center stage. I knew I wasn’t a witch and I was pretty sure Phoebe wasn’t, so I straightened up and dusted my hands against my skirt, all take-charge and businesslike. The minor detail of not knowing what business made me stage-whisper, “Are we boiling somebody for dinner, then?” across the cauldron.

“Sure! Boil, boil, toil and trouble!”

Nobody ever got that line right. I muttered, “It’s ‘double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,’” and the cauldron erupted.

My first thought, through the green smoke and the coughing and hacking, was that I really should’ve been allowed to complete the couplet and set the charm before anything exciting like an explosion happened. My second was to notice that the shrieks around me were turning to laughter, and my third was to notice I didn’t seem to be missing any body parts. In the grand scheme of things, that was good.

The undead rising gracefully from the cauldron were less good. There was something inhuman about the way they came up: smooth, effortless, as if they floated instead of climbed like normal human beings. They didn’t seem to be intent on flinging themselves at anyone in search of human flesh, but rather twined around one another, sensual in every move.

I didn’t especially like horror movies, but I was fairly certain your average zombie didn’t have abs of steel, or an ability to undulate the way the pair in the cauldron did. Zombies were more about body parts dropping off than rhythmic motions. I held off panic another few seconds, giving reality just enough time to set in.

Under the gray-green skin makeup and the extremely well-done painted-on innards rotting out, the couple in the cauldron were pretty much beautiful. The Sight swam into place, assuring me that nothing was untoward about their psychic presences, and swam out again, leaving me to see with normal eyes and grasp that the duo were, in fact, exotic-dancer gorgeous.

The music took a turn toward a spooky bump and grind, and they moved to it, nothing alarming in their dance, except that I was four inches away from pelvic thrusts. The pelvises in question moved higher, the dancers still rising toward the ceiling with inexplicable smoothness. I admired an especially nice pair of thighs before Phoebe lifted her hands to clap and hoot and sway along with the music.

As if she’d given the crowd permission, other people joined in, laughter turning to shouts and cheers of approval. A ripple effect went through the party hall, overhead lights shutting down while black lights and tiny, brightly colored spotlights sprayed across the teeming masses. The dancing zombies’ knees came into my view and a solid click sounded, finally explaining how they were rising so smoothly: the cauldron was fitted with a rising platform. I gave it a weak smile and turned back toward the crowd, looking for Thor.

He was there with a smile that turned concerned. “Joanie?”

“My imagination’s working overtime. Can we get out of here for a minute?” Even wearing as little as I was, my skin was sticky and overheated. Goose bumps washed over my arms in chills that counteracted the heat, and the hot-to-cold flashes made my tummy twist uncomfortably. The air thickened too much to breathe, full of body heat and scents ranging from heavy makeup to perfume to sweat. “I’m not used to this many people.”

“Yeah, no problem.” He went all big and solid and masculine, putting an arm around my waist and his presence somehow enlarging, so the crowd fell back from around us. The claustrophobic heat faded a little and I dragged in a grateful breath of slightly cooler air, feeling like I could make it outside to silence and safety.

That was when the screaming started.

CHAPTER THREE

In the future when I’ve got a bad feeling, it would behoove me to remember that, having been granted phenomenal cosmic powers, it’s okay to trust myself when something seems off. I froze, in the sense of icicles down the backbone and prickles on the skin, but otherwise not as literally as I’d have liked. Almost before the shrieks became more than passionately indrawn breaths, I was turning, not wanting to see what was going on behind me but even less able to ignore it.

The cauldron dancers were rigid, all the grace and beauty flown out of their bodies. The part of me that didn’t know anything at all about medical diagnoses immediately decided it was a petit mal seizure, with their eyes rolled to white and their teeth bared by lips stretched thin and bloodless. Their hands were clawed and every muscle trembled with strain. Cords stood out in their throats as they screamed, and even those sounds were shadows of what they should have been, given the effort their bodies were expending.

The part of me that knew better than to try to diagnose medical conditions with a degree in English and a few too many television dramas tore away the real world and gave me the lowdown on what I could do to help. At least, that’s what it was supposed to do. The first part worked, anyway.

Their auras gave me nothing. They were spiky with distress, the reds and oranges of earlier delight now bleeding dark and terrified: sickly shades with the enormous strength of fear behind them.

Thin gray film rose out of the cauldron, sucking itself skintight against the dancers’ contours beneath their clothes. I had the impression I’d been granted X-ray vision—or maybe M-ray vision, Magic-Ray—as the Sight ignored what they were wearing and honed in on the stuff racing over them, providing me with a totally non-titillating examination of their bodies.

It was even money on whether the spasms were from being cling-wrapped tightly enough to send them into some kind of hind-brain attempt to throw it off, or if the murk was actually invading their bodies. It had already crawled to their chests and throats and sluiced toward their gaping mouths, and I had no freaking clue what it might be.

A smart doctor—maybe a smart shaman—would diagnose the damn problem first, but apparently the whole warrior-princess costume obliterated any kind of rational thought I might’ve indulged in. I vaulted onto the cauldron with a yell and slapped my hands over their mouths just before the gray stuff slipped over their lips and down their throats.

About six things happened at once.

First off, somewhere way in the distance, I heard Billy Holliday bellowing, “Joanne Walker, what in holy living hell!?” As far as I was concerned, that pretty much made up the soundtrack for everything else that happened. Time stretched, extending into slow moments that crystallized everything around me into clarity and allowed me to discard that which was unimportant. On reflection, that included music, calls to 911, some shouting and the start of a stampede, but right then, those seven words made up the walls of the world for a brief and horribly long eternity.

The good news was that the gray film leaped off the dancers, who collapsed out from under my hands. The bad news was, it leaped from them to me, and I had a sudden intimate understanding of just what they’d been enduring.

Enduring. There’s a funny choice of words. It’s not one I’d think would apply to a scenario that couldn’t have lasted longer than five seconds, but under the film’s tenterhooks it was the only one that seemed appropriate.

It was trying to get in, trying to invade. I felt my muscles seize and bunch and rattle in just the way the dancers’ had, a million pinpricks of ice jabbing under my skin and trying to work their way beneath. I’d never been flayed and wasn’t eager to try it, but I thought it might feel like this: burning pain that did its best to defy words and to turn me into nothing more than a scream.

A scream. Screaming was bad. Not because I didn’t deserve to, because anybody being flayed probably deserves to scream, but because the stuff had a purpose, and thwarting flaying gray film was a worthy goal. I snapped my mouth shut and rolled my lips in, biting their insides to keep myself from indulging in the scream that would let the stuff in. Then I wondered if my nose was enough of an access point to let it in, and how I was going to breathe if I needed to pinch my nostrils shut, too.

Then again, if the hurting didn’t stop soon, I wasn’t going to care much about breathing. More or less reassured by the thought, I stopped worrying about it. Look, logic in the face of excruciating pain isn’t one of my strong points. It worked for me, which was all that mattered. Meantime, my stomach, eager to add its opinion on agony, violently rejected the fizzy pink drink I’d indulged in earlier.

It was significantly worse coming up than it’d been going down, and it hadn’t been good to begin with. Human nature trumped scary crawling gray stuff and I doubled over, expelling bright pink spew. The film retreated, apparently as disgusted by Technicolor vomit as I was. The lack of pain left me astonishingly clear-headed.

Clear-headed enough to see that more of the gray fog was bubbling up from the cauldron and flowing over its edges, hurrying toward the partygoers.

Toward people I’d invited to come have a good time tonight.

I forgot that I was probably the only one in the room who could see the goo. Forgot that I’d jumped up onto the cauldron like a madwoman and the two people I’d touched had collapsed, which, by any coherent standard, suggested I was dangerous. Forgot that my own magic had a visible component, and that I was in the middle of a very public place.

Or maybe I didn’t forget. Maybe I just didn’t care, because I’d had enough of innocent bystanders getting run over on my watch. Agony fled my bones, chased out by fury, and I smashed through sickness to call up the healing magic that was my heritage. I had no idea what I was up against, but that’d never stopped me before. Better to turn myself into a super-size McSnack for gray ooze than to let anybody else get eaten.

Silver power surged, its brilliant blue highlights making me feel like an electrical conduit. I could See it, blazing with righteous anger, and while I still couldn’t hear much beyond Billy’s shout, I’m pretty sure that was when the stampede started. Anybody in their right mind wanted to get the hell away from me. For a room as crowded as that one, it was amazing how everybody managed to jump back two feet and leave a circle of emptiness around me.

At least, I thought it was them lurching back. I had a certain amount of success with the idea of capturing things in nets, but a net wasn’t going to hold goop in. I went the bubble-boy route, sending a physical flare of magic from my core into a sphere around me. It was wholly possible that I shoved everybody out of my way, although I didn’t think that was very polite and shamany. Then again, a dead shaman had told me I’d walk a warrior’s path, so maybe I had license to metaphysically bludgeon people once in a while.

Either way, they were a bit farther out of harm’s way, and the cauldron-born ichor ran up against my sphere and began crawling upward, looking for egress and finding none. I figured it would take about two seconds before it reached the top and started dripping down on me. That meant I had about a second and a half to come up with a brilliant plan to stop it.

Time resumed its normal pace, two seconds blew by, and I was screwed.

There’s nothing especially attractive about shrieking like a little kid and curling up in a ball with your hands over your head, but that’s what I did. I didn’t want to face that skin-peeling sensation again. Even the idea made my eyes hot with tears, and if falling down and sobbing kept it away from me for another half second, I wasn’t too proud to grovel.

More than that went by before I realized my skin wasn’t being pulled off. I peeked through my fingers at the shell I’d built around myself and the cauldron.

Man. I had no idea what it looked like from the outside, but from within, it looked like a Gaussian blur of hell. Formless gray surged and slid around me, a relentless ocean of potential danger and pain. Color bled in, but only at the corners of my eyes: if I jerked to look straight on at it, red and black faded away, as if something living didn’t want to meet my gaze. Thin, bonelike hooks scratched at my arms and flinched back again. A sound crept in behind the small bones of my ears, something high and lost that reminded me of the banshee.

It made shapes out of the mist, emaciated wavering things with gaping eyes and mouths. They had the weight of age to them, pressing down on me as if, if they couldn’t scrape their way in through my skin, they’d crush me into component parts that could be absorbed into the gray.

A little belatedly, it occurred to me to wonder why they weren’t scraping their way inside my skin, and I stopped peeking through my hands to look at my fingers.

Seeing through your own skin is a bizarre effect. When my magic had first broken loose, there’d been so much to burn off I’d seen my flesh and blood as rainbows, shimmering with power. Over time that variety had faded to the silver and blue that I now considered to be mine, and right now that was what I saw: oil-slick pools of color burning in my veins and swimming through my muscles. All that magic had once been knotted up under my breastbone, making me sick with the need to act, but it’d become a much more integral part of me, almost always active to some degree, and ready to be called on in its full strength when I needed it.

Offhand, I guessed the gray slime wasn’t down with shamanic power, and that a human body rife with it wasn’t an appealing host. It had likely dared to attack me in the first place because I hadn’t called my power up actively: now that I’d turned it on, I was unfriendly territory. That suggested I was probably dealing with some kind of death magic, because while shamanism had as much to do with death as life, I was coming to think of it as a more or less inherently life-positive kind of magic. Though if I found myself using phrases like life-positive very often I was going to have to life-negative myself out of humiliation. Nobody says things like that. Jeez.

The point, though, was that if the nasty gray slime couldn’t get a foothold in me when I was topped up with blue glowy lifey goodness, then it probably had a big fat hold on death itself. In fact, me being a poor host was, in every aspect but one, excellent. It meant the bubble of power would keep the stuff in, and that I’d be perfectly safe as long as I could maintain it.