No Dominion (The Walker Papers: A Garrison Report) (27 page)

“Sweetheart, my spirit animal is a tortoise, so I figure they know better than we do. It ain’t just about whether we got an affinity for ‘em. It’s about what gifts they can bring us.”

Somethin’ happened in her eyes, a real seriousness all mixed up with curiosity and maybe a bit more understanding than I wanted to see from her. “Your spirit animal. I didn’t know you had one.”

I tried not to grit my teeth, feelin like I’d blown it. “It shows up a long time from now.”

That understanding in her eyes ran deeper. She tilted her head, studying me like I was some kinda new thing before sayin, real careful, “’Future flashes.’”

“Yeah, darlin’.” My heartbeat was going crazy an’ I was getting hot beneath the collar. I didn’t know how, but I was sure she’d figured out the truth somehow. Intuition, or me being a real bad liar, or something, but I’d let too much slip and she
knew
. But I couldn’t ask ‘cause if it was my imagination running wild and she
didn’t
know, then asking would mean the jig was up too. I was starting to blush, and I hadn’t done that in thirty years.

The corner of her mouth turned up just a little. “All right, dear. If you say so. Now, what was I saying. Oh, the cheetah. A cheetah, for heaven’s sake. It’s something a seventeen-year-old girl would want, not a seventy year old lady. The other was—”

“A stag. I kinda saw that one, darlin’. Got a glimpse, anyway.”

“Positively ridiculous,” she said. “Virile and masculine. Why on earth would creatures like that want me?”

I had a hard time pulling my eyebrows outta my hairline. Annie laughed, blushed, and laughed again. “That’s very flattering, but really, Gary, I am seventy years old.”

“Don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. ‘sides, it all kinda fits together. You saw that picture your pa painted of Cernunnos, the horns on him and all. I don’t figure it’s a coincidence a stag came your way, is what I’m saying. You’re feeling stronger, that’s what matters, right?”

“Strong enough to take the fight to this enemy.” The color in her cheeks wasn’t from blushing anymore. It was the fire of battle getting ready to meet. “Gary, I can’t just let it go out into the world, or the Upper World, wherever you want to say, and let other people be hurt by it. But if I’m strong enough to hold on a while, maybe we’ll win something. Maybe if I can hold this evil inside of me just a little longer than it expects, maybe it’ll mean I take one wrong thing out of the world when I go. That’s worth dying for, Gary.  If I’m going to die anyway, I want to make it worth something.”

“You ain’t gonna—”

“Everybody does, sweetheart. Whether it’s tomorrow because of this sickness or thirty years from now from old age, everybody dies. I don’t want to leave you, but if I have to, I’m going to take as much darkness out of the world as I can when I go.”

There wasn’t much I could say to that, so I didn’t try. There was no arguing with the woman at the best of times, an’ this was that, and the worst too. We shut ourselves in together, whispering like kids ‘til way too late in the night, telling secrets about power animals and spirit journeys and doing our best to take ourselves there without anybody helping. I didn’t know what time we fell asleep, but we didn’t wake up until Hester knocked on the door a couple minutes after ten the next morning.

Pretty sure she thought we were too old for the state of dishevelment we came to the door in, but her sour face getting even sourer made me and Annie both laugh. I cooked everybody breakfast while Annie got herself put together.

We spent the whole day doing the rounds, everything Annie usually did. Hester’s eyes went as gold as Jo’s did when she turned on the mojo, which kinda surprised me. I’d figured everybody would have their own color, maybe something to do with their auras, though Jo’s aura wasn’t gold at all, which shot that idea fulla holes. I chuckled at myself, making both women look at me, but I shrugged it off. Explaining any more about future memories was more than I wanted to try.

All three of us got tense when we dropped into the yoga studio, figuring a spiritual center was the most likely place for a magic user, even a dark one, to hole up. Annie introduced Hester around to the teachers, an’ one by one they came up clean, even the new one we’d been laying our bets on. It was coming on toward night again by then, and stronger or not, Annie was wrung out. Hester had to come home with us, ‘cause she’d left her car there, but the drive back was full of her tension and apologies she wasn’t making out loud. Annie finally reached between the front seats and patted Hes’s knee. “It’s not your fault, Miss Jones. Maybe this is a natural illness after all.”

“No. I’ve taken a lot of people to the Lower World to battle their sicknesses, Mrs. Muldoon. No natural illness looks or fights like that.” Hester’s eyes were glowing gold again, like anger was turning them hot. “Shamanism says everything, even illness, has a spirit, and everything with a spirit wants to live, but this is more than that. It doesn’t just want to live. It wants to kill.”

I was watching her in the rear-view mirror, an’ saw her realize she’d said too much. Annie went pale and turned back around to look out the side window, and Hester’s mouth got thin and grim. She was already staring ahead like the Devil himself was waiting at home when we turned up the drive, but she flinched and grabbed the back of my seat as I parked the Chevy. “Who’s here?”

I squinted at her in the mirror. “Nobody, far as I know. Why?”

Annie said, “Probably Myles,” at the same time, adding, “The gardener,” when me and Hester both looked at her. “You haven’t met him yet,” she told me. “He replaced Beth a few weeks ago. I did tell you that.”

“Yeah, I remember. You said he was one of the new folks—” The air got a whole lot colder, raising hairs on my arms. “Hes?”

“It’s like looking into a plague of locusts.” She wasn’t looking at either of us, but at our yard, somewhere past the curve that put the far side outta view. “His aura is overwhelmed with darkness. I can’t See the colors it might once have been. He’s embraced something that lends him power, but at the cost of…of everything he is.” Hester Jones hadn’t been uncertain for even half a heartbeat since we’d met her, but she sounded like the core of her world had been shaken. “I’ve never seen anything…I didn’t even imagine anyone
could
do that.”

“I—” I shut up on sayin
I seen it before
. I had, except not for a few years yet. Joanne had gone up against a sorcerer early on, and we’d both seen how he could get into the hearts and souls of people looking for power. Or, hell, even just looking for a way to survive. I reckoned all of that kinda power backtracked eventually to the same source, to the guy we kept calling the Master.

“It’s sorcery,” I said instead, which made Annie gimme another one of those
you know too much
looks, but she didn’t call me on it. I didn’t figure she was ever gonna.

“Sorcery—” Hester took a deep breath, trying to contain herself. “In shamanic studies, a sorcerer is a shaman who has embraced darkness. Sorcerers can do terrible things. Skinwalk. Steal someone’s will. Cast curses and—”

“And cause sickness instead of healing it.” I’d been on the receiving end of that, though it’d been a corrupted witch, not a sorcerer, who’d magicked me into a heart attack. “Lissen to me, Hester. Most sorcerers are gonna be at least a couple steps removed from the heart o’darkness—”

Annie, beneath her breath, muttered, “
The only thing was for it to come to and wait for the turn of the tide
,” an’ I smirked but kept going. “This fella, there’s a good chance he’s sold himself higher up the river. Ain’t nobody gonna think less of you if you walk away right now, and the truth is, sweetheart, that might be smart. The boss man in this mess, he holds a grudge, and I hate to…”

Way too late, it finally clicked. Hester Jones. Name seemed kinda familiar, yeah, because she’d been one of a half-dozen murders a few years from now. Right at the same time I’d met Jo, in fact, when a demi-god was taking his daddy issues out on the magic users in Seattle. Far as I knew, Herne hadn’t been aligned with the Master, but he’d gone a long way down a road to Hell, and not much of it had been paved with good intentions. When a guy is that far off the path of righteousness, it probably ain’t that hard for a worse bad guy to draw his eyes to a few particular sacrificial lambs.

An’ here I was, pulling Hester neck-deep into a fight a lot bigger an’ uglier than she was counting on. An’ here I was knowing it was already too late, if this was all cause and effect, ‘cause whether I liked it or not, she was gonna die messy in just a couple more years.  “
Dammit
.”

I coulda been talking the wind for all she cared. Her back was up, eyes flashing, and for a minute I liked her, sour grapes and all. “Sorcery is an abomination. It’s a corruption of everything I’ve ever studied. It’s very…chivalrous,” she said, like it was a bad word, “of you to try to save me trouble, but this isn’t an encounter I could ever walk away from.”

“Are you on the warrior’s path, doll?”

Hester was halfway outta the car when I asked, and sat back again looking genuinely surprised. “I am. How did you know?”

“From what I know most shamans ain’t quite so gung-ho about fighting, is all. Healing, yeah, but I don’t get the impression most of ‘em are that good in a fight.” I knew what I was talking about, having watched Jo’s pal Coyote freeze up in a fight, and he was no minor leaguer in the mojo department. “So I figured you might be on a different path.”

Hester’s mouth twitched. “I’m told it’s my personality. We do fight, all of us. But most of our head-on confrontation is in spirit realms, not in this world, and our battles are always on behalf of another. The few of us who follow the warrior’s path are part of a more direct war. This level of corruption is so high that I’d be more afraid of some of my brethren being contaminated than I would be convinced of their ability to succeed, if they fought it in a traditionally shamanic way.”

“You ain’t afraid of being corrupted?”

“I’ll die first.”

Some folks couldn’t say that without it sounding like bragging, or like it was a bit of nothing, somethin’ funny that they said just to get a smile. Hester wasn’t one of ‘em. She coulda been a soldier just then, somebody under orders who knew she was walking into a trap but also knowing it was gonna get other people out alive so long as she held on a little while. For a minute I looked between her and Annie, cut from the same cloth even if it didn’t look like it on the outside, an’ when I got outta the car I saluted ‘em both. I hadn’t done that for anybody in a long time. Hes looked like I was maybe pulling her leg, but Annie smiled and put her hand over her heart. That settled Hester down, and the three of us went together to meet the enemy.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The enemy was twenty-seven, acne-scarred, and dirty to his elbows in topsoil. Nothing about him looked dangerous except maybe the idea some’a that dirt was night soil. Annie, a couple steps behind me, was repeating something she’d said when she’d hired the kid: “I met him while I was volunteering at the hospital, for Heaven’s sake. He has Crohn’s disease. It’s been debilitating, but he achieved a remarkable recovery lately. I can’t see how he could possibly be a—a carrier for evil.”

“How much recovery, doll? Bedridden to walking out the door inside a day, that kinda thing?”

“Well, yes. He said he’s been making dietary changes…” Annie trailed off, finally suspecting something else mighta been going on there.

Truth was, a while back I woulda thought that was nothing but good news, nothing shy of a miracle. But Joanne had watched a kid dying of cancer walk outta the hospital, too, once a sorcerer had taken up with him. I didn’t figure most miracle cases were evil magic working its way in, but this time it looked mighty suspicious. The kid—Myles—straightened up like he was just now hearing us arrive. For a second he was all smiles an’ good nature, just like anybody given a second chance at life mighta been. Then he saw Hester an’ everything about him changed.

I’d long since lost the Sight Jo had laid on me. Didn’t stop me from Seeing the kid fill up with rage like he was pulling it from the boiling core of the earth. Once in a while Jo’s magic went like that, burning so bright anybody could see it, and I guessed that was what was going on with Myles. He lashed out with it. A black toothy ball of fury came tearing across the lawn at Hester, leaving burn marks behind.

For a lady who said she didn’t know much about shields, she sure knew how to put ‘em up for herself. Yellow and dark green shot up around her like the Northern Lights had come way down south to visit, an’ a shockwave like I hadn’t felt since Korea damn near rattled my teeth outta my head. Hester held her ground, and her drawing power was just as clear as Myles’s had been. The earth responded to her, too, all the strong young growth of trees an’ animals a quick cool rush against the core’s ancient fury. She threw it right back at him, no war inside herself about whether shamanic magic was made for fighting or not. I was gonna hafta talk to Jo about that, later on.

Except I was pretty sure that conflicted or not, Jo woulda caught the kid in the teeth with her magic and knocked him head over heels into the hedges. Hester’s nearly reached the kid, but another one of his tar balls flew out and swallowed Hes’s magic whole.
Then
she lurched, like that was a whole lot worse than taking a hit, and I reckoned maybe it was. Bracing yourself for a beating was one thing. Getting a bite taken outta your soul’s energy has gotta be something else. Hester kept her feet, but just barely, and Annie and me were both realizing somethin was gonna go wrong when the kid turned on us instead.