Murphy,C E --- Thunderbird Falls (v1)

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C.E. MURPHY

THUNDERBIRD FALLS

www.LUNA-Books.com

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

Once more, thanks are due to both my editor,

Mary-Theresa Hussey, and my agent,

Jennifer Jackson, for making this a better book;

and to cover artist Hugh Syme, whose artwork

I am still delighted to have my book judged by.

They are further due to Silkie,

for research above and beyond the call of duty

(especially since there was no call of duty at all!); to

Trip, for making me think harder than is my natural

inclination; and to Anna, who is responsible for any

geography I got right in Seattle.

As for the rest of it, if I started listing

my support structure in detail, there wouldn’t be

room for the book. Still, to my family, especially

Ted and Shaun, who respectively keep me fed

and keep the kitchen clean, thank you.

This one’s for Alex Trebek.

(Really.)

CHAPTER ONE

Thursday, June 16, 6:19 a.m.

Two words I never thought would go together: Joanne Walker and 6:00 a.m.

Never mind that that’s actually four words, five if you spell out ante meridiem. If you’re going to get

technical, you’re going to lose all your friends. The point is, it was Oh God Early and I was not only up,

but at work. Not even at work. I was volunteering. Volunteering my own precious sleeping time, five

hours before I was supposed to be at work. I was so noble I could kill myself.

While I was busy admiring my nobility, a bunch of protesters linked arms and waded toward the police

line I was a part of. There were considerably more of them than there were of us—hence me being there

at all—and the power of authority as granted to us by the city of Seattle wasn’t pulling a lot of weight

with them. They weren’t violent, just determined. I spread my arms wide and leaned into the oncoming

mass, blowing a whistle that was more noisome than effective. The protesters stopped close enough that

I could count the individual silver hairs on the head of the man in front of me, who stood there, Right In

My Personal Space.

People have gotten shot for less.

Not, however, by me, and besides, as one of the city’s finest, I wasn’t in a position to be shooting people

just for getting in my personal space. Instead, I took a step forward, trusting my own presence to be

enough to cow them. It was; the silver-haired guy in front of me shifted back, making a bow in his line. I

pressed my advantage, arms still spread wide, and they all fell back a step.

I let go a sigh of relief that I couldn’t let them see, herding them back several more steps before I let up,

and backed up again myself. They watched me, silent, sullen, and short.

I was working on a theory that said all environmentalists were short. I knew it was wrong—Al Gore is a

tall man—but it gave me something to do while I played push-me-pull-you with the protesters. Of

course, most people are short compared to me: I stood a smidge under six feet in socks, and the sturdy

black walking shoes I wore put me an inch over.

Behind me lay the summertime glory of the Seattle Center, where a symposium on global warming was

being held. Representatives from every oil company, every car manufacturer, every corporation that had

ever been fined for too many dirty emissions being pumped out into the air were gathered there to argue

their case against the bleeding-heart liberals who thought a little clean air wasn’t asking too much.

Sarcasm aside, the greenies were losing major ground and had been since the symposium had opened

two days earlier. The federal administration favored big money and big companies, and those companies

were taking as much advantage as they could.

My own sympathies lay a whole lot more with the protesters and their concerns about details like global

warming. It was already in the high seventies and it wasn’t yet seven in the morning, which was just

wrong for mid-June.

But it wasn’t my job to have an opinion about who was right and who was wrong. It was my job to keep

the several thousand men and women who were gathered at the Center from breaking through and

rending the Armani suits from the bodies of the corpulent pigs managing the slaughter.

“Officer?” A woman’s voice, high-pitched with worry, broke me out of my cheerfully spiraling cynicism. I

turned toward her, one hand still lifted in warning against the crowd. I suspected a trick: distract the cop

for a minute while everybody surges forward, therefore losing the law a few precious feet of land. There

were more physical barriers than just the police officers keeping people off the Center grounds—bright

orange, cordoned sawhorses surrounded the entire place—but it was its own sort of psychological

warfare.

The woman held a pale-cheeked sleeping girl in her arms. “She fainted,” the woman said. Her voice was

thready with concern and fear. “Please, I think she needs a doctor.”

Right behind the bottom of my breastbone, centered in the diaphragm, a coil of energy flared up, making

a cool fluttering space inside me. It demanded attention, making my hands cramp and my stomach churn.

I rubbed my sternum, swallowing back the wave of nausea. I’d gotten good at ignoring that sensation in

the past several months, pretending I couldn’t feel it wrapped around my insides, waiting for me to give in

and use it again. Having it crop up so sharply made me feel as pale as the girl. My hand, without any

conscious order from my brain, reached out to touch her forehead. Her skin was cold and sticky with

sweat.

For the first time since I’d nearly burned out in March, I lost the battle with the energy within me. It shot

through me, making silver-tinted rainbows beneath my skin, and strained at my fingertips, trying to pass

from me into the chilly-skinned child. Had she been an adult, I might have been able to pull back and

refuse yet again to acknowledge its existence.

But she was a kid, and whether I wanted the power and responsibility I’d unintentionally taken on a

six-year-old didn’t deserve to suffer for my stubbornness. Silver-sheened magic told me in the most

simple, nonmedical terms possible, that the girl was suffering from near heatstroke.

To me—a mechanic by trade, even if I was a cop by day—that meant her engine had overheated.

Fixing an overheated engine’s not a hard thing. You pop the hood, pour new water into the radiator and

try not to get burned by the steam, then do it again until the radiator’s full and the engine’s cooled down.

Translating that to a child sick with heat was surprisingly easy. The energy inside me boiled with

eagerness to flow out of me and into the girl, but I made it drip instead of pour, afraid of what might

happen if her system cooled down too rapidly. I could actually envision the steam hissing off her as heat

gradually was replaced by my cool silver strength. It seemed a wonder that no one else could see it.

I was glad she was asleep. At her age she probably had very few perceptions about how health and

illness worked, but it was a whole lot easier to heal somebody who couldn’t consciously disbelieve that

what you were doing was possible.

The bitter truth of the matter was that I had to believe it was possible, too, and I didn’t want to. What I

wanted and what was, however, were two very different things. Right through the core of me, I knew

that cooling down an overheated little kid was only the bare edge of what I was capable of I let my hand

fall off the girl’s forehead. There was a little color in her cheeks now, her breathing somehow more

steady and less shallow. She was going to be all right, though an IV drip to help get her fluids back up

would probably be a good idea. From the outside, it looked as if I’d touched the girl’s forehead as an

assessment, then said, “I’ll escort you out.” I was the only one who knew better, and I was grateful for

that. Headlines blaring Cop Turns Faith Healer! would not endear me to my boss.

The girl’s mother, bright-eyed with tears, whispered her thanks. I led them through the crowd, radioing

for an ambulance as we walked.

Watching them drive away half an hour later, I realized I could breathe more easily than I’d been able to

in months. I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone again, irritably, and went back to work.

I left at nine, which was cutting it way too close to expect to get back to the university by nine-thirty. The

traffic gods smiled on me, though, and I slid my Mustang into a parking spot outside the gym with a

whole two minutes to spare.

I have never been what I would call the athletic sort. Not because I’m uncoordinated, but because I was

never very good at working with a team in high school. I hadn’t improved at it since then, for that matter.

The basketball coach had been endlessly frustrated by me. Alone I could shoot hoops till the cows came

home, but put nine other people on a court with me and I got sullen and stupid and couldn’t hold on to

the ball.

So fencing, which I’d started shortly after wrassling a banshee to ground, was the first sport I’d ever

really pursued. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, even with sweat leaking into my eyes and my

own hot breath washing back at me against the mask.

Metal clashed against metal, a twitchy vibration running up my arm, even through the heavy canvas

gloves. Block and retreat, block and retreat, lunge and attack. I blinked sweat away as I extended.

My epee scraped along the other blade and slid home, thumping my opponent solidly in the ribs. For a

moment we both froze, equally startled. Then through the mesh of her mask, I saw her grin as she came

back to a full stand. She pulled the mask off, tucking short damp hair behind her ears, and saluted me. I

straightened and yanked my mask off. My shadow splashed against her white tunic, my hair a hedgehog

of sagging points.

“We might just make a fencer of you yet, Joanne.”

Panting and grinning, I tucked my mask under my arm, transferring my epee to my left hand, and offered

Phoebe my right. She grabbed it in an old-fashioned warrior’s handshake, wrapping her fingers around

my forearm, the way she always shook hands. She was small and compact, like a Porsche, and had

muscles where I didn’t even have body parts. Most days she made me feel large and lumbering and

slow.

Of course, on a bad day, Godzilla could make me feel large and lumbering and slow.

“That’s my plan.” I shook Phoebe’s hand solidly before falling back a step, rubbing a thumb over my

sternum. Phoebe’s dark eyebrows knitted. It was very nearly her dark eyebrow knitting, but I was afraid

to even think that too loudly, for fear she’d hear me and beat the tar out of me.

“Why do you do that?”

My hand dropped as if weighed down by a concrete brick, and I twisted it behind my back guiltily. “Do

what?”

“You’re the worst liar I’ve ever met. Every time somebody makes a point against you and every time a

match ends, you rub your breastbone. How come?”

“I had…surgery a while ago.” I took a too-deep breath, trying to will away the sensation of not getting

enough air. “I guess it still bothers me.”

“Heart surgery?”

“More like lung.”

Phoebe’s eyebrows went up. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.” I hadn’t snitched since January, when a steely eyed cab driver refused to give me a smoke

because his wife of forty-eight years had died of emphysema. I could learn from other people’s lessons.

That was what I told myself.

Quitting smoking had nothing to do with the crushing sensation of being unable to breathe from having a

sword stuffed through my lung. I told myself that, too. It turned out myself was a skeptical bitch and

didn’t believe me. Even so, I tried hard not to think about the truth: that the sword had been wielded by a

Celtic god, and in a shadowland between life and death, a Native American trickster called Coyote

offered me a choice between the two.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I chose a life and became a shaman. I felt that coil of

energy bubble up again inside of me, and squelched it. There was no one around who needed healing

right now. Nobody but myself, anyway, and I didn’t deny I had a lot of self-healing to do.

Actually, I denied it all the time. Which was part of why I was learning to fence, instead of sitting

somewhere quietly, as Coyote would like me to, focusing on my inner turmoil and getting it all sorted out.

Inner turmoil could wait, as far as I was concerned.

External turmoil seemed inclined to stick me with pointy things or otherwise try to do me in. Under those

circumstances, I figured learning how to parry was a much better use of my time than fussing over things

I’d rather let lie.

I rolled my shoulders, pushing the thoughts away. “It wasn’t cancer. Sort of more hereditary. It’s fine

now. Just kind of bugs me sometimes. I think it’s mostly mental.” I knew it was mostly mental. I didn’t

even have a scar.

“Is that why you started coming here?” she wondered. “A lot of people find martial arts to be a great

way to center themselves after they’ve had a life-changing experience.”

I ducked my chin and let out a breathy laugh. “Something like that, yeah. Plus I could use the exercise.”

“I thought cops were supposed to be in good shape.”

I looked back up through my eyebrows. “Don’t know many cops, do you? Speaking of which, I better

hit the shower and get to work. Thanks for the lesson, Phoebe.” I headed for the locker room, Phoebe

taking the lead and holding the door for me.

“My pleasure. I like beating up on the big girls. Makes me feel all studly.”

“You are all studly. And you’re not that small.”

“Compared to you I am.”

“Compared to me Arnold Schwartznegger is small.”

Phoebe laughed out loud. “You‘re not that big.”

I grinned as I struggled out of my tunic. I was pretty sure it had a secret mission in life to strangle me as I

undressed. “Nah. I lack the shoulders.” Phoebe turned the showers on, drowning out anything else I

might say. Once I got loose of the tunic, I followed her, standing to the side while the pins-and-needles

water pelted from cold to too hot.

The beauty of university showers is that they never run out of hot water. I stood there, leaning my

forehead against the wall, until my skin turned boiled lobster-red. Phoebe turned her shower off with a

squeak of faucets, and in the fashion of community showers everywhere, the water in mine got

significantly hotter. Turning it down didn’t help. That was the flip side of never running out of hot water:

the only way I’d ever found to keep a public shower from being too hot was to run more than one at a

time. “Ow. Turn that back on, would you?”

“Sorry.” The faucets squeaked again and after a few seconds my shower faded back to a bearable heat.

Water lapped over the top of my feet, and I pushed away from the wall with another groan, listening to

Phoebe slosh to the drying area.

“Thanks.” I reached for my shampoo, scrubbing a palmful through my hair. If I weren’t so fond of

standing mindlessly in the hot water, it would only take me about thirty seconds to shower. A minute and

a half if I used conditioner, which my hair was too short to bother with except occasionally. But I wasn’t

quite late for work, so I luxuriated in the heat. Water crept up around my ankles. “I think the drain’s

plugged.”

“Check,” Phoebe said. “I’ll call maintenance if it is.”

“Okay.” I rinsed my hair, turned the water off, and wrapped a towel around myself as I slogged through

the shower room in search of the drain.

Two stalls down from me, a naked black girl, her skin ashy blue with death, lay with her hip fitted neatly

in the hollow of the drain.

CHAPTER TWO

“Phoebe,” I said, amazed at how calm my voice was, “call the cops.”

“You are the cops,” she said. I could hear the grin in her voice in the suddenly echoing shower room.

“Phoebe!”

“Yow, okay, what’s wrong?” Phoebe didn’t call the cops. She splashed back through the showers,

rewetting her feet. “What’s wrong, Joanne?”

“There’s a dead girl in the shower,” I said, still very calmly. “Please go call the police, Phoebe.”

“There’s what?!” Phoebe looked around the edge of the shower stall and went pale under her olive skin.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, we have to do something!” She surged forward. I grabbed her shoulder and

pulled her back.

“We have to call the cops,” I repeated. “She’s dead, Phoebe. Look at her color. There’s nothing we can

do. We shouldn’t touch her.”

“You are the cops!”

“I’m also the one who found the body. Again,” I added in a mutter.

“Again?” Phoebe’s voice rose and broke.

“I found a murder victim in January,” I said. My boss was going find a way to blame me for this. He was

convinced I lived out each day with the deliberate intention to piss him off. Some days he was right, but it

hadn’t been in my game plan today. I didn’t get up at five in the morning to volunteer at protests with

irritating my boss in mind. Rather the opposite, in fact, not that I’d admit that out loud.

I took Phoebe’s other shoulder and steered her away from the body. “Shouldn’t we at least check to

make sure she’s dead?” she demanded, voice rising. I exhaled, nice and slow.

“She’s dead, Phoebe. Look, okay.” I let her go and waded to the dead girl. She looked like she’d been

posed for a photograph, her back against the tile wall, her bottom leg and arm stretched out long and her

top leg folded gracefully forward into the water, bent at the knee. Her head was thrown back, slender

neck exposed, as if she were laughing without inhibition. The edge of the drain was just barely visible

beneath her hip, all of the drain holes covered. I wondered who would take that kind of picture, then

remembered that if nobody else would, the police photographer would have to do the job.

“Christ.” I crouched and pressed two fingers against her neck, below her jaw. She was on the cool side

of lukewarm, the skin pliant, and had no pulse. I tried a second time, then a third, shifting my fingers

slightly. “She’s dead, Phoebe.” I stood up again, wiping my fingers against my towel. I’d never touched a

dead body before. It hadn’t felt like I expected it to. “Go call the cops.”

“What’re you going to do?” Phoebe’s voice trembled as she backed away, water splashing around her

ankles.

“I’m going to go get dressed.” I turned to follow Phoebe, who continued to back up, still staring at the

dead girl. “Watch where you’re go—”

I lunged, too late. Phoebe’s heel caught the curb of the shower area and her feet slid out from under her,

kicking water into my eyes. My fingers closed on empty air as she shrieked and crashed to the tile floor

with a painful crack. My own feet slid on the wet tiles and for a moment I thought I’d dive after her. My

arms swung wildly and I caught my balance, heaving myself upright with a gasp. Phoebe, her mouth a

tight line, stared up at me, then let out an uncharacteristic soprano giggle. I stepped over the curb and

offered her a hand up.

“I take it you’re okay, then.”

Phoebe wrapped her fingers around mine in a strong grip and I hauled her to her feet. “No, I’m not

okay.” Her voice squeaked as high as her giggle had. “We just found a dead girl in the showers and I

think my butt’s going to be bruised for a month.” She giggled again, then set her mouth and pressed her

eyes shut, inhaling deeply through her nostrils. “I’m okay,” she said after several seconds. I nodded.

“I’ll call the cops. You get dressed.”

“Okay.” She gave me a pathetically grateful look that I didn’t like from my fencing instructor, and left me

alone with the dead girl. I stole a glance at her over my shoulder, feeling power flutter behind my

breastbone, urging me to use it.

I could think of one good reason to disregard it. Well, one reason. Good was debatable, especially since

even in my own head I heard it as a whine: but I don’t want to be a shaman!

Except, possibly, when it meant I could save little girls from heatstroke. I sighed and went back to the

dead woman, kneeling in the cooling water. The bottom edge of my towel drooped into it, sucking up as

much as it could, and I debated running to put some clothes on before doing anything else. Only then I’d

be soaking up water with my uniform, which, unlike a towel, wasn’t designed for it. It wasn’t like the

police would arrive in the thirty seconds I intended to be out.

“Arright,” I muttered. “One healthy little girl for one esoteric death investigation. I guess that’s fair.” Five

more minutes before calling the cops wasn’t going to make a difference to the body. “I’m here,” I said

out loud, “if you want to talk.”

There was a place between life and death that spirits could linger in, a place that, with all due apology to

Mr. King, I’d started calling the Dead Zone. If I could catch this young woman’s spirit there, I might just

be able to learn something useful, like how she’d ended up filling a drain at the University of

Washington’s gym locker rooms.

Reaching that world was easier with a drum, but somewhere in the shower room a shower leaked, a

steady drip-drop of water hitting water. It was a pattern, and that was good enough. I closed my eyes.

The sound amplified, deliberate poiks bouncing off the bones behind my ears. I lost count of the drops,

and rose out of my body.

I slid through the ceiling, skimming through pipes and wires and insulation that felt laced with asbestos.

The sky above the university was so bright it made my eyes ache, and for a few seconds I turned my

attention away from the journey for the sake of the view.

The world glittered. White and blue lights zoomed along in tangled blurs, each of them a point of life.

Trees glowed in the full bloom of summer and I could see the thin silver rivers of sap running through

them to put out leaves that glimmered with hope and brightness. Concrete and asphalt lay like heavy thick

blots of paint smeared over the brilliance, but at midmorning, with people out and doing things, those

smears of paint had endless sparks of life along them, defying what seemed, at this level, to be a

deliberate attempt to wipe out the natural order of the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Not only do I like my indoor plumbing and my Mustang that runs roughshod over

those dark blots of freeway, but I also think that a dam built by man is just as natural as a dam built by a

beaver. We’re a part of this world, and there’s nothing unnatural about how we choose to modify it. If it

weren’t in our nature, we wouldn’t be doing it.

Still, looking down from the astral plane, the way we lay out streets and modify the world to suit

ourselves looks pretty awkward compared to the blur of life all around it. Humans like right angles and

straight lines. There weren’t many of those outside of man-made objects.

But even overlooking humanity’s additions to the lay of the land, there was something subtly wrong with

the patterns of light and life. I’d noticed it months earlier—the last time I’d gone tripping into the astral

plane—and it seemed worse now. There was a sick hue to the neon brilliance, like the heat had drawn

color out, mixed it with a little death, and injected it back into the world without much regard to where

it’d come from. It made my nerves jangle, discomfort pulling at the hairs on my arms until I felt like a

porcupine, hunched up and defensive.

The longer I hung there, studying the world through second sight, the worse the colors got. Impatient

scarlet bled into the silver lines of life, black tar gooing the edges of what had been pure and blue once

upon a time. I had no sense of where the source of the problem was. It felt like it was all around me, and

the more I concentrated on it the harder it got to breathe. I finally jerked in a deep breath, clearing a

cough from my lungs, and shook off the need to figure out what was wrong. I suspected it had more to

do with procrastination than anything else. I’d been warned more than once that my own perceptions

could get me in trouble, in the astral plane.

It wasn’t that I was scared. Just wary. Apprehensive. Cautious. Uneasy. And that exhausted my mental

thesaurus, which meant I had to stop farting around and go do what I meant to do.

Coyote had told me that traveling in the astral plane wasn’t a matter of distance, but a matter of will. It

seemed like distance to me, always different, always changing. Seattle receded below me, darkening and

broadening until the Pacific seaboard seemed to be just one burnt-out city, the sparks of life that colored

it faded and scattered with distance. Skyscrapers that seemed to defy physics with their height leaped up

around me and crumbled again, and the stars were closer.

A tunnel, blocked off by a wall of stone, appeared to my left, and I felt him waiting there. Him,

it—whatever. Something was there, and it tugged at me. It laughed every time I forged past it, and every

time I did I felt one more spiderweb-thin line binding me to it. The first time I traveled the astral plane I

almost went to him, compelled by curiosity and a sense of malicious lightness. The second time, the stone

wall was in place, my dead mother’s way of protecting me from whatever lay down that tunnel. This time

I knew he was there, and it was easier to ignore him.

Someday I’m not going to be able to.

The tunnel whipped away into a wash of light, the sky bleeding gold and green around me. New

skyscrapers blossomed into tall trees, filled with the light of life, but here that light was orange and red,

not the blues and white I was used to. I grinned wildly and lifted my hands, encouraging the speed that

the world swum around me with.

Under the gold sky, palaces built like where the Taj Mahal’s wealthy older sister grew up. A tiger paced

by, sabre-toothed and feral, watching me like I might be a tasty snack. A man’s laughter broke over me,

and the world spun into midnight, the sky rich and blue and star-studded. I relaxed, letting myself enjoy

the changing vistas, and in the instant I did, the shifting worlds slammed to a stop.

A red man stood in front of me. Genuinely red: the color of bricks, or dark smoked salmon. His eyes

Murphy, C E --- Thunderbird Falls (v1)

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