LITMIR.BIZ

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      “She’s pretty little, and you’re pretty strong,” Suzy said thoughtfully. “I bet you could throw her quite a ways, if you got a good grip. Like the back of her pants and her collar, maybe.”

      She blinked at us with such innocence in her big green eyes that we both laughed. She brightened, making me realize she’d been trying hard to break the tension, just as Morrison had done for her. Poor kid shouldn’t have to be the grown-up. I tugged a lock of her pale hair in thanks, then lifted my eyebrows. “You’re probably right, at that. I could probably even chuck you a fair distance.”

      A spark of teen wickedness sparked in her eyes. “Just try.”

      I lunged for her and she shrieked, fleeing down the hall. I gave a half-voiced roar and chased her a few yards while Morrison said, “Walker,” in despair. I looked back at him with a grin and he presented me with a weak version of the Almighty Morrison glare that used to have me quaking in my shoes. Even that was interrupted by his phone ringing, so he turned away and I went back to chasing Suzy down the hall until a nurse gave us both scathing looks. We scurried back toward Morrison, both of us trying not to giggle.

      Morrison’s expression shut down my laughter. Suzy put her arms around my ribs like a much younger kid and huddled under my arm, both of us listening to Morrison’s grunted responses and a handful of short sentences before he snapped his phone shut and met my eyes.

      “There’s just been a mass murder at Thunderbird Falls.”

       Chapter Six

      Saturday, April 1, 2:02 p.m.

      If Suzy hadn’t been holding on, I’d have fallen. As it was, the world didn’t gray out: it went black. Not a dizzy sort of black. Dark magic sort of black, swirling up to eat at the auras I was half aware of seeing. Snipping away at Morrison’s purples and blues, drinking greedily at Suzy’s blaze green. I shouted, a hoarse hurtful sound.

      Black spilled away under a rush of my own magic, gunmetal pushing back at the darkness. I swung around, out of Suzy’s grip, until I faced Lake Washington. Until I faced Thunderbird Falls, which had been a bastion of white magic in Seattle. I could always See the falls. Power shot upward from it, white magic full of faint rainbow hues that eventually crashed against the clear blue sky or thick gray clouds, and spilled back down over Seattle, bringing a bit more pleasantry and generosity than had been there before. That was a gift of the good-hearted and good-willed New-Agey types in Seattle, by the covens and the other folk who had been drawn to the falls. Their difficult birth had rearranged Seattle’s landscape, but it had been turned into a good thing.

      And now it was dying.

      Ichor oozed upward through the column of white magic, its stain growing exponentially. The faint rainbow tints tainted to oil slicks instead, white shading to shades of gray. I could See perfectly well that it still reached for the sky, but it felt heavier, like the darkness was dragging it down. Like it would be happier buried in the earth, though I didn’t know if that was true. It seemed to me that if the white magic could rain cheer and contentment down on people, that black magic raining doom and misery would be right up the Master’s alley.

      On the other hand, the vicious truth was I didn’t yet know the Master’s endgame. I was good at self-aggrandizing, but I seriously doubted his entire goal was to obliterate me and my friends. It was definitely on his to-do list, because we were a constant pain in his ass, but I didn’t think he would call it done and dusted the moment I was a smear on the pavement. In fact, if I thought that, I might’ve even been willing to become that smear just to offer everybody else a get-out-of-jail-free card. But no, it wasn’t going to work that way, and while I was acknowledging that, my feet headed toward the elevators at top speed.

      I didn’t get twenty feet before I lurched to a halt again. Morrison just about ran me down. “Walker?”

      “I can’t go without Annie.” My legs trembled with indecision. “I mean, I really—if I can only keep Suzy safe by keeping her with me, and Annie’s still got the sickness in her—”

      “Walker, the hospital is not going to let you walk out of here with a seventy-six-year-old woman who has just awoken from a coma after mysteriously returning from death.”

      “I could make us invisible.”

      “You can do that?” Suzy’s voice popped into the shrill register only attainable by a teenage girl in full-on thrill mode. “Can I do that?”

      I spared half a second to imagine what I would have done as a teen with the ability to turn invisible and said, “No,” without really caring if it was true. Suzy drooped and fell back a couple steps as I twitched, trying to decide which way to go. “I can’t go without Annie, Morrison. I can’t leave her here without protection. Or if it comes to it, I can’t leave Gary here without protection from her. I have to get her. Look, just—just go without me, okay? Go, and I’ll try to get the doctors to understand—”

      “Walker, I can’t go without you!”

      That was so preposterous I stopped trembling and gaped at Morrison. He passed a hand through his silver hair. “A mass murder at Thunderbird Falls is your department, Walker. Whatever’s happened there, you’re going to need to see it. I can’t give you what you’re going to need in a written report. You have to see it. To See it. The sooner, the better, right? Because magic doesn’t linger and you can’t track it.”

      I stared at him a long moment or two, wondering when he’d become such an expert on magic. Over the past fifteen months, obviously, but it still jarred me to hear him say such things outright. “Yes. Yeah. You’re right. I just—”

      A door down the hall behind us banged open. Morrison and I both flinched, reaching for duty weapons neither of us were carrying. A few seconds later, Suzy, now wearing a light blue T-shirt, sailed past, balanced on the back lower frame of a wheelchair occupied by a small figure in a gray hoodie. “Taking Grandma for her walk!” she caroled as they swept past the nurses’ station two dozen feet ahead of us. “We’ll be back in twenty minutes!”

      “Get off that wheelchair, young lady!” somebody bellowed after her. Suzy jumped off the frame and ushered the wheelchair into an open elevator before anybody had time to stop her. The doors slid closed, leaving me and Morrison goggling down the hall.

      Gary, shrugging on a Windbreaker and carrying my drum in one hand, lumbered up to us. “I hear we got places to be, doll.” He sounded more like his old self. I stared at him without much comprehension, too, until he swung a finger, lassolike, and pointed it toward the elevators. “That girl’s gonna be out the front door in three minutes, Jo. We goin’, or what?”

      “Yes! Yeah! We’re going. We’re...going.” I jolted into motion with the first word, and tried not to let my feet slow down as I stuttered toward the end of the sentence. Morrison, marching alongside me, was as apoplectic as he ever had been when facing down the curves my life threw at him. Gary, however, had a grin that looked fit to beat the devil.

      Since that was kind of what we had to do, it gave me heart. The three of us got in another elevator and followed Suzy out of the hospital. Nobody gave any of us a second look: there were plenty of other patients in wheelchairs or on crutches, making slow rounds over the hospital grounds. Morrison broke into a jog, gaining ground on us before disappearing into the parking lot. When we were as far away from the hospital front doors as we could get, he appeared in our rented car.

      Annie Muldoon clambered inside the car and threw her hood back to reveal a delighted smile. “I always wanted to ride in a getaway car! I apologize, Captain Morrison, for putting you in this awkward position. I’m grateful for your assistance.”

      Suzy flung herself into the far passenger’s side of the car, catching Morrison’s look of bewilderment. “I explained everything to Grandma, I mean, Mrs. Muldoon, on the way out.”

      Morrison breathed, “I sincerely doubt that,” and Suzy huffed in exasperation.

      “I

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