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avalanche struck, and that it had passed behind us offering no more than a thrill. Mandy nodded silent
agreement to my version of events, and we both agreed we'd been very lucky when the rangers said, repeatedly,
how fortunate we'd been. One of their paramedics even looked us over before they were willing to send us back
to Seattle while daylight lasted.
My phone, buried deep in a pocket, buzzed a voice mail warning as we came back into full satellite coverage.
Mandy glanced at me as I dug the phone out. "If you answer that, is it going to throw you back into something
like what just happened?"
"There probably won't be an avalanche involved, but& " The missed call was from Billy. "But yeah, it's likely."
"Then do me a favor," Mandy said. "Don't answer until you're out of my car."
I closed my phone and leaned my head against the window, feeling the rift between myself and the rest of the
world all the way back into town.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Wednesday, December 21, 4:55 P.M.
I didn't even bother to listen to Billy's message, just went straight to the station after returning Mandy's hiking
gear to her. Billy wasn't technically at work today, not any more than I was, but if something new and horrible
had gone wrong, he'd almost certainly be at the precinct building to tell me.
I ran into Ray just inside the doors, more literally than I would've liked. He stayed planted where he was, like a
fireplug, and I bounced off with a grunt. "Ow. What do you do, eat hubcaps for breakfast?"
"Plate mail," he said unexpectedly, and looked pleased when I laughed. "That woman yesterday, she's okay.
Even agreed to go into a sponsored dry-out program. Guess getting her balls busted with a busted bottle showed
her the light."
I spent way too long working out the busted bottle balls, then shook myself all over and smiled. "That's great.
Sorry for siccing Corvallis on you. How'd that go? I swear, that woman's a betta." I was doing it again,
comparing her to vicious fish. At least bettas, like Corvallis, were pretty. Cold and scaly, but pretty.
Surprise dug deep wrinkles into Ray's forehead. "You think? I always liked her on the television, the way she
doesn't take crap from anybody. A real reporter, not like most of 'em on TV now. Anyway, it went great. We're
going out to dinner tonight."
I scraped my jaw off the floor soon enough to stutter, "Have fun," before he stumped out the doors, and stood
there in the blast of cold air marveling at philosophies undreamed of.
A cynical worm crept into my thoughts, wondering if Corvallis had only agreed to go out with Ray as a way to
gain inside information into the department and, by proxy, me. Then the worm began eating its own tail until it
disappeared into a plonk of nothingness inside my brain, because Ray could most certainly handle himself. I
didn't envy Corvallis trying to pump him for information he didn't plan to share.
That brought an unfortunately suggestive image to mind. I clutched my head, trying to shake it both head and
image loose, and went upstairs to see if Billy was around, or if anybody had details on what else had gone
wrong.
To my dismay, Billy was there, which meant something had gone wrong. I sat on the edge of his desk and
waited silently for him to look up, but I wasn't expecting the haggardness in his face when he did. I slid off the
edge of the desk into the chair beside it, ice forming inside my stomach. "What happened?"
"What happened? My partner disappeared all day and I've been sitting here with my gut turning to acid waiting
for her to get back. And to keep my mind off it I've been going over the files of a dozen people eaten alive over
the past six weeks, and coming up dry. What the hell do you mean, what happened?"
I slumped in the chair, relief turning to a burp that I inexpertly hid behind one hand. "Sorry. From your
expression I thought maybe somebody else was dead. Our gambit kind of worked. We flushed the thing out, but
it started an avalanche and got away." I related the relevant parts of the day, ending with, "I don't know what it
was, Billy. I know what it wasn't. It's not a god. It didn't have that kind of power. It's not even a sorcerer, but it's
not exactly human, either."
Billy was taking notes and muttering, "Not quite human, eats human flesh, invisible but physical spirit
form& you do that."
"What?" I cranked my jaw up for the second time, a guilty blush burning my ears. "Oh. God. Yeah, I guess I
do." There was no guess about it. Very early on I'd learned to bend light around myself to make a mirage, to
suggest I wasn't there. It was a matter of changing perceptions, which was one of the basic precepts of
shamanism, and nobody had to know I'd gotten the idea from a comic book.
I'd looked at my reflection once when I'd pulled that cloak around me, and I had the sudden disturbing
realization that Billy was right: what my opponent had done that morning had looked a lot like my trick. "It's
another shaman?"
That was disturbing on a lot of levels. One, and rather obviously, shamans weren't supposed to go around eating
people, except maybe symbolically. A shaman who went bad wasn't a shaman anymore, but a sorcerer, at least
in a lot of Native American myths. But my admittedly limited experience with sorcery had a different feel to it:
seductive, rational, sacrificial& .
I was starting to notice a lot of nasty things came across as seductive. Not blatantly so no women in red
dresses, no rain of wealth from the sky but seductive nonetheless. Good didn't seem to be quite so charming,
which I kind of thought was a mistake on the home team's part. Enlightenment and altruism weren't actually that
common, as far as I could tell. People tended to want things, and evil tended to offer those things.
"Is that even possible?"
I rattled myself out of considering good's ineptitudes and frowned at Billy. "I don't know. I mean, it wouldn't be [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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