Alice sank back into leather upholstery, eyes shut, allowing herself to relax and turn all systems off. She'd been running flat-out for eighteen, twenty hours, bad wreck up on the Federal Road, ambulance EMT and then drafted into a double shift as ER and ICU nurse when the hospital got caught short.
After that, she'd crawled back here to the House to find Caroline waiting with a very twitchy Jane. She felt wiped, muscles and joints ached from her scalp down to her toe-tips, and the only reason she could lie back in the chair and ignore that damned hole in her shoulder blade was that the rest of her body hurt just about as bad.
And yet she felt peace. She'd won.
Maybe I haven't stopped that killer, but at least sometimes things go right. Hell of a mess, six people serious to critical, one still in ICU, but they're all going to make it. Didn't even have to call the air ambulance and ship anyone off to Naskeag General.
And Jane White's going to be okay, too. All that girl needs is a place she can call "home." Someplace she can feel safe. Damn sure the House can provide that. It even seems willing to let Gary sleep here to give her something warm to cling to when she wakes up scared in the middle of the night, a damned male under the sacred roof.
Alice thought she'd earned a break. Hell, she'd even brought Caroline up to date on Morgans and Pratts and that frigging brujo.
Erik Satie, she decided, piano, the Gymnopédie they used as a movie theme for To Kill a Mockingbird, plus some Nocturnes and stuff. It'd be a welcome change from all those damned requiems, the hellfire and damnation of Verdi or Mozart, the Teutonic gloom of the Brahms. Brightness, serenity, quiet acceptance, release, those were the ticket.
Atropos padded across the parlor rug and levitated into the chair beside her, climbed up on her lap, added purring warmth to the relaxation. Lead by example. Cats know how to relax.
Alice rubbed the cat's ears. "Old Ecclesiasticus had it right, girl. 'To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.' Always got to remember that."
She went on in her head, the relevant passage, 'A time to kill and a time to heal.' Healing pays off better, in the long run. Even if sometimes you have to kill in order to heal.
Alice keyed the remote and emulated the cat, body sinking limp into the chair as her brain sank into the music. Closed her eyes. Let music lift her, carry her, calm her, the instrument, the interpretation, the overriding genius . . .
She opened her eyes, vaguely conscious that Atropos had stirred and hopped down. The stereo had played through its hour of music into silence. Kate leaned against the door jamb to the kitchen, the cat snuggled in the crook of one strong arm, looking massive and patient and guarding like some ancient goddess, a quiet on her face and the set of her shoulders that matched what Alice felt in her soul.
"You are so beautiful when you're sleeping."
"Kate . . ."
"I'm sorry. Pig-headed stiff-necked pride seems to run in the family. You didn't know. No reason I should have thought you knew. Just, to scratch so hard for so little for so long and find out I'd been rich all along . . ."
Alice shook her head and blinked, still stupid with sleep. Kate was back. Kate . . . "Aunt Jean may have known. She talked with your grandmother a lot. But she got so forgetful the last few years, even forgot that she forgot things. And she'd never have written something like that down. It wasn't our secret, to risk putting it down on paper."
She struggled to her feet, woozy, stiff, her balance still lost somewhere in the hours of crisis and then the soft spring rain of Satie's music. She fell into a hug, a warm gentle supporting thing, not fierce or passionate on either side, both conscious of slow-healing back and shoulder and hip, more a thing of long years of friendship than the few months of sex. Kate was back.
A time to heal.
The House had let Kate in and hadn't wakened Alice. The House knew Kate belonged here. So did Atropos, warm fur twining between their ankles and purring madly. She had her favorite human back.
Alice blinked her eyes, still pulling her head together. She must have been really zonked, or in the middle of a dream she couldn't remember. She didn't usually wake up this dumb.
"What's wrong?"
Kate drew into herself, closing down her face. "That obvious, eh? Must look like shit, the big dumb ox only comes back because she needs your help. Never had any social skills."
Alice took a deep breath and sighed it out. "Don't hand me that crap, woman. I've known you for nearly forty years. Knowing you, you'd have been here sooner if you didn't have a problem. It's that 'pig-headed, stiff-necked' bit. You're so used to fighting your own battles, you don't look for friends even when you need them. Now spit it out."
Kate let go the hug and slumped into one of the Eames chairs, wincing. Atropos joined her, settling delicately against that injured hip and offering her body as a self-adjusting heating pad with built-in vibro-massage.
"I don't know what it is. Jeff's missing. We've been working on the roof over to Lew's, when the weather gives us half a chance. I left him there this morning, came back this afternoon and he was gone. His bike was still there, tools still there, he left a shingle hanging loose on the roof with only one nail in. Not like him at all."
Alice sank into the other chair. Problem, all right, big problem. She wondered if Kate ever let herself know how much that boy meant to her.
"And?"
Kate grimaced. "There's always an 'and', isn't there? He'd scratched something in the roofing felt, could have been a name. 'Jackie.' He'd left his hammer lying right by it as a flag, there on the roof." She stared away into a corner, tense, chewing on her lip. "There's something I never told you. I keep seeing Jackie around town, up on the ridge and then over to Lew's. Vanished every time. Ghost. Didn't believe it myself, didn't want you thinking I was nuts."
Oh, shit.
Alice chose her words with care, protecting other people's secrets. And delicate — Kate could take this in two very different directions. "Not nuts. I heard, third hand, fourth hand, someone who looked like Jackie had been seen up in Naskeag Falls. I didn't tell you because I didn't know. This was not a reliable witness, and it's too important for guesses and maybes."
Kate sat there, studying the parlor corner. She settled her hand on the cat. Amazing, how gentle those big scarred hands could be. Or how violent. She finally looked at Alice.
"You've got something else, as well."
Spit it out yourself, Alice Haskell. She'll find out sooner or later.
"The word was, this big blonde girl with some really ugly scars on her head was hanging around the alleys up there last summer. Hanging around with that girl you found dead up at the stone circle."
Kate's hand paused in petting Atropos, squeezed into a fist, and her knuckles turned white. "Not nuts." Anguish washed over her face. "God in heaven, Alice, what did I give birth to?"
Atropos stood up on Kate's thigh, purring strong enough that Alice could hear, rubbing her head against that fist and then licking it with delicate strokes of her pink tongue. Damned cat must have a doctorate in psychotherapy tucked away somewhere.
Or was it the House? Help me with this. "That wasn't Jackie, Kate. Jackie is dead. You felt her die. But we used too much Power. The brujo took it and rode it and found a body nearby that hadn't had time to die yet. Brain dead, body still alive, heart and lungs and all still pumping. He took it and did some magical transplant surgery while we burned his old body into ash. He's old, Kate, he'd done this before."
Kate looked sick, but her fist relaxed back onto fur. Alice felt power rising from the Spring and flowing out of the timbers of the House, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up, felt generations of Haskell Witches gathering in the shadows and corners of the parlor and giving her words strength.
She saw Jackie's body sprawled face down in the gravel by Tom Pratt's carriage house, half her skull blown away, saw first one hand jerk and then the other, one knee shift, one fist clench just like Kate's fist had clenched. The ruined corpse pushed up and sat up and staggered to its feet like a puppet on strings, still bleeding, torn brains still glistening in the afternoon sun, and went hunting. Hunting the battlefield and burning buildings of the Pratts' compound, hunting the lost souls and shattered bodies of that smuggler's boat. She felt the Power flowing to it out of all that death and dying.
She didn't want to know what else it was hunting.
Kate's teeth were chattering, face white, eyes wide and unfocused as if they saw exactly what Alice had seen.
Shock.
The EMT took charge again, to hell with exhaustion. She forced Kate out of the chair like a massive lump of putty to lie down on the parlor rug, lifted her feet to the chair to force blood to her brain, efforts moving that heavy body that left Alice gasping. She draped Aunt Jean's knitted Afghan across Kate's chest and staggered out to the kitchen for hot water and the coffee maker, instant coffee as a stopgap while the real drug brewed.
By the time she returned with a mug hot in her hands, Kate had struggled back into the chair and looked as if she might live. Damned tough woman. Damned stubborn woman.
But she did take the coffee. With her left hand. Alice glanced at Kate's right hand lying in her lap, blinked, blinked again, and stared. Glowing green, orange, silver tarnished blue-black but still somehow glowing with life and power, a rowan sprig lay in Kate's right hand. Atropos stared at the glittering thing, too, sitting up in her Bast-statue pose and purring.
Grannie Rowley's brooch. It couldn't be anything else. It burned bright in Alice's memory, years ago when she and Kate had been kids together, visiting the strange old woman living up on the ridge. Even before Alice started training with Aunt Jean, Grannie Rowley had been different. Fascinating. Strong. A sense of belonging in the land around them. And then she'd died, stroke or heart attack one night while Kate was staying with her.
"You found it."
"Mom had it. Twenty goddamn years, she had it. Kept it locked up in the parlor closet. Part of the stuff the lawyer sent to me. Wish me a happy eighteenth birthday."
"Oh, Christ . . . You okay?"
"Mad. Sad. Glad. Feels good to hold it. Same kind of feeling the House gives, strength, protection, connection. I don't think it's just jewelry. I remember Grannie's voice when I hold it."
And then she looked up, strain still lining her face. "It can't tell me where Jeff went. Grannie never met him. Nobody has touched it since before he was born."
What is the House doing? What is the Spring doing? Or is this the other magic, the magic of the stones?
Stones. "Kate, something you told me, back in June. You were out on Ayers Island. You saw me, you saw the Morgan girls, visions of trouble when you touched stone. That's why you came across and saved my butt. Visions through the stone, granite talking to granite. I wonder if our Seeing stone would show you Jeff."
She knew Kate's face, more than thirty years of reading expressions and no-expressions. Kate was still fighting her war between magic and that hardliner Congregationalist God the Pilgrims transplanted here, stoning witches, hanging witches, drowning witches, the whole Salem legacy that had stomped into her life after her mother remarried. Kate did not want to use that chunk of tourmaline. She'd gained just enough belief to be afraid of believing.
"I can't do it, Kate. I'm too tired." And her body agreed. That short nap almost seemed to have drained her rather than refreshed. She'd pushed herself too far. But people would live, who probably would have died . . . "And tomorrow might be too late. Full moon tonight."
Kate looked as if she didn't understand what that last bit meant. Or didn't want to understand. Alice felt too tired to explain. "Just try holding that damned rock and looking into it, will you? You know Jeff. If anyone can find him, it'd be you."
Kate grunted to her feet. She knew where the crystal lived. Alice didn't have to find the energy to show her. And then Kate was back, big sea-green chunk of tourmaline looking smaller in her hands, far-away expression already taking over her face. Stone magic, she didn't need the ritual drug Haskell Witches had brewed down through the ages to set their souls free to wander after visions.
She mumbled words that weren't English in a voice that wasn't Kate's, raising the hair on Alice's forearms, Kate had never learned Latin or Welsh and this sounded like a mix of both. She still held the brooch in one hand, touching stone to stone, Alice felt sudden fear like a knife cutting the breath from her lungs, fear of mixing magics that had been apart for centuries. Then the voice that wasn't Kate's switched to English in mid sentence. "Moonrise. Strongest at moonrise, full moon, bring the blood. Feed the stones. Wake the stones."
And then she screamed, screamed something in Spanish too fast for Alice to catch but she recognized a word or two and her heart froze for a second before beating again. She jerked herself out of the chair and snatched the stone away and the stream of words and pain cut off like she'd switched off the radio. Kate stood there in the middle of the parlor, swaying, blinking.
"What the fuck?" Caroline braced her body in the open door to the sewing room, the Morgan girls' bedroom, worn bathrobe draped over underwear, one hand propping herself up and the other rubbing bleary eyes. She'd been sleeping, still searching for the soul she'd left somewhere in transit between Arizona and Maine. Jet lag.
"You catch any of that Spanish?"
Caroline blinked and rubbed her eyes again. "Spanish? Pain. Fire. Hatred. Heard some other stuff, not Spanish, think it might have been Quechua. Olivia Martinez does fieldwork in the Andes, that sounded like some of her tapes. What the hell's going on here?"
"Goddamn brujo's going on, that's what. I screwed up. Now that Peruvian bastard's got Jeff Burns and plans another sacrifice up at Kate's stone circle. And tonight's the full moon."
Alice saw that run through Caroline's brain, saw her wince as the neurons woke up and caught implications. She shook her head like a horse bedeviled by flies, trying to clear the inner fog.
"Kate and I have to get up there before moonrise, stop the bastard before he can draw on some serious Power. And he's wearing Jackie's body. Blood tie, that's why Kate was reading him."
Caroline shook her head again, awake at last. "You ain't going nowhere, old witch. You couldn't rassle that kitten and come out on top. I saw you when you came off shift. You look worse now."
They migrated to the kitchen, all three women drawn by the seductive aroma of fresh coffee. But Caroline wouldn't let Alice have a mug.
"No way. You're headed for bed."
"You want Kate to face that alone?"
"I'll watch her back. It'll have to be her magic up there, anyway. Not much you could do with it." She paused, taking sips of scalding coffee. Her eyes widened. "And if that spook is changing bodies, I think the Hunter might have a thing or two to say. If she's willing to get tangled in whiteskin battles." Caroline shuddered. "Skinwalkers. She doesn't like 'em."
Kate frowned and started to speak, then thought better of it. Probably didn't want to pry into Injun religious secrets. Kate was a damned strange cop. A Stonefort cop.
Cop, badge and gun and all. Alice fumbled in her pocket and found the key to her locked cupboard, the place where she kept ammunition and medical stuff safe from the girls. She opened it and pulled out a small plastic box, way too heavy for its size, and handed it to Kate.
"Birthday present, few weeks early. I had Otto Crary make them up, full-power .44 Mag loads tailored to your Colt. Slugs are sterling silver. You'll have to find your own horse, Kemo Sabe."
Probably should change the gender somewhere in that title. She'd intended the cartridges as a Lone Ranger cop joke. But silver bullets might have power against the brujo . . .
The phone rang. Alice turned, picked up the handset, listened, identified the voice. Then she stiffened, rage washing the weakness from her body. "Yes, you have to go in. If one of you gets killed, it's your own goddamn karma! You broke it, you bought it! Are you trying to make me start a fashion for sealskin coats?"
She slammed the phone back on its hook and slumped, the anger draining away into total exhaustion. Caroline took one look at her face, grabbed an arm, and hoisted Alice over her shoulder in a fireman's carry.
"You are going to bed. Now! I don't care if the Prince of Darkness himself comes pounding on the friggin' door. Kate and I can save the goddamn world without you."
Caroline's so much smaller than Kate, I keep forgetting how strong she's grown. Paddling a canoe or kayak day after day, hiking and climbing all over those canyons, Lainie's little girl isn't a kid anymore. Right now, she could pin me down with one hand.
Alice gave up and sagged across Caroline's shoulder. "Bed" sounded so damned good . . . The House faded around her before they even reached the stairs.
"Phone call," she mumbled, voice pitched to Caroline's ears only. "That flint your father stole. Jaguar god. It's hungry. Dangerous. Morgans are going after it. Don't know if you'll have to pick up the pieces."