Demon Hunts. C.E. Murphy

circle. “I wonder…”

      My gaze drifted back to the Hollidays’ distant house. The power emanating there was the good kind, full of life, rather than anything that would harness a killer and send it to do its bidding. I’d never looked for something darker. “Ritual murder probably leaves a different kind of mark than happy fluffy-bunny magic, huh?” I held my breath a moment, working myself up to it, then reached for the magic inside me.

      I’d been depending on auras, and on the brilliant light and dark of a world viewed through shamanistic eyes. There was no healing component to that, nothing that required a wakening of the particular magic I commanded. But that magic was life-magic, so attuned to preservation and healing that the one time I’d used it as a weapon against a living thing, it had nearly wiped me out. It rebelled against death, and in so doing, might help me See places in Seattle where darkness had prevailed.

      After one glance, I wished I’d never thought of it.

      A couple hundred people died every year in Seattle through homicide or suicide. I knew the statistics; I’d worked some of the cases. But I’d never thought about what kind of mark that might leave on the psychic landscape, or how long it might last. There were jagged spots all over the place, far more than could be accounted for over the course of a single year. Dizziness caught me and I widened my eyes, trying to See more clearly. Trying, mostly, to See when the world itself started to heal from the wounds cut in it by violent deaths. There were places where healing was obviously happening, the mark of murder fading but not yet gone, but from the sheer number of still-vicious slashes, recovery time looked to be in the decades or even centuries, rather than months or years. My stomach seized up, making me regret the onion tart appetizer, and I put my hand on the curved window in front of me, ostensibly for balance.

      Really, though, the greater part of me was trying to reach through the glass into the city. I wanted to soothe the damage it had taken; the damage the dead themselves felt, though it was much too late for that. Billy said, “Joanie?” worriedly, and I dredged up a wan smile to accompany a whispered, “It’s so sad.”

      Murders looked different from suicides. I stared across the city, both fascinated and horrified that I could tell the difference. They all bled black and red and spilled out to leave dark gashes in the lives around them, but murders had an external violence to them, leaving behind a spray that reminded me of a blood spatter. Suicides were more internal, wrapped up tight with sharp edges pointing inward. Nauseated, I jerked toward the north, searching for the Quinleys’ home.

      Its mark was no worse than any of the other murders I’d just studied. Incomprehension swam between my ears, then cleared up as I struggled to link thoughts through the bleak chaos of the dead’s world.

      Rachel and David Quinley hadn’t died in ritual murder. They’d just been slaughtered by a madman who wanted to steal their daughter. A warning had been left written in their blood, but sick as that was, it wasn’t ritualized. My hand turned to a fist against the glass, then dropped to my side. I could think—dismayingly—of at least three places where actual ritual murder had been attempted or achieved, and one of them was still in my line of sight: Billy’s home.

      I badly did not want to see what Faye Kirkland’s death looked like, splashed across Billy’s lawn. On the other hand, maybe recognizing it would give me a hint as to how to heal that space a little faster, so there were no malingering effects to distress his family. I actually held my breath, trying to pull the bright shamanistic world into conjunction with the darker, murderous version I was looking at now. A headache spiked in my right eye as two opposing world views fought for domination, then finally settled down like a cat and dog determined to ignore each other. The Hollidays’ home came into focus, a beacon in the dark.

      For long seconds I wasn’t at all sure I was actually seeing their house, because all I really Saw was the brightness, same as I’d seen earlier. Faye’s death came into slow focus, but it was a shadow, with nothing of the strength or horror I expected it to have. I felt Melinda there, full of love and confidence and determination. Full of serenity, greater by a considerable margin than the terrible things that had happened that summer.

      Relief and delight bubbled in my chest and made my eyes sting enough to threaten the Sight. Apparently a deliberate application of positive energy could make a difference, which gave me an uplifting spark of hope for the whole wide world. “Your wife is something else, you know that, Billy?”

      “Yeah,” he said with a note of pride that fell just short of smug. “Yeah, I do.”

      Buoyed by the knowledge that it was possible to fight back against marks left by abominations, I turned toward the next-nearest site of ritual murder that I knew about: Woodland Park.

      Dark power sledgehammered me alongside the skull.

      I dropped into my chair like I’d had my strings cut. Nausea rose up, hurrying to find an escape route, and I ducked my head between my knees, classic crash position as I gasped for air. Billy’s worried “Joanie?” was louder this time, and I barely managed to get fingertips above the table’s edge to give him a semi-reassuring wave.

      “I’m okay. I’m…” I fumbled for my glass of water and took a few tiny sips while still in crash position, which wasn’t the easiest of tasks. “Oogh. Okay. I’m…” I’d said that once already. I got my elbow onto the table and cranked myself up inch by inch, neck stiff as I made myself peek outside again.

      Three points of a diamond raged with malevolence, pouring sick purple-gray power into the sky. I couldn’t imagine what kind of whammy that field would’ve had if the last murder, the last point on the diamond, had been completed. As it was, if I hadn’t been heartened by what the Hollidays had accomplished just before looking at the diamond, I would’ve been down for the count. It was so astonishingly strong and so utterly desolate that I had no idea how I’d failed to notice it earlier.

      Two answers came to mind: one, I hadn’t been looking for it, and two, on a subconscious level I suspected I’d been trying hard to ignore it. Seeing the world in shades of sick and well was supposed to be my purview, but right here, right now, I was just barely able to handle it. Six months ago it would’ve sent me running for the hills.

      Billy came around the table and caught my hand. His fingers felt scalding, which slowly resolved itself into an awareness that mine were icy. “You all right, Joanie?”

      “All right” covered a host of sins. I nodded, pressed my eyes closed and nodded again. “Yeah. I just got…an idea of what I should be looking for.”

      “That bad?”

      “Worse.”

      An uncomfortable shuffle behind us made us both turn to find our waitress, plates in hand, looking concerned. “Is everything okay? Did the tart not agree with you?”

      Visions of consorting with saucily-dressed women over lunch rose unbidden. I fought back the urge to admit that they weren’t really my type, instead mumbling, “No, no, it was fine, sorry, I…”

      Billy stood up with a smile. “Banged her knee on the table, you know that nervy place doctors hit with the hammer? Only worse. She’s fine. Lunch looks great.”

      Relieved, the waitress put our food on the table and scurried off. I worked my way to sitting and looked sadly at my food. “I probably shouldn’t eat if I’m doing all this vision stuff. You’re a good liar.”

      “I’m a very good liar,” Billy corrected, “and you’re not doing quest work here. Even if you were, you should see yourself, Walker. You look like a ghost. Eat. If we have to wait a couple hours to look at the city again, so be it.” He nodded at my plate and repeated, “Eat.”

      He was the senior partner in this relationship. Who was I to argue? Besides, I felt like I’d been run over, and food sounded like the first step to recovering. I bent over my lunch and shoveled it in like a prisoner.

      Twenty minutes of intense eating and the savoring of an incredible chocolate concoction that should have been called “I’ll do anything the chef says as long as he lets me have another one