Annie’s aura went from emergent to radiant in a heartbeat, pouring the warmth of life up and out. It caught in the rain of white magic and spilled back down again, reviving her garden further, until we rushed through the crack in the sky back into the Middle World.
We actually slammed into the hospital room ceiling before bouncing back to our bodies again. I sat up straight, rubbing my nose. Just within my vision, beyond the shadow of my fingertips, Annie took a sharp, soft breath of her own, not dictated by the ventilator’s steady rhythm. Everything else in the room went silent, even the beeping of the monitors. Or maybe not; maybe the next moment happened fast and only seemed to stretch an impossibly long time. It didn’t matter.
It didn’t matter, because Annie Marie Muldoon opened her eyes and smiled at her husband. “Hello, sweetheart.”
Color drained from Gary’s face. From his hands, too: I could see them whiten around where they held Annie’s, and I bet they were suddenly icy to the touch. Annie squeezed his fingers gently, still smiling. “It’s me. I think it’s me. I think your Joanne wouldn’t have let me come back, if I wasn’t me anymore.”
Gary shot me a harder look than he’d ever given me before, like for a moment he couldn’t forgive me for the idea of not bringing her back. I kind of couldn’t blame him, even though his protectiveness came after the fact. He caught up to that realization a moment later and turned his attention back to Annie. His hands were shaking as he lifted her fingers to his mouth, and though he tried a couple of times, he couldn’t make it all the way to words.
That was okay, because Annie seemed to have some. Her voice was warm and steady, comforting, even though she was the one newly back from the dead and could be expected to be at loose ends. But then, she’d been a nurse. Maybe that helped. Or maybe it was easier to come back from the dead than to have mourned and moved on, only then to be presented with a bona fide miracle. “It’s still there. I can still feel it inside me, making my lungs feel heavy. It wants out. I won’t let it,” she said with perfect equanimity. “I’ll die first. I already did once.”
“You won’t have to.” I sounded just as calm, just as resolved. Annie gave me a brief smile. Gary didn’t. I wasn’t even certain he was breathing.
“I’m sure you’re right, Joanne. Now.” Her smile turned stern, though there was a suspicious spark of brightness behind her emerald eyes. She turned all of that stern amusement on her husband, and flicked one eyebrow high up on her forehead. “Imelda, Gary? Is there something I should know about Imelda Welch from Kansas?”
Gary’s mouth fell open, a blush curdling his face. His jaw flapped a few times and a wheeze emerged. I peered between them, nigh unto bursting with curiosity. Finally his wheeze became a breathless grunt, which he followed up by seizing Annie in his arms and burying his face in her shoulder.
For a woman just back from the dead, she looked to have a hell of a grip as she knotted her own arms around Gary and held on tight. For a while neither of them were coherent, mumbles and breaths of laughter interspersed with caught gasps of sobs. I sat there smiling idiotically, tears running unheeded down my face, until it finally occurred to me that they might want a little privacy. My knees were wobbly when I stood, but Morrison was there, his own face as unabashedly wet as mine. He drew me across the room, then murmured, “Imelda?” so quietly that I wouldn’t have understood if I hadn’t been wondering the same thing. I shrugged and tugged him a step or two closer to the door. We could hang out in the hall for a while, until Gary was ready to come get us. Morrison glanced back at the Muldoons one more time, a blinding smile appearing on his features. As we stepped out of the room, he took a deep breath. “Did you see them? Walker, I want to ask you—”
His question fell into startled silence as the door closed behind us. I blinked tears away, still smiling at him, then followed his uncertain gaze.
Suzanne Quinley, granddaughter of a god, sat on a bench across the hall.
She glanced up as the door closed behind us, looking lost in a massive gray hoodie and skinny blue jeans. Her long legs were drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, making her all elbows and knees. Ethereal elbows and knees, though, even disguised by the hoodie. She was slim-built with fine bones, and her wheat-pale straight hair still curtained her features.
When she looked up, I thought it was just as well that her hair often hid her face. Her eyes were so green, so vivid and sharp, that they seemed to be the only living, human thing about her. Therein lay the irony, of course, because she’d gotten that stunning gaze from her immortal grandfather, Cernunnos, god of the Wild Hunt.
Cernunnos, whose power I’d just been messing with in the room behind me. My voice broke as I blurted, “Suzy? Is everything okay?”
For a girl who was all elbows and knees, she unwound with surprising grace and flung herself the short distance across the hall into my arms. I grunted and fell back a step. Morrison caught our weight and straightened us up while Suzy clung to my ribs like a hungry leech. “I knew if I came here I’d find you!”
Last time Suzanne Quinley had said something of that sort to me, she’d been coming to warn me that she’d had visions of my death. Shortly thereafter we’d fought zombies together, a scene which had left me whimpering and sniveling like a child. I did not want to reenact any of that, but it was a little hard to say, Augh! Get off me, kid! without causing offense. “What’s wrong, Suze? What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”
Suzy pulled out of my arms with an expression not dissimilar to Annie’s when she’d mentioned the spirit cheetah. Except I’d had warning about the spirit cat, but had none at all for Suzy’s exasperated reply. “It’s two in the afternoon. And my best friend, Kiseko, and her boyfriend, Robert Holliday, magicked me here from Olympia last night.”
“Rob—” My tongue and brain got all tangled up trying to decide which of those things I should latch on to. Being an honorary aunt of the boy in question, the second bit won. “Robert has a girlfriend?”
Suzy rolled her eyes as only a fifteen-year-old could. “Kiseko says not, but yeah, right. Anyway, they magicked me, Detective Walker, isn’t that more important?”
“Ah. Um. Not ‘Detective’ anymore. I’m just plain old Joanne. How did they...magic you? It’s two in the afternoon? What?” I had the terrible idea I was so far behind that I’d never catch up, and I was kind of afraid to even try. Even so, I looked to Morrison for confirmation about that last, and he nodded. I held up a palm, silencing Suzanne for a few seconds, and said, “It’s two in the afternoon? It was midnight—!”
“You were under for twelve hours, Walker. More than twelve hours. Muldoon and I were—” Morrison took a sharp, deep breath, then abruptly pulled me into a hug. “I was starting to wonder if you were coming back, Walker.”
Muffled by his shoulder, I said, “I did. I always will. I’m sorry. Twelve hours?” Now that I knew half a day had passed I was suddenly incredibly thirsty and a bit woobly of knee. “I’ve never been under that long before. It didn’t feel that long. It felt...” It had felt like minutes, just as it always did. But it had been a hell of a lot of untangling and wrangling in there, and what I knew about more traditional shamanic healings didn’t generally suggest they happened in the blink of an eye that I was accustomed to. I’d apparently just about met my match, which wasn’t exactly a shocker. The Master had been my match—more than my match—all along. “How did you keep the hospital staff off us?”
Morrison grunted, a sound which may have been intended as a distant cousin to laughter. “Muldoon went off on a tear about freedom of religion and infringement of civil rights. They cited the patient’s rights and their own obligations