Page 45 of Spirit Dances

“Is this what it’s like when you try to track?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder it pisses you off.”

“You got us a hell of a lot farther than I have.” We headed for street level. “I don’t know. Maybe if I shift into a coyote again I could pick up the trail.”

“You’ve been hit by a truck once already tonight. Why don’t we try something else first? We’re in the right ballpark.

Let’s go talk to your friend Rita Wagner. If I were down town working a major spell, I’d want to be well out of the way. Maybe she’ll have some ideas on where.”

“Why not the Olivian?” I jerked a thumb northeast, toward the high-rise apartment building a block or two away. “I mean, that’d be plenty out of the way, plus a nice penthouse view. There’s no reason to assume a power-stealing madman is hiding in the down-low and dirty parts of town.”

“Except it was a homeless guy who was murdered down town yesterday morning, not a business executive in a high-rise.”

“Yesterday?” I looked at my wrist, where I’d taken to wearing my copper bracelet instead of my watch. The brace let wasprettier, but much less good at telling time. But Billy was right: it was probably past midnight, so Lynn Schumacher had died yesterday. “Okay. Yesterday. God. Long day. Okay. You were saying?”

“I was saying, assuming they’re connected?—”

“And why would we do that?”

“Because you’re at the center of it all.”

I shut my mouth so hard my ears popped. Billy waited for me to come up with an argument, but all I could manage was a silent, not especially creative litany of bad words.

There was a non-zero probability that he was wrong. It was possible Rita Wagner had come back into my life simply to pass on her gratitude for us saving her life. It was possible someone within her sphere of influence had died horribly out of pure random hideous circumstance, shortly after she re-entered my orbit. And it was possible there was no connection at all between that death’s physical location and the generalized area Melinda had been able to point us at for our magic-stealing-murderer’s location. It waspossible.

It was alsopossiblethat a wendigo had just happened to take up hunting in my neighborhood, or that the right pieces to shatter an ancient, powerful death cauldron had come into play around me coincidentally. It was possible. It just wasn’t very damned likely.

“I’m like that woman,” I said after a long time. “Angela Lansbury in that TV show. No one in their right mind would be friends with her. No one in their right mind would be in the sametownas her. No one should ever, ever go to a cocktail party with me. Or on a road trip. Or?—”

“So we’ll go see Rita.” Billy gestured me out of the garage, and I shuffled toward Pioneer Square, wondering how the hell to escape being a danger to my friends and coworkers.

Chapter 23

The soup kitchen was closed by the time we got there—the Pine Street parking garage was a mile away—but a few stragglers were still making their way out the door. Billy caught the door behind one of them and I ducked under his arm into a long pale-floored room that reminded me of a school cafeteria, right down to the narrow brown tables with built-in colored benches. Rita hauled pans from the food service area, showing more strength in her small form than I’d have expected. The door creaked as it shut behind us, and she, along with another half-dozen volunteers, called out variations on, “Sorry, we’re closed, come back at seven tomorrow morning!”

My conditioned response was, “We’re the police,” except I thought that would get entirely the wrong reaction, so I said, “Actually it’s Joanne Walker,” as if my very name was excuse enough to barge in after hours.

Fortunately I was right. Rita put her pans down with a bang and turned to gape like she’d never expected to see me again. I was equal parts pleased to confound her and guilty that it had taken Billy’s reminder to get me back to Rita and her case. Guilt beat pleasure and I mumbled, “Could you use a hand cleaningup?” which made Billy shoot me a look suggesting I would die slowly and painfully, later, for having volunteered.

Rita, though, exchanged glances with another one of the women, then pulled her apron off and came around the counter. “It’s okay. You came back. Did you find out anything about Lynn? I think the detective this morning just wants to write it off as a dog attack. I heard on the radio tonight people had seen a wolf. Can you imagine? A wolf? In Seattle? It must’ve gotten loose from the zoo.”

My heart did a sick lunge into my stomach and churned it up. “What else did the radio say?”

“Just to call it in if anybody saw it, that Animal Control and the police were tracking it. They didn’t say anything about Lynn. Do you think it was a wolf attack?”

I bit back a bile-filled burp and very carefully didn’t look at my partner. “No. The wolf only…got loose…around nine o’clock tonight. Did they say where they’d seen it last?”

“On the West Seattle Bridge, heading for the viaduct.”

“The we—what the hell’s he—” I broke off, looked at Billy this time and said, “That’s northeast of where it was last sighted,” as carefully as I could. “Why would he head downtown?”

Billy, aggrieved, demanded, “You’re asking me?”

“Well, who else am I supposed to ask?” If I were a sensible shapechanged human, I would slink home and wait for somebody to come rescue me. That would be easier, in theory, for Morrison than it would be for me, as he owned a three-bedroom house with its own small plot of land, whereas I was still renting the fifth-floor apartment I’d moved into my sophomore year of college. At either location, the doors would be a problem, though Morrison might be able to manage the garage door at his house. I really wanted him to be holed up there, gnashing his teeth over the situation I’d gotten him into.

But all of that assumed some level of human intellect and not just a panicked animal running down whatever streets looked least threatening. Not that the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was also Highway 99, was exactly non-threatening, even at midnight on a Saturday.

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