Bone Walker (13 page)

“It's hunger, Miss Thompson. For magic. For flesh. For life.”

The worry in me exploded into full-blown dread. I thought of every monster I'd ever seen in a horror movie, any creature that fed upon the living: zombies, succubi, vampires, you name it. None of those were real—or if they were, Millie hadn't clued me in yet. But there was no mistaking the reality of Elessir's hoarse words. There was no artifice here, no mockery. And it scared the hell out of me. I froze even as I cradled him and had to force my next words out through a fear-locked throat.

“And this is what's riding around in Jude now?”

He sagged in my arms, spent, though his gaze never left my face. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Then he fainted, leaving two shocked Warders and me with his limp form—and an afternoon that had gotten much, much worse.

After that, there wasn't much else to do but figure out our plan of attack.

I wiggled out from under the unconscious singer and left him to sleep sprawled there upon my couch. While we could have moved him, it was almost more reassuring to leave him where he was. We could keep an eye on him there. Nor did I take my blanket back. It bothered me, how Elessir kept clutching at it even in his sleep, but it would have bothered me more to have him back in my bed.

“We have to find her,” I announced as soon as I was on my feet. Millicent in her wisdom didn't argue. In fact, she already had her phone out and was tapping in Jude's number. So was I, for that matter, though I backed off and let the old Warder go first before I tried to get my own call through.

“She won't be answering,” Christopher warned. “She blew Kenna and me off when we went to find her this morning.”

“Simplest stuff first,” said Millie, though the way she scowled immediately on the heels of that and jammed the phone back into her pocket told me all I needed to know: she'd hit Jude's voice mail. “Right then, children. Now we do the complicated stuff.”

“Like what, exactly?” I fired Jude a text message. My thoughts churned almost too fast for my phone's touchscreen, and my hands were shaking enough that I almost dropped the device. I wound up breaking my attempt to get her attention as casually as possible into three separate chunks:
Jake wanted me to check on you call me when you get a minute, okay?
Then,
Millie asked after you too.
And,
So did Christopher and I'm worried about you too.
But I had the sinking feeling she wasn't going to answer those texts anymore than she would the voice mail. Only when Christopher stopped me cold with a grip on both my shoulders did I realize I'd been pacing. “What's the proper Warder procedure for tracking down your best friend when she's got a hungry spirit monster stowing away inside of her? What do we
do
?”

I practically shrieked at him and Millie in my agitation, but neither of them took me to task for it. “I'm not going to send you back over to her place,” Millicent said, scowling. “It'd be a waste of time. If that creature the Unseelie boy told us about has half a brain cell, it has to know we're onto it by now.”

This did nothing to make me less nervous. “If it's in Jude, it's got her brain cells. Jude's not an idiot. It's going to know we'll come after her. It won't just sit still waiting for us.”

“Can you feel her?” was all Christopher said—to Millie, not to me. Power prickled through his hands, just enough to seize my own power's interest. As soon as I was paying proper attention I felt Millicent tapping into the earth. Her magic, as befit her years, was weathered and hardy. It flowed down and out from her with all the ease of a stream following downhill paths it had traced for countless years. In earthy and physical contrast, her bright eyes unfocused, while her jaw set with determination.

“I ain't getting her,” she admitted after a moment, in disgust. “City's gotten so damn big these days, I can
barely

—”

“Wait!” I cut in. “You can find somebody—somebody not magical, I mean—in this city and you didn't do this already? Why the hell didn't you tell me?”

Christopher's hands didn't move, though their grip tightened a little, trying to calm. “Needle in a haystack, lass.”

“What he said. Girlie, I can find somebody in this city only in theory.” Millicent's gaze abruptly snapped back to me, focus restored along with her temper, and she flung a curt bob of her head at Christopher. “You've felt Seattle through him. So you have an idea of how exactly a city full of people can hit you. Do you think
you
could pick out a single soul in the great teeming mass of an entire city's population?”

I wanted to protest, to cry
well of course I could find Jude!
But truth be told, I wasn't at all sure, especially if something else had taken up residence in her. Would she even feel like herself? My shoulders and hands threatened to shake, while tears not quite ready to fall teased at the corners of my eyes. I fought it all down, determined to focus on business. “Let's do it together, then.”

At that Millicent grinned, and held out her hands to us both. “On three,” she said as we took them. Her hand in my left felt much like Christopher's in my right, despite his being larger. The energy crackling through both of them, warming between palms and fingertips before it coursed over into me, came out of the very same wellspring at Seattle's living, thriving heart. “One… two… three!”

When we all let loose our magics, my own, untied to the ground or air or water of Seattle, felt curiously insubstantial against the strength of the Warders'. I was a wild eddy of light between two trees, one gnarled and bent, one tall and strong, but both with roots sunk deep into the earth on which the city stood. For several seconds I could think of nothing but the giddying rush of power that overwhelmed me, for I'd done this with Christopher and Millicent together only in practice—never in earnest.

The light we raised in the room was blinding enough to send Fort scuttling off down the hall for darker places to hide, so I closed my eyes against it. That was no defense, though, against the radiance ignited in my inner senses. Countless impressions swamped me all at once, gilded by that inner light: people young and old, going about their business and their day-to-day lives all over the city around us. The Warders' power touched them all, followed each and every one of them in a complex, ever-changing web of motion and interactions and
life
. For one inexperienced half-Seelie mage, it was intoxicating. I hesitated, poised between the heady joy of it and a burst of fright that we couldn't possibly find Jude in the midst of it all—

Then part of my magic surged to Christopher, which didn't surprise me. That had happened before.

The way Christopher's power
rippled
, though? That was new.

All at once more impressions joined the others, dimmer, farther ones that made my head ring with thoughts of streets and buildings I didn't know. But some of them I did, and a brief, bright spark of dozens of people driving along the 405/520 interchange—on the east side of Lake Washington, outside Seattle—made me gasp.

What were we doing sensing people outside of Seattle?

“Focus, damn it, children! Focus!” The sudden edge to Millie's voice and the jolt of her hand told me she was feeling that broadening of our perceptions too. “Christopher Michael MacSimidh, what in God's name are you doing?”

Christopher looked as shocked as Millicent sounded. Yet he obeyed her swiftly, and with a renewed bolstering of his will, he stabilized the onslaught of life signatures pouring over us all. “Sorry,” he muttered. “It just felt—”

“In a minute,” barked the older Warder. “Jude now. Kendis, you know her best of us. Give her to us. Help us find her.”

My thoughts went wild for a moment. What could I do? It was almost too great to bear, the tidal wave of life energy from all over the city and beyond coursing through me. Needle in a haystack? Hell, this was trying to find a single, specific grain of sand in the middle of a desert.

But I had more tools to sift with than just my hands.

“Judith Alicia Lawrence,” I murmured, taking a hint from Millie, for full names had power. I dug deep into my magic to shape those syllables as I said them, then offered that shaped power to the two who held my hands. Along with them, I offered everything I could think of that made my friend
Jude
to me. “Software tester. Geek. Mexican on your Catholic grandma's side, and boy, was she pissed when you told her you were pagan, or so you told me when you called me up at five in the morning.” Somewhere in the middle of this, I started talking to Jude directly, maybe in the hope that that'd help me track her down. “You aren't going to leave me to make my
Firefly
costume all by myself, are you? Where are you,
chica
? I need you!”

When I started looking in earnest, light flared in starbursts through my consciousness, standing out against the background shine of the life of the city. The closest and brightest starburst of the lot was right there on my couch: Elessir, still limp in sleep, the watery feel of his presence hinting at his ongoing weakness. That I sensed him at all almost threw me for a loop; he didn't live in Seattle, so Warder magic shouldn't have picked up on him. That it might have been just my radar he was pinging on wasn't reassuring either.

But that I could pick up on him at all made me pay harder attention to those bright starbursts. They felt like him, albeit far more distant. They felt like
me
, for that matter. Just beyond his presence came that of my house brownies, lurking curiously somewhere just beyond the nearest walls, though well out of range of the magic we were raising.

Beyond them… “International District,” I burst out.

“That's Jake,” Millie promptly replied.

Disappointment that I'd guessed wrong and hope that I could actually find somebody close and known to me swept through me at the same time.
Okay
, I told myself,
it is on.
I shifted my weight forward just a bit, drew in a deep breath, and pulled the air clear down to my belly, as though I were preparing to sing. Then I grabbed hold of more magic, flung it through the hands that held both of mine, and let it loose towards every one of the starbursts.

There was Jake, all right, though he came through to my senses as a tiny, distant version of himself. Somewhere out on the westernmost stretches of Ballard was an echo of someone I didn't know but who I suspected was an old selkie Millicent had told me about once or twice. Every park in the city glimmered with flocks of fairies, each one too small for me to discern individually, but who collectively filled my consciousness with swarming glimmers of gold. And though it made me grimace to spot them, I found no fewer than three trolls, each one lurking under a bridge somewhere in the city—though none, of course, were anywhere near Fremont.

None of them were Jude. But I held all my best thoughts of her together with the resonances that hit me through the Warders, the echoes of all those fey who lived in Seattle, and used them all to sift through the magic.

Doing that, I found her. Or at least, something that felt like her and yet not, a dim and fleeting impression of my friend wrapped in a strange shroud of nothingness, like fog. “That,” I hissed at the others. I had to fight down the urge to point, for that would have been useless. Instead, I tried to point with the magic, though it felt like aiming a fire hose at full blast. “Do you feel that?”

Christopher's hand tightened on mine, his voice sharpening with surprise and interest. “Got it!”

“Where the hell is it?” Millicent barked. “I'm not getting a damn thing in—” All at once she cut off, letting go of both our hands and backing up a step away from us. “In the city's borders,” she finished, her own tone dropping to a whisper. “Do you still have it, boy?”

Whatever it was, the nothingness tried to slide away from me, as if it—no,
she
, at least if Elessir was to be believed—were aware of my clumsy search. I lunged at it, not only magically but physically as well, only to be caught up in Christopher's arms and the deeper, brighter embrace of his power. “I have it,” he answered Millie, and without a pause for breath he urged me, “Where's she gone, Kenna?”

“Oh no, you Unseelie bitch, you are
not
doing this, you are
not
taking—” With his words rasping in my ear, I realized I was swearing under my breath. I cut myself off in chagrin, trying to concentrate, to judge the distance my magic was trying to cross. “Sorry. Jesus, this is hard! East, and across water…” Now it was my turn to start as Millie had done, and I spun around to look up into Christopher's eyes. “Holy crap. I think she's in Bellevue.”

As I spoke, my focus shattered, and Christopher's went along with it. We stood there staring at each other, wide-eyed, magic reverberating between us as it drained back down into the earth. My throat was dry; I was certain Christopher's was too. “Bellevue,” he croaked. “That's… not in Seattle.”

“It's not,” I breathed. “Whole separate city.”

“A whole separate city which shouldn't goddamn well even be in your reach,” said Millicent, darting forward again to seize Christopher's hand anew. The shock in her expression was transmuted now to the fiercest intensity I'd ever seen her display, and that counted even shooting at my uncle who'd sicced the demon on us. “Do it again. Push east. Hard as you can.”

Christopher complied, this time without me, though with my body touching his I couldn't help but feel the rush of energy he hurled out towards—and across—the lake to the east of us. He held it for several long seconds, until sweat broke out across his forehead and the line of his power thinned and died. While he hauled in a shuddering breath, I hugged him hard. “Did it—”