CHAPTER 10

“Did you see him?” The question was delivered zealously, before I even pushed back to my heels.

“Did you see him?” Garth asked again, avidly. I heard a “Shh!” and the distinct sound of someone elbowing his ribs. I hadn’t known, until that moment, that rib-elbowing had a specific sound.

“Leave her alone,” followed the shushing. Faye. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I shook my head, trying to clear it, then sat back on my heels, looking up.

Eleven worried faces peered down at me. I couldn’t help it: I giggled. Half the faces exchanged worried for offended, and the other half for relieved. “I’m fine,” I repeated.

“What happened?” someone chirruped, full of hope and curiosity. I thought his name was Sam. He looked like an underwear model, with full pouty lips and long eyelashes.

“You guys didn’t hear him?”

They all looked back and forth at one another, above me. I’d never seen so many chins in my life. “No.” Marcia spoke for all of them, and they all looked back down at me.

“He guides us,” Faye gushed, “but we rarely hear his voice. You are blessed among us, Joanne!”

Hoo boy.

“All he said was yes,” I said. “I don’t think it’s that big a deal. Who is he?”

“Our master. Our guide,” Garth said reverently. I groaned and sat up, putting my hand over my nose.

“His name is Virissong,” Marcia offered. “He’s our thirteenth.”

“Doesn’t that mean he should be here?”

Marcia sat down beside me. The others took their cue from her and settled down all around me. I felt like the main attraction at P. T. Barnum. “He’s caught between worlds,” she explained. “We’re working on a spell to free him.”

“Uh-huh. Why?”

“As a beginning to restoring balance to this world,” Marcia said with utmost confidence. “His power will help guide us.”

I sort of thought that kind of power might just bowl them over. “Does that happen every time you get all shoulder to shoulder?”

Faye and Marcia locked gazes for a moment before Marcia looked back at me. “I’ve never joined with a Maiden and Mother with that intensity. I believe Virissong chose very well when he guided Faye to you.”

That was all well and good for their Virissong, but it wasn’t any use at all to the police department. I was afraid the whole visit with the coven, while literally enlightening, had been a complete waste of time. Either they were all very good liars both verbally and magically, or there wasn’t anything here. I hadn’t felt anything wrong in the power that had contained the white light, and I thought I could recognize a taint if it was there. More to the point, I was pretty sure Marcia could, and I didn’t think she’d protect somebody who’d murdered Cassie.

I sighed, and let myself get drawn into my own curiosity about the surge of light and power we’d felt. Marcia’d been very specific, so I asked, “What happens when the male aspect calls the magic?” Male aspect. I was so proud of myself. I could sound New Agey with the best of them.

“Our power’s different,” the Elder said. “You women have the power of creation.”

“Lemme guess. You guys have the power of destruction and your light is black and what we really want to do is blend it so it’s all gray.”

“More like a yin-yang,” Garth corrected. “In balance, black and white, instead of losing them both to grayness.”

“But it’s nothing like the kind of power displayed here tonight,” the Elder went on.

“So I what, kicked it up a notch?” I asked, then compulsively added, “Bam!” Garth laughed out loud. Everybody else stared at me. “Never mind,” I said, grinning at Garth.

“I’d like to try again,” Marcia said, and I said, “Like hell but hell no,” which got the stares again. “A single huge burst of unexplained flashy power is all the fun I can handle in one evening.”

“Oh.” Marcia looked like I’d taken her favorite toy away. “All right. Perhaps tomorrow night.”

“Do you meet every single night?”

A chorus of nos met me. “But the solstice is coming,” Faye concluded, as if it explained everything. I gave her my best look of incomprehension, and she patted my shoulder. I felt like barking. “Virissong believes he can break through to this world on the solstice. Every day until then we’ll meet to guide him with our power. It’s a beacon of light,” she said without the slightest hint of irony. “It shows him his path.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Break through to this world? You didn’t say anything about people coming through from other worlds. You said you wanted to stop the heat wave.” I stared at Marcia, full of accusation.

“We aren’t strong enough by ourselves. We need Virissong’s strength to do it,” she said patiently.

“I don’t like things breaking through to this world.” I had a small amount of familiarity with this kind of thing. In my experience, it meant I wanted to be armed with a sharp pointy object. I blessed the impulse that led me to taking classes from Phoebe, and leaned toward Marcia. “Are we talking about a god here, Marcia?”

“Oh, no. Virissong is powerful, but not a god.”

“Mythologically important? Like a Coyote or Grandfather Sky figure?” I asked. I did not want to be messing with power on that magnitude if I could avoid it.

“No, no. They’re archetypes, like Gaia herself. Virissong was human once, a hero among his people, but he lost an epic battle and was banished to the Shadowlands.”

I let out a slow breath. “And he’s your leader.”

Everyone beamed at me. I felt like a kid who’d been successfully potty-trained under the watchful gaze of an entire community. “Exactly,” the Elder said.

“So he’s a witch,” I said. Silence met my statement, but I didn’t mark it. I was busy thinking. I didn’t know beans about witches in Native American culture, but I did know one thing: if Virissong was in Marcia’s “Shadowlands,” I could probably reach him. Maybe he could lead me toward some kind of information about Cassie’s death. It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to bring back to Morrison, but it might do. I puffed out my cheeks and glanced around. “Can I suggest something?”

They all looked at me expectantly. I was beginning to feel like I was inside a goldfish bowl. “Go gently. We called up an awful lot of power there. I’m not really sure I understand what’s going on.” I knew perfectly well I didn’t know what was going on. I just hoped putting it on myself might make them more open to the idea thatthey didn’t know what was going on.

“You’ll learn,” Faye promised. “You’ll come to understand. We all have.”

Guess that approach wasn’t going to work. “Be careful anyway,” I muttered, climbing to my feet. “Look, you’ve told me an awful lot and I need to take some time to absorb it, okay?” I also needed to talk to Judy, to see if she could tell me anything about Virissong. I had a teacher now, and I was by God going to take advantage of that. I’d had enough of fumbling in the dark.

“You’ll come back, won’t you?” Faye asked. “We need you. Virissong guided me to you with my dream. I know you’re the one we need to complete the coven.”

My nostrils flared. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “That’s all I can promise right now.”

The coven parted, reluctant as Romeo and Juliet, and let me go.

Wisdom dictated that I go home and go to bed, since I had to be up at what I considered an obscenely early hour. Instead, Petite drove herself over to Gary’s house without bothering to notify me about the change of plans. I sat there in his driveway, trying to explain to my car that it was eleven at night and Gary’s job as a cabbie got him up at four in the morning. There was no way he’d be awake. Then the living room light flipped on and he peered at me through the picture windows before coming out to the porch to stand there in shorts and a T-shirt, arms akimbo.

I’d always been a leg girl. When the Olympics were on TV, I’d be the one watching the speed skaters and saying, lustfully, “Look at thosethighs.”Gary, standing there in boxers, could’ve given those skaters a run for their money, even if he was seventy-three years old. Him standing up there was like having Paul Bunyan waiting on me expectantly.