Monday, October 31, 5:57 p.m.

I’d have hated to be on emergency dispatch right then. Halloween night was always nutty, and the department put extra people on in preparation for that, but nobody’d been given a primer on what to do with dozens of calls reporting that poor dead Fido had risen from the backyard grave and was trying to get inside the house, or that Goldy the fish was working her way back up the toilet drain. Grim-faced detectives were responding to unsolved homicides in which the dead were returning home, and I bet Missing Persons was suffering from exactly the same kind of deluge. It wasn’t the kind of scene anybody in their right mind would take a fourteen-year-old into, but I didn’t have anywhere better to bring Suzanne, and she was rather literally the only thing standing between me and certain death. I had no intention at all of bringing her on the case with me tonight, but storing her somewhere safe where I could communicate with her seemed like a good idea.

My desk was in the middle of the uproar, though. Not exactly the most peaceful place to sit and wait out a zombie attack or a cauldron search. I picked up the receiver on my desk to phone Morrison, and Billy pushed the call button down with a thick finger. “Want to tell me why there’s an insurance adjudicator downstairs gibbering about zombie movies?”

I put the phone over my collarbone and groaned. “Because the other explanation was too unpalatable. Do you think if he loses his mind they’ll just give me my money?”

“Detective Walker’s having a bad day.” Suzanne inserted herself into the conversation with a bright smile and an offered hand. “I’m Suzanne Quinley. We talked on the phone. Hi.”

Billy said, “Hi,” and shook her hand sort of automatically, but he didn’t take his gaze off me. “How bad?”

“My bad day doesn’t really matter, Billy. Did you talk to Sandburg?” I couldn’t believe it was still Monday. I hadn’t even gotten up twelve hours ago, but the day had been going on forever. We were only about five hours short of the forty-eight hour mark since Jason Chan had died and the cauldron at my party had awakened. Time was running out, and that didn’t even include Suzy’s premonition.

“I brought him in for questioning. Completely rattled him. I think he would’ve confessed to anything if it meant getting out of there, but either I’m the worst judge of character in Seattle or he was genuinely offended at the idea he might be involved in trying to sell the cauldron. I ended up sending him home again. The guy’s got no hint of being a runner.” Billy hitched himself onto the edge of my desk, arms folded across his chest. “The flip side is our tech guys say the security-tape loops started Friday just after the close of business. Everything matches up with the loop from three weeks ago perfectly. That means somebody with fantastic hacking skills or easy access is probably responsible.”

“Redding or Sandburg.” I pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. “I have a question I’m going to regret asking. Could somebody be manipulating Sandburg through magic so he didn’t even know he was involved in anything illegal?”

Billy stared at me a long moment. “Occam’s razor says no. Could you do something like that?”

Creepy-crawlies ran over my skin, reminding me of the unpleasant shock of slamming weaponized magic into Cernunnos. “I don’t think I could, but witchcraft might be able to. Faye Kirkland magicked Gary into a heart attack. Seems like if you can do that, you might be able to affect people’s actions.”

Billy tipped his head back and glared at the ceiling. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure he was counting to ten. When he reversed his gaze again, it was to fix it on me like I’d become a bug for collecting. “I don’t know, Walker. My department is ghosts. Do you think it’s a real possibility?”

“I still think the cultural anthropologist is more likely than the security guard. Redding’s probably dead by now. If I were stealing a cauldron to bring somebody back to life, I’d want to do a test run first.” My stomach, which didn’t know a cue when it heard one, rumbled ferociously. I had no idea when I’d eaten last.

Suzy, voice small, said, “I could look and See.”

“See?” Billy frowned at her. “See what?”

“If that man is dead. I can…” She faltered, looking at me.

“Suzy can see the future,” I said matter-of-factly. “Ever since January and the thing with Herne and Cernunnos.”

Now, if somebody’d said that to me, I’d have gotten all skeptical. Billy didn’t even blink. “We’ve got some of his personal effects in the evidence lockers. Would that help?”

Suzanne’s eyes widened, then lit up. “I don’t know. I never tried. Do you think it might help me control it? Because that would be awesome.”

Billy said, “Using tangible objects belonging to the subject is a time-honored way of honing focus,” which I was pretty sure meant “yes.” Two minutes later we were downstairs opening an evidence locker while a bored recruit looked on. I wondered if he’d get a flashy show that would wipe away his boredom, and couldn’t decide if I thought that would be good or not.

Suzy fluttered her hands over the handful of things with Redding’s name sticky-taped to them: a glasses case, a pair of civilian shoes, a long raincoat and hat, and an ink sketch of his wife and children, “A. Redding” printed in small letters in the lower right-hand corner. It was a head-and-shoulders image of all of them, his daughters in pigtails and his wife’s hair in an upswept Gibson-girl style. I saw women on the street occasionally who still wore their hair like that: members of a small church I didn’t know the proper name of, but which I thought of as the Church of the Ladies with Hair. Those women usually wore long skirts and blouses, and Redding’s wife had the slightly puffed sleeves I associated with that look. The building manager out in Ballard had mentioned the bingo group, but not a church. Then again, it wasn’t like I knew whether my neighbors went to church, either.

Suzanne lifted the sketch with careful fingers. I was just as glad I wasn’t watching with the Sight as her eyes went all creepy and white again. She shuddered from the core all the way out, until bumps stood up on her skin and her hair looked like it’d been rubbed through static. Color flooded back into her eyes, eating away the white, and she sounded sick as she whispered, “He’s still alive, but he won’t be in a few hours. He dies at the same time you do, Detective Walker.”

“He what?” In Billy’s defense, I was reasonably certain his eardrum-rupturing outrage was over the part of that statement where I died, but Suzanne and I both nearly teleported five feet away at his sheer volume. She shot me a panicked look. I waved her down, and tried to do the same to Billy.

“Suzy had a premonition about my death, too. It’s why she came up here from Olympia, to warn me. It’s all right. It’s going to be fine.” I turned to Suzy, pretending my voice of reason was such that it would drown out Billy’s horror.

It didn’t, of course. He repeated, “It’s what?” and hauled me back around to face him.

Normally I’d object to being manhandled like that. Normally, though, I wasn’t looking my death in the face, so I just kind of got a warm fuzzy over him being that worried. I’d give him shit later, if I lived. Which I intended to do.

But if I didn’t, it was good to have a chance to see him again, and to say goodbye. He was going to have to pick up a lot of pieces if I got myself killed, and I kind of wanted to look him in the eye and say I was sorry, if it was coming to that. “It’s going to be okay. I think I’ve got this one under control, Billy. Don’t worry. I’ve been under a death sentence before and come through okay.” I squeezed his arm, gave him what I hoped was a reassuring smile and turned back to Suzanne. “Did he die in the same place I do? At the house with the swimming pool and the toys?”