No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,113

and it took twenty years of trying and hoping and practicing before I accepted the truth: I’m not magic.

But I’m smart.

The Yakima River started up in Cascades, fed by Keechelus Lake. It was a major tributary for southeastern Washington, providing irrigation water for the orchards, grapes and crop fields, as well as being a year-round fishing and kayaking river. The valley it fed had range lands that were used by the military for training grounds. I’d spent a few months there during my time in the Army, so it was familiar territory, but more important, it was just about in my back yard. But then, a lot of the Pacific Northwest was: I ranged down to Salem and as far north as Whistler. I’d gone out to Coeur d’Alene a few times, too, but anything big enough to draw me farther away was in Joanne’s weight class, not mine.

I headed down through Snoqualmie Pass on the scent of a rumor. That was how most things worth hunting came my way: rumors or small independent news sources. The major media had nearly collapsed under the weight of microreporting, but they’d never carried news stories about this kind of thing anyway. Boiling lakes only made the news if a scientist could explain why it was boiling. When there was no obvious cause, the news outlets shut up and pretended it wasn’t happening. Most people were like that too, which I’d never even wanted to understand. As far as I was concerned, a world with active magic in it was a far better place to live than one that had none. No doubt Joanne had had a significant effect on me, but she’d had an effect on the whole Northwest, too. There was flat-out more magic now than there’d been when I was a kid, and people tried harder than ever not to see it. I didn’t get it.

Keechelus Lake, held in place by Keechelus Dam, was a simmering froth. Steam billowed skyward, killing trees and sending birds to other nesting sites. No insects droned in the air and there wasn’t a hint of sulfur scent or anything else that might account for boiling lakes. There was a faint scent of boiled fish. Just as well they’d dammed up Keechelus, not Kachess, one of the other lakes that fed the Yakima. Keechelus meant few fish in the indigenous Yakama language. That was one of a million bits of almost-useless information I’d picked up while studying anthropology and world mythologies after I got out of the military. Almost useless, but not entirely. Not if you’d chosen to hunt monsters for a living. Well, not exactly a living: it wasn’t like anybody paid me to keep the world safe from things that went bump. I was a grad student in Spokane, halfway done with a degree in world mythologies. I taught two classes a semester, kept my ear to the ground for monster reports, and worked on my dissertation when I had no other option.

Where water was allowed to spill through to the river, it hissed and bubbled. I left the dam and drove downstream, taking Highway 10 and then Canyon Road, which ran closer to the river’s route than the interstates did, and watched to see where the water cooled.

It didn’t. All the way south, through Ellensburg and into the city of Yakima, where I turned around and headed north again. If the river boiled for ninety miles out of the headwaters, it probably boiled all the way down to the Columbia. I stopped for lunch at a diner perched on the river’s edge. It was almost deserted, windows steamy and the whole place smelling heavily of fry grease.

My waitress, the only one working besides the cook, looked wrung-out and flat. I ordered two vanilla milkshakes to go with my chicken breast salad, and gave her one of them when she brought them to me. She gave it a sad smile, then went ahead and sat down with me. “Not like there’s anybody else waiting on their order today.”

“Yeah, I almost thought you were closed when I pulled up. Nobody in the parking lot. How long has this been going on?”

“Two or three days.” Her name tag said Marnie. Marnie was in her thirties and trim in the way women who worked on their feet and didn’t snack on too many french fries could be. She looked like a nice person. She wiped the back of her hand across her forehead, making almost no