No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,7
as my father drove us around. Once in a while, though, the years in North Carolina came through, and for all that the storybooks spelled it br’er, I couldn’t help just swallowing most of the letters and turning the word to bruh, Brother, the way it was supposed to be.
“Won’t you sit down and have some tea, Detective Walker?” Ashley poured me a cup without waiting on my answer, and put two small cookies onto a plate for me. I sat down, not so much because I wanted to break bread with Brer Rabbit as I had no idea what he might do with Allison Hampton’s daughter if I didn’t. Every story I knew about him danced through my mind, and the rabbit managed to smile at me.
“Now, it won’t be the Tar Baby nor the briar patch that looses you of me today, Officer Walker. Nor will it be the tortoise and the hare, nor the scarecrow. We know those tales, you and I, and we will not tell them again here and now.” He sounded like that certain style of old Southern gentleman, the ones who say every syllable in slow concentration, though even so, “Tar Baby” was a rolled-out luxurious, “Taah Baybeh”.
I picked up my teacup to give my hands something to do. “What is it that you want?”
Affront came into the rabbit’s brown eyes. “How can you think I want anything, Officer Walker?”
“You’re Brer Rabbit. You always want something.” A fragile smile worked its way past the edge of my teacup. “Usually something you shouldn’t have.”
It took everything I had not to look at Ashley. Brother Rabbit didn’t have that same restraint, and glanced her way before smiling at me.
“Did you know it’s my birthday?” Ashley beamed at Brer Rabbit, at me, and at the birthday cake which hadn’t previously been on the table. “I’m seven today,” she added self-importantly. “How old are you?”
“Why, I’m as old as the very hills, Miss Ashley. I’m as old as human dreams. And I did know it was your birthday. If it weren’t, you might never have seen that rabbit hole I dug just for you.”
“My mommy couldn’t see it. Sometimes grown-ups don’t see what’s there. Except Detective Walker. She sees things. She’s a superhero!”
Brer Rabbit looked from Ashley to me and back again. “Is she, now. Well, I have an idea, Miss Ashley. If Officer Walker is so much a hero, perhaps she’ll play a little game with me. If she wins, you go home with her, back to the place you call home. If I win, you’ll stay with me, here in this magical land.”
Ashley chirruped, “Sure!” before I could stuff half the cake into her mouth and silence her. Some superhero I was. She turned her bright little smile on me and lifted a china pot. “Would you like some honey in your tea, Detective Walker?”
“Um.” I looked into my undrunk tea. “No, thanks, sweetie. Not right now.” Not until after I’d rescued her from a chaos elemental. Ashley shrugged and began cutting pieces of her cake, though she didn’t go so far as to offer any to me or Brother Rabbit. I supposed there were limits to what you could expect of a seven-year-old left with a cake and no parental supervision. I turned my attention back to Rabbit, warily asking, “What game?”
“A game of chance,” Rabbit said, and it struck me maybe a little too late that for a creature dredged out of Ashley’s imagination, he was awfully well-spoken.
“It’s not just her imagination I spring from, Officer Walker. She may be hearing something very different from what you hear. Tricks,” Brer Rabbit said with a shake of his head. “They’re terrible things.”
What was terrible in my mind was that one, he appeared to be reading my thoughts, and two, Brer Rabbit generally came out ahead of the other animals in his stories. Being out-smarted by a rabbit didn’t seem like a good way to build my shamanic confidence.
Well, said my ever-present sarcastic voice, you could try remembering your mental shields.
Glimmering approval turned Brer Rabbit’s brown eyes to amber as I belatedly constructed the Enterprise-like shields that Coyote had taught me to build. I really needed to get in the habit of maintaining those things twenty-four/seven. “I do come out ahead,” Rabbit agreed, “but so would you, if you were the hero of your own stories.”
I stared at him a long moment, unable to stop myself from looking back over the last seven months of