No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,88

No natural illness looks or fights like that.” Hester’s eyes were glowing gold again, like anger was turning them hot. “Shamanism says everything, even illness, has a spirit, and everything with a spirit wants to live, but this is more than that. It doesn’t just want to live. It wants to kill.”

I was watching her in the rear-view mirror, an’ saw her realize she’d said too much. Annie went pale and turned back around to look out the side window, and Hester’s mouth got thin and grim. She was already staring ahead like the Devil himself was waiting at home when we turned up the drive, but she flinched and grabbed the back of my seat as I parked the Chevy. “Who’s here?”

I squinted at her in the mirror. “Nobody, far as I know. Why?”

Annie said, “Probably Myles,” at the same time, adding, “The gardener,” when me and Hester both looked at her. “You haven’t met him yet,” she told me. “He replaced Beth a few weeks ago. I did tell you that.”

“Yeah, I remember. You said he was one of the new folks—” The air got a whole lot colder, raising hairs on my arms. “Hes?”

“It’s like looking into a plague of locusts.” She wasn’t looking at either of us, but at our yard, somewhere past the curve that put the far side outta view. “His aura is overwhelmed with darkness. I can’t See the colors it might once have been. He’s embraced something that lends him power, but at the cost of…of everything he is.” Hester Jones hadn’t been uncertain for even half a heartbeat since we’d met her, but she sounded like the core of her world had been shaken. “I’ve never seen anything…I didn’t even imagine anyone could do that.”

“I—” I shut up on sayin I seen it before. I had, except not for a few years yet. Joanne had gone up against a sorcerer early on, and we’d both seen how he could get into the hearts and souls of people looking for power. Or, hell, even just looking for a way to survive. I reckoned all of that kinda power backtracked eventually to the same source, to the guy we kept calling the Master.

“It’s sorcery,” I said instead, which made Annie gimme another one of those you know too much looks, but she didn’t call me on it. I didn’t figure she was ever gonna.

“Sorcery—” Hester took a deep breath, trying to contain herself. “In shamanic studies, a sorcerer is a shaman who has embraced darkness. Sorcerers can do terrible things. Skinwalk. Steal someone’s will. Cast curses and—”

“And cause sickness instead of healing it.” I’d been on the receiving end of that, though it’d been a corrupted witch, not a sorcerer, who’d magicked me into a heart attack. “Lissen to me, Hester. Most sorcerers are gonna be at least a couple steps removed from the heart o’darkness—”

Annie, beneath her breath, muttered, “The only thing was for it to come to and wait for the turn of the tide,” an’ I smirked but kept going. “This fella, there’s a good chance he’s sold himself higher up the river. Ain’t nobody gonna think less of you if you walk away right now, and the truth is, sweetheart, that might be smart. The boss man in this mess, he holds a grudge, and I hate to…”

Way too late, it finally clicked. Hester Jones. Name seemed kinda familiar, yeah, because she’d been one of a half-dozen murders a few years from now. Right at the same time I’d met Jo, in fact, when a demi-god was taking his daddy issues out on the magic users in Seattle. Far as I knew, Herne hadn’t been aligned with the Master, but he’d gone a long way down a road to Hell, and not much of it had been paved with good intentions. When a guy is that far off the path of righteousness, it probably ain’t that hard for a worse bad guy to draw his eyes to a few particular sacrificial lambs.

An’ here I was, pulling Hester neck-deep into a fight a lot bigger an’ uglier than she was counting on. An’ here I was knowing it was already too late, if this was all cause and effect, ‘cause whether I liked it or not, she was gonna die messy in just a couple more years. “Dammit.”

I coulda been talking the wind for all she cared. Her back was up, eyes flashing, and for a minute I liked her,

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