Walking Dead by C. E. Murphy

Author:C. E. Murphy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Women shamans, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Seattle (Wash.), Fantasy fiction, Fantasy - Paranormal, Halloween, Contemporary, Fiction - Fantasy, Fiction, Romance, Fantasy, General, Policewomen, Fantasy - Urban Life, Fantasy - Contemporary
ISBN: 9780373803019
Publisher: Luna
Published: 2009-09-01T01:36:08.707000+00:00

On the positive side, I’d gotten through more than half the hours allotted to Halloween already, and I wasn’t dead yet. On the negative, that meant the next ten hours could be very hairy. I looked at my watch. The next ten hours, eleven minutes and twenty-eight seconds, to be exact. It struck me that I’d be better off wearing the copper bracelet my father’d given me than the watch. I wondered if I could to go home and get it, or if moving would alert the universe that I was now worthy of hunting. I sort of didn’t want to, just in case.

Poor Suzanne’s eyes filled with tears while I stood there chasing idiotic thoughts around in a circle in my mind. I sat back down and squeezed her shoulders. “It’ll be okay. There’s a lot of daylight left to burn. Was it nighttime in the vision?”

“Um.” Her voice cracked on the single syllable, but she nodded. “It was—there were—” She dragged in a deep breath and straightened her spine. She was tall, though she probably wouldn’t grow up to rival my height. Still, I sat up straighter, too, hoping it was for sorority and not machismo. “There are a lot of people in the vision. Most of them are shouting your name.”

A trickle of curiosity slipped down my gullet and took up place in my diaphragm, cold and bright. “What name, exactly?”

“Joanne, Officer Walker, things like that. I don’t really remember. I just remember that you go into the cauldron.”

“Ah.” The spot of curiosity turned warm, as if satisfied, and I put my head in my hands. “That’s okay, then. It’ll be okay.”

Relief broke Suzanne’s voice: “It will be?”

I nodded into my hands. “Yeah. It will. I promise.” Joanne Walker could die in the cauldron, and all it would be was a shedding of another skin.

Because my name wasn’t Joanne Walker.

Oh, I responded to it, certainly, the same way I responded to e-mail sent to [email protected], but that didn’t make it my name. My birth certificate read Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, which was pronounced Shevaun Grania, not Seeohbawn Grainy. I’d looked up the pronunciations dozens of times and still didn’t quite believe it. My father had taken one look at the Irish mess bestowed on me by my mother, and anglicized it as he saw fit. I’d been Joanne my entire life, and I’d changed my last name from Walkingstick to Walker the day I graduated high school and left my Cherokee heritage behind. Two people besides me knew my real name, and I hadn’t talked to my father in years.

The other was—inevitably—Morrison. I’d confessed the truth once without meaning to, and later in far more detail while trying to save his life. Names—and truth, it turned out—had power. I’d managed to get Morrison out of trouble, but if I had to stand back and look at it, I could see how somebody might consider Joanne Walker to be a mask. She was a hell of a lot

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