C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts (The Walker Papers, Book 5)

This one's for Tara.

(I think that's enough apologizing now, don't you? :))

Praise for

C.E. MURPHY

and her books

THE WALKER PAPERS

Urban Shaman

"A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger Urban Shaman has them in spades."

Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series

Thunderbird Falls

"Fans of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery's cosmic elements. A good choice."

Library Journal

Coyote Dreams

"Tightly written and paced, [ Coyote Dreams ] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike."

RT Book Reviews

Walking Dead

"Murphy's fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world's most reluctantand stubbornshaman."

RT Book Reviews

THE NEGOTIATOR

Heart of Stone

"An exciting series openerMargrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives."

Publishers Weekly

House of Cards

"Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series."

LOCUS

Hands of Flame

"Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read. Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit's world behind, at least for the time being."

RT Book Review

Also available from

C.E. MURPHY

and LUNA Books

The Walker Papers

URBAN SHAMAN

WINTER MOON

"Banshee Cries"

THUNDERBIRD FALLS

COYOTE DREAMS

WALKING DEAD

The Negotiator

HEART OF STONE

HOUSE OF CARDS

HANDS OF FLAME

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

Tuesday, December 20, 4:34 A.M.

Someone had been chewing on the body.

Not some thing. Some thing, in the grand scheme of life, seemed like it would be okay. Thingscats, dogs, raccoons: choose your omnivore, I wasn't pickywere expected to chew on dead flesh. I was no forensics expert, but I'd learned a few basics at police academy. For example, a bear stripped of its skin and missing its skull can so easily be mistaken for a skinned human that the exposed meat has to be tested in order to ascertain what kind of animal it had been. For another example, humans have a very round, even cusp to their bite that most mammals don't share. So I was pretty confident it was a some one , and not a some thing, who had eaten part of Charlie Groleski's left arm.

This was really not how I wanted to start the holiday season.

My partner, a holiday himselfBilly Hollidayswung down beside me. The Christmas carol he was whistling turned into a low long warble of dismay. "Looks like somebody ate him."

"I'd noticed." I rocked back on my heelsa dangerous endeavor, since I was halfway up a low cliff, standing on a semi-sheer rock face. I was roped into a harness that was secured at the top of the cliff, but leaning back still felt like asking for trouble. "Tell me something, Billy. How come we get all the exciting cases?"

"We don't." Billy crouched beside the body, his own harness squeaking and rattling with the motion. I edged several inches to the side and squinted nervously at the drop immediately to my left. Harsh white searchlights stared back at me, the generators powering them shaking all quietude from the morning. The lights made sharp shadows of our narrow ledge, enhancing my awareness that there wasn't really enough room for two people on the ledge, much less two people and a corpse. "Daniels, he gets exciting cases," Billy said. "Drug murders, Mafia turncoats, revenge killings. We never get that stuff."

"You don't think half-eaten dead guys stuffed into crevasses are exciting?"

He shook his head. "No. I think they're weird. We get the weird cases, not the exciting ones." He pushed up and wrapped a hand around his rappelling line for balance. "Groleski must've been dead from the time they called in a missing persons report, maybe before. Too many days. I can't get anything from him."

I muttered, "Crap," and let the Sight wash over me.

* * *

Billy was right, if you wanted to get technical about it. He and I constituted Seattle's only paranormal detective team, a truth which slightly less than a year earlier I would have pulled my tongue out before believing, much less uttering. We got the weird cases, the ones that could potentially have a supernatural element to them.

He saw dead people. Murdered people, more specifically. Their ghosts tended to linger, and he was the man they could turn to, if he got there within two days of their brutal deaths. Unfortunately for Charlie Groleski, that was too short a window to allow him an opportunity to offer insight as to who'd chewed him up and spat him out.

I, thanks to an unpleasant experience which had left me with a choice between dying or life as a magic-user, was a shaman. Once upon a time, my long-term plans had involved maybe opening my own mechanic's shop. Instead, I was a healer and a warrior up at four in the morning, exhaling steamy breath into an ice-cold Seattle morning, on a case that wasn't actually in my jurisdiction.

The departmentcity-wide, not just the North Precinct where Billy and I workedwas being as goddamned quiet about this case as they could. Murders happened. They increased around the holidays. That was part and parcel of modern city life, and had probably been part of every civilization all the way back to Cain and Abel. As far as I could tell, it was one of the things that made humans human.

But there usually weren't a half dozen bodies found over the course of several weeks, all of them looking like they'd been pre-Christmas-dinner appetizers. Charlie Groleski had been missing for sixteen days, though aside from the gnawed flesh, his body was in pretty good condition. The media had started calling global warming

"climate change" instead, and the longer, colder winters Seattle had been experiencing the past few years ran with that appellation. We'd gotten our first solid freeze in mid-November, and nothing had fully thawed out since, including poor dead Charlie.

Billy had his way of looking at a crime scene: through the deceased's words, if at all possible. Mine was different, and I'd learned early on not to contaminate what my normal vision could see by accessing the Sight right away. Once I saw the world that way, it lingered, influencing everything else.

Winter, viewed through eyes that saw the breath and life pulse of the world, was heart-achingly beautiful. The earth itself lay dormant, a dark forgiving depth scored by brilliant pulses of light that were the living things traveling on its surface. Billy stood out as a flare of fuchsia and orange, and I glanced at my own hands to see familiar silver and blue dancing over my skin. Everyone had an aura, and their well-being could be read through that burst of color.