C.E. Murphy - Thunderbird Falls (The Walker Papers, Book 2)

Thunderbird Falls

By C.E. Murphy

Chapter One

Thursday, June 16, 6:19 a.m.

Two words I never thought would go together: Joanne Walker and 6:00 a.m.

Never mind that thats actually four words, five if you spell out ante meridiem. If youre going to get technical, youre going to lose all your friends. The point is, it was Oh God Early and I was not only up, but at work. Not even at work. I was volunteering. Volunteering my own precious sleeping time, five hours before I was supposed to be at work. I was so noble I could kill myself.

While I was busy admiring my nobility, a bunch of protesters linked arms and waded toward the police line I was a part of. There were considerably more of them than there were of ushence me being there at alland the power of authority as granted to us by the city of Seattle wasnt pulling a lot of weight with them. They werent violent, just determined. I spread my arms wide and leaned into the oncoming mass, blowing a whistle that was more noisome than effective. The protesters stopped close enough that I could count the individual silver hairs on the head of the man in front of me, who stood there, Right In My Personal Space.

People have gotten shot for less.

Not, however, by me, and besides, as one of the citys finest, I wasnt in a position to be shooting people just for getting in my personal space. Instead, I took a step forward, trusting my own presence to be enough to cow them. It was; the silver-haired guy in front of me shifted back, making a bow in his line. I pressed my advantage, arms still spread wide, and they all fell back a step.

I let go a sigh of relief that I couldnt let them see, herding them back several more steps before I let up, and backed up again myself. They watched me, silent, sullen, and short.

I was working on a theory that said all environmentalists were short. I knew it was wrongAl Gore is a tall manbut it gave me something to do while I played push-me-pull-you with the protesters. Of course, most people are short compared to me: I stood a smidge under six feet in socks, and the sturdy black walking shoes I wore put me an inch over.

Behind me lay the summertime glory of the Seattle Center, where a symposium on global warming was being held. Representatives from every oil company, every car manufacturer, every corporation that had ever been fined for too many dirty emissions being pumped out into the air were gathered there to argue their case against the bleeding-heart liberals who thought a little clean air wasnt asking too much.

Sarcasm aside, the greenies were losing major ground and had been since the symposium had opened two days earlier. The federal administration favored big money and big companies, and those companies were taking as much advantage as they could.

My own sympathies lay a whole lot more with the protesters and their concerns about details like global warming. It was already in the high seventies and it wasnt yet seven in the morning, which was just wrong for mid-June.

But it wasnt my job to have an opinion about who was right and who was wrong. It was my job to keep the several thousand men and women who were gathered at the Center from breaking through and rending the Armani suits from the bodies of the corpulent pigs managing the slaughter.

Officer? A womans voice, high-pitched with worry, broke me out of my cheerfully spiraling cynicism. I turned toward her, one hand still lifted in warning against the crowd. I suspected a trick: distract the cop for a minute while everybody surges forward, therefore losing the law a few precious feet of land. There were more physical barriers than just the police officers keeping people off the Center groundsbright orange, cordoned sawhorses surrounded the entire placebut it was its own sort of psychological warfare.

The woman held a pale-cheeked sleeping girl in her arms. She fainted, the woman said. Her voice was thready with concern and fear. Please, I think she needs a doctor.

Right behind the bottom of my breastbone, centered in the diaphragm, a coil of energy flared up, making a cool fluttering space inside me. It demanded attention, making my hands cramp and my stomach churn. I rubbed my sternum, swallowing back the wave of nausea. Id gotten good at ignoring that sensation in the past several months, pretending I couldnt feel it wrapped around my insides, waiting for me to give in and use it again. Having it crop up so sharply made me feel as pale as the girl. My hand, without any conscious order from my brain, reached out to touch her forehead. Her skin was cold and sticky with sweat.

For the first time since Id nearly burned out in March, I lost the battle with the energy within me. It shot through me, making silver-tinted rainbows beneath my skin, and strained at my fingertips, trying to pass from me into the chilly-skinned child. Had she been an adult, I might have been able to pull back and refuse yet again to acknowledge its existence.

But she was a kid, and whether I wanted the power and responsibility Id unintentionally taken on a six-year-old didnt deserve to suffer for my stubbornness. Silver-sheened magic told me in the most simple, nonmedical terms possible, that the girl was suffering from near heatstroke.

To mea mechanic by trade, even if I was a cop by daythat meant her engine had overheated.

Fixing an overheated engines not a hard thing. You pop the hood, pour new water into the radiator and try not to get burned by the steam, then do it again until the radiators full and the engines cooled down.

Translating that to a child sick with heat was surprisingly easy. The energy inside me boiled with eagerness to flow out of me and into the girl, but I made it drip instead of pour, afraid of what might happen if her system cooled down too rapidly. I could actually envision the steam hissing off her as heat gradually was replaced by my cool silver strength. It seemed a wonder that no one else could see it.

I was glad she was asleep. At her age she probably had very few perceptions about how health and illness worked, but it was a whole lot easier to heal somebody who couldnt consciously disbelieve that what you were doing was possible.

The bitter truth of the matter was that I had to believe it was possible, too, and I didnt want to. What I wanted and what was, however, were two very different things. Right through the core of me, I knew that cooling down an overheated little kid was only the bare edge of what I was capable of I let my hand fall off the girls forehead. There was a little color in her cheeks now, her breathing somehow more steady and less shallow. She was going to be all right, though an IV drip to help get her fluids back up would probably be a good idea. From the outside, it looked as if Id touched the girls forehead as an assessment, then said, Ill escort you out. I was the only one who knew better, and I was grateful for that. Headlines blaring Cop Turns Faith Healer! would not endear me to my boss.

The girls mother, bright-eyed with tears, whispered her thanks. I led them through the crowd, radioing for an ambulance as we walked.

Watching them drive away half an hour later, I realized I could breathe more easily than Id been able to in months. I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone again, irritably, and went back to work.

I left at nine, which was cutting it way too close to expect to get back to the university by nine-thirty. The traffic gods smiled on me, though, and I slid my Mustang into a parking spot outside the gym with a whole two minutes to spare.

I have never been what I would call the athletic sort. Not because Im uncoordinated, but because I was never very good at working with a team in high school. I hadnt improved at it since then, for that matter. The basketball coach had been endlessly frustrated by me. Alone I could shoot hoops till the cows came home, but put nine other people on a court with me and I got sullen and stupid and couldnt hold on to the ball.