She reared back a bit and tilted her head to look at me, her loose ponytail of long black hair brushing at the nearest tiny treetops. I imagined she was very rarely surprised, but she widened her eyes and raised her eyebrows as if she were. “Who are you?” she asked.
I gave her a thin smile, but not my name. “Your dad asked me to come find out who killed him. Your sister wants me to run the rest of you wizards and sorcerers out of town. While I can get behind that idea, I’m not sure I want to do it her way. So I guess that makes me the monkey wrench in the works.”
While I’d been talking, I could see the glowing orbs of energy brightening; Willow was gathering power to do something. I wasn’t ready for her to leave, so I reached out and scooped the nearest energy ball out of the air, closing my fist over it. It felt hard as a knot of rope and it hurt like hell; I may have contained it, but it hadn’t gone out like a candle flame deprived of air.
Willow took a hasty step back from me, taking the rest of her glowing energy globes out of my immediate reach. “That’s a nice trick. What do you do for an encore?”
“I break things.”
She narrowed her gaze. “I’m not that easy to break.”
“Maybe it’s not you I’m interested in breaking. See, I’m a stranger in town, and though I’m not sure of all the rules or all the players, I can see things aren’t as they ought to be. . . .”
“So, you won’t kill me if I pay you better than Jewel?”
I shook my head. “You have the wrong impression. I’m not here to kill anyone. I’m just not quite sure which bit of trash needs to be thrown out to make this place clean again. I’m still trying to figure out how the system works, though I think I have a loose idea.” The way she’d reacted to losing one of the spheres of energy had given me a clue: Although there were huge lines of power in the area, they were too deep for anyone on the surface to use easily—or almost anyone, I amended, thinking of the strange lines flowing out of the lake at Fairholm and taking on weird shapes near Sol Duc. That should have made the lakes the only source of power, and that should have been limited and difficult to draw on without care and effort. But something had happened: Somehow, the magic had gone wild and rambled loose like Saint Elmo’s fire, seeping up to the surface like the tears of the lightning fish. The power lines still burned me when I touched them, just as her energy ball had, so my guess was that the orbs were extensions or encapsulations expelled from the grid. Of course, I still didn’t understand what was going on at the hot springs, but it had to be related.
Willow pushed her face toward me, still keeping her body and the gathered energy globes back. “There is no system. Once upon a time, there was order. But when I was a girl, something broke. I didn’t break it,” she hastened to add, “but I’m not going to let a gift go to waste, nor am I willing to play handmaiden to one of the cardinals. And no one else would, either. If they weren’t all such pigs, we could get along, but some people are greedy. Four parts would do—one better still, as it used to be—but no one is going to volunteer to give up the power. So I do what I want, and I do what I must to keep myself out from under my sister’s heel. Or anyone else’s thumb. You really should think twice about taking her money.”
“I already have. And I’m still thinking. I’d rather straighten this mess out than make a new one.”
“Then you’ll have to restore the quarters. Or the center. And good luck with that.”
Outside I could hear a commotion and angry voices. Willow turned her head toward the sound, letting one of the balls of energy spin away through the wall, trailing an unraveling skein of light behind it.
“I’d bet that’s Strother,” I said.
Willow gave me a sharp look from the corner of her eye. “Alan Strother?”
I nodded. “Probably talking to Ridenour. You might consider running right about now.”
She flashed a tiny, mean smile and whipped one of the glowing spheres of energy toward me. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
I ducked the orb and Willow vaulted over me with a diving roll that slammed the door open.
Someone shouted. Shots rang off the hard peak of the mountain and a few shattered the glass near me. I spun and bolted for the door, too.
“Hey! Hey, you idiots! I’m still in here!” I yelled, dashing after Willow.
Strother and Ridenour were both too far back to get a good line of fire at the fleeing Willow, but that wasn’t stopping them from shooting at her as they ran forward to draw a better bead on her.
Running while shooting is stupid. You can’t get a decent sight picture, and unless you’re a damned good instinct shooter and your target does just what you expect, you stand no chance of hitting them except by pure luck. Ridenour had finally stopped and braced himself to take a better shot. So I rammed a shoulder into him and took us both down in a heap.
Willow zigzagged across the last of the open space and dove down into a copse of trees and bracken that seemed to close behind her like a door in a wall. I could hear her tumbling and scrambling down the slope, gaining distance vertically as she went. I tried to run forward and get a look to see if she was somehow flying or falling majestically downward like an actor in a Hong Kong fantasy film, but I was too tangled up with Ridenour. The plants that Willow had passed over so lightly tangled our feet and tripped us as we scurried to the edge of the cliff. By the time any of us got to it, there was nothing to see but the waving of branches in Willow’s wake. Only the startled scream of a mountain lion halfway down the slope gave us any idea where she was.
“I hope the damn cat eats her,” Ridenour muttered. Then he turned and glared at me. “What the hell were you doing in there? Why’d she bolt off like that? Did you tell her we were out here?”
I gave him an incredulous stare. “You must be kidding. You two are about as quiet as a band of five-year-olds with a set of cookware and metal spoons. Next time you open up shooting, make sure there’s no one in the way. One of you guys nearly shot me! What the hell!”
I wasn’t quite as upset as I sounded, but I really disliked the idea of getting shot again. And I was puzzled by the gunfire to begin with. Why had they opened fire on Willow? So far as I knew, neither had any reason to.
They both had the grace to look sheepish. I took a couple of deep breaths and closed my eyes for a moment before I glanced back at the greenhouse. “Maybe we should see if we can figure out what Willow wanted up here,” I suggested.
Strother shrugged, but Ridenour lit up and hurried toward the greenhouse door to investigate. We all trooped inside with Ridenour in the lead.
It took a while to figure it out, but eventually Ridenour found a pot that had been ruthlessly plundered, the small, shrubby plant within ripped in half and lying dry and limp on top of the soil. Strother and I both gave him curious looks.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Kinnikinnik. It’s a ground-hugging evergreen shrub. It grows pretty quick and they use it for securing soil in slide areas or where they’ve had to replant a hillside due to construction or damage. The natives used to smoke the leaves mixed in with some other stuff such as willow bark and blackberry. Some people say it gives you visions. While I can understand being kind of fascinated by this stuff when you’re a kid, it’s not something a grown woman should be fooling with.”
“Is it dangerous?” I asked.
“Not unless you have asthma. It’s also called bearberry because the bears love the little red fruit it puts out in early spring. But I can’t imagine why anyone’d smoke the damned stuff these days unless they were so broke they couldn’t afford a pack of cigarettes.”
Strother made a noise through his nose. “With the way the economy is, plenty of people can’t afford a pack of smokes. But I can’t see why they’d come up here to steal this stuff.”