“Graveyard dust?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Who’s it for?” I had no idea what she was making, but I could guess it was some of the kitchen magic Mara had talked about; some kind of hoodoo or trick, in this case to do someone harm with the threat of the grave.
She stabbed the blade at my nearest hand and I barely jumped out of the way. Willow snickered at me. “I’m going to get whoever killed Alan.”
“Do you know who it was, then?”
“No. But I can find out.”
“How?”
She didn’t reply, just kept at her task.
“How did you know Strother? Not just as a cop. You know him better than that,” I said.
She made a noncommittal head wag. “Around.”
I pushed on her and wasn’t quite surprised when I felt her energy wriggle away from mine. She was stronger than she looked and I was tired. I sighed. “You were friends. Weren’t you? He had to do his duty, but you were still . . . friendly at least. So you must have met him before you got into trouble.”
She made a soft snorting noise that might have been sadness as much as dismissal. “We got into trouble together, to begin with. White boy from the rez, bad girl from the lake, hanging out in the hills, smoking weed.” She cut me a sideways glance, wanting to see my reaction. “Ridenour caught us. We were fifteen, so off to juvie. No record. Alan went straight. I just stayed bent.”
I imagined them as teenagers, outcasts together, lying in the sun on the mountainside and laughing at everything while they had the chance. I could see how Ridenour’s animosity toward them had grown from that little seed of rebellion. Strother had toed the line afterward, but Ridenour probably had never trusted him—handing him the investigation of Leung’s death had been a kind of dare to see where Strother’s loyalty really lay. Willow, of course, hadn’t even tried and had probably thrown her wild ways in the ranger’s face at every opportunity, making friends with his fox-wife and flouting the law until she broke one in an unforgivable way. I wondered why she’d shot the telephone lineman—if she’d really done it—but I didn’t think she’d tell me.
“Did you go back to school afterward?” I asked.
I guess that wasn’t what she’d expected. She turned her gaze away. “No. I had other things to look after.” She glared at Jin, who made a face at her.
She wasn’t scraping or digging anymore, but she stayed crouched down on the ground, not looking at me, letting the silence grow longer.
Maybe it was the place, or maybe it was Willow, but I felt heavy and bleak standing there. “You know that whoever killed Strother probably killed your father, too.”
She nodded.
“Did you use the circle near your dad’s house?”
“No,” she replied, her voice sharp with old resentment. “That was Jonah’s circle, then. I wasn’t old enough to use it. Once you broke it, I sent Jin to clean it up.”
“Why didn’t you do it yourself?”
She made a noise in the back of her throat. “I never learned to write enough Chinese to claim it. It was my mother’s first. Someone stole it after Jonah”—she gave Jin a hard look—“after Jonah was gone.”
“How old were you then? When he died?”
“Twelve. My mother had started teaching me the Tao Chiao and the characters when I was five, but she died of cancer on my birthday in 1990—I was eight. Jonah wouldn’t teach me more.” She made a face. “He said I was a child.”
“What about Jewel?”
“She’s too high and mighty to stoop.” Her voice dripped bitterness so thick even the ghosts turned toward her. “She was busy building her house on the lake. I taught myself.”
“Your brother died . . . when?”
Jin growled at me, but Willow flicked a gesture at him and he shut up. “It was Spring Moon in 1994. When Jin came. Mid-February. A dog year.”
Spring Moon was what I thought of as Chinese New Year. It would have been a powerful time of year to be casting spells—and a stupid one if you weren’t as much in control as you thought. Jin had come through and eaten him, so Jonah Leung hadn’t brought Ridenour’s fox-wife into the world and neither had Willow. Once again, there was someone else at work. Not the ley weaver . . . Costigan? Jewel? Someone I didn’t yet know?
I crouched down next to Willow to think. It was an uncomfortable position—something cold and hungry drew at my energy as I came closer to the surface of the grave while the drizzling rain worked through the trees to chill my back. I touched the headstone and the sensation pulled away like a scalded hand from a stove. That explained the stone and why Willow gathered the ingredients for her vengeance here—something bitter and full of spite lay under it.
“You said order was broken in 1989. Did that have something to do with your mother’s death?”
“I don’t know. She was a happy creature. And then she was sick. As if the magic had suddenly poisoned her. She died so swiftly, they barely knew what killed her. Jewel and Jonah were already fighting—they never liked each other. She married Newman because he owned the land over the nexus and she left the rest of us alone.”
“What else happened in 1989? What made the magic change?”
“I wish I knew.”
“That must have been when the anchor got loose. . . .”
Her glance was sharp. “Anchor? Someone pulled an anchor out of the lake?” she demanded.
I was startled: I had thought she was one of the anchors.... Obviously I’d gotten the wrong end of that stick.
“You didn’t know.”
“No!” She was on her feet so fast, I didn’t see her get up. She darted across the graveyard and I started after her.
“Willow!” I shouted, but I got only a few steps before something yanked my feet out from under me and I sprawled across the nearest graves. The ghosts pounced on me and I heard Jin giggling as he ran after Willow. I cursed him under my breath as I fought off the vicious, incorporeal hands that tore through me.
I tried to yank a shield between myself and the ghosts, but I couldn’t keep it in place and get to my feet at the same time. I’d already lost sight of Jin and Willow, so I gave up trying to follow them and concentrated on getting away from the ghosts of Tragedy Graveyard.
They had no flesh to push through, and their structures weren’t like the spells that had animated the ley weaver’s hands. I pushed at them, but my hands went through their forms without resistance. I’d pulled the hand-spiders apart, but I couldn’t even grab ahold of these, much less tear them apart. I had dismissed a ghost before, on an airplane, just swept it aside and it vanished....
I tried the flicking gesture that had sent my dead cousin away; the ghost nearest to my hand wafted backward, losing shape for an instant before it surged back together and wound itself again around my body.
“Damn you,” I spat.
I repeated the gesture, shoving outward violently, pushing the Grey the same way I’d slammed my force against it to bowl Jin backward. This time the flash was smaller, absorbed by the mist-shapes of the ghosts, but the forms and their tangled energies burst and scattered like leaves before an autumn gust until there were none left that menaced me. For an ire-filled moment, I considered blowing away the rest, just to be thorough, but they hadn’t come for me and most were nothing more sinister than loops of memory, replaying their misery endlessly. And even as I contemplated it, I could see the air and Grey matter moving in the distance; the ghosts would come back, however slowly. It appeared I hadn’t just lost something when I’d died—I’d gained a new trick, or accidentally applied an old one in a new way. I wasn’t limited to pulling things apart. I couldn’t make something out of the Grey or its energy, but I could push it around and pull on its lighter threads. But it did leave me feeling a little as if I’d been standing under a giant bell as it tolled.