“As it happens, I’ve got something for you.” Morrison very solemnly offered her a page in a file folder. “We’re missing a very important box, Ashley. Did you know that police officers come around to the Seattle schools and talk about safety?”
“Of course I do!” Ashley caroled. Allison’s eyebrows went up in disbelieving amusement and she caught my eye to mouth ‘no she didn’t’. I forgot I was busy hating her and her polished look and her flirty voice, and grinned back.
“Well,” Morrison said, still solemnly, “we’ve lost our box of materials that we bring to the schools. I was hoping you could help us find it. Why don’t you sit down and read over the notes we have, and then you and Detective Walker can work on solving the case?”
My grin went a bit foolish. The ‘case’ had been Morrison’s idea to make up for me disappointing Ashley a few weeks earlier. I’d spent half the previous afternoon running around the station setting up clues and the eventual reward of the box for Ashley to discover, and had done it all with a warm fuzzy feeling. I’d spent years with Morrison as my own personal bugbear. I kind of liked discovering he had a squooshy side.
Ashley’s smile lit up the room. “Okay!” She flung herself belly-first on the floor and squirmed halfway under Morrison’s desk to make herself comfortable. Morrison blinked, first at her, then at Allison Hampton, who’d crouched as soon as Ashley hit the floor.
“She never met a floor she didn’t like. Ashley, come out—”
Morrison shook his head. “It’s fine. She won’t be long.”
“Still, I’m so sorry—” Allison stood back up, the better to apologize.
“Hey,” Ashley said from under the desk, “there’s a rabbit hole under here.
“Really.” I bent over, amused, to take a look.
Thing was, there was a rabbit hole under Morrison’s desk.
“Uhm.” I cleared my throat, hoping for a somewhat wittier bit of repartee to burst forth. None did. “Um, Morrison, can you see that?”
I could hear the exasperated look he gave me. Apparently humoring small children with invented police cases was one thing, but humoring me playing along with rabbit holes was something else.
I couldn’t really blame him, truth be told. A little over six months ago I’d gone from an aggravating but extremely skilled mechanic to an extremely aggravating and utterly unskilled shaman. Morrison did not like inexplicable things like the Wild Hunt or banshees turning up in his precinct. Neither did I, for that matter, but I’d come to terms with the fact that it was my job to deal with them.
“No, Walker, I don’t see…” Once more, I could all but hear Morrison’s change of expression, this time accompanied by the grinding of gears in his skull. After a moment he said, “I take it you do,” in an extraordinarily measured voice.
Ashley squirmed further under the desk, calling, “I’m going dooooown!” as she half disappeared into the rabbit hole.
I straightened up, hoping my smile didn’t look as forced as it felt. “Boss, if you don’t mind us taking over your office for a few minutes, Ashley and I can work out the clues in the map during our adventure in the rabbit hole. Maybe you could take Allison for a cup of coffee over at The Missing O.”
“Oh, I couldn’t leave you—”
I felt a little sorry for Allison, who sounded as though she really meant it, and who looked suddenly as if coffee with an adult would be manna from heaven. Coffee with Morrison, who was not only an adult, but attractive and nice to her kid, would presumably be…whatever was better than manna. Ambrosia.
I broadened my smile, trying hard to make it look genuine. “Don’t worry about it. Morrison’s too much of a stickler for time to let a coffee break run more than fifteen minutes. Ashley and I will be fine.”
“We’ll be fiiiiine, Mooooom!”
Ten seconds later they were out the door, and I dove down the rabbit hole after Ashley Hampton.
I was not in the habit of departing this world—the Middle World—in physical form. I’d spent a fair amount of time over the past six months leaving it in spiritual terms, visiting a whole host of realms—Upper, Lower, Astral, Dream, Dead—but I hadn’t once physically crawled down a hole that led somewhere else. On a gut level, I thought Ashley and I were traveling into the Lower World, the plane of demons and power animals and extremely powerful, living mythology. It was the root of the universe to which the Middle World belonged; the Upper World was the branches, people by spirits and, er, well. Power animals and extremely powerful, living mythology.
Ashley, gleeful, shrieked, “There’s a raaaabbit! A white raaaabbit! C’mere, bunny! C’mon, Ossifficer Walker! Help me catch the rabbit!”
The part of my brain that was no help at all made me mumble, “It’s Detective Walker now, actually.” The part that was more helpful connected white rabbits with—well, Alice in Wonderland, as anybody would, but the Alice half of the Hampton Duo was off having a doughnut with Morrison.
Moving on, then. I went from Wonderland to the briar patch, and leggy trouble-making Brer Rabbit. Not for nothing had I spent some of my formative years in Qualla Boundary, the Eastern Band of Cherokee’s land trust in North Carolina. One part voodoo god, one part wise man, Brer Rabbit was a trickster, full of foolish cunning.
All of a sudden I really didn’t want Ashley to catch the critter she was after. “Ashley, wait up!”
I erupted out of the tunnel in a shower of soft loamy sweet-smelling earth. The world around me stretched flat for an instant, going two-dimensional and awful, then snapped back to a more comfortable three dimensions, though a hint of flatness remained. The sky above was rubbed with red, sunlight pouring down with less intensity than I was used to. The vegetation responded to the light, growing tall and thick but with black edges to the leaves: not sinister, but not normal. I was on a low hillside, above a slow-moving river that ran through the valley bottom.
Ashley scampered off across the landscape, shouting, “Come back, come back, Mister Rabbit! I want to have a tea party!”
A flash of cottontail white stopped and turned around to examine Ashley. I swore and scrambled to my feet, chasing child and bunny at top speed. There were aspects of the astral realms which I could travel at impossible speeds. This wasn’t one of them, and by the time I caught up with Ashley and Brer Rabbit, they were seated at a pink-clothed table which, thankfully, did not also have a dormouse and a Mad Hatter in attendence.
Still, a rabbit and a little girl sitting down to tea was really pretty much weird enough. Ashley saw a white rabbit. I saw a brown one, much less cartoony than Disney would have me imagine him, and looking at him gave me the same shiver of awe that the thunderbird and Big Coyote had.
“Well, how do you do, Ossifer Walker.” Brer Rabbit, a sparkle in his eyes, tipped his cup of tea toward me in greeting. I didn’t like that sparkle at alclass="underline" it said that like far too many things in the Other parts of the universe, he knew more than he was saying. He’d call me Ossifer Walker for Ashley’s sake—in fact, the fact that he was talking at all put the whole worldscape solidly in Ashley’s view, because none of the primal animal beings that I’d met had talked, previously. For a disconcerting instant I saw through the button-nosed form sitting at the tea table: Saw through it, with the astounding second sight that I still hadn’t become entirely accustomed to.
Through that sight, Brer Rabbit was elemental, a thing of spikes and sparks and fractal patterns, chaos embodied. He was every trickster that had ever been, every one that ever would be, and he went back and forward through time as easily as wind blew through leaves. I forced my eyes shut, not that doing so affected the sight, and willed it away. I didn’t think human beings, even shamans, were supposed to spend much time contemplating chaos. I was afraid my brain would melt, and I wasn’t quite being hyperbolic about it.