Don't Go Chasing Waterfalls (2 page)

“Is there any singing?” I asked.

Sarah frowned. “No. That’s unusual, isn’t it?”

“It eliminates some possibilities.” I looked over at Isaac. “What about you? Can you see or hear anything strange?”

“Music,” Isaac said shortly. He had been quiet since entering the Stewarts’ house. He was probably thinking about what his own parents were going through, but I could be wrong. I didn’t ask him.

People
had been out searching for Courtney Stewart in droves. The FBI had canvassed the area, and it had rained several times in the weeks since Courtney had gone missing. But none of that mattered. The magic I was scenting was something that water couldn’t wash away; in fact, water only made it stronger. The lawn I was standing on smelled like riverbank. Normal people wouldn’t make anything of
it even if they did smell something, not standing this close to the river, and dogs wouldn’t have been trained to react to this phenomenon or know how to articulate the difference if they did.

I crouched down and studied the lawn. Ronald hadn’t mowed in a while, and dandelions and daisies were beginning to spring up. But there…I plucked a white-petaled flower with a yellow center from the
ground and showed it to Sarah.

It was a water lily. “No more of this not-wanting-to-influence-my-conclusions crap. Tell me everything.” I commanded.

“Now you sound like a knight,” Sarah observed ruefully.

“It was a few days before Courtney disappeared,” Sarah said. We were in a room in the back of Sarah’s bakery, drinking some kind of tea that was good for our chi. She hadn’t wanted
to talk about whatever creature we were dealing with in a place where its magic was still strong, and I had seen the sense in this. “We were working here late because there was a craft festival coming to town in a few days, and it was raining outside.”

“A heavy rain?” I asked. It was not a trivial detail.

She hesitated. “Very. I felt something pressing against my wards. Something powerful
and cold and…hungry. I went to the window and looked out, but all I could see was an outline of someone across the street, just standing there in the middle of that downpour and not even seeming to notice.”

“You guys are freaking me out,” Isaac said uneasily. He was pacing around the room.

“I had three people working that night,” Sarah continued. “Courtney was one of them. I gave them something
that made them go to sleep and called their families and told them that we were pulling an all-nighter. My wards are strong, and I wasn’t letting anyone go out there. I thought there was a pretty good chance that whatever was waiting would go away before dawn.”

“Did it?” I asked. Another important detail.

“No,” she said. “But it went away when it stopped raining. I told myself that it was
something that was just passing through. I wanted to believe it.”

“Then you had another heavy rain?” I guessed.

“Yes, but I was here alone that night and nothing happened.” Sarah drew in a deep breath and released it. “It never occurred to me that whatever was out there hadn’t been looking for me. Isn’t that arrogant? And like I said, I wanted to believe that everything was fine. But the
next day I found out that Courtney had disappeared.”

“You’ve made a good life for yourself here,” I observed. “That’s an admirable thing. It’s not your fault if you’re not used to thinking like a hunter.”

She batted the comment away like an annoying insect. “This thing’s music leaves some strange kind of psychic echo behind in time and space. I’ve been trying to work out a way to follow
the song.”

“You don’t have to. I already know where Courtney is,” I told her. “But I’m going to need Isaac to get something from the Bonaparte police station for me before we go after her. And you…do you have any naptha?”

A lot of magical energy is generated from raw belief.  Cunning folk are descended from a long line of shamans, wise women, witch doctors, druids, houngan, and assorted
show-offs who used herb lore, alchemy, and trickery to make people believe in magic. That belief could then be harvested like a crop to make magic real. In other words, the cunning folk didn’t use make-believe miracles, they used make-
belief
miracles. And cunning folk are nothing if not keepers of lore. As well as canning vegetables, cunning folk extract glow juice from phosphorescent fish.
As well as making soap and candles, they make exotic poisons, poultices, and hallucinogens. I’ve yet to meet one of the cunning folk who didn’t have a well-stocked supply of things that burn, dissolve, paralyze, harden, dye, lubricate, intoxicate, and infect.

Sarah was looking at me warily. “Some rituals involve fire and have to be performed under an open sky at a specific time,
and it doesn’t matter if it’s raining or not.”

I took that as a yes. “Then I’d like to go get Courtney tomorrow morning.”

“Where is she?” Isaac demanded.

“Behind a waterfall,” I said.

Later that night, Sarah brought me a boxful of Bonaparte Bites. Isaac was off somewhere focusing on a large pie, and I was in the storeroom sketching a crude map on a piece of graph paper. I was basing
the drawing on multiple pictures that I had printed off Sarah’s computer, shots that showed Bonaparte Falls from different angles. I would have preferred to scout out the falls physically, but I knew that the thing we were hunting had senses that were somehow amplified by the presence of water, and I didn’t entirely understand how. The one thing I did know for sure was that I didn’t want
to risk losing the element of surprise.

“I know I should get some sleep, but I can’t.” Sarah sat down at the table. “I want to get Courtney right now.”

 “Sometimes right now is the wrong now,” I said. Our chances would be a lot better after dawn, and Sarah knew it. “I don’t know if it helps, but she’s probably entranced.”

“She’s still in what your stories used to call
durance vile
.” Sarah almost
spat.

“My stories?”

“Knight stories,” Sarah elaborated. “Men stories. They’re all about how brave the rescuers are. You never wonder how badly all those damsels in distress were traumatized. “Happily ever after,” my ass.”

“Ending a children’s story with “…
and she had night terrors and never again suffered the touch of another
” would have its own problems,” I observed mildly.

She didn’t hear me. “You never really think about how evil those monsters are either. What do you have to be to rape something you think is beautiful? Or to hold someone against their will because you claim to love them?”

“Aren’t you the one who’s against monster killing?” I wondered.

 “No,” She looked so miserable and uncomfortable then that I regretted baiting her. It’s just hard,
sometimes, being looked down on by people who have everything I want. “I just think calling things evil is too simplistic. I heard that thing’s music, and it was so lonely. I can see someone going insane from that kind of loneliness.”

Her face hardened. “And I’m going to kill it for what it’s done to Courtney. But that’s what I mean. Calling me good might be a little simplistic too.”

“Sarah,
we’re going to be fighting for our lives in a few hours,” I pointed out. “There’s a reason football coaches don’t call the players into a locker room before the game and ask them to talk about their feelings.”

 Sarah gave a small reluctant laugh and shoved the box of Bonaparte Bites forward. “You might as well eat these. They’re past their sell date.”

I popped one of the pastries in my mouth.
It was a bit stale but went well with the coffee I was drinking. The slip of paper I had to negotiate around was a little annoying, and for a minute I wondered why Sarah didn’t just make fortune cookies. Then I reflected that fortune cookies taste like crap. The slip of paper said something vaguely profound about happiness.

“Why aren’t you afraid that I’ll poison or drug you?” Sarah asked.

Because I have an extremely enhanced sense of smell. “I trust my instincts.”

Sarah wasn’t buying it. “You’re not like any knight I’ve ever met.”

“Well, you’re just like all the other cunning folk I’ve met,” I said. “Always trying to sniff out secrets, and it doesn’t seem to much matter what kind. Physical. Psychological. Magical.”

“Truth is truth.” Sarah’s eyes went somewhere far-off and she
absentmindedly picked up one of the pastries and bit into it. Then she froze when she realized what she’d done.

“What is it?” I asked suspiciously. Was there something extra in the pastries after all?

Sarah slowly removed the slip of paper from the pastry and looked at it. Her hands were trembling slightly. That’s when I knew.

“Not all the fortunes are fake, are they?” I asked.

Sarah sat down
in a chair after all, fumbling it away from the table and dropping down into it a little too rapidly. She seemed to need the extra stability. “Sometimes things come to me while I’m baking. They’re not visions, exactly, but they are messages. They itch inside my skull until I put them down on a slip of paper and place them in those powdered pastry balls.”

“You’re an aleuromancer,” I said,
more to let her know that she didn’t have to waste a lot of time explaining than anything else. Aleuromancers can read the future in sifting flour.

“Among other things,” Sarah agreed shakily. “I have to put fake fortunes inside all of the other pastries just so people won’t get suspicious, but every now and then, I go to my computer and print out a real one. I don’t give these messages to
anyone specific, but somehow they always wind up finding their way to the person they were meant for.”

“And you never eat the pastries,” I said slowly.

She looked at me with exasperation then. “Would you?”

“No,” I admitted.

We watched each other for a while.

“What does the prediction say?” I finally asked.

She handed it over to me, like saying it aloud would make it even more real. “I wrote
this before Courtney went missing. Later, I thought that she must have gotten it.”

I read the words on the slip of paper.
Beware falling water.

“I’m scared,” Sarah whispered.

Well, so was I.

“You can stay here tomorrow,” I said.

“That’s not how magic works!” Sarah said angrily. “Trying to avoid things like this only makes them work out the way you were afraid of in the first place!
Or else you become someone less than the person you were meant to be.”

I didn’t argue. She was right. And the truth was, Sarah White had stayed safe behind her wards the first time she had sensed a monster standing outside her store. She must have known on some level that even if the monster went away, someone else a lot less qualified to deal with it than she was would suffer from its presence
later, but she had done nothing but hope the problem would go away. And a few days later, someone she cared about had paid the price.

Sarah White wasn’t staying home.

“It just says to be wary,” I pointed out. “There wouldn’t be any point in that if your death was a foregone conclusion.”

She made a sound with her nose that indicated disgust, but her expression was a little more thoughtful.

I
reached across the table and squeezed her arm, just once, gently, and let it go. I wanted the squeeze to say
I like you, Sarah White, and you will not be alone when the time comes for a reckoning
.

Apparently Sarah took the gesture to mean
I’m taking this chance to initiate physical contact while you’re emotionally vulnerable because I want to exchange bodily fluids
. At any rate, she
smiled faintly and stood up. “You’re different from most knights. But you’re not that different.”

She walked out of the room, and I didn’t protest or call out my innocence. I lost my innocence a long time ago.

At 5:30 the next morning, Sarah turned on a battery-operated CD player next to the river. It was three miles away from the Bonaparte Falls, but that didn’t matter.
The being we were after would be attuned to sounds carrying over water. Sarah had warded the player to make it harder to find, and I was hoping the combination of magic and music would make the fossegrim curious.

The Bonaparte Falls were not breathtaking in their majesty, nor was there an obvious cave at their bottom, but I had not expected there to be. An accessible teen hangout
would not have made a good lair. I was staring at the top of the falls from my perch on a large rock that jutted from the river, my rappelling line anchored around its base.

“She’s chained to a wall in there,” Isaac said curtly. I was seeing a new side of Isaac, the Marine on mission. It looked good on him. “I didn’t see anything else with her.”

“Where’s the entrance?” I asked. I was wearing
a pair of swim trunks with deep pockets and a tool belt with a mallet and several glow sticks looped at my hips.

“I’ll lead you to it,” he said, squinting in thought. “It’s going to be a tight squeeze, but you should be able to make it.”

“Good work,” I said.

He looked at me oddly and turned back. Isaac was walking on the surface of the water. He did not look remotely Christlike.

I let the current
take me to the top of the falls and regained my footing. These were not rapids, and the rocks sloped rather than being a sheer drop. As long as the line did not get pinched and kept feeding through the biner, I would be fine. I began to walk down the side of the falls.

The entrance was a narrow crevasse, hidden by falling water and located some thirty feet above sheer, slick, stone. It was
skin-scrapingly tight, and I had to bend my body at awkward angles twice, but I made it through. I didn’t need the glow sticks. There was a soft blue light suffusing the tunnel. When I made it through to the cave, I saw why.

There were will-o’-the-wisps floating about the cave. They must have been enthralled by the fossegrim’s music and set here like living lanterns. Otherwise, the fossegrim’s
idea of interior decorating was fairly simple. There was gold draped over the walls or embedded in cracks, necklaces, rings, earrings, bracelets, watches, lockets, and in some cases coins. Possessions lost to the river over the centuries. A huge stack of driftwood had been piled and dried in the corner, and a small fire was actually burning, fish bones scattered about its base. A waterproof
guitar case was leaning against the wall. Fossegrim played violins or fiddles in the old tales, but some things change with time.