Free Demon Hunts by Ce Murphy

happened both nine months and almost thirty years ago in my personal timeline. “Would her death be enough to start messing up the balance? Was she that big a gun?”
    Sonata’s eyes were dark. “What’s your calling, Joanne? What are you, in adept terms? What are we?”
    â€œMe? I’m a shaman. You two are mediums. Melinda’s, I don’t know, a witch or something. Why?”
    â€œAnd what do you suppose a mage is?”
    â€œI don’t know. It’s a wizard. A sorc…” Except sorcerer, in my experience, connotated bad guy, and I was pretty damned sure Sheila MacNamarra hadn’t been a bad guy. I fell silent, staring at Sonata and working through the rankings I was aware of.
    Mage didn’t fit anywhere on the scale. It suggested major mojo, skills on a level that beggared the rest of us. Which, from what little I’d seen, summed up my mother nicely. I said, “Phenomenal cosmic powers?” in a small voice.
    Sonata nodded. “If she’s dead, then our side has lost a great warrior.”
    I snorted loudly enough to make my ears pop. “Our side? So far I haven’t seen a lot of us versus them, Sonata. I’ve mostly seen badly screwed-up people in need of help.” Where “people” sometimes meant “gods of unimaginable power,” but who was counting?
    â€œAnd yet you just said your mother spent her life engaged in battle against this ‘Master.’ Is he not the other side?”
    Anybody who commanded banshees—or anything else—to ritual murder in order to feed on the blood and souls of the dead was, I had to admit, pretty much inherently on the other side of where I stood. “All right, point taken. So her death could’ve been the catalyst. Or a catalyst.” I didn’t like the idea of that much hanging on my mother’s life.
    She probably hadn’t liked the idea, either.
    I put my face in my hands. “Basically what you’re telling me is that never mind the cannibal, I have much larger problems looming. Only I can’t never mind the cannibal, so I’m just going to have to figure out a way to make it all work. Which is what I’ve been doing all along.”
    God, I missed Coyote. He was only moderately helpful, mostly by way of kicking me in the ass until I did, in fact, figure it out myself, but having him there to kick my ass would have made me feel a lot better. I exhaled into my palms, then looked up at Billy. “Okay. Sonata was the likable idea. Now for the one you’re going to hate.”
    He sighed. “All right. What do I hate?”
    I put on what I hoped was a convincing, cheerful smile. “I’m going to use myself as bait.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Billy said, “Excuse us,” and hustled me out of Sonata’s house so fast it could have been magic. I warded off his outrage with raised palms, or tried to, and opted to explain rather than wait for him to stop telling me what a bad idea it was.
    It wasn’t that I thought it was a particularly great idea myself. It was just better than setting somebody else out as bait, which argument didn’t slow Billy down at all. “Look, I’m going to head up to the Space Needle and have a look around the city first,” I said in my best reasonable tone. “I’ll see if I can pull up any residue like I saw from Melinda’s circle—”
    That, at least, got his attention. “You saw something? Why the hell didn’t you say so earlier?”
    â€œBecause I took a cab from your house to the coroner’s instead of you picking me up, and I forgot while we were examining decomposing bodies and talking to mediums, okay?I’m sorry.” Billy had the grace to look apologetic, and I charged onward. “Anyway, yes, I saw residue from Mel’s circle, so I thought I could at least try picking up someone else’s. If we’re lucky it’ll turn out