No Dominion (The Walker Papers: A Garrison Report) by CE Murphy Page B

Captain Morrison already. What do you think of him?”
    “What do we think of him?” Walker crowed
    Nichols, as if oblivious to the tone of her voice, went on pleasantly: “I’ve been introducing him around. I thought it would be good for the precinct to meet my replacement before his first day of work in August.”
    Blood drained from Walker’s face. She looked at me, white with accusation, which was fair enough: I’d all but introduced myself under false pretenses, and I was just about ashamed enough to look away. Just about, but not quite, and she had just enough pride and anger to drown out her horror. We glared at each other, neither willing to back down, long enough to make not just the Motor crew, but even Captain Nichols, uncomfortable.
    Walker finally broke the stalemate with a tight smile and a low harsh voice. “Well. Live long and prosper, Captain Morrison.”
    She looked pointedly at my seat on her Mustang. I got up, stepped through the crew, and walked away thinking I’d never been told to go fuck myself so politely in my life.
     
    NOW
    Somehow she’d found a taxi in my quiet residential neighborhood after all. By the time I followed her, she was gone, the street empty but my driveway filled with not just my Toyota Avalon, but the 1969 Mustang Boss that had been the source of years of contention between myself and Joanne Walker.
    The car had had a rough year. Almost as bad as Joanne, and unquestionably worse than my own. An arrow had been shot through the gas tank, an ax dragged through the roof, and then a helicopter had winched the vehicle out of an earthquake fissure that had crumpled the back end. Joanne had spent every spare moment and all her spare cash re-restoring the car, even finally putting in the manual transmission she had always wanted to.
    As far as I knew, no one but Joanne had driven the car since she’d found it in a barn a dozen years earlier and started the restoration work on it. I unlocked and opened the driver’s side door slowly and sat down. The seat didn’t need adjustment. Walker and I had proved to be exactly the same height, in the end. I put the keys in the ignition and my hands on the wheel, feeling the shape of Walker’s body in the seat and the soft worn spots in the leather from her hands. Faint scent lingered: mostly Irish Spring soap, but with a hint of oil and grease that would always remind me of Walker.
    “It’s all right, old girl,” I finally whispered to the car. “She’ll come back to us as soon as she can.”
    We sat together, two things that loved her, and I fell asleep a little while before dawn.

No Dominion
    “No Dominion” begins and ends in the middle of RAVEN CALLS (Book Seven of the Walker Papers).
     
    The author feels strongly that you should read RAVEN CALLS first.

CHAPTER ONE
    A god, an elf and a shaman walked into a bar.
    All right, no, they didn’t. They’d walked backward through time, an’ so had I, but if I didn’t make some kinda joke about it, I was gonna get nervous. A joke was usually enough to throw off oncoming alarm, and it made me figure maybe standing at the Hill of Tara in ancient Ireland, watching the sun start to fall in the west maybe wasn’t so strange. Not after a year that included tackling gods and line-blocking demons, not to mention fighting zombies and hunting banshees.
    And besides, the whole damned world was lit up with what Joanne Walker called the Second Sight. She was the shaman. Me, I was the cab driver who’d ended up her sidekick. I reckoned most folks would think it oughta be the other way around, what with her being twenty-seven and me seventy-four, but I didn’t have magic, just enthusiasm. Not that long ago I hadn’t even had that, but Jo had reawakened a sense of adventure I’d thought died along with my wife.
    Funny thing was, as soon as I started living again I couldn’t remember how to stop anymore. The three years I’d spent being a grumpy old man after Annie’s death had faded like