Spirit Dances (23 page)

Rita gave him a perfectly sunny smile. “Magic.”

The big guy rolled his eyes in an excellent teenage what
ever!
approximation and went back to the fire. Rita’s comment, though, shook my brain loose enough to hit on the idea of using the Sight, which, aside from making a good lie detector, was also handy for noticing people hidden behind doors and walls.

Just not for noticing people hiding off-property, waiting to do something stupid enough to get shot for.

I dropped my chin to my chest, eyes closed as I worked my way through not berating myself. It didn’t seem to matter, though, that I knew very well I’d shoot Patty Raleigh again, and that I’d made the right real-world choice for saving my partner’s life. But the memories of that bat swinging toward Billy’s head, of my finger squeezing the trigger and of Raleigh collapsing backward in shock, were going to haunt me whether I’d made the right choice or not. I was going to have to live with it, just like I’d had to live with a million other unexpected things over the past fifteen months.

The Sight didn’t seem to care much about my little crisis of conscience. It slammed through me again, whiting out everything in my vision. I closed my eyes and reached for Billy’s arm, needing something solid to hang on to. I felt him give me a curious look—felt it both from the motion of his body and through a fuchsia flare in the whiteness—but he didn’t object. Grateful, I focused on the familiar splash of his aura, waiting for the Sight to calm down.

After about thirty seconds it became clear I was going to be waiting a long, long time. I got sparks of emotional information from the Underground town’s denizens, but nothing like the clear readable auras I was accustomed to. At most I could tell that those who were awake and aware were cagey, trusting us about as far as we could be thrown. Not that I needed the Sight to tell me that, but it reinforced a desire to slip by and leave them to their lives. I let my magic fade, normal vision re-establishing itself as I murmured, “Thanks for the flashlights,” as sincerely as I could before releasing Billy’s arm and heading past the campfire group into the Underground’s semi-darkness.

Rita let me take the lead until we were well beyond them, then stepped up again, offering flashlights and a shrug. “I
can lead you into some of the more remote parts, if you want. I’ve been down there already looking for people, but maybe you can see better than I do.”

I clicked the flashlight on to make sure it worked, then turned it off again: there were still long stretches of light from the streets above, and I saw no reason to run the battery down. “I might be able to. How far do these old streets go? I remember the tour saying something like sixty blocks burned, but I don’t know how big the old blocks were….”

“Farther than I’ve gone. I haven’t been in this part of the city that long. Even we have our territory.”

I nodded, though I hadn’t quite thought of it that way. I knew I recognized several of the homeless who hung out along the Way, and that I was never surprised when a new face showed up and then disappeared again within a few days. It was a little like prostitutes who worked a specific corner, though I had the good sense not to say that out loud. “Seems like it takes a certain amount of nerve to go exploring down here. I mean, how stable are these old walls and pipes and things?”

“Most of them haven’t collapsed in a hundred years. I figure they’re not gonna fall on my head today.”

“Irrefutable logic.” Light from above faded into gloom and first Rita, then Billy and I turned our flashlights on. The bright beams made lost city even less friendly, shedding light where none belonged. Rita gestured us onto hands and knees, flashlights thunking awkwardly as we crawled through a low tunnel. The Underground tour I’d been on had said Seattle’s new sidewalks had been built anywhere from three to thirty feet above the old, which I heartily believed as we scrambled up and down steep grades that changed with unexpected rapidity. Rita kept on like she knew where we were going, and after long minutes
we came out above a room big enough to be a cave. There was no natural light, but the flashlights picked out a floor a good ten or twelve foot drop from the tunnel mouth. It had seen more than its fair share of subsidence, with water-filled, sandy cracks running along it. Wood and brick pillars supported a ceiling that stretched an easy fifteen feet above us, bent and broken brick suggesting whatever building lay atop it, its weight was too great. Eventually the whole thing would collapse six yards. I wondered if one building falling in would create a cascade effect, reshaping Seattle’s skyline once again.

Billy said, “Walker,” in an oddly strained voice, and pointed his flashlight across the cavern. I waved my light that way, illuminating another tunnel mouth that had been broken through a building wall rather than having been part of the original street system.

A woman with hip-length golden hair crouched just on this side of that tunnel, hands cupped over a largish pool of water. She turned her head our way, showing long, beautifully symmetrical features, and eyes as gold as mine when I was in the throes of magic usage. They had been brown earlier: that was my first, useless thought.

My second was identical to Mr. Kobe Beef’s once he’d determined I wasn’t dead. Tia Carley was stark naked, and my tiny little brain couldn’t get beyond that fact. She stood up, staring across the distance at us. I had never seen a more athletic, attractive female body in my life: slightly broad shoulders, strong slim biceps, round high breasts and enough taper to her waist that her hips looked lush above long rangy legs. All three of us gaped at her, as unabashed in our staring as she was in her nudity. She remained perfectly still, but even so, she reminded me of the troupe dancers in the midst of the shapeshifting dances. There was something challenging
about her, as if she’d been caught, caged, and escaped, and had no intention of ever returning to the cage.

Then her lips peeled back from her teeth in a purely feral threat, and she sprang away from the wellspring in a single lithe bound.

A gold brindle wolf hit the earth when she landed, and disappeared into the Underground’s tunnels.

Rita made a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard, incredulous dismay mixed with childish excitement and a certain amount of terror. “Was that—did I—did she—?”

“Yeah.” I did a 180, flopped on my belly and slithered down the damp cavern wall until I dared drop to the floor. It wasn’t that far—maybe three feet, with me all stretched out like that—but I hit with a jolt that knocked my breath loose.

Billy said, “My suit,” in resignation, and did the same, then yelled, “Walker, wait up!” as I bolted across the underground room floor. “Rita, you don’t have to come with us—”

“Are you kidding?” She tossed her flashlight to Billy—I could tell from the way light splashed over the room—and squirmed down after us. I was just smart enough not to go after Tia without backup, but by the time they got to me
I was dancing with agitation, and immediately forewent smarts to scramble through the beaten-down brick wall, shouting over my shoulder as I lurched down the tunnel.

“Her name’s Tia Carley! I saw her at the dance concert, goddamn it, I
healed
her, Billy! She had breast cancer! Shit, I talked to her this afternoon. She was interested in the magic, in shamanism, and damn it, I never even imagined she might be asking because she’d gotten caught up in the same power surge I did last night. Or like Morrison did today. If she got caught like Morrison did, she has no idea what’s going on! God, she could’ve even accidentally killed poor Lynn Schumacher this morning—!”

“If she got caught like Morrison did, how come he hasn’t reverted to human? How come she just turned back into a wolf? I don’t think she’s a victim of anything, Walker. I think she’s your killer.”

I stopped and flashed my light back to eyeball my partner. “Come on, Billy. I can pop back and forth between shapes. In theory, anyway. Probably. I bet I can. With practice.”

“With practice! You just said Morrison was caught. You can’t have it both ways, Walker. Either somebody knows what they’re doing or they don’t.”

“So maybe she’s—” I couldn’t think of what she might be, since I knew she wasn’t a shaman, but Billy cut across me, getting straight to the point.

“Somebody who
ripped someone’s throat out?”

I stared at him, and Rita’s half-visible shadow behind him suggested, “Let’s argue about it somewhere else.”

I crawled forward again, light bouncing wildly off the closed-in walls—they were dirt, not brick; someone had dug this space out—and tried to come up with an explanation I liked with regards to Tia. By the time we got free of the tunnel, we were filthy and I was no closer to an answer.

There were, as some small favor, dirty wolf tracks crossing the small room we’d entered, which told us which of the two doors—I used the word advisedly—to choose. “Where are we?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been this far out.” Rita looked up anyway, like the ceiling might offer answers. “I think we’re getting out of downtown by now. We’ve come a long ways.”

“Then we must be running out of Underground, right? She couldn’t have gone far.” Determined, I triggered the Sight again, baring my teeth against the now-expected blinding whiteness. It flared without giving me a single hint of the depth of viewpoint I knew it could, like it was unduly impressed with the weight and pressure of earth around us. I wasn’t certain, though, if it was the Sight itself at fault or if it was me, this time, since I was trying hard not to think about just how far underground we were. Knowing that, however, and shaking it loose were two entirely different things.

Rita said something, but I stopped where I was, in the middle of the room, suddenly irritated. I had had, even by my standards, a hell of an evening so far. Unlike my usual hellacious nights, though, this one had lined me up with what felt like an atom bomb’s worth of fresh power just waiting to be used. Just because my standard operating procedure had always been rushing in where angels feared to tread didn’t mean I actually had to do that now. “Billy, I need advice.”

He was at the door the tracks led through, scowling down it and clenching his hands like he wished he had his duty weapon with him. He stopped doing both, though, to gawk at me. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t remember asking him for advice even once in the whole roller coaster of the past year. I’d barely even asked Coyote for advice, though in my
defense, I’d wanted to. He’d just been unavailable for a lot of that time. Which made Billy the better person to ask for advice, probably, since he’d pretty much been around since moment one of Joanne’s Shamanic Awakening.

And now that I had his attention I didn’t know where to begin. “You know how I told you about my real name?” I finally asked.

His eyebrows elevated, but he nodded and even flickered a smile. “Good thing, too. Caroline Siobhán’s a nicer name than Caroline Joanne.”

I smiled, too. “Yeah, it is.” The Hollidays had nearly named their baby girl after me, which had prompted a confession to the train wreck of a name I never used. That, and they’d gone through a lot, thanks to me, and also I was slowly, cautiously, trying to come clean with the people I was closest to. I’d spent more than a decade holding secrets and damage close to the chest, which was poisonous even for perfectly normal people, and which made a nasty mess of shamanic potential in someone like me. Shedding all the protective layers wasn’t easy—in fact, of my friends, Morrison was the only one who knew all the parts of the truth about my history, and that was because he’d gone digging on his own—but I was getting there.

And since shedding was exactly what had happened to me under Rattler’s influence tonight, it seemed like this was as good a time as any to start doing crazy things like asking for help and advice. “Earlier, after the truck hit me and my spirit animal put me back together, I had this weird idea. This idea that I’d been…reborn.”

Billy, who was no slouch in the detecting department, said, “As Siobhán Walkingstick.”

I nodded. “And you saw how wiped out I was. The power got stripped down to a kernel before the troupe danced me
up some energy again. Right now I can’t See past the end of my nose because every time I try the magic just goes kerblewy. It’s too big. It’s—” I waved my hands in the air, not sure what I was trying to express. “More solid? Confident? I don’t know. Than it’s been. The rebirth, the dance, they
did
something to me.”

Billy, strongly, said, “I know exactly what you mean.”

Right. Of course he did, and he hadn’t even gone through the shedding process I had. He’d just been nailed by what the dance troupe offered. I said, “Right,” out loud and itched my fingers through my hair. “So basically I need to know if this is a good time to completely change my modus operandi. If I should make a power circle, sit my ass down in the middle of this room, stop arguing for my own limitations and try to figure out how to make this whole huge-feeling power work for me. I might be able to, I don’t know. Map this place out in my head. See—” and I tried to invest the word with a capital S beyond it being the beginning of a sentence “—where Tia went, assuming I can get the goddamned Sight to work right at all. The point is, should I try things I’ve never tried because I’ve been too busy busting down doors, metaphorical guns blazing and hoping I don’t get my face eaten off?”

“I assume that’s the other option here.”

“Pretty much.”

Billy lost his grip on a solemn expression just briefly, and I tried not to snicker, myself. It was a frustrated sort of laughter, but it was also hard not to appreciate the mucked-up mindset which required asking if getting my face eaten off was perhaps not a good idea.

“How long would the map and search take?”

“I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know for certain it would work. I mean, it should, if I can control the fricking
Sight. Mapping the layout shouldn’t be more than the magical equivalent of clearing all the rooms in a video game until the one big shiny spot left blinking on the screen is the bad guy.”

Billy gave me a look which suggested that if he did not have a twelve-year-old son, my analogy would have been utterly meaningless. I shrugged apologetically and went on. “Here’s the thing. Conceptually this is new to me, and I don’t know how long it would take. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe hours. The problem is I might be all topped up full of shiny strong brand-new ready-to-be-used magic right now, but I haven’t tested it yet. I’ve blacked out Seattle. I’ve caused earthquakes, for God’s sake. If this mapping idea goes wrong, if I pour out too much power down here beneath the city, I’m afraid I could send the whole downtown into Puget Sound.”

Billy stared at me a few long seconds, then, in a very steady even voice, said, “Let’s bust down some doors and get our faces eaten off.”

Tia leaped out of the wrong door and tried to eat our faces off.

She landed on Rita, who was smallest and closest, and who screamed like—well, like she was being crushed by a gigantic wolf. This time I reacted the way I should have when Patty Raleigh came after Billy: shields spun across the room, not just springing up around Rita so Tia’s enormous jaws snapped and skidded against them, but then slamming into the wolf, knocking it back. It was the most integrated defense-and-attack I’d ever pulled off, a hint of how my power was going to respond in familiar territory. Premature triumph bloomed in me, though at least for once I appreciated it
was
premature.

Tia whipped around behind the shield, snarling and searching for a way out. There wasn’t one: between Raleigh and Morrison in the past thirty-six hours, I at least had the sense to pin the shields up against the wall. “Rita, you okay?”

Her high-pitched, gibbered response indicated I’d asked a stupid question. Billy, though, gave her a brief once-over and reported, “She’s all right,” which I took to mean she hadn’t been bitten or otherwise scathed. I wasn’t sure anybody could be mentally all right after that, but one thing at a time. I inched toward the captured wolf, then, in a fit of brilliance, whispered a sword into my hand
before
a crisis demanded I have it.

The blade was a silver rapier, and I did mean silver, as in the precious metal, not just the color, that I’d taken off a god the very first day I’d been a shaman. The weapon had become part of my armament—I’d been taking fencing lessons for the past year so I could use it properly—but nobody in their right mind carried a four-foot-long rapier around Seattle. Most of the time it lived beneath my bed, where despite my utter lack of attention to it, it refused to tarnish. Neither did my necklace tarnish, now that I thought about it, so the maker they had in common had probably done something to the metal.

It was equally likely that its maker had invested it with the willingness to be called across a breach of space, since I didn’t think bending space was generally within a shaman’s purview. Whether it was my magic or its, though, the sword could be pulled from under my bed and into my hand from a range of up to tens of miles, maybe more, and that let me have it in my repertoire without garnering a reputation as a freak.

Well. Without garnering a reputation as a sword-carrying
freak, anyway. I pointed the thing at the wolf as dramatically as I could, and with my best Errol Flynn sneer, demanded, “Show yourself!”

Wolves perhaps didn’t respond well to human language commands. She jumped at me, bounced off the shield and snarled again, showing impressively large canines. Big brave me shrieked like a little girl and cowered back a step before remembering I was the one with the sword, the shields and the human brain. In theory, I had the upper hand. “That’s not going to work. Look, I mostly want to know what happened to you. Were you at the dance concert last night? Did you accidentally get transformed during the shapeshifter dances?”

Truthfully, I doubted it. Billy’s point about the woman’s ability to shift freely made too much sense. Still, there was a passing chance that Tia was a victim, and there was some important law of the land about innocent until proven guilty. Maybe the fact that she remained a wolf now supported that: presumably an in-control human shapeshifter would switch to the form which would permit communication. My sword wavered a bit. I didn’t want to stab Tia.

With the unerring sense of a predator recognizing weakness, she leaped again. This time, though, she did transform, lupine body surging to human in a ripple that passed through my shields without a whisper of protest. Rita screamed, but before the leaping woman hit the floor she shifted a second time, front paws catching her weight. She wheeled toward the door she’d come from, and disappeared from sight in an instant.

Rita’s scream cut off in astonishment. Billy and I both took a few steps toward the door the wolf had exited through, then stopped, staring at one another. He didn’t
have to ask: after a few seconds of slow brain-grinding, I said, “God damn it, she’s like the goddamned wendigo.”

Billy, who hadn’t been there for that, only elevated his eyebrows and waited. I transferred my sword to my left hand and rubbed my face until it burned with warmth. “Sort of like the wendigo, anyway. The shields don’t work very well on things that are pure or active magic, and the Lower World is all about the magic. Every time the wendigo went there, I lost my grip. And it could slip back and forth with out any effort, so basically it was like trying to catch a live fish with bare hands.”

“I thought the wendigo was…” Billy trailed off, obviously looking for the right phrasing. “Less human than that.”

“Yeah, no, it was. I don’t know what she is.” I did. I just didn’t want to say it, because there was no such thing as a werewolf. Why banshees and thunderbirds and spirit animals were okay and werewolves weren’t, I didn’t know, but I was determined that there should be no such thing as werewolves. They were too Hollywood, or something. “It’s just the principle’s the same. The shields don’t work well on pure magic, and if shapeshifting between one form and another isn’t pure magic, I don’t know what is.”

Rita, who had a more practical grasp on the situation, said, “Is she going to come back?” which made us all edge into the center of the room, creating a back-to-back tri angle. Rita scooped up the flashlight I’d dropped when I’d called the sword and shone her two lights at both doors, then twisted a little to shine one of them at me. “You have a sword.”