Spirit Dances (7 page)

Morrison said, “You what?” in the sort of resigned tone that indicated he’d never keep up with my inconstant ways,
and stayed where he was while I hurried across the theater patio.

The cancer-infected woman I’d noticed in the theater was tall, maybe five foot nine, but she wore flats, so I towered over her as I tapped her shoulder. She turned from her friends, an eyebrow arched curiously, and looked me up and down. I did the same, because the word
statuesque
could have been coined just for her. Valkyries of yore wanted to look like this woman: broad-shouldered, generously endowed, long legs and a mass of genuinely golden hair that I didn’t think came out of a bottle. Her eyes were brown, which surprised me: I almost expected them to be as yellow as her hair. If she’d had a hint of a tan, the snug goldenrod dress she wore would have made her look like a giant banana, but she was so fair-skinned I couldn’t even find any freckles. She was about thirty-five, and aside from that touch of malignant pink in her breast, literally glowed with health. I wished everybody—including myself—had her level of fitness, and said, a bit rashly, “Hi. Do you believe in magic?”

“I don’t know about magic, but if you’re about to ask me on a date, I’ll believe in miracles,” she offered.

Apparently she had the confidence necessary for the bright-colored dress, too, and for a moment I genuinely regretted my limited palate of sexual preferences. “I’m sorry. I wish I was. Instead I’m going to say something really, really weird, and I hope you’ll believe me.”

She arched an eyebrow, looked over her shoulder at her friends, then faced me again, arms folded under her breasts. It was closed-off body language, but she contradicted it by putting her weight on one leg, hip cocked out and the other foot angled sideways to indicate a degree of willingness to listen. I had clearly been a detective too long, if I was studying her body language that carefully, but she took my mind
off it by using her language-language, too: “If this is the ‘you should be a model’ speech, I’ve heard it before.”

“It’s much weirder than that. I’d like to hold your hands for a minute or two.”

Her other eyebrow skyrocketed up to match the first. “Are you sure you’re not asking me out?”

“Sadly, yes. I’d rather explain afterward, if that’s okay.”

She
oofed
as one of her friends elbowed her in the ribs and made a ribald comment, but she put her hands out. I took them, but she made like it was all her idea, grasping mine firmly. Her hands were rough, as if she worked with chemicals or just did fifty pull-ups on an iron bar every day. “You work out?”

“Enough to get noticed, I guess.” A glow of pleasure erupted from her, turning her dominant-yellow aura as brilliant a goldenrod as her dress, and putting her in exactly the kind of mental place I wanted her in. Overlooking the morning’s mess-up, I’d been able to heal people with a drawn-out vehicle analogy for most of the past year, aligning aliments to my mechanic’s trade knowledge. More recently, though, I’d stepped it up a notch, and could affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. It helped enormously, though, if my patient was receptive. Joyful and full of self-confidence was just about as positive and receptive a mental space as I could ask for.

She said something I didn’t hear as my attention went internal. My power leaped to life, no longer reluctant as it had been that morning. It felt like it was making up for lost time, or more likely, making up for the choice I’d made that morning. I didn’t exactly feel guilty, but I did feel like it would take a lot of healing people before I balanced out gunning one down.

Silver and blue magic, topped up and bubbling over from
the energy the dancers had put out, was eager to go where I focused it. I’d never had a target like this one: no more than a handful of cells, lethal pink, unwelcome but unstoppable in the host body.

Habit lingered. It was easy to think of those few sick cells as tiny rust spots that needed sanding, polishing and repainting so they wouldn’t spread to the body around them. The real difference to me was not going through those steps. Once the analogy popped into mind, the work was done between one thought and the next.

What I didn’t expect was the staggering whirl of magic that surged toward the deadly pink cells, obliterating them. But it didn’t stop there. Time tunneled forward like a bad 3-D effect, showing me much paler pink cells, like ghosts of futures yet to come. Those cells multiplied, became blotches, became lumps, became masses, metastasizing and spreading. Healing magic charged headlong into the future-that-could-be, tearing sickness apart and leaving healthy flesh in its wake. It ran all the way through the cycle of disease, destroying it not just now, but all its potential in the future. I caught a glimpse of a double helix, of an off-shoot ladder rung that didn’t belong, and felt my magic gather itself, preparing to fix that, too.

Panic spurted through me and I clawed the magic back. It hesitated, still focused on that genetic anomaly, then rolled back into me, so drained I could barely feel its presence. Time wound backward, landing me back into the here and now, where my knees buckled. The woman’s grip on my hands kept me upright, but she let go, obviously feeling the flux of power. “What the—what’d you do?”

“Removed some rust.” My throat was dry. I coughed and tried again, but shivers wracked me so hard I could hardly focus on the woman before me. Her aura was no longer
marred by the scant touch of unhealthy pink, but even my grip on the Sight faded as I reached feebly for something to lean on. She was the only thing available, and to my relief she put her hand out again, strong fingers banding around my arm.

“Are you all right?” Her voice was pitched high with concern.

I managed a nod. The cancer hadn’t spread, but the amount of magic bent to finding and destroying those sick cells offered a warning: potentially terminal illness, even if it hadn’t come anywhere near actually terminal, was
not
something to mess with lightly. I had the ugly feeling I could have easily killed myself with that unconsidered effort. Walking blithely through cancer wards and laying on hands was clearly not going to be an option.

“What’d you do?” she asked again, this time more mystified than alarmed. “I feel like champagne. Bubbly inside.”

“Do me a favor.” I sounded like I’d drunk a cupful of sand. “Go to the doctor. Get a mammogram. Just to be sure.”

She went white, long rangy lines going rigid. “You don’t think…?”

“No.” Not anymore, but that didn’t seem like a useful thing to say. The image of the distorted double helix popped up again and I crushed my eyes shut, wishing I’d dared try shaving that wrongness away. There were at least two good reasons not to have: one, I didn’t know what the long-term ramifications for her genetics would be if I had, and two, I thought I was lucky to not already be dead. Rewriting DNA was not in the game plan. “Just go to the doctor to be sure, okay? Please? Get one of those genetic tests, if you can, to see if you’ve got a predilection for the disease.”

She relaxed incrementally at the reassurance, then frowned again. “I will. But what did you do? Who are you?”

“I’m a healer.” It sounded absurd, but I was too tired to come up with something clever. No healing I’d done had ever wiped me out so badly. I was going to have to talk to Coyote about tempering the magic so I didn’t kill myself while doing my duties. “I’m a healer, and I think you’ll be okay now, but go to a doctor anyway. Please?”

“A healer.” Befuddlement darkened her eyes and she caught my arm. “Really? That—it sounds like bullshit, but I feel…people like you exist? For real?”

I breathed a tiny laugh. “For real. But you’ll go to a doctor anyway, right? Please?”

“I will.” She didn’t let go of my arm, though, expression searching mine. “But I’d like to see you again, too. Just to be sure. Would that be okay?”

God. It was considerably more bizarre to have someone believe me than not. I smiled, wishing I was more comfortable with being someone’s hero, and nodded. “My name’s Joanne Walker. I work for the Seattle Police Department, so I’m not hard to find. Give me a call sometime, if you want. That would be fine. But, um, don’t noise this around, okay? Faith healing isn’t exactly on my résumé.”

She finally let me go, glancing at her own hands in embarrassment. “Right, no, of course I won’t. And I will call. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so pushy. I just never felt anything like that before, and now you say I had cancer and it’s gone and—” She broke off, took a deep breath, and repeated, “Sorry. Sorry, Miss Walker. I’ll call you.” She glanced in the direction I’d been trying to go, toward Morrison, and tilted her head curiously. I sort of shrugged, and she got a small, crooked smile. “Nice.”

It was an assessment I couldn’t argue with. I smiled a bit
in return, nodded and wobbled back to the theater building where I could lean on a wall.

Morrison joined me, breath drawn to ask a question, but I shook my head. Something was nosing at my exhausted magic, like a dog that had found something interestingly stinky to explore. It was a new sensation, and it withdrew as I reached inside myself to scrape together enough power to create shields. Withdrew, nosed the shields themselves, then disappeared entirely, leaving behind only a fading sense of inquisitiveness and a faint but familiar tugging in my belly, fishhooks pulling me toward some kind of encounter.

Every part of me wanted that sensation to be nothing more than my imagination. Failing that, I liked the idea of it being a good guy recently come to Seattle and just discovering there were other people of power hanging out in town. There’d been no sense of malice or danger from the feeling, just interest.

Nothing in the past fifteen months, though, had given me any reason to believe the happy fluffy bunny scenario. I was dead sure that I’d gotten the killer’s attention.

“Talk to me, Walker. You look like a ghost.” Morrison ducked his head so he could catch my gaze and bring it up, which was surprising enough that it worked.

For a second, anyway. The pedantic part of me then couldn’t help looking over myself, wondering if I really did look like a ghost. Not really: they tended to be more transparent and monochromatic than I was, though I had to give Morrison the nod for my color being off. “Sorry. That woman had breast cancer. Healing it wiped me out.”

“You can…” Morrison sounded like he was about to swallow his tongue. “You can do that?”

“Apparently. I’m also thinking it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, not unless I want to kill myself. There’s probably a better way, maybe if I set up a healing circle, a drum…” I trailed off, letting the building hold me up as I looked toward the theater inside. “Like what they were doing.
Creating a controlled center of power. I’ll work it out later. Long-term project.”

One side of Morrison’s mouth curled up. “You’ve changed.”

I blinked back toward him. “Really?” It was a stupid question. I knew he was right. Still, having him come out and say it warranted a slightly incredulous response.

My stupidity didn’t seem to bother him, as he simply nodded instead of calling me out on it. “You’re a lot more confident.”

“I was always confident.” About cars.

For some reason I didn’t have to say the last two words aloud. Morrison managed to hear them anyway, or at least I hoped that was what he was responding to as the rest of his mouth joined the smile. “No, Walker. You were arrogant. You probably still are, but confidence sits better. I think even three months ago you wouldn’t have been standing here telling me flat-out this thing wasn’t a wendigo or that you could heal terminal illnesses but thought you needed a focal point. The whole thing would have embarrassed you.”

Now the corner of
my
mouth turned up. “And it would’ve pissed you off. Sir.”

“My mother likes to say ‘a body can get used to anything, even being hanged, as the Irishman said.’”

I laughed, then became more solemn. “Oh, great. I don’t know, Morrison. I’ve screwed up so much. So many people’ve gotten hurt. I had to get over myself. And…”

His eyebrow twitched upward and I found myself at a loss. I’d been going to say “Coyote coming back really helped,” which was true, but which was also suddenly something I really didn’t want to say to Morrison. Not when we were getting along so well. So what came out of my mouth was unexpected, if heartfelt: “And you helped. No matter how
much you didn’t like it, you took this talent of mine in stride way before I did. It’s been a year now, you know? Since the banshee? A year almost to the day. And you were the one who pulled me onto that case, because you accepted I had a potentially useful skill set whether you understood it or not. So I owe you a lot, boss. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” There was a momentary pause while we were both uncomfortable with all of that before Morrison got another very slight smile, this one sly. “Or were you just saying all that to soften me up for something I’m not going to like?”

I groaned. “No, not on purpose, but now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure I got the killer’s attention when I healed that woman.”

Morrison’s good humor drained away, leaving him to study me as though I was some kind of new and especially nasty stain on his shoe. “Take a walk with me, Detective.”

That couldn’t be good. I fell into step with him, arms wrapped around myself. Sleeveless velvet sheath dresses were very sexy, but not at all warm, and I’d left my coat in Petite for dramatic effect. Women weren’t too bright sometimes. We got a little distance from the theater before Morrison said, “You remember you’re suspended from duty, right?”

“The theater’s not in our jurisdiction anyway. It all works out,” I said flippantly. “It’s not like either thing is going to stop me from investigating.”

He glowered at me, but it was a resigned sort of glower. “I know. Walker, what do you mean, you got his attention? From what you’ve said, from what I’ve seen, you’ve been throwing power around Seattle for the last year like Jackson Pollock threw paint, and this guy only just now notices you? Explain that to me.”

We hadn’t gotten more than fifty feet away from the
theater, but I stopped to goggle at my boss. Never mind women not being too bright.
I
clearly wasn’t too bright.

There was no need to damn my entire gender just because I was a moron. I tented my hands over my nose and mouth, stared at Morrison over my fingertips and finally said, “I can’t. Not unless it’s someone brand-new to the Pacific Northwest, but if it is, I don’t know why he’d choose here to make his attack. I’d want to work from comfortable territory, myself.”

“The date?”

“I don’t think International Everybody Is Irish Day carries any kind of mystical
kaboom
. If it was the equinox, may…”

I looked skyward. It was a gorgeous clear night, with a few determined stars glittering past the city lights and the moon’s glow. I said a few choice swear words under my breath, then, aloud, said, “It’s not the date. It’s the damned moon.”

Morrison looked up, too. “Full moon? What, it’s a werewolf?”

I glared at him, equilibrium further restored by familiar irritation. “I don’t think there’s any such thing. No, it’s all about dates and phases of the moon with me. Twelfth night, spring equinox, summer solstice, Halloween, wint—”

“Fourth of July?”

I hunched my shoulders guiltily, having skipped that one on purpose. “I don’t think that one has any mystical relevance. I’m pretty sure it was completely my fault, just back lash from the solstice. Backlash from the whole first half of last year. It just reached critical mass in early July. The point is I’m betting this is tied up with the full moon, whatever it is. It’s not as perfect as last year, when the moon lined up with the equinox, but the dancers were still rehearsing then. Even if my guy’s been watching them that long, they
wouldn’t have been ready to…harvest.” I wished to hell another word had come to mind.

From Morrison’s expression, so did he. It took several long seconds for him to get over it, but eventually he said, “Can you backtrack the guy?” in a tone prepared for disappointment.

Unfortunately, it was the right preparation. “Not from here. I’m a lousy tracker, Morrison. I’m still relying on getting up high and taking a look around the city for anything that looks wrong.”

Morrison turned his wrist over, looking at his watch, then dug into his lapel to retrieve and activate his cell phone as he headed for the parking lot. “Seattle Center’s closed, but I’ll call ahead and have security let us in.”

“Us?” I ran after him, trying not to gape, and caught his arm to haul him away from the Avalon. “No way. I get to drive. First, you always drive, and second, my coat’s in Petite and I’m freezing.”

“Walker, your vehicle is a death trap.”

“Petite saved my life in a race with the Wild Hunt. I’d like to see your puny fiberglass Avalon do that.” Toyota Avalons weren’t fiberglass. They had full steel bodies, just like my Boss 302 did, but I was willing to bet Morrison didn’t know that. Either way, I was driving my own damned car to the Seattle Center, with or without Morrison in it.

I wasn’t about to admit aloud that I kinda hoped it was with. Petite was accustomed to my long legs climbing in and out of her, but she’d never had a tuxedo-clad man in her soft black leather interior. I thought they’d look good together, and wanted an eyeful of that particular candy.

Instead I got an eyeful of Morrison grinding his teeth. “Do you expect to be outracing the Wild Hunt this evening, Walker?”

“That’s not the point.” I reached Petite—I’d tucked her into as protected a corner as I could find in the lot, since I trusted no one and nothing with my baby’s handcrafted purple paint job—and turned back to my boss, one eyebrow elevated in either challenge or expectation, depending on how he wanted to interpret it.

He said, “I’ll meet you there,” and left me to climb into Petite all by my lonesome.

A dour security guard at the Seattle Center examined Morrison’s credentials and my lack of them—I’d handed them over to Morrison that morning, and for some reason he wasn’t carrying them around with him—and gave us a look that said
yeah,
sure
you’re on police business,
but he keyed the elevator on and sent us up to the Space Needle’s rotating floor without any vocal commentary.

Seattle at night from the darkened restaurant was spectacular. Bridges and their reflections stretched across the water, and streets busy with cars glittered with motion. Six hundred feet in the air was much too far away for sound to carry, especially through the heavy glass windows, so the changing lights and roadways had an unusual serenity to them. And that was just with my normal vision.

I wouldn’t have said so aloud, but I was relieved I could trigger the Sight. I wasn’t as bone-exhausted as I’d been in the moments after healing the blonde woman, but I didn’t feel all that bright and perky, either. I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to See anything at all, after that over-exuberant display.

With the Sight triggered, Seattle took on gorgeous overtones, brilliant streaks of red marking human life along the highways, which were themselves black dead strips across the earth, unnatural with their engineered curves and straight
lines. Off to the east, the university poured out the whole spectrum, many of the colors reaching both deep and high, as if scholarship had taken root and reached for the stars.

That was the healthy living layer of the city. Beneath it, or beside it, or maybe even occupying the same space, I couldn’t exactly tell, was Seattle’s darker side. I’d only learned to see it recently, and I didn’t like looking at it at all. But I knew better, by now, than to ignore it. There were markers all over of things that had gone wrong: murders, car crashes, suicides, fights. The dance theater was a new bleak mark on the cityscape tonight, and I thought if there was a modicum of fairness in the world, there would also be some kind of nasty streak leading directly from the theater back to our killer’s lair.

There wasn’t, of course. The image of Naomi’s heart being eaten rose again, putting a new thought in my mind: that all the power she’d briefly harbored had also been eaten in one great gulp, effectively hidden from view until it—to put it less than delicately—passed out the other end.

“Ew.” I wrinkled my nose and glanced down, taking in the quiet Seattle Center grounds below me. The icky image faded, leaving me to think that the security guard’s skepticism wasn’t that far off the mark. Sneaking up here could fall under a seriously romantic gesture, if things were just a little different between me and my boss.

But despite a handful of moments in which I’d regretted it, they weren’t different. Morrison had brought me up here to study the city on an esoteric level, not to admire the view. Last time he’d made a gesture that big, it had been an offer to drum me into a shamanic trance, something so far out of his comfort zone that I was still astonished he’d made it. I wasn’t the only one who’d changed, though I didn’t know that he’d appreciate the observation.

He came up behind me—I didn’t know what he’d been patrolling the restaurant for, but he’d made a full round of it while I’d just gone straight to a window—and said, “So what do you see?”

“Nothing wrong, yet. Nothing that looks like a power surge. Do you want to see?” I dragged my attention from the far-below grounds and turned to Morrison, half afraid and half hoping he’d say yes.

His eyebrows furrowed, physical manifestation of emotion that was equally visible in his aura: a jolt of red went through his usually purple-and-blue colors, but was tamped by a swirl of pale yellow, irritation just slightly outgunned by curiosity. “Do I want to see what?”

“Seattle’s colors.” I slipped my heels off and lost my height advantage plus some, since Morrison was still wearing shoes. Being shorter than he was felt vulnerable, and it took active willpower to not put my shoes back on, or at least stand on my toes. Icy palpitations rushed over me, more than just the floor beneath my bare feet being cold. My heartbeat was jackrabbit fast and my stomach full of sloshy discomfort, none of which had happened last time I made this offer. “I tried this with Billy once and it worked. I can lend somebody the Sight for a minute or two, if you want to see how I see.”

Morrison looked at my feet. “Do you have to be barefoot for it to work?”

“No, but you have to stand on my feet and that would hurt like hell, on heels. Take your shoes off, for that matter. I’m not having shod feet standing on my bare ones.”

Curiosity won out, though Morrison shot a glance toward the elevator as he toed his shoes off. “If that guard comes up to check on us…”

I grinned. “Yeah, I know. But wait, it gets worse. Have
you ever had anybody older than about six try to stand on your feet?”

“I taught a girlfriend to waltz in college. She stood on my feet.”

“You can waltz?”

“Can’t you?”

“Morrison, some days I’m lucky to be able to walk. Okay, put your feet on mine. No, really stand on them. Don’t worry, Billy must’ve outweighed you by fifty pounds when we did this.” I wrapped my arm around Morrison’s ribs and hauled him right up against me. He emitted a sound I could only define as an undignified squeak, and I grinned again, this time from about a centimeter away from his face. Laughing at him—at us—made it easier to not think about being pressed up against my boss in what could only be considered an intimate manner. Laughing also made it slightly easier to ignore the scent of Old Spice, which, antithesis of trendy or not, really did smell good. It made me want to put my nose in his neck and inhale, which would almost certainly be ill-advised.

That was not the path I needed my thoughts to be going down. I gave myself a mental shake. “This is the ‘worse’ part. How hard did you have to hang on to your girlfriend to keep her on your feet?”

Morrison made another sound, this one more of a grunt and therefore slightly more dignified, and put his arms around my waist. “She was a lot smaller than you are.”