Urban Shaman (11 page)

I opened my mouth to argue, and let all my air out in a rush. “Okay. Okay. So maybe I’m kind of on-purpose dense about American Indian—” I waved my hand around “—stuff. I just hate playing into stereotypes, you know?”

“Actually, you’re afraid of it,” Jackson murmured. I straightened my shoulders, offended.

“What’s there to be afraid of?”

“Power,” every single one of them said. I took a step back.

“Responsibility,” Samantha said, and Hester said, “Change.” Roger smiled and shrugged a little, as if to
say, what can you do?, and added, “Love,” to the list. “Death,” said the woman who’d been quiet except for swearing at Hester, and Jackson breathed, “Life.”

“I’m not afraid of any of that,” I threw back. “Not that I’m eager to die, but—”

“You’ve been very closed off since you were about fifteen,” Samantha said, sympathetic again. I felt my stomach knot up, and took another step back. “The world was a lot more wonderful before then, wasn’t it?”

One of those cracks I’d seen inside me tore open, surgery with a battle-ax. For a moment there was nothing but pain and rage and a terrible sense of loss, memories that I’d kept safely locked away in a small black box in my mind. “How do you kn—”

I clenched my jaw on the words. I was not having this conversation with dead people in a star field somewhere outside of my own body. I felt a little tug around my heart and ignored it. “What is it that you five have in common,” I said flatly. “There has to be some kind of pattern.”

All five of them exchanged glances, and Jackson spoke up. “Sam asked earlier. What do you know about shamans?”

I shrugged, stiff. “I don’t know. They’re medicine men. They do magic. What do they have to do with me?”

“The world has a lot of people and a lot of problems these days,” Hester murmured. “It needs more shamans than ever.”

“A shaman’s job is to heal,” Roger said. “Whatever
needs healing. That’s what we did, in life. Most of us have been doing it for many lifetimes.”

I stared at him for a while, waiting for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I rubbed my eyes, noticing that here, I could see perfectly clearly without glasses or contacts. “So why would someone go around murdering cosmic caretakers?”

“Power,” the quiet one said wryly. She sounded English. Hester frowned at her.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Not our power,” the quiet one said patiently. “His own power. We’re all people who could have fought or helped him, and so we threatened his power.”

“Fought? You just said you were healers.”

There was a little silence while they all looked at each other again. “There are different paths,” Jackson finally said. “Some of us are warriors. Others are less confrontational. The end purpose is the same, to take away pain, physical and emotional, to heal.”

Very, very slowly, a light came on at the back of my head. “That’s not what I’ve gotten myself into.” I figured this was the moral equivalent of asking for a no. It was like asking, “You wouldn’t want to help me paint the fence, would you?” Put it that way, and you were setting up for denial.

I really,
really
wanted to be denied.

“We rarely understand the consequences of our decisions at the time they’re made,” Samantha murmured, which didn’t sound much like the answer I was hoping for.

“I didn’t have a lot of time,” I snapped. Another tug
pulled at my insides, a little stronger than last time. I rubbed my breastbone absently and took a deep breath. I wondered if my body back in bed did the same thing.

“The important decisions usually come when there’s not much time to debate,” Roger agreed. I frowned at him. He seemed so nice and down to earth, and I was unconsciously counting on him to back me up. My hopes and dreams were obviously being lined up to be crushed.

“Well, Christ, there’s got to be a way out of this, doesn’t there?”

“Of course there is.” Hester’d become even more disdainful, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. “Ignore it.”

“Will it go away?” I asked hopefully.

“No. You’ll keep struggling with the urge to help people, and every time you turn your back, a little part of you will die. Eventually you turn into a prune.”

I stared at her. I could have nightmares about turning into someone like her. To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, I might rub
you
the wrong way, Walkingstick, but there are people who respond to me fine. Listen to this—a shaman is a trickster. To heal someone, you need to change their way of thinking, if only for a moment. Your armor is fractured. One good hit—” She flicked her middle finger against her thumb, like she was thumping me in the chest. The tug returned, painful this time. “—And you’ll come apart into a thousand pieces. Keep your promises, and you might not shatter.”

I hated suspecting people were telling me God’s
own truth. I gulped against another painful tug, and the five of them suddenly seemed distant. “Oh, hell,” said the quiet one. “We’ve wasted too much time. She’s too tired to stay.”

“She’s very young,” Roger reminded her.

“I know, and she’s come a long way, but—” The quiet one broke off and stared at me intensely. “Listen to me—”

“Wait,” I said. “Marie wasn’t a shaman, was she? What did she have in common with you?”

“I don’t know Marie,” the quiet one said impatiently. “Find him, Siobhán Walkingstick. His power and his pain will bleed off him. Find the scent of it and follow him back.”

“But who is he?” My voice sounded very thin and distant, even to myself. The tug was a steady pull now, and the stars were streaking by me, disappearing as I faded away.

“I don’t know. But he controls the—”

I took a sharp breath, woke up and rolled over. Something crunched in my palm. I opened my hand and blinked through the dimness at the shimmering leaf there. After a few moments I sighed quietly and went back to sleep, cradling the leaf carefully.

It was seven-thirty and I’d woken up to a still-dark sky before I remembered that it was January and there were no leaves on anything but the evergreens.

Wednesday, January 5th, 8:30 a.m.

I
don’t go to confession. For one, I’m not Catholic. For two, the whole idea of being absolved of your sins by telling a priest about them has always struck me as a little strange, probably because I’m not Catholic.

On the other hand, a priest isn’t allowed to call up the loony bin and have you committed after you tell him all your crazy little stories, and he’s a whole lot less expensive than a shrink.

St. James Cathedral in downtown Seattle was the only Catholic church I knew of for certain. I parked in one of the lots at the corner of 9th and Columbia, having made it from the University District in thirty-seven minutes. On a weekday morning, that was a record-breaker. Finding a parking spot put it off the charts.

St. James didn’t exactly look like it was imported wholesale from Europe, but it had all the impressive dignity a cathedral ought to. Buff-colored brick and two very tall bell towers defined the place; that, and a sixty-foot arched entryway. I felt properly awed as I went inside, cradling my shimmering leaf in my palm. I kept expecting it to disappear and leave lines of fairy dust on my hand.

I edged around the pews and up to a confessional booth, sliding inside. The leaf gleamed slightly.

There was a thump in the other half of the confessional, and a gusty sigh.

“Ever had one of those days?” the priest asked. “Where you’re doubting everything?”

I’d never done this before, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be his line. I’d been sort of looking forward to the bit where I said, “Forgive-me-father-for-I-have-sinned,” and he’d ruined the pattern already.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I like my job. But don’t you ever get up and wonder if you’ve made the right decisions? Wonder if you’ve really got a calling, or if it’s just all some sort of infinitesimally large joke? Catholics don’t mind the ancient-earth theories so much. I can see that God might call a billion years a day. Life is complicated like that. It’s just that every once in a while something happens that really shakes the hell, excuse my French, out of my faith.”

I blurted, “What happened?” He flashed me a sad little smile through the lattice.

“You haven’t seen the news yet, have you? There
was a massacre this morning at one of the high schools. Four children were killed. The really sick thing is that it was some lunatic with a knife. Not a gun. He went and tore every single one of their hearts out, all those innocent souls. How could God let that happen?”

“They didn’t catch him?”

The priest let out a bitter laugh. “How do you
not
catch someone who’s sticking knives into kids? But no, they didn’t. Their teacher was knifed, too. And no body saw anything.”

“No one saw anything?” Had I done this? Was it vengeance for knifing Cernunnos yesterday? I closed my eyes. How long did it take for a god to heal? What possible purpose was there in the deaths of four kids? Did it give him strength? Hester said power didn’t work that way.

“No.” I spoke aloud, my eyes popping open.
Shamanic
power didn’t work that way. Cernunnos was a god, not a shaman. Maybe his power was some kind of death power. The Web pages hadn’t said.

“No,” the priest agreed angrily. “No one saw. So what’s the point?” I saw the shadow of him move, leaning forward to put his face in his hands. “If God can let this happen, how can I have faith in Him?”

I stood up slowly. The priest turned his head and watched me rise. His eyes were brown and his face unlined, in the unobtrusive confessional light. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. “Don’t worry, Father.” I took a deep breath. “If God can let this happen, then he can put people on Earth who can stop it, too.”

“But where are they?” he asked softly. I lifted my hand and pressed my palm against the lattice. The leaf crunched quietly and shattered in a tiny splash of light.

“I’m right here.”

He reached up and pressed his hand opposite mine, separated by a few centimeters of wood. He was quiet so long I thought he might laugh at my arrogance. But then he smiled, the kind of smile a priest ought to have, gentle and compassionate and full of serene confidence that there’s a better place than this world. “Go with God.”

He left me standing alone in the confessional, a fading imprint of leaf dust glittering on my palm.

“They were shamans.” Out of everyone I knew, Billy Holliday was the only person I would dare say that to. Billy was as enthusiastic as Mulder, a true believer in the things that went bump in the night. New people on staff always gave him shit about it—God knows I had—but it invariably faded into being one of those accepted quirks that make people interesting. Billy had more than his fair share of those quirks, but for the moment I was more or less grateful there was somebody I could talk to without Morrison throwing me in a nuthouse.

I plunked the files Ray lent me on Billy’s desk, doing my best to look triumphant and in control. Billy blinked up at me, eyebrows climbing up his forehead like caterpillars.

“Where’d you get those?” he asked first, to his credit for keeping the security of the department, and, “Who were?” second.

“I found them in a garbage can.”

He eyed the stack of paperwork. “You’re an officer, you know? Not a detective.”

“I’ve been with the department more than three years. I’m up for detective.” I widened my eyes. Billy snorted.

“Yeah, right. Who were shamans? Are you supposed to be here?”

“I dunno,” I admitted, glancing in the general direction of Morrison’s office. “He didn’t tell me what shift I was on. I think he expected me to quit.”

“Have you ever quit anything in your whole life?”

“Not much. Shift change is at eleven, right? It’s ten-thirty. I can be all perky and on time. Listen to me, Billy. These five murders in the past couple weeks, they were all shamans.” I pushed my fingertip against the files. My knuckle turned white.

“How do you know that, Joanne?”

I straightened up, squared my shoulders and said, firmly, “I met them dream-walking.”

Well. It was supposed to be firm. It was really more of an embarrassed whisper. Billy held my gaze for longer than the priest had, until I twisted my shoulders uncomfortably and glanced away. “Look,” I said very quietly.

“No,” he said, “I believe you.”

Despite his rep, I was taken aback. “You do?”

He stood up. “Let’s get some coffee. Down the street.”

That was the usual cue for the good cop to leave the room while the bad cop terrorized the witness. I didn’t usually think of Billy as the bad cop sort, but I sucked my lower lip into my mouth nervously and stuffed my hands in my pockets as I followed him out the door.
On the street, he said, “You’re about the most rational person I know.”

I drew on what little dignity I had left. “Thank you.”

“I like you and respect you even though you’ve been laughing up your sleeve at me for years.”

I winced. “I gave up laughing ages ago, Billy. I just…”

“Think I’m nuts.”

I winced again. “In a good way. Look, I mean…” I sighed. “I mean, why
do
you believe in that stuff, Billy?” I’d never thought, or maybe dared, to ask before.

He glanced at me, mouth drawn in a thin line. “I had an older sister.”

“Had?” I tried to remember if I knew anything about Billy’s childhood, other than the unfortunate name his parents had given him. Nothing surfaced.

“She died when I was eight. She drowned.” Billy’s shoulders were tight, his voice quiet.

“God. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” He glanced at me again, stopping outside the coffee shop door. “When I was eleven, I woke up from a dream that I was suffocating. Caroline was sitting at the edge of my bed with her fists knotted in her lap. She told me that my best friend, Derek, had fallen into the slurry a neighbor was pouring for the concrete foundation to their house. I woke up the whole household and we all went running over there in our pajamas.”

My own hands were knotted at my sides. “And?”

“My dad pulled Derek out of the slurry. It was half-set and crushing his ribs. My dead sister saved his life.”

I hauled in a deep breath of air and rubbed my breast
bone. “Jesus.” I smiled lopsidedly. “So you’re telling me you see dead people?”

Billy shot me a look, seeing if I was teasing him. I was, but it was the only way I could get through the conversation. I didn’t mean to hurt him, and after a moment he realized that. His shoulders relaxed and he smiled back, crookedly. “Yeah. Not like the kid in that movie. Not nearly that often. But yeah, I do. You remember the Franklin murder a couple years ago?”

I shuddered. “Yeah.”

Mrs. Franklin had killed her fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily, after the girl claimed she could see her new stepfather’s past, and that he was a rapist. Mother and daughter had a screaming fight, ending in the girl’s death. Mr. Franklin’s police record proved Emily correct, too late. It was the sort of case the cops hated to have on the news; the tabloids made a huge fuss over it, while the coroner’s office held its tongue about whether Emily had been sexually abused. The news crews took the coroner’s silence as an implicit yes. The police department didn’t like to talk about the fact that she hadn’t been. It led to unanswerable questions about the little girl’s apparent psychic abilities.

“Yeah, I remember. The whole thing was insane.” I wasn’t supposed to have been there. I’d been out with Billy, trying to hear the hitch he claimed was in his engine, when he was called to the murder scene.

“Emily Franklin was in the corner watching you the whole time you were there, like you were the sun and had just come out.” Billy turned and pulled the door to the café open for me.

“Emily Franklin was dead, Billy.”

“I know.”

Hairs stood up all over my body, like someone’d dropped an icicle down my back. “You’re telling me there was a ghost watching me?”

“The ghost of a clairvoyant little girl. She said you didn’t have any past at all. She’d never seen anyone like you. She wanted to see what was going to happen to you. After a few days she let go, but I’ve been waiting ever since to see what happens to you. With you.” He ordered a large decaffeinated espresso and waved his hand at me to order while I stared at him unhappily. “Go ahead and get something.” He dug in his pocket for cash.

“Hot chocolate with mint and whipped cream,” I mumbled. Forget cars. I needed real comfort food. “A grande. Why didn’t you ever tell me that, Billy?”

“Would you have believed me?” He pulled the top off his drink and blew on it before taking a sip. I frowned at the counter.

“No,” I admitted.

He shrugged. It was answer enough. “So something finally happened.” He took a bigger sip of his drink and cursed, sticking his tongue out in an effort to reduce the burn’s pain. “I’ve been waiting two years. You do this kind of about-face, I’m prepared to believe it. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe it yourself. So tell me about the shamans. Was your friend one, too?”

I got my hot chocolate and found a couple dollars to give him for it. “I don’t think so. She had something else going on. Look, where do I start, Billy? I’ve got
a feeling I’ve got a lot of catch-up work to do. Starting right now, and starting with some old Celtic gods.” I said it with a hard C, the way Marie had, and Billy looked both surprised and impressed.

“I woulda thought you’d say ‘Seltic,’” he said. I wrinkled my nose at him.

“I just got back from Ireland,” I pointed out, let a beat pass, and admitted, “Marie said Celtic. I didn’t know better before then.”

“There’s no soft C in the Gaelic language.” Billy took another sip of his coffee, then set it down. “Okay, tell me about this…god? God, Joanie. You start believing and you go whole haul, huh? I’ve just got dead people.”

“Lucky me.” I shook my head. “The guy I fought with yesterday wasn’t a gang member. He was…Marie thought it was Cernunnos. An ancient Celtic god.”

Billy sat back, pressing his lips together. “What do you think?”

“He wasn’t human.” It was strange to hear myself say that. I felt like an alien had taken over my body. Billy nodded slowly.

“You think he’s the one who killed Marie? Who did the other five murders?”

“I don’t know. I hurt him pretty badly yesterday, and I don’t know if he could heal from it that fast. And then there’s the high school this morning.”

Billy nodded again. “Same M.O. Is it your guy?”

I wrapped both my hands around the paper cup. “Marie thought there might be someone else involved. It doesn’t feel right to me, pinning this on Cernunnos.” I barked laughter. “Doesn’t feel right. God, listen to me.”

“I am,” Billy said seriously.

Hot chocolate splashed as I set the cup down. “And that freaks me out even more.”

Billy studied me as he took a long drink of his coffee. “What’s it like?” he finally asked. I dropped my head and looked into my hot chocolate.

“The good news is it’s keeping my mind off having to walk the streets.” I scowled at my drink. “That came out wrong.” I pushed the chocolate away and lowered my head to the table, resting it on my forearms. “You remember the first time someone you loved died, Billy? It’s like that. I can’t believe it, but I can’t not believe it, either. At the very least I should be in a hospital bed breathing through a tube. I should probably be dead.” I sat up, fingers drifted to my sternum again. “It’s like the whole world is a badly tuned engine. I’m starting to feel when it misses or lurches. And I’ve got this stupid idea that I can fix it.”