Urban Shaman (19 page)

Somehow, I didn’t find any comfort in the thought that it was probably
going
to be the very last thing I did, either.

I knew foxes went to ground when they were hunted. I couldn’t think of a single damned place that I could go to ground. I didn’t know how, but Cernunnos had found me toodling down the freeway. That didn’t bode well for losing myself in a crowd, and besides, it was already clear the Hunt didn’t mind a lit
tle property damage. I hardly wanted to give them the opportunity to start killing people. Other people, at least. They already seemed pretty fixed on the idea of making me dead.

Petite’s speedometer climbed past ninety before the Hunt showed any sign of losing ground. Cernunnos fell back, distantly reflected expression furious, and all the host but one slowed with him.

The riderless horse came on, eating great lengths of distance with each stride. It was impossibly fast, and so clear in its motions that even watching in the mirror I could see the play of muscle under pale golden fur, bunching and releasing as it closed the distance between us. I glanced at the speedometer; I was still adding speed, heading toward a hundred now.

And the riderless horse was gaining on me.

A knot of certainty tied itself in my stomach. If Cernunnos were uninjured, all the Hunt would be gaining on me now. I pressed on the gas pedal and Petite responded with an urgent hum of power as she accelerated. I wasn’t surprised that the riderless horse still gained on me. I topped out at one-fifteen, more out of respect for my poor abused car than being unable to push her faster, and watched the pale horse put on a surge of speed that brought it to my side.

It—she—was huge, as tall as Cernunnos’s stallion, and there was nothing wasted in her. Admiration and envy stung through me. Sparks flew where the mare’s feet made solid connection with the ground she ran on, though I’d seen the Hunt ride and I knew she wasn’t constrained by having to run on the unwieldy concrete.
She ran effortlessly, stretched out long and lean, so low that her head was nearly on a level with mine.

She turned her head to look at me, the almost-full-on gaze that horses do, and the weight of her body followed the lead of her head. For the second time in under an hour I braced for the impact, and for the second time the horse avoided it, this time with a tiny burst of speed. She leaped ahead of me, one hoof denting Petite’s hood as she sprang into the sky and wheeled, galloping back to the Hunt, leaving me careening down the freeway alone.

Thursday, January 6th, 5:13 a.m.

I
woke up on my feet, my heart pounding wildly in response to a mysterious sound that I couldn’t hear anymore. The lights were very bright and my glasses were smashed against my face in a tell-tale fashion that suggested I’d gone to sleep on my face while wearing them. It took a few seconds to recognize my own living room and the indentation in the couch pillows as where I’d been sleeping. The details of getting home were sketchy, but since I was here, apparently I’d made it. The distressing noise sounded again. After another several seconds I recognized it as the doorbell. I staggered to the door, adjusting my glasses as I pulled it open. Gary stood there, looking unfairly awake. He laughed at me.

“Morning, sweetheart. Thought you said you’d be awake.”

“Did I say that?” My voice was hoarse. I waved him in and staggered to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Gary followed, brandishing Cernunnos’s sword, and dropped into what looked to me like a pretty good en guarde position. Of course, what I didn’t know about fencing would fill a library.

“You did.” He made a little feint at me. I batted at the sword before I remembered it was sharp, and was glad I hadn’t made contact with it. Gary straightened up. Old guys weren’t supposed to look that solid. I examined that idea while I drank my water. It wasn’t like I knew that many old people, but the ones I saw usually seemed to look fragile.

“I want to look like you when I grow up,” I told Gary blearily. He laughed again.

“When you’re old, you mean. I tell you what, lady, if you don’t quit doing whatever it is you did to your car, you’re not gonna get old. What happened?”

“Cernunnos and I had a race down the freeway. I got away, but they chopped up Petite. I think it was a draw. D’you want some water?” I admired how matter-of-fact I sounded. I was trying hard not to let myself think about the damage to my beautiful car. If I started crying, I didn’t think I was ever going to stop.

Gary wrinkled his eyebrows and looked at me for a while. When I didn’t find anything else to say, he asked, “You gonna be all right here alone, Jo?”

“Oh, sure. I was right. Today’s the day. So I just gotta live through it.” My words were slurred. I turned
around and poured the rest of my water into the coffeemaker and dug around for fresh grounds and a filter. My coffee cup was already sitting under the drip. I didn’t remember putting it there.

“You’re sure today’s it?”

“Herne said so. No.” I shook my head, frowning as I tried to form enough coherent thoughts to elaborate. Gary scowled at me expectantly. “Verified it. Marie told me. Us. She was right. Herne was all upset I knew, so she had to have been right.” Gary didn’t look like I was clearing matters up any. I groaned.

“I’ll tell you on…” I looked at my fingers vacantly, like I had the date written on them. “It’s Wednesday? I’ll tell you Saturday.” That sounded like enough time for me to catch up on my sleep.

“It’s Thursday,” Gary said.

“Saturday,” I said firmly. Gary grinned.

“No, Thursday.”

I glared wearily at him. He laughed and held up his hands, Cernunnos’s sword dangling from his fingertips. “All right, I’ll stop giving you grief. Kids these days. No sense of humor.” He waggled the sword at me. “What should I do with this?”

I discarded the first two suggestions that leaped to mind as being unnecessarily rude. Gary grinned like he knew what I was thinking, and put the sword on the kitchen table. “I’ll just leave it there,” he suggested.

I nodded. “Good idea.” Gary stood by the table a moment, still looking expectant, and I dredged up a sleepy scowl. “I hate morning people,” I told him. He laughed and held up his hands again.

“Okay, okay, I know a hint when I hear one. Stay alive, why doncha?”

“I’m trying,” I promised, and let him find his own way to the door. It was only ten feet. I figured he could make it. The water turned slowly into coffee, dripping steadily into the coffee cup. It was a pink cup. I didn’t consider myself a very pink person, but it had my name on it, so I’d bought it. When it was three quarters full I stuck the usual pot under the drip, filled what was left of the cup with milk and sugar, and went to turn on the computer screen.

The Wild Hunt rode out of the screen at me, in such fine detail my first thought was that I wouldn’t put artwork that good up on the Net without degrading it some, to make it harder to copy. Then my hands began to shake and I had to put the coffee cup down as I stared at the painting.

It was good, maybe of professional caliber, but it was also terrifyingly accurate. Cernunnos’s eyes were filled with the unholy green light that would haunt my nightmares if I ever again got enough sleep to dream. The elegant bone horns swept back along his skull and he smiled as he urged his stallion onward. The silver animal’s broad chest so well rendered I half expected it to pull in its next deep breath as I watched.

Beside Cernunnos, almost in front of him, ran the pale gold mare who’d kept pace with me only an hour or two earlier. She wasn’t riderless, though: a feral-eyed child with hair as wheat-pale as Cernunnos’s rode high in the saddle, mouth open in a shout of joy at the speed his horse ran at.

Others of the Hunt poured down out of the fog, riding down from the sky, the dark shadows of rooks around their heads and the sleek white bodies of the hellhounds running at their heels. Even rendered indistinct by fog, I could pick out the shape of the thick-shouldered man, and the archer. I leaned back and picked up my coffee cup just to give my shaking hands something to do, and took a sip. Not enough sugar. I took another sip, staring at the painting. It was titled
And A Child Shall Lead Them.
Whoever had painted it had seen the Hunt.

In fact, he’d seen more than I had. There wasn’t any child riding with Cernunnos now. I found the artist’s e-mail address and scribbled out a note. Is it scribbling if it’s typing on a keyboard? It seemed like scribbling.

Hey. I just came across your painting of the Wild Hunt, and it’s incredible. Scared the hell out of me, in fact. It’s so real I’m gonna guess you’re not going to think I’m crazy when I tell you I’ve had a run-in with Cernunnos myself, that he almost killed me. But there was no kid riding with him. Can you fill me in on who the child is? It’s important. Please write back.—Joanne.

I sent it and immediately regretted it. For a couple of fruitless seconds I pounded the reply button, like it would somehow retrieve the message from the ether of cyberspace, then groaned and drank half my coffee. One more person would think I was nuts. Oh well. I wasn’t sure he’d be wrong.

I went through two more cups of coffee waiting for an answer, before slowly cluing in to the fact that it was going on six in the morning and no one in his right mind would be up, much less checking e-mail. Unless
he was on the East Coast, in which case it was a perfectly reasonable time to be up. The more that I thought about it, the more logical it seemed that the artist was not only farther east than I was, but was in fact probably in Ireland itself, which meant it was nearly two in the afternoon and why the hell hadn’t he answered my e-mail yet? Did he
want
me to die?

I decided maybe I’d better take a shower and reintroduce reason to my brain.

Standing under the hot water and breathing in steam at least helped shut down the caffeine-inspired paranoia. I slid down to sit on the floor of the tub, trying to find a place to start making sense of the mess my life had become. When I lifted my head a moment later, Coyote sat under the stream of water in front of me, his ears twitching in an undignified manner every time a drop splashed onto them.

“You have terrible control.” His ears twitched, flattened out and went upright again.

“What are you doing in my shower?” I remembered thinking I needed to get a dog. Maybe he would do.

“I’m not a dog,” he repeated, “and I’m in your shower because you think you’re awake and you’re holding the pattern that was around you. I wish you’d stop.”

“I like showers.” I stubbornly clung to the idea that I was awake and sitting on the floor of my shower. With a dog. I grinned again, almost a giggle. Coyote sighed, deeply put-upon. “You could turn into a guy,” I suggested, sort of hopefully. “At least that way you could wash your metaphysical hair.” It wasn’t that I wanted a gorgeous man in my shower. Honest.

I hadn’t noticed before that Coyote had discernible eyebrows, but they went up at that. “Metaphysical?” he asked. I shrugged elaborately.

“This is all very metaphysical. Why are you in my shower, anyway?”

“You called me.”

I blinked at him uncertainly as water streamed down my face. “I did?”

For a moment I had the distinct impression he wished he had hands, so he could pinch the bridge of his nose. “Look,” I said, offended, “you’re the one who dragged me into all this. Left to my own devices I just would have died.”

Coyote lifted his head to look at me with astonishment. “Is that really what you think?”

“Well, of course. Ordinary people don’t go around having near-death out-of-body-experiences of their own free will.”

“Wow,” Coyote said, “have you got a lot to learn.”

I squinted at him. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘wow’?”

“Look,” he said impatiently, “spirit guides can say whatever the hell they feel like.” A drop of water hit him in the eye and he shook his entire body. When he stopped, he was completely dry, and the water rolled off the air above him like it was hitting an invisible umbrella. I lifted my finger and poked at the umbrella, encountering resistance. I jerked my hand back and shook it, blinking. “I came of my own free will,” he explained before I asked. “It gives me the ability to affect your world-form. Just like you did in Herne’s garden.”

“You know about that?”

He smiled an infuriatingly superior little smile. “There are
some
advantages to being a spirit guide.”

I suddenly felt very alone and very, very unknowledgeable. “So what are the advantages to being the new kid on the block?” I whispered. “People are dying, Coyote, and I don’t know how to stop it. I thought I was doing okay and then I found out I wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought I was.”

“You outgunned Herne once,” Coyote said reassuringly. “You’re going to make it through this.”

“I tricked him.”

Coyote smiled. How a dog smiles, I don’t know, but he smiled. “That’s what we do, Joanne. The first thing a healer has to do to heal is to shake up perceptions. To make the impossible, possible.”

“Am I really going to live through this?”

Coyote stuck his nose under my hand and wrapped a long tongue around my wrist. “Yeah,” he said, “you are. I said so.”

I smiled a little. “But Coyote’s a trickster.”

“A trickster. Not a killer. You’ll make it, Jo. Listen to—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. “Don’t even think about saying ‘listen to your heart’ or ‘your soul’. I can’t handle that tonight.”

His tongue lolled out again, a coyote grin. “Listen to the rhythms of the city,” he said, like it was what he’d planned to say all along. “Listen to the heartbeats of the people. Follow them and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“What
am
I looking for?” I asked plaintively, and Coyote shook his head and shrugged, a very manlike movement for the rangy canine. Then the water turned to ice and I scrambled to my feet, gasping. I washed my hair in cold water, shivering, and jumped out of the shower to wrap up in an excessive number of towels. I felt like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, but at least I was warm.

I was weirdly awake. I made a note to myself to try a cold shower and a chat with a spirit guide next time I was too tired to think. Rubbing my hair dry, I went to check my e-mail again. There are those who would say I’m addicted. I’m sure I could find a pithy rebuttal to the accusation somewhere on the Net.

Unfortunately, I had mail.

the child leads them to the souls they can harvest and leads them back to the Otherworld when the ride is over. without the child theres nothing to stop them from riding forever. i dont think your crazy. i just think your going to die.

I stared at the message for a long, long time, the towels doing nothing to keep me warm any longer.

Coyote had said I wasn’t going to die. Somebody had to be wrong.

I decided to bet on the coyote as winner-take-all, and slapped the computer screen off. I had better things
to do than die. It struck me that I’d had that revelation half a dozen times in the past couple of days, and somehow my faith in it had been wiped out every time. If I didn’t keep believing I would stay alive, Herne, or Cernunnos, or whoever else was out there, had me already. I didn’t used to think belief had anything to do with staying alive. I smiled a little and went to check the last of the coffee. It was an hour and a half old and had been strong to begin with, but it was still warm, so I drowned it with milk and sugar and went into the bedroom to stare out the window.

At least I knew what I was looking for, now. I was looking for Herne, I was looking for Cernunnos, but mostly, I was looking for that kid. Herne and the Hunt were both in Seattle. It stood to reason that the missing child was, too. All I had to do was find him.