Urban Shaman (23 page)

“Sorry,” I mumbled. The clouds rolled back in with a decided aura of “hmph.”

My body stayed put, but my sense of self left it to stand in front of the rented Ford. Off to the left, Manny kept up his interminable bitching, but he glowed with contentment as he swung his hammer into the brick. For a few seconds I could see his family as clearly as if they stood around him, four-year-old twin girls and a chubby little boy barely old enough to walk, and a slender woman with a fond smile. He was planning to go home and tell them about the
bruja
he saw, who didn’t curse him, and that was almost as good as a blessing.

It didn’t seem very likely I was ever going to be the sort of person to go around bestowing blessings, but I made a note to send one Manny’s way if I ever felt like the time was appropriate for me to do it. At the least, I could think good thoughts for him, though it seemed to me that he had the good thoughts department covered.

I looked away from Manny and toward the city. Seattle spread out before me like a computer simulation, buildings reduced to their infrastructures, thin lines against the sky that let me see through one into the next, on out to the water. The people were blurs of color, shaming the rainbow, with disproportionately high incidences of reds and oranges. I wondered what the colors meant, but they weren’t what I was looking for. I was looking for a part of the city that I couldn’t see.

And to the southeast, there was an area that was blocked. Not by the granite wall that I expected, but by the solidity of buildings. Bricks were as opaque as mist, and colors drained away from people until they were dull facsimiles of the rest of the city. No matter which direction I approached it from, the half-solid mist remained, too thick to be seen through, but not quite as solid as reality. I could feel Herne’s presence behind the mist, his will drawing a line that he wouldn’t let me cross or look through.

I let myself fade back into my body and sat blinking thoughtfully at the asphalt. I was heading to that part of the city for lunch anyway. Maybe I could narrow down Herne’s location by getting inside the parameters
he’d delineated. To continue to protect himself, he’d have to blur smaller and smaller regions, until I could pinpoint him. Pleased with myself, I dragged my legs inside the car and left early for my lunch date.

O
f course, it wasn’t that easy. I was early enough and late enough, an hour in either direction, to miss both commute and lunch traffic, but the lack of cars on the road didn’t help pierce the veil of obscurity that Herne had flung up around himself. Instead of the field narrowing down, everything that I looked at with my second sight was hazy and thick, just as it had been from a distance. It was like being in San Francisco on a really foggy morning.

It took twenty minutes to find a parking place, so I ended up at the restaurant only half an hour early. I left my gun in the car and went in. By the time Kevin arrived, I was asleep at the table.

“The maître d’ is complaining that you’re drooling on the table,” he murmured as he sat down.

“’Zno maidder-dee.” I lifted my head slowly. It
seemed to have gained twenty or thirty pounds in the half hour I’d been napping.

“All right,” he said agreeably, “the waitress is complaining that you’re drooling on the table.” He smiled, and I chuckled tiredly.

“Sorry.” I drank most of the glass of water that had been left for me, and rubbed my eyes. “Really long night. Keep falling asleep in the weirdest places.”

“Your e-mail was from eleven or so last night. You were up after that?” He was wearing a neat, unobtrusive plaid shirt, ironed. I wondered if Adina had ironed it before she died, or if he did it himself. He looked tired, too, almost as tired as I felt, his hazel eyes sad and weary.

“Yeah, until three or four. Then I got up at ten after five, or something. It’s been a rough few days.” I cringed a little. I had nothing to complain about, comparatively.

He gave me his sad smile. “It has been,” he agreed. “What happened yesterday?”

I made a sound of amusement as the waitress arrived, and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. She gave me a funny look, but wrote it down along with Kevin’s order and went away again. “Not exactly an upscale meal,” Kevin said.

I shrugged. “I like grilled cheese sandwiches. Comfort food, you know? And I need it. The night got a whole lot weirder after I left that e-mail.” I recounted, briefly, my night’s adventures. Kevin blanched and looked away.

“What drives a man like that?” he asked, a low dangerous timbre in his voice. “To slaughter?”

“Statistically? Serial killers are in need of control. Our boy Herne doesn’t really fit the statistics, though.
They weren’t meant to quantify six hundred-year-old demigods.”

Kevin looked up through his eyelashes. “Is that really what you think you’re dealing with?”

“Yeah.” I drank what was left of my water. “He’s older than I am, stronger than I am, more experienced than I am…”

“Smarter than you are?” Kevin asked with a smile. I swirled the remaining ice in the glass around, and considered the question.

“I don’t think so.”

Kevin’s eyes darkened. “Then why haven’t you caught him yet?”

“Older, stronger and more experienced don’t count for anything?” I asked plaintively, and he smiled again.

“They might count for too much.” The waitress delivered our drinks. Kevin nodded politely to make her go away. “Tell me again what stopped you at the airport.”

I shook my head and stuck a straw in my lemonade. “I could feel it,” I said softly. “The power in me to just shut him down. But it’s all connected.” I laced my fingers together and tugged them to the left without pulling them apart. My body tilted slightly with the motion. “I can’t move part of me without affecting all of me.” I tugged my hands to the other side, tilting again. “See? I move. And the city’s like that, too. Probably the whole world. I think you can’t move part of it without making everything shift a little.

“It wasn’t that
I
was all that powerful, really. I could just
draw
on all that life, all that energy.” I let my hands fall, frustrated. “But drawing on it would cost.
Not me, so much, as the whole infrastructure. Taking him down then would have caused a power failure, that’s how much it would take. People would have died.”

“The good of the many?” Kevin asked.

“Outweighs the good of the one, yeah. In this case, the one are…” I trailed off and sighed. “Are people like Adina and Mrs. Potter. I’m sorry. I didn’t see any other choice.”

Kevin nodded, but murmured, “There’s always a choice.”

“Yeah. In this case, letting him go seemed like the better one.”

“Can you live with that?”

I inhaled. “I have to, don’t I? Yeah, I can. I regret it, but I can’t say I’d do it differently, faced with the same choice again.”

Kevin nodded again. “That’s good. Living with the consequences of your actions isn’t always easy. Rationality often fails.”

“Yeah, well.” The waitress delivered our food and I took a grateful bite of grilled cheese, surprised at how hungry I was. “Up until a few days ago I was the most rational person you’d ever care to meet.”

“You’ve converted?” Kevin had a vegetarian burger. I thought that was one of the weirdest ideas in the world. Those, and the fruit drinks that advertised themselves as flavors never intended by Nature. Nature, I figured, knew what she was doing. Leave well enough alone. Except cran-apple juice. That’d been a good idea on somebody’s part.

Grilled cheese and lemonade, incidentally, didn’t go together well. I shuddered and screwed my face up, then took another drink of lemonade. Kevin watched, amused. “You enjoy doing that?”

“Yeah.” My voice was as raspy as if I’d just had a shot of whiskey. I shuddered again, happily, and took another bite of grilled cheese. “No,” I added, “I haven’t converted. I think I’m still rational. It’s just the world’s gone nuts around me. I’ve gotten a crash course in the esoteric. I don’t have to
like
it. I just have to cope with it.”

Kevin nodded again and ate in silence for a while. “So why did you want to see me?” he asked eventually. I stabbed a fry into ketchup and bit it viciously before answering.

“Where would you go if you were a demigod on the verge of making a grab for power? Oh,” I waved another fry at Kevin’s expression of alarm. “Not that
you’d
know, but do you know anyone who could tell me where places of power in Seattle are?”

“Is that what you think he’s doing?” Kevin asked cautiously. I shrugged and shook my head.

“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, except trying to kill me.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I’d piled enough on Kevin already. He didn’t need to hear my theories about Herne’s emotional problems. “I don’t know how he plans to do it, but tonight is the night the Hunt is supposed to return to the Otherworld, and I think Herne’s going to try to affect that somehow. I don’t know what he’s going to do, though,” I admitted. Kevin let out a worried little sigh.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I tried to stay out of
that side of Adina’s life. She was very spiritual and I’m…not. I could look in her address book, if you want, and call you if there are any names.”

“Names of who?” I asked. “I don’t even know what I’d start looking for.”

“Anyone associated with power centers. Probably not the kind of thing you find advertised in the phone book.”

I made a face, drank more lemonade, and made a worse face. “Probably not. If you would look, though, it can’t hurt. I’m chasing wild geese as it is. I thought I would find him here.”

Kevin’s expression turned furtive, and he straightened up a little. “Here?”

“In this part of the city. I linked to him, but he’s blocked me. He could be in the diner and I don’t think I’d know.” I looked around, displeased by the thought, and caught the gaze of a green-eyed man at the counter. It took distressingly long to shake off the paranoia that settled over me like a cloak and glance back at Kevin, who looked unwell.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. I’m not exactly the world’s most reassuring conversationalist right now, am I?”

He pasted on his thin smile. “It’s all right. Neither am I.”

I nodded. “If you can, check her address book.” I scribbled down my number on a napkin. “Thanks, Kevin. I’ll get the check.”

He picked up the napkin, nodding, and quietly made his way out the door. I got the check and the receipt,
for the pure joy of writing it off as a business expense and annoying Morrison. Pleased with myself, I went back out into the winter afternoon.

Driving back to the U District was an adventure in burgeoning road rage. I’d caught the end of lunch-hour traffic dead-on, with bumpers to bumpers and impatient drivers leaning on their horns. Seattle’d had a reputation for having the politest drivers in America, back when. Since then, something had gone terribly wrong, kind of like…a thing that had gone very wrong. Yep, there went my grasp of metaphor. I was going to be in real trouble if I needed to do any more shamanic stuff, with that kind of visualization skill at my beck and call.

It was beginning to rain. I rolled my window down while I waited on an on-ramp, sticking my palm up to catch raindrops. Another degree or two colder, and it might snow. That would make for an exciting drive. There’s nothing quite like Seattle drivers in snow.

Like the weather was responding to my train of thought, a snowflake fell into my palm, and melted. I leaned my head out the window, looking up, and got a snowflake in my eye for the effort. “Crap.” I leaned back into the car. Traffic pulled forward a few meters at a time, creeping ever more cautiously as the snow began to come down like it meant it.

I hoped Kevin would come through for me. If not, I could think of two places in Seattle that seemed like obvious power nodes. One was the Space Needle, just because it
was
so obvious. The other was the Troll Bridge. It was just so bizarre I had to wonder—if I was
going to acknowledge this whole other world—if it had been inspired by something more than just the sculptor’s imagination.

But I was pretty sure there were more power places in Seattle than two modern constructions that might or might not have anything to do with ancient nodes. Wow, I was getting good at this esoteric speech stuff. See what a few hours of reading and some time on the Internet will get you?

The on-ramp let me access the freeway and for a while all I could think about was the other guy, and making sure he didn’t run into me or anyone else. Then I began wondering if I was really affecting whether or not people were driving well, and consequently took a turn too fast and fishtailed all over the slippery road.

After that I just concentrated on driving.

It still took until almost two to get back to the station. I parked in a reserved-for-police parking spot because I could, and took the steps up through the wet snow two at a time. It felt good, not sneaking through the station trying to avoid Morrison. I even nodded at him as I passed his office, and for once he didn’t scowl.

Jen was lying in wait for me, or it seemed like it. I walked into Missing Persons and she handed over a small stack of papers like she’d expected me. “Here’s your girl. Assuming, which I am, that she looks a little less fey than that painting you showed me. I redrew her to send out. No responses, though—she’s not missing.”

I glanced down at the papers without really seeing them, then shook my head as I looked back at Jen. “I’m afraid I wasted your time. I’m so sorry, Jen.” I rubbed
the back of my hand against my forehead, letting the papers fan over my face for a moment. “I don’t think she could’ve been real after all. She had to have been like the others. Not really from this world.” I said that like it wasn’t a completely insane thing to say. I was starting to understand the tired expression Marie had worn more than once, the one that said,
I know you think I’m nuts, and there’s nothing I can do about it, but I can’t change what I am, either.
I wished I could apologize to her. “I’m sorry,” I said to Jen again, instead. One of the copies slid out of my fistful and I sighed, crouching to pick it up. “I really appreciate you trying to he—holy shit.” My fingers, suddenly cold, lost their grip on the rest of the sheets, and a few dozen copies of the drawing spiraled down and spread across the floor.

Jen jerked to attention, looking around the room like she thought I’d seen—I hesitate to say a ghost. “What?”

“I know her.” I stayed in my crouch, staring at the drawing, then swallowed and met Jen’s eyes. She looked like she thought I’d taken leave of my senses. “I know her,” I repeated. “I mean. I saw this kid yesterday. At the high school.”

Jen had applied the coloration from the painting to the sketch. Wheat-pale hair fell around a delicate face, not precisely fey, but with high cheekbones and a small, pointed chin. Her mouth was just slightly too wide, no longer stretched in the rider’s laugh, and the eyes were disconcertingly green. It was the girl from the theater, the one who’d recited the poem.

Jennifer glanced at her watch. “If that school even held classes today, they’ll be over in about forty-five minutes. If you want to find her, you better haul ass.”

I stared at her speechlessly, then vaulted out of my crouch and bolted for the door.