Urban Shaman (7 page)

“I don’t understand.” I sounded young and frightened, but even as I made the protestation I moved, without being told, on to the next of my injuries. The cuts and scrapes on my arms and face were a paint job. Using the coyote’s analogy worked: it gave me a way to focus the cool rushing power inside my belly. It was bewilderingly easy, almost instinctive. The surface damage of the cuts and scrapes called for less of that energy than the lung or the ribs had. I felt myself making choices I barely understood, siphoning just a fraction of the power available to deal with the smaller injuries. The rest settled behind the unlocked place above my belly, waiting. When the “paint job” was complete, the extension of energy faded back into me, joining the rest of the power behind my breastbone. I felt a little like a battery charging up.

I opened my eyes uncertainly, looking down at myself. I couldn’t do anything about my clothes. “I think I’m okay now.”

“What about that one?” The coyote poked his nose at the long cut on my cheek from Marie’s butterfly knife. I put my hand over it; the new paint job hadn’t entirely taken care of it. Instead of disappearing, it had scarred over, a thin silver line along my cheek. After a moment I shrugged.

“It wants to stay.”

Very smart dogs can look approving. The coyote did, then snapped his teeth at me. “I’m not a dog.”

“What
is
it with people reading my mind today?” I looked down at myself, the one lying in the grass. I still looked horrible, my skin a ghastly pallor that made very faint freckles stand out across my nose. My face wasn’t one that did sunken flesh well. My nose is what you might politely call regal, and my cheekbones are high, making my cheeks look very hollow and fallen. Lying there like that, I looked two breaths from dead. The drumbeat, my heartbeat, was still thudding with a degree of uncertainty. I put my hand out over my torso and chewed my lower lip. “There’s still something wrong. Like…” My car analogy almost fell apart. “Like the windshield is all cracked up and burnt from the sun.”

The coyote did the approving look again. “This is the hard part.”

I frowned at him nervously. “What do you mean, the hard part?”

He pushed his nose out toward the me that was dying, there on the grass. “You have to change the way you see the world.”

“Isn’t this place enough proof of that?” I asked,
pitch rising. The coyote’s ears flicked back and he sat up primly, offended.

“Is it?” he asked. “Do you believe what’s happening here?”

I looked down at my body again. My heartbeat was drumming much too slowly. “I don’t know. It feels real, but so do dreams.”

“This place shares much with dreams.” The timbre of his voice changed, deepening from a tenor into a baritone. I jerked my eyes up, to discover a red man sitting there on his butt, arms wrapped around his knees, loose and comfortable. He wore jeans with the knees torn out, no shirt, and he was genuinely red. Brick red, not a color skin comes in, not even sunburned skin. Long straight black hair was parted down the middle, and his teeth were better than Gary’s. His eyes were golden, as golden as the coyote’s. I blinked, and the coyote was back.

“Is Coyote even a Cherokee legend?” I kept blinking at him, hoping he’d turn back into the red man. He stayed a coyote. Still, if men like that were wandering around here, I’d take it as a good argument that this garden had a lot in common with dreams.

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Coyote said. “You don’t have a lot of time, Jo. Is this real?”

I scowled down at my body.
If this is a dream,
I decided,
when I look up, he’ll be the guy again. I’m aware, so it’s a lucid dream, so I can affect it, and he’ll be the man because I want him to be.

I looked up. The coyote was sitting there, head cocked, waiting for me.

“Dammit,” I said out loud. A thin line in the spiderweb I felt inside me made a hissing sound like cracking glass, and disappeared. The drum missed a long, scary beat, then fell into a natural, reassuring rhythm.

“Time to go back,” Coyote said, and the garden went away.

S
hit,
I thought again,
I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true.
I closed my eyes. The light continued to bore into my eyelids until I opened them again. The paramedic squatting above me clicked the penlight off, announcing, “She’s back,” to someone out of my line of sight.

“I’m back,” I agreed in a croak, and closed my eyes again. Perhaps if I was very lucky I’d go away again.

“Getting the crap beat out of you isn’t gonna make Morrison feel bad enough not to fire you, Joanie,” the someone said, then lifted his voice. “Forget the ECG, Jimmy. She’s back with us. Looks like the other guy got the worst of it. What happened,” he said, addressing me again, “his gang dragged him off to die?”

My arm weighed about twenty thousand pounds, but I picked it up and dropped it on my chest, trying
to find the hole the sword had poked in me. I found it by proxy. There was a gash in my shirt, a nasty hole stiffening with dried blood. Beneath it, my rib cage seemed to be unpunctured. I rolled my head to the side, somewhat amazed that it stayed on, and croaked, “Gary?”

All I could see were feet. I didn’t know what kind of shoes Gary wore, but I was pretty sure they weren’t open-toed blue leather heels, absolutely impractical for Seattle in January.

“Who the hell is Gary?”

I rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to focus on the paramedic. “Oh,” I said after a while. “Billy. Cabby.”

“No, Billy Holliday, sweetheart. You’ve always been easily confused.” He squatted by me again, pushing my eyelid back and inspecting my pupil. “How many fingers do you see?”

“I don’t see anything, Billy, somebody’s got his damn thumb stuck in my eye. What happened, you get called in early?”

“How’d you know?” He took his thumb out of my eye and elevated his eyebrows at me.

“The shoes.”

Billy Holliday was, as far as I knew, Seattle’s only cross-dressing detective. I’d met him three days after I was hired: dispatch asked me to rescue an off-duty officer whose car had broken down. Dispatch hadn’t mentioned that the cop in question would be wearing a pale yellow floral print dress and had biceps bigger than my head. Billy looked better in a dress than I did.

Not that I could remember the last time I wore a dress.

Billy inspected his feet. “I shoved my feet into the first thing I found next to the door,” he admitted. “Do you like them?”

I decided I was feeling better, and began to sit up. Billy pushed me back down. “I think they’re great,” I offered, and tried to sit up again. The admiration didn’t appease him, and we had a good little tussle going when Gary’s knees intruded in my line of vision. He crouched while I wondered how I recognized his knees.

“You oughta be dead, lady.”

I let Billy win and dropped onto my back. “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s Marie got to say about that?”

“You ought to be dead,” she said from above my head. I tilted my chin up and looked at her foreshortened form through my eyebrows.

“That’s reassuring.” I closed my eyes. “What happened?”

I felt Marie and Gary cast uncomfortable glances at Billy. “Billy,” I said without opening my eyes, “go change your shoes, would you?”

Mortal offense filled his voice. “What, so you can get your story straight? What kind of detective do you take me for?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that.” I tried to remember where I’d heard that recently. Oh, yeah. Coyote.

My head began to hurt again.

I pushed up on an elbow, opening my eyes. “I’m asking as a friend, Bill. Or I’ll steal your distributor cap.”

He grinned reluctantly. “Friends don’t threaten
friends’ distributor caps. Look, you sure you’re okay, Joanie? You look like hell.”

“I’m sure. I’m fine. I swear I’ll explain it later.”

“Arright.” Billy stood up. So did Gary. They sized each other up while I worked on climbing to my feet. Gary nodded tersely, and Billy walked off. It all smacked of some sort of bizarre male testosterone thing. I tried hard to ignore it.

“What happened?” I asked again. My balance was off. I spread my arms out, trying to find my center. Then it occurred to me that Coyote wanted me to do exactly that, and my head hurt more. I rubbed my temple, then my face, and that didn’t hurt at all. Fascinated, I prodded at my cheek. No pain.

“You got a scar,” Gary pronounced, staring wide-eyed at my face. “On your cheek. Where she cut you. A real thin scar. It was still bleeding just a minute ago.”

I slid my fingertips over my cheek, feeling the thin line, perfectly healed. “What,” I asked for the third time, “happened?” The scar felt weird. I’d always had good skin.

“The Hunt took Cernunnos away,” Marie said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever hurt him like that before.”

“Bully for me.” I kept rubbing my cheek. “How’d I get into the parking lot?”

“I carried you,” Gary volunteered. “The diner was on fire.”

I turned around and looked at it. Sure enough, it was on fire. There were firemen there now, and I realized I’d been hearing the sounds of water and steam and men calling to one another since I woke up. Clouds of
steam and smoke rose up, and, as I watched, a section of the roof fell in. All and all, I was glad Gary hadn’t left me in there. “Thanks. What happened to the sword?”

Gary jerked a thumb toward his cab. “In the back seat. I thought we oughta leave it in you until the paramedics got here, but Marie kept sayin’ we had to get it out. Guess I’m not much good at sayin’ no to a dame.”

“Yeah,” I said, “you look like the henpecked husband type.” My fingers drifted back to the hole in my shirt, feeling skin through it. It felt perfectly normal. I pulled the collar of the shirt out and peered down. Gary guffawed. I muttered, “Oh, shut up,” and kept looking.

My bra was a bloody mess, and there was a gash in it. “God damn it,” I said, “that was a new bra.”

Gary laughed again, and I looked up long enough to glare at him. “Sure, laugh. It cost sixty bucks. God-damned men don’t have to buy goddamned expensive underwear….” I peered down my shirt again. There was no indication the bloody mess on the shirt and bra was from my own bleeding. Breasts, bra, blood, no hole in my chest. Lookit that. I felt like an X-File.

“You kept flashing between living and dying,” Marie said. “I just had the feeling that you wouldn’t live if the sword stayed in you.”

“You were right.” I stopped peeking down my shirt. It was too weird.

“So she made me pull the sword out,” Gary said, his whole face wrinkling up in a grimace. “And then…” He trailed off. Marie drew in a breath.

“And then you began to heal. Just like magic.”

“It was magic,” I mumbled.

“What?” Gary laughed again.

“It was magic,” I repeated, unconvincingly. Marie developed a smug grin. Even smug looked attractive on her. It wasn’t fair.

“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” she said with a reasonable amount of diplomacy. Unfortunately, her grin ruined the sincerity of the moment.

“A lot’s changed since then,” I muttered. A cord tightened around my heart, then loosened, like a bowstring snapping. A sudden vision of the cracked windshield blurred my vision, and a spiderweb-thin line in it sealed up, healing. I shivered a little and wrapped my arms around my ribs. “C’mon. Let’s go talk to Billy.”

“Wait.” Marie caught my arm. “We have a problem.”

Those were not the words I wanted to hear. It took a long time to convince myself to say, “What kind of problem?”

“Cernunnos wasn’t the one I fought at the church.”

I frowned at her without comprehension. “He couldn’t have been,” I said after a minute. “You took that knife from him.” I felt terribly clever for figuring that out, especially when surprise, followed by embarrassment, washed across Marie’s face.

“You’re right. I didn’t even think—but who was he, then? The Hunt
was
after me,” she insisted. I unfolded one hand from around my ribs to head off her protestations.

“I know. I saw. Maybe it was somebody human who’s working for him.” I admired how I said that, all casual-like. I could handle my world being turned up
side down and shaken like a snow globe. No problem. I was cool. I was good. Yeah.

“Then why didn’t he follow me into the church?”

I stared down at her, at a loss. So much for being cool. “I don’t know. Look.” I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Billy and get that part of this over with before we try to figure the rest of it out, okay?” I glanced at Gary. He nodded. So, after a reluctant moment, did Marie.

We went to talk to Billy.

Once upon a time, a nice young half-Cherokee half-Irish girl went to college and got the ultimate would-you-like-fries-with-that degree: English. I had no illusions that I’d get a job in my field when I graduated from college, but I’d never planned to. I already had a day job. I’d started learning how to fix cars when I was barely old enough to walk, and I never really wanted to do anything else.

When I graduated from the University of Washington, my part-time college gig at a local mechanic’s shop couldn’t upgrade me to full-time, so I hired on with the North Precinct police department. The best part about it was I didn’t have to move out of the apartment I’d been renting since my sophomore year of college.

There was just one itty-bitty catch: my then-supervisor, Captain Nichols, wanted me to go to the police academy. It was the black-and-white photos they took for station ID that did me in: my Native American blood showed through like a waving red flag, and Nichols couldn’t resist a bonafide Indian woman on the roster. It made the department look good. I went
to the academy, managed to survive it and gratefully slunk back to the garage, there to stay.

A year later, Nichols retired and Captain Michael Morrison replaced him.

Odds are that Morrison and I never would have so much as spoken, if I hadn’t brought my car to the precinct car wash fund-raiser. I was not prone to doing that sort of thing: my car, Petite, is my baby, and I prefer to wash her myself, but Billy’s oldest kid begged and pleaded with me, and I was weak in the face of big-eyed nine-year-old boys. So I brought her to the car wash.

How any red-blooded American male could mistake a 1969 Mustang for a Corvette, even an admittedly sexy ’63 Stingray, I will never understand. But Morrison did, and I laughed in his face. If I were to be totally honest, I might go so far as to say I mocked him mightily, before, during and after laughing in his face.

I didn’t
know
at the time that he was my new top-level supervisor.

I say that like knowing would have made a difference.

I generally went to some lengths to avoid admitting to myself that I’d behaved like a complete, unmitigated jerk. It was like a horrible, embarrassing reversion to elementary school, where you indicate you think a boy is cute by throwing rocks at him. Once I’d lobbed the first rock, so to speak, I didn’t know how to stop, and the relationship hadn’t exactly improved with time. As far as I could tell, neither Morrison nor I had much life at all outside of the station, so we ran into each other often enough to develop a long-term, stand
ing animosity. We were like Felix and Oscar without the good moments.

So when I’d asked for some personal time off to go meet my dying mother, Morrison’d been in a hurry to tell me that the department could only afford me six weeks of leave, and then they’d have to replace me. I told him I’d be back in a month.

That month stretched to two, then three. When I called to say it was going to be another month, Bruce at the front desk sounded downright grim, and told me that Morrison wanted my ass in his chair the minute I got off the plane.

Which was why I was now on Morrison’s side of Morrison’s desk, in Morrison’s remarkably comfortable chair, with my feet propped up on Morrison’s scarred gray desk. I just had to push my luck.

The office was large enough to not be claustrophobic. The door opened against a half wall of windows that let in the mild winter light. Two chairs that fit under the category of “comfy” were on the opposite side of Morrison’s desk, the side I was supposed to be on. Another three folding chairs were tucked around a long brown table shoved under the windows and into the back corner. The table, like Morrison’s desk, was buried beneath chaotically distributed paperwork.

Morrison’s desk looked out onto the offices through another set of windows, floor-to-ceiling, Venetian blinds hanging at the tops. He usually left them open. When they were closed, somebody was in huge trouble. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved they were open now.

Three calendars, with the past, present and next
months turned up, were tacked on a bulletin board above a quietly percolating coffeemaker on the other side of the office. Around the calendars were clippings from cases, past and present, overlying one another until the board below them was virtually invisible. Next to the coffeemaker was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock. I wondered if it had been a Christmas gift, and who had given it to Morrison. There were no photos of family on his desk. I doubted he had any.

I eyed the clock. He’d kept me waiting seventeen minutes. It only seemed fair, since I’d kept him waiting four and a half months.