Urban Shaman (9 page)

“Damn,” he said, and looked at my feet. So did I. The boots had heels, nice thick sturdy ones. Cludgy, in fact, but I like cludgy boots. I have big feet and can’t wear sexy skinny little shoes, so I always went for the opposite extreme. In those shoes I was every bit as tall as Gary was, maybe a little taller. I grinned at him.

“Lady, you scare me,” he said, and opened the door for me. I went out feeling pretty good about myself.

Marie lived barely ten minutes from me. My all-day nap had evidently made a dent, or at least I’d caught another wind, because I took the stairs up to her condo two at a time, leaving Gary behind. “She said it’d be open,” he called as I looked both ways down the hall. “Number one twenty-one.” I took an arbitrary left as Gary caught up, found Marie’s door and did a staccato rap before pushing it open.

“Hey, Marie, it’s us.” The entryway was a short hall with a longer hall to my right and a kitchen to my left. At the end of the entryway, in front of us, was a Néné Thomas print, a woman surrounded by ravens. “I like
the print,” I called, and went past the kitchen, past the print and around a corner into the living room, still smiling.

Marie’s very dead body lay sprawled across her living room floor.

I
backed up and crashed into Gary, elbowing him in the gut. He grunted, offended. “What the hell was that for?”

“She’s dead,” I whispered.

“What?”
Gary crowded me forward again. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.” I swallowed. Gary did the same, right behind my ear.

Marie lay on her back on the floor, one arm flung above her head, a classic faint. Except it wasn’t a faint. A hole had been torn through her midriff, starting just to the left of her breastbone. It rose up at an angle, and it didn’t take much imagination to envision the heart muscle cut neatly in half beneath the crimson blood. There were no superficial wounds that I could see. It looked like someone had walked in, jerked a knife up
through her chest without warning, and walked out again. I rubbed my chest where Cernunnos had stabbed me, nervously. “Where’s that sword?”

“In the trunk of my cab,” Gary whispered back.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder if that’s good or bad.”

We stood there staring at Marie’s body. “Maybe we should call the cops,” Gary suggested.

I pulled my glasses off and rubbed my eyes, then put them back on. Marie was still lying there, dead. “Shit,” I said after a while. “I
am
the cops.” I backed up again and went looking for a phone. I found one in the kitchen, lying beside the tooth Marie’d collected from the church parking lot. She’d cleaned the blood off it and it looked innocuous, like it was waiting for the tooth fairy. I picked it up and stared at it, then folded it into my pocket as I got the phone and went back into the living room, dialing 9-1-1.

We were still standing there twenty-five minutes later when the real cops showed up. They bustled us down to the station in separate cars. I thought if we were really criminals, we’d have either abandoned the place or worked out our story while we were waiting for the cops, but no one wanted to listen to my point of view.

Gary had an all-day alibi; he’d been at work until two, then at a senior’s poker game until he came to wake me up. I had no alibi at all. A cop I didn’t know questioned me for over an hour. He kept getting hung up on the fact that I’d seen Marie from a plane in the
first place. Everybody was having trouble with that idea. I made a mental note not to play Rescue Chick from the air again.

He let me go after verifying I really was a cop. Gary was waiting on the station stairs for me. We stood there watching splats of rain hit the sidewalk.

“You think it was Cernunnos?” Gary asked after a while.

“I don’t think his horse would fit in that apartment.” I sat down hard on the steps. Gary looked down at me in surprise. I smiled up at him weakly. “I haven’t eaten this week.” I didn’t think I was even exaggerating.

“You could eat?” he asked in horror.

“Either that or I could pass out.” I gave him my hand to pull me up. He did, and put a steadying hand at my waist when I wobbled. I smiled dizzily at him. “You know, Gary, if you were forty years younger I could get to like you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what all the girls say. Where we going? My cab’s at Marie’s.”

“There’s a Denny’s right around the corner.”

“No doughnut shop?”

I grinned a little. “Down the street. But I need real food.”

“You could eat,” he said again, sort of admiringly. I nodded and teetered down the street.

A plate of mozza sticks, a grilled chicken-with-cheese-and-bacon sandwich, a copious number of fries and a chocolate milkshake later I could think again. Gary watched me eat with silent fascination and didn’t so much as steal a fry. When I ordered a hot-fudge
brownie sundae and sat back to wait for it, Gary judged it safe to speak again. “So
do
you think it was Cernunnos?”

I pulled my glasses off and chewed on the earpiece. “I don’t know. Do ancient Celtic gods go around murdering people in their apartments?”

“Dunno. Never met any before. Don’t know why they wouldn’t.”

I looked up and squinted, trying to resolve his fuzzy edges into something more solid. My vision wasn’t that bad—I could drive without my contacts, if I had to—but I’m nearsighted and things more than about three feet away took on the Christmas tree-light effect. “I think maybe we should start with something a little less esoteric.”

“Sure,” Gary said, “like a jealous rival in the anthropology department.” He stared at me until I wrinkled my nose and put my glasses back on.

“It could happen,” I mumbled.

“Could,” Gary agreed. “You think it did?”

“No,” I said reluctantly. “I think Marie was into something weirder than that.”

Gary nodded, satisfied. The waitress came back with my sundae and I poked at it with a fork, no longer hungry enough to eat it. “It was too clean to be Cernunnos.”

“Whaddaya mean, too clean? Didn’t you
look
at her?”

“Yeah, but.” I waved the fork around. “Think about his host. Dogs and birds and guys on horses. Do you think he goes around killing people all by himself? What if it was that other guy?”

“What other guy?”

“The one with the knife. She said it wasn’t Cernunnos, but she’d thought it was up until the diner this morning.” I frowned at my brownie, and took a bite. It was pretty good. I took another bite.

“The human guy?”

“I donno. I wonder if there are any humans associated with Cernunnos. Maybe we should find out.”

“I don’t think the library’s open this late, Jo.”

My eyebrows went up. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a computer at home.” The brownie really was pretty good. I ate some more.

“Never touch the things,” Gary said disdainfully.

I grinned. “Try it. You’ll like it.” I finished my dessert, paid the bill and we went home.

I have a little sign on my computer that says: On The Internet, Nobody Knows You’re A Dog. I dusted it off while the computer booted up. Gary stood back about four feet, looking wary. “It isn’t going to bite you, Gary.”

“That don’t look like the ones on TV,” Gary announced.

I shook my head. “I’m running Linux.”

Gary squinted at me. I inhaled to explain, and gave it up as a bad job before I even started. “It means I’m a computer geek.”

“Right.” Gary edged closer. I opened up a Web browser while he watched curiously. “And you know what you’re doing?”

I grinned over my shoulder at him. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Gary. Anything you want, you can find it on the Net. It takes hardly any effort to find
one hundred percent right answers, and one hundred percent wrong answers.”

He leaned over and planted a hand against the corner of my desk, peering at the screen. “How do you tell which is which?”

“Personal prejudice, sometimes. But for this kind of stuff—” I waggled my fingers at the screen “—you can check through half a dozen sites or so and pick up the information that’s common to all of them. That’s pretty close to being true. I mean, we’re talking about Celtic gods here, Gary. I don’t think there’s a real unquestionable expert on the topic, you know?” I clicked through to one of the sites. Gary dragged a chair over and we both read the screen.

There were a lot of origin stories for the Hunt. Some of it was what Marie had told us already, though some of them mentioned someone called Herne the Hunter. Those ones said the Hunt was made up of mortal hunters who had worked for Richard II of England. The rest suggested it was either of “faerie,” which looked like an obnoxious way to spell “fairy” to me, or made up of great warriors from the past. Even King Arthur was listed among the riders.

“His punishment for killing the children,” Gary said when we got to that bit.

“What?” I pushed my glasses up, peering at him.

“Arthur had hundreds of kids killed.”

I stared at him. “I never heard anything like that.”

Gary shrugged. “It’s one of the stories. Sort of like the Pharaoh killing all the kids trying to get to Moses. Except Arthur was trying to destroy Mordred. Maybe
he’s riding with Cernunnos as his punishment for killing them.”

“Where’d you learn all that?”

Gary cocked an eyebrow at me. “I’m an old dog, lady. You pick up a few tricks along the way.”

Great. Apparently I was the only nonbeliever in Seattle. Well, me and Morrison. Somehow that didn’t make me feel any better. Gary reached out and clicked back to the search engine, and through to another site. I half smiled.

“I thought you never touched these things.”

“Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my rep.” He leaned forward, jutting his jaw at the screen while we waited for a slow-loading page to resolve. “So the only mortal mentioned with Cernunnos is this guy Herne. Is he our guy?”

I slid down in my chair, sighing. “I don’t know. Some of the descriptions sound like they might just be the same person. Which doesn’t do us any good. Dammit.”

“What’s that?” Gary leaned forward, examining the screen. Badly rhyming nonsense filled the page in a painstaking handwritten font.

“In Cernunnos’s name I set this geas?” Gary asked, grinning. I reached out and clapped a hand over his mouth, startling even myself. Above my fingers, his eyes widened.
“Wwwf wng?”

I looked back at the chant. It still looked like nonsense, but I shivered anyway, discomfited. “I don’t think we should read that out loud.”

Gary’s eyebrows went up a little and he glanced at the computer before shrugging. “Okay.”

What, that was it? Just “okay”? My surprise must have shown on my face, because he shook his head, smiling. “Jeez, lady, don’t you ever go on gut feelings?”

I spread my hands. “No.”

“Well, that’s what you been goin’ on since I met you. Better get used to it.”

“God, I have been, haven’t I?” I looked around for my glasses and put them back on. “Tomorrow,” I said firmly, “I will wake up normal and rational again.”

“And have answers to all your problems, right?”

I smiled halfheartedly. “Right.”

“Sounds like a good plan to me.” Gary sighed and ran a hand back through his hair. He didn’t have a lot of it, and what there was, was white. It was the only thing that made him look somewhere around his age. Even his wrinkles were sort of Ernest Hemingway wrinkles, like they were from too much squinting into the sun rather than age. They made him look dependable, not old. “Well, lady, I’m an old man and I’ve been up since early, so I’m heading home. I gotta go to work in the morning.”

“Yeah, okay. Me, I’m going to…” I trailed off and frowned at the computer.

“Gonna what?” Gary prompted. I shrugged.

“I’m going to find out who murdered Marie.”

“No fair having all the fun without me. My shift ends at two. I’ll see you then, maybe.”

“All right. In the meantime, don’t pick up any guys with swords. Oh, hey. Your car. You want a ride to Marie’s, um, to where Marie lived, um, to your car?” I stood up, digging in my pocket for my car keys as an attempt to keep my mouth from running off and making me sound even more idiotic.

“You don’t have to do that,” Gary dissembled, but I’d just spent weeks in Ireland. There’s a certain protocol I’d learned there.

In Ireland, you go to someone’s house, and she asks you if you want a cup of tea. You say no, thank you, you’re really just fine. She asks if you’re
sure.
You say of course you’re sure, really, you don’t need a thing. Except they pronounce it
ting.
You don’t need a
ting.
Well, she says then, I was going to get myself some anyway, so it would be no trouble. Ah, you say, well, if you were going to get yourself some, I wouldn’t mind a spot of tea, at that, so long as it’s no trouble and I can give you a hand in the kitchen. Then you go through the whole thing all over again until you both end up in the kitchen drinking tea and chatting.

In America, someone asks you if you want a cup of tea, you say no, and then you don’t get any damned tea.

I liked the Irish way better.

“No, really,” I said. “It’s the middle of the night and
there’s a crazy man with a knife between here and there, and besides, I need to stop at the store and get something to eat for breakfast tomorrow. There’s no food here at all.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” Gary said, and I fought back a grin as we headed for the door.