Urban Shaman (13 page)

“But what am I, a physician’s assistant or a surgeon? I don’t understand this, Coyote.”

“You’re both.” He stuck his nose under my palm and asked for more scritches while he spoke. “Heal the patient, Jo. The patient—”

The drumbeat stopped and I opened my eyes on a sigh. “—is the world.”

“Eh?” Gary set the drum aside and leaned forward, looking down at me.

“The patient is the world,” I repeated, then slowly grinned at him. The euphoria of the drumbeat surged through me even though it had ended. The colors were brighter, noises sharper. Gary looked different. There was an air of contentment around him, knowledge of a life well-lived. “God
damn,
Gary, I feel good.”

He chuckled, like a nice big V-8 engine purring. I bet his Annie had been a V-4, higher pitch to complement his deeper sound. Divisible numbers, too: one went into the other. It fit. I wished I’d been able to meet her. Gary stood up and put the drum carefully on top
of my computer desk. “Glad to hear it. You get anywhere?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I did.” I got up from the floor, whistling “I’m A Believer.” Gary pursed his lips like he was trying to fight off a smile. “You hush,” I told him happily. Another crack fused shut, a feeling of heat and sizzling deep inside me. I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone and grinned at Gary. “You hush,” I repeated. “You just let me be giddy and weird here for a minute. I’m jumping between worlds here. This is too wild. You just hush.”

Gary laughed and I stuck my nose in the air and went into the kitchen to put some water on for coffee. Gary followed me, leaning in the door. “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“How come you don’t know anything about your heritage?”

I was in a good enough mood that the question didn’t even piss me off. I turned around and leaned on the counter while the coffeepot started up and looked for a place to start. Some of the good humor fell away, but not enough to make me clam up. “I was about twelve when I told my dad we were going to choose one place to live and stay there until I was out of high school. My whole life we’d been picking up every three or four months and going somewhere new and I was sick of it. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before and the next time we got in the car we drove to North Carolina, where he’d grown up. Eastern Cherokee Nation.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets, looking at the floor while I spoke. “I knew he was Cherokee, but he hadn’t ever talked about growing up. He taught me pretty much my whole primary school education, math and science and English. I mean, I went to school, but we were always moving, so I was never anywhere really long enough to get the curriculum. Anyway, he didn’t tell me anything about the People. So I got to North Carolina and I was already years behind in what a lot of other kids had just grown up with. And I’m all horrible and pale like my mother was. Not that there aren’t other Native kids who’re pale, but I was really sensitive about it.” I spread my hands, looked at them, and shrugged. “So I worked really hard on not learning anything. Not caring.”

“Were you born contrary or did you have to work at it?”

I looked up. “Born that way.”

“So where was your mom?”

I snorted and looked over my shoulder to check the coffee. “Ireland. I was the unexpected product of a one-night stand during an American holiday.” God. Apparently I was the deliberate product of a one-night stand. It was just that the deliberation wasn’t on the part of my parents. I fell silent, trying to adjust to that thought.

“And?”

“Um. And she brought me back to the States when I was three months old, handed me over to Dad and went back to Ireland for good.”

“I thought your dad was on the move all the time. How’d she find him?”

“That,” I said, “was the last time he spent more than five months in one place.” Gary winced.

“But you said you’d gone to her funeral. So she turned back up?”

“Why are we playing Twenty Questions About Joanne’s Life?” Everything was still a little too clear, the smell of coffee brewing sharper than normal. My question didn’t come out as acerbically as I’d meant it to. I felt too good to be really bitchy, and I was still trying to absorb what Coyote had said.

“I guess she’d been corresponding with my dad for pretty much my whole life. Once every couple years. She sent letters to his parents in North Carolina and they’d forward them on to wherever we were.”

“And your dad didn’t mention this?”

“No.” I didn’t feel like adding anything else to that. “Anyway, so Mother just called up one day and said she was dying and she’d like to meet me before she keeled over. I was furious. I mean, who was she to ignore me my whole life and then turn around and pull something like that?”

“Your mother?” Gary offered. I sighed and nodded.

“That was basically what I came up with, too. I mean, I spent a really long time…” I went quiet, choosing my word carefully. “Resenting her. Maybe even hating her. She abandoned me and I was like any other kid who figured her life would’ve been way better, way different, if she hadn’t. But in the end I thought,
you know, if I don’t go meet her, I’ll never know. Maybe I’ll find out it was best that way.”

“Was it?”

“I still don’t know.” I leaned on the counter, dropping my head. “Her name was Sheila MacNamarra. She looked a lot like me. Black Irish. She liked Altoids. Um.” I pressed my lips together. “We spent four months together and I feel like all I really know about her was she liked Altoids. I didn’t really like her. I didn’t really dislike her, either.” I touched my throat, where the necklace she’d given me wasn’t. “She gave me—I don’t know if you noticed it. A necklace. I was wearing it yesterday.”

“The cross thing, yeah. I saw it.”

“Yeah. It was literally the last thing she did, giving me that. I don’t know why she did it, really. It didn’t seem very much like something she’d do. It was this weird personal touch after months of hanging out with a stranger. She didn’t ask me very many questions and she didn’t talk about herself, the whole time. She was a lot like my father. He doesn’t like talking about himself either.”

Gary’s eyebrows rose. “The apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

“What?” I poured two cups of coffee, frowning at him.

“I mean, you don’t open up so easy, either. I’m askin’ you questions all over the place and you’re real careful about choosing your answers. Maybe she couldn’t figure out how to say anything to you.” Gary took his coffee and watched while I ladled sugar and milk into my own.

“She was my mother,” I said, frowning.

“So what? That means she was s’posed to be able to just know how to talk to you? You’re an adult. I bet it’s pretty hard trying to talk to a kid you left behind almost thirty years ago.” Gary waved his coffee cup as I frowned more deeply.

“So you’re saying it’s my fault I don’t know anything about her?”

Gary shrugged and waved his coffee cup again. “I ain’t sayin’ anything. What’d she die of?”

I exhaled. “Boredom, I think.”

Gary lifted his eyebrows skeptically. I shook my head. “No, really. I think she was done. She’d seen what she wanted to see and she’d met me and she was done. So that’s the kind of person she was. I don’t know. Tidy. Focused. Capable of dying of boredom, or at least dying when she was done with her checklist of things to do.”

Gary pursed his lips. “’Scuze me for sayin’ so, but I think you’re still resentful. That’s a big thing to get stuck with. A mom who didn’t think you were interesting enough to stick around and get to know?”

“Thanks, Gary, that makes me feel a whole lot better. Can we change the subject now, please? What about you? You’ve got kids, right?”

He crinkled his eyebrows at me. “Kids? Me? No.”

I took a sip of coffee and eyed him over the top of the cup. “You said you had to get married when you knocked your old lady up.”

“Oh, that. I was tellin’ stories.” Gary grinned disarmingly and sat down at the kitchen table. I stared at
him, morally offended. “C’mon, siddown,” he said, still grinning. “Stop looking so put out. An old man’s gotta keep himself entertained somehow.”

I shook my head, muttering semiserious dismay at him, and came to sit down. “Entertain yourself with figuring out what’s going on with Cernunnos. I still think Marie doesn’t fit.” I planted my elbows on the table, supporting my head with fingertips pressed into my temples. It gave me a headache. Instead of stopping I rubbed little circles against my temples and frowned at the table.

“You said that.” Gary drained his coffee cup and got up for a second. “If the guy’s a death god, why doesn’t it fit?”

I frowned more. “Because why kill a bunch of shamans and then start taking out banshees and school kids? Where’s the connection?”

“I thought you were a cop. Aren’t you supposed to be good at this kind of thing?”

I lifted my head to glare at him. “I’m a
mechanic,
Gary. Mechanics
fix cars.
For some reason solving murders just didn’t end up on my résumé.”

“My garage needs somebody,” Gary said. I let my head fall to thump against the table.

“I can’t quit now. Morrison expects me to,” I said into the varnish. “If I can’t hack it I’ll come talk to your garage. But this week I’d like to learn how to be a shaman and try to solve a murder, if that’s okay.”

“Well,” Gary said slowly, “if that’s all you think you can handle….”

I looked up incredulously to see a broad grin showing off those perfect white teeth. “You,” I said, “are a
sonnovabitch.” Gary put a hand over his heart, looking wounded.

“Good thing my mammy’s in her grave to not hear that.”

“Your mammy, my ass.” I got up to get another cup of coffee. Gary handed me his to refill. “Do you have the world’s largest bladder, or what?”

“Lotsa practice drinking beer,” Gary said sagely. I grinned and poured him another cup of coffee. “So Marie’s murder and the school kids don’t fit, and you’re out of coffee. Now what?”

“I don’t usually have to make it for more than one person.” I frowned at the sludge in the cup. I was getting a lot of practice frowning lately. “I think now I go to the school.”

“School’s gonna be empty. They’re not gonna keep the kids there after what happened.”

“I know. I probably should have thought of it this morning. But Adina said the guy who was doing this would have a sense of power about him. Maybe I can get a scent of it.”

“You’re a bloodhound now?”

“I’m playing by ear, Gary. Besides!” For once I felt certain of something. “I bet I can tell if it’s Cernunnos, if I go over there. I know what he feels like.” That much I was sure of. I didn’t think anybody could forget what the horned god’s raw power felt like once they’d met it head-on.

“You didn’t get that off Marie.”

“I didn’t know I should even be trying. Now I do. If I can get even an idea about what’s going on, I shouldn’t
pass it up, right?” I drank some of the coffee, shuddered, and added more milk.

“Guess not. Who’s Adina?”

“One of the dead ladies I talked to last night.” I stared at Gary over the edge of my cup, just daring him to comment. He shut his jaw with an audible click. I grinned into the coffee cup and went to get my shoes.

Wednesday, January 5th, 3:35 p.m.

W
hen I was about nine, my father told me that forgiveness was easier to obtain than permission. I wondered, even at the time, about the wisdom of telling a kid that. In retrospect, it was smart: I tested the premise occasionally, discovered he was right and probably got in less trouble than I would have otherwise. The end result, seventeen years later, was me walking into Blanchet High School like I belonged there. Forget permission. Just act like you belong. I felt very smooth.

Until it turned out it didn’t matter. One hall, cordoned off with yellow police tape, was still packed with reporters, paramedics, cops and traumatized teachers. No one was paying attention to anything else. I watched the throng for a few minutes, then
turned down another hall and began pacing through the school, looking for nothing in particular.

I hadn’t been inside a high school since I’d graduated ten years earlier. Blanchet High had a lot more money than the school I’d gone to did. The wide halls were carpeted, and walls above tan lockers gleamed white, like they’d been repainted over Christmas break. Florescent lights hummed, altering the color of posters cajoling students to turn out for the weekend’s basketball and wrestling tournaments. Water fountains seemed to be about two inches lower than I remembered them being. Either I’d grown since high school, or Blanchet was full of short kids.

I pushed open a heavy door of solid wood with no window in it, and stepped inside a small theater. It was dark except for one white light in the sound booth, and smelled a little of makeup and sweat. I let the door close behind me and walked in quietly, taking the steps down to the stage in near-darkness.

“Long cold note on a tenor saxophone,”
a girl’s voice said very clearly. I stopped where I was, halfway to the stage. She came out on it, nothing more than a pale shadow in the darkness. She had terribly blond hair, long and thin and straight, just like she was. She wore a pale sweatshirt that added bulk to her narrow form, and her legs faded into darkness, not even a shadow. Dim tennies were on her feet.

“Life’s brief candle, a moment in the dark / laid down beneath the blade of sound.”
She knotted her arms around her ribs, like she was holding herself in. Her voice was as thin as she was, a clear soprano that
rose and fell as she delivered the poem. When she quavered in speaking, she didn’t try bullying through it, just let her voice shake, words falling to a whisper.

“Let me fold a thousand paper cranes / longing for a wish that cannot be.”
Hairs stood up on my arms, and I shivered. I had no right to listen to the girl’s private grief, but I was afraid to move and warn her I was there.
“Loss is pure in its first hour, jaded by time.”
She sank down onto the stage, wrapping her arms around her legs and burying her face in her knees. Blond hair fell over her arms as a choked sob broke the silence.

I turned and left the theater as quietly as I could.

Out in the hall, under the florescent lights again, the air was thick, like I was breathing in sadness. I leaned against a wall and kept my eyes closed until the tears stopped leaking and my heartbeat slowed down a little. I could feel something inside me, a knot of appalling rage, fueled by the girl’s sorrow and the rough poem. It lit up all my own scars, all the cracks in my windshield, and threw them into sharp relief until they throbbed with the need to be answered. I slid down the wall, lowering my head and lacing my hands behind my neck. I felt like a beacon, flared up with terrible, unfocused fury that burned through the walls of everything else. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so angry, horror mixed with sorrow and disbelief, and the rage pulling in every other emotion after it, drowning them.

This has to be stopped.
The thought, unnervingly clear through the anger, made me lift my head, staring sightlessly across the hall.
This has to be stopped,
and,
I can stop it.
I grasped the idea with sudden understanding, much deeper than the promise I’d given the priest. For one instant it was painfully obvious. Anger was a tool, and there was a choice in how to use it.

The Gordian knot of rage inside began unraveling, bright orange and yellow lengths of rope springing out to run through me instead of tying me up. Around the rage wound pale blue, thick ropy strands of compassion, feeding off fury. It all happened inside of an instant, and then I could breathe again. The unlocked center of me gobbled it up, storing all the burning energy for later use.

I could still feel the anger pulsing through me, self-righteous and forthright fury that someone could do what had been done. Compassion tempered it, though, delivering me the one step of distance that changed what I needed to do from vengeance to healing. Whomever had done this, whether it was Cernunnos or someone else, was terribly sick, and sickness could be healed.

“Joanie?” Billy’s voice interrupted me, deep and worried. I startled and looked up. He was crouched right in front of me, big hands dangling over his knees, eyebrows beetled down in concern. “You all right? I said your name about three times.”

“Sure.” I blinked at him, then shook my head and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What are
you
doing down here? The party’s at the other end.” If I hoped it would sidetrack him, I was wrong.

“Taking a look around. It’s my job.” Subtle empha
sis on the last word. I closed my eyes. “It’s not,” he pointed out, “your job. You,” he added helpfully, “are suspended.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Billy. I heard it all yesterday.” Had it been yesterday?
They
said hitting the ground running was the best way to deal with jet lag. I bet
They’d
never had two days like I’d had.

“That was this morning.” He stood up, offering me a hand.

“I was afraid of that.” I took his hand and stood up.

“Haven’t caught up on sleep yet, huh?”

I smiled thinly. “There hasn’t really been time.”

He nodded. “What’re you doing down here?”

Damn. I hadn’t distracted him enough. “Sniffing around.”

“For what?”

I shrugged stiffly. “Some sense of who’s doing this. Trying to see if it’s Cernunnos. Trying to get a feeling for his…” I swallowed, uncomfortable with what I was saying. “His power. His…whatever’s driving him.”

Billy folded his arms across his chest and frowned at me. “You think you can do that?” He sounded skeptical. I couldn’t blame him.

“Figured I could try. I’ve got to start somewhere.”

“You’re not supposed to start anywhere, Joanie.” He jerked his head down the hall and started walking. “C’mon.”

I followed sullenly. “What, I warrant a police escort from the building?” Billy looked over his shoulder at me and kept walking. It took me a minute to
realize we were heading for the crime scene, not the front door. I blinked and jogged a few steps to catch up, not questioning the decision.

“Still got your ID?” he asked, lifting the yellow tape for me to duck under.

“Morrison took my badge away,” I muttered. It figured. One minute I didn’t want to be a cop and the next I was sulking because I wasn’t. “But I’ve got my station ID.” I dug my wallet out of my pocket and flipped it open to the ID photo. A cop I didn’t know gave it a cursory glance and waved us by. It seemed like half the North Precinct was there. It occurred to me this would be a good time to perpetrate other crimes, if I were the sort of person who did that.

Working for the police in any capacity had clearly been bad for me. I never would have thought that, back in the day. A couple guys I knew looked surprised but greeted me, and Billy went to talk to a hulk of a man who stood outside the classroom door. I stood around watching the reporters, who practiced looking good for one another, and waited for Billy to come back.

He did, looking grim. “Morrison’s gonna have my eyeteeth if he hears about this,” he muttered, “but come on. I told them you’re on the serial killer case and you’re coming in to see if there’s any connection with these kids.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before, Billy.”

He threw a tight grin over his shoulder and led me into the classroom.

Afternoon sunlight streamed in the windows, glaring off whiteboards. Red and green and blue marker printed out class assignments more neatly than I remembered chalk doing. The teacher’s desk was in front of the boards, and rows of one-piece chair-and-desk units were settled in uneven rows.

For a second, it all looked perfectly normal.

And then the smell hit me. Sweet and tangy and sharp all at once, the air conditioning filtered some, but not enough, of it away. I blinked one time and the haphazard rows of seats resolved themselves into a mishmash that pushed out from the center of the room. Three of the units were overturned, half blocked from sight by the desks around them. From where I stood, still in the doorway, I could see the beige carpet’s discoloration as blood dried.

I didn’t want to see more.

“Joanie?” Billy took a step back toward me, a hand extended and his eyebrows lifted. I shivered.

“I’m okay,” I lied, and walked forward. There were footprints of blood on the floor, dried tennis-shoe shapes, from where the other children had run from the room. I could almost hear them screaming.

Three steps farther into the room any illusion of normality that was left dissolved. Four bodies lay sprawled on the floor, three boys and a girl. Three of them lay touching, arms slumped over ankles. All of them had died with expressions of mixed disbelief and terror. The girl had long brown hair, blood stiffening it to black. Every one of them had died the way Marie
did, with one vicious knife thrust from the rib cage up through the heart. I stopped again, trying to control my breathing. I didn’t want to vomit all over the crime scene. It smelled enough as it was.

“Joanie?” Billy asked again.

“I’m all right,” I said, more sharply than I intended. “Just give me a second here.”

He nodded and fell back a couple of steps, letting me walk forward alone, which was about the last thing I wanted to do.

I did it anyway. A second round of police tape circled the bodies, at about knee-height, wrapped around the desks. I stopped and stared into the circle of tape. I really, really didn’t want to do what I heard my voice asking if I could do. “Can I cross this line, Billy?”

“Do you need to?”

I nodded mechanically. I could
feel
it, malevolence so close if I put my hand out it would be like touching a wall. “What kind of shoes are you wearing?” he asked. I looked at my feet.

Thick-soled boots, no heels this time. “All my clothes are still at the airport,” I realized out loud. “They’re made by somebody called Endura. Wide shoes for women. Size ten and a half.”

“Got it,” somebody else said. “Go on in.”

I stepped across the police tape and into the blood.

Nothing happened. I was shocked enough to take a staggering half step backward. Billy, for the third time, now alarmed, said, “Joanie?”

“It’s okay,” I said distantly. I could hear Coyote’s
voice, faintly:
Ask Marie to help you with your shields. You’ll need them.

I was pretty sure I’d figured out shields all on my own. I still felt the malevolence, all around me, not quite able to touch me. And I knew I was the one keeping it away.

Great. I’d figured out how to shield. How did I take the blocks down?

Imagine you’re a car.
Coyote’s advice, again. I almost looked over my shoulder for him. Instead I closed my eyes. A car with something blocked that I had to get to. Had to be in the dashboard, those were the worst bitch to open up and put back together. I envisioned searching out screws, and all the damned fine wiring. I dragged the dashboard open, the moral equivalent of unhinging the top of my skull and flipping it back.

All sorts of hell broke loose in my brain.

For what felt like about five hundred hours, pain and rage and chaos swam together inside my head, trying to tear my mind apart. They screamed together, telling me the horror of death and the glory of murder and the sheer unadulterated joy of power. Somewhere along the line my car analogy broke down, because now I was drowning. There was blackness, streaked with silver and gray, the not-colors rushing up beyond me as I fell down and down and down. The weight of despair pushed me farther and faster until it seemed I would pop out the other side of the earth. I tried to catch the streaks of light. Where I touched them, they turned crimson and bled, color sticking under my fingernails, but I kept falling, and they kept screaming.

I had to stop falling. In the Coyote dream, all I had to do was concentrate and I stopped falling. Here, I could hardly hear myself think, much less concentrate, and there wasn’t much point anyway, because I was clearly going to die, just like the kids had. I felt them around me, cold fragile wraiths, nothing like the shamans I met dream-walking.
Those
dead men and women grasped the cycle of life.
These
kids still thought they were immortal, and the shock of death turned them into shadows. Not even so much as shadows, all their essence drawn away by the murderer—