Shaman Rises

Chapter Twenty-Three

We were supposed to snap back to the Middle World. I could feel it in Gary’s intent, in his hunger for Coyote and Annie, and especially for Morrison, who was my heart. I assumed he had some kind of plan for me during the time that he was torturing and eating them, since it wasn’t like I would hang out and applaud his efforts without interfering, but that wasn’t foremost in his mind just then. He wanted to get us back to the Middle World.

Thwarting that was, for the moment, sufficient for me. I held the image of the Lower World in my mind as hard as I could, envisioning the yellow road that Coyote often walked along to get there. But it was mist-shrouded, just like Tir na nOg, too airy and breezy to hold on to. Gary’s nasty grin split again, and since I was right there, face-to-face with him, both of us tumbling through the ether, I took a page from a long-ago fight with Cernunnos and kneed the Master in the crotch.

It worked just as well on him as it had on Cernunnos. Outraged shock and pain wiped every other expression from his face and for a heartbeat I was able to take control of our headlong tumble through the ethereal planes. I was definitely putting that one in the handbook of fighting gods: groin shots were totally fair. I didn’t even feel guilty about it technically being Gary’s body, because if there was any chance of getting him back, it would be worth tenderized huevos.

I tore apart the mist, wrenching us toward the Lower World. The dispersing mist cooled, turning whiter, and the sky lightened until it finally tinted toward pale blue. The air chilled until I saw my breath on it, none of which was right for the Lower World. Despair shot through me and, like I’d offered him delicacies on a silver platter, the pain washed out of Gary’s face and turned to triumphant glee. My stomach clenched and I held on to him harder, desperate to reach the Lower World instead of crashing back into Seattle. We fell, picking up speed, until I was pretty certain terminal velocity would smear us both across the restaurant floor when we hit.

Mist became clouds and we broke through their bottom, falling past the edge of the world.

For a little while we were both too surprised to kill each other. The edge of the world zipped by, waterfalls cascading off it into fog and clouds. Stubborn greenery clung to the sides here and there, softening the wall of rock. Clouds receded, and after not very long at all, the bottom of the world, as flat and sharp-sided as the top, flew past. I looked for elephants carrying the whole disk on their backs.

There weren’t any, but below us there was a whole lot of nothing. Blue and clouds went on pretty nearly forever, and where they faded, they did so into the glimmer of stars. The only real sound was the wind screaming past our ears.

“Hah.” The sound tore away like the soft breath it was. I’d missed hitting the Lower World, but the Master hadn’t gotten us to the Middle World, either. We were in the Upper World, and I thought that might be just a smidge more in my favor than his. Either way, Morrison and the others weren’t here, which made it a place I was happy to be.

I didn’t, of course, have any particular idea how to conduct a fight while falling at top speed through an endless world of sky, but I still felt this was a better situation than I’d been in a few minutes ago.

Now, Renee said, and my body burst apart.

It came together again in a heartbeat, taking on a shape that was becoming familiar: the thunderbird. Rattler’s golden color cast itself over Raven’s vast wings; speed became second nature, a breathless, comfortable part of my being. Dangerous claws flexed and clenched: I had Gary’s body in their grip. My eyesight was agonizingly sharp, showing me all the stars into which we fell, but I had no more fear. I had wings, and with them flew, pulsing higher into the endless sky. Sooner or later I would reach the top of the world, and from there I could dash my prey against the ground and destroy it.

Gary twisted in my claws. I clenched them tighter, but he slithered and wiggled, more than just the shape of a man struggling to escape. I dropped him and dove after him, taking the moment of freedom to see what he fought to do.

Wings erupted from his body as easily as they’d been born from mine, but his were white in their moment of creation, and stained black in the endless sun an instant later. I remembered too late that he now had a raven spirit animal as well as the tortoise.

They came together as Raven and Rattler had, making a creature greater than the sum of its parts. Black feathers shellacked with thin tortoiseshell, their patterns perfectly reminiscent of Native Alaskan paintings. The bird’s neck extended, vulturelike, beak sharper and more deadly than a tortoise’s and stronger in its snap than a raven’s. Its legs shriveled, becoming thinner and more birdlike than a tortoise’s, but still four of them remained on its sleek long birdlike belly. Its tail elongated, thinning, whipping the sky with audible cracks, and the very, very human part of me buried in the thunderbird’s brain said, That’s a motherfucking dragon, guys. I got no dissent from the varied parts of me that were the spirit animals, even though I really, really wanted them to disagree. Still in the back of my brain, I said, Fuck, and slammed into the thing at hundreds of miles an hour.

It should have been broken into a thousand pieces beneath my force. Instead its tortoiseshell absorbed the impact, ripples of power shuddering through the broad wings and long spine. Or ripples of pain that it converted into power: this was a place of spirits, and where the flesh was weak, the spirit, in this case, was more than willing to work with that. We broke apart in a thunder of sound, its wings clattering like wooden wind chimes. It didn’t fly as easily as I did: it was weightier, clumsier, either with lack of practice or because tortoises were not known for their aerial skills. Neither, of course, were rattlesnakes, but at least snakes were lithe and quick, whereas tortoises tended to be more ponderous. Still, it flew, and until I could capture it and tear it back into its component parts, I wouldn’t be able to smash it against the earth and end it.

A spike of distress rolled through me, more poignant than the panic of naming my opponent a dragon. The thunderbird was murderously practical; it had no objection to destroying Gary’s body in order to kill the Master. I knew it was right, and that I shouldn’t, either, but it was an archetype, an idea of cold passions and no humanity. I was still very much human, and Gary was my best friend. Part of me knew what I might have to do, but I wasn’t yet ready to take it as writ.

The truth was, I would never be ready, even if that meant the end of the world.

I didn’t even have time to roll with that, to try to figure out what it meant for this whole fight, before the reshaped Master slammed into me with claws as deadly as my own. More deadly, maybe: heat blossomed where they struck me. A skree! broke loose from my throat and I tucked my wings, spinning in the air to dislodge the monster on my back. It shook free and I flung my wings wide again, stopping myself just long enough to get him below me. Healing magic spilled through me, cooling the fire within as I dived, plummeting at top speed to bash into him again.

His beak slashed me, making another line of fire across my shoulder. I bit into him as hard, coming back with a mouthful of flame, and spat it at him. It clung to his shell-covered feathers, but didn’t burn through. Of course not. Pain was his weapon. Mine was healing. I poured gunmetal-blue magic into his wound and he screamed.

He also healed, which was not at all what I’d hoped would happen. Swearing under my breath—it turned out a bird did that kind of muttered angry sound very well—I released him and backwinged to gain space to dive again, hoping to break him apart if I couldn’t rip him without damaging myself. When I hit again, he rolled and seized me with his claws. We bashed each other with our wings, slashing and clawing, never fearing to hit the world below as we fought like earthbound creatures tumbling through the sky.

Trouble was, hitting the earth was starting to sound necessary. The heat pouring through me from his attacks was incredible, my healing magic barely mitigating it. That had happened once before, too, back on the day we’d created Thunderbird Falls. The fire of wrongness that I’d experienced then had stunted my ability to heal. This felt like that, only vastly increased. His taint was heat, stronger than me, but then, he was a god, and I, for all my power, was only human. A very impressive human, with a newborn soul and all the attendant power boost that came with it, but in the end, I was human, and he was a disembodied god.

Well, now he was an embodied god, actually, which didn’t help at all. Gary’s spirit animals were strong enough to take a lot of abuse, and that was exactly what the Master wanted to mete out. I had to figure out how to separate them, to get the Master out of Gary without killing Gary. Thinking rationally while spinning through the air was not my strong suit.

Especially with the fire sluicing through me. Forget separating Gary from the Master: I was burning up, heat from the dragon’s strikes killing my guides and me. The fire felt like it came from the core of me, and pretty soon nothing I could do would hold the Raven-Rattler-Joanne compound together. I folded my wings, becoming a dead weight on the dragon, and after a few seconds it released me to escape and achieve a better angle of attack. I crashed my wings open, gaining height and trying to think of an escape route.

Rattler and Raven tightened their grip on each other, intensifying their presence as the thunderbird. I slipped, even though that was impossible. I was the body. They were the spirits. There was no way they could retain physicality without me in the mix.

Renee whispered, Wrong, and the thunderbird broke away from me.

Together, still bound as one, a creature of pure spirit, Raven and Rattler struck the dragon with claw and beak, and tore from it Gary’s spirit tortoise.

For an instant, a heartbeat, an eyeblink, I thought it was going to work. That they would rip the tortoise away, weaken the Master and come back to me. The tortoise pulled away, its link to Gary stretching and weakening and finally snapping. Gary fell, his raven wings faded to nothing: one spirit animal was not enough to hold the spirit-shaped dragon form. Inside that heartbeat, triumph spiked through me so strongly I felt faint from it. We were going to win.

The next heartbeat lasted forever, a gut-wrenching contraction as I realized that coming back to me had never been Raven and Rattler’s plan. They kept flying, tortoise spirit in their thunderbird talons. Kept climbing higher, receding fast as the Master and I fell away at speed. I saw, or maybe just imagined, my entwined spirit animals looking back at me once, and felt a whisper of a touch inside my mind: Goodbye, ssshaman.

Far, far away, in the distant reaches of the Upper World’s endless sky, thunderbird became phoenix, and immolated with the tortoise in its claws.

Gary hit the floor of the spire restaurant so hard it reverberated. I didn’t. I sank, slipping through like I was a ghost. A spirit. Like I was nothing, like I no longer existed, and I couldn’t stop myself from falling.

I am sorry, said Renee, and time unwound itself just a little.

A moment later, I hit the floor, too, my bones bending with the force of impact. I snapped upward, returning to my body from where my spirit had been sinking through the floor. My head bounced off rubble, and in the stars I saw Renee knitting then and now together.

Then was a heartbeat ago in the Upper World, two of my spirit animals given physical form by the third, who stole it from now to lend to then. She had taken my body away from the moment of impact and lent it to Rattler and Raven, giving them the ability to rip Gary’s tortoise away while releasing Gary and me back to the Middle World. He’d come all at once, part and parcel, but I’d been split spirit from body, and my spirit had landed first, falling through the floor. My body had come after, catching up after its physical presence was no longer needed in the Upper World.

Then and now became one, a time-slip of only a few seconds smoothing itself out without effort, but I lay where I’d hit, unable to even blink. I knew what would happen if I did, and I couldn’t let tears fall.

Instead I spoke. Whispered: speaking aloud was far beyond my capabilities. “You...killed them. You let them die? You...” Raven? Rattler? Their names inside my head were desperate and empty, echoes their only response. I felt naked, naked inside, somehow, as if everything that had shored me up for the past fifteen months had been stripped away. “No. No, no, no, no you can’t, you can’t be gone, you can’t, Rattler, Raven, Raven, Ravenravenravenraven please come back, no, no, no, don’t do this don’t do this—”

But it was too late. They’d done it already, all three of them, made a decision I hadn’t gotten to take part in. I searched helplessly, hopelessly, for some kind of answer from within my mind, and got nothing. No snarky hissing rattlesnake, no enthusiastically bouncing raven. It was just me.

Me and Renee, and sensing her, I went cold. So cold I could hardly feel my own body. She’d survived, when my sweet, crazy Raven hadn’t, and I was never going to forgive that.

I am sorry, Renee said again.

“Go away.” They weren’t words. They were a growl, a snarl, a threat of such violence I couldn’t comprehend how to carry it out. Renee winked out of my consciousness and I screamed, the sound bloodying my throat. I rolled onto my forearms and shins, head ducking between my arms, and the worst of it was I wasn’t even allowed to scream again, or to mourn at all, because in rolling I ran into Gary’s gray, still body, and a whole new panic rose to sandwich the pain of loss.

My magic was still there. Horribly, impossibly, it wasn’t even diminished without Raven’s and Rattler’s presence. It was still there, and it leaped into Gary, searching for lingering life within him.

It was there, barely. His heartbeat stuttered, no longer shored up by the tortoise’s strength. More than that: pulled out of rhythm by the tortoise’s loss, as much as my own gut and heart were torn and abused by Raven and Rattler’s. My hands were nothing but cramps, my body in throes of agony that I couldn’t soothe. I’d been hurt so many times over the past year, but the only thing I’d ever felt as unforgiving as this was Ayita’s death. Ayita, Rattler and Raven. I was still screaming as I healed Gary, a thin high wrenching scream that hurt my throat as badly as the first one had. I couldn’t stop. I could hardly breathe around the sound, but I couldn’t stop, and the magic did nothing to ease it.

It didn’t do enough to ease Gary, either. It wasn’t the magic: I felt it in me as strongly as ever. It was me, so angry, so hurt, that I didn’t know how to get beyond it. Someday I would be able to stop screaming. Maybe then. Until then, Gary was not dying: his heartbeat was steady, his breathing was regular, and that was as much as I could do. The rest, the spark of life, the healthy color, all the things the Master had drained from him, those weren’t things I could fix. Not right now. Maybe never.

“Call. My. Brother.” The grated voice was half-familiar. I dragged my gaze from Gary’s barely breathing form to find Morrison standing above us. His eyes were black as death and his skin a terrible pallor, almost as bad as Gary’s. He had no magic in him, nothing to feed the Master except his own life source, and that would burn out in no time at all.

There was no way. No way the Master would choose Morrison over Coyote, even if he was desperate for a host. I stared at him without comprehension, trying to understand why of all people here, the Master would choose Morrison, until his face contorted and he snarled, “Call my brother,” again.

When I still didn’t move, Morrison drew the duty weapon he had borrowed from Billy and pressed it against his own temple. This time his voice was soft, even calm. “Call my brother, Walker, or this body dies.”