Spirit Dances

CHAPTER SIX

The audience gasped, not sure whether they’d seen something deliberate or tragic. I popped to my feet, wanting to rush the stage, and Morrison followed my lead.

Everybody else took it as the surge into a standing ovation, and people came to their feet all around us, cheering and shouting and applauding. Panic flared across the stage, the dancers at a loss until one of the men stepped forward to collect the woman who’d fallen. Her boneless form in his arms, he turned to the audience and led a troupe-wide curtain call. Fixed smiles looked like rictuses to me, but I could almost hear the axiom driving them: the show must go on. The audience was still going wild when they withdrew, and I knew they wouldn’t return for a second bow.

“What’s going on, Walker?” Morrison’s voice was pitched below the exuberant audience’s catcalls.

I flinched, becoming aware I was straining forward like I’d start climbing over seats and people to reach the stage. In fact, the only thing stopping me was Morrison’s viselike grip on my elbow, which I only noticed belatedly, despite the fact that once I noticed, I realized it was cutting off circulation. “Remember what happened to Billy in July? How he went to sleep because something was draining the life force out of him?”

Poor Morrison gritted his teeth and nodded. I’d explained it all at the time, but there wasn’t much in the way of actual physical evidence for things like that. He believed me, but he didn’t like it.

“Something like that just happened to her, except she’d gathered up all the focused power the dancers were creating. That kind of drain might have killed her, Morrison. I have to get up there!” And there was no way to do it. The aisles were already full in the way theaters always managed the moment a performance ended, even when the audience was going nuts with applause. I was sure it violated some law of physics.

Morrison gave me one brief, searching look, then, as far as I could tell, employed some kind of secret law-enforcement signal code that I wasn’t yet privy to. Within seconds we were in the aisle, Morrison with his badge out as he politely but firmly created a path to the stage. Rubberneckers realizing something was wrong started to clog up the aisle, but somehow Morrison kept being right between me and them, full of professional apology as he got people out of my way. I wanted to kiss the man.

We reached the stage and he did a two-step that landed him behind me. I went to vault up, not sure my dress would survive it, and to my astonishment, Morrison caught my waist and simply dead-lifted me up.

I weighed in at about one sixty-five, which was by no means the featherweight division. I also had very long legs, made longer still by my goddamned high heels. I wouldn’t have thought anybody could lift me four feet straight into the air so smoothly I barely knew what was happening until my feet hit the stage. I stumbled out of pure amazement, and Morrison, who vaulted up after me, offered a briefly steadying hand before we both ran for backstage.

The whole cast was gathered around the fallen woman. Their auras were painful with worry, shooting spikes that made my head hurt. Every one of them looked drained physically, emotionally and spiritually, which made sense. Not only had they danced their hearts out, but the power they’d been offering to their lead dancer had gotten sucked out in a way it was never meant to be taken. I was surprised they were still all on their feet, metaphorically speaking.

A few of them glanced up as Morrison and I came through the wings. They were obviously expecting someone. Paramedics, maybe. Morrison said, “Police,” at the same time I said, “I’m a healer.”

For maybe the first time in my life, nobody looked any more surprised at the one statement than the other. In fact, a couple of them just got out of my way, clearing a path to the dancer’s side. Morrison walked away as I knelt next to her, and I half heard him talking to stagehands, asking them to set up a barrier and refuse all nonofficial personnel access to the backstage area.

The dancer wasn’t breathing. I’d known that on some level, right from the moment she’d collapsed. There were signs of fresh bruising on her chest, like they’d failed at CPR. “What’s her name?”

Someone said, “Naomi Allison.”

I whispered, “C’mon, Naomi,” put my hand over her heart, and went searching for her soul.

Like the breath from her body, it was gone. Not almost-gone, not hanging on in hopes of rescue, but somewhere beyond the veil of death. There was no hint of life to her body, no aura clinging to her skin, no spark buried somewhere deep inside. If life essence was something that could be held in a pool, it was like someone had reached in and with one giant handful, emptied every drop. I had a whole shiny range of esoteric powers, but seeing ghosts didn’t rank among them. I was pretty certain if Billy were here, he’d already be talking to Naomi’s crossed-over self.

I’d never brought anyone back from the dead before. I’d managed to bring people back from mostly dead a couple of times, but not from genuinely, full-stop dead. I wasn’t actually sure it was possible.

From the outside—which was to say, from anyone who hadn’t been watching with my second Sight’s point of view—I thought her death must look like a heart attack. There was no other even vaguely feasible explanation for it. Of course, with my hand over her heart and my magic opened up, I could tell that there was no damage at all to her heart muscle. Nor were there any brain clots or embolisms or other physical symptoms that might explain a phenomenally fit woman in her early thirties suddenly dropping dead.

On the other hand, there was nothing physically wrong with her, except the part where she was dead. If I could manage to catch her soul before it slipped away entirely, maybe I could bind them back together. Unfortunately, since I couldn’t see or communicate with ghosts, that really only left me one place to go.

I called it the Dead Zone, and the first time I’d gone there chasing a wayward soul, I’d very nearly gotten myself and someone I loved killed. But I was a little better prepared these days. It didn’t take much to let myself slide free of my body, not with the amount of power I’d taken in from the dancers. Not so long ago, that would have bothered me. I liked being connected to the world. The idea that I could slip into a black empty place just a finger-length smaller than infinity would have scared the crap out of me. Tonight, though, I was glad I didn’t have to push myself through rituals to make it work. If Naomi Allison had any chance for life, she needed me to be as quick as I possibly could be.

The Dead Zone really was impossibly, hideously large. I always felt like it presented itself that way semi-consciously, as if to make me aware of just how tiny I was. A speck of insignificance on an endless black plain: that was me in the Dead Zone.

I took a breath of cold still air and called, “Raven, guide me?” into the Dead Zone’s infinite curve.

For a few moments silence greeted me, and I wondered if I hadn’t left enough shiny food out for my spirit guide lately. He had a weakness for Pop-Tarts—a weakness I shared, in fact, although I liked the fakey white frosting and he liked the flimsy tinfoil wrappers. I’d gotten much, much better about leaving him treats and generally trying to be appreciative since he’d hauled my ass out of a scary spiritual snowstorm, but I still probably wasn’t the world’s most grateful shaman.

His wings cut across the silence of the Dead Zone like the air was frozen, a whish-whish of sound that settled calmness around my heart. He plonked onto my shoulder and stuck his beak in my hair, pulling it, and I turned my face to grin into his feathery chest. “Hey, Raven. Thank you. I’m looking for a dead woman. A dancer. Naomi Allison. She…understood magic,” I said after a moment’s consideration. “Can you help me find her? You’re a lot cleverer at navigating the dead places than I am.”

Raven let go a caw that sounded ridiculously proud, and beat his wings in the air. Or against my head, more accurately, but I wasn’t going to complain, because as he did so, the Dead Zone changed.

I’d been flattering the bird outrageously, but I wasn’t lying. He walked a line between the living and the dead that I could never do without his help and guidance. Through his eyes, the Dead Zone became manageable: still terribly large, but traversable. Rivers appeared, some with boats full of the dead drifting down them, others broad and wide with ferrymen poling coin-eyed corpses across. Grim reapers, ranging in form from beautiful, gentle creatures to the scythe-bearing hooded thing of nightmares, led ghosts across the realm, bringing them from their mortal lives to something beyond. The Dead Zone was a transitory place, somewhere people lingered only briefly.

And I, as a living thing, had no business there. The dead and their masters could be drawn to the living, and when they were, they tended to want to consume it. Without Raven’s presence, I was alarmingly vulnerable. With it, I merely wanted to get out of there as fast as I could. I said, “Naomi Allison,” aloud, and waited to see if reverberations touched any single soul in particular.

I couldn’t see it, if they did. Raven, though, gave an excited quark and dug his claws into my shoulder, wings smacking my head to urge me forward. He didn’t weigh very much, but his wingspan was more than two feet across, and he hit hard. I made a feeble sound of protest, but broke into a run. There wasn’t much point in asking for his help and then sulking when he smacked me around so I’d notice it.

I didn’t think of the Dead Zone as having any features like hills or plains, but we crested a hill and I skidded to a stop looking down on a ghost dance somewhat more literal than the one at the theater. This one, for example, was being performed by actual ghosts.

And Naomi Allison was at its heart. She wasn’t dancing, only standing as she had been in the last moments of the theatrical performance, like she was waiting to take in all the power the others were building for her. Their dance was silent, with neither song nor drums, but somehow I could still hear both of those things in the small bones of my ears. Noiseless chanting grew in strength, reverberating around the Dead Zone and warning that my time was growing short.

I let out a yell and slid down the hill, disrupting ghosts that were barely more than mist on my skin, raising hairs against a chill. They dissipated into nothingness as I brushed by, but others—or maybe the same ones, hell if I could tell— appeared and continued the dance. There was a different sort of feel to the Dead Zone dance. It lacked the real world’s vibrancy and sense of life, reaching beyond it to attain acceptance that had an urgency all of its own.

I recognized the difference only a few steps from Naomi’s side, and knew then that I was already too late.

The soundless music stopped in a shout. Naomi’s smile was brief, breathless, incandescent: all the things it should have been in the last moment of her dance at the theater. Power rushed her, but not the healing magic her troupe had built. This was the last push to take her over to the other side.

And like that, she was gone.

I gasped, a hard sound that hurt my throat, and to my horror, the dancers turned to me. Made me the centerpiece of their dance, the recipient of their next push. The raven on my shoulder flapped his wings like a mad thing, as if he could fly us both out of there.

Which he probably could, actually. He’d done it before. But given that I was in full agreement with him as to the importance of skedaddling, I thought this time I could do us both a favor and use my nice long legs to run like hell.

I ran all the way out of the Dead Zone, and awakened slumped over Naomi Allison’s unmoving body.

The worst part was watching hope fade from everyone’s eyes as I looked up. Some of them were already crying. Others had been hanging on until I shook my head, and emptiness filled their faces. I said, “I’m sorry. She was already gone,” very quietly, and at more or less the same time people in the background began shouting about paramedics and please get out of the way and emergency action.

I got up awkwardly. My knees were bright red from kneeling on the floor, and though I didn’t think I’d been there very long, my feet had gone to sleep. I opened a thread of healing power within myself, trying to encourage blood flow to return, then had to clench a hand in the nearby curtain to keep myself from doing a dance of oh, God, ow, my feet are waking up ow, ow, ow.

One of the paramedics frowned at me, which was question enough. He wanted to know what a theater patron was doing backstage bending over the dead woman. He obviously hoped I was a doctor.

I said, “Police.” His expression cleared and he turned his full attention to Naomi, shooing the dancers back to give his coworkers room to do their jobs. I watched bleakly, hoping for a miracle I was quite certain wouldn’t manifest.

“Walker?” Morrison appeared at my side and I had the weary impulse to bury my face in his shoulder. Maybe there was some universe out there where I was five foot six and that would’ve been charming, but as it was, I’d have to stoop. Even if it weren’t professionally inappropriate, it would just look wrong.

“They’ll have to call it heart failure,” I said softly. Very softly, because I didn’t want anyone else to overhear me. “I don’t know what else they can call it. But she was murdered, Captain. I’m sure of it. And I’m probably the only cop in the city who might have a chance at figuring out by whom.”

“What about Holliday?”

My partner, after all, was the one who saw ghosts. Murdered ghosts, which would make Naomi Allison a prime target for him to talk to, if she hadn’t already scurried off to the Great Beyond. I shook my head. “He’s good with violent deaths. This was close enough to natural I don’t think her soul even considered sticking around. I’m sure he’ll be able to help, but…”

Morrison sounded like he’d rather be shouting. “Murder is never close to natural, Walker.”

“Tell that to King George.” I sighed as Morrison’s ears turned red, sure sign he was working hard not to yell. “George the Third of England may have been poisoned with arsenic so slowly over so many years it looked like a natural descent into madness and death. His spirit wouldn’t have known to hang around hoping to be avenged any more than Naomi Allison’s might’ve.”

“How do you know this, Walker?”

I wasn’t sure if it was exasperation or incredulity in Morrison’s voice. “How do I know about King George or how do I know ab—”

“About King George!”

“I don’t know, Morrison. I read it somewhere. Saw it on the Discovery Channel. Something. The point is—”

“The point is you tried to help Naomi.” A third person interrupted, the man from the troupe who’d carried Naomi’s body offstage. He was, at a glance, more Native American than me, with coppery skin tones and dark brown eyes. He was also wound as tightly as anyone I’d ever seen, exacting enormous control over his emotions. I wanted to hug him, just to offer him a release, but I doubted he’d appreciate the effort right then. He was probably doing his best to hold himself together for the troupe. “Thank you for that. I’m Jim Littlefoot.”

I couldn’t help it. I looked at his feet. He made a sound that said everybody did that, and offered his hand as I looked back up. “Naomi’s older sister Rebecca and I founded this troupe a few years ago. She’s the one holding Naomi now. You said you were a healer.”

“Not much of one today,” I said unhappily. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Littlefoot. She was gone before I could do anything.”

“She was gone before you got to her,” Littlefoot said very steadily. “We all felt it, Ms….?”

“W-w-wah, Walk. Er.” I knew my last name. I really did. It was just that the one on my birth certificate and the one I used in day-to-day life weren’t the same. I had, over the past decade, chosen to use the former about six times, and I was in no way prepared for the impulse to use it now. “Uh. Walker. Detective Joanne Walker. This is, uh. This is my boss, Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department.” I gestured to Morrison, who stared at me so hard I thought my hair might light on fire. He knew the other name, the one I’d inherited from my Cherokee father, and he clearly recognized I’d just had the impulse to use it. I was going to get grilled later for that. Well, fair enough. I kind of wanted to grill myself. Maybe with a nice teriyaki sauce.

Standing eight feet from a dead woman while talking to someone who’d been closer to her was not the time or place to notice a growing hunger in my tummy. Jim Littlefoot shook Morrison’s hand, but turned his attention back to me.

“What kind of training do you have?”

“Shamanic. Your first act nearly turned me into a coyote.”

Wow. I hadn’t meant to say that, either. I hastily withdrew into myself for a moment, imagining my greening garden, then reinforcing the shimmering silver-blue shields that kept it safe from outside intruders. With no offense meant to Mr.

Littlefoot, people who made me blurt details about a magic I preferred to keep quiet could be highly dangerous. I’d found that out the hard way. It wasn’t a road I wanted to go down again.

A mixture of curiosity and apology came into Littlefoot’s eyes. “It’s meant to prepare the audience for a transformative experience in the second act, not literally change people. I’m sorry.”

“I know. It wasn’t your fault. It’s just the amount of po…” My brain caught up to what he was saying. “So it’s deliberate. I mean, it had to be, with the amount of power you were generating, with the focus, but—but you do know what you’re doing. What you’re creating.”

A fleeting smile crossed his face. “We do. We spent nearly two years perfecting these pieces, getting the right dancers, before we took it on the road. Even one cynic among the troupe can destroy the synergy. It hasn’t been an easy program to develop.”

“How long have you been touring?”

“Since last September. We wrap up in May in Chicago.” Littlefoot cast a glance over his shoulder, then looked back at me with his mouth a thin unhappy line. “Or that had been the plan. I don’t know what we’ll do now.”

“Since September.” Dismay coiled through me, cool and loathsome. “So this attack could have be—”

Littlefoot interrupted, “Attack?” and paled, like he hadn’t thought through all the possibilities behind Naomi’s death.

I said, “I’m sorry,” and turned to my boss. “This could have been months in the planning, Captain. Can we get the list of credit-card purchases for the tickets to tonight’s show? The theater was packed, there must’ve been five hundred people here, but it’s a place to start investigating.”

“Walker.” Morrison drew me back a step, though it wasn’t really an attempt to take me out of Jim Littlefoot’s hearing range. “You already said they’re not going to find anything to provoke a murder investigation. She’ll be autopsied, I’m sure, but—”

“Are you really going to tell me not to investigate this, boss?” I took a breath, steadying myself. “Do you really think I’ll listen if you do? Because I—I need to, Captain.”

Morrison’s expression softened just slightly. I sort of felt like I’d thrown a low blow, given the circumstances of the day, but I was willing to take any bend I could get.

“Hey.” One of the paramedics lifted his voice, clearly not talking to us, but garnering our attention anyway. I was just as glad: backstage at the theater probably wasn’t the place to argue with Morrison over what my duties as one of Seattle’s only paranormal police detectives entailed. Then the paramedic uttered seven little words that invalidated my concerns about being allowed to investigate.

“Hey,” he said, “don’t you think this looks weird?”