Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 9

Wednesday, January 5th, 12:30 a.m.

Ten minutes later I spread out the files on my kitchen table, standing over them. There was no file on Marie yet, but I’d seen that in living—or not—color. Raymond was right. The victims didn’t appear to have anything in common. Nothing obvious, but there had to be something. I could feel it practically vibrating in my eardrums.

What did I know about Marie? She was an anthropologist who started believing in what she studied. She had a talent that let her see more than the average person saw, things that could be politely labeled esoteric. I yawned, and the wire around my heart went spang, releasing so fast it hurt. I swallowed a whimper and rubbed my chest again. I could almost feel spiderweb cracks sealing up.

All right. What if that was what they had in common? They were all banshees. The spiderweb fissured again, and I sighed. “Okay, that’s not it,” I muttered. “How about they’re all, uh…aware of another plane of existence. Not the kind of thing you’re going to talk about, right?” The wire-web relaxed and let me breathe again. I scowled hugely at the photographs. It was Oh God Thirty and I was standing in my kitchen talking to heartburn. Talking out loud, no less. I needed sleep. Or a dog.

“Sleep,” I said out loud. “If any of you want to tell me what your gig was, stop by dreamland. Otherwise I’ll figure you out tomorrow.” I turned the lights off, went to bed and lay there a long time in the dark, looking at the ceiling, faintly white in the dimness. I used to do this when I was a kid, zone out until I could feel myself floating about three inches above my body. I always fell back down into myself as soon as I noticed. I felt like that now, very slightly detached from my flesh.

It was not a comforting feeling after a day like today. I tried closing my eyes and found out they were already closed, but the ceiling still glowed faintly white up above me. I blinked. Darkness came and went, but I didn’t feel my eyelids move. A shock ran through me, radiating out from my heart like the sudden release of a metal-on-metal lock, sharp and high-pitched and tingling through my whole body.

And then I was free, looking down at my shape under the covers. I looked very comfortable. I looked down at my feet, the ones I was standing on. I could see the carpet through my toes.

Something tugged at me, pulling me up. I turned my face up, and disconnected with the floor entirely, floating upward.

Next time I go for a flight, I’ll go out through the window. Even a glimpse of what the upstairs neighbors were doing—well, I honestly hadn’t known human beings could get into that position.

The world outside glowed. I was sure there’d been no moon when I came home, but a brilliant crescent lit the sky with more wattage than usual, silver-blue light weighting down tree branches as if it were snow. Leaves glittered with color, reds and golds and greens that had more to do with neon than nature. Pathways and streets were dark blue streaks undershadowed with something else, like an artist had slapped paint on and let it slide down the canvas to expose other shards of colors beneath it. I stood in the sky, looking down over the streets as the dark blue slowly blurred away.

One exposed path led under an arch of trees that reminded me of Anne Shirley’s “White Way of Delight.” It twisted, sliding underground, and somewhere down it I could feel a heavy presence waiting for me. It felt like it could drink down the light and me with it, like the rabbit hole pulling Alice in. I reached up to tug a leaf off one of the trees, watching it glow a soft silver in my palm. It brightened into a beacon as I scrambled down the pathway.

It met the mouth of the cave, sliding underground. I hesitated at the dark entrance, lifting my leaf up to try to light the way. I saw a reflection, a glimpse of something bright, in the instant before a wall roared up, damming the cave’s mouth. I put my hand against it, the leaf gleaming, but nothing changed except the sensation of the thing waiting for me. It was somewhere beneath the earth, and amused, and patient. I stayed where I was a few moments longer, then slowly turned back up the White Way. The one who waited suddenly felt much more distant, and then I couldn’t feel it at all.

The world changed around me again, then again, and again, until they came so fast I could barely distinguish one from another. Some of the permutations I recognized: glimpses of Paris and New York, places that looked as solid as reality, overlooking the vibrant glow that had nothing to do with city lights and a great deal to do with things I didn’t want to think about. Others were harder to grasp, African plains with seas of violently purple grass, Australian Outback with a sky as bloody red as the stone beneath it. Every one got farther away from civilization, until I exploded into a place of absolute stillness with the hard white light of the stars pricking my skin.

“Well, she’s no good,” a tart little voice said. “Look at her. A baby, spilling out all over the place. You want a cosmic bed wetter to take care of this? She can’t even see us.”

“That’s no way to speak to our guest,” another voice said very firmly. This one was rich and dark and full of very round vowels, chocolaty, like James Earl Jones. “She’s come a long way on nothing but faith.”

“She’s come a long way on our faith,” the tart voice said. It sounded like Granny Smith apples. “She hasn’t got any of her own.”

“She’s a newborn,” a third voice broke in. He sounded like mellow cheese. “She didn’t mean to invite us, but she’s willing to help.” Two more voices chimed in, everyone bickering and sniping at one another until they sounded like a flock of geese. I turned around in a full circle twice, trying to see the people the voices belonged to. The starlight jabbed at my eyes unrelentingly, no shadows or shapes to go with the voices clouding them. It suddenly felt weirdly familiar.

I hadn’t seen Coyote until I believed in him. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that I’d better believe in the voices, because I was pretty sure I had invited them to do…whatever they’d done. Hauled me out of my body to somewhere that horribly murdered people hang out.

My brain just shut down around that thought.

“Look,” I finally said. It got very quiet in the star field. I turned around one more time to find a handful of people behind me, all staring at me with wide, curious eyes. “You’re wrong. I can see you.” I wasn’t sure which one was the Granny Smith, so I fixed them all with a gimlet eye. “And I’m not all that inclined to help somebody who called me a cosmic bed wetter, when you get right down to it.” A tall woman’s long nose twitched. I guessed her to be Granny Smith and removed the gimlet eye from the others to give it just to her. Her nose twitched again.

“Sorry,” she said after being elbowed in the ribs by a short man whom I guessed to be the James Earl Jones voice. He didn’t look anything at all like Jones. I was hideously disappointed.

“You’ll have to forgive Hester,” he said. “She’s not taking well to having been interrupted.”

“Interrupted.” My eyebrows flew up. “You mean murdered?” I was sure these five were the files I had lying on my kitchen table. They were all the right general sizes and shapes, even if I’d only seen photos of their corpses.

He made a moue. “I suppose so. It’s really just an inconvenience, but Hester is young.”

I peered at Hester. She looked like she was well into her fifties, at least. Her mouth pursed up like she’d bitten into one of the apples she sounded like. “Not as young as this one,” she sniffed. I scowled, and suddenly there was an enormous distance between myself and the five, the star field endlessly expanded. I could see, with sharp-edged clarity, the alarm on all five faces.

“Dammit, Hester,” one of the others said, “you’re going to put her off us entirely before she’ll agree to help us at all.” Her voice was absolutely clear despite the distance between us, like she was standing on a sound stage. It echoed faintly. Hester flared her nostrils, then lifted her chin.

“I’m sorry.” It was much less grudging this time. “Roger is right. I was in the middle of something important, and I’m not sure I’d done enough to make it last. But that’s no reason to be rude. You’ve been extraordinarily generous with your invitation already, even if you didn’t know it.” Her voice was still tart, but it was more like the tart of apple pie. I began to wonder if I was hungry. “Will you stay long enough to let us tell you what we know?”

“Well, I’m here,” I said. Distance contracted again, so that the five and I were only a few feet apart, stars glittering around us. “I might as well listen. Maybe you can tell me what the hell is going on.” There was a note of miserable confusion in my voice. I straightened my shoulders and pretended I hadn’t really sounded that pathetic.

“You almost died this morning,” a petite blond woman said. She had dumpling cheeks that went with Earth Mother curves. I remembered from the file that her name was Samantha.

“Yeah, I was there for that part.” I rubbed my breastbone uncomfortably and screwed up my face.

“Do you know that near-death experiences often open people’s eyes to another world?”

“I know that’s what they say,” I replied. Samantha smiled a tolerant little smile. It occurred to me that my current position was a fragile one for argument. “All right.” I gritted my teeth and pushed the words out. “So maybe there’s more than meets the eye.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone again and took a deep breath. “All right, there is more than meets the eye,” I said defensively. “Normal people don’t start burning and smoking when you stick a knife in them. The guy who stabbed me this morning was definitely not normal.”

Hester snorted faintly. Roger elbowed her again. “Be quiet. That’s quite an admission for her.”

“Must it be an admission to come around to stating the obvious?” Hester asked. Apparently sour was just her nature. The moment of grace earlier must have come hard-won. It had worked to make me stay, but she wasn’t earning any brownie points.

“Give me a break, Hes,” I said. She looked up sharply. I bet nobody had called her that since third grade. “Yesterday the world made sense and today I’m standing in a star pit talking to ghosts.” I looked back at Samantha. “So what happened to me?”

“You got to make a choice. Most people don’t get to.”

I spread my hands. “Why me?”

“You must have a lot to offer,” she said. “Many times, those who need the most healing are the ones who can in turn heal the most.”

I took a step backward, a scowl falling down my face like pitch, until I was glaring at her through my eyebrows. “What do you mean, need the most healing,” I said. She was clever enough to withhold an answer. Instead, she spread her hands, a polite mimicry of my earlier gesture.

“I did not mean to intrude,” she said so deferentially that the anger drained out of me again. “What do you know about shamans, Siobhan Walkingstick?”

My eyebrows went up and my jaw went down until my face was as long as a donkey’s. My father had taken one look at the unpronounceable Gaelic first name my mother had bestowed on me and had given me another one. I’d looked up the pronunciation when I was a teenager, but I actually hadn’t been sure that the bizarre combination of letters was pronounced She-vaun, not See-oh-bawn, until my mother used the name when she called to ask to meet me. Aside from that one conversation, not even she’d called me Siobhan. It was even less a part of me than the Walkingstick name I’d abandoned a decade ago. “How did you know that name?”

Samantha drew an outline around me with her fingertip, a loose general shape. “It’s a part of you that you’ve been denying your whole life, and now it’s spilling over. Think of it like a floodlight shining on you, illuminating all the information you’ve been keeping filed away. It’s very clear to anyone who knows how to read it. It’s eager to be acknowledged. You have a remarkable heritage, Siobhan. You ought to explore it, not turn your back on it.”

I stood there and stared at her. After a while I tried to crank my jaw back up. Part of me wondered why I was reacting physically when my body, as far as I could tell, was tucked safely in bed, back at home. Wherever back at home was, from here. “Right,” I said eventually. “This is getting a little too thick for me.” It came out exactly right, casual bullshit. I was very pleased. The thing was, right down in my gut, I believed her.

“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” The fifth person finally spoke up. He was taller than me and had a wonderful Grecian nose and broad cheekbones. He hadn’t looked so good in the murder photos. It was too bad he was dead, or I’d have asked him on a date. His mouth curved in half a smile, and I had the sinking feeling he’d somehow heard that. Coyote and Cernunnos had certainly heard things I hadn’t said out loud.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody. But thanks.” He winked, and the half smile turned into a grin. I told myself I couldn’t possibly blush, without a body handy. I think it even worked.

“I always thought I was a pretty good liar,” I finally mumbled.

He shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your delivery. But the truth flares up around you like a spotlight. We probably don’t have much time, Joanne. Let’s save the pretenses for later.”

“Subtle, Jackson.” Samantha smiled. He grinned and shrugged.

I opened my mouth to argue, and let all my air out in a rush. “Okay. Okay. So maybe I’m kind of on-purpose dense about American Indian—” I waved my hand around “—stuff. I just hate playing into stereotypes, you know?”

“Actually, you’re afraid of it,” Jackson murmured. I straightened my shoulders, offended.

“What’s there to be afraid of?”

“Power,” every single one of them said. I took a step back.

“Responsibility,” Samantha said, and Hester said, “Change.”

Roger smiled and shrugged a little, as if to say, what can you do?, and added, “Love,” to the list. “Death,” said the woman who’d been quiet except for swearing at Hester, and Jackson breathed, “Life.”

“I’m not afraid of any of that,” I threw back. “Not that I’m eager to die, but—”

“You’ve been very closed off since you were about fifteen,” Samantha said, sympathetic again. I felt my stomach knot up, and took another step back. “The world was a lot more wonderful before then, wasn’t it?”

One of those cracks I’d seen inside me tore open, surgery with a battle-ax. For a moment there was nothing but pain and rage and a terrible sense of loss, memories that I’d kept safely locked away in a small black box in my mind. “How do you kn—”

I clenched my jaw on the words. I was not having this conversation with dead people in a star field somewhere outside of my own body. I felt a little tug around my heart and ignored it. “What is it that you five have in common,” I said flatly. “There has to be some kind of pattern.”

All five of them exchanged glances, and Jackson spoke up. “Sam asked earlier. What do you know about shamans?”

I shrugged, stiff. “I don’t know. They’re medicine men. They do magic. What do they have to do with me?”

“The world has a lot of people and a lot of problems these days,” Hester murmured. “It needs more shamans than ever.”

“A shaman’s job is to heal,” Roger said. “Whatever needs healing. That’s what we did, in life. Most of us have been doing it for many lifetimes.”

I stared at him for a while, waiting for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I rubbed my eyes, noticing that here, I could see perfectly clearly without glasses or contacts. “So why would someone go around murdering cosmic caretakers?”

“Power,” the quiet one said wryly. She sounded English. Hester frowned at her.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Not our power,” the quiet one said patiently. “His own power. We’re all people who could have fought or helped him, and so we threatened his power.”

“Fought? You just said you were healers.”

There was a little silence while they all looked at each other again. “There are different paths,” Jackson finally said. “Some of us are warriors. Others are less confrontational. The end purpose is the same, to take away pain, physical and emotional, to heal.”

Very, very slowly, a light came on at the back of my head. “That’s not what I’ve gotten myself into.” I figured this was the moral equivalent of asking for a no. It was like asking, “You wouldn’t want to help me paint the fence, would you?” Put it that way, and you were setting up for denial.

I really, really wanted to be denied.

“We rarely understand the consequences of our decisions at the time they’re made,” Samantha murmured, which didn’t sound much like the answer I was hoping for.

“I didn’t have a lot of time,” I snapped. Another tug pulled at my insides, a little stronger than last time. I rubbed my breastbone absently and took a deep breath. I wondered if my body back in bed did the same thing.

“The important decisions usually come when there’s not much time to debate,” Roger agreed. I frowned at him. He seemed so nice and down to earth, and I was unconsciously counting on him to back me up. My hopes and dreams were obviously being lined up to be crushed.

“Well, Christ, there’s got to be a way out of this, doesn’t there?”

“Of course there is.” Hester’d become even more disdainful, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. “Ignore it.”

“Will it go away?” I asked hopefully.

“No. You’ll keep struggling with the urge to help people, and every time you turn your back, a little part of you will die. Eventually you turn into a prune.”

I stared at her. I could have nightmares about turning into someone like her. To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, I might rub you the wrong way, Walkingstick, but there are people who respond to me fine. Listen to this—a shaman is a trickster. To heal someone, you need to change their way of thinking, if only for a moment. Your armor is fractured. One good hit—” She flicked her middle finger against her thumb, like she was thumping me in the chest. The tug returned, painful this time. “—And you’ll come apart into a thousand pieces. Keep your promises, and you might not shatter.”

I hated suspecting people were telling me God’s own truth. I gulped against another painful tug, and the five of them suddenly seemed distant. “Oh, hell,” said the quiet one. “We’ve wasted too much time. She’s too tired to stay.”

“She’s very young,” Roger reminded her.

“I know, and she’s come a long way, but—” The quiet one broke off and stared at me intensely. “Listen to me—”

“Wait,” I said. “Marie wasn’t a shaman, was she? What did she have in common with you?”

“I don’t know Marie,” the quiet one said impatiently. “Find him, Siobhan Walkingstick. His power and his pain will bleed off him. Find the scent of it and follow him back.”

“But who is he?” My voice sounded very thin and distant, even to myself. The tug was a steady pull now, and the stars were streaking by me, disappearing as I faded away.

“I don’t know. But he controls the—”

I took a sharp breath, woke up and rolled over. Something crunched in my palm. I opened my hand and blinked through the dimness at the shimmering leaf there. After a few moments I sighed quietly and went back to sleep, cradling the leaf carefully. It was seven-thirty and I’d woken up to a still-dark sky before I remembered that it was January and there were no leaves on anything but the evergreens.