Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 21

Walking out of the police station in a mood that good probably meant somebody was preparing to kick me in the metaphorical balls. I stopped at the base of the steps, looking up and down the street. That line of thinking, I realized, along with my newfound phenomenal cosmic powers, would probably get me kicked less metaphorically and more physically. They say the world is what you expect it to be. Right now I was expecting to get kicked. Not a good attitude.

On the other hand, I was expecting to live through it, which was a lot more than I’d thought when I got up. Does it count as getting up if you only slept in the shower?

“My name is Walker,” I said to no one in particular, grinning like a fool. “I carry a badge.” My badge and I went down the street, the latter of us whistling cheerfully. About half a block past The Missing O, I remembered I’d tried to set up a lunch date with Kevin Sadler, and swung back to the cafe to check my e-mail. The barrista, grinning, offered up another apple fritter, and I realized I wasn’t anywhere near hungry enough for lunch.

Of course, it wasn’t anywhere near lunchtime, either. There was a note from Kevin suggesting we meet at a restaurant near where he lived. I got directions and fired off a note agreeing, then headed out onto the big bad street again.

The problem with being cocksure and full of attitude was that it frequently hides the fact you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. I strode along briskly for about two blocks, then wondered where I’d parked my car and what exactly I thought I was doing.

The car, I could find. I backtracked another half block and climbed up on the hood. It wasn’t Petite; she was in no shape to be driven. It was a rental, a recent-model Ford with about as much personality as a shoelace. I really hoped I wasn’t going to have another run-in with Cernunnos while I was driving it. My paycheck was going to stretch thin covering Petite’s repairs, nevermind the rental agency’s fees if I got one of their vehicles hacked up. I was practically certain my insurance policy didn’t cover acts of gods.

I studied the wall on the opposite side of the parking lot, not really seeing it. I’d been running on adrenaline and impulse for days now. There were fourteen hours until midnight, so no matter what, this thing was almost over. The idea of uninterrupted sleep was nice, but I’d already spent way too much time reacting instead of proacting. I needed to think. The concrete wall across from me, however, seemed to be inspiring very little other than a pleasant pale haze in my mind.

I didn’t know why I was assuming whatever was going to happen would happen at midnight rather than, oh, noon, or an even more civilized four in the afternoon. Midnight was just very dramatic.

It was also the final quarter of the day, as winter was the final quarter of the year. It was good enough for me.

I’d read that some shamans could get a sense of the future by opening themselves up to the world and accepting all the possibilities. The most likely possibilities would be brighter, more obvious senses of potential. It was a matter of disregarding time and trusting the universe. I already knew what sliding through time felt like, although that had been going backward, and controlled by Herne. Undaunted, I closed my eyes and tried to stretch myself forward in time.

It was like a cat trying to push its way out of a canvas bag. I prodded around inside my head, feeling muffled, with absolutely no sense of direction. The only information I was able to gather was that Manny, a big guy working on a building at the back of the lot, thought that he was underpaid, overworked and ready for lunch, and I got that from his rarely pausing soliloquy, not through any more esoteric means. Finally I sighed and opened my eyes. Herne had guided the last jaunt through time. Left to my own devices I didn’t know which buttons to push.

That left logic, a commodity I had precious little of just now. Logic and a police badge. “Okay.” I frowned at my feet. Overlooking the fact that Herne and Cernunnos both wanted to kill me, there was something else they had in common: Marie.

What the hell did Marie have to do with any of it? I took the tooth she’d stolen from Herne out of my jeans pocket and examined it. I’d like to say I studied it thoughtfully, but I’m afraid it was more of a vacant gaze. You take what you can get, I guess. The tooth didn’t do anything, just gleamed in the mild way that ivory gleams. I curled my fingers around it and went back to staring across the parking lot at the wall while I thought.

“She saw dead people,” I said after a while, out loud. Thank goodness there was no one around to hear me talking to myself. Well, there was Manny, but Manny was talking to himself, too, so I figured he didn’t have any room to point fingers. “No, no, Billy sees dead people, Marie saw when people were going to die. Okay. So…what?”

The wall across from me was not forthcoming with answers. I pinched the bridge of my nose and puffed my cheeks out and lay back on the hood of the car and made faces at the sky. Then my stomach muscles contracted involuntarily, pulling me halfway upright again. “Oh shit!”

Manny looked over his shoulder at me, quizzical and concerned. I waved him off and my hand kept up the motion, flapping with excitement. “She saw when people were going to die!”

Cernunnos is primal, not evil. That’s what I’d told Morrison. Cernunnos had told me he wanted his freedom. To ride as he chose. Without the girl, he could do that. Why replace her, then? Why add another Rider?

Unless without a full complement of Riders, the Hunt couldn’t fulfill its—sacred?—duty. Unless without someone who knew which souls to harvest, someone who knew who was going to die, they couldn’t Hunt at all.

Without the child, there’s nothing to stop them from riding forever. The e-mail had told me that, although God knows if it was safe to be trusting random e-mail sources. On the other hand, the guy’d been able to paint the Hunt, so I was willing to run with it. It wasn’t like I had a lot of other really good options.

I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against my temples, working my way through the idea methodically. My mind felt thick and puddinglike. “Okay. The girl led them to souls, and led the Hunt back to the Otherworld. No, wait.” I thumped the heel of my hand against my forehead. For somebody who’d been hit on the head and knocked around as much as I’d been the past few days, I certainly seemed willing to keep doing myself injury. And the thumping wasn’t helping me think. I stopped.

“She bound them to the Otherworld.” I opened my eyes and stared at the wall. “How can she bind them anywhere if she’s a girl here?”

The wall continued to not provide answers. “She’s not here,” I said to it in despair. “I don’t know why she’s not with Cernunnos, but it’s not because she’s here. Dammit.” I’d sent Jen on a wild-goose chase. I put my hands over my eyelids and thunked the back of my head against the windshield. “So where is she? How do you lose a Rider of the Wild Hunt?”

You don’t. You steal a Rider. I let out a half-voiced yell and sat up again. “That’s what he’s done!”

Manny turned around and eyed me. I shrank down into myself and gave him a cheesy, apologetic smile, but as he turned away again I smacked my fist into my palm triumphantly. “He controls, that’s what Adina said.” God, I hoped I’d always talked to myself. I really couldn’t remember. I was almost excited enough not to worry about it. Almost. “He controls the child. Which means he controls—oh, shit.”

The Hunt. By controlling the missing Rider, the youthful one, Herne could control the Hunt. Cernunnos had to know that. That’s why he’d needed Marie: to replace the child and to lead the Hunt. She could find the people whose souls needed to be taken, but she had no ties to whatever Otherworld Cernunnos and the Hunt were born to. With Marie to guide them, the Hunt could have ridden forever.

I pressed my eyes harder closed as I tried to think. “But Herne controls the real Rider,” I mumbled. “Somehow. Shit. So he couldn’t let Cernunnos replace that Rider with Marie, because he’d lose whatever advantage he’s trying for. But what’s he—”

I remembered his expression as I’d twisted out of his illusion, the glee wiped out by shock and horror as he drove his blade into his king. The same disbelief had been there when Richard had seen him hanged, not just on the face of the long-remembered man on the rope, but in the eyes of the one who’d stood behind me as he watched his own memory play out again.

The same expression had been there when Henrietta Potter had broken the circle of bodies, too. Betrayal, every time, that something could have gone so terribly wrong. I rather imagined my own expression had been similar when Cernunnos stuffed his sword into me up to the hilt, and hell, I’d meant for that to happen. Still, I hadn’t thought it would hurt quite that badly. I’d be very happy to never hurt that much again.

Well, shit, Joanne. I opened my palm, exposing the tooth I held to the air. He doesn’t want to hurt anymore. He thinks if he controls—if he leads—the Hunt, he’ll be invulnerable.

The thought resonated, like a violin string, shivering through my body and out into the city. With my eyes closed I could see it stretch, vibrations shaking the air like it was water. It dove and twisted through the gray Seattle morning until I saw a startled pair of unearthly green eyes lift, then flinch away.

My eyes popped open. Start with one true thing. I forgot who’d said it, but it was how he always began his writing, with one true thing. I’d hit on one true thing about Herne. I closed my eyes and reached for that resonance again, confident. It lay there, just below the surface of my mind, stretched taut across the city toward Herne. All I needed was to follow it to him.

Unlike trying to stretch through time, thought and action were one. I leaped forward psychically, careening through Seattle as I followed the thread back to Herne. Pure delight and pride splashed through me, making me feel bright as a beacon. I had finally figured out how to do something right!

And then I ran up against a wall of pure granite. I bounced off so hard I recoiled back into my body and slumped into the windshield. Something dripped onto my mouth. I wiped the back of my hand across my nose and it came away smeared with blood.

My ears rang like I’d been at a concert for three hours, and my head pounded.

“Jesus, lady, you okay?” Manny the construction worker stood a few yards away from his building, a sledgehammer in one hand and a look of consternation on his face.

“Yeah,” I croaked. My bottom lip was cut, too. I touched it gingerly with the back of my hand and winced.

“Looked like somebody hit you in the face with one of these, man, only I didn’t see nobody.” Manny hefted the hammer. I coughed and touched my lip again.

“Yeah, feels like it too.” I licked at the blood and slid off the hood to see if my rental car had any tissues. It didn’t. I swore, before remembering my new little trick. What did a bloody nose count as? Touchup on the paint? I closed my eyes and fell inside myself for a few seconds, deliberately reaching for the bubble of energy beneath my sternum. It responded, sending a thrill of glee through me. I laid my paint job analogy over the power, guiding it through the steps of “repainting.” Primer, then the expensive glossy paint applied with an airbrush.

I sneezed explosively, my body reacting to the idea a little more thoroughly than I wanted: I wasn’t wearing a protective mask, and I felt like I’d just breathed in fine paint particles. Sneezing through a banged-up nose is not to be recommended. After a few seconds the throbbing went away and I prodded gingerly at my nose and lip, testing to see if the paint job had taken. The energy coil inside me settled down, as if satisfied. All but a thread of it, at least: I could still feel the faint link to Herne, stretching right from the center of me.

My face didn’t hurt anymore. I sighed in relief and let my shoulders slump.

“You some kinda bruja, lady?” Manny stared at me, slapping the hammer nervously into one hand.

I touched my bottom lip again and found half a grin for him. “Yeah. Yeah, Manny, I’m some kinda bruja. A, um, bruja de la luz, if there is a such thing. Don’t worry. I won’t put a curse on you.”

“That’s good. I never did no bruja no harm. You be careful, bruja. There’s nasty things out there.” He nodded, eyes dark and serious, then turned and went back to his work. My smile got a little bigger.

“Thanks.” I slid off the hood and climbed into the driver’s seat, sitting sideways with my feet on the ground. It crossed my mind again that I was way out of my league, but by now the thought was almost reassuring. At least some things weren’t changing.

I’d found Herne, that much was clear. The pulsing line of truth was still pulled tight between us, disappearing into his granite defenses. If I was going to follow the line back to him, I’d have to be a little more subtle. I touched my mouth one more time and chuckled. Morrison would attest to me never having learned subtle. It appeared I was going to have to cope with a whole series of disconcerting changes to my lifestyle.

Much more cautiously, I closed my eyes and grasped onto the shimmering line that ran toward Herne. The world dimmed, like low thunderclouds had just rolled in. I opened my eyes to discover the same effect. For a moment I was tangled up in uncertainty about whether I’d opened my real eyes or my astral eyes, and that all led to wondering if I was a man dreaming he was a butterfly. The world brightened again, as if irritated with me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. The clouds rolled back in with a decided aura of “hmph.”

My body stayed put, but my sense of self left it to stand in front of the rented Ford. Off to the left, Manny kept up his interminable bitching, but he glowed with contentment as he swung his hammer into the brick. For a few seconds I could see his family as clearly as if they stood around him, four-year-old twin girls and a chubby little boy barely old enough to walk, and a slender woman with a fond smile. He was planning to go home and tell them about the bruja he saw, who didn’t curse him, and that was almost as good as a blessing.

It didn’t seem very likely I was ever going to be the sort of person to go around bestowing blessings, but I made a note to send one Manny’s way if I ever felt like the time was appropriate for me to do it. At the least, I could think good thoughts for him, though it seemed to me that he had the good thoughts department covered.

I looked away from Manny and toward the city. Seattle spread out before me like a computer simulation, buildings reduced to their infrastructures, thin lines against the sky that let me see through one into the next, on out to the water. The people were blurs of color, shaming the rainbow, with disproportionately high incidences of reds and oranges. I wondered what the colors meant, but they weren’t what I was looking for. I was looking for a part of the city that I couldn’t see.

And to the southeast, there was an area that was blocked. Not by the granite wall that I expected, but by the solidity of buildings. Bricks were as opaque as mist, and colors drained away from people until they were dull facsimiles of the rest of the city. No matter which direction I approached it from, the half-solid mist remained, too thick to be seen through, but not quite as solid as reality. I could feel Herne’s presence behind the mist, his will drawing a line that he wouldn’t let me cross or look through.

I let myself fade back into my body and sat blinking thoughtfully at the asphalt. I was heading to that part of the city for lunch anyway. Maybe I could narrow down Herne’s location by getting inside the parameters he’d delineated. To continue to protect himself, he’d have to blur smaller and smaller regions, until I could pinpoint him. Pleased with myself, I dragged my legs inside the car and left early for my lunch date.