Urban Shaman
Urban Shaman
C.E. Murphy
Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt. No worries. No pressure.Never mind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing herself from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams. And if all that's not bad enough, in the three years Joanne's been a cop, she's never seen a dead body–but she's just come across her second in three days. It's been a bitch of a week. And it isn't over yet.
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and her books:
The Walker Papers
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Thunderbird Falls
“Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.”
—Award-winning author Charles de Lint
“The breakneck pace keeps things moving…helping make this one of the most involving and entertaining new supernatural mystery series in an increasingly crowded field.”
—LOCUS
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Urban Shaman
“C.E. Murphy has written a spellbinding and enthralling urban fantasy in the tradition of Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey.”
—The Best Reviews
“Tightly plotted and nicely paced, Murphy’s latest has a world in which ancient and modern magic fuse almost seamlessly…Fans of urban fantasy are sure to enjoy this first book in what looks to be an exciting new series.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
[nominee for Reviewer’s Choice Best Modern Fantasy]
The Negotiator
Hands of Flame
“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
House of Cards
“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”
—LOCUS
“The second title in Murphy’s Negotiator series is every bit as interesting and fun as the first. Margrit is a fascinatingly complex heroine who doesn’t shy away from making difficult choices.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Heart of Stone
“[An] exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fascinating new series…as usual, Murphy delivers interesting worldbuilding and magical systems, believable and sympathetic characters and a compelling story told at a breakneck pace.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
C.E. Murphy
Urban Shaman
Book One: The Walker Papers
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book is for my grandfather,
Francis John Joseph McNally Malone,
who would have been proud of me.
Acknowledgments
I hardly know where to begin saying thank you. Starting at the end and working my way backward seems appropriate.
First: my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, for taking a chance on a brand-new author; my agent, Jennifer Jackson, for her enthusiasm; and cover artist Hugh Syme, whose work I’m delighted to have my book judged by.
Second: Trip, for pointing out the glaring error in the rough draft and thereby making this a much better book; Silkie, for demanding the next chapter every time she saw me; and Sarah, my critique partner extraordinaire.
Third: my family, who never once doubted they’d be holding one of my books in their hands one day…
And most of all, Ted, who looked out the airplane window in the first place.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, January 4th, 6:45 a.m.
There’s nothing worse than a red-eye flight.
Well, all right, that’s wildly untrue. There are lots of things worse than red-eye flights. There are starving children in Africa, hate crimes and Austin Powers’s teeth. That’s just off the top of my head.
But I was crammed into an airplane seat that wouldn’t comfortably hold a four-year-old child, and had been for so many hours I was no longer certain what species I belonged to. I hadn’t slept in over a day. I was convinced that if someone didn’t stay awake, the airplane would fall out of the sky, and I couldn’t trust anyone else to do the job.
My stomach was alternating between nausea from the airline meal I’d eaten hours earlier, and hunger from not eating another revolting meal more recently. I’d forgotten to take my contact lens case with me in my carry-on, and my eyes were burning. My spine was so bent out of shape I’d have to visit a chiropractor for a week to stand up straight again. I was flying back from a funeral to be fired.
Overall, starving children in Africa were taking a distant second to my own misery and discomfort. Shallow, but true.
A very small part of my mind was convinced that if the flight attendants would just let me into the unpressurized luggage compartment to find my contact case, everything would miraculously be right with the world. None of them would let me, so my contacts were welded to my eyes. Every several minutes I decided it wasn’t worth it and started to take them out. Every time, I remembered that they were my last pair and I’d have to suffer with glasses until I made an eye appointment.
I might have succumbed, but the glasses in question were also with my luggage. The idea of navigating a soft-focus world full of featureless faces gave me a headache.
Not that I didn’t have one anyway.
I climbed over the round man sleeping peacefully beside me and went to the bathroom. At least I could take the contacts out and stew them in tap water for a few minutes. Anything would be better than keeping them in my eyes.
Anything except my reflection. Have you ever noticed that the mirror is by far the largest object in those tiny airplane restrooms? I was a sick pasty color under the flickering florescent light, my eyes much too green against a network of bloodshot vessels. I looked like a walking advertisement for one of those “wow” eye-drop commercials. Second runner-up for Least Attractive Feature on an International Flight was my hair. I put my contacts in two little paper cups and set them ostentatiously on the appropriate sides of the sink, then rubbed water through my hair to give it some life again.
Now I looked like a bloodshot porcupine. Big improvement. The only thing on my person that didn’t look slimy was the brand-new silver choker necklace my mother’d given me just before she died. A Celtic cross pendant sat in the hollow of my throat. I wasn’t used to jewelry, and now that I’d been reminded it was there, it felt mildly horrible, like someone was gently pushing his thumb against the delicate flesh. I shuddered and put my contacts back in before weaving my way back down the aisles to my seat. The flight attendants avoided me. I couldn’t blame them.
I rested my forehead on a grease spot I’d left on the window earlier. The airlines, I thought, must have custodians who clean the windows, or there’d be an inches-thick layer of goo on them from people like me.
That thought was proof positive that I shouldn’t be allowed to stay up for more than eighteen hours at a time. I have a bad habit of following every thought to its miserable, pathetic little end when I’m tired. I don’t mean to. It’s just that my brain and my tongue get unhinged. Though some of my less charitable acquaintances would say this condition didn’t require sleep deprivation.
The plane had been descending for a while now, and I squinted at my heavy black wristwatch. The bright orange button for changing the time had become permanently depressed in Moscow, or maybe Venice. Probably Moscow; I’d found Moscow depressing, and saw no reason why the watch shouldn’t. It claimed it was 5:50 p.m., which meant it was almost seven in the morning. I frowned out the window, trying to find the horizon. The sky wasn’t turning gray yet, not flying into Seattle three days after New Year’s. I blinked at the darkness, trying to unglue my contacts again.
My eyes teared up and I spent a few minutes with my hands over them, hoping perversely that I didn’t blink the contacts out. By the time I could see again, the captain had announced the final descent into Seattle. Couldn’t they find a less ominous phrase for it? I don’t like flying as it is, even without the implication that before landing I might want to have all my worldly and spiritual affairs in order. I pressed my head against the window so I could see the ground when it came into view. Maybe I could convince it to let us land without it being our real final descent.
Or maybe not. The plane banked abruptly and began to climb again. A moment or two later the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“Sorry about that, folks. Little disagreement over who got to land next. We’re going to take another spin around the Emerald City and then we’ll have you at the gate right on time.”
Why do airline pilots always call passengers “folks”? I don’t usually take umbrage at generic terminology—I’m one of those forward-thinkers who believes that “man” encompasses the whole darned race—but at whatever o’clock in the morning, I thought it would be nice to be called something that suggested unwashed masses a little less. Ladies and gentlemen, for example. Nevermind that, being an almost six-foot-tall mechanic, I had a hard time passing for a lady on a good day, which this wasn’t.
I watched lights slip away beneath us as we circled. If I have to fly, I like flying into cities in the dark of morning. There’s something reassuring and likable about the purposeful skim of vehicles, zooming along to their destinations. The whisk of cars meant that the people driving them had a goal, somewhere to be, something to do. That was a hell of a lot more than I had.
I stared down at the moving lights. Maybe I didn’t like them after all.
The plane dropped the distance that made me an active voyeur in people’s lives, instead of a distant watcher. I could see individuals under the streetlights. Trees became sets of branches instead of blurry masses of brown.
A school went by below us, swingsets empty. The neighborhood was full of tidy, ordered streets. Carefully tended trees, bereft of leaves, lined uniformly trimmed lawns. Well-washed cars reflected the streetlights. Even from the air well before sunrise, it screamed out, This Is A Good Place To Live.
The next neighborhood over didn’t look as posh. Wrong side of the metaphysical tracks. Cars were older, had duller paint and no wax jobs to make them gleam in the streetlights. Mismatched shingles on patched roofs stood out; lawns were overgrown. It wasn’t that the owners didn’t care. It was that the price of a lawnmower or a matched roof patch could be the difference between Christmas or no Christmas that year.
Not that I knew anything about it.
A whole street went by, lightless except for one amber-colored lamp, the kind that’s supposed to cut through fog. It made the street seem unnaturally vivid, details coming into sharp-edged focus below me.
A modern church, an A-frame with a sharp, nasty spire, was lit by the edges of the lone amber light. Its parking lot was abandoned except for one car, parked at an angle across two spaces, one of its doors hanging open. I wondered if it closed at all. Probably: it was a behemoth from the seventies, the kind of car that will last forever. I grew up with that kind of car. Air bags or no, the little crumply things they make today don’t seem as safe.
Someone tall and lean got out of the car, draping himself over the door as he looked down the street toward the functional light. Even from above I could see the glitter of light on the butterfly knife he played with, comfortable and familiar. Watching, I knew that he could play knife games in the dark and blindfolded, and he’d never stab a finger.
A woman broke into the amber light, running down the center of the street. She took incredibly long strides, eating a huge amount of distance with each step, but her head was down and her steps swerved, like she wasn’t used to running. Her hair was very long, and swung loose, flaring out as she whipped her head back to look behind her.
I twisted in my seat as the plane left the subdivision behind, trying to see.
A pack of dogs leaked out of the darkness. Their coats were pale gold under the amber light, and they loped with the casual confidence of a hunting pack following easy prey.
The woman stumbled, the pack gained and the plane took me away from them.
“You don’t understand. There is a woman in trouble out there.” It was the fourth time I’d said it, and the pilot kept looking at me like I was on drugs. Well, maybe I was. Lack of sleep has the same effect as certain narcotics. I was lodged in the door of the cockpit, other passengers pushing out behind me. Fourteen minutes had passed since I saw the woman. There was a knot of discomfort in my stomach, like I’d throw up if I didn’t find a way to help her. I kept hoping I’d burp and it would go away, but I didn’t, and the pilot was still eyeing me.
“And you saw this from the plane,” he said, also for the fourth time. He had that bright lilting sound to his voice that first grade teachers use to mask irritation. “There are lots of people in trouble, ma’am.”
I closed my eyes. They screamed with pain, tears flooding as I opened them again. Through the upwell, I saw an expression of dismayed horror cross the pilot’s face.
Well, if he was going to fall for it, I might as well milk it. “It was five minutes before we landed,” I quavered. “We circled around and came in from the northwest.” I lifted my wrist to show him the compass on my watch band, although I hoped that, being the pilot, he knew we’d approached from the northwest. “I was looking out the window. I saw a woman running down the street. There was a pack of dogs after her and a guy with a switchblade down the street in the direction she was running.”
“Ma’am,” he said, still very patiently. I reached out and took a fistful of his shirt. Actually, at the last moment, I grabbed the air in front of his shirt. I didn’t think security could throw me out of the airport for grabbing air in a threatening fashion, not even in this post-9/11 age.
“Don’t ma’am me…” I stared at his chest until my eyes focused enough to read his name badge. “Steve. Is that your name? Steve. Don’t ma’am me, Captain Steve. I just need to know our rate of descent. Humor me, Captain Steve. I work for the police department. You don’t want me to go to the six o’clock news after a murder’s been discovered and tell them all about how the airline wouldn’t lift a finger to help the woman who died.”
I didn’t know why I bothered. The woman was probably dead by now. Still, Captain Steve blanched and looked back over his shoulder at his instruments. I retrieved my hand and smiled at him. He blanched again. I guess my smile wasn’t any better than my hair or eyes just now.
“Hurry,” I said. “Once the sun comes up the streetlights will go off and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find her then.”
I left my luggage in the airport and climbed into a cab, trying to work out the triangulation of height, speed and distance. “Drive,” I said, without looking up.
“Where to, lady?”
“I don’t know. Northwest.”
“The airline? It’s just a couple feet down the term—”
“To the northwest,” I snarled. The cabby gave me an unfriendly look and drove. “Do you have a map?” I demanded a minute later.
“What for?”
“So I can figure out where we’re going.”
He turned around and stared at me.
“Watch the road!” I braced myself for impact. Somehow—without looking—he twitched the steering wheel and avoided the collision. I collapsed back into the seat, wide-eyed. “Map?” I asked, somewhat more politely.
“Yeah, here.” He threw a city guide into my lap. I thumbed it open to find the airport.
Airplanes go fast. I realize this isn’t a revelation to stun the world, but it was a little distressing to realize how far we’d flown in five minutes, and how long it would take to drive that. “All right, we’re going northwest of the lake.” I remembered seeing its off-colored shadow making a black mark below the plane as we’d left the subdivision behind. “Somewhere in Aurora.”
“Think? That ain’t such a good neighborhood, lady. You sure you wanna go there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m trying to find somebody who’s in trouble.”
The cabby eyed me in the rearview. “That’s the right place to look.”
I glared at him through my eyebrows. He smiled, a thin I’ve-seen-it-all grin that didn’t really have any humor in it. He had gray eyes under equally gray, bushy eyebrows. He had a thick neck and looked like he’d be at home chewing on a stogie. I asked if he had a cigarette. He turned around and looked at me again.
“Those things’ll kill you, lady.”
His voice was rough and deep like a lifetime smoker’s. Surprise showed on my face and he gave me another soulless smile, reflected in the mirror. “My wife died of emphysema three years ago on our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. You want a smoke, kid, find it somewhere else.”
Sometimes I wonder if I have a big old neon sign stamped on my forehead, flashing Asshole. I retaliated with stunning wit: “I’m not a kid.”
Gray eyes darted to the mirror again, and back to the road. “You’re what, twenty-six?”
Nobody ever guessed my age right. Since I was eleven, people have misguessed my age anywhere from three to seven years in one direction or the other. I felt my jaw drop.
“It’s a gift,” the cabby said. “A totally useless gift. I can tell how old people are.”
I blinked at him.
“Great way to get good tips,” he went on. “I go into this long explanation of how I always get ages right, and then I lie. Works like a charm.”
“So why’d you guess my age right?” The question came out of my mouth without consulting my brain first. I didn’t want to have a conversation with the cabby.
“Never met anybody who didn’t want to be in their twenties, so what’s the point? Why you going out there, lady? Lotta trouble out that way, and you don’t look like the type.”
I glanced sideways at the window. A faint reflection looked back at me. He was right. I looked tired, hopeless and worn-out, but not like trouble. “Looks can be deceiving.” His eyes slid off the rearview mirror like he was too polite to disbelieve aloud. “It’s somebody else who’s in trouble,” I said. “I saw her from the plane.”
He twisted around yet again. “You’re trying to rescue somebody you saw from an airplane?”
“Yeah.” I flinched as he twitched the steering wheel to keep in our lane, again without looking. “What do you do, use the Force?”
He glanced at the road and shrugged before turning around again. “So, what, you’ve got a hero complex? How the hell are you gonna find one dame you saw from the air?”
“I passed a couple basic math classes in college,” I muttered. “Look, I got the approximate height and speed we were traveling from the pilot, so figuring out the distance wasn’t that hard. I mean, adjusting for the change in speed is kind of a pain in the ass, but—” I set my teeth together to keep myself from rattling on. It was a moment before I was sure I had enough control over my brain to continue without babbling. “Someplace in that vicinity there’s a modern church on a street with only one amber streetlight. If I can find it before the lights go out—”
“Then you’ll be the first one on a murder scene. You’re nuts, lady. You must be desperate for thrills.”
“Like it could possibly be any of your business,” I snapped.
“Touchy, too. Pretty girl like you oughta be on her way home to her sweetie, not chasin—”
“I don’t have one.” I admit it. I snarled again.
“With your personality, I can’t figure why not, lady.”
I leaned forward and rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, elbows on my knees. The knot of unpleasantness in my stomach felt like it was trying to push its way out through my sternum, pressuring me to act whether I liked it or not. The idea that it would go away if I could just find the woman was settled into my bones, logic be damned. “Haven’t you ever just really felt like you had to do something?”
“Sure. I felt like I really had to marry my old lady when she got knocked up.”
I was in a cab with Plato. His depth overwhelmed me. I lifted my head enough to stare over the back of the seat at his shoulder. He grinned. He had good teeth, clean and white and strong, like he hadn’t ever smoked. They were probably false.
“Never felt like I had to go chasing down some dame I saw from an airplane, nope. Guess I figured I had enough troubles of my own without adding on somebody else’s.”
I leaned against the window, eyes closed. “Maybe I’ve got enough that I need somebody else’s to make the load seem lighter.”
I could feel his gaze on me in the rearview mirror again. Then he grunted, a sort of satisfied noise. “All right, lady. Let’s go find your corpse.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I glowered out the window. I wouldn’t have been so annoyed if I’d felt more confident myself. The cabby—whose name was Gary, according to the posted driver’s license, and whose seventy-third birthday had been three days ago—drove like the proverbial bat out of hell, while I clung to the seat and tried not to gasp too audibly.
The streetlights were still on when we got to Aurora, and I wasn’t actually dead, so I felt like I shouldn’t complain. Gary pulled into a gas station. I squinted tiredly at the back of his head. “What are you doing?”
“Go ask if anybody knows where that church of yours is.”
My squint turned into lifted eyebrows. “I thought men couldn’t ask for directions.”
“I ain’t askin’,” Gary said with aplomb. “You are. Go on.”
I got.
The pimply kid behind the counter didn’t look happy to see me. Judging from his thrust-out lip and down-drawn eyebrows, I figured he wasn’t happy to see anybody, and didn’t take it personally. He smirked at me when I asked about the church. Smirking is not a nice expression. The only person in the history of mankind who’d been able to make smirking look good was James Dean, and this kid, forgive me Senator Bentsen, was no James Dean.
I tried, briefly, to remember if I’d been that sullen and stupid when I was sixteen. I figured the fact that I couldn’t remember didn’t bode well, and went straight for the thing I knew would have gotten my attention at that age: cash. I wasn’t usually prone to bribing people, but I was too tired to think of anything else and I was in a hurry. I dug my wallet out and waved a bill at the kid. His eyes widened. I looked at it. It was a fifty.
Shit.
“You better walk me to the church for this, kid.”
He didn’t take his eyes from the bill. “There’s two A-frames I can think of. One’s about five blocks from here. The other is a couple miles away.”
“Which direction? For both of them.” He told me, still watching the fifty like it was a talisman. I sighed, dropped it on the counter, and muttered, “Thanks,” as I pushed my way out of the gas station. He snatched it up, hardly believing I was really handing it over. Great. I’d just turned a kid onto the lifetime role of snitch.
Worse, I’d given away a quarter of the meager cash I had on hand, and cabs from SeaTac were damned expensive. I climbed back into the car. “East a few blocks, and if that’s not it, there’s another one to the southwest. Hurry, it’s getting light out.”
“What, you want to get your fingers in the blood while it’s still warm? You need help, lady.”
“Joanne.” Having a nosy cabby know my name had to be better than being called “lady” for another half hour. “And you’re the one hung up on corpses. I’m hoping she’s still alive.” I tugged on my seat belt, scowling again. It was starting to feel like a permanent fixture on my face.
“You always an optimist, or just dumb?”
A shock of real hurt, palpable and cold, tightened itself around my throat and heart. I fumbled the seat belt. It took effort to force the words out: “You have no right to call me dumb.” I stared out the window, seat belt in one numb hand, trying furiously to blink tears away. Gary looked at me in the rearview, then twisted around.
“Hey, hey, hey. Look, lady. Joanne. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“Sure.” My voice was harsh and tight, almost too quiet to be heard. “Just drive.” I got the seat belt on this time. Gary turned around and drove, quiet for the first time since I’d gotten in the cab.
I watched streetlights go by in the hazy gold of sunrise, trying to get myself under control. I didn’t generally cry easily and I didn’t generally get hurt by casual comments from strangers. But it had been a long day. More than a long day. A long week, a long month, a long year, nevermind that it was only the fourth of January. And the day was only going to get longer. I still had to stop by my job and get fired.
The streetlights abruptly winked out as we turned down another street, and with them, my chance to find the runner. A small voice said, “Fuck.” After a moment I realized it was me.
“That one’s still on,” Gary said, subdued. I looked up, keeping my jaw tight to deny tired, disappointed tears. A bastion of amber stood against the dawn, one single light shining on the entire street. I watched it go by without comprehension, then jerked around so fast I hurt my neck. “That’s it!”
Gary hit the brakes hard enough to make my neck crunch again. I winced, clutching at it as I pressed my nose against the window. “That’s it, that’s it!” I shrieked. “Look, there’s the church! Stop! Stop!” The car was gone from the parking lot, but there was no mistaking the vicious spire stabbing the morning air. “Holy shit, we found it!”
Gary accelerated again, grinning, and pulled into the church parking lot. “Maybe you’re not dumb. Maybe you’re lucky.”
“Yeah, well, God watches over fools and little children, right?” I tumbled out of the cab, getting my feet tangled in the floor mat and catching myself on the door just before I fell. “Well?” I demanded. “Aren’t you coming?”
His eyebrows elevated before he shrugged and swung his own door open. “Sure, what the hell. I never saw a fresh murdered body before.”
I closed my door. “Have you seen stale ones?” I decided I didn’t want to know the answer, and strode away. Gary kept up, which surprised me. He was so broad-shouldered I expected him to be short, but he stood a good two inches taller than me. In fact, he looked like a linebacker.
“You look like a linebacker.”
“College ball,” he said, disparaging enough that it was obvious he was pleased. “Before it turned into a media fest. It’s all about money and glory now.”
“It didn’t used to be?”
He flashed me his white-toothed grin. “It used to be about glory and girls.”
I laughed, stopping at the church door, fingertips dragging over the handle. They were big and brass and twice as wide as my own hands. You could pull them down together and throw the doors open in a very impressive fashion. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“You sure your broad is gonna be in here, lady?”
“Yeah,” I said, then wondered why that was. It made me hesitate and turn back to the parking lot. Except for Gary’s cab, it was empty. There was no reason the woman couldn’t have gotten into the car with the man with the butterfly knife, no real reason to think she’d even made it as far as the parking lot, much less the church.
“Yeah,” I said again, but trotted back down the steps. Gary stayed by the door, watching me. The car’d been on the south end of the parking lot, between the woman and the church. I jogged over there, eyes on the ground. I heard Gary come down the steps, rattling scattered gravel as he followed me.
“What’re you looking for? I thought you said the broad was in the church.”
I shrugged, slowing to a walk and frowning at the cement. “Yeah, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. I was wondering if there’d been a fight. If the guy with the knife was after her, she’d have had to have gotten thr—”
“What guy with a knife?” Gary’s voice rose as I crouched to squint at the ground. I looked over my shoulder at him.
“Didn’t I mention that?”
“No,” he said emphatically, “you didn’t.”
“Oh. There was a guy with a knife. He was good, too.”
“You saw this from a plane?”
I puffed out my cheeks. “You ever seen somebody who’s good with a knife? Street-good, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. So have I. It looks a certain way. Graceful. This guy looked that way, yeah, even from a plane.”
“Lady, you better have like twenty-two-hundred vision.”
I stood up. The bubble of icky feeling in my stomach was still there, prodding at me like I hadn’t done enough to help the woman. “I wear contacts.”
Gary snorted derisively. I sighed. “I know what I saw.”
“Sure.” He didn’t say anything for another second, looking at the ground. “I know what you didn’t see.”
“What?”
He pointed, then walked forward a couple of spaces. “Somebody lost a tooth.” He bent over and poked at a shining white thing on the concrete, not quite touching it.
I walked over, bending to look at the enameled thing on the ground. It was a tooth, all right, smooth little curves and a bumpy top, complete with bloody roots. “Eww. Somebody got cut, too.” I nodded at thin splatters of blood, a few feet farther out than the tooth, that were already dry on the concrete. Gary cast his gaze to the heavens.
“The lady goes ‘eww’ at a tooth and she’s looking for a corpse.”
“I’m looking for a person,” I corrected.
“And you think she’s in the church.”
“Yeah.”
“So why the hell are we screwing around in the parking lot?”
I looked around. “The light’s better over here?” It was one of my favorite jokes, left over from my childhood. I never expected anyone else to get it, but Gary grinned, dug a hand into his pocket, and tossed me a quarter. I caught it, grinning back. “Now that we’ve got that taken care of.”
We walked back to the church together.
I was right. The doors swept open, impressively silent. I felt like I should be leading a congregation in search of the light, not a linebacker-turned-cabby in search of a corpse. I stepped through the doors, half-expecting a floorboard to creak and mar the enormous silence.
Within a few steps I was sure a floorboard wouldn’t have dared creak in this place. It wasn’t the solemn, weighty quiet of old churches or cathedrals. Those places could absorb the sound of heels clicking and children laughing with dignity and acceptance. This church simply forbade them. I wasn’t even wearing heels, and I found myself leaning forward on my toes a little so that my tennies couldn’t possibly make any excessive noise on the hardwood floors. This was a church where “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” would be performed and harkened to weekly. I noticed I was holding my breath.
It was stunning, in an austere, heartless way. The A-frame probably carried sound beautifully, but the only natural lighting was from a wall of windows behind the pulpit. I use the term natural loosely: there wasn’t much natural about the violent, grim images of Christ’s crucifixion, or Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, or Judas’s betrayal, or any of the other scenes I recognized, more of them jimmied into the stained glass than I would have thought possible. This was a church where you came to be terrified into obedience, not welcomed as a sinner who has found the true way.
The pews were hardwood, without cushions, and the choir books looked as though they’d never been cracked open. I guessed you’d better know your music before you came to church. It was not a friendly place.
It was also completely empty of human life other than my own and Gary’s. I looked back at him. He frowned faintly before meeting my eye. I couldn’t blame him.
“I don’t know where she is,” I said before he could ask, and lifted my voice. “Hello? Hello?” My voice bounced up to the rafters and echoed back at me. The acoustics were incredible, and I tilted my head back to look longingly at the ceiling. “Wow. I’d love to sing in here.”
“Yeah? You sing?”
I shrugged. “I don’t scare the neighbors.”
Gary bent over and looked under the pews. “Yeah, well, maybe you can sing yourself up a dame. There ain’t nobody here, Jo.”
A muscle in my shoulder blade twitched. “Y’know, nobody calls me that except my dad.”
“What, did he want a boy?”
“Not exactly.” That seemed like enough information to volunteer.
Gary unbent a little, hooking his arm over the top of a pew as he looked at me. Enough time passed to let me know that he was politely not asking about my dad before he asked, “Then what do they call you?”
“Joanie, or Joanne, usually. Sometimes Anne, Annie.”
Gary straightened up, hands in the small of his back. “My wife was named Anne. You don’t look like an Anne to me.”
I smiled. “What’d she look like?”
“’Bout four eleven, blond hair, brown eyes, petite. You gotta be at least a foot taller than she was.”
“Yeah.” It came out sounding like a laugh, and I smiled again. “So call me Jo, then.”
“You sure? I don’t think you get along with your old man.”
“I don’t not get along with him.” How had I ended up in a church looking for a body and discussing my home life? “It’s okay. I don’t mind Jo.” I waited for the muscle in my shoulder blade to spasm again. It always did when I was tense. This time it didn’t. Maybe I really didn’t mind being called Jo. Who knew?
“There’s nobody in here, Jo,” Gary repeated. I tried to stuff my hands in my pockets, only to discover I didn’t have any. The thing I’d learned about traveling was that it was slightly less miserable if I wore stretch pants with an elastic waistband. The ones I was wearing were black and comfy and had nice straight legs, but no pockets. I hooked my thumbs into the strap of my fanny pack, instead. I hated the things, but I never learned to carry a purse, and a fanny pack is at least attached to me. Makes it harder to forget.
“C’mon, let’s go. Nobody here.”
“No, wait.”
Gary sighed, exasperated, and leaned against a pew, arms folded across his chest. Seventy-three or not, he made a pretty impressive wall of a man. “Then do your thing and find the broad.”
I looked at him. “My thing?”
“You got some kinda thing going on here, lady. Normal people don’t stick their heads out a plane window and see dames that need rescuing. So do your thing and rescue her. My meter’s still running.”
Oh, God. It probably was, too. “Hope you take credit cards.” I walked to the front of the church and around the pulpit.
I really, honest-to-God, expected to see the woman cowering in the back side of the pulpit. That she wasn’t came as a shock. “Well, shit.”
“What? You find your body after all?” Gary shoved off his pew and came long-legging it up to the front.
“No, you ghoul. There’s nobody here. I really thought she would be.”
“I’ll cut you a break and won’t expect a tip, just for the satisfaction of being right.” He leaned on the pulpit, grinning whitely at me. I had the sudden urge to pop him in those nice straight clean teeth. It must have shown in my face, because his grin got even wider. “You wanna try it?”
“No,” I said sourly. “I think you’d break me in half.”
“Only a little bit.”
“Gee. Thanks.” I backed up a couple steps and leaned on the edge of the…hell if I know what it’s called. Looked like an altar to me. All gilded and dour. It had probably never been introduced to a woman’s behind in its whole existence. Or maybe it had been. You always heard stories about the priest who’s a pillar of the community but turns out to be having affairs with half the congregation. Seemed to me if you’re going to sin, you might as well do it right. On the altar would be a nice big sin. “I thought she’d be here.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Churches are supposed to be sanctuary, or something. I thought she’d be safe in here. Consecrated ground.”
“What century are you living in, lady?”
“The wrong one, I guess.” I thumped on the edge of the altar, annoyed.
The top slipped.
I leaped off it like it had bitten me. Gary’s bushy eyebrows went up. We both stared at the inch-wide crack at the edge of the box where the lid had pushed back. “You don’t believe in vampires, do you, Gary?”
“God damn it,” he said, “I was trying real hard not to think that way.”
“Kind of fits, though, doesn’t it? Scary-looking church, big old crypt in the middle, the living dead ris—”
“It’s past dawn,” Gary said hastily. “No vampires after dawn. Right?”
“There’s no such thing as vampires, Gary.”
He stared at me dubiously. I stared at the crypt dubiously. Funny how a second ago it had been an altar and now it was a crypt. “Well?” he demanded. “Are you gonna look in it?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“As soon as I get up the nerve.”
He prodded me in the small of my back, pushing me forward. I admired the resistance in my body. I felt like he was trying to move a me-shaped lead weight. I expected to hear my feet scraping along with the sound of metal ripping up hardwood. Instead, I stumbled half a step forward, then glared over my shoulder at Gary. “You’re a big strong man. Aren’t you supposed to be plunging into danger before me?”
“You’re forty-seven years younger than me, lady,” he pointed out. “And almost as tall as I am. And you’re in my weight class. And it’s your vampire in the coffin.”
“I am not in your weight class,” I said, offended. “You’ve got to outweigh me by at least forty pounds.” I edged a quarter of a step closer to the crypt. “And it’s not a vampire.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Isn’t it rude to ask a woman how much she weighs?”
“Nah, it’s rude to ask how old she is, and I already know.”
Oh. Damn. I stepped forward, holding my breath. The crypt didn’t do anything. “I weigh one seventy-two.”
“No shit?”
“I’m almost six feet tall, Gary, what do you want me to weigh, a hundred and thirty? I’d be dead.” I peeked into the little hole the lid made where it had slid over. If there was a vampire in there, it was a very small, very hidden vampire. Or maybe it blended with shadows well. Vampires were supposed to do that, weren’t they?
I was scaring myself. “Give me a hand with this.”
Gary crept forward. “I outweigh you by sixty pounds.”
“That’s why you’re a linebacker, and I’m not. Push on three. One, two, three!”
I underestimated how much push we could provide. The lid shot off the box, crashing to the floor with a thud that rattled the rafters. I fell forward, shrieking, with visions of being sucked dry by vampires supplied by my too-vivid imagination.
Halfway into the crypt, I was met by another shrieking woman on her way out.
CHAPTER THREE
My head hit the floor with a crack only slightly less impressive than the crypt lid had made. My vision swam to black, and my tailbone decompressed like a series of firecrackers. I wouldn’t need to visit the chiropractor after all.
Vision returned in time to see something bright and glittery arching down at me. I flung my hand up, barely deflecting the fall of a knife. My wrist hit the woman’s with the solid thunk that meant a week from now, after I’d forgotten this had happened, a bone bruise would color half my arm. The woman’s grip loosened and the knife glanced off my cheekbone instead of driving into my throat. I hit her again, and the knife skittered away, bouncing across the hardwood floor.
The woman shrieked again—or maybe she hadn’t stopped—and scrambled after the knife. I tackled her, flinging my arms around her. Her white blouse suddenly stained red where my cheek pressed against it.
Gary pulled her out from under me and to her feet, pushing her elbows in against her waist and holding her still. His hands looked bizarrely large in proportion to her waist. She winced and hissed, her head down as I got up unsteadily and touched my face. Blood skimmed over my fingertips and into my palm, coloring in the lifeline. I watched vacantly as it trailed all the way around the side of my hand and down my wrist. My face didn’t hurt. It seemed like it should.
“You got lucky,” Gary said. “She was gonna cut your throat right out. What should I do with her?”
I looked up, startled and vacant. “Oh, fer Chrissakes,” he said, “You’re shocky, or somethin’. Get something to stop the bleeding.”
That seemed like a pretty good idea. I looked around, silver catching my eye again. The knife she’d cut me with lay against the foot of a pew, a nice heavy butterfly knife. I picked it up and cut a piece off the altar banner, holding it to my face while Gary asked again what to do with the woman.
“Um,” I said, and then my face started to hurt. For a minute I was too busy blinking back tears to give a damn what Gary did. I croaked, “Hold her for a minute,” and tried increasing the pressure on my cut to see if it helped the pain any. It didn’t. I looked up through teary eyes. It had to be the same woman. She had hip-length dark brown hair with just enough curl to make me covet it. “You’re the one I saw from the airplane.”
She lifted her head to look at me, eyes wide. I dropped my hand from my face and the makeshift bandage fell to the floor as I gawked at her.
She was beautiful. Not your garden-variety pretty girl, not your movie-star kind of beautiful. She was the sort of beautiful that Troy had gone to war over. High, fragile cheekbones, delicate pointed chin, absolutely unblemished pale skin. Long-lashed blue eyes, thin straight eyebrows. A rosebud mouth, for God’s sake. There were very fine lines of pain around the corners of her mouth and eyes, and the nostrils of her perfectly straight nose were flared a little, none of which detracted from her beauty.
“Jesus.” I suddenly had a very good idea of why she’d been chased.
“What?” Gary demanded. I just kept ogling the woman. She had a perfect throat. She had great collarbones. She had Mae West curves, too, a real hourglass figure. She was at least eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than I was. It said something for her momentum that she’d knocked me flat on my ass. I didn’t think I could have knocked Gary over, if I’d been her and he’d been me.
I hated her.
I was so busy staring and hating her it took a while to notice there was drying blood on her shirt, not just the new stuff I’d put there, but sticky, half-dried brown spots. “Shit. Let her go, Gary.”
“What?”
“Let her go. Her arms are all cut up. You’re hurting her.”
Gary let go like his hands were on fire. The woman made a small sound and folded her arms under her breasts, shallow gashes leaking blood onto her shirt again. I expected her voice to be musical, dulcet tones, with an exotic accent. Instead she was an alto who sounded like she was from Nowhere In Particular, U.S.A. “You saw me from an airplane?”
People kept saying that. I took a breath to respond and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to throw up anymore. The twist of sickness in my belly had disipated. My shoulders dropped and I let the breath go in a sigh. I wasn’t a fan of my innards guiding my actions. Now all I had to do was explain myself so I could go get fired and go home to sleep. “At about seven this morning. I was flying in from Dublin.” As if that had anything to do with anything. “I saw you running, and something was after you. Dogs, or something. And a guy with a knife.” I looked at the knife I was still holding. “This knife? How’d you get past him? How’d you get away from the dogs?”
“I ran away from the dogs,” the woman said, “and I kicked the guy with the knife in the head.”
Gary and I both stared at her. She smiled a little bit. A little bit of a smile from her was like spending a little bit of time with Marilyn Monroe. It went a long way. “I guess I don’t look like a kickboxer,” she said.
“That’s for damned sure,” Gary mumbled. He looked even more awed than I felt. I guessed it was nice to know some things didn’t change even when you hit your eighth decade. “So how’d you get all cut up?” he asked.
She shrugged a little. “I had to get close enough to kick him.”
“That his tooth out there?”
Her whole face lit up. “I knocked a tooth loose?” She looked like a little kid who’d just gotten her very own Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. I almost laughed.
“You knew him? Why was he chasing you?” Even as I asked, I knew the question was idiotic. Men have hunted people down for much less attractive prizes. I liked being tall. Next to this woman I felt as ungainly as a giraffe.
“Why did you come to save me if you don’t know who he is?” she asked at almost the same time. We stared at each other.
“Let’s start again,” I said after a long moment of silence. Then I had no idea where to start with someone who’d been attacked and who just tried to cut my throat out. Names seemed like a good place. “I’m Joanne Walkingstick.”
It’s physically impossible to look at your own mouth in astonishment. I gave it a good shot. I hadn’t called myself by that name in at least five years. More like ten. Gary raised his bushy eyebrows at me curiously.
“You don’t look like an Indian,” he said, which really meant, “How the hell did you end up with a last name like Walkingstick?” I’d heard it for the first twelve years of my life.
“I know.” I hadn’t known that a practiced tone of controlled patience could lie in wait for the next time it was needed, but there it was. It hadn’t been needed for years. It meant I wasn’t going to say anything else, and if you wanted to make a big deal of it, you’d end up in a fistfight.
I was good at brawling.
Gary, the linebacker, let the tone blow right over him and stayed there with his arms folded and eyebrows lifted. The woman studied me through drawn-down eyebrows. It made a wrinkle in the middle of her forehead. On me, that wrinkle was scary. On her, it was cute. I hated her some more.
Gary was wrong, anyway. I did look Indian. My coloring was wrong, but in black-and-white photos I looked like I didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in me. I’d changed my last name to Walker when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nowhere official. I just filled out every piece of paperwork, even the diploma application, with Walker. My birth certificate was the only piece of paper I owned that had Walkingstick as my official last name.
“My name is Marie D’Ambra,” the woman said.
“You don’t look Italia—” I nearly bit my tongue off.
“Adopted,” she replied, amusement sparkling in her eyes.
Oh. “My mother was black Irish,” I said after a moment. “I got her coloring.” It seemed like a fair exchange of information. “Why was that guy after you? What was chasing you? It didn’t look like a dog pack. Exactly.”
Marie inclined her head. It looked gracious. How did she do that? “It wasn’t. His name is Cernunnos, and he is the leader of the Wild Hunt. It was the Hunt who chased me. Why did you come to help me?”
I looked sideways at Gary, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. I wouldn’t think a guy with shoulders that wide could shrug imperceptibly. It should be more like plate tectonics. I hoped I was in that kind of shape when I was seventy-something. Marie waited patiently, and I shrugged more perceptibly. I really didn’t want to say, “I felt like I was going to puke if I didn’t,” but I heard myself saying it anyway. I curled a lip, shook my head, and added, “You looked like you needed help. I felt like I had to try to find you.”
One half of her mouth curved up in a smile. I stopped hating her. I couldn’t hate a smile like that. Her smile made the world seem like it would all be okay. “A gwyld at the crossroads,” she murmured, and I frowned at her.
“A what?”
She shook her head and did the wonderful half smile again. “Nothing. I’m sorry for cutting you. I thought you had to be one of Cernunnos’s people. I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would be looking for me.”
“One of his people? Not him himself?” That sounded wrong. “He himself.”
Marie shook her head. “Christian earth. Even Cernunnos can only stand on it a few minutes. None of the Hunt can at all.”
I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Marie. She smiled the tight little smile of someone who knows she sounds crazy. It made me feel better. “This isn’t the best place to talk about this,” she said.
“Why not? You just said the guy who was after you can’t come here,” Gary said.
“No, but he can send people who can,” I said before Marie could. She nodded. “If he couldn’t, she wouldn’t have thought we might be trouble.” I touched my cheek gingerly. It was still bleeding. “An emergency room might be a good place to go. This is going to need stitches, and you should get looked at, too.”
Marie extended her arms, palms up. Half a dozen cuts still oozed red as she looked at them. She looked like a clumsy suicide attempt. “They’ll heal,” she said dismissively. “He knows I was hurt. I’d rather not go somewhere so obvious.”
“You’d rather bleed?” I demanded. Gary cleared his throat.
“I got a first-aid kit in the car.”
I glared at him. He smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” I said, “the pretty one whose face isn’t cut up gets her way. Fine.” I stomped off the dais, picking the butterfly knife up off the pulpit. It made a satisfying series of clicks as the blade and handles slapped against each other when I closed it.
“Hey. That’s mine.” Marie had to take two steps to every one of mine, even after she ran to catch up with me.
“Not anymore, it isn’t. Call it a finder’s fee.”
“You didn’t find it.”
“I found you.” I shoved the knife into my waistband. Two steps later the elastic shifted and the knife slid down my leg and out of my pants, clattering to the floor. Gary choked back a guffaw and Marie grinned broadly.
I picked up the knife with as much dignity as I could muster and stalked out of the church.
I thought going into a diner all bloody and bandaged was more conspicuous than going to an emergency room, but Marie insisted. Gary butterfly-bandaged my cheek and wrapped up Marie’s arms while I sulked. As a gesture of peace he turned the meter off, but my face hurt too much for me to be grateful.
I dragged a coat out of my carry-on and pulled it on over my bloody T-shirt as we went into the diner. Marie walked in like she was daring the world to comment on her bloodstains. No one did. We sat down, silent until the waitress brought us our drinks. I didn’t know what it was about food, but it always seemed to make it easier to talk.
Marie folded her hands around an enormous glass of orange juice. I had a coffee. Actually, this being Seattle, I didn’t have just a coffee, even at a cheap diner. I had a grande double-shot latte with a shot of amaretto. Just the smell of the stuff got me high.
“Cernunnos leads the Wild Hunt,” Marie said to her orange juice. “They ride to collect the souls of the dead.” She looked up to see if that cleared things up for us. Gary just waited. He really was having a regular black coffee. I didn’t even know they made that anymore. He’d ordered breakfast, too. I was hungry, but between adrenaline and no sleep, I was pretty sure food would just come back up again. Now that I thought about it, the injection of caffeine probably wasn’t such a great idea on that combination. Food would have been better.
“You ain’t dead,” Gary pointed out. Marie winced, producing a pained smile.
“An oversight.”
“Fill in us dumb ones,” I said. “What’s a wild hunt?”
“The Wild Hunt,” she corrected.
“Okay, the wild hunt. What is it?”
She sat back, her hands still wrapped around the orange juice glass. She hadn’t drunk any yet. “Cernunnos was an old Celtic god,” she said slowly. “When Christianity came to Ireland and Britain, his cult was so powerful that it took a while for it to die out. And it never entirely faded.”
“Like any pagan religion,” I interrupted. Marie lifted her eyes to look at me. The muscle in my shoulder blade twitched again and I shrugged, trying to loosen it. “The Peop—the Cherokee still practice their old ways, too. Faith is hard to stomp out.” The People. Walkingstick. What was wrong with me?
“Like any pagan religion,” she agreed. “Cernunnos is the Celtic Horned God, essentially a fertility figure but with very deep ties to death as well. There are Norse and German counterparts, Woden, Anwyn, rooted in a common ancestry.” She waved her hand absently, brushing aside the trivia.
“And he’s after you.” I infused my voice with as much sarcasm as I could. It was pathetically little. She was too pretty to be sarcastic at, even if she was crazy.
“Yes.” Marie nodded and dragged her orange juice to the edge of the table.
“You seriously think you got some kind of god after you?” Gary asked. Marie nodded. Gary turned to me. “I vote we drop her off at a loony bin and run for the hills.”
“Are you asking me to run away with you, Gary? After such a short, violent courtship?” It wasn’t that I didn’t agree. In fact, I pushed my latte away, getting ready to stand up. Gary did the same, looking relieved.
“Sorry, lady,” he said, and stood. I put my palms on the table and looked at Marie. She looked bone-tired, more tired than I felt. She looked like she’d been through this a dozen times already, and was just waiting for the time that she screwed up and didn’t live through it.
Dammit, I’d jumped off a plane and come tearing through the streets of Seattle to find this woman. I didn’t feel like I’d seen it through to the end yet. I settled back into my seat.
“Aw, hell,” Gary said, and sat back down. Marie bit her lower lip, holding her breath while she watched me. When I didn’t move again, she let her breath out and began talking again, without taking her eyes off me. If she thought she was pinning me in place, she was right. Girls weren’t really my thing. Hell, I didn’t even like women much, as a species. I had no idea why I wanted to help her so much. Marie took a deep breath.
“I gather neither of you are mystics.”
Gary laughed so loudly I nearly spilled my coffee. A tired-looking blonde behind the counter turned around and looked at us. Marie twisted a little smile at her orange juice. I suddenly felt sorry for her, which was new.
“Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “Can you handle the idea that there’s more to the world than we see?”
“There are more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It was the obvious line. What wasn’t so obvious was that Gary beat me to it, and said it in a rich, sonorous voice. Marie and I both looked at him. “Annie liked ’em big, not stupid,” Gary said with a grin. “Sure, lady, there’s more than we see.”
Marie glanced at me. “Why does he keep calling me lady?”
“I think it’s an endearing character trait. When he really gets to know you, he’ll start calling you ‘dame’ and ‘broad,’ too.”
“Yeah?” She looked at Gary, then back at me. “How long’ve you known him?” I turned my wrist over to look at my watch, which was still wrong.
“About ninety minutes. So what’re we missing in our philosophies, Marie?”
She smiled. It was radiant. Honest to God. Her whole face lit up, all warm and welcoming and charming. Gary looked pole-axed. I pretended I didn’t and allowed myself the superior thought: Men.
“I’m an anthropologist,” Marie said. “I’ve been studying similarities between cultural mythologies for about ten years now.”
All of a sudden she had an aura of credibility. Well, except I thought she looked about twenty-five. I stole a glance at Gary, who didn’t look disbelieving. Either he thought she looked older than that, or his so-called useless talent was a load of bunk. “How old is she?” I asked him. He lifted a bushy eyebrow, glancing at me, then looked back at her.
“Thirty-nine,” he said, in tandem with Marie. Her eyebrows went up while my jaw went down. Gary looked smug. After a few seconds she shook her head and went on.
“It’s hard,” she said carefully, “to immerse yourself in a study, in mythology and belief, without beginning to understand that even if you don’t believe it, that someone did, and that it has, or had, power. I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to bullshit.”
Looking at her, I could believe it. She had to have heard every line in the book, by now. It would take genuine effort to remain gullible, and she didn’t seem gullible. She finally lifted her orange juice and drank half of it.
“Certain legends had more power for me than others. They were easier to believe. They tended down Celtic lines—my mom says it’s blood showing through. But the Morrigan, the Hunt, banshees, cross-comparisons of those legends to other cultures were more fascinating to me than most other things. A while ago a gloomy friend of mine pointed out that they weren’t just Celtic legends. They were all Celtic legends that had to do with death or violence.”
She took a deep breath, looking up at us with those very blue eyes. “Right after that I started to be able to sense who was about to die.”
Silence held, stretched, and broke as my voice shot up two octaves. “You’re a fucking banshee?” The tired blonde behind the counter looked our way again, then shifted her shoulders and turned away, uninterested. Marie’s thin straight eyebrows lifted a little.
“I thought you didn’t know anything about those legends?”
“I just got off the plane from a funeral in Ireland.”
Understanding and curiosity came into Marie’s eyes. “Whose funeral?” she asked.
“My moth—what does that have to do with anything?”
“I was curious. You don’t have the sense of someone close to you having died.”
“We weren’t close,” I said shortly. This was the second time this morning I’d said something about my family. I was breaking all sorts of rules for me. I really needed sleep. The waitress came by and slid Gary’s breakfast in front of him. Three eggs, fried, over a slab of steak, three huge pancakes, hash browns, bacon, sausage and a side of toast. I got full just looking at it. Gary didn’t pick up his fork, and after a couple seconds I frowned at him.
The big guy was actually pale, gray eyes wide under the bushy eyebrows. He stared at Marie like she’d turned from a golden retriever puppy into a king cobra. I did a double-take from him to her and back again, wondering what was wrong. “Gary?”
“Don’t worry,” Marie said, very softly. “I don’t see anything about you.”
Gary focused on his plate abruptly, cutting a huge bite of steak and eggs to stuff into his mouth. His eyebrows charged up his forehead defiantly, like he expected Marie to make an addendum to her comment. Her mouth twitched in a smile, but she didn’t say anything else.
“Does being a banshee have anything to do with why what’s-his-face wants you?” I reached over and snitched a piece of bacon off Gary’s plate. He noticed, but didn’t stop me.
“Cernunnos. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Because, what, the Hunt isn’t scary enough without you?” I heard myself capitalize the word, and wondered why I’d done it.
“I haven’t had a conversation with him about it,” she said. “I don’t really know what he wants me for.”
“So how do you know he wants you?”
“Having a pack of ghost dogs and rooks and a herd of men on horseback chase you down the street gives a girl a pretty good idea that she’s wanted for something,” Marie said acerbically.
I had the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, it was a stupid question.”
“Couldn’t it have been vampires?” Gary asked wistfully around a mouthful of hash browns. “Vampires are at least kinda sexy. What’s sexy about packs of dogs and birds? No such thing as rooks around here anyway.”
“They come with Cernunnos.” Marie kept saying these things like they were obvious.
“Marie, what are you?” I asked. She shrank back, looking surprisingly guilty. “Banshees are fairies,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you’re a fairy.”
“Not much of one, anyway,” she said to her orange juice, “or I wouldn’t be able to hide on holy ground, or use that knife.” She nodded at the butterfly knife I’d set on the table at my elbow. I picked it up without opening it and looked at her curiously. “Iron,” she said, “steel.”
“What about it?”
Have you ever had someone look at you like you were a particularly slow child? That’s the look Marie gave me. Come to think of it, Captain Steve had given me that same look earlier. I was beginning to think I should be offended. Marie interrupted before I got up the energy. “You really don’t know anything about the mystical, do you?”
“Why should I?”
“I thought Indians knew that kinda stuff,” Gary put in. I looked at him incredulously. He shrugged. “Well, you got all them powwows and stuff. What were you doing during the powwows?”
“Reading books on evolution,” I said through my teeth. Apparently that tone was scarier than the one I’d employed earlier, because Gary closed his mouth around another forkful of food with an audible smack. “That’s like saying all big guys are stupid, or all blondes are dumb, or—”
Gary pushed his food into one cheek, squirrel-like, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. It was a joke, Jo. Jeez.”
“Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny.”
“I’m sorry.” Gary sounded like he meant it. I frowned at him, then sighed and put my face in my hands.
“Forg—fuck that hurts!” I jerked my hand away from my cheek, expecting to see fresh new blood on my palm. I was spared that, at least. This was not my morning.
“The Celtic fair folk aren’t supposed to be able to bear the touch of iron,” Marie explained, once more interrupting my downward spiral of misery before it began. “Not even their gods. And I don’t know what I am, not in the way you’re asking the question. I’m an anthropologist with an unusual skill.”
“Skill? Like you learned it deliberately?”
Marie shrugged. “Talent, skill. I hesitate to call it a gift.” She caught Gary’s eye, and flashed a quick smile. “Although I could make a killing in insurance,” she said quickly. He snapped his mouth shut around another bite of food, beaten to the punch. I grinned. It made my cheek hurt. “In any other aspect,” Marie said, “I’m ordinary.”
“You are not,” I said, “ordinary.” My voice came out about six notes lower than normal. I felt color rush to my cheeks, which made the cut throb furiously. Marie’s mouth quirked in a crooked little smile. I bet even a smirk would look good on her.
“Thank you,” she said, easily enough to make my blush fade. I could feel Gary looking at me. I very carefully didn’t look at him.
“You’re welcome.” I lifted my hands to my temples and held my head. My shoulders ached. I needed a hot shower, a massage from a tall bronze guy named Rafael and about sixteen weeks of sleep. “All right, look. Let me take you at face value.”
Marie pulled a wry little moue, and Gary let out a deep chuckle. I felt a little smile creep over my face and split my cheek open again. I was going to bleed all day long. How fun. “Let me take your story at face value,” I amended. Marie laughed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about eight when I figured out being taken at face value meant people were going to let me get by on my looks. If I’d had a different family I’d never have learned to think at all. Why would I need to?” The way she said it made me think she’d used her looks just as much as she’d used her brain to get where she was in life. There are beautiful people who know they’re beautiful, and use it like a weapon. I got the impression Marie used it as a tool. I couldn’t blame her.
“You’re being hunted by an ancient Irish god who wants you for his own nefarious purposes. Dead or alive will do. Have I got that right?”
Marie nodded.
“Right,” I said. This was completely insane. “How can I help?”
“He’s gaining power,” she said. “He will until the sixth, and then he’ll be banished to the otherworlds until Samhain. It’s the cycle he’s bound to.”
“Until what?”
“Halloween,” Gary and Marie both said. I looked at Gary. He shrugged and ate a piece of bacon. I pressed my eyes shut, wished it didn’t make my cheek hurt, and opened them again to look at Marie. She kept right on not looking as if she were completely insane.
“Just out of morbid curiosity—the sixth?”
“It’s the last day of Yule.”
I wished she would stop saying things like that as if it explained everything. I waved my hand in a circle, eyebrows lifted as I shook my head. Apparently the connotation of “yeah, so?” got through to her, because she sat back with a quiet sigh.
“Yuletide used to be very important in the Catholic Church. It’s the twelve days from Christmas to the sixth of January, and it marks the days of Cernunnos’s greatest power as he rides on this earth.”
“You’re telling me some random church holy days hold sway over an immortal god.” That time the sarcasm came through loud and clear, whether she was pretty or not. Her shoulders drooped.
“Those dates are closely tied to the solstice and the half-moon cycle after the solstice,” she said very quietly. “There aren’t any written records, of course, but I’ve always suspected the lunar cycle had more to do with when the Hunt rode than our calendar.”
“Oh.” I stopped being so sarcastic, the wind taken out of my sails. “Okay. I guess I can buy that.” Insofar as I was buying any of it. What was I doing here? “So what’s he want with you?”
Marie shook her head again. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to stay away from him since Halloween, traveling all over the place. He kept finding me.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “All over the world. So I kept moving. But since Christmas I’ve been…this morning was the closest. I’d never actually seen him before. Never touched him.” She dug into her pocket and pulled the tooth out, putting it on a napkin on the table. “I didn’t even think something like this could be done to him.”
I stared at the tooth. “Eww. I didn’t know you’d picked it up.”
“While Gary was bandaging your face,” she said. “It’s a good thing to have. It gives us a physical connection to him. It may help us build shields against him.”
“Build what?” Gary asked. He’d cleared two-thirds of his plate. I reached over and stole a piece of bacon. He stabbed at my hand with his fork, but not like he meant it. The bacon was really good, so crunchy it practically melted. I stole another piece. “Cut it out,” Gary said. “I gotta watch my figure.”
“Shields,” Marie said. “Protection.”
“How do I protect you from a god?” I demanded. “I could get you thrown in jail for a few days. The sixth is what, three days? He can’t get through steel bars, right?”
“Two. It’s the fourth. And no, he can’t, but he could send someone who could,” Marie pointed out.
I shrugged, hands spread out. “Fourth, okay, whatever, it’s morning, you’ve still got all day to get through. That makes three days. Anyway. So what do I do?”
“Build me a circle of protection.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You want me to get a bunch of people to stand around you with iron crosses and this tooth and only let people you say are okay come in?”
“No, a—” Marie broke off with an ugly little gasp. I was looking right at her. I couldn’t mistake the color draining from her eyes. All that gorgeous deep blue spilled away, even eating away the pupil, until there was just blind white, and then she blinked. Color came back to her eyes, but not the right color. Her irises were all black, tinges of gold and blue around where the pupils ought to be. She blinked a second time, and blanched, then spoke in a very thin voice, staring straight at me.
“You’re going to die.”
CHAPTER FOUR
An announcement of impending death sure could take a girl’s appetite away. The knot of weary tension in my stomach contracted around the bites of bacon I’d stolen, cold threads of terror seeping down like a net. The rational part of my mind dismissed it all.
That would have been a comfort, except it appeared a lot more of my mind wasn’t rational. I seized on to panic and ran with it. All of a sudden I understood why Gary had been so uncomfortable with Marie’s gift. I clenched my teeth together, wondering why my hands were so cold. I wrapped them around my coffee cup and tried to stare at Marie without looking at her eyes. They were still unnervingly black, and I never wanted to see anything like that again.
“Something just changed,” she went on, still in a whisper. “You weren’t supposed to die, but now you’re going to.” There was conviction in her voice. She didn’t blink. Her eyelashes were as black as her eyes, not brown like her hair.
“So I’m going to die because of you.” I meant to sound challenging. Somehow it came out sounding more like a frightened little girl. Marie nodded, dismay vivid even in her altered gaze.
“Well, fuck that.” There. That sounded more like me. I stood up. “I’d like to help you, lady, but not enough to die for you.” Great. Now I sounded like Gary. He scrambled to his feet beside me, favoring Marie with an unhappy glance. I dug into my fanny pack and came up with a five dollar bill and three Irish punts. I threw the five down and picked up my butterfly knife. “Gary, cover the rest, will you?” I headed for the door ignoring the sudden bubble of sickness that erupted in my stomach again, just as it had when I’d seen Marie through the plane window. Gary, thank God, didn’t argue, just pulled out his wallet.
“Wait!” Marie’s voice came after me, plaintive. I didn’t stop. “Maybe I can help you!”
I turned around in the door. The tired blonde behind the counter looked a little more awake, watching first me, then Marie. “You think you can help me?” I demanded. “Weren’t you the one just telling me I was going to die?”
Marie stood up. “The possibilities changed very quickly,” she said softly. “If I’m with you, maybe I can see them change again. Maybe I’ll know what you should do to avoid dying.” She tossed a bill onto the table, too, as Gary came around it. The waitress was going to get a major tip.
“What are you, a banshee or a precognitive?” I asked. I was still in the door having the conversation. That wasn’t a good sign, as far as I was concerned.
“To see someone’s death, you have to be precognitive,” Marie said. “I thought you didn’t believe in any of that.”
“Just because I don’t believe doesn’t mean I don’t know the names.” I put both hands on the door’s center bar and shoved my way out of the diner, listening to the bells chime as the door swung shut behind me.
A SCUD missile hit me in the chest. I smashed back into the door, glass shattering with the impact. The center bar hit me in the small of the back, and I rotated around it. God did not intend anybody’s back to be used in that fashion, except maybe those bendy Cirque du Soleil acrobats.
Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t one of those acrobats. I flipped over the bar and slammed the back of my head against the still-intact glass in the lower half of the door, then collapsed on my face onto glass-littered linoleum. My cheek split open again as I hit the floor. More glass fell into my hair and onto the floor around me, sounding like falling stars.
The possibility of passing out crossed my mind, but I just had to see who was running around suburban Seattle with a SCUD. Lifting my head told me all sorts of painful things about muscles in my neck that I didn’t want to know. I clenched my teeth together on a whimper. Whimpering seemed undignified. No one ever whimpered in the movies after getting smashed through a glass door.
There was no missile launcher in the parking lot. Instead there were very large hooves a few feet outside the destroyed door. While I waited for that to make sense, they disappeared and reappeared again, moving forward.
Have you ever heard the sound of tearing metal? It’s a high-pitched scream that sets your teeth on edge and lifts the hairs on your arms. It’s the kind of sound a mechanic gets used to, but in the diner, along with the rattle of more breaking glass and some other noises I couldn’t place, it was incomprehensible. The hooves disappeared again, and I wondered where my knife had gone. Glass and dust and spikes of wood fell down around me.
The floor wrenched apart with a shriek of sound as one of the enormous hooves smashed down inches from my face. I twisted my head up, whimpering again at the pain in my neck. An extraordinarily broad chest was about four feet above my head. It reared up, which seemed wrong somehow, but I was too busy rolling frantically out of the way to give it more thought. Glass crunched under my arms as I rolled. I felt tiny cuts opening up on my arms.
I ended up sitting with my back against the counter, gasping while the rest of the world caught up with me. The tired blonde behind the counter shrieked with the regularity and volume of a car alarm. Gary had moved maybe two feet from the table, which suggested that despite the slow clarity I was experiencing, the attack had happened very quickly. Marie was shouting in a language I didn’t understand. It didn’t sound like Italian.
The horse made more sense now, for some nebulous value of the word sense. It had been able to rear up because after it kicked me in the chest it had torn out the entire door structure, and part of the roof had fallen down. The rest of the roof was on fire. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, but it didn’t seem to bother the horse.
Horse is such a limited word. The beast in the diner had the grace and delicacy of an Arabian and the size of a Clydesdale, multiplied by two. It shimmered a watery gray, bordering on silver, the color so fluid I thought I might be able to dip my hand in it. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to its forehead. There was no spiral horn sprouting there, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. It was Plato’s horse, the ideal upon which all others are based.
It was trying to kill me, and all I could do was admire it.
Then it screamed, shrill and deep all at once. The blonde behind the counter shut up, but I screamed back, a sort of primal response without any thought behind it.
Just for a moment, everything stopped.
There was a rider astride the gray, arrested in motion by my scream. He wore gray himself, so close to the color of the horse I could barely tell where one ended and the other began. The reputed Native American belief that white men on horseback were one exotic creature suddenly seemed very plausible.
The rider turned his head slowly and looked at me. His hair was brown, peppered with starlight, and crackled with life, as if touching it would bring an electric shock. It swept back from a massively sharp widow’s peak, and was held in place by a circlet. His face was a pale narrow line, all high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and a long straight nose.
The impression he left was of living silver. I locked eyes with him, expecting to see that liquid silver again. Instead I met wild-fire green, a vicious, inhuman color, promising violence.
He smiled and reached out a hand, inviting me toward him. His mouth was beautiful, thin and expressive, the curve of teeth unnervingly sharp, like a predator’s. I pushed up the counter, using it to brace myself, and wet my lips. Marie was right. I was going to die. The rider wanted my soul and I was going to give it to him without a fight because of that smile and those inhuman eyes. I took a step toward him.
The second SCUD of the morning hit me in the ribs and everything started to move again. I slammed into the floor under Gary’s weight, sliding across linoleum and a zillion sharp pieces of glass. We stopped when my head hit the far wall. I opened my eyes to find the butterfly knife lying against the wall a few inches away from my nose. The horse screamed again and reared back, missing my head by half an inch as he crashed back to the floor.
Gary’s breath smelled like syrup and bacon. “Are you outta your mind?” He popped up onto his knees and hauled me to mine by a fistful of shirt at the back of my neck. I snatched up the knife as the horse smashed down again, right where my head had been. I looked up at the rider, and the horse kicked me in the ribs with a toe. I felt the bone crack inward, and didn’t even manage a scream, just a pathetic little grunt.
From a very long way away, I heard Marie scream a warning, in English this time. Before I could react, Gary hauled me over backward. A tip of silver glittered through the air where my throat had been. The rider looked genuinely startled before his eyes narrowed and he urged the horse farther into the diner. They were huge, taking up all the room, all the air. I gasped and scrambled to my feet, clutching Gary’s arm with one hand and my ribs with the other. Breathing hurt.
“Leave them alone.” Marie sounded thin and tired and at the end of her bravery, but there she was at my side, looking up at the rider with a set chin. “I’ll go with you. Just leave them alone. They were only trying to help.”
I let go of Gary’s arm and shouldered forward. The rider watched me. Neither Gary nor Marie moved. Behind me I heard the blond waitress fumbling with the phone, and her panicked, “Hello? Police? Hello?”
“He’ll kill us anyway,” I said, very low. I couldn’t get enough breath to do anything else. “Because it’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s nothing personal. You’re the Hunt, and when the Hunt is loosed, you kill until someone binds you away again. Cernunnos.” Terrifying conviction gave my voice strength. Twenty minutes ago I’d never heard of the thing standing in front of me; now the knowledge of who and what he was felt like the only thing I’d ever been certain of in my whole life. I didn’t like that at all.
The rider’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, inclining his head.
“The Horned God.” I lifted my eyes to his circlet again, which wasn’t a circlet at all. It was more like Caesar’s crown, but it was part of him. It began at his temples and swept back in an elegant bone pattern, horns curved to the sides of his head and meeting at the back, woven together there. Very practical. No catching your head on tree branches that way. I wondered if he shed them yearly and grew them again, or if they were as eternal as he was.
“They grow with my power,” he replied. Chills ran through me. It wasn’t that he responded to an unasked question. That seemed perfectly normal from this being. It was his voice, dark and rich and earthy, deep enough that a roar from him would shake the world. That, and I was quite certain he hadn’t spoken English or any other language I knew.
“What’d he say?” Gary whispered. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marie shake her head fractionally.
“You cannot stop me,” Cernunnos said, little more than a murmur.
“What do you want?” I still couldn’t breathe enough to get a real voice out. He laughed, and it took everything I had to not run away.
“To ride free and hunt,” he answered. “That is what we all want.”
“All?”
“My host.” He flicked his hand casually at the parking lot. I knew I shouldn’t, but I looked anyway.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Gary said.
“Not exactly,” Cernunnos said, and that time Gary understood him. He flinched, jerking his eyes from the parking lot back to Cernunnos. I couldn’t have looked away from the lot if someone paid me to. Everything I didn’t believe in had come to roost there, things that just hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It was like someone pulled the bandage off in one swift rip, exposing a world I didn’t believe existed in full Technicolor glory.
The riders moved too quickly, or maybe not enough in this world, for me to get an accurate count. There were close to a dozen, though, and one magnificent pale gold horse with no rider. Animals and riders alike faded at the edges, sunlight draining through them. Around their knees crept enormous sleek white dogs, with lowered heads and reddened eartips and violent red eyes. They avoided the few cars in the parking lot, milling around them but never touching them. Settled on the cars were narrow, long-beaked birds I’d never seen before, whose cries sounded like lost children. The dogs growled and snapped, every once in a while one baying at the sunrise. I could hear the horse’s hooves against the asphalt, but the bridles made no sound, and neither did the riders as they drifted, waiting for their master.
“That isn’t possible,” I whispered. Cernunnos laughed again.
“You name me the Horned God and yet say my host is impossible? What are you, little mortal?” He put the silver sword against my chin, and turned my face toward him. I held very still, meeting his eyes.
Apparently I do not learn quickly. Meeting his eyes was a terrible mistake the second time, too. They were phenomenal, promising power and passion and eternity. All I wanted was to be with him, part of his ancient world. His blade caressed my cheek, opposite the cut Marie had made earlier. It felt like a lover’s touch, and I wanted all the more to be with him.
“You could be,” he murmured to the unspoken desire, “but then you would interfere, little mortal, and I am very tired of being interfered with. A shame, to end all your unrealized power, but more of a shame to be closed into the night again.”
They say watch the eyes, when you’re about to get into a fight. There are some people who can hide the telegraph of their actions from their eyes. Cernunnos wasn’t one of them: he had no need to be. It just took a flicker, before he drew the sword back and punched it forward. It was all I needed.
I jolted forward, into the sword, instead of away. I tried to twitch enough to one side so the blade would catch my shoulder, instead of something vital. The horrible cool straightness of metal slid through me, fiery pain filling up the right half of my body. It hurt so badly my knees collapsed, and for an instant the sword through my torso was the only thing holding me up. I was pretty sure the next breath I let out would have blood on it.
But now I had his blade trapped.
And I had steel.
One-two-three. The clack-clack-clack of the butterfly knife sounded very loud to me, over the pounding blood in my ears. I coughed, and that made the sword scrape up and down my lung. I spat a mouthful of blood at Cernunnos, pleased that he flinched back. I dragged myself forward along the blade, and took a handful of his shirt, half-expecting it to slip away through my fingers like melting cotton candy. But it held, and as his horse neighed and reared up again, I kept my fist in his shirt and pulled him down. He fell, weighing more than I expected. My knife slid between his ribs, and he screamed.
The windows shattered. My eardrums shattered. I shrieked back, soundless into the overwhelming, unearthly noise that he made. I could see the scream vibrating from his throat even when blood slid from my ears and down my chin. His eyes weren’t compelling anymore. They were filled with seething rage, green fire boiling over. I waited for it to spill out onto me, to set me on fire, and after a few seconds I smelled it: flesh burning. It was sick and sweet and horrible.
It took a long time to look down and see that it was the hole I’d put in Cernunnos’s ribs that burned, not me. Silk singed around the knife, sticking and reeking. Beneath the fabric, his skin blackened and festered, bubbles beginning to burst. I screamed again, and jerked my hand back. The knife came out, and Cernunnos dropped to the floor. I began a long, slow collapse, Cernunnos’s sword still stuck in my lungs. Beyond it, I could see his mouth moving, and even though I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard him promise, “You will pay for this, little mortal.”
The floor came up in a rush and hit me very hard.
CHAPTER FIVE
For a few moments it was very, very dark, and then it was very, very bright. I thought, So this is what it’s like to be dead, and then, Shit, man, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true.
I squinted. The brightness wasn’t really very much like a white tunnel. It was actually a lot like staring directly into the sun. I closed my eyes, and a giant ball of green danced behind my eyelids. It turned red, then blue with red outlines as I squinted my eyes open again. Outside of the white light there was blue that looked suspiciously like the sky.
Lying there, under the suspiciously ordinary sky, I heard a drumbeat. It faltered, unsteady, like the drummer didn’t know what he was doing. I turned my head toward it, scraping my cheek against hot earth. Tears from staring at the sun ran over my nose and wicked away into desert sand.
My cheek didn’t hurt. I rubbed it against the ground a little, and it kept on not hurting. In fact, none of my body hurt, and that seemed wrong. I was pretty sure that only a minute ago there’d been all kinds of holes in it.
Overall, not hurting was an improvement. The sun was hot, and the sand, for ground, was comfortable. I closed my eyes again and relaxed. The drumbeat missed a beat.
“I wouldn’t advise going to sleep right now.”
My eyes popped open and I blinded myself with the sun again. Dammit. I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. No one was there.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I flopped onto my back again.
“Do you hear the drumbeat?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped. The drumbeat sped up for a few beats, then slowed again.
“You should get up and follow it.”
“I’m comfortable.” I closed my eyes more firmly. I was not having a discussion with an invisible man.
“I’m not invisible. You just can’t see me.”
There was a lovely piece of logic. I sat up, glaring around.
If this was my subconscious’s idea of paradise, I needed my head checked. Sulfur-colored sand dunes swept up against robin’s egg-blue sky, both broken periodically by huge outcroppings of rough red stone. Wind hissed across the sand, smelling dry and old. Under my hands, fine particles of earth gritted against each other and melted away, leaving depressions for my fingers. The whole place reminded me of Arizona, only more so.
“This isn’t even the kind of Indian I am,” I protested. The drumbeat sped up a moment, getting louder. I twisted toward the north, where it was coming from. I wondered if I really should follow it.
“You should,” the voice said helpfully.
“Why? I can’t even see you. Why should I listen to you?” I looked around through my eyebrows, trying to find the voice’s origin. “Why can I listen to you? Hear you, I mean. What are you?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions. You can’t see me because you don’t believe in me. You can hear me because you’re dying, and it’s letting me slip in.” The voice sounded like this was a normal thing to say.
Despite the burning sunshine, shivers ran through me, and the drumbeat faltered. “Am I really dying?”
“Oh, yeah. You’re really dying.” The voice had a casual bedside manner. “You can choose not to, if you want.”
“Why the hell would I choose to die?” I climbed to my feet. He had to be around here somewhere.
“Because living means changing your entire worldview. That can be a very difficult thing to do.” His voice came from the same direction as the drumbeat.
“Oh, and dying is easy?” I began walking toward the north, glowering at the invisible voice.
“Dying is remarkably easy. Just stop going toward the drum, and in a few minutes, it’ll stop.”
“And then I’ll be dead?” I didn’t exactly break into a run, but I picked up the pace a bit. The drumbeat accelerated. “That’s my heart, isn’t it?”
“Yep,” the voice said.
“Are you a spirit guide?”
There was a pause that felt considering. “Yep.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘yep’?”
He laughed. “Yep.”
“How far is it to my—” I couldn’t say, to my heart. “To the drum?”
“Not too far. Would you like me to lead you there?”
I took a deep breath. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
A small coyote bounded in front of me, like he’d always been there. I looked behind us. His tracks were tangled with mine, across the sand. He yipped, and I looked forward again. He smiled a coyote smile, and leaped out across the sand in a long, lean run. “I can’t keep up with a running dog!”
“I’m not a dog. Come on.” He stretched out and I swore, but I began to run. The drumbeat sped up again, and my strides got longer, until I was running an easy fast lope across the dunes, my feet kicking up sprays of sand. The coyote stayed a few yards in front of me, cresting over a dune.
I followed recklessly, and the earth dropped out from under me. It turned scarred and pitted, like an asteroid crater with deep, sharp sides. I hit the ground where it began to slope again and rolled ass over teakettle, trying to protect my head as I bounced. The drumbeat sounded once, then stopped again, a rare staccato. The coyote ran on, much more gracefully than I, then looped back to snap his teeth at me.
“Hurry. You don’t have time for this.”
“I fell!”
He bared his teeth in a snarl and pranced away, jerking his head to urge me on. I stumbled to my feet and began to run again. The coyote snapped his teeth again, satisfied, and forged ahead.
The crater narrowed into an impact spot, less than a foot across and plummeting into blackness. The coyote dove into it, just barely fitting. I couldn’t possibly squeeze into it.
On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly be running across an uber-Arizona landscape inside my head, either, and that seemed to be happening without the slightest regard to what was possible. I took a deep breath and dove after the coyote—
—and the impact spot got much bigger, or I got much smaller. It turned into a tunnel, plunging downward. A trickle of water appeared. I loped after it, running on four feet like I’d always done it. My hands felt like hands, but as I watched them flash under my nose, they were pawed and clawed, like the coyote’s. The water widened, becoming a stream. I ran along the bank after the coyote, feeling a tail swishing behind me. The sand turned into rich dark topsoil, and then into solid granite, the stream cutting a swath through it. Every once in a great while I felt my heartbeat shaking the stone around us.
“Is time slowing down?”
“No,” the coyote said, “your heart is.”
Damn.
The stream disappeared without warning, sinking into stone, and the tunnel veered up at a steep angle. I dug unaccustomed claws into the hard rock, scrabbling for a purchase, and wriggled my way up the tunnel, shouldering past the coyote. Stone gave way and I burst through the earth into a pool of numbingly cold water. I kicked frantically toward the bright surface, dragging myself onto the bank a few seconds later. My hands were hands again. I wasn’t a coyote anymore. It felt strange.
The drumbeat, my heartbeat, ricocheted around me, shockingly loud. The coyote ran out of the pool and shook himself furiously on the bank, then trotted through a sparse, stingily kept garden to an unmoving lump on the ground. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed to my hands and knees, watching him.
He nosed the lump on the ground, then sat down beside it, head cocked at me, expression full of expectation. “Physician, heal thyself.”
I crawled over to the lump, still shivering. “Jesus Christ!” I reared onto my knees, backing away.
The lump was me. I looked like hell. Blood matted my hair, which hadn’t been clean to start with. The bandaged cut on my face was almost lost among dozens of other tiny, glass-infested nicks and scratches. My shining new silver necklace was stained red, the cross settled in a pool of blood at the hollow of my throat. My ribs on the left side looked deflated, bent inward, and the sword was still stuck in my right lung.
I—the one sitting, not the lump—fell onto my butt and began crab-walking backward. “I’m dying!”
“I thought we’d established that,” the coyote said. He hopped over my body—the one lying there—and grabbed my shirt in his teeth, tugging me forward again. “Heal yourself. It’s in you.”
“Dammit, Jim, I’m a mechanic, not a doctor.” The coyote was strong, pulling me forward even as I resisted. “I don’t know how.”
He let go of my shirt and lay down with his chin on his front paws. “You know how to fix cars, right? You know where everything goes.”
I nodded. He lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Pretend you’re a car. It’s a nice analogy.”
Are spirit guides supposed to know what analogies are? The coyote grinned at me, even though I hadn’t spoken aloud, and tipped his head toward my body. “You don’t have much time.”
“Pretend I’m a car. Right. Okay.” I scooted closer to my body, hesitantly, mouth pressed closed. “A car. Right. Start with the obvious.” My co-workers tell me I talk to myself when I’m working. I’d never noticed it before. “I’m leaking. What leaks? Oil filters leak. Great. I’m an oil filter.” I put a hand on my chest, grabbed the sword’s hilt with the other, and tugged. It stuck for a moment, grating against my ribs, and the drumbeat stopped entirely.
“No!” I yanked the sword harder, and it slid out with a liquid sound. I threw it to the side, and hit myself in the chest. I—the one on the ground—coughed, and the drumbeat made a sad little thump. Dark, important-looking blood spurted out, covering my hands.
“Patch it up,” the coyote said.
“I don’t know how,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I could imagine an oil filter, emptying itself onto the ground. I ran through the process of changing it—loosening the drain, oiling the gasket on the new filter, screwing it back onto the filter pipe. Uncertainly, I tried overlaying those images on my body, envisioning my torn lung as the old, burned-out filter, imagining the new one sliding into place.
Something clicked in the center of me, below my breastbone and just above my diaphragm in exactly the same place, the sickness that had impelled me to help Marie had been. It felt like cartilage popping, a thick painful feeling, as if a lock, stiff with age, had reluctantly opened. I felt it in both my bodies, the one I was consciously inhabiting, and the one lying all but lifelessly on the bloody grass. Energy surged through that place with the same cool feeling as drinking water on an empty stomach. It lined the insides of me and reached out, connecting my kneeling self to the dying body under my hands. For a few seconds I thought I could see through myself, the ridiculous oil filter analogy at work repairing my lung. The energy I felt was centered there, coiling inside the ruined cavity and patching it. Then the sensation faded and dizziness swept through me. I tilted over sideways, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t think it worked.”
“Take a look,” the coyote murmured. I pried my eyes open and looked down at myself. Ichory black blood still covered my chest and my hands, but when I pushed my shirt out of the way, the hole was gone, the skin unscarred.
“Holy shit.”
The coyote chuckled. “Now reinflate your lung.”
“What, like a tire?”
“Just like that.” He sounded approving.
Flat tire. Filled tire. It doesn’t take that long to fill a tire, but I had the horrible idea that I would explode my lung if I filled it too fast. The drumbeat thumped unsteadily, then fell into a more reassuring pattern as I envisioned air being pushed into a tire. I felt the same energy coil behind my breastbone again, shimmering through both bodies. It spilled out as I dragged in a deep breath. Beneath my hands, the other me did the same thing, and the alien pool of energy went dead again. This time it left me with the faintest sensation of still being there, waiting. I swallowed hard. “What is that?”
“It’s your destiny,” the coyote said.
My heartbeat missed another pulse, but overall it was much better. I let out a high-pitched laugh. “My destiny. I’m a car and I’m fixing me and it’s my destiny? Great, that’s just great, in a completely fucked-up surreal way.”
“The ribs next, I think.” The coyote sounded serene. I reached for the unlocked knot of energy more deliberately this time, and laughed again, a little hysterically, when it responded.
“How can I be doing this?” My broken ribs were like a body frame that had been torn apart. I pressed them back into shape, cautiously realigning them, welding the weak points carefully. Pressure I hadn’t consciously realized existed slowly eased, and I could breathe more easily. My whole body felt more aligned, stronger, just like a car felt solid with its frame intact. The energy I was using spilled from me like it was part of my bone structure, like it was integral to my being, but I’d never felt anything like it before.
“You’re finally beginning to accept a path you abandoned a long time ago,” the coyote answered. “You have gifts, Joanne Walker, that your spirit cries out to use. Healing is chief among them.”
“I don’t understand.” I sounded young and frightened, but even as I made the protestation I moved, without being told, on to the next of my injuries. The cuts and scrapes on my arms and face were a paint job. Using the coyote’s analogy worked: it gave me a way to focus the cool rushing power inside my belly. It was bewilderingly easy, almost instinctive. The surface damage of the cuts and scrapes called for less of that energy than the lung or the ribs had. I felt myself making choices I barely understood, siphoning just a fraction of the power available to deal with the smaller injuries. The rest settled behind the unlocked place above my belly, waiting. When the “paint job” was complete, the extension of energy faded back into me, joining the rest of the power behind my breastbone. I felt a little like a battery charging up.
I opened my eyes uncertainly, looking down at myself. I couldn’t do anything about my clothes. “I think I’m okay now.”
“What about that one?” The coyote poked his nose at the long cut on my cheek from Marie’s butterfly knife. I put my hand over it; the new paint job hadn’t entirely taken care of it. Instead of disappearing, it had scarred over, a thin silver line along my cheek. After a moment I shrugged.
“It wants to stay.”
Very smart dogs can look approving. The coyote did, then snapped his teeth at me. “I’m not a dog.”
“What is it with people reading my mind today?” I looked down at myself, the one lying in the grass. I still looked horrible, my skin a ghastly pallor that made very faint freckles stand out across my nose. My face wasn’t one that did sunken flesh well. My nose is what you might politely call regal, and my cheekbones are high, making my cheeks look very hollow and fallen. Lying there like that, I looked two breaths from dead. The drumbeat, my heartbeat, was still thudding with a degree of uncertainty. I put my hand out over my torso and chewed my lower lip. “There’s still something wrong. Like…” My car analogy almost fell apart. “Like the windshield is all cracked up and burnt from the sun.”
The coyote did the approving look again. “This is the hard part.”
I frowned at him nervously. “What do you mean, the hard part?”
He pushed his nose out toward the me that was dying, there on the grass. “You have to change the way you see the world.”
“Isn’t this place enough proof of that?” I asked, pitch rising. The coyote’s ears flicked back and he sat up primly, offended.
“Is it?” he asked. “Do you believe what’s happening here?”
I looked down at my body again. My heartbeat was drumming much too slowly. “I don’t know. It feels real, but so do dreams.”
“This place shares much with dreams.” The timbre of his voice changed, deepening from a tenor into a baritone. I jerked my eyes up, to discover a red man sitting there on his butt, arms wrapped around his knees, loose and comfortable. He wore jeans with the knees torn out, no shirt, and he was genuinely red. Brick red, not a color skin comes in, not even sunburned skin. Long straight black hair was parted down the middle, and his teeth were better than Gary’s. His eyes were golden, as golden as the coyote’s. I blinked, and the coyote was back.
“Is Coyote even a Cherokee legend?” I kept blinking at him, hoping he’d turn back into the red man. He stayed a coyote. Still, if men like that were wandering around here, I’d take it as a good argument that this garden had a lot in common with dreams.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Coyote said. “You don’t have a lot of time, Jo. Is this real?”
I scowled down at my body. If this is a dream, I decided, when I look up, he’ll be the guy again. I’m aware, so it’s a lucid dream, so I can affect it, and he’ll be the man because I want him to be.
I looked up. The coyote was sitting there, head cocked, waiting for me.
“Dammit,” I said out loud. A thin line in the spiderweb I felt inside me made a hissing sound like cracking glass, and disappeared. The drum missed a long, scary beat, then fell into a natural, reassuring rhythm.
“Time to go back,” Coyote said, and the garden went away.
CHAPTER SIX
Shit, I thought again, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true. I closed my eyes. The light continued to bore into my eyelids until I opened them again. The paramedic squatting above me clicked the penlight off, announcing, “She’s back,” to someone out of my line of sight.
“I’m back,” I agreed in a croak, and closed my eyes again. Perhaps if I was very lucky I’d go away again.
“Getting the crap beat out of you isn’t gonna make Morrison feel bad enough not to fire you, Joanie,” the someone said, then lifted his voice. “Forget the ECG, Jimmy. She’s back with us. Looks like the other guy got the worst of it. What happened,” he said, addressing me again, “his gang dragged him off to die?”
My arm weighed about twenty thousand pounds, but I picked it up and dropped it on my chest, trying to find the hole the sword had poked in me. I found it by proxy. There was a gash in my shirt, a nasty hole stiffening with dried blood. Beneath it, my rib cage seemed to be unpunctured. I rolled my head to the side, somewhat amazed that it stayed on, and croaked, “Gary?”
All I could see were feet. I didn’t know what kind of shoes Gary wore, but I was pretty sure they weren’t open-toed blue leather heels, absolutely impractical for Seattle in January.
“Who the hell is Gary?”
I rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to focus on the paramedic. “Oh,” I said after a while. “Billy. Cabby.”
“No, Billy Holliday, sweetheart. You’ve always been easily confused.” He squatted by me again, pushing my eyelid back and inspecting my pupil. “How many fingers do you see?”
“I don’t see anything, Billy, somebody’s got his damn thumb stuck in my eye. What happened, you get called in early?”
“How’d you know?” He took his thumb out of my eye and elevated his eyebrows at me.
“The shoes.”
Billy Holliday was, as far as I knew, Seattle’s only cross-dressing detective. I’d met him three days after I was hired: dispatch asked me to rescue an off-duty officer whose car had broken down. Dispatch hadn’t mentioned that the cop in question would be wearing a pale yellow floral print dress and had biceps bigger than my head. Billy looked better in a dress than I did.
Not that I could remember the last time I wore a dress.
Billy inspected his feet. “I shoved my feet into the first thing I found next to the door,” he admitted. “Do you like them?”
I decided I was feeling better, and began to sit up. Billy pushed me back down. “I think they’re great,” I offered, and tried to sit up again. The admiration didn’t appease him, and we had a good little tussle going when Gary’s knees intruded in my line of vision. He crouched while I wondered how I recognized his knees.
“You oughta be dead, lady.”
I let Billy win and dropped onto my back. “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s Marie got to say about that?”
“You ought to be dead,” she said from above my head. I tilted my chin up and looked at her foreshortened form through my eyebrows.
“That’s reassuring.” I closed my eyes. “What happened?”
I felt Marie and Gary cast uncomfortable glances at Billy. “Billy,” I said without opening my eyes, “go change your shoes, would you?”
Mortal offense filled his voice. “What, so you can get your story straight? What kind of detective do you take me for?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” I tried to remember where I’d heard that recently. Oh, yeah. Coyote.
My head began to hurt again.
I pushed up on an elbow, opening my eyes. “I’m asking as a friend, Bill. Or I’ll steal your distributor cap.”
He grinned reluctantly. “Friends don’t threaten friends’ distributor caps. Look, you sure you’re okay, Joanie? You look like hell.”
“I’m sure. I’m fine. I swear I’ll explain it later.”
“Arright.” Billy stood up. So did Gary. They sized each other up while I worked on climbing to my feet. Gary nodded tersely, and Billy walked off. It all smacked of some sort of bizarre male testosterone thing. I tried hard to ignore it.
“What happened?” I asked again. My balance was off. I spread my arms out, trying to find my center. Then it occurred to me that Coyote wanted me to do exactly that, and my head hurt more. I rubbed my temple, then my face, and that didn’t hurt at all. Fascinated, I prodded at my cheek. No pain.
“You got a scar,” Gary pronounced, staring wide-eyed at my face. “On your cheek. Where she cut you. A real thin scar. It was still bleeding just a minute ago.”
I slid my fingertips over my cheek, feeling the thin line, perfectly healed. “What,” I asked for the third time, “happened?” The scar felt weird. I’d always had good skin.
“The Hunt took Cernunnos away,” Marie said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever hurt him like that before.”
“Bully for me.” I kept rubbing my cheek. “How’d I get into the parking lot?”
“I carried you,” Gary volunteered. “The diner was on fire.”
I turned around and looked at it. Sure enough, it was on fire. There were firemen there now, and I realized I’d been hearing the sounds of water and steam and men calling to one another since I woke up. Clouds of steam and smoke rose up, and, as I watched, a section of the roof fell in. All and all, I was glad Gary hadn’t left me in there. “Thanks. What happened to the sword?”
Gary jerked a thumb toward his cab. “In the back seat. I thought we oughta leave it in you until the paramedics got here, but Marie kept sayin’ we had to get it out. Guess I’m not much good at sayin’ no to a dame.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you look like the henpecked husband type.” My fingers drifted back to the hole in my shirt, feeling skin through it. It felt perfectly normal. I pulled the collar of the shirt out and peered down. Gary guffawed. I muttered, “Oh, shut up,” and kept looking.
My bra was a bloody mess, and there was a gash in it. “God damn it,” I said, “that was a new bra.”
Gary laughed again, and I looked up long enough to glare at him. “Sure, laugh. It cost sixty bucks. God-damned men don’t have to buy goddamned expensive underwear….” I peered down my shirt again. There was no indication the bloody mess on the shirt and bra was from my own bleeding. Breasts, bra, blood, no hole in my chest. Lookit that. I felt like an X-File.
“You kept flashing between living and dying,” Marie said. “I just had the feeling that you wouldn’t live if the sword stayed in you.”
“You were right.” I stopped peeking down my shirt. It was too weird.
“So she made me pull the sword out,” Gary said, his whole face wrinkling up in a grimace. “And then…” He trailed off. Marie drew in a breath.
“And then you began to heal. Just like magic.”
“It was magic,” I mumbled.
“What?” Gary laughed again.
“It was magic,” I repeated, unconvincingly. Marie developed a smug grin. Even smug looked attractive on her. It wasn’t fair.
“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” she said with a reasonable amount of diplomacy. Unfortunately, her grin ruined the sincerity of the moment.
“A lot’s changed since then,” I muttered. A cord tightened around my heart, then loosened, like a bowstring snapping. A sudden vision of the cracked windshield blurred my vision, and a spiderweb-thin line in it sealed up, healing. I shivered a little and wrapped my arms around my ribs. “C’mon. Let’s go talk to Billy.”
“Wait.” Marie caught my arm. “We have a problem.”
Those were not the words I wanted to hear. It took a long time to convince myself to say, “What kind of problem?”
“Cernunnos wasn’t the one I fought at the church.”
I frowned at her without comprehension. “He couldn’t have been,” I said after a minute. “You took that knife from him.” I felt terribly clever for figuring that out, especially when surprise, followed by embarrassment, washed across Marie’s face.
“You’re right. I didn’t even think—but who was he, then? The Hunt was after me,” she insisted. I unfolded one hand from around my ribs to head off her protestations.
“I know. I saw. Maybe it was somebody human who’s working for him.” I admired how I said that, all casual-like. I could handle my world being turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe. No problem. I was cool. I was good. Yeah.
“Then why didn’t he follow me into the church?”
I stared down at her, at a loss. So much for being cool. “I don’t know. Look.” I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Billy and get that part of this over with before we try to figure the rest of it out, okay?” I glanced at Gary. He nodded. So, after a reluctant moment, did Marie.
We went to talk to Billy.
Once upon a time, a nice young half-Cherokee half-Irish girl went to college and got the ultimate would-you-like-fries-with-that degree: English. I had no illusions that I’d get a job in my field when I graduated from college, but I’d never planned to. I already had a day job. I’d started learning how to fix cars when I was barely old enough to walk, and I never really wanted to do anything else.
When I graduated from the University of Washington, my part-time college gig at a local mechanic’s shop couldn’t upgrade me to full-time, so I hired on with the North Precinct police department. The best part about it was I didn’t have to move out of the apartment I’d been renting since my sophomore year of college.
There was just one itty-bitty catch: my then-supervisor, Captain Nichols, wanted me to go to the police academy. It was the black-and-white photos they took for station ID that did me in: my Native American blood showed through like a waving red flag, and Nichols couldn’t resist a bonafide Indian woman on the roster. It made the department look good. I went to the academy, managed to survive it and gratefully slunk back to the garage, there to stay.
A year later, Nichols retired and Captain Michael Morrison replaced him.
Odds are that Morrison and I never would have so much as spoken, if I hadn’t brought my car to the precinct car wash fund-raiser. I was not prone to doing that sort of thing: my car, Petite, is my baby, and I prefer to wash her myself, but Billy’s oldest kid begged and pleaded with me, and I was weak in the face of big-eyed nine-year-old boys. So I brought her to the car wash.
How any red-blooded American male could mistake a 1969 Mustang for a Corvette, even an admittedly sexy ’63 Stingray, I will never understand. But Morrison did, and I laughed in his face. If I were to be totally honest, I might go so far as to say I mocked him mightily, before, during and after laughing in his face.
I didn’t know at the time that he was my new top-level supervisor.
I say that like knowing would have made a difference.
I generally went to some lengths to avoid admitting to myself that I’d behaved like a complete, unmitigated jerk. It was like a horrible, embarrassing reversion to elementary school, where you indicate you think a boy is cute by throwing rocks at him. Once I’d lobbed the first rock, so to speak, I didn’t know how to stop, and the relationship hadn’t exactly improved with time. As far as I could tell, neither Morrison nor I had much life at all outside of the station, so we ran into each other often enough to develop a long-term, standing animosity. We were like Felix and Oscar without the good moments.
So when I’d asked for some personal time off to go meet my dying mother, Morrison’d been in a hurry to tell me that the department could only afford me six weeks of leave, and then they’d have to replace me. I told him I’d be back in a month.
That month stretched to two, then three. When I called to say it was going to be another month, Bruce at the front desk sounded downright grim, and told me that Morrison wanted my ass in his chair the minute I got off the plane.
Which was why I was now on Morrison’s side of Morrison’s desk, in Morrison’s remarkably comfortable chair, with my feet propped up on Morrison’s scarred gray desk. I just had to push my luck.
The office was large enough to not be claustrophobic. The door opened against a half wall of windows that let in the mild winter light. Two chairs that fit under the category of “comfy” were on the opposite side of Morrison’s desk, the side I was supposed to be on. Another three folding chairs were tucked around a long brown table shoved under the windows and into the back corner. The table, like Morrison’s desk, was buried beneath chaotically distributed paperwork.
Morrison’s desk looked out onto the offices through another set of windows, floor-to-ceiling, Venetian blinds hanging at the tops. He usually left them open. When they were closed, somebody was in huge trouble. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved they were open now.
Three calendars, with the past, present and next months turned up, were tacked on a bulletin board above a quietly percolating coffeemaker on the other side of the office. Around the calendars were clippings from cases, past and present, overlying one another until the board below them was virtually invisible. Next to the coffeemaker was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock. I wondered if it had been a Christmas gift, and who had given it to Morrison. There were no photos of family on his desk. I doubted he had any.
I eyed the clock. He’d kept me waiting seventeen minutes. It only seemed fair, since I’d kept him waiting four and a half months.
A moment later the door banged shut and I flinched upright, startled out of the first sleep I’d had in days. Morrison glowered at me from the doorway. I cast another glance at the clock. I’d been asleep less than three minutes. Just enough time to make the worst possible impression. I hoped I hadn’t drooled on myself.
“Get,” Morrison growled, “the hell. Out. Of my. Chair.”
I beamed. “Bruce was very specific,” I said in my best innocent voice. “‘Morrison wants your ass in his chair the minute you get off the plane.’”
Morrison took a threatening step toward me. I cackled and waved a hand, climbing to my feet. “I’m getting. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.” I walked around the desk to the chair I was supposed to be in, and sat.
Or that’s what I meant to do, anyway. What I actually did was take two steps, tread on my shoelace and collapse in a sprawl at Morrison’s feet. I lay there wondering why I couldn’t breathe. I could feel Morrison staring at the back of my head.
The floor was pretty comfortable, all things considered. Maybe if I stayed there, Morrison would just have me thrown in a nice quiet cell where I could sleep for two or three days. Except there were no quiet cells at the station, and I knew it. I groaned, pushed myself to my hands and knees, then sat back on my heels.
“Don’t do it, Joanie!” someone bellowed, loud enough to be heard through the window. “The job ain’t worth it!”
It took several seconds for my position, relative to Morrison’s, to sink in. Then I turned a dull crimson, too tired to even get up a really brilliant shade of red. Morrison glared over his shoulder and stomped around the desk to take his seat, all without ceasing to scowl at me. I climbed to my feet in a series of small movements, using the desk to push myself up incrementally. Eventually I got turned around and met Morrison’s frown.
“You look like hell,” he said, which wasn’t what I expected, so I blinked at him. He waved at the chair. “Siddown.”
I sat. Not, thankfully, right where I was standing: I had the presence of mind to stagger the couple of steps to the chair. Morrison watched me. He was in his late thirties and looked just like a police captain ought to: a big guy, a little bit fleshy, with cool investigating eyes and strong hands that had blunt, well-shaped fingernails. He was good-looking in a superhero-going-to-seed kind of way, which is probably one of those things you’re not supposed to notice about your boss. I sank into the chair and closed my eyes.
Morrison leaned back in his chair. It creaked, a high shriek that made hairs stand up on my arms. “You overextended your personal leave by three months, Walker.”
“I know.”
“I hired your replacement ten weeks ago.”
“I know.” Damn, but I was a stunning conversationalist. My eyes were glued shut. I rubbed at them, and the sticky contacts suddenly made tears flood through my lashes.
“Jesus,” Morrison said in mystified horror, “don’t tell me you’re crying.”
“It’s my contacts,” I snarled.
“Thank God. You never struck me as the weepy sort.” Morrison was quiet a moment. I didn’t have the energy to look up at him. “It seems like half the department’s been by to make googly eyes on your behalf.”
I snorted into my palms, undignified laughter. “Googly eyes?”
“Googly eyes,” Morrison said firmly. “For some reason they like you.”
“I fix their cars.” It was true. On particularly bad days—of which this was one—I thought it was because I had no way to relate to other people except through cars. On better days, I acknowledged that I just loved the job, and the fact that I’d made friends because of it was a bonus. “Come on, Morrison, give me the ritual ‘I divorce thee’ three times, and let me go home and get some sleep.” I pushed a hand back through my hair. Morrison winced. “God, do I look that bad?” I hadn’t checked a mirror. Maybe I should have.
“You look like you got hit by a truck. What happened?” Morrison actually sounded curious.
“I got into a fight.” I dredged up a little smile. “But you should see the other guy.”
Morrison snorted and stood up, coming around his desk to lean on the edge of it, arms folded as he looked down at me. I checked the impulse to get to my feet. Morrison and I were exactly the same height. I’d been known to wear heels sheerly for the pleasure of looking down on him. He was looming on purpose. “I’m moving you to the street beat.” He sounded alarmingly pleasant.
I stared at him for a long time. “What?”
“I’m moving you to the street beat,” he repeated. “Corner cop duty.”
“You’re supposed to fire me,” I blurted. I’d never done time as a cop. I didn’t really want to. Morrison grinned, and pushed away from his desk to get himself a cup of coffee.
“The chief wouldn’t let me. You’re a woman, you’re an Indian, you’re a cop, all you’ve done wrong is not show up to work for a few months, and that was because of a personal family emergency. It’s not enough to fire you for. Not in this quota-happy age.” He opened a fridge under the coffeemaker table and poured milk into his coffee.
My eyebrows shot up. No one had ever actually mentioned quotas out loud. It was just one of those silent givens that nobody talked about. Morrison turned back, lifting his mug of coffee. “Want some?”
“Sure,” I said dazedly.
Morrison poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to me. I took a sip, burned my tongue, and clutched the cup with both hands, watching Morrison nervously.
“So I’m putting you on the street.”
“Why?” My voice rose and broke. Morrison beamed at me. I’d never seen him smile so broadly before. It was unnerving.
“Because I figure you’ll quit. You’re a mechanic, not a cop. You haven’t got the stuff. Want to save us both time and do it now?” Morrison didn’t burn his tongue when he sipped his coffee. The bastard.
I ground my teeth together so hard it hurt. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. Not in the face of that grin. I couldn’t prove him right, especially by quitting before I’d even tried.
“No,” I said through my teeth, standing up and putting the coffee cup aside. “No, I don’t think I do. Sir.”
It took every ounce of will I had available to close the door gently on my way out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
No fewer than eight cops—all of whose cars I tinkered with regularly—lingered outside Morrison’s office, ostentatiously reading files or exchanging stories over their desks. Every one of them fell silent as I carefully closed Morrison’s door and stepped away from the office. Bruce, a thin blonde who had no business being away from the front desk, put on a mournful smile. “Well?”
“The son of a bitch fired you,” Billy guessed before I had time to draw breath. An uproar met his speculation, a wall of outrage entirely on my behalf. Rex, short and stout as his name, flung his hat on someone’s desk and stalked toward me. I backed up into Morrison’s door, alarmed. The doorknob hit me in the butt.
“Get out of the way, Joanie.” Rex sounded like a bulldog, low-voiced and growly. “I’m gonna give that bastard a piece of my mind. He can’t do this to you! You were on family leave, for Christ’s sake!”
I edged to the side. “Um, actually…”
Rex stormed past me and flung Morrison’s door open, banging it closed behind him again. Around me, furious cops swore and waved their hands and lined up, God help me, actually lined up to be the next one to take on Morrison.
“Actually,” I mumbled, “he didn’t fire me.”
Nobody listened. I rubbed my hand over my eyes, setting my contacts to tearing again, and sighed. Bruce appeared at my elbow and guided me to a desk to sit down. “It’ll be okay, Joanie,” he promised. “You’re a fantastic mechanic. You’ll get a job in no time. Heck, you could probably keep yourself busy just fixing our cars, huh guys?”
“I fix your cars anyway,” I pointed out. “Nobody pays me for it.” Bruce had exactly one hobby: running. His wife’s car, a 1987 Eagle station wagon with a manual transmission, broke down more often than soap opera stars. I wasn’t sure he knew how to drive it, much less fix it. “Look, Bruce, I’m—”
Bruce patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Elise wants you to come over for dinner Friday. She’s going to raise holy living hell about you getting fired.”
Elise made the best tamales I’d ever had, and was convinced I was killing myself eating macaroni and cheese for every meal. “Elise is an angel,” I said, “but—”
Rex burst out of Morrison’s office, cheeks bright red with exertion. Billy marched through the still-open door. Even over the general noise I could hear Morrison’s, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” A moment later Billy backed out of the office, herded by Morrison, who stopped at the door, broad-shouldered and impressive.
“Joanne Walker has not been fired!” he bellowed. “All of you get the hell back to work!” He stepped back into his office, slamming the door behind him.
Eight officers of the law turned as one and stared at me accusingly.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” I said weakly. “He didn’t fire me. He busted me back to foot patrol.” For a moment I wondered if a mechanic could technically be busted back to anything.
Everyone was silent for about as long as it took me to wonder that, and then the cacophony began again. I tried, briefly, to explain, then gave up and let Billy defend my dubious honor as an honest-to-God cop with a badge and everything. I wasn’t sure where that badge was. I remembered they’d given me one when I graduated from the police academy, but my best guess was that it was in my sock drawer. Or possibly in the glove compartment of my car. Or maybe in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I slunk out while the debate about whether I was really a cop heated up.
Gary and Marie were waiting impatiently in the lobby. “You’re a cop?” Gary demanded as I came through the turnstile.
“No. Yes. No. Shit! Why?” I flung myself onto a bench and scrubbed my eyes.
“Jeez, lady, I didn’t mean to ask a tough question. What happened in there? Why didn’t you say you were a cop back at the church? Or the airport? I thought you were nuts, goin’ after some broad you saw from a plane.” Gary towered over me, hands on his hips. Marie hovered in the background, looking just as curious as Gary.
“I’m not a cop. I mean.” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I am a cop. I guess I’m a cop. I’m a mechanic. That’s what I do. Except now I don’t. Now I write jaywalking tickets, or something. I wonder when I’m supposed to be back at work. Shit.”
Gary and Marie stared at me. After several seconds, I mumbled, “I make more sense when I’ve had some sleep.” I pried my eyes open. Tears welled up again. Gary became sympathetic all of a sudden.
“All right, all right. I’ll take you home. Tonight we’ll get together and figure this out.” He actually patted my shoulder, just like Bruce had done.
“We?” Marie and I spoke together. She sounded surprised. I sounded small and pitiful.
“What, you think I’m gonna miss out on what happens next? Crazy dames.” Gary shook his head and pushed his way out of the station, muttering to himself.
Gary dropped me off at my apartment complex. I stood on the concrete stairs and waved as he drove off, then staggered up to my apartment, navigating to the bedroom without turning the lights on. No one lived there but me; it was a safe bet that there wouldn’t be anything unexpected on the floor except four months worth of dust. I was right: falling face-first into the bedcovers dislodged dust and made me sneeze, but nothing worse awaited me. My last conscious thought was that I’d forgotten to take my contacts out.
The apartment was empty of unexpected things. My dreams were not. Coyote was waiting for me. He looked warily approving while I frowned at him groggily. “How d’you do that?” I demanded. “Dogs don’t have that much expression.”
“You’ve never owned a dog, have you?” Coyote asked. “Besides, I’m not a dog.”
I put my face in my hands, eyes closed. “Whatever. Where are we? What do you want?” I peeked at him through my fingers. “Are you always going to be bothering my dreams?”
“This isn’t a dream.” Coyote cocked his head to the side, looking around. After a moment I did too, wearily. I had to admit I’d never had a dream that looked like this one. Even falling dreams, which weren’t big on detail, usually had a gray sky and a very long drop. This one didn’t even have that much, just dark storm clouds pushing at each other with no particular pattern or intent. I thought I preferred falling dreams.
I dropped suddenly, a sickening distance in no time at all. Coyote yipped, a short sound of annoyance and alarm. I flinched upright, back where I’d started. “Pay attention,” he said sharply.
“I am,” I protested. “What was that? Where are we?” There was nowhere for me to have fallen. Coyote and I drifted, in the middle of it, sitting on nothing.
“You called a dream up,” Coyote said patiently. “We’re in a place between dreams.”
“Why? I’m so tired.” I was whining. I made a small sad sound and straightened up, trying to behave like an adult. Coyote licked his nose.
“You did a good job this morning,” he said. I blinked at him slowly.
“Is that why I came here? So you could tell me that?” I didn’t mean to sound like a snappy, ungrateful bitch. I was just so damned tired. Coyote let the tone blow over him.
“Partly,” he agreed. “Ask the banshee to help you with your shields. You’re going to need them.”
“My shields?” I wasn’t used to feeling this thick.
Coyote smiled. I didn’t know dogs could smile. “I’m not a dog,” he said, and, “she’ll know what you mean. Now get some sleep.” He dropped a golden-eyed wink and disappeared.
Or at least, I ceased to be aware of him. Instead I became aware of someone pounding on my door with the patience and rhythm of a metronome. I stayed very still for what felt like a very long time, hoping the pounding would go away. It didn’t. After six or seven years I rolled out of bed and crawled toward the front door.
I made it to my feet somewhere in the living room and was rewarded for my monumental effort by barking my shin on the coffee table. I reached for the doorknob and the injured shin at the same time, pulled the door open, and slammed myself in the forehead with the edge of the door. Collapsing onto the floor in a sniveling lump seemed the only thing to do, so I did it. It was only when tears started to unstick my eyelashes that I realized that I not only hadn’t, but couldn’t, open my eyes. I took turns rubbing at my shin and my forehead and my stuck-together lashes. Somewhere up above me, Gary said, “Jesus Christ, Jo. You look like someone ran you over and backed up to see what he hit.”
“Nice to see you, too, Gary.” Not that I could see him. I put a hand over my throat. I sounded like a bulldozer had dumped a load of gravel into my chest. “What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.” He crouched; I could tell by the location of his voice.
I pried one of my eyes open. “No way. I just went to sleep.” I turned my wrist over and tried to focus on my watch. I couldn’t, but that was okay, since it was wrong anyway. “No way.”
“Yep. Seven-thirty. We’re supposed to meet Marie in half an hour at her place.” Gary straightened up again. I got my other eye open, and blinked tearfully at him.
“Okay. I guess, uh. Let’s go.” I swallowed, trying to loosen my voice up some, and worked on getting my body moving in a direction that felt like ‘up’.
“Uh,” Gary said.
I could only do one thing at a time. I stopped trying to stand and squinted at him. “What?”
“You might wanna think about taking a shower and changing clothes.”
I looked at him without comprehension for a while, then looked down at myself. And, in growing horror, looked some more. After a while, I said, “Oh yuck.”
I wouldn’t have thought sleeping in bloody gory clothes could be beaten for general yuckiness, but adding in a layer of dust over all that made me a fine imitation of a desiccated corpse. “Come in,” I grated. “I’ll shower.” I crawled away from the door without waiting to see if he came in.
The reflection in the mirror was marginally kinder fifteen minutes later. My hair was clean and slightly gelled into spikes. I was still pale, but only from lack of sleep, rather than from blood, dust and lack of sleep. I’d managed to unstick the contacts from my eyes and was wearing an old pair of glasses, thin gold wire frames with long narrow oval lenses. The gold did cool things to my eyes, or at least it did when I wasn’t still suffering from bloodshot-from-hell eyeballs.
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C.E. Murphy
Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt. No worries. No pressure.Never mind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing herself from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams. And if all that's not bad enough, in the three years Joanne's been a cop, she's never seen a dead body–but she's just come across her second in three days. It's been a bitch of a week. And it isn't over yet.
Praise for
C.E. MURPHY
and her books:
The Walker Papers
Coyote Dreams
“Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Thunderbird Falls
“Thoroughly entertaining from start to finish.”
—Award-winning author Charles de Lint
“The breakneck pace keeps things moving…helping make this one of the most involving and entertaining new supernatural mystery series in an increasingly crowded field.”
—LOCUS
“Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”
—Library Journal
Urban Shaman
“C.E. Murphy has written a spellbinding and enthralling urban fantasy in the tradition of Tanya Huff and Mercedes Lackey.”
—The Best Reviews
“Tightly plotted and nicely paced, Murphy’s latest has a world in which ancient and modern magic fuse almost seamlessly…Fans of urban fantasy are sure to enjoy this first book in what looks to be an exciting new series.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
[nominee for Reviewer’s Choice Best Modern Fantasy]
The Negotiator
Hands of Flame
“Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
House of Cards
“Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”
—LOCUS
“The second title in Murphy’s Negotiator series is every bit as interesting and fun as the first. Margrit is a fascinatingly complex heroine who doesn’t shy away from making difficult choices.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
Heart of Stone
“[An] exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A fascinating new series…as usual, Murphy delivers interesting worldbuilding and magical systems, believable and sympathetic characters and a compelling story told at a breakneck pace.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
C.E. Murphy
Urban Shaman
Book One: The Walker Papers
www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk)
This book is for my grandfather,
Francis John Joseph McNally Malone,
who would have been proud of me.
Acknowledgments
I hardly know where to begin saying thank you. Starting at the end and working my way backward seems appropriate.
First: my editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey, for taking a chance on a brand-new author; my agent, Jennifer Jackson, for her enthusiasm; and cover artist Hugh Syme, whose work I’m delighted to have my book judged by.
Second: Trip, for pointing out the glaring error in the rough draft and thereby making this a much better book; Silkie, for demanding the next chapter every time she saw me; and Sarah, my critique partner extraordinaire.
Third: my family, who never once doubted they’d be holding one of my books in their hands one day…
And most of all, Ted, who looked out the airplane window in the first place.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday, January 4th, 6:45 a.m.
There’s nothing worse than a red-eye flight.
Well, all right, that’s wildly untrue. There are lots of things worse than red-eye flights. There are starving children in Africa, hate crimes and Austin Powers’s teeth. That’s just off the top of my head.
But I was crammed into an airplane seat that wouldn’t comfortably hold a four-year-old child, and had been for so many hours I was no longer certain what species I belonged to. I hadn’t slept in over a day. I was convinced that if someone didn’t stay awake, the airplane would fall out of the sky, and I couldn’t trust anyone else to do the job.
My stomach was alternating between nausea from the airline meal I’d eaten hours earlier, and hunger from not eating another revolting meal more recently. I’d forgotten to take my contact lens case with me in my carry-on, and my eyes were burning. My spine was so bent out of shape I’d have to visit a chiropractor for a week to stand up straight again. I was flying back from a funeral to be fired.
Overall, starving children in Africa were taking a distant second to my own misery and discomfort. Shallow, but true.
A very small part of my mind was convinced that if the flight attendants would just let me into the unpressurized luggage compartment to find my contact case, everything would miraculously be right with the world. None of them would let me, so my contacts were welded to my eyes. Every several minutes I decided it wasn’t worth it and started to take them out. Every time, I remembered that they were my last pair and I’d have to suffer with glasses until I made an eye appointment.
I might have succumbed, but the glasses in question were also with my luggage. The idea of navigating a soft-focus world full of featureless faces gave me a headache.
Not that I didn’t have one anyway.
I climbed over the round man sleeping peacefully beside me and went to the bathroom. At least I could take the contacts out and stew them in tap water for a few minutes. Anything would be better than keeping them in my eyes.
Anything except my reflection. Have you ever noticed that the mirror is by far the largest object in those tiny airplane restrooms? I was a sick pasty color under the flickering florescent light, my eyes much too green against a network of bloodshot vessels. I looked like a walking advertisement for one of those “wow” eye-drop commercials. Second runner-up for Least Attractive Feature on an International Flight was my hair. I put my contacts in two little paper cups and set them ostentatiously on the appropriate sides of the sink, then rubbed water through my hair to give it some life again.
Now I looked like a bloodshot porcupine. Big improvement. The only thing on my person that didn’t look slimy was the brand-new silver choker necklace my mother’d given me just before she died. A Celtic cross pendant sat in the hollow of my throat. I wasn’t used to jewelry, and now that I’d been reminded it was there, it felt mildly horrible, like someone was gently pushing his thumb against the delicate flesh. I shuddered and put my contacts back in before weaving my way back down the aisles to my seat. The flight attendants avoided me. I couldn’t blame them.
I rested my forehead on a grease spot I’d left on the window earlier. The airlines, I thought, must have custodians who clean the windows, or there’d be an inches-thick layer of goo on them from people like me.
That thought was proof positive that I shouldn’t be allowed to stay up for more than eighteen hours at a time. I have a bad habit of following every thought to its miserable, pathetic little end when I’m tired. I don’t mean to. It’s just that my brain and my tongue get unhinged. Though some of my less charitable acquaintances would say this condition didn’t require sleep deprivation.
The plane had been descending for a while now, and I squinted at my heavy black wristwatch. The bright orange button for changing the time had become permanently depressed in Moscow, or maybe Venice. Probably Moscow; I’d found Moscow depressing, and saw no reason why the watch shouldn’t. It claimed it was 5:50 p.m., which meant it was almost seven in the morning. I frowned out the window, trying to find the horizon. The sky wasn’t turning gray yet, not flying into Seattle three days after New Year’s. I blinked at the darkness, trying to unglue my contacts again.
My eyes teared up and I spent a few minutes with my hands over them, hoping perversely that I didn’t blink the contacts out. By the time I could see again, the captain had announced the final descent into Seattle. Couldn’t they find a less ominous phrase for it? I don’t like flying as it is, even without the implication that before landing I might want to have all my worldly and spiritual affairs in order. I pressed my head against the window so I could see the ground when it came into view. Maybe I could convince it to let us land without it being our real final descent.
Or maybe not. The plane banked abruptly and began to climb again. A moment or two later the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom.
“Sorry about that, folks. Little disagreement over who got to land next. We’re going to take another spin around the Emerald City and then we’ll have you at the gate right on time.”
Why do airline pilots always call passengers “folks”? I don’t usually take umbrage at generic terminology—I’m one of those forward-thinkers who believes that “man” encompasses the whole darned race—but at whatever o’clock in the morning, I thought it would be nice to be called something that suggested unwashed masses a little less. Ladies and gentlemen, for example. Nevermind that, being an almost six-foot-tall mechanic, I had a hard time passing for a lady on a good day, which this wasn’t.
I watched lights slip away beneath us as we circled. If I have to fly, I like flying into cities in the dark of morning. There’s something reassuring and likable about the purposeful skim of vehicles, zooming along to their destinations. The whisk of cars meant that the people driving them had a goal, somewhere to be, something to do. That was a hell of a lot more than I had.
I stared down at the moving lights. Maybe I didn’t like them after all.
The plane dropped the distance that made me an active voyeur in people’s lives, instead of a distant watcher. I could see individuals under the streetlights. Trees became sets of branches instead of blurry masses of brown.
A school went by below us, swingsets empty. The neighborhood was full of tidy, ordered streets. Carefully tended trees, bereft of leaves, lined uniformly trimmed lawns. Well-washed cars reflected the streetlights. Even from the air well before sunrise, it screamed out, This Is A Good Place To Live.
The next neighborhood over didn’t look as posh. Wrong side of the metaphysical tracks. Cars were older, had duller paint and no wax jobs to make them gleam in the streetlights. Mismatched shingles on patched roofs stood out; lawns were overgrown. It wasn’t that the owners didn’t care. It was that the price of a lawnmower or a matched roof patch could be the difference between Christmas or no Christmas that year.
Not that I knew anything about it.
A whole street went by, lightless except for one amber-colored lamp, the kind that’s supposed to cut through fog. It made the street seem unnaturally vivid, details coming into sharp-edged focus below me.
A modern church, an A-frame with a sharp, nasty spire, was lit by the edges of the lone amber light. Its parking lot was abandoned except for one car, parked at an angle across two spaces, one of its doors hanging open. I wondered if it closed at all. Probably: it was a behemoth from the seventies, the kind of car that will last forever. I grew up with that kind of car. Air bags or no, the little crumply things they make today don’t seem as safe.
Someone tall and lean got out of the car, draping himself over the door as he looked down the street toward the functional light. Even from above I could see the glitter of light on the butterfly knife he played with, comfortable and familiar. Watching, I knew that he could play knife games in the dark and blindfolded, and he’d never stab a finger.
A woman broke into the amber light, running down the center of the street. She took incredibly long strides, eating a huge amount of distance with each step, but her head was down and her steps swerved, like she wasn’t used to running. Her hair was very long, and swung loose, flaring out as she whipped her head back to look behind her.
I twisted in my seat as the plane left the subdivision behind, trying to see.
A pack of dogs leaked out of the darkness. Their coats were pale gold under the amber light, and they loped with the casual confidence of a hunting pack following easy prey.
The woman stumbled, the pack gained and the plane took me away from them.
“You don’t understand. There is a woman in trouble out there.” It was the fourth time I’d said it, and the pilot kept looking at me like I was on drugs. Well, maybe I was. Lack of sleep has the same effect as certain narcotics. I was lodged in the door of the cockpit, other passengers pushing out behind me. Fourteen minutes had passed since I saw the woman. There was a knot of discomfort in my stomach, like I’d throw up if I didn’t find a way to help her. I kept hoping I’d burp and it would go away, but I didn’t, and the pilot was still eyeing me.
“And you saw this from the plane,” he said, also for the fourth time. He had that bright lilting sound to his voice that first grade teachers use to mask irritation. “There are lots of people in trouble, ma’am.”
I closed my eyes. They screamed with pain, tears flooding as I opened them again. Through the upwell, I saw an expression of dismayed horror cross the pilot’s face.
Well, if he was going to fall for it, I might as well milk it. “It was five minutes before we landed,” I quavered. “We circled around and came in from the northwest.” I lifted my wrist to show him the compass on my watch band, although I hoped that, being the pilot, he knew we’d approached from the northwest. “I was looking out the window. I saw a woman running down the street. There was a pack of dogs after her and a guy with a switchblade down the street in the direction she was running.”
“Ma’am,” he said, still very patiently. I reached out and took a fistful of his shirt. Actually, at the last moment, I grabbed the air in front of his shirt. I didn’t think security could throw me out of the airport for grabbing air in a threatening fashion, not even in this post-9/11 age.
“Don’t ma’am me…” I stared at his chest until my eyes focused enough to read his name badge. “Steve. Is that your name? Steve. Don’t ma’am me, Captain Steve. I just need to know our rate of descent. Humor me, Captain Steve. I work for the police department. You don’t want me to go to the six o’clock news after a murder’s been discovered and tell them all about how the airline wouldn’t lift a finger to help the woman who died.”
I didn’t know why I bothered. The woman was probably dead by now. Still, Captain Steve blanched and looked back over his shoulder at his instruments. I retrieved my hand and smiled at him. He blanched again. I guess my smile wasn’t any better than my hair or eyes just now.
“Hurry,” I said. “Once the sun comes up the streetlights will go off and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find her then.”
I left my luggage in the airport and climbed into a cab, trying to work out the triangulation of height, speed and distance. “Drive,” I said, without looking up.
“Where to, lady?”
“I don’t know. Northwest.”
“The airline? It’s just a couple feet down the term—”
“To the northwest,” I snarled. The cabby gave me an unfriendly look and drove. “Do you have a map?” I demanded a minute later.
“What for?”
“So I can figure out where we’re going.”
He turned around and stared at me.
“Watch the road!” I braced myself for impact. Somehow—without looking—he twitched the steering wheel and avoided the collision. I collapsed back into the seat, wide-eyed. “Map?” I asked, somewhat more politely.
“Yeah, here.” He threw a city guide into my lap. I thumbed it open to find the airport.
Airplanes go fast. I realize this isn’t a revelation to stun the world, but it was a little distressing to realize how far we’d flown in five minutes, and how long it would take to drive that. “All right, we’re going northwest of the lake.” I remembered seeing its off-colored shadow making a black mark below the plane as we’d left the subdivision behind. “Somewhere in Aurora.”
“Think? That ain’t such a good neighborhood, lady. You sure you wanna go there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m trying to find somebody who’s in trouble.”
The cabby eyed me in the rearview. “That’s the right place to look.”
I glared at him through my eyebrows. He smiled, a thin I’ve-seen-it-all grin that didn’t really have any humor in it. He had gray eyes under equally gray, bushy eyebrows. He had a thick neck and looked like he’d be at home chewing on a stogie. I asked if he had a cigarette. He turned around and looked at me again.
“Those things’ll kill you, lady.”
His voice was rough and deep like a lifetime smoker’s. Surprise showed on my face and he gave me another soulless smile, reflected in the mirror. “My wife died of emphysema three years ago on our forty-eighth wedding anniversary. You want a smoke, kid, find it somewhere else.”
Sometimes I wonder if I have a big old neon sign stamped on my forehead, flashing Asshole. I retaliated with stunning wit: “I’m not a kid.”
Gray eyes darted to the mirror again, and back to the road. “You’re what, twenty-six?”
Nobody ever guessed my age right. Since I was eleven, people have misguessed my age anywhere from three to seven years in one direction or the other. I felt my jaw drop.
“It’s a gift,” the cabby said. “A totally useless gift. I can tell how old people are.”
I blinked at him.
“Great way to get good tips,” he went on. “I go into this long explanation of how I always get ages right, and then I lie. Works like a charm.”
“So why’d you guess my age right?” The question came out of my mouth without consulting my brain first. I didn’t want to have a conversation with the cabby.
“Never met anybody who didn’t want to be in their twenties, so what’s the point? Why you going out there, lady? Lotta trouble out that way, and you don’t look like the type.”
I glanced sideways at the window. A faint reflection looked back at me. He was right. I looked tired, hopeless and worn-out, but not like trouble. “Looks can be deceiving.” His eyes slid off the rearview mirror like he was too polite to disbelieve aloud. “It’s somebody else who’s in trouble,” I said. “I saw her from the plane.”
He twisted around yet again. “You’re trying to rescue somebody you saw from an airplane?”
“Yeah.” I flinched as he twitched the steering wheel to keep in our lane, again without looking. “What do you do, use the Force?”
He glanced at the road and shrugged before turning around again. “So, what, you’ve got a hero complex? How the hell are you gonna find one dame you saw from the air?”
“I passed a couple basic math classes in college,” I muttered. “Look, I got the approximate height and speed we were traveling from the pilot, so figuring out the distance wasn’t that hard. I mean, adjusting for the change in speed is kind of a pain in the ass, but—” I set my teeth together to keep myself from rattling on. It was a moment before I was sure I had enough control over my brain to continue without babbling. “Someplace in that vicinity there’s a modern church on a street with only one amber streetlight. If I can find it before the lights go out—”
“Then you’ll be the first one on a murder scene. You’re nuts, lady. You must be desperate for thrills.”
“Like it could possibly be any of your business,” I snapped.
“Touchy, too. Pretty girl like you oughta be on her way home to her sweetie, not chasin—”
“I don’t have one.” I admit it. I snarled again.
“With your personality, I can’t figure why not, lady.”
I leaned forward and rubbed my eyes with my fingertips, elbows on my knees. The knot of unpleasantness in my stomach felt like it was trying to push its way out through my sternum, pressuring me to act whether I liked it or not. The idea that it would go away if I could just find the woman was settled into my bones, logic be damned. “Haven’t you ever just really felt like you had to do something?”
“Sure. I felt like I really had to marry my old lady when she got knocked up.”
I was in a cab with Plato. His depth overwhelmed me. I lifted my head enough to stare over the back of the seat at his shoulder. He grinned. He had good teeth, clean and white and strong, like he hadn’t ever smoked. They were probably false.
“Never felt like I had to go chasing down some dame I saw from an airplane, nope. Guess I figured I had enough troubles of my own without adding on somebody else’s.”
I leaned against the window, eyes closed. “Maybe I’ve got enough that I need somebody else’s to make the load seem lighter.”
I could feel his gaze on me in the rearview mirror again. Then he grunted, a sort of satisfied noise. “All right, lady. Let’s go find your corpse.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I glowered out the window. I wouldn’t have been so annoyed if I’d felt more confident myself. The cabby—whose name was Gary, according to the posted driver’s license, and whose seventy-third birthday had been three days ago—drove like the proverbial bat out of hell, while I clung to the seat and tried not to gasp too audibly.
The streetlights were still on when we got to Aurora, and I wasn’t actually dead, so I felt like I shouldn’t complain. Gary pulled into a gas station. I squinted tiredly at the back of his head. “What are you doing?”
“Go ask if anybody knows where that church of yours is.”
My squint turned into lifted eyebrows. “I thought men couldn’t ask for directions.”
“I ain’t askin’,” Gary said with aplomb. “You are. Go on.”
I got.
The pimply kid behind the counter didn’t look happy to see me. Judging from his thrust-out lip and down-drawn eyebrows, I figured he wasn’t happy to see anybody, and didn’t take it personally. He smirked at me when I asked about the church. Smirking is not a nice expression. The only person in the history of mankind who’d been able to make smirking look good was James Dean, and this kid, forgive me Senator Bentsen, was no James Dean.
I tried, briefly, to remember if I’d been that sullen and stupid when I was sixteen. I figured the fact that I couldn’t remember didn’t bode well, and went straight for the thing I knew would have gotten my attention at that age: cash. I wasn’t usually prone to bribing people, but I was too tired to think of anything else and I was in a hurry. I dug my wallet out and waved a bill at the kid. His eyes widened. I looked at it. It was a fifty.
Shit.
“You better walk me to the church for this, kid.”
He didn’t take his eyes from the bill. “There’s two A-frames I can think of. One’s about five blocks from here. The other is a couple miles away.”
“Which direction? For both of them.” He told me, still watching the fifty like it was a talisman. I sighed, dropped it on the counter, and muttered, “Thanks,” as I pushed my way out of the gas station. He snatched it up, hardly believing I was really handing it over. Great. I’d just turned a kid onto the lifetime role of snitch.
Worse, I’d given away a quarter of the meager cash I had on hand, and cabs from SeaTac were damned expensive. I climbed back into the car. “East a few blocks, and if that’s not it, there’s another one to the southwest. Hurry, it’s getting light out.”
“What, you want to get your fingers in the blood while it’s still warm? You need help, lady.”
“Joanne.” Having a nosy cabby know my name had to be better than being called “lady” for another half hour. “And you’re the one hung up on corpses. I’m hoping she’s still alive.” I tugged on my seat belt, scowling again. It was starting to feel like a permanent fixture on my face.
“You always an optimist, or just dumb?”
A shock of real hurt, palpable and cold, tightened itself around my throat and heart. I fumbled the seat belt. It took effort to force the words out: “You have no right to call me dumb.” I stared out the window, seat belt in one numb hand, trying furiously to blink tears away. Gary looked at me in the rearview, then twisted around.
“Hey, hey, hey. Look, lady. Joanne. I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”
“Sure.” My voice was harsh and tight, almost too quiet to be heard. “Just drive.” I got the seat belt on this time. Gary turned around and drove, quiet for the first time since I’d gotten in the cab.
I watched streetlights go by in the hazy gold of sunrise, trying to get myself under control. I didn’t generally cry easily and I didn’t generally get hurt by casual comments from strangers. But it had been a long day. More than a long day. A long week, a long month, a long year, nevermind that it was only the fourth of January. And the day was only going to get longer. I still had to stop by my job and get fired.
The streetlights abruptly winked out as we turned down another street, and with them, my chance to find the runner. A small voice said, “Fuck.” After a moment I realized it was me.
“That one’s still on,” Gary said, subdued. I looked up, keeping my jaw tight to deny tired, disappointed tears. A bastion of amber stood against the dawn, one single light shining on the entire street. I watched it go by without comprehension, then jerked around so fast I hurt my neck. “That’s it!”
Gary hit the brakes hard enough to make my neck crunch again. I winced, clutching at it as I pressed my nose against the window. “That’s it, that’s it!” I shrieked. “Look, there’s the church! Stop! Stop!” The car was gone from the parking lot, but there was no mistaking the vicious spire stabbing the morning air. “Holy shit, we found it!”
Gary accelerated again, grinning, and pulled into the church parking lot. “Maybe you’re not dumb. Maybe you’re lucky.”
“Yeah, well, God watches over fools and little children, right?” I tumbled out of the cab, getting my feet tangled in the floor mat and catching myself on the door just before I fell. “Well?” I demanded. “Aren’t you coming?”
His eyebrows elevated before he shrugged and swung his own door open. “Sure, what the hell. I never saw a fresh murdered body before.”
I closed my door. “Have you seen stale ones?” I decided I didn’t want to know the answer, and strode away. Gary kept up, which surprised me. He was so broad-shouldered I expected him to be short, but he stood a good two inches taller than me. In fact, he looked like a linebacker.
“You look like a linebacker.”
“College ball,” he said, disparaging enough that it was obvious he was pleased. “Before it turned into a media fest. It’s all about money and glory now.”
“It didn’t used to be?”
He flashed me his white-toothed grin. “It used to be about glory and girls.”
I laughed, stopping at the church door, fingertips dragging over the handle. They were big and brass and twice as wide as my own hands. You could pull them down together and throw the doors open in a very impressive fashion. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“You sure your broad is gonna be in here, lady?”
“Yeah,” I said, then wondered why that was. It made me hesitate and turn back to the parking lot. Except for Gary’s cab, it was empty. There was no reason the woman couldn’t have gotten into the car with the man with the butterfly knife, no real reason to think she’d even made it as far as the parking lot, much less the church.
“Yeah,” I said again, but trotted back down the steps. Gary stayed by the door, watching me. The car’d been on the south end of the parking lot, between the woman and the church. I jogged over there, eyes on the ground. I heard Gary come down the steps, rattling scattered gravel as he followed me.
“What’re you looking for? I thought you said the broad was in the church.”
I shrugged, slowing to a walk and frowning at the cement. “Yeah, but that’s probably just wishful thinking. I was wondering if there’d been a fight. If the guy with the knife was after her, she’d have had to have gotten thr—”
“What guy with a knife?” Gary’s voice rose as I crouched to squint at the ground. I looked over my shoulder at him.
“Didn’t I mention that?”
“No,” he said emphatically, “you didn’t.”
“Oh. There was a guy with a knife. He was good, too.”
“You saw this from a plane?”
I puffed out my cheeks. “You ever seen somebody who’s good with a knife? Street-good, I mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. So have I. It looks a certain way. Graceful. This guy looked that way, yeah, even from a plane.”
“Lady, you better have like twenty-two-hundred vision.”
I stood up. The bubble of icky feeling in my stomach was still there, prodding at me like I hadn’t done enough to help the woman. “I wear contacts.”
Gary snorted derisively. I sighed. “I know what I saw.”
“Sure.” He didn’t say anything for another second, looking at the ground. “I know what you didn’t see.”
“What?”
He pointed, then walked forward a couple of spaces. “Somebody lost a tooth.” He bent over and poked at a shining white thing on the concrete, not quite touching it.
I walked over, bending to look at the enameled thing on the ground. It was a tooth, all right, smooth little curves and a bumpy top, complete with bloody roots. “Eww. Somebody got cut, too.” I nodded at thin splatters of blood, a few feet farther out than the tooth, that were already dry on the concrete. Gary cast his gaze to the heavens.
“The lady goes ‘eww’ at a tooth and she’s looking for a corpse.”
“I’m looking for a person,” I corrected.
“And you think she’s in the church.”
“Yeah.”
“So why the hell are we screwing around in the parking lot?”
I looked around. “The light’s better over here?” It was one of my favorite jokes, left over from my childhood. I never expected anyone else to get it, but Gary grinned, dug a hand into his pocket, and tossed me a quarter. I caught it, grinning back. “Now that we’ve got that taken care of.”
We walked back to the church together.
I was right. The doors swept open, impressively silent. I felt like I should be leading a congregation in search of the light, not a linebacker-turned-cabby in search of a corpse. I stepped through the doors, half-expecting a floorboard to creak and mar the enormous silence.
Within a few steps I was sure a floorboard wouldn’t have dared creak in this place. It wasn’t the solemn, weighty quiet of old churches or cathedrals. Those places could absorb the sound of heels clicking and children laughing with dignity and acceptance. This church simply forbade them. I wasn’t even wearing heels, and I found myself leaning forward on my toes a little so that my tennies couldn’t possibly make any excessive noise on the hardwood floors. This was a church where “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” would be performed and harkened to weekly. I noticed I was holding my breath.
It was stunning, in an austere, heartless way. The A-frame probably carried sound beautifully, but the only natural lighting was from a wall of windows behind the pulpit. I use the term natural loosely: there wasn’t much natural about the violent, grim images of Christ’s crucifixion, or Joseph and Mary being turned away from the inn, or Judas’s betrayal, or any of the other scenes I recognized, more of them jimmied into the stained glass than I would have thought possible. This was a church where you came to be terrified into obedience, not welcomed as a sinner who has found the true way.
The pews were hardwood, without cushions, and the choir books looked as though they’d never been cracked open. I guessed you’d better know your music before you came to church. It was not a friendly place.
It was also completely empty of human life other than my own and Gary’s. I looked back at him. He frowned faintly before meeting my eye. I couldn’t blame him.
“I don’t know where she is,” I said before he could ask, and lifted my voice. “Hello? Hello?” My voice bounced up to the rafters and echoed back at me. The acoustics were incredible, and I tilted my head back to look longingly at the ceiling. “Wow. I’d love to sing in here.”
“Yeah? You sing?”
I shrugged. “I don’t scare the neighbors.”
Gary bent over and looked under the pews. “Yeah, well, maybe you can sing yourself up a dame. There ain’t nobody here, Jo.”
A muscle in my shoulder blade twitched. “Y’know, nobody calls me that except my dad.”
“What, did he want a boy?”
“Not exactly.” That seemed like enough information to volunteer.
Gary unbent a little, hooking his arm over the top of a pew as he looked at me. Enough time passed to let me know that he was politely not asking about my dad before he asked, “Then what do they call you?”
“Joanie, or Joanne, usually. Sometimes Anne, Annie.”
Gary straightened up, hands in the small of his back. “My wife was named Anne. You don’t look like an Anne to me.”
I smiled. “What’d she look like?”
“’Bout four eleven, blond hair, brown eyes, petite. You gotta be at least a foot taller than she was.”
“Yeah.” It came out sounding like a laugh, and I smiled again. “So call me Jo, then.”
“You sure? I don’t think you get along with your old man.”
“I don’t not get along with him.” How had I ended up in a church looking for a body and discussing my home life? “It’s okay. I don’t mind Jo.” I waited for the muscle in my shoulder blade to spasm again. It always did when I was tense. This time it didn’t. Maybe I really didn’t mind being called Jo. Who knew?
“There’s nobody in here, Jo,” Gary repeated. I tried to stuff my hands in my pockets, only to discover I didn’t have any. The thing I’d learned about traveling was that it was slightly less miserable if I wore stretch pants with an elastic waistband. The ones I was wearing were black and comfy and had nice straight legs, but no pockets. I hooked my thumbs into the strap of my fanny pack, instead. I hated the things, but I never learned to carry a purse, and a fanny pack is at least attached to me. Makes it harder to forget.
“C’mon, let’s go. Nobody here.”
“No, wait.”
Gary sighed, exasperated, and leaned against a pew, arms folded across his chest. Seventy-three or not, he made a pretty impressive wall of a man. “Then do your thing and find the broad.”
I looked at him. “My thing?”
“You got some kinda thing going on here, lady. Normal people don’t stick their heads out a plane window and see dames that need rescuing. So do your thing and rescue her. My meter’s still running.”
Oh, God. It probably was, too. “Hope you take credit cards.” I walked to the front of the church and around the pulpit.
I really, honest-to-God, expected to see the woman cowering in the back side of the pulpit. That she wasn’t came as a shock. “Well, shit.”
“What? You find your body after all?” Gary shoved off his pew and came long-legging it up to the front.
“No, you ghoul. There’s nobody here. I really thought she would be.”
“I’ll cut you a break and won’t expect a tip, just for the satisfaction of being right.” He leaned on the pulpit, grinning whitely at me. I had the sudden urge to pop him in those nice straight clean teeth. It must have shown in my face, because his grin got even wider. “You wanna try it?”
“No,” I said sourly. “I think you’d break me in half.”
“Only a little bit.”
“Gee. Thanks.” I backed up a couple steps and leaned on the edge of the…hell if I know what it’s called. Looked like an altar to me. All gilded and dour. It had probably never been introduced to a woman’s behind in its whole existence. Or maybe it had been. You always heard stories about the priest who’s a pillar of the community but turns out to be having affairs with half the congregation. Seemed to me if you’re going to sin, you might as well do it right. On the altar would be a nice big sin. “I thought she’d be here.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Churches are supposed to be sanctuary, or something. I thought she’d be safe in here. Consecrated ground.”
“What century are you living in, lady?”
“The wrong one, I guess.” I thumped on the edge of the altar, annoyed.
The top slipped.
I leaped off it like it had bitten me. Gary’s bushy eyebrows went up. We both stared at the inch-wide crack at the edge of the box where the lid had pushed back. “You don’t believe in vampires, do you, Gary?”
“God damn it,” he said, “I was trying real hard not to think that way.”
“Kind of fits, though, doesn’t it? Scary-looking church, big old crypt in the middle, the living dead ris—”
“It’s past dawn,” Gary said hastily. “No vampires after dawn. Right?”
“There’s no such thing as vampires, Gary.”
He stared at me dubiously. I stared at the crypt dubiously. Funny how a second ago it had been an altar and now it was a crypt. “Well?” he demanded. “Are you gonna look in it?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“As soon as I get up the nerve.”
He prodded me in the small of my back, pushing me forward. I admired the resistance in my body. I felt like he was trying to move a me-shaped lead weight. I expected to hear my feet scraping along with the sound of metal ripping up hardwood. Instead, I stumbled half a step forward, then glared over my shoulder at Gary. “You’re a big strong man. Aren’t you supposed to be plunging into danger before me?”
“You’re forty-seven years younger than me, lady,” he pointed out. “And almost as tall as I am. And you’re in my weight class. And it’s your vampire in the coffin.”
“I am not in your weight class,” I said, offended. “You’ve got to outweigh me by at least forty pounds.” I edged a quarter of a step closer to the crypt. “And it’s not a vampire.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Isn’t it rude to ask a woman how much she weighs?”
“Nah, it’s rude to ask how old she is, and I already know.”
Oh. Damn. I stepped forward, holding my breath. The crypt didn’t do anything. “I weigh one seventy-two.”
“No shit?”
“I’m almost six feet tall, Gary, what do you want me to weigh, a hundred and thirty? I’d be dead.” I peeked into the little hole the lid made where it had slid over. If there was a vampire in there, it was a very small, very hidden vampire. Or maybe it blended with shadows well. Vampires were supposed to do that, weren’t they?
I was scaring myself. “Give me a hand with this.”
Gary crept forward. “I outweigh you by sixty pounds.”
“That’s why you’re a linebacker, and I’m not. Push on three. One, two, three!”
I underestimated how much push we could provide. The lid shot off the box, crashing to the floor with a thud that rattled the rafters. I fell forward, shrieking, with visions of being sucked dry by vampires supplied by my too-vivid imagination.
Halfway into the crypt, I was met by another shrieking woman on her way out.
CHAPTER THREE
My head hit the floor with a crack only slightly less impressive than the crypt lid had made. My vision swam to black, and my tailbone decompressed like a series of firecrackers. I wouldn’t need to visit the chiropractor after all.
Vision returned in time to see something bright and glittery arching down at me. I flung my hand up, barely deflecting the fall of a knife. My wrist hit the woman’s with the solid thunk that meant a week from now, after I’d forgotten this had happened, a bone bruise would color half my arm. The woman’s grip loosened and the knife glanced off my cheekbone instead of driving into my throat. I hit her again, and the knife skittered away, bouncing across the hardwood floor.
The woman shrieked again—or maybe she hadn’t stopped—and scrambled after the knife. I tackled her, flinging my arms around her. Her white blouse suddenly stained red where my cheek pressed against it.
Gary pulled her out from under me and to her feet, pushing her elbows in against her waist and holding her still. His hands looked bizarrely large in proportion to her waist. She winced and hissed, her head down as I got up unsteadily and touched my face. Blood skimmed over my fingertips and into my palm, coloring in the lifeline. I watched vacantly as it trailed all the way around the side of my hand and down my wrist. My face didn’t hurt. It seemed like it should.
“You got lucky,” Gary said. “She was gonna cut your throat right out. What should I do with her?”
I looked up, startled and vacant. “Oh, fer Chrissakes,” he said, “You’re shocky, or somethin’. Get something to stop the bleeding.”
That seemed like a pretty good idea. I looked around, silver catching my eye again. The knife she’d cut me with lay against the foot of a pew, a nice heavy butterfly knife. I picked it up and cut a piece off the altar banner, holding it to my face while Gary asked again what to do with the woman.
“Um,” I said, and then my face started to hurt. For a minute I was too busy blinking back tears to give a damn what Gary did. I croaked, “Hold her for a minute,” and tried increasing the pressure on my cut to see if it helped the pain any. It didn’t. I looked up through teary eyes. It had to be the same woman. She had hip-length dark brown hair with just enough curl to make me covet it. “You’re the one I saw from the airplane.”
She lifted her head to look at me, eyes wide. I dropped my hand from my face and the makeshift bandage fell to the floor as I gawked at her.
She was beautiful. Not your garden-variety pretty girl, not your movie-star kind of beautiful. She was the sort of beautiful that Troy had gone to war over. High, fragile cheekbones, delicate pointed chin, absolutely unblemished pale skin. Long-lashed blue eyes, thin straight eyebrows. A rosebud mouth, for God’s sake. There were very fine lines of pain around the corners of her mouth and eyes, and the nostrils of her perfectly straight nose were flared a little, none of which detracted from her beauty.
“Jesus.” I suddenly had a very good idea of why she’d been chased.
“What?” Gary demanded. I just kept ogling the woman. She had a perfect throat. She had great collarbones. She had Mae West curves, too, a real hourglass figure. She was at least eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than I was. It said something for her momentum that she’d knocked me flat on my ass. I didn’t think I could have knocked Gary over, if I’d been her and he’d been me.
I hated her.
I was so busy staring and hating her it took a while to notice there was drying blood on her shirt, not just the new stuff I’d put there, but sticky, half-dried brown spots. “Shit. Let her go, Gary.”
“What?”
“Let her go. Her arms are all cut up. You’re hurting her.”
Gary let go like his hands were on fire. The woman made a small sound and folded her arms under her breasts, shallow gashes leaking blood onto her shirt again. I expected her voice to be musical, dulcet tones, with an exotic accent. Instead she was an alto who sounded like she was from Nowhere In Particular, U.S.A. “You saw me from an airplane?”
People kept saying that. I took a breath to respond and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to throw up anymore. The twist of sickness in my belly had disipated. My shoulders dropped and I let the breath go in a sigh. I wasn’t a fan of my innards guiding my actions. Now all I had to do was explain myself so I could go get fired and go home to sleep. “At about seven this morning. I was flying in from Dublin.” As if that had anything to do with anything. “I saw you running, and something was after you. Dogs, or something. And a guy with a knife.” I looked at the knife I was still holding. “This knife? How’d you get past him? How’d you get away from the dogs?”
“I ran away from the dogs,” the woman said, “and I kicked the guy with the knife in the head.”
Gary and I both stared at her. She smiled a little bit. A little bit of a smile from her was like spending a little bit of time with Marilyn Monroe. It went a long way. “I guess I don’t look like a kickboxer,” she said.
“That’s for damned sure,” Gary mumbled. He looked even more awed than I felt. I guessed it was nice to know some things didn’t change even when you hit your eighth decade. “So how’d you get all cut up?” he asked.
She shrugged a little. “I had to get close enough to kick him.”
“That his tooth out there?”
Her whole face lit up. “I knocked a tooth loose?” She looked like a little kid who’d just gotten her very own Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. I almost laughed.
“You knew him? Why was he chasing you?” Even as I asked, I knew the question was idiotic. Men have hunted people down for much less attractive prizes. I liked being tall. Next to this woman I felt as ungainly as a giraffe.
“Why did you come to save me if you don’t know who he is?” she asked at almost the same time. We stared at each other.
“Let’s start again,” I said after a long moment of silence. Then I had no idea where to start with someone who’d been attacked and who just tried to cut my throat out. Names seemed like a good place. “I’m Joanne Walkingstick.”
It’s physically impossible to look at your own mouth in astonishment. I gave it a good shot. I hadn’t called myself by that name in at least five years. More like ten. Gary raised his bushy eyebrows at me curiously.
“You don’t look like an Indian,” he said, which really meant, “How the hell did you end up with a last name like Walkingstick?” I’d heard it for the first twelve years of my life.
“I know.” I hadn’t known that a practiced tone of controlled patience could lie in wait for the next time it was needed, but there it was. It hadn’t been needed for years. It meant I wasn’t going to say anything else, and if you wanted to make a big deal of it, you’d end up in a fistfight.
I was good at brawling.
Gary, the linebacker, let the tone blow right over him and stayed there with his arms folded and eyebrows lifted. The woman studied me through drawn-down eyebrows. It made a wrinkle in the middle of her forehead. On me, that wrinkle was scary. On her, it was cute. I hated her some more.
Gary was wrong, anyway. I did look Indian. My coloring was wrong, but in black-and-white photos I looked like I didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in me. I’d changed my last name to Walker when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nowhere official. I just filled out every piece of paperwork, even the diploma application, with Walker. My birth certificate was the only piece of paper I owned that had Walkingstick as my official last name.
“My name is Marie D’Ambra,” the woman said.
“You don’t look Italia—” I nearly bit my tongue off.
“Adopted,” she replied, amusement sparkling in her eyes.
Oh. “My mother was black Irish,” I said after a moment. “I got her coloring.” It seemed like a fair exchange of information. “Why was that guy after you? What was chasing you? It didn’t look like a dog pack. Exactly.”
Marie inclined her head. It looked gracious. How did she do that? “It wasn’t. His name is Cernunnos, and he is the leader of the Wild Hunt. It was the Hunt who chased me. Why did you come to help me?”
I looked sideways at Gary, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. I wouldn’t think a guy with shoulders that wide could shrug imperceptibly. It should be more like plate tectonics. I hoped I was in that kind of shape when I was seventy-something. Marie waited patiently, and I shrugged more perceptibly. I really didn’t want to say, “I felt like I was going to puke if I didn’t,” but I heard myself saying it anyway. I curled a lip, shook my head, and added, “You looked like you needed help. I felt like I had to try to find you.”
One half of her mouth curved up in a smile. I stopped hating her. I couldn’t hate a smile like that. Her smile made the world seem like it would all be okay. “A gwyld at the crossroads,” she murmured, and I frowned at her.
“A what?”
She shook her head and did the wonderful half smile again. “Nothing. I’m sorry for cutting you. I thought you had to be one of Cernunnos’s people. I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would be looking for me.”
“One of his people? Not him himself?” That sounded wrong. “He himself.”
Marie shook her head. “Christian earth. Even Cernunnos can only stand on it a few minutes. None of the Hunt can at all.”
I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Marie. She smiled the tight little smile of someone who knows she sounds crazy. It made me feel better. “This isn’t the best place to talk about this,” she said.
“Why not? You just said the guy who was after you can’t come here,” Gary said.
“No, but he can send people who can,” I said before Marie could. She nodded. “If he couldn’t, she wouldn’t have thought we might be trouble.” I touched my cheek gingerly. It was still bleeding. “An emergency room might be a good place to go. This is going to need stitches, and you should get looked at, too.”
Marie extended her arms, palms up. Half a dozen cuts still oozed red as she looked at them. She looked like a clumsy suicide attempt. “They’ll heal,” she said dismissively. “He knows I was hurt. I’d rather not go somewhere so obvious.”
“You’d rather bleed?” I demanded. Gary cleared his throat.
“I got a first-aid kit in the car.”
I glared at him. He smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” I said, “the pretty one whose face isn’t cut up gets her way. Fine.” I stomped off the dais, picking the butterfly knife up off the pulpit. It made a satisfying series of clicks as the blade and handles slapped against each other when I closed it.
“Hey. That’s mine.” Marie had to take two steps to every one of mine, even after she ran to catch up with me.
“Not anymore, it isn’t. Call it a finder’s fee.”
“You didn’t find it.”
“I found you.” I shoved the knife into my waistband. Two steps later the elastic shifted and the knife slid down my leg and out of my pants, clattering to the floor. Gary choked back a guffaw and Marie grinned broadly.
I picked up the knife with as much dignity as I could muster and stalked out of the church.
I thought going into a diner all bloody and bandaged was more conspicuous than going to an emergency room, but Marie insisted. Gary butterfly-bandaged my cheek and wrapped up Marie’s arms while I sulked. As a gesture of peace he turned the meter off, but my face hurt too much for me to be grateful.
I dragged a coat out of my carry-on and pulled it on over my bloody T-shirt as we went into the diner. Marie walked in like she was daring the world to comment on her bloodstains. No one did. We sat down, silent until the waitress brought us our drinks. I didn’t know what it was about food, but it always seemed to make it easier to talk.
Marie folded her hands around an enormous glass of orange juice. I had a coffee. Actually, this being Seattle, I didn’t have just a coffee, even at a cheap diner. I had a grande double-shot latte with a shot of amaretto. Just the smell of the stuff got me high.
“Cernunnos leads the Wild Hunt,” Marie said to her orange juice. “They ride to collect the souls of the dead.” She looked up to see if that cleared things up for us. Gary just waited. He really was having a regular black coffee. I didn’t even know they made that anymore. He’d ordered breakfast, too. I was hungry, but between adrenaline and no sleep, I was pretty sure food would just come back up again. Now that I thought about it, the injection of caffeine probably wasn’t such a great idea on that combination. Food would have been better.
“You ain’t dead,” Gary pointed out. Marie winced, producing a pained smile.
“An oversight.”
“Fill in us dumb ones,” I said. “What’s a wild hunt?”
“The Wild Hunt,” she corrected.
“Okay, the wild hunt. What is it?”
She sat back, her hands still wrapped around the orange juice glass. She hadn’t drunk any yet. “Cernunnos was an old Celtic god,” she said slowly. “When Christianity came to Ireland and Britain, his cult was so powerful that it took a while for it to die out. And it never entirely faded.”
“Like any pagan religion,” I interrupted. Marie lifted her eyes to look at me. The muscle in my shoulder blade twitched again and I shrugged, trying to loosen it. “The Peop—the Cherokee still practice their old ways, too. Faith is hard to stomp out.” The People. Walkingstick. What was wrong with me?
“Like any pagan religion,” she agreed. “Cernunnos is the Celtic Horned God, essentially a fertility figure but with very deep ties to death as well. There are Norse and German counterparts, Woden, Anwyn, rooted in a common ancestry.” She waved her hand absently, brushing aside the trivia.
“And he’s after you.” I infused my voice with as much sarcasm as I could. It was pathetically little. She was too pretty to be sarcastic at, even if she was crazy.
“Yes.” Marie nodded and dragged her orange juice to the edge of the table.
“You seriously think you got some kind of god after you?” Gary asked. Marie nodded. Gary turned to me. “I vote we drop her off at a loony bin and run for the hills.”
“Are you asking me to run away with you, Gary? After such a short, violent courtship?” It wasn’t that I didn’t agree. In fact, I pushed my latte away, getting ready to stand up. Gary did the same, looking relieved.
“Sorry, lady,” he said, and stood. I put my palms on the table and looked at Marie. She looked bone-tired, more tired than I felt. She looked like she’d been through this a dozen times already, and was just waiting for the time that she screwed up and didn’t live through it.
Dammit, I’d jumped off a plane and come tearing through the streets of Seattle to find this woman. I didn’t feel like I’d seen it through to the end yet. I settled back into my seat.
“Aw, hell,” Gary said, and sat back down. Marie bit her lower lip, holding her breath while she watched me. When I didn’t move again, she let her breath out and began talking again, without taking her eyes off me. If she thought she was pinning me in place, she was right. Girls weren’t really my thing. Hell, I didn’t even like women much, as a species. I had no idea why I wanted to help her so much. Marie took a deep breath.
“I gather neither of you are mystics.”
Gary laughed so loudly I nearly spilled my coffee. A tired-looking blonde behind the counter turned around and looked at us. Marie twisted a little smile at her orange juice. I suddenly felt sorry for her, which was new.
“Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “Can you handle the idea that there’s more to the world than we see?”
“There are more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It was the obvious line. What wasn’t so obvious was that Gary beat me to it, and said it in a rich, sonorous voice. Marie and I both looked at him. “Annie liked ’em big, not stupid,” Gary said with a grin. “Sure, lady, there’s more than we see.”
Marie glanced at me. “Why does he keep calling me lady?”
“I think it’s an endearing character trait. When he really gets to know you, he’ll start calling you ‘dame’ and ‘broad,’ too.”
“Yeah?” She looked at Gary, then back at me. “How long’ve you known him?” I turned my wrist over to look at my watch, which was still wrong.
“About ninety minutes. So what’re we missing in our philosophies, Marie?”
She smiled. It was radiant. Honest to God. Her whole face lit up, all warm and welcoming and charming. Gary looked pole-axed. I pretended I didn’t and allowed myself the superior thought: Men.
“I’m an anthropologist,” Marie said. “I’ve been studying similarities between cultural mythologies for about ten years now.”
All of a sudden she had an aura of credibility. Well, except I thought she looked about twenty-five. I stole a glance at Gary, who didn’t look disbelieving. Either he thought she looked older than that, or his so-called useless talent was a load of bunk. “How old is she?” I asked him. He lifted a bushy eyebrow, glancing at me, then looked back at her.
“Thirty-nine,” he said, in tandem with Marie. Her eyebrows went up while my jaw went down. Gary looked smug. After a few seconds she shook her head and went on.
“It’s hard,” she said carefully, “to immerse yourself in a study, in mythology and belief, without beginning to understand that even if you don’t believe it, that someone did, and that it has, or had, power. I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to bullshit.”
Looking at her, I could believe it. She had to have heard every line in the book, by now. It would take genuine effort to remain gullible, and she didn’t seem gullible. She finally lifted her orange juice and drank half of it.
“Certain legends had more power for me than others. They were easier to believe. They tended down Celtic lines—my mom says it’s blood showing through. But the Morrigan, the Hunt, banshees, cross-comparisons of those legends to other cultures were more fascinating to me than most other things. A while ago a gloomy friend of mine pointed out that they weren’t just Celtic legends. They were all Celtic legends that had to do with death or violence.”
She took a deep breath, looking up at us with those very blue eyes. “Right after that I started to be able to sense who was about to die.”
Silence held, stretched, and broke as my voice shot up two octaves. “You’re a fucking banshee?” The tired blonde behind the counter looked our way again, then shifted her shoulders and turned away, uninterested. Marie’s thin straight eyebrows lifted a little.
“I thought you didn’t know anything about those legends?”
“I just got off the plane from a funeral in Ireland.”
Understanding and curiosity came into Marie’s eyes. “Whose funeral?” she asked.
“My moth—what does that have to do with anything?”
“I was curious. You don’t have the sense of someone close to you having died.”
“We weren’t close,” I said shortly. This was the second time this morning I’d said something about my family. I was breaking all sorts of rules for me. I really needed sleep. The waitress came by and slid Gary’s breakfast in front of him. Three eggs, fried, over a slab of steak, three huge pancakes, hash browns, bacon, sausage and a side of toast. I got full just looking at it. Gary didn’t pick up his fork, and after a couple seconds I frowned at him.
The big guy was actually pale, gray eyes wide under the bushy eyebrows. He stared at Marie like she’d turned from a golden retriever puppy into a king cobra. I did a double-take from him to her and back again, wondering what was wrong. “Gary?”
“Don’t worry,” Marie said, very softly. “I don’t see anything about you.”
Gary focused on his plate abruptly, cutting a huge bite of steak and eggs to stuff into his mouth. His eyebrows charged up his forehead defiantly, like he expected Marie to make an addendum to her comment. Her mouth twitched in a smile, but she didn’t say anything else.
“Does being a banshee have anything to do with why what’s-his-face wants you?” I reached over and snitched a piece of bacon off Gary’s plate. He noticed, but didn’t stop me.
“Cernunnos. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Because, what, the Hunt isn’t scary enough without you?” I heard myself capitalize the word, and wondered why I’d done it.
“I haven’t had a conversation with him about it,” she said. “I don’t really know what he wants me for.”
“So how do you know he wants you?”
“Having a pack of ghost dogs and rooks and a herd of men on horseback chase you down the street gives a girl a pretty good idea that she’s wanted for something,” Marie said acerbically.
I had the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, it was a stupid question.”
“Couldn’t it have been vampires?” Gary asked wistfully around a mouthful of hash browns. “Vampires are at least kinda sexy. What’s sexy about packs of dogs and birds? No such thing as rooks around here anyway.”
“They come with Cernunnos.” Marie kept saying these things like they were obvious.
“Marie, what are you?” I asked. She shrank back, looking surprisingly guilty. “Banshees are fairies,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you’re a fairy.”
“Not much of one, anyway,” she said to her orange juice, “or I wouldn’t be able to hide on holy ground, or use that knife.” She nodded at the butterfly knife I’d set on the table at my elbow. I picked it up without opening it and looked at her curiously. “Iron,” she said, “steel.”
“What about it?”
Have you ever had someone look at you like you were a particularly slow child? That’s the look Marie gave me. Come to think of it, Captain Steve had given me that same look earlier. I was beginning to think I should be offended. Marie interrupted before I got up the energy. “You really don’t know anything about the mystical, do you?”
“Why should I?”
“I thought Indians knew that kinda stuff,” Gary put in. I looked at him incredulously. He shrugged. “Well, you got all them powwows and stuff. What were you doing during the powwows?”
“Reading books on evolution,” I said through my teeth. Apparently that tone was scarier than the one I’d employed earlier, because Gary closed his mouth around another forkful of food with an audible smack. “That’s like saying all big guys are stupid, or all blondes are dumb, or—”
Gary pushed his food into one cheek, squirrel-like, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. It was a joke, Jo. Jeez.”
“Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny.”
“I’m sorry.” Gary sounded like he meant it. I frowned at him, then sighed and put my face in my hands.
“Forg—fuck that hurts!” I jerked my hand away from my cheek, expecting to see fresh new blood on my palm. I was spared that, at least. This was not my morning.
“The Celtic fair folk aren’t supposed to be able to bear the touch of iron,” Marie explained, once more interrupting my downward spiral of misery before it began. “Not even their gods. And I don’t know what I am, not in the way you’re asking the question. I’m an anthropologist with an unusual skill.”
“Skill? Like you learned it deliberately?”
Marie shrugged. “Talent, skill. I hesitate to call it a gift.” She caught Gary’s eye, and flashed a quick smile. “Although I could make a killing in insurance,” she said quickly. He snapped his mouth shut around another bite of food, beaten to the punch. I grinned. It made my cheek hurt. “In any other aspect,” Marie said, “I’m ordinary.”
“You are not,” I said, “ordinary.” My voice came out about six notes lower than normal. I felt color rush to my cheeks, which made the cut throb furiously. Marie’s mouth quirked in a crooked little smile. I bet even a smirk would look good on her.
“Thank you,” she said, easily enough to make my blush fade. I could feel Gary looking at me. I very carefully didn’t look at him.
“You’re welcome.” I lifted my hands to my temples and held my head. My shoulders ached. I needed a hot shower, a massage from a tall bronze guy named Rafael and about sixteen weeks of sleep. “All right, look. Let me take you at face value.”
Marie pulled a wry little moue, and Gary let out a deep chuckle. I felt a little smile creep over my face and split my cheek open again. I was going to bleed all day long. How fun. “Let me take your story at face value,” I amended. Marie laughed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about eight when I figured out being taken at face value meant people were going to let me get by on my looks. If I’d had a different family I’d never have learned to think at all. Why would I need to?” The way she said it made me think she’d used her looks just as much as she’d used her brain to get where she was in life. There are beautiful people who know they’re beautiful, and use it like a weapon. I got the impression Marie used it as a tool. I couldn’t blame her.
“You’re being hunted by an ancient Irish god who wants you for his own nefarious purposes. Dead or alive will do. Have I got that right?”
Marie nodded.
“Right,” I said. This was completely insane. “How can I help?”
“He’s gaining power,” she said. “He will until the sixth, and then he’ll be banished to the otherworlds until Samhain. It’s the cycle he’s bound to.”
“Until what?”
“Halloween,” Gary and Marie both said. I looked at Gary. He shrugged and ate a piece of bacon. I pressed my eyes shut, wished it didn’t make my cheek hurt, and opened them again to look at Marie. She kept right on not looking as if she were completely insane.
“Just out of morbid curiosity—the sixth?”
“It’s the last day of Yule.”
I wished she would stop saying things like that as if it explained everything. I waved my hand in a circle, eyebrows lifted as I shook my head. Apparently the connotation of “yeah, so?” got through to her, because she sat back with a quiet sigh.
“Yuletide used to be very important in the Catholic Church. It’s the twelve days from Christmas to the sixth of January, and it marks the days of Cernunnos’s greatest power as he rides on this earth.”
“You’re telling me some random church holy days hold sway over an immortal god.” That time the sarcasm came through loud and clear, whether she was pretty or not. Her shoulders drooped.
“Those dates are closely tied to the solstice and the half-moon cycle after the solstice,” she said very quietly. “There aren’t any written records, of course, but I’ve always suspected the lunar cycle had more to do with when the Hunt rode than our calendar.”
“Oh.” I stopped being so sarcastic, the wind taken out of my sails. “Okay. I guess I can buy that.” Insofar as I was buying any of it. What was I doing here? “So what’s he want with you?”
Marie shook her head again. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to stay away from him since Halloween, traveling all over the place. He kept finding me.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “All over the world. So I kept moving. But since Christmas I’ve been…this morning was the closest. I’d never actually seen him before. Never touched him.” She dug into her pocket and pulled the tooth out, putting it on a napkin on the table. “I didn’t even think something like this could be done to him.”
I stared at the tooth. “Eww. I didn’t know you’d picked it up.”
“While Gary was bandaging your face,” she said. “It’s a good thing to have. It gives us a physical connection to him. It may help us build shields against him.”
“Build what?” Gary asked. He’d cleared two-thirds of his plate. I reached over and stole a piece of bacon. He stabbed at my hand with his fork, but not like he meant it. The bacon was really good, so crunchy it practically melted. I stole another piece. “Cut it out,” Gary said. “I gotta watch my figure.”
“Shields,” Marie said. “Protection.”
“How do I protect you from a god?” I demanded. “I could get you thrown in jail for a few days. The sixth is what, three days? He can’t get through steel bars, right?”
“Two. It’s the fourth. And no, he can’t, but he could send someone who could,” Marie pointed out.
I shrugged, hands spread out. “Fourth, okay, whatever, it’s morning, you’ve still got all day to get through. That makes three days. Anyway. So what do I do?”
“Build me a circle of protection.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You want me to get a bunch of people to stand around you with iron crosses and this tooth and only let people you say are okay come in?”
“No, a—” Marie broke off with an ugly little gasp. I was looking right at her. I couldn’t mistake the color draining from her eyes. All that gorgeous deep blue spilled away, even eating away the pupil, until there was just blind white, and then she blinked. Color came back to her eyes, but not the right color. Her irises were all black, tinges of gold and blue around where the pupils ought to be. She blinked a second time, and blanched, then spoke in a very thin voice, staring straight at me.
“You’re going to die.”
CHAPTER FOUR
An announcement of impending death sure could take a girl’s appetite away. The knot of weary tension in my stomach contracted around the bites of bacon I’d stolen, cold threads of terror seeping down like a net. The rational part of my mind dismissed it all.
That would have been a comfort, except it appeared a lot more of my mind wasn’t rational. I seized on to panic and ran with it. All of a sudden I understood why Gary had been so uncomfortable with Marie’s gift. I clenched my teeth together, wondering why my hands were so cold. I wrapped them around my coffee cup and tried to stare at Marie without looking at her eyes. They were still unnervingly black, and I never wanted to see anything like that again.
“Something just changed,” she went on, still in a whisper. “You weren’t supposed to die, but now you’re going to.” There was conviction in her voice. She didn’t blink. Her eyelashes were as black as her eyes, not brown like her hair.
“So I’m going to die because of you.” I meant to sound challenging. Somehow it came out sounding more like a frightened little girl. Marie nodded, dismay vivid even in her altered gaze.
“Well, fuck that.” There. That sounded more like me. I stood up. “I’d like to help you, lady, but not enough to die for you.” Great. Now I sounded like Gary. He scrambled to his feet beside me, favoring Marie with an unhappy glance. I dug into my fanny pack and came up with a five dollar bill and three Irish punts. I threw the five down and picked up my butterfly knife. “Gary, cover the rest, will you?” I headed for the door ignoring the sudden bubble of sickness that erupted in my stomach again, just as it had when I’d seen Marie through the plane window. Gary, thank God, didn’t argue, just pulled out his wallet.
“Wait!” Marie’s voice came after me, plaintive. I didn’t stop. “Maybe I can help you!”
I turned around in the door. The tired blonde behind the counter looked a little more awake, watching first me, then Marie. “You think you can help me?” I demanded. “Weren’t you the one just telling me I was going to die?”
Marie stood up. “The possibilities changed very quickly,” she said softly. “If I’m with you, maybe I can see them change again. Maybe I’ll know what you should do to avoid dying.” She tossed a bill onto the table, too, as Gary came around it. The waitress was going to get a major tip.
“What are you, a banshee or a precognitive?” I asked. I was still in the door having the conversation. That wasn’t a good sign, as far as I was concerned.
“To see someone’s death, you have to be precognitive,” Marie said. “I thought you didn’t believe in any of that.”
“Just because I don’t believe doesn’t mean I don’t know the names.” I put both hands on the door’s center bar and shoved my way out of the diner, listening to the bells chime as the door swung shut behind me.
A SCUD missile hit me in the chest. I smashed back into the door, glass shattering with the impact. The center bar hit me in the small of the back, and I rotated around it. God did not intend anybody’s back to be used in that fashion, except maybe those bendy Cirque du Soleil acrobats.
Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t one of those acrobats. I flipped over the bar and slammed the back of my head against the still-intact glass in the lower half of the door, then collapsed on my face onto glass-littered linoleum. My cheek split open again as I hit the floor. More glass fell into my hair and onto the floor around me, sounding like falling stars.
The possibility of passing out crossed my mind, but I just had to see who was running around suburban Seattle with a SCUD. Lifting my head told me all sorts of painful things about muscles in my neck that I didn’t want to know. I clenched my teeth together on a whimper. Whimpering seemed undignified. No one ever whimpered in the movies after getting smashed through a glass door.
There was no missile launcher in the parking lot. Instead there were very large hooves a few feet outside the destroyed door. While I waited for that to make sense, they disappeared and reappeared again, moving forward.
Have you ever heard the sound of tearing metal? It’s a high-pitched scream that sets your teeth on edge and lifts the hairs on your arms. It’s the kind of sound a mechanic gets used to, but in the diner, along with the rattle of more breaking glass and some other noises I couldn’t place, it was incomprehensible. The hooves disappeared again, and I wondered where my knife had gone. Glass and dust and spikes of wood fell down around me.
The floor wrenched apart with a shriek of sound as one of the enormous hooves smashed down inches from my face. I twisted my head up, whimpering again at the pain in my neck. An extraordinarily broad chest was about four feet above my head. It reared up, which seemed wrong somehow, but I was too busy rolling frantically out of the way to give it more thought. Glass crunched under my arms as I rolled. I felt tiny cuts opening up on my arms.
I ended up sitting with my back against the counter, gasping while the rest of the world caught up with me. The tired blonde behind the counter shrieked with the regularity and volume of a car alarm. Gary had moved maybe two feet from the table, which suggested that despite the slow clarity I was experiencing, the attack had happened very quickly. Marie was shouting in a language I didn’t understand. It didn’t sound like Italian.
The horse made more sense now, for some nebulous value of the word sense. It had been able to rear up because after it kicked me in the chest it had torn out the entire door structure, and part of the roof had fallen down. The rest of the roof was on fire. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, but it didn’t seem to bother the horse.
Horse is such a limited word. The beast in the diner had the grace and delicacy of an Arabian and the size of a Clydesdale, multiplied by two. It shimmered a watery gray, bordering on silver, the color so fluid I thought I might be able to dip my hand in it. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to its forehead. There was no spiral horn sprouting there, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. It was Plato’s horse, the ideal upon which all others are based.
It was trying to kill me, and all I could do was admire it.
Then it screamed, shrill and deep all at once. The blonde behind the counter shut up, but I screamed back, a sort of primal response without any thought behind it.
Just for a moment, everything stopped.
There was a rider astride the gray, arrested in motion by my scream. He wore gray himself, so close to the color of the horse I could barely tell where one ended and the other began. The reputed Native American belief that white men on horseback were one exotic creature suddenly seemed very plausible.
The rider turned his head slowly and looked at me. His hair was brown, peppered with starlight, and crackled with life, as if touching it would bring an electric shock. It swept back from a massively sharp widow’s peak, and was held in place by a circlet. His face was a pale narrow line, all high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and a long straight nose.
The impression he left was of living silver. I locked eyes with him, expecting to see that liquid silver again. Instead I met wild-fire green, a vicious, inhuman color, promising violence.
He smiled and reached out a hand, inviting me toward him. His mouth was beautiful, thin and expressive, the curve of teeth unnervingly sharp, like a predator’s. I pushed up the counter, using it to brace myself, and wet my lips. Marie was right. I was going to die. The rider wanted my soul and I was going to give it to him without a fight because of that smile and those inhuman eyes. I took a step toward him.
The second SCUD of the morning hit me in the ribs and everything started to move again. I slammed into the floor under Gary’s weight, sliding across linoleum and a zillion sharp pieces of glass. We stopped when my head hit the far wall. I opened my eyes to find the butterfly knife lying against the wall a few inches away from my nose. The horse screamed again and reared back, missing my head by half an inch as he crashed back to the floor.
Gary’s breath smelled like syrup and bacon. “Are you outta your mind?” He popped up onto his knees and hauled me to mine by a fistful of shirt at the back of my neck. I snatched up the knife as the horse smashed down again, right where my head had been. I looked up at the rider, and the horse kicked me in the ribs with a toe. I felt the bone crack inward, and didn’t even manage a scream, just a pathetic little grunt.
From a very long way away, I heard Marie scream a warning, in English this time. Before I could react, Gary hauled me over backward. A tip of silver glittered through the air where my throat had been. The rider looked genuinely startled before his eyes narrowed and he urged the horse farther into the diner. They were huge, taking up all the room, all the air. I gasped and scrambled to my feet, clutching Gary’s arm with one hand and my ribs with the other. Breathing hurt.
“Leave them alone.” Marie sounded thin and tired and at the end of her bravery, but there she was at my side, looking up at the rider with a set chin. “I’ll go with you. Just leave them alone. They were only trying to help.”
I let go of Gary’s arm and shouldered forward. The rider watched me. Neither Gary nor Marie moved. Behind me I heard the blond waitress fumbling with the phone, and her panicked, “Hello? Police? Hello?”
“He’ll kill us anyway,” I said, very low. I couldn’t get enough breath to do anything else. “Because it’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s nothing personal. You’re the Hunt, and when the Hunt is loosed, you kill until someone binds you away again. Cernunnos.” Terrifying conviction gave my voice strength. Twenty minutes ago I’d never heard of the thing standing in front of me; now the knowledge of who and what he was felt like the only thing I’d ever been certain of in my whole life. I didn’t like that at all.
The rider’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, inclining his head.
“The Horned God.” I lifted my eyes to his circlet again, which wasn’t a circlet at all. It was more like Caesar’s crown, but it was part of him. It began at his temples and swept back in an elegant bone pattern, horns curved to the sides of his head and meeting at the back, woven together there. Very practical. No catching your head on tree branches that way. I wondered if he shed them yearly and grew them again, or if they were as eternal as he was.
“They grow with my power,” he replied. Chills ran through me. It wasn’t that he responded to an unasked question. That seemed perfectly normal from this being. It was his voice, dark and rich and earthy, deep enough that a roar from him would shake the world. That, and I was quite certain he hadn’t spoken English or any other language I knew.
“What’d he say?” Gary whispered. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marie shake her head fractionally.
“You cannot stop me,” Cernunnos said, little more than a murmur.
“What do you want?” I still couldn’t breathe enough to get a real voice out. He laughed, and it took everything I had to not run away.
“To ride free and hunt,” he answered. “That is what we all want.”
“All?”
“My host.” He flicked his hand casually at the parking lot. I knew I shouldn’t, but I looked anyway.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Gary said.
“Not exactly,” Cernunnos said, and that time Gary understood him. He flinched, jerking his eyes from the parking lot back to Cernunnos. I couldn’t have looked away from the lot if someone paid me to. Everything I didn’t believe in had come to roost there, things that just hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It was like someone pulled the bandage off in one swift rip, exposing a world I didn’t believe existed in full Technicolor glory.
The riders moved too quickly, or maybe not enough in this world, for me to get an accurate count. There were close to a dozen, though, and one magnificent pale gold horse with no rider. Animals and riders alike faded at the edges, sunlight draining through them. Around their knees crept enormous sleek white dogs, with lowered heads and reddened eartips and violent red eyes. They avoided the few cars in the parking lot, milling around them but never touching them. Settled on the cars were narrow, long-beaked birds I’d never seen before, whose cries sounded like lost children. The dogs growled and snapped, every once in a while one baying at the sunrise. I could hear the horse’s hooves against the asphalt, but the bridles made no sound, and neither did the riders as they drifted, waiting for their master.
“That isn’t possible,” I whispered. Cernunnos laughed again.
“You name me the Horned God and yet say my host is impossible? What are you, little mortal?” He put the silver sword against my chin, and turned my face toward him. I held very still, meeting his eyes.
Apparently I do not learn quickly. Meeting his eyes was a terrible mistake the second time, too. They were phenomenal, promising power and passion and eternity. All I wanted was to be with him, part of his ancient world. His blade caressed my cheek, opposite the cut Marie had made earlier. It felt like a lover’s touch, and I wanted all the more to be with him.
“You could be,” he murmured to the unspoken desire, “but then you would interfere, little mortal, and I am very tired of being interfered with. A shame, to end all your unrealized power, but more of a shame to be closed into the night again.”
They say watch the eyes, when you’re about to get into a fight. There are some people who can hide the telegraph of their actions from their eyes. Cernunnos wasn’t one of them: he had no need to be. It just took a flicker, before he drew the sword back and punched it forward. It was all I needed.
I jolted forward, into the sword, instead of away. I tried to twitch enough to one side so the blade would catch my shoulder, instead of something vital. The horrible cool straightness of metal slid through me, fiery pain filling up the right half of my body. It hurt so badly my knees collapsed, and for an instant the sword through my torso was the only thing holding me up. I was pretty sure the next breath I let out would have blood on it.
But now I had his blade trapped.
And I had steel.
One-two-three. The clack-clack-clack of the butterfly knife sounded very loud to me, over the pounding blood in my ears. I coughed, and that made the sword scrape up and down my lung. I spat a mouthful of blood at Cernunnos, pleased that he flinched back. I dragged myself forward along the blade, and took a handful of his shirt, half-expecting it to slip away through my fingers like melting cotton candy. But it held, and as his horse neighed and reared up again, I kept my fist in his shirt and pulled him down. He fell, weighing more than I expected. My knife slid between his ribs, and he screamed.
The windows shattered. My eardrums shattered. I shrieked back, soundless into the overwhelming, unearthly noise that he made. I could see the scream vibrating from his throat even when blood slid from my ears and down my chin. His eyes weren’t compelling anymore. They were filled with seething rage, green fire boiling over. I waited for it to spill out onto me, to set me on fire, and after a few seconds I smelled it: flesh burning. It was sick and sweet and horrible.
It took a long time to look down and see that it was the hole I’d put in Cernunnos’s ribs that burned, not me. Silk singed around the knife, sticking and reeking. Beneath the fabric, his skin blackened and festered, bubbles beginning to burst. I screamed again, and jerked my hand back. The knife came out, and Cernunnos dropped to the floor. I began a long, slow collapse, Cernunnos’s sword still stuck in my lungs. Beyond it, I could see his mouth moving, and even though I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard him promise, “You will pay for this, little mortal.”
The floor came up in a rush and hit me very hard.
CHAPTER FIVE
For a few moments it was very, very dark, and then it was very, very bright. I thought, So this is what it’s like to be dead, and then, Shit, man, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true.
I squinted. The brightness wasn’t really very much like a white tunnel. It was actually a lot like staring directly into the sun. I closed my eyes, and a giant ball of green danced behind my eyelids. It turned red, then blue with red outlines as I squinted my eyes open again. Outside of the white light there was blue that looked suspiciously like the sky.
Lying there, under the suspiciously ordinary sky, I heard a drumbeat. It faltered, unsteady, like the drummer didn’t know what he was doing. I turned my head toward it, scraping my cheek against hot earth. Tears from staring at the sun ran over my nose and wicked away into desert sand.
My cheek didn’t hurt. I rubbed it against the ground a little, and it kept on not hurting. In fact, none of my body hurt, and that seemed wrong. I was pretty sure that only a minute ago there’d been all kinds of holes in it.
Overall, not hurting was an improvement. The sun was hot, and the sand, for ground, was comfortable. I closed my eyes again and relaxed. The drumbeat missed a beat.
“I wouldn’t advise going to sleep right now.”
My eyes popped open and I blinded myself with the sun again. Dammit. I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. No one was there.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I flopped onto my back again.
“Do you hear the drumbeat?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped. The drumbeat sped up for a few beats, then slowed again.
“You should get up and follow it.”
“I’m comfortable.” I closed my eyes more firmly. I was not having a discussion with an invisible man.
“I’m not invisible. You just can’t see me.”
There was a lovely piece of logic. I sat up, glaring around.
If this was my subconscious’s idea of paradise, I needed my head checked. Sulfur-colored sand dunes swept up against robin’s egg-blue sky, both broken periodically by huge outcroppings of rough red stone. Wind hissed across the sand, smelling dry and old. Under my hands, fine particles of earth gritted against each other and melted away, leaving depressions for my fingers. The whole place reminded me of Arizona, only more so.
“This isn’t even the kind of Indian I am,” I protested. The drumbeat sped up a moment, getting louder. I twisted toward the north, where it was coming from. I wondered if I really should follow it.
“You should,” the voice said helpfully.
“Why? I can’t even see you. Why should I listen to you?” I looked around through my eyebrows, trying to find the voice’s origin. “Why can I listen to you? Hear you, I mean. What are you?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions. You can’t see me because you don’t believe in me. You can hear me because you’re dying, and it’s letting me slip in.” The voice sounded like this was a normal thing to say.
Despite the burning sunshine, shivers ran through me, and the drumbeat faltered. “Am I really dying?”
“Oh, yeah. You’re really dying.” The voice had a casual bedside manner. “You can choose not to, if you want.”
“Why the hell would I choose to die?” I climbed to my feet. He had to be around here somewhere.
“Because living means changing your entire worldview. That can be a very difficult thing to do.” His voice came from the same direction as the drumbeat.
“Oh, and dying is easy?” I began walking toward the north, glowering at the invisible voice.
“Dying is remarkably easy. Just stop going toward the drum, and in a few minutes, it’ll stop.”
“And then I’ll be dead?” I didn’t exactly break into a run, but I picked up the pace a bit. The drumbeat accelerated. “That’s my heart, isn’t it?”
“Yep,” the voice said.
“Are you a spirit guide?”
There was a pause that felt considering. “Yep.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘yep’?”
He laughed. “Yep.”
“How far is it to my—” I couldn’t say, to my heart. “To the drum?”
“Not too far. Would you like me to lead you there?”
I took a deep breath. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
A small coyote bounded in front of me, like he’d always been there. I looked behind us. His tracks were tangled with mine, across the sand. He yipped, and I looked forward again. He smiled a coyote smile, and leaped out across the sand in a long, lean run. “I can’t keep up with a running dog!”
“I’m not a dog. Come on.” He stretched out and I swore, but I began to run. The drumbeat sped up again, and my strides got longer, until I was running an easy fast lope across the dunes, my feet kicking up sprays of sand. The coyote stayed a few yards in front of me, cresting over a dune.
I followed recklessly, and the earth dropped out from under me. It turned scarred and pitted, like an asteroid crater with deep, sharp sides. I hit the ground where it began to slope again and rolled ass over teakettle, trying to protect my head as I bounced. The drumbeat sounded once, then stopped again, a rare staccato. The coyote ran on, much more gracefully than I, then looped back to snap his teeth at me.
“Hurry. You don’t have time for this.”
“I fell!”
He bared his teeth in a snarl and pranced away, jerking his head to urge me on. I stumbled to my feet and began to run again. The coyote snapped his teeth again, satisfied, and forged ahead.
The crater narrowed into an impact spot, less than a foot across and plummeting into blackness. The coyote dove into it, just barely fitting. I couldn’t possibly squeeze into it.
On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly be running across an uber-Arizona landscape inside my head, either, and that seemed to be happening without the slightest regard to what was possible. I took a deep breath and dove after the coyote—
—and the impact spot got much bigger, or I got much smaller. It turned into a tunnel, plunging downward. A trickle of water appeared. I loped after it, running on four feet like I’d always done it. My hands felt like hands, but as I watched them flash under my nose, they were pawed and clawed, like the coyote’s. The water widened, becoming a stream. I ran along the bank after the coyote, feeling a tail swishing behind me. The sand turned into rich dark topsoil, and then into solid granite, the stream cutting a swath through it. Every once in a great while I felt my heartbeat shaking the stone around us.
“Is time slowing down?”
“No,” the coyote said, “your heart is.”
Damn.
The stream disappeared without warning, sinking into stone, and the tunnel veered up at a steep angle. I dug unaccustomed claws into the hard rock, scrabbling for a purchase, and wriggled my way up the tunnel, shouldering past the coyote. Stone gave way and I burst through the earth into a pool of numbingly cold water. I kicked frantically toward the bright surface, dragging myself onto the bank a few seconds later. My hands were hands again. I wasn’t a coyote anymore. It felt strange.
The drumbeat, my heartbeat, ricocheted around me, shockingly loud. The coyote ran out of the pool and shook himself furiously on the bank, then trotted through a sparse, stingily kept garden to an unmoving lump on the ground. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed to my hands and knees, watching him.
He nosed the lump on the ground, then sat down beside it, head cocked at me, expression full of expectation. “Physician, heal thyself.”
I crawled over to the lump, still shivering. “Jesus Christ!” I reared onto my knees, backing away.
The lump was me. I looked like hell. Blood matted my hair, which hadn’t been clean to start with. The bandaged cut on my face was almost lost among dozens of other tiny, glass-infested nicks and scratches. My shining new silver necklace was stained red, the cross settled in a pool of blood at the hollow of my throat. My ribs on the left side looked deflated, bent inward, and the sword was still stuck in my right lung.
I—the one sitting, not the lump—fell onto my butt and began crab-walking backward. “I’m dying!”
“I thought we’d established that,” the coyote said. He hopped over my body—the one lying there—and grabbed my shirt in his teeth, tugging me forward again. “Heal yourself. It’s in you.”
“Dammit, Jim, I’m a mechanic, not a doctor.” The coyote was strong, pulling me forward even as I resisted. “I don’t know how.”
He let go of my shirt and lay down with his chin on his front paws. “You know how to fix cars, right? You know where everything goes.”
I nodded. He lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Pretend you’re a car. It’s a nice analogy.”
Are spirit guides supposed to know what analogies are? The coyote grinned at me, even though I hadn’t spoken aloud, and tipped his head toward my body. “You don’t have much time.”
“Pretend I’m a car. Right. Okay.” I scooted closer to my body, hesitantly, mouth pressed closed. “A car. Right. Start with the obvious.” My co-workers tell me I talk to myself when I’m working. I’d never noticed it before. “I’m leaking. What leaks? Oil filters leak. Great. I’m an oil filter.” I put a hand on my chest, grabbed the sword’s hilt with the other, and tugged. It stuck for a moment, grating against my ribs, and the drumbeat stopped entirely.
“No!” I yanked the sword harder, and it slid out with a liquid sound. I threw it to the side, and hit myself in the chest. I—the one on the ground—coughed, and the drumbeat made a sad little thump. Dark, important-looking blood spurted out, covering my hands.
“Patch it up,” the coyote said.
“I don’t know how,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I could imagine an oil filter, emptying itself onto the ground. I ran through the process of changing it—loosening the drain, oiling the gasket on the new filter, screwing it back onto the filter pipe. Uncertainly, I tried overlaying those images on my body, envisioning my torn lung as the old, burned-out filter, imagining the new one sliding into place.
Something clicked in the center of me, below my breastbone and just above my diaphragm in exactly the same place, the sickness that had impelled me to help Marie had been. It felt like cartilage popping, a thick painful feeling, as if a lock, stiff with age, had reluctantly opened. I felt it in both my bodies, the one I was consciously inhabiting, and the one lying all but lifelessly on the bloody grass. Energy surged through that place with the same cool feeling as drinking water on an empty stomach. It lined the insides of me and reached out, connecting my kneeling self to the dying body under my hands. For a few seconds I thought I could see through myself, the ridiculous oil filter analogy at work repairing my lung. The energy I felt was centered there, coiling inside the ruined cavity and patching it. Then the sensation faded and dizziness swept through me. I tilted over sideways, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t think it worked.”
“Take a look,” the coyote murmured. I pried my eyes open and looked down at myself. Ichory black blood still covered my chest and my hands, but when I pushed my shirt out of the way, the hole was gone, the skin unscarred.
“Holy shit.”
The coyote chuckled. “Now reinflate your lung.”
“What, like a tire?”
“Just like that.” He sounded approving.
Flat tire. Filled tire. It doesn’t take that long to fill a tire, but I had the horrible idea that I would explode my lung if I filled it too fast. The drumbeat thumped unsteadily, then fell into a more reassuring pattern as I envisioned air being pushed into a tire. I felt the same energy coil behind my breastbone again, shimmering through both bodies. It spilled out as I dragged in a deep breath. Beneath my hands, the other me did the same thing, and the alien pool of energy went dead again. This time it left me with the faintest sensation of still being there, waiting. I swallowed hard. “What is that?”
“It’s your destiny,” the coyote said.
My heartbeat missed another pulse, but overall it was much better. I let out a high-pitched laugh. “My destiny. I’m a car and I’m fixing me and it’s my destiny? Great, that’s just great, in a completely fucked-up surreal way.”
“The ribs next, I think.” The coyote sounded serene. I reached for the unlocked knot of energy more deliberately this time, and laughed again, a little hysterically, when it responded.
“How can I be doing this?” My broken ribs were like a body frame that had been torn apart. I pressed them back into shape, cautiously realigning them, welding the weak points carefully. Pressure I hadn’t consciously realized existed slowly eased, and I could breathe more easily. My whole body felt more aligned, stronger, just like a car felt solid with its frame intact. The energy I was using spilled from me like it was part of my bone structure, like it was integral to my being, but I’d never felt anything like it before.
“You’re finally beginning to accept a path you abandoned a long time ago,” the coyote answered. “You have gifts, Joanne Walker, that your spirit cries out to use. Healing is chief among them.”
“I don’t understand.” I sounded young and frightened, but even as I made the protestation I moved, without being told, on to the next of my injuries. The cuts and scrapes on my arms and face were a paint job. Using the coyote’s analogy worked: it gave me a way to focus the cool rushing power inside my belly. It was bewilderingly easy, almost instinctive. The surface damage of the cuts and scrapes called for less of that energy than the lung or the ribs had. I felt myself making choices I barely understood, siphoning just a fraction of the power available to deal with the smaller injuries. The rest settled behind the unlocked place above my belly, waiting. When the “paint job” was complete, the extension of energy faded back into me, joining the rest of the power behind my breastbone. I felt a little like a battery charging up.
I opened my eyes uncertainly, looking down at myself. I couldn’t do anything about my clothes. “I think I’m okay now.”
“What about that one?” The coyote poked his nose at the long cut on my cheek from Marie’s butterfly knife. I put my hand over it; the new paint job hadn’t entirely taken care of it. Instead of disappearing, it had scarred over, a thin silver line along my cheek. After a moment I shrugged.
“It wants to stay.”
Very smart dogs can look approving. The coyote did, then snapped his teeth at me. “I’m not a dog.”
“What is it with people reading my mind today?” I looked down at myself, the one lying in the grass. I still looked horrible, my skin a ghastly pallor that made very faint freckles stand out across my nose. My face wasn’t one that did sunken flesh well. My nose is what you might politely call regal, and my cheekbones are high, making my cheeks look very hollow and fallen. Lying there like that, I looked two breaths from dead. The drumbeat, my heartbeat, was still thudding with a degree of uncertainty. I put my hand out over my torso and chewed my lower lip. “There’s still something wrong. Like…” My car analogy almost fell apart. “Like the windshield is all cracked up and burnt from the sun.”
The coyote did the approving look again. “This is the hard part.”
I frowned at him nervously. “What do you mean, the hard part?”
He pushed his nose out toward the me that was dying, there on the grass. “You have to change the way you see the world.”
“Isn’t this place enough proof of that?” I asked, pitch rising. The coyote’s ears flicked back and he sat up primly, offended.
“Is it?” he asked. “Do you believe what’s happening here?”
I looked down at my body again. My heartbeat was drumming much too slowly. “I don’t know. It feels real, but so do dreams.”
“This place shares much with dreams.” The timbre of his voice changed, deepening from a tenor into a baritone. I jerked my eyes up, to discover a red man sitting there on his butt, arms wrapped around his knees, loose and comfortable. He wore jeans with the knees torn out, no shirt, and he was genuinely red. Brick red, not a color skin comes in, not even sunburned skin. Long straight black hair was parted down the middle, and his teeth were better than Gary’s. His eyes were golden, as golden as the coyote’s. I blinked, and the coyote was back.
“Is Coyote even a Cherokee legend?” I kept blinking at him, hoping he’d turn back into the red man. He stayed a coyote. Still, if men like that were wandering around here, I’d take it as a good argument that this garden had a lot in common with dreams.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Coyote said. “You don’t have a lot of time, Jo. Is this real?”
I scowled down at my body. If this is a dream, I decided, when I look up, he’ll be the guy again. I’m aware, so it’s a lucid dream, so I can affect it, and he’ll be the man because I want him to be.
I looked up. The coyote was sitting there, head cocked, waiting for me.
“Dammit,” I said out loud. A thin line in the spiderweb I felt inside me made a hissing sound like cracking glass, and disappeared. The drum missed a long, scary beat, then fell into a natural, reassuring rhythm.
“Time to go back,” Coyote said, and the garden went away.
CHAPTER SIX
Shit, I thought again, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true. I closed my eyes. The light continued to bore into my eyelids until I opened them again. The paramedic squatting above me clicked the penlight off, announcing, “She’s back,” to someone out of my line of sight.
“I’m back,” I agreed in a croak, and closed my eyes again. Perhaps if I was very lucky I’d go away again.
“Getting the crap beat out of you isn’t gonna make Morrison feel bad enough not to fire you, Joanie,” the someone said, then lifted his voice. “Forget the ECG, Jimmy. She’s back with us. Looks like the other guy got the worst of it. What happened,” he said, addressing me again, “his gang dragged him off to die?”
My arm weighed about twenty thousand pounds, but I picked it up and dropped it on my chest, trying to find the hole the sword had poked in me. I found it by proxy. There was a gash in my shirt, a nasty hole stiffening with dried blood. Beneath it, my rib cage seemed to be unpunctured. I rolled my head to the side, somewhat amazed that it stayed on, and croaked, “Gary?”
All I could see were feet. I didn’t know what kind of shoes Gary wore, but I was pretty sure they weren’t open-toed blue leather heels, absolutely impractical for Seattle in January.
“Who the hell is Gary?”
I rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to focus on the paramedic. “Oh,” I said after a while. “Billy. Cabby.”
“No, Billy Holliday, sweetheart. You’ve always been easily confused.” He squatted by me again, pushing my eyelid back and inspecting my pupil. “How many fingers do you see?”
“I don’t see anything, Billy, somebody’s got his damn thumb stuck in my eye. What happened, you get called in early?”
“How’d you know?” He took his thumb out of my eye and elevated his eyebrows at me.
“The shoes.”
Billy Holliday was, as far as I knew, Seattle’s only cross-dressing detective. I’d met him three days after I was hired: dispatch asked me to rescue an off-duty officer whose car had broken down. Dispatch hadn’t mentioned that the cop in question would be wearing a pale yellow floral print dress and had biceps bigger than my head. Billy looked better in a dress than I did.
Not that I could remember the last time I wore a dress.
Billy inspected his feet. “I shoved my feet into the first thing I found next to the door,” he admitted. “Do you like them?”
I decided I was feeling better, and began to sit up. Billy pushed me back down. “I think they’re great,” I offered, and tried to sit up again. The admiration didn’t appease him, and we had a good little tussle going when Gary’s knees intruded in my line of vision. He crouched while I wondered how I recognized his knees.
“You oughta be dead, lady.”
I let Billy win and dropped onto my back. “Yeah?” I asked. “What’s Marie got to say about that?”
“You ought to be dead,” she said from above my head. I tilted my chin up and looked at her foreshortened form through my eyebrows.
“That’s reassuring.” I closed my eyes. “What happened?”
I felt Marie and Gary cast uncomfortable glances at Billy. “Billy,” I said without opening my eyes, “go change your shoes, would you?”
Mortal offense filled his voice. “What, so you can get your story straight? What kind of detective do you take me for?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” I tried to remember where I’d heard that recently. Oh, yeah. Coyote.
My head began to hurt again.
I pushed up on an elbow, opening my eyes. “I’m asking as a friend, Bill. Or I’ll steal your distributor cap.”
He grinned reluctantly. “Friends don’t threaten friends’ distributor caps. Look, you sure you’re okay, Joanie? You look like hell.”
“I’m sure. I’m fine. I swear I’ll explain it later.”
“Arright.” Billy stood up. So did Gary. They sized each other up while I worked on climbing to my feet. Gary nodded tersely, and Billy walked off. It all smacked of some sort of bizarre male testosterone thing. I tried hard to ignore it.
“What happened?” I asked again. My balance was off. I spread my arms out, trying to find my center. Then it occurred to me that Coyote wanted me to do exactly that, and my head hurt more. I rubbed my temple, then my face, and that didn’t hurt at all. Fascinated, I prodded at my cheek. No pain.
“You got a scar,” Gary pronounced, staring wide-eyed at my face. “On your cheek. Where she cut you. A real thin scar. It was still bleeding just a minute ago.”
I slid my fingertips over my cheek, feeling the thin line, perfectly healed. “What,” I asked for the third time, “happened?” The scar felt weird. I’d always had good skin.
“The Hunt took Cernunnos away,” Marie said. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever hurt him like that before.”
“Bully for me.” I kept rubbing my cheek. “How’d I get into the parking lot?”
“I carried you,” Gary volunteered. “The diner was on fire.”
I turned around and looked at it. Sure enough, it was on fire. There were firemen there now, and I realized I’d been hearing the sounds of water and steam and men calling to one another since I woke up. Clouds of steam and smoke rose up, and, as I watched, a section of the roof fell in. All and all, I was glad Gary hadn’t left me in there. “Thanks. What happened to the sword?”
Gary jerked a thumb toward his cab. “In the back seat. I thought we oughta leave it in you until the paramedics got here, but Marie kept sayin’ we had to get it out. Guess I’m not much good at sayin’ no to a dame.”
“Yeah,” I said, “you look like the henpecked husband type.” My fingers drifted back to the hole in my shirt, feeling skin through it. It felt perfectly normal. I pulled the collar of the shirt out and peered down. Gary guffawed. I muttered, “Oh, shut up,” and kept looking.
My bra was a bloody mess, and there was a gash in it. “God damn it,” I said, “that was a new bra.”
Gary laughed again, and I looked up long enough to glare at him. “Sure, laugh. It cost sixty bucks. God-damned men don’t have to buy goddamned expensive underwear….” I peered down my shirt again. There was no indication the bloody mess on the shirt and bra was from my own bleeding. Breasts, bra, blood, no hole in my chest. Lookit that. I felt like an X-File.
“You kept flashing between living and dying,” Marie said. “I just had the feeling that you wouldn’t live if the sword stayed in you.”
“You were right.” I stopped peeking down my shirt. It was too weird.
“So she made me pull the sword out,” Gary said, his whole face wrinkling up in a grimace. “And then…” He trailed off. Marie drew in a breath.
“And then you began to heal. Just like magic.”
“It was magic,” I mumbled.
“What?” Gary laughed again.
“It was magic,” I repeated, unconvincingly. Marie developed a smug grin. Even smug looked attractive on her. It wasn’t fair.
“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” she said with a reasonable amount of diplomacy. Unfortunately, her grin ruined the sincerity of the moment.
“A lot’s changed since then,” I muttered. A cord tightened around my heart, then loosened, like a bowstring snapping. A sudden vision of the cracked windshield blurred my vision, and a spiderweb-thin line in it sealed up, healing. I shivered a little and wrapped my arms around my ribs. “C’mon. Let’s go talk to Billy.”
“Wait.” Marie caught my arm. “We have a problem.”
Those were not the words I wanted to hear. It took a long time to convince myself to say, “What kind of problem?”
“Cernunnos wasn’t the one I fought at the church.”
I frowned at her without comprehension. “He couldn’t have been,” I said after a minute. “You took that knife from him.” I felt terribly clever for figuring that out, especially when surprise, followed by embarrassment, washed across Marie’s face.
“You’re right. I didn’t even think—but who was he, then? The Hunt was after me,” she insisted. I unfolded one hand from around my ribs to head off her protestations.
“I know. I saw. Maybe it was somebody human who’s working for him.” I admired how I said that, all casual-like. I could handle my world being turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe. No problem. I was cool. I was good. Yeah.
“Then why didn’t he follow me into the church?”
I stared down at her, at a loss. So much for being cool. “I don’t know. Look.” I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Billy and get that part of this over with before we try to figure the rest of it out, okay?” I glanced at Gary. He nodded. So, after a reluctant moment, did Marie.
We went to talk to Billy.
Once upon a time, a nice young half-Cherokee half-Irish girl went to college and got the ultimate would-you-like-fries-with-that degree: English. I had no illusions that I’d get a job in my field when I graduated from college, but I’d never planned to. I already had a day job. I’d started learning how to fix cars when I was barely old enough to walk, and I never really wanted to do anything else.
When I graduated from the University of Washington, my part-time college gig at a local mechanic’s shop couldn’t upgrade me to full-time, so I hired on with the North Precinct police department. The best part about it was I didn’t have to move out of the apartment I’d been renting since my sophomore year of college.
There was just one itty-bitty catch: my then-supervisor, Captain Nichols, wanted me to go to the police academy. It was the black-and-white photos they took for station ID that did me in: my Native American blood showed through like a waving red flag, and Nichols couldn’t resist a bonafide Indian woman on the roster. It made the department look good. I went to the academy, managed to survive it and gratefully slunk back to the garage, there to stay.
A year later, Nichols retired and Captain Michael Morrison replaced him.
Odds are that Morrison and I never would have so much as spoken, if I hadn’t brought my car to the precinct car wash fund-raiser. I was not prone to doing that sort of thing: my car, Petite, is my baby, and I prefer to wash her myself, but Billy’s oldest kid begged and pleaded with me, and I was weak in the face of big-eyed nine-year-old boys. So I brought her to the car wash.
How any red-blooded American male could mistake a 1969 Mustang for a Corvette, even an admittedly sexy ’63 Stingray, I will never understand. But Morrison did, and I laughed in his face. If I were to be totally honest, I might go so far as to say I mocked him mightily, before, during and after laughing in his face.
I didn’t know at the time that he was my new top-level supervisor.
I say that like knowing would have made a difference.
I generally went to some lengths to avoid admitting to myself that I’d behaved like a complete, unmitigated jerk. It was like a horrible, embarrassing reversion to elementary school, where you indicate you think a boy is cute by throwing rocks at him. Once I’d lobbed the first rock, so to speak, I didn’t know how to stop, and the relationship hadn’t exactly improved with time. As far as I could tell, neither Morrison nor I had much life at all outside of the station, so we ran into each other often enough to develop a long-term, standing animosity. We were like Felix and Oscar without the good moments.
So when I’d asked for some personal time off to go meet my dying mother, Morrison’d been in a hurry to tell me that the department could only afford me six weeks of leave, and then they’d have to replace me. I told him I’d be back in a month.
That month stretched to two, then three. When I called to say it was going to be another month, Bruce at the front desk sounded downright grim, and told me that Morrison wanted my ass in his chair the minute I got off the plane.
Which was why I was now on Morrison’s side of Morrison’s desk, in Morrison’s remarkably comfortable chair, with my feet propped up on Morrison’s scarred gray desk. I just had to push my luck.
The office was large enough to not be claustrophobic. The door opened against a half wall of windows that let in the mild winter light. Two chairs that fit under the category of “comfy” were on the opposite side of Morrison’s desk, the side I was supposed to be on. Another three folding chairs were tucked around a long brown table shoved under the windows and into the back corner. The table, like Morrison’s desk, was buried beneath chaotically distributed paperwork.
Morrison’s desk looked out onto the offices through another set of windows, floor-to-ceiling, Venetian blinds hanging at the tops. He usually left them open. When they were closed, somebody was in huge trouble. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved they were open now.
Three calendars, with the past, present and next months turned up, were tacked on a bulletin board above a quietly percolating coffeemaker on the other side of the office. Around the calendars were clippings from cases, past and present, overlying one another until the board below them was virtually invisible. Next to the coffeemaker was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock. I wondered if it had been a Christmas gift, and who had given it to Morrison. There were no photos of family on his desk. I doubted he had any.
I eyed the clock. He’d kept me waiting seventeen minutes. It only seemed fair, since I’d kept him waiting four and a half months.
A moment later the door banged shut and I flinched upright, startled out of the first sleep I’d had in days. Morrison glowered at me from the doorway. I cast another glance at the clock. I’d been asleep less than three minutes. Just enough time to make the worst possible impression. I hoped I hadn’t drooled on myself.
“Get,” Morrison growled, “the hell. Out. Of my. Chair.”
I beamed. “Bruce was very specific,” I said in my best innocent voice. “‘Morrison wants your ass in his chair the minute you get off the plane.’”
Morrison took a threatening step toward me. I cackled and waved a hand, climbing to my feet. “I’m getting. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.” I walked around the desk to the chair I was supposed to be in, and sat.
Or that’s what I meant to do, anyway. What I actually did was take two steps, tread on my shoelace and collapse in a sprawl at Morrison’s feet. I lay there wondering why I couldn’t breathe. I could feel Morrison staring at the back of my head.
The floor was pretty comfortable, all things considered. Maybe if I stayed there, Morrison would just have me thrown in a nice quiet cell where I could sleep for two or three days. Except there were no quiet cells at the station, and I knew it. I groaned, pushed myself to my hands and knees, then sat back on my heels.
“Don’t do it, Joanie!” someone bellowed, loud enough to be heard through the window. “The job ain’t worth it!”
It took several seconds for my position, relative to Morrison’s, to sink in. Then I turned a dull crimson, too tired to even get up a really brilliant shade of red. Morrison glared over his shoulder and stomped around the desk to take his seat, all without ceasing to scowl at me. I climbed to my feet in a series of small movements, using the desk to push myself up incrementally. Eventually I got turned around and met Morrison’s frown.
“You look like hell,” he said, which wasn’t what I expected, so I blinked at him. He waved at the chair. “Siddown.”
I sat. Not, thankfully, right where I was standing: I had the presence of mind to stagger the couple of steps to the chair. Morrison watched me. He was in his late thirties and looked just like a police captain ought to: a big guy, a little bit fleshy, with cool investigating eyes and strong hands that had blunt, well-shaped fingernails. He was good-looking in a superhero-going-to-seed kind of way, which is probably one of those things you’re not supposed to notice about your boss. I sank into the chair and closed my eyes.
Morrison leaned back in his chair. It creaked, a high shriek that made hairs stand up on my arms. “You overextended your personal leave by three months, Walker.”
“I know.”
“I hired your replacement ten weeks ago.”
“I know.” Damn, but I was a stunning conversationalist. My eyes were glued shut. I rubbed at them, and the sticky contacts suddenly made tears flood through my lashes.
“Jesus,” Morrison said in mystified horror, “don’t tell me you’re crying.”
“It’s my contacts,” I snarled.
“Thank God. You never struck me as the weepy sort.” Morrison was quiet a moment. I didn’t have the energy to look up at him. “It seems like half the department’s been by to make googly eyes on your behalf.”
I snorted into my palms, undignified laughter. “Googly eyes?”
“Googly eyes,” Morrison said firmly. “For some reason they like you.”
“I fix their cars.” It was true. On particularly bad days—of which this was one—I thought it was because I had no way to relate to other people except through cars. On better days, I acknowledged that I just loved the job, and the fact that I’d made friends because of it was a bonus. “Come on, Morrison, give me the ritual ‘I divorce thee’ three times, and let me go home and get some sleep.” I pushed a hand back through my hair. Morrison winced. “God, do I look that bad?” I hadn’t checked a mirror. Maybe I should have.
“You look like you got hit by a truck. What happened?” Morrison actually sounded curious.
“I got into a fight.” I dredged up a little smile. “But you should see the other guy.”
Morrison snorted and stood up, coming around his desk to lean on the edge of it, arms folded as he looked down at me. I checked the impulse to get to my feet. Morrison and I were exactly the same height. I’d been known to wear heels sheerly for the pleasure of looking down on him. He was looming on purpose. “I’m moving you to the street beat.” He sounded alarmingly pleasant.
I stared at him for a long time. “What?”
“I’m moving you to the street beat,” he repeated. “Corner cop duty.”
“You’re supposed to fire me,” I blurted. I’d never done time as a cop. I didn’t really want to. Morrison grinned, and pushed away from his desk to get himself a cup of coffee.
“The chief wouldn’t let me. You’re a woman, you’re an Indian, you’re a cop, all you’ve done wrong is not show up to work for a few months, and that was because of a personal family emergency. It’s not enough to fire you for. Not in this quota-happy age.” He opened a fridge under the coffeemaker table and poured milk into his coffee.
My eyebrows shot up. No one had ever actually mentioned quotas out loud. It was just one of those silent givens that nobody talked about. Morrison turned back, lifting his mug of coffee. “Want some?”
“Sure,” I said dazedly.
Morrison poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to me. I took a sip, burned my tongue, and clutched the cup with both hands, watching Morrison nervously.
“So I’m putting you on the street.”
“Why?” My voice rose and broke. Morrison beamed at me. I’d never seen him smile so broadly before. It was unnerving.
“Because I figure you’ll quit. You’re a mechanic, not a cop. You haven’t got the stuff. Want to save us both time and do it now?” Morrison didn’t burn his tongue when he sipped his coffee. The bastard.
I ground my teeth together so hard it hurt. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it. Not in the face of that grin. I couldn’t prove him right, especially by quitting before I’d even tried.
“No,” I said through my teeth, standing up and putting the coffee cup aside. “No, I don’t think I do. Sir.”
It took every ounce of will I had available to close the door gently on my way out.
CHAPTER SEVEN
No fewer than eight cops—all of whose cars I tinkered with regularly—lingered outside Morrison’s office, ostentatiously reading files or exchanging stories over their desks. Every one of them fell silent as I carefully closed Morrison’s door and stepped away from the office. Bruce, a thin blonde who had no business being away from the front desk, put on a mournful smile. “Well?”
“The son of a bitch fired you,” Billy guessed before I had time to draw breath. An uproar met his speculation, a wall of outrage entirely on my behalf. Rex, short and stout as his name, flung his hat on someone’s desk and stalked toward me. I backed up into Morrison’s door, alarmed. The doorknob hit me in the butt.
“Get out of the way, Joanie.” Rex sounded like a bulldog, low-voiced and growly. “I’m gonna give that bastard a piece of my mind. He can’t do this to you! You were on family leave, for Christ’s sake!”
I edged to the side. “Um, actually…”
Rex stormed past me and flung Morrison’s door open, banging it closed behind him again. Around me, furious cops swore and waved their hands and lined up, God help me, actually lined up to be the next one to take on Morrison.
“Actually,” I mumbled, “he didn’t fire me.”
Nobody listened. I rubbed my hand over my eyes, setting my contacts to tearing again, and sighed. Bruce appeared at my elbow and guided me to a desk to sit down. “It’ll be okay, Joanie,” he promised. “You’re a fantastic mechanic. You’ll get a job in no time. Heck, you could probably keep yourself busy just fixing our cars, huh guys?”
“I fix your cars anyway,” I pointed out. “Nobody pays me for it.” Bruce had exactly one hobby: running. His wife’s car, a 1987 Eagle station wagon with a manual transmission, broke down more often than soap opera stars. I wasn’t sure he knew how to drive it, much less fix it. “Look, Bruce, I’m—”
Bruce patted my shoulder reassuringly. “Elise wants you to come over for dinner Friday. She’s going to raise holy living hell about you getting fired.”
Elise made the best tamales I’d ever had, and was convinced I was killing myself eating macaroni and cheese for every meal. “Elise is an angel,” I said, “but—”
Rex burst out of Morrison’s office, cheeks bright red with exertion. Billy marched through the still-open door. Even over the general noise I could hear Morrison’s, “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” A moment later Billy backed out of the office, herded by Morrison, who stopped at the door, broad-shouldered and impressive.
“Joanne Walker has not been fired!” he bellowed. “All of you get the hell back to work!” He stepped back into his office, slamming the door behind him.
Eight officers of the law turned as one and stared at me accusingly.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you,” I said weakly. “He didn’t fire me. He busted me back to foot patrol.” For a moment I wondered if a mechanic could technically be busted back to anything.
Everyone was silent for about as long as it took me to wonder that, and then the cacophony began again. I tried, briefly, to explain, then gave up and let Billy defend my dubious honor as an honest-to-God cop with a badge and everything. I wasn’t sure where that badge was. I remembered they’d given me one when I graduated from the police academy, but my best guess was that it was in my sock drawer. Or possibly in the glove compartment of my car. Or maybe in the junk drawer in the kitchen. I slunk out while the debate about whether I was really a cop heated up.
Gary and Marie were waiting impatiently in the lobby. “You’re a cop?” Gary demanded as I came through the turnstile.
“No. Yes. No. Shit! Why?” I flung myself onto a bench and scrubbed my eyes.
“Jeez, lady, I didn’t mean to ask a tough question. What happened in there? Why didn’t you say you were a cop back at the church? Or the airport? I thought you were nuts, goin’ after some broad you saw from a plane.” Gary towered over me, hands on his hips. Marie hovered in the background, looking just as curious as Gary.
“I’m not a cop. I mean.” I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I am a cop. I guess I’m a cop. I’m a mechanic. That’s what I do. Except now I don’t. Now I write jaywalking tickets, or something. I wonder when I’m supposed to be back at work. Shit.”
Gary and Marie stared at me. After several seconds, I mumbled, “I make more sense when I’ve had some sleep.” I pried my eyes open. Tears welled up again. Gary became sympathetic all of a sudden.
“All right, all right. I’ll take you home. Tonight we’ll get together and figure this out.” He actually patted my shoulder, just like Bruce had done.
“We?” Marie and I spoke together. She sounded surprised. I sounded small and pitiful.
“What, you think I’m gonna miss out on what happens next? Crazy dames.” Gary shook his head and pushed his way out of the station, muttering to himself.
Gary dropped me off at my apartment complex. I stood on the concrete stairs and waved as he drove off, then staggered up to my apartment, navigating to the bedroom without turning the lights on. No one lived there but me; it was a safe bet that there wouldn’t be anything unexpected on the floor except four months worth of dust. I was right: falling face-first into the bedcovers dislodged dust and made me sneeze, but nothing worse awaited me. My last conscious thought was that I’d forgotten to take my contacts out.
The apartment was empty of unexpected things. My dreams were not. Coyote was waiting for me. He looked warily approving while I frowned at him groggily. “How d’you do that?” I demanded. “Dogs don’t have that much expression.”
“You’ve never owned a dog, have you?” Coyote asked. “Besides, I’m not a dog.”
I put my face in my hands, eyes closed. “Whatever. Where are we? What do you want?” I peeked at him through my fingers. “Are you always going to be bothering my dreams?”
“This isn’t a dream.” Coyote cocked his head to the side, looking around. After a moment I did too, wearily. I had to admit I’d never had a dream that looked like this one. Even falling dreams, which weren’t big on detail, usually had a gray sky and a very long drop. This one didn’t even have that much, just dark storm clouds pushing at each other with no particular pattern or intent. I thought I preferred falling dreams.
I dropped suddenly, a sickening distance in no time at all. Coyote yipped, a short sound of annoyance and alarm. I flinched upright, back where I’d started. “Pay attention,” he said sharply.
“I am,” I protested. “What was that? Where are we?” There was nowhere for me to have fallen. Coyote and I drifted, in the middle of it, sitting on nothing.
“You called a dream up,” Coyote said patiently. “We’re in a place between dreams.”
“Why? I’m so tired.” I was whining. I made a small sad sound and straightened up, trying to behave like an adult. Coyote licked his nose.
“You did a good job this morning,” he said. I blinked at him slowly.
“Is that why I came here? So you could tell me that?” I didn’t mean to sound like a snappy, ungrateful bitch. I was just so damned tired. Coyote let the tone blow over him.
“Partly,” he agreed. “Ask the banshee to help you with your shields. You’re going to need them.”
“My shields?” I wasn’t used to feeling this thick.
Coyote smiled. I didn’t know dogs could smile. “I’m not a dog,” he said, and, “she’ll know what you mean. Now get some sleep.” He dropped a golden-eyed wink and disappeared.
Or at least, I ceased to be aware of him. Instead I became aware of someone pounding on my door with the patience and rhythm of a metronome. I stayed very still for what felt like a very long time, hoping the pounding would go away. It didn’t. After six or seven years I rolled out of bed and crawled toward the front door.
I made it to my feet somewhere in the living room and was rewarded for my monumental effort by barking my shin on the coffee table. I reached for the doorknob and the injured shin at the same time, pulled the door open, and slammed myself in the forehead with the edge of the door. Collapsing onto the floor in a sniveling lump seemed the only thing to do, so I did it. It was only when tears started to unstick my eyelashes that I realized that I not only hadn’t, but couldn’t, open my eyes. I took turns rubbing at my shin and my forehead and my stuck-together lashes. Somewhere up above me, Gary said, “Jesus Christ, Jo. You look like someone ran you over and backed up to see what he hit.”
“Nice to see you, too, Gary.” Not that I could see him. I put a hand over my throat. I sounded like a bulldozer had dumped a load of gravel into my chest. “What time is it?”
“Seven-thirty.” He crouched; I could tell by the location of his voice.
I pried one of my eyes open. “No way. I just went to sleep.” I turned my wrist over and tried to focus on my watch. I couldn’t, but that was okay, since it was wrong anyway. “No way.”
“Yep. Seven-thirty. We’re supposed to meet Marie in half an hour at her place.” Gary straightened up again. I got my other eye open, and blinked tearfully at him.
“Okay. I guess, uh. Let’s go.” I swallowed, trying to loosen my voice up some, and worked on getting my body moving in a direction that felt like ‘up’.
“Uh,” Gary said.
I could only do one thing at a time. I stopped trying to stand and squinted at him. “What?”
“You might wanna think about taking a shower and changing clothes.”
I looked at him without comprehension for a while, then looked down at myself. And, in growing horror, looked some more. After a while, I said, “Oh yuck.”
I wouldn’t have thought sleeping in bloody gory clothes could be beaten for general yuckiness, but adding in a layer of dust over all that made me a fine imitation of a desiccated corpse. “Come in,” I grated. “I’ll shower.” I crawled away from the door without waiting to see if he came in.
The reflection in the mirror was marginally kinder fifteen minutes later. My hair was clean and slightly gelled into spikes. I was still pale, but only from lack of sleep, rather than from blood, dust and lack of sleep. I’d managed to unstick the contacts from my eyes and was wearing an old pair of glasses, thin gold wire frames with long narrow oval lenses. The gold did cool things to my eyes, or at least it did when I wasn’t still suffering from bloodshot-from-hell eyeballs.
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C.E. Murphy
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Зарубежное фэнтези
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Joanne Walker has three days to learn to use her shamanic powers and save the world from the unleashed Wild Hunt. No worries. No pressure.Never mind the lack of sleep, the perplexing new talent for healing herself from fatal wounds, or the cryptic, talking coyote who appears in her dreams. And if all that′s not bad enough, in the three years Joanne′s been a cop, she′s never seen a dead body–but she′s just come across her second in three days. It′s been a bitch of a week. And it isn′t over yet.