Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  “That’s true. But you’re not anybody else.” Morrison exhaled, and I dropped my head again, though I kept my fingers laced together in front of my knees, not wanting to breathe in the scent of blood a second time. He was right. I wasn’t certain he was unconditionally right, but the power within me had always put forth some pretty clear ideas on what I should and shouldn’t do. The wrenching pain in my stomach and the lack of response from the magic both told me flat-out I’d chosen poorly.

  “I’m supposed to be on a warrior’s path, you know that?” I asked the stairs beneath my feet. Morrison didn’t know, because I’d never discussed it with him. I didn’t discuss it with many people, much less the boss with whom I had, until quite recently, had a distinctly antagonistic relationship. “That’s what I was told right when all this started. That I was a healer on a warrior’s path. That I was going to have to fight to make things right. But there’s no memo. There’s no handbook saying ‘these are the circumstances you get to fight in.’ Instead what happens is something like today. Or back with the goddamned zombies. God, I hate zombies. Anyway, I always find out the hard way that I can’t use the magic offensively or it craps out on me. Now it turns out if I use ordinary real-world physical force on ordinary real-world people, I get bit in the ass for that, too. I know you don’t think I’m the greatest cop in the world, but I followed protocol. I did the right thing in police terms to protect my partner. Didn’t I?”

  My voice got small as I recognized there were probably a million people it’d be better to say this to than Morrison. Unlucky for him, he was the one who’d asked what had happened, and unlike the psychologist I knew I’d have to talk to later, he was aware of and believed in—however reluctantly—the occult side of my life.

  “There’ll be an investigation before I can properly answer that, Walker,” he said with unusual gentleness. I put my face in my hands again after all, holding my breath to avoid the smell of blood, and startled when he touched my shoulder. “But yes, it sounds like you did.” His voice went wry. “And no one else will be asking why you didn’t use a magic shield instead of a gun. I just wondered.”

  “I don’t know if I’m ever going to think of the magic first, Morrison. Most cases don’t need it. I’m…” I trailed off with no real idea of what I wanted to say, and Morrison got to his feet.

  “You’re officially suspended from duty pending an investigation into this shooting, Walker. A minimum of three days. Thanks for not making that difficult. You have an appointment with the psychologist at one. Get somebody to bring you back to the precinct building and get cleaned up. I want to see you when you’re done talking with her.”

  I whispered, “Yes, sir,” and went to do as I was told.

  Being suspended from duty for three days almost certainly meant “go home once you’re cleaned up,” but although I only lived a few miles from the precinct building, back-and-forthing seemed like a waste of time. I had clothes at work—the blue polyester pants and button-down shirt that were ubiquitous to police officers everywhere—so I showered, put them on and went back to my desk in Homicide. There was paperwork to do, not just for the morning: there was always paperwork to catch up on. It was a damned sight better to work than sit at home and brood. One of the other detectives came by to offer me a green armband, which was his way of offering sympathy for the morning’s incident without making a fuss about it. I put the armband on, glad not to have gotten pinched, and spent the next three hours writing reports, filling out forms and trying hard not to think about Patricia Raleigh’s glassy stare and short, shallow breaths. Mostly it worked, except when I had to write the actual incident report, and then I sat there a long time, wondering why I hadn’t responded the way Morrison suggested I should have.

  Well, no. Not really wondering. I’d gone to the police academy, and though there’d been three solid years of working for the department as a mechanic before I became a cop, at the end of the day, I’d been trained to react the way I had. A couple of times during the academy I’d awakened from dreams I didn’t remember, kneeling in the middle of my bed in a firing position. That kind of training became hardwiring, and nothing I’d done in the past fifteen months had driven magic-using responses that deep into my brain. There was, as far as I knew, no such thing as shamanic boot camp, much as I could use it.

  Knives prickled at my gut again, suggesting that I really could use a shamanic boot camp, or something else that forced me to react with magic first and brute force later. Either that or it was sheer nervousness, as it was a few minutes to one and I had an appointment with a shrink. I abandoned my desk and went upstairs to her office, heart hammering and hands cold for the second time that day. I’d met the psychologist, talked with her a few times, but never officially, and for some reason it was terrifying.

  She took one look at my expression when I came in and said, “Don’t worry, everybody feels that way the first time. I promise it won’t hurt a bit. Louise Caldwell, not that you don’t know that.” She offered a hand, I shook it, and we both sat down as she asked, “How’re you doing?”

  “Been better.” A shrink probably expected a deeper, more profound answer than that. I held my breath, sought something more profound and came up with the same thing again, this time as a shaky laugh on an exhalation: “Yeah. Been better.”

  “Good,” she said crisply. “You’d be surprised how many people walk through that door after shooting someone and say they’re just fine. Did you have a choice?”

  I blinked, taken aback at the no-nonsense approach. I thought psychologists were supposed to pussyfoot around things. Not that Dr. Caldwell looked like the pussyfooting sort: she was in her late forties, gray streaks at her temples probably indicative of carefully dyed hair, and dressed in a well-tailored suit that gave an impression of seriousness. I cleared my throat, wondered if that came across as hesitating and shook my head. “I really don’t think so. There was no warning. Detective Holliday stepped into the bathroom and she was behind him, already swinging the bat. If I hadn’t reacted immediately he would be badly injured, maybe dead.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “I’d sure as hell rather have shot her than have Billy be in the hospital! Especially since she’s not dead.” I cleared my throat again, pretty certain that was entirely the wrong thing to say, but faint humor flickered across Dr. Caldwell’s face.

  “That’s a comparatively healthy attitude, Detective. It’s easy, in a bad situation, to accept only blame instead of seeing the other potential side of the scenario. As you say, she isn’t dead. Was that a deliberate choice?”

  “No. It was just the clearest shot I had, her right shoulder. Billy dropped, but I didn’t double-tap. That…that was deliberate. Kind of. I don’t know if I could’ve shot a second time.” I looked away from her, focusing on one of half a dozen framed certificates on the wall, and much more quietly said, “I could have if she’d kept coming. I would have. I don’t think I knew that until right now.”

  My stomach twisted again, glass shards jabbing at me, but somehow the knowledge made me feel better in a completely screwed-up way. Police officers almost never had to shoot anyone in the line of duty even once, much less twice, but I was darkly certain I could do it again if I had to. I didn’t want to, but there was probably something wrong with somebody who wanted to go around shooting people. I relaxed a little and Caldwell saw it, but apparently it was okay. She kept me there for over an hour, asking questions that eventually had me weary to the bone, but I walked out feeling like I hadn’t completely fucked up, either at the scene that morning or there in her office. I had no idea what she would tell Morrison, but I was too tired to worry about it.

  I went by his office as instructed, but he wasn’t there. I dropped off my incident report, then went back upstairs to Homicide to collect my coat. At some point “suspended from duty” had to mean “go home,” and I was emotionally wrung out enough to decide that point was now. Morrison could kill me for disobeying the come-s
ee-me order later, after I’d napped. Coat in hand, I waved a short goodbye to the rest of the team and headed for the door.

  It cracked open before I got there, revealing a sliver of a woman in her fifties. She had an exceedingly mild blue gaze and short hair that had at one time been blond, but had since gone dirty yellow. She was dressed eclectically in a long skirt, a wool overcoat with a reflective vest over it and combat boots. There was a sparkly green shamrock pinned to the vest. On someone else, the whole outfit could’ve been deliberate eccentricity. On her it looked like the Army-Navy surplus store.

  I fumbled to make sure my own green armband was in place as I tugged the door all the way open. “Oh, hi, sorry, come on in. I’m Detective Walker. Can I help you?”

  “Detective Joanne Walker?”

  I looked over my shoulder like I expected another Detective Joanne Walker to have appeared, then shook myself and looked back. “That’s me. Can I help you?”

  A smile rushed across her face and took ten years off her age. “My name is Rita Wagner. You saved my life.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  There was nothing like a statement of that nature to take one’s mind off the problems at hand, especially when the problem at hand was nearly the polar opposite. My brain dropped out of the slightly shocky slow motion it had been lingering in all day and surged into its more usual mouthy overdrive.

  I had done a variety of remarkable things over the past year. Many of them had involved saving peoples’ lives, although most of the time they had looked more like shutting down Seattle’s power, rearranging the Lake Washington landscape, or wrestling monsters of differing sizes and shapes. In the handful of cases where I’d actively saved someone, I usually knew what they looked like.

  I’d never seen this woman before in my life. I was searching for a nice way to say that when she continued, “You probably don’t remember. Officer Ray Campbell told me it was you, though, who got the ambulance there in time to sa—”

  She kept going, but I said, “Oh! You’re the troll lady!” over her, and only too late realized how awful that sounded. I didn’t mean it badly. It was just that she’d gotten in trouble down by the Fremont Troll, one of Seattle’s more charming landmarks, and I’d never learned her name. I’d only saved her life. I’d been three miles away at the top of the Space Needle, looking for something else entirely, when I’d Seen a flare of rage and violence in Seattle’s city-wide aura. Because of that, the cops had gotten there before aggravated assault turned to murder in the third degree.

  She was still smiling. “I am. I’m the troll lady. I know it’s been months, Detective Walker, but I wanted to thank you. I—”

  Feeling a little desperate, like I’d become a bad host by way of not recognizing the troll lady, I blurted, “Would you like to sit down?” with too much emphasis on the last two words. I sounded like something dire would happen if she didn’t. A wince crawled over my whole body, caving my shoulders, and I tried for a more modulated tone: “Or go for coffee or something? I mean, it’s great to meet you, but the department’s not very comfortable, we could take a few minutes to talk, we—” I wished someone would come along and stuff a sock in my mouth.

  Instead Rita gave me another astonishing smile. It really did take years off her face, and I wondered if she was a hard forty-something instead of the fifties I’d originally pegged her as. “If you have time, I’d like to have coffee. You don’t know me, but I feel like I owe you something. At least a cup of coffee.”

  I said, “You don’t,” under my breath, but it didn’t matter to either of us whether she legitimately owed me something or not. I was grateful as hell to get hit in the face with evidence of having done well, and even if I hadn’t been, I also wasn’t callous enough to say “Just doing my job.” Even if that was true, when you’d saved someone’s life, regardless of the madcap fashion, there was an element to it that ran deeper than just doing the job. Humans were like that. We needed connections and stories to make sense of the world, and Rita Wagner had become part of my story. “There’s a terrific coffee shop up the block.”

  “The Missing O? I saw it, but I thought it was a doughnut shop.”

  I tugged my coat on, hiding the green armband. “It is, but it has good coffee, too, and we call it a coffee shop as to not perpetuate the stereotype of cops and doughnuts.” My indulgence in the stereotype, now that I thought about it, was probably responsible for five or so pounds that had crept up on me the last few months. I made a note to buy vegetables, even though I knew they’d end up melting into brown slime in my fridge’s fruit bin, and held the door for Rita. We escaped the precinct building a minute later, me holding the door for her again. “Not to be rude, but why now?”

  “Because I didn’t think you’d like me very much straight off,” she said forthrightly. I did a classic double-take, the second glance offering me a glimpse at her aura as the Sight washed on without my conscious command. That, as much as her mood-altering arrival, was a relief: the soured magic inside me wasn’t so intent on punishing me for my misdeeds that I couldn’t use the Sight. Rita’s colors were mostly brown, earthy and steady, with prickles of yellow poking through. The prickles were nervousness: she was afraid I’d judge her. Or maybe that I’d judge who she’d been three months ago.

  It clearly wasn’t necessary. She was doing a fine job of bringing down judgment on herself. I said, “Why not?” with genuine curiosity, though I already had a pretty good idea of the answer.

  “I was a drunk living rough and fighting over booze and drugs. I smelled like beer and piss and figured I’d die soon and nobody would care.”

  I said, “Someone always cares,” very softly, though I was sadly aware it wasn’t quite true. Still, Rita gave me a quick look that turned into another one of her de-aging smiles. For someone who’d been living on the brink of extinction only a few months earlier, she sure seemed to smile a lot.

  Then again, maybe she had reason. “I wouldn’t have agreed with you, the day I got stabbed. I’d have said nobody ever cares. I had blood leaking through my fingers. I could see it freezing on the ice. I knew I was dying, Detective Walker, and I figured that made me one less problem in the world.”

  We reached The Missing O as she said that, leaving a nice dramatic moment to pick up from once we’d ordered coffee and doughnuts. Or, more accurately, a hot chocolate with mint for me, pumpkin-spiced tea for her and frosting-covered cinnamon doughnuts called pershings, which were as big as my head, for both of us. Mindful of being in polite company, which was to say someone who didn’t put up with me daily, I tried very hard not to lick the frosting off my pershing like a six-year-old while Rita picked up her story again.

  “I still have dreams about the ambulance. All the sirens and lights. I was bleeding a lot and it all seemed loud and bright and I got the idea it was God sending angels to say ‘Not this one, not yet.’” She picked up her tea, hiding behind it as she gave me a wary, hopeful look. “Does that sound crazy?”

  Thoughtful as always, I said, “Yes,” then made a face. “Sorry. I’ve heard much crazier things.” I’d done much crazier things, but I didn’t want to get into that. “They say God works in mysterious ways. Ambulances and cops aren’t even all that mysterious, when you get right down to it.”

  Her eyebrows, which were almost nonexistent, twitched up. “Do you believe in God?”

  Man. There was a question I didn’t want to contemplate, much less give an answer to. I exhaled noisily into my hot chocolate and stared at my doughnut for a while. “Not by nature, no. But there’s a lot more out there than is dreamt of in my philosophy. I know that for a fact.” Because fifteen months ago I hadn’t believed in magic at all, and these days I was a regular practitioner. Which was something else I wasn’t about to lay out for Rita Wagner.

  “Me either. Not by nature. If I believed in God at all, it was to have someone to blame. But Officer Campbell said you’d called in the attack before you even got there, and that sounds a lot like a miracle to me. I t
hought if somebody’s putting out a miracle for me then maybe I’d better get my shit together. The hospital got me into an AA program and I’m doing volunteer work at a shelter.” She finally put her tea down, though she kept her hands wrapped around the cup. Her fingers were thin and sallow, like they’d been frostbitten. “So I thought now was a good time to see you. I thought now you could be glad you saved me.”

  Hot chocolate went down the wrong way and I coughed. “I was pretty glad before.” My boss and partner had been gladder. I’d been too fixated on the thing I’d been trying, and failing, to do, to be sufficiently impressed with myself for saving someone from halfway across the city. Yet another data point Rita Wagner probably didn’t need to know. I chewed my lower lip, not wanting to be condescending. “You didn’t have to do all this to make a good impression, but I’m glad you did. You’re kind of amazing, Rita. Maybe I saved your life, but you’re the one turning it around. That’s huge. You should be proud. I am. Is it okay if I say that?”

  Pleasure swept her face, like I’d given her some kind of benediction she’d been hoping for. “It’s okay.”

  It struck me that Rita was a very lonely woman, and that I might be the only person to whom she could hold herself accountable. I had issues of my own galore, even overlooking the shooting. The idea that I could be someone else’s lifeline back into society would be laughable, if it weren’t also so sad. “Well, then, I’m proud of you. Where do you volunteer?”

  “At Solid Ground, downtown. At their new soup kitchen off Pioneer Square, mostly, but that’s the other reason I wanted to visit you now. They just did one of their fundraising drives and had a lot of people with money at their headquarters last week. The volunteers got prizes drawn out of a hat, and I, well, I can’t use mine, so I thought…I thought I could say thank you by giving it to you.” She dug into the pocket of her wool overcoat and came out with a small brown envelope which she pushed across the table to me. “They’re tickets. To a dance performance. Native American dancers, they’re on tour. I didn’t know it before I saw you, but you’re Indian, aren’t you? Maybe you’ll like it.”