Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And like that, she was gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What about Holliday?”

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

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

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

  “How do you know this, Walker?”

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

  “About King George!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What kind of training do you have?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How long have you been touring?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There were puncture wounds over Naomi Allison’s heart. Five of them in an arc of about two hundred and forty degrees, like somebody had sunk extremely pointy fingernails into her flesh. They got worse as we watched, deepening until her chest started to cave in.

  Morrison drew breath to speak and I snapped a hand up, fingers rigid, to silence him. To my astonishment, it worked, though I’d probably pay the price later. But I had a good idea of what he’d been going to say—something along the lines of “No signs of murder, Walker?”—and I was a lot more interested in watching Naomi’s degradation than I was in being scolded.

  Besides, I’d been right. When I’d said there were no obvious signs of foul play, there hadn’t been. That, however, had been a whole two minutes earlier, and lots could change in two minutes. I’d gone from being a mechanic to a shaman in that time. Stranger things could happen. Around me, they usually did.

  “It’s a physical manifestation of the power drain. Somebody sucked the energy out of her so fast it’s taken a couple minutes for the corporeal damage to catch up. But I bet dollars to doughnuts there’s somebody out there whose visualization on this is ripping her heart out.” I put my fingertips over the wounds, which were now deep enough to start bending around the heart. There was very little blood, given the depth and the fact that I could see torn arteries. Postmortem injuries were like that. No heartbeat to pump the blood, so the best it could do on its own was ooze and pool.

  Jim Littlefoot said, “Why?”, the paramedic said, “What the hell are you talking about?” and Morrison, in a low, dangerous voice I’d become accustomed to, said, “Walker…” all at more or less the same time. I ignored the latter two and shook my head at Littlefoot.

  “It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s the power you’re generating. Someone wants it, and they’re using the idea of the heart as the soul’s center to focus their desire. They weren’t after Naomi. This would have happened to whoever was the lead dancer tonight.” It was so clear to me I could almost See it, though the Sight itself wasn’t offering much. I was a day late and a dollar short: if I’d chased the black whirlpool of magic when it had fled Naomi’s body, I might have followed it back to the perpetrator.

  But it hadn’t even occurred to me. My only thought had bee
n getting on stage and trying to heal the fallen dancer. I was hell on wheels at second-guessing myself, but for once I wasn’t convinced I’d made the wrong decision. Nobody, not even Coyote, had suggested it was within my power to split my focus in two completely different directions, physically attending to a healing while spiritually charging off for a fight. I’d made my choice. I would have to live with it, even if Naomi Allison hadn’t.

  “Can you tell who’s responsible?” Littlefoot’s voice, like Morrison’s, was low, but not with warning or anger. With despair, and I had no good answer for him.

  “I’d be looking for someone overflowing with power, but anybody in the theater—” I broke off. If the ghost dance had worked properly, if Naomi had been permitted to release the magic into the audience, then everyone would be glowy and happy, but she hadn’t. Only the spirit thief would be boiling over now, assuming he was in the theater at all. I looked at Morrison, who shook his head, but turned and left the backstage with purposeful strides. It was almost certainly far too late already to corral the audience so I could look them over, but he was going to try. I thought of the woman with the lump in her breast and a wave of sick concern broke over me, even though it was so far out of my control that worrying about it was ludicrous.

  That was probably why it bothered me. Easier to focus on the details or the impossible than what was right in front of me. Hell, I’d spent half the day doing that deliberately. I said, “Stop anybody you can at this point, okay? I’ll take a look at them, and if we can get the credit card sales, well, at least it’s someth…” to Morrison’s retreating back, and “Oh. Oh, God, gross,” to the dead woman in front of me.

  Naomi’s heart shuddered, sharp tooth marks tearing flesh, and an entire bite disappeared as we watched. Then another, then a third, and the heart was gone, gulped away. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth, gagging. The paramedic didn’t fare so well, and lurched a few feet away to empty his stomach. Naomi convulsed once more, then went still. Littlefoot turned an unblinking gaze on me, tears draining down his cheeks. All I could do was whisper, “I’m sorry. It’s over now.”