Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  Well, it wasn’t fair, which was childish and inane, but it was also sort of the crux of the matter. If I was willing to consider giving up my life and moving a thousand miles to be with somebody, I wanted him to be willing to consider the same. Poorly acquainted as I was with relationships, I wasn’t quite bad enough to generally think of them as power-balancing scenarios. In this case, though, the balance of power struck me as out of whack. Figuratively, because if we went to the literal on that particular topic, it had become clear it was out of whack in my favor.

  And maybe that meant I should be willing to bend further, but instead it made me just a little more rigid. I couldn’t help the amount of magical potential I’d been granted. Making allowances for that talent with regards to someone else’s within the context of a romance looked to me like a surefire recipe for long-term resentment and misery. I was pretty sure normal people faced this kind of problem over career trajectories or having children, but I’d left normal far enough behind that I didn’t have a problem with where I landed on the Richter scale of bizarre.

  I had a lot more problem with watching slow understanding come into Coyote’s golden gaze as he recognized where my thoughts were going. He said, “We need to talk,” cautiously, and I shook my head.

  “I’m not sure we do, Yote. And even if we do, now isn’t a good time. I’ve got to get to the theater and make sure nobody gets killed tonight. I’ll check in with you later to let you know I’m all right.” I squeezed his hand and let go, but at least Coyote smiled.

  “That sure of yourself, are you?”

  To my surprise, I grinned back. “Know what? Yes, by God, I am.”

  He gave me a broad wink and disappeared as the shower water turned cold. I got out, and, watching myself in the mirror, removed the dangling coyote earrings.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 11:28 A.M.

  Patricia Raleigh was out of the ICU and under police guard, which struck me as somewhere between reasonable and comical. People with shot-up collarbones didn’t strike me as especially likely to make a break for it. On the other hand, it would be a deeply humiliating mark against the police department if she did, and succeeded, and so a couple of my coworkers were slouching around outside her room, looking very, very bored. One of them, a guy I knew mostly as his nickname, Flathead—he had a very round skull—gave me a cautious wave when I came down the hall. “Aren’t you on administrative leave, Walker? Y’know, for…?” He jerked a thumb toward the room behind him, and I nodded.

  “I thought I’d come by and see how she was doing. Are you allowed to let me in?”

  “You really want me to?”

  “Sixty-four thousand dollar question, that.” I didn’t know the other officer, whose military haircut and posture suggested he was just out of the academy. I stuck my hand out with an introductory, “Joanne Walker.”

  “Dale Aldred. Look, I gotta ask, what’s it like to shoot somebody?”

  That was possibly the crassest thing I’d ever been asked. Flathead thought so, too, hissing a warning breath, but it was too late. Aldred, who apparently lacked the socializing factor which might’ve told him he was on thin ice, didn’t even blink. That was not a quality I wanted to see in a cop, not that I had any say in the matter.

  What I could and did say was, “It sucks,” in a cold enough voice that it got through to him. Worry furrowed his eyebrows, and Flathead, whose real name I could not remember, muttered, “Tell you what, go ahead and pop in for a minute if you want. She’s probably sleeping, they’re keeping her under pretty heavy sedation, but go ahead.”

  I thanked him, tapped on the door to be polite and slipped in to the sound of Flathead smacking Aldred with a meaty fist. Aldred said, “Ow,” petulantly, and the door closed on his whined, “What’d I do wrong? Don’t you want to know?”

  Raleigh had a private room. I wondered if her insurance covered that, or if suspected murderers were automatically spared roommates, which was probably the wrong-way-round way to look at it. Either way, she was alone in the middle of the room, sunk into her bed, with tubes running in and out of her. She looked small and pathetic, and I waited for the surge of sympathy and the impulse to heal that would normally accompany seeing somebody in that condition.

  I had none. Regret, yeah, but only at a comparatively shallow level. I wished I hadn’t had to shoot her, but mostly that meant I wished she hadn’t been so stupid as to attack a police officer.

  Anger flared, burning up regret and turning my hands to fists. I was angry that she’d put me into that situation. Which wasn’t fair, since I was a cop and therefore the decision to potentially enter that kind of scenario was mine, but fair didn’t come into play any more than it did with regards to Coyote. The bottom line was Patricia Raleigh had broken all the rules of polite society and forced my hand in a way no reasonable person would do.

  A bright knot of magic twisted in my gut, harsh reminder that the power, at least, didn’t approve of shooting people. I snarled, “Jesus Christ, neither do I,” to my own belly as quietly as I could, but this once my talent was not taking the right-of-way. I’d told Morrison and I’d told Caldwell, and now I told it: I’d been doing my job, and letting her brain Billy had not been an option. Healer or not, the whole shamanic power set could go stuff itself if it didn’t like this particular choice I’d made.

  It pulsed sullenly, reminding me of Aldred. Teeth gritted, I granted one concession, and skulked to Raleigh’s side. I could heal her—not all the way, because I was in no mood to offer inexplicable medical miracles—but at least ease some of the discomfort she had to be in. Therein lay the middle ground between warrior and shaman, I figured. Not a full-on healing, but some basic body work, putting the frame back together with the raw unfinished solders which would eventually provide the basis for detail work. The visualization was easy. I’d done things like it a dozen times.

  There was no power behind the imagery at all. No surge of silver-blue magic, no eager rush to fix the things that were wrong. I huffed, shook myself and reached for the healing talent again, this time more focused on it than the idea of how to heal my patient.

  It was there, responding, awake, a soft core of possibility. It ran through me willingly enough, clearing away vestigial sleepiness, but it simply stopped at my fingertips. No extension into Patty Raleigh, no exploration to understand what was broken, no healing burst to right what was wrong. It felt as though I had stiff bandages wrapped around me, refusing to let anything out.

  I said, “Shit,” very quietly, and triggered the Sight.

  The “bandages” were shields, sucked up so close to my skin I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. Coyote had been giving me grief for over a year about the poor quality of my shields. He would have to admire these ones, though he wouldn’t for a moment admire the reasons behind them. I shimmered with my own magic, containing myself so tightly that not a drop of healing power was about to escape me. The magic, having gotten over the previous morning’s shock of me shooting someone, was willing to ante up. I, however, was manifestly not. I didn’t think Patricia Raleigh deserved the easy way out. She had attacked my partner and very probably killed her husband, and I apparently felt she’d earned every licking she was going to take, including a bullet through the collarbone.

  Not even I could pretend that kind of judgment call was a positive development for somebody whose job was to heal.

  Except it wasn’t my job. It was my calling, maybe. My duty. But it wasn’t my job. My job was as a homicide detective for Seattle’s North Precinct, and nowhere in its description did it say anything about playing heroic healer to the bad guys.

  I slipped out again, thanked Flathead for letting me visit, and left Patricia Raleigh in exactly the same state I’d found her in.

  Since I was visiting hospitals anyway, I headed over to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, which wasn’t actually a hospital, but that was the sort of technical detail people could lose friends over. Th
e point was, it was where Nathan Raleigh, Naomi Allison and Lynn Schumacher’s bodies were all to be found. Chances that the M.E. I knew best, Sandra Reynolds, would have worked on any of them, much less all of them, were slim, but there was an equally slim chance she might be willing to share office gossip with me. I wished I knew her well enough to come bearing a gift, but I had no idea what kind of coffee she drank or snacks she preferred.

  I went into the offices reaching for my badge, and ended up at the front desk patting my chest and feeling like an idiot while the girl behind it watched me curiously. Resigned, I said, “I’m with the police, but I’m on suspended duty, sorry,” and turned for the door.

  “The Raleigh shooting, right?” the girl asked. “Doctor Reynolds mentioned she knew you, when the story broke last night. Is there something I can help with?”

  Evidently there were benefits to being infamous. I turned again and came to lean on the desk. “I was hoping to talk to Dr. Reynolds about—well, two things. First I wanted to know if they’ve examined the baseball bat Patty Raleigh attacked my partner with to see if it was the murder weapon, and then there was a dog attack downtown this morning I wanted to ask about.”

  “I’m totally not supposed to tell you anything like this, but I got to observe part of the autopsy,” the girl said cheerfully. “If it wasn’t the murder weapon, then that poor guy got bashed in the head with a different baseball bat with a nail driven through it. They sent it to Forensics already to look for fingerprints and test the blood to match it against Mr. Raleigh’s, but I don’t think you’re going to have any problem going back on duty, Detective Walker. They’ll clear you for sure.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me I might be asking because I was worried about returning to duty, but it was an excellent reason. Mostly I was backwardly justifying not healing Patricia Raleigh, though even if she hadn’t killed her husband, taking a swing at my partner was all the justification I needed. I cleared my throat. “Thanks. I don’t suppose you know anything about—”

  “The homeless guy? No, sorry. How come you’re looking into that? I thought you worked North Precinct.”

  “He was a friend of a friend. Look, I know you’re not supposed to, but is there any chance you can let me know—or if you could get Dr. Reynolds to let me know—if there was any sign of rabies in the saliva from the attacking dog?”

  The girl, who was probably really about my own age and not a girl at all, gave me a dour look. “It’ll be on the news tonight either way. If it’s rabid they’re going to tell people to watch out for it, if it’s not they’ll tell people not to worry. I’d worry anyway. Did you see what it did to that poor guy?”

  I hadn’t, and so shook my head, which was apparently the response she wanted. “It was awful. It just about bit his head off. I’ve never seen a dog big enough to do that. Jeez, listen to me. It’s probably a good thing they won’t have me doing the news report, huh? Anyway, is there anything else I can help you with, Detective?”

  “Sure,” I said, because what the hell, she was chatty and it never hurt to ask. “Did that dancer, Naomi Allison, come in last night? Have they done any work on her yet?”

  “Oh, she got priority because she’s not local and her troupe’s supposed to leave Monday morning. The boss came in to look her over, it was so weird. But that’s all I know. They said it looked like her heart got ripped out or eaten or something. What is this, a horror movie? Like those zombies at Halloween. We keep a shotgun in the morgue now. Can you imagine?”

  Creepy-crawlies crept up my spine. I hadn’t thought about what a morgue would be like during Seattle’s brief but extremely unpleasant flirtation with the walking dead. Probably not worse than the graveyard, but still bad enough to give me the heebie-jeebies. I was not good with the undead. “Actually, yes. I’m surprised you remember that.” People tended not to, or more specifically, to attach some kind of mundane explanation to the utterly impossible. It was a sanity-saving measure.

  My new friend evidently wasn’t overly concerned with how her sanity was perceived by others. “Kind of hard to forget when the fridge doors burst open and people you were just examining come crawling out. Everybody who was here went nuts trying to fight them. The boss chopped one of them up with a scalpel. Do you know how long that takes? I had a bonecutter, it worked better. But we don’t talk about it very much because who would believe us?” She gave me a suddenly suspicious look, like I’d deliberately drawn her out and would now mock her. I raised my hands and shook my head.

  “Most people wouldn’t. I’m glad everybody here was okay.” I hesitated. “Everybody was okay, right?”

  “Yeah.” She shivered, threw it off and launched in another direction: “Anyway, so the big boss looked at the dancer and you could see him thinking, everybody thinking, that it was something as freaky as the zombies, but who was gonna say that out loud? I don’t think they’re going to release her body before her troupe leaves. It’s too weird. They’re going to keep looking for why her heart’s gone. I hope they find some kind of acid attack or something. That would at least make sense.”

  I crooked an unhappy smile. People by and large didn’t want to believe in magic, but there were at least a few of them out there who didn’t have inherent magic, and who still hunted things that went bump. This girl seemed like she could be one of them. I wondered what she’d say to that, but I’d learned my lesson: telling the truth just made people think I was crazy. Even somebody who’d fought zombies was probably unlikely to accept the truth. I’d had to, but I was sort of in a league of my own, and I’d gotten to where it all more or less made sense. “Unlike zombies.”

  “Totally. So I wish I could be more help, but that’s all I know. And, um, Detective Walker? You won’t tell anybody I told you all that, right?”

  “My lips are sealed. Thanks.” I went back out into the afternoon feeling more lighthearted, if no more illuminated about the status of any of the cases I was unofficially involved with.

  Daylight made my eyes hurt, a shiny reminder that I hadn’t slept since the previous morning. I slumped in Petite’s driver seat, trying to think of anything at all I could do which would be useful on any of the cases, and woke up seventy minutes later when my cell phone blared its obnoxious ringtone through the car.

  “Somebody called in for you,” my buddy Bruce from work informed my panicked grunt of a hello. “Said it was personal, so I thought I’d check to see if I should put it through. Her name’s Tia Carley.”

  “Never heard of her,” I said tiredly. “Okay, put her through. Thanks, Bruce.”

  “No problem.” The phone beeped twice, and then a woman’s vaguely familiar voice came over the line: “Miss Walker? Detective Walker, I should say?”

  “Yeah.” Nobody called me miss, which triggered recognition. “Ms. Carley? From the dance concert?”

  “That’s right!” Delight swept her voice. “I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me.”

  “Did you know your name means ‘Aunt Carley’? Uh. I mean, I mean. Yeah. I remember who you are. I’m sorry, I just woke up.” I sat up, one hand knotted around the steering wheel, and blinked furiously at the world beyond Petite’s hood until my brain started to function a little better. “What can I do for you, Ms. Carley? Have you seen a doctor?” That seemed well-nigh impossible, since I’d only told her to the night before.

  “Maybe let me buy you a cup of coffee, since I woke you up. And no, no, I haven’t, I can’t until Monday at the soonest, but I hoped you might not mind telling me a little more about what you did.”

  I slumped deeper in Petite’s seat. “You can’t go to a doctor and tell them what I did, Ms. Carley. They’d never believe you.”

  “Oh, I know. I want to know for myself. I don’t want to harass you, but I’d like to hear a little about what you do.”

  “You’re not a reporter, are you, Ms. Carley?” I already had one reporter on my case, though that one had bitten off enough of my world to actually back away a bit. I didn’t need someone w
ho wouldn’t.

  “Please, call me Tia, and yes, I did know what my name means. My nieces call me Auntie Chuck, because Carley is derived from Charles. My family’s not normal,” she said cheerfully. “But I’m not a reporter, just someone who believes there’s more to this world than is dreamt of in most philosophies. Could I buy you a coffee, Detective?”

  Gary had quoted that line the morning we’d met, and I’d used it on Rita Wagner just yesterday. At least, I thought it had been yesterday. Either way, its use disposed me more kindly toward Tia Carley. I breathed, “What the hell, I could use the caffeine,” and more clearly, said, “Yeah, okay, sure. Where can I meet you?”

  “I’m downtown right now. At the Elliott Bay Bookstore, maybe?”

  Just a few blocks from where Lynn Schumacher had died. I rubbed my eyes, nodded even though she couldn’t see me, said, “I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” and made it downtown in twenty.

  Tia Carley was waiting for me, a newspaper pinned to the table she’d staked out by a cup of black coffee and a muffin that looked suspiciously bran-y. No wonder she had such a terrific physique. I waved hello and went to order the largest latte they had available, and eyed the sweets cabinet, trying to remember when I’d last eaten something that wasn’t a doughnut-based life-form. Tia appeared at my elbow, paid for my coffee and said, “The lemon muffins are especially good.”

  “Which is why you’re eating something wholesome and poppy-seeded, right?” I ordered a lemon muffin anyway, and a prepackaged turkey sandwich for dessert. Food in hand, we retreated to Tia’s table and I took a couple fortifying slurps of coffee before saying, “People don’t usually want to know about what I can do.”

  “How many of them have just been told they’ve been healed from early-stage breast cancer?” Tia kept her voice low, which I appreciated. “I don’t even know if I said thank you. Is it something you can teach someone to do?”