Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

Morrison snorted laughter. “Unlike the rest of our interactions.”

  I said, “You’re a very confusing man,” under my breath, and did my best to focus on the dance performance after that.

  Its impact was lessened by dint of being on the sidelines rather than in the audience. A few things—the thunderbird’s entrance, flying across the stage as she did, for example— were even more dramatic, because she came straight at us. But mostly, I couldn’t see the structure of the dances building to the shapeshifting climax, and that helped me retain a degree of control. The dancers still buzzed with, and built, enormous energy, but it was directed outward, not into the wings, so instead of being body-slammed by it, I could just siphon off dregs.

  The atonal music, the drums, the heat of stage lights—impressive even from the wings—made my skin tingle, lifting me out of myself in a gentle, reverent way. I was held to my body by threads, a double-existence I’d only experienced a few times before. It had never been so comfortable, or filled my chest with so much delight. For the first time I could remember, I was happy to hold myself in two planes of existence. I was aware of my body, of the heat and the smell of makeup and sweat, of my sweater’s soft nub and the rougher cotton denim of my jeans. My feet felt heavy in their bulky shoes, and I found the idea that they anchored me amusing. As long as I kept my shoes on, the dancers couldn’t take me away.

  But the detached from my body watched them with a shaman’s eyes. I Saw the creatures they made themselves into instead of the human forms throwing themselves across the stage. Their auras were extraordinary: even tinged with grief—or possibly because they were saturated with it—they leaped high and wide, a metaphysical echo and prediction of what the dances themselves did and would do. It took effort not to join them, spiritually if not physically, but my presence would mar the patterns of light and power they built. I felt magnificent, much better than I had since the healing the night before. This was what Coyote had tried to impress upon me, about ritual and drum circles and sweat lodges: power combined and shared and focused was much more effective than anything I could draw on by myself. Passion like this could be drained, of course, but it also renewed itself by its very nature. The fact that the dance troupe had lost a member less than twenty-four hours earlier, and were still able to waken and share depths of magic from within themselves, was existential proof of that.

  Morrison touched my shoulder very lightly. I turned toward him, pleased I retained sufficient bodily awareness to do so even when floating just outside of myself, drawn to the dancers. He tapped a finger beside his eye, indicating—indicating what, I wasn’t sure. That my eyes were gold, probably, but that was practically standard operating procedure now.

  Oh. No. He was asking if he could see what I Saw, a revelation which came like a heady thunderbolt. God, we’d changed, both of us. Maybe we’d even changed since last night, given that it didn’t seem likely the man I’d thrown a shoe at would be asking for a repetition of the performance leading to the shoe-throwing.

  On the other hand, I couldn’t see me from the outside— well, actually, I could if I wanted to, but looking at Morrison was more interesting—and I suspected I was sort of flushed and joyous and possibly like everything was going to be right with the world. If I was standing next to someone who looked like I felt, I’d want in on some of that happy juice, too, and Morrison knew I could share if I felt like it.

  I didn’t bother with the silly rhyme, this time. I just tugged him close, his feet on mine, and put my hand on top of his head as I whispered some of that replenished power out of myself and into my boss.

  Right then, the first act ended. A tremendous surge of shifting magic flooded from the dancers, hitting me in the spine and crashing through me in waves. It was intensely, exotically erotic, and I ducked my head against Morrison’s shoulder, trying to keep my breathless laugh silent.

  I got a nose full of fur. I jerked back, sneezed and came face-to-face with an armful of silver-furred, blue-eyed, deeply bewildered wolf.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  As a rule, wolves, like coyotes, were not human-size. Then again, as a rule, wolves were not found in the wings of a Seattle theater, much less wearing a three-piece suit and standing on somebody’s feet with their front paws sliding frantically around that somebody’s waist.

  I grabbed two fists full of suit jacket at the nominal shoulders, trying to catch enough fur to keep my boss from falling down. Trying to catch enough to keep him from tearing off into the audience, for that matter, but the combination of clothes and fur made for a poor grip. On the other hand, neither of us wanted him to be standing upright, so we sank to the floor together, nose to nose as the dancers poured off stage.

  Bewilderment faded from Morrison’s blue eyes, panic replacing it. He jerked violently when the first dancer gasped upon seeing him, and reared back as more of them by turns jolted and pushed to a stop. I didn’t even need an animal’s senses to catch the fear and confusion in their scents: it was pungent, pouring off sweating bodies and from heaving lungs.

  In face of all that, two fists full of suit-covered fur were not enough to keep a hundred and ninety pounds of wolf in place. His claws scrabbled on the floor—no soft rubber mat here, just black-painted pine—and I was hauled under him, gathering a whole host of splinters in my backside as he lurched toward the rear of the backstage area. I swallowed a gurgle of pain and held on, determined not to make this worse by allowing my boss to run amok on four legs through the streets of Seattle. My brain was already shrieking your fault your fault this is your fault! and miserably, there was no doubt about that at all. Morrison had the magical aptitude of a horseradish.

  This was not a condemnation. It was simply the way of things, and it was probably part of why he could ground me so fast. He was absolutely, solidly connected to the ordinary world. Or he had been, until last night’s unfortunate thought that he’d make a very pretty wolf had met up with me working a bit of magic on him tonight while two dozen dancers poured out a river’s worth of power meant entirely to soften an audience up for a transformative experience.

  God, I was an idiot.

  Morrison gave a truly magnificent surge which almost shook me loose. I snatched at his haunches as they passed over me and managed to de-pants him, which presented me with a much more up-close-and-personal encounter of canine genitals than I’d ever hoped to have. I said “Aaghg,” and hauled myself over his ribs, trying to crawl up his bony, furry spine. It gave me a glimpse of our location—the stage’s absolute darkest, farthest-back corner, with nowhere in particular to go, for which I was grateful. There was a door only a few yards away, but it was closed and I didn’t think Morrison was quite up to knobs just then.

  The entire dance troupe was crowded as far away from me and Morrison as they could get without spilling back onto the stage. Not one of them had made a sound, though several had stuffed knuckles into their mouths to accomplish such silence. I perversely admired the training that ranked “shut the hell up backstage” above “OH MY GOD THERE’S A WOLF BACK HERE!” and tried to keep my grunts quiet as I got some leverage, flung myself forward and wrapped my arms around Morrison’s neck.

  It wasn’t a particularly natural direction of attack on a wolf, and I had no idea how much of Morrison was in control. Enough that he hadn’t bitten my face off in the first seconds after transformation, but the panicked retreat to a defensible corner seemed pretty lupine to me. So did the snarling, snapping, writhing attempt to chew my arms off once I got a neck lock on him. I’d put sleeper holds on people before. I’d never tried it on a dog.

  Somewhere very far at the back of my mind, I whispered wolves aren’t dogs, and that part of me produced a shrill giggle as I folded one elbow around Morrison’s neck and grabbed that wrist with my opposite hand. Humans tapped out or went unconscious from a well-applied carotid restraint within about ten seconds. Canines, it turned out, were a whole hell of a lot less obliging.

  Morrison slithered backward and to the side, not q
uite escaping my grasp only because I was pretty much sitting on top of him when he started. I slid to the side, still trying to keep a grip around his throat, but his neck-to-head ratio was all off, from a chokehold perspective: thick neck, streamlined skull, certainly compared to a human. Furthermore, humans usually required some degree of training to get out of a sleeper hold, either by learning early on to duck the chin so a lock couldn’t be made, or—more usefully, after the fact—by doing something like slamming their heel into their attacker’s instep, which could easily hurt enough to make an assailant loosen his grip.

  Wolves, I discovered, just naturally went for a let me try to disembowel you with my hind feet attack. My bowels were, thank God, not quite in his line of fire, but my thigh was. Denim shredded under his claws and I shrieked like a little girl, letting go so my quadriceps weren’t also shredded.

  Morrison leaped out of reach, careening down the length of the backstage with his tie flying over one shoulder and his suit jacket flapping wildly along his back. I was a moron. I should have grabbed the tie. This piece of information now solidly in mind, I took off after him without considering the futility of a two-legged creature trying to catch a four-legged one. The stage scrim rippled wildly as we bolted alongside it. I hoped the curtains were closed so what audience remained in the theater during intermission wouldn’t see the artistic, shadowy rendition of Woman Chasing Wolf across the stage.

  Two legs versus four or not, I caught up to my panicked, shapeshifted boss because there were no open doors at the far end of the stage, either. He backed into a corner, snarling, and I dropped down low, hands spread wide to make myself as unthreatening an object as I could. Morrison lowered himself to the ground, his own front paws spread wide and his haunches raised, similar to my own position. Except on him, it looked familiar. I’d seen wolves do that on documentaries, and I was reasonably certain it was prelude to a dramatic last stand.

  I said, “Shit,” out loud and fell over, throat and belly exposed in my very best attempt to project canine body language.

  On the positive side, he didn’t rip my throat out. On the somewhat less positive side, a stagehand flung one of the backstage doors open. Morrison tore through it—knocking the stagehand to the floor in the process—and disappeared down the bright-lit hallway that led to the dressing rooms. I gave up on any pretense of backstage silence and bellowed, “Close the doors! Close all the doors!” as I got my feet under me and ran helter-skelter after my four-legged boss.

  The hall behind the stage was mostly concrete, with an ordinary door directly opposite the one I’d burst through, a thankfully closed giant corrugated steel door at the far end, and a sharp turn just beyond that. I spasmed with indecision, then yanked the door across from me open to take a look at what lay beyond.

  A warehouse-size room with set pieces, costumes, marked-off rehearsal areas and another enormous corrugated steel door—this one open to the world—spread out in front of me. I slammed my small door shut, breathlessly confident that Morrison’s only escape route lay that way, and that he currently lacked the skills to open the round-knobbed egress. I pelted up the hall and rounded the corner, increasingly certain he’d come that way when I discovered the adjoining hall to be lined with dancers pressed against the walls and all staring in the direction I was running.

  A door slammed somewhere in front of me and my stomach turned leaden with fear. I skidded around another corner, and there, fifteen feet ahead of me, was a set of double doors with broad press-bar handles. The same doors, in fact, that I’d propped open earlier so that Morrison and I could slip into the theater’s backstage areas without disturbing anyone. And like in all public buildings, for fire code reasons, the doors swung outward, making them easy for almost anyone to open.

  I crashed through them at top speed, but the last I saw of my boss was a streak of silver and a flapping tie disappearing into a nearby patch of trees.

  I wish I could say I swung right into action, but in fact I just stood there for what seemed like an awfully long time, staring after Morrison. Disasters of every magnitude ran through my mind: Morrison getting hit by a car. Morrison getting shot by some redneck. Morrison escaping the city and living out his life howling at the moon. I wondered how long wolves lived, anyway. Morrison starving to death because what the hell did he know about hunting in wolf form, not that instinctive lupine behavior appeared out of his grasp. Coyote had said a forced or unexpected shift made it easy, even likely, that you’d get lost in the animal. I had to assume Morrison’s frenetic fleeing was pure panicked wolf, not the basically unruffleable man who’d become a precinct captain at the tender age of thirty-five.

  The doors opened behind me and Jim Littlefoot, cautiously, said, “Detective Walker?”

  “There’s a six-foot-three man in the audience wearing a bright blue zoot suit. He’s with a Hispanic woman a foot shorter than he is, wearing a black satin fitted Veronica Lake-style gown. I need you to get them, please.” I didn’t sound like me. I sounded like my head had been hollowed out and then refilled with worry so profound all it left was a scary degree of calm.

  Littlefoot hesitated audibly, then exhaled an agreement. The door closed, but didn’t latch. I reached for my cell phone, rediscovering in the process that the right leg of my jeans was shredded. Welts had risen on my thigh, for that matter, big thick red strips which probably should have torn into muscle. I’d been lucky, or Morrison hadn’t really been trying to hurt me, or the magic within me had dealt with a more grievous injury while I wasn’t even paying attention. All three seemed equally possible.

  I dialed Dispatch while my mind made all those little observations, and gave my name and badge number when the operator answered. I still sounded like someone else as I said, “I need Animal Control and the citywide police force to be on the lookout for a giant silver wolf in the West Seattle golf course area. It is absolutely fucking critical that the animal not be shot. Tranqs are all right, but mostly if it’s sighted and can be corralled, I need to be notified immediately.”

  A long, long silence met my demand before the dispatch operator finally said, “Just how big of a wolf are we talking about?”

  “Huge. Twice the size of a normal wolf. Silver fur, blue eyes. It may be wearing a suit jacket.”

  The operator started giggling. I couldn’t blame him, although I also wanted to kill him. I waited for his laughter to die down, which happened very abruptly after about twenty seconds when he said, “911 just had a call about a gigantic wolf in that area.”

  “Tell the 911 crew that the animal isn’t dangerous unless it’s engaged and that everybody should leave it the hell alone. That Animal Control is on its way. Get the message on the radio, on the news, whatever it takes to get the word out. Did the call say anything about a suit jacket?” I’d begun walking as I talked, still mechanical, and I broke through a tangled thicket of branches as I asked the question. Maybe, maybe, if I’d kept running, I’d have caught Morrison, because he’d taken a moment there in the brush to scrape the tie and coat off. I took the tie, particularly, as a positive sign: a paw print on the neck suggested he’d worked a foot between throat and tie to loosen it, which had to require some vestigial form of human thought. The coat and shirt’s seams were torn, savage tooth marks ripping at cloth, but tellingly, the collars were hooked on a brambly branch. It looked like he’d managed to back out of them, much like he’d squirmed free of me. I picked up the coat in a fist and buried my face in it, inhaling Morrison’s cologne and a distinctly more animalistic scent. Not quite dog; not quite anything I’d ever smelled before. Wolf, or maybe just shapeshifter. I didn’t know. “Forget the suit jacket. Just a silver wolf, about a hundred and ninety pounds. That’s about twice the size of your average wolf. Tell people to stay away and that it’s not dangerous unless provoked.”

  I hoped to God that was true. The dispatch guy agreed to do as I said, probably more because of incoming 911 calls than any confidence in my sanity, and I left the copse with a fistful o
f Morrison’s clothes.

  Billy, Melinda and Jim Littlefoot were waiting for me beside the theater. I said, “I’ve fucked up beyond all possible belief,” still very calmly as I approached them, but from the Hollidays’ expressions, Littlefoot had already come to, and shared with them, a reasonably accurate conclusion of the scenario.

  All Billy said was, “What do you want us to do?”

  “Call Sonata. Get her to contact anybody in Seattle who knows anything about shapeshifting or tracking and tell them they’re looking for a man who’s been shapeshifted into a wolf.”

  Melinda, clearly feeling she was on dangerous ground, said, “There’s a name for that, Joanne….”

  I closed my eyes and turned my face skyward, like I could find strength or answers from the motion. Barely twenty-four hours earlier, I’d told Morrison that there was no such thing as a werewolf. “I shapeshifted into a rattlesnake this morning, Melinda. Am I a weresnake?”

  “Of course not. That was—”

  I reversed my gaze and pinned her with it. “Then Morrison’s not a goddamned werewolf. Werewolves are monsters controlled by phases of the moon, and I don’t want anybody getting the idea this should be solved with a silver bullet. Morrison’s been inadvertently shapeshifted and that needs to be made clear to anyone who might be able to help.” There was a cold place inside me, so angry at myself that it wouldn’t let much of anything else through. Drill sergeants were friendlier than I was coming across as. But if there was one thing in my favor, it was that the hard cold place could evidently plan, which wasn’t normally my strong suit. I was much better at rushing in where angels feared to tread.

  Billy had his phone out as he asked, “What’re you going to do?”

  I pointed toward the theater, hating myself for my response and knowing I’d hate myself just as much for any other. “I’m going to go back in there and make sure nobody dies tonight, just like I said I would.”