Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  Billy obviously didn’t like that answer any more than I did. He folded up his phone and stepped toward me, voice dropping. “Joanne, this is Morrison we’re talking about. You can’t…”

  “I can’t what? I can’t trust he’s going to have to be smart enough not to get hit by a car? I can’t let him run amok through Seattle while I lark off doing something else? Billy, there are a couple dozen people you and Sonata know who can maybe help find Morrison and, if not change him back, at least get him somewhere safe until I can get there and try to help. But as far as I know I’m the only person in Seattle who has a chance of protecting the troupe and getting a bead on whomever attacked them last night. I’m sorry, partner, but I don’t see a choice here!”

  Billy, thunderously, said, “You’ve changed,” and opened his phone again to make the calls.

  I rolled my jaw and looked at Melinda, whose expression was less condemning than her husband’s. I was grateful, though the cold, scared place inside me knew that in the end it didn’t matter. Littlefoot, hanging back a few feet, looked a whole lot more appreciative than I deserved. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing noble or sacrificing about the choice I was making. For once I knew I was right, no matter how much being right sucked. “Mel, I’m going to need you and Billy to go ahead with your part like I asked earlier. If nothing goes wrong—” which seemed pretty flipping unlikely at this juncture “—Billy can leave right after the curtain call to go help look for Morrison, if that’s what he wants.”

  “And I can’t?” she asked with the faintest trace of humor.

  I wished I had some of that humor to spare, but it hit me like a flat iron. “That’s not what I meant.”

  She put her hand on my arm. “I know, Joanne. It’s all right. Michael will be fine.”

  Possibly, but as I watched them retreat to the theater, Billy’s shoulders knotted with angry tension, I wondered if he and I ever would be again.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I did not enjoy the second half of the performance one little bit at all. I’d wrapped shields around myself until I could barely breathe, just so I wouldn’t be a scar of angry frustration on the psychic plane, but my heart rate spiked every time I remembered Morrison, which was constantly. After twenty frustrating minutes, I started a deep breathing practice, which was as close as I got to meditation. It almost certainly wouldn’t hurt my long-term prospects to get much closer than that to meditation, but for the moment, it had to be enough. Once I got my heartbeat slowed down, the music helped, drums drawing me into a different state of mind whether I wanted them to or not. And to be fair, I did. I just also wanted to be in two places at once, which I didn’t think even the limits of my talent would provide for.

  Winona looked very small and fragile out there on the stage, centerpiece of power that she was. That actually helped, too: she was a smaller person than Naomi had been, and her physical delicacy made her seem that much more vulnerable. It drove home both just how open to disaster, and how extraordinarily brave, she was. I focused on her, and by the time the last dance began, I’d reached the same semi-detached state I’d been in during the first act. I tingled with magic, filled up by the drums and the dancers. I glanced at my hands, unsurprised that my skin held a familiar translucence that showed silver and blue power running through my veins like blood. I didn’t glow: it wasn’t something anyone who didn’t have the Sight could see. In fact, my shields were so solid that even to a Sighted person, my accumulating power shouldn’t be more than the faintest blip on the radar. But to my own eyes, I was alight, and the potential for disrupting a dark magic felt good.

  I wanted very badly to pry and prod at the theater, to see if I could edge the killer out of the shadows. If he was there, if he was watching, waiting for the moment to pounce on the troupe’s outpouring of power, then he almost certainly would have some kind of psychic presence. As flush with energy as I was, I thought I should sense it if I went looking.

  Except every time I’d tried something like that it had been an abject failure. This was not the right place to run yet another disastrous experiment, particularly when the dancers were doing exactly what was necessary to draw him out. Even more particularly when me doing anything untoward, psychically speaking, could very well warn him off and make the whole evening a wash. I knew that. I knew it, but knowing didn’t make waiting any easier.

  I crept forward to just outside the line of sight in the wings without fully realizing I’d moved. The final dance was in its last minutes, and my heart, already strained, ached with the power the dancers were accumulating. I felt it from the audience as well as the dancers themselves, something I hadn’t noticed the night before. I’d thought it was just the dancers, but there was already a huge wash of positive feedback radiating from the audience, edge-of-the-seat involvement in the dance preparing for an explosive climax.

  The sexual connotation there didn’t escape me, and I had just enough time to wonder if that was part of what the killer was after before the dance ended and my attention went in a million different directions at once.

  I’d created nets and shields with other peoples’ offered energy before. The magic’s strength had varied accordingly to whether they’d been adepts themselves, and to some degree on my own skill. I had never, though, had the opportunity to direct the magnitude of power the dancers had deliberately collected and were now releasing. It rode outward, incandescent white to the Sight, and all I had to do was turn its leading edge solid by adding my own talent, my own vision of an impenetrable silvery shield, to their outpouring.

  Hunter-moon orange slammed into that leading edge with killing intensity, and shattered with a purely animal yelp of pain.

  Triumph shot through me, as hot and white as the dancers’ magic. I held the shield: that was easy, easy, easy, with the power flooding from the stage, and I spared a glance for Winona and the others. They were radiant with hope and fear, still waiting to see if the attack would come. Waiting to see if they might yet mourn their friend in the best way they knew how, by giving everything they had to an audience prepared to accept anything. The window was so narrow, the moment between cutting down their attacker and still permitting their power to make a difference, and the killer’s fractured magic was still whimpering with pain against my own.

  Then it retreated. There was no sensation of conscious decision, just an instinctive flight from something larger and stronger. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed: everything was stretched and clear and slow to me, but I thought the rebound was almost instantaneous, that the pause between pain and withdrawal was merely my own unhurried sense of time allowing me to see—and See—what was happening.

  I bet it all on that being true, and let the ghost dance magic flood the audience.

  Part of me felt them surge to their feet, felt the wall of roaring approval as power in itself, crashing back into the dancers, assuring them that they’d succeeded. That same part of me felt something within Winona and Littlefoot and all the others break, not in a bad way. Just the sudden painful release of emotion they’d both used and bottled up, an abrupt permission for tears, even as they held their places on stage, chests heaving, muscles trembling, holding their final poses until such a time as the audience’s cheers began to wane.

  From the slow-time place I was in, that dwindling seemed unlikely to ever come. That was okay, so long as my injured opponent didn’t come slinking back to try for another feeding. I didn’t think he would: the hunter-moon colors were still in retreat, though not yet out of view. All I had to do was follow them.

  As if they’d heard me, they winked out, a shield dragged into place. I snapped my teeth, as animalistic a response as the killer’s yelps and whimpers, and whispered Rattler? inside my head.

  He was there, waiting, all sibilant interest, as if I’d already prepped to call on him. Maybe I had: the drums and the dances were powerful things, and after more than a year of shamanic practice, my hind brain was well-trained to associate drumming wi
th transition. Grateful, I said thank you for coming so quickly. I need your hunting skills and your shapeshifting guidance. Will you share them with me?

  I’d never thought snakes, by nature, looked pleased, but the glowing white-line spirit animal in my mind looked pretty damned pleased. I shift. I ssstrike. I heal. It is rare, shaman, that sssomeone thinks to ssseek my hunting ssskillsss. I shall ssshare what I can.

  He was getting better at his S’s, at least the SH-ones. I grinned, oddly delighted by that, then repeated, thank you. I need another shape this time, not a snake. Four legs for swiftness, and a keen nose for hunting. Oh, God. I was doing the bizarre phraseology that seemed to overtake people when they started dealing with magic. I didn’t know if there was some kind of ritual or formula in speaking affectedly, but it seemed to be pervasive, and I hated it, even when I did it. Maybe especially when I did it.

  Rattler, however, managed to look increasingly amused, and bobbed his head once in a remarkable approximation of a human nod. I built a very clear mental picture of what I wanted to become, then whispered, “Crap!” out loud and started scrambling out of my clothes.

  I got the sweater and underlying T-shirt off, at least, before power welled up around me and changed what I was forever.

  A snake’s view of the world was hot and cold, alien enough to my warm mammalian mind that the morning’s transformation had merely been different, not lacking or improved in any manner. A hunting mammal, though, with hyper-acute senses…that was something else. That was the difference between seeing the world and Seeing it: I had always feared getting lost in the shamanic view of my surrounds. Suddenly, with my hearing and scenting opening up in extraordinary ways, I knew just how limited my human perception of the world really was. Part of me, in those very first seconds, knew I would never want to go back to being fully human. That I would lose something when I did, and the anticipation of that loss filled me with regret in a way leaving the Sight behind never did.

  Coyote senses: eyesight much sharper than I’d expected, with the slightest movement becoming of great interest to me. Scents were incredibly strong—I could smell Morrison, both as a man and a transformed wolf, even through the dancers and the audience and the dust/makeup/heat of the theater. I could pick out Billy and Melinda from the crowd, and I’d never known I had any particular sense of what they smelled like. There was so much noise I almost couldn’t hear anything, though the slightest twitch of my ears—which had to be enormous, given that I was pretty sure I was a hundred-and-sixty-five-pound coyote—honed in on tiny abstractions of sound that I’d never have caught as a human. The near-silent creak of fly ropes, a cough from the audience audible beneath the roaring applause and a swallowed squeak of astonishment from one of the dancers whose gaze strayed my way.

  I didn’t think more than ten seconds had passed since the dance ended. No more than five seconds since I’d transformed, but even so, I was already losing time. I was also already panting. I didn’t know what my body temperature was, but backstage was warm enough without wearing a fur coat.

  The obvious answer was to leave the backstage. I backed up—awkward as hell when I was still tangled in my pants—and kicked the jeans off to leave them behind. God had not intended a coyote to open round-knobbed doors any more than he’d intended wolves to, but I had an advantage over Morrison in that I’d retained my intellect.

  Stainless steel polished by thousands of human hands twisting it open had the most ungodly salty flavor I’d ever encountered. I gagged on my very long tongue, trying to spit it out, and was incredibly grateful for the bar handles on the outside doors so I didn’t have to taste that again.

  Outside, Morrison’s scent was bright and clear, wind playing with it but in no danger of reducing it to a faintness I couldn’t follow. My gut seized up, impulse at war with promises. I could find him. I could find him quickly, reducing the danger he’d be hurt or killed—assuming he hadn’t been already, and I had to assume that. I wanted to so badly I could taste it in great gulps that washed away the door-handle flavor. I’d gotten him into the mess he was currently in. I should be the one to get him out.

  Teeth bared, anger directed entirely at myself, I deliberately turned out of the wind and whispered another plea to Rattler: Can you show me how to See? I hunt a hidden magic and a shaman’s eyes are not enough to flush it out. I was doing it again, the weird semi-ritualistic speech patterns. On the other hand, Rattler exuded a sense of approval from somewhere behind my frontal lobes, so maybe stilted language wasn’t such a bad idea. I’m shifted, I whispered, magic personified. I’m a coyote, predator personified. Teach me to hunt magic, Rattler. I need your guidance.

  Triggering the Sight, even in shifted form, wasn’t difficult, but nor was it quite normal, even for the Sight. In my own full-color vision, I saw the animistic world as a deepening of the physical world around me. Auras lit up from within, typically, each object proclaiming its own particular duty by whatever color it shone with. My coyote-sharp eyesight didn’t have the color range the human vision spectrum did, but I lost none of the brilliance I was accustomed to Seeing. It just…moved. Moved deeper into my brain, where it resided as information separate from but related to the physical world. It looked as though someone had painted the entire landscape in light, the way it could be done with long camera exposures, and then set the entire image inside my head where it could be consulted at need without interfering with my real-world coyote vision.

  I was pretty certain that was entirely Rattler’s doing, not my own. It lingered a moment, letting me get used to it, before fading. For a disorienting moment I caught a glimpse of the warm/cold world the rattlesnake saw, entirely at odds with my still-mammalian brain’s expectations. Then even Rattler’s view transmogrified, and the overlay of heat sensing made sudden vivid sense.

  Warm-blooded creatures left heat trails where they moved. They didn’t last for long, but to a rattlesnake, the difference between a few seconds’ visible heat trail and the lack thereof could mean the difference between dinner or going hungry. Similarly, with ordinary Sight, the whole world lit up, but with Rattler’s pared-down heat sight, only the left-behind trails of old magic glowed. To me, hunting magic, the difference was between finding a killer and letting one go.

  Or finding Morrison and letting him go. His trail, like his scent, was clear. Both would fade, possibly before I could get back to this starting point and follow him to wherever he’d gone. But there was a better chance of tracing his physical scent later than there was of chasing the hunter-moon orange blaze that even now retreated from the theater. The killer had crept up on it, shielded but questing: he had to be open and aware of the dancers in order to time his attack perfectly, so couldn’t hide himself as well as I’d done. All I’d had to do, after all, was watch: an advantage to working from the inside.

  And all I had to do now was follow him. I snarled at the wind, at the scent that promised I could find my wayward boss, and turned away from it. The killer’s fading streak of color, the mark left from his shielded approach and retreat, wasn’t something I could put my nose down and follow. It was somewhere between my mind and my Sight, and it didn’t tidily use city streets to get between points A and B. It went as the crow flew—a stupid phrase for anyone who’d ever seen a crow fly to use, since they hopped and flitted and winged their way all over the place, rather than going in the straight line implied by the colloquialism, which tangent made me wonder how much of it was me and how much of it was the irritated musings of a coyote which had tried to hunt crow, none of which was important right then. I hauled my brain back on track and trotted through the parking lot, focused on a halfway point between the real world and the Sight which allowed me to follow a killer’s trail. My nose and ears, not especially useful in this particular tracking attempt, informed me that patrons were beginning to leave the theater, a piece of information I took in stride until a woman started screaming bloody murder.

  Like everybody else, I jumped about four feet into the ai
r—well, no, not like everybody else, because I actually did jump four feet into the air, possibly more, which I hadn’t known was in a coyote’s repertoire—and came down with my heart racing as I looked around for whatever the hell had inspired her shrieking.

  A fist-size stone caught me in the ribs, and a scared, angry male bellowed, “G’wan, get out! Get out of here!” at me as he scooped up another rock. From the flower beds, no less. That wasn’t fair. I yelped as the second stone hit home, then fled, tail tucked between my legs, for the self-same copse Morrison had retreated to. Apparently there was at least one disadvantage to retaining human intellect in a shapeshifted body: completely forgetting that everyone would see a gigantic, potentially dangerous wild animal. Following the killer’s trail was going to be harder than I thought, but for reasons I hadn’t even considered.

  Grumpy and with brambles sticking to my fur, I crept out of the trees on my belly, keeping to the shadows. In human form, I could bend light around me to make myself almost invisible, but I was reluctant to try layering magic like that outside of a controlled environment. Coyote would be proud of me. And coyotes, small-c, were decent at skulking and dodging, so I skulked and dodged until I was in a pool of dimness between two streetlights. Theater traffic hadn’t started pouring out yet, so the road was relatively empty. The nearest traffic light was red, a couple vehicles idling at it, and the headlights approaching the traffic light had a fair distance to travel. I took a good hard look both ways and bolted across the street.

  A semi truck blew through the red light and caught me in the teeth of its grill.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Truly astonishing pain erupted in my left hip and thigh bone. In my whole left side, in fact, though it radiated from the hip joint. The world went white with agony and gravity briefly lost its hold on me. That was bad, because eventually it was going to demand its due, and I already hurt more than I could remember ever hurting in the past. I’d been impaled repeatedly, but somehow in comparison that seemed localized, whereas pain was now ricocheting down through my feet and up along my ribs into my arm. I thought there must be streamers of red flowing from my toes and fingertips. Not blood, just a visible arc of pain, like a manga comic book character might show.