Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  Rattler hissed, Apologies, Sssiobhán Walkingssstick, and my world went away in new and exciting ways.

  Everything twisted: the earth, my bones, my memories. The latter enveloped me, a comforting cushion to take me far from the deep wrenching dreadfulness that was now.

  Then, I was a kid barely big enough to see out the window of my father’s big old boat of a Cadillac. Vast trees with leaves so rich in shade they shimmered blue-green reached over the road, making a canopy for us to drive through. Later I would associate stretches of road like that with Anne Shirley’s White Way of Delight, but then I was too small, and only enamored of the colors and how sunlight filtered through them. My father was talking, something I didn’t remember him doing all that often, and since time had rear ranged to give me the opportunity, I paid attention.

  “…almost home. Your grandmother will be glad to see you. Do you remember her, Joanie?”

  I shook my head. Grandmothers were an abstract concept, just like mothers were: mine had deposited me with Dad when I was six months old, and I hadn’t seen her again until I was twenty-six. I’d spent the intervening years resenting her for dumping me with a father who had no apparent interest in me, though this was a revelatory and completely unremembered moment. Joanne Walker of the present day had no memory at all of a grandmother, nor of visiting North Carolina until I was a teen. Now that he said it, though, I recognized the roads and trees my small self was being driven down: we were, in fact, almost to Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee land trust where I’d gone to high school.

  “Well, she remembers you. Thinks I’m terrible for keeping you away. Am I terrible, Joanie?”

  “Nuh-uh!” I leaned out of my seat belt to stretch way across the car’s bench seat and pat Dad’s thigh. “Drandma’s wrong!”

  Dad grinned at me, flash of white teeth in a warm brown face, and time slid forward a ways, landing me in a kitchen I recognized from my teen years.

  The woman in it, though, was completely unfamiliar. She wore bell-bottom jeans over rough bare feet, and a square-cut cotton tunic with an embroidered slash at the collar. It reminded me of commercially-made shirts intended to look handmade, except it somehow seemed authentic, like she, or someone, actually had made it. She was tall and strong-featured, with a beaky nose like my own. Her black hair was barely threaded with white, and her brown eyes were extremely serious.

  So serious, in fact, that they couldn’t be taken seriously, especially when I’d just watched her plate up a bunch of cookies and knew she was holding them behind her back. “Which hand?”

  I pronounced, “Bof!” with a three-year-old’s utter confidence. The woman—presumably my grandmother, though she didn’t really look old enough to be a grandmother—laughed and turned around, revealing she was indeed holding the cookie plate in both hands. I nabbed two and stuffed both of them into my mouth, giving myself strained chipmunk cheeks.

  My father, somewhere behind me, said, “Joanne,” in a mildly chiding tone, but it was too late: spitting them out would be infinitely more disgusting than slowly mashing my way through them. I mumbled, “Sowwy,” and “Thank you” when I’d cleared my mouth enough to do so, and amends were made.

  Grandmother said, “You’re welcome,” and gave me two more cookies, which I gnashed into happily. The now-me, the adult, saw the whole thing as a distraction from Grandmother’s gentle, “You should settle here, Joe,” addressed to my father in an obviously trying-not-to-be-pushy manner. “I’d love to have her near.”

  Dad stepped in for a couple cookies himself, nodding as he did so. “I’ve been thinking about it. The mountains are a good place to grow up.”

  “And there’s…” Again, the adult-me heard a significant pause there: Grandmother had no intention of finishing the sentence, but every confidence Dad knew what she meant.

  And he did, though he stopped any chance she might continue with a wave of one of his absconded-with cookies. “Not now, Ma. Maybe later.”

  Acceptance flickered through her dark eyes, and time bounced forward again. A matter of hours, maybe: certainly not more than days. Dad held my hand, his voice terribly neutral as we looked at the mangled wreck of a blue 1957 Pontiac Star Chief. That was what he was telling me, what kind of car it was, and, “I remember when your grand mother bought it. I was five. My father and I used to work on it together. You wouldn’t remember him, Joanie. He died a long time before you were born. I think she’d like it if I put this old beast back together, but I can’t, sweetheart. Not right now.” Then he picked me up and hugged me, and although as an adult I remembered none of the rest of it, I did remember that hug as the only time I ever saw my father cry.

  We left Qualla Boundary in the Cadillac a few days later, and I didn’t see the place again for ten years, when I demanded he cast off his wanderlust and settle down in one location long enough for me to go to high school. Dad had looked at me like he’d never seen me before. We hadn’t been getting along for a couple years at that point, and I’d always thought that expression was borne of him being uncertain of how he’d ended up with a kid at all, much less one with opinions and demands.

  Now, faced with the idea that he’d almost done just that— settled down to raise me in one place and had instead lost his mother to a horrible car crash—put a whole new spin on that expression. Maybe we could have settled anywhere, but maybe Qualla Boundary was the only place he’d ever thought of as home. Maybe facing that place again without his family there was a little harder than angry-at-the-world teenage Joanne Walker had ever considered.

  There was a lot I hadn’t considered. Things I would have to take a look at, assuming I survived being hit by a semi.

  Memory warped away, as if I’d reminded it I didn’t belong then. Pain flooded back, no longer just setting my left side afire, but blazing through my entire body. My bones were jerking, reforming, shaping themselves in new dreadful ways, and I heard Rattler’s sibilant apology again. I wanted to say it was okay, except I wasn’t at all sure it was. There were afterimages in my mind, shucked snakeskins built from thin strips of light, my own broken form flailing in anti-gravity, a coyote fur lying bedraggled on the ground. Every one of the images wrenched my whole body, yanking things in and out of alignment, changing the shape of my spine, my bones, my skin.

  Coyote, my Coyote, my golden-eyed mentor, appeared in the midst of all the chaos, human form bristling with fear just the way his coyote shape might do. “Joanne? Siobhán? What’s happened?”

  I wailed, “You said it’s not supposed to hurt!” as I writhed again, leaving yet another snakeskin behind. Everyone was calling me by my real name, the one on my birth certificate, rather than the use-name I’d carried most of my life. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, the Irish-Cherokee disaster bestowed upon me by my mother, who had given no thought to how an American might view Siobhán Grainne. Even I’d been half convinced my own name was pronounced Seeobawn Grainy until Mother confirmed the correct way of saying it, Shevaun Grania. But since she hadn’t raised me, Dad had taken one look at the whole mess and dubbed me Joanne. I’d started using Walker instead of Walkingstick the day I graduated high school, cutting all ties with who I used to be.

  Or maybe not quite all. The shamanic heritage I’d boxed off and forgotten about had burst through eventually, and was right now stripping me to my skin, to the muscle, to the very bone, and rebuilding me from the inside out. I’d shapeshifted twice, and it wasn’t supposed to hurt!

  “You’re not shifting,” Coyote whispered, though that was manifestly untrue. Even he sounded like he wasn’t sure of what he was saying. “Joanne, what happened?”

  Rattler’s apology hissed through me a third time as my back arched like a chest-burster was about to, well, burst out of my chest. I screamed this time, something I didn’t think I’d been doing, but there was nowhere else for the pain to go. One more snakeskin fell away, and the white-hot agony drained from my vision so I could see the real world again.

  So I was fully aware t
hat the final twist of earth/body/memory was gravity calling me home. I smashed into asphalt and bounced down the street to the scent of burning rubber. Metal shrieked somewhere very close and voices rose above it in fear and dismay. I kept rolling after I’d stopped bouncing, and finally came to a stop as a bruised, huddled mass on the roadway.

  I hurt everywhere. Not the explosive pain from the impact, but like I’d been thrown forty feet and bounced off the street a few times. People survived that all the time in the movies, but I never thought they should. I wasn’t entirely certain I had. The toes of my right foot twitched involuntarily, and I was grateful even though it made every muscle even distantly attached to my toes hurt. I twitched my fingers experimentally, and that worked, too, although it hurt all the way to my spine. Big girl that I was, I whimpered instead of actually screaming.

  The rattlesnake coiled in front of me, looking unusually mortal and real, and bent his blunt head down to tickle my face with his tongue. It did tickle, which made me flinch, which made me hurt. I did my big-girl whimper again, and the snake, against all laws of snaky nature that I knew about, slithered to my feet, then uncurled himself against me, following every body curve he could get to. I was a pretty small ball for someone nearly six feet tall, and he was unusually large; after a few seconds I was almost entirely wrapped in cool, sympathetic snake. Ssiobhán Walkingstick, he said inside my head. Thisss wass not meant to happen thiss way, and I am sssorry.

  He shuddered—I shuddered—and the physical became metaphysical, Rattler melting deep into my skin.

  Most of the pain vanished, or retreated so far as to become inconsequential by comparison. I cried out, a weak little startled sound mostly of relief, then dragged in a deep breath and let go a much gustier howl. A barbaric yawp, to steal a phrase. It was undignified and angry and pain-ridden and an announcement that against all odds, I was still alive.

  And in the midst of that yell it came to me, quite clearly: Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick had only just now been born.

  On the upside, despite needing glasses which were no longer on my face, I had better vision than your average newborn. The first thing I saw when I lifted my head was the semi’s bed swung across half the intersection, its head lights glaring down on me. The second thing was that the arm supporting me was bare, which made me crane my neck, wincing, to take a look at myself.

  I was quite, quite naked. Quite human, and quite naked, with road rash in places I didn’t even know I had places. I closed my eyes and very carefully put my forehead against my forearm, resting there a moment while my muscles screeched protest at being used, and then took a second look at myself.

  Still naked. Well, yes, of course: I’d shed my clothes in the theater whilst changing into a coyote. Clearly I hadn’t considered the full ramifications of that decision, although even if I had, they would not ultimately have led to the conclusion I would shortly be lying starkers in a city street while a panicked truck driver thundered toward me. I was going to have to reassure him, which at that very moment seemed a task well beyond my capabilities.

  The poor guy dropped to his knees a few feet away and skidded over asphalt on sheer momentum, tearing up his jeans in his bid to not run me over a second time. He was huge in a manner which suggested he both ate way too much truck-stop food and that he spent all his off time at a gym turning grease into fat-lined muscle. He was the Kobe beef of truck drivers, except I had the vague idea Kobe beef involved massages rather than exercising.

  Mr. Kobe Beef had a high tenor voice which had no business coming from a body that size, and it said “Oh my god oh my god I swear I seen a dog a big fucking dog I didn’t mean to hit it Jesus Christ it couldn’t have been a dog I hit you you must be dead are you dead please don’t be dead oh Jesus oh God oh Jesus God” until I croaked, “I’m not dead yet,” and waited for Monty Python to finish the rest of the scene.

  Monty Python were disobliging, and did not appear. Other people were starting to: theater-goers, the people from the cars that had been at the traffic light, and in the very far distance, sirens. I couldn’t quite determine which branch of public safety they belonged to—cops or fire department or paramedics—and a thin wave of regret mentioned that my coyote hearing would have picked them out clearly.

  “Miss,” Kobe Beef said in a tone somewhere between reverent and befuddled, “you’re naked.”

  Ah, yes. I was not dead, and therefore it was more important that I was naked than it was that he’d just run a red light and knocked somebody forty feet down the road. Such was human nature. I said, “Yes, I am,” after a few moments. “I don’t suppose you have a coat I can borrow?”

  Kobe lumbered to his feet and rushed back to his truck at a pretty good clip, for such a big guy. I sat up very cautiously. Tiny pointy stones poked me in the ass, adding insult to the road-rash injuries I’d already taken. I was covered in black smears and road burn, the former of which manifestly refused to disappear under my insistent shamanic imagery of a car wash. Sullen and aching, I dragged every last ounce of reluctant power to the fore and succeeded in giving myself a new paint job that removed the road rash before Kobe Beef returned with an enormous flannel-lined jacket that smelled like French fries. He draped it over my shoulders and I shivered hard, surprised at how cold I’d gotten without noticing. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Did I, ImeanIguessIdidIhadtohavebut did I hit you, miss? I was drivingtoodamnedfast I’msorryit’slateI’mtired justtryingtogethome Ididn’tnoticethelight you should be dead—!”

  I stared over his head toward the traffic lights. There were cameras on all four crossbars above each street, making it almost certain that the whole wreck had been filmed. Everything, including my transformation from coyote to woman. For a moment, I longed for a world in which magic wasn’t something that could be caught on camera, but I knew from personal experience that it could be. Somebody—probably my periodic nemesis, news reporter Laurie Corvallis—could make a big stinking story out of this.

  Except Laurie wouldn’t. Not after what had happened with the wendigo. Maybe I could get her to tread on a few toes and make sure nobody else turned it into a story, either. Or maybe I could get somebody in traffic control to accidentally wipe a magnet over tonight’s traffic tapes, or whatever the modern equivalent thereof was. That would be better all around.

  “I’m not dead.” Interrupting Kobe’s squeaking, alarmed rant felt better than it probably should. “Obviously you didn’t hit me. I’d be dead if you had.”

  His jaw flapped, but there was a certain infallible logic to my statement, and relief started creeping across his thick features. “I’m probably just some crazy woman,” I went on. “Out crossing the street naked in the middle of the night. Probably your truck’s impact against…” I looked around, trying to find something the truck had actually hit, and settled on the median strip. “…against the median had enough concussive effect to knock me off my feet and down the road a bit.”

  “That…must’ve been what happened…” Kobe’s forehead sank into deep wrinkles, and I almost felt sorry for him.

  Almost. Not quite sorry enough to go try to straighten out the witnesses’ stories, for example. My largesse ended with climbing stiffly to my feet—the paint job that cleared my rash up hadn’t dealt with the pain of muscles abused by bouncing down the street—and patting Kobe’s shoulder. “If you ever drive tired or above the speed limit again, God Himself is going to come down on you like a load of bricks. Trust me. I have connections.”

  I left him there looking like I’d put a gypsy curse on him, and not feeling one little bit bad about it as I limped down the street. I was exhausted, but I was alive, and that was good. I suspected I’d been through some kind of rebirthing, that Rattler’s frantic scraping off of my old skins to reveal new, fresh, healed ones had probably done something profound, and that once I understood fully what had happened, I would have my feet under myself a whole lot more solidly. That was also good. By all rights, I should be happy
.

  But I had by now lost any hope of tracking the hunter-orange killer, and that was not good at all.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Under anybody’s definition of normal circumstances, a six-foot-tall woman walking barefoot down a city street wearing only a smelly lightweight coat would attract an impossible amount of attention. Moreso when she was leaving the scene of a wreck while more or less everyone else was running toward it.

  It being me, though, I turned one of my oldest tricks to my advantage. Typically bending light around me to render myself essentially invisible was pretty easy. It took a little concentration, a little envisioning light waves just sort of washing on by without bouncing off me with any real enthusiasm.

  Walking down the street and keeping myself relatively unseen was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. It took a quite literally staggering amount of concentration. I kept weaving around, sometimes bouncing off passersby who had no idea what had hit them.

  I wanted specific passersby. I wanted Billy and Melinda, or failing them, Jim Littlefoot, though the Hollidays were by far my first choice. Unfortunately, my phone was back at the theater with my clothes, and I wasn’t expecting happen-stance to put them in my path. Odds were Billy was already hunting for Morrison, and that Melinda was either helping or on her way home. The passing fancy that I could retake a coyote form and search for Morrison myself struck me.

  My knees collapsed at the idea, thigh muscles squealing in protest as they tried to keep me from falling to the sidewalk. They succeeded, just barely, and I lurched to a nearby tree, holding myself up until my legs were trustworthy again. Coyote had said shapeshifting didn’t hurt. He hadn’t mentioned it left a person completely fricking exhausted. Someday I was going to write that Shaman’s Handbook that no one had seen fit to give me. It would be full of useful information like don’t trust snakes in your garden and start and end your shapeshifting adventures at home, so you don’t lose your clothes and so you can collapse into sleep for twelve hours. Although now that I thought about it, that first one was a bit Biblical and I was, in retrospect, even dumber than I’d realized. The second part, though, was helpful.