Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  But then, from a self-castigating perspective, it was a little odd that Morrison hadn’t thought of it, either. That left me with three possibilities: either my boss was losing it, the snake within the troupe’s grass was running a look-elsewhere spell, or my shamanic instincts were dead on target and it was somebody else entirely. Of those three, the first was the least likely, and I had to admit that given my track record, the third didn’t seem all that likely either. I was all light-voiced and hollow as I asked, “Did you kill her?”

  Winona paled, a fair trick for someone of her already-porcelain complexion. “Why would you even think that?”

  “The killer’s aura is hunter-moon orange, and that color just slammed me between the eyes when I looked at you.” I triggered the Sight again as I spoke, wanting to see if guilt or horror surged through Winona’s colors.

  Obliterating white smashed into my head again, sending the bells in my ears to new frenzied pitches and making my skin itch until I wanted to score it off. Orange stabbed through the white, pulses emanating from Winona. I tried to stalk forward with a commanding air and instead staggered in a circle, holding my head as I turned the Sight off yet again and waited for its after-effects to fade. I’d had my vision go on the blink before, a physical warning against the wrong mystic path I was charging down, but I couldn’t remember the Sight itself acting up in quite this way. I had no idea what was wrong with it, but I wished it would stop.

  When my vision had cleared again, the dancers had moved. Some had stepped closer to Winona, supporting her. Others had fallen back, just as clearly rejecting her, fear greater than friendship. I gritted my teeth and moved toward her. “Tell me what happened, Winona. I can’t believe you tried an attack tonight, knowing I was here to shield everyone.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” She backed away from me, her small group of supporters moving with her. “I didn’t kill anybody! I would never hurt Naomi. She was my friend!”

  “Winona, I can See it. I can See the hunter-orange blazi—”

  “Joanne,” Melinda said gently, “Winona’s aura is emerald-green with touches of red. There’s no orange in it at all.”

  Cold sluiced through me, washing away the anger at my own assumptions and leaving an acidic pit of worry in its place. Even if I knew hundreds of magic users—adepts; I had to remember to use that word, because I liked it—even if I’d known hundreds of adepts, my temperament would almost certainly leave me disinclined to believe most of them when they made a flat statement. I would want to see it myself.

  That was the nature of a Joanne.

  Melinda Holliday was one of the few exceptions I could think of to that rule. If Melinda said it, I believed it, even if my own empirical evidence was to the contrary. I stopped where I was, teeth and fists clenched, eyes closed so I couldn’t see Winona and give in on the urge to advance further. I triggered the Sight for a third time, prepared for it to white out the world and set my skin afire, which it did. I turned my head toward Billy and Melinda, because of everyone there I knew their aura colors, and after long moments spoke. “Okay. All I can See right now is white, Mel. I can’t even See your colors, so okay, if you say Winona’s red and green, she’s red and green. But something’s not right. Orange is cutting through the white, and it’s the killer’s signature shade.”

  Melinda, still in the same calm, gentle voice, said, “I don’t see it.” She wasn’t arguing its existence, just making an admission. I exhaled noisily and nodded, then turned back toward Winona, my eyes still closed. A headache was building and I wanted very badly to stop using the Sight, but screwed-up or not, it was providing the only lead I had. I edged forward and extended a fingertip, trying to locate the very heart of the orange blaze. When I was almost touching it, I opened my eyes again.

  Winona was holding her breath, my finger an inch from her breastbone. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, given she was wearing a thunderbird costume. Long feathers and bright bits of gold adorned her, all of them making a loose flowing outfit that both hid and enhanced her form. “Have you changed anything in your costume lately?”

  She clapped a hand against her chest and shook her head. “No. It’s Naomi’s costume anyway, not mine. I—” Her eyebrows furled and she closed her fingers around the feathers just beneath her hand and just beyond my pointing finger. “Ow. This is supposed to all be soft, not—” She tugged, then came up with a small bone, holding it in her fingertips. “God, what is that, a bird bone?”

  Three or four people said, “No,” including me. I went on to add, “It’s not fragile enough. But maybe I can use it as a tracking device, since it’s got the killer’s colors,” as I reached for it.

  Melinda said, “Joanne, I don’t think you should touch that,” exactly one second too late.

  Power sluiced out of me like somebody’d opened a drain on the Mississippi. No: more like somebody had stuck the world’s largest straw into the Mississippi and was schlucking it all out in one gigantic gulp. My knees and brain both went wobbly, the former delivering me to the floor with a crash and the latter filling with a static rush that made thinking hard. I’d given blood a couple of times in the past. The feeling of light-headedness from standing up too rapidly after blood had been drawn was not dissimilar to the power drain, only magnitudes less significant.

  One fuzzy thought came clear: this was exactly the kind of thing Coyote kept warning me about. If I didn’t get out of it intact, he was going to deride me from here to breakfast. Of course, if I didn’t get out of it intact, he probably wouldn’t be able to, which wasn’t exactly reassuring. I fell forward to dig my fingertips into the dance mat and tried to concentrate.

  A ball of nausea rolled my stomach as a reward for my efforts. I’d always felt the magic start in my gut, and now it was being sucked out from there, vampire-like. Not that I’d ever heard of a vampire that attacked peoples’ stomachs. Which was just as well, because ew.

  Somewhere at the back of my mind, a weary little voice suggested that following thoughts like that to their inevitable conclusion was perhaps a result of a static-filled brain, which was in turn the result of having power gulped out of me. It was not, in other words, the kind of focus I needed to shield against the power drain and survive this so Coyote could yell at me for it. I lowered my forehead to the mat and squished my eyes shut, determined to See what was happening.

  The Sight exploded blindingly white again, so brilliant that for a moment nothing else mattered: mostly I was interested in figuring out why that was happening. I had control of my magic, these days. Getting pumped up full of spirit dance drumming shouldn’t supercharge me to such a degree that the Sight rendered me, well, sightless.

  Except all the control I was accustomed to having was shaped around the relatively comfortable Joanne Walker limitations, rather than the new exciting Siobhan Walkingstick potential. I knew from firsthand experience that the problem with mystical potential was once unleashed, it was disinclined to fit back into the tidy little box it originally came in. Rattler had scraped me down to a spark, and the dancers had thrown that spark into an ocean’s worth of metaphysical gasoline. I probably shouldn’t be surprised when explosions ensued. I was surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be.

  Of course, at the rate power was draining out of me, in a minute I’d be somewhat less than even my usual comfortable level of magical self, and that would be bad. Bad for the troupe, bad for Morrison, bad for me. I gritted my teeth and looked for my shields, uncertain if I’d find them intact or obliterated, and not sure which to expect under the newly-changed circumstances.

  Silver-shot blue was there, but weak and unimpressive. Given my overflow of power, I thought it should be like the walls of Jericho, except that was a bad analogy, because they’d come tumbling down. Or maybe that made it a good analogy. Either way I clawed at the magic flowing from me, trying to shape it into shields instead of a river.

  I might as well have tried stirring the ocean with a Popsicle stick.
It was worse than futile: achieving a degree of focus simply awakened vicious hunter-orange stripes in the whiteness still filling the Sight. They dove into my faltering shields and drained them ever-faster as I poured more strength into them. The bone I’d taken from Winona’s costume burned my hand, giving me something physical to fixate on for what felt like the first time in forever, but it wasn’t enough. Orange slipped inside the silver-blue of my shields, worming its way deep inside and leaving streaks of pain where it touched me. Agony drove inward and gathered like a storm waiting to break.

  And break it did. Or, more accurately, I broke, the bones of my skull crumpling with a hideous series of grinding pops. My brain cramped, suddenly no longer fitting inside my head, and someone gave a tiny, desperate gasp of agony. I suspected it was me.

  I was getting tired of pain. Sadly, pain was not tired of me. It stretched and wracked me just as violently as Rattler had done less than an hour before. Except Rattler had been frantically trying to put me back together, and this new exciting pain was clearly trying to pull me apart.

  No. Not trying to pull me apart. Trying to reshape me. Bones cracked, marrow oozing out, and my skin split to expose blood and muscle. Fur burst from joints that crackled and reformed, and panic spurted through me as I concentrated on remaining human.

  Derision slammed through the flow of orange power, a belief that to be merely human was pathetically inadequate. My fingernails turned to claws, black and short and shining under the stage lights. A whimsical and very stupid part of me thought it might be interesting to see what shape I was being forced into, and in that instant I lost a huge amount of ground. My hands, my forearms, all the way up to my elbows, cracked and shifted. A canine of some sort, but not the semi-familiar coyote form: the color was wrong. I let myself observe that, then knotted my fingers against the mat, determined that they should be fingers, and not paws.

  I might as well have wished they were fishes, though with someone’s malicious shapeshifting magic running through me, that was probably a dangerous thought. The howl that ripped from my throat was distinctly doglike and ended in a series of panting whimpers. Fear built at the back of my brain, eating away my understanding of what was happening: making me less human and more wild. Another minute and I would no longer know who or what I was supposed to be.

  Fresh panic surged through me and caught hold of my magic, finally stopping the terrible outpouring I’d been experiencing. The power woke, suddenly mine to command. It was not an offensive weapon: I’d had that beaten into my head in unpleasant ways. But shields were defensive, and staggering amounts of magic were still fluctuating inside me. I solidified my shields and shoved outward, power bursting forth in a shockwave. The killer’s magic dispersed over a suddenly enormous surface of outgoing magic, and for the briefest moment my hands were my own again. Triumphant, relieved and terrified all at once, I flung a net, trying to capture my attacker’s thinned-out magic.

  An impossibly large pulse of magic roared out of me for the second time. A patch of damp bothered the corner of my mouth, drool collecting on the mat. There was too damned much power running through me. I couldn’t control its output, nor the equally sudden influx as it returned to full strength, which it did in exhaustively quick cycles, regardless of how much my opponent sucked down. I was starting to feel like an all-night smorgasbord, which was probably just dandy for the guy whose original plan had been intended to suck up as much power from the troupe as possible, but wasn’t so great for me. He gathered his hunter-orange power back together while I scrabbled uselessly at the floor, and when the next surge of shapeshifting magic flowed toward me, I had no focus to stop it with.

  A clear yellow shield rose up out of nowhere and surrounded me. The killer’s attack cut off like it had never happened. Bewildered and exhausted, I wheezed, flipped on my back and stared upward.

  Stared, actually, at Melinda Holliday, who stood above me blazing with glorious, inhuman luminescence.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I had, in my short career as a shaman, run across quite a few non-human beings. Melinda was not one of them. Of that, I was absolutely sure. But the woman standing over me was clearly Melinda, and just as clearly touched by the gods, a phrase I did not use lightly. Her eyes were as gold as mine had ever been in the midst of power throes, and there was a radiance to her I’d never before seen embodied by anyone. Not even Cernunnos, ancient and terrible god of the Hunt, had glowed the way Melinda did. It was as if someone had taken her already generous and gentle spirit and hooked it to a star, until barely-contained grace and power shone through her fragile, mortal skin.

  That power was more than enough to trump mine. I could See properly again, Melinda’s talent blotting out the whiteness in an effervescent glow. Wisps of color floated round her like she might be lifted into the air by them, their delicate dance mesmerizing until Melinda knelt beside me, concern in her gaze. Deep concern, more than a human, even a good friend, could contain. My heart missed a beat and hurt when it started up again, though I had no idea why. I inhaled to risk a question, then jerked my hands upward, making sure they were, in fact, hands.

  They were, no trace of shapeshifting left on them. I exhaled all the air in my lungs and let my eyes close with the breath, taking an instant to not care that I didn’t understand and to revel in my gratitude for Melinda’s interference. Then I opened my eyes again. Melinda was still brilliant, the stage lights far above somehow dull by comparison. There were traces of someone unfamiliar in her features, like someone else was looking out through her eyes. Disconcerted, I turned my head away, glad I hadn’t asked that question after all. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know who or what was within my friend.

  Billy’s shoes intruded on my vision, reminding me of the day I’d gotten a sword stuffed through my gut. He had been there then, too, seen from the same angle. He’d been off duty that morning, and wearing a killer pair of high-heeled blue pumps. Tonight they were spats, every bit as theatrical but in a whole different way. I smiled at them, then cautiously offered the smile to the Hollidays.

  From their expressions, my smile was more of a horrible grimace than an expression of pleasure. I stopped doing it, and they looked grateful. Melinda, still in the same gentle voice she’d been using for some time now, said, “Are you all right, Joanne?”

  I croaked, “Yeah,” then swallowed a couple times, trying to loosen my throat. “What just happened?”

  “Your energy was being torn apart. I shielded you.” Melinda’s tone held the slightest hint of reproval, which was a whole lot less than I deserved. Part of me wanted to address that fact.

  The other larger, nosier part of me said, “You can do that?” in genuine astonishment.

  She said, “I can at the moment,” which I suspected also needed addressing, but instead of pursuing it I transferred my gaze to the high stage lights and chose to admire how I was no longer writhing in misery. Melinda had done that somehow, and while curiosity killed the cat, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. After a moment I gathered myself enough to say, “Good news is, I think I can safely say we’re dealing with a shapeshifter.”

  Melinda’s voice went wary: “And the bad news?”

  “He’s better at it than I am.” There was a terrible scent of burnt feathers in the air. I held my breath as discreetly as I could, looking for the smell’s source.

  Winona was just beyond the Hollidays, gaping at me. Gaping at my hand, specifically. I lifted it, wondering what was so interesting.

  My fingertips were blackened, the charred remains of a tiny bone still clutched in them. I considered that a while, then frowned at Winona. A small round burn mark marred her breastbone, exposed by melted fabric. The feathers adorning her costume were singed, and her expression was stricken, like she was hurt but too shocked to fully realize it. I got to my feet carefully and put my palm over her breastbone, calling up healing power.

  Blue-rimmed silver ricocheted out of me, so brilliant the entire troupe gasped
. It was possible for my magic to have a visual component, but it didn’t normally. Then again, it didn’t normally make my eyes cross or my knees buckle, either. Billy saved me from collapsing as Winona stepped backward, staring at her own chest before raising her gaze to mine. Her brown eyes were silver-shot, my own residual power coloring them. It faded quickly, but left her glowing with health and strength, no sign of grief or the performance’s exertions weakening her.

  I, on the other hand, said, “Wooga,” and let Billy take more of my weight than a self-sufficient independent woman should rely on a guy to do. My vision tunneled, then righted itself, and I stood up with a whisper of thanks. Only then did Winona say, “What was that?”

  “A talisman.” I turned the blackened bit of bone in my fingers. “A focal point. Something that belonged to the killer, something he could focus his power through to attack the troupe. He, um. Shouldn’t be able to again. Unless it’s just a way to make it easier, and given the thrashing he just gave me, that’s poss…” I could tell from Winona’s expression I should have stopped with “shouldn’t be able to.” My shoulders slumped. If there was a PR department for shamans, I needed their help. I mumbled, “Nevermind. Obviously when I touched it he used it to focus on attacking me, but now it’s burned up and that really should render it powerless.”

  “You did more than that.” Billy had a deeply unfocused expression, like he was looking at something far beyond what normal people could see. Farther beyond than usual, even, since he generally did see things normal people couldn’t. His voice was unusually light and soft as he said, “Only one person has ever died in this theater, Walker. I can see her now. Do you need to talk to her?”

  My stomach lurched, all that fresh new magic suddenly worried. There were a dozen reasons Billy shouldn’t be seeing Naomi Allison’s ghost. First, though it had been murder, she’d gone so fast she had no idea she’d died brutally. He didn’t see ghosts from non-violent deaths. Second, though technically it was within his two-day window for seeing ghosts, I knew very well that Naomi had danced right into the Great Beyond, and Billy had always only ever been able to communicate with the dead who remained on this side of that divide.