Shaman

by Chloe Garner

  Anadidd’na anan’ae.

  He tried again, the shapes a little easier, but when he looked up at her again, he couldn’t remember.

  “I’ll put a couple of these around the house. You have to look at them a lot of times before you’ll be able to remember. It’s not a bad thing for you to be able to do. Worst case, if you have to pull a demon’s attention away from an innocent, this’ll do it.” She grinned. “Just make sure you mean it, when you do it.”

  Sam reached over and flipped the paper, shaping out the sounds.

  “Anadithna anuth.” He looked up at her. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”

  She looked at him strangely.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Something about the way you say it. It’s special.”

  She swallowed, eyes not leaving his face.

  “It is. It’s my eloi. My ‘I am’. The words of your eloi are more powerful for you than for anyone else, and they translate, when you say them, as ‘I am’. I would introduce myself ‘eloi anadidd’na anu’dd’. ‘My I am is anadidd’na anu’dd’. That’s why I had to speak the words to heal myself at Heather’s. If Carter had said them, they wouldn’t have worked. They wouldn’t have had the right meaning.”

  “That’s amazing,” Sam said.

  “You two are free to geek out on your own time,” Jason said, taking the paper back from Sam and flipping it back over. “I’m just interested in outing demons. That’s amazing.”

  <><><>

  Day seven. Fail.

  <><><>

  Day eight. Fail.

  <><><>

  Day nine. Fail.

  <><><>

  They chased down a rumored poltergeist that turned out to be a german shepherd.

  <><><>

  Then a bloody murder that turned out to be a jealous ex-wife.

  <><><>

  Day ten. Fail.

  <><><>

  Day eleven. Fail.

  <><><>

  Samantha went in to see Janice by herself; Jason dropped her at the door, promising to be back in an hour, while they went and investigated an unlikely string of accidents one town over - a man had fallen off a ladder, a woman had died in labor, and a child had been hit by a drunk driver while riding his bike - to see if there was anything worth looking at. Elspeth answered the door. She frowned.

  “How do I look?” Samantha asked.

  “Like I should call the police on your abusive husband,” Elspeth said. “Are you sleeping?”

  “Not a lot. I don’t think Sam is, either. I go downstairs for a drink, and I find him, more often than not.”

  Elspeth pressed her lips together, but didn’t say anything further. Samantha crutch-walked her way back to the exam table and hopped up. Janice took a few minutes.

  “Elspeth says you’re killing yourself, and I shouldn’t bother,” she said.

  “Good thing I’m not seeing just any healer, then,” Samantha said, nodding at the certificate on the wall. “If you didn’t have a degree, you might actually consider listening to her.”

  “It does seem a waste,” Janice said, rubbing her thumbs over Samantha’s knee. The ache of healing bones echoed off her heel, and she reclined onto her elbows as Janice completed her work.

  “Let me see your wrist,” the woman said. Samantha shrugged and handed it over.

  “Haven’t even thought of it,” she said. The woman flexed it through its normal range of motion. There was a slight twinge at one extreme, and Janice’s eyes confirmed she had noticed it. Samantha sometimes wondered what it would be like to be a healer. What they must feel.

  “There’s a new injury here,” she said. “One that was removed by an amateur.”

  “Sorceress. Long story,” Samantha said.

  “The one you chased?” Janice asked. Samantha nodded. Janice narrowed her eyes.

  “We both know you could have shaken loose of any grip she had on you immediately. Why did you go running after her?”

  “I wanted to know,” Samantha said.

  “Shamen,” Janice said, like a curse. Samantha grinned.

  “If Sam doesn’t manage to kill me, and then saving Sam or Jason doesn’t, it’s destined to be my Shamanism. I’m curious. I want to know.”

  “Don’t come crawling to me and expect me to put all the pieces back together, when it happens,” Janice said.

  “I don’t crawl,” Samantha said. “I have a pair of perfectly strong boys to carry me.”

  Janice clicked her tongue against her teeth, then stood.

  “You’re done. The wrist should be fine. Full range of motion.”

  “How much longer on my leg?” Samantha asked. Janice tilted her head.

  “You heal more quickly than anyone I’ve worked on before. Probably next week I’ll be willing to take the cast off.”

  “I’ll be back in five days,” Samantha said. Janice snorted and smiled.

  “Just don’t run on it again. You’re going to develop scarring I can’t fix, if you tear it up much more.”

  “Wouldn’t be my first scar,” Samantha said. “You’re a miracle worker.”

  She picked up her backpack and was getting settled onto her crutches when Elspeth walked into the room.

  “You asked me what I would try,” the woman said. She held out a small leather pouch. “That’s it.”

  Samantha took it, opening it up and trying to get light down to the bottom.

  “What is it?”

  “Gray dust,” Elspeth said. Samantha looked up at her sharply.

  “I didn’t think anyone was making it any more,” she said. Elspeth smiled with coy smugness.

  “Only if you don’t know the right people,” she said. Samantha nodded. Gray dust was very expensive, and very rare, Elspeth’s connections not withstanding.

  “Thank you.”

  “It won’t help. You can’t save him, but if I had to pick one thing to try, that would be it.”

  “I’ll return it to you, one way or the other,” Samantha said. Elspeth held up her hands and shook her head.

  “Consider it a gift between friends. Return would be an insult.”

  Samantha bowed slightly, as gracefully as she could with the crutches.

  “I’m honored.”

  “Let him go, when it’s time,” Elspeth said. “As a friend.”

  Samantha nodded.

  “I know it’s the right thing to do. I just don’t know if I can.”

  Elspeth took a step forward, taking Samantha’s hand from the handle of her crutch and running her fingers over the palm. Samantha resisted flinching away. The lovely head turned up to look at her, the almond eyes knowing.

  “Yours is a valuable life to just throw away in grief,” she said. “We need you here, at least for a time longer.”

  “Do you read the future?” Samantha asked. Elspeth shook her head.

  “Simply what is.”

  “My secrets are dangerous,” Samantha told her. Elspeth inclined her head, allowing her to take her hand back.

  “And deserve to be jealously guarded. But someone must remind you.”

  “I hear you,” Samantha said softly, “but what would you do?”

  Elspeth regarded her evenly.

  “We all bear our marks of pain,” she said. Samantha dropped her head.

  “Forgive me. You’re right. I don’t know.”

  Elspeth put the backs of her fingers to Samantha’s cheek, face still placid.

  “Perhaps you bear more than most, at that,” she said. “Go now. The impatient one is waiting.”

  Samantha nodded to her and crutched her way out of the house, waving over her shoulder at Janice as she turned to close the door. Jason was parked in the driveway.

  “Have we got something?” she asked.

  “It’s more than nothing,” Jason said. “Sam was talking to the widow when I left. The doctor at the hospital said that the birth was basically over when the mother ruptured a blood vessel and hemorrhaged into her brain until the pr
essure killed her, and Simon said the police report says the driver swears he stopped before he hit the kid.”

  Samantha nodded, shifting her backpack down between her knees and wrangling the crutches into the back seat.

  “He’s giving up,” Jason said. She looked at him, eyes squinted in the sunlight despite her sunglasses, and frowned.

  “I know.”

  “I need you to save him.”

  She sighed.

  “I told you from the beginning. I can’t promise that. I’m going to try; I haven’t stopped trying, but this is a long shot.”

  “You have to stop talking like that,” he said. “That’s why he’s giving up. No one believes he’s going to live.”

  “I can’t tell him things that are untrue.”

  He pulled over, turning square to face her.

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  “Even if he gives up and lets himself die?”

  Samantha paused.

  “Could you live with yourself, if you had his memories?”

  “Listen, Sweetheart, I promise I’ve done worse.”

  “No. I promise you haven’t. It’s possible you can’t even imagine some of the things he remembers.”

  “And you can?”

  “I’ve seen them. And it’s scarred me. He was a willing, enthusiastic participant. And those memories are there in his head forever.”

  Jason looked at her for a moment, then his face changed, becoming sarcastic, angry.

  “Oh my god. This is about sex. He had sex, he enjoyed it, and you want to punish him for it. You hate him for it.”

  “I do not,” Samantha said, stung.

  “You do. You can’t have him, so no one can have him. He’s used goods now, anyway.”

  “Take that back. Tell me you don’t mean that.”

  “Tell me it isn’t true,” Jason sneered. Samantha opened her door and stumbled out, pulling her backpack after her, then wrestled the crutches out of the back seat.

  “I’ll walk from here,” she said, slamming the door. There was no sidewalk on this side of the street, so she started to cross. Jason rolled along after her.

  “Get back in the car,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Listen, I’m just sitting by, watching my brother die. You have no idea what that’s like.”

  She spun, pulling the photo out of the pocket on the side of her backpack and slamming it into the windshield.

  “No. No, you’re right. I didn’t get there until after she was dead.”

  He slammed the brakes, leaning forward to look at the picture. Pretty teenage girl, blond, posing with a soccer ball in her team uniform. Worn. He licked his lips.

  “Who is that?”

  “My sister.”

  He looked at her, all anger gone.

  “What happened?”

  “She was in the house, too. My parents were asleep, but she was probably awake.”

  He got out of the Cruiser.

  “Get in. Please.”

  Being angry felt good. She had wanted someone to be angry at for weeks, now, and now that she had managed it, she was going to melt when she let go of it, but her reasonable mind said he didn’t deserve it. He felt just like she did.

  “You and I should probably just yell at each other for a while, sometime,” she said, letting him take her crutches and put them back in the back seat.

  “Yeah.”

  He helped her around the Cruiser and opened the door for her, settling her backpack in the floorboards before he helped her in.

  “What happened?” he asked as he got into the driver’s seat and put the car back in drive.

  “I was nineteen, coming back from school, second semester Sophomore year.”

  She saw the wheels turning.

  “Yes, I graduated highschool at seventeen.”

  “Geez, you’re a nerd,” he said. She smiled and looked out the window.

  “She was having a sleepover with five of her friends, down in the basement. They said the fire started at the top of the stairs down to the basement. They didn’t figure out how to get out the windows in time. Nine people died in that fire.”

  Again, the attempt at math.

  “Nine?”

  “Her friend had just found out she was pregnant. The sleepover was for her, before she told her parents. She had only just told her boyfriend a couple of days before. He was a hot-tempered idiot. Always had been. I don’t know why one of my sister’s friends would have been dating him, but…” she shrugged, “they were sixteen. As it turns out, extreme mental instability narrows the barrier, and an opportunistic fire demon hopped across. The two of them got on famously.” She looked at him, stirrings of hot anger lighting amid the ashes of the memory. “Not all possessions are unwilling. It took the demon all of thirty-six hours to talk him into burning down my parents’ house in order to kill his girlfriend.” She looked out the window again, remembering. “One of our rules is that, if a demon attacks you personally, either physically or through an intermediate, you are the only one who has the right to kill it. I didn’t know it at the time, but when Garret sent me to Carter, he was washing his hands of the fire demon who killed my family. Richard torched eighteen more buildings before Carter decided I was ready to help kill the demon he was working with. Twelve more people died, while he was training me. I didn’t even know a demon had killed my family until he bought the plane tickets to Colorado.”

  Jason reached for the photo she still had out, holding it up where he could look at it and still see the road in front of him.

  “Looks like a hellraiser,” he said. Samantha smiled.

  “She was that. Pretty, popular, athletic. No one ever said no to her.”

  “Were you close?”

  “We were different, but we were as close as we could be. When we were little…” she swallowed, her throat tightening. “We used to go out hiking in the woods outside of town. I don’t know why Mom let us go. But she was outdoorsy and headstrong, and I loved climbing and exploring. We used to talk about what we were going to do when we were grownups. I knew that I was going to grow up to be a nerd and marry a nerdy boy and have nerdy children, and she was going to buy the house next door and teach my daughters to play soccer and football and basketball, and then, when she wasn’t doing that, she was going to travel the world. She was never going to get married, she said back then. Maybe nine years old. A boy would just slow her down.” She paused, remembering. “Yeah, we were close.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. She looked up at the ceiling, willing the tears back down.

  “I’m not giving up on him, Jason. I just… I put my best guesses first. All I can do is work through them in order and hope. But I’m not going to give either one of you false hope.”

  “Because lying is wrong.”

  “Because lying is wrong.”

  “And you know all the rules.”

  “And I know all the rules.”

  Jason sat silently, staring at the road.

  “Screw your rules. I believe you know what you’re talking about, with demons. I’m even beginning to believe you’re right about people. I might even go so far as to believe that the angel of death is a real thing. Hell, it makes sense, doesn’t it? You spend your entire life afraid of God, then he sends some big shiny guy with wings to kill you? But I’m not buying all this ‘angels are watching over you’ crap. I see a demon, I shoot it. I’ve never had an angel show up to help. I’ve never seen one, and I’ve never known anyone who saw one, other than you, and I think you have some massive guilt complex going on, probably about not being there to save your family, and now you think you have to be perfect. God doesn’t care if you have a good time or not, I promise. It looks like he doesn’t even care if Sam lives or dies. That looks like it’s all up to you, and you can’t hack it. Some big monster in the sky who doesn’t want you to do anything to make yourself happy… I really don’t see why you think this is the guy you should be follo
wing around.”

  Samantha leaned her head on the window, closing her eyes. There was the constant bubble of anger, ready to blow up if she let it, but this was too important. If Sam died, she and Jason would go their own separate ways, and he had just given her the window into who he would become.

  “Why do you do what you do?” she asked.

  “Because I can,” he said. He was still testy, sensing for a trap.

  “You kill things. How do you decide what to kill?”

  “They’re evil,” he said. She nodded.

  “I don’t disagree, but how do you tell?”

  “It really isn’t that hard, Sam. Usually, the baby blood dripping from their mouths tips me off.”

  He parked the Cruiser in front of a house where Sam was waiting on a step. Samantha looked at Jason.

  “I’m not unhappy because of the things I don’t get to do. I’m unhappy because of things that have happened. Things that were allowed because of human free will. God doesn’t make me unhappy. People and their decisions do.”

  She climbed down out of the passenger seat for Sam, who stood back while she pulled her backpack free and climbed back up into the back seat.

  “You could have stayed,” he mumbled. She shrugged. She could tolerate the front seat for short periods of time, but she hated the idea of him sitting in her seat. He got in and closed the door.

  “What did you get?” Jason asked.

  “He fell and had gotten back up. She thought that he had broken his arm, when apparently he threw a blood clot and stroked out. She’s sad,” Sam said. Jason looked at him then over his shoulder at Samantha, raising his eyebrows. What did he expect her to do about it? She held up her hands. He grimaced and put the car back in gear.

  “Well, that sounds like one of ours. Did she see anything strange?”

  Sam shook his head.

  “No, just her husband and their friend Larry cleaning leaves out of the gutter.”

  “Larry who?” Jason asked. Sam stared out the front window.

  “Would have been a weird question to ask,” he said. Jason snuck a glare at him, then turned the Cruiser back out of town, toward the rental house.

  “What?” Samantha asked.

  “The Petersons had just gotten medical clearance to have friends and family come in and visit. Their first visitor was an old family friend named Larry. I need to look at the police report again.”