Shaman

by Chloe Garner

  “So why do it?” Samantha asked. “I spent sixteen hours last night looking at police reports and coroners’ reports for missing people and dead people. Most of them exist because of the people you spent the morning talking to.”

  “Sixteen hours?” Jason asked. “Sam, is she okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “It’s the paradise in her head that you’ve been to and I haven’t,” Sam said. “That one.”

  “Oh,” Jason said, frowning, then he shrugged and dug into his food. “Whatever.”

  “Why do it?” Samantha asked.

  “Because people are dying, Sam,” Jason said. “And I know how to get people to tell me things. Bad people. And I can’t do that with you two gumshoes standing next to me. Okay? We’re going to stop her. This is what we do, and sometimes we take risks. Sometimes we take stupid risks, when there aren’t any smarter choices.”

  Sam looked at Samantha. Something else was upsetting her, underneath her veneer of anger at Jason.

  “This is about the dead people, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Of course it is,” Jason said. “Let her be mad at me, Sam.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Samantha snapped.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jason said sarcastically, grinning at his eggs. She growled at her coffee and he grinned wider.

  “So how do we find her?” Sam asked.

  “Was hoping you two would have figured that out,” Jason said around a mouthful of toast.

  “Oh, no, I figure out who she is, and that’s just not enough,” Samantha said. Jason shrugged.

  “We’ve all got to carry our own weight, here.”

  “So what have we got to tell Simon?” Sam asked, scratching his eye.

  “If he’s any good at isolating clan mythology by family, lots. Otherwise…” Samantha said. He frowned. She hadn’t been this angry ten minutes ago.

  “We need to see if there are any more reports on the angel of death,” Jason said. “A white woman in a long dress has got to stand out around here.”

  “Or a jacket,” Samantha said.

  “Yeah, because she’s so much better camouflaged in a pastel blue jacket,” Jason said.

  “Did you just say pastel?” Sam asked. Jason choked, taking a swallow of water.

  “I’m not kidding you, this punk kid with a gun tucked into his pants outside his shirt actually described it as either seafoam green or baby blue.”

  Sam laughed.

  “They’re putting you on,” he said. Jason shook his head, taking another bite.

  “Fear, dude. Real fear. This isn’t like a normal city. They’ve turned tribal. They believe this stuff.”

  “I’m going to take a strip out of Lindsey’s flesh if it turns out there’s a proper demon actually haunting Detroit,” Samantha said.

  “You’ve got to admit, figuring out what’s city and what’s demon isn’t easy,” Sam said.

  “Simon did it,” Samantha said. Sam looked at her.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “All right, all right, kids. Let’s head back to the room and let Samantha do her voodoo paperwork magic and we’ll e-mail Simon and see if he can find our lady in the dress,” Jason said. He waved at the waitress. “Can we get the check, please?”

  Jason stood to meet the waitress and give her cash.

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t like it here, either. Too many people dying.”

  “We’ll find her and we’ll kill her, and then we’ll get out of here. Just like every other time.”

  “Yeah. But Lindsey’s going to hear from me if this is actually as bad as it looks.”

  <><><>

  Jason looked out the window as Samantha laid out pages on the beds and Sam e-mailed Simon. Summer hadn’t gotten here yet, and the sky was gray and rolling with clouds that didn’t storm.

  “How did you know it was Carly?” Jason asked without turning around.

  “What?” Sam asked.

  “Samilla,” he said. “How did you know it was Carly who took Sam?”

  “Drawing on a map,” Samantha said. “A lot of demons do it. A lot of them do it compulsively, without even knowing that they’re doing it. But Carly made an art of it. It’s how she expresses power.”

  “You just answered to Samilla,” Sam said.

  “Shoot. Did I?”

  “Yup,” Jason said, watching the clouds.

  “Well, Simon’s on it,” Sam said. “What can I do?”

  Jason turned to watch as Samantha handed him a stack of the missing persons reports.

  “Anything with a tattoo or an identifying mark noted, put aside.”

  She was sitting with the dead people all around her. Five of the six people Simon had used to decide they needed to come had had tattoos. A snake, a tiger, a dolphin, a duck, of all things, and the butterfly. The snake had been on the one who had bled out. Samantha had said that was important.

  She took the stiletto out of her boot and fidgeted with it, using it to push papers around as she read them. He leaned against the window frame and took a flask out of his shirt pocket. Sam turned his head as the lid come off.

  “Can’t come up with anything more useful to do, can you?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  Samantha looked up at him, evaluating, but didn’t speak, quickly returning to what she was doing. He emptied the flask and went out to the car to refill it, bringing the bottle back in with him. Samantha held her hand out as he returned. He looked at it for a minute, confused, then she looked up at him. He read her face. He handed her the bottle and returned to the window with his flask.

  “Canyon Road,” she said. Sam looked up from his sorting.

  “What’s that?”

  “The demon we’re looking for is Canyon Road. Or was, at one point. I can’t be sure they still exist. But she trained with Canyon Road for a long time. The dress is blue.”

  “How can you tell?” Jason asked. She shook her head.

  “It doesn’t matter. Good news: there were marks on some of the bullets from Abby that Canyon Road are particularly sensitive to, and she’s probably working on her own. Canyon Road don’t even like each other. Bad news: she’s going to loathe Jason; her victims were people who had a strong grip and love for life. Also, I’m no closer to finding her.”

  “So I can start taking out the suicidal drug addicts?” Sam asked. She looked up.

  “Yeah.”

  “Does she have a pattern we should look for?” Jason asked. He liked patterns. They were neat and they confirmed theories.

  “No,” Samantha said. “Wait.” She took three swallows from the bottle and Jason frowned, going to take it back from her. She gave it up willingly, digging through a stack of papers with the newly-emptied hand and the stiletto, one arm wrapped around her knee.

  “Here,” she said, handing a page to him. Jason tried to stay out of the way in this phase. He asked annoying questions, he knew, and he didn’t have the gift for seeing the clue in the words. He had, though, gone through the list of victims once, just to be familiar with them. This was one of the more innocuous ones.

  “Strangled,” he said.

  “The tip of her tongue was gone,” Samantha said. They thought she had bitten it off in the struggle. Jason nodded.

  “I read, once, about an extinct clan that taught that the tongue was the root of freewill. An interesting theory, actually. They collected them on this side and wore them as jewelry.”

  “Tongues,” Jason said. She nodded.

  “Compulsively. Favoring the tip of the tongue, because that’s what forms most speech.”

  “So…”

  “The thing about demons is they’re immortal,” Samantha said.

  “Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “No, before they were with the family they’re with now, they were always somewhere else. The old habits die, with time, but…”

  Jason sat on the bed as she stared at nothing
.

  “The thing about Top Nesters…” she said slowly, scraping the stiletto over the surface of the pages scattered around her. She looked at him sharply. “They were completely preoccupied with circular stairwell five points.” She sprung off of the bed. “Map. I need a map.”

  Sam started typing on the computer, but she shook her head.

  “Bigger. On paper. I need a map, now.”

  Jason stood.

  “I’ll see if they have one at the office.”

  He left her pacing the room drawing shapes in the air and walked down to the office, where they did have a rack of touristy maps. He paged through a couple, finding the one with the best street definition, then took it back to the room. Sam was standing against the wall, watching Samantha burn nervous energy. She snatched the map away from him without appearing to notice he was holding it, then held it up against the wall.

  “Tacks,” she said.

  “I’ve got nails,” Jason said. She held out her hand.

  “Gimme.”

  He rummaged them out of his bag and gave her the box of them. She punched them into the top corners of the map then went to the bed.

  “What is a…” Jason asked.

  “Need more words than that,” she said, finding an address on the first piece of paper and returning to the map.

  “The circle thing,” he said.

  “A circular stairwell is a geometric shape. A circle that loses half of its radius every three hundred and sixty degrees. Hard to draw by hand. Some demons, especially former Top Nesters, do it natively. They can’t help it. Everything they do is based on the circular stairwell shape. It’s symbolic of hell.”

  “Why?”

  “If you stood at the top of an infinite stairwell and looked down, that’s what you would see. You combine it with the fivepoints on the curve, and you have an exact mathematical description of what they consider to be the center of their world.”

  She stabbed a nail into the map and went on to the next page.

  “Help me. Any missing person with a very good guess on last-known location, any murder with a tattoo - where the body turned up.”

  “The woman with the tongue thing…” Sam said. “She didn’t have a tattoo.”

  Samantha looked at him, eyes feral.

  “The woman in the dress only took the tip of her tongue. She couldn’t even get to her organs. Look at the report. She was worse than a tattoo.”

  She went back to stabbing nails into the wall and Sam picked up the report she referenced. Jason glanced over his shoulder as Sam flipped pages. He saw the address where her body had been found and memorized it to put on the map. Sam froze.

  “She was pregnant.”

  <><><>

  Jason stood back from the map, a chaotic mess of ink and nails and frowned. Samantha seemed more confident than ever.

  “You can’t see them?” she asked. He shook his head. “We’ve got her. Tonight. We kill her tonight.”

  “Just point,” Jason said. “We aren’t holding you back.”

  She got a pen and stood in front of the map.

  “They’re everywhere.”

  “What are we looking for?” Sam asked. She drew a curl on a blank section of the brochure.

  “This shape. Fivepoints are the five locations connected by a pentagram.”

  Jason snorted. Samantha glanced at him.

  “If Carter hadn’t gone with you when you crossed, there was no guarantee you’d get back by yourself. The shortest guaranteed distance between two points in hell is a V, and their version of a circle is a pentagram. The geography defies traditional mathematics. They have their own version of astrology that is obsessed with fivepoints. Fivepoints on a circular stairwell is a positive reference to hell, for a demon. Hellcity, specifically.”

  “So how do you pick five points on a spiral?” Sam asked. She drew a line down the center of the spiral.

  “The center is roughly four-sevenths of the way down from the first point to the far edge of the staircase.” She drew a dot. “From that, it’s the five radii that correspond to the points on a normal circle.” She drew them. “Here, here, here, here, and here.”

  The map still looked like chaos, even with Samantha’s guide. She drew a couple of them on the map, connecting dots, then Sam pointed at another five.

  “Yes,” she said, drawing the curl. They worked for another fifteen minutes.

  “You think she actually took people at all of these points?” Sam asked.

  “They don’t start a new fivepoints until they’ve finished the last. Yes. I think every one of these represents five dead people.”

  “That’s more than a hundred,” Jason said. She looked at him and nodded.

  “Tonight. We kill her tonight.”

  “Where is she?”

  Sam started spacing out the curls, frowning.

  “She’s had three different sites,” Samantha said. “The fivepoints that the woman at the morgue is on, it points here,” she said, drawing a mark on the map. “I think we should go look at the other two, anyway, to see what we can find out about her before we’re actually trying to kill her.”

  Jason looked at the window.

  “We’ve got a few hours of sunlight left,” he said. She frowned at him.

  “You really would just run off and fight her, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why? What would you do?”

  She sighed and went to go get her backpack, glancing at the map.

  “I’m going to make sure I beat her.”

  <><><>

  The sun was most of the way down by the time she had finished smearing things on her skin and handing Jason bowls to drink out of.

  “How come Sam doesn’t have to drink any of this stuff?” Jason asked. Sam pulled the pendant out from under his shirt and shrugged, tucking it back away. Jason had grimaced and downed the last bowl of stuff, handing it back.

  “So how powerful is a… what, Canyon-whatsit?”

  “Canyon Road. How powerful is an Elliott? The family is maybe a bit above average, but they have a normal range. She could be a real handful, or she could be a renegade blood monkey that slipped through the cracks.”

  “Renegade blood monkey,” Jason said. “That’s going to be the name of my band.”

  “You aren’t worried,” Sam said. She shook her head. “Mostly just want to avoid Jason getting slammed against a wall again.”

  “Never thought I’d say it, but that’s definitely getting old,” Jason said.

  “Prepared is better than not,” Samantha said, going to the laptop to pull up maps of the three points she had picked out.

  “The first site is just a pile of rubble. That explains that,” Samantha said. “It looks like the city tore it down.”

  She zoomed the map in and pointed.

  “I bet that was where she worked.”

  “What is it?” Jason asked.

  “Char mark,” Sam said.

  She clicked a few more times.

  “This one’s still standing. Shall we go look?”

  <><><>

  They sat on the roadside next to another demolished factory.

  “Well, that didn’t do us any good, did it?” Jason asked.

  “Tells us why she’s moving,” Samantha said.

  “And that she likes buildings that should probably be torn down,” Sam said.

  “So…”

  “So now we go shoot her,” Samantha said.

  “Excellent.”

  <><><>

  They got to the last site as the sun was setting, throwing up orange light over the building off of the undersides of the clouds and silhouetting the jagged roofline of the factory black. Both of the buildings on either side had been torn down already.

  “Hope you weren’t off a quarter inch,” Jason said. “Else she’s moved again.”

  “No, she’s here,” Sam said.

  “How do you know?”

  Sam motioned to a trio of men walking across the first rubble lot towa
rd the building Samantha had pinpointed, carrying military-grade weapons.

  “We going to do something about that?” Sam asked.

  “She’ll tear them apart, if they don’t actually know what they’re doing,” Samantha said, jumping out of the Cruiser with her backpack. Jason looked at Sam and grunted. Sam grinned, getting out of his door and running after her. The three men leveled their guns at Samantha as she approached.

  “You don’t want to be here. Turn around and go back to your big-ass car and get out of here,” he said. She looked down the street where a second black SUV was parked. Sam rolled his eyes. She was in a fight-picking mood.

  “Right,” she said. “I just want to make sure you aren’t amateurs.”

  He jerked his gun up, landing the barrel against his shoulder with a metallic noise as the parts shifted against each other.

  “Do I look like a rookie?”

  “Let me see your rounds. I’m satisfied you know what you’re getting yourself into, we’ll go get take-out and come back to help you clean up. Otherwise, no, I’m not letting you go in there on your own.”

  “Listen, little girl, I don’t take orders from you or anyone else.” He looked over at one of the other men. “Do you believe this?”

  Samantha stepped closer to him, picking her way through the rubble in her lightweight boots. The other two men pointed their guns at her and she waved at them.

  “I’m not armed. Well, I don’t have a gun on me. They do. Worry about them,” she said, pointing. Sam closed his eyes, struggling not to shake his head.

  “Listen, guys, I suspect we’re all here for the same reason,” Jason said.

  “Shut up, white boy,” the leader said.

  “Can’t take you two anywhere,” Jason muttered.

  “You’re here to kill her,” Samantha said. The man with the gun against his shoulder sneered.

  “What if I am?”

  “How did you know she was here?”

  “One of my boys followed her here.”

  Samantha frowned internally. Sam actually did frown.

  “Not just anything is going to kill her,” Samantha said. “Let me see what you’re carrying, and we’ll get on with it.”

  “Oh, I think we’ve got it covered,” he said. The rifles they were carrying were full-automatic. Black market. Jason had one like them in the back of the Cruiser.