by C. E. Murphy
“Something big,” I finally said to Coyote. “Something too big to think about right now.”
“If it’s big you need to think about it, Jo—”
“No.” I actually held my hand up to stop him, not that he or anybody else could see me right now. “Look, just no, Cyrano. This isn’t burying my head in the sand, okay? I’ll deal with it. I just can’t right now. A nice homeless lady wants me to look into some missing persons, I lost the ghost dance killer’s trail and Morrison’s been turned into a wolf. I cannot cope with anything else right now.”
“Morrison’s been what?” Coyote managed a vocal knife’s edge balance between horrified and thrilled.
I crossed the street into the theater’s parking lot, muttering an explanation that made confused arts patrons look around in search of the body providing the voice, and finished with, “I’ll call you back later, okay? I have to get dressed and try to salvage this mess.”
“You’re naked?” That went a lot more toward thrilled, and I snickered through my weariness.
“Naked but invisible. I’ll talk to you later, Cyrano, okay?” Dropping a psychic connection was harder than hanging up a phone, and I got a mental echo of his goodbye for a few seconds before shaking it off and going in search of my clothes.
Billy and Melinda were backstage, the latter with my clothes neatly bundled in her arms. She said, “You dropped these,” and handed over my copper bracelet and glasses. I pressed a hand to my throat, astonished to discover my mother’s silver necklace hadn’t ruptured when I’d shifted form. I was pretty certain my coyote-neck was thicker than my own.
Then again, the necklace hadn’t fallen out of place when I’d changed into a snake earlier, either. I was absolutely certain I’d had greater circumference as a rattler than my neck typically did. I slunk into the changing rooms with my clothes, stopping to frown at myself in the mirror when I was dressed.
Cernunnos, Horned God of the Wild Hunt, had recognized the necklace. Had, more importantly, recognized its maker: Nuada of the Silver Hand, who was an elf king or a small god or something of that nature. Not human, and not as powerful as Cernunnos himself, but a silversmith of literally legendary proportions, regardless of his ranking in the esoteric echelon. Even I’d heard of him before Cernunnos mentioned his name, and my repository of magical knowledge was still far more limited than it should be. My mother had bequeathed to me a necklace of great history and possibly enormous power without one word of explanation. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that a minor detail like retaining its position around my throat wasn’t beyond its capabilities.
Frankly, if I ever got over being surprised by things like that, I would consider myself way too jaded and go sit on a mountaintop and meditate until some of the wonder came back into the world. And that was such a far cry from where I’d been a year and a half ago that I left the dressing rooms with far less trepidation than I might have, given that the Hollidays’ continuing presence at the theater suggested something had gone wrong.
The dancers were gathered on stage behind the closed curtains. Jubilation and sorrow sparked from them as they embraced each other, obviously still coming down from the high of the performance. Two or three were carrying drums, though they hadn’t begun to beat them. A weary selfish part of me wished they would: I got a little buzz from the energy they were still radiating, but I needed a whole lot more than that. Or a good solid night’s sleep, which didn’t seem likely to be on the agenda.
Winona was at the center of everything, passed from one dancer to another, congratulations and thanks murmured to her with each hug. It looked like they’d been doing the same thing since the curtain came down, but I imagined they could keep it up a while yet. She’d gone above and beyond the call of duty, and everyone knew it. Whatever had happened to keep Billy and Melinda here, at least I hadn’t failed the troupe.
I exhaled, tension sliding free on the breath, though my shoulders sagging reminded me again that my whole body ached. “So what happened?”
Melinda smiled. “You were perfect, that’s what. They were perfect. I’ve never seen a performance like that one.”
“Me, neither. But so why are you still here?”
“Why are you?” Billy demanded. He was still pissed I hadn’t gone after Morrison, which was only unfair in that even with my phenomenal cosmic powers, I couldn’t be in two places at once.
At least, I didn’t think I could be. I gave the shining kernel of new-forged power inside me a prod to see if it agreed. I got back a sensation very like a mother’s disapproving look, and barely restrained myself from giggling aloud. Billy’s expression darkened and I wiped all laughter from my face, which was less difficult than it might have been. “I got hit by a semi while trying to cross the road. I lost the killer’s trail and I have about as much shamanic energy as a…a…” I couldn’t think of something with insufficient amounts of power to even finish the sentence, but it didn’t matter. Pissed or not, Billy went white and Melinda caught my arm as if assuring herself I was still alive.
“You got hit by a semi?”
“I was a coyote, he ran the light, I…look, I’m okay. I’m just a little flat in terms of power reserves. The last day has been like a yo-yo with that.”
“You’re more than a little flat.” Melinda pursed her mouth prissily, looking me over like a side of meat. “I’ve never seen your aura so low, not since before last January, anyway.”
Distracted, I said, “You looked before then?”
Melinda shrugged. “Bill had told me what the little ghost girl said about you. Any time a clairvoyant mentions someone is unusual, I’m interested. So I’d looked, yes.”
I remembered the girl in question, Emily Franklin. I’d been a mechanic at the time, not a cop. The only reason I’d encountered her—or hadn’t, more accurately, since she was dead—was I’d been out with Billy, trying to hear a hitch in his vehicle’s engine, when he got the murder call. Emily, victim of a violent death and a budding clairvoyant, was lingering and had seen me waiting for him. Besides what she’d told Billy about her own murder, she’d mentioned I had no visible past beyond the twenty-six short years of my life. She’d never seen anyone like me.
None of that was something Billy could have told me at the time, some three years ago now. I’d have laughed at him, to say the least. But apparently he’d told Melinda, and I’d had even more people looking out for my eventual arcane awakening than I’d known. Not for the first time, I mumbled, “I don’t deserve friends as good as you.”
Melinda smiled. “You only say that because you’ve never seen Bill’s expression of smug ‘I told her so’ when he’s spilling the details of your adventures to me.”
Billy looked guilty enough to make me chortle tiredly. “You had to be saying it to somebody. You were incredibly restrained with me. Okay. So yeah, I’m flat. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to transform again, and even if I did, I’m not sure I could pick up the trail. It was like a heat trail, fading fast, so I’m back at goddamned square one. So anyway, why are you guys still here?”
Whatever humor Billy’d manifested fled. “I was hoping you’d be calling with some kind of information about Morrison. I thought this would be the place to start from.”
“That’s it?” This time relief, not exhaustion, made my knees buckle. “Nothing went horribly wrong with the dancers?”
Billy wrapped a hand around my elbow, supporting me. “It looks like the only person something’s gone wrong with is you.”
“Detective Walker’s been injured?” Jim Littlefoot appeared like he’d been summoned, worry creasing his forehead. “Are you all right, Detective? Everything went so well on stage…”
“It was nothing to do with you,” I promised. Billy’s hand around my arm was more helpful than I wanted to admit to. In fact, I kind of wanted to flop over and lean on him, or possibly just to sit down in a lump and stay there until I was about a hundred and twelve. “I wasn’t able to track the killer. I’m sorry, Jim.�
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Disappointment flashed through his dark eyes, replaced almost instantly by resolution. “We have one more performance.”
“Ha.” I didn’t mean to laugh, but the sound popped from my throat. “You people are insane. Insanely brave. Insanely…insane. Tomorrow, I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow is good. I’m just so tired right now.”
Onstage, somebody smacked the heel of his hand against the drum he carried. The vibration rippled through the air and caught me in the belly, a twang so deep and profound my knees buckled again. This time, despite already having a grip on me, Billy didn’t manage to keep me on my feet. I flumped to the floor, sitting cross-legged and pushing my glasses up so I could cup my face in my hands. A few more drumbeats thumped through me, each one like a physical, palpable hit. I was used to the magic inside me coming alive in response to a drum, but it just took the beats like body blows, shockwaves hitting me from within. I curled down even farther, hands folded behind my head like I could protect myself from the music.
Melinda crouched and put her hand on my shoulder. Worry pulsed through her touch, so strong I didn’t need the Sight to know it flowed toward me. I wanted to explain how Rattler had shed my skin a million times, stripping me down physically, emotionally and magically in order to save my life. I wanted to tell her about the peculiar feeling I’d been reborn, and Rattler’s apology about how it wasn’t supposed to have happened that way, like I’d gone through not just a rebirth, but a premature rebirth. Telling somebody those things seemed important, and Melinda, who had five kids, might just understand.
All I did, though, was whimper, a tiny pulse of sound every time the drum was hit.
Melinda withdrew her hand and stood, her voice calm and quiet above me. “Bill, Mr. Littlefoot, could you bring Joanne onto the stage, please?”
Normal people would have asked why. Normal people would have said what the hell? and fussed about it, which was what I wanted to do. Instead the two men shared a few seconds’ silence in which I imagined they at least exchanged what the hell glances. Then Billy slid his hands into my armpits and uncurled me a little. Jim Littlefoot took my knees, and they carried me onstage and put me back down. They didn’t try to rebalance me on my butt: they just tucked me down on my side, and I curled up a little smaller, fetal position.
The troupe, who were not especially loud, got much quieter as I was carried out. The drum stopped, and I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, the weight of their gazes. I thought probably they should be offered some sort of explanation as to what one used-up shaman was doing lying center stage shortly after their dance performance.
Melinda, however, was going to have to offer that explanation, because I didn’t have a clue. All I knew was that the rubber dance mat was unexpectedly comfortable, and that the stage lights from the wings were warm enough to make my bones start melting. In fact, despite my ventilated jeans, I thought I’d start sweating pretty soon, which would have been a more dismaying prospect if I wasn’t distantly aware of the already-pungent scent of dancers. I’d fit right in, smelling up the place.
Three people hit drums at the same time, abrupt enough that despite my weariness, I flinched. Footsteps ran across the stage, quick light sounds that changed to more solid thumps as whoever it was reached the nonpadded wings, paused, then came rushing back to spring across the mat. The next drumbeat came from four instruments, low rumble of quick beats which moved clockwise around me until the dancers and the drumming alike came to a sharp stop. I had a dizzifying vision as if from above, of the four musicians slotting into place on a power wheel, one taking up a position in each cardinal direction. And then I knew why Melinda had put me onstage, and what the troupe themselves instinctively understood.
They were offering me a spirit dance.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The part of me that wasn’t beaten down and wasted—I was sure there had to be a part like that buried in there somewhere—thought I should probably sit up and watch, to properly appreciate what was going on around me. The rest of me, however, was completely content to lie huddled in the middle of the stage, listening to drums and footsteps falling into patterns around me.
At first it was just the drummers, sound pulsing in almost visible waves, for all that my eyes were closed. Then some one else joined in, using heavy steps to make a counter-rhythm, one-two-three. Within a minute the stage vibrated with the weight of feet matching that pattern, and the high-pitched drums were a fourth beat thrown into the air to make certain the cadence didn’t become too comfortable. The sounds sent goose bumps down my spine, then crept in along the big nerves and nudged my exhausted, fragile power.
It didn’t so much nudge back as go splaaaaah! like a dog rolling over to have its tummy rubbed. Dignity wasn’t one of my strong suits, and it was all I could do not to roll over and go splaaaaah! myself. Instead I just sank a little farther into the mats, letting drumbeats and dance steps wash over me. The stage lights pounding down were magnificent, their warmth lifting me out of myself to drift on the dance Littlefoot’s troupe was offering.
I actually did rise out of myself, the world becoming half-visible through the Sight, like my closed eyes were partially obscuring my vision. That didn’t normally happen—usually I could See very clearly whether my physical eyes were open or not—but I appreciated it. Full-blown Sight would’ve been overwhelming, and I’d kind of had enough of overwhelming for one day.
Watching the dancers, though, was worth the effort. They weren’t doing one of their choreographed pieces. They moved in toward me, backed away, dropped in and out, clapped or stomped their feet, and as a whole appeared to dance as the spirit moved them. Their auras flowed together and separated again, always achieving lighter shades when they touched one another, though not once did they reach the blinding white of the ghost dance’s final eruption. That dance had been impassioned; this one was gentle.
I was profoundly grateful for the quieter approach. More would have flattened me, not that I could get much flatter either figuratively or literally. Every time the energy they danced up roiled forward to touch me—and it did, even if they didn’t themselves—my own magic sighed a little more deeply, as if it was being massaged back into wakefulness.
Admittedly, wakefulness wasn’t a place I had any raging desire to be. Conked out on the dance floor mat sounded pretty good, really. I snorted a near-silent laugh into my forearm, and a remarkably good mimic of the noise echoed within the constraints of my skull. My eyebrows flicked upward, and Raven glided out of the stage lights to flit around me, finally coming to a stop by way of multitudinous hops. He gave another snorting laugh, this time sounding a bit more ravenlike, and cocked his head to give me a good hard look with one bright black eye.
I said, “Up here,” because while I retained enough connection to my body to laugh, mostly my consciousness was detached and basking in the light and energy above me.
Raven twisted his head to peer up at me, then cawed in delight and leaped back into the air. He was unusually solid, all gleaming blue-black feathers and massive ruffed throat instead of the outlined white light form I often saw. He winged his way around me, going ek! ek! ek! with approval, like floating around outside my own body was an excellent place to be. Probably from his avian perspective, it was. He probably considered humans to be depressingly limited, what with being stuck to the earth all the time. I was starting to get behind that train of thought myself when he stuck his entire head in my belly and said “Quaaarrk!” in unmistakable dismay.
I muttered, “It wasn’t my idea,” and he pulled his head out of my stomach to glower and batter me with his wings. It always hurt when he did that, but it seemed like he was putting more oomph into it this time. I smacked back at him with childish displeasure. “Knock it off! Talk to Rattlesnake, if you want to bitch somebody out! He—”
Well. Technically Rattler was at fault for the reduced state of power that Raven evidently found so distressing. On the other hand, I would be a thin red smear across a Seattle
street had Rattler not done what he did. “He saved my life,” I finished, considerably more graciously than I’d started. “It just about wiped us out. Well, me, anyway. He’s probably okay. I mean, it’s hard to hurt spirit animals, right?”
Raven, who very rarely spoke—because ravens could talk in the real world, Rattler had said—gave me a distinctly concerned look and quarked again. I said, “Okay, okay,” and drifted back down toward my body. Not really into it, but closer to its general vicinity than I’d been. Raven winged down beside me and strode around self-importantly while I whispered, Rattler? in the recesses of my mind.
Like Raven, he came out of the light, slithering between dancers’ feet as he materialized into something that looked very much like a real-world rattlesnake. There was a thread there, a commonality, it seemed. The more out-of-body I was, the more real my spirit animals were. If I was solidly within myself, they manifested as quick sketches of light and power. I wondered if they saw me similarly when I wasn’t inhabiting my flesh.
Rattler crawled over my hip and settled into the warm divot between it and my ribs, then lifted his head to have a look at Raven. They weren’t usually in it together: I tended to need one or the other, not both. The once I’d needed both had been in the Lower World, where we’d all been busy enough with our separate tasks to not have any kind of territory wars. Not that I had any idea if spirit animals had territory wars, though it seemed unlikely. The whole point was they each offered a shaman very different skill sets, so in theory there was no toe-treading or reason to argue.
I still had the distinct impression they were arguing. Raven went klokklokKLOK! and hopped around, wings and chest puffed with disapproval, while Rattler stuck his long forked tongue out repeatedly, which somehow came across as a two-year-old’s behavior instead of a snake’s. It wasn’t good form to tell outsiders what your spirit animals were, but I suddenly wished the dancers could see my two guides in their private little battle. I wanted to see how they would interpret it, and how it would affect their dance.
