by C. E. Murphy
He was at the door the tracks led through, scowling down it and clenching his hands like he wished he had his duty weapon with him. He stopped doing both, though, to gawk at me. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t remember asking him for advice even once in the whole roller coaster of the past year. I’d barely even asked Coyote for advice, though in my defense, I’d wanted to. He’d just been unavailable for a lot of that time. Which made Billy the better person to ask for advice, probably, since he’d pretty much been around since moment one of Joanne’s Shamanic Awakening.
And now that I had his attention I didn’t know where to begin. “You know how I told you about my real name?” I finally asked.
His eyebrows elevated, but he nodded and even flickered a smile. “Good thing, too. Caroline Siobhán’s a nicer name than Caroline Joanne.”
I smiled, too. “Yeah, it is.” The Hollidays had nearly named their baby girl after me, which had prompted a confession to the train wreck of a name I never used. That, and they’d gone through a lot, thanks to me, and also I was slowly, cautiously, trying to come clean with the people I was closest to. I’d spent more than a decade holding secrets and damage close to the chest, which was poisonous even for perfectly normal people, and which made a nasty mess of shamanic potential in someone like me. Shedding all the protective layers wasn’t easy—in fact, of my friends, Morrison was the only one who knew all the parts of the truth about my history, and that was because he’d gone digging on his own—but I was getting there.
And since shedding was exactly what had happened to me under Rattler’s influence tonight, it seemed like this was as good a time as any to start doing crazy things like asking for help and advice. “Earlier, after the truck hit me and my spirit animal put me back together, I had this weird idea. This idea that I’d been…reborn.”
Billy, who was no slouch in the detecting department, said, “As Siobhán Walkingstick.”
I nodded. “And you saw how wiped out I was. The power got stripped down to a kernel before the troupe danced me up some energy again. Right now I can’t See past the end of my nose because every time I try the magic just goes kerblewy. It’s too big. It’s—” I waved my hands in the air, not sure what I was trying to express. “More solid? Confident? I don’t know. Than it’s been. The rebirth, the dance, they did something to me.”
Billy, strongly, said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Right. Of course he did, and he hadn’t even gone through the shedding process I had. He’d just been nailed by what the dance troupe offered. I said, “Right,” out loud and itched my fingers through my hair. “So basically I need to know if this is a good time to completely change my modus operandi. If I should make a power circle, sit my ass down in the middle of this room, stop arguing for my own limitations and try to figure out how to make this whole huge-feeling power work for me. I might be able to, I don’t know. Map this place out in my head. See—” and I tried to invest the word with a capital S beyond it being the beginning of a sentence “—where Tia went, assuming I can get the goddamned Sight to work right at all. The point is, should I try things I’ve never tried because I’ve been too busy busting down doors, metaphorical guns blazing and hoping I don’t get my face eaten off?”
“I assume that’s the other option here.”
“Pretty much.”
Billy lost his grip on a solemn expression just briefly, and I tried not to snicker, myself. It was a frustrated sort of laughter, but it was also hard not to appreciate the mucked-up mindset which required asking if getting my face eaten off was perhaps not a good idea.
“How long would the map and search take?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know for certain it would work. I mean, it should, if I can control the fricking Sight. Mapping the layout shouldn’t be more than the magical equivalent of clearing all the rooms in a video game until the one big shiny spot left blinking on the screen is the bad guy.”
Billy gave me a look which suggested that if he did not have a twelve-year-old son, my analogy would have been utterly meaningless. I shrugged apologetically and went on. “Here’s the thing. Conceptually this is new to me, and I don’t know how long it would take. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe hours. The problem is I might be all topped up full of shiny strong brand-new ready-to-be-used magic right now, but I haven’t tested it yet. I’ve blacked out Seattle. I’ve caused earthquakes, for God’s sake. If this mapping idea goes wrong, if I pour out too much power down here beneath the city, I’m afraid I could send the whole downtown into Puget Sound.”
Billy stared at me a few long seconds, then, in a very steady even voice, said, “Let’s bust down some doors and get our faces eaten off.”
Tia leaped out of the wrong door and tried to eat our faces off.
She landed on Rita, who was smallest and closest, and who screamed like—well, like she was being crushed by a gigantic wolf. This time I reacted the way I should have when Patty Raleigh came after Billy: shields spun across the room, not just springing up around Rita so Tia’s enormous jaws snapped and skidded against them, but then slamming into the wolf, knocking it back. It was the most integrated defense-and-attack I’d ever pulled off, a hint of how my power was going to respond in familiar territory. Premature triumph bloomed in me, though at least for once I appreciated it was premature.
Tia whipped around behind the shield, snarling and searching for a way out. There wasn’t one: between Raleigh and Morrison in the past thirty-six hours, I at least had the sense to pin the shields up against the wall. “Rita, you okay?”
Her high-pitched, gibbered response indicated I’d asked a stupid question. Billy, though, gave her a brief once-over and reported, “She’s all right,” which I took to mean she hadn’t been bitten or otherwise scathed. I wasn’t sure anybody could be mentally all right after that, but one thing at a time. I inched toward the captured wolf, then, in a fit of brilliance, whispered a sword into my hand before a crisis demanded I have it.
The blade was a silver rapier, and I did mean silver, as in the precious metal, not just the color, that I’d taken off a god the very first day I’d been a shaman. The weapon had become part of my armament—I’d been taking fencing lessons for the past year so I could use it properly—but nobody in their right mind carried a four-foot-long rapier around Seattle. Most of the time it lived beneath my bed, where despite my utter lack of attention to it, it refused to tarnish. Neither did my necklace tarnish, now that I thought about it, so the maker they had in common had probably done something to the metal.
It was equally likely that its maker had invested it with the willingness to be called across a breach of space, since I didn’t think bending space was generally within a shaman’s purview. Whether it was my magic or its, though, the sword could be pulled from under my bed and into my hand from a range of up to tens of miles, maybe more, and that let me have it in my repertoire without garnering a reputation as a freak.
Well. Without garnering a reputation as a sword-carrying freak, anyway. I pointed the thing at the wolf as dramatically as I could, and with my best Errol Flynn sneer, demanded, “Show yourself!”
Wolves perhaps didn’t respond well to human language commands. She jumped at me, bounced off the shield and snarled again, showing impressively large canines. Big brave me shrieked like a little girl and cowered back a step before remembering I was the one with the sword, the shields and the human brain. In theory, I had the upper hand. “That’s not going to work. Look, I mostly want to know what happened to you. Were you at the dance concert last night? Did you accidentally get transformed during the shapeshifter dances?”
Truthfully, I doubted it. Billy’s point about the woman’s ability to shift freely made too much sense. Still, there was a passing chance that Tia was a victim, and there was some important law of the land about innocent until proven guilty. Maybe the fact that she remained a wolf now supported that: presumably an in-control human shapeshifter would switch to the form which would permit comm
unication. My sword wavered a bit. I didn’t want to stab Tia.
With the unerring sense of a predator recognizing weakness, she leaped again. This time, though, she did transform, lupine body surging to human in a ripple that passed through my shields without a whisper of protest. Rita screamed, but before the leaping woman hit the floor she shifted a second time, front paws catching her weight. She wheeled toward the door she’d come from, and disappeared from sight in an instant.
Rita’s scream cut off in astonishment. Billy and I both took a few steps toward the door the wolf had exited through, then stopped, staring at one another. He didn’t have to ask: after a few seconds of slow brain-grinding, I said, “God damn it, she’s like the goddamned wendigo.”
Billy, who hadn’t been there for that, only elevated his eyebrows and waited. I transferred my sword to my left hand and rubbed my face until it burned with warmth. “Sort of like the wendigo, anyway. The shields don’t work very well on things that are pure or active magic, and the Lower World is all about the magic. Every time the wendigo went there, I lost my grip. And it could slip back and forth with out any effort, so basically it was like trying to catch a live fish with bare hands.”
“I thought the wendigo was…” Billy trailed off, obviously looking for the right phrasing. “Less human than that.”
“Yeah, no, it was. I don’t know what she is.” I did. I just didn’t want to say it, because there was no such thing as a werewolf. Why banshees and thunderbirds and spirit animals were okay and werewolves weren’t, I didn’t know, but I was determined that there should be no such thing as werewolves. They were too Hollywood, or something. “It’s just the principle’s the same. The shields don’t work well on pure magic, and if shapeshifting between one form and another isn’t pure magic, I don’t know what is.”
Rita, who had a more practical grasp on the situation, said, “Is she going to come back?” which made us all edge into the center of the room, creating a back-to-back tri angle. Rita scooped up the flashlight I’d dropped when I’d called the sword and shone her two lights at both doors, then twisted a little to shine one of them at me. “You have a sword.”
It was obviously a question. It was equally obvious that an explanation would take all night, so I shrugged. “It’s a magic sword.”
“People,” Rita said, sounding very much like I had not all that long ago, “don’t have magic swords.”
“They don’t shapeshift into wolves, either,” I pointed out as nicely as I could. Billy coughed suddenly, and I suspected I’d sounded a lot like he had once upon a time, tolerating my utter refusal to believe what he knew was true. I said, “Sorry,” to him, and his cough turned into a guffaw.
“Water under the bridge, Joanie. Water under the bridge. Are we going to stand here all night waiting to see if she comes back?”
It sounded like a good plan to me, but it wasn’t actually going to get the job done. “Just give me a minute to at least be damned good and sure she’s not lurking around the corner.”
“Be my guest.”
The Sight flashed on, a burst of white that unexpectedly faded into normality. Well, normality in terms of being able to See beyond the physical walls of the world. I didn’t know if it was necessity forcing me to get my act together, or if I was adjusting to the new power level, but either way, the walls around us turned a shadowy gray-green. Most buildings blazed green, a sentry color of certainty in their duty, but these ones were too old and neglected; they’d forgotten their purpose. I felt sorry for them, and like my emotional state affected my magic, white surged up again. I said “Stop that” aloud to myself, and hauled my emotions into as steady a line as I could get them.
The doors on either side of us led into alleys that looped around, explaining how the wolf had come at us so easily from the evidently-wrong direction. Another path led away from that looped hall, and I saw a rush-and-tumble maze of twisty little passages, all alike, leading into stretches of underground that I suddenly, seriously doubted were Underground at all. “Seattle’s not built on a bunch of cave systems, is it?”
“No. It’s volcanic sediment and sandstones,” Billy said with utter confidence. Rita and I both turned to look at him and he spread his hands. “Robert just did a science fair project on Puget Sound geology. Why?”
I reeled the Sight back in and squinched my face up. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m seeing things. It just looks like this direction is riddled with caves and tunnels.”
After a long, cautious silence, Billy said, “It was a pretty big earthquake….”
“No. Absolutely not. No fricking way. I do not accept that as a possibility.” In order to prevent myself from considering it—because the idea had leaked into my mind, too, and I wanted it far, far away—I took my flashlight from Rita, whispered the sword back to its hiding place beneath my bed and boldly strode through the closest doorway.
Rita, following me, said, “Earthquake?” to Billy in an appropriately hushed voice, but there wasn’t anywhere I could escape overhearing her.
“Last July, remember the one that tore up Lake Washington and made Thunderbird Falls? That was Detective Walker.”
I muttered, “It was June, and I was having a bad day,” and bent forward as the passageway got lower. Rita took a breath like she wanted to ask a dozen questions, but restrained herself as I got down on hands and knees to continue forward. I was certain there was room: Tia, either in human or canine form, had fit through, and I was pretty sure she didn’t outweigh me. “Look, I know she isn’t right in front of us, but once we get through here I want you to let me take point and you two stay back to back, okay? Rita, are you sure you even want to be here?”
“People have been brought through here recently, Detective. There are heel marks in the dirt, like they were dragged.”
I stopped and looked at the dirt under my hands, which was littered with paw prints and, indeed, drag marks. “Please tell me you’d noticed that, Billy.”
“Crawling behind two of you who are wiping out the marks? No. Good job, Rita. We owe you one.”
“We see a lot more than people think we do,” Rita said softly. “Just because you don’t see us…”
I said, “Remind me to hire you as my eyes and ears on the street when we get done with this,” and Rita breathed a smile behind me.
“Joanne,” Melinda Holliday said, loud and clear and inside my head, “we have a problem. The police have found Michael.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
I bucked upright, smashed my head against the low ceiling, howled with outrage and came down again saying, “What the fuck?” mostly to the voice inside my head. “Melinda?”
“Melinda?” Billy looked around in alarm and I snapped a fist closed like I was snatching the sound from the air.
“Since when is your wife telepathic, Billy? Melinda? Melinda!” I finally tried Melinda? inside my head, and got startlement back in response. Melinda, what the fuck?
Impatience shot through her answer: “For heaven’s sake, Joanne, I don’t know how long I can maintain this. Wherever you are doesn’t have cell reception and this is important. Get somewhere you can call me before they decide to shoot Michael.”
I bent double—not that it was far to bend—and beat both fists against the ground, swearing and swearing and swearing. “They found Morrison. I have to go get him.”
Rita’s protest was as sharp as my own astonishment. “You can’t leave! You can’t—that thing, it’s, it’s a, a…”
“I don’t have much choice, Rita. We know where Tia is, at least generally. I’ll come back for her, but if I don’t go get Morrison he’s probably going to get killed and—” I broke off, because that sentence finished with and I would rather let every single person down here die than let that happen. I wasn’t sure it was a lie, but I was very sure it was the wrong thing to say. “Are there other ways in and out of here?”
“Probably, but I don’t know! I’ve never been this far!”
Well, the first
tunnel we’d chased our golden goose through had been dug out by hand, not one of the old city streets. I arbitrarily chose to believe that meant it was the main, perhaps the only, access point, and started backing up. “Billy, shit, you don’t even have your gun, do you?” I knew he didn’t, not any more than I had one. Worry was making me ask stupid questions.
“I don’t usually bring it to theater performances, no,” he said tightly. “What about Melinda?”
“She’s fine, she’s just talking in my head.” I was feeling a little over-emphatic, but it was the only way I could keep from shouting everything I said. “Is that normal?”
After a careful pause he said, “No,” which suggested to me it wasn’t entirely abnormal, either, but I wasn’t in the mood to get into it.
“It must have something to do with the dance tonight. Look, if we retreat to the chamber we first saw her in, can you hold the fort until I get back?”
“Me and what army?”
“Ours,” Rita offered, sounding determined if not absolutely certain. “Wolves avoid people, right? Normal wolves? So if I go get some of the guys to join us, maybe just having so many people there will keep her trapped.”
It was dark and the tunnel was cramped, but Billy and I both turned toward her, lights flashing to illuminate her wide-eyed face. “That,” I said in genuine approval, “is a great idea. Thank you, Rita. You’re a hell of a woman.”
“And you owe me a hell of an explanation.” She turned around more easily in the tunnel’s confines than either Billy or I could do, and scampered back the way we’d come.
Shamanic powers did not come invested with super-strength, so getting Billy, particularly, out of the chamber we’d first seen the wolf woman in was something of a challenge. Fortunately, I was tall and broad-shouldered, if not superheroic, and once I’d boosted him up he was able to haul me up without much trouble. Rita, who weighed about ninety pounds, was no problem, though it was she who said, “We’ll bring a ladder next time.”
