Spirit Dances wp-6

by C. E. Murphy

  The Sight hadn’t burned out my visual receptors or my brain when I’d used it in the Market, so I was cautiously willing to press it ahead of where we crawled and walked, hoping I’d get some sense of what lay ahead. Mostly I got a sense of open spaces beneath the city that I was sure no geological survey could be aware of. Or maybe all earth was riddled with pockets of emptiness and tunnels that sometimes went nowhere and sometimes connected; I had no idea. Unless given some kind of extenuating reason not to, like a sinkhole suddenly opening up, I tended to think of ground as solid. Still, apparently Robert Holliday’s science report hadn’t mentioned anything about tunnel-riddled bedrock beneath Seattle, so the fact we were working our way through non-old-city tunnels boded peculiar, if not ill. “Hey, Morrison, can you smell anything down here that isn’t us?”

  I peered over my shoulder as I asked, and got his nose-wrinkled expression of distaste in exchange. I took that as a yes. “Anything female?”

  Morrison stopped dead in the middle of the tunnel, giving me an excellent wolfish glare. Billy backpedaled, trying not to trip over him as I spread my hands in self-defense. “What? Are you telling me you don’t know what girls smell like?”

  His nose wrinkled again, this time so delicately it looked like deliberate refrain from commentary on the smell of one particular girl, i.e., me. I turned back to the path, muttering, “I had no idea dogs were so expressive,” and actually felt the snap of his teeth as he just narrowly missed biting me on the ass. I bet anything that meant “Wolves aren’t dogs.”

  Evidently I’d put an idea in his head, though, because he pushed past me, head extended long and low as he scented the air. His ruff fluffed up and he glanced at me, then paced forward just slowly enough that we could keep up. I ducked through stretches of tunnel that Morrison fit through more tidily, Billy a few steps behind me, and we caught up to our boss at the mouth to a narrow natural cave dripping with water.

  The brindle wolf stood at its far end, one paw lifted in a classic attentive pose. Morrison stood in exactly the same position, neither of them looking certain as to what to do next. I felt like a wildlife photographer who’d accidentally come across the shot of a lifetime, gold wolf and silver examining one another in a primal size-up. Then Tia wagged her tail in a blatantly come-hither sweep and leaped into the darkness at the cavern’s far end.

  Morrison whurrfed, a noise that was nothing at all like a human response to anything, and my stomach turned to lead. “Oh my God, Morrison, don’t you dare.”

  He whurrfed again, then darted forward at a pace we measly humans couldn’t hope to match, disappearing after the werewolf.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Why…” Billy’s voice sounded dreadfully thin and hollow, like he knew the answer to the question he was trying to ask, but hoped against hope I might have a response he liked better. “Why would he do that…?”

  “It could be that he can keep up and we can’t, so he’s forging on ahead to keep tabs on her.” It was the most harmless explanation I could come up with.

  Sadly, Billy didn’t believe it any more than I did. “You have to go after them before—before something awful happens.”

  I was pretty sure “something awful” loosely translated as “before Morrison bangs a she-wolf,” but I wasn’t nearly man enough to say it aloud, either. I just stood there, arrested by the potential horror of the situation unfolding somewhere ahead of us. Billy nudged me and I flinched. “I can’t just leave you here. And I’m not even sure I can shift without…” I waved a hand, attempting to encompass vague but terrible things with the gesture.

  “Joanne,” Billy said, firmly, “if you don’t haul ass after them and stop Morrison from mating with a werewolf, obliterating Seattle with too much magic use is going to look like the preferable alternative once he’s human again.”

  He was right, but I shook my head and jolted into a jog. “No, not unless I have no choice. We can catch up. How does this crap end up happening? I’m trying, Billy, I’m really trying to get things right, and my best efforts still end up with Morrison chasing a piece of ta—”

  Billy burst out laughing and I threw a smirk over my shoulder at him as we ran for the far end of the cavern.

  Nearly an hour later we’d squeezed through more tight spaces, damp stone and slippery earth than I’d imagined could exist. There were spurs going off all over the place, some too narrow to fit through, others far more wide and inviting than the areas we’d squished through. If it weren’t for the paw prints leading us, we’d have been hopelessly lost, and as it was I had no concept at all of how far we’d come. Billy, behind me, panted as heavily as I did, which made me feel equal parts better and horribly guilty. We’d sloped down through most of our travels, and however deep we were, it was warm enough to be this side of muggy, and I wished I’d left my sweater behind. Not enough to take it off: it cushioned me against the rock spurs and the occasional fall, and didn’t tear as easily as Billy’s magnificent, ruined suit. I was going to have to learn to sew to make him a new one.

  “Do you even know what direction we’re headed?” he asked for the third or fourth time.

  I bared my teeth at the darkness beyond the flashlight’s reach, and said, patiently, “Not really, no. All I know is these aren’t natural caves and tunnels.” I’d said that as many times as he’d asked, but the repetition was almost better than the silence. There was nothing quite like a zillion tons of earth pressing down to give a girl a proper sense of mortality. And that was from someone who’d been stabbed, hanged, skewered and squished enough to make Jean Grey look like a piker.

  Of course, answering made me dwell on the aforementioned unnaturalness. It was increasingly clear to my damaged Sight that the areas we squeezed through were new formations. Concerningly familiar silvers and blues ran through them, mostly in vertical spikes, like someone had taken a giant wedge and hammered it into the earth, then rucked it back and forth a couple times to open spaces where there hadn’t been any before. There were other colors, too, colors I recognized as remnants from the coven I’d worked with briefly. Mostly, though, the lingering impression was of me. One Joanne Walker, shaman extraordinaire, who had rearranged Seattle’s topography most of a year ago, apparently far more thoroughly than I’d realized.

  Since the city hadn’t collapsed in a giant sinkhole, I wasn’t too worried about the modifications to its underpinnings. What I was concerned with was why anyone would bother going this deep into the altered earth. I couldn’t come up with any reasons I liked, since an hour’s fast walk through muck and stone was a bit much for privacy’s sake. Of course, it probably wouldn’t take a four-legged wolf nearly that long, which thought I didn’t much care for, either. Morrison could get in a lot of trouble in an hour. I tested my magic again, nervously, and felt it still sparking like a volcano waiting to go off. Volcanoes under Seattle would be bad.

  Billy said, “Hold up,” all of a sudden, and I stopped dead, clicking my flashlight off, as if its light made us vulnerable. He flashed his own at me, somehow indicating irritation with the motion, but said nothing, and after a couple seconds I heard what had stopped him: water dripping.

  More to the point, water echoing, like it had lots of room around it when it plopped to the ground. Below that, there was a dull rumble that reminded me of heavy machinery working in the distance. Frankly, if somebody had heavy machinery down here, I was going to be really irritated, because it meant there was a much more accessible way into the warm earth-scented burrows we’d made our way through. Then again, the temperature hadn’t changed at all, so probably nobody up ahead of us had a Caterpillar making a nice smooth grade to the surface.

  Billy tapped my shoulder. I turned and he put his finger over his lips, then gestured me forward before turning his own flashlight off. I put my hand on his chest, holding him in place until my eyes gradually picked up hints of light from well in front of us. I crept forward, hearing Billy’s occasional breath that let me know he was still with me, and af
ter a long few minutes in the dark, we edged our way into the mouth of an underground cavern.

  About a million things were wrong with it. First, it existed at all. I didn’t think that was good. It was of respectable size—I probably couldn’t throw a baseball well enough to hit the far wall—and it seemed to me like somebody should have noticed a hole this big beneath Seattle. I was sure people came out with ultrasound machines to look for stuff just like this, but nobody’d ever mentioned it, not even after the earthquake. I tried, briefly, to remember the guy’s name who’d found me in the earthquake’s aftermath. He’d been a geologist. I bet he’d be plenty interested in an enormous, roughly circular pit somewhere under the city.

  The second and larger thing wrong was that even with the knotted-down Sight I was using, the whole place was sheeted with magic. It imbued the walls and flowed out of them, drizzling to the floor and wafting like fog across the damp stone. Even the water condensed and dripping from the ceiling was filled with power. Droplets and tiny streams glowed in a not-even-slightly natural way, even given that water, the stuff of life, tended to be rather radiant in the Sight.

  This was supercharged, radioactive-bright water, except without the hideous dangerous auras I’d imagine actual radioactivity gave off. The point was, water, stone, the world in general, wasn’t normally so magic-laden that it looked like a touch would explode it.

  Which probably explained why my geologist pal hadn’t found the place. It seemed very possible the whole extensive underground network was sufficiently power-ridden that it actually didn’t exist within the mundane world. It was like somebody had opened pockets of another plane into the Middle World.

  That somebody, of course, was me. Unfortunately, that was pretty much exactly what I’d done with the coven: ripped a hole between my world and the Lower World, letting demons flood through and wreak a bit of havoc. I knew it’d left scars—and a waterfall—on Seattle’s surface, and all of a sudden I was quite sure of just how far we’d traveled. I sank back half a foot and breathed, “I think we’re under Thunderbird Falls,” to Billy.

  I was getting really good at reading people’s unspoken commentary. The look Billy gave me very clearly said does that really fucking matter right now? I shrugged and went back to studying the Things That Were Wrong, going so far as to shut the Sight down briefly so I saw only the normal world.

  There were flickering torches set high in the stone. Their smoke wafted up, trapped by water-dripping limestone, and never managed to make an escape: even knowing they were there, I could barely catch the scent of flame and smoke. Their light reflected off damp walls and a low shallow pool at the cavern’s far side, giving the whole place an otherworldly glimmer even without the Sight.

  It was, however, just slightly possible that the otherworldly aura was dramatically enhanced by a thirty-foot-tall wicker man in the cave’s center.

  He—and it was alarmingly clear it was a he—was raw and fresh-looking, as though the trees used to weave him had only recently been stripped and woven together. He was strong, though: his architect had done a good job supporting his thick, stubby arms. I could tell because cages dangled from the ends of each, like thief cages of old hung at crossroads to warn travelers that the locals meant business when it came to crime.

  Except they weren’t peopled with thieves. Both of them had a single person in them, wearing the sort of eclectic, cobbled-together outfits Rita wore. Her missing compatriots, squished into short uncomfortable wicker coops. Nor were they the only two: the wicker man’s sturdy legs each contained another person, as did his torso. His head looked large enough to hold a sixth person, but it was empty, and I wondered if Lynn Schumacher had been intended for that spot.

  Worse, I wondered if Morrison would take his place.

  There was no immediate sign of my wayward boss, but we were too low to see beyond piles of shredded wood that lay around the wicker man’s feet. I didn’t like that pile. It suggested bonfires, and I had the vague, uncomfortable idea that wicker men often came to fiery endings. I was not about to watch one wicker man and five real men burn to death, regardless of what else happened. My overenthusiastic magic would have to come to heel, or I would—

  Distressingly, the only way I could think to finish that idea was or I would risk knocking a hole through to the world above, which would have been just fine if I wasn’t really quite sure we were beneath Lake Washington. I mean, yes, that would be better than exploding a hole in downtown Seattle, but in terms of a dramatic rescue it would be an utter failure. I didn’t want to save these guys from burning to death only to drown them.

  Images of shielding them all in bubbles and letting them bob to the surface came to mind, complete with pop-pop-popping sound effects. Great. I had a backup plan, in case everything went stupidly, spectacularly wrong. Too bad I didn’t have a decent primary plan.

  Billy elbowed me and nodded toward the firewood ring just as movement caught my eye, too. Tia paced out of the ring like Lady Godiva sans the horse. A moment later Morrison, still very much a wolf, trotted after her, his head nearly level with her ribs. There were worse places for it to be level with, all things considered. Billy widened his eyes at me and I shrugged, as wide-eyed as he was. I didn’t know what had been going on behind the wooden ring. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know. I had a horrible feeling that at some point, I’d find out.

  The idea made me exhale just a little too loudly. Morrison’s ears cocked and he looked my way, but Tia didn’t. Apparently werewolves didn’t retain canine senses in human form. I filed that away under “Thank God for small favors” and stayed where I was, stomach clenched as Morrison gave me a long, steady look to make it clear he knew I was there. A flicker of hope danced through me. Maybe he had chased Tia in order to keep an eye on her. Maybe it hadn’t just been wolfy instinct out to get him—and eventually me—into trouble.

  Nah. Nothing was ever that easy. I almost smiled, and Morrison caught up to Tia with a couple of loping steps, evidently uninterested in Billy and me. Billy performed a soundless collapse of relief which would have done Charlie Chaplin proud. I wanted to follow suit, but I remained as I was, tense and wide-eyed, for just a few seconds longer while I tried like hell to make out what was supposed to happen in this underground cavern.

  A sacrifice, obviously: people didn’t go around randomly constructing wicker men in magic-born, power-filled chambers and then stuffing the wicker men full of expendables just for the fun of it. But if there were werewolf gods, I knew nothing about them, including why they might want sacrifices, or whether this might be an annual thing or just a special occasion.

  A penny dropped, quick twist of certainty at the back of my mind: it was a special occasion. The same special occasion which prompted the ghost dance killing. The moon was full, or would be tonight, and the equinox was only another day away. It still wasn’t a perfect alignment like it had been the year before for the banshee murders, but it was close enough.

  The only question was, close enough for what. Not that it mattered, particularly: it wasn’t very likely Tia would sit down, explain it all and make such sense that I’d say, “Oh, well, okay, go ahead then, light ’em up.” A burble of relief slipped through me. I was a full day ahead of schedule, with the full moon not being until tonight. Between being here early and having stopped another ghost dance murder, for once I had the upper hand. Particularly since Morrison hadn’t informed his new lady love that we were there. All I had to do was tiptoe up and bash her unconscious without being noticed, and we could get all our answers later.

  It sounded like a respectable Plan A. I very cautiously triggered the tamped-down Sight again, hoping it wouldn’t blast my eyeballs out. It merely filtered on, the way it was supposed to. Pleased, I tapped Billy’s shoulder and went into a complicated mime routine trying to explain what I intended to do. After about thirty seconds of playing peekaboo, which completely failed to get across the idea of “I’m going to wrap myself in an invisibility cloak,” he rolled
his eyes, mouthed, “Just do it,” and hunched back down to await my antics.

  If the Sight could knock me senseless for a couple minutes, I could hardly imagine how badly something that inherently screwed with the laws of physics might end up if I wasn’t careful. I delved into my magic more delicately than I’d ever done, trying not to do more than scrape enough off its surface to bend light around myself. Even those tiny scrapes left bright silver-white marks, like I was coming dangerously close to unleashing power I was totally unprepared to deal with. If I had to do anything fast while we were down here, that Plan B with the bubble shields might well come in necessary.

  Gradually I felt like I’d succeeded, but one of the problems with this trick was I could still see myself. In fact, I was pretty sure it violated laws of physics all over the place, since I could also see out of my invisibility cloak, which technically I shouldn’t be able to do. Magic, however, wasn’t physics. I tapped Billy’s shoulder again and he flinched, suggesting he couldn’t see me. Satisfied, I crept forward, flashlight knotted in my hand like the bludgeoning tool it was shortly to be used as.

  Morrison and Tia had gone halfway around the wicker man, Tia stopping every few feet to examine something. I paused where she had, trying to see what she’d seen, but gave it up after a couple of attempts and edged around the circle as quickly and quietly as I could, until I was opposite Billy and only a few yards from my furry boss and his golden-haired girlfriend.

  Tia scruffed the top of Morrison’s head and said something inaudible to him. He lay down immediately, chin on his paws, but his whole body quivered like a dog who wasn’t at all sure he wanted to do as he was told. I wondered abruptly who was the boss in a wolf pack, the alpha male or the alpha female. In an awful lot of pack structures, the males were there for protection and breeding, and the females ruled the roost. Morrison looked very much like his roost was being ruled. Tia crouched to scruff him again and he lay flatter, ears and tail full of displeased body language, but Tia ignored him as she laid a hand on the wooden ring she’d built.