Spirit Dances

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It felt—almost sorta kinda—like the moment when I’d invited the entire city of Seattle to hit me with its best shot. Except that had been untempered power, and I’d been a raw newbie, desperate for a surge that would help me knock down a demi-god. This was focused, and all I needed it for was replenishing a magic I’d become accustomed to using. I’d been topped up by drum music before; I knew how it was supposed to go.

Feeling like a bottle of liquid soap had been poured into a fountain was not generally how it went. Bubbles popped through me, toe to skull, palm to palm, and I expected to see them drifting from my fingertips like I’d become a giant Joanne-shaped bubblemaker. It tickled ferociously, but giggling seemed wholly inappropriate, so I breathed through my nose until it became a series of perfectly horrible snorts that were too funny to ignore. The lights came back up as more bubbles erupted in my nose, and I did giggle, then laughed out loud at the smiling, bemused faces around me.

Last time I’d done this—when Seattle had overloaded me—I’d accidentally become an end-times sign for the Navajo Nation. My silver-blue power had changed to colors of the whole rainbow, power strong enough to last all day. I was much more contained now, radiating blue and silver, but not so out of control that I went full-spectrum. That was an enormous relief. Even with Rattler and Raven on my side to help smooth things over—and they’d disappeared with the burst of power, their job here evidently done—I didn’t need a second round of explaining to a god that I was merely incompetent, not intentionally dangerous. Happy, even gleeful, I triggered the Sight so I could thoroughly enjoy being punched up to full throttle.

The theater went white as a flash-bang erupted in my vision. I howled, clapping my hands over my eyes, which was about as useful as holding my nose when magic was providing a visual component. I could See through my eye lids and fingers, though the only thing to See was the as tonishing whiteness. My head rang with it, which was all new; the Sight had never had a soundtrack before. Not that it was much of a soundtrack, just a high-pitched squeal that could’ve been the result of leaving a rock concert. Except this was much, much louder, like I’d gone to every rock concert in creation at the same moment, and my skull was vibrating with the aftermath.

So was my skin, for that matter. It felt like someone had run a zillion needles over it, leaving invisible but painful scores. My hands tingled, my cheeks burned, my stomach cramped, all of it making me seem more alive, somehow. Too alive: people weren’t supposed to feel at this level, not if they wanted to retain their sanity. I wanted to escape myself, leave my overloaded body behind and get somewhere safe.

For most people that was nothing more than a nutty wish. In my case, I slipped free the surly bonds of flesh and rose up into the whiteness. It surrounded me, too harsh to be comforting, and I spun around in search of yet another way to escape.

Hunter-moon orange, violent in its contrast against the brilliance, seared through me. I flung my hands up again, even more uselessly in my disembodied state, and clawed the Sight back, trying to turn it off. It faded reluctantly, leaving behind pinprick tingles and ear-ringing. I rubbed my eyes, trying to erase the flaring white edges of everything I looked at, and finally scraped enough brain cells together to focus on where the orange shard had pierced my vision.

Winona, Naomi’s replacement, stood right in front of me, confusion writ large on her delicate features. A sense of the absurd bloomed in me. I’d automatically assumed an outside force attacking the dance troupe. It hadn’t even occurred to me to look for a devil within, much less to look at the individual who would gain the most, careerwise, from Naomi’s death. Some detective I was.

But then, from a self-castigating perspective, it was a little odd that Morrison hadn’t thought of it, either. That left me with three possibilities: either my boss was losing it, the snake within the troupe’s grass was running a look-elsewhere spell, or my shamanic instincts were dead on target and it was somebody else entirely. Of those three, the first was the least likely, and I had to admit that given my track record, the third didn’t seem all that likely either. I was all light-voiced and hollow as I asked, “Did you kill her?”

Winona paled, a fair trick for someone of her already-porcelain complexion. “Why would you even think that?”

“The killer’s aura is hunter-moon orange, and that color just slammed me between the eyes when I looked at you.” I triggered the Sight again as I spoke, wanting to see if guilt or horror surged through Winona’s colors.

Obliterating white smashed into my head again, sending the bells in my ears to new frenzied pitches and making my skin itch until I wanted to score it off. Orange stabbed through the white, pulses emanating from Winona. I tried to stalk forward with a commanding air and instead staggered in a circle, holding my head as I turned the Sight off yet again and waited for its after-effects to fade. I’d had my vision go on the blink before, a physical warning against the wrong mystic path I was charging down, but I couldn’t remember the Sight itself acting up in quite this way. I had no idea what was wrong with it, but I wished it would stop.

When my vision had cleared again, the dancers had moved. Some had stepped closer to Winona, supporting her. Others had fallen back, just as clearly rejecting her, fear greater than friendship. I gritted my teeth and moved toward her. “Tell me what happened, Winona. I can’t believe you tried an attack tonight, knowing I was here to shield everyone.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” She backed away from me, her small group of supporters moving with her. “I didn’t kill anybody! I would never hurt Naomi. She was my friend!”

“Winona, I can See it. I can See the hunter-orange blazi—”

“Joanne,” Melinda said gently, “Winona’s aura is emerald-green with touches of red. There’s no orange in it at all.”

Cold sluiced through me, washing away the anger at my own assumptions and leaving an acidic pit of worry in its place. Even if I knew hundreds of magic users—adepts; I had to remember to use that word, because I liked it—even if I’d known hundreds of adepts, my temperament would almost certainly leave me disinclined to believe most of them when they made a flat statement. I would want to see it myself.

That was the nature of a Joanne.

Melinda Holliday was one of the few exceptions I could think of to that rule. If Melinda said it, I believed it, even if my own empirical evidence was to the contrary. I stopped where I was, teeth and fists clenched, eyes closed so I couldn’t see Winona and give in on the urge to advance further. I triggered the Sight for a third time, prepared for it to white out the world and set my skin afire, which it did. I turned my head toward Billy and Melinda, because of everyone there I knew their aura colors, and after long moments spoke. “Okay. All I can See right now is white, Mel. I can’t even See your colors, so okay, if you say Winona’s red and green, she’s red and green. But something’s not right. Orange is cutting through the white, and it’s the killer’s signature shade.”

Melinda, still in the same calm, gentle voice, said, “I don’t see it.” She wasn’t arguing its existence, just making an admission. I exhaled noisily and nodded, then turned back toward Winona, my eyes still closed. A headache was building and I wanted very badly to stop using the Sight, but screwed-up or not, it was providing the only lead I had. I edged forward and extended a fingertip, trying to locate the very heart of the orange blaze. When I was almost touching it, I opened my eyes again.

Winona was holding her breath, my finger an inch from her breastbone. I couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, given she was wearing a thunderbird costume. Long feathers and bright bits of gold adorned her, all of them making a loose flowing outfit that both hid and enhanced her form. “Have you changed anything in your costume lately?”

She clapped a hand against her chest and shook her head. “No. It’s Naomi’s costume anyway, not mine. I—” Her eyebrows furled and she closed her fingers around the feathers just beneath her hand and just beyond my pointing finger. “Ow. This is supposed to all be soft, not—” She tugged, then came up with a small bone, holding it in her fingertips. “God, what is that, a bird bone?”

Three or four people said, “No,” including me. I went on to add, “It’s not fragile enough. But maybe I can use it as a tracking device, since it’s got the killer’s colors,” as I reached for it.

Melinda said, “Joanne, I don’t think you should touch that,” exactly one second too late.

Power sluiced out of me like somebody’d opened a drain on the Mississippi. No: more like somebody had stuck the world’s largest straw into the Mississippi and was schlucking it all out in one gigantic gulp. My knees and brain both went wobbly, the former delivering me to the floor with a crash and the latter filling with a static rush that made thinking hard. I’d given blood a couple of times in the past. The feeling of light-headedness from standing up too rapidly after blood had been drawn was not dissimilar to the power drain, only magnitudes less significant.

One fuzzy thought came clear: this was exactly the kind of thing Coyote kept warning me about. If I didn’t get out of it intact, he was going to deride me from here to breakfast. Of course, if I didn’t get out of it intact, he probably wouldn’t be able to, which wasn’t exactly reassuring. I fell forward to dig my fingertips into the dance mat and tried to concentrate.

A ball of nausea rolled my stomach as a reward for my efforts. I’d always felt the magic start in my gut, and now it was being sucked out from there, vampire-like. Not that I’d ever heard of a vampire that attacked peoples’ stomachs. Which was just as well, because ew.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, a weary little voice suggested that following thoughts like that to their inevitable conclusion was perhaps a result of a static-filled brain, which was in turn the result of having power gulped out of me. It was not, in other words, the kind of focus I needed to shield against the power drain and survive this so Coyote could yell at me for it. I lowered my forehead to the mat and squished my eyes shut, determined to See what was happening.

The Sight exploded blindingly white again, so brilliant that for a moment nothing else mattered: mostly I was interested in figuring out why that was happening. I had control of my magic, these days. Getting pumped up full of spirit dance drumming shouldn’t supercharge me to such a degree that the Sight rendered me, well, sightless.

Except all the control I was accustomed to having was shaped around the relatively comfortable Joanne Walker limitations, rather than the new exciting Siobhan Walkingstick potential. I knew from firsthand experience that the problem with mystical potential was once unleashed, it was disinclined to fit back into the tidy little box it originally came in. Rattler had scraped me down to a spark, and the dancers had thrown that spark into an ocean’s worth of metaphysical gasoline. I probably shouldn’t be surprised when explosions ensued. I was surprised, but I probably shouldn’t be.

Of course, at the rate power was draining out of me, in a minute I’d be somewhat less than even my usual comfortable level of magical self, and that would be bad. Bad for the troupe, bad for Morrison, bad for me. I gritted my teeth and looked for my shields, uncertain if I’d find them intact or obliterated, and not sure which to expect under the newly-changed circumstances.

Silver-shot blue was there, but weak and unimpressive. Given my overflow of power, I thought it should be like the walls of Jericho, except that was a bad analogy, because they’d come tumbling down. Or maybe that made it a good analogy. Either way I clawed at the magic flowing from me, trying to shape it into shields instead of a river.

I might as well have tried stirring the ocean with a Popsicle stick. It was worse than futile: achieving a degree of focus simply awakened vicious hunter-orange stripes in the whiteness still filling the Sight. They dove into my faltering shields and drained them ever-faster as I poured more strength into them. The bone I’d taken from Winona’s costume burned my hand, giving me something physical to fixate on for what felt like the first time in forever, but it wasn’t enough. Orange slipped inside the silver-blue of my shields, worming its way deep inside and leaving streaks of pain where it touched me. Agony drove inward and gathered like a storm waiting to break.

And break it did. Or, more accurately, I broke, the bones of my skull crumpling with a hideous series of grinding pops. My brain cramped, suddenly no longer fitting inside my head, and someone gave a tiny, desperate gasp of agony. I suspected it was me.

I was getting tired of pain. Sadly, pain was not tired of me. It stretched and wracked me just as violently as Rattler had done less than an hour before. Except Rattler had been frantically trying to put me back together, and this new exciting pain was clearly trying to pull me apart.

No. Not trying to pull me apart. Trying to reshape me. Bones cracked, marrow oozing out, and my skin split to expose blood and muscle. Fur burst from joints that crackled and reformed, and panic spurted through me as I concentrated on remaining human.

Derision slammed through the flow of orange power, a belief that to be merely human was pathetically inadequate. My fingernails turned to claws, black and short and shining under the stage lights. A whimsical and very stupid part of me thought it might be interesting to see what shape I was being forced into, and in that instant I lost a huge amount of ground. My hands, my forearms, all the way up to my elbows, cracked and shifted. A canine of some sort, but not the semi-familiar coyote form: the color was wrong. I let myself observe that, then knotted my fingers against the mat, determined that they should be fingers, and not paws.

I might as well have wished they were fishes, though with someone’s malicious shapeshifting magic running through me, that was probably a dangerous thought. The howl that ripped from my throat was distinctly doglike and ended in a series of panting whimpers. Fear built at the back of my brain, eating away my understanding of what was happening: making me less human and more wild. Another minute and I would no longer know who or what I was supposed to be.

Fresh panic surged through me and caught hold of my magic, finally stopping the terrible outpouring I’d been experiencing. The power woke, suddenly mine to command. It was not an offensive weapon: I’d had that beaten into my head in unpleasant ways. But shields were defensive, and staggering amounts of magic were still fluctuating inside me. I solidified my shields and shoved outward, power bursting forth in a shockwave. The killer’s magic dispersed over a suddenly enormous surface of outgoing magic, and for the briefest moment my hands were my own again. Triumphant, relieved and terrified all at once, I flung a net, trying to capture my attacker’s thinned-out magic.

An impossibly large pulse of magic roared out of me for the second time. A patch of damp bothered the corner of my mouth, drool collecting on the mat. There was too damned much power running through me. I couldn’t control its output, nor the equally sudden influx as it returned to full strength, which it did in exhaustively quick cycles, regardless of how much my opponent sucked down. I was starting to feel like an all-night smorgasbord, which was probably just dandy for the guy whose original plan had been intended to suck up as much power from the troupe as possible, but wasn’t so great for me. He gathered his hunter-orange power back together while I scrabbled uselessly at the floor, and when the next surge of shapeshifting magic flowed toward me, I had no focus to stop it with.

A clear yellow shield rose up out of nowhere and surrounded me. The killer’s attack cut off like it had never happened. Bewildered and exhausted, I wheezed, flipped on my back and stared upward.

Stared, actually, at Melinda Holliday, who stood above me blazing with glorious, inhuman luminescence.