Spirit Dances

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I had, in my short career as a shaman, run across quite a few non-human beings. Melinda was not one of them. Of that, I was absolutely sure. But the woman standing over me was clearly Melinda, and just as clearly touched by the gods, a phrase I did not use lightly. Her eyes were as gold as mine had ever been in the midst of power throes, and there was a radiance to her I’d never before seen embodied by anyone. Not even Cernunnos, ancient and terrible god of the Hunt, had glowed the way Melinda did. It was as if someone had taken her already generous and gentle spirit and hooked it to a star, until barely-contained grace and power shone through her fragile, mortal skin.

That power was more than enough to trump mine. I could See properly again, Melinda’s talent blotting out the whiteness in an effervescent glow. Wisps of color floated round her like she might be lifted into the air by them, their delicate dance mesmerizing until Melinda knelt beside me, concern in her gaze. Deep concern, more than a human, even a good friend, could contain. My heart missed a beat and hurt when it started up again, though I had no idea why. I inhaled to risk a question, then jerked my hands upward, making sure they were, in fact, hands.

They were, no trace of shapeshifting left on them. I exhaled all the air in my lungs and let my eyes close with the breath, taking an instant to not care that I didn’t understand and to revel in my gratitude for Melinda’s interference. Then I opened my eyes again. Melinda was still brilliant, the stage lights far above somehow dull by comparison. There were traces of someone unfamiliar in her features, like someone else was looking out through her eyes. Disconcerted, I turned my head away, glad I hadn’t asked that question after all. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know who or what was within my friend.

Billy’s shoes intruded on my vision, reminding me of the day I’d gotten a sword stuffed through my gut. He had been there then, too, seen from the same angle. He’d been off duty that morning, and wearing a killer pair of high-heeled blue pumps. Tonight they were spats, every bit as theatrical but in a whole different way. I smiled at them, then cautiously offered the smile to the Hollidays.

From their expressions, my smile was more of a horrible grimace than an expression of pleasure. I stopped doing it, and they looked grateful. Melinda, still in the same gentle voice she’d been using for some time now, said, “Are you all right, Joanne?”

I croaked, “Yeah,” then swallowed a couple times, trying to loosen my throat. “What just happened?”

“Your energy was being torn apart. I shielded you.” Melinda’s tone held the slightest hint of reproval, which was a whole lot less than I deserved. Part of me wanted to address that fact.

The other larger, nosier part of me said, “You can do that?” in genuine astonishment.

She said, “I can at the moment,” which I suspected also needed addressing, but instead of pursuing it I transferred my gaze to the high stage lights and chose to admire how I was no longer writhing in misery. Melinda had done that somehow, and while curiosity killed the cat, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. After a moment I gathered myself enough to say, “Good news is, I think I can safely say we’re dealing with a shapeshifter.”

Melinda’s voice went wary: “And the bad news?”

“He’s better at it than I am.” There was a terrible scent of burnt feathers in the air. I held my breath as discreetly as I could, looking for the smell’s source.

Winona was just beyond the Hollidays, gaping at me. Gaping at my hand, specifically. I lifted it, wondering what was so interesting.

My fingertips were blackened, the charred remains of a tiny bone still clutched in them. I considered that a while, then frowned at Winona. A small round burn mark marred her breastbone, exposed by melted fabric. The feathers adorning her costume were singed, and her expression was stricken, like she was hurt but too shocked to fully realize it. I got to my feet carefully and put my palm over her breastbone, calling up healing power.

Blue-rimmed silver ricocheted out of me, so brilliant the entire troupe gasped. It was possible for my magic to have a visual component, but it didn’t normally. Then again, it didn’t normally make my eyes cross or my knees buckle, either. Billy saved me from collapsing as Winona stepped backward, staring at her own chest before raising her gaze to mine. Her brown eyes were silver-shot, my own residual power coloring them. It faded quickly, but left her glowing with health and strength, no sign of grief or the performance’s exertions weakening her.

I, on the other hand, said, “Wooga,” and let Billy take more of my weight than a self-sufficient independent woman should rely on a guy to do. My vision tunneled, then righted itself, and I stood up with a whisper of thanks. Only then did Winona say, “What was that?”

“A talisman.” I turned the blackened bit of bone in my fingers. “A focal point. Something that belonged to the killer, something he could focus his power through to attack the troupe. He, um. Shouldn’t be able to again. Unless it’s just a way to make it easier, and given the thrashing he just gave me, that’s poss…” I could tell from Winona’s expression I should have stopped with “shouldn’t be able to.” My shoulders slumped. If there was a PR department for shamans, I needed their help. I mumbled, “Nevermind. Obviously when I touched it he used it to focus on attacking me, but now it’s burned up and that really should render it powerless.”

“You did more than that.” Billy had a deeply unfocused expression, like he was looking at something far beyond what normal people could see. Farther beyond than usual, even, since he generally did see things normal people couldn’t. His voice was unusually light and soft as he said, “Only one person has ever died in this theater, Walker. I can see her now. Do you need to talk to her?”

My stomach lurched, all that fresh new magic suddenly worried. There were a dozen reasons Billy shouldn’t be seeing Naomi Allison’s ghost. First, though it had been murder, she’d gone so fast she had no idea she’d died brutally. He didn’t see ghosts from non-violent deaths. Second, though technically it was within his two-day window for seeing ghosts, I knew very well that Naomi had danced right into the Great Beyond, and Billy had always only ever been able to communicate with the dead who remained on this side of that divide.

Okay, that was only two reasons, but two was close enough to a dozen for my purposes. The point was, it took a medium of much greater psychic stature than Billy commanded to speak with the dead who had shuffled off this mortal coil as thoroughly as Naomi had.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one undergoing a surge of power. I doubted very much the troupe had intended to boost my friends, but I’d drawn them into the center of the circle. Even if the dancers had been focused on me, residual energy had left its mark on the Hollidays. Melinda had always insisted she was a blip on the radar, nothing much in terms of adeptitude, and Billy had been comfortable with his talent’s limitations as long as I’d known him. I wondered if they were going to have to adapt the way I had—though no doubt much more graciously—and then because I wasn’t that stupid, I said, “Yeah, I’d like to talk to her if it’s possible.”

“So,” came Jim Littlefoot’s emotion-harsh voice, “would we.”

I’d only participated in one or two séances in my life. Billy and his bright blue zoot suit would have struck me as an extremely unlikely medium had the first séance-leader I’d met not worn hippie skirts and violent comic-book T-shirts. Much of my life appeared to be a lesson in not judging books by their covers.

The dance troupe apparently already knew not to. None of them looked even slightly suspicious of Billy’s ability to bring their friend back across the Great Divide. Then again, if I did nightly what they did, I’d probably be fairly confident in people and their ability to breach other realms, too. In fact, I was getting there.

Sonata Smith, the medium who’d run the séances I’d attended, had been a bit on the mystical gooshy side of things for me. Billy only asked that everyone sit—not verbally, but by patting his palms toward the floor—and let a flicker of appreciation dart over his features as the troupe joined hands without prompting. They’d already made a power circle with their dance. The physical link between their bodies only shored it up, creating—to my eyes, anyway—a visible rippling wall which I very much doubted Naomi would be able to cross, should she be of a mind to.

Melinda and I, like Billy, remained standing. I did it because I was going to have to ask some questions and wanted to be on equal footing, as it were. I suspected Mel was mostly too busy being agog at the depth of Sight she was encountering to think of sitting. Either way, Billy didn’t ask us to, only said, “We’re ready for you now, Naomi,” in the same extraordinarily gentle voice I’d heard him use before, when speaking to lost spirits.

Powerful stage lights did ethereal bodies no favors at all, though at least they also disguised any physical damage her ghost might have shown from her untimely death. But my brief impression of Naomi Allison had been of a vibrant woman full of passion and physical strength. Most of that passion was lost with the amber lights pouring through her, stripping away any color or vitality she might have shown. I had the impulse to run offstage and see if I could find a switch to dim or darken them, so she might seem more real. I didn’t, partly because I wasn’t sure what would happen if I broke out of the circle, and mostly because I thought it might be even harder for her friends and family if the woman they’d lost became any more real than she was at the moment. I wasn’t the world’s most sensitive sensitive, but I was getting better.

Naomi was completely focused on Billy. The rest of us might not have existed, and for all I knew, from her perspective, we didn’t. She hadn’t been pretty: she was too thin and too muscled from dancing, without enough softness to her features, for prettiness. Her intensity on stage had drawn the eye, though, and she showed a similar intensity in how she observed Billy. It made her interesting, even attractive, despite a lack of conventional beauty. And despite being dead, which was the much more disturbing thought.

“I have someone here who’d like to ask you some questions,” Billy said to her, “and some others who would like to say goodbye. Is that all right?”

Naomi tilted her head, gaze sweeping the circle, though nothing suggested she took note of any of us. She nodded, though, as she came back to Billy. He gestured me forward, muttering, “Keep it short, Joanie. I’ve never connected with someone this far gone and I don’t know how long she’ll stay.”

Implicit in the statement was and these people have a lot more to say to her than you possibly can. I nodded and stepped right up to his side, hoping proximity to him would help her awareness of me. I even loosened my shields a little, trying to become brighter, in spiritual terms, so I might be easier to see.

It worked: her eyebrows furrowed and she tipped her head again, now watching me, but as if I was as washed-out and difficult to see as she was.

I only had one question, and it caught in my throat. Billy gave me a sharp look. I fell back a step, losing most of Naomi’s attention, and shook my head. “Let them say goodbye first. I’m not sure what my question will do to her.”

Naomi’s sister, Rebecca, whispered, “Thank you,” and joined the hands of the two people on either side of her so she could rise without breaking the circle. She came to stand by Billy, face contorted with tears, but Naomi’s expression lit up and she extended her hands toward Rebecca. I fell back another couple of steps, not really wanting to eavesdrop on the last words two sisters shared, and kept my eyes mostly averted while a handful of others came to say their good byes as well. Breathing the air within the circle hurt; it was that full of loss and sorrow. My refreshed power pounded at my temples and in my heart, searching for some way to ease their pain, but they already had their mechanisms. The ghost dance was meant to do just that. They would be fine, in time, perhaps especially because they had this rare opportunity for closure after Naomi’s sudden, terrible death.

Gradually—actually rather quickly, but it seemed slow because of the ache in the air—the few who’d come to say a specific goodbye rejoined the circle at large. Others obviously wanted to take their place, say goodbye individually, but Naomi was visibly fading, Billy’s grip on her loosening.

They began to sing, a Native American song I imagined was a mourning tune from Naomi’s tribe. That was how the bulk of them would say goodbye, by overriding their own desires so I would have a chance to ask my question. I joined Billy again, knowing what I owed them and still reluctant: Naomi seemed relatively at peace, and I was afraid what I had to ask would shatter that calm.

On the other hand, I didn’t see that I had much choice. The killer’s trail had gone cold, and while going out hunting Morrison was a worthy cause for the remainder of the night, it wasn’t going to render the dance troupe safe from another attack. “Naomi, can you show me where your killer is?”

Naomi Allison withered, shrieking, and spun skyward to rush out of the theater, every goddamned bit as untrackable as the killer’s trail had been.

The circle broke up around us, dismay crowing from every throat as dancers scrambled to their feet in Naomi’s wake. Rebecca was in tears, hiccups of “But she was fine, she was okay, she was fine,” clearer than most of the other babble. Littlefoot pulled her against his chest, scowling over her head at me. Not blaming me, I didn’t think. Just angry and frustrated and probably scared because he didn’t understand what had happened.

Neither did I, exactly, except I’d been relatively sure asking about her killer would upset her. I’d hoped she might do something mundane like point in the right direction, or better yet, give me an address, though I’d thought the former more likely. Zipping off into the ether was really no help at all, though it was a little hard to condemn the ghost of a murdered woman for not wanting to consider the means or perpetrator of her death.

“I’ve got it.” Billy sounded as thick as he’d sounded light before, like a sinus headache had suddenly taken up all the space and comfort in his head. “I can see her trail. Almost. Close enough to follow, anyway.”

Breath whooshed out of me, and the hubbub fell silent as everyone absorbed that. Rebecca sobbed one more time, a short sharp noise, but this time there was relief in it: maybe Naomi’s horrible departure had a purpose. Even I thought that somehow made it better.

I grabbed Billy’s hand, said, “Sorry, I’m stealing him,” to Mel, and started tugging him toward the door. “Where? Which way? I can’t follow a trail very long and I don’t know how long a ghost trail might last. Where do we need to go?”

“Joanne!” Melinda’s voice cracked across the stage and I turned back, electricity jittering down my spine. She softened a little, though her voice remained serious: “Be careful.”

I gave her a weak smile, nodded and hauled Billy out of the theater. He shook off the deepest part of his malaise as we got outside and cleared his throat. “Keys.”

I dug them out of my pocket as I scurried along, and he thrust his hand at me. I frowned at it. “What?”

“Give me your keys. I’m the one seeing ghost trails.”

A little bubble of astonishment popped at the very bottom of my soul. It gave rise to lots more, like soda fizzing in a glass. The closer they got to the top, the more they exploded with tiny bursts of outrage instead of astonishment. “You want to drive Petite?”

“Everybody wants to drive Petite, Joanne. She’s a beautiful car. People who don’t drive want to drive her.”

“And nobody gets to!” One person. One person besides me had driven my baby since I’d rescued her from a North Carolina barn over a decade earlier, and I’d torn into that person with the unholy vengeance of a thousand paper cuts. I had put blood, sweat and soul into my big purple beauty, and nobody got to drive her but me.

Billy, with infinite patience, said, “Don’t be an idiot. Give me the keys.”

I clutched them against my chest, eyes wide with indignation. “Do you even know how to drive a stick?”

“Walker!”

Sullen, I said, “You sound like Morrison,” and tried to hand over the keys. I did. I really tried, but my hand wouldn’t uncurl from my chest, nor would my fingers unclench from around the keychain. “I can’t.”

“You can’t hand over your keys.”

They cut into my fingers, I was holding them so hard. It hurt enough that I was starting to want to let go, but my crimped fingers wouldn’t loosen. “I really don’t think I can. Nobody drives Petite, Billy. Nobody but me.”

My partner flung his hands into the air—a remarkably melodramatic and impressive act, in his bright blue zoot suit—and stomped around the car. “Morrison is right. Your relationship with your car is pathological, Walker. If we lose this trail because you miss a turn, I will haunt you for the rest of eternity. Do you understand me?”

I said, “Yes,” in a tiny voice, and even believed him, but it was still me who got in the driver’s seat.

Billy alternated between giving directions and cursing me, all the way downtown. I parked Petite at the all-night garage on Pine Street, grumpily aware that I wouldn’t get to write off the parking fee because I wasn’t officially on a case. Billy stopped swearing once we were safely parked, sat silent a minute or two, then started up again. “I can’t see the trail anymore. We need to go south from here.”

“I don’t know if there’s any overnight parking south of here and I’m not leaving Petite on the street.” I got out of the car, locked my door, and waited for Billy, cursing all the while, to do the same.

“Is this what it’s like when you try to track?”

“Yes.”

“No wonder it pisses you off.”

“You got us a hell of a lot farther than I have.” We headed for street level. “I don’t know. Maybe if I shift into a coyote again I could pick up the trail.”

“You’ve been hit by a truck once already tonight. Why don’t we try something else first? We’re in the right ballpark.

Let’s go talk to your friend Rita Wagner. If I were down town working a major spell, I’d want to be well out of the way. Maybe she’ll have some ideas on where.”

“Why not the Olivian?” I jerked a thumb northeast, toward the high-rise apartment building a block or two away. “I mean, that’d be plenty out of the way, plus a nice penthouse view. There’s no reason to assume a power-stealing madman is hiding in the down-low and dirty parts of town.”

“Except it was a homeless guy who was murdered down town yesterday morning, not a business executive in a high-rise.”

“Yesterday?” I looked at my wrist, where I’d taken to wearing my copper bracelet instead of my watch. The brace let was prettier, but much less good at telling time. But Billy was right: it was probably past midnight, so Lynn Schumacher had died yesterday. “Okay. Yesterday. God. Long day. Okay. You were saying?”

“I was saying, assuming they’re connected—”

“And why would we do that?”

“Because you’re at the center of it all.”

I shut my mouth so hard my ears popped. Billy waited for me to come up with an argument, but all I could manage was a silent, not especially creative litany of bad words.

There was a non-zero probability that he was wrong. It was possible Rita Wagner had come back into my life simply to pass on her gratitude for us saving her life. It was possible someone within her sphere of influence had died horribly out of pure random hideous circumstance, shortly after she re-entered my orbit. And it was possible there was no connection at all between that death’s physical location and the generalized area Melinda had been able to point us at for our magic-stealing-murderer’s location. It was possible.

It was also possible that a wendigo had just happened to take up hunting in my neighborhood, or that the right pieces to shatter an ancient, powerful death cauldron had come into play around me coincidentally. It was possible. It just wasn’t very damned likely.

“I’m like that woman,” I said after a long time. “Angela Lansbury in that TV show. No one in their right mind would be friends with her. No one in their right mind would be in the same town as her. No one should ever, ever go to a cocktail party with me. Or on a road trip. Or—”

“So we’ll go see Rita.” Billy gestured me out of the garage, and I shuffled toward Pioneer Square, wondering how the hell to escape being a danger to my friends and coworkers.