Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 12

Wednesday, January 5th, 3:35 p.m.

When I was about nine, my father told me that forgiveness was easier to obtain than permission. I wondered, even at the time, about the wisdom of telling a kid that. In retrospect, it was smart: I tested the premise occasionally, discovered he was right and probably got in less trouble than I would have otherwise. The end result, seventeen years later, was me walking into Blanchet High School like I belonged there. Forget permission. Just act like you belong. I felt very smooth.

Until it turned out it didn’t matter. One hall, cordoned off with yellow police tape, was still packed with reporters, paramedics, cops and traumatized teachers. No one was paying attention to anything else. I watched the throng for a few minutes, then turned down another hall and began pacing through the school, looking for nothing in particular.

I hadn’t been inside a high school since I’d graduated ten years earlier. Blanchet High had a lot more money than the school I’d gone to did. The wide halls were carpeted, and walls above tan lockers gleamed white, like they’d been repainted over Christmas break. Florescent lights hummed, altering the color of posters cajoling students to turn out for the weekend’s basketball and wrestling tournaments. Water fountains seemed to be about two inches lower than I remembered them being. Either I’d grown since high school, or Blanchet was full of short kids.

I pushed open a heavy door of solid wood with no window in it, and stepped inside a small theater. It was dark except for one white light in the sound booth, and smelled a little of makeup and sweat. I let the door close behind me and walked in quietly, taking the steps down to the stage in near-darkness.

“Long cold note on a tenor saxophone,” a girl’s voice said very clearly. I stopped where I was, halfway to the stage. She came out on it, nothing more than a pale shadow in the darkness. She had terribly blond hair, long and thin and straight, just like she was. She wore a pale sweatshirt that added bulk to her narrow form, and her legs faded into darkness, not even a shadow. Dim tennies were on her feet.

“Life’s brief candle, a moment in the dark I laid down beneath the blade of sound.” She knotted her arms around her ribs, like she was holding herself in. Her voice was as thin as she was, a clear soprano that rose and fell as she delivered the poem. When she quavered in speaking, she didn’t try bullying through it, just let her voice shake, words falling to a whisper.

“Let me fold a thousand paper cranes / longing for a wish that cannot be.” Hairs stood up on my arms, and I shivered. I had no right to listen to the girl’s private grief, but I was afraid to move and warn her. “I was there. Loss is pure in its first hour, jaded by time.” She sank down onto the stage, wrapping her arms around her legs and burying her face in her knees. Blond hair fell over her arms as a choked sob broke the silence.

I turned and left the theater as quietly as I could.

* * *

Out in the hall, under the florescent lights again, the air was thick, like I was breathing in sadness. I leaned against a wall and kept my eyes closed until the tears stopped leaking and my heartbeat slowed down a little. I could feel something inside me, a knot of appalling rage, fueled by the girl’s sorrow and the rough poem. It lit up all my own scars, all the cracks in my windshield, and threw them into sharp relief until they throbbed with the need to be answered. I slid down the wall, lowering my head and lacing my hands behind my neck. I felt like a beacon, flared up with terrible, unfocused fury that burned through the walls of everything else. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so angry, horror mixed with sorrow and disbelief, and the rage pulling in every other emotion after it, drowning them.

This has to be stopped. The thought, unnervingly clear through the anger, made me lift my head, staring sightlessly across the hall. This has to be stopped, and, I can stop it. I grasped the idea with sudden understanding, much deeper than the promise I’d given the priest. For one instant it was painfully obvious. Anger was a tool, and there was a choice in how to use it.

The Gordian knot of rage inside began unraveling, bright orange and yellow lengths of rope springing out to run through me instead of tying me up. Around the rage wound pale blue, thick ropy strands of compassion, feeding off fury. It all happened inside of an instant, and then I could breathe again. The unlocked center of me gobbled it up, storing all the burning energy for later use.

I could still feel the anger pulsing through me, self-righteous and forthright fury that someone could do what had been done. Compassion tempered it, though, delivering me the one step of distance that changed what I needed to do from vengeance to healing. Whomever had done this, whether it was Cernunnos or someone else, was terribly sick, and sickness could be healed.

“Joanie?” Billy’s voice interrupted me, deep and worried. I startled and looked up. He was crouched right in front of me, big hands dangling over his knees, eyebrows beetled down in concern. “You all right? I said your name about three times.”

“Sure.” I blinked at him, then shook my head and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.”

“What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing down here? The party’s at the other end.” If I hoped it would sidetrack him, I was wrong.

“Taking a look around. It’s my job.” Subtle emphasis on the last word. I closed my eyes. “It’s not,” he pointed out, “your job. You,” he added helpfully, “are suspended.”

“Thanks for the reminder, Billy. I heard it all yesterday.” Had it been yesterday? They said hitting the ground running was the best way to deal with jet lag. I bet They’d never had two days like I’d had.

“That was this morning.” He stood up, offering me a hand.

“I was afraid of that.” I took his hand and stood up.

“Haven’t caught up on sleep yet, huh?”

I smiled thinly. “There hasn’t really been time.”

He nodded. “What’re you doing down here?”

Damn. I hadn’t distracted him enough. “Sniffing around.”

“For what?”

I shrugged stiffly. “Some sense of who’s doing this. Trying to see if it’s Cernunnos. Trying to get a feeling for his…” I swallowed, uncomfortable with what I was saying. “His power. His…whatever’s driving him.”

Billy folded his arms across his chest and frowned at me. “You think you can do that?” He sounded skeptical. I couldn’t blame him.

“Figured I could try. I’ve got to start somewhere.”

“You’re not supposed to start anywhere, Joanie.” He jerked his head down the hall and started walking. “C’mon.”

I followed sullenly. “What, I warrant a police escort from the building?” Billy looked over his shoulder at me and kept walking. It took me a minute to realize we were heading for the crime scene, not the front door. I blinked and jogged a few steps to catch up, not questioning the decision.

“Still got your ID?” he asked, lifting the yellow tape for me to duck under.

“Morrison took my badge away,” I muttered. It figured. One minute I didn’t want to be a cop and the next I was sulking because I wasn’t. “But I’ve got my station ID.” I dug my wallet out of my pocket and flipped it open to the ID photo. A cop I didn’t know gave it a cursory glance and waved us by. It seemed like half the North Precinct was there. It occurred to me this would be a good time to perpetrate other crimes, if I were the sort of person who did that.

Working for the police in any capacity had clearly been bad for me. I never would have thought that, back in the day. A couple guys I knew looked surprised but greeted me, and Billy went to talk to a hulk of a man who stood outside the classroom door. I stood around watching the reporters, who practiced looking good for one another, and waited for Billy to come back.

He did, looking grim. “Morrison’s gonna have my eyeteeth if he hears about this,” he muttered, “but come on. I told them you’re on the serial killer case and you’re coming in to see if there’s any connection with these kids.”

“You sound like you’ve done this before, Billy.”

He threw a tight grin over his shoulder and led me into the classroom.

Afternoon sunlight streamed in the windows, glaring off whiteboards. Red and green and blue marker printed out class assignments more neatly than I remembered chalk doing. The teacher’s desk was in front of the boards, and rows of one-piece chair-and-desk units were settled in uneven rows.

For a second, it all looked perfectly normal.

And then the smell hit me. Sweet and tangy and sharp all at once, the air conditioning filtered some, but not enough, of it away. I blinked one time and the haphazard rows of seats resolved themselves into a mishmash that pushed out from the center of the room. Three of the units were overturned, half blocked from sight by the desks around them. From where I stood, still in the doorway, I could see the beige carpet’s discoloration as blood dried.

I didn’t want to see more.

“Joanie?” Billy took a step back toward me, a hand extended and his eyebrows lifted. I shivered.

“I’m okay,” I lied, and walked forward. There were footprints of blood on the floor, dried tennis-shoe shapes, from where the other children had run from the room. I could almost hear them screaming.

Three steps farther into the room any illusion of normality that was left dissolved. Four bodies lay sprawled on the floor, three boys and a girl. Three of them lay touching, arms slumped over ankles. All of them had died with expressions of mixed disbelief and terror. The girl had long brown hair, blood stiffening it to black. Every one of them had died the way Marie did, with one vicious knife thrust from the rib cage up through the heart. I stopped again, trying to control my breathing. I didn’t want to vomit all over the crime scene. It smelled enough as it was.

“Joanie?” Billy asked again.

“I’m all right,” I said, more sharply than I intended. “Just give me a second here.”

He nodded and fell back a couple of steps, letting me walk forward alone, which was about the last thing I wanted to do.

I did it anyway. A second round of police tape circled the bodies, at about knee-height, wrapped around the desks, I stopped and stared into the circle of tape. I really, really didn’t want to do what I heard my voice asking if I could do. “Can I cross this line, Billy?”

“Do you need to?”

I nodded mechanically. I could feel it, malevolence so close if I put my hand out it would be like touching a wall. “What kind of shoes are you wearing?” he asked. I looked at my feet.

Thick-soled boots, no heels this time. “All my clothes are still at the airport,” I realized out loud. “They’re made by somebody called Endura. Wide shoes for women. Size ten and a half.”

“Got it,” somebody else said. “Go on in.”

I stepped across the police tape and into the blood.

Nothing happened. I was shocked enough to take a staggering half step backward. Billy, for the third time, now alarmed, said, “Joanie?”

“It’s okay,” I said distantly. I could hear Coyote’s voice, faintly: Ask Marie to help you with your shields. You’ll need them.

I was pretty sure I’d figured out shields all on my own. I still felt the malevolence, all around me, not quite able to touch me. And I knew I was the one keeping it away.

Great. I’d figured out how to shield. How did I take the blocks down?

Imagine you’re a car. Coyote’s advice, again. I almost looked over my shoulder for him. Instead I closed my eyes. A car with something blocked that I had to get to. Had to be in the dashboard, those were the worst bitch to open up and put back together. I envisioned searching out screws, and all the damned fine wiring. I dragged the dashboard open, the moral equivalent of unhinging the top of my skull and flipping it back.

All sorts of hell broke loose in my brain.

* * *

For what felt like about five hundred hours, pain and rage and chaos swam together inside my head, trying to tear my mind apart. They screamed together, telling me the horror of death and the glory of murder and the sheer unadulterated joy of power. Somewhere along the line my car analogy broke down, because now I was drowning. There was blackness, streaked with silver and gray, the not-colors rushing up beyond me as I fell down and down and down. The weight of despair pushed me farther and faster until it seemed I would pop out the other side of the earth. I tried to catch the streaks of light. Where I touched them, they turned crimson and bled, color sticking under my fingernails, but I kept falling, and they kept screaming.

I had to stop falling. In the Coyote dream, all I had to do was concentrate and I stopped falling. Here, I could hardly hear myself think, much less concentrate, and there wasn’t much point anyway, because I was clearly going to die, just like the kids had. I felt them around me, cold fragile wraiths, nothing like the shamans I met dream-walking. Those dead men and women grasped the cycle of life. These kids still thought they were immortal, and the shock of death turned them into shadows. Not even so much as shadows, all their essence drawn away by the murderer—by the son of a bitch who had killed children—

All the colors of darkness stopped with a shock so hard I bounced. For one blessed moment, there was silence.

“Oh, no,” I said into the quiet. “You don’t get to take me that easily.”

And the howling started again, but I wasn’t alone anymore. Four children, less than insubstantial, stood around me, watching with pleading in what was left of their souls.

“I’ll find him.” My voice cut through the howling so sharply I knew they’d heard me. One by one they gave me thin, ghostly smiles, and one by one they flew up like the silver and gray had flown.

This time I followed them.

I took one staggering step and opened my eyes, expecting the sunlight to be gone, expecting the police guard to have changed, expecting the world to be completely different.

It was exactly the same. Billy didn’t say my name this time, but I felt him standing less than an arm’s length away, just on the other side of the yellow tape. Goose bumps stood up on my arms and I shivered, looking down at the four bodies. I felt him, the murderer, could feel what he’d done.

“They were lucky,” I heard myself say very quietly. “Something stopped the circle from being completed.” I crouched and touched the hair of the last boy, whose outflung arm and sprawled legs were inches away from the legs of the two closest him.

“Lucky?” Billy asked, not as incredulously as I would have under the same circumstances.

“It was supposed to be a power circle of some kind,” I whispered. “I can feel his exultation at the last death. And then rage. Something stopped him from aligning them properly. North, east, south, were all closed. West wasn’t closed. He took their life essence.” My voice shook and I couldn’t stop it. “Drained them. But he meant to take their souls. Bind them to…” I shook my head and stood up unsteadily. “I don’t know.” I was crying. “But the circle wasn’t closed, and their souls escaped.”

Someone let out a very gentle breath. It changed the current in the room for just a moment, displacing air-conditioned air, adding moisture and warmth. I felt it as potential, like the butterfly who makes a storm in China. I could feel everything living in the room, an awareness a little bigger than my skin.

“Can you recognize this guy’s power again?” Billy’s question was quiet, but intense, spoken just behind me.

I took a deep breath, tasting copper on the air, tasting death and power and the last burning emotions of the murderer, his glee and his fury. “Yeah. I’ll know him when I feel it again. I’ll know the fucker.”