Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 27

It took a minute to trust that I could get up. Gary took the rapier away from me and slung it over his shoulder, then offered me a hand. “You’re gonna poke somebody’s eye out with that thing,” I said as he pulled me to my feet. He glanced at the blade, bushy eyebrows lifted, and lowered it to lean against his leg instead.

“Just helping Darwin along. Now what, boss?” He tilted his head at the dispersing cops. Few of them wanted to look at me. Part of me wanted to be a fly on the wall to hear the gossip for die next few hours. More of me wished my life was still normal, like it had been a mere seventy-two hours earlier. Yeah, well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. I patted myself down, seeing if there was any part of me that hurt too much to ignore. There wasn’t, although I could feel the ball of energy inside me fizzling out. You want your car analogies. Talk about running on empty. I exhaled, puffing my cheeks. “‘Boss’, huh? I kind of like that. We’re going to go look for a pretty teenage girl.”

Gary grinned, cheerfully wicked. “Sounds like my kind of plan.”

“You’re an old pervert.”

We left the office a few steps behind the mechanics. Nick, my former supervisor, averted his eyes when I offered him a weary smile. It felt like a gut-punch. Gary saw it and nudged my shoulder as we went by.

“Hey, it’s a tough job, being a dirty old man. Who’s the girl?”

My head swam. It didn’t seem possible Gary didn’t know what had happened, but telling him distracted me from Nick’s carefully blank expression. Gary herded me into the front seat of his cab and I spent most of the drive to Suzy’s address to get all the details in more or less the right order. When I was done talking, I looked around for the first time, realizing we’d driven into one of the precinct’s posher neighborhoods while I’d been concentrating. “Suzy Q’s a rich girl,” I murmured.

“Poor kids don’t go to Blanchet High, Jo,” Gary said. I shrugged.

“Never paid attention.” I remembered how clean and big the school was, though, and tried not to compare it to my high school.

That led, inevitably, to trying not to remember old scabs Cernunnos had ripped the tops off. I hunched my shoulders and stared resolutely out the window, not thinking about it.

The problem with not thinking about a specific topic is that it eats at your brain and won’t let you think about anything else until you’re distracted by an outside influence. I was grateful when Gary pulled up beside an imposing, dark-windowed house, and said, “Here we go. Doesn’t look like anybody’s home.”

I leaned forward to peer out the windshield at the house. It was painted in cream with brown trim and had enormous, imposing pillars holding up a front porch. “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

“Abandon all hope, ye who enter,” Gary corrected. I glared sideways at him and got out of the cab. Most of the muscles in my body groaned in protest, and the bruise from Cernunnos’s sword reminded me it was there. I rubbed it gingerly as I climbed the steps to the front door. A neat little red-and-gold sign greeted me: No Solicitors.

“Wonder what they’ve got against lawyers.” I cast a wary glance over my shoulder. Gary was still in the cab, from whence he couldn’t hear me making smart-ass remarks to myself. Satisfied, I located the doorbell, which was irritatingly hidden in an intricate carving of leaves framing the door, and rang it.

There was no answer. I stood there a minute, then rang the doorbell again, more than half-expecting a tuxedo-clad butler to appear, looking irritated and aloof. When, after another minute, one didn’t appear, I idly tested the doorknob.

Which turned, and the door swung open. I jumped back with a yelp and stared into the foyer. The floor had the ugliest tile pattern I’d ever seen, fleur de lis of thick blocky lines. I imagined it was very expensive.

“Well, now what?” Gary asked from behind me. I yelped, turning to scowl at him.

“I didn’t hear you.”

He looked like a pleased five-year-old. “I know. I snuck up on you.”

“Well, don’t!” He might’ve looked like a pleased five-year-old, but I sounded like a petulant one. “Oh, be quiet,” I muttered, and turned around to look into the foyer again. “Now what?”

“I asked you first.”

Damn. I’d been hoping he wouldn’t remember that.

“Front door’s open,” I said. “Isn’t that an invitation for cops to sneak in, in the movies? As long as you don’t touch anything? To, um, make sure everything’s okay?”

“This isn’t a movie,” Gary pointed out, “and the door wasn’t open.”

“It was unlocked. That’s like open.” I leaned forward and stuck my head into the foyer, shouting, “Hello?”

It echoed, but no one answered. I looked at Gary. He shrugged. “This is the police!” I shouted, and then burst into a fit of giggling. Gary grinned. “Sorry,” I said when I got my breath back. “That was just fun to say.” In fact, I said it again. “This is the police! Is anybody home? Suzanne? Mrs. Quinley? Mr. Quinley?” The foyer smelled faintly of chocolate, like someone had been baking.

Still no one answered. Gary shrugged again when I looked back at him. “Got any gut feelings on it?”

One very small part of me announced, I don’t do gut feelings, but by this time not even I believed that, so I didn’t say it out loud. Instead I took a step back, crowding into Gary. He muttered and moved back while I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the aches and pains and goldfish that kept distracting me from focusing my power. Every time I opened myself to it, it collapsed around me like a misty waterfall: there, but intangible. Distantly, I recognized what the shamans might have considered to be rudimentary shields causing that collapse. My mind and body knew when I’d pushed them too far, even if I didn’t want to acknowledge it. I couldn’t afford to burn out yet.

“Jo?”

I became aware I’d been standing with my eves closed for over a minute. “Just a little tired.” The words came out thick, like syrup. I rubbed my breastbone, above the bruise, and dropped my chin to my chest. If I couldn’t control it, I’d try for the other way. “C’mon,” I said out loud, to the city. “Hit me with everything you got.”

In the future, remind me not to ask a city to hit me with everything it’s got. Cernunnos had nothing on the influx of power that slammed through me as my pathetic shields disintegrated. I staggered back, my back foot catching the edge of the top step. I held my balance there, weight off-center, the city revitalizing me like fresh strong blood in my veins. Inside a breath I was a mugger, a fireman, a newborn, a dying man. The impatient roar of vehicles filled my ears, the city’s lifeblood flowing from one place to another. Even the air was charged, electricity carried in the molecules along with particles of smog and dust. If I could carry this in me all the time, I would never be tired, never need to eat or breathe. It was exhilarating, every life in the city my own, and mine a part of everyone’s. Had this once been shared by all humanity, as Eve had implied? A long time ago, when there were far fewer of us? I couldn’t imagine anyone being willing to give up something this good, being so connected.

There was a storm building off the coast. It was only a change in the wind now. In a few days, it would gather, and late next week it would dump eight inches of snow on the city. I knew it as clearly as if I were already in the midst of it.

“Jo?” Gary said again. I opened my eyes. He was brilliant again, the thrumming V-8 engine, his colors surrounding him in curious pulses. Unable to resist, I reached for him specifically, out of the millions of lives in Seattle. His was a joyous one to touch, tempered with pain. In his memory, I sat by Annie’s deathbed, holding her hand. She was delicate and pretty, thin hair neatly coiled. Her grip was firm even though she was dying. She spoke quietly, smiling, not about regrets, but about all the beautiful things in her life. Stories about me, about us, making me laugh, even knowing the conversation was her last. Leaving a good memory, for the last one.

And the first one. A tiny elegant young woman, in an evening gown the color of peaches, the back swept down low and her golden hair in permanent waves, Veronica Lake-style. I was a soldier on leave. I asked her to dance, knowing from the very beginning that I wanted to spend my life with her. Daring and confident, I kissed her at the end of the evening. What a lifetime it was going to be, with Annie at my side.

Scarlet fever, terrifying. Annie, never robust but always strong, so fragile I counted her breaths to make sure she still lived. The doctor, apologetic. There would be no children. It didn’t matter: my Annie was still alive. The fights, oh, the fights over that, when she wouldn’t believe that I still wanted her, when she saw herself as only half a woman. I held on and waited it out. There was nothing else I could do. In time the pain faded.

I drew back from Gary’s memories with a shiver. He watched me with a frown, tilting his head toward the house. “Anything?”

I remembered what I was supposed to be doing. With the strength of the city energizing me, I left my body behind and stepped into the foyer.

The house was eerily cold. I hadn’t noticed temperatures before, except in the desert where Coyote met me in the first place. It had been, well, desertlike, but not even the void between the stars had been cold like the Quinley’s house was. Even with the force of the city running through me, I couldn’t feel any life in the austere building.

I walked across the ugly tiles silently, then up a sweeping Cinderella staircase, perfect for making an entrance. Glittering above the stairway was a silver Mylar sign, block letters spelling out Happy Birthday, Sweetie!

The hall the stairs led to was marble, too, the same ugly tile as the foyer, though the stairs themselves were white. This was a house for sneaking around in barefoot. Woe betide anyone in hard-soled shoes trying to make a silent getaway.

Upstairs was more oppressive than the foyer, the cold deeper. I stood in the hallway, trying to analyze the chill. Was it just that the house had never seen much love between its walls? That seemed so corny I rejected it, despite my crash course in the strange and unusual. It felt more complicated than that, and I was supposed to be paying attention to how things felt.

I exhaled, nevermind that my body was somewhere else. The sound was muffled, like I’d breathed into a blanket. That was it: the heavy lifelessness lay over the house like a blanket, like something someone else had put there.

Like something Herne had put there. I recognized the touch with a shock, the dark taint of the god’s son settled over Suzanne Quinley’s home.

“Call the police,” I said out loud. A small part of me was aware of Gary startling, and hurrying for the cab. I waited until I heard the static of the CB before steeling myself to walk forward. Past two doors on the right—linen closet, bathroom, my superconscious told me—and turned to the left, into a bedroom. Fear hit me like a wall as I stepped over the threshold. I squeezed my eyes shut.

Unfortunately, although screwing my metaphysical eyes shut had the peculiar effect of rendering me unable to see, it had no effect at all on the shattering agony that stained the room. Far more clearly than I could see with my eyes, I watched and felt everything that had happened here in history so recent it hadn’t really ended yet.

Rachel Quinley worked part-time as a lawyer, her mornings tied up in legalese. She was always home by midafternoon, though, so Suzanne wouldn’t come home to an empty house. She hadn’t gone to work today for a hundred reasons. First, it was Suzy’s birthday, though the Mylar sign seemed tacky in the face of yesterday’s horror at the school. Then there was that thing itself, so many of Suzy’s friends brutally murdered. Rachel had wanted Suzy to stay home today, but the girl—young woman, her mother thought with a combination of regret and pride—insisted on going. There were to be no classes. It was going to be a day of counseling and healing and talking. Suzy still wanted the cake for after dinner, too: she’d said it would make her feel more normal. How anyone could feel normal after yesterday—but Suzy’d been strange for months already. It was part of growing up. Rachel remembered the alienation she’d felt in high school, for all that she’d been popular. It was a universal feeling, she thought.

But she’d stayed home. To make the cake—chocolate with raspberry swirls, Suzy’s favorite—and to wait to see if Suzanne needed to come home early. She wanted to be home, so her daughter wouldn’t feel any distress over interrupting Mom at work. Just in case, she’d told herself. Just in case.

David Quinley came home at lunch, just in time to lick a cake beater. He was taking a half day off from his own law firm, to be home when Suzy got in. But she wasn’t home yet, and they both were…

I blushed my way through the next eternity. I really thought people only used kitchen counters for that in the movies. This being a shaman thing was very enlightening, in an embarrassing way. When the cake was done baking, they moved upstairs to the bedroom, and that’s where Herne found them.

I didn’t envy them what happened next. I stood there, eyes shut, a silent, screaming observer of a thing I was too late to stop. It was not as fast or as comparatively easy a death as Marie had suffered, or the Blanchet High students, or Mrs. Potter. I understood what he was doing, if not how: Herne was harnessing the last of the power he needed to complete his night’s task, and that took ritual.

I could feel him drawing in power in a way that felt like what I’d done with the police officers at the station. Where they’d offered goodwill and hope, though, Herne seemed to be taking from the darker things that man had to offer: lust and pain and greed. The coil of energy inside my belly spat and bubbled so fiercely my insides cramped, reacting physically to the dark power Herne called up.

The horrifying thing was how close it felt to the power inside me. The other side of the coin, a razor’s edge away. Yeah, so I was mixing metaphors again, but that’s how it felt: clearly the other side of the power I could access, so close it would be terribly easy to slip over the edge and call on it. It was a difference of motivation, the slender line between compassion and vengeance.

Even what he was doing wasn’t so far from what I’d done with Cernunnos. I’d bound the god to drag him back to a world he could be controlled in. Herne bound Suzanne’s parents in the same way, weaving a net of power. The difference was that he intended to take them all the way into himself, subsume them and use their power to strengthen himself without leaving anything for them to return to. They were the last piece of his power source, made a part of him, where I’d only held Cernunnos captive a brief while.

I couldn’t help but wonder if it would have been easier with more bodies, creating the same kind of power circle Henrietta Potter had disrupted in the classroom. I watched him—no longer obscured, at least for this task, although I could feel a gray blank-ness within the city where he was out there now—as he opened veins and drew a bloody circle, himself and the Quinleys inside. The gift of Babylon had left me, and he made no effort, as Cernunnos had done, to be understood. His invocation was in an old language, but not, I thought, the Gaelic Cernunnos spoke. It wasn’t Latin, either, but something harsher and uglier: a dead language, but more to the point, a death language. In the same way that I’d seen the energy offered up by the cops, I could see the life forces that Herne stole from the Quinleys. Where what I’d been given had been free and without fear, the Quinley’s spirits were streaked with pain and terror, the brightness of their lives swallowed whole by the darkness Herne carried within himself.

I realized I was throwing everything I had at the memories the room held, trying desperately to stop what was happening in front of me. Waves of silver power rolled off me, splashing uselessly into the apparitions. Had I been here earlier, I could have stopped this. I watched brilliance slowly rise up from the dying Quinleys, blackening like burning paper as Herne stole their life force for his own purposes.

A purpose you still don’t understand! a little panicked part of me screamed. How could I stop the child of a god when I didn’t know what he intended? How did he mean to protect himself against hurt?

By taking Cernunnos’s place in the Hunt. The thought struck me so hard I literally staggered. I didn’t know if I’d come on it myself or if it had slipped away from Herne in the midst of his intake of power, but that was it.

Holy God. Cernunnos might have been better off if I’d left him in Babylon. I shuddered. Herne, his head held triumphant, closed his fists in the memory of the room. The last of what had been David and Rachel Quinley became his, swallowed whole by his hatred. He smiled, thin and mocking, and looked directly at me. I clamped down on a useless scream as he crouched and dipped a hand into blood, then stepped to a wall.

Against my will, I opened my eyes to read the message he’d left me.

Too late, gwyld.