Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 30

We surged out of the void into a blackness unlike anything I’d ever seen in a city, split by lightning from a storm that hadn’t been there when I went under. The wind was colder than death, cutting through me and yanking at my hair like it was trying to pull it out. Pellets of snow and water struck my hands and face.

There was an extraordinary line of fire stretched over my back. When I tried to roll over the movement made me scream, a hoarse guttural sound that I was growing all too familiar with. For a moment I just lay there, trying to breathe.

Then, because there wasn’t really time to lie around feeling sorry for myself, I forced my head up. As obvious as it was that I had something desperately wrong with me, it was equally obvious that Suzanne hadn’t been struck by Cernunnos’s blade. Her eyes were closed, but there was color in her cheeks that even the flashes of lightning couldn’t bleach out, and her breathing was steady.

Which meant either I’d succeeded utterly or failed completely.

There was no boy in my arms. Wasn’t that a Scottish fairy tale? I laughed, a high-pitched sound of panic, and rolled over just in time to miss being stabbed in the back a second time by an extremely unhappy god. The sword stuck into the wooden carousel floor. Cernunnos snarled. I smiled up at him and looked through his legs to see what was going on.

In the flashes of light, Gary slid down the carousel horse, dark blood seeping through his coat to stain it black. Behind him, a spark with the same unearthly luminescence as the Hunt appeared, whirling in unexpected directions as the wind snatched it back and forth. The Hunt came forward through the storm, gathering around the rapidly growing spark.

Cernunnos yanked his sword from the floor as the pale mare let out a nicker of pleasure and shadowed through both Gary and the carousel horse. The Hunt parted their circle for her, and I realized I was still seeing through solid objects.

“Stupid shaman,” I mumbled, and closed my eyes. The darkness went away, replaced by the brilliance of pure spirit in everything from the carved carousel animals to the god of the Hunt himself. When I opened my eyes again it was easier to see, physical forms faded to lesser importance.

Gary was dying. Every heartbeat drove thick blood out, more slowly now than a few moments ago. Suzanne—I didn’t even need to turn my head to see her—was growing stronger, her breathing deeper. Cernunnos swept his sword up and I flinched, too badly hurt to move more, waiting for the next blow.

Instead the god parried a blow he couldn’t have seen, sword braced over his shoulder as Herne drove his own sword down from behind Cernunnos. Metal sang as they smashed together, then scraped as Cernunnos whirled, drawing his blade along the length of Herne’s. It was perfect: Herne’s sword was pushed wide, and Cernunnos opened his son’s ribs from side to side in one long sweep. Herne dropped to his knees, sword falling from numb fingers, the emeralds and browns of his colors suddenly bleaching.

Cernunnos drew back his sword for the final blow, and a child’s voice rang out: “Stop!”

Cernunnos dropped his sword like a marionette released from its strings, turning in shocked rage to face the young Rider. He stood fey and slender and stunningly beautiful, with a look of deep resolve in his brilliant emerald eyes. He sat astride his pale mare, one palm reassuringly against her neck, his other hand easy on the reins. Behind him, the Hunt were gathered, the hounds sitting and lying at the horses’ hooves rather than slinking around.

“This one is not yours, Father,” the boy said, almost apologetically. “I would that he were, for the Hell that has been visited on me. But of your blood, none is less meant for you than he but I myself.”

Cernunnos’s mouth curled in a snarl. “Thou wouldst have mercy on the one who stole your power and would have usurped mine?”

The boy shrugged, as painfully graceful as Cernunnos. “It is not mine to say. There is no mark on his soul that gives him to you. He is your child, Father. You cannot have him. It is the way of things.”

Behind me, Suzanne whimpered and shifted, the warmth of her body moving away. Cernunnos turned, eyes bright with anger, and lifted his sword again. I felt a peculiar kind of relief, knowing that I was his target, rather than the young woman sprawled on the carousel floor.

“Father,” the boy said, apologetic and warning.

“I can see the mark on this one,” Cernunnos growled. The boy inclined his head.

“So can we all, Father, but not yet. She has a long journey before she comes to the Shadowlands.”

That didn’t relieve me as much as it should have. “Nor are you done here, gwyld,” the boy said. “Get up. Finish your tasks. We have a long Hunt before us tonight, and I will not ride until I see this thing finished.”

“You’re welcome too,” I croaked. Ungrateful little bastard.

“Make right what has been put asunder,” the boy said sharply. The mare pranced, a few nervous steps, and he stroked her neck again.

“Make right,” I mumbled. “Make what right?” I closed my eyes again and sank into myself, reaching out toward everyone who stood or lay around the carousel, looking for something that was obviously wrong, knowing better than to expect the superficial physical wounds to be the problem.

Big fat sword holes are superficial? a little part of my brain asked. I told it to shut up and go away. To my surprise, it did.

Nor were my own flaws the problem. I knew that without bothering to look to myself. I touched the others only fleetingly; it was Herne, I knew that, much as I didn’t want to face another encounter with him. A schism ran through his soul, a chasm of pure blackness, holding apart the thing that he was from the thing he was meant to be.

Green Man. Protector. Healer. Godling. Those things lay on the wrong side of the gap, torn and distorted by a terrible jealousy, by anger and bitterness at a mortal lifetime gone wrong, hundreds of years ago. Herne had turned his back on a shaman’s path, and his immortal blood had granted him no peace since then. He’d buried pain in the pursuit of power.

Would this have happened to me? I could see the potential in myself, the buried anger from a dozen years ago, never acknowledged, never dealt with. Nor was I ready to deal with them now.

But I could acknowledge. I swallowed hard and laid myself open to Herne, soul to soul, matching wound for wound, fissure for fissure. His were deeper, more plentiful than mine, but this wasn’t a popularity contest. Shared pain was pain eased. The elder who’d given me my drum had told me that after Ayita died. I’d turned away.

As Herne tried to turn away now. I caught him in a web of silver rainbows, wondering where I was getting the power to maintain my own strength, when I’d started out the evening exhausted already.

Soul to soul, we met, and Herne screamed out the unfairness of his death six hundred years before.

You’re right, I said without thinking. It sucks.

On some microcosmic level, he stopped shouting and stared at me in astonishment. I shrugged. It sucks, I repeated. It wasn’t fair. But nobody said life is fair, and you’ve been behaving like a three-year-old long enough.

Herne gaped at me.

Look, I’m calling the kettle black here, okay? Except I’ve only been sulking for twelve years, not six centuries. You’re the soul of the forests, you idiot. You’ve been ignoring them for half a millennium. Look what’s happening to them. Look what’s happening to you. Green Man. I poked him in the chest with two fingers. He stumbled back a step, looking down at himself.

It still lay within him, the depths of the great woods, buried beneath centuries of pain. Once noticed, the ancient strength of growing things flared up like a challenge. It lit him from the inside, showing all the cracks and flaws in his character, just as my own spiderweb of broken glass did to me. Herne howled and flung his arms up, an action of denial even as his hands curved as if to pull all the power and strength of the woods into himself. He stood frozen like that for what seemed a brief eternity, and then the lure of power was too great for him to resist. He grasped at it, and something fundamental changed in the world.

A roar surfaced, so loud it threatened my eardrums, so loud it seemed impossible that everyone could not hear it. It was the sound of welcome, of green things recognizing the touch of their protector, and it went on and on.

Even with the onslaught of power and welcome from the earth, it took a terribly long time to delve into Herne’s dearly held grievances and draw them out. But I had made him listen, for one brief moment. Long enough to begin a change somewhere deep within him, and once begun, I neither could nor would stop until the healing was complete. The power within me exulted, shooting sparks through my body that kept me on my feet much longer than I thought I could manage. There was joy in the healing, empty places inside me filling with relief and purpose that I’d never known I was missing.

I went at Herne mindlessly, stripping away lies: Richard had not betrayed him; Cernunnos had not abandoned him. Herne shrieked with rage and pain, fighting to cling to the lies and the life he’d built around them.

Adina. The essence of the woman rolled over me, through us, and for a moment it seemed like she stood with us at the carousel, expression sad. She had known, of course, that her husband had power, and more, that he had been in great pain. But she was no more able to see through the veil Herne constructed than I had been. I was grateful, very briefly, that I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t recognize Herne and his power instantly, even if I’d been convinced I could. Adina seemed to share a sad, wry smile with me, and then she was gone.

With her departure went the tangled remains of Herne’s pain. I realized with a shock that we were tearing down even the links that held soul to body, and drew back, alarmed.

“Let it go.” As with Cernunnos, I wasn’t sure if the words were spoken aloud or inside my head, but they were said with tired confidence. I hesitated, and Herne repeated himself more insistently: “Let it go.”

He stood in front of me, hands spread a little. The pale-skinned half god was gone. In his place was a woodling god, skin dark and gnarled as an oak tree, fingers knotty and a little too long. Looking at his face was difficult, like finding faces in tree trunks. The pale brown hair had thickened, darkened, flowing back from his face in knots and tangles. Even his colors, the otherworldly light from within, had deepened, into rich browns and dark greens, the color of good soil and summer leaves. In the half-light, only his eyes were the same, brilliant emerald-green. The betrayal in those eyes had been replaced by loss and an ancient sadness.

“Did you have the right to do this?” he asked, and his voice scraped, like rough bark being torn.

“Yes,” I said without hesitation. “I couldn’t have if you hadn’t agreed. Hadn’t helped me. All I did was make you see.”

“I feel no peace,” the Green Man said. I tilted my head.

“I don’t think it comes that easily. Still, you’ve got all the time in the world.”

Herne laughed, wind through leaves. “Sever the last bonds, gwyld. Let me go.”

I looked down at the shallowly breathing body. Only a few threads still held the tree spirit to the physical form. I put my hand on Herne’s chest and looked up at the godling one more time to be certain. He nodded.

I drew the rapier and swung it in a low phantom loop just above Kevin Sadler’s body. The threads leaped free, coiling up into Herne as fast as released springs.

A ball of pure light erupted, expanded beyond the carousel in a flare of shocking brilliance, as white as a nuclear bomb. It collapsed back in on itself in the same instant, and the Green Man was gone.

* * *

I woke up a little while later with Gary crouching over me. The Center was dark, the lights on the Space Needle blacked out. I wasn’t seeing in two worlds anymore, but the Wild Hunt still milled around, bearing with them their own unearthly light. “You’re dying,” I accused. Gary grinned.

“Not anymore.”

“Oh, good,” I said faintly. “How’d that happen?” I shifted a shoulder tentatively. The line of fire in my back had disappeared. “I missed something, didn’t I? What happened to the lights?”

“They went out when you grabbed Suzanne,” Gary answered, taking the questions in the opposite order. “All over the place.”

Oh. That maybe explained how I’d kept on my feet, metaphysically speaking. I’d borrowed the whole city’s power. I hoped I hadn’t hurt anybody. “And you’re not dead because…?”

“Big ball of light,” Gary reported. “Weirdest damned thing I ever saw. I could see you lying down on the job over here and standing nose to nose with Herne at the same time. You swung the sword and he lit up and you faded away. Thought you were dead. Then the light faded and everybody was patched up. Was that you or him?”

“I dunno.” I sat up carefully. Suzanne Quinley was kneeling by the extraordinarily ordinary body of Kevin Sadler, sightlessly rocking forward and back. I glanced at Gary, then climbed to my feet and walked to the girl in an almost straight line. “Suzanne?”

“My parents are dead, aren’t they,” she said in the same thin soprano I remembered from the theatre.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“He killed them. My sperm dad killed them.”

“Yeah,” I said again, because I didn’t know what else to say.

“Why?”

God. What a question. “Someone hurt him a long time ago,” I said slowly. “I think maybe it drove him insane. He was trying to protect himself from being hurt again.”

Suzanne swallowed and looked up at me, then climbed to her feet. “He was trying to steal my soul, wasn’t he? Could he do that? What was he?”

I rubbed my breastbone. “Do you really want the answer to that?”

She gave me a scornful look. “I saw what happened. He turned into a…spirit-thing. What was he?”

“A demigod,” Cernunnos said from a few yards away. His stallion stood stone still, radiating impatience to be off. “His name was Herne, and he was my son.”

“He still is your son,” I mumbled. “Just a little less corporeal.”

“So you’re my grandfather.” Suzanne ignored me. Cernunnos blinked, taken aback.

“We must go, Father,” the youngest Rider said quietly. Cernunnos glanced at the boy, then back at Suzanne.

“I am,” he agreed, and shot me a look of venom. “But I am bound to another world, granddaughter, and I cannot stay.”

“Will I ever see you again?” Suzanne sounded very young and alone. I bit my lower lip. Cernunnos looked back at the young Rider, who smiled.

“At the hour of your birth, each and every year until your mortal life ends, we will greet you, if only for a moment, niece. I will lead the Hunt to you. Only do not fear us, and all will be well.”

Suzanne lifted her chin and nodded, green eyes wide. “I’ll see you next year, then,” she whispered, and looked down at the body at her feet. Anger set her jaw, and she drew one foot back and kicked Kevin Sadler’s body in the ribs, hard. Then, chin lifted again, she stepped over the body with immense dignity and walked away from the carousel, pausing for one moment to put her hand on the nose of the pale horse she’d ridden. Then she stepped down and began walking across the Center grounds back toward the parking lot. It was only then that I noticed red-and-blue flashes of light and the approaching sound of sirens, and closed my eyes. It was all over but the yelling.

“Not quite yet, gwyld,” Cernunnos murmured.

“Oh, no,” I said out loud, and opened my eyes again. Standing on the carousel, I wasn’t at eye level with the god, but at least I didn’t have to crane my neck too badly to meet his eye. “Go away,” I said, and flapped a hand. “I won. Go ride. You don’t have a lot of time.”

“More than you think,” the young Rider said. “We count the days from dusk to dusk. Still, waste no more time than you must, Father.” He shifted his weight to the side, not using the reins at all. The pale mare turned and walked away with the rest of the Hunt following after.

“I will see thee again, Siobhan Walkingstick,” the horned god said to me. I ducked my head and smiled.

“Will you visit me like you’ll visit Suzanne? I may be marked for you, Cernunnos, but not yet. I’ve got a few things to do, first.”

He reached down and slid gloved fingers under my chin, tilting it up so I met his eye again. “Not yet,” he agreed, emerald eyes full of things unfamiliar: respect, admiration, even affection. “Thou art a worthy opponent, gwjld. I think I will leave you a gift. It amuses me.”

He bent with all his customary grace, and even though I knew what was coming, the compulsion of his brilliant eyes held me where I was. Or maybe I just didn’t really want to move. In the distance, Morrison bellowed, “Walker!”, and Cernunnos kissed me, a horrifyingly good kiss that would have weakened the knees of a lesser woman.

Oh, all right, a horrifyingly good kiss that weakened my knees. Gary, the helpful son of a bitch, let out a piercing wolf whistle, and I colored from my collarbones to my hairline. Cernunnos released me, chuckling. “Until later, Siobhan Walkingstick.”

I had just enough presence of mind to sketch a half bow, and reply, “Until later, my lord master of the Hunt.”

Cernunnos returned the bow, then whirled the stallion about and, with a shout, led the Wild Hunt in a gallop up over the heads of the arriving cops. Even Morrison ducked, then glared at me through the distance like it was my fault. The lights were coming back on, slowly.

“Consorting with the enemy, Walker?” he demanded as soon as he was close enough to speak.

“That’s not the enemy. The enemy’s over there.” I jerked my head toward the carousel, still watching the Hunt disappear up into the stars. Morrison climbed up onto the carousel and went to look at the body, eyebrows drawn down.

“That’s a demigod?”

“Not anymore,” I admitted. Morrison scowled at the body.

“What happened?”

I groaned. “I’ll put it in my report. That’s what I’m supposed to say, right? I’ll put it in my report?”

Morrison frowned magnificently at me. “You’re sure that’s him?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said in a chorus with Gary. We exchanged weary grins that nearly turned into exhausted giggles before I pulled myself back together. “Suzanne Quinley just walked away on her own.” I had to stare hard at Morrison to keep my thoughts in order. “Her whole family’s dead. Somebody should get her.”

Morrison’s mouth thinned as he looked to where I gestured, then turned away briefly, calling, “Gonzalez! She’s that way.”

Jen Gonzalez came out of the dark and jogged across the Center grounds after Suzy. Morrison and I both watched her, before he looked back at me. “Her aunt lives in Olympia. Gonzalez called her. She’s on her way.” He hesitated a moment before adding, “Suzy’ll be okay.”

I dropped my chin to my chest. Jen’d come through for a girl who wasn’t missing and Morrison was enough on top of the details to be able to reassure me. I was wary of saying thanks, out of fear I might fall apart. Instead I swallowed and nodded. “Can we go back to the station so I can fill out whatever paperwork I need to fill out, and go sleep for a week?”

Morrison thrust his chin out. “Is it your fault all the lights went out?”

“…probably.”

“Care to tell me how you managed to keep power going at hospitals and emergency services and nowhere else?”

I lifted my head and stared at him for a tremendously long time. “No,” I finally said, but I smiled. “No, I don’t care to tell you that at all. Neat trick, though, huh?”

Morrison scowled some more. “Yeah. It was.” He struggled with the next words for a few moments, looking as if he was trying to find a way not to say them: “Good job.” He gave me one sharp little nod, then flared his nostrils. “Get your ass in the car, Walker, and get back to the station. I want to know what happened here.”

I took a couple steps, then paused and looked back at him. “Isn’t that, ‘Get your ass in the car, Officer Walker’?”

Morrison glared hard enough to set my hair on fire. Thank heavens he didn’t have my exciting new power set. “Get your ass in the car, Officer Walker, you…” He trailed off, unable to come up with sufficient invective to describe me.

Grinning, I got my ass in the car, and fell asleep on the way back to the station. There was a hell of a lot waiting for me just on the other side of sleep, but I pushed it away. For a few minutes, at least, I figured I deserved to be satisfied with saving the girl and stymieing Morrison. The rest of the world could wait until tomorrow.

I was pretty sure it would.