Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 10

Wednesday, January 5th, 8:30 a.m.

I don’t go to confession. For one, I’m not Catholic. For two, the whole idea of being absolved of your sins by telling a priest about them has always struck me as a little strange, probably because I’m not Catholic.

On the other hand, a priest isn’t allowed to call up die loony bin and have you committed after you tell him all your crazy little stories, and he’s a whole lot less expensive than a shrink.

St. James Cathedral in downtown Seattle was the only Catholic church I knew of for certain. I parked in one of the lots at the corner of 9th and Columbia, having made it from the University District in thirty-seven minutes. On a weekday morning, that was a record-breaker. Finding a parking spot put it off the charts.

St. James didn’t exactly look like it was imported wholesale from Europe, but it had all the impressive dignity a cathedral ought to. Buff-colored brick and two very tall bell towers defined the place; that, and a sixty-foot arched entryway. I felt properly awed as I went inside, cradling my shimmering leaf in my palm. I kept expecting it to disappear and leave lines of fairy dust on my hand.

I edged around the pews and up to a confessional booth, sliding inside. The leaf gleamed slightly.

There was a thump in the other half of the confessional, and a gusty sigh.

“Ever had one of those days?” the priest asked. “Where you’re doubting everything?”

I’d never done this before, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be his line. I’d been sort of looking forward to the bit where I said, “Forgive-me-father-for-I-have-sinned,” and he’d ruined the pattern already.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I like my job. But don’t you ever get up and wonder if you’ve made the right decisions? Wonder if you’ve really got a calling, or if it’s just all some sort of infinitesimally large joke? Catholics don’t mind the ancient-earth theories so much. I can see that God might call a billion years a day. Life is complicated like that. It’s just that every once in a while something happens that really shakes the hell, excuse my French, out of my faith.”

I blurted, “What happened?” He flashed me a sad little smile through the lattice.

“You haven’t seen the news yet, have you? There was a massacre this morning at one of the high schools. Four children were killed. The really sick thing is that it was some lunatic with a knife. Not a gun. He went and tore every single one of their hearts out, all those innocent souls. How could God let that happen?”

“They didn’t catch him?”

The priest let out a bitter laugh. “How do you not catch some-one who’s sticking knives into kids? But no, they didn’t. Their teacher was knifed, too. And nobody saw anything.”

“No one saw anything?” Had I done this? Was it vengeance for knifing Cernunnos yesterday? I closed my eyes. How long did it take for a god to heal? What possible purpose was there in the deaths of four kids? Did it give him strength? Hester said power didn’t work that way.

“No.” I spoke aloud, my eyes popping open. Shamanic power didn’t work that way. Cernunnos was a god, not a shaman. Maybe his power was some kind of death power. The Web pages hadn’t said.

“No,” the priest agreed angrily. “No one saw. So what’s the point?” I saw the shadow of him move, leaning forward to put his face in his hands. “If God can let this happen, how can I have faith in Him?”

I stood up slowly. The priest turned his head and watched me rise. His eyes were brown and his face unlined, in the unobtrusive confessional light. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. “Don’t worry, Father.” I took a deep breath. “If God can let this happen, then he can put people on Earth who can stop it, too.”

“But where are they?” he asked softly. I lifted my hand and pressed my palm against the lattice. The leaf crunched quietly and shattered in a tiny splash of light.

“I’m right here.”

He reached up and pressed his hand opposite mine, separated by a few centimeters of wood. He was quiet so long I thought he might laugh at my arrogance. But then he smiled, the kind of smile a priest ought to have, gentle and compassionate and full of serene confidence that there’s a better place than this world. “Go with God.”

He left me standing alone in the confessional, a fading imprint of leaf dust glittering on my palm.

“They were shamans.” Out of everyone I knew, Billy Holliday was the only person I would dare say that to. Billy was as enthusiastic as Mulder, a true believer in the things that went bump in the night. New people on staff always gave him shit about it—God knows I had—but it invariably faded into being one of those accepted quirks that make people interesting. Billy had more than his fair share of those quirks, but for the moment I was more or less grateful there was somebody I could talk to without Morrison throwing me in a nuthouse.

I plunked the files Ray lent me on Billy’s desk, doing my best to look triumphant and in control. Billy blinked up at me, eyebrows climbing up his forehead like caterpillars.

“Where’d you get those?” he asked first, to his credit for keeping the security of the department, and, “Who were?” second.

“I found them in a garbage can.”

He eyed the stack of paperwork. “You’re an officer, you know? Not a detective.”

“I’ve been with the department more than three years. I’m up for detective.” I widened my eyes. Billy snorted.

“Yeah, right. Who were shamans? Are you supposed to be here?”

“I dunno,” I admitted, glancing in the general direction of Morrison’s office. “He didn’t tell me what shift I was on. I think he expected me to quit.”

“Have you ever quit anything in your whole life?”

“Not much. Shift change is at eleven, right? It’s ten-thirty. I can be all perky and on time. Listen to me, Billy. These five murders in the past couple weeks, they were all shamans.” I pushed my fingertip against the files. My knuckle turned white.

“How do you know that, Joanne?”

I straightened up, squared my shoulders and said, firmly, “I met them dream-walking.”

Well. It was supposed to be firm. It was really more of an embarrassed whisper. Billy held my gaze for longer than the priest had, until I twisted my shoulders uncomfortably and glanced away. “Look,” I said very quietly.

“No,” he said, “I believe you.”

Despite his rep, I was taken aback. “You do?”

He stood up. “Let’s get some coffee. Down the street.”

That was the usual cue for the good cop to leave the room while the bad cop terrorized the witness. I didn’t usually think of Billy as the bad cop sort, but I sucked my lower lip into my mouth nervously and stuffed my hands in my pockets as I followed him out the door. On the street, he said, “You’re about the most rational person I know.”

I drew on what little dignity I had left. “Thank you.”

“I like you and respect you even though you’ve been laughing up your sleeve at me for years.”

I winced. “I gave up laughing ages ago, Billy. I just…”

“Think I’m nuts.”

I winced again. “In a good way. Look, I mean…” I sighed. “I mean, why do you believe in that stuff, Billy?” I’d never thought, or maybe dared, to ask before.

He glanced at me, mouth drawn in a thin line. “I had an older sister.”

“Had?” I tried to remember if I knew anything about Billy’s childhood, other than the unfortunate name his parents had given him. Nothing surfaced.

“She died when I was eight. She drowned.” Billy’s shoulders were tight, his voice quiet.

“God. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” He glanced at me again, stopping outside the coffee shop door. “When I was eleven, I woke up from a dream that I was suffocating. Caroline was sitting at the edge of my bed with her fists knotted in her lap. She told me that my best friend, Derek, had fallen into the slurry a neighbor was pouring for the concrete foundation to their house. I woke up the whole household and we all went running over there in our pajamas.”

My own hands were knotted at my sides. “And?”

“My dad pulled Derek out of the slurry. It was half-set and crushing his ribs. My dead sister saved his life.”

I hauled in a deep breath of air and rubbed my breastbone. “Jesus.” I smiled lopsidedly. “So you’re telling me you see dead people?”

Billy shot me a look, seeing if I was teasing him. I was, but it was the only way I could get through the conversation. I didn’t mean to hurt him, and after a moment he realized that. His shoulders relaxed and he smiled back, crookedly. “Yeah. Not like the kid in that movie. Not nearly that often. But yeah, I do. You remember the Franklin murder a couple years ago?”

I shuddered. “Yeah.”

Mrs. Franklin had killed her fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily, after the girl claimed she could see her new stepfather’s past, and that he was a rapist. Mother and daughter had a screaming fight, ending in the girl’s death. Mr. Franklin’s police record proved Emily correct, too late. It was the sort of case the cops hated to have on the news; the tabloids made a huge fuss over it, while the coroner’s office held its tongue about whether Emily had been sexually abused. The news crews took the coroner’s silence as an implicit yes. The police department didn’t like to talk about the fact that she hadn’t been. It led to unanswerable questions about the little girl’s apparent psychic abilities.

“Yeah, I remember. The whole thing was insane.” I wasn’t supposed to have been there. I’d been out with Billy, trying to hear the hitch he claimed was in his engine, when he was called to the murder scene.

“Emily Franklin was in the corner watching you the whole time you were there, like you were the sun and had just come out.” Billy turned and pulled the door to the cafe open for me.

“Emily Franklin was dead, Billy.”

“I know.”

Hairs stood up all over my body, like someone’d dropped an icicle down my back. “You’re telling me there was a ghost watching me?”

“The ghost of a clairvoyant little girl. She said you didn’t have any past at all. She’d never seen anyone like you. She wanted to see what was going to happen to you. After a few days she let go, but I’ve been waiting ever since to see what happens to you. With you.” He ordered a large decaffeinated espresso and waved his hand at me to order while I stared at him unhappily. “Go ahead and get something.” He dug in his pocket for cash.

“Hot chocolate with mint and whipped cream,” I mumbled. Forget cars. I needed real comfort food. “A grande. Why didn’t you ever tell me that, Billy?”

“Would you have believed me?” He pulled the top off his drink and blew on it before taking a sip. I frowned at the counter.

“No,” I admitted.

He shrugged. It was answer enough. “So something finally happened.” He took a bigger sip of his drink and cursed, sticking his tongue out in an effort to reduce the burn’s pain. “I’ve been waiting two years. You do this kind of about-face, I’m prepared to believe it. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe it yourself. So tell me about the shamans. Was your friend one, too?”

I got my hot chocolate and found a couple dollars to give him for it. “I don’t think so. She had something else going on. Look, where do I start, Billy? I’ve got a feeling I’ve got a lot of catch-up work to do. Starting right now, and starting with some old Celtic gods.” I said it with a hard C, the way Marie had, and Billy looked both surprised and impressed.

“I woulda thought you’d say ‘Seltic,’” he said. I wrinkled my nose at him.

“I just got back from Ireland,” I pointed out, let a beat pass, and admitted, “Marie said Celtic. I didn’t know better before then.”

“There’s no soft C in the Gaelic language.” Billy took another sip of his coffee, then set it down. “Okay, tell me about this…god? God, Joanie. You start believing and you go whole haul, huh? I’ve just got dead people.”

“Lucky me.” I shook my head. “The guy I fought with yesterday wasn’t a gang member. He was…Marie thought it was Cernunnos. An ancient Celtic god.”

Billy sat back, pressing his lips together. “What do you think?”

“He wasn’t human.” It was strange to hear myself say that. I felt like an alien had taken over my body. Billy nodded slowly.

“You think he’s the one who killed Marie? Who did the other five murders?”

“I don’t know. I hurt him pretty badly yesterday, and I don’t know if he could heal from it that fast. And then there’s the high school this morning.”

Billy nodded again. “Same M.O. Is it your guy?”

I wrapped both my hands around the paper cup. “Marie thought there might be someone else involved. It doesn’t feel right to me, pinning this on Cernunnos.” I barked laughter. “Doesn’t feel right. God, listen to me.”

“I am,” Billy said seriously.

Hot chocolate splashed as I set the cup down. “And that freaks me out even more.”

Billy studied me as he took a long drink of his coffee. “What’s it like?” he finally asked. I dropped my head and looked into my hot chocolate.

“The good news is it’s keeping my mind off having to walk the streets.” I scowled at my drink. “That came out wrong.” I pushed the chocolate away and lowered my head to the table, resting it on my forearms. “You remember the first time someone you loved died, Billy? It’s like that. I can’t believe it, but I can’t not believe it, either. At the very least I should be in a hospital bed breathing through a tube. I should probably be dead.” I sat up, fingers drifted to my sternum again. “It’s like the whole world is a badly tuned engine. I’m starting to feel when it misses or lurches. And I’ve got this stupid idea that I can fix it.”

“The world,” Billy said. I smiled thinly.

“Let me just start with Seattle.”

I turned up at Morrison’s door, still carrying my hot chocolate, at five minutes to eleven. He stared at me like he’d never seen me before. “You didn’t tell me when my shift started,” I said with all the aplomb I could manage.

Morrison continued to stare at me. “I don’t have a patrol uniform, either. I do have my badge!” I dug it out of my jacket pocket and waved it at him.

He stared at it.

“So now you pair me with an old curmudgeon, right? Somebody to show me the ropes? Somebody who hates paperwork and foists it all off on me? That’s what happens now, right?” That’s what happened in the movies, anyway. I frowned at Morrison. “You okay?”

“What the hell are you doing here, Walker?”

I straightened up, startled. “What’d you think I was gonna do, not show up so you’d have an excuse to fire me? Y’know, I might have loads of stupid, Morrison, but I’m not quite that bad.”

“Walker.” Morrison walked around to my side of his desk, pausing to close the door. My heart lurched. “You are a suspect,”

Morrison said, the words measured, “in a murder case. Walker. Do you really think I’m going to put you on the street?”

I swallowed hot chocolate wrong, and coughed until my eyes teared. Morrison stared at me impassively. When I could breathe again, I croaked, “Suspect? But they let me go.”

“It looks bad. You chased that woman all over hell and breakfast, and twelve hours later she’s dead? The papers will have a field day. Murdering cop put on foot patrol. The department can’t afford that kind of publicity, Walker. The only place I want to see you in the next week is nowhere near here.”

“If I’m nowhere near here how can you see—” Morrison’s eyebrows shot upward. I shut up.

“Since you’re here, go get a uniform and the rest of the equipment. Then stay outta my sight until this thing is cleared up.”

“But—”

“Get!”

I got, stopping by Billy’s desk on the way out. “Swing shift?” he asked. I snorted.

“No shift. I’m on temporary leave of duty until this murder’s been taken care of. Morrison thinks I’m the prime suspect.”

“Isn’t it nice to have co-workers who have faith in you?” Billy shoved the paperwork I’d gotten from Ray at me, grinning. “So go clear yourself.”

I retreated to the coffee shop to study the files, reading about the murders and trying to figure out what they had to do with Marie. None of it made any sense to me. The last of the shamans, the quiet woman whose name I hadn’t been able to remember, had died on New Year’s Eve. Her next of kin was listed as Kevin Sadler, and there was a contact phone number. Maybe I hadn’t missed the funeral.

I’d never called up a stranger to ask about a dead person be-fore. Kevin Sadler had a quiet voice and told me I’d missed the funeral but he would appreciate a visit; the house was very quiet and empty now. Nervous, uncomfortable and glad I wasn’t in uniform, I drove to the address he gave me.

The man who met me at the door was as unprepossessing as his voice, with thinning ashy brown hair and weary hazel eyes. He was at least my height, but his shoulders stooped and he gave the impression of being much smaller. Despite the shadows under his eyes, he smiled at me and offered his hand. “I’m Kevin. I don’t think Adina ever mentioned you, Joanne.”

I shook his hand and came in as he ushered me. “We only met once, very briefly,” I said awkwardly. “The circumstances were unusual.”

A genuine smile flickered over his face. “Things with Adina often were. Can I get you some tea? I have the kettle on.”

Despite my discomfort I smiled back. “If you’re sure it’d be no trouble, I’d love some tea.” I followed him into the kitchen, looking around.

The Sadler home was tiny, small enough to be called a cottage. The kitchen was country-style, with innumerable calico cat figurines, besieged with flouncy bows, on wall racks and littering the counters. The walls were butter-yellow where they could be seen behind pine cupboards, and the counters a cheerful orange that somehow avoided being overwhelming. Only one small window, with pretty gingham curtains, gave the room natural light, but it seemed bright and pleasant anyway. A calico-printed kettle puffed madly, a promise that any moment now it would whistle and the water would be ready.

“I think the first thing I heard Adina say was swearing at someone,” I commented, still looking around. “I don’t think this is the kitchen I would have expected from her.”

Kevin smiled as he took down teacups from a cupboard. They looked like real china, with cats on the sides. “Adina liked to shake up people’s preconceptions. When did you meet her?”

“I was looking for help.” I couldn’t find a tactful way to say “last night” to this quietly mourning gentleman. “I think she may have had some answers, but I didn’t have time to ask her.” The whistle blasted. Kevin took the kettle off and poured boiling water over tea bags.

“What did you need help with?” He reached out to pat one of the calico cats on the counter. It opened its eyes and purred. I leaned back, startled.

“I’m tryingfind someone,” I temporized, then suddenly went on a gut feeling and corrected, “I’m trying to find the man who killed her.”

All the smile went out of Kevin’s face. “He’s a very dangerous man. A lunatic.”

“I know. But a friend of mine was murdered last night and the police think it’s the same man. Four kids were massacred this morning, and I think it’s the same man. I don’t—” I took a breath and gulped down air. “I don’t have much to go on. He seems to be attracted to different kinds of power.”

Kevin glanced over at me. “What kinds of power?”

Damn. I was going to have to say it out loud. “Shamanic power. And—and death power.”

Kevin nodded slowly. “Adina believed in those kinds of things. Do you?”

I let my breath out, relieved he hadn’t laughed and shown me the door. “I didn’t used to,” I admitted, “but some pretty convincing things have happened to me lately. Adina said she was a shaman and that…I was too.” I didn’t like saying it out loud. “But I don’t know much about it. I’m running blind.”

“But you think you can stop this man.”

“I promised a priest.” I smiled a little. “Seems like the kind of promise you shouldn’t renege on.”

Kevin smiled back without it touching his eyes, and turned away to take the tea bags out of the tea. He offered me a cup. I sipped and watched him struggle for words. “Adina went back east for Christmas,” he finally said. “To visit her family. She came home early to surprise me, and—” He took a shaking breath.

“Hell of a Christmas present,” I mumbled, and clapped a hand over my mouth when I realized I’d said it out loud. Kevin lifted his teacup in a mock salute, a ghost of an unhappy smile on his face.

“And a Happy New Year.”