Urban Shaman

CHAPTER 11

I left Adina and Kevin’s home with a list of books to check out and no more information at all about Cernunnos or anyone who might be working with him. I stopped off at the University Bookstore on the Ave. found all but one of the recommended books, and went home to check my e-mail. There were two messages promising I could lose fifty pounds in thirty days, and another telling me I could make twenty thousand dollars in the same amount of time. My spam filter was getting sloppy. I manfully resisted these temptations and sat down with one of the books. I was still reading when Gary pounded on the door.

“You look better,” he announced when I let him in. “I was half afraid you’d be dead, too.”

“Gee, thanks. I didn’t think you’d come by.” I let the door swing shut and went into the kitchen to start some coffee. Gary followed me.

“Lady, you’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since Annie died. You think I’m gonna miss out on all of this? Sowhat’d you find out?” He leaned against the counter and folded his arms across his chest, looking for all the world like he belonged there. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen a man who looked as comfortable in my kitchen as Gary did. He filled up the room in the same way I imagined Sean Connery might, so easy with himself it was like the air around him vibrated.

I put the distracting but otherwise appealing thought of Sean Connery out of my mind and lifted a hand to tick off my accomplishments for the day. “Priests are losing faith, the police don’t want my help and shamanism is kind of interesting.”

“Shamanism.” Gary’s bushy eyebrows climbed up toward his receded hairline, making deep solid wrinkles in his forehead. “I leave you alone a few hours and I miss all kindsa things.”

“You have no idea.” I frowned at the countertop, trying to find a place to start. There was a crack that ran along the edge of the counter. It had been there since I’d moved in. It had never bothered me before, but it looked dark and uncared for after Adina’s kitchen. I bumped my fingertips over it, shaking my head. “Funny thing is, a lot of this stuff makes sense to me. I mean, drug-induced spirit journeys, I’m not sure if I think that’s real. It could just be the drugs. But trance-induced, that’s easier to take. It’s not being brought on by mind-altering drugs, you know? It’s something your psyche is doing all on its own. But on the other hand, how much of it is influenced by what you’ve read or been told or have held in your subconscious somewhere? Does it matter? Is it any more or less real because it’s been influenced by something?”

“Jo,” Gary said politely, “what in hell are you talking about?” I looked up and laughed. “Can you play a drum, Gary?” He leaned back, eyebrows quirked. “I can keep a beat, sure.”

“I want to try an experiment. I went somewhere yesterday when Cernunnos stabbed me. I want to see if I can go there again.”

“Spirit journey,” Gary guessed. I nodded. “Thought you Injun types knew all about that.” He grinned as I rolled my eyes. “Got a drum?”

“Nope. I thought you could use one of my stainless steel pots.”

Gary blinked at me. I laughed out loud, and his blinking faded into mild chagrin. “Makin’ fun of an old man,” he grumbled, but his gray eyes held a spark of humor.

“I don’t see any old men here,” I said as I went back through the living room into my bedroom. I heard his snort of pleasure and the creak of the floorboard as he followed me out of the kitchen. I came out with a drum and handed it to him, trying not to look proud. It must not have worked, because he took it with a great deal of grace and care.

“Where’d you get this, Injun?”

Trying not to sound proud didn’t work, either. “It was a birthday present. One of the elders made it for me.”

I didn’t own much that qualified as art. In fact, the drum was probably the sum total. It was about eighteen inches across, thin stretched hide evenly tanned and evenly pulled over the wooden frame. A raven whose wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake was dyed into the leather, bright colors that hadn’t faded in the fourteen years I’d owned it. Bone and leather strips decorated the frame, hand-carved polished beads dangling down from the ends of stays that crossed under the head to make a handle. The drumstick that went with it had a knotted leather end and a cranberry-red rabbit fur end. I brushed my fingers over the soft drumhead, smiling. “He said I’d need it some day. I thought he was crazy, but it was the most beautiful thing anyone’d ever given me. No one ever made anything just for me before.”

Gary grinned. “Not even a valentine?”

“I wasn’t ever at any schools long enough to get valentines.” Half-truths were a lot easier than whole truths, sometimes.

Gary brought the drum and drumstick together with a deep ringing boom. “Looks to me like that was their loss.”

“You’re too old to flirt with me, Gary.” I grinned, though. I’d been complimented more in the day I’d known Gary than in the past year put together.

“Listen to her. A minute ago she’s sayin’ she didn’t see any old men. ‘Sides, the day I’m too old to flirt is the day they nail the coffin shut, lady. Keeps you young.” He reached out and poked me in the chest with the drumstick. “You oughta remember that. This gonna wake up the neighbors?” He knocked the drumstick against the drum again.

“I don’t care if it does. I have to listen to them having kinky sex at two in the morning. They can listen to my drum at two in the afternoon.”

Gary sat down on the couch. “How do you know it’s kinky?”

“You don’t want to know,” I said fervently. “Can you keep a heartbeat rhythm?”

The answer was a pair of beats, the sound of a heartbeat. I snagged a pillow off the couch and stretched out on my back on the floor, eyes half-closed. The drum had a deep warm sound, and Gary’s rhythm was close enough to my own heartbeat to send a wash of chills over me.

“How long we playing for?” Gary asked over the drumbeat.

“Half an hour after my breathing changes.” I admired how confident I sounded, just like I knew what I was talking about. “I’ll wake up when the drum stops.” Well, that’s how the book said it ought to work, anyway.

“Gotcha,” he said, and I drifted.

I knew where I was going this time. I wasn’t sure if I could get there, but I knew what I was looking for. The drum bumped along steadily. I wondered, briefly, about the sanity of inviting someone I barely knew to sit in my living room and watch me zone out, but the idea set off no alarm bells and I performed a mental shrug.

The room wasn’t quite warm enough for this kind of behavior. I could feel a cool draft from somewhere, and while I’d always appreciated the breeze in the summer, discovering it while lying on the floor in January wasn’t as pleasant.

On the other hand, the floor was remarkably comfortable. I’d slept on it for two months after I’d moved into the apartment, too broke to afford a bed. The carpet was soft enough to sort of sink down into, like I might fall through the floor.

I did fall through the floor, and into the coyote-sized hole I’d traveled before. It got smaller and smaller, and so did I, until I was mouse sized. A stream appeared alongside me and I jumped onto a palmero leaf that bobbled along the water’s surface. A moment or two later it dropped over the edge of a newly appeared waterfall, and I spread hawk wings to glide to the edge of the pool before landing on my own two perfectly human feet. I felt dizzy and exhilarated by the shifts, even if I didn’t know how I’d performed them. I stretched my arms, feeling like I might be able to sprout wings again, then relaxed.

“You’re back soon,” Coyote said. He hadn’t been there an instant earlier, but somehow it didn’t surprise me as he trotted up beside me and sat down. I scratched his ears and his tongue lolled out blissfully while I looked around.

The garden was healthier than it had been yesterday. There had been a lot of function, no form, precise trees and neatly cut grass, like an English maze. The trees had been browning, as if they needed watering, and nothing had bloomed, like the flowering season was long over. I was surprised at how much I remembered. I didn’t think I’d looked around that much.

“It’s your garden,” Coyote said lazily. “You should know what it looks like.” He stuck his nose in my hand and flipped my hand back on top of his head. I skritched his ears again, obediently, and looked around some more.

It still favored function, with austere stone benches and narrow pathways leading from bench to bench, to the pool, and to flowerbeds that had been empty of life yesterday. Today they were greening, and wind dusted up fallen leaves, shuffling them away in favor of growing grass. There were, I could see clearly, twigs sticking out from the carefully clipped trees, so they were no longer perfectly symmetrical.

It was very quiet, though. “Is everyone’s garden this quiet? I don’t hear any birds or squirrels or anything.”

“Some people like it quiet.” Coyote snapped his teeth together and wagged his tail, eyeing my hand hopefully. “I didn’t think you’d come back so soon. What happened?”

I sat down cross-legged and scruffled his ears again. “Is it undignified to scratch a spirit guide’s ears?”

He thumped his tail against the grass. “Not if the spirit guide likes it.” He lay down and put his nose against my leg, looking hopeful. I grinned and rubbed the top of his head.

“I went and visited a bunch of dead people.”

Coyote’s ears pricked up in alarm. “That’s dangerous.”

“Now you tell me. Did you know you were making me a…shaman?”

He sat up, paws placed mathematically in front of him. “I didn’t make you anything. You almost died. You chose to live, and that woke possibilities in you.”

“But you knew it was going to happen.”

He lay down again, chin on his paws. “There are so many people.” He sounded sad. “There are lots of new shamans, and they make a difference, but the Old Man thinks he needs someone with a little extra power.”

My eyebrows went up. “Old Man?”

Coyote licked his nose. “Grandfather Sky. The Maker. He has a hundred names. Brand-new souls are hard to make,” he said. “He worked hard on you. I knew if you chose to live everything you keep inside would start to spill out.”

“Damn,” I murmured. “I like my intestines where they are.” Coyote snapped his teeth at me again, like I was an aggravating fly. “I know,” I said. “That’s not what you meant. You meant…” I trailed off again. “What did you mean? Somebody made me? On purpose? Come on, Coyote. There’ve got to be jillions of new souls every day. There’s lots more people than there ever were before. Besides, who would make me?”

“The Old Man would. There are many more people than there used to be, but there are far more souls than there have ever been people. They recycle.”

“You don’t look like a Buddhist.”

“Is there anything you believe in?” Coyote sounded impatient.

I thought about that. “I suppose this is an inappropriate time to say, ‘I believe I’ll have another cookie.’”

The coyote gave a very human-sounding sigh. “There’s no talking to you.”

I sighed back at him. “What’s this good for, Coyote? What do I do with it? Why am I the shiny new soul?”

He shifted his eyebrows, peering up at me until he was certain I was listening. “The Old Man wanted to bring together two very old cultures to make a child who would bridge both of them. There’ve been lots of Celtic-Cherokee crossbreeds before, but he wanted someone who could grow to her full potential. You can’t be tied down with a lot of back story, to do that.”

“Back story?”

“We carry the scars of our past lives with us. He thought starting fresh would be best.”

I pulled my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them. “I’ve got plenty of scars.”

“I know.” Coyote’s voice gentled. “I’m not sure the Old Man remembered that we carry the wisdom of our past lives with us, too.”

I didn’t like where this conversation was going. I hunched my shoulders and scowled. “So what do I do with it?”

One of his ears pricked up, like a human lifting an eyebrow. “It’s a lever,” he said after a while.

“You don’t look much like Archimedes, Coyote. I bet he was taller than you, for one.”

How long does it take for the human eye and brain to register something it sees? For exactly that amount of time, Coyote was the golden-eyed Indian man again, stretched out on his belly with his chin in his hands, grinning at me. “Not really,” he said, and it was the coyote who said it. I blinked at him.

“Stop that.” He grinned, a toothy coyote grin, and I rubbed my eyes. “Shouldn’t it take more than a blink of an eye to shape-change?” I demanded waspishly. He laughed, a mixture of human laughter and a coyote’s cheerful yip.

“Not when you’ve got as much practice as I do.” He sat up, lining his paws up together again. “It’s a lever, Joanne Walker. Siobhan Walkingstick. You can move the world. It won’t be easy, but I told you that before. You have the power to heal.” He leaned forward and butted his head against my shoulder. It was like having a block of furry concrete smack me. I rubbed my shoulder, frowning at him.

“But what am I, a physician’s assistant or a surgeon? I don’t understand this, Coyote.”

“You’re both.” He stuck his nose under my palm and asked for more scritches while he spoke. “Heal the patient, Jo. The patient—”

The drumbeat stopped and I opened my eyes on a sigh. “—is the world.”

“Eh?” Gary set the drum aside and leaned forward, looking down at me.

“The patient is the world,” I repeated, then slowly grinned at him. The euphoria of the drumbeat surged through me even though it had ended. The colors were brighter, noises sharper. Gary looked different. There was an air of contentment around him, knowledge of a life well-lived. “Goddamn, Gary, I feel good.”

He chuckled, like a nice big V-8 engine purring. I bet his Annie had been a V-4, higher pitch to complement his deeper sound. Divisible numbers, too: one went into the other. It fit. I wished I’d been able to meet her. Gary stood up and put the drum carefully on top of my computer desk. “Glad to hear it. You get anywhere?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I did.” I got up from the floor, whistling “I’m A Believer.” Gary pursed his lips like he was trying to fight off a smile. “You hush,” I told him happily. Another crack fused shut, a feeling of heat and sizzling deep inside me. I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone and grinned at Gary. “You hush,” I repeated. “You just let me be giddy and weird here for a minute. I’m jumping between worlds here. This is too wild. You just hush.”

Gary laughed and I stuck my nose in the air and went into the kitchen to put some water on for coffee. Gary followed me, leaning in the door. “Tell me something.”

“What?”

“How come you don’t know anything about your heritage?”

I was in a good enough mood that the question didn’t even piss me off. I turned around and leaned on the counter while the coffeepot started up and looked for a place to start. Some of the good humor fell away, but not enough to make me clam up. “I was about twelve when I told my dad we were going to choose one place to live and stay there until I was out of high school. My whole life we’d been picking up every three or four months and going somewhere new and I was sick of it. He looked at me like he’d never seen me before and the next time we got in the car we drove to North Carolina, where he’d grown up. Eastern Cherokee Nation.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets, looking at the floor while I spoke. “I knew he was Cherokee, but he hadn’t ever talked about growing up. He taught me pretty much my whole primary school education, math and science and English. I mean, I went to school, but we were always moving, so I was never anywhere really long enough to get the curriculum. Anyway, he didn’t tell me anything about the People. So I got to North Carolina and I was already years behind in what a lot of other kids had just grown up with. And I’m all horrible and pale like my mother was. Not that there aren’t other Native kids who’re pale, but I was really sensitive about it.” I spread my hands, looked at them, and shrugged. “So I worked really hard on not learning anything. Not caring.”

“Were you born contrary or did you have to work at it?”

I looked up. “Born that way.”

“So where was your mom?”

I snorted and looked over my shoulder to check the coffee. “Ireland. I was the unexpected product of a one-night stand during an American holiday.” God. Apparently I was the deliberate product of a one-night stand. It was just that the deliberation wasn’t on the part of my parents. I fell silent, trying to adjust to that thought.

“And?”

“Um. And she brought me back to the States when I was three months old, handed me over to Dad and went back to Ireland for good.”

“I thought your dad was on the move all the time. How’d she find him?”

“That,” I said, “was the last time he spent more than five months in one place.” Gary winced.

“But you said you’d gone to her funeral. So she turned back up?”

“Why are we playing Twenty Questions About Joanne’s Life?” Everything was still a little too clear, the smell of coffee brewing sharper than normal. My question didn’t come out as acerbically as I’d meant it to. I felt too good to be really bitchy, and I was still trying to absorb what Coyote had said.

“I guess she’d been corresponding with my dad for pretty much my whole life. Once every couple years. She sent letters to his parents in North Carolina and they’d forward them on to wherever we were.”

“And your dad didn’t mention this?”

“No.” I didn’t feel like adding anything else to that. “Anyway, so Mother just called up one day and said she was dying and she’d like to meet me before she keeled over. I was furious. I mean, who was she to ignore me my whole life and then turn around and pull something like that?”

“Your mother?” Gary offered. I sighed and nodded.

“That was basically what I came up with, too. I mean, I spent a really long time…” I went quiet, choosing my word carefully. “Resenting her. Maybe even hating her. She abandoned me and I was like any other kid who figured her life would’ve been way better, way different, if she hadn’t. But in the end I thought, you know, if I don’t go meet her, I’ll never know. Maybe I’ll find out it was best that way.”

“Was it?”

“I still don’t know.” I leaned on the counter, dropping my head. “Her name was Sheila MacNamarra. She looked a lot like me. Black Irish. She liked Altoids. Um.” I pressed my lips together. “We spent four months together and I feel like all I really know about her was she liked Altoids. I didn’t really like her. I didn’t really dislike her, either.” I touched my throat, where the necklace she’d given me wasn’t. “She gave me—I don’t know if you noticed it. A necklace. I was wearing it yesterday.”

“The cross thing, yeah. I saw it.”

“Yeah. It was literally the last thing she did, giving me that. I don’t know why she did it, really. It didn’t seem very much like something she’d do. It was this weird personal touch after months of hanging out with a stranger. She didn’t ask me very many questions and she didn’t talk about herself, the whole time. She was a lot like my father. He doesn’t like talking about himself either.”

Gary’s eyebrows rose. “The apple don’t fall far from the tree.”

“What?” I poured two cups of coffee, frowning at him.

“I mean, you don’t open up so easy, either. I’m askin’ you questions all over the place and you’re real careful about choosing your answers. Maybe she couldn’t figure out how to say anything to you.” Gary took his coffee and watched while I ladled sugar and milk into my own.

“She was my mother,” I said, frowning.

“So what? That means she was s’posed to be able to just know how to talk to you? You’re an adult. I bet it’s pretty hard trying to talk to a kid you left behind almost thirty years ago.” Gary waved his coffee cup as I frowned more deeply.

“So you’re saying it’s my fault I don’t know anything about her?”

Gary shrugged and waved his coffee cup again. “I ain’t sayin’ anything. What’d she die of?”

I exhaled. “Boredom, I think.”

Gary lifted his eyebrows skeptically. I shook my head. “No, really. I think she was done. She’d seen what she wanted to see and she’d met me and she was done. So that’s the kind of person she was. I don’t know. Tidy. Focused. Capable of dying of boredom, or at least dying when she was done with her checklist of things to do.”

Gary pursed his lips. “‘ Scuze me for sayin’ so, but I think you’re still resentful. That’s a big thing to get stuck with. A mom who didn’t think you were interesting enough to stick around and get to know?”

“Thanks, Gary, that makes me feel a whole lot better. Can we change the subject now, please? What about you? You’ve got kids, right?”

He crinkled his eyebrows at me. “Kids? Me? No.”

I took a sip of coffee and eyed him over the top of the cup. “You said you had to get married when you knocked your old lady up.”

“Oh, that. I was tellin’ stories.” Gary grinned disarmingly and sat down at the kitchen table. I stared at him, morally offended. “C’mon, siddown,” he said, still grinning. “Stop looking so put out. An old man’s gotta keep himself entertained somehow.”

I shook my head, muttering semiserious dismay at him, and came to sit down. “Entertain yourself with figuring out what’s going on with Cernunnos. I still think Marie doesn’t fit.” I planted my elbows on the table, supporting my head with fingertips pressed into my temples. It gave me a headache. Instead of stopping I rubbed little circles against my temples and frowned at the table.

“You said that.” Gary drained his coffee cup and got up for a second. “If the guy’s a death god, why doesn’t it fit?”

I frowned more. “Because why kill a bunch of shamans and then start taking out banshees and school kids? Where’s the connection?”

“I thought you were a cop. Aren’t you supposed to be good at this kind of thing?”

I lifted my head to glare at him. “I’m a mechanic, Gary. Mechanics fix cars. For some reason solving murders just didn’t end up on my resume.”

“My garage needs somebody,” Gary said. I let my head fall to thump against the table.

“I can’t quit now. Morrison expects me to,” I said into the varnish. “If I can’t hack it I’ll come talk to your garage. But this week I’d like to learn how to be a shaman and try to solve a murder, if that’s okay.”

“Well,” Gary said slowly, “if that’s all you think you can handle….”

I looked up incredulously to see a broad grin showing off those perfect white teeth. “You,” I said, “are a sonnovabitch.” Gary put a hand over his heart, looking wounded.

“Good thing my mammy’s in her grave to not hear that.”

“Your mammy, my ass.” I got up to get another cup of coffee. Gary handed me his to refill. “Do you have the world’s largest bladder, or what?”

“Lotsa practice drinking beer,” Gary said sagely. I grinned and poured him another cup of coffee. “So Marie’s murder and the school kids don’t fit, and you’re out of coffee. Now what?”

“I don’t usually have to make it for more than one person.” I frowned at the sludge in the cup. I was getting a lot of practice frowning lately. “I think now I go to the school.”

“School’s gonna be empty. They’re not gonna keep the kids there after what happened.”

“I know. I probably should have thought of it this morning. But Adina said the guy who was doing this would have a sense of power about him. Maybe I can get a scent of it.”

“You’re a bloodhound now?”

“I’m playing by ear, Gary. Besides!” For once I felt certain of something. “I bet I can tell if it’s Cernunnos, if I go over there. I know what he feels like.” That much I was sure of. I didn’t think anybody could forget what the horned god’s raw power felt like once they’d met it head-on.

“You didn’t get that off Marie.”

“I didn’t know I should even be trying. Now I do. If I can get even an idea about what’s going on, I shouldn’t pass it up, right?” I drank some of the coffee, shuddered, and added more milk.

“Guess not. Who’s Adina?”

“One of the dead ladies I talked to last night.” I stared at Gary over the edge of my cup, just daring him to comment. He shut his jaw with an audible click. I grinned into the coffee cup and went to get my shoes.