Urban Shaman

Marie inclined her head. It looked gracious. How did she do that? “It wasn’t. His name is Cernunnos, and he is the leader of the Wild Hunt. It was the Hunt who chased me. Why did you come to help me?”

I looked sideways at Gary, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. I wouldn’t think a guy with shoulders that wide could shrug imperceptibly. It should be more like plate tectonics. I hoped I was in that kind of shape when I was seventy-something. Marie waited patiently, and I shrugged more perceptibly. I really didn’t want to say, “I felt like I was going to puke if I didn’t,” but I heard myself saying it anyway. I curled a lip, shook my head, and added, “You looked like you needed help. I felt like I had to try to find you.”

One half of her mouth curved up in a smile. I stopped hating her. I couldn’t hate a smile like that. Her smile made the world seem like it would all be okay. “A gwyld at the crossroads,” she murmured, and I frowned at her.

“A what?”

She shook her head and did the wonderful half smile again. “Nothing. I’m sorry for cutting you. I thought you had to be one of Cernunnos’s people. I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would be looking for me.”

“One of his people? Not him himself?” That sounded wrong. “He himself.”

Marie shook her head. “Christian earth. Even Cernunnos can only stand on it a few minutes. None of the Hunt can at all.”

I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Marie. She smiled the tight little smile of someone who knows she sounds crazy. It made me feel better. “This isn’t the best place to talk about this,” she said.

“Why not? You just said the guy who was after you can’t come here,” Gary said.

“No, but he can send people who can,” I said before Marie could. She nodded. “If he couldn’t, she wouldn’t have thought we might be trouble.” I touched my cheek gingerly. It was still bleeding. “An emergency room might be a good place to go. This is going to need stitches, and you should get looked at, too.”

Marie extended her arms, palms up. Half a dozen cuts still oozed red as she looked at them. She looked like a clumsy suicide attempt. “They’ll heal,” she said dismissively. “He knows I was hurt. I’d rather not go somewhere so obvious.”

“You’d rather bleed?” I demanded. Gary cleared his throat.

“I got a first-aid kit in the car.”

I glared at him. He smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” I said, “the pretty one whose face isn’t cut up gets her way. Fine.” I stomped off the dais, picking the butterfly knife up off the pulpit. It made a satisfying series of clicks as the blade and handles slapped against each other when I closed it.

“Hey. That’s mine.” Marie had to take two steps to every one of mine, even after she ran to catch up with me.

“Not anymore, it isn’t. Call it a finder’s fee.”

“You didn’t find it.”

“I found you.” I shoved the knife into my waistband. Two steps later the elastic shifted and the knife slid down my leg and out of my pants, clattering to the floor. Gary choked back a guffaw and Marie grinned broadly.

I picked up the knife with as much dignity as I could muster and stalked out of the church.

I thought going into a diner all bloody and bandaged was more conspicuous than going to an emergency room, but Marie insisted. Gary butterfly-bandaged my cheek and wrapped up Marie’s arms while I sulked. As a gesture of peace he turned the meter off, but my face hurt too much for me to be grateful.

I dragged a coat out of my carry-on and pulled it on over my bloody T-shirt as we went into the diner. Marie walked in like she was daring the world to comment on her bloodstains. No one did. We sat down, silent until the waitress brought us our drinks. I didn’t know what it was about food, but it always seemed to make it easier to talk.

Marie folded her hands around an enormous glass of orange juice. I had a coffee. Actually, this being Seattle, I didn’t have just a coffee, even at a cheap diner. I had a grande double-shot latte with a shot of amaretto. Just the smell of the stuff got me high.

“Cernunnos leads the Wild Hunt,” Marie said to her orange juice. “They ride to collect the souls of the dead.” She looked up to see if that cleared things up for us. Gary just waited. He really was having a regular black coffee. I didn’t even know they made that anymore. He’d ordered breakfast, too. I was hungry, but between adrenaline and no sleep, I was pretty sure food would just come back up again. Now that I thought about it, the injection of caffeine probably wasn’t such a great idea on that combination. Food would have been better.

“You ain’t dead,” Gary pointed out. Marie winced, producing a pained smile.

“An oversight.”

“Fill in us dumb ones,” I said. “What’s a wild hunt?”

“The Wild Hunt,” she corrected.

“Okay, the wild hunt. What is it?”

She sat back, her hands still wrapped around the orange juice glass. She hadn’t drunk any yet. “Cernunnos was an old Celtic god,” she said slowly. “When Christianity came to Ireland and Britain, his cult was so powerful that it took a while for it to die out. And it never entirely faded.”

“Like any pagan religion,” I interrupted. Marie lifted her eyes to look at me. The muscle in my shoulder blade twitched again and I shrugged, trying to loosen it. “The Peop—the Cherokee still practice their old ways, too. Faith is hard to stomp out.” The People. Walkingstick. What was wrong with me?

“Like any pagan religion,” she agreed. “Cernunnos is the Celtic Horned God, essentially a fertility figure but with very deep ties to death as well. There are Norse and German counterparts, Woden, Anwyn, rooted in a common ancestry.” She waved her hand absently, brushing aside the trivia.

“And he’s after you.” I infused my voice with as much sarcasm as I could. It was pathetically little. She was too pretty to be sarcastic at, even if she was crazy.

“Yes.” Marie nodded and dragged her orange juice to the edge of the table.

“You seriously think you got some kind of god after you?” Gary asked. Marie nodded. Gary turned to me. “I vote we drop her off at a loony bin and run for the hills.”

“Are you asking me to run away with you, Gary? After such a short, violent courtship?” It wasn’t that I didn’t agree. In fact, I pushed my latte away, getting ready to stand up. Gary did the same, looking relieved.

“Sorry, lady,” he said, and stood. I put my palms on the table and looked at Marie. She looked bone-tired, more tired than I felt. She looked like she’d been through this a dozen times already, and was just waiting for the time that she screwed up and didn’t live through it.

Dammit, I’d jumped off a plane and come tearing through the streets of Seattle to find this woman. I didn’t feel like I’d seen it through to the end yet. I settled back into my seat.

“Aw, hell,” Gary said, and sat back down. Marie bit her lower lip, holding her breath while she watched me. When I didn’t move again, she let her breath out and began talking again, without taking her eyes off me. If she thought she was pinning me in place, she was right. Girls weren’t really my thing. Hell, I didn’t even like women much, as a species. I had no idea why I wanted to help her so much. Marie took a deep breath.

“I gather neither of you are mystics.”

Gary laughed so loudly I nearly spilled my coffee. A tired-looking blonde behind the counter turned around and looked at us. Marie twisted a little smile at her orange juice. I suddenly felt sorry for her, which was new.

“Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “Can you handle the idea that there’s more to the world than we see?”

“There are more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It was the obvious line. What wasn’t so obvious was that Gary beat me to it, and said it in a rich, sonorous voice. Marie and I both looked at him. “Annie liked ’em big, not stupid,” Gary said with a grin. “Sure, lady, there’s more than we see.”

Marie glanced at me. “Why does he keep calling me lady?”

“I think it’s an endearing character trait. When he really gets to know you, he’ll start calling you ‘dame’ and ‘broad,’ too.”

“Yeah?” She looked at Gary, then back at me. “How long’ve you known him?” I turned my wrist over to look at my watch, which was still wrong.

“About ninety minutes. So what’re we missing in our philosophies, Marie?”

She smiled. It was radiant. Honest to God. Her whole face lit up, all warm and welcoming and charming. Gary looked pole-axed. I pretended I didn’t and allowed myself the superior thought: Men.

“I’m an anthropologist,” Marie said. “I’ve been studying similarities between cultural mythologies for about ten years now.”

All of a sudden she had an aura of credibility. Well, except I thought she looked about twenty-five. I stole a glance at Gary, who didn’t look disbelieving. Either he thought she looked older than that, or his so-called useless talent was a load of bunk. “How old is she?” I asked him. He lifted a bushy eyebrow, glancing at me, then looked back at her.

“Thirty-nine,” he said, in tandem with Marie. Her eyebrows went up while my jaw went down. Gary looked smug. After a few seconds she shook her head and went on.

“It’s hard,” she said carefully, “to immerse yourself in a study, in mythology and belief, without beginning to understand that even if you don’t believe it, that someone did, and that it has, or had, power. I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to bullshit.”

Looking at her, I could believe it. She had to have heard every line in the book, by now. It would take genuine effort to remain gullible, and she didn’t seem gullible. She finally lifted her orange juice and drank half of it.

“Certain legends had more power for me than others. They were easier to believe. They tended down Celtic lines—my mom says it’s blood showing through. But the Morrigan, the Hunt, banshees, cross-comparisons of those legends to other cultures were more fascinating to me than most other things. A while ago a gloomy friend of mine pointed out that they weren’t just Celtic legends. They were all Celtic legends that had to do with death or violence.”

She took a deep breath, looking up at us with those very blue eyes. “Right after that I started to be able to sense who was about to die.”

Silence held, stretched, and broke as my voice shot up two octaves. “You’re a fucking banshee?” The tired blonde behind the counter looked our way again, then shifted her shoulders and turned away, uninterested. Marie’s thin straight eyebrows lifted a little.

“I thought you didn’t know anything about those legends?”

“I just got off the plane from a funeral in Ireland.”

Understanding and curiosity came into Marie’s eyes. “Whose funeral?” she asked.

“My moth—what does that have to do with anything?”

“I was curious. You don’t have the sense of someone close to you having died.”

“We weren’t close,” I said shortly. This was the second time this morning I’d said something about my family. I was breaking all sorts of rules for me. I really needed sleep. The waitress came by and slid Gary’s breakfast in front of him. Three eggs, fried, over a slab of steak, three huge pancakes, hash browns, bacon, sausage and a side of toast. I got full just looking at it. Gary didn’t pick up his fork, and after a couple seconds I frowned at him.

The big guy was actually pale, gray eyes wide under the bushy eyebrows. He stared at Marie like she’d turned from a golden retriever puppy into a king cobra. I did a double-take from him to her and back again, wondering what was wrong. “Gary?”

“Don’t worry,” Marie said, very softly. “I don’t see anything about you.”

Gary focused on his plate abruptly, cutting a huge bite of steak and eggs to stuff into his mouth. His eyebrows charged up his forehead defiantly, like he expected Marie to make an addendum to her comment. Her mouth twitched in a smile, but she didn’t say anything else.

“Does being a banshee have anything to do with why what’s-his-face wants you?” I reached over and snitched a piece of bacon off Gary’s plate. He noticed, but didn’t stop me.

“Cernunnos. I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Because, what, the Hunt isn’t scary enough without you?” I heard myself capitalize the word, and wondered why I’d done it.

“I haven’t had a conversation with him about it,” she said. “I don’t really know what he wants me for.”

“So how do you know he wants you?”

“Having a pack of ghost dogs and rooks and a herd of men on horseback chase you down the street gives a girl a pretty good idea that she’s wanted for something,” Marie said acerbically.

I had the grace to look embarrassed. “Okay, it was a stupid question.”

“Couldn’t it have been vampires?” Gary asked wistfully around a mouthful of hash browns. “Vampires are at least kinda sexy. What’s sexy about packs of dogs and birds? No such thing as rooks around here anyway.”

“They come with Cernunnos.” Marie kept saying these things like they were obvious.

“Marie, what are you?” I asked. She shrank back, looking surprisingly guilty. “Banshees are fairies,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you’re a fairy.”

“Not much of one, anyway,” she said to her orange juice, “or I wouldn’t be able to hide on holy ground, or use that knife.” She nodded at the butterfly knife I’d set on the table at my elbow. I picked it up without opening it and looked at her curiously. “Iron,” she said, “steel.”

“What about it?”

Have you ever had someone look at you like you were a particularly slow child? That’s the look Marie gave me. Come to think of it, Captain Steve had given me that same look earlier. I was beginning to think I should be offended. Marie interrupted before I got up the energy. “You really don’t know anything about the mystical, do you?”

“Why should I?”

“I thought Indians knew that kinda stuff,” Gary put in. I looked at him incredulously. He shrugged. “Well, you got all them powwows and stuff. What were you doing during the powwows?”

“Reading books on evolution,” I said through my teeth. Apparently that tone was scarier than the one I’d employed earlier, because Gary closed his mouth around another forkful of food with an audible smack. “That’s like saying all big guys are stupid, or all blondes are dumb, or—”

Gary pushed his food into one cheek, squirrel-like, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. It was a joke, Jo. Jeez.”

“Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny.”

“I’m sorry.” Gary sounded like he meant it. I frowned at him, then sighed and put my face in my hands.

“Forg—fuck that hurts!” I jerked my hand away from my cheek, expecting to see fresh new blood on my palm. I was spared that, at least. This was not my morning.

“The Celtic fair folk aren’t supposed to be able to bear the touch of iron,” Marie explained, once more interrupting my downward spiral of misery before it began. “Not even their gods. And I don’t know what I am, not in the way you’re asking the question. I’m an anthropologist with an unusual skill.”

“Skill? Like you learned it deliberately?”

Marie shrugged. “Talent, skill. I hesitate to call it a gift.” She caught Gary’s eye, and flashed a quick smile. “Although I could make a killing in insurance,” she said quickly. He snapped his mouth shut around another bite of food, beaten to the punch. I grinned. It made my cheek hurt. “In any other aspect,” Marie said, “I’m ordinary.”

“You are not,” I said, “ordinary.” My voice came out about six notes lower than normal. I felt color rush to my cheeks, which made the cut throb furiously. Marie’s mouth quirked in a crooked little smile. I bet even a smirk would look good on her.

“Thank you,” she said, easily enough to make my blush fade. I could feel Gary looking at me. I very carefully didn’t look at him.

“You’re welcome.” I lifted my hands to my temples and held my head. My shoulders ached. I needed a hot shower, a massage from a tall bronze guy named Rafael and about sixteen weeks of sleep. “All right, look. Let me take you at face value.”

Marie pulled a wry little moue, and Gary let out a deep chuckle. I felt a little smile creep over my face and split my cheek open again. I was going to bleed all day long. How fun. “Let me take your story at face value,” I amended. Marie laughed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about eight when I figured out being taken at face value meant people were going to let me get by on my looks. If I’d had a different family I’d never have learned to think at all. Why would I need to?” The way she said it made me think she’d used her looks just as much as she’d used her brain to get where she was in life. There are beautiful people who know they’re beautiful, and use it like a weapon. I got the impression Marie used it as a tool. I couldn’t blame her.

“You’re being hunted by an ancient Irish god who wants you for his own nefarious purposes. Dead or alive will do. Have I got that right?”

Marie nodded.

“Right,” I said. This was completely insane. “How can I help?”

“He’s gaining power,” she said. “He will until the sixth, and then he’ll be banished to the otherworlds until Samhain. It’s the cycle he’s bound to.”

“Until what?”

“Halloween,” Gary and Marie both said. I looked at Gary. He shrugged and ate a piece of bacon. I pressed my eyes shut, wished it didn’t make my cheek hurt, and opened them again to look at Marie. She kept right on not looking as if she were completely insane.

“Just out of morbid curiosity—the sixth?”

“It’s the last day of Yule.”

I wished she would stop saying things like that as if it explained everything. I waved my hand in a circle, eyebrows lifted as I shook my head. Apparently the connotation of “yeah, so?” got through to her, because she sat back with a quiet sigh.

“Yuletide used to be very important in the Catholic Church. It’s the twelve days from Christmas to the sixth of January, and it marks the days of Cernunnos’s greatest power as he rides on this earth.”

“You’re telling me some random church holy days hold sway over an immortal god.” That time the sarcasm came through loud and clear, whether she was pretty or not. Her shoulders drooped.

“Those dates are closely tied to the solstice and the half-moon cycle after the solstice,” she said very quietly. “There aren’t any written records, of course, but I’ve always suspected the lunar cycle had more to do with when the Hunt rode than our calendar.”

“Oh.” I stopped being so sarcastic, the wind taken out of my sails. “Okay. I guess I can buy that.” Insofar as I was buying any of it. What was I doing here? “So what’s he want with you?”

Marie shook her head again. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to stay away from him since Halloween, traveling all over the place. He kept finding me.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “All over the world. So I kept moving. But since Christmas I’ve been…this morning was the closest. I’d never actually seen him before. Never touched him.” She dug into her pocket and pulled the tooth out, putting it on a napkin on the table. “I didn’t even think something like this could be done to him.”

I stared at the tooth. “Eww. I didn’t know you’d picked it up.”

“While Gary was bandaging your face,” she said. “It’s a good thing to have. It gives us a physical connection to him. It may help us build shields against him.”

“Build what?” Gary asked. He’d cleared two-thirds of his plate. I reached over and stole a piece of bacon. He stabbed at my hand with his fork, but not like he meant it. The bacon was really good, so crunchy it practically melted. I stole another piece. “Cut it out,” Gary said. “I gotta watch my figure.”

“Shields,” Marie said. “Protection.”

“How do I protect you from a god?” I demanded. “I could get you thrown in jail for a few days. The sixth is what, three days? He can’t get through steel bars, right?”

“Two. It’s the fourth. And no, he can’t, but he could send someone who could,” Marie pointed out.

I shrugged, hands spread out. “Fourth, okay, whatever, it’s morning, you’ve still got all day to get through. That makes three days. Anyway. So what do I do?”

“Build me a circle of protection.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “You want me to get a bunch of people to stand around you with iron crosses and this tooth and only let people you say are okay come in?”

“No, a—” Marie broke off with an ugly little gasp. I was looking right at her. I couldn’t mistake the color draining from her eyes. All that gorgeous deep blue spilled away, even eating away the pupil, until there was just blind white, and then she blinked. Color came back to her eyes, but not the right color. Her irises were all black, tinges of gold and blue around where the pupils ought to be. She blinked a second time, and blanched, then spoke in a very thin voice, staring straight at me.

“You’re going to die.”

CHAPTER FOUR

An announcement of impending death sure could take a girl’s appetite away. The knot of weary tension in my stomach contracted around the bites of bacon I’d stolen, cold threads of terror seeping down like a net. The rational part of my mind dismissed it all.

That would have been a comfort, except it appeared a lot more of my mind wasn’t rational. I seized on to panic and ran with it. All of a sudden I understood why Gary had been so uncomfortable with Marie’s gift. I clenched my teeth together, wondering why my hands were so cold. I wrapped them around my coffee cup and tried to stare at Marie without looking at her eyes. They were still unnervingly black, and I never wanted to see anything like that again.

“Something just changed,” she went on, still in a whisper. “You weren’t supposed to die, but now you’re going to.” There was conviction in her voice. She didn’t blink. Her eyelashes were as black as her eyes, not brown like her hair.

“So I’m going to die because of you.” I meant to sound challenging. Somehow it came out sounding more like a frightened little girl. Marie nodded, dismay vivid even in her altered gaze.

“Well, fuck that.” There. That sounded more like me. I stood up. “I’d like to help you, lady, but not enough to die for you.” Great. Now I sounded like Gary. He scrambled to his feet beside me, favoring Marie with an unhappy glance. I dug into my fanny pack and came up with a five dollar bill and three Irish punts. I threw the five down and picked up my butterfly knife. “Gary, cover the rest, will you?” I headed for the door ignoring the sudden bubble of sickness that erupted in my stomach again, just as it had when I’d seen Marie through the plane window. Gary, thank God, didn’t argue, just pulled out his wallet.

“Wait!” Marie’s voice came after me, plaintive. I didn’t stop. “Maybe I can help you!”

I turned around in the door. The tired blonde behind the counter looked a little more awake, watching first me, then Marie. “You think you can help me?” I demanded. “Weren’t you the one just telling me I was going to die?”

Marie stood up. “The possibilities changed very quickly,” she said softly. “If I’m with you, maybe I can see them change again. Maybe I’ll know what you should do to avoid dying.” She tossed a bill onto the table, too, as Gary came around it. The waitress was going to get a major tip.

“What are you, a banshee or a precognitive?” I asked. I was still in the door having the conversation. That wasn’t a good sign, as far as I was concerned.

“To see someone’s death, you have to be precognitive,” Marie said. “I thought you didn’t believe in any of that.”

“Just because I don’t believe doesn’t mean I don’t know the names.” I put both hands on the door’s center bar and shoved my way out of the diner, listening to the bells chime as the door swung shut behind me.

A SCUD missile hit me in the chest. I smashed back into the door, glass shattering with the impact. The center bar hit me in the small of the back, and I rotated around it. God did not intend anybody’s back to be used in that fashion, except maybe those bendy Cirque du Soleil acrobats.