Urban Shaman

Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t one of those acrobats. I flipped over the bar and slammed the back of my head against the still-intact glass in the lower half of the door, then collapsed on my face onto glass-littered linoleum. My cheek split open again as I hit the floor. More glass fell into my hair and onto the floor around me, sounding like falling stars.

The possibility of passing out crossed my mind, but I just had to see who was running around suburban Seattle with a SCUD. Lifting my head told me all sorts of painful things about muscles in my neck that I didn’t want to know. I clenched my teeth together on a whimper. Whimpering seemed undignified. No one ever whimpered in the movies after getting smashed through a glass door.

There was no missile launcher in the parking lot. Instead there were very large hooves a few feet outside the destroyed door. While I waited for that to make sense, they disappeared and reappeared again, moving forward.

Have you ever heard the sound of tearing metal? It’s a high-pitched scream that sets your teeth on edge and lifts the hairs on your arms. It’s the kind of sound a mechanic gets used to, but in the diner, along with the rattle of more breaking glass and some other noises I couldn’t place, it was incomprehensible. The hooves disappeared again, and I wondered where my knife had gone. Glass and dust and spikes of wood fell down around me.

The floor wrenched apart with a shriek of sound as one of the enormous hooves smashed down inches from my face. I twisted my head up, whimpering again at the pain in my neck. An extraordinarily broad chest was about four feet above my head. It reared up, which seemed wrong somehow, but I was too busy rolling frantically out of the way to give it more thought. Glass crunched under my arms as I rolled. I felt tiny cuts opening up on my arms.

I ended up sitting with my back against the counter, gasping while the rest of the world caught up with me. The tired blonde behind the counter shrieked with the regularity and volume of a car alarm. Gary had moved maybe two feet from the table, which suggested that despite the slow clarity I was experiencing, the attack had happened very quickly. Marie was shouting in a language I didn’t understand. It didn’t sound like Italian.

The horse made more sense now, for some nebulous value of the word sense. It had been able to rear up because after it kicked me in the chest it had torn out the entire door structure, and part of the roof had fallen down. The rest of the roof was on fire. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, but it didn’t seem to bother the horse.

Horse is such a limited word. The beast in the diner had the grace and delicacy of an Arabian and the size of a Clydesdale, multiplied by two. It shimmered a watery gray, bordering on silver, the color so fluid I thought I might be able to dip my hand in it. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to its forehead. There was no spiral horn sprouting there, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. It was Plato’s horse, the ideal upon which all others are based.

It was trying to kill me, and all I could do was admire it.

Then it screamed, shrill and deep all at once. The blonde behind the counter shut up, but I screamed back, a sort of primal response without any thought behind it.

Just for a moment, everything stopped.

There was a rider astride the gray, arrested in motion by my scream. He wore gray himself, so close to the color of the horse I could barely tell where one ended and the other began. The reputed Native American belief that white men on horseback were one exotic creature suddenly seemed very plausible.

The rider turned his head slowly and looked at me. His hair was brown, peppered with starlight, and crackled with life, as if touching it would bring an electric shock. It swept back from a massively sharp widow’s peak, and was held in place by a circlet. His face was a pale narrow line, all high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and a long straight nose.

The impression he left was of living silver. I locked eyes with him, expecting to see that liquid silver again. Instead I met wild-fire green, a vicious, inhuman color, promising violence.

He smiled and reached out a hand, inviting me toward him. His mouth was beautiful, thin and expressive, the curve of teeth unnervingly sharp, like a predator’s. I pushed up the counter, using it to brace myself, and wet my lips. Marie was right. I was going to die. The rider wanted my soul and I was going to give it to him without a fight because of that smile and those inhuman eyes. I took a step toward him.

The second SCUD of the morning hit me in the ribs and everything started to move again. I slammed into the floor under Gary’s weight, sliding across linoleum and a zillion sharp pieces of glass. We stopped when my head hit the far wall. I opened my eyes to find the butterfly knife lying against the wall a few inches away from my nose. The horse screamed again and reared back, missing my head by half an inch as he crashed back to the floor.

Gary’s breath smelled like syrup and bacon. “Are you outta your mind?” He popped up onto his knees and hauled me to mine by a fistful of shirt at the back of my neck. I snatched up the knife as the horse smashed down again, right where my head had been. I looked up at the rider, and the horse kicked me in the ribs with a toe. I felt the bone crack inward, and didn’t even manage a scream, just a pathetic little grunt.

From a very long way away, I heard Marie scream a warning, in English this time. Before I could react, Gary hauled me over backward. A tip of silver glittered through the air where my throat had been. The rider looked genuinely startled before his eyes narrowed and he urged the horse farther into the diner. They were huge, taking up all the room, all the air. I gasped and scrambled to my feet, clutching Gary’s arm with one hand and my ribs with the other. Breathing hurt.

“Leave them alone.” Marie sounded thin and tired and at the end of her bravery, but there she was at my side, looking up at the rider with a set chin. “I’ll go with you. Just leave them alone. They were only trying to help.”

I let go of Gary’s arm and shouldered forward. The rider watched me. Neither Gary nor Marie moved. Behind me I heard the blond waitress fumbling with the phone, and her panicked, “Hello? Police? Hello?”

“He’ll kill us anyway,” I said, very low. I couldn’t get enough breath to do anything else. “Because it’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s nothing personal. You’re the Hunt, and when the Hunt is loosed, you kill until someone binds you away again. Cernunnos.” Terrifying conviction gave my voice strength. Twenty minutes ago I’d never heard of the thing standing in front of me; now the knowledge of who and what he was felt like the only thing I’d ever been certain of in my whole life. I didn’t like that at all.

The rider’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, inclining his head.

“The Horned God.” I lifted my eyes to his circlet again, which wasn’t a circlet at all. It was more like Caesar’s crown, but it was part of him. It began at his temples and swept back in an elegant bone pattern, horns curved to the sides of his head and meeting at the back, woven together there. Very practical. No catching your head on tree branches that way. I wondered if he shed them yearly and grew them again, or if they were as eternal as he was.

“They grow with my power,” he replied. Chills ran through me. It wasn’t that he responded to an unasked question. That seemed perfectly normal from this being. It was his voice, dark and rich and earthy, deep enough that a roar from him would shake the world. That, and I was quite certain he hadn’t spoken English or any other language I knew.

“What’d he say?” Gary whispered. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marie shake her head fractionally.

“You cannot stop me,” Cernunnos said, little more than a murmur.

“What do you want?” I still couldn’t breathe enough to get a real voice out. He laughed, and it took everything I had to not run away.

“To ride free and hunt,” he answered. “That is what we all want.”

“All?”

“My host.” He flicked his hand casually at the parking lot. I knew I shouldn’t, but I looked anyway.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Gary said.

“Not exactly,” Cernunnos said, and that time Gary understood him. He flinched, jerking his eyes from the parking lot back to Cernunnos. I couldn’t have looked away from the lot if someone paid me to. Everything I didn’t believe in had come to roost there, things that just hadn’t been there a moment earlier. It was like someone pulled the bandage off in one swift rip, exposing a world I didn’t believe existed in full Technicolor glory.

The riders moved too quickly, or maybe not enough in this world, for me to get an accurate count. There were close to a dozen, though, and one magnificent pale gold horse with no rider. Animals and riders alike faded at the edges, sunlight draining through them. Around their knees crept enormous sleek white dogs, with lowered heads and reddened eartips and violent red eyes. They avoided the few cars in the parking lot, milling around them but never touching them. Settled on the cars were narrow, long-beaked birds I’d never seen before, whose cries sounded like lost children. The dogs growled and snapped, every once in a while one baying at the sunrise. I could hear the horse’s hooves against the asphalt, but the bridles made no sound, and neither did the riders as they drifted, waiting for their master.

“That isn’t possible,” I whispered. Cernunnos laughed again.

“You name me the Horned God and yet say my host is impossible? What are you, little mortal?” He put the silver sword against my chin, and turned my face toward him. I held very still, meeting his eyes.

Apparently I do not learn quickly. Meeting his eyes was a terrible mistake the second time, too. They were phenomenal, promising power and passion and eternity. All I wanted was to be with him, part of his ancient world. His blade caressed my cheek, opposite the cut Marie had made earlier. It felt like a lover’s touch, and I wanted all the more to be with him.

“You could be,” he murmured to the unspoken desire, “but then you would interfere, little mortal, and I am very tired of being interfered with. A shame, to end all your unrealized power, but more of a shame to be closed into the night again.”

They say watch the eyes, when you’re about to get into a fight. There are some people who can hide the telegraph of their actions from their eyes. Cernunnos wasn’t one of them: he had no need to be. It just took a flicker, before he drew the sword back and punched it forward. It was all I needed.

I jolted forward, into the sword, instead of away. I tried to twitch enough to one side so the blade would catch my shoulder, instead of something vital. The horrible cool straightness of metal slid through me, fiery pain filling up the right half of my body. It hurt so badly my knees collapsed, and for an instant the sword through my torso was the only thing holding me up. I was pretty sure the next breath I let out would have blood on it.

But now I had his blade trapped.

And I had steel.

One-two-three. The clack-clack-clack of the butterfly knife sounded very loud to me, over the pounding blood in my ears. I coughed, and that made the sword scrape up and down my lung. I spat a mouthful of blood at Cernunnos, pleased that he flinched back. I dragged myself forward along the blade, and took a handful of his shirt, half-expecting it to slip away through my fingers like melting cotton candy. But it held, and as his horse neighed and reared up again, I kept my fist in his shirt and pulled him down. He fell, weighing more than I expected. My knife slid between his ribs, and he screamed.

The windows shattered. My eardrums shattered. I shrieked back, soundless into the overwhelming, unearthly noise that he made. I could see the scream vibrating from his throat even when blood slid from my ears and down my chin. His eyes weren’t compelling anymore. They were filled with seething rage, green fire boiling over. I waited for it to spill out onto me, to set me on fire, and after a few seconds I smelled it: flesh burning. It was sick and sweet and horrible.

It took a long time to look down and see that it was the hole I’d put in Cernunnos’s ribs that burned, not me. Silk singed around the knife, sticking and reeking. Beneath the fabric, his skin blackened and festered, bubbles beginning to burst. I screamed again, and jerked my hand back. The knife came out, and Cernunnos dropped to the floor. I began a long, slow collapse, Cernunnos’s sword still stuck in my lungs. Beyond it, I could see his mouth moving, and even though I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard him promise, “You will pay for this, little mortal.”

The floor came up in a rush and hit me very hard.

CHAPTER FIVE

For a few moments it was very, very dark, and then it was very, very bright. I thought, So this is what it’s like to be dead, and then, Shit, man, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true.

I squinted. The brightness wasn’t really very much like a white tunnel. It was actually a lot like staring directly into the sun. I closed my eyes, and a giant ball of green danced behind my eyelids. It turned red, then blue with red outlines as I squinted my eyes open again. Outside of the white light there was blue that looked suspiciously like the sky.

Lying there, under the suspiciously ordinary sky, I heard a drumbeat. It faltered, unsteady, like the drummer didn’t know what he was doing. I turned my head toward it, scraping my cheek against hot earth. Tears from staring at the sun ran over my nose and wicked away into desert sand.

My cheek didn’t hurt. I rubbed it against the ground a little, and it kept on not hurting. In fact, none of my body hurt, and that seemed wrong. I was pretty sure that only a minute ago there’d been all kinds of holes in it.

Overall, not hurting was an improvement. The sun was hot, and the sand, for ground, was comfortable. I closed my eyes again and relaxed. The drumbeat missed a beat.

“I wouldn’t advise going to sleep right now.”

My eyes popped open and I blinded myself with the sun again. Dammit. I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. No one was there.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I flopped onto my back again.

“Do you hear the drumbeat?”

“Of course I do,” I snapped. The drumbeat sped up for a few beats, then slowed again.

“You should get up and follow it.”

“I’m comfortable.” I closed my eyes more firmly. I was not having a discussion with an invisible man.

“I’m not invisible. You just can’t see me.”

There was a lovely piece of logic. I sat up, glaring around.

If this was my subconscious’s idea of paradise, I needed my head checked. Sulfur-colored sand dunes swept up against robin’s egg-blue sky, both broken periodically by huge outcroppings of rough red stone. Wind hissed across the sand, smelling dry and old. Under my hands, fine particles of earth gritted against each other and melted away, leaving depressions for my fingers. The whole place reminded me of Arizona, only more so.

“This isn’t even the kind of Indian I am,” I protested. The drumbeat sped up a moment, getting louder. I twisted toward the north, where it was coming from. I wondered if I really should follow it.

“You should,” the voice said helpfully.

“Why? I can’t even see you. Why should I listen to you?” I looked around through my eyebrows, trying to find the voice’s origin. “Why can I listen to you? Hear you, I mean. What are you?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions. You can’t see me because you don’t believe in me. You can hear me because you’re dying, and it’s letting me slip in.” The voice sounded like this was a normal thing to say.

Despite the burning sunshine, shivers ran through me, and the drumbeat faltered. “Am I really dying?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re really dying.” The voice had a casual bedside manner. “You can choose not to, if you want.”

“Why the hell would I choose to die?” I climbed to my feet. He had to be around here somewhere.

“Because living means changing your entire worldview. That can be a very difficult thing to do.” His voice came from the same direction as the drumbeat.

“Oh, and dying is easy?” I began walking toward the north, glowering at the invisible voice.

“Dying is remarkably easy. Just stop going toward the drum, and in a few minutes, it’ll stop.”

“And then I’ll be dead?” I didn’t exactly break into a run, but I picked up the pace a bit. The drumbeat accelerated. “That’s my heart, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” the voice said.

“Are you a spirit guide?”

There was a pause that felt considering. “Yep.”

Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘yep’?”

He laughed. “Yep.”

“How far is it to my—” I couldn’t say, to my heart. “To the drum?”

“Not too far. Would you like me to lead you there?”

I took a deep breath. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

A small coyote bounded in front of me, like he’d always been there. I looked behind us. His tracks were tangled with mine, across the sand. He yipped, and I looked forward again. He smiled a coyote smile, and leaped out across the sand in a long, lean run. “I can’t keep up with a running dog!”

“I’m not a dog. Come on.” He stretched out and I swore, but I began to run. The drumbeat sped up again, and my strides got longer, until I was running an easy fast lope across the dunes, my feet kicking up sprays of sand. The coyote stayed a few yards in front of me, cresting over a dune.

I followed recklessly, and the earth dropped out from under me. It turned scarred and pitted, like an asteroid crater with deep, sharp sides. I hit the ground where it began to slope again and rolled ass over teakettle, trying to protect my head as I bounced. The drumbeat sounded once, then stopped again, a rare staccato. The coyote ran on, much more gracefully than I, then looped back to snap his teeth at me.

“Hurry. You don’t have time for this.”

“I fell!”

He bared his teeth in a snarl and pranced away, jerking his head to urge me on. I stumbled to my feet and began to run again. The coyote snapped his teeth again, satisfied, and forged ahead.

The crater narrowed into an impact spot, less than a foot across and plummeting into blackness. The coyote dove into it, just barely fitting. I couldn’t possibly squeeze into it.

On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly be running across an uber-Arizona landscape inside my head, either, and that seemed to be happening without the slightest regard to what was possible. I took a deep breath and dove after the coyote—

—and the impact spot got much bigger, or I got much smaller. It turned into a tunnel, plunging downward. A trickle of water appeared. I loped after it, running on four feet like I’d always done it. My hands felt like hands, but as I watched them flash under my nose, they were pawed and clawed, like the coyote’s. The water widened, becoming a stream. I ran along the bank after the coyote, feeling a tail swishing behind me. The sand turned into rich dark topsoil, and then into solid granite, the stream cutting a swath through it. Every once in a great while I felt my heartbeat shaking the stone around us.

“Is time slowing down?”

“No,” the coyote said, “your heart is.”

Damn.

The stream disappeared without warning, sinking into stone, and the tunnel veered up at a steep angle. I dug unaccustomed claws into the hard rock, scrabbling for a purchase, and wriggled my way up the tunnel, shouldering past the coyote. Stone gave way and I burst through the earth into a pool of numbingly cold water. I kicked frantically toward the bright surface, dragging myself onto the bank a few seconds later. My hands were hands again. I wasn’t a coyote anymore. It felt strange.

The drumbeat, my heartbeat, ricocheted around me, shockingly loud. The coyote ran out of the pool and shook himself furiously on the bank, then trotted through a sparse, stingily kept garden to an unmoving lump on the ground. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed to my hands and knees, watching him.

He nosed the lump on the ground, then sat down beside it, head cocked at me, expression full of expectation. “Physician, heal thyself.”

I crawled over to the lump, still shivering. “Jesus Christ!” I reared onto my knees, backing away.

The lump was me. I looked like hell. Blood matted my hair, which hadn’t been clean to start with. The bandaged cut on my face was almost lost among dozens of other tiny, glass-infested nicks and scratches. My shining new silver necklace was stained red, the cross settled in a pool of blood at the hollow of my throat. My ribs on the left side looked deflated, bent inward, and the sword was still stuck in my right lung.

I—the one sitting, not the lump—fell onto my butt and began crab-walking backward. “I’m dying!”

“I thought we’d established that,” the coyote said. He hopped over my body—the one lying there—and grabbed my shirt in his teeth, tugging me forward again. “Heal yourself. It’s in you.”

“Dammit, Jim, I’m a mechanic, not a doctor.” The coyote was strong, pulling me forward even as I resisted. “I don’t know how.”

He let go of my shirt and lay down with his chin on his front paws. “You know how to fix cars, right? You know where everything goes.”

I nodded. He lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Pretend you’re a car. It’s a nice analogy.”

Are spirit guides supposed to know what analogies are? The coyote grinned at me, even though I hadn’t spoken aloud, and tipped his head toward my body. “You don’t have much time.”

“Pretend I’m a car. Right. Okay.” I scooted closer to my body, hesitantly, mouth pressed closed. “A car. Right. Start with the obvious.” My co-workers tell me I talk to myself when I’m working. I’d never noticed it before. “I’m leaking. What leaks? Oil filters leak. Great. I’m an oil filter.” I put a hand on my chest, grabbed the sword’s hilt with the other, and tugged. It stuck for a moment, grating against my ribs, and the drumbeat stopped entirely.

“No!” I yanked the sword harder, and it slid out with a liquid sound. I threw it to the side, and hit myself in the chest. I—the one on the ground—coughed, and the drumbeat made a sad little thump. Dark, important-looking blood spurted out, covering my hands.

“Patch it up,” the coyote said.

“I don’t know how,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I could imagine an oil filter, emptying itself onto the ground. I ran through the process of changing it—loosening the drain, oiling the gasket on the new filter, screwing it back onto the filter pipe. Uncertainly, I tried overlaying those images on my body, envisioning my torn lung as the old, burned-out filter, imagining the new one sliding into place.

Something clicked in the center of me, below my breastbone and just above my diaphragm in exactly the same place, the sickness that had impelled me to help Marie had been. It felt like cartilage popping, a thick painful feeling, as if a lock, stiff with age, had reluctantly opened. I felt it in both my bodies, the one I was consciously inhabiting, and the one lying all but lifelessly on the bloody grass. Energy surged through that place with the same cool feeling as drinking water on an empty stomach. It lined the insides of me and reached out, connecting my kneeling self to the dying body under my hands. For a few seconds I thought I could see through myself, the ridiculous oil filter analogy at work repairing my lung. The energy I felt was centered there, coiling inside the ruined cavity and patching it. Then the sensation faded and dizziness swept through me. I tilted over sideways, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t think it worked.”

“Take a look,” the coyote murmured. I pried my eyes open and looked down at myself. Ichory black blood still covered my chest and my hands, but when I pushed my shirt out of the way, the hole was gone, the skin unscarred.

“Holy shit.”