Spirit Dances

I said, “I’m sorry,” and turned to my boss. “This could have been months in the planning, Captain. Can we get the list of credit-card purchases for the tickets to tonight’s show? The theater was packed, there must’ve been five hundred people here, but it’s a place to start investigating.”

“Walker.” Morrison drew me back a step, though it wasn’t really an attempt to take me out of Jim Littlefoot’s hearing range. “You already said they’re not going to find anything to provoke a murder investigation. She’ll be autopsied, I’m sure, but—”

“Are you really going to tell me not to investigate this, boss?” I took a breath, steadying myself. “Do you really think I’ll listen if you do? Because I—I need to, Captain.”

Morrison’s expression softened just slightly. I sort of felt like I’d thrown a low blow, given the circumstances of the day, but I was willing to take any bend I could get.

“Hey.” One of the paramedics lifted his voice, clearly not talking to us, but garnering our attention anyway. I was just as glad: backstage at the theater probably wasn’t the place to argue with Morrison over what my duties as one of Seattle’s only paranormal police detectives entailed. Then the paramedic uttered seven little words that invalidated my concerns about being allowed to investigate.

“Hey,” he said, “don’t you think this looks weird?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

There were puncture wounds over Naomi Allison’s heart. Five of them in an arc of about two hundred and forty degrees, like somebody had sunk extremely pointy fingernails into her flesh. They got worse as we watched, deepening until her chest started to cave in.

Morrison drew breath to speak and I snapped a hand up, fingers rigid, to silence him. To my astonishment, it worked, though I’d probably pay the price later. But I had a good idea of what he’d been going to say—something along the lines of “No signs of murder, Walker?”—and I was a lot more interested in watching Naomi’s degradation than I was in being scolded.

Besides, I’d been right. When I’d said there were no obvious signs of foul play, there hadn’t been. That, however, had been a whole two minutes earlier, and lots could change in two minutes. I’d gone from being a mechanic to a shaman in that time. Stranger things could happen. Around me, they usually did.

“It’s a physical manifestation of the power drain. Somebody sucked the energy out of her so fast it’s taken a couple minutes for the corporeal damage to catch up. But I bet dollars to doughnuts there’s somebody out there whose visualization on this is ripping her heart out.” I put my fingertips over the wounds, which were now deep enough to start bending around the heart. There was very little blood, given the depth and the fact that I could see torn arteries. Postmortem injuries were like that. No heartbeat to pump the blood, so the best it could do on its own was ooze and pool.

Jim Littlefoot said, “Why?”, the paramedic said, “What the hell are you talking about?” and Morrison, in a low, dangerous voice I’d become accustomed to, said, “Walker…” all at more or less the same time. I ignored the latter two and shook my head at Littlefoot.

“It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s the power you’re generating. Someone wants it, and they’re using the idea of the heart as the soul’s center to focus their desire. They weren’t after Naomi. This would have happened to whoever was the lead dancer tonight.” It was so clear to me I could almost See it, though the Sight itself wasn’t offering much. I was a day late and a dollar short: if I’d chased the black whirlpool of magic when it had fled Naomi’s body, I might have followed it back to the perpetrator.

But it hadn’t even occurred to me. My only thought had been getting on stage and trying to heal the fallen dancer. I was hell on wheels at second-guessing myself, but for once I wasn’t convinced I’d made the wrong decision. Nobody, not even Coyote, had suggested it was within my power to split my focus in two completely different directions, physically attending to a healing while spiritually charging off for a fight. I’d made my choice. I would have to live with it, even if Naomi Allison hadn’t.

“Can you tell who’s responsible?” Littlefoot’s voice, like Morrison’s, was low, but not with warning or anger. With despair, and I had no good answer for him.

“I’d be looking for someone overflowing with power, but anybody in the theater—” I broke off. If the ghost dance had worked properly, if Naomi had been permitted to release the magic into the audience, then everyone would be glowy and happy, but she hadn’t. Only the spirit thief would be boiling over now, assuming he was in the theater at all. I looked at Morrison, who shook his head, but turned and left the backstage with purposeful strides. It was almost certainly far too late already to corral the audience so I could look them over, but he was going to try. I thought of the woman with the lump in her breast and a wave of sick concern broke over me, even though it was so far out of my control that worrying about it was ludicrous.

That was probably why it bothered me. Easier to focus on the details or the impossible than what was right in front of me. Hell, I’d spent half the day doing that deliberately. I said, “Stop anybody you can at this point, okay? I’ll take a look at them, and if we can get the credit card sales, well, at least it’s someth…” to Morrison’s retreating back, and “Oh. Oh, God, gross,” to the dead woman in front of me.

Naomi’s heart shuddered, sharp tooth marks tearing flesh, and an entire bite disappeared as we watched. Then another, then a third, and the heart was gone, gulped away. I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth, gagging. The paramedic didn’t fare so well, and lurched a few feet away to empty his stomach. Naomi convulsed once more, then went still. Littlefoot turned an unblinking gaze on me, tears draining down his cheeks. All I could do was whisper, “I’m sorry. It’s over now.”

That much, at least, I was sure of. The bodily attack had finished catching up to the magical, as if time had slid slightly out of sync. I didn’t think that was it, not really. It was just that the psychic attack was so virulent it had taken Naomi’s life before the physical could have its turn. At least there’d been no agony, this way. It had been over the moment power whirlpooled out of her.

Littlefoot nodded, lips tight. “Can you find what did this?”

“Yeah. I’ll find it, and I’ll stop it.” I had no idea how, but I was pretty confident I could. “Your people all look exhausted, Jim. They won’t want to, but make sure they eat, okay? What happened to them is a lot more than coming down after a show. All that energy they were supposed to throw out to the audience should have come back to them in a way, and instead it’s been stolen. Even if your friend hadn’t died, they’d be a lot more drained than usual. A drum circle wouldn’t hurt, something to replenish them a little. In fact, I’ll come back later to lead one, if you want.”

I had no idea who I was, making an offer like that. The Joanne Walker of fifteen months ago wouldn’t have thought of it, much less genuinely meant it. Littlefoot made a motion of agreement, but asked, “Later?” in a way that put a lot more questions into the word than seemed possible.

“I need to check whatever’s left of the audience, just in case the killer is here. If he’s not, I want to take a look over the city and see if I can find a flare where there’s too much power. And I have to figure out what did this, if I can. I haven’t seen anything quite like it before.”

Littlefoot started to speak, then let it go in a rush of breath. The second try worked better: “We’ll gather a drum circle. Don’t feel obliged to come back. I think you have enough to do already.”

I got to my feet, touching his shoulder as I did so. It was rock solid, dancer-trained strength knotted into tension. I gathered a pulse of healing power, magic warm and comforting in my belly before I released it into Littlefoot. Experience said he should relax, at least a modicum; that the influx of strength and calm would help even if he wasn’t aware it had arrived. I might as well have been trying to heal a rock, for all the difference it made in his anxiety levels. That didn’t actually bode so well for me helping out in a drum circle, so although I meant it when I said, “It’s not an obligation,” the feeling of obligation lessened some.

He nodded and I stepped back, finally giving him and ultimately his people the space they were going to need. “If any of you know anything about shielding, that would be best. Keep what you do internal, just for the troupe. You usually only do one performance a day, right? So if whoever’s behind this has been watching you, he’s probably not going to be looking for a second hit right away, but there’s no sense in offering him an easy target.” Not when I had every intention of offering up a much harder target.

Me.

Morrison had done a hell of a job corralling the audience, given the late start he’d had. There were probably three hundred people still in the lobby, and security guards at the doors chitchatting politely with men and women who didn’t seem too terribly eager to escape, anyway. Human nature, I guessed; they probably wanted to be among the first to know what had happened, all the better to gossip about in the morning.

Lots and lots of them turned my way when I came out of the theater, their auras spiking with curiosity. With the weight of their interest, I realized that between my height, the form-fitting green dress and the fact I’d run up on stage seconds after Naomi collapsed, I was probably pretty recognizable. Sneaking out a side door or up to the mezzanine floor to peek at the crowd might’ve been smarter, but smart wasn’t so much my stock in trade.

Not mostly, anyway. I was smart enough to not say “She’s dead,” which was sort of my first impulse. Even when people started asking, I kept my mouth shut and just looked over them, grateful that the strappy heels meant I could see virtually everybody.

Nobody had the mark of a killer. Auras were rife with nosy interest and concern, with boredom, with amorous intentions and chilly brush-offs, but no one was burgeoning with the kind of energy the killer had stolen. I sighed, singled Morrison out of the crowd—he was at one of the doors, badge on display as he smiled at a redhead at least ten years older than he was—and made my way through the gathering to his side. “Can I talk to you privately, boss?”

The redhead’s expression flashed from a downright sulk at my interruption all the way to smug delight as I finished with the word boss. She actually tucked a card into his lapel as he backsided the door open and gestured me through. I couldn’t help stealing another look at her as Morrison followed me, and my big mouth said, “You like redheads, huh?” without consulting me on the topic first.

Morrison looked back at her, too, then at me. “What makes you say that?”

“Oh, Barbara Bragg was a redhead, and now her. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” Rita Wagner had asked if I believed in God. I thought a kind God would probably strike me dead right then just to save me from myself. Since nobody did, I chalked one up in the “not so much” column, and tried to shrug off the conversation causally.

Morrison was amenable enough to shrugging it off, though he said, “Maybe redheads like me,” before a considerably more relevant, and much more Morrison-like, “What happened after I left?”

“Whatever attacked Naomi ate her heart.” I was horrified at how steadily that came out.

Morrison’s eyes popped. “What is it with you and bodies getting eaten lately, Walker? Is it another wendigo?”

“No.” I had plenty more to say than just a categorical denial, but it struck me again that Morrison had been bizarrely normal all day. Normal like a normal person, not normal like my boss, which was a much more antagonistic kind of normal than normal-normal was. I knew why: he was going easy on me because of the shooting, which meant he really didn’t think I’d screwed up. I was glad of that, but he was shooting so straight I thought maybe inadvertently asking him on a date hadn’t been a mistake after all. I didn’t know what it meant if it wasn’t a mistake.

And it didn’t matter very much right then. Morrison’s expression descended toward its more-usual exasperation the longer I didn’t answer the question. I spewed a more detailed answer, hoping to get the more genial Morrison back as a reward. “The wendigo was eating souls, but I was able to track Naomi’s into the Dead Zone. Whatever attacked her was just after the energy she’d collected. It’s a completely different M.O.”

“And the heart?”

“The wendigo wasn’t after viscera. It was chewing the external flesh, trying to re-establish a body for itself. No, this is different, Morrison. I’m sure the heart was the focal point for whatever magic was used to strip Naomi of all that energy.” I put a fist over my own heart. “It’s what we perceive as the center of our emotions. I mean, we say we mean things from the heart, we suffer heartache, we pledge our hearts, we wear our hearts on our sleeves. The only other organ we assign as much importance to is the brain, except brain-dead bodies can be kept alive if the heart continues pumping and not the other way around. The heart is our core, the perfect and obvious point to attack if you’re trying to collect the emotional and spiritual power of an individual. If I was going to try something like that—”

“Which you wouldn’t.”

I broke off, gaping. “No, because I’m not insane. I mean, I couldn’t, this is black magic, it’s sorcery, not shamanism, I’d be—I mean, Jesus Christ, Morrison, of course not! What the hell?”

His nostrils flared and words came through pinched lips: “You have a track record of doing incredibly stupid things in an attempt to figure out who or what your adversary is. Reverse engineering something like this sounds right up your alley.”

Righteous indignation bubbled up and spilled over into splutters. Splutters only, because he was right. It did sound like exactly the kind of moronic thing I’d try.

This did not seem like a good time to explain my plan had actually been more along the lines of throwing down a big shiny gauntlet of my own power in an attempt to get the killer’s attention, even though in comparison to Morrison’s fears, it seemed very mild and practical. Instead I collected my splutters into words. “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I think my magic would cut out on me. It has definite opinions about what I’m allowed to do with it. I mean, it went flat this morning, and that whole scenario was a hundred percent mundane, no paranormal activity involved. I’m pretty sure eating people’s hearts, even with the best of intentions, is right out.”

Morrison harrumphed, apparently satisfied, and I tried to gather my derailed thoughts. “If I was going to try something like that, which I’m not, I would use representational magic. Like voodoo, where you use a doll to—right, you know what voodoo is. Only instead of a doll I’d use a candy heart, or something. I’d devour it—would you stop looking at me like that?”

“I was wrong,” Morrison said in a deadly tone. “I thought I was all out of freak, but listening to one of my detectives discussing devouring hearts while dressed to kill pushes the limits. Skip to the end game, Walker. I can’t take much more of this.”

Probably the “dressed to kill” bit wasn’t supposed to make me grin, so I tried to keep it to a tiny smile, and looked somewhere else so meeting Morrison’s eyes wouldn’t loosen the expression into full-blown idiocy. I could be such a girl sometimes that I wanted to kick myself. Fortunately there were several dozen people still outside the theater, hanging around muttering quietly and eyeing the lobby in hopes of someone coming out with answers. They gave me something to focus on while I gave Morrison his end game. “Eating the representational heart would give me the physical and emotional target to draw down the power. Once the power drain was complete, destroying the actual heart would sever any link between myself and the body. There’s nothing left, no representational evidence, no physical evidence, no psychic residue. Excuse me. I have to go cop a feel on a pretty woman.”

Morrison said, “You what?” in the sort of resigned tone that indicated he’d never keep up with my inconstant ways, and stayed where he was while I hurried across the theater patio.