Urban Shaman

“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.”