Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  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 bee
n 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.

  The cancer-infected woman I’d noticed in the theater was tall, maybe five foot nine, but she wore flats, so I towered over her as I tapped her shoulder. She turned from her friends, an eyebrow arched curiously, and looked me up and down. I did the same, because the word statuesque could have been coined just for her. Valkyries of yore wanted to look like this woman: broad-shouldered, generously endowed, long legs and a mass of genuinely golden hair that I didn’t think came out of a bottle. Her eyes were brown, which surprised me: I almost expected them to be as yellow as her hair. If she’d had a hint of a tan, the snug goldenrod dress she wore would have made her look like a giant banana, but she was so fair-skinned I couldn’t even find any freckles. She was about thirty-five, and aside from that touch of malignant pink in her breast, literally glowed with health. I wished everybody—including myself—had her level of fitness, and said, a bit rashly, “Hi. Do you believe in magic?”

  “I don’t know about magic, but if you’re about to ask me on a date, I’ll believe in miracles,” she offered.

  Apparently she had the confidence necessary for the bright-colored dress, too, and for a moment I genuinely regretted my limited palate of sexual preferences. “I’m sorry. I wish I was. Instead I’m going to say something really, really weird, and I hope you’ll believe me.”

  She arched an eyebrow, looked over her shoulder at her friends, then faced me again, arms folded under her breasts. It was closed-off body language, but she contradicted it by putting her weight on one leg, hip cocked out and the other foot angled sideways to indicate a degree of willingness to listen. I had clearly been a detective too long, if I was studying her body language that carefully, but she took my mind off it by using her language-language, too: “If this is the ‘you should be a model’ speech, I’ve heard it before.”

  “It’s much weirder than that. I’d like to hold your hands for a minute or two.”

  Her other eyebrow skyrocketed up to match the first. “Are you sure you’re not asking me out?”

  “Sadly, yes. I’d rather explain afterward, if that’s okay.”

  She oofed as one of her friends elbowed her in the ribs and made a ribald comment, but she put her hands out. I took them, but she made like it was all her idea, grasping mine firmly. Her hands were rough, as if she worked with chemicals or just did fifty pull-ups on an iron bar every day. “You work out?”

  “Enough to get noticed, I guess.” A glow of pleasure erupted from her, turning her dominant-yellow aura as brilliant a goldenrod as her dress, and putting her in exactly the kind of mental place I wanted her in. Overlooking the morning’s mess-up, I’d been able to heal people with a drawn-out vehicle analogy for most of the past year, aligning aliments to my mechanic’s trade knowledge. More recently, though, I’d stepped it up a notch, and could affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. It helped enormously, though, if my patient was receptive. Joyful and full of self-confidence was just about as positive and receptive a mental space as I could ask for.

  She said something I didn’t hear as my attention went internal. My power leaped to life, no longer reluctant as it had been that morning. It felt like it was making up for lost time, or more likely, making up for the choice I’d made that morning. I didn’t exactly feel guilty, but I did feel like it would take a lot of healing people before I balanced out gunning one down.

  Silver and blue magic, topped up and bubbling over from the energy the dancers had put out, was eager to go where I focused it. I’d never had a target like this one: no more than a handful of cells, lethal pink, unwelcome but unstoppable in the host body.

  Habit lingered. It was easy to think of those few sick cells as tiny rust spots that needed sanding, polishing and repainting so they wouldn’t spread to the body around them. The real difference to me was not going through those steps. Once the analogy popped into mind, the work was done between one thought and the next.

  What I didn’t expect was the staggering whirl of magic that surged toward the deadly pink cells, obliterating them. But it didn’t stop there. Time tunneled forward like a bad 3-D effect, showing me much paler pink cells, like ghosts of futures yet to come. Those cells multiplied, became blotches, became lumps, became masses, metastasizing and spreading. Healing magic charged headlong into the future-that-could-be, tearing sickness apart and leaving healthy flesh in its wake. It ran all the way through the cycle of disease, destroying it not just now, but all its potential in the future. I caught a glimpse of a double helix, of an off-shoot ladder rung that didn’t belong, and felt my magic gather itself, preparing to fix that, too.

  Panic spurted through me and I clawed the magic back. It hesitated, still focused on that genetic anomaly, then rolled back into me, so drained I could barely feel its presence. Time wound backward, landing me back into the here and now, where my knees buckled. The woman’s grip on my hands kept me upright, but she let go, obviously feeling the flux of power. “What the—what’d you do?”

  “Removed some rust.” My throat was dry. I coughed and tried again, but shivers wracked me so hard I could hardly focus on the woman before me. Her aura was no longer marred by the scant touch of unhealthy pink, but even my grip on the Sight faded as I reached feebly for something to lean on. She was the only thing available, and to my relief she put her hand out again, strong fingers banding around my arm.

  “Are you all right?” Her voice was pitched high with concern.

  I managed a nod. The cancer hadn’t spread, but the amount of magic bent to finding and destroying those sick cells offered a warning: potentially terminal illness, even if it hadn’t come anywhere near actually terminal, was not something to mess with lightly. I had the ugly feeling I could have easily killed myself with that unconsidered effort. Walking blithely through cancer wards and laying on hands was clearly not going to be an option.

 
“What’d you do?” she asked again, this time more mystified than alarmed. “I feel like champagne. Bubbly inside.”

  “Do me a favor.” I sounded like I’d drunk a cupful of sand. “Go to the doctor. Get a mammogram. Just to be sure.”

  She went white, long rangy lines going rigid. “You don’t think…?”

  “No.” Not anymore, but that didn’t seem like a useful thing to say. The image of the distorted double helix popped up again and I crushed my eyes shut, wishing I’d dared try shaving that wrongness away. There were at least two good reasons not to have: one, I didn’t know what the long-term ramifications for her genetics would be if I had, and two, I thought I was lucky to not already be dead. Rewriting DNA was not in the game plan. “Just go to the doctor to be sure, okay? Please? Get one of those genetic tests, if you can, to see if you’ve got a predilection for the disease.”

  She relaxed incrementally at the reassurance, then frowned again. “I will. But what did you do? Who are you?”

  “I’m a healer.” It sounded absurd, but I was too tired to come up with something clever. No healing I’d done had ever wiped me out so badly. I was going to have to talk to Coyote about tempering the magic so I didn’t kill myself while doing my duties. “I’m a healer, and I think you’ll be okay now, but go to a doctor anyway. Please?”

  “A healer.” Befuddlement darkened her eyes and she caught my arm. “Really? That—it sounds like bullshit, but I feel…people like you exist? For real?”

  I breathed a tiny laugh. “For real. But you’ll go to a doctor anyway, right? Please?”

  “I will.” She didn’t let go of my arm, though, expression searching mine. “But I’d like to see you again, too. Just to be sure. Would that be okay?”