Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  Tia, infuriated, broke from me to go after him. I jumped after her, astonished at how far I could move in a single leap, and bore her to the ground with my superior weight. She flipped on her back before I could get my teeth into her neck, and we were at it again, muzzles in each other’s faces, canines slashing and trying to hit vulnerable territory.

  Then as fast as we’d come together, we broke apart again, both of us circling and snarling, waiting for another moment to attack. My lungs burned with effort and every nerve in my body was ratcheted up as I slunk around, head lowered, ears back, teeth bared.

  It felt fantastic. It felt brutal, ugly, dangerous, alive, and I didn’t know if it was the animal or the human in me that loved it. I feared it was the human: animals didn’t fight for fun, not like this. They fought for dominance or survival. I didn’t think they walked away from fights triumphant, not the way people did, and I didn’t know if the warrior’s path I was on meant if it was okay to revel in warfare while in animal form.

  Tia came at me one last time, and it ceased to matter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Smoke and flame and blood: those were the scents in Tia’s fur and in the whole of the cavern. I had no time to look, but I thought the reprieve was over. Whatever my little magic overload had done, it hadn’t put all the fire out, and it was picking up speed again. I had to quit screwing around, for all that torn fur and blurred vision and general heaving and panting suggested I hadn’t been screwing around at all. Part of me screamed to finish it, to end the battle in as brutal and final a manner as necessary.

  But I was a human in coyote’s clothing, and like it or not, Tia was at least partially human under her own lupine coat. Decent humans did not go around killing one another. But we weren’t exactly in the right physical forms to sit down and discuss the matter, and I seriously doubted Tia would shift back to her beautiful naked human self if I went that route. In her shoes—or paws—I’d just jump on me and rip my throat out. Which, as far as I could tell, pretty much left me with the option to do unto her before she did unto me.

  I’d already shot somebody this week. I was not delighted with the prospect of causing grievous physical harm, by which I meant almost certain death, to a second party inside forty-eight hours.

  Knowing I would lose time and ground, knowing I would almost certainly regret it, I went within and whispered, Rattler? Raven? Guide me?

  We ssstrike, Rattler replied instantly. He was a white streak against blackness in my mind, barely there, as if he, no more than I, hadn’t yet fully recovered from the blast at the theater. But he was confident in his response, which was more than I could claim. We hunt, we shift, we heal. Life is sssacred, shaman. Yours no lessss than othersss. Theirsss no lessss than othersss, and I knew he meant the men trapped in the wicker man above me. You did not ssstart this battle, he told me. There isss no shame in finishing it.

  Good enough, from a predator. I repeated Raven?, and my other guide soared out of darkness, power flexing with each beat of his wings.

  It shed light on a field of war. There was nothing familiar about it, none of the tanks or guns or trenches from the past century or more of warfare. Instead, a few surviving horses picked their way across bloody, mashed-down grass, and whickered in distress at the bloody short swords and leather armor that lay on and around innumerable human bodies.

  Ravens by their dozens dropped to those bodies and sank talons into dead flesh, then rose again with souls clawed in their feet. They winged into the sky as if burdened by the weights they carried, and one by one winked out, carrying the dead into another world. They returned as rapidly as they’d left, falling to earth again and again, ferrying mortal souls into and through the Dead Zone to whatever lay beyond.

  And when their duties were done, when no more souls were left to draw from one world to the next, they quite horribly landed on the bodies and began to gobble the choicest bits: eyes, torn bellies, tongues from open, once-screaming mouths.

  I gagged and clenched my eyes shut against the vision, which was remarkably ineffective against something playing in my mind. Raven swept his wings again and wiped away the images, then gave me a beady look from first one eye, then the other. I swallowed bile and said Yeah, hoarsely, which I thought was a pretty good trick for a non-vocalized response. I think I get it. Death’s part of the cycle, right? If that’s what it takes…?

  He gave a satisfied quark! and both my spirit animals disappeared to leave me bowled over and rolling through fire wood with Tia Carley’s teeth snapping at my throat.

  I’d clearly missed a couple rounds while I was talking to my guides. We’d scattered from the wicker man and knocked embers and brush over half the cave. I smelled burned fur, and it wasn’t all Tia: coyote fur somehow had its own special stink when it burned, distinct and separate from toasted wolf. There was more blood than there’d been, too, some of it tinged with my scent, some of it with Tia’s. I hurt in new places all over my body.

  I had spent a lot of time hurting in new places the last several hours, and it was starting to piss me off. I writhed under Tia’s weight, flinging her away, and charged after her single-mindedly, leaping the fire ring again to put us right back under the wicker man. She’d started this fight, what with murdering Naomi Allison and probably Lynn Schumacher, never mind the more literal attack just a few minutes ago. She’d started it, but I was by God going to finish it.

  With that thought, I let most of my rational mind go.

  I’d been right. My longer legs and rangier form gave me a speed advantage, once I gave in to the coyote form. Tia rushed me and I spun to the side, cornered on one foot, and tore flesh from her haunch as she crashed by me. Her yelp was pure soprano pain and fury, but when she came back at me, I was already gone.

  Gone up, in a leap very much like the one I’d performed outside the theater when people’d started screaming. Coyotes were springy like Tiggers, a great mass of potential able to leap straight up and dive forward to catch a rabbit. Or in this case, a wolf: I landed on Tia’s hindquarters. She collapsed under my weight, which probably wouldn’t happen with a normal wolf and coyote, and in her surprise, flipped over to engage in another whirlwind struggle of tooth and claw. But I already had the upper hand, and no compunction against using my greater weight to keep her pinned.

  Panic soured her scent as I crawled up her body, and her struggles altered from attacking to escaping. Her back claws raked my stomach and I snarled with pain, but disemboweling me would take more time than she had. There was one thing she could do to—if not win, then at least not permanently lose—this fight, and she was much too deep in wolf-mind to think of shifting shape.

  Grim and determined, I sank my teeth into her throat and held on.

  Blood, salty, tangy, sweet, flooded my tongue. I wanted to be all coyote, all predator, all beast, so that all the blood meant to me was survival. I couldn’t divorce myself that far: I knew all too well that it meant Tia was dying, too. She’d murdered at least two people. In a dog-eat-dog world, that certainly meant she deserved what was coming to her.

  But coyotes weren’t dogs.

  I eased off just a fraction, certain Tia had already lost enough blood to reduce her aggressiveness. I was right: she flinched and gave me a wild stare, scrabbled a little, then lay still, gold eyes wide on mine. Her breathing was fractured, blood pumping into my mouth with each gasp. It drooled out again past my teeth and gums, taste growing more bitter. More like death, I thought, and in weariness, released her.

  She surged once, trying to regain her feet. I put my—paw; it was still a paw—out, placing it over the bleeding holes in her throat, and let my shoulders sink. Whispered, Rattler, one last time, and dreamed myself human again.

  Blinding power deluged me, this time ripping away all the rich, overwhelming senses of the coyote form. It was as debilitating to be human as it had been to be a coyote: suddenly I was blind, physically weak, unable to scent, barely able to hear. Nearby fire was hotter against my mostly
-bare skin than it had been against fur, the air drier and less comfortable to breathe, but I could hardly smell the flame. I wanted to cry, bereft of the animalistic world, but instead I leaned forward, numb human senses all I had at my disposal, and risked calling the healing magic that was my birthright.

  It responded: that was never the fear. It responded brilliantly, an outpouring of strength more significant than I’d ever commanded. I clenched a fist over Tia’s throat, throttling my own magic back to something more manageable: I had no desire to repeat the cancer incident. Just like always, I still needed control, not raw power.

  The fire ring, battered and broken as it was, was a place of ritual. Condemnable ritual, maybe, but ritual. I extended my other hand toward its boundaries and split my concentration: one part of me holding Tia in stasis a few seconds, not yet healing her, and the other part lighting up a power circle in what had, moments earlier, been a sacrificial monument.

  The cave itself responded, magic flowing from its walls into the floor and then upward around the circle I created. Feeling like I hadn’t spoken in years, I said, “Raven,” out loud.

  He dropped from the ceiling, a sketch of light and wings, to land by Tia’s head. A look of unmistakable greed crossed his birdy face, and I chuckled despite myself. “No. Her pretty gold eyes aren’t for you to eat. I’ll bring you shiny food later, Raven. Right now she’s dying and I need you to help me walk the line and bring her back.”

  The bird tucked his beak into his ruff and gave me a disbelieving stare. I said, “I know,” very quietly. “You gave me the all-clear. The warrior’s path permits her death. Maybe it even encourages it. But it’s not what I want, Raven. I don’t mind being a fighter. I can kill, if I have to. But I don’t have to this time. I’m going to find another way. Will you help me?”

  Raven kloked as softly as I’d spoken, then sprang up and beat wing around the circle, stopping four times to crash his wings against it. Cardinal directions, I expected; power criss-crossed me as he smacked the final line into place, and I felt something uncoil within me. Rattler unwound from my abdomen, a thing of light and lines just as Raven was, and inclined his head to me, as if respecting the choice I’d made. He stretched out along Tia like he’d done to me earlier on the street, then hissed once in anticipation. It had only been seconds, but it felt like I had been holding back power forever when I finally released it, trusting Raven and Rattler to be my tempering.

  The healing itself was easy, with two spirit guides and the untapped magic pounding through me. Rattler’s first gift had been the sloughing away of all my time-consuming visualizations, all my vehicle metaphors and layering processes that had let me heal before he came to me. Both patient and healer only needed the right mindset, the acceptance of the basic shamanic belief that life was change, and change could be effected instantaneously. I knew it could be done, and it was easier on a canine mind, even one burying a human mind within it, than it would have been on a conscious human. Inside one breath she was bleeding out from the throat; inside the next, she was listless from blood loss, but whole. Even burned patches of fur were restored, and all the smaller wounds from our fight disappeared.

  Awakening outrage lit Tia’s eyes and she writhed under my hand, which still lay tight against her throat. I shook my head, denying her escape. Pinning her down not just with my weight, but with sheets of silver-blue magic. Contempt flashed across her face, expressed by a curled-back lip that exposed her canines. I felt a surge of power as she attempted to transform from wolf to human shape.

  It should have worked. Hours earlier, it had: I’d been unable to hold her behind shields in the moment of transformation, one magic canceling the other out. But I had Rattler with me now, and he lay coiled around Tia like she was his own oversize stuffed animal. Her shifting powers were inherent, as much a part of her as her nose, but Rattler was a master of shapechanging, as would be any creature which shed its skin. Between his will and mine, she would remain in wolf form until I chose otherwise.

  And choose I did. My magic already lay in her flesh, from the wild and exhausting battle against cancer all the way to the healing I’d just performed. I let it sink deeper, searching inside for the gift, or the curse, that made her what she was.

  Werewolf, no question about it; the word itself was a point of pride to her. A point of vulnerability, too: it meant so much that it offered me a path into a deep part of her soul, a place I had no business going.

  I went.

  A man-made stone hill of ridiculous height swelled up before me, then faded again, leaving behind a vaguely recognizable afterimage: steep sides, a broad flat top and greenery below; one hill built on another. Then it was gone entirely, a midnight garden growing around me. Ancient woods with massive, wide-spread trees and thin undergrowth littered a rolling landscape, forty shades of green. But something unhealthy discolored its beauty. Darkness turned greens to ichory black and throttled the life from the great trees. I’d never entered a garden that felt rotten to—or from—the core; even my own Spartan internal world was only that, not spoiled. I turned cautiously, wishing I had my sword in hand, but tight-woven shields would have to do.

  A cave mouth, alarmingly familiar, lay to my left. Last time I’d seen it, a rockslide had been pulled into it, blocking it. Now, though, it was open to the world, and a mewling black beast crawled from it as I watched. It was followed by two more, all of them nasty little things covered in slime, though they rolled and rubbed themselves in dry moss until the goop came off. They got bigger as they rolled, shedding the worst of their ugliness and taking on a more common place form: wolves, born from the bowels of the earth. They paced toward me without seeing me, growing larger with each step, until they were in front of me, and abruptly, all at once, threw off their lupine bodies to become women every bit as striking as Tia Carley was.

  I shot a compulsive glance at the night sky. The moon was quartered, just enough to spill light through the wide-spaced trees. Not, certainly, the full moon werewolves were legendarily bound to.

  The three women leaped into canine form again, leaving one another behind. I followed one, inhumanly quick on my feet as I often was in gardens; no need to change form here, for which I was grateful. My quarry stopped often, becoming human, seducing and killing men—always men, never women—and moving on. Time and again she met with her sisters, all of them vicious with killing pleasure, and as weeks rolled into years it because obvious these beasts were by no means tied to the moon. Their power came from somewhere else: from the cave they’d crawled from, and from the being who lay somewhere within it. A banshee had called him the Master, and what little I knew about him said that if werewolves were his creatures, the world would be a better place if they were eradicated.

  Time, as if in response to my thought, warped forward. The three wolf sisters came together and faced a woman with light-colored hair. She was unarmed and unafraid, waiting on three killers beneath the light of what was now a full moon, and when they were within a dozen feet of her, she knelt and put her hands in the earth.

  Shockingly, I recognized the gesture. I’d used it myself, calling up a power circle to contain a wendigo only a few months earlier. Magic sprang up for her as it had done for me, flares bringing my attention to a huge circle of standing stones so distant from us and from one another that I’d never have noticed them without the magic suddenly flowing through them.

  I didn’t understand a word of the language she shouted in, but I didn’t need to: its effects were vivid and obvious. The wolf sisters collapsed in on themselves, writhing, howling, twisting as their very bodies were reshaped. As the magic inside them was countermanded by someone else, their master howled up out of the darkness to object. The fair-haired woman slapped his presence away as if he was nothing more than an annoying bug. The moon rose and set and rose again as the woman worked her magic, and on the final night, the third night of the full moon, she left the sisters beaten and battered, but not dead. Come morning, they staggered to their f
eet and tested their shapeshifting skills, and found themselves as werewolves of legend were: bound to human form all but three nights of the month.

  Cursed to human form: that was the word Tia had used. The fair-haired woman had cursed them to near-mortality, and in doing so used more magic than I’d ever seen anyone do. My stomach lurched, pulling me toward that show of power, and for the first time in my life I actually wanted to follow. To find out who she was, and to study with her, learning what more I might be able to do.

  I would, I promised myself. Very soon, I would. But time twisted again, dragging me out of the midnight garden I thought represented the past, and thrust me into a spiky angry garden I was reasonably certain represented Tia’s current situation. Thorns dragged at me, prickling protests that told me what she’d been trying to do, though having touched on the Master’s presence in a world gone away, I almost knew already.

  So much power necessary to break the fair-haired woman’s spell. The troupe with their transformative dances, with the enormous gathering of healing magic meant for so many people, offered her almost the only chance she would ever have to break the magic binding her to a mostly-mortal life. She was sick, from her ancestors’ points of view; all the werewolves through history were, tied as they’d been to the moon. Only healing magic could cure that. Three nights of the dancers’ power sucked up might have been enough to counter the ancient magic. Failing that, having discovered me, my own talent might be enough to rip apart a spell set millennia ago.

  And only the death of innocents could feed the Master, who was weak. I’d interrupted his feeding a year ago; my own mother had done the same, almost thirty years prior to that. He had to be starving by now, but a wicker man full of people who’d done nothing to deserve death might have offered him enough appetizer to lend Tia’s desperate transformative magic a little strength. It would certainly endear her to him, so if he should ever loosen himself from the rubble holding him down, he might turn some aspect of his power to freeing her from the constraints her kind had been put under centuries ago. As far as hedging bets went, it was a good call.