Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  “I need some time off,” was unquestionably the wrong thing to say, but my mouth said it anyway. Morrison’s expression darkened and I pinched the bridge of my nose. “What I really mean is—”

  “You don’t have any time off, Walker.”

  Contrary to the end, I said, “Yeah, I do, a couple weeks. I still get my vacation, don’t I? Even if—”

  “Fine. Take it. Get out of my hair.” He brushed by me, scowling, and went into the kitchen, where he began making a pot of coffee. If he was anyone else, I’d say he began slamming things around to make a pot of coffee, actually, but that would be far too emotional and temperamental for my boss.

  I stomped after him. “Captain, listen to me. I—”

  He growled, “I thought I said you could have your time off. What the hell do you need now?” in a credible wolf imitation.

  I stuck my jaw out and stared at the ceiling, willing patience into my voice before I dared look at him again. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone.”

  His nostrils flared. I mashed my lips together, glaring as he snapped, “Your mother dying again?”

  I was going to kill him. That was new. Usually I figured he was going to kill me. I snapped, “No, but maybe she’s sending me messages from beyond the veil. You know. The usual,” right back.

  Flippancy was the wrong approach. Morrison started yelling. Overall, he probably had every right to: he’d had something of a bad night, and it could all be laid at my feet. I, however, just kept talking beneath the shouting. It wasn’t that I had any expectation that he’d hear me. It just helped me not listen, which I didn’t want to do. Eventually my explanation ran out, but Morrison’s head of steam didn’t.

  I sighed and said, “Captain,” to no avail. After a few more seconds, I tried, “Boss?” but that went over like a raindrop in a thunderstorm, too, so I moved on to, “Morrison!”

  It was like talking into outer space. His outrage swallowed anything I had to say, but if I waited for him to wind down on his own, I’d still be there an hour after I was supposed to be at the airport. I put my shoulders back, drew a deep breath and bellowed, “Michael!”

  The silence that followed was so complete the coffee pot’s sudden burble sounded like a jet engine exploding. Morrison gaped, florid color fading.

  “What do you suppose we would do,” I said conversationally, “if we ever had sex? I mean, what would we call each other? Captain and Walker? Morrison and Detective? Or would we just find excuses to not call each other anything?”

  Morrison’s eyes bugged. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to shut up or if I was enjoying the left field my brain had gone out to. I hadn’t been previously aware that I’d spent subconscious time on this subject, but given the way I was running off at the mouth, it seemed I had. “It’s not that Michael isn’t a nice name,” I went on blithely. “It’s just that you look like you’re having an apoplectic fit at being called by it, and I can only remember you calling me by my given name once.”

  “Siobhán.”

  The world went out from under my feet. When you live in the altered state of reality I’d gotten used to, that sort of phrase was dangerous to use, because it could be literally true. In this case, I was pretty sure it wasn’t, but it sure felt like it. My knees went weak, my vision tunneled, and I felt all floaty, like Wile E. Coyote right before he noticed the road had been painted over thin air. I had to try twice to wet my lips, because someone’d taken sandpaper to my throat. “…I meant Joanne.”

  A very faint light of triumph glittered in Morrison’s eyes, and the brief smile he offered made my stomach turn into a round stone of alarm before it sank toward my still-floaty feet. I could feel the color Morrison had lost starting to flood my own face, and now I wished very much that I’d shut up a long time ago. Possibly years ago. Morrison left the counter to come stand toe to toe with me. I had shoes on and he was in stocking feet, so I had a slight height advantage, but I seemed to have forgotten how to breathe. Morrison didn’t appear to be having that problem. I thought it was probably a bad sign for the home team that the competition was still breathing when all signs pointed toward me being dead. On the other hand, dead had to be better than standing there in Morrison’s kitchen working up to enough heat for self-immolation.

  “Overlooking,” Morrison said from about three inches away, and so quietly a fly on the wall wouldn’t be able to hear a thing, “the sheer inappropriateness of this conversation, I try to leave work at work as much as possible. I prefer to be called Michael in bed. Was there another point to this discussion, Detective Walker?”

  I couldn’t blush any harder, but there was one worse thing I could do. My eyes betrayed me, filling with stinging tears. I told myself it was embarrassment, which was true, and that it wasn’t gut-wrenching disappointment at the rebuke ending in my formal title instead of my name, which was so patently untrue I didn’t think anybody in the entire universe would believe it. I rolled my jaw forward until the joint hurt, trying to counter emotional pain with the much, much less agonizing sensation of physical pain, and averted my gaze.

  That was a mistake. Moving my eyes made the tears spill over. I bit my tongue until I tasted blood instead of letting myself lift a hand to wipe them away. Maybe Morrison wouldn’t notice, if I didn’t draw attention to them. Maybe a meteor would smash through the ceiling and end my humiliation, too. I wasn’t counting on either.

  My throat was so tight that the words I forced out actually hurt, thin scrapings in the air. “I’m sure there’s paperwork I could fill out for a sabbatical or a leave of absence, but any way you look at it I effectively took one of those eighteen months ago when my mother died, so I figure I’m probably screwed in that department.” The unfortunate choice of words hit me a little too late, but since ritual suicide sounded like a better option than trying to correct myself, I just kept talking. “I’ve got to go to Ireland. I don’t know how long I’m going to be gone, and I don’t even know what I’m going to be like when or if I come back. So what I’m really trying to say, Captain, is that you win. You win. I quit.”

  “Well, thank goddamned God,” Morrison said, and took my face in both hands to guide me into a kiss.

  On a list of Things Joanne Was Expecting, that one hadn’t even been penciled in. In the unlikely event it had, I would have imagined it as the possessive, frustrated kiss that impatient film noir heroes give the aggravating women of their dreams.

  Morrison kissed me like he was apologizing for making me cry. Thumbs on my cheeks, brushing tears away over the thin scar, and he traced that scar like it meant I was fragile. His mouth was warm and soft and tasted a little bit like coffee, but once I’d noticed those things I didn’t seem to be able to quantify anything anymore, and besides, the floor had fallen out from under my feet again. I really thought I might be floating, so wrapping my legs around his waist seemed like a very sensible thing to do.

  One or the other of us ran out of air before I got that far, though, and we broke apart, me with an astonished gasp and Morrison with that glimmer of satisfaction in his eyes again. I wet my lips two or three times and searched for something more intelligent to say than, “Buh,” and Morrison’s grin turned first sly, then slightly embarrassed. The embarrassment gave me something to hang my hat on, and I squeaked, “Speaking of sheer inappropriateness?”

  “I’m—”

  I clapped my hand over his mouth. “I swear to God, Morrison, if you say I’m sorry I will break your nose.” I thought I was more likely to knee him in the crotch, but men never think that threat is funny. Broken noses, funny. Bruised dangly bits, not funny. Morrison’s eyes crinkled a little and he took my hand away from his mouth to reveal a crooked smile.

  See?

  The smile fell away, though, and he put his thumb into the palm of my hand. I curled my fingers around it, like we were about to begin waltzing. “I don’t want you to quit, Joanie.”

  “Don’t.” My voice shot up to a strangled register and I forced it back down
. “Don’t you even dare start calling me Joanie now, Morrison. That is not fair.” My hand had tightened around his, hard enough to make my fingers ache. “Really? You mean that?”

  Morrison pulled his lips back from his teeth, brief expression of frustration. “Yeah, I do. You’re turning into a decent cop, Walker. I never thought I’d say it, but you’re doing a good job.”

  A knot I hadn’t known was there suddenly unraveled in my heart, sending sprays of light along a vision of a cracked windshield that flashed before my eyes. I could all but hear the glass crackling and fusing back together, sunshine heating it into something strong and whole again. When the flare of brilliance faded, there was still a vicious shatter-spot in the windshield, a hole punched almost all the way through, with spiderwebs of dark, injured glass radiating out from it.

  But for the first time since I’d seen that windshield when I lay dying in a garden of my own mind, there was more whole glass than damaged. I laughed, a surprised little sound, and put my forehead against Morrison’s shoulder like it was the natural thing to do. “Thanks, Captain. Thank you. That means more to me than I know how to tell you.”

  “You’re still quitting, aren’t you.”

  I nodded against his shoulder and he put his mouth against my hair. “Thank goddamned God,” he said again. “I should’ve said resignation accepted before I kissed you.”

  “I’ll consider not suing.”

  He chuckled and tightened his hand around mine. “We need to talk, Walker.”

  I backed up enough to give him a sloppy half smile. “About the elephant in the room, sir?”

  Morrison looked pained. “Considering how long it took to get you to start calling me sir, I hate to think how long it’s going to take to get you to stop. Yeah,” he said more quietly and more seriously. “About the elephant in the room. We’ve been dancing around it a long damned time.”

  “Yeah. We have been. Well. I knew I had been.” I let out another breath of laughter and closed my eyes a moment. “No wonder you were so pissed off about Mark Bragg. That makes me feel better. Shit, Captain. It’s always been you. Didn’t you know that?” I didn’t know why he should have. It took me ages to figure it out.

  “No.” He shrugged, small motion. “I didn’t. Between Ed Johnson and you taking the promotion to detective, and your damned mentor—”

  “Coyote,” I said softly. “Yeah, that was…but no. That’s not going to work for me. There’s…too much give, there.”

  Morrison spread his hand without letting go of mine. “And that cab driver of yours—”

  “Gary?” I flung my hands up and stepped back, laughter mixed with outrage. “What is it with everybody thinking I’ve got something going on with Gary? He’s seventy-four years old! He could be my grandfather! I love him, but come on! God! If I had half the sex life you people think I do, I’d—I’d get laid a lot more.” Oh, yes, that was me, mistress of witty repartee.

  Morrison’s voice dropped about two octaves. “If you’d like to write a letter of resignation, that’s a topic I’d like to address in some detail.”

  A blush that started somewhere around my navel—or possibly several inches lower—crept up to my cheeks. I covered my face with my hands, feeling like a glowbug, and sighed. “I can write the letter, but this conversation and…everything else…is going to have to wait. I’ve got to go to the airport. My flight is in two hours.”

  “What?” Good humor drained out of Morrison’s expression, leaving something more vulnerable and bereft than I’d expected. Regret lanced through me and I bit my bottom lip.

  “I’m leaving. When I said I had to go to Ireland, I meant right now. I’ve got this sick knot in my stomach yanking me that way. I’ve got to go. I need you to go see Jim Littlefoot this afternoon and tell the troupe they’re safe now, okay? Please. I would, but—”

  He ignored the request, which I knew didn’t mean he hadn’t heard it, or that he wouldn’t do it. What he said, though, in a low voice, was, “You have a real knack for running away from things, Walker.”

  A whole new kind of pain replaced regret: anger, sharpened with the discomfort of knowing how right my boss— former boss—was. “I know. I know, and that’s why I’ve got to go. There are things there I’ve been running away from a lot longer than I’ve been running from this.” I made a little circle with my hand, encompassing the both of us. “I’ll come back, Michael. I just don’t know when.”

  “If you don’t,” Morrison said in a low rumble, “I’m coming after you, Walker.”

  I managed a quick smile. “I’m counting on it, sir.”

  Morrison reached up to brush his thumb over the scar on my cheek again, then let his hand drop as he nodded toward the door. “All right. Go. Get out of here. I don’t want to see you again until you’ve got this thing settled.” Familiar gruffness filled his voice, but for once I wasn’t fooled. I stepped forward to steal one brief, hard kiss, then bolted for the door before I could say anything to mess the moment up.

  Two minutes later I was on the road, my heart still hammering until it made my stomach sick. I had to get to Ireland because of the pull I’d felt, because of the women I’d seen in my visions, and because of one other thing I hadn’t told Morrison. Something I was going to need help with, help that neither he nor anybody else I knew could provide.

  Help finding a cure, because I’d been bitten by a werewolf.

  Acknowledgments

  My editor Mary-Theresa Hussey, to whom SPIRIT DANCES is dedicated, deserves a particular shout-out this time around. I made Matrice crazy by sending her the final scene in this book years before the rest of it was written, and she’s been waiting for it ever since. I hope it was worth the wait. :) (Editor’s note: Yes! Finally! And where’s the next one?!)

  The rest of the usual suspects know who you are: the Word Warriors, who helped me get this book finished with literally days to spare before my son was born, Jennifer Jackson, Agent Extraordinaire, Paul “Beta-Reader” Knappenberger, and my husband, Ted, without whom I wouldn’t be doing any of this. You’re all my heroes.

  SPIRIT DANCES

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-8893-9

  Copyright © 2011 by C.E. Murphy

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Worldwide Library, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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