by C. E. Murphy
Thin gray film rose out of the cauldron, sucking itself skintight against the dancers’ contours beneath their clothes. I had the impression I’d been granted X-ray vision—or maybe M-ray vision, Magic-Ray—as the Sight ignored what they were wearing and honed in on the stuff racing over them, providing me with a totally non-titillating examination of their bodies.
It was even money on whether the spasms were from being cling-wrapped tightly enough to send them into some kind of hind-brain attempt to throw it off, or if the murk was actually invading their bodies. It had already crawled to their chests and throats and sluiced toward their gaping mouths, and I had no freaking clue what it might be.
A smart doctor—maybe a smart shaman—would diagnose the damn problem first, but apparently the whole warrior-princess costume obliterated any kind of rational thought I might’ve indulged in. I vaulted onto the cauldron with a yell and slapped my hands over their mouths just before the gray stuff slipped over their lips and down their throats.
About six things happened at once.
First off, somewhere way in the distance, I heard Billy Holliday bellowing, “Joanne Walker, what in holy living hell!?” As far as I was concerned, that pretty much made up the soundtrack for everything else that happened. Time stretched, extending into slow moments that crystallized everything around me into clarity and allowed me to discard that which was unimportant. On reflection, that included music, calls to 911, some shouting and the start of a stampede, but right then, those seven words made up the walls of the world for a brief and horribly long eternity.
The good news was that the gray film leaped off the dancers, who collapsed out from under my hands. The bad news was, it leaped from them to me, and I had a sudden intimate understanding of just what they’d been enduring.
Enduring. There’s a funny choice of words. It’s not one I’d think would apply to a scenario that couldn’t have lasted longer than five seconds, but under the film’s tenterhooks it was the only one that seemed appropriate.
It was trying to get in, trying to invade. I felt my muscles seize and bunch and rattle in just the way the dancers’ had, a million pinpricks of ice jabbing under my skin and trying to work their way beneath. I’d never been flayed and wasn’t eager to try it, but I thought it might feel like this: burning pain that did its best to defy words and to turn me into nothing more than a scream.
A scream. Screaming was bad. Not because I didn’t deserve to, because anybody being flayed probably deserves to scream, but because the stuff had a purpose, and thwarting flaying gray film was a worthy goal. I snapped my mouth shut and rolled my lips in, biting their insides to keep myself from indulging in the scream that would let the stuff in. Then I wondered if my nose was enough of an access point to let it in, and how I was going to breathe if I needed to pinch my nostrils shut, too.
Then again, if the hurting didn’t stop soon, I wasn’t going to care much about breathing. More or less reassured by the thought, I stopped worrying about it. Look, logic in the face of excruciating pain isn’t one of my strong points. It worked for me, which was all that mattered. Meantime, my stomach, eager to add its opinion on agony, violently rejected the fizzy pink drink I’d indulged in earlier.
It was significantly worse coming up than it’d been going down, and it hadn’t been good to begin with. Human nature trumped scary crawling gray stuff and I doubled over, expelling bright pink spew. The film retreated, apparently as disgusted by Technicolor vomit as I was. The lack of pain left me astonishingly clear-headed.
Clear-headed enough to see that more of the gray fog was bubbling up from the cauldron and flowing over its edges, hurrying toward the partygoers.
Toward people I’d invited to come have a good time tonight.
I forgot that I was probably the only one in the room who could see the goo. Forgot that I’d jumped up onto the cauldron like a madwoman and the two people I’d touched had collapsed, which, by any coherent standard, suggested I was dangerous. Forgot that my own magic had a visible component, and that I was in the middle of a very public place.
Or maybe I didn’t forget. Maybe I just didn’t care, because I’d had enough of innocent bystanders getting run over on my watch. Agony fled my bones, chased out by fury, and I smashed through sickness to call up the healing magic that was my heritage. I had no idea what I was up against, but that’d never stopped me before. Better to turn myself into a super-size McSnack for gray ooze than to let anybody else get eaten.
Silver power surged, its brilliant blue highlights making me feel like an electrical conduit. I could See it, blazing with righteous anger, and while I still couldn’t hear much beyond Billy’s shout, I’m pretty sure that was when the stampede started. Anybody in their right mind wanted to get the hell away from me. For a room as crowded as that one, it was amazing how everybody managed to jump back two feet and leave a circle of emptiness around me.
At least, I thought it was them lurching back. I had a certain amount of success with the idea of capturing things in nets, but a net wasn’t going to hold goop in. I went the bubble-boy route, sending a physical flare of magic from my core into a sphere around me. It was wholly possible that I shoved everybody out of my way, although I didn’t think that was very polite and shamany. Then again, a dead shaman had told me I’d walk a warrior’s path, so maybe I had license to metaphysically bludgeon people once in a while.
Either way, they were a bit farther out of harm’s way, and the cauldron-born ichor ran up against my sphere and began crawling upward, looking for egress and finding none. I figured it would take about two seconds before it reached the top and started dripping down on me. That meant I had about a second and a half to come up with a brilliant plan to stop it.
Time resumed its normal pace, two seconds blew by, and I was screwed.
There’s nothing especially attractive about shrieking like a little kid and curling up in a ball with your hands over your head, but that’s what I did. I didn’t want to face that skin-peeling sensation again. Even the idea made my eyes hot with tears, and if falling down and sobbing kept it away from me for another half second, I wasn’t too proud to grovel.
More than that went by before I realized my skin wasn’t being pulled off. I peeked through my fingers at the shell I’d built around myself and the cauldron.
Man. I had no idea what it looked like from the outside, but from within, it looked like a Gaussian blur of hell. Formless gray surged and slid around me, a relentless ocean of potential danger and pain. Color bled in, but only at the corners of my eyes: if I jerked to look straight on at it, red and black faded away, as if something living didn’t want to meet my gaze. Thin, bonelike hooks scratched at my arms and flinched back again. A sound crept in behind the small bones of my ears, something high and lost that reminded me of the banshee.
It made shapes out of the mist, emaciated wavering things with gaping eyes and mouths. They had the weight of age to them, pressing down on me as if, if they couldn’t scrape their way in through my skin, they’d crush me into component parts that could be absorbed into the gray.
A little belatedly, it occurred to me to wonder why they weren’t scraping their way inside my skin, and I stopped peeking through my hands to look at my fingers.
Seeing through your own skin is a bizarre effect. When my magic had first broken loose, there’d been so much to burn off I’d seen my flesh and blood as rainbows, shimmering with power. Over time that variety had faded to the silver and blue that I now considered to be mine, and right now that was what I saw: oil-slick pools of color burning in my veins and swimming through my muscles. All that magic had once been knotted up under my breastbone, making me sick with the need to act, but it’d become a much more integral part of me, almost always active to some degree, and ready to be called on in its full strength when I needed it.
Offhand, I guessed the gray slime wasn’t down with shamanic power, and that a human body rife with it wasn’t an appealing host. It had likely dared to attack
me in the first place because I hadn’t called my power up actively: now that I’d turned it on, I was unfriendly territory. That suggested I was probably dealing with some kind of death magic, because while shamanism had as much to do with death as life, I was coming to think of it as a more or less inherently life-positive kind of magic. Though if I found myself using phrases like life-positive very often I was going to have to life-negative myself out of humiliation. Nobody says things like that. Jeez.
The point, though, was that if the nasty gray slime couldn’t get a foothold in me when I was topped up with blue glowy lifey goodness, then it probably had a big fat hold on death itself. In fact, me being a poor host was, in every aspect but one, excellent. It meant the bubble of power would keep the stuff in, and that I’d be perfectly safe as long as I could maintain it.
And therein lay the flaw. I’d been in the midst of a hideous gray blur for less than a minute and I was already eager to get out. I still didn’t have any idea how. This kind of thing wasn’t covered in the shamanic handbook. In fact, nobody’d given me a handbook, an oversight I felt was increasingly gross as I stumbled along this path.
Well, said a little voice inside my head, you might not know how to get out, but you don’t actually have to be stuck in the gray, you know.
I hated that voice. It sounded just like me being sarcastic, which was bad enough, but it also usually had a very good point, which only added insult to injury. I was pretty sure everybody had a voice that made snide comments and that I’d had one before my world went magical and mystical, but I couldn’t remember for sure. I was afraid to ask anybody else in case they said no. Being a shaman was challenging enough. Being an actually insane shaman would just suck.
Teeth clenched against mumbling imprecations at a voice in my head, I let go of the Sight so I could, well, see.
Only when the gray faded did I realize how weird it was I hadn’t been able to See beyond it. Usually the Sight gave me layers upon layers: I’d looked through half of Seattle in the past, buildings becoming strong semi-visible constructs of pride and place, things that knew what they were meant to do and glad to do it. People were brilliant spots of color, and highways black-and-blue jagged smears across a natural landscape. Other living things, trees particularly, were incredible with their light, but none of it blocked each other out like the gray film had done. I’d really only encountered something like that once, when a demi-god was trying to hide his exact location from me. It’d worked, and if that meant the cauldron was pouring cranky demi-gods out into my Halloween party I was going to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with the management. Never mind that I had no idea who or what might constitute The Management in the complex spiritual world I’d been introduced to. I’d complain to it anyway. No fear, that’s me.
No fear, or no sense. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.
My sphere glimmered at a diameter too great for me to touch with spread arms. Even without the Sight it was visible to me, and by the way people were scurrying for the doors, I guessed they could see it, too. I had to look bizarre, wearing that ridiculous costume and crouched in the midst of a shimmering ball of light.
Actually, I thought I might look kind of awesomely dramatic and theatrical, at least if I wasn’t cowering. I straightened my shoulders, lifted my chin and put my fingertips against the cauldron’s platform floor. I had no idea what other people thought, but it gave me an absurd burst of confidence, and an idiotic smile bloomed across my face. If that’s what being an action hero feels like, sign me up.
Most everybody around me was moving away. From my action-hero pose I saw Thor and Phoebe holding their ground, though Phoebe’s jaw was dropped and she held her quarterstaff as if she wanted to use it. I wished my sword wasn’t peace knotted, then wished it was real, then felt a chill rush over my skin and knew that if I needed a blade to fight the mist, I’d have one. I’d earned or been given all the elements that made up sword and shield and armor, and even if I wasn’t carrying them, they were an indelible part of my shamanic gifts now.
More certain of myself, I stood up to draw a silver rapier from the ether. I’d done it in the astral plains, and though the physical blade had been lying safe at home under my bed, its presence had been as real as anything else in the world between this one and the next. I was serenely sure I could reach through the intervening space in the real world, too, and have the sword I’d taken from a god materialize in my hand.
Billy Holliday burst through the mass of people running the other way and shouted, “Joanne, don’t!”
All of my serene confidence exploded into little tiny bits. My fingers spasmed open, loosing any hope I had of seizing my sword, and the Sight flashed back on to give me a visual on the hair-raising sensation that the mist thought I’d shown weakness. Indeed, the sound-induced figures in the fog surged, clawing at my power, trying to break it apart so they could get inside me. The rest of the world went away, blocked out by the gray, and my heart seized up with the clenching panic of trying to figure out what I’d done wrong, or had been about to do wrong, that made Billy yell at me. Dammit, every time I thought I was getting a handle on things it turned out I was wrong. I’d have done anything to have Coyote and his lectures and interminable practice sessions back.
Billy said, “Don’t move,” and I knew from the sound of his voice that his teeth were clenched. I didn’t know if he was talking to me or to Phoebe and Thor, but I thought maybe I’d just do what he said and find out why later. A moment later he stepped through the barrier of my power into the midst of the gray, and gave me a grim nod of approval.
Now, the sphere was meant to keep things in, not out, and if anybody could walk through my defenses it would be Billy, who’d shared enough psychic intimacies with me that if Melinda was the jealous type we’d both be in real trouble. I still wouldn’t have expected him to do that in a million years. A combined demand of what are you doing? and get out of here! and how did you do that? came out as “Wblrdt,” and Billy, to my utter shock, snapped, “Shut up, Joanne.”
There were things I’d come to expect from William Robert Holliday. He’d turn up to off-duty events in women’s clothes, for example. Tonight’s ball gown wasn’t an outrageous costume choice, overlooking the detail that Billy, like most people, didn’t often have a chance to indulge in formal wear. So I expected that. I also expected him to take the mystical more seriously than I was constitutionally capable of doing. He was a True Believer, and had been since childhood when he started seeing ghosts after his older sister’s death by drowning. I used to give him hell about it. Now I was grateful for his calm solid presence when the world went wacky.
And despite all the grief I’d given him, he’d never once responded with the kind of comeback I deserved, not even an I told you so when I found myself faced with irrefutable proof that the world contained a lot more than met the eye. I couldn’t remember him ever telling anybody to shut up, much less me in the midst of a paranormal crisis.
I’d been functioning on “act now, think later,” which had, as a rule, worked for me so far.
Now I was scared.
CHAPTER 4
My obvious impulse was to hiss, “What can I do?” but I’d just been told both to shut up and to not draw a blade on the mist. That left me with a big fat nothing in the easy-choices department, and every inch of my body was cold with indecision and worry. Moreover, I didn’t take it as a good sign that the ooze slicked away from me and swirled around Billy, nibbling at the orange-and-fuchsia colors that made up his aura. They were as steady as I’d ever seen them, nothing in his psychic presence suggesting distress, but it bothered the hell out of me. I was supposed to take on all mystical comers, not let my friends step up and do the job.
Unless, of course, my friends had a better idea of what to do, in which case I should get over myself and help somehow, albeit without asking aloud what might be useful. Billy was almost obscured by the mist, nearly all of it having drifted from the perimeter of my sphere to su
rround him. My heart took up residence in my stomach and churned the remaining pink drink. I closed my lips on a vile-tasting burp and gave Billy five more seconds to tell me what to do before I went Grecian on the gray stuff’s ass.
Billy said, “You don’t belong here,” so gently I flinched, first out of surprise at hearing his voice and then from childish insult. I wasn’t the world’s greatest shaman or anything, but I was doing my best. His vote of confidence meant a lot. Having it dismissed cut my legs out from under me.
“You should be resting.” His colors strengthened, coming through the mist more strongly, like he was putting energy into what he was saying. Exactly like that, actually: from three feet away I felt soothed. Even the sweat beading under my wig and trickling against my scalp stopped itching so much. “I know it’s easy to travel at this time of year, and that you miss your bodies, but they’re gone. Long gone.” Strain showed in his voice, and I finally clued in.
“It’s dead people!”
The mist whipped away from Billy and surged at me, a high-pitched whine suddenly loud enough to make my eardrums ache. The gaping eyes and howling mouths came clearer to me, much clearer as one of the ghosts came at me like it wanted a kiss. Dull cold slid along my cheekbones, fingering a scar on one. I shuddered and stepped back, finding the edge of the cauldron with my heel.
“Joanie, stay still.” Billy’s voice was cold as the dead’s.
I whispered, “They can’t get at me. They don’t like my magic. Just tell me how to banish them and get out of here.”
“Joanne.” Billy had four kids and a fifth on the way, but I’d never heard him employ a Daddy Voice before. Part of me seized up with resentment. My own father and I had an atheistic relationship, which is to say, he’d never quite believed he’d ended up with a child at all. I generally disliked anything that reminded me of that.
The rest of me just seized up because that’s what instinct tells people to do when they hear a Daddy Voice. I stared at Billy, who kept his attention on the mist and spoke through his teeth. “They don’t have to get in you. The longer you’re around them, the more they latch on. The more you move, the more they notice you. The louder you are, the faster they come to you. So shut up.”