Shaman Rises (The Walker Papers) (4 page)

But the fact that he’d thought of it made it a little easier to draw a deep breath and admit “Not good” aloud. “I hope like hell it is, Gary, but...”

He nodded. A nurse came in to check Annie’s blood pressure, stopped short at seeing a crowd in the room and said in an excellent, hackle-raising warning tone, “Visiting hours aren’t until—”

“This’s my granddaughter and her partner,” Gary said flatly. “They’re family. They stay.”

The nurse was old enough to have the authority age brings, but Gary’s tone and greater age apparently trumped hers. She stiffened from the core out, then gave one sharp nod and went about her business. Morrison, who wasn’t exactly uncomfortable with authority, and I, who often had problems with it, both stood still as hunted mice until she left, pretending if we didn’t move she wouldn’t notice us again.

Gary’s big shoulders rolled down in apology after she was gone. “Sorry ’bout that.”

“For preemptively adopting me? I’m okay with it.” I hugged him again and he grunted, casting a look at Morrison. I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s smile before he said, “
Partner
works for me. Holliday’s going to have to adapt.”

To my surprise and pleasure, Gary gave a huff of laughter. “Diff’rent kind of partner. ’Sides, Joanie quit the day job, so Holliday’s gonna have to adapt anyway.”

He was still calling me Joanie, which meant he was really not okay. Gary had never called me Joanie, always Jo, unless I was undergoing some sort of major emotional meltdown. Unless, as it turned out,
he
was undergoing some sort of major emotional meltdown. I didn’t think he even knew he was doing it. I put on my best smile, which was pretty wry. “Yeah. Billy is going to kill me for quitting without even warning him. I’m hoping he’ll have cooled down in the two weeks he hasn’t seen me.”

“Him and Melinda came by yesterday,” Gary said. “He’s worried, not mad. Worried about a lotta things.”

Including, no doubt, Annie Muldoon’s reappearance on the scene. I nodded, then lifted my chin a little. “Go on, go sit back down, or go get a drink of water if you want. I’ll do everything I can, Gary. You know I w—”

A doctor swept in imperiously and glowered at us all. “Mr. Muldoon, I understand we have some more family visiting. It’s already well past visiting hours and we don’t normally allow more than one family member at a time—”

“My dead wife turned up again outta nowhere and you’re tellin’ me my
granddaughter
ain’t supposed to be here? I’m an old man, Erickson, and I’m tired. You need to talk to anybody from here on out, you talk to my granddaughter, Joanne Walker. Jo, this’s Dr. Pat Erickson. Erickson, this’s Jo’s partner, Mike. If Jo ain’t here, you talk to him.” Like a cranky bear just out of hibernation, Gary lumbered back to Annie’s bedside and sat.

Dr. Pat Erickson was about forty-five, with expertly dyed auburn hair and a long nose. She was about six feet tall, just like I was, and I bet she was accustomed to people deferring to her because of her height, if nothing else. So was I, so there was a possibility of an interesting-in-the-Chinese-sense dynamic raising its ugly head, but after a few long seconds of sizing me up, Dr. Erickson sighed. “I’m sorry for the confusion with your grandmother, Ms. Walker. May I speak to you outside for a moment?”

My jaw flapped. Erickson herded me into the hall while I collected my wits and, once we were there, apologized again. “Hospital records get lost,” she said unhappily. “People do not. Ms. Walker, can you explain any of this? The only thing that makes sense is that she’s been in private care for the past four and a half years, but there are no records of it, and clearly your grandfather has no recollection of that....”

“You’re right. She has been in private care.” If my suspicions were right, it had been very, very private care, and there would never be any real-world explanations for it. I stared at the bridge of her nose, hoping I was giving the impression of looking sincerely into her eyes as I struggled to pull together a story she might accept. “She, um. We...weren’t aware of it. I know that sounds impossible, but it appears that a...humanitarian organization...has been caring for her. They...prefer to remain anonymous, so they can select the people they wish to help without...their doors being beaten down by needy applicants. They specialize in providing long-term life support to patients on the verge of death. Apparently my grandmother...had arranged that if she became very ill, they were to take her away at the point of death. She didn’t want us to know, because she felt our lives would better be able to go on, the healing process would be able to proceed, if we believed she was...really dead. It was only when she was returned to the hospital that we were...notified that this had taken place.” I was going to give myself an award for fast talking. Maybe Erickson’s long nose had inspired me, Pinocchio-like.

Confused relief flashed across the doctor’s features. She wanted to believe me, because it gave the medical professionals who had lost Annie Muldoon a way out. Besides, I was almost telling the truth. Or I thought I was, anyway, and that helped sell the story. Erickson’s only protest was, “But your grandfather didn’t mention any of this...”

“He’s had a very hard few days, Doctor. In his position I don’t think I’d have tried to explain it, either.”

Erickson’s shoulders relaxed a fractional amount. “No, I suppose not. Ms. Walker, I understand private organizations wanting to remain anonymous, but it would be enormously helpful if we could receive their medical records for Mrs. Muldoon. If they’ve released her to standard care they must believe there’s some hope or change in her diagnosis. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t admit her through regular channels, though. I don’t understand how they could avoid it. We do not have people simply walk in and claim a bed, Ms. Walker.”

“I’ll see if I can get answers for you,” was probably the most useless promise I’d ever made, but Dr. Erickson seemed grateful for it. She shook my hand and let me go back into Annie’s room, where Morrison was standing over Gary like a protective gargoyle.

“Sagebrush is used in shamanic healing to help clear the lungs,” Morrison offered as I sat across from them. “Your father says good luck.”

“Lungs, of course. Emphysema, or something that presents as it. And the sickness is still right there.” I put my hand above her chest, not quite touching her, and added, “Tell him thanks,” even though Morrison was obviously no longer on the phone with Dad.

Gary stirred, everything about his actions heavy and hopeless. “Everything okay with the doctor, Jo?”

“Yeah.” I told them the story I’d given Erickson, ending with her supposition that the mysterious private carer had concluded something had changed and that was why Annie had been returned to a public hospital. I took her hand as I spoke, letting my consciousness sink more toward investigating her health than the discussion we were having.

It didn’t take healing magic to feel her fragility. Paperlike skin lay against knobbly bones, no excess flesh to pad them. Her breathing remained perfectly steady, but a machine was doing most of it for her, so that wasn’t surprising. The heart monitor beeped, such a familiar sound from film and television that I hadn’t even heard it until I was sitting quietly and listening. An oxygen monitor was taped to one finger, weighting not just her hand, but her whole self: it seemed like she was so light and fragile that without that inconvenient piece of plastic she might float away. She had a strange scent, the hospital’s antiseptic cleanliness lying over a deeper, earthier smell. It should probably have been the smell of death and decay, but it brought to mind cool green growing places, and mist beading on leaves. I knew that scent: I’d been to the place that birthed it.

For all that it had only been a moment since I’d stopped speaking, I was still startled when Gary asked, “Is the doc right? Did somethin’ change?”

“Yeah. Me. I’m ready now.” I pressed my eyes shut and put my forehead against Annie’s hand a moment before looking up again, meeting Gary’s eyes, glancing at Morrison, basically trying to establish myself as calm, cool and in control. “I wasn’t, when she got sick. I didn’t know you, and even if I had, I could never have helped. Not back then.”

“I nearly called you about a million times, anyway.” Gary’s mouth thinned, fair acknowledgment of the twist his life had evidently taken. At this stage, I was used to my own past not being quite as I remembered. Weirdly, that didn’t make it any easier to know Gary’s wasn’t what he remembered, either. “It ain’t normal, Jo, remembering things two ways.”

“Sure it is. Cernunnos apparently does it all the time.”

That got a laugh out of the old man, which was worth everything to me. I smiled, then spread my fingers beneath Annie’s hand. “Anyway, you didn’t need to call me back then, because you had Cernunnos in your pocket. Gary, I want you to think about everything he said to you. Did he ever say she was dead?”

“He said she’d gone into the light, doll. He said he was gonna take her to her resting place. He said...” Gary trailed off, unwilling to reiterate the list again.

I couldn’t blame him, but he hadn’t repeated a couple of the things I thought were important. “And he said he’d bent time to come to her, and that he couldn’t take you where she’d gone, right? Gary, did you go back to Tir na nOg after that?”

“No, I di—” Gary sat bolt upright, looking like himself for the first time since we’d arrived. “What’re you sayin’, Jo? Did Horns
lie
to me?”

“I think he might’ve gone a long way to avoid lying to you, actually. Gary, her aura, it’s blazing green, like his. Not as bright. I can look at it without going blind, but it’s the same color. It’s like Suzanne’s, not quite human. I don’t think she died, Gary. I think he took her to Tir na nOg to rest until he could get her to me.”

“Jo, give it to me straight. What’re you sayin’?”

“I’m saying that if I’m right, this really is Annie. And I can heal her.”

Chapter Three

Morrison’s gaze went flat. It took everything I had not to make pleading eyes at him, and instead to keep my attention on Gary. I knew, I
knew
I shouldn’t have said that aloud, and if I was wrong I was never going to forgive myself. Morrison wasn’t ever going to forgive me, either.

The complete stillness in Gary’s face, the utter cessation of expectation, of hope, of fear, of anything, somehow said that he
would
forgive me if I was wrong, and that was almost worse than the alternative. I tried to keep my voice steady. “I could be wrong, Gary. I might be wrong. But Cernunnos wouldn’t have brought her to me if he didn’t think there was a chance. And that means either...” I swallowed. “Either it’s her and I’ve got a chance, or Cernunnos is corrupt and we’re all screwed and have been since the beginning. I choose not to believe that. Gary, with your permission...I’ll try.”

“No way I could say no, doll. Whaddaya need us to do?”

“Just keep the doctors off my back. I don’t know how long this is going to take. Morrison...” I gave him a pained, apologetic look, and some of his anger faded. “Will you drum me under? And do you think we can move Annie’s bed far enough away from the wall that I can build a power circle around her?”

“That’s not going to go over well.” Whether he meant moving the bed or drumming up a power circle in a hospital room, I wasn’t sure, but between the three of us we did edge Annie’s bed several inches away from the wall, then rotated it about thirty degrees so it aligned east-west. I squeezed between the wall and the bed, for once not self-conscious about greeting the cardinal directions aloud and asking them to be the points of my power circle. I guessed that meant I was getting better about ritual.

Not that much better, though, because what I really ended up with was a power diamond, with Annie sort of squeezed in the middle. It couldn’t be helped: the room wasn’t big enough and the medical equipment wasn’t mobile enough for anything else, but it emphasized the awareness that my whole shamanic approach seemed to be that rules were made to be broken. I sat beside Annie again and gave Morrison a hopeful look. He got my drum from the corner I’d tucked it in, and he and Gary sat across from me.

Gary did a double-take at the drum, which was fair enough. When he’d first seen it, its broad round surface had been painted with a wolf, a rattlesnake and a raven. Or I’d always assumed it was a wolf, anyway, until the painting had faded and disappeared. Only then did I start to think maybe it had been a coyote, representing my spiritual guide and mentor, whose influence on me had begun to wane. In the past few days I’d found a new spirit animal, a walking stick bug, and a new image had come in strong on the drum, obliterating the coyote: a praying mantis, its sticklike legs folded in its best-known pose. The rest of the drum remained unchanged: crossbars inside it to hold on to, beads and feathers dangling here and there from the four-inch-deep sides and a drumstick padded with raspberry-red-dyed rabbit fur. Morrison spun the drumstick in his fingers with unexpected grace, then, at my nod, began a steady beat.

Energy burst forth, a visible ripple, like sound waves had been given color so ordinary eyes might see them. Not that my eyes were ordinary: I was using the Sight, calling on magic, but the shock of power seemed so natural I was surprised I couldn’t always see it. It leaped from one point of the diamond to the next with each beat of the drum, passing through each of us as it closed the circle. It picked up all our colors—Gary’s solid silver, my gunmetal-blue, Morrison’s blue and purple—and it came together as a soft white wall of magic. That was what white magic really was: additive, the power of many working together. Black magic was subtractive, sucking life away from one or many in order to feed itself.

And that was what was going on inside of Annie Muldoon. The sickness that had been put inside her was eating away at her life and strength for its own benefit, and to the eventual detriment of the world.
That
wasn’t just about Annie. That was simply how the Master worked. Every spark of love and life he was able to extinguish gave him an incrementally larger hold on humanity. Annie was the poster girl for demonstrative purposes today, but it wasn’t like the entire battle lived or died with her. There would always be other hills to take. Right now, though, taking this particular hill would be enough. I exhaled quietly and let myself slip out of my body, searching for a way through the darkness to heal Annie Muldoon’s body and soul.

An unexpectedly familiar vista came into focus around me as I left my body behind. The first several times I’d spirit-walked, I’d been unable to control it, and had dug my way through to the different metaphysical planes I needed to reach. Literally dug: I’d usually end up in loamy, life-filled earth, my sense of myself turning badger or vole or wormlike as I churned my way through the soil in search of my destination. I was back there again, working through dirt chunked with vast rocks and water-filled drainage points. Back in the day, the impediments probably would have stopped me cold. These days, not so much.

For one thing, back in the day I’d have assumed there was only one path to get to where I was going, and that it lay straight ahead. I smiled faintly at my slightly younger self, then extended my hands upward. I supposed I shouldn’t really have been able to: I was packed into dirt and stone, but I’d always been able to move through it while in an astral realm, and at the moment it made me think of swimming. I wasn’t the world’s strongest swimmer, but I wouldn’t drown in a pool, which was enough. For an instant the dirt surrounding me was pool water, and I was on the bottom of the pool. I bent my knees, pushed off all the way through my toes, and burst upward into the heart of Annie Muldoon’s inner sanctum, into the garden that represented the state of her soul.

Dirt splashed away from me like water, rolling off my skin and streaming from my clothes. I ran my hand over my hair to get rid of the worst of the “wet,” then turned my palm up to watch dirt absorb into the lifeline there, just as water might do. The part of me that would always be six years old wanted to squeak, “So cool!” and do a little dance. Shamanism’s basic tenet was change: to heal someone, it was necessary to change their outlook for just an instant, just long enough to get their attention. It worked that way on every level, so if I could make myself believe, even briefly, that dirt was water, well, then, I could move through dirt like I could move through water.

Magic, when I let myself acknowledge it, was really pretty damned nifty. I shook the last of the dirt away and lifted my eyes, trying to prepare myself for the worst possible visage of Annie’s garden.

Unfortunately, I got it. I had just come off a visit to Aidan’s war-ravaged garden, a place that had been so damaged it crumbled beneath our feet. Annie’s was maybe even worse than that.

What had no doubt once been greenery was infested with black oil. Not just slicked with it, but grayed-out leaves pulsed black ichor through their thin veins like it was sap, and the roots of bleached grass sucked death out of the dry soil. Meadows and scant trees rolled on forever, the size of the place reminding me a little of the jungle that represented Gary’s garden. It appeared a life well-led created a tremendous depth of soul that was represented by vast distances. I thought of my own small, tidy garden, and how the walls that penned it in were only just now crumbling. I had a long way to go to catch up to Gary and Annie. Or even Morrison, for that matter. I was getting there, though, and every step I took through my own garden or someone else’s helped me become a little more of what I wanted to be.

Feeling a bit braver and more confident, I walked into Annie’s meadows, trying not to shiver at the bleak sky above. It twisted in unhealthy purples and blacks, and I had the distinct sense it was pulling at me and at the garden around me. Wonderful. A miniature black hole in the midst of Annie’s garden. Just what we all needed. Even more distressingly, it reminded me of the vortex Raven Mocker had come through, back in Carolina. I did
not
want to follow that thought to its obvious conclusion.

Instead, I reached out and touched a branch on one of the sickly, sparse trees as I went by. It crumbled, leaving a tacky substance on my fingertips. My own magic glimmered softly beneath the sticky stuff, shields ensuring that it wouldn’t sink into my skin and contaminate me, too.

Which it certainly wanted to do. It smeared across my fingers without help from me, seeking a way in so it could infect this new, healthy territory it had found. I lifted my hand, hoping for a way to get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior, then hesitated. There was always a heart to the darkness, and it was just possible I could let the muck guide me there.

Not all that long ago, the very thought would have gotten me in trouble. I was grateful that the stuff didn’t instantly slide through my shields and gobble up my soul. Even so, I concluded it probably wouldn’t be all that smart to grab another branch and get more of the glop on me. Naturally, that’s what I did: coated both hands in the unpleasant crumbly sticky goo, then closed my eyes and did my best to
feel
whether it wanted to tug me in any particular direction. It reminded me of driving on a worn road, where the wheels of the vehicle slid into ruts and rumbled along there whether the driver liked it or not. It meant turning aside was difficult, but I wasn’t looking to turn aside just now. I wanted that easy pull, and it seemed like it should work.

Nothing happened.

After standing there long enough to start feeling foolish, I opened my eyes again and swallowed a squeak. Apparently my definition of nothing and the garden’s definition of nothing were not the same. I was no longer in a meadow. I was no longer in a garden, for that matter. I stood on the very edge of a black precipice, wind rushing up to rip tears from my eyes. I couldn’t see a damned thing below me, but above me was the center of the vortex, screaming silently against the small bones of my ears. Hints of shimmering green quartz ran through the black stone beneath my feet like a source of light, the only real light visible in this place. It gave me an unearthly glow and struck me as just the faintest, tiniest strike against the dark, against evil and misery and dreadfulness as a whole. I said, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” out loud, and edged one quarter of an inch farther over the cliff, looking down.

The vortex above me was pulling even harder now, straining to haul me upward into it. Straining to pull the very bottom of the world up into it, as far as I could tell, and that made me think there was something at the bottom that it wanted.

Before I let myself think about it, I dived off the cliff.

I had fallen off the side of forever once before, in the Upper World. Then, a thunderbird had caught me. This time I was pretty certain nothing was going to catch me, but I was less afraid than I should have been. I had no idea where the bottom was, though once in a while I got a brighter glimpse of the falling world around me, as the green quartz flared and darkened again in the cliff face. I whispered,
Raven?
inside my head, and though my oldest and best-loved spirit animal didn’t actually appear, he offered something he had never shared before: a gift of wings.

I didn’t fly. My fall didn’t even slow. Not until the bottom of the pit finally came into view, a thin green light that strengthened and brightened as I fell closer. At the critical moment that sense of wings
flared,
slowing me, breaking my fall. I hit the ground in a three-point crouch, feeling like a goddamned superhero, and bounced to my feet crowing, “I’m Batman!”

Bouncing up was nearly my undoing. The vortex’s upward pull dragged me up several feet before it lost its grip. I fell again, far less gracefully this time, and stayed down when I hit.

The green light was coming from a crack in the pit’s floor, which I could now see clearly because my face was mashed into it. The rock broke away under my weight, which was probably a bad sign, but it didn’t collapse entirely while I stared into the light and tried to wrap my mind around what I saw.

Apparently I’d stumbled on the shamanic version of Snow White. An emerald-green stone casket—not really a casket, more a cocoon—was buried beneath the pit, and Annie Muldoon lay within the cocoon. Quiet, soothing power pulsed from it, bringing a soft and unexpected scent of mist and leaves with it. I pushed my right arm into the crack, seeing if I could touch the cocoon.

I couldn’t, quite. It had been well buried. I twisted to look toward the vortex, wondering if the cocoon had in fact been
really
well buried and that the vortex was only just now managing to tear its way through the earth to reach it. Assuming the shards of quartz in the cliff were related to the casket, it seemed fairly likely. Which meant—

Well. It meant we’d barely timed this right. If Morrison and I had been half a day later in arriving from North Carolina, the vortex would’ve gotten to Annie before I did. As it stood, I was afraid to dig her out for fear we’d both go flying up into the great mouth of darkness in the sky. I was going to have to go down to her.

Goose bumps stood on the back of my neck and swept down my arms, sending a chill into my belly, where it churned around a little bit. I had never had a problem with enclosed spaces until two weeks ago, when I’d had to make a mad run out of a collapsing cave system. Since then, I’d discovered a growing tendency toward heebie-jeebies when presented with squeezing myself into tight spaces, which had happened more often than seemed reasonable in a mere two weeks. The upshot was a quick internal lecture about tough luck and the lesson therein, not that I could think of any useful lessons beyond “Stop getting embroiled in mystical altercations that squish you into crevasses and cracks,” which seemed like sound, but possibly unfollowable, advice.

I knocked some of the thinning pit floor away with my elbows and knees while ruminating over all of that, and fell five feet onto Annie Muldoon’s crypt.