Urban Shaman (6 page)

I jolted forward,
into
the sword, instead of away. I tried to twitch enough to one side so the blade would catch my shoulder, instead of something vital. The horrible cool straightness of metal slid through me, fiery pain filling up the right half of my body. It hurt so badly my knees collapsed, and for an instant the sword through my torso was the only thing holding me up. I was pretty sure the next breath I let out would have blood on it.

But now I had his blade trapped.

And I had steel.

One-two-three. The
clack-clack-clack
of the butterfly knife sounded very loud to me, over the pounding blood in my ears. I coughed, and that made the
sword scrape up and down my lung. I spat a mouthful of blood at Cernunnos, pleased that he flinched back. I dragged myself forward along the blade, and took a handful of his shirt, half-expecting it to slip away through my fingers like melting cotton candy. But it held, and as his horse neighed and reared up again, I kept my fist in his shirt and pulled him down. He fell, weighing more than I expected. My knife slid between his ribs, and he screamed.

The windows shattered. My eardrums shattered. I shrieked back, soundless into the overwhelming, unearthly noise that he made. I could see the scream vibrating from his throat even when blood slid from my ears and down my chin. His eyes weren’t compelling anymore. They were filled with seething rage, green fire boiling over. I waited for it to spill out onto me, to set me on fire, and after a few seconds I smelled it: flesh burning. It was sick and sweet and horrible.

It took a long time to look down and see that it was the hole I’d put in Cernunnos’s ribs that burned, not me. Silk singed around the knife, sticking and reeking. Beneath the fabric, his skin blackened and festered, bubbles beginning to burst. I screamed again, and jerked my hand back. The knife came out, and Cernunnos dropped to the floor. I began a long, slow collapse, Cernunnos’s sword still stuck in my lungs. Beyond it, I could see his mouth moving, and even though I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard him promise, “You will pay for this, little mortal.”

The floor came up in a rush and hit me very hard.

F
or a few moments it was very, very dark, and then it was very,
very
bright. I thought,
So this is what it’s like to be dead,
and then,
Shit, man, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true.

I squinted. The brightness wasn’t really very much like a white tunnel. It was actually a lot like staring directly into the sun. I closed my eyes, and a giant ball of green danced behind my eyelids. It turned red, then blue with red outlines as I squinted my eyes open again. Outside of the white light there was blue that looked suspiciously like the sky.

Lying there, under the suspiciously ordinary sky, I heard a drumbeat. It faltered, unsteady, like the drummer didn’t know what he was doing. I turned my head toward it, scraping my cheek against hot earth. Tears
from staring at the sun ran over my nose and wicked away into desert sand.

My cheek didn’t hurt. I rubbed it against the ground a little, and it kept on not hurting. In fact, none of my body hurt, and that seemed wrong. I was pretty sure that only a minute ago there’d been all kinds of holes in it.

Overall, not hurting was an improvement. The sun was hot, and the sand, for ground, was comfortable. I closed my eyes again and relaxed. The drumbeat missed a beat.

“I wouldn’t advise going to sleep right now.”

My eyes popped open and I blinded myself with the sun again. Dammit. I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. No one was there.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I flopped onto my back again.

“Do you hear the drumbeat?”

“Of course I do,” I snapped. The drumbeat sped up for a few beats, then slowed again.

“You should get up and follow it.”

“I’m comfortable.” I closed my eyes more firmly. I was
not
having a discussion with an invisible man.

“I’m not invisible. You just can’t see me.”

There was a lovely piece of logic. I sat up, glaring around.

If this was my subconscious’s idea of paradise, I needed my head checked. Sulfur-colored sand dunes swept up against robin’s egg-blue sky, both broken periodically by huge outcroppings of rough red stone. Wind hissed across the sand, smelling dry and old.
Under my hands, fine particles of earth gritted against each other and melted away, leaving depressions for my fingers. The whole place reminded me of Arizona, only more so.

“This isn’t even the kind of Indian I am,” I protested. The drumbeat sped up a moment, getting louder. I twisted toward the north, where it was coming from. I wondered if I really should follow it.

“You should,” the voice said helpfully.

“Why? I can’t even see you. Why should I listen to you?” I looked around through my eyebrows, trying to find the voice’s origin. “Why
can
I listen to you? Hear you, I mean. What are you?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions. You can’t see me because you don’t believe in me. You can hear me because you’re dying, and it’s letting me slip in.” The voice sounded like this was a normal thing to say.

Despite the burning sunshine, shivers ran through me, and the drumbeat faltered. “Am I really dying?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re really dying.” The voice had a casual bedside manner. “You can choose not to, if you want.”

“Why the hell would I
choose
to die?” I climbed to my feet. He had to be around here somewhere.

“Because living means changing your entire worldview. That can be a very difficult thing to do.” His voice came from the same direction as the drumbeat.

“Oh, and dying is easy?” I began walking toward the north, glowering at the invisible voice.

“Dying is remarkably easy. Just stop going toward the drum, and in a few minutes, it’ll stop.”

“And then I’ll be dead?” I didn’t exactly break into a run, but I picked up the pace a bit. The drumbeat accelerated. “That’s my heart, isn’t it?”

“Yep,” the voice said.

“Are you a spirit guide?”

There was a pause that felt considering. “Yep.”

Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘yep’?”

He laughed. “Yep.”

“How far is it to my—” I couldn’t say,
to my heart.
“To the drum?”

“Not too far. Would you like me to lead you there?”

I took a deep breath. “Please. I don’t want to die.”

A small coyote bounded in front of me, like he’d always been there. I looked behind us. His tracks were tangled with mine, across the sand. He yipped, and I looked forward again. He smiled a coyote smile, and leaped out across the sand in a long, lean run. “I can’t keep up with a running dog!”

“I’m not a dog. Come on.” He stretched out and I swore, but I began to run. The drumbeat sped up again, and my strides got longer, until I was running an easy fast lope across the dunes, my feet kicking up sprays of sand. The coyote stayed a few yards in front of me, cresting over a dune.

I followed recklessly, and the earth dropped out from under me. It turned scarred and pitted, like an asteroid crater with deep, sharp sides. I hit the ground where it began to slope again and rolled ass over teakettle, trying to protect my head as I bounced. The drumbeat sounded once, then stopped again, a rare
staccato. The coyote ran on, much more gracefully than I, then looped back to snap his teeth at me.

“Hurry. You don’t have time for this.”

“I
fell!
”

He bared his teeth in a snarl and pranced away, jerking his head to urge me on. I stumbled to my feet and began to run again. The coyote snapped his teeth again, satisfied, and forged ahead.

The crater narrowed into an impact spot, less than a foot across and plummeting into blackness. The coyote dove into it, just barely fitting. I couldn’t possibly squeeze into it.

On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly be running across an uber-Arizona landscape inside my head, either, and that seemed to be happening without the slightest regard to what was possible. I took a deep breath and dove after the coyote—

—and the impact spot got much bigger, or I got much smaller. It turned into a tunnel, plunging downward. A trickle of water appeared. I loped after it, running on four feet like I’d always done it. My hands
felt
like hands, but as I watched them flash under my nose, they were pawed and clawed, like the coyote’s. The water widened, becoming a stream. I ran along the bank after the coyote, feeling a tail swishing behind me. The sand turned into rich dark topsoil, and then into solid granite, the stream cutting a swath through it. Every once in a great while I felt my heartbeat shaking the stone around us.

“Is time slowing down?”

“No,” the coyote said, “your heart is.”

Damn.

The stream disappeared without warning, sinking into stone, and the tunnel veered up at a steep angle. I dug unaccustomed claws into the hard rock, scrabbling for a purchase, and wriggled my way up the tunnel, shouldering past the coyote. Stone gave way and I burst through the earth into a pool of numbingly cold water. I kicked frantically toward the bright surface, dragging myself onto the bank a few seconds later. My hands were hands again. I wasn’t a coyote anymore. It felt strange.

The drumbeat, my heartbeat, ricocheted around me, shockingly loud. The coyote ran out of the pool and shook himself furiously on the bank, then trotted through a sparse, stingily kept garden to an unmoving lump on the ground. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed to my hands and knees, watching him.

He nosed the lump on the ground, then sat down beside it, head cocked at me, expression full of expectation. “Physician, heal thyself.”

I crawled over to the lump, still shivering. “Jesus
Christ!
” I reared onto my knees, backing away.

The lump was me. I looked like hell. Blood matted my hair, which hadn’t been clean to start with. The bandaged cut on my face was almost lost among dozens of other tiny, glass-infested nicks and scratches. My shining new silver necklace was stained red, the cross settled in a pool of blood at the hollow of my throat. My ribs on the left side looked deflated, bent inward, and the sword was still stuck in my right lung.

I—the one sitting, not the lump—fell onto my butt and began crab-walking backward. “I’m
dying!
”

“I thought we’d established that,” the coyote said. He hopped over my body—the one lying there—and grabbed my shirt in his teeth, tugging me forward again. “Heal yourself. It’s in you.”

“Dammit, Jim, I’m a mechanic, not a doctor.” The coyote was strong, pulling me forward even as I resisted. “I don’t know
how.
”

He let go of my shirt and lay down with his chin on his front paws. “You know how to fix cars, right? You know where everything goes.”

I nodded. He lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Pretend you’re a car. It’s a nice analogy.”

Are spirit guides supposed to know what analogies are? The coyote grinned at me, even though I hadn’t spoken aloud, and tipped his head toward my body. “You don’t have much time.”

“Pretend I’m a car. Right. Okay.” I scooted closer to my body, hesitantly, mouth pressed closed. “A car. Right. Start with the obvious.” My co-workers tell me I talk to myself when I’m working. I’d never noticed it before. “I’m leaking. What leaks? Oil filters leak. Great. I’m an oil filter.” I put a hand on my chest, grabbed the sword’s hilt with the other, and tugged. It stuck for a moment, grating against my ribs, and the drumbeat stopped entirely.

“No!” I yanked the sword harder, and it slid out with a liquid sound. I threw it to the side, and hit myself in the chest. I—the one on the ground—coughed,
and the drumbeat made a sad little thump. Dark, important-looking blood spurted out, covering my hands.

“Patch it up,” the coyote said.

“I don’t know how,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I could imagine an oil filter, emptying itself onto the ground. I ran through the process of changing it—loosening the drain, oiling the gasket on the new filter, screwing it back onto the filter pipe. Uncertainly, I tried overlaying those images on my body, envisioning my torn lung as the old, burned-out filter, imagining the new one sliding into place.

Something clicked in the center of me, below my breastbone and just above my diaphragm in exactly the same place, the sickness that had impelled me to help Marie had been. It felt like cartilage popping, a thick painful feeling, as if a lock, stiff with age, had reluctantly opened. I felt it in both my bodies, the one I was consciously inhabiting, and the one lying all but lifelessly on the bloody grass. Energy surged through that place with the same cool feeling as drinking water on an empty stomach. It lined the insides of me and reached out, connecting my kneeling self to the dying body under my hands. For a few seconds I thought I could see
through
myself, the ridiculous oil filter analogy at work repairing my lung. The energy I felt was centered there, coiling inside the ruined cavity and patching it. Then the sensation faded and dizziness swept through me. I tilted over sideways, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t think it worked.”

“Take a look,” the coyote murmured. I pried my eyes open and looked down at myself. Ichory black
blood still covered my chest and my hands, but when I pushed my shirt out of the way, the hole was gone, the skin unscarred.

“Holy shit.”

The coyote chuckled. “Now reinflate your lung.”

“What, like a tire?”

“Just like that.” He sounded approving.

Flat tire. Filled tire. It doesn’t take that long to fill a tire, but I had the horrible idea that I would explode my lung if I filled it too fast. The drumbeat thumped unsteadily, then fell into a more reassuring pattern as I envisioned air being pushed into a tire. I felt the same energy coil behind my breastbone again, shimmering through both bodies. It spilled out as I dragged in a deep breath. Beneath my hands, the other me did the same thing, and the alien pool of energy went dead again. This time it left me with the faintest sensation of still being there, waiting. I swallowed hard. “What is that?”

“It’s your destiny,” the coyote said.

My heartbeat missed another pulse, but overall it was much better. I let out a high-pitched laugh. “My destiny. I’m a car and I’m fixing me and it’s my destiny? Great, that’s just great, in a completely fucked-up surreal way.”

“The ribs next, I think.” The coyote sounded serene. I reached for the unlocked knot of energy more deliberately this time, and laughed again, a little hysterically, when it responded.

“How can I be doing this?” My broken ribs were like a body frame that had been torn apart. I pressed
them back into shape, cautiously realigning them, welding the weak points carefully. Pressure I hadn’t consciously realized existed slowly eased, and I could breathe more easily. My whole body felt more aligned, stronger, just like a car felt solid with its frame intact. The energy I was using spilled from me like it was part of my bone structure, like it was integral to my being, but I’d never felt anything like it before.

“You’re finally beginning to accept a path you abandoned a long time ago,” the coyote answered. “You have gifts, Joanne Walker, that your spirit cries out to use. Healing is chief among them.”