Spirit Dances

The cancer-infected woman I’d noticed in the theater was tall, maybe five foot nine, but she wore flats, so I towered over her as I tapped her shoulder. She turned from her friends, an eyebrow arched curiously, and looked me up and down. I did the same, because the word statuesque could have been coined just for her. Valkyries of yore wanted to look like this woman: broad-shouldered, generously endowed, long legs and a mass of genuinely golden hair that I didn’t think came out of a bottle. Her eyes were brown, which surprised me: I almost expected them to be as yellow as her hair. If she’d had a hint of a tan, the snug goldenrod dress she wore would have made her look like a giant banana, but she was so fair-skinned I couldn’t even find any freckles. She was about thirty-five, and aside from that touch of malignant pink in her breast, literally glowed with health. I wished everybody—including myself—had her level of fitness, and said, a bit rashly, “Hi. Do you believe in magic?”

“I don’t know about magic, but if you’re about to ask me on a date, I’ll believe in miracles,” she offered.

Apparently she had the confidence necessary for the bright-colored dress, too, and for a moment I genuinely regretted my limited palate of sexual preferences. “I’m sorry. I wish I was. Instead I’m going to say something really, really weird, and I hope you’ll believe me.”

She arched an eyebrow, looked over her shoulder at her friends, then faced me again, arms folded under her breasts. It was closed-off body language, but she contradicted it by putting her weight on one leg, hip cocked out and the other foot angled sideways to indicate a degree of willingness to listen. I had clearly been a detective too long, if I was studying her body language that carefully, but she took my mind off it by using her language-language, too: “If this is the ‘you should be a model’ speech, I’ve heard it before.”

“It’s much weirder than that. I’d like to hold your hands for a minute or two.”

Her other eyebrow skyrocketed up to match the first. “Are you sure you’re not asking me out?”

“Sadly, yes. I’d rather explain afterward, if that’s okay.”

She oofed as one of her friends elbowed her in the ribs and made a ribald comment, but she put her hands out. I took them, but she made like it was all her idea, grasping mine firmly. Her hands were rough, as if she worked with chemicals or just did fifty pull-ups on an iron bar every day. “You work out?”

“Enough to get noticed, I guess.” A glow of pleasure erupted from her, turning her dominant-yellow aura as brilliant a goldenrod as her dress, and putting her in exactly the kind of mental place I wanted her in. Overlooking the morning’s mess-up, I’d been able to heal people with a drawn-out vehicle analogy for most of the past year, aligning aliments to my mechanic’s trade knowledge. More recently, though, I’d stepped it up a notch, and could affect a healing pretty much instantaneously. It helped enormously, though, if my patient was receptive. Joyful and full of self-confidence was just about as positive and receptive a mental space as I could ask for.

She said something I didn’t hear as my attention went internal. My power leaped to life, no longer reluctant as it had been that morning. It felt like it was making up for lost time, or more likely, making up for the choice I’d made that morning. I didn’t exactly feel guilty, but I did feel like it would take a lot of healing people before I balanced out gunning one down.

Silver and blue magic, topped up and bubbling over from the energy the dancers had put out, was eager to go where I focused it. I’d never had a target like this one: no more than a handful of cells, lethal pink, unwelcome but unstoppable in the host body.

Habit lingered. It was easy to think of those few sick cells as tiny rust spots that needed sanding, polishing and repainting so they wouldn’t spread to the body around them. The real difference to me was not going through those steps. Once the analogy popped into mind, the work was done between one thought and the next.

What I didn’t expect was the staggering whirl of magic that surged toward the deadly pink cells, obliterating them. But it didn’t stop there. Time tunneled forward like a bad 3-D effect, showing me much paler pink cells, like ghosts of futures yet to come. Those cells multiplied, became blotches, became lumps, became masses, metastasizing and spreading. Healing magic charged headlong into the future-that-could-be, tearing sickness apart and leaving healthy flesh in its wake. It ran all the way through the cycle of disease, destroying it not just now, but all its potential in the future. I caught a glimpse of a double helix, of an off-shoot ladder rung that didn’t belong, and felt my magic gather itself, preparing to fix that, too.

Panic spurted through me and I clawed the magic back. It hesitated, still focused on that genetic anomaly, then rolled back into me, so drained I could barely feel its presence. Time wound backward, landing me back into the here and now, where my knees buckled. The woman’s grip on my hands kept me upright, but she let go, obviously feeling the flux of power. “What the—what’d you do?”

“Removed some rust.” My throat was dry. I coughed and tried again, but shivers wracked me so hard I could hardly focus on the woman before me. Her aura was no longer marred by the scant touch of unhealthy pink, but even my grip on the Sight faded as I reached feebly for something to lean on. She was the only thing available, and to my relief she put her hand out again, strong fingers banding around my arm.

“Are you all right?” Her voice was pitched high with concern.

I managed a nod. The cancer hadn’t spread, but the amount of magic bent to finding and destroying those sick cells offered a warning: potentially terminal illness, even if it hadn’t come anywhere near actually terminal, was not something to mess with lightly. I had the ugly feeling I could have easily killed myself with that unconsidered effort. Walking blithely through cancer wards and laying on hands was clearly not going to be an option.

“What’d you do?” she asked again, this time more mystified than alarmed. “I feel like champagne. Bubbly inside.”

“Do me a favor.” I sounded like I’d drunk a cupful of sand. “Go to the doctor. Get a mammogram. Just to be sure.”

She went white, long rangy lines going rigid. “You don’t think…?”

“No.” Not anymore, but that didn’t seem like a useful thing to say. The image of the distorted double helix popped up again and I crushed my eyes shut, wishing I’d dared try shaving that wrongness away. There were at least two good reasons not to have: one, I didn’t know what the long-term ramifications for her genetics would be if I had, and two, I thought I was lucky to not already be dead. Rewriting DNA was not in the game plan. “Just go to the doctor to be sure, okay? Please? Get one of those genetic tests, if you can, to see if you’ve got a predilection for the disease.”

She relaxed incrementally at the reassurance, then frowned again. “I will. But what did you do? Who are you?”

“I’m a healer.” It sounded absurd, but I was too tired to come up with something clever. No healing I’d done had ever wiped me out so badly. I was going to have to talk to Coyote about tempering the magic so I didn’t kill myself while doing my duties. “I’m a healer, and I think you’ll be okay now, but go to a doctor anyway. Please?”

“A healer.” Befuddlement darkened her eyes and she caught my arm. “Really? That—it sounds like bullshit, but I feel…people like you exist? For real?”

I breathed a tiny laugh. “For real. But you’ll go to a doctor anyway, right? Please?”

“I will.” She didn’t let go of my arm, though, expression searching mine. “But I’d like to see you again, too. Just to be sure. Would that be okay?”

God. It was considerably more bizarre to have someone believe me than not. I smiled, wishing I was more comfortable with being someone’s hero, and nodded. “My name’s Joanne Walker. I work for the Seattle Police Department, so I’m not hard to find. Give me a call sometime, if you want. That would be fine. But, um, don’t noise this around, okay? Faith healing isn’t exactly on my résumé.”

She finally let me go, glancing at her own hands in embarrassment. “Right, no, of course I won’t. And I will call. Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so pushy. I just never felt anything like that before, and now you say I had cancer and it’s gone and—” She broke off, took a deep breath, and repeated, “Sorry. Sorry, Miss Walker. I’ll call you.” She glanced in the direction I’d been trying to go, toward Morrison, and tilted her head curiously. I sort of shrugged, and she got a small, crooked smile. “Nice.”

It was an assessment I couldn’t argue with. I smiled a bit in return, nodded and wobbled back to the theater building where I could lean on a wall.

Morrison joined me, breath drawn to ask a question, but I shook my head. Something was nosing at my exhausted magic, like a dog that had found something interestingly stinky to explore. It was a new sensation, and it withdrew as I reached inside myself to scrape together enough power to create shields. Withdrew, nosed the shields themselves, then disappeared entirely, leaving behind only a fading sense of inquisitiveness and a faint but familiar tugging in my belly, fishhooks pulling me toward some kind of encounter.

Every part of me wanted that sensation to be nothing more than my imagination. Failing that, I liked the idea of it being a good guy recently come to Seattle and just discovering there were other people of power hanging out in town. There’d been no sense of malice or danger from the feeling, just interest.

Nothing in the past fifteen months, though, had given me any reason to believe the happy fluffy bunny scenario. I was dead sure that I’d gotten the killer’s attention.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Talk to me, Walker. You look like a ghost.” Morrison ducked his head so he could catch my gaze and bring it up, which was surprising enough that it worked.

For a second, anyway. The pedantic part of me then couldn’t help looking over myself, wondering if I really did look like a ghost. Not really: they tended to be more transparent and monochromatic than I was, though I had to give Morrison the nod for my color being off. “Sorry. That woman had breast cancer. Healing it wiped me out.”

“You can…” Morrison sounded like he was about to swallow his tongue. “You can do that?”

“Apparently. I’m also thinking it’s not the best idea I’ve ever had, not unless I want to kill myself. There’s probably a better way, maybe if I set up a healing circle, a drum…” I trailed off, letting the building hold me up as I looked toward the theater inside. “Like what they were doing. Creating a controlled center of power. I’ll work it out later. Long-term project.”

One side of Morrison’s mouth curled up. “You’ve changed.”

I blinked back toward him. “Really?” It was a stupid question. I knew he was right. Still, having him come out and say it warranted a slightly incredulous response.

My stupidity didn’t seem to bother him, as he simply nodded instead of calling me out on it. “You’re a lot more confident.”

“I was always confident.” About cars.

For some reason I didn’t have to say the last two words aloud. Morrison managed to hear them anyway, or at least I hoped that was what he was responding to as the rest of his mouth joined the smile. “No, Walker. You were arrogant. You probably still are, but confidence sits better. I think even three months ago you wouldn’t have been standing here telling me flat-out this thing wasn’t a wendigo or that you could heal terminal illnesses but thought you needed a focal point. The whole thing would have embarrassed you.”

Now the corner of my mouth turned up. “And it would’ve pissed you off. Sir.”

“My mother likes to say ‘a body can get used to anything, even being hanged, as the Irishman said.’”

I laughed, then became more solemn. “Oh, great. I don’t know, Morrison. I’ve screwed up so much. So many people’ve gotten hurt. I had to get over myself. And…”

His eyebrow twitched upward and I found myself at a loss. I’d been going to say “Coyote coming back really helped,” which was true, but which was also suddenly something I really didn’t want to say to Morrison. Not when we were getting along so well. So what came out of my mouth was unexpected, if heartfelt: “And you helped. No matter how much you didn’t like it, you took this talent of mine in stride way before I did. It’s been a year now, you know? Since the banshee? A year almost to the day. And you were the one who pulled me onto that case, because you accepted I had a potentially useful skill set whether you understood it or not. So I owe you a lot, boss. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” There was a momentary pause while we were both uncomfortable with all of that before Morrison got another very slight smile, this one sly. “Or were you just saying all that to soften me up for something I’m not going to like?”

I groaned. “No, not on purpose, but now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure I got the killer’s attention when I healed that woman.”

Morrison’s good humor drained away, leaving him to study me as though I was some kind of new and especially nasty stain on his shoe. “Take a walk with me, Detective.”

That couldn’t be good. I fell into step with him, arms wrapped around myself. Sleeveless velvet sheath dresses were very sexy, but not at all warm, and I’d left my coat in Petite for dramatic effect. Women weren’t too bright sometimes. We got a little distance from the theater before Morrison said, “You remember you’re suspended from duty, right?”