Spirit Dances

There was an open sliding glass door beside us, making up the back wall of the living room. She’d clearly come through it, but where she’d been before that, I had no idea. The cat I’d Seen was still pouncing around the backyard, intent on capturing a moth.

“Clear.” Billy came back from the bedrooms and crouched beside me, face grim with concern. “You okay, Walker?”

“Yes. No. I can’t heal her.”

To my utter surprise, he touched my right cheek. I had a scar there, thin and mostly invisible, a remnant and reminder of the day my shamanic powers had exploded to life. “You couldn’t heal this, either. Some things aren’t meant to be fixed.”

“But I did this.” My belly cramped again and the words came out tiny and painful.

“Maybe that’s why you can’t undo it. The paramedics will be here in a few minutes.” He was silent a few seconds, then put his hand on my shoulder, squeezing. “You saved my life.”

I wanted to make a joke. Just a small one, something about I had to or your wife would kill me, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t at all. I only nodded, a jerky little motion like he’d given me a minute earlier. He offered a heartbreaking smile in return, like he understood exactly what I couldn’t say. “Keep pressure on that wound until the ambulance arrives.”

It was a very sensible order. It made me feel like I was accomplishing something, when we both knew the truth was I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. If I’d had to, yeah, probably. But short of somebody else coming out of the woodwork to kill Billy, no, I was stuck there on my knees next to Patricia Raleigh for the interim. I nodded again, and Billy went to the front door to await an onslaught of cops, paramedics, forensic examiners and, inevitably, Michael Morrison, captain of the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct, and our boss.

I was sitting on the front steps, holding gun and badge loosely in my hands, when he came up the driveway. Any cop involved in a shooting had an automatic three-day suspension, so Morrison didn’t have to ask: I just handed the weapon and badge over. Patty Raleigh’s blood was under my fingernails, and Morrison noticed it as he accepted them. He checked the chamber and magazine—I’d already unloaded it—then tucked the gun into an empty holster under his suit jacket before asking, “What happened?”

I knew I should probably stand up and make a brisk report, but instead I stayed seated and outlined the incident in as few words as possible, mostly staring at Morrison’s belt while I did so. “Paramedics took Raleigh away about three minutes ago. She’ll probably live. Billy’s, uh. He’s inside, heading up the investigation on Nathan Raleigh. He thought it was better if I…”

Morrison nodded, only partially visible from my viewpoint angle. Then he sat down beside me, wooden porch creaking with his weight. “So what happened?”

I looked sideways at him. He wasn’t looking at me, gaze focused on the fence or the street beyond it, but he didn’t have to be looking my way for me to feel the weight of his concern or his determination to get an answer. I put my hands over my face, realized they smelled like blood, and dropped them again to stare at the street just like Morrison was doing. “I couldn’t heal her. I couldn’t…”

“I’ve seen you use shields to protect people. Why didn’t you stop her that way? Put one up around Holliday?”

Christ. Morrison, who liked magic even less than I did, would still be a better practitioner than I was. “I didn’t think of it. This wasn’t a paranormal case. It was a domestic homicide. I don’t usually bring the whole shooting match to the day job. She was there, she had a weapon, I had a weapon, I shot her. And now my gut feels like I ate a box of fishhooks and the healing won’t respond. And if I was anybody else you wouldn’t be wondering why I used my Glock .40 instead of magic.”

“That’s true. But you’re not anybody else.” Morrison exhaled, and I dropped my head again, though I kept my fingers laced together in front of my knees, not wanting to breathe in the scent of blood a second time. He was right. I wasn’t certain he was unconditionally right, but the power within me had always put forth some pretty clear ideas on what I should and shouldn’t do. The wrenching pain in my stomach and the lack of response from the magic both told me flat-out I’d chosen poorly.

“I’m supposed to be on a warrior’s path, you know that?” I asked the stairs beneath my feet. Morrison didn’t know, because I’d never discussed it with him. I didn’t discuss it with many people, much less the boss with whom I had, until quite recently, had a distinctly antagonistic relationship. “That’s what I was told right when all this started. That I was a healer on a warrior’s path. That I was going to have to fight to make things right. But there’s no memo. There’s no handbook saying ‘these are the circumstances you get to fight in.’ Instead what happens is something like today. Or back with the goddamned zombies. God, I hate zombies. Anyway, I always find out the hard way that I can’t use the magic offensively or it craps out on me. Now it turns out if I use ordinary real-world physical force on ordinary real-world people, I get bit in the ass for that, too. I know you don’t think I’m the greatest cop in the world, but I followed protocol. I did the right thing in police terms to protect my partner. Didn’t I?”

My voice got small as I recognized there were probably a million people it’d be better to say this to than Morrison. Unlucky for him, he was the one who’d asked what had happened, and unlike the psychologist I knew I’d have to talk to later, he was aware of and believed in—however reluctantly—the occult side of my life.

“There’ll be an investigation before I can properly answer that, Walker,” he said with unusual gentleness. I put my face in my hands again after all, holding my breath to avoid the smell of blood, and startled when he touched my shoulder. “But yes, it sounds like you did.” His voice went wry. “And no one else will be asking why you didn’t use a magic shield instead of a gun. I just wondered.”

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to think of the magic first, Morrison. Most cases don’t need it. I’m…” I trailed off with no real idea of what I wanted to say, and Morrison got to his feet.

“You’re officially suspended from duty pending an investigation into this shooting, Walker. A minimum of three days. Thanks for not making that difficult. You have an appointment with the psychologist at one. Get somebody to bring you back to the precinct building and get cleaned up. I want to see you when you’re done talking with her.”

I whispered, “Yes, sir,” and went to do as I was told.

Being suspended from duty for three days almost certainly meant “go home once you’re cleaned up,” but although I only lived a few miles from the precinct building, back-and-forthing seemed like a waste of time. I had clothes at work—the blue polyester pants and button-down shirt that were ubiquitous to police officers everywhere—so I showered, put them on and went back to my desk in Homicide. There was paperwork to do, not just for the morning: there was always paperwork to catch up on. It was a damned sight better to work than sit at home and brood. One of the other detectives came by to offer me a green armband, which was his way of offering sympathy for the morning’s incident without making a fuss about it. I put the armband on, glad not to have gotten pinched, and spent the next three hours writing reports, filling out forms and trying hard not to think about Patricia Raleigh’s glassy stare and short, shallow breaths. Mostly it worked, except when I had to write the actual incident report, and then I sat there a long time, wondering why I hadn’t responded the way Morrison suggested I should have.

Well, no. Not really wondering. I’d gone to the police academy, and though there’d been three solid years of working for the department as a mechanic before I became a cop, at the end of the day, I’d been trained to react the way I had. A couple of times during the academy I’d awakened from dreams I didn’t remember, kneeling in the middle of my bed in a firing position. That kind of training became hardwiring, and nothing I’d done in the past fifteen months had driven magic-using responses that deep into my brain. There was, as far as I knew, no such thing as shamanic boot camp, much as I could use it.

Knives prickled at my gut again, suggesting that I really could use a shamanic boot camp, or something else that forced me to react with magic first and brute force later. Either that or it was sheer nervousness, as it was a few minutes to one and I had an appointment with a shrink. I abandoned my desk and went upstairs to her office, heart hammering and hands cold for the second time that day. I’d met the psychologist, talked with her a few times, but never officially, and for some reason it was terrifying.

She took one look at my expression when I came in and said, “Don’t worry, everybody feels that way the first time. I promise it won’t hurt a bit. Louise Caldwell, not that you don’t know that.” She offered a hand, I shook it, and we both sat down as she asked, “How’re you doing?”

“Been better.” A shrink probably expected a deeper, more profound answer than that. I held my breath, sought something more profound and came up with the same thing again, this time as a shaky laugh on an exhalation: “Yeah. Been better.”

“Good,” she said crisply. “You’d be surprised how many people walk through that door after shooting someone and say they’re just fine. Did you have a choice?”

I blinked, taken aback at the no-nonsense approach. I thought psychologists were supposed to pussyfoot around things. Not that Dr. Caldwell looked like the pussyfooting sort: she was in her late forties, gray streaks at her temples probably indicative of carefully dyed hair, and dressed in a well-tailored suit that gave an impression of seriousness. I cleared my throat, wondered if that came across as hesitating and shook my head. “I really don’t think so. There was no warning. Detective Holliday stepped into the bathroom and she was behind him, already swinging the bat. If I hadn’t reacted immediately he would be badly injured, maybe dead.”

“And how do you feel about that?”

“I’d sure as hell rather have shot her than have Billy be in the hospital! Especially since she’s not dead.” I cleared my throat again, pretty certain that was entirely the wrong thing to say, but faint humor flickered across Dr. Caldwell’s face.

“That’s a comparatively healthy attitude, Detective. It’s easy, in a bad situation, to accept only blame instead of seeing the other potential side of the scenario. As you say, she isn’t dead. Was that a deliberate choice?”

“No. It was just the clearest shot I had, her right shoulder. Billy dropped, but I didn’t double-tap. That…that was deliberate. Kind of. I don’t know if I could’ve shot a second time.” I looked away from her, focusing on one of half a dozen framed certificates on the wall, and much more quietly said, “I could have if she’d kept coming. I would have. I don’t think I knew that until right now.”

My stomach twisted again, glass shards jabbing at me, but somehow the knowledge made me feel better in a completely screwed-up way. Police officers almost never had to shoot anyone in the line of duty even once, much less twice, but I was darkly certain I could do it again if I had to. I didn’t want to, but there was probably something wrong with somebody who wanted to go around shooting people. I relaxed a little and Caldwell saw it, but apparently it was okay. She kept me there for over an hour, asking questions that eventually had me weary to the bone, but I walked out feeling like I hadn’t completely fucked up, either at the scene that morning or there in her office. I had no idea what she would tell Morrison, but I was too tired to worry about it.

I went by his office as instructed, but he wasn’t there. I dropped off my incident report, then went back upstairs to Homicide to collect my coat. At some point “suspended from duty” had to mean “go home,” and I was emotionally wrung out enough to decide that point was now. Morrison could kill me for disobeying the come-see-me order later, after I’d napped. Coat in hand, I waved a short goodbye to the rest of the team and headed for the door.

It cracked open before I got there, revealing a sliver of a woman in her fifties. She had an exceedingly mild blue gaze and short hair that had at one time been blond, but had since gone dirty yellow. She was dressed eclectically in a long skirt, a wool overcoat with a reflective vest over it and combat boots. There was a sparkly green shamrock pinned to the vest. On someone else, the whole outfit could’ve been deliberate eccentricity. On her it looked like the Army-Navy surplus store.

I fumbled to make sure my own green armband was in place as I tugged the door all the way open. “Oh, hi, sorry, come on in. I’m Detective Walker. Can I help you?”

“Detective Joanne Walker?”

I looked over my shoulder like I expected another Detective Joanne Walker to have appeared, then shook myself and looked back. “That’s me. Can I help you?”

A smile rushed across her face and took ten years off her age. “My name is Rita Wagner. You saved my life.”

CHAPTER THREE

There was nothing like a statement of that nature to take one’s mind off the problems at hand, especially when the problem at hand was nearly the polar opposite. My brain dropped out of the slightly shocky slow motion it had been lingering in all day and surged into its more usual mouthy overdrive.

I had done a variety of remarkable things over the past year. Many of them had involved saving peoples’ lives, although most of the time they had looked more like shutting down Seattle’s power, rearranging the Lake Washington landscape, or wrestling monsters of differing sizes and shapes. In the handful of cases where I’d actively saved someone, I usually knew what they looked like.

I’d never seen this woman before in my life. I was searching for a nice way to say that when she continued, “You probably don’t remember. Officer Ray Campbell told me it was you, though, who got the ambulance there in time to sa—”

She kept going, but I said, “Oh! You’re the troll lady!” over her, and only too late realized how awful that sounded. I didn’t mean it badly. It was just that she’d gotten in trouble down by the Fremont Troll, one of Seattle’s more charming landmarks, and I’d never learned her name. I’d only saved her life. I’d been three miles away at the top of the Space Needle, looking for something else entirely, when I’d Seen a flare of rage and violence in Seattle’s city-wide aura. Because of that, the cops had gotten there before aggravated assault turned to murder in the third degree.

She was still smiling. “I am. I’m the troll lady. I know it’s been months, Detective Walker, but I wanted to thank you. I—”

Feeling a little desperate, like I’d become a bad host by way of not recognizing the troll lady, I blurted, “Would you like to sit down?” with too much emphasis on the last two words. I sounded like something dire would happen if she didn’t. A wince crawled over my whole body, caving my shoulders, and I tried for a more modulated tone: “Or go for coffee or something? I mean, it’s great to meet you, but the department’s not very comfortable, we could take a few minutes to talk, we—” I wished someone would come along and stuff a sock in my mouth.

Instead Rita gave me another astonishing smile. It really did take years off her face, and I wondered if she was a hard forty-something instead of the fifties I’d originally pegged her as. “If you have time, I’d like to have coffee. You don’t know me, but I feel like I owe you something. At least a cup of coffee.”

I said, “You don’t,” under my breath, but it didn’t matter to either of us whether she legitimately owed me something or not. I was grateful as hell to get hit in the face with evidence of having done well, and even if I hadn’t been, I also wasn’t callous enough to say “Just doing my job.” Even if that was true, when you’d saved someone’s life, regardless of the madcap fashion, there was an element to it that ran deeper than just doing the job. Humans were like that. We needed connections and stories to make sense of the world, and Rita Wagner had become part of my story. “There’s a terrific coffee shop up the block.”

“The Missing O? I saw it, but I thought it was a doughnut shop.”

I tugged my coat on, hiding the green armband. “It is, but it has good coffee, too, and we call it a coffee shop as to not perpetuate the stereotype of cops and doughnuts.” My indulgence in the stereotype, now that I thought about it, was probably responsible for five or so pounds that had crept up on me the last few months. I made a note to buy vegetables, even though I knew they’d end up melting into brown slime in my fridge’s fruit bin, and held the door for Rita. We escaped the precinct building a minute later, me holding the door for her again. “Not to be rude, but why now?”