Urban Shaman. C.E. Murphy

I stopped peeking down my shirt. It was too weird.

      “So she made me pull the sword out,” Gary said, his whole face wrinkling up in a grimace. “And then…” He trailed off. Marie drew in a breath.

      “And then you began to heal. Just like magic.”

      “It was magic,” I mumbled.

      “What?” Gary laughed again.

      “It was magic,” I repeated, unconvincingly. Marie developed a smug grin. Even smug looked attractive on her. It wasn’t fair.

      “I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” she said with a reasonable amount of diplomacy. Unfortunately, her grin ruined the sincerity of the moment.

      “A lot’s changed since then,” I muttered. A cord tightened around my heart, then loosened, like a bowstring snapping. A sudden vision of the cracked windshield blurred my vision, and a spiderweb-thin line in it sealed up, healing. I shivered a little and wrapped my arms around my ribs. “C’mon. Let’s go talk to Billy.”

      “Wait.” Marie caught my arm. “We have a problem.”

      Those were not the words I wanted to hear. It took a long time to convince myself to say, “What kind of problem?”

      “Cernunnos wasn’t the one I fought at the church.”

      I frowned at her without comprehension. “He couldn’t have been,” I said after a minute. “You took that knife from him.” I felt terribly clever for figuring that out, especially when surprise, followed by embarrassment, washed across Marie’s face.

      “You’re right. I didn’t even think—but who was he, then? The Hunt was after me,” she insisted. I unfolded one hand from around my ribs to head off her protestations.

      “I know. I saw. Maybe it was somebody human who’s working for him.” I admired how I said that, all casual-like. I could handle my world being turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe. No problem. I was cool. I was good. Yeah.

      “Then why didn’t he follow me into the church?”

      I stared down at her, at a loss. So much for being cool. “I don’t know. Look.” I shook my head. “Let’s go talk to Billy and get that part of this over with before we try to figure the rest of it out, okay?” I glanced at Gary. He nodded. So, after a reluctant moment, did Marie.

      We went to talk to Billy.

      Once upon a time, a nice young half-Cherokee half-Irish girl went to college and got the ultimate would-you-like-fries-with-that degree: English. I had no illusions that I’d get a job in my field when I graduated from college, but I’d never planned to. I already had a day job. I’d started learning how to fix cars when I was barely old enough to walk, and I never really wanted to do anything else.

      When I graduated from the University of Washington, my part-time college gig at a local mechanic’s shop couldn’t upgrade me to full-time, so I hired on with the North Precinct police department. The best part about it was I didn’t have to move out of the apartment I’d been renting since my sophomore year of college.

      There was just one itty-bitty catch: my then-supervisor, Captain Nichols, wanted me to go to the police academy. It was the black-and-white photos they took for station ID that did me in: my Native American blood showed through like a waving red flag, and Nichols couldn’t resist a bonafide Indian woman on the roster. It made the department look good. I went to the academy, managed to survive it and gratefully slunk back to the garage, there to stay.

      A year later, Nichols retired and Captain Michael Morrison replaced him.

      Odds are that Morrison and I never would have so much as spoken, if I hadn’t brought my car to the precinct car wash fund-raiser. I was not prone to doing that sort of thing: my car, Petite, is my baby, and I prefer to wash her myself, but Billy’s oldest kid begged and pleaded with me, and I was weak in the face of big-eyed nine-year-old boys. So I brought her to the car wash.

      How any red-blooded American male could mistake a 1969 Mustang for a Corvette, even an admittedly sexy ’63 Stingray, I will never understand. But Morrison did, and I laughed in his face. If I were to be totally honest, I might go so far as to say I mocked him mightily, before, during and after laughing in his face.

      I didn’t know at the time that he was my new top-level supervisor.

      I say that like knowing would have made a difference.

      I generally went to some lengths to avoid admitting to myself that I’d behaved like a complete, unmitigated jerk. It was like a horrible, embarrassing reversion to elementary school, where you indicate you think a boy is cute by throwing rocks at him. Once I’d lobbed the first rock, so to speak, I didn’t know how to stop, and the relationship hadn’t exactly improved with time. As far as I could tell, neither Morrison nor I had much life at all outside of the station, so we ran into each other often enough to develop a long-term, standing animosity. We were like Felix and Oscar without the good moments.

      So when I’d asked for some personal time off to go meet my dying mother, Morrison’d been in a hurry to tell me that the department could only afford me six weeks of leave, and then they’d have to replace me. I told him I’d be back in a month.

      That month stretched to two, then three. When I called to say it was going to be another month, Bruce at the front desk sounded downright grim, and told me that Morrison wanted my ass in his chair the minute I got off the plane.

      Which was why I was now on Morrison’s side of Morrison’s desk, in Morrison’s remarkably comfortable chair, with my feet propped up on Morrison’s scarred gray desk. I just had to push my luck.

      The office was large enough to not be claustrophobic. The door opened against a half wall of windows that let in the mild winter light. Two chairs that fit under the category of “comfy” were on the opposite side of Morrison’s desk, the side I was supposed to be on. Another three folding chairs were tucked around a long brown table shoved under the windows and into the back corner. The table, like Morrison’s desk, was buried beneath chaotically distributed paperwork.

      Morrison’s desk looked out onto the offices through another set of windows, floor-to-ceiling, Venetian blinds hanging at the tops. He usually left them open. When they were closed, somebody was in huge trouble. I couldn’t decide if I was relieved they were open now.

      Three calendars, with the past, present and next months turned up, were tacked on a bulletin board above a quietly percolating coffeemaker on the other side of the office. Around the calendars were clippings from cases, past and present, overlying one another until the board below them was virtually invisible. Next to the coffeemaker was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock. I wondered if it had been a Christmas gift, and who had given it to Morrison. There were no photos of family on his desk. I doubted he had any.

      I eyed the clock. He’d kept me waiting seventeen minutes. It only seemed fair, since I’d kept him waiting four and a half months.

      A moment later the door banged shut and I flinched upright, startled out of the first sleep I’d had in days. Morrison glowered at me from the doorway. I cast another glance at the clock. I’d been asleep less than three minutes. Just enough time to make the worst possible impression. I hoped I hadn’t drooled on myself.

      “Get,” Morrison growled, “the hell. Out. Of my. Chair.”

      I beamed. “Bruce was very specific,” I said in my best innocent voice. “‘Morrison wants your ass in his chair the minute you get off the plane.’”

      Morrison took a threatening step toward me. I cackled and waved a hand, climbing to my feet. “I’m getting. Don’t get your panties in a bunch.” I walked around the desk to the chair I was supposed to be in, and sat.

      Or that’s what I meant to do, anyway. What I actually did was take two steps, tread on my shoelace and collapse in a sprawl at Morrison’s feet. I lay there wondering why I couldn’t breathe. I could feel Morrison staring at the back of my