Urban Shaman. C.E. Murphy

any pagan religion,” I interrupted. Marie lifted her eyes to look at me. The muscle in my shoulder blade twitched again and I shrugged, trying to loosen it. “The Peop—the Cherokee still practice their old ways, too. Faith is hard to stomp out.” The People. Walkingstick. What was wrong with me?

      “Like any pagan religion,” she agreed. “Cernunnos is the Celtic Horned God, essentially a fertility figure but with very deep ties to death as well. There are Norse and German counterparts, Woden, Anwyn, rooted in a common ancestry.” She waved her hand absently, brushing aside the trivia.

      “And he’s after you.” I infused my voice with as much sarcasm as I could. It was pathetically little. She was too pretty to be sarcastic at, even if she was crazy.

      “Yes.” Marie nodded and dragged her orange juice to the edge of the table.

      “You seriously think you got some kind of god after you?” Gary asked. Marie nodded. Gary turned to me. “I vote we drop her off at a loony bin and run for the hills.”

      “Are you asking me to run away with you, Gary? After such a short, violent courtship?” It wasn’t that I didn’t agree. In fact, I pushed my latte away, getting ready to stand up. Gary did the same, looking relieved.

      “Sorry, lady,” he said, and stood. I put my palms on the table and looked at Marie. She looked bone-tired, more tired than I felt. She looked like she’d been through this a dozen times already, and was just waiting for the time that she screwed up and didn’t live through it.

      Dammit, I’d jumped off a plane and come tearing through the streets of Seattle to find this woman. I didn’t feel like I’d seen it through to the end yet. I settled back into my seat.

      “Aw, hell,” Gary said, and sat back down. Marie bit her lower lip, holding her breath while she watched me. When I didn’t move again, she let her breath out and began talking again, without taking her eyes off me. If she thought she was pinning me in place, she was right. Girls weren’t really my thing. Hell, I didn’t even like women much, as a species. I had no idea why I wanted to help her so much. Marie took a deep breath.

      “I gather neither of you are mystics.”

      Gary laughed so loudly I nearly spilled my coffee. A tired-looking blonde behind the counter turned around and looked at us. Marie twisted a little smile at her orange juice. I suddenly felt sorry for her, which was new.

      “Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “Can you handle the idea that there’s more to the world than we see?”

      “There are more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” It was the obvious line. What wasn’t so obvious was that Gary beat me to it, and said it in a rich, sonorous voice. Marie and I both looked at him. “Annie liked ’em big, not stupid,” Gary said with a grin. “Sure, lady, there’s more than we see.”

      Marie glanced at me. “Why does he keep calling me lady?”

      “I think it’s an endearing character trait. When he really gets to know you, he’ll start calling you ‘dame’ and ‘broad,’ too.”

      “Yeah?” She looked at Gary, then back at me. “How long’ve you known him?” I turned my wrist over to look at my watch, which was still wrong.

      “About ninety minutes. So what’re we missing in our philosophies, Marie?”

      She smiled. It was radiant. Honest to God. Her whole face lit up, all warm and welcoming and charming. Gary looked pole-axed. I pretended I didn’t and allowed myself the superior thought: Men.

      “I’m an anthropologist,” Marie said. “I’ve been studying similarities between cultural mythologies for about ten years now.”

      All of a sudden she had an aura of credibility. Well, except I thought she looked about twenty-five. I stole a glance at Gary, who didn’t look disbelieving. Either he thought she looked older than that, or his so-called useless talent was a load of bunk. “How old is she?” I asked him. He lifted a bushy eyebrow, glancing at me, then looked back at her.

      “Thirty-nine,” he said, in tandem with Marie. Her eyebrows went up while my jaw went down. Gary looked smug. After a few seconds she shook her head and went on.

      “It’s hard,” she said carefully, “to immerse yourself in a study, in mythology and belief, without beginning to understand that even if you don’t believe it, that someone did, and that it has, or had, power. I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to bullshit.”

      Looking at her, I could believe it. She had to have heard every line in the book, by now. It would take genuine effort to remain gullible, and she didn’t seem gullible. She finally lifted her orange juice and drank half of it.

      “Certain legends had more power for me than others. They were easier to believe. They tended down Celtic lines—my mom says it’s blood showing through. But the Morrigan, the Hunt, banshees, cross-comparisons of those legends to other cultures were more fascinating to me than most other things. A while ago a gloomy friend of mine pointed out that they weren’t just Celtic legends. They were all Celtic legends that had to do with death or violence.”

      She took a deep breath, looking up at us with those very blue eyes. “Right after that I started to be able to sense who was about to die.”

      Silence held, stretched, and broke as my voice shot up two octaves. “You’re a fucking banshee?” The tired blonde behind the counter looked our way again, then shifted her shoulders and turned away, uninterested. Marie’s thin straight eyebrows lifted a little.

      “I thought you didn’t know anything about those legends?”

      “I just got off the plane from a funeral in Ireland.”

      Understanding and curiosity came into Marie’s eyes. “Whose funeral?” she asked.

      “My moth—what does that have to do with anything?”

      “I was curious. You don’t have the sense of someone close to you having died.”

      “We weren’t close,” I said shortly. This was the second time this morning I’d said something about my family. I was breaking all sorts of rules for me. I really needed sleep. The waitress came by and slid Gary’s breakfast in front of him. Three eggs, fried, over a slab of steak, three huge pancakes, hash browns, bacon, sausage and a side of toast. I got full just looking at it. Gary didn’t pick up his fork, and after a couple seconds I frowned at him.

      The big guy was actually pale, gray eyes wide under the bushy eyebrows. He stared at Marie like she’d turned from a golden retriever puppy into a king cobra. I did a double-take from him to her and back again, wondering what was wrong. “Gary?”

      “Don’t worry,” Marie said, very softly. “I don’t see anything about you.”

      Gary focused on his plate abruptly, cutting a huge bite of steak and eggs to stuff into his mouth. His eyebrows charged up his forehead defiantly, like he expected Marie to make an addendum to her comment. Her mouth twitched in a smile, but she didn’t say anything else.

      “Does being a banshee have anything to do with why what’s-his-face wants you?” I reached over and snitched a piece of bacon off Gary’s plate. He noticed, but didn’t stop me.

      “Cernunnos. I don’t know. Maybe.”

      “Because, what, the Hunt isn’t scary enough without you?” I heard myself capitalize the word, and wondered why I’d done it.

      “I haven’t had a conversation with him about it,” she said. “I don’t really know what he wants me for.”

      “So how do you know he wants you?”

      “Having a pack of ghost dogs and rooks and a herd of men on horseback chase you down the street gives a girl a pretty good idea that she’s wanted for something,” Marie said acerbically.

      I had the grace to look embarrassed.