Urban Shaman

I took a step backward, a scowl falling down my face like pitch, until I was glaring at her through my eyebrows. “What do you mean, need the most healing,” I said. She was clever enough to withhold an answer. Instead, she spread her hands, a polite mimicry of my earlier gesture.

“I did not mean to intrude,” she said so deferentially that the anger drained out of me again. “What do you know about shamans, Siobhan Walkingstick?”

My eyebrows went up and my jaw went down until my face was as long as a donkey’s. My father had taken one look at the unpronounceable Gaelic first name my mother had bestowed on me and had given me another one. I’d looked up the pronunciation when I was a teenager, but I actually hadn’t been sure that the bizarre combination of letters was pronounced She-vaun, not See-oh- bawn, until my mother used the name when she called to ask to meet me. Aside from that one conversation, not even she’d called me Siobhan. It was even less a part of me than the Walkingstick name I’d abandoned a decade ago. “How did you know that name?”

Samantha drew an outline around me with her fingertip, a loose general shape. “It’s a part of you that you’ve been denying your whole life, and now it’s spilling over. Think of it like a floodlight shining on you, illuminating all the information you’ve been keeping filed away. It’s very clear to anyone who knows how to read it. It’s eager to be acknowledged. You have a remarkable heritage, Siobhan. You ought to explore it, not turn your back on it.”

I stood there and stared at her. After a while I tried to crank my jaw back up. Part of me wondered why I was reacting physically when my body, as far as I could tell, was tucked safely in bed, back at home. Wherever back at home was, from here. “Right,” I said eventually. “This is getting a little too thick for me.” It came out exactly right, casual bullshit. I was very pleased. The thing was, right down in my gut, I believed her.

“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” The fifth person finally spoke up. He was taller than me and had a wonderful Grecian nose and broad cheekbones. He hadn’t looked so good in the murder photos. It was too bad he was dead, or I’d have asked him on a date. His mouth curved in half a smile, and I had the sinking feeling he’d somehow heard that. Coyote and Cernunnos had certainly heard things I hadn’t said out loud.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody. But thanks.” He winked, and the half smile turned into a grin. I told myself I couldn’t possibly blush, without a body handy. I think it even worked.

“I always thought I was a pretty good liar,” I finally mumbled.

He shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your delivery. But the truth flares up around you like a spotlight. We probably don’t have much time, Joanne. Let’s save the pretenses for later.”

“Subtle, Jackson.” Samantha smiled. He grinned and shrugged.

I opened my mouth to argue, and let all my air out in a rush. “Okay. Okay. So maybe I’m kind of on-purpose dense about American Indian—” I waved my hand around “—stuff. I just hate playing into stereotypes, you know?”

“Actually, you’re afraid of it,” Jackson murmured. I straightened my shoulders, offended.

“What’s there to be afraid of?”

“Power,” every single one of them said. I took a step back.

“Responsibility,” Samantha said, and Hester said, “Change.”

Roger smiled and shrugged a little, as if to say, what can you do?, and added, “Love,” to the list. “Death,” said the woman who’d been quiet except for swearing at Hester, and Jackson breathed, “Life.”

“I’m not afraid of any of that,” I threw back. “Not that I’m eager to die, but—”

“You’ve been very closed off since you were about fifteen,” Samantha said, sympathetic again. I felt my stomach knot up, and took another step back. “The world was a lot more wonderful before then, wasn’t it?”

One of those cracks I’d seen inside me tore open, surgery with a battle-ax. For a moment there was nothing but pain and rage and a terrible sense of loss, memories that I’d kept safely locked away in a small black box in my mind. “How do you kn—”

I clenched my jaw on the words. I was not having this conversation with dead people in a star field somewhere outside of my own body. I felt a little tug around my heart and ignored it. “What is it that you five have in common,” I said flatly. “There has to be some kind of pattern.”

All five of them exchanged glances, and Jackson spoke up. “Sam asked earlier. What do you know about shamans?”

I shrugged, stiff. “I don’t know. They’re medicine men. They do magic. What do they have to do with me?”

“The world has a lot of people and a lot of problems these days,” Hester murmured. “It needs more shamans than ever.”

“A shaman’s job is to heal,” Roger said. “Whatever needs healing. That’s what we did, in life. Most of us have been doing it for many lifetimes.”

I stared at him for a while, waiting for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I rubbed my eyes, noticing that here, I could see perfectly clearly without glasses or contacts. “So why would someone go around murdering cosmic caretakers?”

“Power,” the quiet one said wryly. She sounded English. Hester frowned at her.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Not our power,” the quiet one said patiently. “His own power. We’re all people who could have fought or helped him, and so we threatened his power.”

“Fought? You just said you were healers.”

There was a little silence while they all looked at each other again. “There are different paths,” Jackson finally said. “Some of us are warriors. Others are less confrontational. The end purpose is the same, to take away pain, physical and emotional, to heal.”

Very, very slowly, a light came on at the back of my head. “That’s not what I’ve gotten myself into.” I figured this was the moral equivalent of asking for a no. It was like asking, “You wouldn’t want to help me paint the fence, would you?” Put it that way, and you were setting up for denial.

I really, really wanted to be denied.

“We rarely understand the consequences of our decisions at the time they’re made,” Samantha murmured, which didn’t sound much like the answer I was hoping for.

“I didn’t have a lot of time,” I snapped. Another tug pulled at my insides, a little stronger than last time. I rubbed my breastbone absently and took a deep breath. I wondered if my body back in bed did the same thing.

“The important decisions usually come when there’s not much time to debate,” Roger agreed. I frowned at him. He seemed so nice and down to earth, and I was unconsciously counting on him to back me up. My hopes and dreams were obviously being lined up to be crushed.

“Well, Christ, there’s got to be a way out of this, doesn’t there?”

“Of course there is.” Hester’d become even more disdainful, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. “Ignore it.”

“Will it go away?” I asked hopefully.

“No. You’ll keep struggling with the urge to help people, and every time you turn your back, a little part of you will die. Eventually you turn into a prune.”

I stared at her. I could have nightmares about turning into someone like her. To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, I might rub you the wrong way, Walkingstick, but there are people who respond to me fine. Listen to this—a shaman is a trickster. To heal someone, you need to change their way of thinking, if only for a moment. Your armor is fractured. One good hit—” She flicked her middle finger against her thumb, like she was thumping me in the chest. The tug returned, painful this time. “—And you’ll come apart into a thousand pieces. Keep your promises, and you might not shatter.”

I hated suspecting people were telling me God’s own truth. I gulped against another painful tug, and the five of them suddenly seemed distant. “Oh, hell,” said the quiet one. “We’ve wasted too much time. She’s too tired to stay.”

“She’s very young,” Roger reminded her.

“I know, and she’s come a long way, but—” The quiet one broke off and stared at me intensely. “Listen to me—”

“Wait,” I said. “Marie wasn’t a shaman, was she? What did she have in common with you?”