Urban Shaman

elegant line of his jaw clenched. He was pale, even in comparison to the others, even bearing in mind the color- leaching lights along the freeway.

“I thought you’d have healed.” One of the hounds made a lunge at the open window, his teeth snapping shut centimeters from my arm. I flinched back, and the hound dropped a few inches, smacking his chin on the window frame. He let out a high-pitched yelp of pain and backed off, snarling at the car.

“We do not heal well from iron,” Cernunnos said, warm liquid voice still distorted with fury. The dog slunk toward his master and lay down between the stallion’s forelegs, lips pulled back from his teeth as he looked at me.

“So I really hurt you,” I whispered, watching the hound. Cernunnos let out a bark of laughter. My eyes snapped up to his. His distance and the stallion’s restless shuffling kept his eyes from having the drowning power I remembered from the diner, but even through the amber lights, they were compelling, violent green, filled with rage.

“Oh, yes.” He edged his stallion closer. The hound jumped up and slunk around to the horse’s back heels, his head lowered, crimson eyes as dangerous-looking as the ivory canines. I watched them, and shrank back a little farther into my car.

“Am I safe in here?” I wondered out loud. “The steel?” I was suddenly very glad I didn’t like show cars like Corvettes, all fiberglass and no substance. Petite was solid steel through and through. She felt safe.

At least, she felt safe until Cernunnos laughed, a sound that could scratch glass. “Safer than you would be outside of it. Not safe enough. Glass holds no power to hurt, and your window is open.” He lifted a hand, graceful, though his nostrils flared as he pulled at the injured tissue in his side. One of his host raised a bow as tall as I was, and sighted me down the long narrow shaft of an arrow.

I saw a special on PBS once, with a Welshman demonstrating the power of a longbow. Standing much farther away from his target than Cernunnos’s man was from me, he put an arrow through platemail armor, through the dummy body, and out again through the back of the platemail.

All of a sudden Petite didn’t seem nearly so safe. Cernunnos edged his stallion to the side, to give his man a clear shot. The archer was tall and slender and very blond, his expression almost sympathetic and clearly bored. Shooting at mortals in tin cans apparently wasn’t much sport. I certainly didn’t think it was very sporting.

I flung Petite into Drive. She roared and leaped forward. Fire burned over the back of my shoulders as the arrow sliced through shirt and skin without hitting anything vital. It embedded in the passenger door with a shriek and I winced, the injury to my car more offensive than the injury to myself.

Two of the ghostly hellhounds disappeared beneath Petite’s wheels, making horribly solid thunks as the Mustang hit them. For one moment, one of the host stood in my way, the bearded man on a washed-out roan. We met eyes, and I braced myself for the impact, knowing none of us, not horse and rider nor car and driver, were going to survive.

The roan gathered himself, catlike, and sprang forward, in so little time I barely saw it happen. Hooves flashed over Petite’s windshield, silvery shoes glittering. I wondered what kind of metal fairy horses were shod with, and in the rearview mirror saw the roan come down lightly, back feet tucked up to miss Petite’s tail end as she careened forward. The rider put a hand solidly against the roan’s neck, and turned to watch me go without the slightest expression on his face.

I caught one glimpse of myself, wide-eyed with shock, in the rearview, then snapped my eyes back to the road, twitching the steering wheel as I tried to avoid a hellhound stupid enough to fling himself at the Mustang. I heard Petite dent, but the dog bounced off with a painful yelp. It rolled away and didn’t get up again.

Another sharp chink sounded as Petite’s wheels squealed and we tore off down the freeway, zero to sixty in about seven seconds. I pushed her up to ninety for maybe two minutes, then remembered the cop who’d stopped to talk to me, and slowed down to somewhere around the speed limit. There was no possible way a herd of riders were going to catch me.

Petite coughed, a sick little sound, and lost power for a second.

“Oh, no.” I breathed the words over the steering wheel. “Be good, girl.” The gas gauge was lower than I remembered it being, but it had been a long drive out to the airport. Petite coughed once more, then rumbled contentedly. I sank down in my seat. “Good girl,” I whispered again. “That’s my baby.” Don’t tell me talking to your car doesn’t help.

She coughed again, lurching as her power drained. “What? What’d I do? I’m sorry I left you in a garage for four months. This is fun, though, right? Out on the freeway, driving fast? This is fun. Come on, baby. What’s wrong?”

We drifted to the side of the road, where she gave one more pathetic little cough and settled into a heap with an apologetic sigh. I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel for a moment, eyes closed. “Okay, nice cop lady,” I mumbled. “Come check on me again.” I opened my eyes and peered under the top curve of the wheel at the dashboard. The oil was fine, but the gas registered below empty. “You got thirsty awfully fast, baby.” I flipped the hazards on and climbed out of the car.

The smell of gas was so strong I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. Oh, adrenaline, maybe? a sarcastic little voice in my head said. I hoped I’d always talked to myself that way, and it wasn’t another shiny new improvement that came along with being a shaman. There was a neat round hole through Petite’s purple rear end, punched through steel like it was plastic wrap. I popped the trunk, my teeth set together, and sure enough, there was another neat round hole jammed at an angle down through the bottom of my trunk. The gas tank was directly below the trunk. I hardly needed to get the flashlight out of the glove compartment to go look, but indeed, there was a neat round hole through the gas tank, too. An arrow was caught in it, scant centimeters from the asphalt. If the arrow’d been another two inches longer, sparks from the metal rubbing the freeway as we sped along would’ve blown me and Petite to Kingdom Come.

I lay on my back, methodically going through all the swear words I knew. When I ran out, I yanked the arrow out through the hole it’d made and climbed to my feet, staring at it.

Then I broke it into as many pieces as I could with my hands, dropped them, jumped up and down on them and swore some more. A few cars whisked by. One slowed way down so the guy in the passenger seat could take a photo. The flash made a sharp shadow on the freeway wall, and I started laughing with furious hysteria as I kicked the arrow bits around and crunched them under my boots. It took about a minute for the novelty to wear off. When it did, I kicked the rest of the wood shards out of my way, got my jack and emergency duct tape out of the trunk, and jacked the car up so I could reach the gas tank.

Duct tape may not be the ultimate answer to everything, but it’s the best temporary ultimate answer I know. I slapped two strips together and taped them over the hole with four more strips, then crawled out from under the car to watch Cernunnos’s host, led by the god and a riderless horse, gallop down from the sky toward me.

For a moment I just stood there, disbelieving. This couldn’t be happening.

The riders forged on. Apparently it was happening. I kicked the jack out from under Petite, who crashed down with a reproachful smash. “Sorry, baby.” I flung the jack back into the trunk and yanked the four-month-old five-gallon emergency gas container out all in the same movement. I untwisted the top and poured a good-sized splash of gasoline out onto the concrete, and because I was moving too fast to be careful, also all over my shoes and shins. “Shit! Dammit, dammit, dammit, shit!” At least I was pretty sure I’d gotten rid of any water that might have built up. I poured the rest into the tank, threw the open container into Petite’s trunk with another apology, slammed the trunk closed and ran around to the driver’s side just in time to almost impale myself on Cernunnos’s sword.

“Oh, look,” I said. “You got a new one. And me without my knife.” I flung myself sideways into the open door, across Petite’s front seats, as the stallion lunged forward, bashing into the door.

I scrambled for the gas pedal and the ignition all at once. Unfortunately, my head was in the passenger footwell, and the pedal and ignition weren’t. I twisted around and sat up as a battle-ax smashed into Petite’s windshield. The glass shattered and caved inward, breaking the ax’s momentum only enough that it didn’t follow through to split open my breastbone. For a couple of seconds I stared at the gleaming metal edge that had broken through the windshield, then cranked the ignition. Petite, God bless her little steel soul, started with a roar.

The ax tore along the windshield in an agonized squeal of glass and metal as I gunned her and shot forward. The thick-shouldered rider on the roan reflected in the side-view mirror for a moment, startled and shaking his hand where Petite’s sudden acceleration had yanked the ax away. Then he caught up his reins and whirled the roan around as Cernunnos’s host began to give chase.