Urban Shaman

Hunt.

In fact, he’d seen more than I had. There wasn’t any child riding with Cernunnos now. I found the artist’s e-mail address and scribbled out a note. Is it scribbling if it’s typing on a keyboard? It seemed like scribbling.

Hey. I just came across your painting of the Wild Hunt, and it’s incredible. Scared the hell out of me, in fact. It’s so real I’m gonna guess you’re not going to think I’m crazy when I tell you I’ve had a run-in with Cernunnos myself, that he almost killed me. But there was no kid riding with him. Can you Jill me in on who the child is? It’s important. Please write back.—Joanne.

I sent it and immediately regretted it. For a couple of fruitless seconds I pounded the reply button, like it would somehow retrieve the message from the ether of cyberspace, then groaned and drank half my coffee. One more person would think I was nuts. Oh well. I wasn’t sure he’d be wrong.

I went through two more cups of coffee waiting for an answer, before slowly cluing in to the fact that it was going on six in the morning and no one in his right mind would be up, much less checking e-mail. Unless he was on the East Coast, in which case it was a perfectly reasonable time to be up. The more that I thought about it, the more logical it seemed that the artist was not only farther east than I was, but was in fact probably in Ireland itself, which meant it was nearly two in the afternoon and why the hell hadn’t he answered my e-mail yet? Did he want me to die?

I decided maybe I’d better take a shower and reintroduce reason to my brain.

Standing under the hot water and breathing in steam at least helped shut down the caffeine-inspired paranoia. I slid down to sit on the floor of the tub, trying to find a place to start making sense of the mess my life had become. When I lifted my head a moment later, Coyote sat under the stream of water in front of me, his ears twitching in an undignified manner every time a drop splashed onto them.

“You have terrible control.” His ears twitched, flattened out and went upright again.

“What are you doing in my shower?” I remembered thinking I needed to get a dog. Maybe he would do.

“I’m not a dog,” he repeated, “and I’m in your shower because you think you’re awake and you’re holding the pattern that was around you. I wish you’d stop.”

“I like showers.” I stubbornly clung to the idea that I was awake and sitting on the floor of my shower. With a dog. I grinned again, almost a giggle. Coyote sighed, deeply put-upon. “You could turn into a guy,” I suggested, sort of hopefully. “At least that way you could wash your metaphysical hair.” It wasn’t that I wanted a gorgeous man in my shower. Honest.

I hadn’t noticed before that Coyote had discernible eyebrows, but they went up at that. “Metaphysical?” he asked. I shrugged elaborately.

“This is all very metaphysical. Why are you in my shower, anyway?”

“You called me.”

I blinked at him uncertainly as water streamed down my face. “I did?”

For a moment I had the distinct impression he wished he had hands, so he could pinch the bridge of his nose. “Look,” I said, offended, “you’re the one who dragged me into all this. Left to my own devices I just would have died.”

Coyote lifted his head to look at me with astonishment. “Is that really what you think?”

“Well, of course. Ordinary people don’t go around having near-death out-of-body-experiences of their own free will.”

“Wow,” Coyote said, “have you got a lot to learn.”

I squinted at him. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘wow’?”

“Look,” he said impatiently, “spirit guides can say whatever the hell they feel like.” A drop of water hit him in the eye and he shook his entire body. When he stopped, he was completely dry, and the water rolled off the air above him like it was hitting an invisible umbrella. I lifted my finger and poked at the umbrella, encountering resistance. I jerked my hand back and shook it, blinking. “I came of my own free will,” he explained before I asked. “It gives me the ability to affect your world-form. Just like you did in Herne’s garden.”

“You know about that?”

He smiled an infuriatingly superior little smile. “There are some advantages to being a spirit guide.”

I suddenly felt very alone and very, very unknowledgeable. “So what are the advantages to being the new kid on the block?” I whispered. “People are dying, Coyote, and I don’t know how to stop it. I thought I was doing okay and then I found out I wasn’t nearly as cool as I thought I was.”

“You outgunned Herne once,” Coyote said reassuringly. “You’re going to make it through this.”

“I tricked him.”

Coyote smiled. How a dog smiles, I don’t know, but he smiled. “That’s what we do, Joanne. The first thing a healer has to do to heal is to shake up perceptions. To make the impossible, possible.”

“Am I really going to live through this?”

Coyote stuck his nose under my hand and wrapped a long tongue around my wrist. “Yeah,” he said, “you are. I said so.”

I smiled a little. “But Coyote’s a trickster.”

“A trickster. Not a killer. You’ll make it, Jo. Listen to—”

“Don’t,” I interrupted. “Don’t even think about saying ‘listen to your heart’ or ‘your soul’. I can’t handle that tonight.”

His tongue lolled out again, a coyote grin. “Listen to the rhythms of the city,” he said, like it was what he’d planned to say all along. “Listen to the heartbeats of the people. Follow them and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

“What am I looking for?” I asked plaintively, and Coyote shook his head and shrugged, a very manlike movement for the rangy canine. Then the water turned to ice and I scrambled to my feet, gasping. I washed my hair in cold water, shivering, and jumped out of the shower to wrap up in an excessive number of towels. I felt like the Stay-Putt Marshmallow Man, but at least I was warm.

I was weirdly awake. I made a note to myself to try a cold shower and a chat with a spirit guide next time I was too tired to think. Rubbing my hair dry, I went to check my e-mail again. There are those who would say I’m addicted. I’m sure I could find a pithy rebuttal to the accusation somewhere on the Net.

Unfortunately, I had mail.

the child leads them to the souls they can harvest and leads them back to the Otherworld when the ride is over, without the child theres nothing to stop them from riding forever. i dont think your crazy, i just think your going to die.

I stared at the message for a long, long time, the towels doing nothing to keep me warm any longer.

i just think your going to die.

your going to die

going to die

Coyote had said I wasn’t going to die. Somebody had to be wrong.

I decided to bet on the coyote as winner-take-all, and slapped the computer screen off. I had better things to do than die. It struck me that I’d had that revelation half a dozen times in the past couple of days, and somehow my faith in it had been wiped out every time. If I didn’t keep believing I would stay alive, Herne, or Cernunnos, or whoever else was out there, had me already. I didn’t used to think belief had anything to do with staying alive. I smiled a little and went to check the last of the coffee. It was an hour and a half old and had been strong to begin with, but it was still warm, so I drowned it with milk and sugar and went into the bedroom to stare out the window.

At least I knew what I was looking for, now. I was looking for Herne, I was looking for Cernunnos, but mostly, I was looking for that kid. Herne and the Hunt were both in Seattle. It stood to reason that the missing child was, too. All I had to do was find him.

All.

I got dressed, printed out a copy of the painting, and went to the police station.