Urban Shaman

my gun in the car and went in. By the time Kevin arrived, I was asleep at the table.

“The maitre d’ is complaining that you’re drooling on the table,” he murmured as he sat down.

‘“Zno maidder-dee.” I lifted my head slowly. It seemed to have gained twenty or thirty pounds in the half hour I’d been napping.

“All right,” he said agreeably, “the waitress is complaining that you’re drooling on the table.” He smiled, and I chuckled tiredly.

“Sorry.” I drank most of the glass of water that had been left for me, and rubbed my eyes. “Really long night. Keep falling asleep in the weirdest places.”

“Your e-mail was from eleven or so last night. You were up after that?” He was wearing a neat, unobtrusive plaid shirt, ironed. I wondered if Adina had ironed it before she died, or if he did it himself. He looked tired, too, almost as tired as I felt, his hazel eyes sad and weary.

“Yeah, until three or four. Then I got up at ten after five, or something. It’s been a rough few days.” I cringed a little. I had nothing to complain about, comparatively.

He gave me his sad smile. “It has been,” he agreed. “What happened yesterday?”

I made a sound of amusement as the waitress arrived, and ordered a grilled cheese sandwich. She gave me a funny look, but wrote it down along with Kevin’s order and went away again. “Not exactly an upscale meal,” Kevin said.

I shrugged. “I like grilled cheese sandwiches. Comfort food, you know? And I need it. The night got a whole lot weirder after I left that e-mail.” I recounted, briefly, my night’s adventures. Kevin blanched and looked away.

“What drives a man like that?” he asked, a low dangerous timbre in his voice. “To slaughter?”

“Statistically? Serial killers are in need of control. Our boy Herne doesn’t really fit the statistics, though. They weren’t meant to quantify six hundred-year-old demigods.”

Kevin looked up through his eyelashes. “Is that really what you think you’re dealing with?”

“Yeah.” I drank what was left of my water. “He’s older than I am, stronger than I am, more experienced than I am…”

“Smarter than you are?” Kevin asked with a smile. I swirled the remaining ice in the glass around, and considered the question.

“I don’t think so.”

Kevin’s eyes darkened. “Then why haven’t you caught him yet?”

“Older, stronger and more experienced don’t count for anything?” I asked plaintively, and he smiled again.

“They might count for too much.” The waitress delivered our drinks. Kevin nodded politely to make her go away. “Tell me again what stopped you at the airport.”

I shook my head and stuck a straw in my lemonade. “I could feel it,” I said softly. “The power in me to just shut him down. But it’s all connected.” I laced my fingers together and tugged them to the left without pulling them apart. My body tilted slightly with the motion. “I can’t move part of me without affecting all of me.” I tugged my hands to the other side, tilting again. “See? I move. And the city’s like that, too. Probably the whole world. I think you can’t move part of it without making everything shift a little.”

“It wasn’t that I was all that powerful, really. I could just draw on all that life, all that energy.” I let my hands fall, frustrated. “But drawing on it would cost. Not me, so much, as the whole infrastructure. Taking him down then would have caused a power failure, that’s how much it would take. People would have died.”

“The good of the many?” Kevin asked.

“Outweighs the good of the one, yeah. In this case, the one are…” I trailed off and sighed. “Are people like Adina and Mrs. Potter. I’m sorry. I didn’t see any other choice.”

Kevin nodded, but murmured, “There’s always a choice.”

“Yeah. In this case, letting him go seemed like the better one.”

“Can you live with that?”

I inhaled. “I have to, don’t I? Yeah, I can. I regret it, but I can’t say I’d do it differently, faced with the same choice again.”

Kevin nodded again. “That’s good. Living with the consequences of your actions isn’t always easy. Rationality often fails.”

“Yeah, well.” The waitress delivered our food and I took a grateful bite of grilled cheese, surprised at how hungry I was.

“Up until a few days ago I was the most rational person you’d ever care to meet.”

“You’ve converted?” Kevin had a vegetarian burger. I thought that was one of the weirdest ideas in the world. Those, and the fruit drinks that advertised themselves as flavors never intended by Nature. Nature, I figured, knew what she was doing. Leave well enough alone. Except cran-apple juice. That’d been a good idea on somebody’s part.

Grilled cheese and lemonade, incidentally, didn’t go together well. I shuddered and screwed my face up, then took another drink of lemonade. Kevin watched, amused. “You enjoy doing that?”

“Yeah.” My voice was as raspy as if I’d just had a shot of whiskey. I shuddered again, happily, and took another bite of grilled cheese. “No,” I added, “I haven’t converted. I think I’m still rational. It’s just the world’s gone nuts around me. I’ve gotten a crash course in the esoteric. I don’t have to like it. I just have to cope with it.”

Kevin nodded again and ate in silence for a while. “So why did you want to see me?” he asked eventually. I stabbed a fry into ketchup and bit it viciously before answering.

“Where would you go if you were a demigod on the verge of making a grab for power? Oh,” I waved another fry at Kevin’s expression of alarm. “Not that you’d know, but do you know anyone who could tell me where places of power in Seattle are?”

“Is that what you think he’s doing?” Kevin asked cautiously. I shrugged and shook my head.

“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, except trying to kill me.” That wasn’t exactly true, but I’d piled enough on Kevin already. He didn’t need to hear my theories about Herne’s emotional problems. “I don’t know how he plans to do it, but tonight is the night the Hunt is supposed to return to the Otherworld, and I think Herne’s going to try to affect that somehow. I don’t know what he’s going to do, though,” I admitted. Kevin let out a worried little sigh.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I tried to stay out of that side of Adina’s life. She was very spiritual and I’m… not. I could look in her address book, if you want, and call you if there are any names.”

“Names of who?” I asked. “I don’t even know what I’d start looking for.”

“Anyone associated with power centers. Probably not the kind of thing you find advertised in the phone book.”

I made a face, drank more lemonade, and made a worse face. “Probably not. If you would look, though, it can’t hurt. I’m chasing wild geese as it is. I thought I would find him here.”

Kevin’s expression turned furtive, and he straightened up a little. “Here?”

“In this part of the city. I linked to him, but he’s blocked me. He could be in the diner and I don’t think I’d know.” I looked around, displeased by the thought, and caught the gaze of a green-eyed man at the counter. It took distressingly long to shake off the paranoia that settled over me like a cloak and glance back at Kevin, who looked unwell.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. I’m not exactly the world’s most reassuring conversationalist right now, am I?”

He pasted on his thin smile. “It’s all right. Neither am I.”

I nodded. “If you can, check her address book.” I scribbled down my number on a napkin. “Thanks, Kevin. I’ll get the check.”

He picked up the napkin, nodding, and quietly made his way out the door. I got the check and the receipt, for the pure joy of writing it off as a business expense and annoying Morrison. Pleased with myself, I went back out into the winter afternoon.

* * *

Driving back to the U District was an adventure in burgeon-in? road rage. I’d caught the end of lunch-hour