Urban Shaman

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. “Okay, it was a stupid question.”

“Couldn’t it have been vampires?” Gary asked wistfully around a mouthful of hash browns. “Vampires are at least kinda sexy. What’s sexy about packs of dogs and birds? No such thing as rooks around here anyway.”

“They come with Cernunnos.” Marie kept saying these things like they were obvious.

“Marie, what are you?” I asked. She shrank back, looking surprisingly guilty. “Banshees are fairies,” I said. “Please don’t tell me you’re a fairy.”

“Not much of one, anyway,” she said to her orange juice, “or I wouldn’t be able to hide on holy ground, or use that knife.” She nodded at the butterfly knife I’d set on the table at my elbow. I picked it up without opening it and looked at her curiously. “Iron,” she said, “steel.”

“What about it?”

Have you ever had someone look at you like you were a particularly slow child? That’s the look Marie gave me. Come to think of it, Captain Steve had given me that same look earlier. I was beginning to think I should be offended. Marie interrupted before I got up the energy. “You really don’t know anything about the mystical, do you?”

“Why should I?”

“I thought Indians knew that kinda stuff,” Gary put in. I looked at him incredulously. He shrugged. “Well, you got all them powwows and stuff. What were you doing during the powwows?”

“Reading books on evolution,” I said through my teeth. Apparently that tone was scarier than the one I’d employed earlier, because Gary closed his mouth around another forkful of food with an audible smack. “That’s like saying all big guys are stupid, or all blondes are dumb, or—”

Gary pushed his food into one cheek, squirrel-like, and nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I gotcha. It was a joke, Jo. Jeez.”

“Perpetuating stereotypes through joking isn’t funny.”

“I’m sorry.” Gary sounded like he meant it. I frowned at him, then sighed and put my face in my hands.

“Forg—fuck that hurts!” I jerked my hand away from my cheek, expecting to see fresh new blood on my palm. I was spared that, at least. This was not my morning.

“The Celtic fair folk aren’t supposed to be able to bear the touch of iron,” Marie explained, once more interrupting my downward spiral of misery before it began. “Not even their gods. And I don’t know what I am, not in the way you’re asking the question. I’m an anthropologist with an unusual skill.”

“Skill? Like you learned it deliberately?”

Marie shrugged. “Talent, skill. I hesitate to call it a gift.” She caught Gary’s eye, and flashed a quick smile. “Although I could make a killing in insurance,” she said quickly. He snapped his mouth shut around another bite of food, beaten to the punch. I grinned. It made my cheek hurt. “In any other aspect,” Marie said, “I’m ordinary.”

“You are not,” I said, “ordinary.” My voice came out about six notes lower than normal. I felt color rush to my cheeks, which made the cut throb furiously. Marie’s mouth quirked in a crooked little smile. I bet even a smirk would look good on her.

“Thank you,” she said, easily enough to make my blush fade. I could feel Gary looking at me. I very carefully didn’t look at him.

“You’re welcome.” I lifted my hands to my temples and held my head. My shoulders ached. I needed a hot shower, a massage from a tall bronze guy named Rafael and about sixteen weeks of sleep. “All right, look. Let me take you at face value.”

Marie pulled a wry little moue, and Gary let out a deep chuckle. I felt a little smile creep over my face and split my cheek open again. I was going to bleed all day long. How fun. “Let me take your story at face value,” I amended. Marie laughed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was about eight when I figured out being taken at face value meant people were going to let me get by on my looks. If I’d had a different family I’d never have learned to think at all. Why would I need to?” The way she said it made me think she’d used her looks just as much as she’d used her brain to get where she was in life. There are beautiful people who know they’re beautiful, and use it like a weapon. I got the impression Marie used it as a tool. I couldn’t blame her.

“You’re being hunted by an ancient Irish god who wants you for his own nefarious purposes. Dead or alive will do. Have I got that right?”

Marie nodded.

“Right,” I said. This was completely insane. “How can I help?”

“He’s gaining power,” she said. “He will until the sixth, and then he’ll be banished to the otherworlds until Samhain. It’s the cycle he’s bound to.”

“Until what?”

“Halloween,” Gary and Marie both said. I looked at Gary. He shrugged and ate a piece of bacon. I pressed my eyes shut, wished it didn’t make my cheek hurt, and opened them again to look at Marie. She kept right on not looking as if she were completely insane.

“Just out of morbid curiosity—the sixth?”

“It’s the last day of Yule.”

I wished she would stop saying things like that as if it explained everything. I waved my hand in a circle, eyebrows lifted as I shook my head. Apparently the connotation of “yeah, so?” got through to her, because she sat back with a quiet sigh.

“Yuletide used to be very important in the Catholic Church. It’s the twelve days from Christmas to the sixth of January, and it marks the days of Cernunnos’s greatest power as he rides on this earth.”

“You’re telling me some random church holy days hold sway over an immortal god.” That time the sarcasm came through loud and clear, whether she was pretty or not. Her shoulders drooped.

“Those dates are closely tied to the solstice and the half-moon cycle after the solstice,” she said very quietly. “There aren’t any written records, of course, but I’ve always suspected the lunar cycle had more to do with when the Hunt rode than our calendar.”

“Oh.” I stopped being so sarcastic, the wind taken out of my sails. “Okay. I guess I can buy that.” Insofar as I was buying any of it. What was I doing here? “So what’s he want with you?”

Marie shook her head again. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to stay away from him since Halloween, traveling all over the place. He kept finding me.” She shivered, wrapping her arms around herself. “All over the world. So I kept moving. But since Christmas I’ve been…this morning was the closest. I’d never actually seen him before. Never touched him.” She dug into her pocket and pulled the tooth out, putting it on a napkin on the table. “I didn’t even think something like this could be done to him.”

I stared at the tooth. “Eww. I didn’t know you’d picked it up.”

“While Gary was bandaging your face,” she said. “It’s a good thing to have. It gives us a physical connection to him. It may help us build shields against him.”

“Build what?” Gary asked. He’d cleared two-thirds of his plate. I reached over and stole a piece of bacon. He