C.E. Murphy - Urban Shaman

The possibility of passing out crossed my mind, but I just had to see who was running around suburban Seattle with a SCUD. Lifting my head told me all sorts of painful things about muscles in my neck that I didn’t want to know. I clenched my teeth together on a whimper. Whimpering seemed undignified. No one ever whimpered in the movies after getting smashed through a glass door.

There was no missile launcher in the parking lot. Instead there were very large hooves a few feet outside the destroyed door. While I waited for that to make sense, they disappeared and reappeared again, moving forward.

Have you ever heard the sound of tearing metal? It’s a high-pitched scream that sets your teeth on edge and lifts the hairs on your arms. It’s the kind of sound a mechanic gets used to, but in the diner, along with the rattle of more breaking glass and some other noises I couldn’t place, it was incomprehensible. The hooves disappeared again, and I wondered where my knife had gone. Glass and dust and spikes of wood fell down around me.

The floor wrenched apart with a shriek of sound as one of the enormous hooves smashed down inches from my face. I twisted my head up, whimpering again at the pain in my neck. An extraordinarily broad chest was about four feet above my head. It reared up, which seemed wrong somehow, but I was too busy rolling frantically out of the way to give it more thought. Glass crunched under my arms as I rolled. I felt tiny cuts opening up on my arms.

I ended up sitting with my back against the counter, gasping while the rest of the world caught up with me. The tired blonde behind the counter shrieked with the regularity and volume of a car alarm. Gary had moved maybe two feet from the table, which suggested that despite the slow clarity I was experiencing, the attack had happened very quickly. Marie was shouting in a language I didn’t understand. It didn’t sound like Italian.

The horse made more sense now, for some nebulous value of the word sense. It had been able to rear up because after it kicked me in the chest it had torn out the entire door structure, and part of the roof had fallen down. The rest of the roof was on fire. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, but it didn’t seem to bother the horse.

Horse is such a limited word. The beast in the diner had the grace and delicacy of an Arabian and the size of a Clydesdale, multiplied by two. It shimmered a watery gray, bordering on silver, the color so fluid I thought I might be able to dip my hand in it. Despite myself, my gaze jerked up to its forehead. There was no spiral horn sprouting there, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been. It was Plato’s horse, the ideal upon which all others are based.

It was trying to kill me, and all I could do was admire it.

Then it screamed, shrill and deep all at once. The blonde behind the counter shut up, but I screamed back, a sort of primal response without any thought behind it.

Just for a moment, everything stopped.

There was a rider astride the gray, arrested in motion by my scream. He wore gray himself, so close to the color of the horse I could barely tell where one ended and the other began. The reputed Native American belief that white men on horseback were one exotic creature suddenly seemed very plausible.

The rider turned his head slowly and looked at me. His hair was brown, peppered with starlight, and crackled with life, as if touching it would bring an electric shock. It swept back from a massively sharp widow’s peak, and was held in place by a circlet. His face was a pale narrow line, all high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and a long straight nose.

The impression he left was of living silver. I locked eyes with him, expecting to see that liquid silver again. Instead I met wildfire green, a vicious, inhuman color, promising violence.

He smiled and reached out a hand, inviting me toward him. His mouth was beautiful, thin and expressive, the curve of teeth unnervingly sharp, like a predator’s. I pushed up the counter, using it to brace myself, and wet my lips. Marie was right. I was going to die. The rider wanted my soul and I was going to give it to him without a fight because of that smile and those inhuman eyes. I took a step toward him.

The second SCUD of the morning hit me in the ribs and everything started to move again. I slammed into the floor under Gary’s weight, sliding across linoleum and a zillion sharp pieces of glass. We stopped when my head hit the far wall. I opened my eyes to find the butterfly knife lying against the wall a few inches away from my nose. The horse screamed again and reared back, missing my head by half an inch as he crashed back to the floor.

Gary’s breath smelled like syrup and bacon. “Are you outta your mind?” He popped up onto his knees and hauled me to mine by a fistful of shirt at the back of my neck. I snatched up the knife as the horse smashed down again, right where my head had been. I looked up at the rider, and the horse kicked me in the ribs with a toe. I felt the bone crack inward, and didn’t even manage a scream, just a pathetic little grunt.

From a very long way away, I heard Marie scream a warning, in English this time. Before I could react, Gary hauled me over backward. A tip of silver glittered through the air where my throat had been. The rider looked genuinely startled before his eyes narrowed and he urged the horse farther into the diner. They were huge, taking up all the room, all the air. I gasped and scrambled to my feet, clutching Gary’s arm with one hand and my ribs with the other. Breathing hurt.

“Leave them alone.” Marie sounded thin and tired and at the end of her bravery, but there she was at my side, looking up at the rider with a set chin. “I’ll go with you. Just leave them alone. They were only trying to help.”

I let go of Gary’s arm and shouldered forward. The rider watched me. Neither Gary nor Marie moved. Behind me I heard the blond waitress fumbling with the phone, and her panicked, “Hello? Police? Hello?”

“He’ll kill us anyway,” I said, very low. I couldn’t get enough breath to do anything else. “Because it’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s nothing personal. You’re the Hunt, and when the Hunt is loosed, you kill until someone binds you away again. Cernunnos.” Terrifying conviction gave my voice strength. Twenty minutes ago I’d never heard of the thing standing in front of me; now the knowledge of who and what he was felt like the only thing I’d ever been certain of in my whole life. I didn’t like that at all.

The rider’s eyes widened, and then he smiled, inclining his head.

“The Horned God.” I lifted my eyes to his circlet again, which wasn’t a circlet at all. It was more like Caesar’s crown, but it was part of him. It began at his temples and swept back in an elegant bone pattern, horns curved to the sides of his head and meeting at the back, woven together there. Very practical. No catching your head on tree branches that way. I wondered if he shed them yearly and grew them again, or if they were as eternal as he was.

“They grow with my power,” he replied. Chills ran through me. It wasn’t that he responded to an unasked question. That seemed perfectly normal from this being. It was his voice, dark and rich and earthy, deep enough that a roar from him would shake the world. That, and I was quite certain he hadn’t spoken English or any other language I knew.

“What’d he say?” Gary whispered. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Marie shake her head fractionally.

“You cannot stop me,” Cernunnos said, little more than a murmur.

“What do you want?” I still couldn’t breathe enough to get a real voice out. He laughed, and it took everything I had to not run away.