C.E. Murphy - Urban Shaman

That seemed like a pretty good idea. I looked around, silver catching my eye again. The knife she’d cut me with lay against the foot of a pew, a nice heavy butterfly knife. I picked it up and cut a piece off the altar banner, holding it to my face while Gary asked again what to do with the woman.

“Um,” I said, and then my face started to hurt. For a minute I was too busy blinking back tears to give a damn what Gary did. I croaked, “Hold her for a minute,” and tried increasing the pressure on my cut to see if it helped the pain any. It didn’t. I looked up through teary eyes. It had to be the same woman. She had hip-length dark brown hair with just enough curl to make me covet it. “You’re the one I saw from the airplane.”

She lifted her head to look at me, eyes wide. I dropped my hand from my face and the makeshift bandage fell to the floor as I gawked at her.

She was beautiful. Not your garden-variety pretty girl, not your movie-star kind of beautiful. She was the sort of beautiful that Troy had gone to war over. High, fragile cheekbones, delicate pointed chin, absolutely unblemished pale skin. Long-lashed blue eyes, thin straight eyebrows. A rosebud mouth, for God’s sake. There were very fine lines of pain around the corners of her mouth and eyes, and the nostrils of her perfectly straight nose were flared a little, none of which detracted from her beauty.

“Jesus.” I suddenly had a very good idea of why she’d been chased.

“What?” Gary demanded. I just kept ogling the woman. She had a perfect throat. She had great collarbones. She had Mae West curves, too, a real hourglass figure. She was at least eight inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter than I was. It said something for her momentum that she’d knocked me flat on my ass. I didn’t think I could have knocked Gary over, if I’d been her and he’d been me.

I hated her.

I was so busy staring and hating her it took a while to notice there was drying blood on her shirt, not just the new stuff I’d put there, but sticky, half-dried brown spots. “Shit. Let her go, Gary.”

“What?”

“Let her go. Her arms are all cut up. You’re hurting her.”

Gary let go like his hands were on fire. The woman made a small sound and folded her arms under her breasts, shallow gashes leaking blood onto her shirt again. I expected her voice to be musical, dulcet tones, with an exotic accent. Instead she was an alto who sounded like she was from Nowhere In Particular, U.S.A. “You saw me from an airplane?”

People kept saying that. I took a breath to respond and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to throw up anymore. The twist of sickness in my belly had disipated. My shoulders dropped and I let the breath go in a sigh. I wasn’t a fan of my innards guiding my actions. Now all I had to do was explain myself so I could go get fired and go home to sleep. “At about seven this morning. I was flying in from Dublin.” As if that had anything to do with anything. “I saw you running, and something was after you. Dogs, or something. And a guy with a knife.” I looked at the knife I was still holding. “This knife? How’d you get past him? How’d you get away from the dogs?”

“I ran away from the dogs,” the woman said, “and I kicked the guy with the knife in the head.”

Gary and I both stared at her. She smiled a little bit. A little bit of a smile from her was like spending a little bit of time with Marilyn Monroe. It went a long way. “I guess I don’t look like a kick-boxer,” she said.

“That’s for damned sure,” Gary mumbled. He looked even more awed than I felt. I guessed it was nice to know some things didn’t change even when you hit your eighth decade. “So how’d you get all cut up?” he asked.

She shrugged a little. “I had to get close enough to kick him.”

“That his tooth out there?”

Her whole face lit up. “I knocked a tooth loose?” She looked like a little kid who’d just gotten her very own Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. I almost laughed.

“You knew him? Why was he chasing you?” Even as I asked, I knew the question was idiotic. Men have hunted people down for much less attractive prizes. I liked being tall. Next to this woman I felt as ungainly as a giraffe.

“Why did you come to save me if you don’t know who he is?” she asked at almost the same time. We stared at each other.

“Let’s start again,” I said after a long moment of silence. Then I had no idea where to start with someone who’d been attacked and who just tried to cut my throat out. Names seemed like a good place. “I’m Joanne Walkingstick.”

It’s physically impossible to look at your own mouth in astonishment. I gave it a good shot. I hadn’t called myself by that name in at least five years. More like ten. Gary raised his bushy eyebrows at me curiously.

“You don’t look like an Indian,” he said, which really meant, “How the hell did you end up with a last name like Walkingstick?” I’d heard it for the first twelve years of my life.

“I know.” I hadn’t known that a practiced tone of controlled patience could lie in wait for the next time it was needed, but there it was. It hadn’t been needed for years. It meant I wasn’t going to say anything else, and if you wanted to make a big deal of it, you’d end up in a fistfight.

I was good at brawling.

Gary, the linebacker, let the tone blow right over him and stayed there with his arms folded and eyebrows lifted. The woman studied me through drawn-down eyebrows. It made a wrinkle in the middle of her forehead. On me, that wrinkle was scary. On her, it was cute. I hated her some more.

Gary was wrong, anyway. I did look Indian. My coloring was wrong, but in black-and-white photos I looked like I didn’t have a drop of Irish blood in me. I’d changed my last name to Walker when I turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nowhere official. I just filled out every piece of paperwork, even the diploma application, with Walker. My birth certificate was the only piece of paper I owned that had Walkingstick as my official last name.

“My name is Marie D’Ambra,” the woman said.

“You don’t look Italia—”I nearly bit my tongue off.

“Adopted,” she replied, amusement sparkling in her eyes.

Oh. “My mother was black Irish,” I said after a moment. “I got her coloring.” It seemed like a fair exchange of information. “Why was that guy after you? What was chasing you? It didn’t look like a dog pack. Exactly.”

Marie inclined her head. It looked gracious. How did she do that? “It wasn’t. His name is Cernunnos, and he is the leader of the Wild Hunt. It was the Hunt who chased me. Why did you come to help me?”

I looked sideways at Gary, who shrugged almost imperceptibly. I wouldn’t think a guy with shoulders that wide could shrug imperceptibly. It should be more like plate tectonics. I hoped I was in that kind of shape when I was seventy-something. Marie waited patiently, and I shrugged more perceptibly. I really didn’t want to say, “I felt like I was going to puke if I didn’t,” but I heard myself saying it anyway. I curled a lip, shook my head, and added, “You looked like you needed help. I felt like I had to try to find you.”

One half of her mouth curved up in a smile. I stopped hating her. I couldn’t hate a smile like that. Her smile made the world seem like it would all be okay. “A gwyld at the crossroads,” she murmured, and I frowned at her.

“A what?”

She shook her head and did the wonderful half smile again. “Nothing. I’m sorry for cutting you. I thought you had to be one of Cernunnos’s people. I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would be looking for me.”

“One of his people? Not him himself?” That sounded wrong. “He himself.”