C.E. Murphy - Urban Shaman

Marie shook her head. “Christian earth. Even Cernunnos can only stand on it a few minutes. None of the Hunt can at all.”

I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Marie. She smiled the tight little smile of someone who knows she sounds crazy. It made me feel better. “This isn’t the best place to talk about this,” she said.

“Why not? You just said the guy who was after you can’t come here,” Gary said.

“No, but he can send people who can,” I said before Marie could. She nodded. “If he couldn’t, she wouldn’t have thought we might be trouble.” I touched my cheek gingerly. It was still bleeding. “An emergency room might be a good place to go. This is going to need stitches, and you should get looked at, too.”

Marie extended her arms, palms up. Half a dozen cuts still oozed red as she looked at them. She looked like a clumsy suicide attempt. “They’ll heal,” she said dismissively. “He knows I was hurt. I’d rather not go somewhere so obvious.”

“You’d rather bleed?” I demanded. Gary cleared his throat.

“I pot a first-aid kit in the car.”

I glared at him. He smiled and shrugged. “Sure,” I said, “the pretty one whose face isn’t cut up gets her way. Fine.” I stomped off the dais, picking the butterfly knife up off the pulpit. It made a satisfying series of clicks as the blade and handles slapped against each other when I closed it.

“Hey. That’s mine.” Marie had to take two steps to every one of mine, even after she ran to catch up with me.

“Not anymore, it isn’t. Call it a finder’s fee.”

“You didn’t find it.”

“I found you.” I shoved the knife into my waistband. Two steps later the elastic shifted and the knife slid down my leg and out of my pants, clattering to the floor. Gary choked back a guffaw and Marie grinned broadly.

I picked up the knife with as much dignity as I could muster and stalked out of the church.

I thought going into a diner all bloody and bandaged was more conspicuous than going to an emergency room, but Marie insisted. Gary butterfly-bandaged my cheek and wrapped up Marie’s arms while I sulked. As a gesture of peace he turned the meter off, but my face hurt too much for me to be grateful.

I dragged a coat out of my carry-on and pulled it on over my bloody T-shirt as we went into the diner. Marie walked in like she was daring the world to comment on her bloodstains. No one did. We sat down, silent until the waitress brought us our drinks. I didn’t know what it was about food, but it always seemed to make it easier to talk.

Marie folded her hands around an enormous glass of orange juice. I had a coffee. Actually, this being Seattle, I didn’t have just a coffee, even at a cheap diner. I had a grande double-shot latte with a shot of amaretto. Just the smell of the stuff got me high.

“Cernunnos leads the Wild Hunt,” Marie said to her orange juice. “They ride to collect the souls of the dead.” She looked up to see if that cleared things up for us. Gary just waited. He really was having a regular black coffee. I didn’t even know they made that anymore. He’d ordered breakfast, too. I was hungry, but between adrenaline and no sleep, I was pretty sure food would just come back up again. Now that I thought about it, the injection of caffeine probably wasn’t such a great idea on that combination. Food would have been better.

“You ain’t dead,” Gary pointed out. Marie winced, producing a pained smile.

“An oversight.”

“Fill in us dumb ones,” I said. “What’s a wild hunt?”

“The Wild Hunt,” she corrected.

“Okay, the wild hunt. What is it?”

She sat back, her hands still wrapped around the orange juice glass. She hadn’t drunk any yet. “Cernunnos was an old Celtic god,” she said slowly. “When Christianity came to Ireland and Britain, his cult was so powerful that it took a while for it to die out. And it never entirely faded.”

“Like any pagan religion,” I interrupted. Marie lifted her eyes to look at me. The muscle in my shoulder blade twitched again and I shrugged, trying to loosen it. “The Peop—the Cherokee still practice their old ways, too. Faith is hard to stomp out.” The People. Walkingstick. What was wrong with me?

“Like any pagan religion,” she agreed. “Cernunnos is the Celtic Horned God, essentially a fertility figure but with very deep ties to death as well. There are Norse and German counterparts, Woden, Anwyn, rooted in a common ancestry.” She waved her hand absently, brushing aside the trivia.

“And he’s after you.” I infused my voice with as much sarcasm as I could. It was pathetically little. She was too pretty to be sarcastic at, even if she was crazy.

“Yes.” Marie nodded and dragged her orange juice to the edge of the table.

“You seriously think you got some kind of god after you?” Gary asked. Marie nodded. Gary turned to me. “I vote we drop her off at a loony bin and run for the hills.”

“Are you asking me to run away with you, Gary? After such a short, violent courtship?” It wasn’t that I didn’t agree. In fact, I pushed my latte away, getting ready to stand up. Gary did the same, looking relieved.

“Sorry, lady,” he said, and stood. I put my palms on the table and looked at Marie. She looked bone-tired, more tired than I felt. She looked like she’d been through this a dozen times already, and was just waiting for the time that she screwed up and didn’t live through it.

Dammit, I’d jumped off a plane and come tearing through the streets of Seattle to find this woman. I didn’t feel like I’d seen it through to the end yet. I settled back into my seat.

“Aw, hell,” Gary said, and sat back down. Marie bit her lower lip, holding her breath while she watched me. When I didn’t move again, she let her breath out and began talking again, without taking her eyes off me. If she thought she was pinning me in place, she was right. Girls weren’t really my thing. Hell, I didn’t even like women much, as a species. I had no idea why I wanted to help her so much. Marie took a deep breath.

“I gather neither of you are mystics.”

Gary laughed so loudly I nearly spilled my coffee. A tired-looking blonde behind the counter turned around and looked at us. Marie twisted a little smile at her orange juice. I suddenly felt sorry for her, which was new.

“Okay,” she said in a very small voice. “Can you handle the idea that there’s more to the world than we see?”

“There are more things, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. ” It was the obvious line. What wasn’t so obvious was that Gary beat me to it, and said it in a rich, sonorous voice. Marie and I both looked at him. “Annie liked ‘em big, not stupid,” Gary said with a grin. “Sure, lady, there’s more than we see.”

Marie glanced at me. “Why does he keep calling me lady?”

“I think it’s an endearing character trait. When he really gets to know you, he’ll start calling you ‘dame’ and ‘broad,’ too.”

“Yeah?” She looked at Gary, then back at me. “How long’ve you known him?” I turned my wrist over to look at my watch, which was still wrong.

“About ninety minutes. So what’re we missing in our philosophies, Marie?”

She smiled. It was radiant. Honest to God. Her whole face lit up, all warm and welcoming and charming. Gary looked pole-axed. I pretended I didn’t and allowed myself the superior thought: Men.

“I’m an anthropologist,” Marie said. “I’ve been studying similarities between cultural mythologies for about ten years now.”

All of a sudden she had an aura of credibility. Well, except I thought she looked about twenty-five. I stole a glance at Gary, who didn’t look disbelieving. Either he thought she looked older than that, or his so-called useless talent was a load of bunk. “How old is she?” I asked him. He lifted a bushy eyebrow, glancing at me, then looked back at her.