Spirit Dances. C.E. Murphy
when we both knew the truth was I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to. If I’d had to, yeah, probably. But short of somebody else coming out of the woodwork to kill Billy, no, I was stuck there on my knees next to Patricia Raleigh for the interim. I nodded again, and Billy went to the front door to await an onslaught of cops, paramedics, forensic examiners and, inevitably, Michael Morrison, captain of the Seattle Police Department’s North Precinct, and our boss.
I was sitting on the front steps, holding gun and badge loosely in my hands, when he came up the driveway. Any cop involved in a shooting had an automatic three-day suspension, so Morrison didn’t have to ask: I just handed the weapon and badge over. Patty Raleigh’s blood was under my fingernails, and Morrison noticed it as he accepted them. He checked the chamber and magazine—I’d already unloaded it—then tucked the gun into an empty holster under his suit jacket before asking, “What happened?”
I knew I should probably stand up and make a brisk report, but instead I stayed seated and outlined the incident in as few words as possible, mostly staring at Morrison’s belt while I did so. “Paramedics took Raleigh away about three minutes ago. She’ll probably live. Billy’s, uh. He’s inside, heading up the investigation on Nathan Raleigh. He thought it was better if I…”
Morrison nodded, only partially visible from my viewpoint angle. Then he sat down beside me, wooden porch creaking with his weight. “So what happened?”
I looked sideways at him. He wasn’t looking at me, gaze focused on the fence or the street beyond it, but he didn’t have to be looking my way for me to feel the weight of his concern or his determination to get an answer. I put my hands over my face, realized they smelled like blood, and dropped them again to stare at the street just like Morrison was doing. “I couldn’t heal her. I couldn’t…”
“I’ve seen you use shields to protect people. Why didn’t you stop her that way? Put one up around Holliday?”
Christ. Morrison, who liked magic even less than I did, would still be a better practitioner than I was. “I didn’t think of it. This wasn’t a paranormal case. It was a domestic homicide. I don’t usually bring the whole shooting match to the day job. She was there, she had a weapon, I had a weapon, I shot her. And now my gut feels like I ate a box of fishhooks and the healing won’t respond. And if I was anybody else you wouldn’t be wondering why I used my Glock .40 instead of magic.”
“That’s true. But you’re not anybody else.” Morrison exhaled, and I dropped my head again, though I kept my fingers laced together in front of my knees, not wanting to breathe in the scent of blood a second time. He was right. I wasn’t certain he was unconditionally right, but the power within me had always put forth some pretty clear ideas on what I should and shouldn’t do. The wrenching pain in my stomach and the lack of response from the magic both told me flat-out I’d chosen poorly.
“I’m supposed to be on a warrior’s path, you know that?” I asked the stairs beneath my feet. Morrison didn’t know, because I’d never discussed it with him. I didn’t discuss it with many people, much less the boss with whom I had, until quite recently, had a distinctly antagonistic relationship. “That’s what I was told right when all this started. That I was a healer on a warrior’s path. That I was going to have to fight to make things right. But there’s no memo. There’s no handbook saying ‘these are the circumstances you get to fight in.’ Instead what happens is something like today. Or back with the goddamned zombies. God, I hate zombies. Anyway, I always find out the hard way that I can’t use the magic offensively or it craps out on me. Now it turns out if I use ordinary real-world physical force on ordinary real-world people, I get bit in the ass for that, too. I know you don’t think I’m the greatest cop in the world, but I followed protocol. I did the right thing in police terms to protect my partner. Didn’t I?”
My voice got small as I recognized there were probably a million people it’d be better to say this to than Morrison. Unlucky for him, he was the one who’d asked what had happened, and unlike the psychologist I knew I’d have to talk to later, he was aware of and believed in—however reluctantly—the occult side of my life.
“There’ll be an investigation before I can properly answer that, Walker,” he said with unusual gentleness. I put my face in my hands again after all, holding my breath to avoid the smell of blood, and startled when he touched my shoulder. “But yes, it sounds like you did.” His voice went wry. “And no one else will be asking why you didn’t use a magic shield instead of a gun. I just wondered.”
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to think of the magic first, Morrison. Most cases don’t need it. I’m…” I trailed off with no real idea of what I wanted to say, and Morrison got to his feet.
“You’re officially suspended from duty pending an investigation into this shooting, Walker. A minimum of three days. Thanks for not making that difficult. You have an appointment with the psychologist at one. Get somebody to bring you back to the precinct building and get cleaned up. I want to see you when you’re done talking with her.”
I whispered, “Yes, sir,” and went to do as I was told.
Being suspended from duty for three days almost certainly meant “go home once you’re cleaned up,” but although I only lived a few miles from the precinct building, back-and-forthing seemed like a waste of time. I had clothes at work—the blue polyester pants and button-down shirt that were ubiquitous to police officers everywhere—so I showered, put them on and went back to my desk in Homicide. There was paperwork to do, not just for the morning: there was always paperwork to catch up on. It was a damned sight better to work than sit at home and brood. One of the other detectives came by to offer me a green armband, which was his way of offering sympathy for the morning’s incident without making a fuss about it. I put the armband on, glad not to have gotten pinched, and spent the next three hours writing reports, filling out forms and trying hard not to think about Patricia Raleigh’s glassy stare and short, shallow breaths. Mostly it worked, except when I had to write the actual incident report, and then I sat there a long time, wondering why I hadn’t responded the way Morrison suggested I should have.
Well, no. Not really wondering. I’d gone to the police academy, and though there’d been three solid years of working for the department as a mechanic before I became a cop, at the end of the day, I’d been trained to react the way I had. A couple of times during the academy I’d awakened from dreams I didn’t remember, kneeling in the middle of my bed in a firing position. That kind of training became hardwiring, and nothing I’d done in the past fifteen months had driven magic-using responses that deep into my brain. There was, as far as I knew, no such thing as shamanic boot camp, much as I could use it.
Knives prickled at my gut again, suggesting that I really could use a shamanic boot camp, or something else that forced me to react with magic first and brute force later. Either that or it was sheer nervousness, as it was a few minutes to one and I had an appointment with a shrink. I abandoned my desk and went upstairs to her office, heart hammering and hands cold for the second time that day. I’d met the psychologist, talked with her a few times, but never officially, and for some reason it was terrifying.
She took one look at my expression when I came in and said, “Don’t worry, everybody feels that way the first time. I promise it won’t hurt a bit. Louise Caldwell, not that you don’t know that.” She offered a hand, I shook it, and we both sat down as she asked, “How’re you doing?”
“Been better.” A shrink probably expected a deeper, more profound answer than that. I held my breath, sought something more profound and came up with the same thing again, this time as a shaky laugh on an exhalation: “Yeah. Been better.”
“Good,” she said crisply. “You’d be surprised how many people walk through that door after shooting someone and say they’re just fine. Did you have a choice?”
I blinked, taken aback at the no-nonsense approach. I thought psychologists were supposed to pussyfoot around things. Not that Dr. Caldwell looked like the pussyfooting sort: she was in her late forties, gray streaks at her temples probably indicative of carefully dyed hair, and dressed in a well-tailored