I crawled forward again, light bouncing wildly off the closed-in walls—they were dirt, not brick; someone had dug this space out—and tried to come up with an explanation I liked with regards to Tia. By the time we got free of the tunnel, we were filthy and I was no closer to an answer.
There were, as some small favor, dirty wolf tracks crossing the small room we’d entered, which told us which of the two doors—I used the word advisedly—to choose. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been this far out.” Rita looked up anyway, like the ceiling might offer answers. “I think we’re getting out of downtown by now. We’ve come a long ways.”
“Then we must be running out of Underground, right? She couldn’t have gone far.” Determined, I triggered the Sight again, baring my teeth against the now-expected blinding whiteness. It flared without giving me a single hint of the depth of viewpoint I knew it could, like it was unduly impressed with the weight and pressure of earth around us. I wasn’t certain, though, if it was the Sight itself at fault or if it was me, this time, since I was trying hard not to think about just how far underground we were. Knowing that, however, and shaking it loose were two entirely different things.
Rita said something, but I stopped where I was, in the middle of the room, suddenly irritated. I had had, even by my standards, a hell of an evening so far. Unlike my usual hellacious nights, though, this one had lined me up with what felt like an atom bomb’s worth of fresh power just waiting to be used. Just because my standard operating procedure had always been rushing in where angels feared to tread didn’t mean I actually had to do that now. “Billy, I need advice.”
He was at the door the tracks led through, scowling down it and clenching his hands like he wished he had his duty weapon with him. He stopped doing both, though, to gawk at me. I couldn’t blame him. I didn’t remember asking him for advice even once in the whole roller coaster of the past year. I’d barely even asked Coyote for advice, though in my defense, I’d wanted to. He’d just been unavailable for a lot of that time. Which made Billy the better person to ask for advice, probably, since he’d pretty much been around since moment one of Joanne’s Shamanic Awakening.
And now that I had his attention I didn’t know where to begin. “You know how I told you about my real name?” I finally asked.
His eyebrows elevated, but he nodded and even flickered a smile. “Good thing, too. Caroline Siobhán’s a nicer name than Caroline Joanne.”
I smiled, too. “Yeah, it is.” The Hollidays had nearly named their baby girl after me, which had prompted a confession to the train wreck of a name I never used. That, and they’d gone through a lot, thanks to me, and also I was slowly, cautiously, trying to come clean with the people I was closest to. I’d spent more than a decade holding secrets and damage close to the chest, which was poisonous even for perfectly normal people, and which made a nasty mess of shamanic potential in someone like me. Shedding all the protective layers wasn’t easy—in fact, of my friends, Morrison was the only one who knew all the parts of the truth about my history, and that was because he’d gone digging on his own—but I was getting there.
And since shedding was exactly what had happened to me under Rattler’s influence tonight, it seemed like this was as good a time as any to start doing crazy things like asking for help and advice. “Earlier, after the truck hit me and my spirit animal put me back together, I had this weird idea. This idea that I’d been…reborn.”
Billy, who was no slouch in the detecting department, said, “As Siobhán Walkingstick.”
I nodded. “And you saw how wiped out I was. The power got stripped down to a kernel before the troupe danced me up some energy again. Right now I can’t See past the end of my nose because every time I try the magic just goes kerblewy. It’s too big. It’s—” I waved my hands in the air, not sure what I was trying to express. “More solid? Confident? I don’t know. Than it’s been. The rebirth, the dance, they did something to me.”
Billy, strongly, said, “I know exactly what you mean.”
Right. Of course he did, and he hadn’t even gone through the shedding process I had. He’d just been nailed by what the dance troupe offered. I said, “Right,” out loud and itched my fingers through my hair. “So basically I need to know if this is a good time to completely change my modus operandi. If I should make a power circle, sit my ass down in the middle of this room, stop arguing for my own limitations and try to figure out how to make this whole huge-feeling power work for me. I might be able to, I don’t know. Map this place out in my head. See—” and I tried to invest the word with a capital S beyond it being the beginning of a sentence “—where Tia went, assuming I can get the goddamned Sight to work right at all. The point is, should I try things I’ve never tried because I’ve been too busy busting down doors, metaphorical guns blazing and hoping I don’t get my face eaten off?”
“I assume that’s the other option here.”
“Pretty much.”
Billy lost his grip on a solemn expression just briefly, and I tried not to snicker, myself. It was a frustrated sort of laughter, but it was also hard not to appreciate the mucked-up mindset which required asking if getting my face eaten off was perhaps not a good idea.
“How long would the map and search take?”
“I honestly don’t know. I don’t even know for certain it would work. I mean, it should, if I can control the fricking Sight. Mapping the layout shouldn’t be more than the magical equivalent of clearing all the rooms in a video game until the one big shiny spot left blinking on the screen is the bad guy.”
Billy gave me a look which suggested that if he did not have a twelve-year-old son, my analogy would have been utterly meaningless. I shrugged apologetically and went on. “Here’s the thing. Conceptually this is new to me, and I don’t know how long it would take. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe hours. The problem is I might be all topped up full of shiny strong brand-new ready-to-be-used magic right now, but I haven’t tested it yet. I’ve blacked out Seattle. I’ve caused earthquakes, for God’s sake. If this mapping idea goes wrong, if I pour out too much power down here beneath the city, I’m afraid I could send the whole downtown into Puget Sound.”
Billy stared at me a few long seconds, then, in a very steady even voice, said, “Let’s bust down some doors and get our faces eaten off.”
Tia leaped out of the wrong door and tried to eat our faces off.
She landed on Rita, who was smallest and closest, and who screamed like—well, like she was being crushed by a gigantic wolf. This time I reacted the way I should have when Patty Raleigh came after Billy: shields spun across the room, not just springing up around Rita so Tia’s enormous jaws snapped and skidded against them, but then slamming into the wolf, knocking it back. It was the most integrated defense-and-attack I’d ever pulled off, a hint of how my power was going to respond in familiar territory. Premature triumph bloomed in me, though at least for once I appreciated it was premature.
Tia whipped around behind the shield, snarling and searching for a way out. There wasn’t one: between Raleigh and Morrison in the past thirty-six hours, I at least had the sense to pin the shields up against the wall. “Rita, you okay?”
Her high-pitched, gibbered response indicated I’d asked a stupid question. Billy, though, gave her a brief once-over and reported, “She’s all right,” which I took to mean she hadn’t been bitten or otherwise scathed. I wasn’t sure anybody could be mentally all right after that, but one thing at a time. I inched toward the captured wolf, then, in a fit of brilliance, whispered a sword into my hand before a crisis demanded I have it.
The blade was a silver rapier, and I did mean silver, as in the precious metal, not just the color, that I’d taken off a god the very first day I’d been a shaman. The weapon had become part of my armament—I’d been taking fencing lessons for the past year so I could use it properly—but nobody in their right mind carried a four-foot-long rapier around Seattle. Most of the time it lived beneath my bed, where despite my utter lack of attention to it, it refused to tarnish. Neither did my necklace tarnish, now that I thought about it, so the maker they had in common had probably done something to the metal.