No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,79
and every once in a while I got a glimpse of different critters ghosting their way through the dark. Once I caught sight of a crow, and once other of a buncha walking stick bugs, but my guides kept waiting, looking for something I didn’t know what.
I guessed they finally saw it, even if I didn’t, ‘cause the raven started hopping around and flapping his wings like he was all excited, and the tortoise hunkered down feeling satisfied. The raven bounced up on the tortoise’s shell and settled there, preening and shaking his feathers while we waited some more.
Seemed like about forever before Annie let go a real soft long breath and whispered somethin’ I couldn’t quite hear. Then she turned her cheek against my chest. “How interesting. You should try this sometime, Gary. Something actually came to me. A—”
“Don’t tell us,” Hester barked. She was flushed, prolly from the heat, but she was kinda agitated, too. “A spirit guide’s choice is a private matter.”
Annie lifted her head and gave Hes a hairy eyeball, but didn’t say anything else. I didn’t figure I’d want Hes knowin’ what my spirit animals were, either, even if she was helping out. “You all right to try this healing thing, then, Miz Jones?”
She nodded, but she was paying attention to Annie, not me. “I need you to understand that a shamanic healing is most effective when the person seeking healing is receptive. Without your belief, there’s very little, perhaps nothing, that I can do.”
Annie gave her a hard look. “That certainly puts the onus on the patient. Does it help you sleep at night?”
Hester’s pink cheeks went pale and I tried to pick up my flapping jaw, not remembering the last time I’d heard Annie being that sharp, though I got where it was coming from. She’d spent a lotta years as a nurse, and always said a good attitude helped, but for her, medicine worked whether the patient believed in penicillin or not. I could see how the idea of laying it all on the patient would bug her right down to her bones. She started looking like she mighta regretted saying that, but she not like she wasn’t gonna back down on having said it.
It took a long damned minute for Hes to find her voice. “Shamanic healing doesn’t have to be at odds with modern medicine. I would encourage you and anyone else to also pursue conventional treatment. But if you’re willing accept your own role in the healing process, shamanic magic may be able to help.”
Annie’s cheeks were pink too, like she’d helped herself to the color that’d drained outta Hes. She was as embarrassed as I’d ever seen her, an’ murmured, “Of course I’m willing to accept it.”
Hes nodded, so I guessed they’d sorted it out in the way women do when they ain’t gonna say what they really mean. “I’ve had a glimpse of the illness within you. We’ve done a spirit quest. I think we may need to do a spirit journey, now. If we leave this plane, the illness inside you may manifest itself separately, which would allow us to fight it in physical form and drive it away. Does that make sense?”
“Not really, but I’m not sure that matters. Will it make sense as it happens?”
“It should. I’ll bring you to the Lower World—”
“No.” That was me, surprisin’ all of us. Hes straightened up, looking like she was ready to give me a tongue-lashing, but I shook my head and kept talking. “Take her to the Upper World instead, all right? I ain’t sure this thing can’t just walk in and out on whatever levels it wants to, but I know the deeper you go the closer you’re getting to its home territory. Reach for the sky, darling. Don’t dig down deep. All right?”
Hes looked uncertain. “The Upper World’s spirits are more capricious. Trying to draw this illness out for a battle there may let it escape and do harm elsewhere, if we fail.”
“You can’t—” I shut up before I finished asking, ‘cause I already knew the answer. Jo threw magic nets around all over the place, all the time, but I’d seen her and her pal Coyote fighting together once, and it had mostly been on Jo’s shoulders. Coyote was a full-out shaman, one who wasn’t walkin’ the warrior path that Joanne was on. He could manage some shields, but twisting magic into other shapes and catching things in it was outta his league.