“I always thought I was a pretty good liar,” I finally mumbled.

He shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with your delivery. But the truth flares up around you like a spotlight. We probably don’t have much time, Joanne. Let’s save the pretenses for later.”

“Subtle, Jackson.” Samantha smiled. He grinned and shrugged.

I opened my mouth to argue, and let all my air out in a rush. “Okay. Okay. So maybe I’m kind of on-purpose dense about American Indian—” I waved my hand around “—stuff. I just hate playing into stereotypes, you know?”

“Actually, you’re afraid of it,” Jackson murmured. I straightened my shoulders, offended.

“What’s there to be afraid of?”

“Power,” every single one of them said. I took a step back.

“Responsibility,” Samantha said, and Hester said, “Change.”

Roger smiled and shrugged a little, as if to say, what can you do?, and added, “Love,” to the list. “Death,” said the woman who’d been quiet except for swearing at Hester, and Jackson breathed, “Life.”

“I’m not afraid of any of that,” I threw back. “Not that I’m eager to die, but—”

“You’ve been very closed off since you were about fifteen,” Samantha said, sympathetic again. I felt my stomach knot up, and took another step back. “The world was a lot more wonderful before then, wasn’t it?”

One of those cracks I’d seen inside me tore open, surgery with a battle-ax. For a moment there was nothing but pain and rage and a terrible sense of loss, memories that I’d kept safely locked away in a small black box in my mind. “How do you kn—”

I clenched my jaw on the words. I was not having this conversation with dead people in a star field somewhere outside of my own body. I felt a little tug around my heart and ignored it. “What is it that you five have in common,” I said flatly. “There has to be some kind of pattern.”

All five of them exchanged glances, and Jackson spoke up. “Sam asked earlier. What do you know about shamans?”

I shrugged, stiff. “I don’t know. They’re medicine men. They do magic. What do they have to do with me?”

“The world has a lot of people and a lot of problems these days,” Hester murmured. “It needs more shamans than ever.”

“A shaman’s job is to heal,” Roger said. “Whatever needs healing. That’s what we did, in life. Most of us have been doing it for many lifetimes.”

I stared at him for a while, waiting for the punch line. When it didn’t come, I rubbed my eyes, noticing that here, I could see perfectly clearly without glasses or contacts. “So why would someone go around murdering cosmic caretakers?”

“Power,” the quiet one said wryly. She sounded English. Hester frowned at her.

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Not our power,” the quiet one said patiently. “His own power. We’re all people who could have fought or helped him, and so we threatened his power.”

“Fought? You just said you were healers.”

There was a little silence while they all looked at each other again. “There are different paths,” Jackson finally said. “Some of us are warriors. Others are less confrontational. The end purpose is the same, to take away pain, physical and emotional, to heal.”

Very, very slowly, a light came on at the back of my head. “That’s not what I’ve gotten myself into.” I figured this was the moral equivalent of asking for a no. It was like asking, “You wouldn’t want to help me paint the fence, would you?” Put it that way, and you were setting up for denial.

I really, really wanted to be denied.

“We rarely understand the consequences of our decisions at the time they’re made,” Samantha murmured, which didn’t sound much like the answer I was hoping for.

“I didn’t have a lot of time,” I snapped. Another tug pulled at my insides, a little stronger than last time. I rubbed my breastbone absently and took a deep breath. I wondered if my body back in bed did the same thing.

“The important decisions usually come when there’s not much time to debate,” Roger agreed. I frowned at him. He seemed so nice and down to earth, and I was unconsciously counting on him to back me up. My hopes and dreams were obviously being lined up to be crushed.

“Well, Christ, there’s got to be a way out of this, doesn’t there?”

“Of course there is.” Hester’d become even more disdainful, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. “Ignore it.”

“Will it go away?” I asked hopefully.

“No. You’ll keep struggling with the urge to help people, and every time you turn your back, a little part of you will die. Eventually you turn into a prune.”

I stared at her. I could have nightmares about turning into someone like her. To my surprise, she threw her head back and laughed. “Oh, I might rub you the wrong way, Walkingstick, but there are people who respond to me fine. Listen to this—a shaman is a trickster. To heal someone, you need to change their way of thinking, if only for a moment. Your armor is fractured. One good hit—” She flicked her middle finger against her thumb, like she was thumping me in the chest. The tug returned, painful this time. “—And you’ll come apart into a thousand pieces. Keep your promises, and you might not shatter.”

I hated suspecting people were telling me God’s own truth. I gulped against another painful tug, and the five of them suddenly seemed distant. “Oh, hell,” said the quiet one. “We’ve wasted too much time. She’s too tired to stay.”

“She’s very young,” Roger reminded her.

“I know, and she’s come a long way, but—” The quiet one broke off and stared at me intensely. “Listen to me—”

“Wait,” I said. “Marie wasn’t a shaman, was she? What did she have in common with you?”

“I don’t know Marie,” the quiet one said impatiently. “Find him, Siobhan Walkingstick. His power and his pain will bleed off him. Find the scent of it and follow him back.”

“But who is he?” My voice sounded very thin and distant, even to myself. The tug was a steady pull now, and the stars were streaking by me, disappearing as I faded away.

“I don’t know. But he controls the—”

I took a sharp breath, woke up and rolled over. Something crunched in my palm. I opened my hand and blinked through the dimness at the shimmering leaf there. After a few moments I sighed quietly and went back to sleep, cradling the leaf carefully. It was seven-thirty and I’d woken up to a still-dark sky before I remembered that it was January and there were no leaves on anything but the evergreens.

Wednesday, January 5th, 8:30 a.m.

I don’t go to confession. For one, I’m not Catholic. For two, the whole idea of being absolved of your sins by telling a priest about them has always struck me as a little strange, probably because I’m not Catholic.

On the other hand, a priest isn’t allowed to call up die loony bin and have you committed after you tell him all your crazy little stories, and he’s a whole lot less expensive than a shrink.

St. James Cathedral in downtown Seattle was the only Catholic church I knew of for certain. I parked in one of the lots at the corner of 9th and Columbia, having made it from the University District in thirty-seven minutes. On a weekday morning, that was a record-breaker. Finding a parking spot put it off the charts.

St. James didn’t exactly look like it was imported wholesale from Europe, but it had all the impressive dignity a cathedral ought to. Buff-colored brick and two very tall bell towers defined the place; that, and a sixty-foot arched entryway. I felt properly awed as I went inside, cradling my shimmering leaf in my palm. I kept expecting it to disappear and leave lines of fairy dust on my hand.

I edged around the pews and up to a confessional booth, sliding inside. The leaf gleamed slightly.

There was a thump in the other half of the confessional, and a gusty sigh.