“Ever had one of those days?” the priest asked. “Where you’re doubting everything?”

I’d never done this before, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t supposed to be his line. I’d been sort of looking forward to the bit where I said, “Forgive-me-father-for-I-have-sinned,” and he’d ruined the pattern already.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, “I like my job. But don’t you ever get up and wonder if you’ve made the right decisions? Wonder if you’ve really got a calling, or if it’s just all some sort of infinitesimally large joke? Catholics don’t mind the ancient-earth theories so much. I can see that God might call a billion years a day. Life is complicated like that. It’s just that every once in a while something happens that really shakes the hell, excuse my French, out of my faith.”

I blurted, “What happened?” He flashed me a sad little smile through the lattice.

“You haven’t seen the news yet, have you? There was a massacre this morning at one of the high schools. Four children were killed. The really sick thing is that it was some lunatic with a knife. Not a gun. He went and tore every single one of their hearts out, all those innocent souls. How could God let that happen?”

“They didn’t catch him?”

The priest let out a bitter laugh. “How do you not catch some-one who’s sticking knives into kids? But no, they didn’t. Their teacher was knifed, too. And nobody saw anything.”

“No one saw anything?” Had I done this? Was it vengeance for knifing Cernunnos yesterday? I closed my eyes. How long did it take for a god to heal? What possible purpose was there in the deaths of four kids? Did it give him strength? Hester said power didn’t work that way.

“No.” I spoke aloud, my eyes popping open. Shamanic power didn’t work that way. Cernunnos was a god, not a shaman. Maybe his power was some kind of death power. The Web pages hadn’t said.

“No,” the priest agreed angrily. “No one saw. So what’s the point?” I saw the shadow of him move, leaning forward to put his face in his hands. “If God can let this happen, how can I have faith in Him?”

I stood up slowly. The priest turned his head and watched me rise. His eyes were brown and his face unlined, in the unobtrusive confessional light. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. “Don’t worry, Father.” I took a deep breath. “If God can let this happen, then he can put people on Earth who can stop it, too.”

“But where are they?” he asked softly. I lifted my hand and pressed my palm against the lattice. The leaf crunched quietly and shattered in a tiny splash of light.

“I’m right here.”

He reached up and pressed his hand opposite mine, separated by a few centimeters of wood. He was quiet so long I thought he might laugh at my arrogance. But then he smiled, the kind of smile a priest ought to have, gentle and compassionate and full of serene confidence that there’s a better place than this world. “Go with God.”

He left me standing alone in the confessional, a fading imprint of leaf dust glittering on my palm.

“They were shamans.” Out of everyone I knew, Billy Holliday was the only person I would dare say that to. Billy was as enthusiastic as Mulder, a true believer in the things that went bump in the night. New people on staff always gave him shit about it—God knows I had—but it invariably faded into being one of those accepted quirks that make people interesting. Billy had more than his fair share of those quirks, but for the moment I was more or less grateful there was somebody I could talk to without Morrison throwing me in a nuthouse.

I plunked the files Ray lent me on Billy’s desk, doing my best to look triumphant and in control. Billy blinked up at me, eyebrows climbing up his forehead like caterpillars.

“Where’d you get those?” he asked first, to his credit for keeping the security of the department, and, “Who were?” second.

“I found them in a garbage can.”

He eyed the stack of paperwork. “You’re an officer, you know? Not a detective.”

“I’ve been with the department more than three years. I’m up for detective.” I widened my eyes. Billy snorted.

“Yeah, right. Who were shamans? Are you supposed to be here?”

“I dunno,” I admitted, glancing in the general direction of Morrison’s office. “He didn’t tell me what shift I was on. I think he expected me to quit.”

“Have you ever quit anything in your whole life?”

“Not much. Shift change is at eleven, right? It’s ten-thirty. I can be all perky and on time. Listen to me, Billy. These five murders in the past couple weeks, they were all shamans.” I pushed my fingertip against the files. My knuckle turned white.

“How do you know that, Joanne?”

I straightened up, squared my shoulders and said, firmly, “I met them dream-walking.”

Well. It was supposed to be firm. It was really more of an embarrassed whisper. Billy held my gaze for longer than the priest had, until I twisted my shoulders uncomfortably and glanced away. “Look,” I said very quietly.

“No,” he said, “I believe you.”

Despite his rep, I was taken aback. “You do?”

He stood up. “Let’s get some coffee. Down the street.”

That was the usual cue for the good cop to leave the room while the bad cop terrorized the witness. I didn’t usually think of Billy as the bad cop sort, but I sucked my lower lip into my mouth nervously and stuffed my hands in my pockets as I followed him out the door. On the street, he said, “You’re about the most rational person I know.”

I drew on what little dignity I had left. “Thank you.”

“I like you and respect you even though you’ve been laughing up your sleeve at me for years.”

I winced. “I gave up laughing ages ago, Billy. I just…”

“Think I’m nuts.”

I winced again. “In a good way. Look, I mean…” I sighed. “I mean, why do you believe in that stuff, Billy?” I’d never thought, or maybe dared, to ask before.

He glanced at me, mouth drawn in a thin line. “I had an older sister.”

“Had?” I tried to remember if I knew anything about Billy’s childhood, other than the unfortunate name his parents had given him. Nothing surfaced.

“She died when I was eight. She drowned.” Billy’s shoulders were tight, his voice quiet.

“God. I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” He glanced at me again, stopping outside the coffee shop door. “When I was eleven, I woke up from a dream that I was suffocating. Caroline was sitting at the edge of my bed with her fists knotted in her lap. She told me that my best friend, Derek, had fallen into the slurry a neighbor was pouring for the concrete foundation to their house. I woke up the whole household and we all went running over there in our pajamas.”

My own hands were knotted at my sides. “And?”

“My dad pulled Derek out of the slurry. It was half-set and crushing his ribs. My dead sister saved his life.”

I hauled in a deep breath of air and rubbed my breastbone. “Jesus.” I smiled lopsidedly. “So you’re telling me you see dead people?”

Billy shot me a look, seeing if I was teasing him. I was, but it was the only way I could get through the conversation. I didn’t mean to hurt him, and after a moment he realized that. His shoulders relaxed and he smiled back, crookedly. “Yeah. Not like the kid in that movie. Not nearly that often. But yeah, I do. You remember the Franklin murder a couple years ago?”

I shuddered. “Yeah.”

Mrs. Franklin had killed her fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily, after the girl claimed she could see her new stepfather’s past, and that he was a rapist. Mother and daughter had a screaming fight, ending in the girl’s death. Mr. Franklin’s police record proved Emily correct, too late. It was the sort of case the cops hated to have on the news; the tabloids made a huge fuss over it, while the coroner’s office held its tongue about whether Emily had been sexually abused. The news crews took the coroner’s silence as an implicit yes. The police department didn’t like to talk about the fact that she hadn’t been. It led to unanswerable questions about the little girl’s apparent psychic abilities.