Urban Shaman by Lyn Gala

Author:Lyn Gala
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: M/M Paranormal, Source: Amazon
ISBN: 9781615814220
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Published: 2010-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

THE city was almost quiet and the sun would be up in a couple of hours. The morning had a smell unique to the city: asphalt and salt and a faint smell of water that blew in from East River. When Miguel had first arrived, that smell had bothered him, waking him in the morning when he left his windows open. But now it was a familiar friend. “You okay?” Miguel asked when Nikolai limped slowly out of the church.

“Yeah.” Nikolai might have said that, but he used the railing to lower himself to the steps gingerly, like an old man.

“We should get you to a hospital,” Miguel said. He had bruised ribs at the very least, and he’d need pain killers. He’d be in bad shape the second he tried to pee, and worse shape when he tried to get out of bed in the morning. All those bruises were going to swell up, joints would stiffen, and he was going to be crippled with pain before long.

“You really didn’t suspect?” Nikolai asked, sighing when he finally managed to get settled on the stairs.

Miguel thought about that. Had he suspected that Carl Williamson had used him for an old-fashioned case of suicide-by-cop? No. Maybe Miguel had just spent too much time fighting hard to stay alive, but it never occurred to him that someone would ever give up on life. That made Miguel smile with bitter irony. He actually had given up on life, but when he’d survived, he sure never thought about trying to hurry things along. The next world would come for him when it was ready, and Miguel could wait.

“I didn’t think you had. You didn’t have a choice; he did.”

Miguel glanced toward the church doors. “So you make the widow blame him?” Miguel really wasn’t sure how he felt about that. She was already carrying enough guilt. But Nikolai was already shaking his head.

“Oy gevalt, no. No, she now puts the blame where it should lie. His teachers didn’t prepare him. His society trapped him within a slum. His world is full of such cold disinterest in each other that a human soul has no value. He didn’t kill himself because of his failing, but because of the failings of the world. You couldn’t have controlled those any more than he could, any more than she could. I hope she sees that now.”

Miguel sat watching a streetlight blink, the circuitry on the verge of failing. “How did you know?”

“I’m a shaman.”

Leaning back onto the warm concrete, Miguel looked at Nikolai. He looked so very normal now. He looked like some half grown, lanky white boy who’d just gotten in a back-alley brawl and lost. Badly. “I’m starting to get really tired of hearing that.”

He shrugged. “It’s my explanation for being so many things. Between being Jewish and being a shaman, there are very few motes of dust in my soul that are not accounted for.”

With a frown, Miguel really studied Nikolai, his bruises and

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