Wintermoon

by Mercedes Lackey

  “What the hell happened?”

  All right, kind enough not to ask for a few seconds, at least. I shook my head, exhaustion sweeping over me without warning. The bubble of energy inside me that I spent so much time trying to ignore was depleted again. I felt like I’d been depending on it without knowing about it. “I need food.”

  I got up, largely to see if I could, and wobbled to the kitchen door. When I’d reached the frame without mishap, I turned my head to answer Gary’s question. “I don’t think my mother is as dead as I thought she was.”

  I refused to say anything else until I’d eaten. Gary finally stopped asking, “Zombie? Vampire? Wraith?” and ate his own dinner, watching me with the eagerness of a kid at Christmastime. I swear, anybody on the planet—except possibly Morrison—would have been better suited to my insane new world than I was. Billy had already lived with something like it his whole life. Gary thought it was cool. I wanted it to all go away so I could sleep in peace at night, and work on Petite by day.

  “There’s something out there,” I finally said. Gary gave an evocative snort that made me aim a kick at him under the table. To both our surprise, it connected, and he yelped, looking injured.

  “Sorry. I mean, something that wants me to go check it out. My mother was standing sentinel over it tonight. She wasn’t there last time.”

  “Last time?”

  “I saw it in January. Look, that doesn’t matter. She kicked my ass.”

  Gary put a bite of spaghetti—the closest thing I had in the freezer to chicken fettuccine—in his mouth to hide a smirk. I drew my foot back for another kick, then remembered I’d managed to hit him once already and felt guilty. He looked smug, making me annoyed for feeling guilty, so I swung at him again. I missed. “So obviously,” I said through gritted teeth, “she thinks whatever’s behind door number one is dangerous.”

  “Then you should stay away from it,” Gary said wisely.

  “I don’t even know what it is!”

  “Mothers are always right. Don’t you know that?” He wrinkled his eyes into nonexistence as I scowled at him. “Right. I forgot. Sorry.” He paused. “Mothers are always right. You don’t wanna find out what’s behind that door.”

  “Gary!”

  He lifted his hands defensively. “I’m just sayin’.”

  “Well, dammit, I want to know what’s back there.” I hesitated. “She said I wasn’t ready for it.”

  Gary’s bushy eyebrows rose. “If you’ll excuse me for coppin’ a phrase from today, duh. You really think you’re ready for the monster in the closet?”

  “No, but I’d like to know what it is! Knowledge is half the battle, or something.”

  “Look.” Gary pointed his fork at me. “What’d you go in there looking for?”

  I shrugged, uncomfortable. “I don’t know. Nothing specific.”

  “Okay. There’s your problem. You got no focus. You need to go in there and talk to somebody who knows what’s going on. Your buddy the coyote.”

  “Coyote never gives me a straight answer.” I sounded just like the sullen kid my mother had accused me of being.

  “Yeah, that’s kinda what the whole trickster thing is all about, Jo.”

  I flung my hands in the air. “Why do you know that? Why does everybody on the whole planet know this stuff that I don’t? Why didn’t somebody else get this stupid talent? You can have it. You’d be a lot better at it than I am!”

  Gary huffed. “Probably.”

  My rant cut off as my jaw dropped. Gary’s gray eyes sparked good humor with a steely undercut. “You done?”

  “Uh.” I cleared my throat. “Um. Yes. Thank you.”

  “You got something special, kid. You’re gonna have to learn to suck it up and live with it, or walk away. Right now there’s some dead ladies out there that maybe you can help, if you stop your whining and bitching and get on with it. Are you gonna do that, or what?”

  “Okay.” I sounded very small and pathetic. And embarrassed.

  “Arright.” Gary got up, his plastic spaghetti dish in one hand. “Let’s go try this again, then.” He stalked into the living room, leaving his muttered, “Jeez. Dames,” lingering on the air.

  It took longer to go under this time, in part because of chagrin and in part because of the microwaved fried chicken that settled in my tummy and made me more aware of my body than was helpful. After several minutes of drumming, though, I suddenly fell backward into my body and found myself scrambling down a thin tunnel, in search of an internal garden that somehow reflected the state of my soul.

  There was a fundamental difference between going there and going…other places…that I went. It struck me that it might really be helpful to get a grasp of the different levels of reality that I seemed to be able to access. Being able to name them, for example, could be useful. It might make me sound—or at least feel—like less of an idiot.

  Whether I had a name for it or not, the journey to my garden felt distinctly internal, whereas moving to the astral plane seemed to involve leaving my body in some kind of upward fashion. I scuttled through little tunnels, feeling myself drawing closer to the center of me, until the light turned gray around me and I popped out of a mouse-sized hole in one of the walls surrounding my garden. I looked back and the hole was gone, sealed up safely by my meager mental defenses.

  The garden itself was—well, it wasn’t quite dead, which was something. It was functional, not beautiful, with straight pathways in geometric patterns and grass cropped so short I could see dirt between individual blades. A small pond with its own waterfall bubbled at one end of the garden, more agitated than I remembered it being. I took a couple of deep breaths to see if it would calm the pond, but it didn’t seem to help.

  “The problem’s deeper than your breathing, Joanne.”

  “I don’t have any problems!” There I went again with the juvenile-response syndrome. I waited a few seconds, trying not to blush, then looked for the speaker, who lolled on a concrete bench, his tongue hanging out. I tried very, very hard to modulate my voice into politeness as I said, “Hello, Coyote.”

  He rolled to a sitting position and shook himself all over, golden eyes bright as he cocked his head at me. “If you don’t have any problems, what are you doing shouting for me?”

  “I—” I took a deep breath and stood up straighter. “I need some, um, help. Guidance!” I latched on to the word, feeling rather proud of myself. “Please,” I added hastily. “If you could.” Nice Mr. Coyote Man, I thought but didn’t say. I didn’t have to: he snapped his teeth at me like I was an annoying fly.

  “I heard that.”

  My shoulders sagged. Coyote could hear anything I thought, while I heard nothing of what he thought. Sometimes I thought that meant I’d made him up. Other times I was equally certain it meant I hadn’t.

  “You did not make me up,” Coyote said.

  “No,” I muttered. “You’d be cuter and less annoying if I had.”

  He grinned a coyote grin at me and stretched, long and lazy. When he was done stretching, he wasn’t a brown and gold beast any longer. Instead an Indian man sat there, his skin as red as bricks and his hair blue-black and long and falling to his hips. He wore jeans and was barefoot, looking incredibly comfortable in his own skin. Only the eyes were the same, bright gold and full of mirth. “Is this better?”

  It was certainly cuter. He laughed even though I hadn’t spoken out loud, and stood up to go drag a hand through the bubbling pool at the end of my garden. “What do you need, Jo?”

  “There’ve been some murders. And…my mother is alive. Or something. I—can you help me find her?”

  He lifted his head in a swift motion, more like a coyote than a man. “Your mother?”

  “Is up there in the astral realm or whatever it is, bossing me around.”

  “Wow.”

  I was practically certain spirit guides were not supposed to say wow. “’Cause you know so much about spirit guides,” he said. “I’ll see i
f I can—”

  “You won’t be needing to, lad.”

  “Jesus Christ!” I whipped around, unbalancing myself with the motion, to find my mother standing directly in front of the mouse hole that I could’ve sworn closed up when I arrived. She ignored me momentarily, focused on Coyote.

  “Sheila MacNamarra,” she said to him. “A pleasure, and aren’t you the handsome one. Joanne’s a lucky girl.”

  My dead mother was matchmaking me with a dog. Great.

  “I’m not a dog.”

  “I’m hardly matchmaking, Joanne. You opened up the conduit. I’m just here to say hello.”

  I set my teeth together and waited a few seconds before I trusted my voice. “Hello, Mother.” I waited a few more seconds before it burst out of me: “What the hell are you doing alive?”

  A trace of surprise and injury darkened her eyes. “I’m not alive, Joanne. You saw me die.”

  “Then what are you doing here? Besides kicking my ass back into my body, which hurt, thank you very much.”

  “Not nearly so much as facing down that enemy would have hurt. Joanne—” Sheila made a small and elegant gesture, bringing her hands in toward her heart, as if collecting sorrow there. “There’s very little time, and a great deal to tell you. I’d hoped we could talk before, but you weren’t ready—”

  “Before what?”

  “Before I died,” Sheila said, nonplussed. “That was why I asked you to come, of course. I never dreamed you’d be so closed off. If you’d been ready, I could have explained so much.”

  “Ready for what?” I felt very small and young suddenly, a feeling that was reflected in the garden: it grew around me dramatically, until Coyote and my mother both towered over me, and even the sparse blades of grass seemed much larger in comparison to my own height.

  My mother cast a glance at Coyote that clearly said she despaired of me, but she brought her attention back to me in an instant. “To accept your heritage, at least on my side. What you’ve got to face. You’re still not ready to hear it, but the moon is changing and I’m out of time. Siobhan, listen to me. I’m a gwyld, a—”

  “Shaman,” I interrupted dully. I’d heard the word before, only directed at me, not my mother. “Some kind of druidic version of a shaman. You came back from the dead to tell me that? Like it could possibly matter? Like I could care?” I was not, I knew, being fair. Part of me did care. Part of me cared so much it hurt to breathe, and that was the part that lashed out at her. It was perversely like finding out there was a Santa after all.

  Frustration creased her forehead. “I left the mortal world to protect you, Siobhan. I’ve known since before you were born what you might be, what it was you’d have to face. But you were so unprepared I saw no other choice. You needed protecting.”

  “What,” I said, “if you strike me down I’ll become more powerful than you can ever imagine? Is that your gig?”

  Complete incomprehension flitted across her expression. I set my teeth together, about to lash out again, but a shriek of wind erupted, sounding in my ears but going unfelt against my skin. My gaze went to the sky even as a shadow, dark and red, fell across my vision again. A full moon hung above me, one that hadn’t been shining on my garden moments before. One with blood spilling down its face, and with a piece of darkness falling from it like a scythe. A deep sense of malignancy boiled up inside me, as if a thing of hatred was being born. Cold, raging hands seemed to clench around my heart, and I listened frantically for the rhythmic drumbeat that would let me know I was still alive.

  My mother let go an inhuman screech, like a car braking too hard, and flung herself at the sky. Her hair spread out like raven’s wings, blocking my view of the bloody moon. The slice of night that had fallen from it was enveloped by the black spiderweb of her hair. I heard another yowl, as gut-wrenching as the earlier ones, and the barbs that had knotted in my heart loosened.

  A small, furry bundle of bone crashed into my chest, knocking my heart into pounding again as sweat stood out on my body in cold terror. Coyote stood over me for a moment or two, his golden gaze fixed on mine before he brought his head down to smash it against mine with tremendous force.

  For the second time in a single evening, I slammed out of the realm of Other and back into my body, aching all over with pain and confusion.

  4

  It took the better part of an hour to get Gary out of my apartment, which both made me feel better and worse. When he was gone I sat on the couch with a pillow hugged against my chest, staring blindly at nothing.

  It was inconceivable to me that my mother had been some sort of mystic. The woman I’d known for a few scant months had held her cards close to the chest, always judging and never commenting. I’d spent four months with her and, when she died, felt as though I’d known nothing more about her than she liked Altoids. There’d been no real mourning, at least not on my part. Confusion, yes, and, not to be delicate about it, a whole lot of resentment. She’d disrupted a life in which I had not missed her to any noticeable degree in order to have me witness her death. She’d been young, only fifty-three, and in extremely good health. I’d been left with the impression that she was bored of life, and as such saw fit to leave it under her own power.

  It appeared that the power in question was more literal than I’d thought. I mean, anybody who could will herself to death wasn’t a person whose emotional state was one I wanted to tangle with. She might decide it was time for me to die, and I might not be tough enough to argue. I hadn’t even tried arguing in favor of her life, which probably made me a very bad daughter.

  Not that there was any really compelling reason to be a good daughter to the woman who’d abandoned me when I was a few months old. We hadn’t liked each other as adults. I could only assume she hadn’t much cared for me as a baby, either.

  A fine thread of emptiness wove through me, an ache that I’d spent the better part of my life resolutely ignoring. I hadn’t been given up for adoption by a mother who thought it was best for me. I’d been dumped on a father who hadn’t known I existed until that moment, by a mother who evidently didn’t like me very much. It was not something I enjoyed thinking about.

  Especially as it reminded me, inevitably, of a boy growing up in North Carolina, whom I had known full well I couldn’t properly mother. Not at fifteen. Not in the confusion of mourning the sister who’d been born with him, and who’d died just minutes later, too small to live.

  I set my teeth together and put my forehead against the pillow, shoving away every thought of family ties that came haunting me. Introspection was not my strong suit. I didn’t like to look back, and I wasn’t prepared for the past, in the form of my dead mother, to come calling.

  I fell asleep sometime after midnight, still wrapped around the scratchy couch pillow.

  Monday March 21, 8:20 a.m.

  There was a place on the other side of sleep that I’d been to, where I’d walked among the dead and spoken with them. The plan—a plan which I didn’t have any intention of mentioning aloud, not even to myself—had been to whoosh through dreamtime, find the dead women and learn who’d killed them, then jaunt off to work like Don Juan triumphant.

  Instead I woke up stiff and disoriented the next morning, curled up on the solitary couch cushion, without having had a single moment’s otherworldly experience while I slept. An ache of uselessness welled up behind my eyes. Not only did I not understand what was going on, but the baser part of me didn’t care. Having it all go away would have been far more within my comfort zone.

  I had just used the phrase comfort zone with all due seriousness, right inside my own head. I clearly needed to get up, stick my head in a bowl of cold water, and drink a pot of strong coffee. Which I did, except it was a hot shower instead of a cold bowl, and I swear I didn’t drink more than three cups of coffee. Honest.

  I called a cab—not Gary; he knew too much about me and I wasn’t up to facing that this morning—and went to work, my nose mashed against the window. I missed Pe
tite. I wanted to be cozy and safe, driving her instead of taking a cab. I had a better relationship with my car than I had with most people.

  With any people, a small and somewhat snide voice inside my head said. I told it to go away, paid the cabby, and stumped through the precinct building to find Billy.

  Actually, I was looking for his desk, where I figured I could leave a note explaining my humiliating inability to find anything useful, and then run away before I had to confess my failure out loud. I’d come in early just to be sure I could pull that off.

  Billy was earlier. He leaned on his elbow, big palm wrinkling the side of his face until his left eye had all but disappeared into the curves of flesh. He looked like he’d been up all night, which was not only possible, but likely. An attack of guilt grabbed me by the throat. I snuck back out of the precinct building and scurried down the street to the doughnut shop to get him a lemon-poppyseed muffin and an oversize mocha. His face actually lit up when I plopped them down on his desk several minutes later, which made me feel slightly less like a loser.

  “You’re a goddess.” The side of his face was one big red mark from leaning on his hand too long. He unwrapped the muffin, took a slurp of coffee, and squinted up at me. “You didn’t get anything about the murders, did you.”

  “Is it that obvious?” Back to Loserville.

  “You look like a kicked puppy. But I’ll forgive you anything for the next five minutes, because you brought me the manna of heaven.”

  “Damn.” I looked at the muffin, impressed. “I shoulda gotten me one of those things.”

  Billy chuckled and sank back in his chair, its unoiled hinge drawing out a creak that slowly lifted every individual hair from my fingertips to my nape. I wrapped my hands around his coffee cup for a few seconds, trying to chase the chill away. He ate half the muffin in one bite, then nodded at his computer screen, speaking around crumbs. “I’d forgive you anyway. I found some stuff out. Not about our dead girls. They all had ID, by the way. We’re seeing if they’ve got anything in common, but so far they look random. Anyway, the murders.”