by C. E. Murphy
He did not, however, look as though he’d like to kiss me. He looked as if I’d stepped on his foot, and like whatever had prompted him to say my name had been a bad idea.
Intuition and me weren’t the closest of friends, but I was still following the thought that’d led to my collapse. Morrison hadn’t been asking if Billy would take care of me. He’d been asking if I needed him to. Bubbling gladness spilled through me, as though he’d offered an answer to problems I didn’t even know I had. I wanted to hug him, or bury my nose in his neck, or something else unseemingly physical. I held it back to an idiotic beam and blurted, “Shit, I’m sorry, yes, that’d be—”
Morrison put me back on my feet and I looked over his shoulder to see Thor. Guilt that had gone passive surged back to life and my smile crumbled. Everything crumbled: I felt like I was shrinking, delight draining out and leaving bone-deep regret. I’d shut Thor down a few hours ago when he’d had the courage to ask if he could help, and jumping at the chance to put Morrison in his place, especially when the captain had been so circumspect in asking, seemed like a particular and special brand of cruelty. Thor’d been right: I didn’t trust one of us in our pairing, and the fact that Morrison’s offer sent my heart soaring where Thor’s sent it plummeting didn’t bode well for which one I didn’t trust, after all.
Morrison turned us both so he could see where I was looking. His hands loosened abruptly and he fell back half a step, making room for the Holy Spirit between us. He took a breath and I knew, I just knew, he was going to issue a retraction. I grabbed his lapels hard enough that my hands ached from it, and he exhaled, words lost in surprise.
“I…” I wanted to say a million things. Most of them didn’t seem especially appropriate. I held on to his lapels for a moment longer, then let go and smoothed them, like doing so would help me keep my voice moderate. “I would be a lot more comfortable with you drumming me under than with calling Gary in the middle of the night and asking him to come over.”
There. That sounded very reasonable. It didn’t touch on why I wasn’t having Thor do it, because that was none of Morrison’s business. It didn’t focus on the fact that Melinda would no doubt be perfectly fine drumming me under. It was also utterly true. I’d rather have Morrison, who was already awake, lend a hand, than get a seventy-three-year-old out of bed and ask him to help.
It in no way told Morrison, or let me acknowledge, that when my captain picked up that drum of mine, I felt magic.
Christ, I was doomed.
CHAPTER SIX
Phoebe and Morrison and half a dozen other lag-behinds stayed to help clean up, so we were out of there by half past three. Phoebe’d come over with me, but her eyes skittered away and she hailed someone else for a ride home. Worse, for the first time since I’d known her, she didn’t remind me of our upcoming fencing lesson. Thor snaked his arms around me for a hug. “She’ll come around. Give her a little time.”
“To get used to me sounding like a lunatic?” I gave him a wan smile and glanced toward Petite. “I’m going to go home and get this ghost thing sorted out, okay?”
“Sure. Call me in the morning and let me know you’re all right.” If he resented being kept away, he did a good job of hiding it. I felt guilty all over again. Relationships were complicated. No wonder I’d stayed away from them all this time.
Amazing how the human mind will let a person rearrange facts to suit her. That phrasing made it sound as if I’d made a deliberate choice to not get seriously involved with anybody since at least college. But if I was serious about the new Joanne-faces-reality lifestyle, it would be somewhat more accurate to say I’d buried my head in the sand and gone “LA LA LA LA LA” to drown out any possible chance of having to deal with romantic entanglements. Emotionally stunted, that was me. At least I had nice long legs to make up for it.
I nodded a promise to call, and Thor peeled off in his monster Chevy truck. It was black and chromey and had the worst gas mileage of anything this side of a Hummer, but it was also short-circuit-the-brain sexy, and I had a terrible soft spot for it. The wheels were three feet tall, and stepping up to the running board and the driver’s seat proved Thor had some nice long legs his own self. I felt that same dippy little grin from earlier crawl into place. A girl could do a whole lot worse than her own personal Norse god.
He roared off, exposing Morrison getting into his top-safety-rated Toyota Avalon.
I burst out laughing. Morrison looked up—so did the Hollidays, for that matter—and I waved them all off and climbed into Petite, still grinning. If I didn’t need my psyche examined, I’d have put my sweet little Mustang in gear and chased Thor down the road. Emotionally stunted or not, at least I could tell when a guy’s car sense coincided with mine, and Morrison’s never would. I reminded myself to give Thor an extra kiss next time I saw him, and drove home to find out what it was like to be part of a genuine ghost story.
Melinda looked like she’d swallow her tongue when Morrison pulled in to my apartment-building parking lot as I climbed out of my car. I locked Petite, patted her purple roof and said, “I thought if we were going ghost hunting it might be good to have somebody who’d done it before drum me under,” all breezy-like, as if it was no big deal. The weird thing was, right then it didn’t seem like one.
Melinda unswallowed her tongue, coughed, “Sure,” and gave Morrison a sunny smile. I figured stronger men than he could be hornswoggled by that smile. Billy wasn’t bad-looking, but his wife was a knockout. If I ever needed to be a five-foot-two Hispanic woman, I wanted to be Melinda. Also, she could and did say, “Hello, Michael,” like it was a normal thing to do, whereas I still couldn’t imagine calling my boss by his given name. “I might’ve made Billy drive me home if I’d known you’d be here.”
Morrison and I exchanged glances. It’d seemed awkward to me to mention he was coming over when I’d sent my boyfriend home, and I have no idea what he thought. Telepathy ought to come standard with psychic talents, although if I put any actual consideration into that, it sounded like a really bad idea. Morrison said, “I’m sure Walker will lend you her bed if you want to take a nap,” and I gave a feeble nod of agreement that Melinda brushed off, clearly not too worried about it.
Billy gave first Morrison, then me, looks that said volumes, but kept his mouth shut. I made them climb all five flights of stairs to my apartment out of cheerful vindictiveness and the knowledge that the building’s ancient elevator was both astonishingly slow and incredibly noisy. Only very drunk college students or heavily laden tenants used it, and the former had been known to fall asleep in front of its doors waiting for it to arrive.
Poor Melinda was pink cheeked and puffing by the time we reached my apartment. I had the grace to be ashamed of myself, but she flopped down on the couch and wheezed, “I’ll try anything to go into labor. I could’ve protested in the lobby.”
I scurried to get her a glass of water, and by the time I got back everybody looked comfortably positioned to perform a spirit journey. Billy was across from his wife on the couch, and Morrison’d taken up the entirety of the love seat, looking larger than life and extremely cinematic in his ridiculous pink shirt and pale loafers. I said, “I hope that stuff washes out of your hair fast. I have to change clothes,” like they were related comments, and retreated to my bedroom. Back in January I’d discovered a draft blew in under the front door. No way was I sitting on the floor dressed in nothing more than a handful of leather bits.
Changing clothes also gave me a minute in private to nerve myself up to handing the drum over to Morrison. I pulled on sweats and a warm shirt, took my contacts out and washed away the kohl eyeliner before putting my glasses on. The woman in the mirror was unfamiliar, straight black hair falling around her face and catching in the glasses’ earpieces. I pulled the wig off, dropped it on the toilet, and scrubbed my fingers through my hair, creating short messy spikes that made me look more like myself. The warrior princess was gone. It was just me, Joanne Walker, and I couldn’t help thin
king the other reflection made a much better hero type than I did. For one thing, anybody willing to run around in that outfit had metaphorical balls of solid steel, whereas I only had an uncanny ability to keep staggering forward despite panic and uncertainty.
A bubble of warmth erupted in my belly, a reminder that I had a little more than a knack for keeping on against impossible odds. The damn magic could be comforting, sometimes.
It could also be bossy. I got my drum off my bureau and stood with it for a moment, running my fingers over its dyed surface. A raven’s wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake. Their bright colors were unchanged after half a lifetime, but the wolf looked smeared, as if the drum’s surface had gotten wet. I wiped my fingers against it gingerly, worry making a pit of sickness in my belly. It didn’t blur any further, and there was nothing in the leather’s tension that suggested it had been soaked or damaged. For the first time I wondered if the figure was supposed to be a coyote, not a wolf, and if the smearing had something to do with my mentor’s death. The sickness in my stomach turned to tears burning my eyes, and I clenched my fingers around the drum’s edge, bone and leather denting my flesh. The polished beads that dangled from crossed lengths of leather holding the skin tight against its frame rattled, strain in my hands translating to the drum. It had been a gift for my fifteenth birthday, overwhelming and bewildering: I’d had no waking recollection of the dream-borne shamanic training I was undergoing. The drum was the first thing I’d ever had that made me feel welcome among what were technically, if not emotionally, my people.
My father was about as full-blooded Cherokee as you got in this day and age, and had been born with a wanderlust that’d sent him away from North Carolina and the Eastern tribe as a young man. He’d met my mother in New York, and she’d brought me to him when I was three months old. I took after her in most ways: fair skin and a smattering of freckles, green eyes and black hair, though hers had waves and mine was unrelentingly straight. In color, I looked Irish. In black and white, my bone structure stood out, and I was clearly Native American. The thing is, despite truisms like kids don’t see shades of gray, what they saw when Dad took me home to Qualla Boundary was a tall gangly white girl with a perpetual chip on her shoulder. It wasn’t their fault. It was how I’d seen myself, even though I’d been the one who insisted on settling down somewhere so I could go to high school in one place.
I don’t think my father’d ever intended to go back to the Carolinas, but that was where he took me. We’d gotten by, me with an eternal defiant scowl and Dad with the air of always waiting to leave again. I didn’t know if he was still there. I hadn’t talked to him in years.
The more I looked back and thought about it, the more I knew my exile’d been largely self-imposed. My first memories were of Dad’s big old boat of a Cadillac driving across the country, and my favorite memories were those of him teaching me how to work on that car, and then all the others that came along. We’d rarely stayed in any town long enough for me to make friends at the schools I’d gone to—six weeks here, six weeks there didn’t do the job—and by the time we went to Qualla Boundary I had a hate-on at the world. It hadn’t wanted me, so I didn’t want it.
Truth was, in most ways, I’d only just started getting over that. I touched the smeary colors on my drum again, and, assured that it at least wasn’t going to rupture if Morrison used it, took it out to the living room. Morrison stood up to take it from me, which seemed oddly respectful. I didn’t know how to tell him I appreciated the gesture, and instead tried to steel myself against the vicarious thrill I expected when he took it.
To my supreme disappointment, I got nothing. Maybe I’d steeled myself too well. We both held on to the drum for a second, before Morrison said, “Stick?” in a tone that suggested maybe I wasn’t too bright. I let go with a curse and went back for the drumstick, brushing my fingers against its cranberry-red rabbit-fur end before handing it over to my boss with far less expectation of getting a buzz. I didn’t get one then, either, and sat down on the floor, telling myself I shouldn’t be sullen.
Billy groaned. “Do we have to be on the floor?”
I blinked up at him. “I don’t know. Do you even have to be in the same place I am? I don’t really know what your plan is.”
“You’ve never journeyed inside with anyone?”
“Is that a question that should be asked in polite company?”
Melinda laughed. “Good thing we’re not polite company.”
I wrinkled my nose at her, then shrugged at Billy. “Everybody who’s turned up has just been there. I never invited anyone. I’ve done it the other way, kind of. Been invited in, or sort of fallen in.” From the corner of my eye I saw Morrison’s expression grow increasingly strained, and guilty recollection sizzled through me. “Or barged in.”
Billy frowned. “You need to work on your sense of personal boundaries.”
Guilt crashed right over into irritation. He was no doubt right, but this was a lousy time to bring it up. “I’m under the impression that I need to make sure my brain isn’t haunted. Can we maybe worry about my crappy people skills later?”
Morrison said, “If I start beating this thing will they stop arguing?” to Melinda, and without further ado, did.
My world flipped upside down.
It might’ve been technically more accurate to say I flipped upside down. Or that I turned inside out. Either way, the floor went from below me to above me, leaving me sitting cross-legged on a roof of the earth with a tunnel burrowing down below me. I stayed there a couple of seconds, taken aback at how quickly the transition had happened. I knew Morrison could send me to other planes of existence with a touc…There was no way to get out of that sentence alive. The point was, he helped my transition from one world to another, but even so, I was used to the drumming settling into my skin before it transported me elsewhere. Just blinking from one world to another was disconcerting.
Billy presumably wouldn’t have such a dramatically quick crossover, but that didn’t mean I should stick—so to speak—around on the roof of the earth. I pushed off the ground and dived into the tunnel, squirming my way deeper. Almost instantly, I wasn’t me any longer, not the way I think of myself, person-shaped with two legs and a torso and arms and a head. Industrious paws dug at the earth instead, pushing it aside with far more skill than my weak human hands could’ve done. I wasn’t sure what I was; rodents weren’t much for external awareness of what they looked like, but at least I was efficient.
I popped through to a sunlit garden in record time and staggered around on four feet, getting my bearings. A good shake got dirt out of my fur, and another one whisked me into my usual shape. I thought someday I might, like, get to just walk through a tunnel big enough to hold me, but so far when I’d come into my garden it’d mostly been as one form of vermin or another.
That was a thought I definitely didn’t want to pursue. Instead I lifted a hand to block glare—apparently nobody’d told my inner sanctuary that it was four in the morning—and had a look around.
When I’d first come to this place, it was the most rigid, well-defined little plot of land I’d ever seen. The grass had been mown to a millimeter height, so dry and sparse the ground could be seen between blades. The benches had been austere, uncomfortable things, and the pathways had been narrow and very straight. A pond at the northern end had been shallow with a trickle feeding it, and the sky had been gray. In my defense, I’d been dying at the time, but anybody looking around might’ve guessed I’d been dead a long time already.
It’d gotten a lot better since then. It had nothing on some of the lush landscapes I’d seen representing my friends’ souls, but there was some life there now. Moss grew on what had been stark walls, wearing down at their edges. The desperately precise footpaths were buckling a little as roots began to grow under them, and stone benches had turned to wood, far more inviting. The grass was richer in color and in amount, and no longer kept to a uniform height. There were even places along the
walls where it’d grown into tall fat bunches with thick roots that would be difficult to loosen if I wanted to tidy up. The waterfall and pond bubbled cheerfully, and I could no longer see the distant southern end, where mist and trees obscured a door into the land of the dying. It was an altogether nicer place to be, and I was as proud as I was relieved.
Now, if I only had any idea how to let somebody else in. Coyote’d waltzed in and out as though it was his own territory, and the only other person who’d visited had taken advantage of my lousy shields and slipped in like a snake. My own pride wanted to make a better invitation to Billy than that, especially after he’d wounded it with his personal-boundaries comment. I wanted to prove myself.
I’d cobbled together my idea of proper shielding from Star Trek, and insofar as I imagined them at all, I imagined them rather like a big blue pearly bubble surrounding me and my garden. Presumably phasers set on “stun” wouldn’t break through, and I trusted Billy wouldn’t be shooting to kill. I curled my fingers in the grass, admiring how it was long enough to grasp, and tried to make a Billy-shaped hole in the pearlescent glow.
Billy-shaped, to me, meant a mix of a minivan and a police car. I liked vehicle metaphors, but usually I didn’t get mash-ups. Melinda was a hundred percent minivan. Morrison was that damn gold safety-rated Toyota. I was Petite, which didn’t work all that well if I thought too deeply about it, because a 1969 Mustang was a much sexier car than I was a person. Still, if anything’d been my heart and soul over the last decade, it was the purple Boss 302 I’d put everything into since I bought her out of somebody’s barn. Even then, she’d been in better shape than I was, but like it or lump it, she was the shape of me in my head. Billy, though, got mixed up between the professional detective and the family man, at least when I thought of him. His own sense of himself, in car terms, had been more minivan.
