by C. E. Murphy
I stayed firmly stuck to the ground in both body and spirit. I bared my teeth at the sky, willing to admit that thoughts could be depressingly weighty. Better to be light as a bird, with hollow bones and an ability to fly. I could break free from gravity’s pull and soar up to the roof on an impulse of will.
My astral self, it seemed, was absolutely unimpressed with my puny logic. Eventually, swearing silently, my astral form crawled up a drainpipe and swung onto the roof. There was no way I could’ve done that physically. Neither the pipe nor my dignity nor my hand strength-which was pretty good, but not that good-would have let me. Astrally, though? No problem. It made no sense at all. On the positive side, it didn’t have to make sense. It just had to work.
And up there on the rooftop, the monster was waiting for me.
By all rights I should’ve woken up dead. I’d thought the thing would’ve been scared off. It was only once I was up there on the roof, nose to nose with a stinking beast, that I wondered why I thought an invisible ravening magic cannibal would be frightened by a kid with a cell phone or a few police sirens.
While I was standing there stupefied, it raised a lazy paw and backhanded me so hard I flew off the roof and slid across Mandy’s front yard to smash up against her white picket fence. Little peaks of snow fell off the fence and right through me, making tiny lumps on the frozen lawn.
I couldn’t remember anything ever doing that before. I tended to think of my astral form as a pretty safe place for me to be. Sure, a god had stuffed a sword through me once when I’d been incorporeal, but we’d been traveling through time and space, too, so under those circumstances it seemed fair that I could be hit. I’d fought another god in a kind of dreamscape, but dreams were a little different. I didn’t remember anything ever flat-out belting my astral self while it was just standing around in the Middle World. But this thing had, and I didn’t like that at all.
It hadn’t come after me. I pushed onto my elbows and scowled at the roof, where its form was barely more than a glimmer against white snow and gray skies. It stood on two legs, but its shoulders were hunched forward, like it was devolving toward four legs. It hadn’t moved beyond hitting me.
A clear, unpleasant thought unfurled itself. Maybe it hadn’t come after Mandy. Maybe it had just used her to draw the more powerful agent to it, so it could get another look at me. Size me up, study me. Decide if I was a threat or a tasty morsel.
I figured lying on my back in the snow wasn’t at all threatening, and got to my feet. The thing watched. Warily, I thought. Hoped. I wanted to be scary enough to set it on edge. That would be a definite score for my side.
It had hit my astral form. That suggested maybe my astral form could hit it. All I had to do was get close enough, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to give me another chance to climb the drainpipe.
Which meant I had one chance to convince my recalcitrant brain that the laws of gravity and physics didn’t apply to a soul set loose to wander away from its body. I’d crossed great leaps and bounds effortlessly in other planes of reality. I could do it in this one, if I had to.
And I had to. The monster on the rooftop was still watching me, and I didn’t want its attention to land on anyone else. I muttered, “There is no spoon,” took three running steps, and jumped.
The creature vanished, I smashed into Mandy’s house, and warm fingers touched my face as Morrison said, “Walker,” drawing me back into my body.
I opened my eyes disoriented and confused. The world had tipped over sideways, and a puddle of slush had crept up to envelop my left cheek. Rather a lot of weight seemed to be pressing the slush into my jaw and shoulder, and enough blood rushed to my head to make my nose itch.
Morrison was perpendicular to me, feet planted in the same icy water that was crawling over my face, and his forehead was wrinkled with concern. “You fell over, Walker.”
That explained a lot. The pressure, for example, was my own body weight resting on my head and shoulder, which were at the foot of the stairs, while the rest of me was angled down them. It was profoundly uncomfortable, and I was beginning to fear it might be embarrassing, too. On the other hand, it distracted from the dull ache running from head to toe, which I suspected was the physical response to psychically smacking myself into Mandy’s house. I’d been so sure I could make it, too.
Morrison offered me a hand up, which proved to be more like putting his hands under my armpits and bodily hauling me to my feet. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry, I thought I’d propped myself up well enough that I wouldn’t fall. I was…” I made a feeble gesture, which was apparently enough to remind Morrison he was holding me up. He let go and stepped back. I was kind of disappointed.
No, not disappointed. A little sad, maybe. I liked being close to my boss; he smelled good. But I’d blown it on that front, and was working on living with the consequences. “I was trying to follow the killer. Hang on a second, okay?”
Dismay and confusion spasmed across Morrison’s face, leaving his blue eyes darker than usual. The color he’d put in it at Halloween had grown out of his hair, leaving it short and silvering, the way I liked it, and the whole package made for a handsome man in need of some reassurance. Or at least explanation, if I couldn’t offer the other. The best I could do was step away and look up at the roof.
No monsters. There were tracks, cold trails through the air visible with the Sight, but my prey had run away. I whispered, “Maybe it decided I was tougher than it was,” without much hope, and glanced toward the ambulance.
Two paramedics were still checking Mandy over. A third stood with Jake at the vehicle’s tail end. They had her on an IV already, and I figured it wouldn’t be more than another minute before they brought her to the hospital. I wondered if they’d let me in to see her, and if I could be any help if they did, or if I’d be better off trying to track the thing that had attacked her. But I hadn’t spoiled the marks this time, so its trail wasn’t going to get any colder, and there was something I really had to do before trying to either follow it or help Mandy.
It took everything I had to look back at Morrison and say, “This is my fault, boss.”
Every shred of warmth fled the captain’s face, turning him back into the nemesis he’d been for years. A short jerk of his chin said “Keep talking.”
I did, through knots of anger and guilt. “She volunteered,” wasn’t much of an excuse, and I knew it as I told him what Mandy Tiller and I had done that morning. “I never imagined it might come after her once we were off the mountain. I should have,” I said before he could. “I should have, and I didn’t. I completely fucked up. I’m sorry.” Sorry didn’t begin to cover it, but language was badly suited to expressing handshaking chills of misery and a hollow feeling burning my eyes in a single word. “Sorry,” inadequate as it was, had to do the job.
“You got a civilian involved in a dangerous case that the media is all over, and now she’s hospitalized and you’re sorry?”
“This one’s on me, Captain.” Billy put himself between me and Morrison. “I asked Mandy to give us a hand.”
“Why?” Morrison erupted like a bull seal, and Billy, who was bigger than either of us, somehow seemed to absorb the captain’s rage and expand a little with it. “There are dozens of officers who could have-”
“Two reasons, sir,” Billy said very steadily. “One is that Walker’s original plan was to use herself as bait-”
“Which she would have needed permission for!”
“Not,” I mumbled, “if I did it off duty. Which I did.” I was sure I wasn’t actually helping the situation, but sometimes I talked when I knew I should shut up. It was a character flaw.
“And the other,” Billy went on as though neither of us had spoken, “is that this is getting worse fast, sir, and even under the best of circumstances, going through the department on this would have added another twenty-four hours to the search. Getting permission from you, possibly having to wait for a green light from your s
uperiors, getting volunteers, getting equipment…this was faster.”
“That wasn’t your decision to make!”
“No, sir, it wasn’t, and I regret my error in judgment.” Billy, stiffly, reached into his coat, withdrew his badge and gun, and offered them to Morrison.
Who stared at them, then at Billy and me, and then said, “Shit,” more violently than I’d ever heard him speak before.
All three of us knew he had to take them. Involving civilians in police business, even surreal police business like the stuff Billy and I handled, was bad enough. Getting a civilian hospitalized, maybe killed, was at the very least a suspension offense, and would likely have both of us up on charges. I fumbled for my own badge and gun, because I couldn’t let Billy take the fall for me even if he was technically right. I was still the one who’d gotten Mandy Tiller hurt.
Morrison saw what I was doing and made a very sharp, short gesture and pitched his voice bone-scrapingly low: “You have until the nine o’clock news to find a way to make this right. If I get called before then, if I have to make a statement, I’ll do it with your badges in my hand. Do I make myself clear?”
My knees went weak and I nodded feebly. “At least Corvallis is at dinner with Ray right now, so she’s probably not going to be breathing down our necks for a couple hours.”
Despite his fury, Morrison got an expression very much like the one I’d had when Ray had announced his date for the evening. He eventually said, “Ray Campbell?” like the department might have sprouted another Ray recently that he didn’t know about.
I nodded, and Billy whistled. “Takes all kinds, I guess.” He put his badge and gun away very carefully, offering a quiet, “Thanks, Captain.”
“Don’t thank me. If we get away with this I’m stringing you both up by your toes. If we don’t, I’m crucifying you.”
I’d been skewered more times than I cared to think about, which gave me an uncomfortably visceral idea of what crucifixion might feel like. I looked over Morrison’s shoulder, not wanting to read any truth in his eyes. The ambulance crawled out of the Tillers’ driveway and stopped a few yards down the street, blocked by a black-haired man standing in its path. The driver leaned on the horn, then rolled down the window to shout at the man, who smiled apologetically and shrugged, but didn’t move.
A tiny smile of my own was born somewhere around the fine muscles of my eyes, not even getting close to my mouth as it spilled golden happiness, rich and sweet as warm honey, all the way through me. It neutralized the worry bubbling in my belly and revitalized the tiny shred of hope I’d felt at seeing Mandy was alive. I thought my heart was likely to burst, and my chest filled with breathless giggles that I didn’t dare let out. Even my hands felt wrong, but in a good way, as they alternated between thrums of thick aching heat and icy coldness with every pulse-beat. For the first time in six months, in a year, maybe for the first time in my whole life, the overwhelming confidence that everything was going to be all right filled me.
The ambulance driver swung his door open, angry words a wash of meaningless noise to my ears. The self-imposed obstruction raised his hands placatingly, then shot me a direct look, one eyebrow elevated in amusement. My itty-bitty smile crinkled my eyes enough to turn my vision all blurry with tears, and finally made it to my mouth. I couldn’t breathe, not at all, but I felt so light I thought I might be able to fly.
“Walker, crucifixion isn’t a threat that should make you smile.” Morrison sounded justifiably annoyed, like I’d taken the wind out of his melodramatic sails. I wanted to promise that I had no doubt at all he meant he’d crucify us, professionally if not physically, but the little smile he was complaining about blossomed into this huge, foolish, jubilant thing that I laid on him like a blessing.
Then I was running just like an ingenue in a bad movie. Running across a snow-covered yard, vaulting the Tillers’ low fence, and sliding across the slush-slick asphalt street to crash, joyfully, impossibly, wonderfully, into Coyote’s arms.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Coyote caught me with a grunt that sounded like a laugh and squeezed hard enough to take my breath as he swung me around and around in a slushy circle. I squeaked and buried my nose in his neck, and he didn’t let me hang on nearly long enough before he set me back, hands on my shoulders.
His smile was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, bright and gentle in a face that wasn’t nearly as red-brick colored as he was in my dreams. Nor were his eyes golden, but the rest was as I remembered: straight nose, high cheekbones, hip-length black hair. He was a little shorter than me and smelled like the outdoors, and he wiped happy tears away from my cheeks. “We don’t have a lot of time. How is she?”
I didn’t care about the tears, didn’t care that they tickled the creases around my mouth where my face was already getting tired from such a big smile, and somehow didn’t care that I had a hundred thousand questions that were all going to have to wait. “She’s all right physically. Banged up. But her aura, Coyote, it’s gone. Like nobody’s home.”
He nodded, and though his joy didn’t dissipate, the smile became something more serious. Something trustworthy and confident, something that I suddenly wished I could command myself. He took my hand and said, both apologetically and in a tone that brooked no nonsense, “We need to see your patient. Go ahead and drive us to the hospital, if you want, but I hope it won’t be necessary,” to the incensed ambulance driver.
We let ourselves in while the guy spluttered.
Both paramedics in the back gave guttural sounds of protest that faded into uncertainty when Coyote said, “It’s all right. We’re healers. Excuse us, please.”
They both moved, and neither of them looked like they had the foggiest idea why. I didn’t either, but I wished to hell I could do that. Jake Tiller, his face tear-stained, stared between us like we were aliens, and Coyote gripped the boy’s shoulder a moment. “My name’s Cyrano. This is my friend Joanne. You’re…?”
“Jake,” he whispered. The ambulance driver threw the back doors shut again as the kid spoke, and a few seconds later we were in motion. “Jake Tiller. This’s my mom.”
Coyote nodded solemnly. “I think Joanne and I can do something for your mom that the paramedics can’t, Jake. Will you let us try?”
“Will it make her wake up?”
“I hope so.”
The kid nodded. “Then okay.”
One of the paramedics made another strangled noise, surging forward. “We can’t let you-”
Trying to sound as calm and reassuring as Coyote, I said, “She’s stabilized, right?” At the medic’s reluctant nod, I offered a brief smile. “Then if we’re right and we can help, you won’t have anything to worry about. If we can’t, well, this won’t take more than a few minutes and we’re already on the way to the hospital, so no time will be lost. Okay?”
“We could get sued-”
“You won’t,” Coyote said with serene confidence, then reached across Mandy’s still form and said, “Have you done a soul retrieval yet? Besides me, I mean?”
“Besss-” I bit my tongue on the s and tried to claw shocked thoughts back under control. There would be time later. There had to be time later. “Billy, a few weeks ago. But I know him, Coyote. I know him really well.”
“I’m here now. You’ll be fine. We don’t have a drum, Joanne, so I’m going to need you to-”
“I can do it.” For once I felt as confident as I sounded. “Where are we going?”
“The Lower World.”
I nodded, closed my eyes, and let the rattle of the ambulance over rough roads drop me into a world not my own.
Red skies and yellow earth, a flat sun and a world more two-dimensional than my own: that was the Lower World, in my rare experiences with it. I was certain there were other ways it could be viewed-roots of a mighty tree, burrows and hollows beneath the earth-but I saw it as one of the strange, not-quite-real worlds-that-had-come-before in terms of Native American mythology. It was beautiful
and intimidating, and I knew almost nothing about navigating it safely. I said, “Raven?” into the empty air, hopefully.
My raven fell out of the sky, something glittering in his beak. He landed on the ground and dropped it, cocking his head first at me, then it, then back again before he pounced on it with both feet and tore it apart.
It was the shiny food I’d left him, Pop-Tarts wrapped in foil. He made delighted burbling sounds in the back of his birdy throat as he stabbed pieces of frosted raspberry tart and shredded the wrapper with his claws. I sat down, laughing, and stole a piece of pastry that had been flung away so I could offer it to him directly. He hopped over, snatched it from my fingers, and scurried back to his feast.
Coyote said, “This is a good sign,” and licked my ear with a very long wet tongue. I squawked and reached out to grab him around the neck without even looking. I had thousands of questions, and none of them mattered as long as I could hide my face in his neck and hold on.
He leaned against me hard, until fur tickled my nose and I sneezed into his shoulder. I sat up to rub my nose, then grabbed him again, scruffing the top of his bony head and pulling on pointed ears. “Where’ve you been, you dumb dog? I missed you. I missed you so much.” I could barely control my voice, even my whispers all shaky, and I tried to push relief so big it exhausted me away so I could ask, “How do we help Mandy?”
He rolled over on his back, legs waving in the air and neck stretched to try to nab a piece of my raven’s treat. It quarked in agitation, wings spread as it hopped toward him, and he gave a coyote laugh and rolled away to sit up, prim and proper as a cat with his feet all in alignment. “I’m not a dog.”
