by C. E. Murphy
“Christ.” I crouched and pressed two fingers against her neck, below her jaw. She was on the cool side of lukewarm, the skin pliant, and had no pulse. I tried a second time, then a third, shifting my fingers slightly. “She’s dead, Phoebe.” I stood up again, wiping my fingers against my towel. I’d never touched a dead body before. It hadn’t felt like I expected it to. “Go call the cops.”
“What’re you going to do?” Phoebe’s voice trembled as she backed away, water splashing around her ankles.
“I’m going to go get dressed.” I turned to follow Phoebe, who continued to back up, still staring at the dead girl. “Watch where you’re go—”
I lunged, too late. Phoebe’s heel caught the curb of the shower area and her feet slid out from under her, kicking water into my eyes. My fingers closed on empty air as she shrieked and crashed to the tile floor with a painful crack. My own feet slid on the wet tiles and for a moment I thought I’d dive after her. My arms swung wildly and I caught my balance, heaving myself upright with a gasp. Phoebe, her mouth a tight line, stared up at me, then let out an uncharacteristic soprano giggle. I stepped over the curb and offered her a hand up.
“I take it you’re okay, then.”
Phoebe wrapped her fingers around mine in a strong grip and I hauled her to her feet. “No, I’m not okay.” Her voice squeaked as high as her giggle had. “We just found a dead girl in the showers and I think my butt’s going to be bruised for a month.” She giggled again, then set her mouth and pressed her eyes shut, inhaling deeply through her nostrils. “I’m okay,” she said after several seconds. I nodded.
“I’ll call the cops. You get dressed.”
“Okay.” She gave me a pathetically grateful look that I didn’t like from my fencing instructor, and left me alone with the dead girl. I stole a glance at her over my shoulder, feeling power flutter behind my breastbone, urging me to use it.
I could think of one good reason to disregard it. Well, one reason. Good was debatable, especially since even in my own head I heard it as a whine:but I don’t wantto be a shaman!
Except, possibly, when it meant I could save little girls from heatstroke. I sighed and went back to the dead woman, kneeling in the cooling water. The bottom edge of my towel drooped into it, sucking up as much as it could, and I debated running to put some clothes on before doing anything else. Only then I’d be soaking up water with my uniform, which, unlike a towel, wasn’t designed for it. It wasn’t like the police would arrive in the thirty seconds I intended to be out.
“Arright,” I muttered. “One healthy little girl for one esoteric death investigation. I guess that’s fair.” Five more minutes before calling the cops wasn’t going to make a difference to the body. “I’m here,” I said out loud, “if you want to talk.”
There was a place between life and death that spirits could linger in, a place that, with all due apology to Mr. King, I’d started calling the Dead Zone. If I could catch this young woman’s spirit there, I might just be able to learn something useful, like how she’d ended up filling a drain at the University of Washington’s gym locker rooms.
Reaching that world was easier with a drum, but somewhere in the shower room a shower leaked, a steady drip-drop of water hitting water. It was a pattern, and that was good enough. I closed my eyes. The sound amplified, deliberate poiks bouncing off the bones behind my ears. I lost count of the drops, and rose out of my body.
I slid through the ceiling, skimming through pipes and wires and insulation that felt laced with asbestos. The sky above the university was so bright it made my eyes ache, and for a few seconds I turned my attention away from the journey for the sake of the view.
The world glittered. White and blue lights zoomed along in tangled blurs, each of them a point of life. Trees glowed in the full bloom of summer and I could see the thin silver rivers of sap running through them to put out leaves that glimmered with hope and brightness. Concrete and asphalt lay like heavy thick blots of paint smeared over the brilliance, but at midmorning, with people out and doing things, those smears of paint had endless sparks of life along them, defying what seemed, at this level, to be a deliberate attempt to wipe out the natural order of the world.
Don’t get me wrong. Not only do I like my indoor plumbing and my Mustang that runs roughshod over those dark blots of freeway, but I also think that a dam built by man is just as natural as a dam built by a beaver. We’re a part of this world, and there’s nothing unnatural about how we choose to modify it. If it weren’t in our nature, we wouldn’t be doing it.
Still, looking down from the astral plane, the way we lay out streets and modify the world to suit ourselves looks pretty awkward compared to the blur of life all around it. Humans like right angles and straight lines. There weren’t many of those outside of man-made objects.
But even overlooking humanity’s additions to the lay of the land, there was something subtly wrong with the patterns of light and life. I’d noticed it months earlier—the last time I’d gone tripping into the astral plane—and it seemed worse now. There was a sick hue to the neon brilliance, like the heat had drawn color out, mixed it with a little death, and injected it back into the world without much regard to where it’d come from. It made my nerves jangle, discomfort pulling at the hairs on my arms until I felt like a porcupine, hunched up and defensive.
The longer I hung there, studying the world through second sight, the worse the colors got. Impatient scarlet bled into the silver lines of life, black tar gooing the edges of what had been pure and blue once upon a time. I had no sense of where the source of the problem was. It felt like it was all around me, and the more I concentrated on it the harder it got to breathe. I finally jerked in a deep breath, clearing a cough from my lungs, and shook off the need to figure out what was wrong. I suspected it had more to do with procrastination than anything else. I’d been warned more than once that my own perceptions could get me in trouble, in the astral plane.
It wasn’t that I was scared. Just wary. Apprehensive. Cautious. Uneasy. And that exhausted my mental thesaurus, which meant I had to stop farting around and go do what I meant to do.
Coyote had told me that traveling in the astral plane wasn’t a matter of distance, but a matter of will. It seemed like distance to me, always different, always changing. Seattle receded below me, darkening and broadening until the Pacific seaboard seemed to be just one burnt-out city, the sparks of life that colored it faded and scattered with distance. Skyscrapers that seemed to defy physics with their height leaped up around me and crumbled again, and the stars were closer.
A tunnel, blocked off by a wall of stone, appeared to my left, and I felt him waiting there. Him, it—whatever. Something was there, and it tugged at me. It laughed every time I forged past it, and every time I did I felt one more spiderweb-thin line binding me to it. The first time I traveled the astral plane I almost went to him, compelled by curiosity and a sense of malicious lightness. The second time, the stone wall was in place, my dead mother’s way of protecting me from whatever lay down that tunnel. This time I knew he was there, and it was easier to ignore him.
Someday I’m not going to be able to.
The tunnel whipped away into a wash of light, the sky bleeding gold and green around me. New skyscrapers blossomed into tall trees, filled with the light of life, but here that light was orange and red, not the blues and white I was used to. I grinned wildly and lifted my hands, encouraging the speed that the world swum around me with.
Under the gold sky, palaces built like where the Taj Mahal’s wealthy older sister grew up. A tiger paced by, sabre-toothed and feral, watching me like I might be a tasty snack. A man’s laughter broke over me, and the world spun into midnight, the sky rich and blue and star-studded. I relaxed, letting myself enjoy the changing vistas, and in the instant I did, the shifting worlds slammed to a stop.
A red man stood in front of me. Genuinely red: the color of bricks, or dark smoked salmon. His eyes were golden and his mouth was angry. “H
aven’t you learned anything?”
I gaped at him, breathless. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re making enough noise to wake the dead.”
“That was kind of the idea.”
“Siobhàn Walkin—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“Don’t,” I repeated, “call me that. Not here.”
I’d become uncomfortably protective of that name: Siobhàn Walkingstick. It was my birth name, the one I’d been saddled with by parents whose cultures clashed just long enough to produce me. My American father’d taken one look at Siobhàn and Anglicized it to Joanne. Until I was in my twenties, no one had called me Siobhàn except once, in a dream.
The last name, Walkingstick, I’d abandoned on my own when I went to college. I’d wanted to leave my Cherokee heritage behind, defining myself by my own rules. I was Joanne Walker. Siobhàn Walkingstick was someone who barely existed.
But whether I liked it or not, that name belonged to the most internal, broken parts of me, and flinging it around astral planescapes made me vulnerable. I had learned to build protective shields around it, the one thing I’d managed to do to Coyote’s satisfaction over the past six months. I saw those shields as being titanium, thin and flexible and virtually unbreakable, an iridescent fortress in my mind. They were meant to protect my innermost self from the bad guys.
So I didn’t like having the two names rolled together in the best of circumstances, and I resented the shit out of having them flung around the astral plane as a form of reprimand by the very same brick-red spirit guide who’d insisted I develop the shields in the first place.
The spirit guide in question flared his nostrils, inclining his head slightly, and inside that motion, shifted. A loll-tongued, golden-eyed coyote sat in front of me, looking as disgruntled about the eyes as the man had.
“Dammit,” I said, “I hate when you do that.”
“This is not about what you hate,” the coyote said, in exactly the same tenor the man owned. His mouth didn’t move, and I was, as ever, uncertain if he was speaking out loud or in my mind. “You haven’t got the skill for this, Joanne.”
I wet my lips. “Looks to me like you’re wrong.”
“Do you really understand what you’re doing?” The coyote’s voice sharpened, making my chin lift and my shoulders go back defensively.
“I’m just trying to see if she can tell me anything about what happened, Coyote.”
“There are more mundane ways to find out. You are a policeman, are you not?”
“I’m a beat cop,” I said through my teeth. “Beat cops don’t get to investigate dead bodies in the women’s shower.”
Coyote cocked his head at me, a steady golden-eyed look that spoke volumes. Then, in case I’d missed the speaking of volumes, he said it out loud, too: “Then maybe you shouldn’t.”
Which comedian was it who said wisdom came from children, especially the mouth part of the face? I felt like he must have when he first thought it: like it would be nice to wrap duct tape around the talking part until nothing more could be said.
Coyote snapped his teeth at me, a coyote laugh. “Wouldn’t work anyway.”
“Oh, shut up.” Yet another incredibly annoying thing: he heard every thought I had, and I heard none of his. “This is supposed to be my dreamscape. Why can’t I hear your thoughts?”
He cocked his head the other way, wrinkles appearing in the brown-yellow fur of his forehead. “First,” he said, “it’s not your dreamscape. Haven’t you learned even that much? The astral plane is a lot bigger than just you or me.”
“I thought it was all basically the same,” I muttered. “How’m I supposed to know?”
“By studying,” Coyote suggested, voice dry with sarcasm. “Or is that asking too much?”
For one brief moment I wondered if it was possible that Coyote might also be my boss, Morrison.
“I’ll have to meet him someday,” Coyote said idly. I winced.
“Sure, he’ll like that a lot. Talking coyotes from the astral plane. That’ll go over well.” Morrison made Scully look like a paragon of belief. Once upon a time, our skepticism for the occult was the only thing we had in common. Then I’d done some unpleasantly weird things, like come back from the dead more or less in front of him, and now the only thing we had in common was neither of us was happy about me being a cop, though our reasons were different. “What was the second thing?” I asked, unwilling to pursue any more thoughts of Morrison.
For a moment Coyote looked blank as a happy puppy. Then he shook himself and stood up to pace, the tip of his tail twitching. “Second, you can’t hear my thoughts because I have shields, and I can hear yours because even after six months of study your shields are rudimentary and poorly crafted.”
“Thank you,” I said, “would you like me to lie down to make it easier to kick me?”
Coyote stopped turning in a circle and flashed, seamlessly, into the man-form. He had perfectly straight black hair that fell down to his hips, gleaming with blue highlights even in the star-studded blackness near the Dead Zone.
I closed up my thoughts like all the windows rolling up in a car at once, and privately admitted to myself that Coyote was a hell of a lot easier to deal with as a coyote. As a man he was almost too pretty to live, and I mostly wanted to look at him, not listen to him.
“Joanne, you took on a great power when you chose life.”
“If you say, ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ so help me God, I’m going to kick you into last week.”
He gave me the same unblinking gaze that the coyote could. “Try it.”
A beat passed in which we neither moved nor spoke, until Coyote dropped his chin, watching me through long dark eyelashes. “You accepted this life months ago, Joanne. Why do you insist on fighting it?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I snapped. “Isn’t that something?”
“Something,” he agreed, but shook his head. “But not enough. Speaking with the dead is a dangerous art, and you’re not even doing that. You’re just opening yourself up and offering yourself as a conduit for anybody who has a piece to speak.”
“Yeah, so?” I admired my mature rebuttal. High school debate teams would weep to have me. “It’s all I know how to do.” Ah, a defensive attack.Good, Joanne, I said to myself, and hoped the windows of my mind were still sealed tight enough that Coyote didn’t hear me.That’ll show him you’re really the It girl. Any moment now legions of cheerleaders would leap out and rah-rah-rah their support of my rapier wit and keen discussion skills.
“That,” Coyote said with more patience and less sharpness than I deserved, “is my point. Has it occurred to you, Joanne, that I’d prefer it if you didn’t get yourself killed out here?”
I blinked, and swallowed.
“Why are you so afraid?” he asked, much more softly.
There are questions a girl doesn’t want to answer, and then there are the ones she doesn’t even want to think about. I reached out, around Coyote and beyond him, for the Dead Zone.
The stars shut down and the world went blank.
CHAPTER 3
In time, stars began winking in and out again, solitary dots of light that made me feel like a single extremely small point on an endless curve of blackness. I was cold beneath my skin, but when I touched my arm, my body temperature seemed normal. I didn’t remember the chill in the Dead Zone before. It was as if it was tainted, too, with the same subtle wrongness that had marred Seattle.
I held my breath and turned, one slow circle, reaching out with my hands and my mind alike. The former felt nothing.
The latter encountered pain.
It rolled through me, a bone-cold ache that settled in my spine at the base of my neck, creating a headache. Ice throbbed into my veins with every heartbeat. My skin was flayed from my flesh and my flesh from my bones, knives thrusting into my kidneys and cutting out my heart. My bones broke, crushed by a weight o
f regret that lay heavier than the sea. It dragged me down to my knees, too weak from a hundred billion lifetimes of mistakes to bear up any longer.
And rapture shattered through me, turning the ice in my blood to golden heat. I staggered to my feet again, fire in my lungs so pure it seemed I could breathe it. Burning tears scalded my face, tracks following a thin scar to the corner of my mouth. I swallowed them down, not caring that they seared my throat.
Disbelief caught me in the belly, a bowel-twisting moment of realization that culminated in the words, “Oh, shit,” when I knew I couldn’t stop the carcrashbombexplosionrunawayhorsetrainwreckshipsinking followed by relief and dismay, to put down the burden of a body after secondsminuteshoursdaysyearsdecadescenturieseons of life.
Dimly, I was aware that I was connected, hideously and intimately, to everything that had ever died.
More immediately, I understood that nowI was going to die. Again. For good.
Then somebody hit me in the face. New, fresh pain blossomed, shattering all the old. I clapped both hands to my nose, doubling over and shrieking.
Note to self: grabbing a broken nose does not, in any fashion, help. Lightning shot through my head in blinding stabs of agony. I made a retching noise and fell to the ground, knocking my forehead against the featureless planescape. Brightness flashed in my eyes. I closed them, grateful for the ache in my skull that took a little away from the shards of pain in my nose. “Mother of Christ.”
I rolled onto my side, panting, and gingerly put my hand over my nose, envisioning a Mustang with a dented hood as I did so. Undenting it was easy: stick a suction cup over it and ratchet up the pressure until it popped back into place. In my mind’s eye, the dent banged into shape. I opened my eyes, relieved.
