by C. E. Murphy
A burp formed in my stomach and refused to go anywhere, just sat and collected nervousness until I thought I might sick up. I said “Um,” very quietly, and the ridiculous music started. I started to sing, “Big fat and wide,” beneath my breath, but Mark nudged me and shook his head. “No making fun of brides today, Joanne. Not today.”
I nodded, but I didn’t really hear him. Dad wasn’t there. We weren’t exactly close—I didn’t remember the last time I’d called him, in fact—but it seemed like he should be the one walking me down the aisle. Walking with the man I was going to partner myself with was nicely symbolic and all, but I wanted that man to be waiting for me at the altar.
Barb was up there, in the maid of honor’s place, holding a bouquet as bright as her butterfly tattoo. Morrison stood opposite her, and all I could think was he was standing in the wrong place.
I jolted awake with sweat beading on my forehead. Melinda still slept, cheeks flushed with color. The weight that pressed down on her seemed to fill the room, darkness trying to work its way into me, too.
I dragged in a breath through my nostrils and staggered to my feet, rubbing my eyes and then the scar on my cheek. “Arright.” My voice was scratchy. “All right, Jo. You’re awake. It’s okay. Just a nightmare.” Only I wasn’t sure it had been. Overlooking that I thought weddings probably weren’t supposed to be nightmare material, an awful lot of that dream had been just what I wanted. My old life back, my old friends back. It was a little early to be planning a wedding to Mark, but as a flight of fancy it didn’t seem too awful. Except the part where color rushed to my cheeks when I thought about Morrison being the best man. I guessed it was nice my brain thought they’d be friends, but that didn’t make any of it feel quite right.
I shivered and went to look out the window. The sky was graying with the coming dawn, suggesting my nap had lasted longer than it’d seemed. That was twice, first sleeping under Petite and now this. Sleep and me were clearly going to be a dangerous combination for the next few days, until I got whatever was going on figured out. I wondered if I could put in a petition for one of my adventures being done with plenty of extra snooze time, instead of operating on half-brained sleep deprivation, which had been the order of the day so far and appeared to be coming up on the roster yet again.
I put the wish aside and went back to Melinda’s bedside, bracing my face in my fingers as I sat. The air still felt weighty, making me reluctant—or, more accurately, outright afraid—to try slipping into her mind again, or to try following the thing keeping her asleep back to its source. I’d woken up once. I didn’t know if I’d do it again, not when I was sitting there by her side with dark pressure drawing me toward sleep.
I honestly didn’t know which way to turn. I had nothing useful to work with, nothing I could go look up on the Internet and find answers to. Gary, for all his sturdiness, didn’t seem likely to come up with a solution for this one. The only person I could think to ask hadn’t responded to me in almost three weeks, not since I’d encouraged him to shove off in the face of impending doom. Having a snit and staying away didn’t seem like very spirit-guide-like behavior to me, but I’d never had a spirit guide before, so what did I know? “All right,” I whispered out loud again. “One more try, Coyote. I don’t know what else to do.” At least going inside myself seemed less dangerous than questing outward in search of the right thing to do. My index finger started tapping against my cheek, rhythmic little thump-thumps that made a heartbeat pattern. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it was quiet in the house and there was nothing to distract me.
It might’ve been general tiredness that let me slide deep into my own psyche. Sleep deprivation was one of those tools shamans were supposed to use. Either way, it didn’t seem to take very long, Melinda’s bedroom fading around me in favor of a misty, moonlit garden.
There was no use standing around in there yelling for Coyote. I’d tried that several times in the last weeks, to no avail. But it struck me that when I’d come to my garden the very first time, Coyote had found me in an uber-Arizona desert and led me here. I thought if I could get back to that desert—which I vaguely envisioned as being a place accessible by anyone who knew how, rather like Babylon—I might just be able to get Coyote’s attention again.
Of course, the key words there were anyone who knew how. Not for the first time I cursed my own amazing contrariness, and paced my garden, trying to determine how to get out of it.
You could try a door, the snide little voice in my head suggested. I swear, if I could have grabbed it and shaken it, I would have. I nearly clutched my own head to do just that before I got ahold of myself. Or didn’t get ahold of myself, more accurately. “There isn’t a door,” I muttered, then ground my teeth together. I really hated that voice. I especially hated it because it was right a lot of the time.
I mean, technically, I was right. There wasn’t a door in my garden. But it was my garden, and if I wanted a door, then there would be a door. It would be at the misty end, hidden by soft fog. I walked around the garden’s edge, trailing my fingers over the rough stone wall and keeping my gaze forward, expecting the door to appear before my eyes or under my fingers.
Instead a robin twittered violently, the first animal I’d ever heard in my garden, and I tripped over my own feet as I jolted around looking for it. It peered down at me, one beady black eye and then the other, and chirruped again as if its little red-breasted life depended on it. Then it was gone, swallowed up by the fog. I rocked back on my heels, huffing a laugh as I looked at the ground. A robin; a garden. I knew a cue when my subconscious gave me one. I whispered, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” and a glitter of silver in the damp earth caught my eye.
I tilted my head at it just like the robin had at me, taking a few seconds to convince myself to kneel and curl my fingers around the bit of metal. It was cool and heavy and felt solid in my palm, and for some reason holding it made an ache in my heart I could hardly breathe around. “Maybe it’s been buried for ten years,” I murmured to the robin, because that was what I was supposed to say, though I knew it was closer to thirteen years the thing had been buried and ignored.
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, still to the robin. “The key’s supposed to be outside the garden, not in it.” There was no answering chirp, and I pushed my way back to my feet feeling older than my twenty-seven years. “Close enough, eh?” I asked the silence, and stepped forward through the fog to brush a sheet of ivy away and reveal the door.
CHAPTER 12
It opened upward, into the peak of a vast crater. I came through cautiously, feeling like I was caught in an Escher painting. My center of balance swerved dramatically and my stomach muscles constricted as I rotated onto the landscape, the world itself pulling me around until I was vertical by its standards. The door closed behind me, though by the time I looked down I was standing on it, the key still clutched in my hand. As I watched, the door faded into striated dirt, becoming a perfectly ordinary crater center.
Oddly enough, for the second time, I knew where I was.
It took rather a lot of huffing and puffing and even more sliding down the crater’s steep sides before my stride remembered the ground-eating run I’d learned when Coyote had led me through the desert and to this place. I had to keep reminding myself it was a matter of will, of my own desire overriding the evident reality of the situation around me, that allowed me to move anywhere in the psychic realm. I suspected that subconsciously I’d expected the door to open in the crater, and if I’d been more focused, I could have just walked through into the desert.
Instead I went leaping and bounding over hill and dale, until the air went sandy and dry and the landscape below me turned beautiful orange-red. I skidded to a halt in the sand, tilting my head back at the sky, blue as robin eggs. Heat poured down from the white sun, too much for comfort, though I wasn’t even sweating. There were no coyote tracks in the sand, no footprints left from my last visit here, although no wind blew to erase them. Then agai
n, I wasn’t sure this place existed except when people came to visit it, so the idea that it was remade new and whole each time someone encountered it seemed completely plausible.
I chose a patch of sand that looked as much like where I’d lay dying as anywhere else, and flopped onto my back. Grit seared through my shirt and jeans, bringing stinging prickles of heat rash to my skin, but I ignored it. The suntan I sported was thanks to a mystical desert heat considerably more antagonistic than this one, so I figured I could handle a little itching. I dropped my elbow over my eyes so the sun didn’t make red spots through my eyelids, took a deep breath, and bellowed “Coyote!” into the desert air.
Only that wasn’t what I did at all. It was the equivalent, maybe, but it felt completely different. It felt as if I was spread thin as hot butter over the sand, sending my consciousness over the whole surface of the desert. I could feel lumps and scrapes of earth beneath me, all over and everywhere. Curious lizards ran over my skin, hardly aware I was there. Water bubbled up through me in a few precious locations, and the dry earth considered whether I was something that could be drunk down for nourishment. It found the coil of power beneath my breastbone and tugged at it curiously, but I envisioned titanium shields protecting that power. Shot-blue sworls slipped into place, blocking the desert’s hold, and it relinquished it without argument.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, very privately, I wished to holy living hell I had a nice sturdy-vehicle analogy to work with here, but my psyche and my power seemed to be getting along just fine without my metaphorical grasp on things. I didn’t want to think any of it too loudly, in case my brain should notice I didn’t really know what I was doing, and stop doing it. I had this idea I’d end up like so much hamburger all over the highway if the desert-wide awareness stopped suddenly.
Crap. Now I had the idea of a car wreck smeared across the desert in my mind. Well, I’d wanted a car analogy. That was what I got for wishing. Since I was stuck with the idea, anyway, I leaned on the horn, vibrating out a call to my spirit guide with all my will.
A tiny reverberation of recognition bounced back at me from what felt like somewhere around my left knee. I gathered the idea of the smashed-up car together in my mind, rebuilding the vehicle, purple paint shimmering bright in the harsh desert sun, in that place where I’d felt an answer.
The sensation that followed felt very much like watching Stan Laurel take a long slithering step across the movie screen. It began with inching a black-clad foot across the floor, then slowly whiplashing his whole tall thin body to its new destination. I expected to hear a bloop! sound effect, or at the very least a soft pop of air, as I reconverged on a completely different spot in the desert.
Usually I wasn’t so much for telling one spot of desert from another, but this one had potential shade from rounded rocks piled up into wobbly pillars and hills, sculpted and buffeted by wind until they looked soft to the touch. The sun came down at enough of an angle to drop cooler shadows into hollows in the stone, a few of them big enough for a coyote to curl up in. Add a water source, and it would be a perfect hideaway in the landscape of the mind.
I should have been able to curl myself up in the idea of becoming a coyote, and fit into one of those little hollows all comfy and snug. That was one of the things about shamanism, shapeshifting on at least a psychic level. I’d read it could be done in the real world, too, but I wasn’t exactly a believer on that particular topic yet. Thus far, my internal shapechanges had been either accidental or the result of having been eaten by a particularly huge and powerful spirit animal, the latter of which was not on my list of things to do again. I wanted to be able to coil up in one of the coyotesize shallows in the rock, but not enough to convince myself I was a coyote. Instead, with a sigh, I fit my Joanne-shaped-self into one of them, folding my arms against a higher curve of stone and resting my head on them. It wasn’t all that comfortable, but as I settled in, I started to feel like I at least belonged there.
All I needed was a way to search the area. The heat made me think of waves boiling off a car’s hood on a hot summer day, the physical pressure of over-warm air something that could be used. I slid myself into the idea of that pressure, trying to feel the world from its perspective instead of mine. I wanted a hint of Coyote, something I could follow back to his consciousness. I wasn’t sure what I’d do after that— probably read him the riot act for not talking to me for weeks on end—but I had to start with finding him.
Cooler air melted as easily as tissue paper under the encroaching heat of my search. The weight of my analogy rolled over the hills and hollows, exploring them until a thrill of recognition tingled through me. It was as if the stone where Coyote habitually lay tasted different, flavored with his tang and sarcasm and general irritating habit of never directly answering questions. I wondered suddenly if this rocky little oasis was his garden, but discarded the idea. It felt more like the place he entered this landscape from his garden, like mine was at the center of the crater.
I very much didn’t want to know why he got an oasis and I got the scarred remnants of disaster striking. Rather than pursue that thought, I did the mental equivalent of knock knock, I’m coming in, and poured myself into the spot that had felt most like Coyote.
To my complete surprise, there was no resistance. Coyote’d lectured me up and down and left and right about my shields, so I expected to smack into his and be soundly rebuffed. I’d certainly slammed into Billy’s hard enough to get a headache. But I slid through so easily that for a moment I thought I’d have screwed up and not gone where I’d wanted to at all. There was nothing of a garden around me, just amber-tinted blackness, and a sense of time draining away very slowly. I had no idea where I was, and was trying to cast an apology into the darkness and back away when Coyote walked out of the night.
He came in his brick-red man form, black hair loose and swinging to his hips. For all that I’d gone looking for him, finding him in the black simply astonished me, emotion rising up from within like its own kind of power. He put both hands on my face, thumbs against my cheekbones, looking down at me with such curious seriousness I thought he might kiss me. Spirit guides weren’t supposed to go around kissing girls, were they?
It didn’t matter, because he didn’t do it. Instead he put his forehead against mine, a light touch that carried a staggering order: get the hell out of here, Joanne.
It wasn’t rejection. It was desperation, a single panicked rally to try to keep me safe. I could feel Coyote’s exhaustion behind it, as if he’d been struggling with the darkness for days. I couldn’t tell if he’d been waiting for me, or if my arrival had forced him to split off from what he’d been doing so he could warn me.
Because he hadn’t abandoned me after I’d thrust him out of the Dead Zone when I faced the ancient serpent there. He hadn’t left me to struggle through the aftermath of my failures as a shaman alone. The knowledge washed into me with his touch, all the information he could share inside a moment. He hadn’t been punishing me, these last two weeks.
He’d been a captive. There was something out there, an amorphous being awakened by enormous fluxes in the astral realm. Awakened, to put none too fine a point on it, by my clumsy use of power. It had slept for eons and had been waking for months, and when flickering life in the astral plain sped by it, it reacted, even half asleep. It trapped that life like a tiger in a tar pit, pulling it down into silent stillness until it roused itself fully and could decide what to do with it. My attempt to save Coyote from the serpent had thrust him right into this thing’s arms, and now he slept in amber, neither dead nor alive.
Coyote gave me a push, the action gentle enough to go unnoticed by the thing that held him captive. I drifted out of the place that should have been the garden of his soul, and went bounced like a tumbleweed through the desert, all the way back to Melinda’s bedside.
I spent a little while longer hovering at Mel’s side, trying to get more sense of what was keeping her—and Billy, and Coyote—asleep.
The only thing I came out pretty sure of was that whatever it was, it didn’t have any idea Mel had a baby along for the ride. The only energy drain I could find was Melinda’s, with no connection to her daughter. Moreover, there was a sense of sheer, raw power, a shield itself that protected the child’s presence from the dangers of the outside world. I didn’t think it was something she’d cooked up just for this occasion. I was willing to bet there were still remnants of that kind of shielding lingering around all of her children, Melinda’s love made manifest. That was great for the kids, but not useful in the larger sense. I was feeling like a big fat loser when Dr. Brad tapped on the door and let himself in.
“She’ll need to go to the hospital,” I said, hoping to head off any disgruntled lectures. “They won’t be able to do anything for her except keep her fluids up and stuff, but I guess she needs to be there for that. It seems stupid,” I added, mostly to Mel. “Hooking you up to an IV at the hospital will just cost more than hooking you up to one here would.”
“There are other reasons for Melinda to be hospitalized,” Brad said. I looked at the bump that was going to be the Hollidays’ fifth child, and nodded.
“Yeah. I guess so.” I could feel the baby’s energy if I wanted to, all bright and vital and rosy pink. She was busy, that little person, busy growing and being made and buzzing with enthusiasm for the whole process. In another few months she’d be making her mother’s life miserable with great wholloping kicks and punches as she turned somersaults in her confined growing space. My own stomach cramped with sympathy, and I rubbed it, wishing the flutter of power behind my breastbone would let me wipe stuff like that away. Apparently it considered them to be part of the hardships of living, because it showed no interest in responding. “I can stay with the kids if you want to take her over and get her admitted. I don’t work until eleven.”
