by C. E. Murphy
I got to Petite before Morrison caught up with me, shaking hands fumbling the keys repeatedly. My heart hammered so badly it hurt, taking up all the room in my chest so I couldn’t get any air, and the only clear thought I could form was that I didn’t want to scratch Petite’s paint job with my shaking hands and key.
Morrison put his hand on my shoulder. Confusion, anger, concern all flared in the touch, tainting the purples and blues of his aura. I felt it all the way through me, the same bright agonizing definition of things around me that I’d experienced when he’d picked up my drum and played it.
Under the circumstances, it was an unforgivable intimacy.
I turned around and threw a punch, catching him in the chest with a meaty thwock. My keys, folded into my fist, cut into my fingers, and that, like the knot in my thigh and crashing into the door, was better than the hurt that squeezed my chest until I couldn’t breathe. Morrison staggered back, more from surprise than the power of the blow, and I dropped my keys to grab his shirt in both fists.
“Do you just not get it, Morrison? Are you just totally failing to comprehend that I’m trying to protect you? Do you think sheer blind arrogance and ignoring what’s going on is going to get you through it unscathed?” I let him go with a shove, taking the step with him so I could stay right in his face. “Let me tell you that I’ve learned the hard way that it doesn’t work. I know you don’t want to believe it. I don’t want to believe it, but goddamn it, Morrison, you’ve got to be smarter than I am, and even I’m finally listening.”
My grip on the second sight slid off somewhere in my outrage, so the only way I could tell Morrison was building up a head of steam was the way his face darkened into a dangerous shade of red, instead of watching his aura do the same. I jerked my hand at his throat as if I’d cut his words off before he spoke, and it seemed to work. He inhaled, but didn’t yell.
Maybe that was because I wasn’t giving him a chance to get a word in edgewise. I’d backed him up another several steps, until he hit a row of hedges. Once he did, he didn’t lean away from me or move forward, just stood his ground while I shouted. “This sickness is killing people, Morrison! It killed Coyote!” I slapped my palm against his chest, not quite the outright punch I’d thrown before, but enough to cause a sharp crack of sound and a sting in my hand. “You think you’re special? I promise you, you’re not! That goddamned piece of stone is supposed to keep you safe while I try to figure out how to fix all the crap I’ve fucked up. I need you to have that rock, Morrison, because how am I supposed to do my job if I’m worrying about you? Sure, great, you gave the fucking thing to a beautiful woman, guess that makes you a real hero, doesn’t it? Just like you’re supposed to be, the handsome cop saving the girl. Good for goddamned you, Morrison, but what the hell am I supposed to do if something happens to you? I’m trying to protect you, Morrison, because I don’t know what—”
I finally broke off, my anger going cold and lonely as the rest of that sentence finished itself in my head. Morrison was florid, his jaw set and eyes blazing with fury. At least a couple dozen people from the restaurant had come out to watch me berate my boss, including Mark and Barbara. Barb had her hands over her mouth, eyes wide with distress, and Mark stood with his gaze cast down, as if he couldn’t watch or look away, either. A bunch of others looked delighted, the thrill-seeking sons of bitches. Some of them were clearly embarrassed for the people causing the commotion, and a little of that started to sink through my stomach-churning emotion.
“Are you done?” Morrison asked, so softly I was surprised I could even hear it, for all I was only standing three inches away. I turned my head to the side and pressed my lips together, embarrassment and anger welling up in equal parts. After a couple of seconds I nodded and Morrison took one abrupt step forward that sent me back a couple of steps.
“I’m going to cut you some slack, Walker, because a friend of yours just died.” The quiet rage in my boss’s voice was about a thousand times worse than the shouting I’d gotten used to. “But if you ever. So much as think. About throwing another punch my way, I will have you up on assault charges so fast your head will spin, and I am goddamned good and certain that your bag of tricks doesn’t hold a get-out-of-jail-free card. Do I make myself perfectly clear, Officer Walker?”
Blood curdled in my face, so thick and painful I wanted to cry just from the weight of the blush. I nodded twice, stiff motions, then forced, “Yes, sir,” through still-compressed lips.
Morrison didn’t say anything else. He just turned away from me and went back to Barbara and Mark. I heard him making apologies to them, to the restaurant staff, to everyone, while I stood there like an unstrung marionette, my heart beating so hard in my throat I thought I would be sick. Mark broke away from the others and approached me. I shook my head before he got close enough to speak, and then did it again, lifting my palm to ward him away. It was a nice gesture on his part. I could almost feel sympathy and unhappiness coming off him. I just didn’t want to even try explaining myself just then. After a few seconds I saw his shoulders slump, and he turned away, joining the breaking crowd in returning to the restaurant.
Only when I was more or less alone in the parking lot did I wet cracked lips and whisper, “Because I don’t know what I’d do without you,” to the empty pavement.
My skin had gone numb, sometime between my breaking off and Morrison dressing me down. My head was hollow and my ears were ringing, eyes too dry and mouth sticky. I knew myself well enough to feel like I ought to have some witty rejoinders, a way to blow off what I’d just admitted to myself with a sarcastic comment or two. Instead I stood there staring at the pavement. I had the idea that finding a sword to fall on was probably the appropriate thing to do. It was what I’d do if I were the heroine of a Chinese film, having just confessed to the unreachable hero that I was in lo—
My own self-censorship wouldn’t even let me finish that thought. I supposed the only small thing preventing me from having to throw myself on a sword was the fact I hadn’t actually made an idiot of myself in front of Morrison.
Boy. Some things sure were relative. I hadn’t made an idiot of myself over that particular topic in front of Morrison, to be somewhat more accurate. Besides, seppuku was for people with moral resolve, not windshield-shattered police mechanics whose mystical backgrounds were catching up to them. I wondered how long I might’ve gone on, able to deny to myself what was obvious, if Coyote hadn’t interfered with what would have been an otherwise very dramatic death seven months earlier.
There was a flaw in that thought process, but I didn’t want anybody pointing it out to me, not even me.
It wasn’t as if I hadn’t known what was going on behind Melinda or Gary’s sideways smiles when my tongue got tangled up over Morrison, but hunching up and looking away had worked as a denial method. Besides, there were half a million good reasons to not think about it, starting with the screamingly obvious one: he was my boss.
He also didn’t like me very much, didn’t like my gifts at all and knew nothing about cars. In no way was it a match made in heaven, or even by a canny matchmaker planning to rake in her profit for arranging an unlikely marriage. Kate and Petruchio, comparatively, were a sure thing.
I could almost feel thoughts whirling around in my head, like I was deliberately trying to keep them on the surface, nice and superficial. It seemed like a very me thing to do, which in and of itself made me uncomfortable. I didn’t particularly like being aware of my emotional status. I especially didn’t like being aware and suspecting it was equivalent to the maturity level of your average turnip.
“Siobhán.”
No one but Morrison knew to call me that name, and he had already left. The voice wasn’t his, anyway, and it repeated “Siobhán” after a few moments’ delay.
I tried to put my hand over my throat but couldn’t. The voice wasn’t mine, either, but I thought it was me talking. I turned around in the parking lot, looking to see who was there, and discovered I wasn’t
in the parking lot at all.
Stars, distant and meaningless, surrounded me in a place between worlds and dreams. They went on just less than forever, to a horizon so distant it made me feel insignificant. I stood among the blackness and the stars, comfortable with it: I’d traveled there an uncountable number of times already, though this was the first time I’d made the journey on my own. It was dangerous in the way any new territory was dangerous. An unwise show of power could attract things that were never meant to find fragile humans, but a judicious asking could as easily call up protectors for that same delicate psyche. My own protector danced around me even now, lithe and furry and looking for a chance to cause trouble.
Not trouble, I chastised myself, or thought I did. It could as well have been Coyote, shaking his golden head at me. He never caused trouble, only learning opportunities. Who did the learning was beside the point, and the fact that he never seemed to learn himself even more so.
“Welcome, Siobhán,” I said one more time, and finally someone else appeared in the Dead Zone. A girl I knew, all elbows and knees, her black hair cropped short in defiance of the big bangs and perms that were stylish when she was that age. She was more than half asleep, a frown etched between her eyebrows, and she glowered at me suspiciously.
I offered out a brick-red hand and smiled. “This is where it begins. Brightness of body, brightness of soul.”
A doorway opened up in my mind.
CHAPTER 22
I fell through myself and memory and dreams until I was no longer capable of telling up from down or me from him. In every room of memory a brick-red boy waited, golden eyes bright and cheerful while I argued with him. I was thirteen and gawky and even I knew shamans didn’t just happen. You had to do a spirit quest and be guided and be prepared to focus yourself on the good of the community. I barely knew what a community was, much less had any interest in making it healthy. I felt distant and sullen even contemplating it. I was new to North Carolina at that age, still the outsider, and the part of me that wanted desperately to fit in was overridden by the part that just didn’t know how. I never had figured it out.
“That’s why I’m here,” Coyote said over and over again, showing patience far beyond his apparent years. I could see him through my own eyes, a brick-red young man of about eighteen with hair past his shoulders, long and gleaming blue-black in the darkness. The part of my mind able to think about it thought that made sense. A prepubescent girl was more likely to respond positively to an eighteen-year-old knockout than a thirty-something…well. Knockout. Coyote in any form was beautiful, bequeathed with the striking features that seemed par for the course when it came to otherworldly beings. But watching him now had a peculiar echo to it, as if what I saw was somehow being filtered through more than one set of eyes. It didn’t exactly diminish him, but it gave him a slightly more human cast. The red brick of his skin was warmer, sun-kissed instead of masonry, and his golden eyes were touched with brown. Looking too hard made me dizzy.
“You’re unusual,” Coyote said. My thirteen-year-old self snorted with the same lack of delicacy the woman twice her age had at her disposal.
“Siobhán,” he said, and I watched me hunch my shoulders up and shift, as if I was dragging a blanket over them.
“Stop calling me that. My name’s Joanne.”
A wave of sorrow caught me off guard, not my own emotion at all, but Coyote’s. Unexpectedly, it brought clarification. I wasn’t visiting memory on my own. These were Coyote’s memories, not mine, and the double vision was brought on by both of us remembering the same thing from different vantages. I had the impulse to gather up the younger me into my arms and hug her. Rather, Coyote had the impulse. My reluctance might have been what stopped him. I wondered if the me now could affect the him then. I wouldn’t put it past me.
I shook my head without moving his at all, unable to keep my selves straight. “Hang on.” That was actually me, breathing the words while I looked for the coil of power inside me. It felt awkward, tangled up in Coyote’s dreams, especially as his power wasn’t centered the way mine was.
Separating myself felt like making taffy candy, pulling and stretching and bringing it back together. Coyote’s power was recognizable to me, in the same way the Eiffel Tower was: I’d never seen it before, but all the representations and reproductions looked like the real thing. I’d dealt with enough magic from other people to recognize what I was facing.
His magic was all rusty oranges and hard blues, desert colors that had a faint taste of grit to them. Everything that was mine was silver and shot-silk blue. His were a part of him, as natural as breathing, and mine were still bunched together at the center of me, tendrils feeling their way into me as if they weren’t certain they were welcome. A touch of green sprouted in my silver, envy at how easy it was for Coyote, then disappeared again as I folded taffy one more time and found myself untangled from my spirit guide.
For one truly alarming instant I didn’t belong anywhere. I had no attachment to my own body, not even the pulse of silver cord I’d seen when my mother and I had come together to fight the Blade. I hung in the Dead Zone, numbed by a coldness that went beyond anything I’d ever felt before. Even Amhuluk’s presence hadn’t held the bone-draining chill that was death in such a profound manner. Panic clenched my heart and I dove forward, taking up residence behind the eyes of my thirteen-year-old self.
She didn’t notice a thing. I wondered once more if it’d been like this all along and I just hadn’t known I was visiting back then, or if this was only memory, and nothing I did could affect what was to play out. Not that I had the foggiest idea what was going to play out. My subconscious seemed to remember this conversation, but I certainly didn’t.
“Joanne.” I could hear the sadness in Coyote’s voice as clearly as I’d felt it rise in him. My mother had sounded much that way the first time I’d corrected her as to my name. Right after that I’d done something that turned her from being a light-hearted woman with a ready smile into someone with the strength to will herself to death on a specific date. I very much didn’t want a repeat of that scenario.
The younger me didn’t hear anything beyond the brick-red boy in her dreams using the name she wanted him to. It was enough to satisfy her, at least for the moment. “What do you mean, I’m unusual?” The question was cautious, guarded, like somebody’d said Tom Cruise was on the phone for her. She wanted to believe it, but couldn’t fathom it being true. She had half-formed ideas that I remembered, wanting to be told she was really the lost daughter of some insanely wealthy family who would dote on their missing child, not the half-breed daughter of a reclusive father who didn’t know what to do with her. Probably every kid in the universe had that kind of fantasy, whether they’d been abandoned at three months old or not.
The adult me didn’t expect anything at all. I remembered this dream. It’d come the night my period started, and I’d woken up after Coyote’d said brightness of body, brightness of soul. He’d shown up in my dreams a few times after that, never more than an instant or two. I usually woke up as soon as he appeared, to the best of my recollection. I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t already awake, instead of lingering in the Dead Zone. Coyote put his hand out again, inviting.
“Let me show you, Joanne.”
I got up, rubbing my eyes like a much smaller kid, and put my hand in Coyote’s, feeling grubby and gangly next to him. He dropped a wink and said, “Down the rabbit hole!”
The Dead Zone opened up a funnel and zipped me down a swirling tube at about a thousand miles an hour. Wind ripped through my hair and the tube took a rise and dip, making me squeal and laugh and reach for support that wasn’t there. The adult me thought there ought to be friction burns on my thighs—I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, my usual sleeping apparel as a kid—and the younger me thought she’d never been on such a totally excellent roller coaster. Light suddenly enveloped us and Joanne shrieked gleefully as we exploded out of the tunnel over a body of water. We were in the air
just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of greenery, and then we hit the pond with a tremendous splash and a whole lot of giggling. Joanne came to the surface laughing and wiping her eyes, merrier than I could ever remember being, and stood there looking around, thigh-deep in water.
A lush, misty garden spread out in front of me, cobblestone paths wending through it into a foggy distance. Enormous trees grew up, branches braiding together to make arches over the pathways. A scent of cherries filled warm air, blossoms drifting down like soft rain, and thunder filled my ears. There were lily pads and floating cherry blooms on the water’s surface, and Joanne trailed her fingers through the water, scooping one of the flowers up. She actually tucked it behind her ear, a feminine gesture I couldn’t imagine doing, and turned to look behind her while she waded out of the pool.
I knew what I’d see: a waterfall filling the pool from the garden’s northern end. I thought maybe it’d been the water-slide we’d come in on. But the falls I was accustomed to tended to be a trickle, or a thin sheet of water over granite facing, hardly enough to play in.
Joanne’s waterfall ran higher than I could see, blue sky and pounding mist obscuring its top. For all its enthusiastic fury and the white water it made when it hit the pond, the pool itself was remarkably still, so clear I could see the depths it plunged to near the waterfall’s foot.
Joanne backed up until a bench hit her in the knees and she sat, arms braced as she smiled at rainbows brought into relief by sunlight playing over the falls. “What is this place?”
“Your soul, for lack of a better word,” Coyote said. He was sitting beside me on the bench, apparently unconcerned with having temporarily disappeared, and he wore the coyote form I was most familiar with. Joanne did a double take that even I found funny, and Coyote himself snapped air in a doglike laugh.
