Coyote Dreams twp-3

by C. E. Murphy

  “I’m not a dog,” he said, nearly before the thought was finished, and I laughed while Joanne wriggled sheepishly. Some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

  “Sorry.” She sounded like she meant it, which was more than I’d ever done. “Does everybody have a garden like this one?”

  “Everyone has a garden,” Coyote said with a bony-shouldered shrug. “Nobody’s exactly alike. It’s the source of who you are, Joanne. The heart of your power.”

  Joanne curled a lip, the expression familiar to me. I’d tried hard to train myself out of it once I’d grown up, for a couple of reasons. One was that sneering only looked good on James Dean. The other was that I’d eventually figured out nobody wanted to be friends with somebody who perpetually looked like she’d bite your head off if you spoke to her. But that was years ahead of the girl I was right now, and she sneered with the best of them. “I don’t have any power. I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

  Oh, God. Reliving being thirteen was going to be a lesson in humiliation I could do without. I tried closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears, but it was amazingly ineffective against things that were happening in my own head. Coyote cocked his ears, as if doing so would explain the logic behind the younger me’s statement, then rolled out his tongue and let it go. “Close your eyes, and tell me what you feel.”

  Joanne eyed him, then shrugged and did so, straightening her spine as she did. I didn’t remember having such good posture at her age. Then again, being tall had kept me out of some fistfights, so there were reasons to stand up straight.

  Being tall and standing up so straight had come across as arrogant, the snide voice in my head reminded me, and had gotten me into a lot more fights than it’d gotten me out of. I told the voice to shut up and go away, even if it was right. Especially because it was right. I’d learned, too, to never let them know they’d beaten you, and standing up straight went a long way toward that. I’d stood up so straight every goddamned day of my pregnancy that my back hurt again just thinking about it. Pride had kept me stiff-spined for eight months. I guessed maybe it’d been doing that for a lot longer than I cared to think about.

  “I feel like I’m going to puke,” the younger me announced in the midst of all that introspection. She rubbed her hand over her stomach and opened her eyes again, nose wrinkled. “Like somebody hit me in the stomach with a golf club.”

  Coyote’s mouth opened and his tongue lolled out, as if he’d been about to say something and Joanne’s comment had caught him off guard. “Golf club?”

  “Yeah,” she said, oblivious to his surprise, while I remembered the club sinking into my diaphragm like it was meant to be there, hooking under the breastbone with a solid whump. It’d been an accident, the kid who hit me considerably younger than I was, but the club’s backswing had still taken the breath out of me for what seemed like hours on end. Even now, more than fifteen years later, the memory made a sick little pit beneath my breastbone, and I realized Joanne was right. The power, when it wanted to be noticed, did feel a lot like that had. It wasn’t something that could be ignored. “It feels kind of connected to something,” she added. Coyote shook off his curiosity about the golf club and looked pleased.

  “Connected to what?”

  “I dunno.” Joanne turned around in a circle, still rubbing her tummy. “Maybe to this whole place. Maybe to you.” She let go a sudden burp, clapped a hand over her mouth and looked back at Coyote with wide eyes. “Feels better now,” she said through her fingers. “Maybe it’s just gas.”

  Humor creased Coyote’s long face and he lifted his chin, ears pricking up. “Close your eyes and try again. Imagine reaching out with that feeling so you can touch everything with it.”

  “You want me to puke all over everything?” Joanne asked dubiously, but closed her eyes. I couldn’t see when she closed her eyes, and twitched impatiently, trying not to order myself to open my eyes again. I could feel the power inside her—us—respond when she reached for it, flowing cool and silver-blue out from her center. There was nothing sluggish or reluctant, as there’d been in the worst moments of my denying it, nor did it feel in any way gleeful or glad to be used. It just was, as much a part of my younger self as breathing or messing around with cars was. For an instant I envied her, and wished there was a way to get her not to make the mistakes I’d made.

  Joanne didn’t even have to open her eyes. The world began to come into focus through closed eyelids, the gorgeous, powerful neon colors I’d become so fond of spilling into her vision through the power of magic. I’d never tried looking at my garden with the second sight, and wouldn’t have thought an imaginary place representing my soul would have all the colors of life inside it, vibrating with excitement and potential.

  The waterfall was made of crystal, crashing down with a liquid music that raised hairs on my arms. The pool it splashed into rippled into prisms, colors riding tiny waves to the pool’s edge, where they crawled up over the banks and spilled into grass and trees with all the joie de vivre imaginable. I could see Coyote in both his forms at once, the lanky good-natured animal shape seeming to settle inside the young man’s torso. His own power, his aura, was less tempered through Joanne’s eyes than through his own, burnt sienna and bright cobalt-blue, but it was infused with joy and patience.

  “Open your eyes,” he murmured, and Joanne did, very slowly, until the spirit world and the normal world amalgamated and became one in her vision, neither seeming complete without the other. I felt raw delight rise up in her, so overwhelming her throat tightened and tears swam in her eyes as she split a smile broad enough to hurt her cheeks.

  “It’s magic!”

  “It’s your birthright,” Coyote said. “I’ve got a lot to teach you.”

  Joanne turned that blinding smile, an expression I couldn’t remember ever having, on the coyote, then reached out to hug him so hard I could feel bony ribs and shoulders digging into my cheek and arm. There was greed and hope and excitement in her voice as she said, with more enthusiasm than I’d ever shown, “I want to learn.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The sun had set when I became aware of it again. I didn’t know why no one had disturbed me, the scene-causing woman standing mindlessly still in the middle of the restaurant’s sidewalk, but then, I didn’t know why nobody’d awakened me when I was sleeping beneath Petite a couple of days earlier, either. I had the sensation of being veiled, as if I were sleepwalking, or maybe as if everyone around me was. I’d have thought Morrison would see through the veil, and the idea made my stomach clench. Me being cosmically attuned to him in some way hardly meant the reverse was true.

  I remembered, now. I remembered Coyote dreams so clearly I could barely fathom why I’d forgotten them for so long. I remembered his patience in teaching me how to draw my powers out, how to heal, starting with the most superficial of wounds and working toward the most profound. I remembered that even as a kid I’d had a hard time with the idea of simply seeing something as whole and it being that way. I had never quite achieved that to Coyote’s satisfaction, and I remembered that back then, I’d used the same tire-patching and car-fixing analogies to rebuild bone and sinew as I did now.

  I remembered the tricks I’d shown him: the way I’d learned to bend light around me so I was invisible, the idea taken from some comic book I’d read. I remembered a night when it’d been pouring rain in my garden and I’d changed the rain to flowers, daisies and sunflowers and dandelions spilling out of the sky, and I’d realized then that I could do that in the waking world, too. I remembered touching on a river so deep and fast I’d almost drowned in it before Coyote put his teeth into my belt and tugged me back. I remembered learning to create things from my will alone, and I remembered that the basic rule of magic was the same one a coven had taught me a couple of weeks earlier: do what thou wilt, and it harm none. Neither the coven nor I had done so well with that, but it was still the immutable rule.

  What I did not remember was walking through school ever
y day, cocky and proud of my knowledge and power. I didn’t remember using it to make myself popular or stronger or better, to push myself into the place I’d always wanted to be: belonging. I turned my palm up, creating a silver-shot ball of blue energy there. It swam around my fingers, darting and dancing like it had life of its own, and I wished it was sheer moral superiority that had kept me from making a place for myself in Qualla Boundary. That was what my fictional Chinese heroine would’ve done, kept her gifts quiet and worked silently in the background to the betterment of the people around her.

  I was nowhere near that good a person. I hadn’t eked out a position for myself using my power because in the waking world, I didn’t even know about it. I could just about see it now, a thin line across my psyche that Coyote had drawn, keeping my awareness of burgeoning power apart from the often bitter, sullen teenager I was in day-to-day life. On one side of that line lay the memories of dreams, and on the other was what I’d been meant to remember until I’d grown beyond the emotional maturity of a turnip. On that side, I remembered Coyote visiting a handful of times, always waking me up immediately, until the day he’d stopped visiting at all.

  I thought I should be bubbling over with resentment at my spirit guide, for all the trouble he’d put me through by walling up my power until I was grown-up enough to use it. It was arrogant, high-handed and officious, assuming I wouldn’t have been able to handle the responsibilities he was offering me.

  It was unquestionably the right move.

  I walked back to Petite, my body stiff from standing motionless on concrete, and crawled into my car. I wanted to stay there, small and hidden, and sleep until I understood everything that had ever happened to me. Dreaming would help sort it all out. That was what dreams were for.

  Only lately, they seemed heavy and dangerous, too, and I didn’t think this was a good time to risk letting my subconscious do all the work. I put my hands on the steering wheel and let intellect unfold creases of memory I was too drained to deny.

  The advantage of being a new soul, Coyote’d told me not that long ago, was I didn’t have the burdens of past lives to weigh me down. The disadvantage was I didn’t have the experiences, either. I had thirteen short years of existence behind me when we first met, and in all that time I’d never really belonged anywhere. Maybe someone with a little more history would have felt the weight of smart choices and understood that shamanic gifts weren’t for personal gain. I’d known that on an intellectual level at thirteen, but I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass, and Coyote knew it.

  The bitch of the thing was there wasn’t much choice about whether I’d have those powers or not. I’d been built that way by a Maker I wasn’t quite convinced existed, but Grandfather Sky and Mother Earth didn’t care if I believed in them or not. They believed in me. That was all that mattered. So Coyote’d been stuck teaching a kid who’d use her powers in all the wrong ways if she’d known she had them. In his position, I’d have kept me in the dark, too.

  I’d like to think I’d have grown into learning the truth. In retrospect it was clear other people did—the drum that lay at home on my dresser was proof of that. It’d been a gift when I turned fifteen. Maybe it’d been a sign that the elders saw that I was finally coming into myself.

  But then I met Lucas, and everything went to hell.

  I leaned forward, putting my forehead on Petite’s steering wheel, my eyes closed. I didn’t let myself think of him by name, not since he’d hightailed it back to his mother’s people in Canada when I told him I was pregnant. The First Boy. That was how I thought of him. It was safer that way, as if he was a symbol more than a person. School had just started and he was new, newer than even me, visiting his father and cousins in North Carolina. Even now, almost thirteen years later, when he came to mind I still thought he was beautiful, with broad cheekbones and a white smile. I’d hoped going to bed with him would make him like me, or make me fit in better. It hadn’t worked, though it’d lost me the only best friend I’d ever had.

  I wasn’t dumb enough to pretend not to know what a missed period meant, under the circumstances. Lucas had left at Christmastime, maybe as he’d always intended. It certainly gave him a legitimate excuse to be far away from Qualla Boundary before it became obvious I was pregnant. It didn’t really matter: I hadn’t told anybody but him and my friend Sara, and still haven’t. The father’s name is left unknown on the birth certificate, and that was probably as much the reason for Morrison’s concern as my lousy phrasing yesterday morning. Part of me wanted to get out of the car and go find Morrison and tell him right then that it hadn’t been rape, just a stupid mistake, but I knew I’d never do that. I hadn’t even told my father I was pregnant, just let it become obvious as time went on. He never asked.

  Other people did, but I’d learned that stiff-spined solitude by then, and didn’t answer. The only two people I’d ever admitted my pregnancy to out loud were Lucas and Sara, and I’d lost them both. I didn’t know how to break that silence anymore, even if I wanted to.

  I’d thought Coyote’d stopped visiting my dreams around then. Sitting there in Petite, the steering wheel making a dent in my forehead, it was finally clear he hadn’t stopped visiting. I’d stopped answering. He’d taught me shields back then, just like he’d had to teach me all over again, and that was a lesson I’d learned by God well. I’d kept them up so well for more than twelve years it’d taken almost dying in order to bring them down again. By then I was so set against the whole idea of a mystical world I don’t think he stood a chance. Getting back inside my head, or helping me to, in order to access the dreamworld training he’d given me more than a decade earlier would have required at least a smidgen of willingness on my part. I’d been about as willing to listen as a man might be eager to walk to the gallows. And, frankly, if I’d been my spirit guide at that point, I’d have been tempted to throw in the towel and let me figure it out by my own damned self. Coyote was a better person, so to speak, than I was.

  Some of it had made it through, anyway. Healing came naturally to me, even as I fought it. I’d pulled out gimmicks that felt instinctive, and now could remember they’d been learned and figured out. I was torn between relief and disappointment. Being able to do what I did on instinct really seemed like it meant I was supposed to be doing those things. There was nothing like a little predestination to make a girl feel like she’s got a place in the world. On the other hand, having studied with Coyote, in however esoteric a fashion, made sense in a way that I was much happier with. Being able to do something because I’d studied it fit much more nicely into my rational world than the uncomfortable idea I’d become part of a massive sportswear campaign and could Just Do It.

  I spread my fingers and thunked the heel of my hands against Petite’s steering wheel. Part of my mind was demanding, so why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t he at least try? Blaming Coyote for my shortcomings was much easier than taking responsibility for them myself. The truth was, I just couldn’t imagine me listening six months ago. I couldn’t fathom a better way to get me to dig my heels in and refuse any of what was happening to me than saying, “Hey, you liked it when you were fifteen.” I was nothing if not contrary. Even the slightest hint that we’d been there, done that, would’ve slammed me back into my shell. I wasn’t sure even the gods could’ve pulled me out of that one, and they’d been running rampant around Seattle at the time. Better to treat me like the sulky, snotty rank beginner I’d grown up into than try to pick up where we’d left off.

  I wished I could tell Coyote I was sorry, and that I remembered now, and even that I understood.

  Instead I whispered a promise to him that I’d do my best, and let Petite take me to Northwest Hospital.

  Wednesday, July 6, 10:29 p.m.

  It was well after visiting hours when I got to the hospital. Odds were good that I could slip in under the forgiveness is easier to get than permission axiom, which had worked for me in the past. On the other hand, seven months earlier, I’d wrapped light
around myself until it bounced away and pretended I wasn’t there. People who’d been looking straight at me frowned in confusion, then slowly walked away. I hadn’t known then how I’d done it. I remembered now, and part of me wanted to see if I could replicate it.

  Part of me also thought, a bit grimly, that it would be a good way to find out if the sleep demon was triggering to any external magic I did, or just attempts at healing. I wasn’t strictly sure the light trick was external, but it was far more external than visiting my garden and the realms accessible from there to find Coyote.

  My heart spasmed again and I got out of the car, hoping that moving and taking deliberate deep breaths would help me get through the impulse to burst into tears.

  My reflection, highlighted by a streetlamp in a night-dark window, caught my eye before I got to the main entrance. Light bounced around me, warping and weaving in smooth glass, like I’d been stretched out of shape. I stopped, watching my distorted self. Disappearing had come from far within me back in January, anger and desperation pushing me to use my power for something other than healing. Choosing to use it in a different way.

  Choice. My reflection’s lips parted with the word, though I didn’t say it out loud. I felt out of focus, staring at a corner of glass, listening to a running patter that went on in the back of my mind: c’mon, baby, you can do it. This is what the magic’s there for, right? Shamanism’s about choosing different paths, so you just have to choose to embrace it, Joanne. Choose to use it. You know you can do it. I knew the cajoling rhythm: it was what I used with Petite when I needed just a little more out of her. I honestly couldn’t remember ever using it on myself to encourage a little more out of the gifts I’d been granted, much less encouraging the power itself. I’d paid for that, too, and so had others. Without really thinking about it, I walked forward to put my fingertips against my reflection’s, looking at myself without seeing.