by C. E. Murphy
The end of the world unfolded before my eyes. Fire, like the first one I’d seen, only this time the spirit of flame came in mushroom clouds and burning wastelands. A very human destruction, incinerating cities and poisoning the air. One people survived, carried by a yellow-haired god up through a tall hollow reed that broke through the sky and into another world. Only they were ready; only they lived.
Time rewound, a blur of images faster than thought could process. Coyote slunk away from the hole in the earth where the water baby floated away to the floods that were its mother. Coyote, wearing my face. I watched him go, turned to the People and warned them, the words tasting like ritual in my mouth.
“This world, too, might someday be destroyed by fire, flood or cyclone, and then I will come again. You must live the right way, or this will happen. The signs that you must watch for are the rainbow around the sun, or when the sacred yellow rabbit bush, Giss-dil-yessi, does not grow, and most of all the rainbow that lasts all day. This means something dreadful will happen, and I will come then.”
The People all nodded and took note of my words and wisdom, telling them to each other so they would not be forgotten, and I slipped away into the darkness of sleep. Only one being stopped me, and that was Coyote, standing in my path. He wore his own face now, and I said to him again, “Watch for the rainbow that lasts all day. Then I will come.”
Time skidded forward an unending number of years, and slammed to a halt.
I looked down at myself from somebody else’s point of view. I was lying outside a diner, a silver sword stuck through my lungs. Then I sat in a coffee shop across from Morrison, my eyes gold as I looked through my own skin. Then outside Suzanne Quinley’s house, asking the city to hit me with its best shot. Then the Seattle Center deserted at an hour it should have been busy, all but me and Gary and the Host of the Wild Hunt in a battle between gods and sons.
Through all of it, all of it, silver rainbows of power bled off me like diamonds washed by sunlight. My aura, now mostly settled down to silver-blue, had glowed like rainbows for days, an endless, beautiful threat to the world. I remembered staring into my own skin, watching spirit unbound by flesh, rainbows of power held in by what seemed to be surface tension.
I heard myself whisper, “Oh. Oh, shit,” somewhere in the waking world, and then a little louder, “I’m not—”
Barbara clobbered me over the head.
As far as being hit on the head went, it wasn’t nearly as bad as pruning shears to the face. Stars shot through my vision and I sort of collapsed forward, muffling Mark. He grunted and I tried to get enough focus back to push myself off him. I heard Barb scramble to her feet and run for the door. By the time I sat up, it’d slammed shut. I put a hand on the back of my head and winced. “I’m not whatever this thing thinks I am. I’m not the end of the world.” I was practically certain. I hoped.
Mark didn’t appear to care much. After a couple seconds I realized that was probably because I’d fallen on his face when Barbara hit me, and I’d just bashed his nose in a minute earlier. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Hang on a second.”
For the second time in as many minutes, I did something really stupid. In my defense, I hadn’t known that letting Barb touch Mark would throw me into a vision, but I did know that trying to heal somebody when all that dark power was waiting to pounce was a bad idea.
Unfortunately, I’d already gone down the rabbit hole toward Mark’s garden when I remembered that.
Just as it had with Gary, overwhelming blackness rose up and followed me, so fast and sure of itself this time I had no way to stop it. I wasn’t carrying topaz, and Mark didn’t have the slightest familiarity with my intrusions to help me fight back with. His aura split apart, all the rainbows colors widening, and butterflies rose from the darkness between color to cloud out the sun.
I thought, quite clearly, this is going to get very confusing, and then it did.
In so far as there was good news, it was in my adversary being no better at planning than I was. My attempt at healing Mark had lit a path for it to follow, and it’d done so without hesitation or compunction. I had the sense that each time I built this sort of link to another person, it gave my enemy strength to draw from, a new route for it to take. I had a sudden awful concern for Ashley Hampton, but worry disappeared again under trying to untangle what my opponent had wrought.
Because it had just driven its own host into deep slumber. I felt Mark’s breathing change, both from inside where I was caught, and from outside where I was sitting on him. Butterflies whirled around me in obvious agitation, their rapid-beating wings making rainbows that danced in the corners of my vision. For the first time I got a feeling for Mark’s own aura, and realized I hadn’t even known I wasn’t seeing it. His was rusty-brown, so flattened that most of the red had been pulled from it. I thought it ought to be warm and friendly with life, but the butterfly colors had ridden it so long it was like he’d lost the ability to recognize himself at all. Standing inside the darkened garden that represented his soul, I felt energy draining out of it, sapped through uncountable needle-fine points. The trees and grasses and bushes in his garden were hole-ridden, as if it’d been attacked by voracious insects that neither knew nor cared that their feasting would ultimately destroy their food source and themselves.
Cold shocked through me, making hairs stand up all over my body. Destroy their food source. I doubted that doing so would be the end of whatever demon was carrying, but Mark was dying.
Standing there in the midst of a butterfly storm, my hands clenched and cold anger built up inside me. Not on my watch. I actually spoke the words out loud, then tilted my head up and shouted them into the sky: “Not on my watch, do you hear me, Goddamn it? Not again! Nobody else! Not on my watch!”
As if I’d thrown a challenge into my opponent’s teeth, half the colors of the rainbow bled down from above, butterflies by their thousands coming to feed off the sheer raw anger I flung out. I felt safe in drawing them to me: as long as Mark slept I thought they couldn’t escape the confines of his garden, which left the link to Morrison untouchable. That I wasn’t sure how I could escape was a matter to be dealt with later.
Rust under paint. In a way, that’s what this thing was, rust encroaching on the metal beneath a vehicle’s painted surface. It could be sanded out, replacement sheets soldered in and polished up, and with a professional job, the car’d be good as new. Mark’s soul needed replenishing and some TLC, but first the damage had to be excised.
I met the onslaught of butterflies with a belt sander. There was something particularly awful about that image if I let myself think about it too hard. Working with the idea of damaged paint was easier, since it didn’t involve delicate beautiful bugs being turned into so much ichor and smeared all over the place. Those that had already landed on my skin dissolved into fine mist, like paint drifting in the air, and I tried not to breathe too deeply at first.
Then I thought better the connection be in me than in Mark, and inhaled sharply, sparks of an otherworldly power crashing into me. Every breath I took replenished me enough to keep pouring power out, and the dark swarm of hungry butterflies kept coming to it, rather literally like moth to flame. The more I took in, the more distinctly I felt recognition, as if I was allowing whatever had ridden Mark to see me, and it knew me for the world-ending herald it had seen within Coyote. A certain delight began to feed through the loop as it drew closer, and I had the unfortunate feeling that my clever plan to rescue Mark from the clutches of sleep might not have been so clever after all. If it got inside me, I might go to sleep, too, and then we were all screwed.
I would just have to hold my ground and drag it out into the real world somehow. It had so much strength, so much weight to it, that I thought I might be able to. I’d brought an immortal child across worlds once, and a demon after that. There was no reason I couldn’t pull it off a third time.
Except those other two had been willing to go, and I wasn’t sure this thing was. I pushe
d the thought aside with an audible sniff, as if contempt for the details would make them go away.
By that time my whole body was buzzing from running a belt sander over my own skin. My own power was its usual burnished silver-blue, now gleaming over the rainbows of magic I’d obliterated with my psychic belt sander. The colors gleamed as if in defiance or mockery of the prophecy that had gotten me here, and the endless attack of fluttering creatures began to slow. I felt full up of power, like butterfly wings might lift me up from within and carry me away.
Beyond me, the pinprick holes that damaged Mark’s garden were healing, green returning to grayed-out leaves, blue fading back into a pale sky. With the butterflies focused on me, he had a chance. That was all I asked for. Triumphant, I turned my focus back on myself, looking for a way to seal the multi-winged dark power inside me long enough to wake up again.
Barbara, wreathed in red and yellow and violet flame, stepped into the garden of Mark’s soul just as I was about to sever the link, and pulled all the magic I’d stolen from my adversary to herself.
CHAPTER 31
I gasped, wrenching my eyes open, and to my surprise they did open, leaving me awake and breathless and still sitting on Mark’s chest. His nose was no longer mashed in, and Barbara was nowhere to be seen. I got up, the change in pressure reminding me I’d just been hit on the head, and dialed 911 on my way out the door. An ambulance would have to pick up my snoozing paramour. I had to find Barb.
Which would be a lot easier if she would stop running away from me. I gave the emergency services people the address Mark was staying at and climbed into Petite, gnawing on my cell phone. Not that I could blame her for running away: except for the pruning shears thing, I was pretty much on top of things physically. She wasn’t exactly the sort of person who could beat the tar out of me. Keeping the fight from me was the smartest thing she could do.
I straightened up so fast I hit my head on Petite’s roof and said, “Shit!” both because it hurt and because wisdom had fallen down on me like a load of bricks. I pulled out of the parking lot and dialed Gary, telling myself I was grounded from driving for another week.
He wasn’t home. At least, he wasn’t at my home. I whacked the phone against the steering wheel a few times, like it was its fault, and tried calling him at his house. No answer there, either. He’d said he’d be there.
I whispered, “Shit,” one more time, this time with worry. The topaz should be protecting him. He couldn’t have gone to sleep. Then again, I didn’t think Mark would’ve been a potential victim, either, so what the hell did I know?
There were absolutely no cops on the roads. I hoped it was just because I was getting lucky this morning, not because the wave of sleeping sickness had gone beyond the North Precinct and was starting to overtake Seattle. Given the general lack of vehicles at seven in the morning on a Thursday, though, I thought I was probably pipe dreaming. I got home and pounded up the stairs, afraid of what I’d see.
What I saw was an empty apartment with a box of two-day-old doughnuts on the kitchen table. I said something unladylike and ate the last two doughnuts, too hungry to care if they were stale. I couldn’t remember if I’d had lunch the day before. Or breakfast. I knew I hadn’t had dinner. The second half of the last doughnut stuffed in my cheek, I called Gary’s house again, still getting no answer. He didn’t have voice mail or an answering machine, on the logic that if it was important, they’d call back. He was right, but that didn’t do me any good when I wanted to rant worriedly at him.
Which was probably exactly how he’d felt when I’d run off last night and hadn’t called until this morning. Properly chastised, I went and sat at my computer, desperate for a little research on butterflies and nightmares.
Half a minute later I was scrubbing my eyeballs with my fingertips after clicking through to a pair of DVDs that came up with those words in the title. Never once in my life did I suspect butterfly nightmares might be just the ticket for determining just how much of a prude I really was. I tried a second search, using the ill-advised combination of “butterfly dream,” and really should have expected the innumerable Chuang Tsu hits. At least they weren’t brain-scrubbing. It took another couple minutes to find anything something useful.
Butterflies, it turned out, were across-the-board erotic little things. Mythologically and legendarily, they were associated with all sorts of sexiness. Mark and Barb fit that bill very nicely. Of course, butterflies were also associated with insanity, which didn’t make me particularly happy, as well as rebirth and, in fact, sleep. None of it, though, suggested that butterfly demons flapped around the psychic ether putting people to sleep and draining their life forces. I sucked on my teeth and tried another search, adding in the end of the world and some of the elements of my visiondreams. My hands grew cold as I began to get hits.
By the time my door banged open half an hour later, I had an unfortunately clear idea of what I was facing. Gary came in red-faced and huffing, and looked startled to see me there. I got up and went to hug him hard, not caring where he’d gone as long as he’d come back safely. He grunted with surprise and returned the hug. “You okay, doll?”
“I’ve been better.” I spoke into his shoulder, muffled. “I was worried when you didn’t answer the phone. You’re okay?”
“’Course I am. What’s wrong, Jo?”
I breathed a little laugh and held on tighter. “I think I really blew it this time, Gary. I woke up a god.”
Gary extracted himself from my hug and leaned back, looking at me. “You’ve gone up against gods before.”
“Yeah. Except the last one just wanted free of his constraints.” I managed a smile and stepped away. “This one thinks I heralded the end of the world, and he doesn’t like it. Is that interesting enough for you?”
To my never-ending surprise, Gary cracked a grin. “Just about. What are you, crazy, lady?”
“You tell me. I mean, you’ve got to admit, as the pinnacle of half a year’s screwups, bringing the world to an end is hard to beat. I start with the Wild Hunt, I move on to unleashing earthquakes and demons on suburban Seattle, and I wrap it up with signaling a god that it’s time to end the world. I think I’ve got the escalation about right.”
“Yeah,” Gary said, “but what’re you gonna do for an encore?”
Laughter caught me out. “I hope to God,” and for a moment there I wasn’t sure if I should be pluralizing that, or if I had a specific deity in mind, “that when we get through this I’ll have laid all the ashes of my spectacular opening act to rest, and that anything else I get to deal with isn’t quite as cosmic in nature.”
A thread of cold warning slithered down my spine, bringing with it a vivid image: a cave in the lit-up astral realm, a place of real beauty and unending life. That cave was blocked off, its depths cut away from me by my mother’s will, but beyond it lay something that thought of me as a tasty morsel. It knew I was out here, and every time I tripped through that part of the Other worlds, it taunted and teased me. I’d resisted it once, and been forbidden that path by Sheila MacNamarra’s power, but moonlit blue darkness waited for me. I didn’t think it would prove to be a puff of dust to be blown away, not when it was so well buried, so deep in the astral planes.
As if thinking of it—him; I had a sense of maleness about the thing, and if I was right in my summation of connections, the banshee I defeated had called it Master—as if thinking of him brought me to his attention, a soft wave of rich, malign amusement danced over my skin, raising goose bumps. I shuddered off thoughts of that particular monster in the dark. I had others to deal with.
“The visions I’ve been having. The waking visions?” Gary nodded, reassuring me that I’d told him about them. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight anymore. I was so tired I wanted to cry on general principles. “I thought I was supposed to be fighting those dreams. I mean, the world kept coming to an end. It flooded, it burned, it…kept ending. And there I was trying to fling everything I had against that, to
stop the destruction of the world. And I couldn’t. They were Navajo history, Gary.” I looked at him in unhappy exhaustion. “I finally had enough pieces to do research.”
“So what’re we up against, Jo?” That was something else I loved about the old man. He meant it when he said we. Even if I was the world’s biggest screwup, Gary was on my side.
“A god,” I said again. “Begochidi. He led the Navajo from one world to the next. And now he’s come back to do it again. I think I just told him it was time. I think a bunch of physicists working on wormhole theory accidentally set him loose. Like I did with the Lower World demons. I think they made the walls of the worlds thin enough to pass through, and Begochidi was just waiting to step through.” I caught Gary’s expression and shook my head. “The point is he’s here now, to deal with the threat and lead his people to the next world. To deal with me.”
I let out a hoarse laugh and looked away, like I could see through the walls of the apartment. Actually, I could, but I didn’t want to right now, so they were solid and normal. “Begochidi’s not just a minor character in Navajo legend. He’s the Maker of the world, both male and female. Mark and Barbara,” I heard myself add wearily. Gary made a sound of dismay and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him or explain that particular misfortune any further. “Twins, male and female, to carry his spirit toward the blight that endangered his people. Only I think I freed Mark from his hold, so now it’s just Barb out there someplace and I’ve got to fight her.”
I was used to running behind, trying desperately to catch up. It turned out being ahead of the curve sucked just as much as not knowing what I was getting myself into. Maybe more. There was a certain blind hope associated with playing catch-up. Having a clear idea of what I was up against made me feel pretty damn grim.
“You sure ’bout this, Jo?”
I nodded. I didn’t have the impression that shamans went through quite such dramatic trials by fire under usual circumstances, but nothing about my life had been much in the way of normal for a long time now. Longer than I’d thought, really, looking back to my Coyote dreams. Longer than that, even, if I’d really been mixed up by the Makers of the world. Not Begochidi. He wasn’t one of the ones responsible for me, or he’d recognize me. But even the Navajo had more than one creation myth, and from what I’d read, Begochidi didn’t feature as powerfully in all of them. The Makers, it seemed, weren’t necessarily in on the Making together. I’d have to give them a scolding about that, if I ever got the chance.
