by C. E. Murphy
“What? No. What?” God, I was a stunning conversationalist. Even if people with bodies mashed up against one another weren’t typically expected to have profound conversations—after all, they were probably either in a subway or a bedroom, if they were as pressed close as Morrison and I were—monosyllabic inanities were still on the disappointing end of witty repertoire. Fortunately after a second or two my brain caught up to what he was probably actually asking. “That’s just me. My aura. It’s usually silver and blue. You’re purple and blue. Billy’s fuchsia and orange.”
“Really? I’m purple? I thought you would be. Like that car of yours.”
My mouth, unwisely, said, “Maybe that’s magic’s way of saying we’re simpatico,” and Morrison, much more wisely, released me and stepped back.
I looked down and to the side, suddenly brimming with self-loathing at a potency level usually reserved for teenagers. If the floor opened up and dropped me six hundred feet to the Seattle Center grounds, that would almost be sufficient punishment for the humiliation of saying something so incredibly stupid and desperate and stupid. And desperate. I’d closed the damned door on a potential relationship with Morrison months ago. The niggling detail that at least one of us had put a foot in that door to keep it from slamming shut was not supposed to bear any relevance to my life.
It might have borne a lot less relevance if I wasn’t half-sure it was Morrison’s foot in the door. He’d asked me to dance at the Halloween party. He’d gotten huffy and territorial when Coyote came back. He’d even come to get me on New Year’s Eve, thus pretty much ensuring he and I would be ringing in the new year together, whether or not anybody else was around.
None of which overruled the fact that he was my boss, but all of which, put together like that, set fire to my humiliation and turned it into good old-fashioned crankiness. Okay, fine, I’d put us in a bit of a compromising position there, but if we were doing some kind of stupid song and dance around a not-relationship, it wasn’t fair that he made small advancing movements and then staged full-scale withdrawals when I said something imprudent but hopeful.
Genuinely pissed off, I snatched up my sandals and glared at my boss. “I’m going to check out the other side of the city. I’ll call you tomorrow if I’ve found anything.”
Morrison’s expression shut down, betraying a whole lot as it did so. I wasn’t sure he knew what he’d done wrong, but I was even less sure he didn’t know. I caught a hint of I deserved that and a pinch of I’m your boss, how dare you and some disappointment and some resignation, all of which transformed into a mask as stony as my own before he said, “I’ll tell security you’ll be out shortly,” and stalked to the elevator.
I waited until the doors dinged shut before pitching a shoe after him as hard as I could.
CHAPTER NINE
Emotional turmoil probably wasn’t the best mental state to hunt bad guys in, but I stomped around the empty restaurant anyway, widdershins to its rotation, and stopped where I could see the northern half of the city. Everything blazed with too much light, like my temper offered the Sight extra oomph. That would’ve been great, if it just zoomed in on one particular shining spot, but no, instead it had to make everything more brilliant and vital. The actual places of power I knew about, like Thunderbird Falls on Lake Washington, were glorious, white magic reaching for the sky like welder’s arcs.
The phrase white magic caught my attention and broke my own temper tantrum. The power dancing over the waterfall was literally white, fed daily by the goodwill and positive energy of those people who were drawn to a place where magic had happened. They had chosen to make the new falls a place of companionship, if not exactly worship. The visible-to-me result of so many Magic Seattleites offering up a bit of who they were to keep the place refreshed and invigorated was a magic made of so many people and colors and auras that it became white, a culmination of all colors.
I’d never thought about it before, but the correlation between white equaling good magic and black equaling bad magic suddenly seemed pretty fricking obvious. It didn’t even strike me as much of a values judgment. It was just that bad magic tended to be detractive—like, oh, say, eating somebody’s heart out—where good tended to be additive. In the light spectrum you generally ended up with either black or white if you did enough of either of those things.
Well, in theory, anyway. My vaguely recalled artistic attempts at finger painting as a child suggested if you kept adding one color to another what you really got was nasty brown-gray muck, but that was of absolutely no help here and now. Besides, auras blended better than acrylics.
Minor turn-of-phrase epiphanies aside, the Sight-bright city wasn’t showing me much of what I hoped to see. I was disappointed, but a small calm spot inside me suggested I wasn’t surprised. If I’d been planning a major power-grab, I’d have created some kind of haven where my newly stolen magic wasn’t the moral equivalent of a neon arrow flashing to say BAD GUY LOCATED HERE! It wouldn’t be a null spot, either, because that would be just as obvious. It would look, in essence, like the rest of the city: streaked with life and activity, but not so much or so little as to stand out.
I probably should have thought of that before dragging Morrison up to the Space Needle in the middle of the night. Not that I was about to apologize. I went back to the elevator and collected my shoe, keeping an idle eye on the view while I waited for the doors to open. It appeared I was right about getting up high to have a look around not being sufficient as a tracking method. Well, I lived and I learned. Though more accurately I got stabbed, beaten up, rolled over, hung out to dry and learned, but at least I was learning.
And if the view-from-above approach hadn’t worked, then I could be grateful that for once, I actually knew what tactic to try next. Shoes dangling from my fingertips, I headed back home to wake Coyote from a sound sleep.
SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 1:58 A.M.
In an ideal world, that would have meant climbing into bed and putting my cold feet on him. On the other hand, in that ideal world I would’ve had no reason to accidentally take Morrison on a date. Ideal, it seemed, had many strange and unexplored convolutions. Either way, instead of climbing into bed, I changed into sweats and a T-shirt, got my drum and tucked a blanket against my apartment’s front door to cut down on the draft. I hadn’t eaten in hours, so I was as prepared as I could be to settle down on the living-room floor to thump a quiet fingertip beat against the drum’s painted surface.
Fifteen months ago, mostly I’d moved from one realm to another by dint of getting hit on the head, or from pure exhaustion loosening me from my body and sending me somewhere else. I’d gotten better at it, and could largely step from the Middle World—day to day reality—into shamanic trances that let me travel to a wide variety of different planes at whim.
My whim was evidently not on call tonight. Half-formed images kept flitting through my mind: Patricia Raleigh’s snarl as she’d swung the baseball bat, Naomi’s heart being gobbled up, Raleigh’s shock when the bullet impacted her shoulder, the blonde woman’s cancer stretching forward into her future, Raleigh lying wide-eyed and shallow-breathed on the floor, and more vividly than any of those, Morrison’s eyes filtering gold.
Morrison cropped up a lot, in fact, not just memories from the evening, but from the years we’d known each other, all the way back to him mistaking Petite for a Corvette. That was what had gotten us off on the wrong foot—I simply could not understand how any red-blooded American male could make that mistake, and had said so, loudly, pointedly, and mockingly, shortly before discovering he was the newly appointed Captain of Seattle Police’s North Precinct. Oops, sorry didn’t cover it at that juncture, and we’d spent most of the past four years on the wrong foot.
Which had ended up with me throwing a shoe at him tonight. There was probably cosmic justice in that, but I neither appreciated nor admired its irony. Mostly I wished I could just let the idea of him go, so I could get into the garden that was the center of my soul and talk to Coy
ote. My apartment had gotten chilly and gray around me, features fading into a nothingness that Morrison wandered through time and again, usually in the suits he wore to work, but occasionally—enticingly—in shirtsleeves or flannel, the latter of which I’d never seen him in. Not in the real world, at least. Just in his own soul’s garden, where bits of hidden personality leaked through even the firmest of reserve.
Coyote, behind me, said, “It’s three in the morning. Could you spare me the dream-wrought fantasies about someone who isn’t me?”
I yelped, Morrison disappeared and the dreamscape suddenly became recognizable in its featureless nothingness. I’d been here before, in a space between dreams, though not for a long time. “I’m asleep?”
“Evidently.” Coyote always sounded much more dry and sour as a coyote than he did as a man, so I wasn’t surprised, when I spun around, to find him sitting there, tongue lolling and his feet placed with catlike mathematical precision, all tight and tidy.
“I haven’t fallen asleep on a psychic journey in months. God, am I regressing?” I prodded at the dreamscape mentally, trying to push myself from sleep into the half-conscious wakefulness of a trance. The quiet gray nothing swirled around me, making halfhearted attempts at forming images, then fell away again, uninterested.
Coyote frowned, an expression that had a lot to do with what would be his eyebrows if dogs had eyebrows, and not so much to do with his long grinning mouth. “You’re not regressing. You’re exhausted. Your aura’s almost flat. What’ve you been doing, Jo?”
“Making new exciting mistakes.”
“Normally I’d say that was better than repeating the old ones, but I’m not so sure, if this is what it does to you.” The nothingness around us shifted as Coyote spoke, drawing away from the realm of dreams into a desert landscape. A hard white sun glared out of an equally hard blue sky, and the earth beneath me warmed to uncomfortably hot. Red rock formations cropped up, offering some degree of shade, and for a moment Coyote disappeared into the heart of his garden, hidden and protected by it.
Then he came over the stone ridges, no longer the eponymous coyote, but a jeans-clad shirtless man with skin colored brick-red and shining black hair that fell unbound past his hips. His eyes, like his coyote form’s, were gold, though I knew in real life both his eyes and skin were softer in shade. Here in the garden of his soul, though, he saw himself as the shamanistic leader he’d been trained as, super-saturated by life.
He walked right up to me, concern still furrowing his eyebrows as it had when he was a coyote, crouched and put a hand over my heart. I’d have slapped anybody else for being fresh, but there was nothing sexual about the gesture at all. Especially when, a moment later, a burst of desert-dune and blue magic swept through me, replenishing some of the energy I’d lost.
If I hadn’t already been sitting, I’d have dropped to the earth with gratitude. As it was I tilted sideways. Coyote caught my shoulder, propping me, then tipped my chin up so he could frown at me more directly. “What happened?”
“Well, first I shot someone. Then there was the dance concert that almost turned me into a coyote, then a psychic murder at the end of the concert drained every ounce of deliberately-awakened power from the dancers, and then I healed somebody with really early-stage breast cancer and saw something screwy in her genetic code and almost fixed it, so I think maybe that was, like, accidentally almost rewriting it to remove the predilection her family has toward the disease.” That sounded like quite enough. I didn’t think I needed to mention offering Morrison the Sight.
Coyote paled, which was quite an event for a man of his red-brick complexion. He sat down with a thump, sand dusting up to coat his thighs, and for a long few moments had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall that happening before, and marked two points on the Joanne has made some truly heinous mistakes today scoreboard.
He finally said, “You shot someone,” in a way that suggested he was only groping for a place to start, rather than it necessarily being the most important topic at hand. I almost felt guilty for bringing it up, but since it had kind of gotten my day off on the wrong foot, and was showing no signs of ceasing to prey at my thoughts, I couldn’t really imagine having not mentioned it.
“She attacked Billy,” was all I said, though. There wasn’t much else to say, not when I’d do the whole thing over again in a heartbeat, if I had to.
To my astonishment, Coyote, who had extremely pointed opinions about what I should be doing with my gifts, paled even further and said, “Is he okay?” Not is she okay, which is what I’d expected, but is he okay. I hadn’t known Billy would rank higher in Coyote’s hierarchy of concerns than somebody that a nominal healer had shot at.
“Yeah, he’s…he’s fine. She missed, she…I was faster. And she’s okay, too. In the hospital. Shattered clavicle, but she’ll be fine. I couldn’t heal her. The power went flat.”
“You said your magic’s responsive to your needs, even when you don’t want it to be. That it has opinions. If your need was an act of violence I’m not surprised it wouldn’t respond. Jo,” Coyote said carefully, “shamans aren’t supposed to hurt people.”
“And cops aren’t supposed to let their partners get a nail through the skull.” I thought it was a pretty inarguable defense.
Coyote stared at me a moment, then closed his eyes, shrugged all over and nodded. I had the impression a lot went unsaid in the context of that shrug, but I couldn’t read it, and what he said next was clearly not a direct follow-up to his thoughts: “Cancer?”
He said it in much the same tone as you shot someone?, like he was really still just trying to find a place to start. I judged it for an opening salvo and remained silent, which let him say, “Cancer is dangerous, Joanne. As healers we’re supposed to show the body a path to health, but the healing strength itself has to mostly come from within the patient. You could—” He swallowed, pulled his hand over his mouth, looked away, and looked back. “You could kill yourself, healing cancer with your magic alone. I know the last spirit quest gave you the focus to effect an instantaneous healing, and you have astonishing raw strength, but…”
“Yeah. I kind of figured that out when I almost fainted. It was like time tunneled forward and I was healing all the potential damage. How do I…” I tilted my head back, wishing I had something nice and hard behind me to thunk it on, like a rock. Beating my skull against stone seemed like the only way anything was ever going to sink in. “I’ve mostly only healed small things, Yote. Things I can use my own power for. I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to use someone else’s strength to help them heal themselves.”
“Jo, you’ve never done a proper shamanic healing in a sweat lodge or healing circle. The setting is important to creating the right mental space for the healer as well as the healed. Don’t you remember anything I taught you?”
Feebly, I said, “I thought she was in the right headspace,” but the question was a depressingly legitimate one. I did remember. Hell, after the antics I’d gone through to access the memories of his teachings from back when I’d been a teen, I’d better remember. Much of my bad attitude and mucked-up view of the world was my own fault, in a way that blithely disregarded the usual linear development of time. But I remembered discussing healing circles and the mental transport created by sweat lodges, how those things readied a human mind for the extraordinary. I’d just never applied them in my own roughshod shamanic practices.
In fact, I had the sudden sinking feeling that I’d been arrogantly assuming the rules didn’t apply to me. Other people had to build sweat lodges and use healing circles, but I could just go larking off doing what I wanted, because Grandfather Sky had seen fit to pump me full of extra-special magic mojo.
Coyote’d told me early on I was a new soul, mixed up fresh. The advantage to that was I had no baggage from previous incarnations, and could focus all my strength and power going forward. The disadvantage was I had no baggage from previous incarnations, and got to make great huge rutting mista
kes that a more-experienced lizard brain might warn me about ahead of time.
I said, “Okay,” very quietly. “No more healing, especially big stuff, without the right preparations.”
Coyote’s shoulders dropped so far I half thought he was going to slide right out of his man shape and into dog form. He lifted his eyes to give me a sharp look and I smiled a little. “I know. Coyotes aren’t dogs.”
Instead of scolding, he said, “Tell me about the shapeshifting.”
“It was completely involuntary.” I outlined the dances and the collected power I’d felt, and somehow accidentally left out the detail that Morrison had been my date and he was the one who’d noticed me changing. “As soon as I got away from the theater I started reverting, but I could feel the potential still under my skin.” I rubbed my hands, remembering it even now, and in absolute, utter denial of what I’d experienced, whined, “People can’t shapeshift, Coyote.”
“Of course they can, although you’re so ungodly stubborn about it I might have believed you couldn’t. What’s your newest spirit animal, Joanne?” Coyote sounded tired, which made me feel guilty for whining, and my answer was subdued.
“A rattlesnake. You know that.”
“And what do rattlesnakes do?”
“They bite things. All right, all right, sorry. Mine’s a symbol of healing. And he gave me super reflexes in the Lower World, at least. Snakelike reflexes. Whssht, whssht.” I made a couple of karate chops, mimicking my snake-granted speed, and subsided at Coyote’s heartfelt sigh.
“What else, Jo?”
“Um. They shed their skins? Symbol of renewal and all that?”
“Symbol of change.”
I opened my mouth, shut it again, then said, “Oh,” in a smaller voice. “Like shapechanging, maybe?”