by C. E. Murphy
I chuckled at the ground, wondering if my car analogies would infect Dad and Grandfather Coyote, or if they had their own imagery that they were overlaying onto my healing. It didn’t matter. Mostly it was just nice to feel the clogs and lumps loosening. The music definitely lifted all that muck out, uplifting the way the best music does, and leaving heat penetrating my bones until they felt like melting butter. Even if I was lying on a dirt bed, I was more comfortable than I could remember being in weeks. I drifted into that fugue state of dreaming without quite being asleep: I could hear Dad and Grandfather Coyote’s song, and feel the heat and mugginess, but it was all wonderfully distant and slightly surreal. Sometimes it all faded out before snapping back into focus, though even those snaps didn’t bring me close to waking.
Gradually a visual component added itself to my half sleep. First the sun, taking up a mantle as the source of heat. That was another thing I liked about this stage of wakefulness: the dream state seemed slightly more logical, as if there was just enough waking mind to feel things needed an explanation. The sun’s gently pounding heat didn’t explain the wet air, though, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when I started to hear water gurgling, like a waterfall had grown up nearby. Bit by bit so did other things that didn’t make quite so much sense, although the undulating wind was obviously representative of the voices singing in the background. Artistic, I complimented my brain, and in response it finished building my garden.
At least, I thought it was my garden. Lush growth spread from just beyond the top of my nose as far as my heavy-lidded eyes could see. Aidan and I had torn the garden’s containing walls down just a few days ago, but I hadn’t expected this from my next visit. The air smelled good, fresh and rich and clean. So did the dirt, which I discovered by trying to take a really deep appreciative breath with my face half buried in it. I coughed and rolled over, unwilling and possibly unable to get to my feet.
Thunderbird Falls poured down a cliff face just a few feet away from me. Or maybe Thunderbird Falls’ older, larger and highly metaphysical brother, because even from the view at ground level, it was clear there was no lake just a few yards below us. Through the warm misty air, it looked fairly possible that I was lying at the very edge of the world.
That inspired me to scootch forward on my belly so I could peer over the cliff’s edge. There was world down there, quite a ways down, but definitely there. A lake pooled at the falls’ foot, and a river cut away into land that became foggy with distance long before logic dictated it should. That implied I had a lot of personal exploring to do. That seemed fair enough. I scooted back from the cliff’s edge and rolled over again, contemplating whether sitting up was worth the effort.
Big Coyote trotted across the rich green landscape. Water droplets beaded on his metallic fur, scattering rainbow fragments across gold and silver and copper as he dipped his head to touch a cold black nose against mine.
For a heartbeat I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to rail and hit and lash out, wanted to demand why he hadn’t saved Coyote, why he hadn’t made him hold on until I could get back to save him. Then a surprisingly warm and wet pink tongue dragged across my face and all I could do was grab the beast’s glittering fur, drag him down and sob into it.
He wasn’t a dog. He wasn’t even a coyote. He was an idea, an enormously large idea, but he was an idea put into familiar shape and form, and in that form, he behaved as a mourning dog might. Soft yips and whines met my tears, and Big Coyote, archetype trickster, twisted around in my desperate grip until he could lick my face again and butt his head against my shoulder, my ribs, whatever part he could reach. Ideas couldn’t love things, but in our shared sorrow, I thought Big Coyote had loved my Coyote anyway, and was as distraught over his death as I was. I slept for a while, when the tears were done, slept with my head pillowed in Big Coyote’s ribs. I dreamed of deserts, and when I woke up, it was to meet the depthless stars in Big Coyote’s eyes.
They told me a necessary truth. I hadn’t had the strength to reshape the Master without the grief and anger of Coyote’s death driving me. I had sown a monster’s new shape in love and rage, in despair and punishment and hope, and nobody, not even me, went that deep or that far without paying for it. I would never have let Coyote pay for it, even if I’d known to the core of my being that it was necessary. I wasn’t that ruthless.
In the end, it seemed that Coyote had been.
I put my forehead against Big Coyote’s and my arms around his skinny coyote shoulders, wrung out but no longer devastated. Accepting, maybe.
When I sat back again, a coyote still sat beside me, but it wasn’t Big Coyote anymore. This one was more like my Coyote, with golden eyes and normal, if gray-grizzled, fur. He did his best to look as alien and remote as Big Coyote, and I laughed at his complete inability to do so. “Grandfather?”
“Is it so easy to tell?” Even if I’d had any doubts, that put them to rest. Big Coyote never talked. He typically just smashed me in the head with his own and then went along on his business. I smiled and nodded, and Grandfather Coyote heaved a sigh very like the ones I’d seen his grandson offer. “Are you ready to come back now?”
“No.”
Grandfather Coyote flicked an ear and looked at me sideways, but I was—for a rarity—absolutely certain of myself. “No, there’s something I need to do first.” I drew a circle around me in the dirt as I spoke, leaning awkwardly to include the coyote in it. “Renee?” Less hopefully, I also said, “Rattler? Raven?” but the only one I expected was Renee.
She was the only one I got, too, her quiet presence awakening not in my mind, but in front of me, manifesting as her physical form here in the Lower World. We stared at each other a long time, Renee waiting with the calm patience of one of her species, me trying to keep myself from reaching out and breaking her long thin legs and spine into pieces. Maybe that wasn’t fair, but it wasn’t fair that the spirit guide who had survived was the one I liked the least, either.
I finally started talking, because somebody had to, and it wasn’t going to be the walking stick. “This wasn’t what I wanted. You weren’t what I wanted. I mean, in the beginning, none of this was, but things have changed. Raven, Rattler...” I crushed my eyes shut, pretending I could see them: Raven’s feathers gleamed blue and red with blackness, and Rattler glowed gold and brown in my mind’s eye.
“I needed their gifts in my everyday magic. Crossing the barrier into the Dead Zone, healing, maybe even the fighting speed, I need those. But time travel, that’s not something anybody should be messing with. I get that my life, the last year and whatever has been, um. Unusual. I get that we’ve been trying to set things right that went wrong so long ago that maybe, yeah, maybe actually having to go back and fix things was necessary. But that fight is done now. I know there are going to be ramifications right, left and center, but they’re going to be ramifications that go forward, not backward. I only want to travel one way through time anymore. Forward, day by day, just like everybody else.”
I wet my lips and looked down, then met her gaze to add the rest of the truth. “And I’m angry at you. Unforgivably angry. Maybe Rattler and Raven taking the thunderbird from me and dying in that fight was necessary. Maybe you three had a little powwow without me and they agreed it was the right course of action. I don’t. I can’t. So I’m left not trusting you, and a shaman should trust her spirit guides. So I thank you, and I honor you for your gifts, but...it’s time for you to go now.”
Renee looked at me impassively. Birds and snakes didn’t have much in the way of ability to present physically different expressions, but compared to the walking stick, they were paragons of emotive capability. I couldn’t read anything in her heart-shaped face, and her presence was as calm and reserved as it had always been.
Then she spoke, and maybe I imagined the faintest hint of pride and approval. “Your very name ties us together, Joanne Walker, but you are not oblig
ed to use the gifts I offer. I will not—I cannot—leave you, but neither must I stay waking in your mind. Call me, and I will answer. Until then, unchanging sleep will be welcome.” She bowed, a little dip of her forearms and head. I bowed much more deeply in return, eyes closed, and when I opened them again, she was gone.
I immediately couldn’t help myself, and poked around inside my mind to see if she was still there. Kind of to my shock, she was gone. Really gone, no sense of her at all. No sense of any of my spirit animals, just an empty quietness that felt totally unfamiliar after over a year of presences in my mind. My throat seized and a miserable shudder ran through me. I leaned forward until my forehead touched the ground, trying not to cry. “I guess that’s over.”
“It isn’t quite that simple,” Grandfather Coyote said. “Your father and your son still carry the walking sticks with them.”
I nodded into the earth. “That’s their decision and their path to travel, though. I know it’s part of my heritage, and part of theirs, and I guess they’ll do what they need to with it.” I sat up again, barely fighting tears away. “Me, I’m done with that. I hope I’m done with it. I think I’m done with it.”
“Good. A shaman should know not to speak in absolutes. I hope...” The coyote hesitated very like a man would have done. “I hope you might someday come to study with me, for a little while.”
My eyes spilled over, after all. “I would be honored.”
He offered a coyote grin, old and sweet and solemn instead of my Coyote’s rakish teasing. “Then maybe we are done here, my student.”
“Maybe we are.” Smiling, I opened my eyes.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Morrison’s living room floor was not drafty. That was really the first thing I thought when I woke up. My living room floor was drafty as hell, but Morrison’s was comfortably warm.
So was his lap, which my head and shoulders were resting in. I opened my eyes to smile at him, and saw the shimmer of magic beyond him. A power circle, or, really, a power dome. The sweat lodge I’d seen, inside. Somehow that surprised me. I hadn’t expected it to have a real-world physicality at all, even if Dad and Grandfather Coyote had both been there.
They were both here, too, kneeling on either side of me and Morrison. I looked at their three faces, then grinned. Morrison, with his blue eyes, fair skin and prematurely silver hair, looked very white-bread between the two Native American men. I could only imagine that if I could see all four of us, me with my dark gold tan playing up my Cherokee heritage, he would look even more white-bread. He saw me smile and returned it, upside down from my angle. “What’s so funny? We’re not doing anything.”
“What do you mean ‘we,’ white man? Nothing.” I slid a hand upward and pulled him down for a kiss.
He grunted and, when I let him go, muttered, “I’m going to have to start practicing yoga if you’re going to do that kind of thing a lot.”
The idea of Morrison practicing yoga made me grin again. “If I’m going to kiss you often? Better break out the yoga mat, boss.”
“If you’re going to wrench me around upside down for kisses,” he said loftily, but the loftiness faded almost instantly into relieved concern. “You look better.”
“I feel better.” Morrison helped me sit up and I did what I had done when I’d entered: reached for Grandfather Coyote’s hands. This time I succeeded, clasping fingers with him and feeling the fragility in thinning flesh and old bones. “Thank you. Thank you. I’m so sorry.”
The old man drew me into a hug, his iron-colored hair falling past my face and hiding me from the world. “I am less sorry now that I understand you a little, and why my grandson chose as he did. Do not forget, granddaughter, that he chose, too. For good, for bad, he chose, too.”
I nodded against his shoulder, and didn’t object when he held on for a long time. When we finally broke apart, I lurched toward Dad and hugged him, too. “Thank you. We gotta talk about the condition you left Petite’s clutch in, though.”
“We—you—what?” Dad spluttered in real enough offense that I laughed, and laughed again when he managed to get out, “I taught you to drive on a stick shift! Her clutch is in perfect shape!” through general incoherence.
“I know. I know. She’s fine.” I sat back smiling, and Dad’s offense faded into chagrin.
“You did that on purpose.”
“Yeah. I thought we could use a little grounding. How are you doing, after all of this?”
His face turned solemn. “Your mother would be proud of you, Joanne. I’m proud of you. I’m also... I’m glad it wasn’t me,” he confessed in something just shy of embarrassment. “Not that I’d have wished any of this on you, but...I don’t know if I could have handled it.”
“You would’ve if you’d had to, but I guess I’d been lined up to bat since before I was born. That’s enough of destiny-with-a-capital-D,” I added firmly. “I have had enough of that crap, and I think I’ve by god earned my lifetime of free will.”
“Your free will had better want you to get over and visit the Hollidays,” Morrison said. “Melinda called three times while you were out. Nothing’s wrong,” he added hastily, as I turned to him in alarm. “They just want to see you and make sure you’re all right. And find out what’s happened the past...week.” He said the word like he couldn’t believe it had been so little time.
I fully sympathized with that, though I got hung up on something else. “Three times while I was out? How long were we in there?” As if in response, my stomach rumbled. I glanced out the living room window, noticing the sky was dusky. “Please tell me that’s sunset and not tomorrow’s sunrise.”
“It is, but it’s still been a long day.”
“I can no longer remember a day that wasn’t. I’ll call them, but I’m not going over there tonight. At this point they can wait until tomorrow. Oh, crap. Suzanne. Has anybody talked to her?”
“She’s still at her friend’s house. Most of the roads are impassable, not just in Seattle but statewide. Up into Vancouver and down into Oregon, really. Her aunt can’t get up here. She said she’s all right.” Morrison sounded cautiously accepting of that, which was good enough for the moment. I would have to go see her soon and not only thank her for her part in saving the world, but give her a thorough psychic checkup to make sure the burden she’d taken on wasn’t poisoning her. That, I suspected, was going to become a lifelong habit. I couldn’t imagine just leaving her to cope, even if she was the granddaughter of a god.
It could probably wait until the weekend, though. I nodded, trying to catalog all the things I needed to do, and my stomach growled again.
“Food,” I said aloud, like it would put everything into perspective. “Food and sleep and...would it be all right if we had a memorial for Coyote tomorrow, Grandfather? At Thunderbird Falls, I think. I know you meant to leave tonight, but...”
“A memorial,” he agreed. “I will not leave his body here, though.”
“No. No, he’d want to be back in his desert.” The desert which he had never intended to leave, and where I had never been willing to join him. I nodded again, and accepted Morrison’s help in getting to my feet. We ordered an awful lot of pizza for only four people, and when it was demolished, I slept in Morrison’s arms all night without waking.
Tuesday, April 4, 10:39 a.m.
Police tape still marked off the murder site at the falls, but it looked like no one had been there to pursue the investigation in several days. Given the shambles Seattle was in, I thought it might be weeks before anybody was able to come back down here. I paced the outer rim of the circle, trying not to look at Morrison as I did so.
Apparently I needed to work on my subterfuge, because after I’d made a full circuit, he said, “What are you thinking, Walker?”
“That there’s no answer to this that anyone is going to like, and that maybe it’s a
terrible shame the scene was disturbed during all the chaos.”
My boss—my former boss—looked pained. “I was afraid you would say something like that. What do you want to do?”
“Cleanse it. I managed to clear up the falls once—” and I didn’t look at them, either, all too aware of what that particular job had cost us “—but this area here is still stained with the murders. I’d like to wipe up the mess, like Melinda did at their house after the serpent attack.”
Morrison took a few steps back, like he could see over the top of the cliff and watch the Hollidays pull up in the parking lot. They weren’t here yet. Nobody was except me and Morrison. The memorial was going to be held at noon, one of the quarter points of the day, but I’d wanted to come over early. The falls had featured heavily in my redesigned personal garden, so I thought spending some time with the real thing would be a smart choice. We’d driven Petite, leaving Morrison’s Avalon for my dad and Grandfather Coyote to drive over. Dad’s expression at the idea of driving a modern, top-safety-rated vehicle had apparently been so similar to my own that Morrison was still inclined to grin when he thought of it. In fact, he did smile as I watched him, then chuckled, clearly thinking about it again. But then he drew himself back to the matter at hand, nodding at the police tape. “Are you going to do it yourself?”