Wintermoon

by Mercedes Lackey

  I turned my head, for all that I didn’t want to look at the woman on the bed. She had black hair, worn much longer than mine. It lay in soft-looking waves against her white pillow, stark contrast in the moonlight. Even in the blue-white light, her eyes were very green, and her skin was nearly as pale as the pillowcase. I heard myself say, “Mirror, mirror, on the wall,” which I certainly hadn’t said in real life. I wouldn’t have let myself, even if I’d dared.

  I was a wildly imperfect reflection of the woman on the bed. Where her skin was uniformly smooth and pale, mine was marked with a handful of freckles scattered across my nose; where her features were fine, mine seemed too sharp or too blunt. She was tall, although not as tall as I was, and had a degree of elegance to her that my long limbs and mechanic’s hands could never emulate.

  Her skin changed color, a horrid sallowness creeping in. I looked back at the moon to see blood draining over it. Fear scampered through me, the pure childish terror of the unknown. My voice broke as I said, “Sheila?” but when I turned to her, the woman was gone.

  “Joanie?” Billy’s hand on my elbow, big and warm, brought me back to the field with a start. I looked at his hand, then up at his worried frown. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. I just…kind of spaced out. Sorry. I don’t know what that was. Did you say something?” The wet chill of Seattle winter settled back into my bones, leaving me scowling at nothing. The moon had been full the night my mother died, but we hadn’t spoken. We hadn’t had much to say to one another, not from the time she’d called me out of the blue to say she was dying and she’d like to meet the daughter she abandoned twenty-six years earlier. I’d gone out of a mixed sense of duty and curiosity, and spent four uncomfortable months that culminated in her death on the winter solstice, almost three months ago to the day.

  “I said, do you think there’s anything else you can pick up? You’ve got more mojo than I do.” His grin suggested he was biting his tongue to not ride me harder than that.

  “I’ll, um…shit.” The last word wasn’t meant to be heard, but Billy laughed anyway. I curled a lip and waved it off, perversely glad that he was teasing me a little. “I’ll try.” I wanted to try about as much as I wanted to stick red-hot pokers against my feet, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that to the one person who didn’t think I was at all crazy.

  Granted, he was nuts himself by any normal standards, but I wasn’t in a position to be throwing stones. “Is the morning soon enough?”

  Billy turned a sad smile on the woman’s body, then made a gesture to encompass the rest of the field. “There’s a lot to do here, and I don’t think another night is going to make this any harder on anybody. You work tomorrow?”

  “Yeah. I’ll give you anything I’ve got before I go out on patrol.” I admired the weary confidence in my voice, as if I actually expected to come up with anything.

  The problem was that I was afraid I might.

  “All right. Thanks, Joanie.” Billy hesitated a moment before adding, “I know you don’t like this.”

  “So I’m a great sport for going along with it. I know. Tomorrow, Billy.”

  It was more than not liking it. It was like fingernails on chalkboards combined with dentist drills on unnumbed teeth. My world was a sensible, straightforward place. Checking out ritual murders on a psychic level simply did not belong. I kicked clumps of snow as I slogged back to Morrison to bum a ride home. He was driving his personal vehicle, a gold Toyota Avalon XLS—which I thought of as the American version of “boxy, but safe!”—so he hadn’t been on duty when he’d called me. I didn’t envy him his job.

  Neither of us spoke during the whole drive, both wrapped up in our individual discomfort of what I was doing there. I didn’t even say thanks when I got out, just thumped the top of his car and watched him drive off. Only after he disappeared down the Ave did I go into my building, taking the steps up to my fifth-floor apartment two at a time.

  Gary, to whom I was practically certain I had not given a key, was hanging out in my apartment playing Tetris on my computer. “Thought you never touched the things,” I said as I unlaced my boots.

  “You didn’t leave any entertainment rags. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Cook dinner?” I put the boots on the carpet where all the melting snow would be absorbed and slid into the kitchen in my stocking feet.

  “Nothin’ to cook. I looked.”

  “Details, details. Besides, there is, too. I’ve got at least three different frozen dinners in here.” I heard the telltale musical bloop that said he’d died horribly in the game, and a moment later he appeared in the door frame, making it look ridiculously small with his bulk. Even in his eighth decade he retained the build of the linebacker he’d once been, a fact that he took no small amount of pride in.

  “So. Was there a body?”

  I pulled two microwave dinners out of the freezer. “Do you remember calling me a bloodhound when we first met?”

  “Nope.” Gary gave me a disarming smile. “So there was a body.”

  “There were three. And…” I really didn’t want to say anything else. I busied myself stabbing holes in the plastic tops of the dinners, then mumbled, as fast as I could, “And I said I’d maybe do a little checking out of what was going on in the astral realm sort of thing I don’t suppose you’d hang around and bang a drum after dinner.”

  “Eh?” Gary cupped a hand behind his ear, leaning forward a little and wearing a cocky grin that would do James Garner’s Maverick proud. “What’d you say? I’m an old man, lady. Can’t hear when you don’t speak up.”

  “I hate you, Gary.”

  He beamed at me. “Now, that’s no way to talk to an old man, Joanne Walkingstick.”

  “Augh! Gary! No! Stop that!” I’d dropped my last name along with the rest of my Cherokee heritage when I graduated from high school, and a compulsive slip of the tongue—was there such a thing? It had felt like it at the time—had caused me to mention the long-since-abandoned name to Gary the day we’d met. “It’s Walker. Don’t do that, Gary.” The humor I’d started with fell away into discomfort and I shrugged my shoulders unhappily as I put the first meal into the microwave. “Please.”

  “Hey.” He came into the kitchen to put a hand on my shoulder and turn me around. “No harm meant, Jo. You arright?”

  “I just…” I summarized the experience at the park, staring alternately at his feet and my own, not wanting to meet his eyes. “I just hate this shit. And the thing with remembering my mother all of a sudden just freaked me out.” The microwave beeped and I turned back to it, my stomach grumbling. Gary put a hand on the door, keeping me from opening it.

  “Let’s hit the voodoo stuff first, darlin’. Food grounds you, you know that. You’re shooting yourself in the foot by eating first.” He lifted a bushy eyebrow. “Or is that on purpose?”

  I squirmed, feeling like I’d been caught being naughty. Gary grinned, bright flash of white teeth that looked like he’d never smoked a cigarette in his life, and steered me into the living room. “Where’s your drum?”

  “Bedroom.” I dragged a cushion off the couch and stuffed it against the front door, cutting off the draft that circled from beneath it. Gary went into my bedroom like he belonged there and got my drum.

  It was the only thing I owned of any intrinsic value. It’d been a gift from one of the elders out in Qualla Boundary, not long after my father and I moved back there. It was painted with a raven whose wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake, and had a drumstick with a soft rabbit-fur end dyed raspberry red, and a knotted leather end that made sharp rich pangs of sound against the taut leather. Even fourteen years after having been gifted with it, I was still amazed anyone would make something like it for me. Gary knew it, and carried it as if it was fragile, a gesture that made my nose sting with embarrassing emotion.

  I settled down on the floor as he came out of the bedroom with the drum and a closed fist. “I thought you might want this.”

&n
bsp; I turned my hand up and he dropped a silver choker into my palm. Made of tube links intersected by triskelions, it had an Irish cross—a simple quartered circle, identical to the Cherokee power circle—as its pendant. “What—?”

  “Your mom gave it to you, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, I…” She’d given it to me the day she died. I’d worn it for two weeks, gradually getting used to the peculiar feeling of having something resting in the hollow of my throat, until the day I’d been stabbed through the lung and the necklace had been blackened with my blood. It’d taken days to get the stains out, and I hadn’t brought myself to put it back on in the intervening weeks. “Yeah, all right.” I swallowed nervously and fastened the choker with fingers that suddenly felt thick and clumsy. “You’re all Mr. Insightful tonight, aren’t you?”

  Gary sat down on the couch cushion that hadn’t been scavenged, grinning. “Somebody’s gotta be. You ready?”

  I nodded, fighting the urge to curl my fingers around the necklace and pull it away from my throat to alleviate the alien pressure of jewelry against my skin. “I’ll wake up thirty seconds after you stop drumming.” We’d only done this a few times, but establishing the time felt like ritual. Gary started knocking out a heartbeat rhythm, and I let my eyes drift shut, waiting to follow the sound of the drum out of my own body.

  3

  I had a deep dark secret. The world I saw through shamanic eyes—the one in which every thing on earth, be it animal, mineral or vegetable, sparked with the essence of life—was a world I dreamed about even when I was dead set against its reality. The world I saw with my spirit eyes was one where I could see Gary’s big rumbly presence like a V-8 engine that a girl could rely on. It was one where I could slide through the ceiling and get an alarming look at my neighbors’ sexual proclivities—although this time I went through the window when I separated from my body, because I can be taught, and I really didn’t need another eyeful of somebody else’s sex life.

  Except for the glimpse that afternoon, I hadn’t looked at the world from a spirit’s perspective since January, when my life got turned upside down in the first place. There was something off-kilter as I slid into the Seattle night. Winter had come on too hard, and the life in the city that sped below me felt strained, like the world was being pushed in a direction it wasn’t prepared to go in. The blues I’d seen a few months ago seemed darker, the electricity of life dammed up in some way. Streets seemed more congested, as if their purpose had been forgotten. It hadn’t been like this a few months ago, and the feel of it made my skin prickle. There was a lingering feeling of familiarity below the wrongness, but when I reached for it, it slipped away.

  I spun through the air, weightless and silent, watching sudden flashes of red and orange erupt in backed-up traffic, countered by calm waves of blue that I tried to encourage, clumsily. I passed a stretch of road where a woman’s astrally projected spirit hovered above her car, looking down at traffic much like I did. Pure boredom emanated from her, as if driving home had been so dull it’d flung her out of her own body. She didn’t seem to sense my presence, and I whisked past her, not knowing how to stop and say hello.

  I left the city behind without having a destination in mind, moving as fast as thought itself. Color, vivid and strong, streaked with the coldness of winter, shot past me, sometimes forming into recognizable images, but more often staying abstract. I wondered if the abstraction was due to my lack of direction, but with the thought came a clear pathway that I recognized with a startled shiver.

  A bower of trees arched over a single-track path, white flowers all but glowing under a source of light I couldn’t pinpoint. The path was smooth, as if it had been often walked on. I tumbled from flight to run along it, great huge strides so I felt I was still flying. There was a presence in front of me, somewhere buried in the depths of the earth. It carried its own weight, its own gravity well, drawing me toward it. I careened around a corner, pretending I was driving Petite, and came up against a cave, its mouth blocked off with boulders.

  The presence beyond the cave mouth had a genial feeling to it, as if it were amused at my audacity and youth.

  I hated feeling like people were laughing at me. I glowered at the boulders and reached for the smallest stone I could find, trying to wriggle it out of its lodged position in the ranks of larger stones.

  A vise clamp fastened itself around my wrist, hauled me back, and did something that put my feet over my head and my head against the ground. I lay on my face with a mouthful of dirt, not entirely sure how I’d gotten there but pretty certain that any moment now I was going to start to hurt.

  “And what is it,” a woman’s voice above me asked, “that you think you’re doing, Siobhan Walkingstick?” The lilt of Ireland was strong in her voice, almost masking the sarcasm with which the question was delivered.

  I was pretty sure she didn’t want an answer. I had comparatively little experience with mothers, but the tone suggested to me that she knew perfectly well what I was doing, and that the real question was why was I doing something she obviously regarded as unbelievably stupid.

  The physical pain I was expecting didn’t seem to be coming, so I rolled onto my back and stared up at her. She looked remarkably tall from this vantage, and somewhat bustier than I thought of her as being. She also wore an expression of exasperation that was both more vivid than any expression I could remember seeing on her in life, and which, although strictly speaking was entirely new to me, I had felt on my own face any number of times. Distress settled over me. It didn’t seem fair that I was turning into my mother when I’d barely even known the woman.

  Eventually one of the numerous things crowding my mind and vying to be said won out: “I asked you not to call me that.” It seemed, even at the moment, an awfully calm response to the appearance of a woman I believed to be dead.

  I was treated to a second new expression: dismay, which was wiped out almost instantly by the thoughtful, examining gaze that was all I’d really ever seen of her. “Very well, then. Joanne.” Her tone spoke volumes about what she thought of my Anglicized name, but I was almost entirely overwhelmed with not caring. I got to my feet somewhat stiffly, although I suspected any injuries I’d sustained were in my own mind.

  Of course they were. That’s what happens when you travel on the astral plane. Moving on, then. I looked back to the wall of rocks, eyeing the one I’d initially grabbed. “Joanne,” my mother said in a remarkably good “don’t you dare test my patience one more time, young lady” voice. I dropped my hand and turned to face her, making a point of looking around rather dramatically.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you think you had something to say to me that I might listen to? Is there some burning reason that I should pay attention to, I don’t know, what are you, a banshee or something? You’re dead, Mother. We didn’t much like each other when you weren’t dead. Why don’t we just leave it at that and you can go do whatever it is dead people do? I’m busy.”

  “Busy.”

  “Yes.” I went to work on my rock again, tugging it a few millimeters out of the wall. She clamped her hand around my wrist again. Her fingers were tremendously cold, not just like the dead, but as if she was emitting cold the way a living body emits heat.

  “You don’t understand what you’re doing, Joanne.” I hated the warm lilt of her voice, a low alto that I wanted to instinctively trust. I couldn’t possibly have recognized it. She’d abandoned me with my father when I was three months old, but from the moment she’d called me, seven months ago, I’d fought against wanting to curl up in the warmth and safety of that voice and letting myself forget about the world.

  “Like you could possibly know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what you’re doing here. Go away.” I yanked my wrist, trying to escape her grasp. I failed in that, but I did manage to loosen the rock I held. The entire wall shifted ominously, deep scrapes of stone bumping down a few inches against one another. My mother hissed, a sound like an angry cat, then lift
ed her voice in a high keen that made me jerk away again, this time succeeding and clamping my hands over my ears.

  “You will not pass this barrier, Siobhan Walkingstick.” Her voice thundered inside my head, making me equal parts angry and dizzy. I set my teeth together and stomped forward, grabbing my stone again.

  They always say, “I never knew what hit me.” Technically, I knew what hit me: it was my mother. Beyond that, I really don’t know what happened, except one second I had the stone in my hands and the next I was about forty feet away, lying on my back in the dirt, and she was standing over me like one of God’s avenging angels in a blouse and long skirt. My lip was bleeding. I lifted the back of my hand to it, staring up at her. She crouched, putting a hand on my shoulder. It seemed to carry the weight of the world behind it, as profoundly heavy as the draw that had pulled me toward the cave mouth in the first place.

  “You are not yet ready to face what lies beyond that wall, daughter. I haven’t much time to act, and less time still to tell you about it. Get yourself home. I’ve no energy for wasting on sullen little girls who refuse to listen to their mothers.”

  Her will hit me like a wall itself, reaching right for the core of energy inside me as if it was her own. She shoved me into the earth with the hand on my shoulder, using my own stored power as her focus point.

  I popped out the other side and into my body so hard I fell over backward. Gary stopped drumming and jumped to his feet while I stared at the ceiling and tried to determine if all my parts were where I thought they should be. They were. After a few seconds I said, “Ow,” and thought I’d leave it at that.

  There was no part of me that didn’t hurt. It wasn’t the god-awful pain of having a sword driven through me, but I ached, like someone had…well, shoved me through solid ground. I said, “Ow,” again, for good measure, and pushed myself up slowly. Gary hovered over me, nervous but kind enough not to ask.