by C. E. Murphy
Then desert heat exploded in my veins, and everything went white for a while.
Chapter Thirty
A coyote and a wolf fought on a desert mesa. Eggshell-blue sky, hard white earth, a too-large sun pounding relentlessly on the combatants. The wolf was larger, black-furred, green-eyed and looked hot. The coyote, rangier, golden-eyed and quick, was more comfortable in the heat, but outgunned in terms of body weight. I was too far away to help either of them. I was, in fact, trussed and dangling upside-down from a dead white tree for the second, and I fervently hoped the final, time in my life.
The air this time wasn’t so hot as to be unbreathable. Not quite. I could just barely manage small sips, enough to keep me from gasping at the lack of oxygen. The sounds of battle carried through it: snarls, growls, bites, yips, howls and less obvious noises like claws scrabbling for purchase against hard dirt. Furthermore, heat waves played with the distance, so at some moments the fight seemed very far away and, others, startlingly near. Discomfort fluctuated in my own body as the fight changed distances, sometimes rocketing past pain into blinding agony, other times rolling back to nothing more than a vague nuisance. I kind of thought the waves should reflect which animal seemed to have the upper hand, but there didn’t appear to be a correlation. Or if there was, it hurt more when Coyote was winning. That didn’t seem quite fair.
Of course, I was hanging upside-down from a bleached-out desert tree, so I probably wasn’t in much position to be dictating what was and wasn’t fair. The wolf left black oily footprints behind as it fought, reminiscent of the black shapeless horrors that had formed themselves into the werewolves back at the dawn of time. Once in a while Coyote stepped in some of the goo. My heart rate accelerated every time, in half-rational conviction he would be contaminated by it.
I didn’t quite see it coming when the two animals locked on each other’s throats. I felt it, though. Felt it in my bloodstream: the blue-gold desert power Coyote brought to the game firing all cylinders against the wolf’s slick black magic. My whole body shuddered, contorting into a shape not meant to have arms tied behind its back. I tried for a scream, managed a croak and realized a little belatedly that I was letting Coyote do all the work for me.
My experiences in the desert had mostly been getting pummeled by somebody else’s magic. I didn’t really know what would happen if I called on my own. On the other hand, I had a fairly clear idea of what would happen if I didn’t, and it involved my mentor and one-time lover getting his ass handed to him. I bit my tongue until saliva flooded my mouth, and with that one tiny wet swallow, nerved myself to face the healing power again.
It was losing ground, even with Coyote shoring it up. Silver-blue was being eaten alive, mutated, corrupted, by the buzzing spill of black oil. I pushed back, tentatively, and my flesh wracked again, a modicum of ground regained. I was going to have to regain a lot more than that, and fast, or my extremities were going to be pulled from their sockets as I became more and more wolflike. Healer or no, that was not something I was eager to experience. I shoved again, this time whispering, “Your own worst enemy,” to myself.
It was true. I had been since the beginning. I’d been some other people’s worst enemy, too, often people I’d meant to be a friend to, but mostly I’d been in my own way. There were a million faces to my impediments: my mother, my father, my children, my job prospects, my romantic prospects—basically I’d thrown everything I could think of in the way. Excuses or reasons, regardless of what I called them, they stood there like trenchermen, my own personality determined to hold me back.
But so much had gotten cleared away recently. I had to go back to North Carolina, that was increasingly obvious, but beyond my dad and Aidan, I’d done so well lately. Like I’d told my mother, I’d gotten the magic, the guy, the job. I didn’t have much left to be afraid of, and no sense at all of why I should be so afraid that turning into a werewolf seemed like a better option.
“You’re afraid of success,” my own voice said to me. I bobbled around to see myself, aged fifteen, standing a few yards beyond the deadwood tree. It was the angry version of me, the one that had lost all contact with the shamanic heritage she’d been learning about. She’d chopped her hair off in defiance, and if she wasn’t already, she’d be pregnant within a few weeks, in her timeline. I thought she was a brat.
She was also painfully clear-sighted about some things. She, who had fought the whole damned world tooth and nail, had gotten me through a confrontation with a Navajo Maker god by demanding to know why it was I, the person she’d become, thought everything had to be a fight. It didn’t, it turned out. Some things needed acceptance, not railing against. I had no idea how she’d figured that out, when I, a dozen years older and presumably wiser, certainly hadn’t. So if she was turning up to let me know new and obvious ways in which she thought I sucked, I should probably listen.
“Who the hell,” I demanded, “is afraid of success?”
“You are.” She walked around me, eyeing the ropes and the dead tree with a sort of scathing respect. Respect for the bindings, scathing for me. “Seriously, look at you. You’ve spent my entire life running from responsibility and pretending all you’re good for is fixing cars. Only, oh, no! It turns out that if you’re, like, forced to be, you’re pretty good at some other stuff, too. And now you’ve finally tapped into the real power I was working toward before you screwed me over, and you’re all ‘Oh, my God! More responsibility!’” She made spooky wavy hands and put a tremble in her voice with the last bit. “‘Oh, no! I’ve gotten this far but I can’t handle even more responsibility! What if I screw up with it? Worse! What if I don’t! What if it turns out I can actually, like, be really good at saving the world and helping people? No, no, Brer Rabbit, we can’t risk that, better get turned into a horrible monster instead! Oh, my God, Morrison really likes me! We can’t have that! I better run off and get myself killed fighting banshees instead! Oh, no! Mom didn’t hate me after all! I better—’”
“ALL RIGHT ALREADY.” Jesus but I didn’t like that kid. I bobbled around in another circle and glared when she came back into view. “What’re you doing here, anyway? I didn’t go stealing power from you this time, there’s no time loop to cl—”
Scathing respect had faded into the rant, but now scathing pity rose to replace it. “Are you kidding? We’re almost at the end of the time loop now. Not just ours, but the big one, the one the Master and the Morrígan set in place when they made the cauldron. I always would’ve been here, in Ireland, fighting this fight, because of what happened with us and Mom and the banshee before we were born. This is it,” she said a lot more softly. “This is the end of me. Tie us up with a bow. Tell Coyote goodbye, because from here on out it’s all you, Siobhán.”
Desert heat or not, the idea that my younger self was facing her last moments was a bucket of cold water in the face. I didn’t like her, but she appeared to have her shit together in a way I hadn’t for a long time, and she had, frankly, deserved better than me. I tried to wet my lips, had nothing to do it with and croaked, “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Be good. Be right. Be a hero.” She’d demanded that of me once before, and I supposed if anybody did, she had the right. She pointed at my arm, at the shiny red-hot infection, said, “Man up, Joanne,” and vanished.
Right there in that instant, she healed me. Not because she was throwing power around, but because she’d hit me so hard I had to see the world a different way, and that was all it took for a shaman. Just a moment’s change of viewpoint. I’d been so proud of myself for doing increasingly well it had never occurred to me I might be afraid of doing better yet. Of succeeding. But my younger self, brat or not, was nobody’s fool, either, and all of a sudden I could see success for the huge, scary beastie that it was.
I’d never had ambitions toward greatness. I genuinely believed I’d have been happy running a mechanic shop, tinkering with Petite and drinking beer with the guys on days off. But that wasn’t in the cards, and I’
d gotten good at the hand I’d been dealt. I’d been pleased with that and hadn’t wanted more. It never crossed my mind that being dealt an even better hand would scare me, but Joanne The Younger was right.
It terrified me. And terror, George Lucas forgive me, was the way to the dark. Realistically I should’ve been scared spitless back when this began, but I hadn’t known enough. I’d just resented it. Now, when I knew a lot more, I didn’t have nearly as much to be afraid of, even if the potential power load had increased. Now I had Billy and Melinda. Now I had Gary. I had Coyote. I had Morrison, and it was all his damned fault I’d gotten better at things anyway, because not only had he been more willing to use my esoteric skill set, but because I, foolish creature that I was, hadn’t wanted to disappoint him.
He was going to be very disappointed if I came home from Ireland a werewolf.
Coyote nominally had the healing gig in hand. I didn’t try to usurp it. I just ripped down all the shells and shields and protective barriers and finally, finally let my fresh new topped-up Siobhán Walkingstick magic flow in behind his, his robin’s-egg-blue flooding forward on a tide of steely-blue, his hot-desert-gold cooled by a rush of my silver.
For just an instant there I was raw to him. Exposed, open, vulnerable. It was mostly about Morrison, between us. My former boss, silver-haired, blue-eyed, solid as the earth. My laughter, my tears, my safety and my future. My everything, these days.
For the space of a breath, his presence between us cut too deep. Coyote retreated, leaving me all alone against the black magic running through my veins. I staggered, shocked at its strength. I thought I could beat it, but not easily. I couldn’t do everything alone, after all. I’d found that out the hard way. But I’d do this alone, if I had to, because I was not going to go home to Morrison all furry and toothy.
Then the breath was gone and Coyote’s power surged back to the fore, leading mine in a ferocious battle against the wolf. Two coyotes on the mesa now, and the black wolf dwindled simply because of my attention, my presence, in the battle. I sensed its rage as the infection grew less profound, sensed the threads that had slowly bound me closer to the Master shriveling and sensed his fury that one of my lineage had once more slipped through his fingers.
But not all of us. Crystal-clear thought in the midst of his anger. Master’s meal was a little wild, bore herself a wee boy child. The one precious piece of information Sheila had garnered while still in his thrall. The one thing she’d shared with the Master, before her bones were burned and he lost most of his hold on her.
I could all but feel his promise: that he would find and destroy Aidan not for the sake of damaging the family line, but sheerly for revenge against me. Me, the one who had helped Sheila MacNamarra get away thirty years ago and just last night. The one who had thrown down a gauntlet a few months ago, a gauntlet the Master had declined—or been unable—to take up.
I whispered, “Like hell. I’m coming for your witch Morrígan and then I’m coming for you.”
Raucous laughter answered me. Raven’s laughter, harsh and unkind. Heard a challenge in that laughter, a dare: if I met the Morrígan, he would come to me himself. Right here, right now. We could finally go mano a mano, and if I won, well, then. He would leave Aidan be.
“You’d have to, you stupid bastard. I’m gonna kick your ass so far back into the caves even the cavemen won’t be able to find you. I’ll see you at Tara, you son of a bitch.”
The Master cackled again and the threads along which we communicated were suddenly gone. So was the ache, the infection, the terrible redness in my arm. The black magic receded, and in the planescape of psychic battle, the wolf simply disappeared. I snapped back to the hanging tree, still dangling upside-down, and Coyote, limping, disheveled, his hair in tangles, came across the mesa and sat at the foot of the tree with a thud.
Big Coyote, who hadn’t been there before, but who was also always here in this desert, meandered up and shoved his nose into Coyote’s hand, which made him chuckle and drag the gleaming animal into a hug. They were astonishing together, Big Coyote’s every strand of fur a bristling wire of gold or copper or brass, and his eyes full of stars, while my Coyote was a sweat-stained red-skinned tangle-haired dirty mess. Or he was at first. All of it washed away under Big Coyote’s lean, and my Coyote looked refreshed when he let the archetype go. “Seriously,” he said as I rotated in another slow circle: tree, desertscape, blinding sky, more desert, tree and coyotes again. “Seriously,” my Coyote repeated, “you thought I was him?”
They wobbled out of my view as I spun again. Twisting my head toward them only made an impending headache worse, so I stopped trying and mumbled, “Well, yeah. Back in the day. I didn’t know better.”
Big Coyote snorted. So did Little. I tried shrugging, but that made my head hurt, too. Hanging upside-down was not my favorite place to be. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? But we won, right? Does that mean someone’s going to let me down now?”
The two coyotes exchanged glances in a way that didn’t bode well for the home team. But then Coyote, my Coyote, got up and did something I couldn’t see to the ropes. They went elastic-y and dropped me on my skull, which was moderately better than hanging upside-down. It wasn’t good, though, and I spent a minute with my arms curled around my head, trying to get past the starbursts in my vision. When I finally looked up, both coyotes looked like I was their idea of a great afternoon’s entertainment. I started to say something caustic, then thought better of it. “You guys saved my bacon. Thank you.”
Big Coyote’s tongue slurped halfway around his head, like not even amazing animistic representations of archetypes were immune to the power of bacon. I had another dizzy moment of wondering when, exactly, I’d last eaten something worth calling food, and hoped all this not-eating would have knocked off the five or so pounds I’d put back on recently. If it had, I promised I wouldn’t eat so many doughnuts once I got home. And that I would take up jogging. And follow through on whatever other rash promises I’d made over the past several days. “Coyote?”
One pricked his ears and the other sat up a little straighter. I chuckled, but it was the second one I spoke to, humor fading fast. “I’m supposed to say goodbye to you f—”
“What? Joanne, no, you—”
Okay, that hadn’t been the best way to launch into the goodbye. I sat up, grateful my head had stopped throbbing, and waved my hands in the face of his protests. “Listen! Stop freaking out! I’m supposed to say goodbye from…me. From me fifteen years ago, from me you started teaching when I was a kid. She’s…”
Little Coyote looked uncomprehending while I searched for the right way to explain, but Big Coyote’s star-filled eyes were sad and acknowledging and maybe a little proud. He, at least, understood what had gone on between my younger and current self. Probably understood better than I did, for that matter. And he was certainly in a position to be watching over time loops, so he must have known this one was coming to an end.
“She’s been this annoying little voice of reason at the back of my skull for ages now,” I said after a while. “My dream self, the part of me that remembered your teachings even after I went and ripped them away from myself mid-lessons. But she says no matter what, she would have ended up here, fighting this fight in Ireland, and that means we’re coming to the end of her. I’m…integrating. Siobhán and Joanne and magic and…all of it. So she—” In the middle of the sentence I understood. She, the younger Joanne, the one who’d been in love with Coyote, was the one saying goodbye. Another loop closed. I faltered, then swallowed and, helpless, said, “She loved you. She loves you. And she’s…”
“Gone.” One rough low word from my mentor, and suddenly even Big Coyote’s brilliance wasn’t enough to make Little Coyote reflect shining glory. He turned his face away, giving me a profile shot: strong nose, strong jaw, restless black hair, brick-red skin against the bleached desert whiteness. Beautiful. Perfect. Very literally the man of my childhood dreams.
And then, because t
his was a landscape of the mind, and because magic let us do things that we couldn’t otherwise, because of those things, and because I’d finally and for the last time broken his heart…
…he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-One
I opened my eyes to find Gary and my mother sitting cross-legged up against a half-fallen wall, both of them laughing so hard they had tears running down their faces. My mother had Gary’s forearm in one hand as she wheezed, “She didn’t, she didn’t!” and wiped tears away with the other, and Gary nodded so merrily it appeared his head would go bobbling off.
It was so completely incongruous with the farewell I’d just experienced I just sat there, offended on general principles, and waited for them to notice I’d woken up. Instead my mother threw her head back and shrieked like a delighted banshee, laughter bouncing off the crumbling walls.
I looked upward. The surviving banshees still sat in the oak rafters, many of them with expressions of accusation. This was not how things were done, and it was clearly all my fault. I shrugged a protestation of innocence, and when Gary started in with, “That’s nothing, you should’ve seen her when—” I decided I’d better take matters into my own hands before I found out for sure they were in hysterics over me.
I cleared my throat. Loudly. Gary, without the slightest hint of guilt, looked up, beamed and said, “There you are, darlin’. You never told me your old lady was so much fun,” which made my solemn, reserved, Altoids-loving mother whack his shoulder.
“Auld me foot,” said she, “sure and you’re old enough to be me own father, so let’s hear none of this auld lady nonsense. How’s your arm, Joanne?”
I couldn’t think of anything I’d done half so funny as to bring people to such gales of laughter, but I couldn’t shake the feeling they were laughing at me, so I extended my arm petulantly without speaking. The action sounded like wings whispering together, which made my skin crawl, but there was no sign of bite or infection under the shredded remains of my coat sleeve.