by C. E. Murphy
I suddenly felt like a particularly tall and bony stick, and noticed the woman in the mirror didn’t look like she was having so much fun anymore. I gave Mark a meaningless smile and shouted, “Agua,” before elbowing my way off the dance floor. Being tall and broad-shouldered was good for that, anyway.
I ordered a shot of whiskey before remembering I was driving, then swore and gave it to the guy standing next to me while I flagged down the bartender a second time to get water. The guy looked surprised, then gave me a once-over and a smile that made me feel a little better about being a stick on legs.
A Walking stick. Hah. I was so funny. I said “Shit” under my breath and tightened my fingers around the cold glass the bartender slid at me. A peek over my shoulder told me Phoebe looked very butch dancing with Barb, though really, Phoebe looked butch a lot of the time. I didn’t normally think women several inches shorter than me could kick my butt, but I never doubted Phoebe’s ability to do so.
“What’s up?” Mark said from behind my other shoulder. I startled and almost tipped my glass over, and Mark followed my gaze to Phoebe and Barb. “Oops,” he said, the word almost a question. “You and Phoebe?”
The whole world had more faith in my ability to attract romantic partners than I did. I said, “No,” and slammed my water as if it was vodka. An ice cube hit me in the tooth. Ow. Mark touched my arm.
“So what’s the deal?”
I hate your sister seemed a little extreme as far as answers went. I had no reason at all to hate Mark’s sister. Certainly no reason I was willing to listen to myself about, anyway. I swirled ice cubes in the bottom of my glass, put on a deliberate smile and looked over my shoulder at Mark. “Nothing. Nothing,” I said more firmly. “Just needed some water. C’mon.” I caught his arm and pulled him back onto the dance floor, doing my best to let the music pick me up and sweep me away. Mark slid his arms around me from behind and the soft silk of his shirt brushed my spine, sending an unexpectedly enticing shiver over my skin. I nestled in his arms, closed my eyes and, half a moment later, somebody collided into my chest, completely ruining the moment. I opened my eyes, about to yell, but my objection was cut short as Phoebe gave me a ridiculously abject smile of apology. I rolled my eyes and shouted, “Careful, or I’ll take it out on you next time we fence.”
“Oh,” she yelled back, “so you’re planning on coming back to practice?” There was too much noise to carry on a real conversation, so she turned away as she asked, putting her back against me. The top of her head was just above my chin. Barb was in front of her, making a sandwich of the two of us in the middle. I smiled a bit and shook my head, then let my eyes close again. Mark did get all the cute girls, even if one of them was his sister. Ew.
Spotlights swirled through my eyelids, bursting down from above the dance floor in a rainbow of colors. The beat caught me in the small bones of the ear, rather like my drum did, and I detached from my body.
Sound roared incessantly, as powerful as the dance beat, but without its rhythm. Instead it crackled and popped, heat encroaching with every hiss and snap. I opened my eyes, face still tilted upward, and saw a sky of blackness. Not night, not stars, but heavy pressing blackness, the color of sorrow and loneliness. Orange reflected high against that blackness, like city lights glowing against the night, but there was raw intent in this color.
From what I’ve tasted of desire whispered through my mind, and I lowered my eyes to the horizons, knowing what I would see.
I was wrong.
No. I wasn’t wrong. I was just woefully short in my expectations. Fire was all I expected, and it was there, raging on the landscape, but there was more to the world than I thought. Not just empty blackness like the sky, it was built with four mountains that, even scoured by flame, held their colors with resolve. To the east lay a white mountain, gleaming through soot, and to the west a sun-yellow one, defying the orange and red of flame. To the south lay a blue mountain, and to the north black so hard that even fire couldn’t diminish it. There was a semifamiliar flatness to all of it, a hint of the Lower World. It tasted of history and of magic, of mythology built up to create reality. Colors here weren’t real in the sense that I knew them, and the world had edges defined by those colors and by the mountains.
Between those four borders of the world, fire reigned. Everything burned. I stood at the center of it all, animals and insects fleeing toward me, their panic making my skin itch with growing fear. I saw no people, but I found myself leaning into the wind that fire brought, throwing myself against the destructive onslaught. All the power I could bring to bear, cool and silver-blue, as if it was the antithesis of flame, did nothing to quench it. Tears ran down my cheeks from the heat and I strained into it, gulping in rough breaths as I tried to stop what sure as hell looked like the end of the world.
A gigantic hollow tube settled over me, bringing fresh air with it. Creatures I didn’t think could crawl scoured the tube’s sides and clambered up, the air and walls thick with them. I couldn’t see where they were going, but I went with the masses, scrambling away from devastating heat toward a new world somewhere beyond the sky.
And gasped awake to find myself in the comparatively cool air of a Seattle night, nestled against Mark Bragg’s chest. Phoebe and Barb stood close by, faces concerned. “God, Joanne,” Mark said as my eyes opened. “Are you okay?”
“You guys didn’t…” No. Of course they hadn’t seen that. “I had a…” Visions weren’t really my thing. Well. Visions hadn’t really been my thing up to this point. I had no idea if they were something I’d get on a regular basis from now on or not. If they involved passing out in dance clubs, I hoped they’d be an infrequent visitor to my repertoire. “What happened?” Somebody else talking sounded good.
“You just collapsed,” Mark said in bewilderment. “One second we were dancing and you just slithered down to the floor. I picked you up and Barb and Phoebe cleared a path. Are you all right, Joanne?”
I started to lift a hand to rub my cheek, then realized I was still cradled against Mark’s chest. He wasn’t standing, so most of my weight was really in his lap, but he held me close, like I might be fragile. Since fragile and I had never really been on speaking terms, I felt a little silly, and tried squirming loose. Mark didn’t quite let me go, though he relaxed his hold some. “I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I just had a little…”
A little psychic escapade. Phoebe’d seen me zone out in the locker room a couple weeks earlier, but I hadn’t explained it. Mark, thanks to Gary, knew a little about my shamanism gig. Barb had no idea. None of it made me want to confess to the truth. “I just got dizzy all of a sudden.”
Phoebe’s hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm. “Oh, my god. You’re not pregnant or anything, are you?” The question was filled with equal parts of horror, glee and interest.
Mark, holding me, went very still. My first thought, almost incongruously, was it might’ve been easier if even one person had reacted that way, and my second was that it would not do at all to reach out and throttle my friend. She could not possibly know the demons she stirred up with the question. It felt like it took a long time indeed to pull a sick smile into place and say, “Uh, no, I don’t think so, Phoebe. Maybe dinner didn’t agree with me.”
“You had shrimp in your salad,” Mark said hastily. “Maybe that was it.” Barb looked between the two of us knowingly, though she kept her mouth shut. That was good. I didn’t want to have to punch Morrison’s girlfriend in the mouth.
Well. All right, never mind that. “I’m okay,” I said after a couple of seconds. “But I think I might call it a night now. It’s been kind of a weird day.” Between Mark and Billy and unsaid things with Morrison and conking out in the parking lot and having a date and—yeah. Weird day.
“I’ll drive you,” Mark said, and I discovered I felt well enough to say “Like hell” in a relatively mild voice. “Nobody drives Petite but me.”
He chuckled. “All right. Guess you’re feeling okay, if you�
��re up to arguing about it. Barbie, I’ll meet you later, all right? Phoebe, it was nice to meet you.”
Barbie?
Mark helped me to my feet, and I had enough sense not to echo his nickname for her out loud. Or snicker at it, which was also high on my list of things to do. I wondered if Morrison knew his new girl was named after a toy.
I had a brief, unpleasant suspicion there was a word for what I was feeling toward Barbara in regards to her relationship with Morrison, and that only small, nasty people let themselves indulge in the emotion described by that word.
Fortunately, nobody ever said I was a good person. Phoebe hugged me, Barb shook my hand and Mark walked me back to Petite very carefully. It’d gotten later than I thought, pressing two in the morning, and the streets were empty as we drove back to my apartment, listening to music too loudly. A few blocks from the building Mark turned the music down and glanced at me. “So what really happened back there?”
I sucked air in through my teeth. “I had a vision.” It took a long time to say that.
Mark quirked a smile. “This is killing you, isn’t it?”
I hoped not, or that it was only figurative if it was. “Yeah. Look.” Apparently that word took so much effort I couldn’t say anything again until I’d pulled into my building’s parking lot and killed the engine in my usual spot. “Look,” I said again, then.
Mark said, “Hang on,” and got out of the car. Came around to my door and opened it for me, giving a little half bow as I chuckled and climbed out. He closed the door behind me gently, patted Petite’s roof, and then turned his attention to me. “Okay. Now go.”
“Why now?”
“Because it’s much less awkward to kiss you good night and make an elegant exit after your speech when I’m already on my feet,” he said, smiling openly. I stared at him for a few seconds, then laughed.
“Confident, aren’t you?”
“Hopeful,” he corrected. “So what were you going to say?”
“You know, I really don’t know.” The heel of my hand went to my breastbone and rubbed there, a nervous habit I hadn’t been able to break since getting a sword stuffed through me. “Just…”
“Joanne.” Mark lifted a finger, as if he’d put it over my lips but didn’t complete the touch. “You seem like a pretty solid person. Obviously this shamanism thing is important to you but you don’t want to talk about it, so how about we just leave it at that? You get to where you want to talk, well, I’m kind of hoping I’ll be around for that. In the meantime, I won’t push and I won’t roll my eyes and mutter, ’What a kook,’ when you’re gone, okay? Does that sound like a good place to work from?”
I felt a disbelieving smile pull at my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said around it. “That sounds pretty great, actually. Maybe too good to be real.” I knew people whose too-good-to-be-real early relationships had turned into actually-just-good-enough-to-be-real ones. I knew ones that hadn’t turned out, too, of course, but all of a sudden I was feeling hopeful. So he was a kook who was willing to go with my whole magic-filled lifestyle. For somebody like me, that might not be a bad thing. And he knew when not to push it, which for somebody like me was perfect. “Where exactly did you come from?”
“Arizona.” He grinned, touched my cheek and ducked his head to steal a brief kiss, as threatened. Then he stepped back with another grin and a wink, and left me smiling idiotically after him as he sauntered off to find his car. Not until he left did I stagger upstairs to collapse in my bed, eyes wide despite a great weariness encroaching on me. I felt peculiarly normal, which struck me as all wrong, because nothing in the past twenty-four hours had been normal for me.
Which was a complex thought in and of itself. The last six or seven months, when I’d thought something along those lines, it’d meant old gods and spirit guides and magical things were going on. Right now it meant I’d almost accidentally slept with somebody and had gone out dancing and appeared to have something of a social life. That was all wildly abnormal. Billy’s illness might’ve been mystical in nature, but by God if my mind hadn’t assimilated that as an ordinary thing that happened in the course of Joanne’s life.
I honestly couldn’t decide if that was a good sign or not.
Somewhere right around the edge of sleep I could feel an idea of what I should be doing next starting to form. I was afraid to look too closely at it, for fear of sending it scurrying away. A few hours’ sleep before work might shake it loose, and in the morning I’d have to tell Phoebe I owed her one. Who could’ve known that a little R & R was good for the soul? I rolled over, chortling sleepily at myself, and dragged a pillow across the bed to moosh my face into it. It smelled faintly of Mark’s after-shave, which made my stomach tighten up, but the vast sleepies had a head start on berating myself with a what were you thinking lecture.
I was very nearly asleep when the phone rang.
CHAPTER 10
Wednesday, July 6, 2:19 a.m.
Panic smashed through me, turning ice water to nausea in my belly. I fell out of bed and grabbed for the phone on the way to the floor, fumbling the receiver and putting it to my ear with shaking hands. “Hello? Jesus. What’s wrong? Hello?”
“Joanne?” It was a little boy’s voice, so out of place my foggy brain couldn’t comprehend it for a moment. “Joanne?” he asked again.
“Yeah, this is—yeah.” I rubbed my eyes frantically, trying to wake up. “Who is thi—is this Robert?”
“Yeah.” A gulp, precariously near a sob, sounded in the word. “Joanne, Mommy went to sleep like Daddy did. Erik is sick and tried to wake her up and we can’t get her to wake up. Can you help us? Please?” Robert was nearly twelve, the quaver in his voice swallowed down in an attempt at adult bravery, but Mommy and Daddy went a long way toward telling me just how scared he was.
“Everything’s going to be okay, Robert. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Are your sisters okay?”
“Clara’s still sleeping. Me and Jacquie are awake. And Erik keeps saying he’s gonna throw up.”
“Okay. You guys all get a blanket so you stay warm and keep Erik company in the bathroom so he can throw up in the toilet if he needs to, okay?” I pulled clothes on as I talked, exhaustion burning my eyes. “I’ll be there as fast as I can. Just hold tight, Robert. I’ll be right there.”
“Okay.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “What do I do if somebody else goes to sleep?”
Billy’s sleeping image flashed through my mind. And I’d gone out to have fun instead of trying to find answers. I was never going to forgive myself. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Robert. It’ll be okay. I’ll be right there. You did good, calling me. I’ll be right there,” I promised again, and hit the door at a run.
The Hollidays’ home had a wonderful front yard that’d seen better days. Trees and bushes were mashed, and a section of the picket fence had been replaced but not yet repainted. The front porch, similarly, was of fresh raw wood, though a can of stain sat on the corner of the railing, making a dark cylindrical spot against the lightness of the wood. Billy’d repainted the new boards above the front door where the frame had been torn apart and fixed, since the last time I’d been over. Even in the middle of the night and half repaired, it looked like the sort of place where a person would want to raise a herd of children. Billy and Melinda were doing just that, with four already and a fifth on the way.
There was a white Mercedes SUV parked behind Billy’s car. I parked Petite behind Mel’s minivan and didn’t think anything of the SUV until I rang the doorbell, expecting Robert to answer. Instead, Brad Holliday, bearing the wild-eyed combination of alarm and anger people do when they’re woken up at two-thirty in the morning, flung the door open and stared at me. Even straight out of bed, he wore the heavy ring that had helped annoy me at the hospital. It was on his right hand, wrapped around the edge of the door above his head, and I wondered if he wore a wedding ring on his left hand. I hadn’t noticed earlier.
We stared at each other
a few seconds, equally surprised, before I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was another adult here,” and he started berating me for small-hours visits.
Robert appeared in the hall behind him and interrupted with “I called her, Uncle Brad,” before ducking under Dr. Bradley’s arm to take my hand and pull me into the house. Brad got out of the way, surprised into silence by his nephew’s arrival on the scene. I gave Brad a fleeting, semi-apologetic smile, and hugged Robert.
“Told you I’d be here as fast as I could. How come you didn’t get your uncle instead of me?”
Robert shrugged against my ribs. “You’re the one who got the Thing out of the kitchen.”
“Yeah.” I ducked my head over Robert’s, an arm around his shoulders as I pressed my mouth against his hair. I didn’t want to call it a kiss. Kissing sounded all girlie and uncomfortable, the wrong sort of thing to impose on an eleven-year-old boy. Comfort could be imparted by mouth presses, too. “Yeah, I guess I did.”
“The thing in the kitchen?” From the tone of his voice, I couldn’t tell which was worse for Brad: asking, or not knowing.
Robert shrugged under the weight of my arm, matter-offactly. “There was a Thing in the kitchen a couple weeks ago. A big snake thing. Joanne got rid of it. That’s what happened to the front of the house,” he added, as if it cleared everything up.