by C. E. Murphy
Brad’s mouth went thin and tight. “Robert, that was an effect of the earthquake. I’m sure your father explained that to you.”
Robert and I exchanged glances and the kid sighed. “Yeah, Uncle Brad. I know.” He didn’t actually say, “Whut-ev-aaar,” as people his age were prone to doing, but it sounded loud and clear in his voice. I swallowed hard to keep a smile from jumping into place.
“You think what put your Mom to sleep is the same kind of thing as the, uh, Thing?” I really needed to work on my Mystical Stuff vocabulary. I wondered if I could find a handbook. Robert shrugged against my ribs again and started leaning in a time-to-move way. I shuffled down the entry hall with him, hanging a right through the living room so we could go upstairs to the bedrooms.
“It’s not the same kind of Thing,” the boy said, “but it’s the same kind of Thing.” He cast me one quick look to see if I understood, concern that I wouldn’t clear in his eyes. But since we seemed to be speaking exactly the same language, I was able to give him a reassuring smile and another quick hug.
“Yeah. I think you’re right. I’d like to know how you know that, though.”
“I dunno. It just feels the same. The air’s kind of cold and wet-feeling. Kinda like it is when…” He looked back at his uncle, who couldn’t get past us as we climbed the stairs together, and said, evasively, “When Dad does his thing.”
“You can tell when he does that?” I asked, surprised. Robert gave me a look that suggested I wasn’t too swift.
“Yeah. Can’t you?”
“I’ve never tried,” I admitted. And a child shall lead them popped into my head, the phrase a title of the painting that had led me to answers about the Wild Hunt back in January. I gave the top of Robert’s head a crooked grin. “You’ll have to teach me, if you can.”
“Sure,” Robert said, with all the nonchalant ease of a kid who hadn’t stopped believing in six impossible things before breakfast. For a startled instant I thought of another little boy, not much older than the one at my side, and wondered whether he, too, would have held my lack of ability to sense what was apparently obvious in such casual disdain.
“Is this conversation supposed to be making any sense?” Brad snapped. I let go of Robert’s shoulders to turn and look down on the doctor. Way down, since I was two steps above him and had several inches of height on him, anyway. Not that I was enjoying it. Honest.
And the strange thing was that was all it took. I’d been going to round on the guy, give him a lecture on things I was only beginning to believe in myself, and all of a sudden it simply didn’t matter. Bradley Holliday had his own reasons for not believing in the esoteric, just like I’d had, and just like me, nothing anybody said was going to change his opinion. I knew enough about pissing into the wind not to start doing it, at least this once. Brad didn’t look in the least bit qualmed, but he subsided, anyway, and the breath I drew in to scold him with slipped out as nothing more than a slow exhalation. I could feel Robert’s round-eyed gaze of admiration as I turned away from his uncle and climbed the rest of the stairs.
Erik, the youngest, met us at the upstairs bathroom door, clutching his sister Jacquie’s hand. The boy had the sour scent of an ill child, and Jacquie looked green around the gills. “He threw up. Twice. On me.”
“He only threw up on you once,” Robert corrected pedantically. I crouched to give Erik a sympathetic smile.
“Don’t feel good, huh, lil’ guy?” I ruffled his hair. It was sticky with sweat and he wobbled under the touch. The power resting behind my breastbone burbled, and I leaned forward to kiss his forehead, feeling very much as though I was running a diagnostic on a car. The wash of power that came back to me said there was nothing strange or worrisome wrong with him, just one of the innumerable bugs that children were routinely exposed to. It also told me, in essence, not to worry about it: other than Jacquie wreaking vengeance for being puked on, Erik was in no danger. I brushed my fingers over the scar on my cheek, remnant of the morning I’d become a shaman. That particular scar had refused to heal into nothingness, and it’d struck me at the time that not everything needed to be fixed. So it was with Erik; he’d get better on his own, and I didn’t need to interfere. I stood up to smile brightly down at him. “Uncle Brad’ll take care of you. You’ll be just fine.”
“I’m not—”
“You’re the doctor, Doctor.” I might’ve been enjoying myself a little too much, especially when Erik staggered forward to latch on to Brad’s leg. Brad gave me a look that would peel paint, then bent to scoop the boy up, feeling his forehead. Robert caught my wrist and tugged me down the hall toward his mother’s room. I watched him as he pulled me into the bedroom.
Goose bumps stood up on his arms as soon as he crossed the threshold. My skin felt warm under his grip, though not as warm as Erik had been. “Robert, did you feel cold when you visited your dad at the hospital?”
“It’s always cold at hospitals.”
An uneasy sense of profundity crept over me with his statement, and I resisted the urge to pull him into my lap as I sat down on the edge of Mel’s bed. Like Billy, she appeared to be sleeping peacefully, but when I shook her, she wouldn’t wake. “Always?” I asked, half to distract Robert from his mother’s state, and half because I was curious. He curled a lip.
“Yeah. There’s always bad stuff going on in hospitals.”
“Bad stuff like this? Like the thing keeping your mom and dad asleep?”
He shrugged one shoulder, stiff. “No, but there’s always people hangin’ around. Dad sees ’em sometimes, but I can always feel them. They’re cold.”
My mouth, somewhat ill-advisedly, said, “That’s creepy,” but Robert only nodded, evidently in complete accordance with me. “How’d you learn to feel the cold?”
“I dunno. I guess I always could. It makes my skin itch. Like it’s trying to crawl off.” He gave me another uncertain look, hoping he was communicating. I puffed out my cheeks and glanced down at Mel. There was nothing in my car metaphor that allowed for skin itching like it was going to crawl off, unless rust flaking off a vehicle counted. I stuck my lower lip out, thoughtfully, then shrugged one shoulder at myself, much as Robert had done.
“I’m going to see if I can learn to feel that. Did the Thing in the kitchen feel cold, too?”
“Yeah.” For a kid awake at three in the morning, lecturing an adult on paranormal activity, Robert sounded remarkably patient and composed. “It’s how I knew something was wrong in the first place. My bedroom’s right above the kitchen and I woke up all shivery.”
I squinted at him. “Your dad didn’t tell me it was there.”
“He didn’t know. We couldn’t see it until right before you came over to take care of Mom. I just knew it was there.”
When this was all over I was going to have a long talk with Billy about his family. “Can the other kids sense stuff like that, too?”
“Clara can. But it’s different for her. You’d have to ask her,” he said before I could put the question to him. “It’s not that big a deal, Joanne. Mom and Dad are just kind of weird.”
“Aren’t all adults?” I asked automatically. Robert gave me a very faint smile.
“Yeah, but some are weirder than others. You’re even weirder than Dad, but you don’t know what you’re doing.”
I stared, then laughed to cover dismay. “What, it shows?”
“Duh. Everything about you’s all patchy, like somebody dropped a mirror and stuck the pieces back together.” He rolled his eyes, then looked at his mother. “So can you help her?”
I cranked my jaw back up. “We’re going to have a talk when this is finished, you and me.”
“Okay. But can you help her?”
I sighed and looked back down at Mel’s snoozing form. “Honestly, Robert, probably not. Not right away, at least. You’re pretty much right. I don’t know what I’m doing. But I’m learning, and I am going to figure out how to wake them up. Why don’t you go back to bed? I’ll g
et you up if I figure anything out, or if your uncle and I decide we need to take your mom to the hospital, okay?”
“Promise?”
“Yeah.” I reached out to ruffle his hair, just like I’d done the three-year-old’s. Robert looked put upon, but took it. “I promise. You’re kind of the grown-up for your little brother and sisters right now, and you did a good job calling me, so I’m going to treat you like you’re an adult. You’ve earned it.”
“Do you mess up grown-ups’ hair?”
I laughed, admitting, “Not usually. I’ll try to remember not to do that again.”
Robert climbed off the bed, looking like he’d won a small battle. “Okay. Thanks, Joanne.”
“For what?”
“For telling me the truth about not being able to help Mom. Uncle Brad wouldn’t have.”
It was a strange world where admitting to my shortcomings was the right thing to do. I nodded and tilted my head toward his bedroom. “Back to bed now, Robert.”
“Okay.” He slipped out, leaving me to turn to Melinda Holliday’s sickbed and see if there was anything I could do to waken her from a sleep of death.
CHAPTER 11
Trying to slip inside Melinda’s mind was as difficult as getting through to Billy had been. Like him, she had solid mental shields, only a trickle of life force draining through them. Syrupy weight pinned her down, heavy with determination that bordered on malevolence. I didn’t try the siphoning approach, or the equally unsuccessful needle. Instead I turned away from Mel and looked into thick shadow, wondering if I could find my way to its heart. Nothing like taking the fight to the source, after all.
It occurred to me, perhaps a moment too late, that such a decision could be terminally dangerous. But by then a pathway had melted open, like a dream obliging me by creating passage when I needed one, and I stepped onto the road offered.
I’d become accustomed to flitting through astral realms in the past six months, whether I wanted to admit to it or not. The world I belonged to in day-to-day life was the Middle World, caught between the Upper and Lower Worlds, places of mythology and mysticism. The names I had for them were Native American in origin, but they fit remarkably well over an ancient Irish structure of the universe as well. I suspected that if I ever entered the Celtic Upper and Lower Worlds, they wouldn’t look like the ones I’d seen in my dealings with Native American gods and demons, but the structure seemed to hold true regardless.
There was also an astral realm I could tune into. That one could be tapped by turning on my second sight, without ever leaving the Middle World. It could also be entered wholesale: that was how I usually got to the Dead Zone, and it was how I’d found ancient Babylon and the ghostly, sad land of Tir na nOg. I wasn’t quite sure how those places connected to Earth, or the Middle World or whatever I wanted to call it. Babylon had, ultimately, seemed to reside in the deepest parts of human consciousness, but Tir na nOg was somewhere else entirely, a world of fae creatures that were gods and immortals in my world. I thought someday I might understand how all those places linked together, but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough yet.
What I walked through now was somewhere else yet again. I’d spent almost no time in the dreamlands, only using them as conduits in the first days of awakening to my shamanic powers, when I just hadn’t known any better. They were a place where thought formed and melted around me, gray shapeless forms that looked like the stuff of nightmares. I could feel the weight of sleep pressing down on me as surely as it had caught Billy and Mel, trying to snare me as well. I didn’t like it, in a more specific and visceral way than my general discomfort with traipsing through realms of Otherness. I knew there could be danger in any aspect of psychic exploration, but something about the dreamlands struck me as more actively alarming than the astonishing neons of the astral realm.
Maybe it was that the demons here grew straight up out of my own psyche. Dreams were personal, tailor-made to inspire exultation and fear alike, whereas the dangers in other aspects of the Other were their own creatures, able to prey on anyone who came too close. I guess the egalitarian approach made me more comfortable.
Someone walked beside me. In the fashion of dreams, it seemed like she’d been there all along, and when I tried to focus on her arrival it shimmered and faded away into irrelevance. “It’s okay,” Barb said. “I won’t be around for long.” Morrison was on her other side, completely oblivious to my presence. They were holding hands and he was smiling at something she said. Something I couldn’t hear, despite being right next to her.
See what I mean? I set my jaw and shoved my hands in my pockets. “This is a stupid dream. You two can just go away.”
“I said we would,” Barb repeated. My hands made themselves into fists in my pockets. Wanting them to go away and wanting them to go away together were different. Stupid dream. The gray-on-black surroundings had changed while I wasn’t looking, resolving into the precinct headquarters. Except the hallways didn’t have this many windows in the headquarters, and the trim was a different color. I curled a lip and turned away from my walking companions, stomping down to the garage through a series of halls that weren’t really there. The light over the last set of stairs was incandescent and not burned out, both of which were wrong. Even in the midst of the dream I wondered what it meant that the place I was happiest in the precinct building was well lit in my dreams, when it wasn’t in real life.
“Joanie.” My old boss, Nick Hamilton, nodded as I came around the corner, then waved me toward the coveralls the mechanics wore. “You’re late. Get to work, would you?”
“I brought doughnuts.” I put an oversize box of doughnuts on the hood of one of the cars, a peace offering for being late to work. The Missing O, a local doughnut shop, had become a favorite hangout for the precinct cops, and we usually got discounts for buying three dozen or more doughnuts at a time. Nick grinned at me, which he hadn’t done since January, and popped the box open to dig out his favorite, a raspberry-filled vanilla-crème monstrosity that dripped all over the place. I took it as writ that I was forgiven and sauntered back to grab my coveralls, pausing for a round of mock fisticuffs with Nathan, one of the guys who was still talking to me. He was the SOB who’d handed over the Johnnie Walker at the picnic, in fact. I threw one extra punch that landed on his shoulder with a meaty thwock and he looked offended. “For my hangover,” I said, and he laughed.
I swung down into one of the pits, coverall sleeves rolled up to my elbows, whistling jauntily to myself. “Joanie got laid,” somebody said dryly, and I threw a rag in his general direction, calling, “At least one of us is getting some,” back. Familiar faces and voices filled my peripheral vision and my ears. I hadn’t had a chance to banter with the guys since Cernunnos rode through the garage six months earlier. Tears burned at the back of my throat for a moment and I inhaled harshly to push them away. The sharp scent of oil and gasoline thrummed through my brain, making me feel welcome and at home. Not sniffling took more than I wanted to admit.
A year ago this had been my life. I’d been a mechanic for the Seattle Police Department. I got up and went to work five mornings a week, got covered in grease, fiddled with computery bits and kept cars running. In my off time, I worked on Petite and hung out with the guys from the garage, or took out work in trade for some of my cop coworkers: I’d fix their cars and they’d feed me. It was a sweet setup.
But then the mother I’d never met called up to tell me she was dying, and invited me over to Ireland to watch it happen. What’d been a two-week…I hesitated to call it a vacation…had turned into a four-month leave of absence. Sheila MacNamarra had taken her own sweet time about dying, though I hadn’t found out the reasons why until later. By the time I got back to Seattle, my position in the garage had been filled by someone else, although my Cherokee heritage and my gender made me too appealing, quota-wise, to fire. Morrison had a clever plan to get me out of his hair.
He made me a cop.
I mean, I had the credentials and e
verything. The department had sent me to the academy because of that whole heritage-and-gender thing, and I hadn’t done too badly, but I’d hired on as a mechanic and nobody’d expected me to stop doing that and start arresting people. Neither, frankly, did Morrison. He figured I’d quit. I figured I’d rather poke myself in the eye than give him the satisfaction. It’d taken six months to get back where I belonged, back down in the garage. I yelled an answer to some half-heard question and crawled out of my pit, content with my place in the universe. That was all I really wanted.
The room changed around me, turning into the reception area upstairs. Dozens of cops moved around, doing their work, getting ready for the day, most of them little more than blurred faces in the background, though I picked a couple people out and waved greetings. Ray, who was built like a fireplug and who was usually the first to warn me when Morrison was on the warpath. Thin-faced Bruce, whose wife Elise made me tamales for fixing their car, looked up from the front desk and gave me a broad smile. “There you are. They’re waiting for you.” He looked me up and down, still beaming. “You look beautiful, Joanie.”
I hadn’t asked. That made me nervous. I looked down at myself to see I was no longer wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but an honest-to-God dress with a dropped waist and a fair amount of frothy cream lace. It could’ve been a wedding dress, though not one of the meringue ones that were so often advertised. It kind of suited me. Pretty but understated. I was also wearing fantastic shoes, with bits of gold glimmering through the straps. I said, “Who’s waiting?” but it was too late: I’d gone around the corner to meet a man in a tuxedo.
Mark Bragg. He looked fantastic, goldy-brown hair brushed back, his tux navy-cut with long tails. I smiled automatically and looked past him; he wasn’t the one I expected. After a few seconds, the one I did expect appeared. Morrison, also in a tuxedo, though his wasn’t nearly as ornate as Mark’s. Barbara Bragg appeared behind him, in a very simple, pretty yellow gown that made mine look all the more formal. I could see the butterfly fluttering on her shoulder.