by C. E. Murphy
The bearer. God. All the people I’d mocked for getting weird with language when they got into otherworldly stuff deserved an apology. It really did do something to the brain, because now I was doing it.
“Let me know if I can help at all,” Jen said. Her hand was still in her pocket, making a bump in her pants where her fingers were curled around the stone. I ducked my head in a nod and backed toward the door, then stopped in it to look at her.
“Look, Jen, if this thing starts sniffing around you, don’t throw anything at it, okay? It siphons off life force. Just make yourself as quiet as you can.”
Jen gave me a quick smile. “You’re getting good at this, Joanie. That sounded like you knew what you were talking about.” She lifted her chin, ushering me out. “Get going. You’re letting the draft in.”
Almost nobody was as cool with my little weird gifts of topaz as Jen had been. I found myself saying things like, “I thought this might make a cool good-luck stone for you,” to almost everybody who’d helped me back in January. I don’t think most of them wanted to know why I was handing out good-luck stones. People preferred to forget the bizarre things I’d done. On the other hand, with a noticeable number of coworkers out of the office, nobody said no. They just didn’t quite look at me when I handed over the stones. I couldn’t exactly blame them, but I was starting to have an inkling of what it would feel like when I was actually good at being a shaman, and the rest of the world refused to see what was going on around them.
I plodded down to the garage, not really wanting to enter what I’d once considered my haven in the station. I’d seen the roster. I knew how many people from the shop were out sick. I came around the corner at the base of the stairs watching my feet, and nearly crashed into Thor. For once I darted to the left and he held still, so it didn’t turn into a dance of trying to circumvent each other. I even managed a faint smile, then blurted, “Hey, Thor, uh, I mean, dammit, Ed. Edward!” to his shoulders as he started up the stairs.
He turned and looked back at me with a curious expression. “You weren’t in my dream,” I said, more to myself than to him, and his eyes went even more curious. “Guess you wouldn’t have been,” I mumbled. “I mean, it was my job.” I was making sense to me, anyway. “Never mind.” I followed him up the stairs a couple of steps and offered a piece of topaz. “Hang on to this, would you? It’s kind of a…” To my surprise, I found I didn’t want to prevaricate. “A protective charm.”
His golden eyebrows rose. “You serious?”
“Yeah.” I managed another little smile. “I don’t know how good it is, but there’s some kind of weird stuff going on, and it might be a good idea to have it.”
He shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. “You and weird go together like beer and pizza, you know that?”
My smile faltered, not that it was very good to begin with. “You noticed, huh?”
“Yeah. Kinda hard to miss, really. The guys down here—” He broke off with the look of someone realizing he was about to betray ranks. I turned my face away, mouth twisting.
“Yeah. I know. Good old Joanie used to be awesome. The Girl Mechanic, kind of like the garage mascot, until she got screwy in the head. Trust me, I know what they say, and I know how half of them don’t like talking to me anymore, and—” It was my turn to break off and take a deep breath. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, you want this or not?” I hefted the little stone, looking back at my big blond nemesis. I’d just decided he was going to say no and was thinking about putting it in his locker when he reached out and plucked it from my hand.
“What the hell. Anybody who can drink as much whiskey as you did the other day and look as good a night later is okay in my book.” He lifted the piece of topaz with a quick smile and stuck it in his pocket as he turned away and went upstairs.
Not that Morrison had any reason to avoid me, but a fruitless search of the station didn’t turn him up, and I left feeling vaguely out of sorts. I was supposed to avoid him, not the other way around. It was the whole pulling-rank thing. I’d ended up leaving one of the pieces of topaz on his desk with a note that said, “Put this in your pocket” and no signature. I couldn’t decide if my name on it would have made him more or less likely to do as I asked.
Okay, ordered. No wonder I didn’t date much. I had the social skills of a laboratory gorilla.
My next stop was the Ravenna area east of the university. Scraping up my nerve to get out of the car at the ranch-style house I pulled up at was harder than I wanted to admit to. Giving Morrison a topaz talisman face-to-face would’ve been easier than knocking on the door. The house emanated sorrow, old grief mixed with fresh. It didn’t take any particular skill to pick that up. I’d been there barely ten days earlier for the gathering after a funeral.
The young man who opened the door had lost weight since I’d seen him last, his sandy hair grown a little too long and flopping into his eyes. He wasn’t surprised to see me, but he wasn’t happy, either. He leaned heavily on the doorknob, making it clear he was a barrier between me and entering the house. “Joanne.”
“Garth.” I offered a little smile, then pulled my lower lip into my mouth. “How’re you doing?”
His gaze skittered away from me, the shoulder his weight wasn’t on twitching upward in a shrug that was supposed to be dismissive. “Okay. Dunno if Dad said thanks for coming to the funeral, so…” Another twitched shrug. “Thanks.”
“He did.” My voice was hardly a whisper, the smile I tried for weak and unhappy. “It was the least I could do.”
Garth’s gaze flickered back to me, and I saw him swallow the words: yeah. It was. His brother had died because of mistakes I’d made, and I deserved the rejoinder. That he didn’t make it was a lot more than I’d earned. “So what do you want?”
“I don’t know if you’re still part of the coven,” I began. Garth cut me off with a slice of his hand and a harsh sound.
“Yeah, you know, what with everything that went down, between Colin and Faye, the coven kind of decided to take a step back. I’m out of it. That kind of shit doesn’t do anybody any good.” Bile filled his words, the bitterness of a true believer who’d seen his god’s feet of clay. While I would have shared his sentiment not very long ago, it left me with a hollow feeling where I was accustomed to my power being settled.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” My throat had gone all scratchy and my eyes stung with disappointment that struck me as inexplicable, even if it wasn’t really. “You had some real power. Look, I just came by to offer you this.” I took one of the topaz stones from my pocket and held it out. “It’s kind of a good-luck charm. I thought maybe…”
“No. Thanks.” The second word was perfunctory, thrust at me like a weapon. “I don’t want anything else to do with magic or spells or any of that crap.” Garth moved out of the door as he spoke, retreating and rejecting. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”
I let the topaz fall from my fingers into the lawn as I walked away, a host of regrets at my back.
CHAPTER 15
Returning home felt anti-climactic. Garth’d rejected me, I hadn’t found Morrison and I still didn’t have any actual answers. I climbed the stairs slowly—for once it might’ve been faster to take the building’s ancient elevator—and bumbled the key into my door’s lock. Turning the knob proved it’d been open and that I’d just locked it, which didn’t strike me as too unusual. I’d been known to forget to lock the door before. But when I reopened it and entered my living room, I found Gary snoozing on my couch. He had his hands folded over his belly and his ankles crossed on the arm, so his knees were locked. My own knees ached in sympathy, but my mouth said, “I know I didn’t give you a key, Gary!”
He cracked one gray eye open. “That ain’t stopped me yet, darlin’. Welcome home.”
“I thought you had to work. Are the kids okay?”
“I thought you had to,” Gary said in a perfectly reasonable rejoinder, kicking his feet off the couch arm. “Called Keith and told him I w
asn’t comin’ in today after all. Kids are fine. What’ve I missed? Start with passin’ out.” He sat up and clapped his hands together, making an unexpectedly loud pop.
I dropped into the other end of the couch and pulled my knees up until I could put my chin on them. “Did I tell you I fell asleep on the concrete outside yesterday?”
“Jo,” Gary said in astonishment. I couldn’t tell if there was reprimand in it, too, and had to look up to find Gary’s bushy eyebrows drawn in concern. “What’s goin’ on, doll?”
My hands fluttered, making a useless circle in front of my shins, which were in the way of my stomach. “I don’t know, Gary.” I recounted the larger part of the past twenty-four hours as best I could, a feeling of unease settling inside me. It was centered in that coil of power I carried, the same pressure that’d driven me to find a woman I’d seen from an airplane seven months earlier. I took a breath, trying to dispel it, then moved my legs to press my hands against my stomach. It wasn’t as bad as it’d been then, but that didn’t surprise me. I’d had a whole lifetime of unused magic to tune into then, and now I was at least sort of used to it. “I’d think it was this sleeping sickness, except—”
“’Cept you woke up,” Gary said. “You been dreamin’?”
“About all kinds of things.” I didn’t want to go into dreams of marrying Mark Bragg while Morrison looked on. “Yesterday it was about a coyote. Not a real one. Like a—I guess I dreamed about a spirit quest. But it wasn’t mine. I mean, it wasn’t the one I did with…Judy.” I said the name slowly, a prickle of shame stinging my cheeks. “It was like a real one,” I added more quietly. “Like the one I did for you.”
“Makes sense, don’t it? You got Coyote as your spirit guide. Mebbe he’s just tryin’ to show you the way.”
“Yeah, but this isn’t—have you eaten?” I wasn’t trying to change the subject, though Gary gave me another bushy-eyebrowed look. “All I’ve eaten was cereal this morning. I’m starving.”
“Got any Pop-Tarts?” He followed me into the kitchen and snitched one of the doughnuts he’d brought by the previous morning. “I could use a snack,” he allowed. “Ate lunch before I came over. Now, finish what you were sayin’, Jo.”
I sat down at the table with a glass of water and watched Gary putter around the kitchen while he ate his doughnut. “My Coyote, Little Coyote, doesn’t look like the spirit coyote I saw or like your tortoise or any of the other animals who came when I asked for help for you. They were all luminescent and drawn out of fine lines, like they didn’t exactly have bodies to them. Like constellations. Little Coyote’s solid. I’ve never seen him get all starry like that. So he’s not the same.”
“How ’bout Big Coyote?” One of the things I loved about Gary was that he went along with my terrible naming scheme. Even so, referencing Big Coyote made me shiver and take my hands away from the glass of cold water.
“Big Coyote was like the thunderbird, Gary. Solid’s too weak a word for him.” The scent of burned sand filled my nostrils, memory so vivid I felt a wash of heat come over me like it was renewing my tan. “Big Coyote and the thunderbird and the serpent, for that matter, are all solid like the earth is solid or like space is empty. You couldn’t move him even if you had the lever and a place to stand, unless he wanted you to. Little Coyote’s just not like that. And the spirits aren’t, either.”
“You’re startin’ to sound pretty sure of yourself, lady.”
“I know,” I muttered at my water glass. “I just wish I knew if I was right.”
“Arright.” Gary came to lean on the table, making knuckles against its hard surface without appearing to suffer any discomfort. “So you’re dreamin’ about spirits quests like one you’ve never done, is that it?”
“Pretty much.” I drank my water and put the glass down again as Gary cocked his head at me.
“Maybe it’s a hint, darlin’. Why doncha do one?”
I opened my mouth and closed it again and looked intently at my empty glass. “Because last time I did, I was hoodwinked by the bad guys?”
“You think I’m one of the bad guys, Jo?”
Every vestige of good cheer drained out of me like somebody’d opened a valve, complete misery rising to take its place. My throat went tight and my eyes stung with tears, color heating my cheeks even as my stomach twisted and my hands turned icy. “If you are I’m throwing the towel in now, because I just couldn’t handle that.”
“Aw, hey, Joanie.” Gary took my wrist, pulling me to my feet and into a bear hug that left me snuffling in his shoulder. “I was teasin’, sweetheart. I ain’t one of the bad guys. Just an old dog with a pretty girl to look after.”
I snuffled again, leaking tears. “’m not little.”
He chuckled against my head. “Didn’t say you were, darlin’.”
“Oh.” I sniffled again and extracted myself to find a tissue. “I guess you didn’t.” Gary turned to watch me.
“You all right, Joanie?”
“Yeah.” I scraped up a smile and offered it to him. “You never call me Joanie.”
The old man waggled his head dismissively. “Tough broad like you don’t usually need to be called by a little girl’s name. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. Just don’t turn out to be one of the bad guys, okay?” I gave him another weak smile, then put my cold hands over my too-hot face. It felt good, so I stood there until my hands warmed up again. “You think maybe there are some real spirit animals out there for me?” I asked into my palms.
“Only one way to find out.” Gary came up to me as he spoke, slinging his arm around my shoulders to give me another brief hug. “You found one for me, didn’t you? If an old tortoise could spare some time for me, there’s gotta be somethin’ out there for a powerhouse like you. I’ll get the drum.”
“Thanks, Gary.” I dropped my hands to watch him exit the kitchen, then slumped against the counter, trying to remember if my little emotional breakdowns were usually followed by getting my act together. Maybe I needed to start keeping a journal: Wednesday: burst into tears on Gary, then saved Seattle. A good day. The idea made me smile and I pushed off the counter to get ready for a spirit quest.
I had an almost complete lack of things that struck me as appropriate for preparing for a spirit quest. I had no overheated hut like the dream had featured, I had no drum circle, I had no guide and I had pretty much no idea what I should be doing, except for the examples of the dream and the success of the quest I’d done for Gary. With any luck, that would be enough. I forewent the towel I usually tucked against the front door, as the draft from under it felt nice in July, and plunked down in the middle of my living room floor.
There was no electric shock when Gary picked up my drum, and the beat he picked out didn’t send shards of light through my soul and out into the world. Overall, I thought that was probably a good thing, even if it did make my heart skip a thud with missing Morrison’s rhythm.
Wow. There wasn’t anything wrong with the thought, exactly, but it brought me to all sorts of places I just wasn’t prepared to go. I fought down a blush, totally without success, and hoped Gary didn’t see it. It took a while to get my heart rate back to normal after that, and visions of Morrison kept popping up in my head. I hadn’t gone out with him. It didn’t seem right for him to hang around my brain, clouding things up.
Wow, again. I’d had a real, honest-to-gosh date. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone on a date. It’d been before my mother died, which meant at least a year ago. My social life was an absolute disaster. I was going to have to call Phoebe and see if she wanted to go out again, although maybe not to the club Thor had seen us at.
Then again, maybe. I felt a grin creep over my face and tried to push it away. I was sitting in the middle of my living room listening to a drum. It was not supposed to be the time to reflect on my personal life. This was the bit where it was all deep and dark and serious and mystical, so I could get inside my own head, or outside of it, and maybe meet a
few spirit animals out there in the black.
That was, of course, the problem with trying to think of nothing. All sorts of somethings kept crowding around in my mind, vying for attention. Morrison, Mark, Thor…for a moment I paused to admire all the men suddenly in my life, then shook my head. Morrison was certainly not a man in my life. I mean, he was, what with being a man and in my life, but he wasn’t a Man in My Life. And a compliment from Thor probably didn’t make him a Man in My Life, either. I was getting a big head.
Mark, on the other hand. Mark was nice to think about. He was quirky and charming and absolutely no doubt too good to be true, and made a warm little bubbly place in my tummy that I liked. I let out a tired, content sigh and thought about Mark until his image dissolved and let me drift thoughtlessly in the dark behind my eyelashes.
Warmth and comfort and safety gradually surrounded me, all caught up in the sound of the drumbeat. My heart had staggered into the drum’s pattern, or maybe the other way around. Both felt languid and unworried, a part of me but not to be terribly concerned with. Distant sparkles glittered and faded in the dark, almost familiar now. I sat myself down, folding my legs yoga-style, and resolved in a laid-back kind of way to be patient. Judy’d said it was easier to do spirit quests for others than for yourself, and while I had good reason not to trust most of what she’d told me, that part actually resounded with some of what I’d read.
I’d asked for help for Gary—and for Colin, though that was something I didn’t want to think about in the middle of my own spirit quest—but doing so now seemed presumptuous somehow. My spirit animals, if they wanted to come to me, might take their own sweet time about it. I just had to be patient.
One of the distant shimmers took on a harder glimmer, making a seared sharp edge of brightness in the darkness. It brought with it color, desert-blue sky meeting red stretches of earth, coalescing at a horizon that seemed a thousand miles away. A road, straight and narrow and plumed with dust, cut toward that horizon, and the hard line of light glinted again. I walked forward, raising a hand against the shadowless skies, and squinted at puffs of dirt ambling up from the far-off vehicle.