by C. E. Murphy
“Technically,” I said, “if they’re sleeping, they can’t be the ones calling in.”
I don’t know why I did things like that. Morrison erupted in a nearly incoherent bellow of frustration while I leaned on Petite’s hood and watched Gary admire his stone. “Captain,” I interrupted when he sounded like he was winding down a little, “get that piece of topaz. It’s the only thing I’ve got that might be protecting people from this. I really mean it, Morrison. Put the topaz in your pocket.”
“How in hell is a rock going to do any good?”
“It’s symbolic, Morrison, if nothing else. Haven’t you ever gone to church?” I hung up before he could answer, although I was suddenly curious as to the answer. My own church-learnings were sketchy at best. Once in a while, and only when we were in the South, Dad would feel the urge to stop by a Baptist temple and absorb some gospel music and the high-rolling passion of belief, but that was as much as I’d ever had in the way of formal church attendance. Still, the power of faith wasn’t something you had to go to church to pick up. I just hoped Morrison would put the stupid rock in his pocket. That conversation had not gone as planned. I don’t know what had made me think Morrison might start listening to reason. Or listening to me, which wasn’t really the same thing at all. I spun the phone in the palm of my hand, trying to decide what to do with it. “Was it only this morning Mel went to sleep?”
“’Fraid so, sweetheart.” Gary lowered his stone, then slid it into his pocket. “Maybe you oughta sleep, Jo.”
I shook my head. “I think that’s a bad idea. I’m already getting stuck in dreams and being blindsided by visions. I don’t want to give this thing any more opportunity to snag me than I have to.”
“And how many is that?”
I looked up. Gary’s white hair was bright with sun, almost glowing, and his eyes were concerned. I smiled despite myself. “Enough to figure out what it is and get everybody free from it. I’m being careful, Gary. As careful as I can be, anyway. If this thing can grab Coyote, it’s a lot stronger than I am.” As if the admission was a weakness, I yawned until my nose stung, and felt my expression go wry. “Maybe I’ll get a caffeine IV and drop by the hospital. If they’ve got Billy and Mel in the same room I might be able to get more off both of them than just the one. Hang on to that rock, will you, Gary? Please?”
“’Course I will.” His eyes sparkled in the sunlight. “I don’t want you givin’ me the look you gave Morrison a minute ago. Coulda peeled paint, and he ain’t even here.”
“That’s my goal in life,” I muttered. “Peel Morrison’s paint.” Something sounded unbelievably wrong with that and I felt my ears heat up. Gary cleared his throat too loudly and looked somewhere else, trying not to grin. I slumped somewhat melodramatically, feeling put-upon, then straightened. “Anyway,” I said, also too loudly, “I’m going to the hospital.”
Gary came around to Petite’s passenger side and bopped his hand against her door handle. “Arright, let’s go.”
“This became a we?” I crawled in and popped the lock on Gary’s door open. He swung down into the seat like it was natural, a marked difference from Morrison, and shrugged.
“I took the day off, doll. Might as well be in on the good stuff. Besides, you kept me out of it last time.”
Like clockwork, guilt swept through me, bubbling around the core of power in my stomach. I reached over without thinking, putting my fingers on Gary’s chest, and magic spilled out.
CHAPTER 17
Magic was okay. Magic was what I expected. What I didn’t expect was the depth it crashed to, wholesale ignoring my intent to work a little good mojo into Gary’s heart and call it done. A jungle rushed up around me, shaking into place with such force I staggered while leaves and branches settled into place with rustling whispers. Water splashed around my ankles, cold and fresh and urgent. I stepped with it, letting its current guide me. Within a few steps it deepened and pulled me off my feet, buffeting me and carrying me to wherever it wanted me to go. I laughed, breathless with surprise, and twisted in the water, looking to see how far back it went.
Following me came a flood of inky-black wings, so rich in their darkness that I could see hints of purples and blues within them. Blackness tainted what it touched, sucking life away. Horror seized me as surely as the stream had and I snatched for shore, trying to stop my plummet before I fell any deeper and brought death to everything that surrounded me.
A big hand reached down and snagged my arm, hauling me out of the water and onto a branch dangling over the river. I yelped and clung to it, dripping and astonished. Below me, darkness bubbled and boiled in place, apparently unable to go farther than I was, regardless of things like physics. I could see it roiling against clean water as if they were two wholly different substances, never meant to mix. From above, it was easier to see into the depths of the black, and to imagine eyes of indigo and violet, fluttering like urgent wings against the air. The rapid, soundless beats carried pressure with them, as if someone had made a corset of the earth’s core and squeezed the breath from my lungs with its weight.
“That what I think it is?”
I twisted my head up to look at Gary, who’d righted himself on a branch above me and was drying his hands on his khaki pants. There was a pink flush to his arms, telling evidence of the burst of strength that had hauled me from the river. His army-issue shirt was a little different this time, Muldoon still printed in yellow block letters on a black nametag over his left breast. Below it, though, there was now a medal, so discreet it faded when I tried looking at it directly, and only reappeared when I caught it from the corner of my eye. His eyebrows had gotten a little farther away from him than they’d been the first time I’d been in the privacy of his own garden, as if he’d learned to see himself as slightly older than he had then, only a few weeks ago. I guessed a heart attack would do that to a guy. His hairline was flushed, too, from hanging upside down to catch me in the river, but his hair was dark and the wrinkles I knew so well had only just started settling into his face.
“Annie was so lucky,” I blurted, and my old/young friend gave me a sly grin that made me laugh and blush at the same time.
“You’re avoidin’ the question, Jo.” He nodded beyond me at the river and the flittering, dangerous surface that tried to rise from it. I shuddered as I glanced at its alien blend, then lay on my stomach and reached down.
Weight swam up my arm, black and heavy, as if it was trying to drag me into the water. Flutters of magic danced through that weight, a feeling like eyelash kisses on my skin. I yawned, and the lethargic murkiness came to life, no longer content to be slow and drowsy. It rose up, not like water at all, but like a wave of enclosing wings that worked to buffet me into them. Oil-slicked patterns formed in the darkness, delicate purple eyes and blue threads between them, familiar without quite being recognizable. Softness swept in around me, diminutive feathers tickling and bearing a promise of sleep making everything all right.
“C’mon, doll.”
I looked up, eyes glittering from holding back another yawn, to find Gary offering his hand and a smile. The lush trees were gone, and he looked younger than I’d ever seen him, in his twenties. His eyebrows were groomed and his smile was as strong and white as it was when he was in his seventies. His uniform was crisp and new, not yet worn comfortably like it was in his self-image a decade hence. A dance floor lay behind him, uniformed men dancing with women in full-skirted dresses. They looked absurdly young and beautiful to my eye, semiformal atmosphere tinged with hope and desire and the rush of falling in love as quickly as possible. Gary tilted his head, an eyebrow rising in a rather endearing look of puppy-dog anticipation. “Don’t break a soldier’s heart, lady.”
I laughed, unduly charmed, and put my hand in his, discovering I wore wrist-length white gloves. A startled glance down at myself told me I was wearing one of those period dresses, too, in a forest-green that I suspected complemented my skin very well. The dress had a prim collared thr
oat opened just far enough to be not that prim after all, and a nipped waist that fitted over my hips and flattened out into pleats. I had no idea I had so much hourglass to my shape, and wondered briefly just how sturdy my underwear had to be to keep me curved that way. My hair brushed forward against my chin, fat black undercurls, and I touched my forehead to discover bangs, just as well coiffed as the rest of my hair. A mirror on the far wall gave me the startling impression the outfit made me look taller, not something I normally needed, and then I was dancing with Gary and no longer worried about my clothes or hair, or even the fact that I couldn’t dance.
Because I could. Whether it was Gary’s lead or magic shoes or the music lending me its gift, I followed him on the dance floor without thinking or worrying about it, and instead laughed and nestled close when the music slowed, unable to remember being so happy. At breaks between songs, other boys cut in and asked to dance, and Gary let me go graciously, unconcerned, and that was as much a reason to come back to him as anything else. There were young men who scowled when their girls danced with someone else, sulking around the edges of the dance floor, but Gary put a hand in his pocket and got a glass of punch and watched, eyes full of confidence and pleasure.
“I thought boys didn’t like to see their girls dancing with other men,” I said when I came back to him after one dance, and he let go a belly laugh that all but knocked me off my feet.
“Darlin’, if they’ve got that much to worry about, I guess I wouldn’t like it, either, in their shoes.” He winked, then cast an exaggerated look toward the dance hall clock and lowered his head to say, “Your mama staying up waitin’ for you to come home at the stroke of midnight?”
I lifted my chin in a mixture of pride and offense. “I’m nineteen years old, Gary Muldoon, and in college. I can go home when I want.”
He gave me a grin that melted all the offense out of my expression, then caught my hand. A moment later we were in sweet-scented woods, Gary offering me his coat as I shivered. I slipped into it, feeling silly for leaving my own coat behind, though a tiny part of me knew I’d done it on purpose so I could huddle in the warmth left from his body. “I’m lost in here,” I protested in amusement, which was more true than I expected. Gary had height and breadth on me even as an septuagenarian. His younger self was wonderfully broad-shouldered.
“That’s whatcha get for leavin’ your coat inside,” Gary teased. “C’mon, this way.” He nodded ahead of us, taking my hand to lead me over a root-ridden forest pathway, an incline leading us to a bluff that looked over a night-black ocean. “They’re sendin’ me to Korea,” he said abruptly.
My heart caught, little white pulse of pain. “When?” Gary watched me out of the corner of his eye, as if afraid of my reaction. I’d let go of his hand, and mine were knotted together in the sleeves of his army jacket, worry tasting like copper at the back of my throat.
“I leave Saturday. You gonna wait for me, sweetheart?”
“Wait for you,” I said quietly. “What do you think I’ve been doing the past four months, Gary?”
Relief swept the big man’s expression and he turned all the way to me, hope bright in his eyes. “It ain’t much, but I wanted to…” He slid a hand into his front pocket and came out with a small black box. My heart caught again, a lurch so profound I wasn’t sure it would start again, and Gary gave me a funny crooked grin as I lifted my gaze to his. “It ain’t much,” he repeated, “but maybe it’s enough. I’ll getcha somethin’ better before we—well, will you? Will you marry me, Annie?” He opened the box and a soft golden glow sprang up from the ring within. I laughed, and touched the stone with a fingertip—
—and flinched awake in a surge of alarm that pushed sleep away. I could feel it consciously now, a pressing blackness trying to enter me more forcefully than it had Billy or Melinda. There, it had the sense of having all the time it needed. With me, it felt disturbed, as if my power drew it out of its usual languor and encouraged it to action. I jerked back from the river, shaking darkness from my skin, and put my hands against my mouth. I didn’t want to look at Gary. I was afraid I’d start crying, which would be impossible to explain.
“Jo?” Concern colored Gary’s voice and I bit my knuckles, eyes wide as I stared into the unblended water. “It’s what you think it is,” I whispered. “It wants to put you to sleep. Or me. I don’t know. It followed me in here. I’m sorry, Gary. I didn’t mean to do this. I just wanted to put a tingle on your heart to help it heal some more.”
“Jo,” he said again, the word more solid. “Darlin’, something’s stoppin’ it. What?”
“The…” I closed my eyes, the yellow chip of stone set into silver metal against a black box playing behind my eyelids. “The topaz,” I whispered. “I think it’s the topaz. It woke me up.”
“Woke you up?”
“I think it’s trying to give me things I want. Dreams. Dreams I want. Like they’re real.” My voice was tight, and I wasn’t sure I was really talking to Gary. The last dream swam around in my mind, its focus on Mark and the mechanic’s job I’d been so happy with. I wondered, sharply, if the only reason it’d lost its hold on me was Morrison’s intrusion into the scene. I wondered, too, if Gary had been able to afford a diamond fifty years ago when he proposed to his wife, if I’d be content to stay in that dream of happiness they’d shared for five decades.
I shook my head, trying to push the questions away, and climbed down the tree so I could crouch at the river’s edge without touching the water. “Come here.” My voice kept playing in that same scratchy whisper, too tight and small to really be heard. “Take the topaz out and take my hand.” I reached for his without looking, waiting until he’d dropped from the tree and done as I asked.
His raw strength rumbled through me, the big V8 engine I always thought of around him. I didn’t so much gather it up as focus it through the topaz, like I was letting the darkness know that this man, at least, wasn’t an easy target. The stone held in our hands thrummed with its own kind of defiance, like it knew what I was doing. I couldn’t sense any natural antipathy for the gem on the part of the darkness, but the rest it offered was far from peaceful, and the topaz seemed to have an opinion about that. I added my own whisper to the barrier against sleep the gem presented, a shoring up of its will, then said to Gary, “Push it out. It’s your mind. Your garden. You’re the one with the power to reject it. I’ll be right behind you.”
War fell down on us, clods of earth spraying from the sky as we crawled forward, doing more than just holding the line against the enemy. We were encroaching on Korean territory, the black scent of powder in the air and screams of anger and fear tearing through smoke and gunshots. I dragged in a breath that somehow sounded too loud in the noise and Gary reached back to silence me, a warning hand lifted. I bit the heel of my hand, tasting mud, and waited.
The surge forward came before I knew it, a final call across the lines that was a promise of victory or death. Enemy fire lashed out in rays of colored heat, more seen in my mind’s eye than in reality. Only the aftermath, puffs of dirt rising where bullets hit, men falling in their path, were truly visible. But for every encroachment I saw another of my brothers in arms stand fast, stagger forward and reclaim a span of land. My vision blurred, confusing me: those warriors had faces of their own, but when I looked too closely they became my face, contorted with determination that bordered on rage. Even my face was a confusing concept; I saw myself, Gary, reflected all around, doing battle against an unseen adversary.
Once routed by even a single step, our attackers fell back, slowly at first and then faster, slipping through cracks and hollows as if they’d never been there at all. As quickly as a syringe might draw blood. And then we met a wall, as if the forty-ninth parallel had been given physical, real presence, and then the enemy lay beyond that wall and I stood at the edge of Gary’s garden, fingers against it, panting from an effort I could hardly conceive of. I thought I saw feathery eyes glowing, dark in the shape of the wall.
/> Then sparks of gold and blue darted through it, the colors of topaz half daring anyone to test them. I dropped my hand with a wheezed laugh and turned to Gary.
He was battle-torn and bleeding, gray eyes gone darker than I’d ever seen them. Youth had fled him, for all that he was no older than he’d been at the USO dance. That boy was gone, though, leaving behind a man who’d learned mortality belonged to everyone. All my laughter fell away and I stepped forward, reaching up to take his face in both hands. “Come on back to me now, Gary. It’s gone. Whatever it is, it’s gone.”
He flinched when I touched him, staring down at me as if I were a stranger to him. Then a shudder ran over him and he folded one of his hands around one of mine, taking it from his face. “Jo.” The name seemed to bring him back to himself a little, and he drew a sharp breath, eyes clearing. “Jesus, I ain’t had dreams like that in forty years.”
I pulled a smile. “I probably would’ve gone for more of a pickup truck with a snowplow metaphor, myself, but whatever works, right? I didn’t know you’d fought,” I said with a little less humor. “I mean, I didn’t know it was like that.”
“It’s not somethin’ I care to dwell on, doll.” He’d folded my hand over his heart and smiled at me. “I figure I’m all shored up now, Jo. Do your trick and get us out of here, you crazy dame. You’ve got a lotta work to do back there.”
“Right.” I slid my hand out of his and turned to the strong wall we’d come to, putting my fingertips against it again. I knew the topaz, steady as stone with its intrinsic gift of quiet sleep had done its work there, but there was something else—
—yes. As much a part of those defenses as anything I’d done, maybe more, rested the complacency of the tortoise spirit that helped protect Gary. I wasn’t at all sure it could keep him awake, but along with his deliberate, forceful rejection of the thing that had followed me into his soul, and the piece of protective stone in his pocket, there was something of a trinity working in his favor now. He’d been struck down twice because of me, once by Cernunnos and once by Faye. I was not going to let it happen again.