by C. E. Murphy
I said, “Okay,” and opened my eyes again in the real world. My hand fell away from Gary’s chest and he took a deep, startled breath, then looked at me, gray eyes opened wide. I said, “I don’t know,” before he could speak, and rubbed the heel of my hand against my breastbone. Scattered thoughts danced through my mind, barely letting me catch hold of them. “Unless it’s following me. I might’ve gotten its attention, poking around at Billy and Mel.” I was speaking more to Petite’s dashboard than anything else, and Gary kept quiet, letting me talk. “I’m trying to think. I’ve been falling in and out of trances all over the place the past couple days.” I tried for a smile. “See how I said that, like it was totally normal?”
He gave me a quick grin and I leaned forward to put my hands and forehead against the steering wheel. “But that was the first time since Billy went to sleep that I’ve tried healing anybody. I ran a diagnostic on Erik—”
Gary laughed. I found I couldn’t blame him, and returned a sheepish smile. “Well, I did. But I didn’t try healing him, and that was before the dream at Mel’s bedside, anyway. I think…crap, Gary.” I sat up again. “I think if I try healing anybody I might lead this thing right into them. Come on,” I said to the roof, and the sky beyond that, and to any gods who might be listening beyond that, “I finally agree to play ball and now I don’t get to? What kind of joke is that?”
“Cosmic irony,” Gary offered in a dry voice. I eyed him, then exhaled and nodded, tapping my fingertip against the steering wheel.
“Change of plans.” My voice sounded hoarse again. “I’ve got to learn more about this thing, Gary. Even if it sucks me up, I’ve got to try. Maybe just one thing will go right today.”
My cell phone rang.
CHAPTER 18
I shrieked and dropped the damned thing in the foot well, nearly stomping it for good measure, and decided to let it ring. After the fourth ring Gary gave me a look I preferred not to interpret and reached for it, answering with a gruff “H’lo?” A moment later he handed it over, looking sanguine. “It’s for you.”
I muttered, “I’m going to kill you,” and took the phone. “I’d hate for you to think I was following you,” a woman’s voice said, “but if your personal business is necking with older men in your Mustang, do you really think that’s more important than being at work?”
It took a few seconds for the voice to click. Then I dropped against the headrest and groaned. “Ms. Corvallis.”
“Officer Walker,” she said far too cheerfully. “He’s not really my type, but whatever floats your boat. Sugar daddy?”
“What do you want, Ms. Corvallis?” I didn’t want to call her Laura, for fear of creating some kind of bond between us.
“I want to know what you’re doing, Officer Walker, since it doesn’t seem to be protecting Seattle’s citizens. I’m almost certain that’s your job description.”
“I’m…” I had no answer for her. Gary, who knew whom he’d handed over to me, raised a finger in suggestion. I put my thumb over the mouthpiece and lifted my eyebrows at him.
“Why doncha just tell her?”
“Tell her.” I more mouthed the words than spoke them, afraid she’d somehow overhear. “That some kind of mystical, contagious virus is making people sleep and I’m trying to find its source?”
“You could leave out the mystical part,” he suggested. I gave him a dirty look that gradually faded into a moue of surprised agreement. Maybe it would get her off my back. I took my thumb off the mouthpiece.
“Actually, you might be able to help me.”
“Really.” I couldn’t tell if she sounded amused or delighted. “Do tell, Officer Walker.”
I pressed the heel of one hand against Petite’s steering wheel. “I’m trying to find the source of this sleeping sickness. You’re a news reporter. You’ve probably got easy access to files, right? If you could look up every case of unexplained sleeping sickness since the seventh of January…”
“That’s the day after the lights went out,” Corvallis said. The woman didn’t miss a beat. I wished she had. “What’s the relationship?”
I really didn’t want to say, “Me.” I glowered at Gary. This was his fault, somehow. He didn’t seem to be bothered by my glowering. “If you can find that out, Ms. Corvallis, you’ll be on to something.” I was putting a lot of faith in me being such an unlikely link she’d never figure it out. “One more thing.”
“What?” She sounded like a cat pouncing.
“The origin point’s probably not going to be anything handy like a CDC containment-facility breach. It’ll just be people going to sleep for no reason and not waking up.”
“How do you know this?”
I sighed and pushed Petite’s door open, climbing out and closing it with a thump before answering.
“Magic.”
Wednesday, July 6, 4:50 p.m.
Gary followed me back upstairs once I got Corvallis off the phone, and I paused to stare longingly at the day-old doughnuts on the counter before going to take my contacts out for the first time in days. The problem with not sleeping—one of them, anyway—was I got used to the idea that I could see, so I tended to forget to give my eyes a break. Gary, the heartless monster, was eating doughnuts when I came back out wearing my glasses. “What’re we doin’ now, doll?”
I stared hungrily at his doughnut. “I have to go inside again. You shouldn’t be eating that.”
“You’re the one who can’t be grounded, Jo.”
“I know, but it’s not nice to torture me.” Gary waved the doughnut at me, filling my nose with its scent and my gaze with his gleefully malicious grin. “Are you trying to torture me?”
“Somebody’s gotta.”
I shook my head and sat down in the middle of my living room floor, spine straight and hands on my knees. Gary blinked and scurried for my drum, but before he started drumming I was halfway to my garden, flashing through what had once been a difficult journey. Once the drumbeat kicked in I fell completely into myself, deeper and faster than I was accustomed to. Good cheer bubbled up through me, infiltrating my power and making my skin tingle even as I left my body behind. I was maybe starting to get the hang of this shamanism thing.
I already had the key in my pocket when I stepped into the garden, and took too little time to glance around at the green growing things springing up all around. The misty southern end of the garden seemed to be farther away this time, though a handful of steps folded space and I found myself standing in cool drifting fog in front of the door I’d willed into being. I stepped through it, still trying not to think too hard about what I was doing, for fear it would bungle my plans.
The one person I’d been able to speak with through the wall of sleep had been Coyote. I had no doubt that what I was facing was as dangerous to me as he thought it was, but unless I could find out more, I’d be going into battle unarmed, and no matter how you cut it, that couldn’t be good. Passing through the crater and desert to Coyote’s entrance place was easier this time, too, as if I’d made tracks in my mind with the first journey, and, like a river, power took the path of least resistance.
The good humor turned into a brief body-shaking chuckle. Working through me was probably the path of most resistance any kind of magic could have taken. Coyote’d once told me— and it had been independently verified by a clairvoyant dead girl—that my soul was a new one, cooked up by worldcreating archetypes who wanted an unburdened conduit to help heal the world with. I almost felt sorry for Grandfather Sky. I could not possibly be what he’d had in mind.
Too bad for him I was what he’d ended up with. I found Coyote’s entrance spot and curled up in it, much more comfortably this time, though I maintained my own form. I didn’t want to broadcast my presence as loudly as I had before, cautious for once about announcing myself to whatever held Coyote trapped in amber darkness. I needed an image that wouldn’t draw attention, which purple Mustangs speeding through the desert definitely would.
Tumbleweeds
popped to mind. They were completely out of my natural vehicle-based analogy, but they certainly fit into deserts, and could bounce along to wherever the wind drove them. I wasn’t sure how to direct a tumbleweed, but on the other hand, dreams were as random as wind gusts, too, so I wrapped semiwistful thoughts of Coyote in spiky tumbleweed images and let them scour their way across the desert floor. Wisting was easier than I liked to admit to, not just because I badly felt in need of some guidance. Coyote in his man form was wonderfully easy on the eyes, and that might’ve had a bit of effect on his wistability.
Of course, that put me in mind of Mark, which brought a dumb smile to my face until I remembered his sister and Morrison.
Concentrate on the job at hand, Joanne.
My tumbleweeds took the self-directed reprimand and spun into the air with it, sending me soaring on vast howling winds through blinding sand. Dizziness swept me, the vertigo of a falling dream, and darkness closed in all around, the blue desert sky funneled away. Stars took its place, hard and bright in the cold night. The scent of baked sand, its heat now lost but distantly remembered by my nostrils, lingered at the back of my throat. I floated a few inches above myself, lying on ground too hard to be comfortable and too smooth to be uncomfortable. I lifted a hand to point at the stars above, and could see myself twice, spirit and physical body both making the motion, like the shadow of a bad photocopy.
I traced a shape in the stars and heard an older voice say, “What do you see?” A man’s voice, one I didn’t know at all, and yet did. I couldn’t get my head to turn so I could look toward the speaker.
“A raven.” I dropped my hand. “I see ravens everywhere.”
“As guides,” my grandfather said hazarding a guess, but I could tell from his voice he said it only to give me something to continue from. I shook my head against the sand, staring up at the corvidae in the sky.
“As a path.” I sounded pretentious even to myself and tried again. “As a warning. A choice. It’s scarier than a guide. It would be something else if it was a guide. It wouldn’t be a trickster.” Now I sounded confident, though I faltered again as my grandfather asked, “What would it be?”
“I don’t know. But not a raven. I see shadows of other animals around it, but the raven is the important one to me.”
“Your spirit animal,” my grandfather offered, but I shook my head again.
“Someone else’s. Mine hasn’t come yet.”
Surprise, wholly my own, coursed through me. This dream was out of sequence, before the sweat lodge or the day I’d seen myself and my father’s car out in the desert. Whosever dreams I was sharing, he hadn’t yet experienced some of the things I’d dreamt, our disjointed realities not yet converged. I crunched up, hoping to pull my spirit into a sit so I could twist and look down at myself and see whose body I inhabited.
Instead I snapped free and flew up to the stars on raven wings.
They say stars appear to be different colors because of interference in the atmosphere. Maybe it was my nearsightedness, but I’d never thought stars twinkled yellow and blue and the various other colors people assigned to them. I always thought they pretty much looked white, up there in the night sky. I supposed it was a limited existence, but I’d gotten used to it.
So the stars taking a clear bend toward amber struck me as noticeably odd. They left tracks in my vision, streaks of warm gold as I passed through them, and instead of the night getting darker it turned warmer and thicker, until I felt like I was struggling through honey. In time I stopped moving, wings straining to beat against the weight that held them, and the stars began to take shape.
They coalesced into a slow golden form, shining as brightly as Big Coyote’s every hair did, though without the pinprick edge that made him seem more than real. Shoulders, hips, a mane of long hair; they were familiar to me, though I was used to seeing them in Little Coyote’s normal colors, brick-red and black, not starlight and sable. Triumph should have welled in my breast, except my plan in finding Little Coyote had not included getting stuck in amber-laden stars. He was much, much larger than life, as if I was seeing him from a raven’s point of view, and the expression he turned on me was sad and worried. I drew breath to tell him it was all right, when I realized how very all right it wasn’t.
Night’s blackness had butterfly eyes in it. All the hints and shapes of colors I’d seen in my dreams and visions, when I’d tried searching pulling Billy and then Mel out of sleep, when I’d drawn this demon toward Gary, finally resolved into something recognizable. I’d known the form without recognizing it; butterflies weren’t something that I thought of as malicious, and the familiarity of form had simply slipped by me.
Little Coyote’s hair, strung out through the sky like a spiderweb, was caught by indigo and violet spots, watching us. If I took my gaze away from the darkness and concentrated on Coyote, I could see the ripple of life that went through the watching eyes, like endless wings fluttering in a breeze I couldn’t feel. Under different circumstances, the living night might have been overwhelmingly beautiful, traces of green and blue so dark they could hardly be seen washing through the empty spaces of sky. Instead, the feeling of being examined sent a stab of fear directly through the center of my power, beneath my breastbone. It hurt in an almost familiar way, like the cold of a silver blade being slammed through my chest.
For a painful, unfunny moment, laughter bubbled up through that familiarity. Karmically speaking, it was probably less like having a sword shoved through me than a butterfly collector’s pin. I focused hard on Coyote, afraid if I let that idea get too far out of hand I’d see a giant needle piercing me through. To my relief, I didn’t see any such thing in Coyote’s starry self, just an outline of sorrow and regret written in the stars. He’d told me to stay out of the ether. Just then it struck me that he might’ve had a good reason for doing that. I could feel amber hardening around me, sticking me in place, and behind my breastbone, the slow build of panicked power. My only thought was to release it like a grenade, a concussive explosion that might shatter the golden warmth that held us, but there were a number of problems with that plan.
First, I didn’t know if my power could even be used that way. I remembered, as if through someone else’s mind, an already-dead shaman telling me there was more than one path to be had, and that some shamans chose the warrior’s path. The implication had been that that was the road I was expected to travel, and I could make an argument for it with my experiences thus far. Whether that meant I could go commando on a sleepy butterfly monster’s ass was not a question I’d thought to cover in Shamanism 101.
Second, and somewhat more important, I had a sinking feeling that if I went the blow shit up route, Coyote and I would get blown up, too. That was the problem with grenades. They weren’t picky about who they exploded. Coyote and I both knew how to shield ourselves, but me going kerblewy struck me as the psychic equivalent of friendly fire. It didn’t really matter how friendly the fire was if it went off on your side of the barricade. I’d needed answers, but coming to Coyote to find them might very well have killed both of us, and now I didn’t know how to get out of it.
We stared at each other across what felt like an impossible distance, the space between stars, and Coyote inclined his head, slow movement in the amber.
It looked horribly like a goodbye.
CHAPTER 19
I came awake with my heart sick in my throat and my ears ringing. My vision had streaks of golden stars in it, the aftermath of a rupture of power that looked like something I would do accidentally, not something my irritable guide would do deliberately. The butterfly darkness had swept over him so quickly it’d seemed to devour him, one moment his lanky form and starlit eyes saying goodbye and the next all the sarcasm and smart-mouthing drowned in blackness. My eyes burned and my chest hurt, like I was waiting for tears.
“Jo?” Gary crouched in front of me, a big mass of man that I could only see as an abstract shape, my gaze still focused on things that had happened
in other worlds. “Jo,” he said again, more urgently, then took a big breath and blew it in my face as if I were a baby screaming the last air from her lungs.
It worked just as effectively, too, making me drag in a sharp, startled breath and blink, which went a long way toward relieving the pain in both my lungs and eyes. It did nothing for the sickness in my heart, though, and the second breath I took exited again as a shuddered, “Oh, God.”
“What happened, Jo?” Gary’s bushy eyebrows were drawn in concern and he had both hands on my shoulders, grip tight enough to hold me up. I diverted my gaze to him, still staring almost sightlessly, then leaned forward to wrap my arms around him and knot my hands in his shirt. I was afraid I might collapse if I let go. “Joanie? What the hell’s goin’ on, sweetheart?”
“I think Coyote just committed suicide to keep me safe.” My belly knotted as I spoke and I lurched to my feet, scrambling for the bathroom. A minute later I wasn’t sure if I was grateful to Gary or not, as it was largely his fault I had nothing in my stomach to heave up. I tried, anyway, stomach twisting and clenching as tears fell from my eyes. Gary followed me into the bathroom and crouched beside me again, waiting until I fell back against the bathtub before speaking.
“What happened, Jo?”
I wiped my hand over my mouth, shaking my head as tears rolled down my cheeks, my eyes still wide and aching. “I think it ate him. The bad thing. He let go this huge burst of power, and he was so tired before, Gary.” I stared at the old man without quite seeing him, my whole body shaking with chills.