by C. E. Murphy
For two weeks I’d been running helter-skelter, looking for answers and quick fixes and a crash course in using the powers that had grown up inside me. I’d drummed and gone in and out of my body until it was halfway natural, and I’d faced up to being stuck with magical talent. All of a sudden I wasn’t sure that facing up was the same as accepting.
An evil spirit had told me that I might very well have to struggle every single day to accept what I was and what I could do. I’d let myself forget about that, because, hey, evil spirits. Standing there staring through my reflection in the dark, I wondered if the message had been right, even if the bearer had used it to confound me. I could not imagine there’d come a day when I was happy or comfortable being a shaman. The idea that my natural skepticism would eventually give up the fight seemed ludicrous.
It also seemed inevitable. How long could I keep not quite believing in my own gifts? How long was I going to wince when somebody like Mark wanted to know about them? I wasn’t even letting him judge for himself whether I was nuts or not. I was doing the job for him, putting it out there so he couldn’t reject me first.
That was uncomfortably like another one of those introspective thoughts I never enjoyed having. I finally focused on my reflection, my eyes dark in the overhead lights. Like it or not, this was who and what I was. I said, “Shit,” under my breath, very quietly, and the black-haired woman in the window looked about as unhappy as I felt.
Conviction, a grim dark feeling of knowing I could pull this off, was right there, waiting for me to sink into it again. I’d done it before, more than once, pulling belief around me like a cloak to be shed when the crisis had passed. I didn’t exactly feel guilty about dropping it when the moment was gone, but I was getting tired of it. I just didn’t know how to stop. I closed my eyes, prickles of weariness stinging the inside of my nose like a warning of tears. The power behind my sternum waited, so calm and patient it felt like mockery. For the first time I could remember I just stood there, paying attention to what it felt like. It was cool and still, mostly centered in my diaphragm, but if I concentrated I felt it welling up higher, running through my veins like blood, as if it was a part of me. If I called up the second sight and looked at my skin, I thought I’d be able to see it, silver and blue and flowing inside me. It wasn’t conscious, but I could be subsumed by it, giving myself over to its strange and scary potential.
The idea terrified me. I wanted to be in control, rational and intelligent and logical, not at the mercy of a healing magic sufficiently greater than myself that I couldn’t even recognize what to do with it half the time.
I also wanted to go in and visit Billy. I opened my eyes again and whispered, “Okay. I’m trying this your way,” to my reflection. “You can do it. It’s who you are. You taught Coyote, remember? Just let yourself…go.”
Feather-soft warmth enveloped me. For an instant I thought I saw a white ghost of wings in the reflection, making a shelter that fell around my shoulders. Inside that hollow place of safety, I felt as though I slid inside myself, a cool drink of water sliding down my insides. It brought the Sight with it, the world visible in two realities for a few seconds, one ordinary and night-dark, the other neon brilliant and vibrating with life. Then the second one settled out, leaving me with whispers of encouragement reverberating through my mind and echoing in the power centered within me. I did my best to formulate a please without making the word, afraid something as mundane as language would screw my attempts up for good, and magic responded.
It burgeoned out of me, pushing out in bubbles and bursts of pleasure at being used, and slithered over my skin like a coat of thick paint. It started with my chest and ran downward, distorting even my own vision so that light bent and I seemed to be looking through myself. It ran over my fingertips and touched the glass, then splashed back up my arm to my throat and face. The last thing I saw was my eyes, oddly gold in the darkness, and then my reflection wasn’t there at all.
Absolute sheer panic erupted in my stomach, cramping it and making cold sweat stand out all over my body as I stared at where I ought to be reflected. I clenched my teeth and breathed in and out like a Lamaze mother, half convinced that if I couldn’t see my reflection, I wasn’t there. I wondered if vampires felt that way, then had to remind myself severely that there was no such thing.
God on high, how I hoped there was no such thing.
The thought seemed to be a source of amusement to the power hiding me from myself. I ground my teeth and willed myself to take a few steps backward, seeing if the magic would hold. To my complete fascination, moving made me visible, but only just: if I didn’t know where to look, I wouldn’t see me. I’d seen news stories about technology that did what I seemed to be doing, projecting images of what was around me over where I was. The tech I’d read about only worked from one direction, but as I peered over my own shoulder, it appeared that magic was a more effective invisibility cloak than technology. A very tiny pop of glee burst through me. There was no actual crisis and I’d talked myself into doing something pretty dramatic with my power. I actually whispered “Thank you” to myself, and headed for the hospital doors.
It was then that it occurred to me to wonder if the hospital’s sliding glass doors were triggered by weight or motion. The question kept me paralyzed for several long seconds as I stared at the doors a few yards ahead. Then someone exited and I made a mad dash inside, never knowing which it might’ve been.
A noseful of sharp sweet hospital smell made me sneeze so explosively I staggered to the lobby chairs, leaning on one while tears ran down my face and I sneezed again. More people than I’d hoped were about at that hour. Every single one of them stared around in confusion at the sneezes evidently coming out of nowhere. I got myself under control and snuffled my way to the elevators, still wiping at my eyes and nose. I couldn’t remember Harry Potter ever having this sort of problem while he was running around in his invisibility cloak. I was going to have to speak to the management.
The elevators and halls upstairs were bustling with exhausted-looking doctors and nurses and the buzz of worried confusion. More and more people were being admitted with the sleeping sickness, and nobody’d woken up yet. I flinched my way around gurneys and frustrated medical personnel, whispering promises to make it better as I slipped into Billy’s room and sank against the door, eyes closed for a few seconds as I muttered another internal thanks to my gifts and let the bubble of invisibility slide off me. Then I shoved away from the door and took two steps before jolting to a halt in complete dismay.
Bradley Holliday was conked out in a chair by Billy’s bed.
CHAPTER 24
My first thought was, shit, what if he wakes up? And my second was, shit, what if he doesn’t? I stood where I was, foot half off the ground with indecision, then swore noiselessly and crept forward. A tile creaked beneath me and Brad snorted and stirred, far more reaction than Billy gave. Despite my not wanting to be caught, my shoulders dropped in relief: far better to have Doc Holliday wake up than go into a permanent sleep like his brother and sister-in-law had. I put my foot down and exhaled carefully, looking around the room.
Mel was in the bed closer to the door, now that I was noticing things. She, like Billy, looked well, except for the unbroken sleep. Brad Holliday looked uncomfortable as hell. I thought about waking him up to save him the crick in his neck, but he probably wouldn’t appreciate it. Besides, I didn’t want to explain how I’d gotten in there.
Which led me to the good news. Nothing had come out of the dark to attack me through my use of power.
The bad news was I could feel the feathery heaviness of sleep in the room, as if it gathered there and waited for something. Even’d get you odds it was waiting for me.
And I didn’t know what to do about it.
I tiptoed to the middle of the room, seeing if I could touch both Billy and Melinda at once. I couldn’t, and edged back to Mel’s bed to see if it could be moved a few inches without noise or pulling any import
ant-looking tubes loose. I didn’t want to try moving Billy. For one thing, he had almost a hundred pounds on me, and for another, it was his bed Brad was next to.
Mel’s bed was actually surprisingly easy to move. I lifted the foot and swung it over eight or ten inches, then snuck forward to move the head as far as I dared. Air stirred around me, thick and slow, and seemed to stick to my skin as I moved. Like tar. I thought of Coyote, and thought, like amber. It took another minute of maneuvering to get the beds close enough together, and then I stood there between them, panting quietly and trying to order my thoughts.
As best I could tell, Billy and Mel had been the first two to go to sleep. I’d spent more time psychically linked with Billy than anybody, and I figured the events of a few weeks past had bound Melinda and me together in some fashion as well. If there was a place to start ending this plague of sleep, it was probably with them.
But I was on my own. Coyote was gone and my forays into other realms were stung left and right with darkness and encroaching sleep. There was a real possibility I wouldn’t be able to snap out of it if I went to do battle with this thing.
I also didn’t see that I had much choice in the matter. I wasn’t going to let my friends die. I wasn’t going to let Coyote have died for nothing.
Besides. A ghost of humor passed through me. At least if I got myself caught by this thing I wouldn’t have to face the embarrassment of seeing Morrison again. That made the prospect of getting stuck in dreamworlds almost appealing. The extra chair in the room was on the far side of Billy’s bed. I didn’t want to move it and risk waking Brad up, so I took a deep breath and knelt down between the two beds, reaching out to touch the sleepers, making myself a conduit. It wasn’t very comfortable. I thought it’d take a while to get myself into a trance state.
Instead, the weight in the room crashed down on me like a waterfall.
The world around me was golden, the color of a warm summer day, but with no sun to light it. The earth itself gave off brightness, mountains glowing with cheer and good purpose. A river cut through the land, gold as the sky and ground, and reached to the horizons. They were farther away than I expected, a certain curvature to the earth, unlike the flatness of the burning world or the near mountains of the blue world. It wasn’t the Middle World, certainly not with the warm glow of the land and no sun in the sky, but this place was the closest yet to my own time and place that I’d seen.
Around me, in the distance and close by, I half heard and half knew that men and women and beasts and plants, all the creatures and things of the world, spoke the same language, communicating easily with one another. It reminded me of Babylon, though the land I’d entered was as different physically as it could be from that city of twisting spires and hanging gardens. That had been a metropolis, and this world was an agrarian desert. For an instant I grasped how they might still be the same thing, but my understanding was lost as red streaks appeared in the sky, pocked and marked like comets.
People fell ill and struggled to survive, their distress worsening with every heartbeat. Accusations rose up, turning a land of joy and peace into something far more like the world I knew. Blame fell down gender lines, anger and fear thrown all around me. The women said it was the men bringing illness, and the men said it was the women. They separated themselves from one another, making the streaks in the sky and the pain of loss even more difficult to bear. A protest formed in my throat and caught there uselessly; watching the world collapse around me was like watching a time-elapsed video of a train station. It moved too quickly and too violently for me to affect. I stood outside it, gasping for air as the world fell down.
And then something slipped through the midst of the world’s breakdown, moving at the same slow, normal rate of speed I did. My eyes, accustomed to the lurching hurry of the dying world, took a few seconds to pick out details that were as much physical as known within the depths of my mind. It wasn’t a human creeping through the world’s end, not on four legs, not furry and sly and furtive.
Coyote.
My heart leapt and lost hope in almost the same instant, leaving me with an ache bordering on whimpers. This coyote’s fur was acid-etched, each thread of it gold and copper and bronze, strong with power. Not a spirit, not a guide, but an archetype, the trickster who helped make and unmake the world. I wondered if every trickster was Coyote, and Coyote every trickster, one eternal concept that took form however the people thought to see it. That left me with the bemusing idea that Coyote and Brer Rabbit were exactly the same thing underneath, and for an instant I saw through to the truth of that. Saw, not just saw, the very concept that lay beneath Coyote’s recognizable form.
A fractal pattern exploded in my vision. Chaos bled in bright beautiful spikes, sometimes doing damage where it struck, other times ricocheting into mutation, creating new life. It wasn’t caring or uncaring or anything but there, senseless in the way that most of the universe often seemed to be.
Curiosity hung over it like a cloud, not an inherent part of its random magic, but so heavily imposed by limited human understanding that it seemed to wear that impulse like a cloak. I kept my eyes wide, afraid to blink for fear I’d lose sight of that thread, and while I watched the cloak shifted. Rabbits and spiders, gods I could name, like Loki, and an astonishing series of creatures and beings I couldn’t, interspersed with a handful of icons so familiar they made me laugh despite the oddness—Charlie Chaplin and Daffy Duck—shimmered through that cloak, and then it settled down again into a coyote shape, leaving my eyes burning.
I had thought Cernunnos with his Wild Hunt had been a thing of chaos. I stared, still unblinking, at Coyote darting through the people of the yellow world, and understood with great surprise that Cernunnos had been an agent of order, if there was such a thing. He belonged to rules and a pattern of life and death, only able to lead the Hunt in certain times, in adherence to specific ritual. He had made his play to be a creature of chaos, trying to break free of the place written for him in the laws of creation, and I’d put him back in his box.
I wondered where the hell that put me, in that pattern of life and death, order and chaos. Did I straddle some kind of neutral line? That seemed pretty much unspeakably arrogant. I made a face at myself and pushed the thought away. With any luck there would be plenty of time later for navel-gazing and deciding my place in the universe. For the moment I scurried after Big Coyote, just as grateful, all things told, that my sight had settled out and I didn’t have to look at his discordant soul.
Behind me, the men went to live on one side of the river and the women on the other, never to be together again. The crimson slashes faded from the sky, and Coyote explored the world in front of me, nosing high and low. He dipped his nose in the river and pulled something out, and even I knew enough about Coyote and chaos to think uh-oh.
Storms rose up all around, dark colors coming from each direction. Rain fell and water began to rise. I turned back to the village separated by the river, finding men and women together again and climbing frantically up an endlessly tall hollow reed that stretched to the sky. I waited for all the men and all the women, all the animals and insects and the winds and the people of every sort to climb as high as they could, and then climbed up myself, looking for a new world to live in.
But the water kept rising, and the reed didn’t reach high enough. Spider-people wove webs for us to climb, and the insects made their way to the hard shell of sky and began to gnaw and chew and break their way through, until finally there was a hole big enough to scramble through. All the creatures of the world made their way through and gathered around the hole, watching to see what happened.
And the water kept rising, threatening to flood this world, too, just as it had done with the old one. Every world had an end, and I realized I was once more throwing power out, this time like I was the little Dutch boy. The hole in the world wouldn’t plug up, and from the corner of my eye I saw Coyote slinking away, his head hung low from the weight of carrying something. I s
houted “Coyote!” and he stopped, shoulders hunching high.
I strode to him, men and women and beasts and bugs making way for me, and stood above him. “What are you carrying, Coyote?”
He wouldn’t meet my eye. Instead he lowered his head farther, gently putting a bundle on the ground. A black-haired baby looked up at me, his dark hair streaming very long.
For one wretched moment visions collided with memory and dreams, and the child lying wide-eyed and serious, bundled there on the ground, was my own. For that moment all the sorrow of a child lost was my own, and the breath I took caught in my chest until it brought tears to my eyes.
I had never planned to keep them, not at fifteen. Not having been myself dumped on a father who didn’t want me by a mother I’d grown up assuming didn’t like me. I had wanted them to grow up in a home where they were wanted and loved and could be raised by adults able to care for children. I wasn’t ready. The only way I could see to love them was to let others be their parents. I’d known from the start they wouldn’t stay with me.
But the girl, Ayita, first to dance in Cherokee, had left long before I thought she would. She was born second, the only moments of her brief life that she spent apart from her brother Aidan those few while he blinked at the outside world and waited for her arrival. They nestled together in life just as they’d done in the womb, tiny bodies huddled in an incubator as I watched Ayita fade away. Aidan’s eyes seemed clearer after she died, as if the two had only had enough life force for one, and she, smaller and weaker, had given Aidan the strength he needed to survive their early birth. It was his gaze I saw reflected in the serious little person before me, though I’d only seen him for a matter of hours before he went to live with his family.
I had not known much joy in my life after that. The image of a silver key, buried thirteen years, flashed through my mind. Buried since I realized I was pregnant, keeping me apart from the heritage the makers of the world planned for me. I had not been any unhappier in the half a lifetime since then than I had ever been before it, but I had not been happier, either. It was a hitching point, the center of my spider-webbed soul, and the only thing I’d given myself over to fully in the intervening years was lavishing attention on my Mustang. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat to give myself voice.