by C. E. Murphy
His inner world was nothing like I would have imagined. I’d have guessed his garden might be like mine, clean lines and short-cropped grass, with everything in its place. Hedges trimmed, pathways paved, all ordered and restrained.
The place I stepped into was breathtakingly tumultuous. I stood on a craggy ledge above evergreen wilderness, wind strong enough to push me off balance. The sky above whipped with clouds that did little to dim the brightness of the day, a hard white sun blazing heat down on me. The horizons were faint with blue mountains, snowcapped peaks catching the sun and setting it free again. The air buffeting me scented of the outdoors, earth and rain and green things.
A whitewater river crashed far below me, enough that its rush only came up on blasts of wind instead of being a constant. It bent into the woods, glimpses of it visible in low points where valleys spread with low-brush meadows instead of trees. Irritable squirrels chittered at me, a bird of prey circling overhead as I gaped. It wasn’t the lush jungle that Gary carried in him and it was further from my own small, ordered garden than I could have dreamed. It was a place of confidence and raw beauty and stark challenges.
And there was a darkness in it, behind me where bare, broken stone became pristine forest again. The sleeping god drew strength through that point of darkness, and that was where I had to go and cut him off. I took a deep breath of the clean air, feeling regret prick at my eyes, and turned away from the vista to face the woods.
Morrison was waiting there, behind me. He leaned against a spruce tree, its rough grey bark between his shoulderblades, with one foot kicked out and crossed over the other, hands in his pockets. Even in his own mind, he wore a button-down shirt, solid slate blue and soft-looking, like brushed flannel. He wore jeans, not slacks, and boots sturdy enough for hiking or working. I looked at my feet, wondering which of us would have the height advantage. He would: I wore tennies.
I looked up again to catch an indecipherable half smile on his mouth. His hair was as silvered in his self-perception as it was in reality. Either there was no vanity about graying, or he knew the look was attractive on him. He didn’t say anything, so I said the first thing that came to mind: “What’s the J stand for?”
Morrison actually laughed, glancing away as he let go a burst of chuckle, then pushed off the tree and walked up to me. He had the height advantage by at least an inch. I restrained the impulse to stand on my toes, or change my shoes. “James,” he said, completely to my surprise. I didn’t think he’d tell me.
“J—Jay—mmm—your parents named you Jim Morrison?”
Real amusement curled my boss’s mouth. He shrugged, easy casual movement I couldn’t remember seeing him use before, and said, “There’s a reason I go by Michael. Nobody in their right minds in 1968 would call a boy with the last name of Morrison ’Jim.’ I was named for my grandfather. So was Holliday,” he added, and it took me a moment to parse that he meant Billy’d been named after his own grandfather, not Morrison’s.
I said, “Oh,” reflexively, because that explained his unfortunate name. I’d never known.
“How’d you know about the J?” Morrison was alarmingly relaxed. Never, in four years of acquaintance, had he been so pleasant with me. Then again, I was quite literally and completely on his territory.
“I—you went to sleep.” My hand fluttered up to my forehead as I squinched my eyes apologetically. “I had to look at your driver’s license to fill out your insurance paperwork at the hospital. Sorry.” I meant it. Morrison pushed his lips out, then shrugged one shoulder again, just as easily as before. Apparently I was forgiven. If I’d known it was that easy, I’d have…I didn’t know what. Snuck inside his head earlier didn’t seem likely.
“I’m sleeping,” Morrison said, as if he’d just caught up with that. I pressed my lips together and nodded. His eyebrows rose fractionally. “So what is this? A dream?”
“Are you in the habit of dreaming about me?” My mouth bypassed my brain once more. I considered giving myself an emergency tonguectomy. Morrison’s eyebrows went back down, eyes turning stormy blue, and he didn’t answer, which was probably all to the good. “You’re not dreaming.” I cast my gaze at his workboot-clad feet and muttered the words at them. “I had to shield you, and now the only way I can get you loose of the shield is to take the thing that’s keeping you asleep and hook it up to me instead of you. And I have to do that from inside. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying not to snoop.”
“Hook it up to you,” Morrison repeated. That was the part I hadn’t wanted him to catch. I twisted my lip in discomfort and nodded. He said, “Absolutely not.”
“Morrison—”
“Walker!” Ah. That was the boss I knew. “This isn’t a negotiation.”
“No, sir,” I said with a sigh, “it isn’t. If I don’t do this, when I go to fight this thing it’s going to follow this link right into you and suck you dry. I would rather die. But if you’d like to not be pigheaded about this, for once I don’t actually think I’m going to die, so it’d be nice to just get this done and then I’ll be out of your head. I promise.”
“Why me?” And there was another part I’d hoped he wouldn’t pick up on. “Why not Holliday?”
“Because Billy can shield himself, and he wasn’t the one dating half the monster.”
I saw all the obvious questions and all their answers dart through Morrison’s eyes. What he said, after a measured few seconds, was, “Who’s dating the other half?”
Laughter caught me off guard and I said, “God, I love—” before my tongue fell down my throat and tried to strangle me. I choked, coughed and wheezed “—the way your mind works. Sir,” as I wiped tears from my eyes. “I am. Of course I am. Because what fun would it be if I was just having a normal social life.”
“What was that at the restaurant, Walker?” That was as abrupt a transition as I tended to make. My hands went cold and I skittered a glance toward Morrison. The wind around us still blew wildly, and the light had grown gradually dimmer.
I closed my eyes against the first spatters of raindrops. “Does it really matter, sir?”
“It might,” he said in such a peculiar voice I opened my eyes again. But he’d let it go, or moved on, stepping away from me to look out over the evergreen valley. I half turned, watching him. Lightning split the sky in the distance, and moments later a puff of smoke rose up from the trees. “Barb woke up when you called,” he said eventually. “She said I should be flattered that my officers worried about me that much. She said—” and now he looked back at me, though I wished he wouldn’t “—she said she’d have thought you were jealous, if you weren’t dating her brother. I told her she was being ridiculous.”
My chin came up a little, like I’d taken a hit. That, then, was what I should have said when he’d accused me of the same thing. Pounding on Petite’s horn and confessing to the green-eyed monster hadn’t been the right move. As if that was a surprise. For some reason I said, “Why’d you tell her that?”
“Because it’s what anyone would expect me to say.”
We weren’t high enough in the mountains for the air to suddenly be so thin. I clenched my fists and tried to breathe, not knowing what to say, or how to say it. After a little while Morrison looked out at the valley again. The skies went darker, and rain began to come down harder. “The next thing I remember is this conversation.”
“You’re—” Damnit. I could feel it, a thread that didn’t lie flat in the weaving of his story. It’d bumped up and tangled when I’d found myself unable to speak. I curled my hands into fists and stared at the granite beneath my feet, frustration washing off me in waves. I felt them, and if I’d wanted to slide the second sight on, I had no doubt I’d see them, too, bright silver-blue splashes of power coming off me like a beacon in the dark. “What do I say, Morrison? How am I supposed to get out of this conversation alive? You’re my boss. What do you want me to tell you?”
“The truth,” Morrison said. “I wonder if you’ve got so much as a passin
g acquaintance with the truth, Siobhán.”
My heart twisted hard, drawing a rough small sound from my throat. My knees seemed to have stopped working, because I was abruptly on them, kneeling on hard rock and reaching for stone to grind my hands against. I still couldn’t breathe easily, or maybe it’d gotten worse. “Not fair, Morrison. Not fair at all.”
He looked down at me. “Isn’t it?”
I could feel more than the wondering, in the air of the wild valley. For a moment, as he asked that, something thin and hard pulled taut, a fishline that made a vulnerable space inside him. A space that the goddamned topaz was supposed to protect. Only he’d given it away, and I only saw one way to seal it up again.
“What kind of truth do you want?” I said, more to the view than to Morrison. “My name is Siobhán Grania MacNamarra Walkingstick. I—” I swallowed the next words, then clenched my stomach muscles, forcing myself to speak. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen—” I cast a quick look at my boss, almost an apology. “Out of stupidity, not violence.” That much, at least, I could give him, for the concern he’d shown more than once in the last couple of days. Every breath was an agonizing challenge to my too-tight throat.
“I had twins, a boy and a girl. Ayita, the girl, died right away. Aidan’s growing up somewhere in Cherokee County. I don’t date because I’m scared of repeating my mistakes.” New thunder rumbled, this time the sound of blood in my ears, and I raised my voice over it. “Which probably leads directly to—” I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say falling for or loving, and I didn’t want to use a phrase as stupid as crushing on or its ilk. The weaker word I defaulted to was hard enough: “Caring. For someone totally unobtainable.” It took a long time to make myself clarify that further, to push the words out: “For you.”
“I’m dating Mark because he was the nearest cliff for me to jump off, after she turned up looking all cute and perky and…cute.” There was another cliff right in front of me that I could jump off. The idea held appeal. “It is ridiculous, and I’m sorry, and I’m also not particularly proud of my behavior. So if that’s enough truth, if it’d be all right, I’d like to just go get this monster off your back now so you can wake up and I can do my job.”
“I think you already have.” Morrison’s voice was light and hollow, unlike I’d ever heard it before. I looked up, then looked back toward the woods.
Black threads, flowing and alive with butterfly darkness, swam from me into the woods, and far beyond that. They danced beyond Morrison’s personal area and back into the battleground of dreams that I intended to fight in. I stared at the link without comprehension, unsure when I’d slipped myself between Morrison and Begochidi.
Oh, said the sarcastic voice, probably when you played ball and admitted, with your usual lack of grace, the truth. I didn’t know who was more surprised by my answers, Morrison or the sleeping god, but either way, I’d made somebody do a double take, and when the power reattached, it did so to the magical powerhouse instead of the police captain. I said, “Good,” in a harsh small voice, and flapped a hand at Morrison. “Go. Wake up. Get out of here, boss. You wake up and my dream of you will end and then I can go fight this thing.” There was no real reason it should work that way, except I wasn’t traversing the dreamworld as an ordinary sleeper. I could move in and out of my shamanic trances here, and generally when I wanted to wake up from one of those, I did. The rule should hold.
Except it didn’t. Morrison took a breath as if he were waking up, but it caught and held like the blankets were too heavy in the morning. Perplexity danced across his expression and I got the idea that Morrison never had mornings when the blankets weighed too much. “I can’t,” he said in some astonishment. “I never have trouble waking up.”
“You probably never sleep hard enough to,” I muttered. “Come on, Morrison. Wakey wakey.”
“I’m trying,” he said irritably. “I feel like something’s keeping my eyes closed.”
“Begochidi. Damnit!” The first word was under my breath, the second a shout at the skies. “He’s not yours, you redheaded bitch! You want a taste of something that’ll get you through the day, try me!” Power flared with my outburst, silver burning away the black threads that tied me to the dreamworld. Heat sizzled with a nasty dark smell, and Morrison himself flinched. I couldn’t fight from here, inside his garden. It would destroy his mind or his soul or something equally important. I swore again, taking two long strides over to my boss. “This always works in fairy tales.”
I slid my fingers into Morrison’s hair and brought his mouth down to mine for a kiss.
CHAPTER 33
It turned out an inch in shoe height wasn’t enough for either of us to have to give ground in order to share a kiss. It turned out all the times I’d thought he was close enough to kiss hadn’t been quite right, either. There was a hell of a difference between what I thought of as close enough to kiss and actually closing that last half inch or so. Frustration and anger and needing to get the job done and innumerable other emotions spilled away in the compass of Morrison’s arms, leaving me light-headed and warm and absurdly, blazingly happy. Silver-blue peaked and swooped all around me, a dance of joy that lit the insides of my eyelids.
The best part was Morrison kissed me back. There wasn’t even a moment of complete startlement where he drew away before giving in to it. For a few brief, glorious seconds it was just the two of us, surprise flaring through Morrison’s rich colors until our blues tangled together for an instant. Desire and pleasure zinged through me so brightly I blushed. I wondered if astral sex was better than real sex, or just different, and if a girl could manage both at once. Then reality, such as it was, intruded, and I pushed Morrison away. He blinked down at me twice, and the second time, the Rocky Mountain wilderness disappeared from all around me and left me falling through a place between dreams.
There was a sensation of gray cloudiness in the midst of formless nothing, instantaneous and immediate. For a moment I thought I might get away with sneaking through the dreamworld and taking Begochidi unawares, if only I could find my bearings.
My bearings found me first. I tumbled to an upright stop, still breathless and dizzy, though I could no longer tell if that was from falling or kissing. Either way, I had about enough time to look around before a maw of butterflies cropped up out of the dark and swallowed me.
Typically, this was the point at which I would either panic, shriek and try to run, or dig my heels in and hang on to where I was with everything I had. Getting sucked into a vortex of butterflies—or anything else; getting sucked up by vortexes in general just couldn’t be good—was not the best game plan a girl could come up with. Ideally, I’d take a lance and a white charger and gallop my way through the dream realms to throw down a gauntlet at a god’s feet and challenge him to single combat.
But I didn’t have a gauntlet, much less a lance or a white charger, and I hadn’t ridden a horse since I was fifteen, anyway. I had to trust to my silver sword and my array of shields, and I had to find Begochidi one way or another. Letting him scoop me up and bring me to the battlefields seemed as practical an arrival as any.
Butterflies melted all around me, dark dangerous colors bleeding into ordinary walls in a room with no floor. I fell at an alarming rate, jerking upward into wakefulness with a lurch of my heart that made me feel sick. Gary dropped my drum and caught my arm, concern in his eyes. “Jo? Jeez, there you are. You been sleepin’ for a week, Joanie.”
I stared around me at the familiar walls of my apartment, then sank back into my couch with a groan. My left wrist ached like hell, pounding and burning as if a rope had been twisted around it and pulled. I wrapped my fingers around it, encountering smooth heat that I rubbed without looking. The ache went up my arm to throb in my heart. Taking a deep breath lessened the pain enough for me to focus on what Gary’d said.
“A week?” My voice sounded dry, as if I hadn’t drunk anything for…well. Days. “What’s happening? What’s going on? I’ve been havin
g…” I stopped rubbing my wrist and went for my eyes instead, turning over to bury my face in the couch back. The throb came back, less intent as I mumbled, “Awful dreams.” Except the one about kissing Morrison. I felt a tiny grin develop. “Mostly awful.” I rolled back over to stare at Gary, whose bushy eyebrows were drawn down. “I dreamed Morrison had a girlfriend. A cute little redhead. I hated her.”
Gary’s eyebrows went down further, until his eyes disappeared beneath the gray beetles of them. “Mike?” His voice rose, worry still evident in it. My own eyebrows went down far enough to give me a headache. I didn’t know any Mikes. The closest I’d come was what’s his face in my dream. Hey, I’d had a boyfriend in my dream, too. I guess it was fair for Morrison to have a girlfriend, if I got to have a boyfriend. I squinted my eyes shut, trying to remember my guy’s name. Matt. Something like that. Good-looking, sandy-haired. Maybe I needed to conk out for a week more often. His image was already fading, nebulous as a dream.
“She’s awake,” Gary said, presumably to somebody else, since I knew I was awake. “She’s been dreamin’ you got a bit on the side. Got anything you want to confess?”
I heard an inhalation behind the couch, then a rough laugh that had more to do with relief than amusement. “Thank God. All this living a lie was getting too much.”
Gary chuckled while I frowned. I knew the second voice. It was incongruous in my living room, but I knew it, and I knew the scent of the man who sat down on the couch and pulled me into a bear hug. For a few long moments I just knotted my fists in the back of Morrison’s shirt and held on, inhaling Old Spice cologne and wondering why I was trembling. My wrist still ached, all the more now that I was using my hands. “It’s all right now,” he murmured above my head. “Tell you what, I promise to dump the girlfriend now that you’re awake again. You had me worried, Joanie. You had us all worried.”