by C. E. Murphy
“I’m okay,” I croaked. “Thirsty. What’re you doing here, boss?” Morrison didn’t call me Joanie. Neither did Gary, for that matter. They had to have been worried.
“’Boss.’” Morrison sat back with a chuckle, looking down at me. “You haven’t called me that in a while.”
“Nah, I guess it’s been ’Cap’ lately.”
Morrison’s eyebrows drew down and he frowned toward Gary. “She’s still not quite awake, Mike. Give her a few minutes.” Gary got to his feet, jerking his chin toward the kitchen. “I’ll get her some water.”
“Thanks.” Morrison nodded at the big old cabbie, who went around the couch while I tried working my brain around the idea of anybody, much less Gary, calling Morrison “Mike.” They called each other by their formal titles, Mr. Muldoon and Captain Morrison, when they had cause to call each other anything at all. It was one of those weird male rivalry things I neither understood nor wanted to understand.
“Mike?” I said, which was intended to convey all that unspoken commentary. Instead, Morrison looked down at me curiously.
“Yeah?”
“No, I mean…why’s Gary calling you Mike?”
A shadow passed over Morrison’s expression, to be replaced a few seconds later by something of a wry grin. “We got some things settled out while you were asleep. Being worried about you trumped our differences. Guess I’ve always been a little jealous of him.”
“Jealous? Of Gary? Morrison, how often do I have to tell you, he’s—”
“Morrison?” Another funny thing happened to Morrison’s expression, hurt tempered with an attempt at humor washing through tightness around his eyes. “Boss, Morrison, what is this? I thought we were past that, Joanie. That was the idea behind you leaving the department and setting up your own shop, wasn’t it? I know it hasn’t been that long, but—”
“Shop?” A sort of thrilled hope leapt in my chest, reversing the ache in my heart back down toward my wrist. “You mean I’ve got my own shop?”
“Joanie, it’s been open for a month. You’ve been working eighteen-hour days. She’s still really muzzy, Muldoon,” Morrison called. “Maybe we should call the doctor again. It’s all right, Joanie. I guess anybody’d be disoriented after sleeping for a week.”
The ache in my wrist took up as a sense of wrongness at the base of my brain, dissoluted by my preference to leave things just the way there were. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t let it go. “Joanie. You’re calling me Joanie. What’s that about?”
Morrison’s smile went crooked and concerned, voice lowering. “I thought we agreed neither of us wanted to go by Jim or Siobhán in public. Muldoon’ll get the doctor here, all right? You haven’t woken up all the way yet. Just give yourself a few minutes.” He ducked his head to bump his nose against mine, so intimate it’d have been unforgivable if it wasn’t also so incredibly bizarre, and then he kissed me.
Pain flared through my left wrist, cold hot enough to burn. I thought aw, crap far too clearly, and put my forehead against Morrison’s chest with a sigh. If I’d been asleep for a week, why wasn’t I in a hospital bed? Why was Gary sitting on my floor with my drum, like he had been when I went to sleep? What was Morrison doing there at all, much less calling me by nicknames and intimating we were in a relationship, or that I had my own mechanic’s shop? It was perfect. It was the kind of life I didn’t even let myself dream about.
“Nice try, Begochidi,” I said into my boss’s shirt. “But no cigar. I’m not awake yet.”
I gave Morrison a gentle push, trying not to see surprise and injury in his eyes in the moment before he dissolved in an upward rush of butterfly wings. The heat in my arm finally subsided and I rubbed it again, then looked down. My copper bracelet gleamed with firelight, making me wince in embarrassment. “Sorry,” I whispered to it. “I didn’t pick up the hint. That Joanne, she’s a nice girl, but not too bright.”
To my unending relief, the bracelet didn’t respond. I curled my arms around my ribs and looked up into the realm of dreams, watching trails of color left behind by the flock of butterflies. Flock? Herd? What was a multitude of butterflies called? It probably didn’t matter, but I was suddenly curious. There had to be a good word for it. I’d have to look it up when I woke up again. If I woke up again.
I actually lifted both hands to my head in an attempt to stop my brain from derailing itself. If shamans were meant to have disciplined minds, I was doomed from the start. The unfortunate fallout of that was it might mean the world was doomed from the start, too, and that just wouldn’t do. I needed to learn to stop distracting myself from the task at hand and face the music when it played, or something with similarly mixed metaphors.
I was doing it again.
“This is a dream,” I said out loud, on the off chance it might help me focus. “And I’m aware of that, so it’s a lucid dream, which means I can control what happens. Okay? Okay. I’d like a ladder, please. I need to follow the butterflies.” Soaring up into the darkness after them sounded like a much more fun, dramatic pursuit, but my experience with flying dreams was that either I couldn’t go as fast as I wanted, or just as I was getting the hang of it, I remembered I couldn’t really fly and went plunging to the earth. Typically falling in dreams wasn’t fatal, but given that I was here by deliberate action and choice, I didn’t exactly want to take the risk. “A ladder,” I repeated firmly, and dug my fingers into the ether.
Darkness protruded and gleamed, iron runs like a submarine ladder stretching up to the faint streaks of color left behind by retreating butterflies. I gave myself a mental pat on the back and began climbing, keeping my gaze up. I thought I’d actually won that round with Begochidi, recognizing his dream of my life for what it was. Maybe he was regrouping. Maybe I could get to him before he’d come up with a new game plan.
Maybe a fantastic indigo and violet wall of feather-light touches could slam down from nowhere and knock me about a thousand feet to the ground. I slammed against a black shapeless floor, unable to breathe with the weight of butterflies on me. They fluttered about my face, tiny razor touches keeping me from screaming for fear of inhaling them. I batted at them, trying to get free, and those I brushed away ghosted back to amalgamate and create a shape in the darkness. Tall, well-built, sandy-haired, smiling pleasantly. I wanted to cry. “Joanne,” Mark said cheerfully. “There you are.”
“Here I am.” He didn’t look like a god. He just looked like himself, a decent, rather charming young man who cooked as well as he lounged naked in bed. I could fight Barbara. I didn’t like Barbara. I didn’t want to beat Mark up. “You’re not the one I expected. I was kind of hoping for your other half.”
“I was kinda hoping you’d be my other half.” His nose wrinkled and he looked sheepish. “Okay, that was incredibly corny. But it’s true, too. I mean, I like you, Joanne. You’re a little scary with this shamanism thing you’ve got going on, but you really seem to care a lot about what’s going on around you, and I guess it’s better to be a little weird and scary with caring than not. I’d kind of like to stick it out and see if we could make it work.”
I found myself knotting and unknotting my hands like it would lead me to some kind of salvation. Morrison’s sleeping form kept splashing through my vision, as if I needed the reminder. “I meant your twin sister, Mark, not your soul mate.” I barely knew Mark Bragg. Pretty much everything I’d shared with him had been the machination of a god searching for the danger to his people. It wasn’t a normal relationship. It wasn’t even a real relationship. So why in hell did shooting him down make my heart ache?
Maybe because I hadn’t had anything like a real relationship in longer than I could remember.
Maybe because at the bottom of it, he was an ordinary man who’d gotten caught up in the mess of a life I’d led. I didn’t like my magic reaching out and touching people outside my immediate sphere. Mark was god-ridden, and that, plain and simple, was my fault. I might have done better by him.
There were so many p
eople I might have done better by.
The thought made my throat tighten, a cold knot settling in its hollow. Faye Kirkland’s fanatical expression as she died blurred into Colin Johannsen’s pale face, all forming in my mind’s eye. Colin no longer wore the weary good cheer I’d seen in him in the few days I’d known him. He was drawn up thin and tall, much thinner than the boy I’d known had been, with the weight of cancer treatments bloating his body, and his eyes were accusing. Hard eyes, the expression of a young man used, and used badly. Cassandra Tucker, the only way I’d ever known her: blue and cold with death. I couldn’t breathe, cold at my throat burning with despair, but the faces wouldn’t stop.
Three young women, dead at a banshee’s hands, strewn about a baseball field and hidden beneath unseasonable snow. I had memorized their names, too: Rachel and Nikki and Lisa, who had died because I’d distracted my mother from the all-important task of banishing their murderer. And before them a handful of schoolchildren and their teacher and the Quinleys and Marie D’Ambra and shamans whose life’s blood began a legacy of death that tied to me. All of them were people who might have lived, had their paths not crossed mine.
And before that, a strong and determined woman who willed herself to death because I had turned away from the road I was supposed to travel, and before that, a baby girl whose dying breath seemed to give her brother the strength to live.
I could not breathe. Despair brought me to my knees in a jerky fall, pressure at my throat so intense I struggled to lift a hand to claw at it. Dark spots washed through my vision, indigo and violet, like eyes watching my death without remorse or pity. I had not expected this. Had not, for once, thought I was going to die. But the legacy that lay behind me spread so easily before me, so obviously. I could name the faces, count the numbers, now, of those who had died for my mistakes. Now. Soon I wouldn’t be able to, not with the plague sweeping out across Seattle and in time over the world. The end of the world, heralded by my toolate arrival on the psychic stage, by my clumsy use of power that whispered apocalypse to slumbering gods. So many deaths, with me as the focal point.
My fingers snagged in metal, cold and hard and smooth under my hand, and I remembered, incongruously, Suzanne Quinley and Melinda Holliday and Ashley Hampton, all alive and healthy because their paths had crossed with mine. I knotted my fingers around the necklace, feeling the cross press into my palm, and lifted my gaze to stare across butterfly-swarming darkness at Mark Bragg.
“The shamans weren’t my fault,” I heard myself whisper, voice scratchy, as if the cold pressure from my mother’s necklace had scraped my vocal box into disuse. “I probably could’ve done better, but I did my best. And I saved Suzanne Quinley.” I felt a weak, miserable smile tweak my mouth. “That’s got to count for something. I saved Gary.”
A flash of warmth spilled through me at that, make me break out with a hoarse laugh. “I even saved myself. At least, I’m working on it.” I could feel so much of the angry, resentful child I’d been still knotted up inside me, her world taken away from her in the moment I’d reached back through time to borrow the training she’d worked so hard to master. A shattershot image of a spider-webbed windshield flashed through my vision and I laughed again, another coarse sound. “I’m out of balance right now,” I admitted. “More people dead because of me than alive. But I’m working on it. And I’m not the one pulling life force from others to stay awake. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it, Begochidi?”
I knotted my fingers around the necklace, hanging on to it to keep my thoughts in order, and advanced a step toward the god’s avatar who stood before me. “You woke up without meaning to and took strength from the first people you could reach. The Dine. Your people. But you’re supposed to save them, not put them all to sleep forever, so you had to let them wake them up again, didn’t you? They woke up and started getting ready for the end of the world, while you looked for the strength to wake all the way up yourself. The poor bastards at the university.”
I reached out, searching for Mark’s memories and dreams in the darkness. “Is that what happened?” I whispered. I could sense excitement in their dreams—daydreams, night dreams; it didn’t matter. Both could be found in this place. I should know. I’d been offered the stuff of daydreams repeatedly in the last few days. I clung to their anticipation, spinning out misty recollection from the recesses of Mark’s mind, so foggy it seemed he didn’t actively recall the day.
They invited everybody in the department down to the lab to watch the first test of their machine. I’d seen photographs of a machine other physicists had build that could teleport a photon from one place to another. I’d retained a critical disappointment that it hadn’t looked like the beam-me-up sort, and felt similarly about the wormhole-maker. It looked more like a 1980s movie laser than a machine that could tear space and time asunder, and when they turned it on, there was little more than a pulse that rippled the air, and then silence.
Terrible silence, as everyone in the lab fell, soundless, to the floor. Everyone, including Mark and Barbara Bragg. The memory/dream faded into unconsciousness, Mark no longer able to provide information about what had happened, and me with no idea how to draw memory out of a god of sleep.
Mark stood very still, a sign I took as hopeful. I’d fought a god and won once. I didn’t want to put money on pulling it off a second time. “Is that what you had to do all the other times, Begochidi? The world’s ended a lot of times before. Did you have to reach out beyond the People for your strength? It shouldn’t be this hard, should it? If it’s really supposed to be the end of the world, shouldn’t you have just woken right up and gone to save your people? You shouldn’t have to fight so hard, should you?”
I inhaled, tasting my own sorrow in the dreamland. “All my friends,” I said quietly. “If you think taking their lives will weaken me, you’re wrong. If that’s why you’re choosing them to take life force from, let me tell you, it’s not going to work. Not any more than me threatening your people with annihilation would keep you from fighting. You’re putting me in a position where I’ve got nothing to lose, Begochidi.”
Mark turned his face away, almost submissive action, and for one bright moment I had hope. There didn’t have to be an end-all, be-all battle. We could work it out with words.
And then something happened in his eyes, something deep and profound that turned them to agate blue, like Barbara’s. The color of a hard desert sky. My jaw set and I let the Sight film over my own vision, looking to See what I suspected.
I hated being wrong, but there were days I hated being right even more.
CHAPTER 34
Mark’s aura was no longer split. The full spectrum of rainbow colors bled out so sharply it hurt to look at, throbbing and pulsing with power. There were no empty razors of blackness between the brilliant shades, nothing suggesting a weakness. Then again, it wasn’t really Mark. It wasn’t even Barbara, and I had no idea what had happened to her, if Begochidi had consolidated his energy to the dreamlands. The image of her collapsed somewhere wasn’t entirely unappealing, though I knew that was petty and nasty and should be scrubbed from my brain. I’d scrub it later.
Assuming there was a later.
Two attacks. One emotional, trying to trap me in a dream, the other intellectual, trying to weigh me down with implacable logic. The lingering burn in my throat felt tied to the dissipated ache in my wrist, the talismans Gary had girded me with reminding me of what they protected. My heart. My head, which was, for all intents and purposes, where I thought of my soul as residing. That left one obvious method of attack.
I snatched Cernunnos’s sword from my hip and flung up my free hand as if I bore a shield, just as Mark gathered his hands in to his chest, then released them in a burst of winged color. Butterflies swarmed over me, parting with such force as they hit my shield and sword that I felt the reverberations up my arm and through my body.
They were a distraction, nothing more. In the instant they cleared I saw that Mark had di
sappeared, dreamtime swallowing him as if he’d never been. Swallowing him as effectively as he’d absorbed Coyote. My heart lurched, painful missed beat, and I tightened my hand around the rapier’s hilt. It would not do to keep thinking of him as Mark. This was Begochidi I faced, a god wrapped in a sandy-haired man’s form. I lowered my blade and my shield arm, casting out with hyper-natural senses to see if I could locate Begochidi in the darkness.
A rainbow of color hammered down on me, grasping the narrow threads I put out and draining their silver-blue dry. I reeled back, and lifted my sword again. Begochidi’s assault faded away again, as if he couldn’t attack directly unless I provided him with a power line to feed on, or find me by. I hoped so. I thought that meant he wasn’t drawing any more from the people in Seattle who slept beneath his spell.
A net had done nicely to catch the god of the Hunt. It seemed more than a little ironic that it wouldn’t work on a butterfly god. On the other hand, standing here sending out dribbles of power until he sucked all the life force out of me wasn’t exactly the best plan I’d ever come up with. I took a moment to wonder if there was some kind of handbook on how best to fight powerful otherworldly beings, or if I was going to be stuck making the best of it every time I faced one. I was pretty sure I’d be stuck. That seemed excruciatingly unfair.
On the other hand, maybe it meant the powerful otherworldly beings didn’t have any idea how to fight me, either. The thought cheered me, and I found myself doing like I’d seen in the movies, banging my sword against my shield to call my enemy out. It was only then that I noticed I was in fact carrying a shield, that the purple heart Gary had pinned to my breast had become a small round shield, quartered by a cross, clutched in my left hand. I had no idea how to fight with a sword and shield. I was going to have to go back to fencing lessons, and see if Phoebe could teach me.