Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 11

Trying to slip inside Melinda’s mind was as difficult as getting through to Billy had been. Like him, she had solid mental shields, only a trickle of life force draining through them. Syrupy weight pinned her down, heavy with determination that bordered on malevolence. I didn’t try the siphoning approach, or the equally unsuccessful needle. Instead I turned away from Mel and looked into thick shadow, wondering if I could find my way to its heart. Nothing like taking the fight to the source, after all.

It occurred to me, perhaps a moment too late, that such a decision could be terminally dangerous. But by then a pathway had melted open, like a dream obliging me by creating passage when I needed one, and I stepped onto the road offered.

I’d become accustomed to flitting through astral realms in the past six months, whether I wanted to admit to it or not. The world I belonged to in day-to-day life was the Middle World, caught between the Upper and Lower Worlds, places of mythology and mysticism. The names I had for them were Native American in origin, but they fit remarkably well over an ancient Irish structure of the universe as well. I suspected that if I ever entered the Celtic Upper and Lower Worlds, they wouldn’t look like the ones I’d seen in my dealings with Native American gods and demons, but the structure seemed to hold true regardless.

There was also an astral realm I could tune into. That one could be tapped by turning on my second sight, without ever leaving the Middle World. It could also be entered wholesale: that was how I usually got to the Dead Zone, and it was how I’d found ancient Babylon and the ghostly, sad land of Tir na nOg. I wasn’t quite sure how those places connected to Earth, or the Middle World or whatever I wanted to call it. Babylon had, ultimately, seemed to reside in the deepest parts of human consciousness, but Tir na nOg was somewhere else entirely, a world of fae creatures that were gods and immortals in my world. I thought someday I might understand how all those places linked together, but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough yet.

What I walked through now was somewhere else yet again. I’d spent almost no time in the dreamlands, only using them as conduits in the first days of awakening to my shamanic powers, when I just hadn’t known any better. They were a place where thought formed and melted around me, gray shapeless forms that looked like the stuff of nightmares. I could feel the weight of sleep pressing down on me as surely as it had caught Billy and Mel, trying to snare me as well. I didn’t like it, in a more specific and visceral way than my general discomfort with traipsing through realms of Otherness. I knew there could be danger in any aspect of psychic exploration, but something about the dreamlands struck me as more actively alarming than the astonishing neons of the astral realm.

Maybe it was that the demons here grew straight up out of my own psyche. Dreams were personal, tailor-made to inspire exultation and fear alike, whereas the dangers in other aspects of the Other were their own creatures, able to prey on anyone who came too close. I guess the egalitarian approach made me more comfortable.

Someone walked beside me. In the fashion of dreams, it seemed like she’d been there all along, and when I tried to focus on her arrival it shimmered and faded away into irrelevance. “It’s okay,” Barb said. “I won’t be around for long.” Morrison was on her other side, completely oblivious to my presence. They were holding hands and he was smiling at something she said. Something I couldn’t hear, despite being right next to her.

See what I mean? I set my jaw and shoved my hands in my pockets. “This is a stupid dream. You two can just go away.”

“I said we would,” Barb repeated. My hands made themselves into fists in my pockets. Wanting them to go away and wanting them to go away together were different. Stupid dream. The gray-on-black surroundings had changed while I wasn’t looking, resolving into the precinct headquarters. Except the hallways didn’t have this many windows in the headquarters, and the trim was a different color. I curled a lip and turned away from my walking companions, stomping down to the garage through a series of halls that weren’t really there. The light over the last set of stairs was incandescent and not burned out, both of which were wrong. Even in the midst of the dream I wondered what it meant that the place I was happiest in the precinct building was well lit in my dreams, when it wasn’t in real life.

“Joanie.” My old boss, Nick Hamilton, nodded as I came around the corner, then waved me toward the coveralls the mechanics wore. “You’re late. Get to work, would you?”

“I brought doughnuts.” I put an oversize box of doughnuts on the hood of one of the cars, a peace offering for being late to work. The Missing O, a local doughnut shop, had become a favorite hangout for the precinct cops, and we usually got discounts for buying three dozen or more doughnuts at a time. Nick grinned at me, which he hadn’t done since January, and popped the box open to dig out his favorite, a raspberry-filled vanilla-crème monstrosity that dripped all over the place. I took it as writ that I was forgiven and sauntered back to grab my coveralls, pausing for a round of mock fisticuffs with Nathan, one of the guys who was still talking to me. He was the SOB who’d handed over the Johnnie Walker at the picnic, in fact. I threw one extra punch that landed on his shoulder with a meaty thwock and he looked offended. “For my hangover,” I said, and he laughed.

I swung down into one of the pits, coverall sleeves rolled up to my elbows, whistling jauntily to myself. “Joanie got laid,” somebody said dryly, and I threw a rag in his general direction, calling, “At least one of us is getting some,” back. Familiar faces and voices filled my peripheral vision and my ears. I hadn’t had a chance to banter with the guys since Cernunnos rode through the garage six months earlier. Tears burned at the back of my throat for a moment and I inhaled harshly to push them away. The sharp scent of oil and gasoline thrummed through my brain, making me feel welcome and at home. Not sniffling took more than I wanted to admit.

A year ago this had been my life. I’d been a mechanic for the Seattle Police Department. I got up and went to work five mornings a week, got covered in grease, fiddled with computery bits and kept cars running. In my off time, I worked on Petite and hung out with the guys from the garage, or took out work in trade for some of my cop coworkers: I’d fix their cars and they’d feed me. It was a sweet setup.

But then the mother I’d never met called up to tell me she was dying, and invited me over to Ireland to watch it happen. What’d been a two-week…I hesitated to call it a vacation…had turned into a four-month leave of absence. Sheila MacNamarra had taken her own sweet time about dying, though I hadn’t found out the reasons why until later. By the time I got back to Seattle, my position in the garage had been filled by someone else, although my Cherokee heritage and my gender made me too appealing, quota-wise, to fire. Morrison had a clever plan to get me out of his hair.

He made me a cop.

I mean, I had the credentials and everything. The department had sent me to the academy because of that whole heritage-and-gender thing, and I hadn’t done too badly, but I’d hired on as a mechanic and nobody’d expected me to stop doing that and start arresting people. Neither, frankly, did Morrison. He figured I’d quit. I figured I’d rather poke myself in the eye than give him the satisfaction. It’d taken six months to get back where I belonged, back down in the garage. I yelled an answer to some half-heard question and crawled out of my pit, content with my place in the universe. That was all I really wanted.

The room changed around me, turning into the reception area upstairs. Dozens of cops moved around, doing their work, getting ready for the day, most of them little more than blurred faces in the background, though I picked a couple people out and waved greetings. Ray, who was built like a fireplug and who was usually the first to warn me when Morrison was on the warpath. Thin-faced Bruce, whose wife Elise made me tamales for fixing their car, looked up from the front desk and gave me a broad smile. “There you are. They’re waiting for you.” He looked me up and down, still beaming. “You look beautiful, Joanie.”

I hadn’t asked. That made me nervous. I looked down at myself to see I was no longer wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but an honest-to-God dress with a dropped waist and a fair amount of frothy cream lace. It could’ve been a wedding dress, though not one of the meringue ones that were so often advertised. It kind of suited me. Pretty but understated. I was also wearing fantastic shoes, with bits of gold glimmering through the straps. I said, “Who’s waiting?” but it was too late: I’d gone around the corner to meet a man in a tuxedo.

Mark Bragg. He looked fantastic, goldy-brown hair brushed back, his tux navy-cut with long tails. I smiled automatically and looked past him; he wasn’t the one I expected. After a few seconds, the one I did expect appeared. Morrison, also in a tuxedo, though his wasn’t nearly as ornate as Mark’s. Barbara Bragg appeared behind him, in a very simple, pretty yellow gown that made mine look all the more formal. I could see the butterfly fluttering on her shoulder.

A burp formed in my stomach and refused to go anywhere, just sat and collected nervousness until I thought I might sick up. I said “Um,” very quietly, and the ridiculous music started. I started to sing, “Big fat and wide,” beneath my breath, but Mark nudged me and shook his head. “No making fun of brides today, Joanne. Not today.”

I nodded, but I didn’t really hear him. Dad wasn’t there. We weren’t exactly close—I didn’t remember the last time I’d called him, in fact—but it seemed like he should be the one walking me down the aisle. Walking with the man I was going to partner myself with was nicely symbolic and all, but I wanted that man to be waiting for me at the altar.

Barb was up there, in the maid of honor’s place, holding a bouquet as bright as her butterfly tattoo. Morrison stood opposite her, and all I could think was he was standing in the wrong place.

I jolted awake with sweat beading on my forehead. Melinda still slept, cheeks flushed with color. The weight that pressed down on her seemed to fill the room, darkness trying to work its way into me, too.

I dragged in a breath through my nostrils and staggered to my feet, rubbing my eyes and then the scar on my cheek. “Arright.” My voice was scratchy. “All right, Jo. You’re awake. It’s okay. Just a nightmare.” Only I wasn’t sure it had been. Overlooking that I thought weddings probably weren’t supposed to be nightmare material, an awful lot of that dream had been just what I wanted. My old life back, my old friends back. It was a little early to be planning a wedding to Mark, but as a flight of fancy it didn’t seem too awful. Except the part where color rushed to my cheeks when I thought about Morrison being the best man. I guessed it was nice my brain thought they’d be friends, but that didn’t make any of it feel quite right.

I shivered and went to look out the window. The sky was graying with the coming dawn, suggesting my nap had lasted longer than it’d seemed. That was twice, first sleeping under Petite and now this. Sleep and me were clearly going to be a dangerous combination for the next few days, until I got whatever was going on figured out. I wondered if I could put in a petition for one of my adventures being done with plenty of extra snooze time, instead of operating on half-brained sleep deprivation, which had been the order of the day so far and appeared to be coming up on the roster yet again.

I put the wish aside and went back to Melinda’s bedside, bracing my face in my fingers as I sat. The air still felt weighty, making me reluctant—or, more accurately, outright afraid—to try slipping into her mind again, or to try following the thing keeping her asleep back to its source. I’d woken up once. I didn’t know if I’d do it again, not when I was sitting there by her side with dark pressure drawing me toward sleep.

I honestly didn’t know which way to turn. I had nothing useful to work with, nothing I could go look up on the Internet and find answers to. Gary, for all his sturdiness, didn’t seem likely to come up with a solution for this one. The only person I could think to ask hadn’t responded to me in almost three weeks, not since I’d encouraged him to shove off in the face of impending doom. Having a snit and staying away didn’t seem like very spirit-guide-like behavior to me, but I’d never had a spirit guide before, so what did I know? “All right,” I whispered out loud again. “One more try, Coyote. I don’t know what else to do.” At least going inside myself seemed less dangerous than questing outward in search of the right thing to do. My index finger started tapping against my cheek, rhythmic little thump-thumps that made a heartbeat pattern. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it was quiet in the house and there was nothing to distract me.

It might’ve been general tiredness that let me slide deep into my own psyche. Sleep deprivation was one of those tools shamans were supposed to use. Either way, it didn’t seem to take very long, Melinda’s bedroom fading around me in favor of a misty, moonlit garden.

There was no use standing around in there yelling for Coyote. I’d tried that several times in the last weeks, to no avail. But it struck me that when I’d come to my garden the very first time, Coyote had found me in an uber-Arizona desert and led me here. I thought if I could get back to that desert—which I vaguely envisioned as being a place accessible by anyone who knew how, rather like Babylon—I might just be able to get Coyote’s attention again.

Of course, the key words there were anyone who knew how. Not for the first time I cursed my own amazing contrariness, and paced my garden, trying to determine how to get out of it.

You could try a door, the snide little voice in my head suggested. I swear, if I could have grabbed it and shaken it, I would have. I nearly clutched my own head to do just that before I got ahold of myself. Or didn’t get ahold of myself, more accurately. “There isn’t a door,” I muttered, then ground my teeth together. I really hated that voice. I especially hated it because it was right a lot of the time.

I mean, technically, I was right. There wasn’t a door in my garden. But it was my garden, and if I wanted a door, then there would be a door. It would be at the misty end, hidden by soft fog. I walked around the garden’s edge, trailing my fingers over the rough stone wall and keeping my gaze forward, expecting the door to appear before my eyes or under my fingers.

Instead a robin twittered violently, the first animal I’d ever heard in my garden, and I tripped over my own feet as I jolted around looking for it. It peered down at me, one beady black eye and then the other, and chirruped again as if its little red-breasted life depended on it. Then it was gone, swallowed up by the fog. I rocked back on my heels, huffing a laugh as I looked at the ground. A robin; a garden. I knew a cue when my subconscious gave me one. I whispered, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” and a glitter of silver in the damp earth caught my eye.

I tilted my head at it just like the robin had at me, taking a few seconds to convince myself to kneel and curl my fingers around the bit of metal. It was cool and heavy and felt solid in my palm, and for some reason holding it made an ache in my heart I could hardly breathe around. “Maybe it’s been buried for ten years,” I murmured to the robin, because that was what I was supposed to say, though I knew it was closer to thirteen years the thing had been buried and ignored.

“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, still to the robin. “The key’s supposed to be outside the garden, not in it.” There was no answering chirp, and I pushed my way back to my feet feeling older than my twenty-seven years. “Close enough, eh?” I asked the silence, and stepped forward through the fog to brush a sheet of ivy away and reveal the door.