Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 31

I gasped, wrenching my eyes open, and to my surprise they did open, leaving me awake and breathless and still sitting on Mark’s chest. His nose was no longer mashed in, and Barbara was nowhere to be seen. I got up, the change in pressure reminding me I’d just been hit on the head, and dialed 911 on my way out the door. An ambulance would have to pick up my snoozing paramour. I had to find Barb.

Which would be a lot easier if she would stop running away from me. I gave the emergency services people the address Mark was staying at and climbed into Petite, gnawing on my cell phone. Not that I could blame her for running away: except for the pruning shears thing, I was pretty much on top of things physically. She wasn’t exactly the sort of person who could beat the tar out of me. Keeping the fight from me was the smartest thing she could do.

I straightened up so fast I hit my head on Petite’s roof and said, “Shit!” both because it hurt and because wisdom had fallen down on me like a load of bricks. I pulled out of the parking lot and dialed Gary, telling myself I was grounded from driving for another week.

He wasn’t home. At least, he wasn’t at my home. I whacked the phone against the steering wheel a few times, like it was its fault, and tried calling him at his house. No answer there, either. He’d said he’d be there.

I whispered, “Shit,” one more time, this time with worry. The topaz should be protecting him. He couldn’t have gone to sleep. Then again, I didn’t think Mark would’ve been a potential victim, either, so what the hell did I know?

There were absolutely no cops on the roads. I hoped it was just because I was getting lucky this morning, not because the wave of sleeping sickness had gone beyond the North Precinct and was starting to overtake Seattle. Given the general lack of vehicles at seven in the morning on a Thursday, though, I thought I was probably pipe dreaming. I got home and pounded up the stairs, afraid of what I’d see.

What I saw was an empty apartment with a box of two-day-old doughnuts on the kitchen table. I said something unladylike and ate the last two doughnuts, too hungry to care if they were stale. I couldn’t remember if I’d had lunch the day before. Or breakfast. I knew I hadn’t had dinner. The second half of the last doughnut stuffed in my cheek, I called Gary’s house again, still getting no answer. He didn’t have voice mail or an answering machine, on the logic that if it was important, they’d call back. He was right, but that didn’t do me any good when I wanted to rant worriedly at him.

Which was probably exactly how he’d felt when I’d run off last night and hadn’t called until this morning. Properly chastised, I went and sat at my computer, desperate for a little research on butterflies and nightmares.

Half a minute later I was scrubbing my eyeballs with my fingertips after clicking through to a pair of DVDs that came up with those words in the title. Never once in my life did I suspect butterfly nightmares might be just the ticket for determining just how much of a prude I really was. I tried a second search, using the ill-advised combination of “butterfly dream,” and really should have expected the innumerable Chuang Tsu hits. At least they weren’t brain-scrubbing. It took another couple minutes to find anything something useful.

Butterflies, it turned out, were across-the-board erotic little things. Mythologically and legendarily, they were associated with all sorts of sexiness. Mark and Barb fit that bill very nicely. Of course, butterflies were also associated with insanity, which didn’t make me particularly happy, as well as rebirth and, in fact, sleep. None of it, though, suggested that butterfly demons flapped around the psychic ether putting people to sleep and draining their life forces. I sucked on my teeth and tried another search, adding in the end of the world and some of the elements of my visiondreams. My hands grew cold as I began to get hits.

By the time my door banged open half an hour later, I had an unfortunately clear idea of what I was facing. Gary came in red-faced and huffing, and looked startled to see me there. I got up and went to hug him hard, not caring where he’d gone as long as he’d come back safely. He grunted with surprise and returned the hug. “You okay, doll?”

“I’ve been better.” I spoke into his shoulder, muffled. “I was worried when you didn’t answer the phone. You’re okay?”

“’Course I am. What’s wrong, Jo?”

I breathed a little laugh and held on tighter. “I think I really blew it this time, Gary. I woke up a god.”

Gary extracted himself from my hug and leaned back, looking at me. “You’ve gone up against gods before.”

“Yeah. Except the last one just wanted free of his constraints.” I managed a smile and stepped away. “This one thinks I heralded the end of the world, and he doesn’t like it. Is that interesting enough for you?”

To my never-ending surprise, Gary cracked a grin. “Just about. What are you, crazy, lady?”

“You tell me. I mean, you’ve got to admit, as the pinnacle of half a year’s screwups, bringing the world to an end is hard to beat. I start with the Wild Hunt, I move on to unleashing earthquakes and demons on suburban Seattle, and I wrap it up with signaling a god that it’s time to end the world. I think I’ve got the escalation about right.”

“Yeah,” Gary said, “but what’re you gonna do for an encore?”

Laughter caught me out. “I hope to God,” and for a moment there I wasn’t sure if I should be pluralizing that, or if I had a specific deity in mind, “that when we get through this I’ll have laid all the ashes of my spectacular opening act to rest, and that anything else I get to deal with isn’t quite as cosmic in nature.”

A thread of cold warning slithered down my spine, bringing with it a vivid image: a cave in the lit-up astral realm, a place of real beauty and unending life. That cave was blocked off, its depths cut away from me by my mother’s will, but beyond it lay something that thought of me as a tasty morsel. It knew I was out here, and every time I tripped through that part of the Other worlds, it taunted and teased me. I’d resisted it once, and been forbidden that path by Sheila MacNamarra’s power, but moonlit blue darkness waited for me. I didn’t think it would prove to be a puff of dust to be blown away, not when it was so well buried, so deep in the astral planes.

As if thinking of it—him; I had a sense of maleness about the thing, and if I was right in my summation of connections, the banshee I defeated had called it Master—as if thinking of him brought me to his attention, a soft wave of rich, malign amusement danced over my skin, raising goose bumps. I shuddered off thoughts of that particular monster in the dark. I had others to deal with.

“The visions I’ve been having. The waking visions?” Gary nodded, reassuring me that I’d told him about them. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight anymore. I was so tired I wanted to cry on general principles. “I thought I was supposed to be fighting those dreams. I mean, the world kept coming to an end. It flooded, it burned, it…kept ending. And there I was trying to fling everything I had against that, to stop the destruction of the world. And I couldn’t. They were Navajo history, Gary.” I looked at him in unhappy exhaustion. “I finally had enough pieces to do research.”

“So what’re we up against, Jo?” That was something else I loved about the old man. He meant it when he said we. Even if I was the world’s biggest screwup, Gary was on my side.

“A god,” I said again. “Begochidi. He led the Navajo from one world to the next. And now he’s come back to do it again. I think I just told him it was time. I think a bunch of physicists working on wormhole theory accidentally set him loose. Like I did with the Lower World demons. I think they made the walls of the worlds thin enough to pass through, and Begochidi was just waiting to step through.” I caught Gary’s expression and shook my head. “The point is he’s here now, to deal with the threat and lead his people to the next world. To deal with me.”

I let out a hoarse laugh and looked away, like I could see through the walls of the apartment. Actually, I could, but I didn’t want to right now, so they were solid and normal. “Begochidi’s not just a minor character in Navajo legend. He’s the Maker of the world, both male and female. Mark and Barbara,” I heard myself add wearily. Gary made a sound of dismay and I couldn’t bring myself to look at him or explain that particular misfortune any further. “Twins, male and female, to carry his spirit toward the blight that endangered his people. Only I think I freed Mark from his hold, so now it’s just Barb out there someplace and I’ve got to fight her.”

I was used to running behind, trying desperately to catch up. It turned out being ahead of the curve sucked just as much as not knowing what I was getting myself into. Maybe more. There was a certain blind hope associated with playing catch-up. Having a clear idea of what I was up against made me feel pretty damn grim.

“You sure ’bout this, Jo?”

I nodded. I didn’t have the impression that shamans went through quite such dramatic trials by fire under usual circumstances, but nothing about my life had been much in the way of normal for a long time now. Longer than I’d thought, really, looking back to my Coyote dreams. Longer than that, even, if I’d really been mixed up by the Makers of the world. Not Begochidi. He wasn’t one of the ones responsible for me, or he’d recognize me. But even the Navajo had more than one creation myth, and from what I’d read, Begochidi didn’t feature as powerfully in all of them. The Makers, it seemed, weren’t necessarily in on the Making together. I’d have to give them a scolding about that, if I ever got the chance.

“Arright, Jo. So what do we do now?”

I shook my head, taking a deep breath. “You don’t do anything. I’m going to sleep.”

Thursday, July 7, 7:37 a.m.

Nothing in my dreams of Coyote or in any other experience in my life had taught me how to say “I’m going to sleep” as a declaration of war. Consequently, it sounded nothing like one, which disappointed me. I wanted it to be dramatic and world-shaking, but it just sounded like exhausted relief. I wanted to sleep so badly I could taste it. Gary’s bushy eyebrows went up.

“You’re goin’ to sleep? Are you nuts? You just said this guy’s power is comin’ from everybody who’s asleep!”

“I know. Dreams are his domain, Gary. If I don’t meet him on his own ground I’m not going to be able to fight him at all. Barb keeps running away from me.” That made me laugh, huff of sound. “At least that’s something.”

Gary took another breath in protest, then exhaled and slumped his broad shoulders. “You sure,” he said again, but it wasn’t a question this time. “Arright. Lissen to me, Jo. You stay right there.” He got up from the couch and went into my bedroom while I wondered where exactly he thought I would go. I didn’t think dreamland was a place to be entered physically.

He came out of my bedroom with a sword. “Under the bed’s a lousy place to keep a sword, Jo.”

I blinked, getting up to meet him. “It’s a perfectly good place to keep a sword. It’s not like I use it a lot.” He offered to me, so I took it, surprised as always at its heft. The weight hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first seen it in Cernunnos’s hand, silver metal gleaming beneath prosaic fluorescent lights, but it’d meant a lot later on when the damned thing got shoved through my lung. I’d struck back with iron-based steel, and Cernunnos had fled without his silver blade. It was only considerably after the fact that I brought it to a dealer to have it appraised and found out it really was silver. In retrospect, it made sense, as the Celtic god couldn’t touch anything made of iron.

The dealer had almost literally drooled over the blade. Its swept-silver handle protected the hand easily, the rapier blade impossibly sharp, holding its edge flawlessly despite the metal it was forged of. And that was something else: the forging was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Almost as if it had been cast, like a sculpture. He’d offered me such a ridiculous sum of money for it I hadn’t believed him, and I’d gone home to read up on the Internet about Celtic magic and silver. I’d learned about somebody named Nuada, whose hand, lost in battle, was re-made in silver by a god. I’d tapped a finger on the blade cautiously and wondered.

A week later the dealer called me up and offered twice what he’d offered in the first place. He was still calling occasionally. There had to be a price I couldn’t resist, but so far keeping Cernunnos’s sword beneath my bed was more appealing than cold hard cash. Of course, if the car insurance company didn’t pay up soon, I might start reconsidering my stance.”

“So you don’t go in unarmed,” Gary said to me as I took the sword. My eyebrows rose and I glanced up at him, half smiling, not sure how seriously to take him. He wasn’t smiling at all, eyes serious beneath untamed eyebrows. The lines in his face were deeper, as if the weight of the moment made him seem closer to his seventy-three years. My smile fell away and I just watched him, rapier balanced across my palms as I waited for whatever he had in mind next.

He didn’t disappoint. He pulled a copper cuff bracelet, one that usually sat on my dresser next to the drum, from his pocket. It’d been tarnished and green until recently, when I’d had cause to buy metal cleaner and scrub a silver necklace clean of my own blood. I’d done the bracelet then, too, tracing my fingertip over etched knotwork that might have been Celtic around its borders, and the cut away shapes of Cherokee spirit animals between the borders.

“Gary.” My voice came out small and tight as he turned the bracelet sideways and slid it over my wrist.

“’S from your dad, right?”

I nodded, unable to trust words, and he tapped the metal against my skin. It was already warm from the minute in his pocket. “Left wrist,” he said. “Protects your heart.”

My heart tightened as he spoke, throat closing even more. “Gary,” I said again, scratchy whisper, as if it would stop him, but he wasn’t done. He dipped into his pocket again and came out with what I knew he would, a silver choker necklace I hadn’t worn in months. Hollow tubes of metal rattled gently against its chain, the curved stretches broken apart by triskelions, the Celtic three-way knot that represented the Holy Trinity in modern days, and a much older trio of goddesses from a time before Christianity. The center pendant hung from the chain itself, just far enough to rest in the hollow of my throat: a Celtic cross, a circle quartered by two bars. My mother had given me the necklace as she lay dying, the only thing she’d ever given me besides life. Gary fastened the necklace around my throat with unbelievable delicacy, his big old hands far more certain than mine ever were when I put on jewelry. Something happened as the clasp shut, a soft sparkle of warmth that danced over my skin as powerfully as Gary’s words did.

“To guard your soul,” he said. My heart contracted again, tears blurring my vision, though I managed a painful little smile as I looked down at the sword and the bracelet. The necklace made an uncomfortable pressure against my throat, something I’d never given myself time to get used to. Then I looked up again, smile shaky.

“What about you?” I was trying to tease him, but emotion rode me far too hard. I felt girded for battle, as if I’d been entrusted with a kingdom’s honor and my loved ones had helped me don my armor. “Don’t I get anything from you? Mother’s got my soul covered and Dad’s got my heart, but without you, jeez, Gary, I wouldn’t be here at all. You took the damned sword out of me when I was dying so I could heal myself. And all I get is a lousy little ritual?” I was afraid to blink, for fear tears that burned my eyes would scald my cheeks. My smile was so tremulous I thought it might shake those tears loose, anyway.

A complex expression darkened Gary’s eyes, more facets of sentiment there than I could easily recognize. Pride and love and laughter, mixed up with wry chagrin and just a touch of smugness, and other things that flickered so quickly I couldn’t read them. He slid a hand into his other front pocket and came out with a small, nondescript black velvet box, the kind that makes a girl’s heart slam into her throat when a man pulls it out. My heart did exactly that, cutting off my breath, and I blinked despite all my efforts not to, sending tears rushing down my cheeks. Gary chuckled, barely a sound, and opened the box toward me.

A heart-shaped purple medal, bordered in gold, lay below its ribbon against smooth black velvet, the metal bright by comparison. He only gave me an instant to see what it was before he took it from its case more brusquely than he’d done with the jewelry, and with gruff quick movements pinned it to my shirt. “Never meant that much to me,” he muttered. “Just a way of sayin’ I made it back when a lot of other good fellas didn’t. But since I did, maybe it’ll shield you, too, sweetheart.”

A chime rang out as he dropped his hands, the medal fastened safely to my shirt. I didn’t think he could hear it, but it sounded sweet and loud in my ears, pure tone like silver bells. I felt a click behind my breastbone, profound latching that welded those four items together within me. They whispered recognition to one another: rapier for the hand, to wield in battle. Copper for the wrist, to shield the heart. Silver for the throat, to shield the soul. Bronze for the breast, to shield the body. Four cardinal points burning a bright circle in my mind, heat flaring through each of the items Gary had bestowed on me. With that flare came the Sight, showing me how they shone with purpose and power. When I lifted my eyes to Gary, he blazed with the same resolve, in that moment an icon of all the best things that drove humanity onward.

“My girl,” he added, but less roughly, because I’d dropped the rapier and stepped forward into his arms to let tears run freely down my cheeks. He bowed his head over mine, hand in my hair, and murmured nonsense at me while I held on to him with everything I had. When I finally snuffled and edged back a little, he gave me a soft smile that had nothing to do with the wolfish, toothy grin he liked to disconcert people with, and everything to do with family bonds that couldn’t be broken. “Normally a man don’t like to make a pretty girl cry, but I think maybe this time it means an old dog did somethin’ right.”

I smiled idiotically through the remnants of tears, nodding. “You know you did. You were what, just carrying this around waiting for the right moment?” My voice was still all hoarse and tight, but I didn’t care. Gary beamed down at me.

“That’s good, then. Nah. S’where I went, home to get it. Been thinkin’ about that sword and everything you got for a while now.” He shrugged, big lumbering motion of dismissal. “Thought maybe I could bring somethin’ to the fold, if you asked for it, s’all. And you did.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Gary.” The words, whispered, were as true as anything I’d ever said. “Thank you.”

“Anything for my girl.” His smile reminded me of the younger Gary I’d met in his garden, full of warmth and gentle strength coupled with a linebacker’s ability to clear a path. “I know you’re goin’ to sleep instead of into a trance, but maybe I’ll drum you under anyway, arright?”

I nodded again, crouching to pick up the blade I’d dropped. I curled one hand around the pommel and the other around the blade very carefully, and made my way to the couch. The drum was already there, and Gary came around the other end of the sofa to pick it up. I tilted over, nestling my head on a pillow as I pulled the sword up to my chest like it was a teddy bear.

I heard about three beats of the drum before I fell asleep.