Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 30

She would’ve been a lot better off if she hadn’t said anything. I ducked, which was not at all my usual response to people speaking unexpectedly behind me, but it proved to be a good choice. A lamp sailed over my head and smashed into the wall. Mark, who had to have seen her sneaking up on me, lamp in hand, yelled with surprise, anyway. I spun around, still crouched, and charged full-bore into Barbara’s rib cage.

I only had about two steps to build up momentum, but it was enough. I got my shoulder in her gut and she whooshed out air, unable to dig in and stop my headlong rush. That was okay. The bathroom door frame stopped it a handful of steps later. Barbara croaked like a dying frog as her spine impacted the frame and my shoulder drove farther into her belly.

It was incredibly satisfying.

Less satisfying was the way she heaved in a breath of air and used the energy to bring her knee up into my left boob. Insomuch as people aim in fistfights, she was probably aiming for my diaphragm, but crushing my breast was at least as effective. I went, “Glork,” and staggered back, still doubled over, clutching an arm over my chest. Barbara kicked me in the jaw with her bare toes, then howled and fell back herself, hopping on her other foot. Despite having head-butted me earlier, she pretty much fought like a girl, which was to say, without any experience at it. Anybody who’s gotten in a couple of real fights learns to hit soft parts with hard parts. Kicking me in the face was a good idea, but she should’ve done a side kick and made the impact point my nose with her heel.

I actually thought all of that during the course of a couple ragged breaths, by which time the radiating pain in my breast had lessened enough to let me move again. Barb was still hopping up and down and shrieking when I dragged in one more breath and let it pull me to my full height, so I was looking down six inches at her. I wanted to have a really good view of slamming her into the floor. She stopped jumping around when I reached for her, eyes widening as she twigged to the fact that the fight wasn’t over yet.

A pair of strong arms wrapped around me, pinning my own arms to my sides. Mark, through gritted teeth right next to my ear, said, “I—” and the rest of it was lost to me bracing myself against him and lifting both feet to kick Barb in the gut.

She flew back and crashed into the wall. Mark staggered under a hundred and sixty pounds of unexpected weight in his arms. I got my feet under me again and slammed my head back, Mark’s lovely nose crunching quite horribly against my skull. He shrieked like a girl and let me go, and for a moment there I stood there, a panting, breathless, triumphant king of the hill. I hadn’t gotten into a fight with ordinary, unarmed people since I was a teenager. It was nice to know I hadn’t lost my touch, and that brawling was still in my repertoire. “Now that I have your attention.”

Like Barb, I should’ve kept my mouth shut. She got enough breath back to produce a howl of outrage and flung herself on me, hands clawed all over again. Her weight was enough to drive me back into Mark, and all three of us went down in a clawing, scratching, shouting pile of arms and legs. I caught an elbow to the ear and my head started ringing. I grabbed a shoulder and pounded on it, which just felt good. It was better than not knowing what to do, and it was much better than remembering that Coyote’d died to keep me safe. White fury rose up in me and I smashed down all the harder.

The shoulder moved and gave me room for purchase on a shirt—Barbara’s, slippery soft sleeping satin—and I dug my hands in, lifting her away bodily. She kicked and squealed and I grunted, dropping her heavily to the side. A couple of seconds later I ended up on top of the dogpile, straddling Mark’s chest with his arms pinned by my knees and shins. He gave me an unexpected rakish grin that really didn’t go with a bleeding, swollen nose, and said, “Dis has probmis.”

I was so taken aback I actually laughed out loud. Barbara lunged and I drew a fist back and said, “Eht!” in warning, not threatening her at all, but Mark. He might make me laugh, but that wasn’t enough at this particular moment in time to save him from getting the tar beat out of him. Barb lurched to a halt and a thrill of triumph went through me. She was protective of her baby brother. “Here we are, then,” I breathed. “I need some answers. Who are you? What are you? Why are you doing this? What in God’s name have I done to you?”

Barb all but hissed at me. I rolled my eyes, settling my weight on Mark’s chest. “I can sit here all day, you redheaded bitch.” I didn’t know if it was true. I thought I might fall asleep if I had to sit there for more than a couple minutes. But Barb didn’t know that, and it sounded good.

“Leave him alone,” she muttered, “and I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me and I’ll leave him alone.”

She gave me a baleful look and snaked a hand out, cautiously, toward Mark. It didn’t look like an attack, so I let her.

That, too, was a mistake.

I did not think of rainbows as something that had sound. Nonetheless, rainbow thunder rolled over me as she touched her brother’s shoulder. Their auras melded and fit together, dark spaces between them filling up with missing color. Color and noise slammed into me and I grabbed my head, aware I was yelling fruitlessly at the thunder rumbling in my mind. I didn’t want to respond, not even to protect myself, for fear of sending up that beacon that pointed straight to Morrison again, and so all I could do was yell.

The end of the world unfolded before my eyes. Fire, like the first one I’d seen, only this time the spirit of flame came in mushroom clouds and burning wastelands. A very human destruction, incinerating cities and poisoning the air. One people survived, carried by a yellow-haired god up through a tall hollow reed that broke through the sky and into another world. Only they were ready; only they lived.

Time rewound, a blur of images faster than thought could process. Coyote slunk away from the hole in the earth where the water baby floated away to the floods that were its mother. Coyote, wearing my face. I watched him go, turned to the People and warned them, the words tasting like ritual in my mouth.

“This world, too, might someday be destroyed by fire, flood or cyclone, and then I will come again. You must live the right way, or this will happen. The signs that you must watch for are the rainbow around the sun, or when the sacred yellow rabbit bush, Giss-dil-yessi, does not grow, and most of all the rainbow that lasts all day. This means something dreadful will happen, and I will come then.”

The People all nodded and took note of my words and wisdom, telling them to each other so they would not be forgotten, and I slipped away into the darkness of sleep. Only one being stopped me, and that was Coyote, standing in my path. He wore his own face now, and I said to him again, “Watch for the rainbow that lasts all day. Then I will come.”

Time skidded forward an unending number of years, and slammed to a halt.

I looked down at myself from somebody else’s point of view. I was lying outside a diner, a silver sword stuck through my lungs. Then I sat in a coffee shop across from Morrison, my eyes gold as I looked through my own skin. Then outside Suzanne Quinley’s house, asking the city to hit me with its best shot. Then the Seattle Center deserted at an hour it should have been busy, all but me and Gary and the Host of the Wild Hunt in a battle between gods and sons.

Through all of it, all of it, silver rainbows of power bled off me like diamonds washed by sunlight. My aura, now mostly settled down to silver-blue, had glowed like rainbows for days, an endless, beautiful threat to the world. I remembered staring into my own skin, watching spirit unbound by flesh, rainbows of power held in by what seemed to be surface tension.

I heard myself whisper, “Oh. Oh, shit,” somewhere in the waking world, and then a little louder, “I’m not—”

Barbara clobbered me over the head.

As far as being hit on the head went, it wasn’t nearly as bad as pruning shears to the face. Stars shot through my vision and I sort of collapsed forward, muffling Mark. He grunted and I tried to get enough focus back to push myself off him. I heard Barb scramble to her feet and run for the door. By the time I sat up, it’d slammed shut. I put a hand on the back of my head and winced. “I’m not whatever this thing thinks I am. I’m not the end of the world.” I was practically certain. I hoped.

Mark didn’t appear to care much. After a couple seconds I realized that was probably because I’d fallen on his face when Barbara hit me, and I’d just bashed his nose in a minute earlier. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Hang on a second.”

For the second time in as many minutes, I did something really stupid. In my defense, I hadn’t known that letting Barb touch Mark would throw me into a vision, but I did know that trying to heal somebody when all that dark power was waiting to pounce was a bad idea.

Unfortunately, I’d already gone down the rabbit hole toward Mark’s garden when I remembered that.

Just as it had with Gary, overwhelming blackness rose up and followed me, so fast and sure of itself this time I had no way to stop it. I wasn’t carrying topaz, and Mark didn’t have the slightest familiarity with my intrusions to help me fight back with. His aura split apart, all the rainbows colors widening, and butterflies rose from the darkness between color to cloud out the sun.

I thought, quite clearly, this is going to get very confusing, and then it did.

In so far as there was good news, it was in my adversary being no better at planning than I was. My attempt at healing Mark had lit a path for it to follow, and it’d done so without hesitation or compunction. I had the sense that each time I built this sort of link to another person, it gave my enemy strength to draw from, a new route for it to take. I had a sudden awful concern for Ashley Hampton, but worry disappeared again under trying to untangle what my opponent had wrought.

Because it had just driven its own host into deep slumber. I felt Mark’s breathing change, both from inside where I was caught, and from outside where I was sitting on him. Butterflies whirled around me in obvious agitation, their rapid-beating wings making rainbows that danced in the corners of my vision. For the first time I got a feeling for Mark’s own aura, and realized I hadn’t even known I wasn’t seeing it. His was rusty-brown, so flattened that most of the red had been pulled from it. I thought it ought to be warm and friendly with life, but the butterfly colors had ridden it so long it was like he’d lost the ability to recognize himself at all. Standing inside the darkened garden that represented his soul, I felt energy draining out of it, sapped through uncountable needle-fine points. The trees and grasses and bushes in his garden were hole-ridden, as if it’d been attacked by voracious insects that neither knew nor cared that their feasting would ultimately destroy their food source and themselves.

Cold shocked through me, making hairs stand up all over my body. Destroy their food source. I doubted that doing so would be the end of whatever demon was carrying, but Mark was dying.

Standing there in the midst of a butterfly storm, my hands clenched and cold anger built up inside me. Not on my watch. I actually spoke the words out loud, then tilted my head up and shouted them into the sky: “Not on my watch, do you hear me, Goddamn it? Not again! Nobody else! Not on my watch!”

As if I’d thrown a challenge into my opponent’s teeth, half the colors of the rainbow bled down from above, butterflies by their thousands coming to feed off the sheer raw anger I flung out. I felt safe in drawing them to me: as long as Mark slept I thought they couldn’t escape the confines of his garden, which left the link to Morrison untouchable. That I wasn’t sure how I could escape was a matter to be dealt with later.

Rust under paint. In a way, that’s what this thing was, rust encroaching on the metal beneath a vehicle’s painted surface. It could be sanded out, replacement sheets soldered in and polished up, and with a professional job, the car’d be good as new. Mark’s soul needed replenishing and some TLC, but first the damage had to be excised.

I met the onslaught of butterflies with a belt sander. There was something particularly awful about that image if I let myself think about it too hard. Working with the idea of damaged paint was easier, since it didn’t involve delicate beautiful bugs being turned into so much ichor and smeared all over the place. Those that had already landed on my skin dissolved into fine mist, like paint drifting in the air, and I tried not to breathe too deeply at first.

Then I thought better the connection be in me than in Mark, and inhaled sharply, sparks of an otherworldly power crashing into me. Every breath I took replenished me enough to keep pouring power out, and the dark swarm of hungry butterflies kept coming to it, rather literally like moth to flame. The more I took in, the more distinctly I felt recognition, as if I was allowing whatever had ridden Mark to see me, and it knew me for the world-ending herald it had seen within Coyote. A certain delight began to feed through the loop as it drew closer, and I had the unfortunate feeling that my clever plan to rescue Mark from the clutches of sleep might not have been so clever after all. If it got inside me, I might go to sleep, too, and then we were all screwed.

I would just have to hold my ground and drag it out into the real world somehow. It had so much strength, so much weight to it, that I thought I might be able to. I’d brought an immortal child across worlds once, and a demon after that. There was no reason I couldn’t pull it off a third time.

Except those other two had been willing to go, and I wasn’t sure this thing was. I pushed the thought aside with an audible sniff, as if contempt for the details would make them go away.

By that time my whole body was buzzing from running a belt sander over my own skin. My own power was its usual burnished silver-blue, now gleaming over the rainbows of magic I’d obliterated with my psychic belt sander. The colors gleamed as if in defiance or mockery of the prophecy that had gotten me here, and the endless attack of fluttering creatures began to slow. I felt full up of power, like butterfly wings might lift me up from within and carry me away.

Beyond me, the pinprick holes that damaged Mark’s garden were healing, green returning to grayed-out leaves, blue fading back into a pale sky. With the butterflies focused on me, he had a chance. That was all I asked for. Triumphant, I turned my focus back on myself, looking for a way to seal the multi-winged dark power inside me long enough to wake up again.

Barbara, wreathed in red and yellow and violet flame, stepped into the garden of Mark’s soul just as I was about to sever the link, and pulled all the magic I’d stolen from my adversary to herself.