Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 35

Saturday, July 9, 9:39 a.m.

Voices, low and good-natured, mumbled around me in the careful pitch used for sick rooms and hospitals. Once in a while someone broke out of that, a laugh climbing up, or a discussion rising out of polite tones. There were other sounds, too: buzzes and beeps that went on rhythmically. Not the kind of thing I expected to hear in my apartment. It was all muffled, like somebody’d wrapped six or eight scarves around my head. Perhaps they had. That would explain why I didn’t seem to be able to open my eyes, either.

Instead of opening them, I yawned so hard tears leaked through my eyelashes. I couldn’t quite get a groan out, even though I felt the situation warranted one. I was sure it was too early to be up. The blankets were heavy and my head was weighed down. I yawned again and rolled over, dragging my pillow down to bury my face in it.

I tried, anyway. My wrist ran into something cold and metal. I did groan that time, and pulled my eyelids half open to see what the problem was. The noise around me stopped.

There was a metal railing about ten inches from my nose. Beyond it was a fuzzy green curtain, though the fuzziness was probably due to my lack of contacts. Between the railing and the curtain was somebody’s burly arm. The arm was attached to a hand gripping the railing. The hand was in focus, and had pale pink polish on the nails. I chuckled, or croaked, depending on how you wanted to look at it, and said, “Billy?”

The sound came back much louder than before, a cacophony of cheers and yells and general glee while a surprising number of people shoved around the bed and bent over to hug me. Gary appeared, trying to look gruff, and I hung on to his hand. “You saved me in there,” I whispered. “You and your crazy totems.”

“Weren’t nothin’,” he said, but his eyes were suspiciously bright and he held on hard when he hugged me. “You been out two days, kid.”

“Really.” I couldn’t rub my eyes and hang on to Gary at the same time, so I only squinted blearily, trying to see past him. Billy and Mel were hovering side by side, Robert poking his head over Mel’s shoulder. “I dunno, Billy.” He took a step forward, worried, and I shook my head. “You’re thinner, but going into a coma for days on end seems like a kind of drastic weight loss plan to me. Maybe you should just avoid The Missing O and all those doughnuts.”

He laughed and Mel put an arm around his ribs, hugging him. She looked better, her color back to normal and her dress cut to disguise four months of pregnancy. I could see glimmers of buttercup yellow around her, even without trying. The same kinds of shadings fell away from everyone in my line of sight, in fact, from Gary to Robert to other people from the department. Bruce was there, thin face lit up with happiness as he spoke into his cell phone, telling Elise I’d woken up. “Ask her if I can have some tamales, Bruce.” His smile widened and he nodded. I flopped back into the bed, yawning until my eyes teared again. I couldn’t be as tired as I felt. I’d just slept for two days. “Everybody’s okay?”

A wave of solemness came over the room. “Yeah, pretty much,” Billy answered after a moment.

I closed my eyes, tears suddenly having nothing to do with yawning. “Pretty much?”

Billy hesitated too long and my stomach clenched. “Who, Bill?” I sat up, knotting my fingers in the covers. I’d severed Begochidi’s link with Morrison. It couldn’t be him. Unless Barbara, in the waking world, had reached him somehow. “Billy. Please.”

“Mark Bragg still hasn’t woken up. I’m sorry, Joanie.”

A horrible combination of relief and dismay chilled me right through the gut, color draining from my skin. “What about Barb?”

“Nobody’s seen her.” Billy said quietly. “They’ve got an APB out. The captain’s been out looking for her himself.”

My heart tightened and I nodded, trying to sound indifferent as I asked, “He’s okay?”

Half a dozen people said, “He’s fine.” I got the idea my nonchalance ploy hadn’t worked. I nodded again. “Where’s Mark?”

“Down the hall,” Gary said. “Doctors don’t think he’s gonna wake up.”

I fumbled the bed railing down while he spoke and pulled the oxygen sensor off my finger. “Bring me to him.”

The same half dozen people said some variation on “Joanne,” and I swung my legs off the bed, wishing I was wearing something more dignified than a hospital gown. Mel, as if on command, dropped a robe around my shoulders, and I looked at Gary. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Arright. C’mon, sweetheart.”

The herd of them—I was touched at how many people were sitting vigil at my bedside—left me outside Mark’s room. I went in barefoot and cold to find him alone with the sounds of a hospital room. I wondered what had happened to Barb, if she’d suffered the same unexpected coma Mark had. I didn’t think so. I wondered if there was a way for me to find her. The same cool certainty that said she hadn’t collapsed in a coma told me I wouldn’t be able to find her, either. It wouldn’t stop me from looking, but my gut wasn’t on my conscience’s side this time.

The glimmerings of Sight that were with me when I woke deepened as I sat down at Mark’s side. His aura no longer shone with half a spectrum’s colors, but lay quiet against his skin, the rusty brown I’d seen before. I had a pretty good idea already of what had happened, but I put my fingers on his shoulder and slipped out of my body to do a diagnostic. It was only later I realized how easy it was to do that, even without the drum bringing me under.

Mark’s soul lay unguarded, a desert oasis full of blooming cactus and clear sun-warmed water. But no wind blew, the water lay still and lifeless in its pools, and the sun’s warmth faded a little even as I stood there. All around me, the blooms seemed in stasis, not yet dying, but no more living than a shadow. I’d cut off too much, when I’d pulled Begochidi’s power from the gentler side of his human host. The bond Mark held on his own soul was fragile now, barely there.

My vehicle metaphors came back to me with a sense of the ridiculous. The easiest way to fix a lot of problems was with duct tape. I just needed to bind his soul and his body together again, wrapping them tight with tape until they grew strong together again.

The power that flowed through me was far less half-assed than tape would’ve been, though. It had permanence and strength, sticky silver glue binding life to body. I had no sense of how much time it took, but when the ghost of a breeze whispered over me, I knew I’d succeeded. With a small sad smile, I left Mark’s desert garden and stepped into another one, a place between souls in the astral realm. It only took a moment to settle down into a coyote-sized hollow in the rocks, though I fit into it no better than I had before. “Coyote?” The word was hardly a whisper, and the second one even fainter: “Cyrano?” I said nothing else, only sat beneath the violent blue sky and stretched my senses, pouring myself out in hopes of a response.

In time, the wind turned acid with sand, heat intensifying by degrees until the sky was white with it, and the horizons bled with rising, burning waves. The sun settled closer to me, hard and merciless, and I felt the stones I lay curled into shift around me. Rock became sand, gritty and white as salt, baking under the light. I knew without looking up that what I leaned on now was a single bleached tree in the midst of desert, as lonely a thing as ever I’d known. Breath ached in my chest, air so hot it felt too thin to keep life in my body. When tears swam in my eyes against the heat, I opened my mouth and said, very softly into the weight of sun, “I honor you, Trickster. You may as well show yourself. I know you’re here.”

Then he was sitting before me, Big Coyote with his coat made of copper and gold threads, so sharp and vivid I expected to cut myself when I leaned forward to wrap my arms around his bony shoulders. I buried my face in metalcolored wire fur, and poured a lifetime’s worth of thanks and sorrows and fears into Big Coyote’s heart. I scraped up all the love I knew how to and offered that up, starting with my own mother’s hard choice to send me away and my unconscious echo of that decision fifteen years later. I added in everything I’d learned from Gary, and the admission about Morrison I still didn’t like to put into words, and Billy and Melinda and their kids and the mistakes I’d made and every scrap of life my memory and my soul could find to share. I was trembling and light-headed under the relentless sun, still searching for essence to give away, when Big Coyote pulled away very gently and licked tears from my face.

Surprised, I laughed and put my hand out. He licked that, too, solemnly, then stood, his tail wagging slowly at first, then considerably faster. I smiled and tried to pet him one more time, but he turned away with unexpected speed and smacked me in the face with his whipping tail before bounding away into the desert.

The sting was still with me as my eyes popped open and I looked down at Mark Bragg, who gave me a tired, uncertain smile in return. “Do I know you?”

“No,” I whispered after a few long seconds. “Not really. You’ve been sick for a while, but you’re going to be okay now.” The door opened behind me as I spoke. I looked over my shoulder to see Brad Holliday, who was about the last person I expected. I got up, very aware I was wearing a hospital gown beneath my robe. I desperately wanted to ask what he was doing there, but helping out seemed like the obvious answer, so I refrained and said something else obvious instead: “He’s awake, Doctor.”

“I see that,” Holliday said shortly. I cast a rueful smile at the floor and edged toward the door as he came in. He gave Mark a perfunctory look and me a harder one. “Did you do this?”

I slowed and glanced back at him. “Does it matter?”

I saw him struggling with the question, wanting the answer to be yes and not sure it was. After a few seconds he went around the end of Mark’s bed, introducing himself and clearly dismissing me. It was as good a start—or finish—as any, and I let myself out as quietly as possible.

Laurie Corvallis, who was as much the last person I expected as Brad Holliday, was sitting on my hospital bed when I padded back into the room. “I missed something,” she said.

I hung there in the doorway wondering if I could stage a retreat through the whole hospital wearing only a robe. Probably not. “Missed something?”

“You promised me the big break on the sleeping sickness story. Yet here we are, the last sleeper awake again and I’ve got no terrorists, I’ve got no spooky disease, Project Rainbow is buried and I’ve got nothing. What’d I miss, Walker?” The officer part had been dropped. Apparently I’d slid a few points in her estimation.

I opened my mouth to give her the flippant, if honest, answer, and stopped again. I’d written off my knowledge of things as being magic a couple of times already. Corvallis didn’t strike me as the true believer type, but I didn’t like to point her along those lines any more than I already had. So I said, “I’m sorry. It didn’t work out the way I thought it would,” which was true enough. “At least I got you off my back for a couple days.”

To my surprise, that got a smile from her. Pointed, faint, but a smile. “It won’t work again. I smell smoke, Walker.”

“There’s no fire, Ms. Corvallis. I’m sorry.” I came all the way into the room—it was mine, after all—and looked around for my clothes. Corvallis watched me a good long minute or two, until I thought I might end up doing a strip tease for her, then got off the bed and walked out. I’d gotten myself dressed and down to the front desk to check myself out when Gary reappeared from somewhere.

“Had ta drive your pal Bruce home,” he announced. “Guess their Eagle’s actin’ up again.”

I laughed. “I’ll fix it. Elise is making me tamales anyway. What happened to Billy and Mel?”

“They headed out, too. Mel says she’s makin’ dinner for everybody tonight and you’re comin’ over. And Rob says—”

“Robert. He doesn’t like nicknames.”

“Robert,” Gary said with the patience of an old man humoring a young one, which was to say, no patience at all, “says you looked better when you woke up. Not so patchy, he said. He said you’d know what that meant.”

I looked down at my hands as if I’d be able to see what Robert saw in them, and smiled again. “Yeah. I know what he means. I think he’s right.” I knew he was. I couldn’t see my patchwork the way Robert seemed to, but there was no incessant ball of power beneath my breastbone any longer. I couldn’t even feel it anymore, not like it was something separate, anyway. It belonged to me, or I belonged to it, as much as my hand or eye did. It took less than a blink to be able to see silver-sheened magic coursing under my skin, and as little to turn that second sight off again. “I really need to practice,” I said, “but I think I’ve kind of got the hang of this thing now. It’s…” I looked up at the big gray-eyed old man and smiled. “I guess I’m not fighting it anymore. That’s good, right?”

Gary wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me against his chest. “That’s great, doll. Now, you take a ride home from an old cab driver?”

“Promise not to drive using only the Force as your guide?”

“No,” Gary said cheerfully, and herded me out the door.

I made him leave me alone at home. It was hours till dinnertime and Petite, despite her wrinkled back end, would get me to the Hollidays’ home just fine. I also badly needed some time to sit and think and just be me without any magical interference or helpful friends hanging out to make sure I was okay. I took a shower, knowing perfectly well I was going about things backwards, and put on some grubby clothes and my driving shades before getting my toolbox and going down to the parking lot to work on Petite.

Morrison was leaning on the hood of his gold Avalon, arms folded across his chest, studying my Mustang when I got down there. He looked as though he was actively, even aggressively, trying not to look like he had when I’d stepped into his garden.

He wore a white short-sleeved T-shirt instead of a button-down suit shirt. It fit snugly, tight around his biceps, and I suddenly realized the suit shirts and jackets he normally wore added a thickness to his waist that wasn’t his at all. Either that or he’d had some amazing sculpting surgery in the two days I’d been sleeping. The T-shirt was tucked into dark gray slacks, making his hips and waist look much narrower than I was accustomed to. He wore loafers. I couldn’t remember seeing him in anything but shining tied shoes, either, not even at the Fourth of July picnic. His hair was bright with silver in the sunlight, and he was wearing dark sunglasses, which would’ve seemed like an affectation if they hadn’t looked so good. The entire ensemble was completely unlike anything I’d ever seen Morrison in before.

For one brief and rather glorious moment I wondered if my captain had actually dressed to show off for me. Then I got myself under control and came the rest of the way out of the building, putting my toolbox down and leaning against Petite. I wished I was wearing something better than an oil-stained tank top and jeans with the knees already torn out, but that was me, Joanne Walker. You take what you can get. We stood there for a while, both of us leaning on our cars, both of us with our arms crossed over our chests, both of us watching the other through sunglasses that hid our eyes.

Then Morrison said, “Was it real?” and I found I had to look away even with the protective lenses.

“I don’t know.” I pulled my shades off and pinched the bridge of my nose, setting the glasses on Petite’s roof, then looked at him. “Yeah.” I didn’t like how low my voice was, but I couldn’t get it any louder. My heart hurt, and so did breathing. Morrison might have let me get off with the I don’t know, but I owed a lot of people better than that, not least him. “It was real for me. This is my reality. Waking or not.”

Morrison took his own shades off and pushed away from the Toyota. I straightened up automatically to just his height, and there he was, close enough to kiss again, his eyebrows drawn down a little over very blue eyes.

“This is going to keep happening with you, isn’t it. Things that can’t be explained sensibly. Whether I try to keep my precinct running smoothly and without—” His mouth worked and he grated, “Paranormal incidents,” before resuming something of a more natural tone. “They’re just going to keep following you around, aren’t they.”

“Yeah, probably.” I sighed, knowing there was no probably about it. “Yes.”

“You and goddamned Holliday,” Morrison said, exhaled, looked away, and looked back again. “Would you take a promotion?”

“What?” My ears were suddenly ringing, disbelief sharp and tinny in my blood.

“To detective. I’d partner you with Holliday. He knows the ropes, and you two work well together. And there are things you’d work on better together than anybody else I’ve got.” The last words were spoken almost through his teeth, dislike of the truth colored with growing resignation. I knew exactly how he felt. That he could stand there and offer me a detective position, knowing what he was letting himself in for, was a measure of the man.

And I wanted it. To my shock I wanted it so badly I could just about taste it. It meant having license to follow the weird events that my life was becoming a part of. It meant, with any luck, being proactive enough to stop nasty, dark things from happening in my city. It meant working with somebody who believed in what I could do, with tacit understanding from our boss, whether he liked it or not. I had never thought of myself as ambitious, particularly with ambitions to be a cop, but Morrison had pulled me into it and I was starting to realize that I liked helping people.

But there was a huge chasm on the other side of that question. Two questions. He’d asked me two questions, and no matter what I said, answering the one precluded the other. Was it real did not, would not, could not fit into the same universe as would you take a promotion. And Morrison knew it. He hadn’t said, “I’m promoting you.” That would’ve closed the door on was it real. It would’ve told me something, and that he left that door open…

…that told me something, too.

Color pounded in my cheeks, so high I knew my tan would never hide it. My throat hurt. My heart hurt. My hands hurt. As if the bracelet and the necklace and the medal all lay tight and piercing those places, maybe trying to build a shield of protection that for the first time, I didn’t want and didn’t know how to do without. If I’d thought a sword was any good for stabbing myself with, I’d have drawn Cernunnos’s blade from its astral sheath at my hip and thrown myself on it, but that kind of behavior required something to prop it on, or someone else to hold it. I didn’t want to blink, knowing more of those tears that were coming too easily lately would fall. Regardless of what I said, I was going to lose something.

I knotted my hands into fists until my fingernails cut into my palms, and said, “I’d take the promotion.”

Morrison let out a breath like he’d been holding it and inclined his head. “Congratulations, then.”

That was all there was to say: he stepped away, turning to his vehicle. I whispered, “Thanks,” as he pulled the door open, then raised my voice abruptly to say, “Morrison.”

He looked back over the Toyota’s door, squinting in the sunlight. “Mel’s making dinner for everybody at their place tonight. You want to come?” I heard my own voice with a distant sense of astonishment, wondering what exactly I thought I was doing. Trying, maybe. Trying to tell him something my choice didn’t allow for.

There was the faintest hint of expression I couldn’t read in Morrison’s blue gaze. No: I could read it. All it would take was shifting my sight a little, letting myself see what the colors of his aura told me. I didn’t do it, and after a few seconds he said, “I think I’d better not.”

I didn’t mean to close my eyes. I didn’t want to. It was too much of a give-away. Still, my eyelids pressed shut for a moment, my heart lurching like I’d taken a hit. Or, maybe more accurately, a hint. The door on was it real had closed. I opened my eyes again and nodded a little, somewhat astonished at my ability to keep breathing. “See you at work, then, sir.” One more nail in the coffin. I offered a faint smile that felt like regret, and said, “Captain,” very softly.

“Detective,” he said, almost as softly, and now that we knew where we stood, he got in his car and drove away. I watched sunlight glitter off his bumper as the Toyota turned out of sight, then put my chin against my chest, eyes closed for a few moments. Making a deliberate choice as to my path didn’t feel quite as liberating as I wished it did, but it was a place to begin. I exhaled and scooped up my toolbox, patting Petite’s roof as I slid the box into the passenger-side foot well and climbed into my car after it. There were a few hours until dinner. Maybe I’d see how fast and how far I could go, before then. “It’s a place to start,” I murmured aloud.

Petite rumbled agreement as I turned the ignition. I even found a smile by the time we hit the road.