Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 18

I had no idea why the cops weren’t coming down on us like a load of bricks. The flames, pushed to a bonfire, sent heat pouring over us. Everyone but me sang in a language I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure it was a real language, but after a few minutes of listening to the high, sweet tones, it didn’t matter. It was like Gregorian chants wrapped around wind chimes. Their voices got under my skin, lifting goose bumps. Faye’s soprano skirled up, pure enough to tangle with thin blue wood smoke, and dropped away again, leaving the air sharper and harder to breathe, like someone had brought a winter chill into the smoky summer air. Garth’s tenor matched her for a few notes, then was overrun by the Elder’s deep baritone.

Whistling, I thought, had nothing on this performance. I could feel what they were doing, all the way into my bones. Their singing had the same power as the drum, breaking down thought into the pure joy of sound. And, like the drum, it was meant to dilute the walls between the worlds, allowing the merely mortal to pass into the Upper and Lower Worlds. It made me gasp for air and grin at the fire while I struggled not to dance for the sheer delight of being alive. I leaned into the music, catching vowel sounds and carrying them up into the smoke, driven to participate without wanting to disrupt.

The six of us began by holding hands. We women had the symbols of the moon painted on our palms with sticky red that flared black in my wretched vision. The men stood between us, their own symbols—sword, scythe, skull—painted on their palms. When we joined hands, power spasmed through us, an electrical connection that lingered even after we stepped back from the fire. The other coven members joined us one at a time, taking up the empty spaces between our shoulders. Each new addition changed the power flow, a brisk shock that went through my body and pooled in unexpected places. I’d never thought about magic making a girl horny. Suddenly the reputed Wiccan practice of performing witchcraft “skyclad” sounded pretty entertaining.

Too bad, the irreverent and sane part of my mind said,that the garden Gary isn’t around.

It was too bad Gary wasn’t here, period. He would’ve loved the pageantry. I grinned, bumping my shoulders against the people next to me. I’d have to enjoy it for him, and tell him about it in the morning.

We made a tight circle around the fire.Ring around the rosy, I sang to myself, not wanting to interrupt the music the others still made. My feet had begun a bright, excited dance entirely of their own volition, and the coven as a whole circled the fire, crushing half steps closer to the flame.

Power built in its heart, a core of white expanding. I wanted to kneel down and touch it, but the under-the-skin ache of sunburn stopped me. My own powers, meant for healing or not, wouldn’t stop me from developing some lovely third-degree burns if I stuck my hand into a bonfire.

I was almost dancing in the fire now as it was, singing the few bright sounds I could anticipate. I closed my eyes, tilting my head back, and lifted my hands up toward the sky. The music made me feel like my feet were only bound to the ground by habit. I wondered if that was how Virissong felt: bound by time and habit to a world he fled to in hopes of saving his own. It was too late now; his world had been gone for eons.

For a moment, that thought seemed very important.

The coven’s song reached a crescendo, and ended.

Silence thundered in my ears, so loud my eyes flew open.

And my goddamned vision inverted again, the flames turning white with flickering gray cores. Blackened branches glowed crimson and white, the fire’s center bubbling a malicious, murky purple. I shook my head, trying to clear away the reversal of colors as I realized the song had been more than just music. It was a spell.

Power exploded upward.

It erupted from the heart of the fire, slamming into the atmosphere so hard it cracked the sky. Darkness boiled down from the stars, shredding the evening sky. Somebody screamed.

Things poured out of the darkness. They were pale, wraithlike, blues and grays and whites against a blackness so encompassing I couldn’t breathe. The fire was a single point of illumination, but even its colors were wrong, struggling through my reversed vision. Sheets of flat color ripped through the sky, like I imagined the aurora to look, only in grayscale or shades of purples and blues that seemed too deep. Spirits leaped from the colored sheets, in shapes and forms I had no frame of reference for. They were horrible, distorted and cruel, their faces pulled long to accommodate teeth meant for tearing and rending. They were neither human nor animal, and sometimes not even something in between. They taloned their hands, clutching at me, at the coven, then whisked away through the black power. They were made up of legends: names for some of them settled behind my ear bones, painfully intense knowledge that forced its way into the front of my mind. Stone giants calledNa-senee-ki-wakw; flint-winged monsters from the stars; mistai who haunted the dark and sad places.

They hated. Trapped for more time than I could comprehend, they only wanted to be free and to wreak destruction on a world that had rejected them. Panic surged up in my stomach, making me cold as I scrabbled for a foothold against them, anything that could help me build a wall and stop Hell from being unleashed on Earth. I had no support from the coven: they held fast, pulling the edges of darkness farther open. I spared one glance around the fire, hoping to find the desperation I felt in at least one face.

Instead, I found ecstasy.

Faye’s blond hair was strung out wildly, her mouth open and head flung back. Her skin glowed blue, as if she stood under black lights, her eyes dark pits and her open mouth swallowing down, or injecting, power. She looked like she was screaming, but her expression held fierce joy, not fear.

At the third point of the triangle, Marcia stood with her teeth bared, a terrible grimace distorting her face. But I could see and feel the power emanating from her; there was no rejection in her. From one face to another, I saw the same things. Even Garth, whose earnestness I had trusted, cried out in silent, joyful abandon, tears spilling down his cheeks.

I set my teeth together and prepared to dig down to the core of my being, and call up the power to stop this. There was a gut-level certainty in me: even if the earth itself were willing to share power with me, the effort would kill me. I wished, desperately, that I’d said goodbye to Gary.

And then, like Pandora’s Box, hope came.

Nothing outward changed: the silence still shrieked in my ears, the sky still boiled black. But theintent of the specters pouring out of the black hole we’d created seemed to change. The body-confused chill of sunburn swept up from my bones, making me shiver, making a bubble of sickness in my tummy. I swayed, and the boy next to me, more aware than I expected, put his hand under my elbow, supporting me. I glanced at him; his eyes shone with hope and excitement, even through my distorted vision.

Spirits like the ones who’d tumbled and mock-fought over Gary filled the sky. One caught my eye, a lion with tufts missing from his mane, and I wondered if the badger was nearby, carrying a tawny victory prize. More fantastical creatures, honochenokeh who were benevolent spirits; oni which had no visible form, but were life-force personified; other beings, some nearly human and some from pure legend, rolled out of the gap, chasing down their nightmare counterparts and disappearing into the sky. I looked for the thunderbird, and for Coyote, but saw neither of them in the mad rush. Even so, a sense of safety overwhelmed me.

The fire burned out in one impossible burst, swallowing the sparks it had thrown at the stars just one breath earlier. The column of power cut off, and all around me the coven members collapsed to their knees, as if they’d been supported by nothing more than the sky-rending light. The rip of blackness sealed shut, leaving twilight skies again, and suddenly I could hear distant voices.

They weren’t laughing anymore. They were raised in alarm and confusion: the overhead activity hadn’t gone unnoticed, even if our bonfire had. I stared up at the sky, trying to grasp the implications of what we’d done, when Garth grabbed my arm.

“It’s time to go,” he said in a low, urgent voice. I startled and shook him off, staring first at him and then at the other coven members, who were scrambling to their feet and hurrying away.

“What? Why?”

“Because that was way too much magic to hide. Can’t you hear people coming? We’ll get in trouble if we’re found around the smoking ruins of a bonfire in the middle of the park.” Garth was smiling brightly at me, his colors fading from inversed. “Did you see it, Joanne? Did you see what we did?”

I looked back up at the healed sky. “We let monsters into the world.”

“Light and dark,” he said earnestly. “We can’t have the good without the bad. You felt all the goodness, too, didn’t you?”

I nodded slowly. The strength of the spirit animals and benevolent ghosts still lingered beneath my skin. I remembered Colin’s snake, and Gary’s tortoise, and smiled suddenly. They’d have a lot of company now.

My vision went completely black, and I fell over.

Monday, June 20, 5:04 a.m.

I woke up around dawn, more feeling the time in my sunburned bones than actually knowing it. The ceiling above me was unfamiliar, gold sparkles mixed in with the ridges of plaster. The corners of the room seemed dim, which, after a few moments’ consideration, I realized was due to the lights being off. I thought about my whole body, from toes to the top of my head, and decided that while I needed about eighteen weeks of sleep, I didn’t hurt, so probably all was well. I pushed up on an elbow.

Like a sledgehammer crashing into the side of my skull, a headache announced its disapproval of my moving. I groaned and put a hand over my eye, trying without much focus to will the headache away. What qualified as a headache for a car? Being too cold to start in the morning? The body rusting out? I settled on the too-cold analogy and tried to think my car warm again. Absolutely nothing happened.

Faye appeared in a flurry of worry, sitting down on the edge of the couch I lay on and feeling my forehead. I groaned again, even though her hands were cold and felt good. “Where am I?”

“My apartment. You passed out last night. We were worried. I thought you might not want to go to Garth’s, and nobody knew where you lived.”

“What time is it?” I didn’t trust the internal chronometer.

“I don’t know, like five in the morning. The sun’s rising.”

Guess I should’ve trusted it. “Have you been up all night?”

“Mostly. I napped a little, but I was worried about you. We all were. Are you all right, Joanne?” Her eyebrows drew down over her puppy dog brown eyes. I tried to work up a smile, got as far as a grimace, and gave it up as a bad job.

“I—” I started, then yawned so big it felt like my head was going to split open. I groaned again. “Do you have any aspirin?”

“Sure.” She leaped to her feet and scurried to get some. I sat up gingerly, surprised to discover that my head didn’t hurt as much when I was in a sitting position. Maybe the barometric pressure was different two feet farther off the ground. Faye hurried back with aspirin and a huge glass of water. I took both gratefully.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” I said when I’d drained the glass. “Or the night before, whatever. And it was kind of a long day. I guess last night’s little powwow was too much.”

“You put an awful lot of power out.” she said sympathetically. “It exhausted all of us. But think of what we’re doing, Joanne! Think how different things will be. Maybe there’ll be no more war, once we understand better how connected we all are.”

I grinned tiredly at her. “Faye’s a good name for you. You’ve got a lot of faith.” She smiled, and I resisted the urge to pat her on top of the head. “I hope you’re right.”

“I am,” she said with confidence. “You felt what followed the nightmares last night. All the hope and goodness.”

“Yeah.” I nodded a bit, then did it some more, noticing that my head didn’t hurt nearly as much. Either it was wonder-aspirin, or I’d been very badly dehydrated. “Look, where are we meeting tonight? I’ve got a million things to do today, so I should get home.” Well, I had at least four things to do today. That was sort of like a million. I admired how much better my head felt after just a glass of water. “You didn’t put anything in that water, did you?” I asked. Faye’s eyes widened.

“No!”

I held up a hand, grinning. “I didn’t think so. It just helped a lot. Thanks. Look, how far are we from the park? I’d like to go pick Petite up.”

“Petite? Your car?”

I nodded.

“Oh,” Faye said blithely, “I drove it home last night.”

My vision went all tunnelly and red in a way that had nothing to do with the annoying inversions that had been bothering me for the last day. “You drove. My car. Here?”

“Sure,” Faye chirped. “I thought you’d like it to be here.”

“You don’t even have a driver’s license! You drovemy car,” my beautiful, wonderful, delicate Petite, “without mypermission, andwithout a driver’s license?!”

It began to dawn on Faye that she had perhaps made a tactical error. “Well, I—it wasn’t so hard—”

“You drove my1969 Mustang WITHOUT PERMISSION AND WITHOUT A DRIVER’S LICENSE?”

Faye shrank in on herself and squeaked, “I’m sorry.” Then her eyebrows wrinkled down and she straightened up a little. “How’d you know I didn’t have a driver’s license?”

“BECAUSE I’M A COP!” I thundered. “Now GIVE ME MY KEYS!”

She handed them over and I stomped outside like the wrath of God. Faye followed me at what she judged to be a safe distance, not knowing that if there was so much as a scratch or a dent, or a whisper of timing being off, that the next county wouldn’t be a safe distance. The nextcountry might not be a safe distance.

Perhaps I was a little unreasonable on the subject of Petite, but I was literally the only one who’d driven her since I got her when I was sixteen. She was a junker I’d rescued from somebody’s barn, and I’d put more time, energy, and love into that car than anything else in my entire life. I’d rebuilt her from the bottom up. Her engine had been in remarkably good shape, with fewer than fifty thousand miles on it. It was creeping toward a hundred now and I had a storage locker full of parts and plans to rebuild it from scratch. Her bucket seats were black and I’d hand-sewn the leather, replacing entire panels when they were damaged. The paint job was custom and entirely my own work. The driver’s seat was set to my specifications and nobody had ever moved it except me. Petite was mybaby. She’d gotten wracked up badly back in January and it’d taken most of the intervening five months and a lot of money to get her back into shape. I wouldn’t have let God himself drive Petite, much less some twenty-year-old chickadee with no driver’s license.

Who must have had a hell of a time driving it, because she hadn’t, in fact, moved the driver’s seat, and my legs were a good six inches longer than hers. I started Petite up and she rumbled to life without complaint or suspicious sounds. I glowered at Faye. “You get a stay of execution. Don’t ever,ever drive my car again without permission.” Poor Petite had already had a very bad year, and I was more paranoid than usual about her. Faye looked on the verge of tears. I was too bent out of shape to apologize.

“I’m sorry,” Faye warbled. “I just thought you’d want it here. I thought it’d be safer than the park.”

I ground my teeth together. She had a point. “You have a point.” Grr. “Just…don’t do that again, okay?”

“I won’t.” She sniffled. I suddenly felt like the Big Bad Wolf, so I put Petite in Drive and roared out of Faye’s parking lot with unnecessary but satisfactory noise.