Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 23

I stared at the blood welling up with an astounded sense of deja vu. It would hurt. Pretty soon it was going to hurt a lot. The bone was already gone, hidden by pooling blood. Yep. Any second now, it was going to hurt a whole lot. But right now, pure astonishment was keeping the pain at bay. It was very interesting. I blinked up at Marcia, wondering if she would suddenly reveal herself to actually be my teacher.

She didn’t. She looked just like herself. “Blood binds us to this earth,” she said sonorously. “Put your hand together with Duane’s.”

“That seems like a bad idea.” One of the things I got to learn at police academy was how diseases like hepatitis were spread. Smearing bloody hands with somebody else wasn’t the best way to avoid that sort of thing.

“For pity’s sake, Joanne! Must everything be difficult with you? Get a bowl,” Marcia snapped to someone else. I cupped my left hand beneath my right, catching blood that was now flowing over and between my fingers. It still didn’t hurt. For the moment, I was grateful.

“I’m not trying to be difficult.” I really wasn’t. If I was trying, I’d have gone tearing off to an emergency room, at the very least. “Just, you know. AIDS, hepatitis, all that sort of thing. We didn’t exactly exchange blood tests, you know?” I thought I was being very reasonable, for somebody who was dripping her own blood all over the place. It probably helped that it didn’t hurt yet. Neither, I remembered, had the cut on my face that had left the thin scar on my cheek. I nearly lifted my hand to touch the scar, but Marcia grabbed my wrist with a painful grip. “Ow!”

Thenmy palm started to hurt. It was worse, shockingly, than having a sword stuffed into my lung. That had just been going to kill me. This was crippling. I could conceivably be unable to use my left hand again. The line of pain burned up my arm and all the way down into my stomach, making me heave. If Marcia hadn’t had an iron grip on my wrist I’d have fallen. I wasn’t particularly grateful for the prevention. I wanted to scream, but my teeth were clenched together and my throat was locked up, so I just stood there staring at my bleeding hand. The edges of the wound pulsed with my heartbeat, blood popping up in little bursts with each thud. My stomach rolled again, cold sweat sticking my tank top along my spine.

Someone pushed an earthenware bowl beneath my hand and Marcia turned it palm down. My fingers curled over my palm all on their own, which gave me hope that the tendons were all right. Blood splooshed into the bowl, then began dripping down my hand like macabre finger-paint. After a moment Duane’s hand joined mine above the bowl, his blood pooling down into it as well. I could feel it when it mingled with mine, tiny electric shocks snapping back up into my hand like drops of blood reversing their fall. It stung all the way up into the nerve in my elbow, and made my stomach twist again. I felt cooler for the first time in days, like all the sunburned heat was running out of my body through the cut in my palm.

I looked up to see Duane’s face as white as mine felt, his nose pinched and strong lines standing out around his mouth. “Well, crap,” I whispered. My voice sounded like it came from far away, possibly another planet entirely. “Next time, let’s go for sex.”

His laugh cracked over me like a whip, a sharp sound of surprise that made us both wince. Then we were leaning on each other for support, shrieking with laughter that was mixed with tears. Marcia and the Elder kept the bowl beneath our outstretched hands, but the rest of the coven stood back nervously, dismayed by our howls of laughter. I couldn’t have explained it to them if I’d tried, but Duane and I got it. We kept leaning on each other, giggling, until my knees went out and I hit the ground in a silent rush.

When I woke up my hand was bandaged. Duane was sitting up a few feet away from me, cradling his own hand, swathed in bandages as well. He looked as sick as I still felt, all the desperate humor gone from his eyes. My palm throbbed so badly I could feel it in the back of my throat and in my stomach. If I made it through the rest of the night without puking, it would be just shy of a miracle.

I rolled to hands and knees, or more accurately, hand and knees, my left hand curled up against my chest, and hitched over to Duane. “Give me your hand.”

He looked wary. “No offense, but last time somebody said that.”

A bubble of laughter popped through the nausea, making me feel better for about two-thirds of a second. I managed a smile. “No more bleeding. Promise.” I didn’t know what was going on around us. Marcia said, “She’s awake,” but no one came to check on us. Duane, who looked too tired to argue, gave me his hand. I cupped it in my right, afraid to even try touching anything with the left. “Do you believe in magic, Duane?” All things considered, it was a ridiculous question.

He half smiled and shrugged. “Yes, I do.”

“S’good. Close your eyes.” I closed mine, partly because I was too tired to keep them open. The heat had come back while I wasn’t paying attention. I felt it bearing down into the cut on my hand as if it were trying to get in. I didn’t have the energy to keep it out.

My heartbeat, thick and slow, matching the throb in my hand, was enough of a drumbeat to put me under. The heat probably helped, too, and maybe the blood loss.

I retained a vague sense of awareness of the world around me. Duane’s hand in mine had a little weight to it; the popping fire lit the insides of my eyelids to strange reversed colors. Distressingly, my garden didn’t appear around me. I wasn’t used to doing this when I couldn’t fully reach at least some level of the astral realm.

I wrapped Duane in my image of a damaged vehicle: a blue minivan, with thin white racing stripes and a baby rattle hanging from the rearview mirror. I couldn’t tell if it was my own concoction or if Duane had a secret inner minivan, which didn’t seem inappropriate, given his role as the Father.

The left front wheel well had been keyed, a deep scored mark that cut through paint and into the metal. I ran my thumb over Duane’s palm without quite touching the bandages, and, behind my eyelids, ran my hand over the mark on his car. The scoring ran deep, almost through to the other side. It would take heat to fix it, a soldering iron that would let the metal reach viscosity again so filaments could blur back together. That was how it worked in my mind’s eye; I understood on some level that a more practiced shaman should be able to just see the damage as whole, and through that strength of vision, make it happen. I wasn’t that good.

And I didn’t want to leave Duane with burns where I’d just cleaned up a cut. I reached out my damaged hand toward the fire. Pulling heat from the image of the minivan I was fixing while continuing to solder the injury was more difficult than I expected. I wanted the heat to bleed off through my outstretched fingers, but it stayed in me, my own blood heating up. I wondered just how hot I could get before I caused some sort of irreversible damage. I tried to stop worrying about it, and concentrated instead on Duane’s injury.

Gray metal melted and merged back together, overlaying the idea of the cut on his hand. I could feel, if not quite see, the flesh knitting back together, wholeness working its way up from the bottom of the slice. It should have been easy, but the core of power inside me didn’t want to respond. It was as if it, too, was oppressed by the weather, unwilling to do anything.

Duane believed, though, and I thought that might be the only thing getting us through the healing process. I was able to put the idea of the soldering iron away after a few minutes, replacing it with a noisy airbrush. The heat within me didn’t fade. By the time I had the image of smooth, unblemished blue paint in my mind, I felt parboiled. Sweat rolled down the bridge of my nose and through my eyelashes. I didn’t want to open my eyes and feel its sting. “There.” My voice was croaky from heat bubbling inside me. I wiped my arm across my forehead before blinking my eyes open. “You should be okay now.”

Duane lifted his eyebrows a little and began unwrapping the bandages from his hand. A handful of the coven surrounded us, watching him curiously. “I’ll be damned.” He turned his palm up, unblemished, and stared at me in pleased astonishment.

For an instant my vision crashed back to normal. His skin looked healthy and whole in the mix of firelight and dappling sun. I could see the unscarred lifeline wrinkling across his palm. I smiled and it made me dizzy.

The image of a windshield, sun-baked and spider-webbed with age, slammed into my line of sight. I recognized it with a catch of my breath, although I hadn’t seen it in months. Coyote would say it was my soul, and right now I wouldn’t have enough in me to argue. As I watched, a handful of the spiderweb lines along the outer edges of the windshield crackled and hissed, melding together again. Healing.

My vision smashed back into reverse. The windshield fled to black. Silver-clear splinters of spiderwebs glowed an unhealthy throbbing white against it. The fractures that had just healed split apart again, reaching all the way to the edges of the windshield. My windshield. The car, if my vision drew back far enough, would be Petite. My heart and soul. Poor damned Petite. My head hurt. I blinked, and the vision of the windshield was gone.

Someone touched my shoulder. Dull white pain curdled through me at the touch.

“Joanne, are you all right? You’re all red.”

I looked down at my own hands. My below-the-skin sunburn had surfaced, flushing my skin to dark reddish pink in the failing light. I might tan, from this burn. Sometimes I did, when a bad sunburn peeled away. It was the only time my Cherokee heritage showed up in my coloring, and it made my green eyes look weird and bright in contrast with suddenly darker skin.

Now that I was aware of the burn, my skin ached and itched. I was still sweating, the heat inside me pushing moisture out. I climbed to my feet, trying not to touch myself. I couldn’t bend my arm enough to cradle my left hand against my chest like I wanted to. I felt tears burgeoning, but they would sting my face, so I didn’t let them fall.

“Come on.” My voice sounded hollow in my ears, like it was echoing through an empty cavern. I wondered if my brain had boiled away. I wondered if I’d notice. “Let’s finish this thing up.” I couldn’t take my eyes off the fire, black-tipped wings licking at the air. My hand throbbed in time to the pops and crackles of the embers. I felt like I was putting off more heat than the fire was.

Everyone else apparently felt like I was, too. No one stood near me. Several of them wouldn’t look directly at me. I wondered if I hurt to look at. I thought I probably did, because it certainly hurt to be me.

I didn’t know what Marcia and the others had done with the blood. I wasn’t sure I cared. All I could feel was the cut on my hand and the heat in my body. Everything was starting to make sense, in the heady, rushy way that came with heat exhaustion. There needed to be a sacrifice to initiate the change we were after. That was the real reason I was there: to apply what I’d learned from Judy. I was pretty sure I knew the sacrifice that needed to be made. I just hadn’t quite talked myself into doing it yet.

The coven took up their places around the fire. Marcia hesitated, then left me where I was. I was facing the wrong direction, or at least, I was facing a different direction than I had the night before, but I thought it was probably wiser to rearrange everyone around me. I wasn’t sure I could walk, for one thing, and for another, I was quite sure I didn’t want anyone touching me to guide me into place. It seemed reasonably certain that I was going to spontaneously combust at any moment.

Which thought distracted me while the coven began a chant, a different, deeper song than the night before. Did people who spontaneously combusted do something like I had? Draw heat off something and then be unable to release it? My vision swirled down to pinpoints while I struggled to follow that idea through. I was missing something there. There was something about this heat that was clear and obvious and…gone. My mind was too overcooked to hold on to the thought.

I closed my eyes, swaying on my feet. Maybe if I could direct all the heat to my head I would be able to lift off and fly away, like a hot air balloon. I concentrated on that for a few minutes. I succeeded in giving myself tiny fits of giggles that made the other coven members cast stern looks at me. I could feel the frowns even with my eyes closed, their irritation like cool points of pressure against my skin. Possibly if I annoyed them enough they would scowl hard enough that their cool anger would bleed off all the extra heat in me. I started a hopeful little dance, shuffling my feet around and waggling my hips back and forth. I lifted my hands above my head, squeaking in pain as my tank top shifted against my skin. More of them scowled at me, but it wasn’t enough to cool me down. I usually thought of anger as being hot. I wondered if they were actually coolly annoyed, or if I was just so hot that anger felt cold against my burning skin.

I giggled again, not because it was funny, but because it was a choice between laughter and panicked tears. The disapproval was stronger this time, hitting my skin in cool waves. I thought I could hear the hiss as it hit me and turned to steam, but I didn’t want to open my eyes to see if vapor was coming off my skin. It seemed like the precursor to the whole combustion thing, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to have my eyes open when that happened.

I could feel things starting, a low rumble from the belly of the earth. I thought my soles were shaking, though judging from the unbroken chanting around me, it was probably just my imagination. No one else seemed bothered by it. Still, I thought the ground might split open beneath my feet and spew out the bodies we were trying to call forth. I wondered if they would erupt upward in solid form, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! and then come crashing back down onto us. It would be an ignominious death, squashed by zoo animals. I wondered what the epitaphs would say. Morrison would probably write mine, and it would probably say, “Thank God.”

The earth groaned and stretched. I stumbled to the side, crashing into Sam. He caught me, a hand wrapped around my forearm. I made a high-pitched sound of pain, a squeal without enough air behind it. He let go as fast as he’d caught me, staring at his hand. To my eyes, his palm turned white, blood rushing up where I’d burned him. On my arm, where he’d caught me, there was a bleached black hand-print against the sunburn. The earth grumbled and I lost my balance again. This time Sam yanked his hands away, making sure not to touch me. I couldn’t blame him.I didn’t want to touch me, but I couldn’t get away from myself. I broke out of the circle, moving toward the fire.

“Can’t you feel it?” I didn’t know if anyone else could hear me. I wasn’t sure I was speaking out loud, or if my voice was making it through the tight heat that clenched in my throat. “Can’t you feel it coming?” I didn’t know how they could miss the pressure building, the impatience buried beneath the land.

No one answered. I spun in a reckless circle, coming too close to the fire. It ripped my breath away, leaving my lungs empty and burning, too. Faye, across the circle, met my eyes. Her eyes were back to normal, but her gaze was sharp and intense, like it could flay the burning flesh from my bones. “You feel it,” I panted at her. She tensed and looked away, gaze skittering to the fire. I couldn’t tell if it was denial or encouragement. I swung to face the fire myself, and shrugged. My tank top scraped my skin and I found myself savoring the rough, painful feeling. It was the last time I’d ever feel it. I knew what the demanding earth beneath my feet wanted. I knew what the burning in my skin wanted. And really, I didn’t think I could hurt anymore than I did already. It might even be peaceful. I was ridiculously glad I’d met Judy and had learned enough in a few short days to understand what was going on, and what I needed to do.

I took one last look around at the coven and shrugged again. “Hell with it.” My voice was breathy and light, like flame itself.

I walked into the fire and let it burn.