Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 13

A muscle cramped in my neck as I tried not to look at Morrison. I had no idea what she was talking about, and worse, no idea if I should. My tongue felt like it’d swollen to choke my throat, which, all things considered, was probably good. It made it very difficult for me to say the wrong thing. I could practically feel Morrison telegraphing keep quiet! at me, and after a few seconds I got my tongue loose enough to croak, “I don’t, Ms. Corvallis. No comment. Nice to see you again. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get to work.” I tilted my head at the building, nodded at Morrison, said, “Captain,” just like a good little police officer and made a break for it.

“Don’t you think it’s rather odd that a quarter of the North Precinct police force can’t get out of bed this morning?” Corvallis called after me. “How do you suppose you’ve escaped the illness, Officer Walker?”

I nearly tripped over my own feet. A quarter? That explained the empty parking lot. I was afraid to look over my shoulder and see Morrison’s expression, and I still had no idea how to respond to Corvallis. I repeated, “No comment,” in a strangled voice and tried not to actually run for the building. Corvallis let me go, turning her shark’s smile on Morrison instead. I ducked into the building hyperventilating and feeling sorry for my boss.

A quarter of the force? It didn’t seem possible. The lot was empty, but that empty? It’d only been Billy, yesterday, and Mel this morning. Hollow laughter built inside me and faded away again. Funny how I assumed it was the same thing striking everyone, but Corvallis had said people couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t know how else to construe that.

Morrison was going to want to talk to me. Morrison was probably going to want to kill me, but if I got into uniform before he came back into the building, maybe it’d remind him he shouldn’t go around killing police officers. I barged off to the locker rooms, which were noticeably emptier than was normal a few minutes before shift change. I changed clothes and escaped the echoing chamber feeling like I was getting out of solitary. For a moment I just leaned on the wall outside the locker room, eyes closed and my cheeks puffed out. This was not going to be a good day.

What a firm grasp of the obvious I had. I huffed a breath and wrinkled my face, eyes still closed. Someone chuckled. “That’s not such a good look for you.”

My eyes popped open. Thor had just exited the men’s locker room, the door swinging shut behind him. He looked, as usual, like a thunder god, all blond and broad-shouldered and chisel-jawed as he grinned at me. “Thor.” I’d been going to try to call him by his real name. That was one of my new Joanne resolutions. “I mean, uh, Ed. Hi.”

“Edward.”

“What?” I needed a better comeback than that, for when I missed a beat. I felt like I was saying, “What?” a lot lately.

“Edward’s better than Ed. Leftover childhood trauma.” It took me a couple of seconds, but I got it: “Mr. Ed, huh?”

He smiled, brief twist of one corner of his mouth. “Yeah. As far as nicknames go, ’Thor’ doesn’t seem that bad when you’re used to being called after a horse.”

“I guess it wouldn’t.” As if missing a night of sleep wasn’t enough, I was now having a nearly normal conversation with the guy I’d been considering my arch nemesis ever since Morrison gave him my job. This was, once again, a whole different kind of weird than the weird I’d gotten used to. “Did you…want something?”

He cleared his throat. Actually cleared his throat. Put his hands in his pockets and pushed his mouth out in duck lips before asking, “You ever go out clubbing?”

“What,” I asked in astonishment, “like cavemen?” No way the one night in the last however-many years I’d gone out a coworker had seen me. It just wasn’t possible. Especially when it was a good-looking coworker. Especially when it was a good-looking coworker who didn’t like me.

Edward laughed, an out-loud belly laugh that nearly knocked me off my feet from sheer surprise. He had a nice deep laugh, infectious enough to make me give him a confused smile in response. “No,” he said a moment later, still chortling. “Dancing. I coulda sworn I saw you last night.”

I was going to kill Phoebe. Or Mark. Or both of them. “Uh. I, um. Yeah. Was out last night. At Contour. Sort of a freak occurrence. Like, never happens. Probably never will again. Like, you know, a perfect storm or something. Not that I’m perfect. I dance like an accident victim.” I bit my tongue to keep from babbling any more.

“Well, I thought you looked pretty good.”

“So why didn’t you ask me to dance?” I asked, suddenly full of inexplicable piss and vinegar. Oh, the snide little voice in my head said, maybe because you’ve been nasty to him pretty much straight for the last seven months?

“I figured you’d say no.”

I stared. “Why would I do that?” Oh, the snide little voice repeated. I told it to shut up and go away.

Edward shrugged one shoulder and did the half smile again. It was a kind of nice smile. “Told you. It’s like trying to follow Roth. We haven’t exactly gotten along. Besides, you looked like you had a date.” He hesitated, then crooked another half smile and said, “Promise you won’t sue me for sexual harassment if I say this.”

My eyebrows went up. “You’re probably safe.” To the best of my recollection, no one in my entire life had ever said anything to me that might set them up for a sexual harassment suit. I was almost hopeful.

“Well, you’re usually…” He gestured at me: bulky blue uniform, clodhopper boots, broad-shouldered and without a discernible waist beneath the Kevlar. “I’d never seen you dressed up before. You were kind of intimidating.”

“Intimidating?” I was beginning to think someone had replaced me with Folger’s Crystals and I hadn’t noticed. “You must be very confident to confess that to me.”

He flashed me a genuine grin. “Yeah. Just not confident enough to ask a coworker to dance.” He waited out my jaw-dropped, stunned silence for a few seconds, still grinning. “Maybe I’ll catch you at a club sometime. Right now I better get to work.”

He left me standing in the hallway, blinking in astonishment after him.

I lurked around the hall outside Morrison’s office, mostly out of sight, until he came back from the Channel Two interview. He wasn’t quite in dress uniform, but his clothes were crisper than usual, as if he’d known the interview was coming. But crisp or not, there were worried wrinkles around his eyes, and his gaze was concerned as it roved over the empty desks in the room outside his office. A frown pinched his eyebrows, and a wave of wry exasperation filtered through me. I was pretty sure he was looking for me. Even in the midst of a crisis I could annoy him with the mere question of my presence. Go, me. Morrison went into his office and I lurked for a couple more minutes, giving him some time to wind down after the interview before coming out of hiding to tap on his door.

He said, “There you are. Good job with Corvallis,” as I came in. I actually looked over my shoulder to see if there was someone else behind me, which got a faint smile out of my captain. “I’m talking to you, Walker.”

“So I see. It just seemed incredibly unlikely.”

“Take what you can get,” Morrison suggested, and gestured toward a chair. “Now tell me what the hell is going on with my police force.” I sat, then sank into the chair as weariness swept over me. Morrison’s mouth soured as I fought and lost to a yawn big enough to make my eyes water. “Did I interrupt your beauty sleep, Walker?”

“No.” I squeaked it out on the last of the yawn. “Robert Holliday did. Mel’s gone to sleep, too.”

A subtle flinch went through him. “Melinda Holliday? She’s not—” Morrison’s expression darkened until his blue eyes were almost as gray as Gary’s. “What’s going on, Walker?”

“She’s not a cop,” I finished for him. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Morrison. Billy and Melinda kind of make sense. They’re—” I struggled with the right way to say this. “Like me,” I finally said, though it was incomplete. “I don’t know why I’m still awake.”

“Because they’re not like you,” Morrison said flatly. “Holliday’s a believer, Walker, but he can’t do what you do. You want to see the roster of people who are out today?” He shoved paperwork across his desk at me. I leaned forward to pick it up, not wanting to see it at all.

Almost everyone from the garage was on it. Nick, who hadn’t smiled at me in months, except in the dream that morning. The guys I’d been drinking with on the Fourth; all the old friends I’d bantered with in my sleep. Bruce was there, and so was Ray. For a moment I thought I was onto something, but I let it go with a hoarse laugh. Morrison wasn’t on the list, and he’d featured heavily in the dream. Damn. It’d been a good thought.

I slid further down in my chair and put one foot against Morrison’s desk and my elbow on the armrest so I could push my knuckles against my mouth and rub my thumb over the scar on my cheek. Somewhere during the fidgeting I got the impression Morrison was looking at me disapprovingly, but I couldn’t stop. “All I know is whatever this is, I woke it up,” I said through the barrier of my knuckles.

Morrison stood, then walked across the room to windows that overlooked the parking lot. He’d taken his jacket off before I’d come into the office, and sunlight softened the sharpness of his white shirt, making a faint shadow of his torso inside the fabric. The line of him was casual, hands in his pockets, but I could almost see tension rolling off his shoulders. Energy fluttered behind my breastbone and I pushed the heel of my hand against my stomach, then stopped fighting the push of power and let myself blink.

And I could see, with a capital S. Morrison’s colors, dominant purples and blues, were stained with the tension I could now literally see. There was too much red in his purple, edging it toward burgundy, and the colors clouded over his shoulders in roiling dark swirls. Blues were tinged toward black, the color of anger mixed with fear. Not, emphatically not, fear for himself, but concern for his people, and anger at being helpless in the face of their illnesses. Compassion ran deep in him, royal-blue tempered to something more soothing, but gray ran through it, the frustration of being unable to act. Just beyond him, my second sight let the sky thrum with neon intensity, bright electric colors of life making Morrison seem unusually solid and grounded by distress.

I didn’t really mean to get up and walk over to him, and I certainly had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. Morrison made it a moot question by turning to look at me when I was still a few steps away. A flicker of expression washed over his face, and he said, “Your eyes are gold again,” before brushing past me and returning to his desk. I stood there alone, staring out the window at a world of garish colors.

Morrison said something else and I flinched, all the brilliance of my other sight disappearing in a flash. I closed my eyes, not particularly wanting to look at a dull-colored earth and more particularly not wanting to look at Morrison, though I turned my head toward the sound of his voice. “I’m sorry, sir. What did you say? I was…I wasn’t listening.”

“I said you sound pretty confident that this sleeping sickness is caused by an it.” There was nothing at all about his phrasing that made it a question, but it was one. I nodded and my eyes came open whether I wanted them to or not. There was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock on one of the bookshelves in Morrison’s office; I stared at its slim glass form and the seconds ticking away as I answered.

“You remember when the lights went out in January?”

“As if I could forget.”

I ignored his tone and shrugged at the clock. “I really screwed up with that. I guess it was kind of like using a bulldozer to swat a fly. It sent…” My hand lifted and made a wave in the air, all of its own accord. “Ripples. All those snowstorms. The heat wave.”

“You’re telling me you can affect weather patterns, Walker?” Morrison sounded rightfully disbelieving. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, fingers cool against the corners of my eyes.

“You know, sir, if I could summon a little thundercloud above your head to prove myself, I’d do it, but I don’t think I could even if it’d help anything. That’s…” I struggled for a word, and the only one I could come up with was, “magic. Making something out of nothing. I can’t do that. All I can do is manipulate what’s there, move energy and shape it some, and if I do it badly, we get snowstorms and heat waves and thunderbirds, oh my. I don’t know. Maybe I could make a ministorm above your head if I had the training. I don’t.” I dropped my hand and went back to staring at the clock, then at the calendars above it. Three of them, turned to the past, present and upcoming months. All three were covered in Morrison’s handwriting, tiny but readable. I talked to the fine print, pretending my boss wasn’t really in the room.

“Everything that happened a couple weeks ago, all that stuff with Colin Johannsen and Faye Kirkland. It got started because I should’ve started out years ago as a firecracker, and instead I showed up a decade too late as an atom bomb. It was like I threw up a big red arrow in the sky pointing to me and saying, ’Stupid newbie on the astral scene, please use and abuse to your heart’s content.’” I had never once put all this into words, and I was pretty sure there were better people to be telling it to than Morrison. On the other hand, Gary and Coyote both basically understood the problem already, and right then I couldn’t think of anybody else who might need to understand it more than my boss.

“I thought everything I’d screwed up had been fixed on the solstice, but I guess not. Whatever’s putting people to sleep, I woke it up, and now it’s hunting and I’ve still got that arrow blinking over my head.” That sounded like I was completely concerned with myself, which was bitterly untrue.

I drew in a breath to try rephrasing, and Morrison interrupted with, “A decade ago.”

It was very nearly the last thing I expected him to say. For all I didn’t want to, I found myself looking at Morrison, who had an expression of cautious restraint pulled tight across his face. It was so careful it was clear he was asking a question, and that question told me just how detailed the research he’d done on me when I’d let slip my full original name. Captain Michael Morrison knew something about me I didn’t want anybody to know, something I’d thought nobody outside of Qualla Boundary knew. My jaw and my stomach both tightened.

“Close enough.”

“All right,” he said after a long time. “I’m taking you off street beat, Walker. God knows I need you out there, but if my people are going down because of something only you can stop, then that’s what your assignment is. Get. Go save the world, however you have to do it.” He sat down at his desk, looking worn to the bone.

He hadn’t said because of something you did, which was far more than I deserved. But because it was Morrison, I had to ask: “You believe me?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, Walker. Just get out of here and find a way to keep my people safe. Go.”

I went.