Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 16

Agony knotted my shoulder muscles, just as if the raven’s talons had buried themselves in my flesh and not in young Joanne’s. I felt like I was being dragged skyward, the raven’s wings whispering against desert air that thinned and turned bluer as we rose into it. The world hollowed around me until it had cylindrical walls, just like the vision I’d had in the dance club. There was nowhere to go but up or down, and the raven kept climbing higher. I set my teeth together and tried not to either squirm or scream, afraid the former would get me dropped and figuring the latter to be pretty much pointless.

I didn’t know if a bird could actually wheeze from breathlessness, but by the time we broke out of the cylinder into a blue world, I had the impression that was exactly what the raven was doing. Well, I hadn’t asked it to haul my hundred-and-sixty-pound self through the sky.

As if in response, it dropped me and I tumbled down to the earth, bumping and whacking myself on mountains along the way. Clouds wafted above me when I finally came to a rest, lying on my back and staring up.

I’d called it a blue world, when we broke into it. Normally that would mean I’d been looking skyward, except I hadn’t been. I had no need to watch a raven’s butt as it hauled me around. I’d been looking down, and the mountains and the dirt and the plant life had all been different shades of cerulean.

The sky, it turned out, was also blue, though not a typical Middle World blue. It was a hard flat blue, dark enough in hue to be pushing dusk, except the sun burned down, blazing so white the edges of its corona were—I regretted the descriptor, but it was true: sky blue. I turned my head, looking for a horizon, expecting it to be like the Lower World’s horizon, like my last vision’s horizon: too close.

I found no horizon. There was instead a lithe, long cat staring at me. For a few critical seconds I forgot how to breathe, my heart clogging my throat and cutting off air. Another cat padded up, standing above me with the blueeyed curiosity of a wild animal. Another and another appeared, all of them watching me as if to see if I was about to become dinner. Their stomachs were pale, almost white, and their faces and the tips of twitching tails were dark.

Dark blue, actually. So was the rest of the fur on their bodies, paler blue instead of tawny like I expected it to be. Mountain lions didn’t come in blue, as far as I knew. Not cobalt and powder-blue, anyway, as if somebody’d carved them out of this strange sky and made them into cats with clouds for underbellies.

The first one, delicately, put a large paw onto my chest and pressed. I hadn’t been breathing, anyway, but the weight brought that home, and I gasped. He shifted forward, liquid movement that took his bulk from long hind legs and leaned it into me. This was not a spirit animal. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt pretty confident of that. It was something entirely Other, belonging to a world that wasn’t my own. Spots danced in my vision, blocking out his wide eyes.

Thin voices cried out from the mountains around me. I turned my head the other way with effort, to find other humans pinned to the ground in the same manner I was. Innumerable Prussian-colored cats leaned into uncountable people, squashing the life from them, and like me, they all seemed too frightened to fight back. I twisted my head forward again and wrapped my hands around the cougar’s paw, pushing back enough to drag in a lungful of air.

As if my inhalation called them down, sparrows flocked from the sky by the thousands, sparks of darting sapphire against the stillness of the dusky sky and blue-smoke mountains. For a moment I thought they would attack the cats, but instead they swept down to the captive humans, pecking and plucking at tender flesh and tasty eyes. The sky blotted into darkness from their numbers and from mortal screams.

Then the sky broke apart, fragile as an eggshell, and black poured in.

I flung my hands up, half warding off sparrows and half as if I’d catch the sky. Power came without bidding, spilling from my hands as I pushed toward the pieces of sky as they fell. I tried to shore up the world, and it almost worked. For a few seconds destruction came to a halt, and the people around me cried out in gladness.

Then a huge whacking straw burst up through the heart of the world and shattered the remaining sky into a billion pieces. Sparrows and cats alike chittered and yowled with fear, springing away from the men they held captive and feasted upon. All around me, people scrambled to their feet and ran for the tube that pierced the sky, while I lay there heaving with a useless attempt to save the world.

Blue mountain broke apart beneath me and I fell a hundred miles, all the way back into my apartment. I was just about to hit my body at terminal velocity when I felt myself jerk, as if wings had spread, and popped back into myself just a little more gently than I’d expected. My shoulders ached. I pressed on one, trying to work the pain away, and encountered slight resistance and the fluttered offense of a man-handled bird. I even thought I heard an undignified squack of dismay, and looked up to find Gary gaping at me without the slightest apology.

“You got—it’s gone now—you had a—you had wings, Jo.”

“What, like an angel?” I slid my hand down my shoulder, half expecting to encounter angel wings.

He pushed his mouth out in exasperation. “Around your head, you crazy dame.”

Right where the raven had snagged me. I could feel its presence on my shoulder, claws dug in for purchase. It had no weight, just a peculiar thereness I couldn’t otherwise identify. “Gary, can you feel that tortoise?”

Gary drew himself up, mock dignity almost hiding the amused twinkle in his gray eyes. “Lady, I ain’t sure that’s the kinda question a nice girl asks an old man.”

“Gary!” I couldn’t get enough exasperation into my voice. It came out sounding like laughter. Gary let the twinkle overtake dignity and gave me a wicked smirk.

“I guess I kinda can,” he allowed, “if I think about it. I got kind of a sense of havin’ somebody watchin’ my back, like maybe I got that big ol’ shell keepin’ me safe. Why?”

I rolled my shoulder, seeing if I could dislodge the faint sense of having a bird clinging to it. I couldn’t. In fact, it hung on harder, so I stopped that nonsense. Well, I tried, anyway. I found myself still shifting around a bit, getting used to the idea of having somebody—or something—watching over me. “I think it worked.”

“That’s good, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like your spirit quest. Or the one I dreamed about. I had another…” I hesitated, frowning. “Dream, I guess. I didn’t think I was asleep.”

“You didn’t fall over,” Gary supplied helpfully. “What’d you dream?”

I shook my head and got to my feet, stretching out some of the stiffness of sitting still. “I dreamed about meeting my dad and me out in a desert someplace. I don’t know where. And I saw Big Coyote in the dream. He was giving me a choice of some kind, but then the raven grabbed me—the little me—and then—”

“Raven?” Gary turned my drum toward me so I could see the raven sheltering the rattlesnake and the wolf under its wings. I stared at the rich dye job and pressed my lips together, nodding. “Think somebody knew somethin’ you didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Gary.” I couldn’t even decide if I hoped the answer was yes or no. I’d had that drum since I was fifteen. The idea that somebody’d seen the potential for what I might become that long ago, without me ever knowing anything about it, made me both sad and nervous. “I don’t know,” I said again. “That didn’t exactly go like I thought it was going to.”

“Nothin’ ever does,” Gary said, far too cheerfully. “That’s how life is, Jo. You gotta run with the punches.”

I smiled. “You’re mixing your metaphors, old man.” Gary sniffed. “Mix a few words up and she starts callin’ me old. How you like that?” he asked of no one in particular, before shaking off his snit and adding, “So you got yourself a little spiritual protection goin’ on. That gonna be any use?”

“Honestly?” I dropped into the couch. “I have no idea.”

“Oh, good.” Gary put my drum aside, folding his hands behind his head. “I always like it when you got a nice solid game plan.”

I grinned despite myself and leaned against his rib cage, feeling like a big cat demanding attention. Reminded, I straightened before I got comfortable. “The world ended again. I forgot. The raven distracted me.”

“That s’posed to make sense?”

I gritted my teeth impatiently and tried once more, explaining the second part of the dream I’d had. “It was kind of like the vision at the dance club. The world—some world—came to an end and I couldn’t stop it.”

“Some world?”

“It wasn’t this one. It was like the Lower World, except not. I mean…” I screwed up my face. “Everything was blue. Everything. The first one was all kind of primary colors. So it was like the second one was more real, more like this, than the first, kind of. If that makes sense.” I was pretty sure it didn’t.

Gary harrumphed. “If they’re gettin’ realer, I guess that kinda gives us an idea of what we’re up against, don’t it?”

I leaned against his side again. “You always sound so cheerful about things like that. ’Hey, Gary, I saw the world ending.’ ’Great!’ I don’t know why you stick around in the face of that, but I’m glad you do.”

Gary put his arm over my shoulders and wrapped it over my collarbone to squeeze me, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “How many times I gotta tell you, you’re the most interesting thing—”

“That’s happened to you since Annie died, I know.” I smiled. “I just think you must be crazy, the way you run with all this and just kind of let it come without freaking out.”

“Darlin’, you get to be my age, and you start figurin’ there’s two ways to take the world. One’s like it ain’t never gonna change and you’re not gonna, either. The other’s ta keep right on believing in six impossible things before breakfast. Guess I’d just rather do that.”

“Is that what Annie would’ve done, too?” I closed my eyes, inhaling the old man’s mellow scent. “I wish I’d met her.”

“Me, too. She woulda liked you, Jo. You woulda liked her.”

“I’d like anybody who could stay married to you for forty-eight years.”

“Harrumph.” Gary gave me another squeeze to let me know he didn’t mean it. “Always thought she was the practical one,” he said after a moment. I turned my cheek toward his chest, eyes still closed as I listened. “She was a nurse, didja know?”

“I think you told me,” I said with a nod. I felt Gary nod, too, pride coming into his voice.

“She said it was in case I never came back from the war, so she’d have somethin’ to do. I always thought it was so she could work with the little ones without bringin’ ’em home to remind me of what she couldn’t give me. Damn fool woman never did understand.” Sorrow mixed with pride by the end of his words and I squirmed around to put my arm over his chest and hug him.

“How come you didn’t adopt? I think you would’ve made a fantastic dad.” Gary had mentioned once, in passing, that Annie couldn’t have children. He didn’t know I’d seen more than that in a moment of revelation, seen the illness that had nearly claimed his wife’s life and had taken her ability to bear children instead. It was one of those things there was no less-than-awkward way to confess: sorry, Gary, but I accidentally spied on your history a couple days after we met.

Gary chuckled. “Annie was the breadwinner then. Me, I was wanderin’ around playin’ the trumpet at jazz clubs and drinkin’ too much. Guess we never thought we fit the right mold to adopt.”

I sat up, an incredulous smile blooming over my face. “Trumpet? You? Were you any good?”

“I was all right,” Gary said with such deprecation I suspected he’d been a lot better than all right. “Brought in enough spare cash to take Annie on some nice vacations.”

“You still play?”

Gary made a noise that sounded suspiciously like pshaw. I poked him in the ribs, grinning. “You do, don’t you? How come I don’t know this? What other secrets are you keeping?”

Gary gave me a white-toothed grin and shrugged his big shoulders, looking thirty years younger than the Hemingway wrinkles and white hair told me he was. “A fella’s gotta keep some secrets, Jo, or you’ll stop comin’ around.”

“I’m not the one who goes breaking into your house,” I pointed out. “You’re doing the coming around.” Gary looked not at all repentant, and I climbed off the couch, smiling as I looked for my cell phone. “Come on down to the car with me. I left the topaz and my phone there.” There was absolutely no good reason I couldn’t use the phone in the house, but Gary ambled down to Petite with me, anyway, and I dug a particularly nice piece of topaz out of the bag and handed it to him. He held it up to the light, and I dialed Morrison’s number into my phone. I hadn’t figured out how to program numbers into the phone’s auto-dial—or, more accurately, I hadn’t figured out how to make the stupid keypad give me the right letters so I could spell people’s names when it offered to store numbers for me—and so I still had to actually dial phone numbers. For someone who owned a Linux box at home instead of a Microsoft or Mac PC, that was an embarrassing failure in the technical department. I liked to imagine that memorizing numbers was a good mental exercise that would stand me well while all of my contemporaries’ brains turned to mush from lack of use.

“Walker.” Morrison spoke through gritted teeth before I even heard the connection go through. How I could tell his teeth were gritted, I wasn’t sure, unless I was just making the relatively safe assumption that if he was talking to me, his teeth were gritted. “Tell me you’ve got a better solution to my police force calling in sick than leaving pieces of rocks on people’s desks.”

“Technically,” I said, “if they’re sleeping, they can’t be the ones calling in.”

I don’t know why I did things like that. Morrison erupted in a nearly incoherent bellow of frustration while I leaned on Petite’s hood and watched Gary admire his stone. “Captain,” I interrupted when he sounded like he was winding down a little, “get that piece of topaz. It’s the only thing I’ve got that might be protecting people from this. I really mean it, Morrison. Put the topaz in your pocket.”

“How in hell is a rock going to do any good?”

“It’s symbolic, Morrison, if nothing else. Haven’t you ever gone to church?” I hung up before he could answer, although I was suddenly curious as to the answer. My own church-learnings were sketchy at best. Once in a while, and only when we were in the South, Dad would feel the urge to stop by a Baptist temple and absorb some gospel music and the high-rolling passion of belief, but that was as much as I’d ever had in the way of formal church attendance. Still, the power of faith wasn’t something you had to go to church to pick up. I just hoped Morrison would put the stupid rock in his pocket. That conversation had not gone as planned. I don’t know what had made me think Morrison might start listening to reason. Or listening to me, which wasn’t really the same thing at all. I spun the phone in the palm of my hand, trying to decide what to do with it. “Was it only this morning Mel went to sleep?”

“’Fraid so, sweetheart.” Gary lowered his stone, then slid it into his pocket. “Maybe you oughta sleep, Jo.”

I shook my head. “I think that’s a bad idea. I’m already getting stuck in dreams and being blindsided by visions. I don’t want to give this thing any more opportunity to snag me than I have to.”

“And how many is that?”

I looked up. Gary’s white hair was bright with sun, almost glowing, and his eyes were concerned. I smiled despite myself. “Enough to figure out what it is and get everybody free from it. I’m being careful, Gary. As careful as I can be, anyway. If this thing can grab Coyote, it’s a lot stronger than I am.” As if the admission was a weakness, I yawned until my nose stung, and felt my expression go wry. “Maybe I’ll get a caffeine IV and drop by the hospital. If they’ve got Billy and Mel in the same room I might be able to get more off both of them than just the one. Hang on to that rock, will you, Gary? Please?”

“’Course I will.” His eyes sparkled in the sunlight. “I don’t want you givin’ me the look you gave Morrison a minute ago. Coulda peeled paint, and he ain’t even here.”

“That’s my goal in life,” I muttered. “Peel Morrison’s paint.” Something sounded unbelievably wrong with that and I felt my ears heat up. Gary cleared his throat too loudly and looked somewhere else, trying not to grin. I slumped somewhat melodramatically, feeling put-upon, then straightened. “Anyway,” I said, also too loudly, “I’m going to the hospital.”

Gary came around to Petite’s passenger side and bopped his hand against her door handle. “Arright, let’s go.”

“This became a we?” I crawled in and popped the lock on Gary’s door open. He swung down into the seat like it was natural, a marked difference from Morrison, and shrugged.

“I took the day off, doll. Might as well be in on the good stuff. Besides, you kept me out of it last time.”

Like clockwork, guilt swept through me, bubbling around the core of power in my stomach. I reached over without thinking, putting my fingers on Gary’s chest, and magic spilled out.