Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 22

I fell through myself and memory and dreams until I was no longer capable of telling up from down or me from him. In every room of memory a brick-red boy waited, golden eyes bright and cheerful while I argued with him. I was thirteen and gawky and even I knew shamans didn’t just happen. You had to do a spirit quest and be guided and be prepared to focus yourself on the good of the community. I barely knew what a community was, much less had any interest in making it healthy. I felt distant and sullen even contemplating it. I was new to North Carolina at that age, still the outsider, and the part of me that wanted desperately to fit in was overridden by the part that just didn’t know how. I never had figured it out.

“That’s why I’m here,” Coyote said over and over again, showing patience far beyond his apparent years. I could see him through my own eyes, a brick-red young man of about eighteen with hair past his shoulders, long and gleaming blue-black in the darkness. The part of my mind able to think about it thought that made sense. A prepubescent girl was more likely to respond positively to an eighteen-year-old knockout than a thirty-something…well. Knockout. Coyote in any form was beautiful, bequeathed with the striking features that seemed par for the course when it came to otherworldly beings. But watching him now had a peculiar echo to it, as if what I saw was somehow being filtered through more than one set of eyes. It didn’t exactly diminish him, but it gave him a slightly more human cast. The red brick of his skin was warmer, sun-kissed instead of masonry, and his golden eyes were touched with brown. Looking too hard made me dizzy.

“You’re unusual,” Coyote said. My thirteen-year-old self snorted with the same lack of delicacy the woman twice her age had at her disposal.

“Siobhán,” he said, and I watched me hunch my shoulders up and shift, as if I was dragging a blanket over them.

“Stop calling me that. My name’s Joanne.”

A wave of sorrow caught me off guard, not my own emotion at all, but Coyote’s. Unexpectedly, it brought clarification. I wasn’t visiting memory on my own. These were Coyote’s memories, not mine, and the double vision was brought on by both of us remembering the same thing from different vantages. I had the impulse to gather up the younger me into my arms and hug her. Rather, Coyote had the impulse. My reluctance might have been what stopped him. I wondered if the me now could affect the him then. I wouldn’t put it past me.

I shook my head without moving his at all, unable to keep my selves straight. “Hang on.” That was actually me, breathing the words while I looked for the coil of power inside me. It felt awkward, tangled up in Coyote’s dreams, especially as his power wasn’t centered the way mine was.

Separating myself felt like making taffy candy, pulling and stretching and bringing it back together. Coyote’s power was recognizable to me, in the same way the Eiffel Tower was: I’d never seen it before, but all the representations and reproductions looked like the real thing. I’d dealt with enough magic from other people to recognize what I was facing.

His magic was all rusty oranges and hard blues, desert colors that had a faint taste of grit to them. Everything that was mine was silver and shot-silk blue. His were a part of him, as natural as breathing, and mine were still bunched together at the center of me, tendrils feeling their way into me as if they weren’t certain they were welcome. A touch of green sprouted in my silver, envy at how easy it was for Coyote, then disappeared again as I folded taffy one more time and found myself untangled from my spirit guide.

For one truly alarming instant I didn’t belong anywhere. I had no attachment to my own body, not even the pulse of silver cord I’d seen when my mother and I had come together to fight the Blade. I hung in the Dead Zone, numbed by a coldness that went beyond anything I’d ever felt before. Even Amhuluk’s presence hadn’t held the bone-draining chill that was death in such a profound manner. Panic clenched my heart and I dove forward, taking up residence behind the eyes of my thirteen-year-old self.

She didn’t notice a thing. I wondered once more if it’d been like this all along and I just hadn’t known I was visiting back then, or if this was only memory, and nothing I did could affect what was to play out. Not that I had the foggiest idea what was going to play out. My subconscious seemed to remember this conversation, but I certainly didn’t.

“Joanne.” I could hear the sadness in Coyote’s voice as clearly as I’d felt it rise in him. My mother had sounded much that way the first time I’d corrected her as to my name. Right after that I’d done something that turned her from being a light-hearted woman with a ready smile into someone with the strength to will herself to death on a specific date. I very much didn’t want a repeat of that scenario.

The younger me didn’t hear anything beyond the brick-red boy in her dreams using the name she wanted him to. It was enough to satisfy her, at least for the moment. “What do you mean, I’m unusual?” The question was cautious, guarded, like somebody’d said Tom Cruise was on the phone for her. She wanted to believe it, but couldn’t fathom it being true. She had half-formed ideas that I remembered, wanting to be told she was really the lost daughter of some insanely wealthy family who would dote on their missing child, not the half-breed daughter of a reclusive father who didn’t know what to do with her. Probably every kid in the universe had that kind of fantasy, whether they’d been abandoned at three months old or not.

The adult me didn’t expect anything at all. I remembered this dream. It’d come the night my period started, and I’d woken up after Coyote’d said brightness of body, brightness of soul. He’d shown up in my dreams a few times after that, never more than an instant or two. I usually woke up as soon as he appeared, to the best of my recollection. I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t already awake, instead of lingering in the Dead Zone. Coyote put his hand out again, inviting.

“Let me show you, Joanne.”

I got up, rubbing my eyes like a much smaller kid, and put my hand in Coyote’s, feeling grubby and gangly next to him. He dropped a wink and said, “Down the rabbit hole!”

The Dead Zone opened up a funnel and zipped me down a swirling tube at about a thousand miles an hour. Wind ripped through my hair and the tube took a rise and dip, making me squeal and laugh and reach for support that wasn’t there. The adult me thought there ought to be friction burns on my thighs—I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, my usual sleeping apparel as a kid—and the younger me thought she’d never been on such a totally excellent roller coaster. Light suddenly enveloped us and Joanne shrieked gleefully as we exploded out of the tunnel over a body of water. We were in the air just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of greenery, and then we hit the pond with a tremendous splash and a whole lot of giggling. Joanne came to the surface laughing and wiping her eyes, merrier than I could ever remember being, and stood there looking around, thigh-deep in water.

A lush, misty garden spread out in front of me, cobblestone paths wending through it into a foggy distance. Enormous trees grew up, branches braiding together to make arches over the pathways. A scent of cherries filled warm air, blossoms drifting down like soft rain, and thunder filled my ears. There were lily pads and floating cherry blooms on the water’s surface, and Joanne trailed her fingers through the water, scooping one of the flowers up. She actually tucked it behind her ear, a feminine gesture I couldn’t imagine doing, and turned to look behind her while she waded out of the pool.

I knew what I’d see: a waterfall filling the pool from the garden’s northern end. I thought maybe it’d been the water-slide we’d come in on. But the falls I was accustomed to tended to be a trickle, or a thin sheet of water over granite facing, hardly enough to play in.

Joanne’s waterfall ran higher than I could see, blue sky and pounding mist obscuring its top. For all its enthusiastic fury and the white water it made when it hit the pond, the pool itself was remarkably still, so clear I could see the depths it plunged to near the waterfall’s foot.

Joanne backed up until a bench hit her in the knees and she sat, arms braced as she smiled at rainbows brought into relief by sunlight playing over the falls. “What is this place?”

“Your soul, for lack of a better word,” Coyote said. He was sitting beside me on the bench, apparently unconcerned with having temporarily disappeared, and he wore the coyote form I was most familiar with. Joanne did a double take that even I found funny, and Coyote himself snapped air in a doglike laugh.

“I’m not a dog,” he said, nearly before the thought was finished, and I laughed while Joanne wriggled sheepishly. Some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

“Sorry.” She sounded like she meant it, which was more than I’d ever done. “Does everybody have a garden like this one?”

“Everyone has a garden,” Coyote said with a bony-shouldered shrug. “Nobody’s exactly alike. It’s the source of who you are, Joanne. The heart of your power.”

Joanne curled a lip, the expression familiar to me. I’d tried hard to train myself out of it once I’d grown up, for a couple of reasons. One was that sneering only looked good on James Dean. The other was that I’d eventually figured out nobody wanted to be friends with somebody who perpetually looked like she’d bite your head off if you spoke to her. But that was years ahead of the girl I was right now, and she sneered with the best of them. “I don’t have any power. I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Oh, God. Reliving being thirteen was going to be a lesson in humiliation I could do without. I tried closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears, but it was amazingly ineffective against things that were happening in my own head. Coyote cocked his ears, as if doing so would explain the logic behind the younger me’s statement, then rolled out his tongue and let it go. “Close your eyes, and tell me what you feel.”

Joanne eyed him, then shrugged and did so, straightening her spine as she did. I didn’t remember having such good posture at her age. Then again, being tall had kept me out of some fistfights, so there were reasons to stand up straight.

Being tall and standing up so straight had come across as arrogant, the snide voice in my head reminded me, and had gotten me into a lot more fights than it’d gotten me out of. I told the voice to shut up and go away, even if it was right. Especially because it was right. I’d learned, too, to never let them know they’d beaten you, and standing up straight went a long way toward that. I’d stood up so straight every goddamned day of my pregnancy that my back hurt again just thinking about it. Pride had kept me stiff-spined for eight months. I guessed maybe it’d been doing that for a lot longer than I cared to think about.

“I feel like I’m going to puke,” the younger me announced in the midst of all that introspection. She rubbed her hand over her stomach and opened her eyes again, nose wrinkled. “Like somebody hit me in the stomach with a golf club.”

Coyote’s mouth opened and his tongue lolled out, as if he’d been about to say something and Joanne’s comment had caught him off guard. “Golf club?”

“Yeah,” she said, oblivious to his surprise, while I remembered the club sinking into my diaphragm like it was meant to be there, hooking under the breastbone with a solid whump. It’d been an accident, the kid who hit me considerably younger than I was, but the club’s backswing had still taken the breath out of me for what seemed like hours on end. Even now, more than fifteen years later, the memory made a sick little pit beneath my breastbone, and I realized Joanne was right. The power, when it wanted to be noticed, did feel a lot like that had. It wasn’t something that could be ignored. “It feels kind of connected to something,” she added. Coyote shook off his curiosity about the golf club and looked pleased.

“Connected to what?”

“I dunno.” Joanne turned around in a circle, still rubbing her tummy. “Maybe to this whole place. Maybe to you.” She let go a sudden burp, clapped a hand over her mouth and looked back at Coyote with wide eyes. “Feels better now,” she said through her fingers. “Maybe it’s just gas.”

Humor creased Coyote’s long face and he lifted his chin, ears pricking up. “Close your eyes and try again. Imagine reaching out with that feeling so you can touch everything with it.”

“You want me to puke all over everything?” Joanne asked dubiously, but closed her eyes. I couldn’t see when she closed her eyes, and twitched impatiently, trying not to order myself to open my eyes again. I could feel the power inside her—us—respond when she reached for it, flowing cool and silver-blue out from her center. There was nothing sluggish or reluctant, as there’d been in the worst moments of my denying it, nor did it feel in any way gleeful or glad to be used. It just was, as much a part of my younger self as breathing or messing around with cars was. For an instant I envied her, and wished there was a way to get her not to make the mistakes I’d made.

Joanne didn’t even have to open her eyes. The world began to come into focus through closed eyelids, the gorgeous, powerful neon colors I’d become so fond of spilling into her vision through the power of magic. I’d never tried looking at my garden with the second sight, and wouldn’t have thought an imaginary place representing my soul would have all the colors of life inside it, vibrating with excitement and potential.

The waterfall was made of crystal, crashing down with a liquid music that raised hairs on my arms. The pool it splashed into rippled into prisms, colors riding tiny waves to the pool’s edge, where they crawled up over the banks and spilled into grass and trees with all the joie de vivre imaginable. I could see Coyote in both his forms at once, the lanky good-natured animal shape seeming to settle inside the young man’s torso. His own power, his aura, was less tempered through Joanne’s eyes than through his own, burnt sienna and bright cobalt-blue, but it was infused with joy and patience.

“Open your eyes,” he murmured, and Joanne did, very slowly, until the spirit world and the normal world amalgamated and became one in her vision, neither seeming complete without the other. I felt raw delight rise up in her, so overwhelming her throat tightened and tears swam in her eyes as she split a smile broad enough to hurt her cheeks.

“It’s magic!”

“It’s your birthright,” Coyote said. “I’ve got a lot to teach you.”

Joanne turned that blinding smile, an expression I couldn’t remember ever having, on the coyote, then reached out to hug him so hard I could feel bony ribs and shoulders digging into my cheek and arm. There was greed and hope and excitement in her voice as she said, with more enthusiasm than I’d ever shown, “I want to learn.”