Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 24

My first thought was, shit, what if he wakes up? And my second was, shit, what if he doesn’t? I stood where I was, foot half off the ground with indecision, then swore noiselessly and crept forward. A tile creaked beneath me and Brad snorted and stirred, far more reaction than Billy gave. Despite my not wanting to be caught, my shoulders dropped in relief: far better to have Doc Holliday wake up than go into a permanent sleep like his brother and sister-in-law had. I put my foot down and exhaled carefully, looking around the room.

Mel was in the bed closer to the door, now that I was noticing things. She, like Billy, looked well, except for the unbroken sleep. Brad Holliday looked uncomfortable as hell. I thought about waking him up to save him the crick in his neck, but he probably wouldn’t appreciate it. Besides, I didn’t want to explain how I’d gotten in there.

Which led me to the good news. Nothing had come out of the dark to attack me through my use of power.

The bad news was I could feel the feathery heaviness of sleep in the room, as if it gathered there and waited for something. Even’d get you odds it was waiting for me.

And I didn’t know what to do about it.

I tiptoed to the middle of the room, seeing if I could touch both Billy and Melinda at once. I couldn’t, and edged back to Mel’s bed to see if it could be moved a few inches without noise or pulling any important-looking tubes loose. I didn’t want to try moving Billy. For one thing, he had almost a hundred pounds on me, and for another, it was his bed Brad was next to.

Mel’s bed was actually surprisingly easy to move. I lifted the foot and swung it over eight or ten inches, then snuck forward to move the head as far as I dared. Air stirred around me, thick and slow, and seemed to stick to my skin as I moved. Like tar. I thought of Coyote, and thought, like amber. It took another minute of maneuvering to get the beds close enough together, and then I stood there between them, panting quietly and trying to order my thoughts.

As best I could tell, Billy and Mel had been the first two to go to sleep. I’d spent more time psychically linked with Billy than anybody, and I figured the events of a few weeks past had bound Melinda and me together in some fashion as well. If there was a place to start ending this plague of sleep, it was probably with them.

But I was on my own. Coyote was gone and my forays into other realms were stung left and right with darkness and encroaching sleep. There was a real possibility I wouldn’t be able to snap out of it if I went to do battle with this thing.

I also didn’t see that I had much choice in the matter. I wasn’t going to let my friends die. I wasn’t going to let Coyote have died for nothing.

Besides. A ghost of humor passed through me. At least if I got myself caught by this thing I wouldn’t have to face the embarrassment of seeing Morrison again. That made the prospect of getting stuck in dreamworlds almost appealing. The extra chair in the room was on the far side of Billy’s bed. I didn’t want to move it and risk waking Brad up, so I took a deep breath and knelt down between the two beds, reaching out to touch the sleepers, making myself a conduit. It wasn’t very comfortable. I thought it’d take a while to get myself into a trance state.

Instead, the weight in the room crashed down on me like a waterfall.

The world around me was golden, the color of a warm summer day, but with no sun to light it. The earth itself gave off brightness, mountains glowing with cheer and good purpose. A river cut through the land, gold as the sky and ground, and reached to the horizons. They were farther away than I expected, a certain curvature to the earth, unlike the flatness of the burning world or the near mountains of the blue world. It wasn’t the Middle World, certainly not with the warm glow of the land and no sun in the sky, but this place was the closest yet to my own time and place that I’d seen.

Around me, in the distance and close by, I half heard and half knew that men and women and beasts and plants, all the creatures and things of the world, spoke the same language, communicating easily with one another. It reminded me of Babylon, though the land I’d entered was as different physically as it could be from that city of twisting spires and hanging gardens. That had been a metropolis, and this world was an agrarian desert. For an instant I grasped how they might still be the same thing, but my understanding was lost as red streaks appeared in the sky, pocked and marked like comets.

People fell ill and struggled to survive, their distress worsening with every heartbeat. Accusations rose up, turning a land of joy and peace into something far more like the world I knew. Blame fell down gender lines, anger and fear thrown all around me. The women said it was the men bringing illness, and the men said it was the women. They separated themselves from one another, making the streaks in the sky and the pain of loss even more difficult to bear. A protest formed in my throat and caught there uselessly; watching the world collapse around me was like watching a time-elapsed video of a train station. It moved too quickly and too violently for me to affect. I stood outside it, gasping for air as the world fell down.

And then something slipped through the midst of the world’s breakdown, moving at the same slow, normal rate of speed I did. My eyes, accustomed to the lurching hurry of the dying world, took a few seconds to pick out details that were as much physical as known within the depths of my mind. It wasn’t a human creeping through the world’s end, not on four legs, not furry and sly and furtive.

Coyote.

My heart leapt and lost hope in almost the same instant, leaving me with an ache bordering on whimpers. This coyote’s fur was acid-etched, each thread of it gold and copper and bronze, strong with power. Not a spirit, not a guide, but an archetype, the trickster who helped make and unmake the world. I wondered if every trickster was Coyote, and Coyote every trickster, one eternal concept that took form however the people thought to see it. That left me with the bemusing idea that Coyote and Brer Rabbit were exactly the same thing underneath, and for an instant I saw through to the truth of that. Saw, not just saw, the very concept that lay beneath Coyote’s recognizable form.

A fractal pattern exploded in my vision. Chaos bled in bright beautiful spikes, sometimes doing damage where it struck, other times ricocheting into mutation, creating new life. It wasn’t caring or uncaring or anything but there, senseless in the way that most of the universe often seemed to be.

Curiosity hung over it like a cloud, not an inherent part of its random magic, but so heavily imposed by limited human understanding that it seemed to wear that impulse like a cloak. I kept my eyes wide, afraid to blink for fear I’d lose sight of that thread, and while I watched the cloak shifted. Rabbits and spiders, gods I could name, like Loki, and an astonishing series of creatures and beings I couldn’t, interspersed with a handful of icons so familiar they made me laugh despite the oddness—Charlie Chaplin and Daffy Duck—shimmered through that cloak, and then it settled down again into a coyote shape, leaving my eyes burning.

I had thought Cernunnos with his Wild Hunt had been a thing of chaos. I stared, still unblinking, at Coyote darting through the people of the yellow world, and understood with great surprise that Cernunnos had been an agent of order, if there was such a thing. He belonged to rules and a pattern of life and death, only able to lead the Hunt in certain times, in adherence to specific ritual. He had made his play to be a creature of chaos, trying to break free of the place written for him in the laws of creation, and I’d put him back in his box.

I wondered where the hell that put me, in that pattern of life and death, order and chaos. Did I straddle some kind of neutral line? That seemed pretty much unspeakably arrogant. I made a face at myself and pushed the thought away. With any luck there would be plenty of time later for navel-gazing and deciding my place in the universe. For the moment I scurried after Big Coyote, just as grateful, all things told, that my sight had settled out and I didn’t have to look at his discordant soul.

Behind me, the men went to live on one side of the river and the women on the other, never to be together again. The crimson slashes faded from the sky, and Coyote explored the world in front of me, nosing high and low. He dipped his nose in the river and pulled something out, and even I knew enough about Coyote and chaos to think uh-oh.

Storms rose up all around, dark colors coming from each direction. Rain fell and water began to rise. I turned back to the village separated by the river, finding men and women together again and climbing frantically up an endlessly tall hollow reed that stretched to the sky. I waited for all the men and all the women, all the animals and insects and the winds and the people of every sort to climb as high as they could, and then climbed up myself, looking for a new world to live in.

But the water kept rising, and the reed didn’t reach high enough. Spider-people wove webs for us to climb, and the insects made their way to the hard shell of sky and began to gnaw and chew and break their way through, until finally there was a hole big enough to scramble through. All the creatures of the world made their way through and gathered around the hole, watching to see what happened.

And the water kept rising, threatening to flood this world, too, just as it had done with the old one. Every world had an end, and I realized I was once more throwing power out, this time like I was the little Dutch boy. The hole in the world wouldn’t plug up, and from the corner of my eye I saw Coyote slinking away, his head hung low from the weight of carrying something. I shouted “Coyote!” and he stopped, shoulders hunching high.

I strode to him, men and women and beasts and bugs making way for me, and stood above him. “What are you carrying, Coyote?”

He wouldn’t meet my eye. Instead he lowered his head farther, gently putting a bundle on the ground. A black-haired baby looked up at me, his dark hair streaming very long.

For one wretched moment visions collided with memory and dreams, and the child lying wide-eyed and serious, bundled there on the ground, was my own. For that moment all the sorrow of a child lost was my own, and the breath I took caught in my chest until it brought tears to my eyes.

I had never planned to keep them, not at fifteen. Not having been myself dumped on a father who didn’t want me by a mother I’d grown up assuming didn’t like me. I had wanted them to grow up in a home where they were wanted and loved and could be raised by adults able to care for children. I wasn’t ready. The only way I could see to love them was to let others be their parents. I’d known from the start they wouldn’t stay with me.

But the girl, Ayita, first to dance in Cherokee, had left long before I thought she would. She was born second, the only moments of her brief life that she spent apart from her brother Aidan those few while he blinked at the outside world and waited for her arrival. They nestled together in life just as they’d done in the womb, tiny bodies huddled in an incubator as I watched Ayita fade away. Aidan’s eyes seemed clearer after she died, as if the two had only had enough life force for one, and she, smaller and weaker, had given Aidan the strength he needed to survive their early birth. It was his gaze I saw reflected in the serious little person before me, though I’d only seen him for a matter of hours before he went to live with his family.

I had not known much joy in my life after that. The image of a silver key, buried thirteen years, flashed through my mind. Buried since I realized I was pregnant, keeping me apart from the heritage the makers of the world planned for me. I had not been any unhappier in the half a lifetime since then than I had ever been before it, but I had not been happier, either. It was a hitching point, the center of my spider-webbed soul, and the only thing I’d given myself over to fully in the intervening years was lavishing attention on my Mustang. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat to give myself voice.

“Bring him back, Coyote. Send him back to the world we came from, so the water will not rise and try to find him.”

Coyote sighed, a very human sound, and picked up the baby in his teeth, carrying him back to the hole between worlds. He set the child down in the rising water, and a sigh of joy rose up from the world below. Water receded, and all the men and women and creatures that had survived another world smiled and began to explore their new home.

All but Coyote, who sat with his back to me, looking into the hole. “Who do you think you are?” I rasped. “Playing games that bring the world to an end. Who do you think you are?”

He looked over his shoulder at me, and his face was my own.

I recoiled so violently it reflected in the physical world, pulling me loose from the bridge I’d made between Billy and Melinda. I came awake falling to the side, and grabbed for the first thing I could to regain my balance.

Unfortunately, it was Brad Holliday’s leg. He yelled and jolted to his feet. I yelled and fell over, still flailing at bedsides and chairs. It was a good thing there weren’t any IV racks near me. I sprang to my feet in a flurry of embarrassment and dismay, not sure if I was more upset by waking Brad or by what I’d seen. I was looking for a way to explain myself when he demanded, “How’d you get in here,” and my mouth replied, “Magic,” flippantly, without consulting my brain.

Anger contorted his features sharply enough that I lifted a hand in apology, though my mouth went on without any evident concern for what it was getting me into. “What’s the story, Doc?” I asked with genuine curiosity. “I know Billy’s side of it. Is it just that it’s incredibly frustrating to have a little brother everybody thinks is nuts? Don’t get me wrong.” I let go a huff of air that I thought passed for humorless laughter. “I’m really on your side of things by nature. I don’t blame you for not liking the superstitious stuff. I don’t, either. But Billy’s so into it. What’s your story?”

“That’s none of your business, Officer Walker.”

That much was certainly true. I squinted, hoping to take a look at his aura, but even that tiny shift toward using my power seemed to alert the sleeping thing in the room. I felt it gather, ready to pounce, and let go my grasp on the Sight before it even came into focus. Brad Holliday and I might not get along, but I didn’t want to be responsible for putting him into a coma. I was a little surprised he wasn’t already, after hanging out in this sleep-laden room for hours. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Brad turned away, folding his arms across his chest as he looked down at his brother. His ring caught blue light from one of the monitors, turning it green, and I found myself staring at the jewel in its weighty setting. I still hadn’t noticed if he wore a wedding ring. “Class ring?” I heard myself say.

He glanced at me, frowning, then at his hand, and scowled even more deeply. “From medical school, yes.”

A thin band popped around my heart, releasing a thin wash of satisfaction. African evil spirits seemed ever-more unlikely, but my enemy did seem reluctant to mess with topaz. I didn’t know how, or by whom, the stone had first been recognized as conducive to easy sleep and pleasant dreams, but I thanked them for it. It wasn’t a lot, but it was something, and I was grateful for a reprieve, small as it might be.

Right on cue, my cell phone rang.