Coyote Dreams

CHAPTER 34

Mark’s aura was no longer split. The full spectrum of rainbow colors bled out so sharply it hurt to look at, throbbing and pulsing with power. There were no empty razors of blackness between the brilliant shades, nothing suggesting a weakness. Then again, it wasn’t really Mark. It wasn’t even Barbara, and I had no idea what had happened to her, if Begochidi had consolidated his energy to the dreamlands. The image of her collapsed somewhere wasn’t entirely unappealing, though I knew that was petty and nasty and should be scrubbed from my brain. I’d scrub it later.

Assuming there was a later.

Two attacks. One emotional, trying to trap me in a dream, the other intellectual, trying to weigh me down with implacable logic. The lingering burn in my throat felt tied to the dissipated ache in my wrist, the talismans Gary had girded me with reminding me of what they protected. My heart. My head, which was, for all intents and purposes, where I thought of my soul as residing. That left one obvious method of attack.

I snatched Cernunnos’s sword from my hip and flung up my free hand as if I bore a shield, just as Mark gathered his hands in to his chest, then released them in a burst of winged color. Butterflies swarmed over me, parting with such force as they hit my shield and sword that I felt the reverberations up my arm and through my body.

They were a distraction, nothing more. In the instant they cleared I saw that Mark had disappeared, dreamtime swallowing him as if he’d never been. Swallowing him as effectively as he’d absorbed Coyote. My heart lurched, painful missed beat, and I tightened my hand around the rapier’s hilt. It would not do to keep thinking of him as Mark. This was Begochidi I faced, a god wrapped in a sandy-haired man’s form. I lowered my blade and my shield arm, casting out with hyper-natural senses to see if I could locate Begochidi in the darkness.

A rainbow of color hammered down on me, grasping the narrow threads I put out and draining their silver-blue dry. I reeled back, and lifted my sword again. Begochidi’s assault faded away again, as if he couldn’t attack directly unless I provided him with a power line to feed on, or find me by. I hoped so. I thought that meant he wasn’t drawing any more from the people in Seattle who slept beneath his spell.

A net had done nicely to catch the god of the Hunt. It seemed more than a little ironic that it wouldn’t work on a butterfly god. On the other hand, standing here sending out dribbles of power until he sucked all the life force out of me wasn’t exactly the best plan I’d ever come up with. I took a moment to wonder if there was some kind of handbook on how best to fight powerful otherworldly beings, or if I was going to be stuck making the best of it every time I faced one. I was pretty sure I’d be stuck. That seemed excruciatingly unfair.

On the other hand, maybe it meant the powerful otherworldly beings didn’t have any idea how to fight me, either. The thought cheered me, and I found myself doing like I’d seen in the movies, banging my sword against my shield to call my enemy out. It was only then that I noticed I was in fact carrying a shield, that the purple heart Gary had pinned to my breast had become a small round shield, quartered by a cross, clutched in my left hand. I had no idea how to fight with a sword and shield. I was going to have to go back to fencing lessons, and see if Phoebe could teach me.

Right after I took some names and kicked some godly butt.

I smashed my sword and shield together again, letting out a yell. “Hey! C’mon! You’re going to have to do this the hard way, Begochidi! I’m not going to stand here and spoon-feed you power. You want me, come and get me!” I liked shouting things like that. It made me feel all studly and stuff.

Unfortunately, it also got the god’s attention. He hadn’t been hanging around in the dark waiting for me to lure him out with power, after all. He’d been off stage for a costume change, and nobody’d told me whether I got to have one or not.

On the positive side, he no longer looked like Mark. All the sandiness was gone from his hair, leaving it bright and golden as sunlight, so shadows seemed to slip away from it unnoticed. His eyes were cornflower blue, so mild as to be intense, and his features were strong and regular and handsome, like Aztec paintings had been modeled after him. He was bare-chested and wore a cloak of emerald and violet and sapphire, butterfly patterns woven into the vivid colors so beautifully that when he moved it looked like the cloak flowed with life. He wore leggings with a loincloth over them, and his feet were bare. He carried a massive feathered spear in his left hand. The entire ensemble looked as if it were meant to impress and intimidate.

It worked.

I looked down at myself. Jeans. A button-down shirt with three-quarters length sleeves. Tennies. Impressive I was not. On the other hand, I felt my singular lack of impressiveness gave me license to skip the posturing that he appeared to be going through—he’d stopped and stood there impassively to let me admire his glory—so when I looked up again, it was with a lunge that brought my rapier point a hair from his belly. I actually saw the inhalation that kept me from drawing blood, and an instant later when I met his eyes there was a mixture of outrage and astonishment in his expression. Come to think of it, Cernunnos had looked a lot like that when I’d fought him, too. Gods were apparently not accustomed to mere mortals taking the fight to them.

I stopped having any time to continue my entertaining internal commentary right about then, and started trying to keep myself alive.

Begochidi, unlike the last god I’d fought, didn’t have any inclination toward seducing me, or persuading me in any manner. Or, I thought, given the dreams and visions I’d had, he’d tried and failed, so killing me was just fine, no holds barred. He slapped the spear up so the length of it followed his arm, and swept it around with massive grace. I skittered backward, holding my own breath to keep from being sliced in half. My shirt ripped silently under the spear’s point, giving me an idea of just how sharp the metal head was, and just how much I didn’t want it to touch me. Surprise flashed across Begochidi’s handsome features, as if he’d expected me to hold still and be skewered.

I lunged forward again, six months of fencing classes overriding my brain. It was just as well: muscle memory observed how he’d exposed himself without my mind consciously registering it. I brought my shield up to ward off his spear as he drew it back to strike again, a forward attack instead of a sweeping one. He’d taken the haft in both hands now, as if I’d moved up a notch from easy kill to respectable opponent. I parried, tangling our swords together, surprised to find that move actually worked in battle. Then I swung the shield around and clobbered him in his pretty face.

He howled with outrage, which would have been satisfying if a heavy wash of black-and-crimson butterflies had not erupted from his mouth, beating at the air so heavily I suddenly couldn’t breathe. Panic swept in and I staggered, releasing his spear as I gagged on soft feathered wings and honey-sweet thickness all around me. It felt hideously like a dream, being too far underwater and unable to claw my way to the surface for air. I’d lost sight of Begochidi entirely, scraping and flailing at butterflies instead. I wanted to run, but my feet were thick and slow and I couldn’t get my legs to move fast enough. I knew there was something horrible behind me, something that would tear me to shreds if it caught me, but I was stuck, and there was nobody there to save me.

White terror closed my throat. I sent out an instinctive thread of power, searching for the help I’d had all the other times I’d faced something awful. The coven had helped me; the thunderbird had. Billy’d nearly given his life to keep me on my feet with the banshee, and my coworkers had banded together, even not knowing what was going on, to help me capture a god with a net woven from our energy. Coyote’d been there to guide me, however cryptically, and Gary’s solid presence had anchored me when I felt most adrift. The whole of Seattle had given me what I needed when I first tuned into the shamanic world.

It was all gone now. There was me in the dark, drowning in butterflies, and nothing else. The only thing responding to the signal for help I’d reached out with was the god I had to defeat, and the butterflies around me grew heavier and stronger as I kept that desperate plea open.

“Idiot,” I heard my own voice say, bitterly. Butterflies erupted in a shower of brightly colored confetti, and I discovered I was on my knees, choking until tears came to my eyes. I looked up to find myself, fifteen and angry, staring down at the me who couldn’t breathe.

“Idiot,” she said again. “You took all that power from me, and you still don’t get it. What’d they tell you, Joanne?” A cord of power thrummed between us, not giving or taking, just linking. Shadows reformed around its brightness like it was food, delicate wings moving in the dark. Joanne-the-younger batted at them, silver-blue light surging, and for an instant they retreated, leaving us alone in a ball of light. “That the only way to win was to fight?”

“Yeah.” My voice scraped. That was the path the dead shamans had set me on: the warrior’s path. I’d tried talking to Begochidi already. I didn’t know what else to do. My younger self sneered.

“Coyote told me that the whole idea was to get somebody to change his perceptions, even just for a second. So you can get inside. So you can heal.”

“He’s a god!” I yelled. “How the hell am I supposed to heal a god? I can’t even tell what’s wrong with him!”

She stared down at me disdainfully. “Who says it’s him you’re supposed to heal?”

A golf club to the stomach couldn’t have been more effective. The air went out of my lungs and I stared back at her wordlessly. “You’re supposed to be your own hero, Joanne. How can you be anybody else’s if you’re not?”

“When’d you get so smart?” I whispered.

“Somebody’s gotta be,” she retorted. “You’re doing a crappy job of it. Get up and figure out a way to live. I don’t want to die this way.”

I could think of a number of ways I’d like her to die. Throttling her was top on the list. I swear I didn’t remember being that much of a shit at her age. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

“Why should I?” she asked. “You don’t.” Then she was gone, all the demons and darkness she’d been holding back swarming in on me again to take the air away. Great. I was having oxygen-deprivation-induced illusions of my own temperamental teenage self. Just how I wanted to go out, scolded by a bratty me.

Well, she didn’t want me to go out this way any more than I did. At least we had something in common. I climbed to my feet as I spoke, pushing at the darkness with my mind. It felt rather like wrapping myself in bent light, only now I was using that light to send sleeping night into retreat. I held my sword and shield like I was used to them, competent with them. Like I was ready to face the darkness and do battle.

My younger self had told me not to fight. Of all the people in the world, my fifteen year old punk-ass attitude-ridden self…

…had told me not to fight.

I lowered my sword, swaying in the ball of light I’d made in the heart of darkness, trying, for the first time I could remember, to really look at myself.

I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t willing to pick a fight. There’d been a chip on my shoulder as long as I’d been able to put two thoughts together. First it was being a gypsy in a comparatively stable world, then being a girl who was into cars. Being a stranger in a strange land when we went back to North Carolina, and God help anybody who’d gotten in my face when my pregnancy started to show. All the way through college, all the way through my job at the department, epitomized by my relationship with Morrison.

Mark had refused to fight with me.

I crouched, carefully, and put down my sword and shield, ending with my face in my hands, my stomach twisting. I wasn’t accustomed to facing anything without a weapon of some kind in hand. In hand didn’t even have to be in hand: it could be my tongue or my fist or my power. It didn’t matter. It was all something to fight with.

I could see where that reckless confrontation could look like the forerunner of doom, especially when coupled with the sign that the Navajo people had been told to watch for. I wondered if the men and women who’d fallen asleep and awakened again to prepare for the end of the world could ever forgive me for being such a mess.

I wondered, sharply, if Coyote had been one of those people, and knew that he would’ve forgiven me.

That, of all things, was what gave me the strength to put my hands on my thighs and push myself upward. I’d blown it badly enough. My heart was sick in my throat, but my younger self’s distaste and dislike weighed even more heavily than fear. I could do one thing right by her at this late date, and I wasn’t going to screw that up. Not now. Not when it was the only way I could say thank you to the girl whose childhood I’d managed to take away.

“I’m not the bad guy, Begochidi.” My voice broke, nothing more than a little laugh. “I’m just a rank beginner. I’m not the rainbow that lasts all day. I’m a healer. Maybe not a very good one, but it’s what I’m supposed to do. And I’m not going to fight you.” The laugh came back, more self-deprecating. “I hope you won’t take advantage of that by sticking a spear through my head.” There wasn’t any answer to my brief laugh. Damn. I curled my hands into loose fists, then relaxed them again. “Go back to sleep, Maker. It’s not time for you to be here yet. There’s gonna be a real rainbow that lasts all day sometime down the line, and your people are going to need you then.” I passed my hand over my eyes. “If you don’t think it’s arrogant of me, I’ll do what I can to keep an eye on things until then. I really am trying to do the right thing,” I added more quietly.

I was about to give it up as a lost cause when white light flashed and left me blinking and blinded in the dark.