Shaman Rises

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I waited. I waited a long time, hoping against hope that Coyote, Big or Little, would come back to me. I knew neither of them would, but I still couldn’t bring myself to leave the painfully hot desert. Breathing hurt, but fighting for sips of scalding air made it almost impossible to think about Raven or Rattler, or about Gary’s tortoise, or about Coyote himself. Every inhalation was an agonizing little hiccup, and I was grateful to face that pain, and hide from the rest of it. Sunlight beat through my clothes, bronzing my skin so fast it stung, but that was okay, too. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay forever, because here it was hot and awful, but it was also silent and a barrier to the ramifications of the past hours.

I didn’t know how long it was until I felt Morrison’s hand on my shoulder in the Middle World, and heard his quiet, concerned voice. “C’mon, Walker. Come back to me. C’mon, Joanie.”

My eyes opened reluctantly. I wasn’t at all certain I’d be able to see, but the obliterating Sight that had burned my vision earlier was now gone. The world was made up of Morrison’s worried smile, and the relief in his blue eyes when mine opened. “There you are. There you are, Jo. You came back to me.”

I leaned forward—the Master’s body that had lain in front of me was gone—and put my arms around Morrison’s neck. Buried my face in his shoulder, and held on. I would have been happy to stay there forever, not letting the world intrude at all, but eventually he mumbled, “I’m sorry, Walker, but there’s a rock digging into my patella. If I don’t move we’re going to have to amputate my knee.”

To my surprise, I laughed. A muffled little sound, but a laugh. I hugged him tighter for one more instant, then let go enough that we could both shift and start to get up.

Finding the Muldoons, the Hollidays, two gods and my father looking down on us was something of a shock. I’d known they were there, but I hadn’t really seen all of them, and I stared from one face to another uncertainly. Finally I focused on my father. “Dad?”

“Jo. Anne. Joanne.” Dad paused, then whispered, “Joanie,” and, despite the broken glass and concrete-riddled ground, dropped to his knees to pull me into a hug.

“Dad. Daddy, what are you... How did you even get here? It’s only been, like, a day...a day?” I took my face from his shoulder and looked in bewilderment to the pinkening eastern horizon. “Was it only a day?”

“Shamans can go quite a while without sleep. And that invisibility trick of yours turned out to be pretty helpful on long stretches of speed-trapped highway in the badlands.”

I stared at him. I’d never thought of that. Invisible driving. It would be awesome, except if a semi came out of nowhere. I started to say something like that, wanting to scold him, but it was a little hard to scold a man who’d just driven twenty-four hours straight to be at my side in the nick of time. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Petite’s in the parking garage. She’s fine,” Dad said as my spine straightened.

I was sure she was. I just had the irrational desire to see her. Everything had been turned upside down in the past day, all changed utterly. Seeing Petite would reassure me that something hadn’t changed. “Where’s Coyote?”

Morrison’s face went bleak in preparation for giving me the dreadful news. I shook my head, stopping him. “No. I know. I just... I want to see him. I need to see him.”

“Over here, doll.” Gary’s voice was solemn. More than solemn. I let Dad and Morrison help me to my feet. I felt oddly light as they did, like some heavy weight had burned out of me. Everyone, even the gods, stood aside as I walked slowly past them to where Coyote lay on a bier of concrete.

He wasn’t burned or blackened anymore. A small favor, a gift to me, though from whom I didn’t know. His beautiful hair lay quietly, no wind to disturb it, and someone had folded his hands neatly over his breast.

His eyes were closed, but he didn’t look like he was sleeping. His color was wrong, his face too still. I knelt beside him and unfolded one of his hands, hating that it was already cool to the touch, and pressed my forehead against the back of it. After a minute or so, I heard the others slowly move away, for which I was grateful. I heard them shifting, taking seats, speaking quietly among one another as the light gradually changed, but they stayed away, giving me space for things I couldn’t even name. I wasn’t at mourning yet. My rage was burned out, poured into the Master’s punishment and release. I was too tired for anything else, too emptied of emotion. Sooner or later it would come back, but right now, later sounded okay.

I had been sitting there maybe half an hour when a scream like the thunderbird’s tore the air far above me. I flinched out of my solitude and threw shields around my friends, wondering if shields would even protect from a thunderbird’s claws and wondering what a thunderbird was doing hunting us at this late stage of the game anyway, and if the thunderbird even existed anymore, after the fight in the Upper World. We all looked up, hands cupped around our eyes to block out an incongruously brilliant sunrise.

The Space Needle’s restaurant, already at a dramatic cant that tilted opposite of the direction the Needle itself listed, let go of another few yards of height with another metal-rending scream. It jolted to a stop just long enough to notice, then dropped again, and again, glass and concrete and metal shattering with each collapse.

After the fourth, it gave up all hope of retaining integrity and slammed, crashed and bashed its way down the Needle’s slender spire in deafening roars. Dust and debris flew, clouding the clean air. Chunks of metal bounced off my shields repeatedly, and we all shrieked with each impact, so our screams made shrill counterpoints to the impossible noise of the restaurant’s collapse.

The fall itself lasted only a few seconds. The debris took longer to settle. All nine of us, even Cernunnos, just sat there, staring upward through the shimmer of my shield, like Moses on the mountain waiting for the commandments. Bit by bit the ruins came clear as wind swept the dust away to reveal the restaurant caught about halfway down the spire, where it began to flare toward the earth. It looked like somebody had been playing horseshoes with a UFO.

“Well, shit,” I finally croaked. “Somebody’s gonna have to clean that up.”

Then I put my face in my hands and began to cry.