Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 5

Morrison didn’t catch up with me. He didn’t have to. I spent the rest of the morning reciting what he would’ve said in my head, anyway. It was a bad sign when I’d bawl myself out and save my boss the trouble. I found myself writing more parking tickets than were strictly necessary. There was a kind of quota about them. Too many meant I was being overzealous, but not enough meant I was slacking. Being the sympathetic sort—at least when it came to cars—I usually erred on the side of slacking, but I was taking a mean vengeance against the universe by overdoing it today. I slapped a ticket on a double-parked cab and stalked by, muttering at the Morrison in my head.

“Lady, I cannot believe you just did that.”

My shoulders rose toward my ears of their own accord and my face wrinkled up until it felt like a raisin around my nose.

“I mean, after all I done for you, you go and write me a ticket? A…Christ, lady! A sixty dollar ticket?”

The raisin of my face started to split with a grin. I peeked over my shoulder. Leaning on the cab I’d just ticketed was the most solid old man I’d ever seen. His massive gray eyebrows were lifted toward an all-white hairline, and even squinting into the sun, his gray eyes were bright as he grinned.

“Gary,” I said, trying not to let my own smile slide into “idiotic.” “I thought you were calling me ‘copper’ these days.”

“I just can’t get the hang of it,” the cabbie admitted. He shoved away from the cab, holding the ticket as if it were something two weeks dead, and arched his bushy eyebrows more sharply. “You ticketed me, Jo. Doncha love me anymore?”

I snatched the ticket and stuffed it in my mouth, chewing. Two gnaws in, the flat gray taste of the paper and the sharp blue of the ink stung my tongue, and my mouth went all Mr. Magoo while I tried to figure out what to do with it now. “I didn’t know you were back,” I croaked, and spat the gooey ticket into my palm. “Don’t try that,” I advised, then grinned stupidly again. “You look good.”

“‘Course I do,” Gary said with pleasant arrogance. He still had the build of the linebacker he’d once been, and deep-set Hemingway wrinkles assured the world he knew the score. “How’s my crazy dame?”

“Fine,” I said automatically, considered, then nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay. You look like California was good for you. You’re tanned.”

Gary’s expression closed down, some of the brightness dying from gray eyes. “First time I’d been since Annie died.”

A cord of loss knotted around my heart, for all that I’d never met his wife. Gary’d walked into my life—or I’d climbed into his cab, more accurately—six months ago, the day everything went to hell. Somehow he’d become the most real thing in my life since then. “Was it tough?”

“Yeah. Sometimes. But she woulda hated the thought of me sittin’ around until I was rotted enough to die, so I figured I better get off my duff and go see some of the world again.”

I exhaled a snort. “Gary,I’m going to rot before you do.”

He squinted up at the sky. “In this heat, you’re prob’ly right. If I’d known it was gonna be ninety by noon, I mighta stayed in San Diego. At least the girls there wear bikinis.”

I put on my best indignant look. “Are you cheating on me, Gary? Running around with bikini-clad bimbos?”

“Yeah,” he said, good humor restored. “Blond ones.”

“You’re breaking my heart.” I smiled so I’d fool myself into thinking I wasn’t just a little bit jealous of a seventy-three-year-old’s romantic notions.

“Guess I better invite you over for dinner, then,” Gary said with aplomb.

“It’s a date,” I said instantly. “Wait. You’re not cooking, are you?”

He let out a shout of laughter. “Like you can complain about my cooking. I know what you live on.”

“Hey, you’ve got me eating frozen Italian dinners instead of mac and cheese. All your nagging did some good.”

“I don’t nag.”

“You do too. Italian dinners have vegetables in them. I haven’t eaten vegetables without nagging in my whole twenty-seven years.”

“Arright, if you say so, Jo.” He gave me a good-natured grin, like he knew he was humoring me.

Actually, it was true. I’d started eating better—frozen entreesdid qualify as better than an endless diet of macaroni and cheese—in part becauseI wanted to look as good as he did at seventy-three. Hell, I’d be glad to look as good as he did at twenty-eight. “I get off work at seven, barring disaster.”

Gary’s bushy eyebrows drew together. “Been any lately?”

I hesitated, then brushed the answer away with a wave of my hand. “I’ll tell you at dinner.”

“Arright.” Gary beamed at me. “Look, I gotta take off, there’s this crazy lady cop who wants to ticket my cab. Call when you’re on the way over. Dinner at seven-thirty.”

“It’s a date,” I repeated. “See you tonight.”

Gary gave me a broad wink and climbed into his cab. I stood on the sidewalk, smiling stupidly as I watched him drive away.

Gary being back in town lifted my spirits despite the oppressive heat. With a dinner date to look forward to, I stopped writing so many tickets and grabbed a doughnut for lunch. I wanted to drop into the astral realm to apologize to Coyote, and a real meal would take too long. Besides, I was on street beat, which I told myself gave me license to eat anything I wanted because I’d walk it off. So far I believed me.

Doughnut in hand, I scurried down to the garage, my favorite place in the station. The smell of gasoline and motor oil soothed the savage beast, or at least the savage Joanne.

Not everyone down there would meet my eye. I still hadn’t gotten used to that, especially from Nick, who’d been my supervisor and a pretty good friend not all that long ago. His greeting was made up of shoving his hands in his pockets and lifting his shoulders as he dropped his chin, turning him into a no-neck wonder. He kept his gaze fixed firmly on the wall as I gave him a tentative smile. Tentative didn’t used to be in my vocabulary around the boys in the garage. We’d worked together for three years, and I’d thought I was just one of the guys. But in January I’d invited the Wild Hunt into the garage’s office, and two months later I’d collapsed on the stairs, bleeding from the ears. Since then things had been a little touchy when I came down to visit. I hoped if I just kept it cool everybody would relax again, but so far it hadn’t worked.

Still, hope sprang eternal. I strengthened my smile for Nick and said, “Hi,” as normally as I could. My voice squeaked and broke, which at least made him look at me. I cleared my throat and smiled again, wishing it didn’t feel plastic. “I was wondering if I could hang out in the office for a little bit.”

Nick’s gaze snapped back to the wall and he shrugged his shoulders higher. “Sure. Whatever.”

Not the most ringing endorsement I’d ever heard. Nick stalked off to harass one of the other mechanics, who gave me a wry look and rolled his eyes. It made me feel better, and I said, “Thanks,” to Nick’s retreating back before turning to discover my arch nemesis, Thor the Thunder God, standing about eight inches behind me. Thor—whose real name was something dull like Ed or Eddie or Freddie—had been hired to replace me in the motor pool. He was blond, about six foot five, and had shoulders that Thor himself would envy. I figured him taking my job gave me license to call him whatever I wanted. For some reason he didn’t like it.

We both stepped the same direction, trying to get out of each other’s way. We both hesitated, then lurched the other way. By the third twitch, I was grinning. “Shall we dance?”

He took a deliberately large step backward and gestured me by with a sarcastic flourish. My smile fell away. “Thank you, O Mighty God of Thunder.” I saw his mouth twist as I headed for the office. It was the one place in the station I thought I could slide into the astral realm without the help of a drum. I was comfortable there, and back in January I’d done enough—

This shaman thing was getting to me. I’d almost thoughtdone enough magic there without the idea even making me hitch. I sat down with a shiver and tried to push the thought away. Despite everything, I didn’t like being comfortable enough with the idea that magic was real to just think it casually. Having oatmeal for breakfast was casual. Doing magic was not.

Then, excruciatingly aware of the irony, I relaxed and thought of my garden.

Everyone has an inner landscape, shaped by the events and thoughts that make a life. The first time I’d been in mine, it had been stiff and parched. Now it looked distorted, seen from only several inches above the ground and in faded grayscale. To the right was a thick, shimmering pool of mercury, ripples wobbling over the surface to break against the shore. Behind it was a tall granite-streaked bluff, too high to easily see the top of from a badger’s vantage point. To the left, a lawn manicured so short it was nearly dead spread out, a handful of dark-leafed hedges sprouting up in austere blocks of green. Stone pathways and stone benches made straight lines through the garden.

Possibly, just possibly, I still had some inner-garden nurturing to do.

Immediately behind me, my badger hole folded in on itself and smoothed out again, leaving lawn behind. “Well, that’s something,” I said out loud, as the world around me stained with color. The pool faded from mercury to clear, its earthy bottom refracting brown through reflected gray skies. I rolled onto my back, briefly missing the extraordinary strength of the badger’s legs, and closed my eyes. “Coyote?” I tried to picture him, long-legged and golden-eyed, then laughed silently as the image slid between Coyote-the-man and Coyote-the-coyote. Straight black hair drooped over perked furry ears. He looked like a character from Disney’sRobin Hood gone terribly wrong.

A rustle hissed over the grass like wax paper sliding against itself. I sat up, grinning.

“You’re always reading my mind,” I said. “So get a load of how I think of…you?”

A rattlesnake swayed in front of me, black eyes reflecting the sudden paleness of my skin.

A snake in my garden.

For one hysterical moment I looked for an apple tree. Then panic took over and I crab-walked backward, elbows and knees going everywhere. It took another few seconds to make myself stop by asserting enough control to dig my fingers into the earth. “My garden,” I croaked. “You can’t be here.”

The rattler slithered forward a few inches, dry scrape against the short grass. “You can’tbe here,” I repeated. It lifted its head and hissed at me, long tongue darting in and out. I shot to my feet, barely keeping myself from leaping to one of the stone benches and screaming like a ‘50s housewife. It was my garden. My rules were supposed to apply. I bit the inside of my cheek and closed my eyes, reverting to the car metaphor I was most comfortable with. Rolling up the mental windows and making a shield of glass around myself reminded me of movies where the venomous animal was kept away from the actors by a sheet of glass.

The snake bonked its nose against the glass, striking out and coiling back as I opened my eyes. Its tongue thrust out again, and it reared back, expressionless flat eyes somehow looking offended. I grinned in a breathless combination of triumph and fear, and waggled my fingers at it. “G’bye, then.”

For once I let myself forget the vehicle metaphor, and instead spun glass. Heat poured off my body as I willed it to soften the shield between myself and the snake. I blew air through pursed lips and the glass expanded, spilling clear and delicate over the lawn as I protected my garden. The snake squiggled backward, forced to the edges of the garden.

I nearly had the thing vanquished when it shifted.

It didn’t change like Coyote did, inside a blink. Instead it reared up, making a long slender line of itself, balancing on a single coil of muscle. A hood flared, cobralike, then widened farther, broadening until it became shoulders. The body thickened, arms sprouting and waist narrowing. Hips splayed, legs splitting from the expanding breadth of muscle that had been its body. The coil upon which she had balanced became feet, small and bare. I jerked my eyes up to her face.

The rattlesnake’s dead eyes gazed back at me; like Ra, she was human-shaped with a snake’s head, large enough to fit the body. She flicked her tongue at me once more and completed the transformation into a brisk-looking Native American woman whose age I couldn’t judge. Her eyes were still very black, though bright with reflected sunlight. She had salt-and-pepper hair and wrinkles around her eyes. Her cheeks were round over a thin mouth that looked like it was used to smiling, but which was at the moment pushed out in a thoughtful moue. “Well, you certainly are a handful.”

“What?”

“You’re a handful,” she repeated. “Sliding around the astral realm, leaving psychic debris all over the place, and with such terrible shields I could walk right in here. I can see what needs to be done. At least you have potential,” she added, shaking her head. “You nearly pushed me out just now.”

I set my teeth and reared my head back, reestablishing the crystalline wall. It glimmered, becoming a solid curve of glass between the snake woman and myself. Her eyebrows—straight and slightly angled, like Spock’s—rose a fraction of an inch, and she took a step back. “You see?” She sounded pleased.

“Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

“My name is Judy Morningstar,” she said. “I’m going to be your teacher.”