you, Joanne, that I’d prefer it if you didn’t get yourself killed out here?”
I blinked, and swallowed.
“Why are you so afraid?” he asked, much more softly.
There are questions a girl doesn’t want to answer, and then there are the ones she doesn’t even want to think about. I reached out, around Coyote and beyond him, for the Dead Zone.
The stars shut down and the world went blank.
CHAPTER 3
In time, stars began winking in and out again, solitary dots of light that made me feel like a single extremely small point on an endless curve of blackness. I was cold beneath my skin, but when I touched my arm, my body temperature seemed normal. I didn’t remember the chill in the Dead Zone before. It was as if it was tainted, too, with the same subtle wrongness that had marred Seattle.
I held my breath and turned, one slow circle, reaching out with my hands and my mind alike. The former felt nothing.
The latter encountered pain.
It rolled through me, a bone-cold ache that settled in my spine at the base of my neck, creating a headache. Ice throbbed into my veins with every heartbeat. My skin was flayed from my flesh and my flesh from my bones, knives thrusting into my kidneys and cutting out my heart. My bones broke, crushed by a weight of regret that lay heavier than the sea. It dragged me down to my knees, too weak from a hundred billion lifetimes of mistakes to bear up any longer.
And rapture shattered through me, turning the ice in my blood to golden heat. I staggered to my feet again, fire in my lungs so pure it seemed I could breathe it. Burning tears scalded my face, tracks following a thin scar to the corner of my mouth. I swallowed them down, not caring that they seared my throat.
Disbelief caught me in the belly, a bowel-twisting moment of realization that culminated in the words, “Oh, shit,” when I knew I couldn’t stop the
Dimly, I was aware that I was connected, hideously and intimately, to everything that had ever died.
More immediately, I understood that now
Then somebody hit me in the face. New, fresh pain blossomed, shattering all the old. I clapped both hands to my nose, doubling over and shrieking.
Note to self: grabbing a broken nose does not, in any fashion, help. Lightning shot through my head in blinding stabs of agony. I made a retching noise and fell to the ground, knocking my forehead against the featureless planescape. Brightness flashed in my eyes. I closed them, grateful for the ache in my skull that took a little away from the shards of pain in my nose. “Mother of Christ.”
I rolled onto my side, panting, and gingerly put my hand over my nose, envisioning a Mustang with a dented hood as I did so. Undenting it was easy: stick a suction cup over it and ratchet up the pressure until it popped back into place. In my mind’s eye, the dent banged into shape. I opened my eyes, relieved.
Pain slammed through my nose and stabbed me in the pupils. I shot to my feet, clutching my nose more cautiously, and stared accusingly at Coyote.
“This is the realm of the dead, Joanne,” he said with a shrug. He was back in coyote form, his narrow shoulders twitching lankily. “It’s not a place for healing.”
None of the things that came to mind were very ladylike. I managed to hold my tongue, but Coyote tilted his head at me and gave a very human snort of derision. “Nice girls don’t think things like that.”
“Thank you for getting me out of that,” I said without the slightest degree of genuine gratitude. I hadn’t felt even a hint of the healing power that normally boiled behind my breastbone when I envisioned fixing my nose. I should’ve known it hadn’t worked.
“You’re welcome,” Coyote said, not meaning it any more than I had. “Can we go now?”
“No, we’re here. I might as well see if I can find her.”
Coyote sighed, a tremendous puff of air. “All right. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t know dogs could look scathing. I thought they were supposed to be all about supportive looks and hopeful puppy eyes. Coyote turned a scathing look on me anyway.
“I’m not,” he said through his teeth, which seemed larger and whiter and much pointier suddenly, “a dog. How do you expect to find someone in the realms of the dead if you don’t even have a name to start with?”
“The others just met me here,” I said uncomfortably. Coyote said something in an Indian language I didn’t know, but I didn’t really need a translation. The tone was enough.
“When you get out of here,” he went on, “if you don’t find a teacher I’m going to…” He snapped his teeth.
“Bite me?” I supplied, as helpfully as I could. He snapped his teeth again.
“The others met you here,” he said, instead of completing the threat, “because you invited them to contact you. They drew you here through their skill. This time you’re on your own.”
“Am not. I have you.”
This time he said, “Ministers and angels of grace defend us,” in English, and shifted back into his human form, stepping forward to put his hands on my shoulders. I blinked. Aside from hitting me in the face a few minutes ago, I couldn’t remember him having touched me before. “Have you no sense of self-preservation at all, Joanne? Are you—” Sudden clarity lit his gold eyes to amber, and his chin came up with evident surprise. “Ah,” he said more quietly, and let me go.
“What? What? Am I what?”
“I think we’d better try to do what you came to do, and get out of here.” He stepped away from me. A strangled sound of frustration erupted from my throat. “This is a dangerous place for you, in more ways than one. Tell me what you know about this girl, and we’ll see if we can find her.”
I told him what I knew: young, black, dead in the shower of the women’s locker room. It was pathetically little, and I began to feel embarrassed. “Focus on her,” Coyote said. “Focus on what she looked like. If we’re lucky she won’t have lost her body sense yet, and we’ll be able to find her that way.”
“And if we’re not?”
“Then we’re going home and you’re going to have to do your research the old-fashioned way. I don’t want you to be here.”
I muttered under my breath as I closed my eyes, constructing an image of the dead girl behind my eyelids. She’d been pretty, with round cheekbones and a pointed chin. Her hair was short with kinky curls, a few of them bleached and dyed fire engine-red. She was dark-skinned, even in death, and I tried to imagine away the ashy blue that had tinged full lips and discolored her fingernails.
A chill slid down my back, slow and thick, like cold blood wending its way around my spine. Fine hairs stood up all over me, sweeping in waves until I shivered and shook my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said, eyes still closed. “I can’t do any better.”
Coyote’s voice came from a long way away, echoing as if through a cavernous chamber. “I think you’ve done more than well enough.”
I opened my eyes.
Snakes.
Snakes were everywhere, winding through the empty blackness of the floor like sanguine rivers, curdling in spots and making pools of heart’s-blood red. They wrapped around my ankles and crawled up my thighs, invasive and intimate. One twisted itself around my waist and ribs and lifted its face to mine, a hissing, flickering tongue tasting my breath. Smelling me and seeing me. Fangs curved dangerously past its wide-open lower jaw, drops of venom forming and splashing away. It didn’t blink; I couldn’t. “Coyote?” I could barely hear myself.
“I can’t help you.” He sounded even farther away. I dared to turn my head, the smallest motion I could manage, very aware that doing so exposed my jugular to the snake. It hissed softly, dropping its jaw wider.
