Coyote Dreams

made everything more complicated. “I’m sorry, Captain. If it was going to be easy, the doctors probably could’ve woken him up. But I’ll figure it out. I really will,” I promised, then offered a hopeful smile and added, “Look at it this way. At least nobody’s dead.”

Morrison’s cell phone rang.

CHAPTER 6

I steepled my palms and fingers together against my mouth, fitted my thumbs under my chin and tried not to throw up. I had the distinct feeling I’d just made the at least it’s not raining comment on a much nastier scale, and from the tension throbbing in Morrison’s temple, he thought I had, too. For a few seconds the only sound in the room was the beeping of Billy’s monitors while we all watched Morrison pick up the call.

He tilted his head back and exhaled, shoulders slumping a little before he cast me an indecipherable glance and left the room with an apology on his lips for whoever it was he was talking to. Relief-tinged nausea settled into my bones and I put my head down on my knees and breathed for a minute. If somebody was dead, the look Morrison’d given me wouldn’t have been unreadable. I was willing to take small favors where I could get them. A shiver swept over me and I curled my arms around myself more tightly.

Melinda put her hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, Joanie.”

I shook my head against my knees. “I didn’t do anything.”

Brad’s disgruntled “You certainly didn’t” came across the room in a mutter. Melinda ignored him, squeezing my shoulder.

“You’ll find a way to help him,” she said with quiet confidence. “And at least I’ve got something to tell the kids.”

“What,” Brad snapped, “that their father is being held captive by a psychic whammy? Melinda, you have got to start dealing with the real world here. Bill is in a coma and he may never wake up. These things aren’t caused by evil spirits and magic. It’s a physical condition and has to be treated with science and medical professionals, not voodoo and snake oil.”

I lifted my head to watch him rant, hands steepled against my mouth again. “We’re all worried, Dr. Holliday,” I said when he was done. “I know you’ve already lost one sibling.” Careless of him, my snide little voice said, but I didn’t let it out. Brad didn’t like me as it was. Joking about dead family wasn’t exactly the best way to win friends and influence people. “I hope the doctors can help him. In the meantime, maybe voodoo hoodwinks won’t hurt.” I could hardly believe I was hearing myself say that. How very far the mighty had fallen.

I stood up and gave Melinda a hug. “I’m going to head home and see if I can scare anything up about sleeping sicknesses and…” I trailed off with a sigh. And penetrating mental shields was how the sentence ended, but my coping mechanism had slid out of place, and it just seemed like too much to say right then. “I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything, okay?”

“Okay.” Mel returned the hug and I heard the argument with Brad start up again as I left the hospital room.

Morrison was folding his phone closed as I came down the hall. “Everything all right, Captain? Who was on the phone?”

He gave me another look I couldn’t read. “Everything’s fine. Just a friend.”

“Tell your friend he’s got lousy timing,” I said.

“She,” Morrison said, then looked like he wished he hadn’t. A too-vivid mental picture of Barbara Bragg snagged in my mind and I closed my hands into fists. Morrison noticed and I tried to find something else to do with my hands. “What’s going on back there?” Morrison asked just a shade too loudly. I seized on it, grateful for any change of topic.

“Oh, you know.” I had something to do with my hands now, gesturing down the hall toward the elevators. Morrison went for the stairs, probably out of sheer contrariness, but I followed him anyway. “Brad’s back there trying to convince Mel it’s dangerous to let me within fifty yards of his brother, and she’s telling him that Billy isn’t Caroline, and that everything’s going to be all right.” My vast psychic powers didn’t actually include telepathy, but I figured it was a pretty good guess as to what was going on. Morrison cornered on the stairs and threw a furrow- browed glance back at me.

“Caroline?”

“Their sister. She drowned when Billy was a kid. He told me about it a few months ago.” He’d told me considerably more than that, the day after my powers had woken up. Caroline’s death and consequent visits had precipitated Billy’s fascination with the paranormal world. He didn’t see dead people all the time, the way the kid in the movie did, but he saw them often enough. It was why he’d become a homicide detective: the newly dead were sometimes able to point him toward their killers. I would not in a million years have believed him if I hadn’t spent the night before he told me talking to a bunch of dead shamans.

“I didn’t know.” Morrison pushed an exit door open, letting in brilliant July sunshine. I lifted a hand to protect my eyes as we went out to the parking lot.

“Funny what we don’t know about the people we work with.” I regretted saying it almost before the words were finished, and Morrison gave me a sharp look that said, as clearly as words might have, No kidding, Siobhán. I knotted my fists and muttered, “See what I mean?” at the pavement.

My real name wasn’t Joanne Walker. I’d been born Siobhán Walkingstick, names stuck on me by diversely ethnic parents. My father had taken one look at the Gaelic mess Siobhán and Anglicized it to Joanne, and I’d abandoned the Cherokee Walkingstick the day I graduated high school. Since then I hadn’t given much thought to either name, until dead shamans and old gods started calling me by it. I can be a little slow on the uptake, but I got the idea pretty fast that names had power, and my true name wasn’t something I wanted bandied about.

So, of course, I’d turned around and told it to Morrison. I’d say I was still trying to work my way through that, but I was more trying to pull the covers over my head and pretend it hadn’t happened. Apparently good ol’ Captain Morrison wasn’t going to let me forget. I wished he would. Regardless of the name printed on my birth certificate, Siobhán Walkingstick was someone who barely existed. I pushed myself into a jog for a few steps, pulling ahead of the captain as we headed for my car.

Sunlight glittered across her windshield, and for a moment I saw dozens of spiderweb cracks in it, radiating out from a hole that punched nearly all the way through. A surge of panic yanked my stomach downward, but when I blinked the damage was gone. I came up to the car and leaned on the hood, fingers splayed and knuckles popping against the heated metal as I breathed through my teeth. My head dropped between my shoulders, making my neck ache, but I just wanted to touch my Mustang and know she was all right. I could hear the frown and the concern in Morrison’s voice as he said, “Walker?”

“Nothing. Thought I saw a crack in the windshield.” I had. It just hadn’t precisely been Petite’s windshield that was cracked. It was, for lack of a better word, my soul. Every flaw I’d ever run away from was imprinted on a sheet of windshield glass, my mechanic-trade influence weighting the way I saw myself. A few times over the past six months some of those cracks had fused, but there were a whole hell of a lot more of them left to heal. I had a pretty good idea of what moment had left the puncture hole, and I wanted to keep as far away from that moment as possible. I didn’t like it when my little avoidance techniques threw the whole intertwined mess of my emotional state back in my face.

“…who cracked your windshield,” Morrison was saying. I cranked my head up and turned it toward him without comprehension. “I’d pity the poor bastard who cracked your windshield,” he repeated.

“Don’t. He walked away.” My lip curled against the words. Morrison’d been talking about my car, and I was talking about something else entirely. Something I didn’t want to talk about, I informed the inside of my head, so if my brain would like to cooperate and pass sentences through it first before they got to my mouth, I’d appreciate it.

Great. Now the snide little voice was me. Not that it wasn’t all the time, but this time it was actively me.