Coyote Dreams

just like her brother. It wasn’t exactly hard to figure out what attracted Morrison to her.

I suddenly felt like a particularly tall and bony stick, and noticed the woman in the mirror didn’t look like she was having so much fun anymore. I gave Mark a meaningless smile and shouted, “Agua,” before elbowing my way off the dance floor. Being tall and broad-shouldered was good for that, anyway.

I ordered a shot of whiskey before remembering I was driving, then swore and gave it to the guy standing next to me while I flagged down the bartender a second time to get water. The guy looked surprised, then gave me a once-over and a smile that made me feel a little better about being a stick on legs.

A Walking stick. Hah. I was so funny. I said “Shit” under my breath and tightened my fingers around the cold glass the bartender slid at me. A peek over my shoulder told me Phoebe looked very butch dancing with Barb, though really, Phoebe looked butch a lot of the time. I didn’t normally think women several inches shorter than me could kick my butt, but I never doubted Phoebe’s ability to do so.

“What’s up?” Mark said from behind my other shoulder. I startled and almost tipped my glass over, and Mark followed my gaze to Phoebe and Barb. “Oops,” he said, the word almost a question. “You and Phoebe?”

The whole world had more faith in my ability to attract romantic partners than I did. I said, “No,” and slammed my water as if it was vodka. An ice cube hit me in the tooth. Ow. Mark touched my arm.

“So what’s the deal?”

I hate your sister seemed a little extreme as far as answers went. I had no reason at all to hate Mark’s sister. Certainly no reason I was willing to listen to myself about, anyway. I swirled ice cubes in the bottom of my glass, put on a deliberate smile and looked over my shoulder at Mark. “Nothing. Nothing,” I said more firmly. “Just needed some water. C’mon.” I caught his arm and pulled him back onto the dance floor, doing my best to let the music pick me up and sweep me away. Mark slid his arms around me from behind and the soft silk of his shirt brushed my spine, sending an unexpectedly enticing shiver over my skin. I nestled in his arms, closed my eyes and, half a moment later, somebody collided into my chest, completely ruining the moment. I opened my eyes, about to yell, but my objection was cut short as Phoebe gave me a ridiculously abject smile of apology. I rolled my eyes and shouted, “Careful, or I’ll take it out on you next time we fence.”

“Oh,” she yelled back, “so you’re planning on coming back to practice?” There was too much noise to carry on a real conversation, so she turned away as she asked, putting her back against me. The top of her head was just above my chin. Barb was in front of her, making a sandwich of the two of us in the middle. I smiled a bit and shook my head, then let my eyes close again. Mark did get all the cute girls, even if one of them was his sister. Ew.

Spotlights swirled through my eyelids, bursting down from above the dance floor in a rainbow of colors. The beat caught me in the small bones of the ear, rather like my drum did, and I detached from my body.

Sound roared incessantly, as powerful as the dance beat, but without its rhythm. Instead it crackled and popped, heat encroaching with every hiss and snap. I opened my eyes, face still tilted upward, and saw a sky of blackness. Not night, not stars, but heavy pressing blackness, the color of sorrow and loneliness. Orange reflected high against that blackness, like city lights glowing against the night, but there was raw intent in this color.

From what I’ve tasted of desire whispered through my mind, and I lowered my eyes to the horizons, knowing what I would see.

I was wrong.

No. I wasn’t wrong. I was just woefully short in my expectations. Fire was all I expected, and it was there, raging on the landscape, but there was more to the world than I thought. Not just empty blackness like the sky, it was built with four mountains that, even scoured by flame, held their colors with resolve. To the east lay a white mountain, gleaming through soot, and to the west a sun-yellow one, defying the orange and red of flame. To the south lay a blue mountain, and to the north black so hard that even fire couldn’t diminish it. There was a semifamiliar flatness to all of it, a hint of the Lower World. It tasted of history and of magic, of mythology built up to create reality. Colors here weren’t real in the sense that I knew them, and the world had edges defined by those colors and by the mountains.

Between those four borders of the world, fire reigned. Everything burned. I stood at the center of it all, animals and insects fleeing toward me, their panic making my skin itch with growing fear. I saw no people, but I found myself leaning into the wind that fire brought, throwing myself against the destructive onslaught. All the power I could bring to bear, cool and silver-blue, as if it was the antithesis of flame, did nothing to quench it. Tears ran down my cheeks from the heat and I strained into it, gulping in rough breaths as I tried to stop what sure as hell looked like the end of the world.

A gigantic hollow tube settled over me, bringing fresh air with it. Creatures I didn’t think could crawl scoured the tube’s sides and clambered up, the air and walls thick with them. I couldn’t see where they were going, but I went with the masses, scrambling away from devastating heat toward a new world somewhere beyond the sky.

And gasped awake to find myself in the comparatively cool air of a Seattle night, nestled against Mark Bragg’s chest. Phoebe and Barb stood close by, faces concerned. “God, Joanne,” Mark said as my eyes opened. “Are you okay?”

“You guys didn’t…” No. Of course they hadn’t seen that. “I had a…” Visions weren’t really my thing. Well. Visions hadn’t really been my thing up to this point. I had no idea if they were something I’d get on a regular basis from now on or not. If they involved passing out in dance clubs, I hoped they’d be an infrequent visitor to my repertoire. “What happened?” Somebody else talking sounded good.

“You just collapsed,” Mark said in bewilderment. “One second we were dancing and you just slithered down to the floor. I picked you up and Barb and Phoebe cleared a path. Are you all right, Joanne?”

I started to lift a hand to rub my cheek, then realized I was still cradled against Mark’s chest. He wasn’t standing, so most of my weight was really in his lap, but he held me close, like I might be fragile. Since fragile and I had never really been on speaking terms, I felt a little silly, and tried squirming loose. Mark didn’t quite let me go, though he relaxed his hold some. “I’m okay,” I said. “Really. I just had a little…”

A little psychic escapade. Phoebe’d seen me zone out in the locker room a couple weeks earlier, but I hadn’t explained it. Mark, thanks to Gary, knew a little about my shamanism gig. Barb had no idea. None of it made me want to confess to the truth. “I just got dizzy all of a sudden.”

Phoebe’s hand shot out and grabbed my upper arm. “Oh, my god. You’re not pregnant or anything, are you?” The question was filled with equal parts of horror, glee and interest.

Mark, holding me, went very still. My first thought, almost incongruously, was it might’ve been easier if even one person had reacted that way, and my second was that it would not do at all to reach out and throttle my friend. She could not possibly know the demons she stirred up with the question. It felt like it took a long time indeed to pull a sick smile into place and say, “Uh, no, I don’t think so, Phoebe. Maybe dinner didn’t agree with me.”

“You had shrimp in your salad,” Mark said hastily. “Maybe that was it.” Barb looked between the two of us knowingly, though she kept her mouth shut. That was good. I didn’t want to have to punch Morrison’s girlfriend in the mouth.

Well. All right, never mind that. “I’m okay,” I said after a couple of seconds. “But I think I might call it a night now. It’s been kind of a weird day.” Between Mark and Billy and unsaid things with Morrison and conking out in the parking lot and having a date and—yeah. Weird day.

“I’ll drive you,” Mark said, and I discovered I felt well enough to say “Like hell” in a relatively mild voice. “Nobody drives Petite but me.”

He chuckled. “All right. Guess you’re feeling okay, if you’re up to arguing about it. Barbie, I’ll meet you later, all right? Phoebe, it was nice to meet you.”

Barbie?

Mark helped me to my feet, and I had enough sense not to echo his nickname for her out loud. Or snicker at it, which was also high on my list of things to do. I wondered if Morrison knew his new girl was named after a toy.

I had a brief, unpleasant suspicion there was a word for what I was feeling toward Barbara in regards to her relationship with Morrison, and that only small, nasty people let themselves indulge in the emotion described by that word.

Fortunately, nobody ever said I was a good person. Phoebe hugged me, Barb shook my hand and Mark