“Yeah.” I reached out to ruffle his hair, just like I’d done the three-year-old’s. Robert looked put upon, but took it. “I promise. You’re kind of the grown-up for your little brother and sisters right now, and you did a good job calling me, so I’m going to treat you like you’re an adult. You’ve earned it.”
“Do you mess up grown-ups’ hair?”
I laughed, admitting, “Not usually. I’ll try to remember not to do that again.”
Robert climbed off the bed, looking like he’d won a small battle. “Okay. Thanks, Joanne.”
“For what?”
“For telling me the truth about not being able to help Mom. Uncle Brad wouldn’t have.”
It was a strange world where admitting to my shortcomings was the right thing to do. I nodded and tilted my head toward his bedroom. “Back to bed now, Robert.”
“Okay.” He slipped out, leaving me to turn to Melinda Holliday’s sickbed and see if there was anything I could do to waken her from a sleep of death.
CHAPTER 11
Trying to slip inside Melinda’s mind was as difficult as getting through to Billy had been. Like him, she had solid mental shields, only a trickle of life force draining through them. Syrupy weight pinned her down, heavy with determination that bordered on malevolence. I didn’t try the siphoning approach, or the equally unsuccessful needle. Instead I turned away from Mel and looked into thick shadow, wondering if I could find my way to its heart. Nothing like taking the fight to the source, after all.
It occurred to me, perhaps a moment too late, that such a decision could be terminally dangerous. But by then a pathway had melted open, like a dream obliging me by creating passage when I needed one, and I stepped onto the road offered.
I’d become accustomed to flitting through astral realms in the past six months, whether I wanted to admit to it or not. The world I belonged to in day-to-day life was the Middle World, caught between the Upper and Lower Worlds, places of mythology and mysticism. The names I had for them were Native American in origin, but they fit remarkably well over an ancient Irish structure of the universe as well. I suspected that if I ever entered the Celtic Upper and Lower Worlds, they wouldn’t look like the ones I’d seen in my dealings with Native American gods and demons, but the structure seemed to hold true regardless.
There was also an astral realm I could tune into. That one could be tapped by turning on my second sight, without ever leaving the Middle World. It could also be entered wholesale: that was how I usually got to the Dead Zone, and it was how I’d found ancient Babylon and the ghostly, sad land of Tir na nOg. I wasn’t quite sure how those places connected to Earth, or the Middle World or whatever I wanted to call it. Babylon had, ultimately, seemed to reside in the deepest parts of human consciousness, but Tir na nOg was somewhere else entirely, a world of fae creatures that were gods and immortals in my world. I thought someday I might understand how all those places linked together, but I wasn’t knowledgeable enough yet.
What I walked through now was somewhere else yet again. I’d spent almost no time in the dreamlands, only using them as conduits in the first days of awakening to my shamanic powers, when I just hadn’t known any better. They were a place where thought formed and melted around me, gray shapeless forms that looked like the stuff of nightmares. I could feel the weight of sleep pressing down on me as surely as it had caught Billy and Mel, trying to snare me as well. I didn’t like it, in a more specific and visceral way than my general discomfort with traipsing through realms of Otherness. I knew there could be danger in any aspect of psychic exploration, but something about the dreamlands struck me as more actively alarming than the astonishing neons of the astral realm.
Maybe it was that the demons here grew straight up out of my own psyche. Dreams were personal, tailor- made to inspire exultation and fear alike, whereas the dangers in other aspects of the Other were their own creatures, able to prey on anyone who came too close. I guess the egalitarian approach made me more comfortable.
Someone walked beside me. In the fashion of dreams, it seemed like she’d been there all along, and when I tried to focus on her arrival it shimmered and faded away into irrelevance. “It’s okay,” Barb said. “I won’t be around for long.” Morrison was on her other side, completely oblivious to my presence. They were holding hands and he was smiling at something she said. Something I couldn’t hear, despite being right next to her.
See what I mean? I set my jaw and shoved my hands in my pockets. “This is a stupid dream. You two can just go away.”
“I said we would,” Barb repeated. My hands made themselves into fists in my pockets. Wanting them to go away and wanting them to go away together were different. Stupid dream. The gray-on-black surroundings had changed while I wasn’t looking, resolving into the precinct headquarters. Except the hallways didn’t have this many windows in the headquarters, and the trim was a different color. I curled a lip and turned away from my walking companions, stomping down to the garage through a series of halls that weren’t really there. The light over the last set of stairs was incandescent and not burned out, both of which were wrong. Even in the midst of the dream I wondered what it meant that the place I was happiest in the precinct building was well lit in my dreams, when it wasn’t in real life.
“Joanie.” My old boss, Nick Hamilton, nodded as I came around the corner, then waved me toward the coveralls the mechanics wore. “You’re late. Get to work, would you?”
“I brought doughnuts.” I put an oversize box of doughnuts on the hood of one of the cars, a peace offering for being late to work. The Missing O, a local doughnut shop, had become a favorite hangout for the precinct cops, and we usually got discounts for buying three dozen or more doughnuts at a time. Nick grinned at me, which he hadn’t done since January, and popped the box open to dig out his favorite, a raspberry-filled vanilla-crème monstrosity that dripped all over the place. I took it as writ that I was forgiven and sauntered back to grab my coveralls, pausing for a round of mock fisticuffs with Nathan, one of the guys who
I swung down into one of the pits, coverall sleeves rolled up to my elbows, whistling jauntily to myself. “Joanie got laid,” somebody said dryly, and I threw a rag in his general direction, calling, “At least one of us is getting some,” back. Familiar faces and voices filled my peripheral vision and my ears. I hadn’t had a chance to banter with the guys since Cernunnos rode through the garage six months earlier. Tears burned at the back of my throat for a moment and I inhaled harshly to push them away. The sharp scent of oil and gasoline thrummed through my brain, making me feel welcome and at home. Not sniffling took more than I wanted to admit.
A year ago this had been my life. I’d been a mechanic for the Seattle Police Department. I got up and went to work five mornings a week, got covered in grease, fiddled with computery bits and kept cars running. In my off time, I worked on Petite and hung out with the guys from the garage, or took out work in trade for some of my cop coworkers: I’d fix their cars and they’d feed me. It was a sweet setup.
But then the mother I’d never met called up to tell me she was dying, and invited me over to Ireland to watch it happen. What’d been a two-week…I hesitated to call it a vacation…had turned into a four-month leave of absence. Sheila MacNamarra had taken her own sweet time about dying, though I hadn’t found out the reasons why until later. By the time I got back to Seattle, my position in the garage had been filled by someone else, although my Cherokee heritage and my gender made me too appealing, quota-wise, to fire. Morrison had a clever plan to get me out of his hair.
He made me a cop.
I mean, I had the credentials and everything. The department had sent me to the academy because of that whole heritage-and-gender thing, and I hadn’t done too badly, but I’d hired on as a mechanic and nobody’d expected me to stop doing that and start arresting people. Neither, frankly, did Morrison. He figured I’d quit. I figured I’d rather poke myself in the eye than give him the satisfaction. It’d taken six months to get back where I belonged, back down in the garage. I yelled an answer to some half-heard question and crawled out of my pit, content with my place in the universe. That was all I really wanted.
The room changed around me, turning into the reception area upstairs. Dozens of cops moved around,
