doing their work, getting ready for the day, most of them little more than blurred faces in the background, though I picked a couple people out and waved greetings. Ray, who was built like a fireplug and who was usually the first to warn me when Morrison was on the warpath. Thin-faced Bruce, whose wife Elise made me tamales for fixing their car, looked up from the front desk and gave me a broad smile. “There you are. They’re waiting for you.” He looked me up and down, still beaming. “You look beautiful, Joanie.”
I hadn’t asked. That made me nervous. I looked down at myself to see I was no longer wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but an honest-to-God dress with a dropped waist and a fair amount of frothy cream lace. It could’ve been a wedding dress, though not one of the meringue ones that were so often advertised. It kind of suited me. Pretty but understated. I was also wearing fantastic shoes, with bits of gold glimmering through the straps. I said, “Who’s waiting?” but it was too late: I’d gone around the corner to meet a man in a tuxedo.
Mark Bragg. He looked fantastic, goldy-brown hair brushed back, his tux navy-cut with long tails. I smiled automatically and looked past him; he wasn’t the one I expected. After a few seconds, the one I did expect appeared. Morrison, also in a tuxedo, though his wasn’t nearly as ornate as Mark’s. Barbara Bragg appeared behind him, in a very simple, pretty yellow gown that made mine look all the more formal. I could see the butterfly fluttering on her shoulder.
A burp formed in my stomach and refused to go anywhere, just sat and collected nervousness until I thought I might sick up. I said “Um,” very quietly, and the ridiculous music started. I started to sing, “Big fat and wide,” beneath my breath, but Mark nudged me and shook his head. “No making fun of brides today, Joanne. Not today.”
I nodded, but I didn’t really hear him. Dad wasn’t there. We weren’t exactly close—I didn’t remember the last time I’d called him, in fact—but it seemed like he should be the one walking me down the aisle. Walking with the man I was going to partner myself with was nicely symbolic and all, but I wanted that man to be waiting for me at the altar.
Barb was up there, in the maid of honor’s place, holding a bouquet as bright as her butterfly tattoo. Morrison stood opposite her, and all I could think was he was standing in the wrong place.
I jolted awake with sweat beading on my forehead. Melinda still slept, cheeks flushed with color. The weight that pressed down on her seemed to fill the room, darkness trying to work its way into me, too.
I dragged in a breath through my nostrils and staggered to my feet, rubbing my eyes and then the scar on my cheek. “Arright.” My voice was scratchy. “All right, Jo. You’re awake. It’s okay. Just a nightmare.” Only I wasn’t sure it had been. Overlooking that I thought weddings probably weren’t supposed to be nightmare material, an awful lot of that dream had been just what I wanted. My old life back, my old friends back. It was a little early to be planning a wedding to Mark, but as a flight of fancy it didn’t seem too awful. Except the part where color rushed to my cheeks when I thought about Morrison being the best man. I guessed it was nice my brain thought they’d be friends, but that didn’t make any of it feel quite right.
I shivered and went to look out the window. The sky was graying with the coming dawn, suggesting my nap had lasted longer than it’d seemed. That was twice, first sleeping under Petite and now this. Sleep and me were clearly going to be a dangerous combination for the next few days, until I got whatever was going on figured out. I wondered if I could put in a petition for one of my adventures being done with plenty of extra snooze time, instead of operating on half-brained sleep deprivation, which had been the order of the day so far and appeared to be coming up on the roster yet again.
I put the wish aside and went back to Melinda’s bedside, bracing my face in my fingers as I sat. The air still felt weighty, making me reluctant—or, more accurately, outright afraid—to try slipping into her mind again, or to try following the thing keeping her asleep back to its source. I’d woken up once. I didn’t know if I’d do it again, not when I was sitting there by her side with dark pressure drawing me toward sleep.
I honestly didn’t know which way to turn. I had nothing useful to work with, nothing I could go look up on the Internet and find answers to. Gary, for all his sturdiness, didn’t seem likely to come up with a solution for this one. The only person I could think to ask hadn’t responded to me in almost three weeks, not since I’d encouraged him to shove off in the face of impending doom. Having a snit and staying away didn’t seem like very spirit-guide-like behavior to me, but I’d never had a spirit guide before, so what did I know? “All right,” I whispered out loud again. “One more try, Coyote. I don’t know what else to do.” At least going inside myself seemed less dangerous than questing outward in search of the right thing to do. My index finger started tapping against my cheek, rhythmic little thump-thumps that made a heartbeat pattern. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it was quiet in the house and there was nothing to distract me.
It might’ve been general tiredness that let me slide deep into my own psyche. Sleep deprivation was one of those tools shamans were supposed to use. Either way, it didn’t seem to take very long, Melinda’s bedroom fading around me in favor of a misty, moonlit garden.
There was no use standing around in there yelling for Coyote. I’d tried that several times in the last weeks, to no avail. But it struck me that when I’d come to my garden the very first time, Coyote had found me in an uber-Arizona desert and led me here. I thought if I could get back to that desert—which I vaguely envisioned as being a place accessible by anyone who knew how, rather like Babylon—I might just be able to get Coyote’s attention again.
Of course, the key words there were
I mean, technically, I was right. There wasn’t a door in my garden. But it was
Instead a robin twittered violently, the first animal I’d ever heard in my garden, and I tripped over my own feet as I jolted around looking for it. It peered down at me, one beady black eye and then the other, and chirruped again as if its little red-breasted life depended on it. Then it was gone, swallowed up by the fog. I rocked back on my heels, huffing a laugh as I looked at the ground. A robin; a garden. I knew a cue when my subconscious gave me one. I whispered, “Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” and a glitter of silver in the damp earth caught my eye.
I tilted my head at it just like the robin had at me, taking a few seconds to convince myself to kneel and curl my fingers around the bit of metal. It was cool and heavy and felt solid in my palm, and for some reason holding it made an ache in my heart I could hardly breathe around. “Maybe it’s been buried for ten years,” I murmured to the robin, because that was what I was supposed to say, though I knew it was closer to thirteen years the thing had been buried and ignored.
“You’ve got it wrong,” I said, still to the robin. “The key’s supposed to be outside the garden, not in it.” There was no answering chirp, and I pushed my way back to my feet feeling older than my twenty-seven years. “Close enough, eh?” I asked the silence, and stepped forward through the fog to brush a sheet of ivy away and reveal the door.
CHAPTER 12
It opened upward, into the peak of a vast crater. I came through cautiously, feeling like I was caught in an Escher painting. My center of balance swerved dramatically and my stomach muscles constricted as I rotated onto the landscape, the world itself pulling me around until I was vertical by its standards. The door closed behind me, though by the time I looked down I was standing on it, the key still clutched in my hand. As I watched, the door faded into striated dirt, becoming a perfectly ordinary crater center.
Oddly enough, for the second time, I knew where I was.
It took rather a lot of huffing and puffing and even more sliding down the crater’s steep sides before my stride remembered the ground-eating run I’d learned when Coyote had led me through the desert and to this place. I had to keep reminding myself it was a matter of will, of my own desire overriding the evident reality of the
