Coyote Dreams

whatever this is, I woke it up,” I said through the barrier of my knuckles.

Morrison stood, then walked across the room to windows that overlooked the parking lot. He’d taken his jacket off before I’d come into the office, and sunlight softened the sharpness of his white shirt, making a faint shadow of his torso inside the fabric. The line of him was casual, hands in his pockets, but I could almost see tension rolling off his shoulders. Energy fluttered behind my breastbone and I pushed the heel of my hand against my stomach, then stopped fighting the push of power and let myself blink.

And I could see, with a capital S. Morrison’s colors, dominant purples and blues, were stained with the tension I could now literally see. There was too much red in his purple, edging it toward burgundy, and the colors clouded over his shoulders in roiling dark swirls. Blues were tinged toward black, the color of anger mixed with fear. Not, emphatically not, fear for himself, but concern for his people, and anger at being helpless in the face of their illnesses. Compassion ran deep in him, royal-blue tempered to something more soothing, but gray ran through it, the frustration of being unable to act. Just beyond him, my second sight let the sky thrum with neon intensity, bright electric colors of life making Morrison seem unusually solid and grounded by distress.

I didn’t really mean to get up and walk over to him, and I certainly had no idea what I was going to do when I got there. Morrison made it a moot question by turning to look at me when I was still a few steps away. A flicker of expression washed over his face, and he said, “Your eyes are gold again,” before brushing past me and returning to his desk. I stood there alone, staring out the window at a world of garish colors.

Morrison said something else and I flinched, all the brilliance of my other sight disappearing in a flash. I closed my eyes, not particularly wanting to look at a dull-colored earth and more particularly not wanting to look at Morrison, though I turned my head toward the sound of his voice. “I’m sorry, sir. What did you say? I was…I wasn’t listening.”

“I said you sound pretty confident that this sleeping sickness is caused by an it.” There was nothing at all about his phrasing that made it a question, but it was one. I nodded and my eyes came open whether I wanted them to or not. There was a Frank Lloyd Wright clock on one of the bookshelves in Morrison’s office; I stared at its slim glass form and the seconds ticking away as I answered.

“You remember when the lights went out in January?”

“As if I could forget.”

I ignored his tone and shrugged at the clock. “I really screwed up with that. I guess it was kind of like using a bulldozer to swat a fly. It sent…” My hand lifted and made a wave in the air, all of its own accord. “Ripples. All those snowstorms. The heat wave.”

“You’re telling me you can affect weather patterns, Walker?” Morrison sounded rightfully disbelieving. I squeezed the bridge of my nose, fingers cool against the corners of my eyes.

“You know, sir, if I could summon a little thundercloud above your head to prove myself, I’d do it, but I don’t think I could even if it’d help anything. That’s…” I struggled for a word, and the only one I could come up with was, “magic. Making something out of nothing. I can’t do that. All I can do is manipulate what’s there, move energy and shape it some, and if I do it badly, we get snowstorms and heat waves and thunderbirds, oh my. I don’t know. Maybe I could make a ministorm above your head if I had the training. I don’t.” I dropped my hand and went back to staring at the clock, then at the calendars above it. Three of them, turned to the past, present and upcoming months. All three were covered in Morrison’s handwriting, tiny but readable. I talked to the fine print, pretending my boss wasn’t really in the room.

“Everything that happened a couple weeks ago, all that stuff with Colin Johannsen and Faye Kirkland. It got started because I should’ve started out years ago as a firecracker, and instead I showed up a decade too late as an atom bomb. It was like I threw up a big red arrow in the sky pointing to me and saying, ’Stupid newbie on the astral scene, please use and abuse to your heart’s content.’” I had never once put all this into words, and I was pretty sure there were better people to be telling it to than Morrison. On the other hand, Gary and Coyote both basically understood the problem already, and right then I couldn’t think of anybody else who might need to understand it more than my boss.

“I thought everything I’d screwed up had been fixed on the solstice, but I guess not. Whatever’s putting people to sleep, I woke it up, and now it’s hunting and I’ve still got that arrow blinking over my head.” That sounded like I was completely concerned with myself, which was bitterly untrue.

I drew in a breath to try rephrasing, and Morrison interrupted with, “A decade ago.”

It was very nearly the last thing I expected him to say. For all I didn’t want to, I found myself looking at Morrison, who had an expression of cautious restraint pulled tight across his face. It was so careful it was clear he was asking a question, and that question told me just how detailed the research he’d done on me when I’d let slip my full original name. Captain Michael Morrison knew something about me I didn’t want anybody to know, something I’d thought nobody outside of Qualla Boundary knew. My jaw and my stomach both tightened.

“Close enough.”

“All right,” he said after a long time. “I’m taking you off street beat, Walker. God knows I need you out there, but if my people are going down because of something only you can stop, then that’s what your assignment is. Get. Go save the world, however you have to do it.” He sat down at his desk, looking worn to the bone.

He hadn’t said because of something you did, which was far more than I deserved. But because it was Morrison, I had to ask: “You believe me?”

“Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, Walker. Just get out of here and find a way to keep my people safe. Go.”

I went.

CHAPTER 14

I wish I could say I went boldly forth with a plan in mind, but what I really did was go to the locker room and change into my regular clothes. I wasn’t going to be doing police work, and although the heat wave had broken, it was still in the eighties. Jeans and a T-shirt sounded a lot more pleasant for tromping around in than my uniform. I went out into the July morning with my head down and my eyes squinted against sunlight bouncing off the asphalt. Such diligent concentration on my feet led me over to Petite, and to a bright, semifamiliar voice saying, “Officer Walker. You don’t look like you’re on shift.”

I felt distinctly deer-in-headlights as I looked up to see Laura Corvallis perched in the open sliding door of her news van, a gotcha smile pasted across her face. It took everything I had not to break into a panicked run back toward the precinct building. “Ms. Corvallis. I thought you’d be at the studio getting your tape ready.”

“Oh, we don’t air until six. I’m looking for some human interest sides of the Blue Flu story. Captain Morrison’s got a real knack for looking handsome and not answering questions.”

I let out a little breath of laughter. “Yeah.” Crap. That was a bad confession to make. I didn’t want to build any sort of camaraderie with a news reporter. I bit my tongue so I couldn’t say anything else, unbit it and added, “That’s his job,” which I hoped would mitigate my agreement that my boss was handsome, and dug Petite’s keys out of my pocket.

“So I thought you had to go to work,” Corvallis said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got the day off, with a quarter of the workforce out.” Her voice was full of polite curiosity, but I glanced up through my eyebrows as I unlocked Petite’s door, and saw the dark glitter of a hungry hunter in her gaze.

“Ms. Corvallis, that sounds like a good idea. I won’t tell you anything.” I smiled, winked and got into Petite before she had time for a rebuttal. Cranking the engine made a satisfying lot of noise that drowned out any chance of me hearing her follow-up, and I pulled out of the parking lot feeling like I’d gotten a reprieve. Morrison had given me rope to hang myself with. I wasn’t eager to use it explaining why I’d ended up on the evening news babbling about Laura Corvallis’s poorly named Blue Flu.

About three blocks farther on I realized the news van was following me.

I pulled into a drive-thru, mostly to waste a few minutes and see if the van was actually following me. I emerged from the other side with a burger I didn’t really want and a bag of fries that would kick off a month-long craving for more if I gave into their evil seductive ways. The Channel Two van was waiting in the parking lot, so I