Coyote Dreams

something…well. Knockout. Coyote in any form was beautiful, bequeathed with the striking features that seemed par for the course when it came to otherworldly beings. But watching him now had a peculiar echo to it, as if what I saw was somehow being filtered through more than one set of eyes. It didn’t exactly diminish him, but it gave him a slightly more human cast. The red brick of his skin was warmer, sun-kissed instead of masonry, and his golden eyes were touched with brown. Looking too hard made me dizzy.

“You’re unusual,” Coyote said. My thirteen-year-old self snorted with the same lack of delicacy the woman twice her age had at her disposal.

“Siobhán,” he said, and I watched me hunch my shoulders up and shift, as if I was dragging a blanket over them.

“Stop calling me that. My name’s Joanne.”

A wave of sorrow caught me off guard, not my own emotion at all, but Coyote’s. Unexpectedly, it brought clarification. I wasn’t visiting memory on my own. These were Coyote’s memories, not mine, and the double vision was brought on by both of us remembering the same thing from different vantages. I had the impulse to gather up the younger me into my arms and hug her. Rather, Coyote had the impulse. My reluctance might have been what stopped him. I wondered if the me now could affect the him then. I wouldn’t put it past me.

I shook my head without moving his at all, unable to keep my selves straight. “Hang on.” That was actually me, breathing the words while I looked for the coil of power inside me. It felt awkward, tangled up in Coyote’s dreams, especially as his power wasn’t centered the way mine was.

Separating myself felt like making taffy candy, pulling and stretching and bringing it back together. Coyote’s power was recognizable to me, in the same way the Eiffel Tower was: I’d never seen it before, but all the representations and reproductions looked like the real thing. I’d dealt with enough magic from other people to recognize what I was facing.

His magic was all rusty oranges and hard blues, desert colors that had a faint taste of grit to them. Everything that was mine was silver and shot-silk blue. His were a part of him, as natural as breathing, and mine were still bunched together at the center of me, tendrils feeling their way into me as if they weren’t certain they were welcome. A touch of green sprouted in my silver, envy at how easy it was for Coyote, then disappeared again as I folded taffy one more time and found myself untangled from my spirit guide.

For one truly alarming instant I didn’t belong anywhere. I had no attachment to my own body, not even the pulse of silver cord I’d seen when my mother and I had come together to fight the Blade. I hung in the Dead Zone, numbed by a coldness that went beyond anything I’d ever felt before. Even Amhuluk’s presence hadn’t held the bone-draining chill that was death in such a profound manner. Panic clenched my heart and I dove forward, taking up residence behind the eyes of my thirteen-year-old self.

She didn’t notice a thing. I wondered once more if it’d been like this all along and I just hadn’t known I was visiting back then, or if this was only memory, and nothing I did could affect what was to play out. Not that I had the foggiest idea what was going to play out. My subconscious seemed to remember this conversation, but I certainly didn’t.

“Joanne.” I could hear the sadness in Coyote’s voice as clearly as I’d felt it rise in him. My mother had sounded much that way the first time I’d corrected her as to my name. Right after that I’d done something that turned her from being a light-hearted woman with a ready smile into someone with the strength to will herself to death on a specific date. I very much didn’t want a repeat of that scenario.

The younger me didn’t hear anything beyond the brick-red boy in her dreams using the name she wanted him to. It was enough to satisfy her, at least for the moment. “What do you mean, I’m unusual?” The question was cautious, guarded, like somebody’d said Tom Cruise was on the phone for her. She wanted to believe it, but couldn’t fathom it being true. She had half-formed ideas that I remembered, wanting to be told she was really the lost daughter of some insanely wealthy family who would dote on their missing child, not the half-breed daughter of a reclusive father who didn’t know what to do with her. Probably every kid in the universe had that kind of fantasy, whether they’d been abandoned at three months old or not.

The adult me didn’t expect anything at all. I remembered this dream. It’d come the night my period started, and I’d woken up after Coyote’d said brightness of body, brightness of soul. He’d shown up in my dreams a few times after that, never more than an instant or two. I usually woke up as soon as he appeared, to the best of my recollection. I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t already awake, instead of lingering in the Dead Zone. Coyote put his hand out again, inviting.

“Let me show you, Joanne.”

I got up, rubbing my eyes like a much smaller kid, and put my hand in Coyote’s, feeling grubby and gangly next to him. He dropped a wink and said, “Down the rabbit hole!”

The Dead Zone opened up a funnel and zipped me down a swirling tube at about a thousand miles an hour. Wind ripped through my hair and the tube took a rise and dip, making me squeal and laugh and reach for support that wasn’t there. The adult me thought there ought to be friction burns on my thighs—I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, my usual sleeping apparel as a kid—and the younger me thought she’d never been on such a totally excellent roller coaster. Light suddenly enveloped us and Joanne shrieked gleefully as we exploded out of the tunnel over a body of water. We were in the air just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of greenery, and then we hit the pond with a tremendous splash and a whole lot of giggling. Joanne came to the surface laughing and wiping her eyes, merrier than I could ever remember being, and stood there looking around, thigh-deep in water.

A lush, misty garden spread out in front of me, cobblestone paths wending through it into a foggy distance. Enormous trees grew up, branches braiding together to make arches over the pathways. A scent of cherries filled warm air, blossoms drifting down like soft rain, and thunder filled my ears. There were lily pads and floating cherry blooms on the water’s surface, and Joanne trailed her fingers through the water, scooping one of the flowers up. She actually tucked it behind her ear, a feminine gesture I couldn’t imagine doing, and turned to look behind her while she waded out of the pool.

I knew what I’d see: a waterfall filling the pool from the garden’s northern end. I thought maybe it’d been the water-slide we’d come in on. But the falls I was accustomed to tended to be a trickle, or a thin sheet of water over granite facing, hardly enough to play in.

Joanne’s waterfall ran higher than I could see, blue sky and pounding mist obscuring its top. For all its enthusiastic fury and the white water it made when it hit the pond, the pool itself was remarkably still, so clear I could see the depths it plunged to near the waterfall’s foot.

Joanne backed up until a bench hit her in the knees and she sat, arms braced as she smiled at rainbows brought into relief by sunlight playing over the falls. “What is this place?”

“Your soul, for lack of a better word,” Coyote said. He was sitting beside me on the bench, apparently unconcerned with having temporarily disappeared, and he wore the coyote form I was most familiar with. Joanne did a double take that even I found funny, and Coyote himself snapped air in a doglike laugh.

“I’m not a dog,” he said, nearly before the thought was finished, and I laughed while Joanne wriggled sheepishly. Some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

“Sorry.” She sounded like she meant it, which was more than I’d ever done. “Does everybody have a garden like this one?”

“Everyone has a garden,” Coyote said with a bony-shouldered shrug. “Nobody’s exactly alike. It’s the source of who you are, Joanne. The heart of your power.”

Joanne curled a lip, the expression familiar to me. I’d tried hard to train myself out of it once I’d grown up, for a couple of reasons. One was that sneering only looked good on James Dean. The other was that I’d eventually figured out nobody wanted to be friends with somebody who perpetually looked like she’d bite your head off if you spoke to her. But that was years ahead of the girl I was right now, and she sneered with the best of them. “I don’t have any power. I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Oh, God. Reliving being thirteen was going to be a lesson in humiliation I could do without. I tried closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears, but it was amazingly ineffective against things that were happening in my own head. Coyote cocked his ears, as if doing so would explain the logic behind the younger me’s statement, then rolled out his tongue and let it go. “Close your eyes, and tell me what you feel.”

Joanne eyed him, then shrugged and did so, straightening her spine as she did. I didn’t remember having such good posture at her age. Then again, being tall had kept me out of some fistfights, so there were reasons to