Coyote Dreams

stand up straight.

Being tall and standing up so straight had come across as arrogant, the snide voice in my head reminded me, and had gotten me into a lot more fights than it’d gotten me out of. I told the voice to shut up and go away, even if it was right. Especially because it was right. I’d learned, too, to never let them know they’d beaten you, and standing up straight went a long way toward that. I’d stood up so straight every goddamned day of my pregnancy that my back hurt again just thinking about it. Pride had kept me stiff-spined for eight months. I guessed maybe it’d been doing that for a lot longer than I cared to think about.

“I feel like I’m going to puke,” the younger me announced in the midst of all that introspection. She rubbed her hand over her stomach and opened her eyes again, nose wrinkled. “Like somebody hit me in the stomach with a golf club.”

Coyote’s mouth opened and his tongue lolled out, as if he’d been about to say something and Joanne’s comment had caught him off guard. “Golf club?”

“Yeah,” she said, oblivious to his surprise, while I remembered the club sinking into my diaphragm like it was meant to be there, hooking under the breastbone with a solid whump. It’d been an accident, the kid who hit me considerably younger than I was, but the club’s backswing had still taken the breath out of me for what seemed like hours on end. Even now, more than fifteen years later, the memory made a sick little pit beneath my breastbone, and I realized Joanne was right. The power, when it wanted to be noticed, did feel a lot like that had. It wasn’t something that could be ignored. “It feels kind of connected to something,” she added. Coyote shook off his curiosity about the golf club and looked pleased.

“Connected to what?”

“I dunno.” Joanne turned around in a circle, still rubbing her tummy. “Maybe to this whole place. Maybe to you.” She let go a sudden burp, clapped a hand over her mouth and looked back at Coyote with wide eyes. “Feels better now,” she said through her fingers. “Maybe it’s just gas.”

Humor creased Coyote’s long face and he lifted his chin, ears pricking up. “Close your eyes and try again. Imagine reaching out with that feeling so you can touch everything with it.”

“You want me to puke all over everything?” Joanne asked dubiously, but closed her eyes. I couldn’t see when she closed her eyes, and twitched impatiently, trying not to order myself to open my eyes again. I could feel the power inside her—us—respond when she reached for it, flowing cool and silver-blue out from her center. There was nothing sluggish or reluctant, as there’d been in the worst moments of my denying it, nor did it feel in any way gleeful or glad to be used. It just was, as much a part of my younger self as breathing or messing around with cars was. For an instant I envied her, and wished there was a way to get her not to make the mistakes I’d made.

Joanne didn’t even have to open her eyes. The world began to come into focus through closed eyelids, the gorgeous, powerful neon colors I’d become so fond of spilling into her vision through the power of magic. I’d never tried looking at my garden with the second sight, and wouldn’t have thought an imaginary place representing my soul would have all the colors of life inside it, vibrating with excitement and potential.

The waterfall was made of crystal, crashing down with a liquid music that raised hairs on my arms. The pool it splashed into rippled into prisms, colors riding tiny waves to the pool’s edge, where they crawled up over the banks and spilled into grass and trees with all the joie de vivre imaginable. I could see Coyote in both his forms at once, the lanky good-natured animal shape seeming to settle inside the young man’s torso. His own power, his aura, was less tempered through Joanne’s eyes than through his own, burnt sienna and bright cobalt-blue, but it was infused with joy and patience.

“Open your eyes,” he murmured, and Joanne did, very slowly, until the spirit world and the normal world amalgamated and became one in her vision, neither seeming complete without the other. I felt raw delight rise up in her, so overwhelming her throat tightened and tears swam in her eyes as she split a smile broad enough to hurt her cheeks.

“It’s magic!”

“It’s your birthright,” Coyote said. “I’ve got a lot to teach you.”

Joanne turned that blinding smile, an expression I couldn’t remember ever having, on the coyote, then reached out to hug him so hard I could feel bony ribs and shoulders digging into my cheek and arm. There was greed and hope and excitement in her voice as she said, with more enthusiasm than I’d ever shown, “I want to learn.”

CHAPTER 23

The sun had set when I became aware of it again. I didn’t know why no one had disturbed me, the scene- causing woman standing mindlessly still in the middle of the restaurant’s sidewalk, but then, I didn’t know why nobody’d awakened me when I was sleeping beneath Petite a couple of days earlier, either. I had the sensation of being veiled, as if I were sleepwalking, or maybe as if everyone around me was. I’d have thought Morrison would see through the veil, and the idea made my stomach clench. Me being cosmically attuned to him in some way hardly meant the reverse was true.

I remembered, now. I remembered Coyote dreams so clearly I could barely fathom why I’d forgotten them for so long. I remembered his patience in teaching me how to draw my powers out, how to heal, starting with the most superficial of wounds and working toward the most profound. I remembered that even as a kid I’d had a hard time with the idea of simply seeing something as whole and it being that way. I had never quite achieved that to Coyote’s satisfaction, and I remembered that back then, I’d used the same tire-patching and car-fixing analogies to rebuild bone and sinew as I did now.

I remembered the tricks I’d shown him: the way I’d learned to bend light around me so I was invisible, the idea taken from some comic book I’d read. I remembered a night when it’d been pouring rain in my garden and I’d changed the rain to flowers, daisies and sunflowers and dandelions spilling out of the sky, and I’d realized then that I could do that in the waking world, too. I remembered touching on a river so deep and fast I’d almost drowned in it before Coyote put his teeth into my belt and tugged me back. I remembered learning to create things from my will alone, and I remembered that the basic rule of magic was the same one a coven had taught me a couple of weeks earlier: do what thou wilt, and it harm none. Neither the coven nor I had done so well with that, but it was still the immutable rule.

What I did not remember was walking through school every day, cocky and proud of my knowledge and power. I didn’t remember using it to make myself popular or stronger or better, to push myself into the place I’d always wanted to be: belonging. I turned my palm up, creating a silver-shot ball of blue energy there. It swam around my fingers, darting and dancing like it had life of its own, and I wished it was sheer moral superiority that had kept me from making a place for myself in Qualla Boundary. That was what my fictional Chinese heroine would’ve done, kept her gifts quiet and worked silently in the background to the betterment of the people around her.

I was nowhere near that good a person. I hadn’t eked out a position for myself using my power because in the waking world, I didn’t even know about it. I could just about see it now, a thin line across my psyche that Coyote had drawn, keeping my awareness of burgeoning power apart from the often bitter, sullen teenager I was in day-to-day life. On one side of that line lay the memories of dreams, and on the other was what I’d been meant to remember until I’d grown beyond the emotional maturity of a turnip. On that side, I remembered Coyote visiting a handful of times, always waking me up immediately, until the day he’d stopped visiting at all.

I thought I should be bubbling over with resentment at my spirit guide, for all the trouble he’d put me through by walling up my power until I was grown-up enough to use it. It was arrogant, high-handed and officious, assuming I wouldn’t have been able to handle the responsibilities he was offering me.

It was unquestionably the right move.

I walked back to Petite, my body stiff from standing motionless on concrete, and crawled into my car. I wanted to stay there, small and hidden, and sleep until I understood everything that had ever happened to me. Dreaming would help sort it all out. That was what dreams were for.

Only lately, they seemed heavy and dangerous, too, and I didn’t think this was a good time to risk letting my