drove farther into her belly.
It was incredibly satisfying.
Less satisfying was the way she heaved in a breath of air and used the energy to bring her knee up into my left boob. Insomuch as people aim in fistfights, she was probably aiming for my diaphragm, but crushing my breast was at least as effective. I went, “Glork,” and staggered back, still doubled over, clutching an arm over my chest. Barbara kicked me in the jaw with her bare toes, then howled and fell back herself, hopping on her other foot. Despite having head-butted me earlier, she pretty much fought like a girl, which was to say, without any experience at it. Anybody who’s gotten in a couple of real fights learns to hit soft parts with hard parts. Kicking me in the face was a good idea, but she should’ve done a side kick and made the impact point my nose with her heel.
I actually thought all of that during the course of a couple ragged breaths, by which time the radiating pain in my breast had lessened enough to let me move again. Barb was still hopping up and down and shrieking when I dragged in one more breath and let it pull me to my full height, so I was looking down six inches at her. I wanted to have a really good view of slamming her into the floor. She stopped jumping around when I reached for her, eyes widening as she twigged to the fact that the fight wasn’t over yet.
A pair of strong arms wrapped around me, pinning my own arms to my sides. Mark, through gritted teeth right next to my ear, said, “I—” and the rest of it was lost to me bracing myself against him and lifting both feet to kick Barb in the gut.
She flew back and crashed into the wall. Mark staggered under a hundred and sixty pounds of unexpected weight in his arms. I got my feet under me again and slammed my head back, Mark’s lovely nose crunching quite horribly against my skull. He shrieked like a girl and let me go, and for a moment there I stood there, a panting, breathless, triumphant king of the hill. I hadn’t gotten into a fight with ordinary, unarmed people since I was a teenager. It was nice to know I hadn’t lost my touch, and that brawling was still in my repertoire. “Now that I have your attention.”
Like Barb, I should’ve kept my mouth shut. She got enough breath back to produce a howl of outrage and flung herself on me, hands clawed all over again. Her weight was enough to drive me back into Mark, and all three of us went down in a clawing, scratching, shouting pile of arms and legs. I caught an elbow to the ear and my head started ringing. I grabbed a shoulder and pounded on it, which just felt good. It was better than not knowing what to do, and it was much better than remembering that Coyote’d died to keep me safe. White fury rose up in me and I smashed down all the harder.
The shoulder moved and gave me room for purchase on a shirt—Barbara’s, slippery soft sleeping satin—and I dug my hands in, lifting her away bodily. She kicked and squealed and I grunted, dropping her heavily to the side. A couple of seconds later I ended up on top of the dogpile, straddling Mark’s chest with his arms pinned by my knees and shins. He gave me an unexpected rakish grin that really didn’t go with a bleeding, swollen nose, and said, “Dis has probmis.”
I was so taken aback I actually laughed out loud. Barbara lunged and I drew a fist back and said, “Eht!” in warning, not threatening her at all, but Mark. He might make me laugh, but that wasn’t enough at this particular moment in time to save him from getting the tar beat out of him. Barb lurched to a halt and a thrill of triumph went through me. She was protective of her baby brother. “Here we are, then,” I breathed. “I need some answers. Who are you? What are you? Why are you doing this? What in God’s name have I done to you?”
Barb all but hissed at me. I rolled my eyes, settling my weight on Mark’s chest. “I can sit here all day, you redheaded bitch.” I didn’t know if it was true. I thought I might fall asleep if I had to sit there for more than a couple minutes. But Barb didn’t know that, and it sounded good.
“Leave him alone,” she muttered, “and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me and I’ll leave him alone.”
She gave me a baleful look and snaked a hand out, cautiously, toward Mark. It didn’t look like an attack, so I let her.
That, too, was a mistake.
I did not think of rainbows as something that had sound. Nonetheless, rainbow thunder rolled over me as she touched her brother’s shoulder. Their auras melded and fit together, dark spaces between them filling up with missing color. Color and noise slammed into me and I grabbed my head, aware I was yelling fruitlessly at the thunder rumbling in my mind. I didn’t want to respond, not even to protect myself, for fear of sending up that beacon that pointed straight to Morrison again, and so all I could do was yell.
The end of the world unfolded before my eyes. Fire, like the first one I’d seen, only this time the spirit of flame came in mushroom clouds and burning wastelands. A very human destruction, incinerating cities and poisoning the air. One people survived, carried by a yellow-haired god up through a tall hollow reed that broke through the sky and into another world. Only they were ready; only they lived.
Time rewound, a blur of images faster than thought could process. Coyote slunk away from the hole in the earth where the water baby floated away to the floods that were its mother. Coyote, wearing my face. I watched him go, turned to the People and warned them, the words tasting like ritual in my mouth.
“This world, too, might someday be destroyed by fire, flood or cyclone, and then I will come again. You must live the right way, or this will happen. The signs that you must watch for are the rainbow around the sun, or when the sacred yellow rabbit bush,
The People all nodded and took note of my words and wisdom, telling them to each other so they would not be forgotten, and I slipped away into the darkness of sleep. Only one being stopped me, and that was Coyote, standing in my path. He wore his own face now, and I said to him again, “Watch for the rainbow that lasts all day. Then I will come.”
Time skidded forward an unending number of years, and slammed to a halt.
I looked down at myself from somebody else’s point of view. I was lying outside a diner, a silver sword stuck through my lungs. Then I sat in a coffee shop across from Morrison, my eyes gold as I looked through my own skin. Then outside Suzanne Quinley’s house, asking the city to hit me with its best shot. Then the Seattle Center deserted at an hour it should have been busy, all but me and Gary and the Host of the Wild Hunt in a battle between gods and sons.
Through all of it,
I heard myself whisper, “Oh. Oh, shit,” somewhere in the waking world, and then a little louder, “I’m not —”
Barbara clobbered me over the head.
As far as being hit on the head went, it wasn’t nearly as bad as pruning shears to the face. Stars shot through my vision and I sort of collapsed forward, muffling Mark. He grunted and I tried to get enough focus back to push myself off him. I heard Barb scramble to her feet and run for the door. By the time I sat up, it’d slammed shut. I put a hand on the back of my head and winced. “I’m not whatever this thing thinks I am. I’m not the end of the world.” I was practically certain. I hoped.
Mark didn’t appear to care much. After a couple seconds I realized that was probably because I’d fallen on his face when Barbara hit me, and I’d just bashed his nose in a minute earlier. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Hang on a second.”
For the second time in as many minutes, I did something really stupid. In my defense, I hadn’t known that letting Barb touch Mark would throw me into a vision, but I did know that trying to heal somebody when all that dark power was waiting to pounce was a bad idea.
Unfortunately, I’d already gone down the rabbit hole toward Mark’s garden when I remembered that.
Just as it had with Gary, overwhelming blackness rose up and followed me, so fast and sure of itself this time I had no way to stop it. I wasn’t carrying topaz, and Mark didn’t have the slightest familiarity with my intrusions to help me fight back with. His aura split apart, all the rainbows colors widening, and butterflies rose from the darkness between color to cloud out the sun.
I thought, quite clearly,
In so far as there was good news, it was in my adversary being no better at planning than I was. My
