Coyote Dreams

“Joanie, it’s been open for a month. You’ve been working eighteen-hour days. She’s still really muzzy, Muldoon,” Morrison called. “Maybe we should call the doctor again. It’s all right, Joanie. I guess anybody’d be disoriented after sleeping for a week.”

The ache in my wrist took up as a sense of wrongness at the base of my brain, dissoluted by my preference to leave things just the way there were. Unfortunately, my mouth wouldn’t let it go. “Joanie. You’re calling me Joanie. What’s that about?”

Morrison’s smile went crooked and concerned, voice lowering. “I thought we agreed neither of us wanted to go by Jim or Siobhán in public. Muldoon’ll get the doctor here, all right? You haven’t woken up all the way yet. Just give yourself a few minutes.” He ducked his head to bump his nose against mine, so intimate it’d have been unforgivable if it wasn’t also so incredibly bizarre, and then he kissed me.

Pain flared through my left wrist, cold hot enough to burn. I thought aw, crap far too clearly, and put my forehead against Morrison’s chest with a sigh. If I’d been asleep for a week, why wasn’t I in a hospital bed? Why was Gary sitting on my floor with my drum, like he had been when I went to sleep? What was Morrison doing there at all, much less calling me by nicknames and intimating we were in a relationship, or that I had my own mechanic’s shop? It was perfect. It was the kind of life I didn’t even let myself dream about.

“Nice try, Begochidi,” I said into my boss’s shirt. “But no cigar. I’m not awake yet.”

I gave Morrison a gentle push, trying not to see surprise and injury in his eyes in the moment before he dissolved in an upward rush of butterfly wings. The heat in my arm finally subsided and I rubbed it again, then looked down. My copper bracelet gleamed with firelight, making me wince in embarrassment. “Sorry,” I whispered to it. “I didn’t pick up the hint. That Joanne, she’s a nice girl, but not too bright.”

To my unending relief, the bracelet didn’t respond. I curled my arms around my ribs and looked up into the realm of dreams, watching trails of color left behind by the flock of butterflies. Flock? Herd? What was a multitude of butterflies called? It probably didn’t matter, but I was suddenly curious. There had to be a good word for it. I’d have to look it up when I woke up again. If I woke up again.

I actually lifted both hands to my head in an attempt to stop my brain from derailing itself. If shamans were meant to have disciplined minds, I was doomed from the start. The unfortunate fallout of that was it might mean the world was doomed from the start, too, and that just wouldn’t do. I needed to learn to stop distracting myself from the task at hand and face the music when it played, or something with similarly mixed metaphors.

I was doing it again.

“This is a dream,” I said out loud, on the off chance it might help me focus. “And I’m aware of that, so it’s a lucid dream, which means I can control what happens. Okay? Okay. I’d like a ladder, please. I need to follow the butterflies.” Soaring up into the darkness after them sounded like a much more fun, dramatic pursuit, but my experience with flying dreams was that either I couldn’t go as fast as I wanted, or just as I was getting the hang of it, I remembered I couldn’t really fly and went plunging to the earth. Typically falling in dreams wasn’t fatal, but given that I was here by deliberate action and choice, I didn’t exactly want to take the risk. “A ladder,” I repeated firmly, and dug my fingers into the ether.

Darkness protruded and gleamed, iron runs like a submarine ladder stretching up to the faint streaks of color left behind by retreating butterflies. I gave myself a mental pat on the back and began climbing, keeping my gaze up. I thought I’d actually won that round with Begochidi, recognizing his dream of my life for what it was. Maybe he was regrouping. Maybe I could get to him before he’d come up with a new game plan.

Maybe a fantastic indigo and violet wall of feather-light touches could slam down from nowhere and knock me about a thousand feet to the ground. I slammed against a black shapeless floor, unable to breathe with the weight of butterflies on me. They fluttered about my face, tiny razor touches keeping me from screaming for fear of inhaling them. I batted at them, trying to get free, and those I brushed away ghosted back to amalgamate and create a shape in the darkness. Tall, well-built, sandy-haired, smiling pleasantly. I wanted to cry. “Joanne,” Mark said cheerfully. “There you are.”

“Here I am.” He didn’t look like a god. He just looked like himself, a decent, rather charming young man who cooked as well as he lounged naked in bed. I could fight Barbara. I didn’t like Barbara. I didn’t want to beat Mark up. “You’re not the one I expected. I was kind of hoping for your other half.”

“I was kinda hoping you’d be my other half.” His nose wrinkled and he looked sheepish. “Okay, that was incredibly corny. But it’s true, too. I mean, I like you, Joanne. You’re a little scary with this shamanism thing you’ve got going on, but you really seem to care a lot about what’s going on around you, and I guess it’s better to be a little weird and scary with caring than not. I’d kind of like to stick it out and see if we could make it work.”

I found myself knotting and unknotting my hands like it would lead me to some kind of salvation. Morrison’s sleeping form kept splashing through my vision, as if I needed the reminder. “I meant your twin sister, Mark, not your soul mate.” I barely knew Mark Bragg. Pretty much everything I’d shared with him had been the machination of a god searching for the danger to his people. It wasn’t a normal relationship. It wasn’t even a real relationship. So why in hell did shooting him down make my heart ache?

Maybe because I hadn’t had anything like a real relationship in longer than I could remember.

Maybe because at the bottom of it, he was an ordinary man who’d gotten caught up in the mess of a life I’d led. I didn’t like my magic reaching out and touching people outside my immediate sphere. Mark was god-ridden, and that, plain and simple, was my fault. I might have done better by him.

There were so many people I might have done better by.

The thought made my throat tighten, a cold knot settling in its hollow. Faye Kirkland’s fanatical expression as she died blurred into Colin Johannsen’s pale face, all forming in my mind’s eye. Colin no longer wore the weary good cheer I’d seen in him in the few days I’d known him. He was drawn up thin and tall, much thinner than the boy I’d known had been, with the weight of cancer treatments bloating his body, and his eyes were accusing. Hard eyes, the expression of a young man used, and used badly. Cassandra Tucker, the only way I’d ever known her: blue and cold with death. I couldn’t breathe, cold at my throat burning with despair, but the faces wouldn’t stop.

Three young women, dead at a banshee’s hands, strewn about a baseball field and hidden beneath unseasonable snow. I had memorized their names, too: Rachel and Nikki and Lisa, who had died because I’d distracted my mother from the all-important task of banishing their murderer. And before them a handful of schoolchildren and their teacher and the Quinleys and Marie D’Ambra and shamans whose life’s blood began a legacy of death that tied to me. All of them were people who might have lived, had their paths not crossed mine.

And before that, a strong and determined woman who willed herself to death because I had turned away from the road I was supposed to travel, and before that, a baby girl whose dying breath seemed to give her brother the strength to live.

I could not breathe. Despair brought me to my knees in a jerky fall, pressure at my throat so intense I struggled to lift a hand to claw at it. Dark spots washed through my vision, indigo and violet, like eyes watching my death without remorse or pity. I had not expected this. Had not, for once, thought I was going to die. But the legacy that lay behind me spread so easily before me, so obviously. I could name the faces, count the numbers, now, of those who had died for my mistakes. Now. Soon I wouldn’t be able to, not with the plague sweeping out across Seattle and in time over the world. The end of the world, heralded by my toolate arrival on the psychic stage, by my clumsy use of power that whispered apocalypse to slumbering gods. So many deaths, with me as the focal point.

My fingers snagged in metal, cold and hard and smooth under my hand, and I remembered, incongruously, Suzanne Quinley and Melinda Holliday and Ashley Hampton, all alive and healthy because their paths had crossed with mine. I knotted my fingers around the necklace, feeling the cross press into my palm, and lifted my gaze to stare across butterfly-swarming darkness at Mark Bragg.

“The shamans weren’t my fault,” I heard myself whisper, voice scratchy, as if the cold pressure from my mother’s necklace had scraped my vocal box into disuse. “I probably could’ve done better, but I did my best. And I saved Suzanne Quinley.” I felt a weak, miserable smile tweak my mouth. “That’s got to count for something. I saved Gary.”

A flash of warmth spilled through me at that, make me break out with a hoarse laugh. “I even saved myself. At least, I’m working on it.” I could feel so much of the angry, resentful child I’d been still knotted up inside me,