CHAPTER 35
Voices, low and good-natured, mumbled around me in the careful pitch used for sick rooms and hospitals. Once in a while someone broke out of that, a laugh climbing up, or a discussion rising out of polite tones. There were other sounds, too: buzzes and beeps that went on rhythmically. Not the kind of thing I expected to hear in my apartment. It was all muffled, like somebody’d wrapped six or eight scarves around my head. Perhaps they had. That would explain why I didn’t seem to be able to open my eyes, either.
Instead of opening them, I yawned so hard tears leaked through my eyelashes. I couldn’t quite get a groan out, even though I felt the situation warranted one. I was sure it was too early to be up. The blankets were heavy and my head was weighed down. I yawned again and rolled over, dragging my pillow down to bury my face in it.
I tried, anyway. My wrist ran into something cold and metal. I did groan that time, and pulled my eyelids half open to see what the problem was. The noise around me stopped.
There was a metal railing about ten inches from my nose. Beyond it was a fuzzy green curtain, though the fuzziness was probably due to my lack of contacts. Between the railing and the curtain was somebody’s burly arm. The arm was attached to a hand gripping the railing. The hand was in focus, and had pale pink polish on the nails. I chuckled, or croaked, depending on how you wanted to look at it, and said, “Billy?”
The sound came back much louder than before, a cacophony of cheers and yells and general glee while a surprising number of people shoved around the bed and bent over to hug me. Gary appeared, trying to look gruff, and I hung on to his hand. “You saved me in there,” I whispered. “You and your crazy totems.”
“Weren’t nothin’,” he said, but his eyes were suspiciously bright and he held on hard when he hugged me. “You been out two days, kid.”
“Really.” I couldn’t rub my eyes and hang on to Gary at the same time, so I only squinted blearily, trying to see past him. Billy and Mel were hovering side by side, Robert poking his head over Mel’s shoulder. “I dunno, Billy.” He took a step forward, worried, and I shook my head. “You’re thinner, but going into a coma for days on end seems like a kind of drastic weight loss plan to me. Maybe you should just avoid The Missing O and all those doughnuts.”
He laughed and Mel put an arm around his ribs, hugging him. She looked better, her color back to normal and her dress cut to disguise four months of pregnancy. I could see glimmers of buttercup yellow around her, even without trying. The same kinds of shadings fell away from everyone in my line of sight, in fact, from Gary to Robert to other people from the department. Bruce was there, thin face lit up with happiness as he spoke into his cell phone, telling Elise I’d woken up. “Ask her if I can have some tamales, Bruce.” His smile widened and he nodded. I flopped back into the bed, yawning until my eyes teared again. I couldn’t be as tired as I felt. I’d just slept for two days. “Everybody’s okay?”
A wave of solemness came over the room. “Yeah, pretty much,” Billy answered after a moment.
I closed my eyes, tears suddenly having nothing to do with yawning. “Pretty much?”
Billy hesitated too long and my stomach clenched. “Who, Bill?” I sat up, knotting my fingers in the covers. I’d severed Begochidi’s link with Morrison. It couldn’t be him. Unless Barbara, in the waking world, had reached him somehow. “Billy. Please.”
“Mark Bragg still hasn’t woken up. I’m sorry, Joanie.”
A horrible combination of relief and dismay chilled me right through the gut, color draining from my skin. “What about Barb?”
“Nobody’s seen her.” Billy said quietly. “They’ve got an APB out. The captain’s been out looking for her himself.”
My heart tightened and I nodded, trying to sound indifferent as I asked, “He’s okay?”
Half a dozen people said, “He’s fine.” I got the idea my nonchalance ploy hadn’t worked. I nodded again. “Where’s Mark?”
“Down the hall,” Gary said. “Doctors don’t think he’s gonna wake up.”
I fumbled the bed railing down while he spoke and pulled the oxygen sensor off my finger. “Bring me to him.”
The same half dozen people said some variation on “Joanne,” and I swung my legs off the bed, wishing I was wearing something more dignified than a hospital gown. Mel, as if on command, dropped a robe around my shoulders, and I looked at Gary. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Arright. C’mon, sweetheart.”
The herd of them—I was touched at how many people were sitting vigil at my bedside—left me outside Mark’s room. I went in barefoot and cold to find him alone with the sounds of a hospital room. I wondered what had happened to Barb, if she’d suffered the same unexpected coma Mark had. I didn’t think so. I wondered if there was a way for me to find her. The same cool certainty that said she hadn’t collapsed in a coma told me I wouldn’t be able to find her, either. It wouldn’t stop me from looking, but my gut wasn’t on my conscience’s side this time.
The glimmerings of Sight that were with me when I woke deepened as I sat down at Mark’s side. His aura no longer shone with half a spectrum’s colors, but lay quiet against his skin, the rusty brown I’d seen before. I had a pretty good idea already of what had happened, but I put my fingers on his shoulder and slipped out of my body to do a diagnostic. It was only later I realized how easy it was to do that, even without the drum bringing me under.
Mark’s soul lay unguarded, a desert oasis full of blooming cactus and clear sun-warmed water. But no wind blew, the water lay still and lifeless in its pools, and the sun’s warmth faded a little even as I stood there. All around me, the blooms seemed in stasis, not yet dying, but no more living than a shadow. I’d cut off too much, when I’d pulled Begochidi’s power from the gentler side of his human host. The bond Mark held on his own soul was fragile now, barely there.
My vehicle metaphors came back to me with a sense of the ridiculous. The easiest way to fix a lot of problems was with duct tape. I just needed to bind his soul and his body together again, wrapping them tight with tape until they grew strong together again.
The power that flowed through me was far less half-assed than tape would’ve been, though. It had permanence and strength, sticky silver glue binding life to body. I had no sense of how much time it took, but when the ghost of a breeze whispered over me, I knew I’d succeeded. With a small sad smile, I left Mark’s desert garden and stepped into another one, a place between souls in the astral realm. It only took a moment to settle down into a coyote-sized hollow in the rocks, though I fit into it no better than I had before. “Coyote?” The word was hardly a whisper, and the second one even fainter: “Cyrano?” I said nothing else, only sat beneath the violent blue sky and stretched my senses, pouring myself out in hopes of a response.
In time, the wind turned acid with sand, heat intensifying by degrees until the sky was white with it, and the horizons bled with rising, burning waves. The sun settled closer to me, hard and merciless, and I felt the stones I lay curled into shift around me. Rock became sand, gritty and white as salt, baking under the light. I knew without looking up that what I leaned on now was a single bleached tree in the midst of desert, as lonely a thing as ever I’d known. Breath ached in my chest, air so hot it felt too thin to keep life in my body. When tears swam in my eyes against the heat, I opened my mouth and said, very softly into the weight of sun, “I honor you, Trickster. You may as well show yourself. I know you’re here.”
Then he was sitting before me, Big Coyote with his coat made of copper and gold threads, so sharp and vivid I expected to cut myself when I leaned forward to wrap my arms around his bony shoulders. I buried my face in metalcolored wire fur, and poured a lifetime’s worth of thanks and sorrows and fears into Big Coyote’s heart. I scraped up all the love I knew how to and offered that up, starting with my own mother’s hard choice to send me away and my unconscious echo of that decision fifteen years later. I added in everything I’d learned from Gary, and the admission about Morrison I still didn’t like to put into words, and Billy and Melinda and their kids and the mistakes I’d made and every scrap of life my memory and my soul could find to share. I was trembling and light- headed under the relentless sun, still searching for essence to give away, when Big Coyote pulled away very gently and licked tears from my face.
Surprised, I laughed and put my hand out. He licked that, too, solemnly, then stood, his tail wagging slowly
