“Bedroom.” I dragged a cushion off the couch and stuffed it against the front door, cutting off the draft that circled from beneath it. Gary went into my bedroom like he belonged there and got my drum.
It was the only thing I owned of any intrinsic value. It’d been a gift from one of the elders out in Qualla Boundary, not long after my father and I moved back there. It was painted with a raven whose wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake, and had a drumstick with a soft rabbit-fur end dyed raspberry red, and a knotted leather end that made sharp rich pangs of sound against the taut leather. Even fourteen years after having been gifted with it, I was still amazed anyone would make something like it for me. Gary knew it, and carried it as if it was fragile, a gesture that made my nose sting with embarrassing emotion.
I settled down on the floor as he came out of the bedroom with the drum and a closed fist. “I thought you might want this.”
I turned my hand up and he dropped a silver choker into my palm. Made of tube links intersected by triskelions, it had an Irish cross—a simple quartered circle, identical to the Cherokee power circle—as its pendant. “What—?”
“Your mom gave it to you, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, I…” She’d given it to me the day she died. I’d worn it for two weeks, gradually getting used to the peculiar feeling of having something resting in the hollow of my throat, until the day I’d been stabbed through the lung and the necklace had been blackened with my blood. It’d taken days to get the stains out, and I hadn’t brought myself to put it back on in the intervening weeks. “Yeah, all right.” I swallowed nervously and fastened the choker with fingers that suddenly felt thick and clumsy. “You’re all Mr. Insightful tonight, aren’t you?”
Gary sat down on the couch cushion that hadn’t been scavenged, grinning. “Somebody’s gotta be. You ready?”
I nodded, fighting the urge to curl my fingers around the necklace and pull it away from my throat to alleviate the alien pressure of jewelry against my skin. “I’ll wake up thirty seconds after you stop drumming.” We’d only done this a few times, but establishing the time felt like ritual. Gary started knocking out a heartbeat rhythm, and I let my eyes drift shut, waiting to follow the sound of the drum out of my own body.
CHAPTER 3
I had a deep dark secret. The world I saw through shamanic eyes—the one in which every thing on earth, be it animal, mineral or vegetable, sparked with the essence of life—was a world I dreamed about even when I was dead set against its reality. The world I saw with my spirit eyes was one where I could see Gary’s big rumbly presence like a V-8 engine that a girl could rely on. It was one where I could slide through the ceiling and get an alarming look at my neighbors’ sexual proclivities—although this time I went through the window when I separated from my body, because I can be taught, and I really didn’t need another eyeful of somebody else’s sex life.
Except for the glimpse that afternoon, I hadn’t looked at the world from a spirit’s perspective since January, when my life got turned upside down in the first place. There was something off-kilter as I slid into the Seattle night. Winter had come on too hard, and the life in the city that sped below me felt strained, like the world was being pushed in a direction it wasn’t prepared to go in. The blues I’d seen a few months ago seemed darker, the electricity of life dammed up in some way. Streets seemed more congested, as if their purpose had been forgotten. It hadn’t been like this a few months ago, and the feel of it made my skin prickle. There was a lingering feeling of familiarity below the wrongness, but when I reached for it, it slipped away.
I spun through the air, weightless and silent, watching sudden flashes of red and orange erupt in backed-up traffic, countered by calm waves of blue that I tried to encourage, clumsily. I passed a stretch of road where a woman’s astrally projected spirit hovered above her car, looking down at traffic much like I did. Pure boredom emanated from her, as if driving home had been so dull it’d flung her out of her own body. She didn’t seem to sense my presence, and I whisked past her, not knowing how to stop and say hello.
I left the city behind without having a destination in mind, moving as fast as thought itself. Color, vivid and strong, streaked with the coldness of winter, shot past me, sometimes forming into recognizable images, but more often staying abstract. I wondered if the abstraction was due to my lack of direction, but with the thought came a clear pathway that I recognized with a startled shiver.
A bower of trees arched over a single-track path, white flowers all but glowing under a source of light I couldn’t pinpoint. The path was smooth, as if it had been often walked on. I tumbled from flight to run along it, great huge strides so I felt I was still flying. There was a presence in front of me, somewhere buried in the depths of the earth. It carried its own weight, its own gravity well, drawing me toward it. I careened around a corner, pretending I was driving Petite, and came up against a cave, its mouth blocked off with boulders.
The presence beyond the cave mouth had a genial feeling to it, as if it were amused at my audacity and youth.
I hated feeling like people were laughing at me. I glowered at the boulders and reached for the smallest stone I could find, trying to wriggle it out of its lodged position in the ranks of larger stones.
A vise clamp fastened itself around my wrist, hauled me back, and did something that put my feet over my head and my head against the ground. I lay on my face with a mouthful of dirt, not entirely sure how I’d gotten there but pretty certain that any moment now I was going to start to hurt.
“And what is it,” a woman’s voice above me asked, “that you think you’re doing, Siobhán Walkingstick?” The lilt of Ireland was strong in her voice, almost masking the sarcasm with which the question was delivered.
I was pretty sure she didn’t want an answer. I had comparatively little experience with mothers, but the tone suggested to me that she knew perfectly well what I was doing, and that the real question was why was I doing something she obviously regarded as unbelievably stupid.
The physical pain I was expecting didn’t seem to be coming, so I rolled onto my back and stared up at her. She looked remarkably tall from this vantage, and somewhat bustier than I thought of her as being. She also wore an expression of exasperation that was both more vivid than any expression I could remember seeing on her in life, and which, although strictly speaking was entirely new to me, I had felt on my own face any number of times. Distress settled over me. It didn’t seem fair that I was turning into my mother when I’d barely even known the woman.
Eventually one of the numerous things crowding my mind and vying to be said won out: “I asked you not to call me that.” It seemed, even at the moment, an awfully calm response to the appearance of a woman I believed to be dead.
I was treated to a second new expression: dismay, which was wiped out almost instantly by the thoughtful, examining gaze that was all I’d really ever seen of her. “Very well, then. Joanne.” Her tone spoke volumes about what she thought of my Anglicized name, but I was almost entirely overwhelmed with not caring. I got to my feet somewhat stiffly, although I suspected any injuries I’d sustained were in my own mind.
Of course they were. That’s what happens when you travel on the astral plane. Moving on, then. I looked back to the wall of rocks, eyeing the one I’d initially grabbed. “Joanne,” my mother said in a remarkably good “don’t you dare test my patience one more time, young lady” voice. I dropped my hand and turned to face her, making a point of looking around rather dramatically.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you think you had something to say to me that I might listen to? Is there some burning reason that I should pay attention to, I don’t know, what are you, a banshee or something? You’re dead, Mother. We didn’t much like each other when you weren’t dead. Why don’t we just leave it at that and you can go do whatever it is dead people do? I’m busy.”
“Busy.”
“Yes.” I went to work on my rock again, tugging it a few millimeters out of the wall. She clamped her hand around my wrist again. Her fingers were tremendously cold, not just like the dead, but as if she was emitting cold the way a living body emits heat.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing, Joanne.” I hated the warm lilt of her voice, a low alto that I wanted to instinctively trust. I couldn’t possibly have recognized it. She’d abandoned me with my father when I was three months old, but from the moment she’d called me, seven months ago, I’d fought against wanting to curl up in the warmth and safety of that voice and letting myself forget about the world.
