The doctor looked up his nose at me. I had at least two inches on him, so he couldn’t, try as he might, look down his nose at me. I gave him my very best, politest, most friendly, cheerful smile, and the wonderful thing was, I genuinely meant it. It was one of those rare, beautiful moments when I really loved every inch of my nearly six foot height, not to mention the shoulders and arms that came with spending a lifetime working on cars. I might’ve been slender next to my boss, but I wasn’t exactly a waif, and once in a while looming over officious jerks in an imposing manner was incredibly satisfying. “I’m sorry, Doctor, is something wrong?”
His nostrils flared and he backed up a step. I showed tremendous restraint and didn’t follow him. His expression suggested he’d stepped back of his own free will so he could see me better. My neighbor’s cat got that same kind of expression when he fell off the windowsill: I wanted to be on the floor. I smiled some more.
“This is Mrs. Holliday. Oh, you’ve met,” I said into the sour face of acknowledgment he made, and before he could actually get a word in edgewise. “So I’m sure you understand that whatever’s going on in here is happening with her approval, which makes it, let me see, what’s the phrase I’m looking for here. Oh, yeah. None of your goddamned business.”
He inhaled. I pointed a finger at him and he coughed on his words. “Does it appear to you that anyone in this room is providing illegal medical advice, or in fact trying to remove Mr. Holliday from the hospital’s expert care?”
He inhaled again. I thought if I could keep him doing this for a few minutes, he might just puff up and blow away like a hot air balloon. It was worth a shot, so I carried on full bore. “I didn’t think so. I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of positive thoughts and prayer shoring up the ill, Doctor, even if you don’t subscribe to its usefulness yourself.” His nose pinched again and I smiled less pleasantly this time. “That’s what I thought. But you’d hardly deny the family and friends of an ill man the chance to surround him with those thoughts and prayers, would you? I didn’t think so.” Somewhere in the middle of that I started walking toward him, and he started backing up. By the time I got to the end, I was smiling so hard it hurt, and he was on the wrong side of the door that I closed in his face. I turned back to Melinda and Morrison, triumph writ large in my expression.
“That,” Melinda said, “was Bill’s older brother.”
It turned out ritual suicide wasn’t an option while hanging out in a friend’s hospital room. Morrison wouldn’t even let me crawl under Billy’s bed and hide in humiliation. Billy’s brother—who, now that I knew was his brother, did bear some resemblance to him, in a shrunken-down, weasly kind of way—gave me the world’s flattest look and then ignored me wholesale when he came back into the room. I not only couldn’t blame him, I was sort of grateful.
Bradley Holliday had driven up from Spokane the moment his shift at Valley Hospital ended, which was why he wore doctor’s whites. On hearing he was from Spokane, I wanted to know any number of things, like why I hadn’t known Billy had a brother, if he lived nearby and whether or not Bradley Holliday had ever met a teenage girl named Suzanne Quinley who’d gone to live in Spokane after her parents were brutally murdered. I figured the answers were “You never asked,” and “No,” respectively, but I wondered, anyway.
I also wondered why my friend Billy, who loved all things paranormal and who had married a woman like himself, had a brother who became livid at a healer’s drum in a hospital room.
I sat down on the far side of Billy’s bed, making myself as small as possible while I put a hand on his shoulder. It hardly mattered: none of the others were paying any attention to me, but I felt like I needed to be surreptitious, anyway.
The coil of energy flared inside me as I touched Billy’s shoulder, impatience sparkling through my skin like champagne. I felt a knot loosen in my shoulder and let my eyes close for a moment, absurdly grateful that the power was responding. It hadn’t been a couple of weeks earlier, and although it’d been behaving since then, the idea of failing my friends again made my stomach clench with nausea.
In a way it was helpful to have Brad over there talking intently with Melinda and Morrison. It put less pressure on me to be the performing monkey, and I was uncertain enough about what to do as it was. I did know one thing: pouring my life essence into Billy, like Melinda had tried to do, was right out. She didn’t have the healing knack that I did, but that hadn’t been the important part of what she’d been offering. She’d been trying to give him the will to live, and Billy wasn’t missing that. What I’d felt was more like a siphon draining away what would have normally made him vital.
And siphons were a metaphor I could work with. The idea brought a smile to my lips even as I concentrated on my breathing, unwilling to interrupt and bring attention to myself by asking for my drum. Ideally I would pop by the garden that housed my inner self, invite Billy in and do a little fixer-upper from there. Even more ideally, I’d pop right into Billy’s garden and do my work from inside his own head, but the one time I’d fallen into somebody else’s garden, it’d been Gary, and I didn’t really have much idea of how I’d done it. I suspected I hadn’t done it at all, in fact, and that the old man’s sense of self had just overwhelmed my newbie attempts to set up his shop in my head. It all meant that realistically, I was going to try slipping inside my garden, drawing Billy’s soul closer to mine and pinching off the siphon that was drawing life force out of him. It seemed very straightforward and simple.
Oh, what my life had come to, that such things should seem simple.
A few deep breaths had me drifting, like the clarity Morrison’s drumming had brought on was simmering just below the surface, waiting for me to pay attention to it again. My goal this time was an internal journey, not an external one, so there was no lens flare effect or rearrangement of the color spectrum into neons and pulsing life. Instead I slid down a brightly colored rabbit hole, tumbling chaotically through my own mind into a place I didn’t recognize at first.
There were familiar elements. The pond with a waterfall feeding it at one end, for example, and the pathways that lay in straight lines through the grounds. But the grass, usually cropped so short I could see dirt between individual blades, had grown up to ankle-deep, and there was a hint of Kentucky blue to its color now. Leaves were fully open on trees that were still tidily trimmed, and a few of the hedges even bore flowers, though I had no idea what kind. The garden had been rectangular and functional last time I’d been in it, but now the far end, away from the waterfall, seemed hazy, as if fog were hiding the possibility of more.
It was almost pretty.
I stood by the pond, rotating slowly and trying to remember when I’d last actually gone inside myself. I’d been looking outward for days, searching for Coyote—my erstwhile spirit guide, who’d stopped speaking to me after I threw him out of a dangerous situation—but I’d been avoiding taking a look at the state of my soul ever since the catastrophe that had cost two people their lives. It seemed unlikely that those events had led to all the blossoming going on around me now.
Of course not, said a snide little voice inside my head. Because horrible things happening couldn’t possibly have any positive aspects, like forcing you to get your act together.
I really hated that voice. I was almost certain it’d been there before my shamanic powers had been woken up. It was the almost part that made me nervous. Sometimes I wanted to ask if other people had snarky little voices that gave them smart-ass commentary on their lives, but I was afraid they’d say no.