CHAPTER 16

Agony knotted my shoulder muscles, just as if the raven’s talons had buried themselves in my flesh and not in young Joanne’s. I felt like I was being dragged skyward, the raven’s wings whispering against desert air that thinned and turned bluer as we rose into it. The world hollowed around me until it had cylindrical walls, just like the vision I’d had in the dance club. There was nowhere to go but up or down, and the raven kept climbing higher. I set my teeth together and tried not to either squirm or scream, afraid the former would get me dropped and figuring the latter to be pretty much pointless.

I didn’t know if a bird could actually wheeze from breathlessness, but by the time we broke out of the cylinder into a blue world, I had the impression that was exactly what the raven was doing. Well, I hadn’t asked it to haul my hundred-and-sixty-pound self through the sky.

As if in response, it dropped me and I tumbled down to the earth, bumping and whacking myself on mountains along the way. Clouds wafted above me when I finally came to a rest, lying on my back and staring up.

I’d called it a blue world, when we broke into it. Normally that would mean I’d been looking skyward, except I hadn’t been. I had no need to watch a raven’s butt as it hauled me around. I’d been looking down, and the mountains and the dirt and the plant life had all been different shades of cerulean.

The sky, it turned out, was also blue, though not a typical Middle World blue. It was a hard flat blue, dark enough in hue to be pushing dusk, except the sun burned down, blazing so white the edges of its corona were—I regretted the descriptor, but it was true: sky blue. I turned my head, looking for a horizon, expecting it to be like the Lower World’s horizon, like my last vision’s horizon: too close.

I found no horizon. There was instead a lithe, long cat staring at me. For a few critical seconds I forgot how to breathe, my heart clogging my throat and cutting off air. Another cat padded up, standing above me with the blueeyed curiosity of a wild animal. Another and another appeared, all of them watching me as if to see if I was about to become dinner. Their stomachs were pale, almost white, and their faces and the tips of twitching tails were dark.

Dark blue, actually. So was the rest of the fur on their bodies, paler blue instead of tawny like I expected it to be. Mountain lions didn’t come in blue, as far as I knew. Not cobalt and powder-blue, anyway, as if somebody’d carved them out of this strange sky and made them into cats with clouds for underbellies.

The first one, delicately, put a large paw onto my chest and pressed. I hadn’t been breathing, anyway, but the weight brought that home, and I gasped. He shifted forward, liquid movement that took his bulk from long hind legs and leaned it into me. This was not a spirit animal. I didn’t know what it was, but I felt pretty confident of that. It was something entirely Other, belonging to a world that wasn’t my own. Spots danced in my vision, blocking out his wide eyes.

Thin voices cried out from the mountains around me. I turned my head the other way with effort, to find other humans pinned to the ground in the same manner I was. Innumerable Prussian-colored cats leaned into uncountable people, squashing the life from them, and like me, they all seemed too frightened to fight back. I twisted my head forward again and wrapped my hands around the cougar’s paw, pushing back enough to drag in a lungful of air.

As if my inhalation called them down, sparrows flocked from the sky by the thousands, sparks of darting sapphire against the stillness of the dusky sky and blue-smoke mountains. For a moment I thought they would attack the cats, but instead they swept down to the captive humans, pecking and plucking at tender flesh and tasty eyes. The sky blotted into darkness from their numbers and from mortal screams.

Then the sky broke apart, fragile as an eggshell, and black poured in.

I flung my hands up, half warding off sparrows and half as if I’d catch the sky. Power came without bidding, spilling from my hands as I pushed toward the pieces of sky as they fell. I tried to shore up the world, and it almost worked. For a few seconds destruction came to a halt, and the people around me cried out in gladness.

Then a huge whacking straw burst up through the heart of the world and shattered the remaining sky into a billion pieces. Sparrows and cats alike chittered and yowled with fear, springing away from the men they held captive and feasted upon. All around me, people scrambled to their feet and ran for the tube that pierced the sky, while I lay there heaving with a useless attempt to save the world.

Blue mountain broke apart beneath me and I fell a hundred miles, all the way back into my apartment. I was just about to hit my body at terminal velocity when I felt myself jerk, as if wings had spread, and popped back into myself just a little more gently than I’d expected. My shoulders ached. I pressed on one, trying to work the pain away, and encountered slight resistance and the fluttered offense of a man-handled bird. I even thought I heard an undignified squack of dismay, and looked up to find Gary gaping at me without the slightest apology.

“You got—it’s gone now—you had a—you had wings, Jo.”

“What, like an angel?” I slid my hand down my shoulder, half expecting to encounter angel wings.

He pushed his mouth out in exasperation. “Around your head, you crazy dame.”

Right where the raven had snagged me. I could feel its presence on my shoulder, claws dug in for purchase. It had no weight, just a peculiar thereness I couldn’t otherwise identify. “Gary, can you feel that tortoise?”

Gary drew himself up, mock dignity almost hiding the amused twinkle in his gray eyes. “Lady, I ain’t sure that’s the kinda question a nice girl asks an old man.”

“Gary!” I couldn’t get enough exasperation into my voice. It came out sounding like laughter. Gary let the twinkle overtake dignity and gave me a wicked smirk.

“I guess I kinda can,” he allowed, “if I think about it. I got kind of a sense of havin’ somebody watchin’ my back, like maybe I got that big ol’ shell keepin’ me safe. Why?”

I rolled my shoulder, seeing if I could dislodge the faint sense of having a bird clinging to it. I couldn’t. In fact, it hung on harder, so I stopped that nonsense. Well, I tried, anyway. I found myself still shifting around a bit, getting used to the idea of having somebody—or something—watching over me. “I think it worked.”

“That’s good, ain’t it?”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t like your spirit quest. Or the one I dreamed about. I had another…” I hesitated, frowning. “Dream, I guess. I didn’t think I was asleep.”

“You didn’t fall over,” Gary supplied helpfully. “What’d you dream?”

I shook my head and got to my feet, stretching out some of the stiffness of sitting still. “I dreamed about meeting my dad and me out in a desert someplace. I don’t know where. And I saw Big Coyote in the dream. He was giving me a choice of some kind, but then the raven grabbed me—the little me—and then—”

“Raven?” Gary turned my drum toward me so I could see the raven sheltering the rattlesnake and the wolf under its wings. I stared at the rich dye job and pressed my lips together, nodding. “Think somebody knew somethin’ you didn’t?”

“I don’t know, Gary.” I couldn’t even decide if I hoped the answer was yes or no. I’d had that drum since I was fifteen. The idea that somebody’d seen the potential for what I might become that long ago, without me ever knowing anything about it, made me both sad and nervous. “I don’t know,” I said again. “That didn’t exactly go like I thought it was going to.”

“Nothin’ ever does,” Gary said, far too cheerfully. “That’s how life is, Jo. You gotta run with the punches.”