“And how many is that?”

I looked up. Gary’s white hair was bright with sun, almost glowing, and his eyes were concerned. I smiled despite myself. “Enough to figure out what it is and get everybody free from it. I’m being careful, Gary. As careful as I can be, anyway. If this thing can grab Coyote, it’s a lot stronger than I am.” As if the admission was a weakness, I yawned until my nose stung, and felt my expression go wry. “Maybe I’ll get a caffeine IV and drop by the hospital. If they’ve got Billy and Mel in the same room I might be able to get more off both of them than just the one. Hang on to that rock, will you, Gary? Please?”

“’Course I will.” His eyes sparkled in the sunlight. “I don’t want you givin’ me the look you gave Morrison a minute ago. Coulda peeled paint, and he ain’t even here.”

“That’s my goal in life,” I muttered. “Peel Morrison’s paint.” Something sounded unbelievably wrong with that and I felt my ears heat up. Gary cleared his throat too loudly and looked somewhere else, trying not to grin. I slumped somewhat melodramatically, feeling put-upon, then straightened. “Anyway,” I said, also too loudly, “I’m going to the hospital.”

Gary came around to Petite’s passenger side and bopped his hand against her door handle. “Arright, let’s go.”

“This became a we?” I crawled in and popped the lock on Gary’s door open. He swung down into the seat like it was natural, a marked difference from Morrison, and shrugged.

“I took the day off, doll. Might as well be in on the good stuff. Besides, you kept me out of it last time.”

Like clockwork, guilt swept through me, bubbling around the core of power in my stomach. I reached over without thinking, putting my fingers on Gary’s chest, and magic spilled out.

CHAPTER 17

Magic was okay. Magic was what I expected. What I didn’t expect was the depth it crashed to, wholesale ignoring my intent to work a little good mojo into Gary’s heart and call it done. A jungle rushed up around me, shaking into place with such force I staggered while leaves and branches settled into place with rustling whispers. Water splashed around my ankles, cold and fresh and urgent. I stepped with it, letting its current guide me. Within a few steps it deepened and pulled me off my feet, buffeting me and carrying me to wherever it wanted me to go. I laughed, breathless with surprise, and twisted in the water, looking to see how far back it went.

Following me came a flood of inky-black wings, so rich in their darkness that I could see hints of purples and blues within them. Blackness tainted what it touched, sucking life away. Horror seized me as surely as the stream had and I snatched for shore, trying to stop my plummet before I fell any deeper and brought death to everything that surrounded me.

A big hand reached down and snagged my arm, hauling me out of the water and onto a branch dangling over the river. I yelped and clung to it, dripping and astonished. Below me, darkness bubbled and boiled in place, apparently unable to go farther than I was, regardless of things like physics. I could see it roiling against clean water as if they were two wholly different substances, never meant to mix. From above, it was easier to see into the depths of the black, and to imagine eyes of indigo and violet, fluttering like urgent wings against the air. The rapid, soundless beats carried pressure with them, as if someone had made a corset of the earth’s core and squeezed the breath from my lungs with its weight.

“That what I think it is?”

I twisted my head up to look at Gary, who’d righted himself on a branch above me and was drying his hands on his khaki pants. There was a pink flush to his arms, telling evidence of the burst of strength that had hauled me from the river. His army-issue shirt was a little different this time, Muldoon still printed in yellow block letters on a black nametag over his left breast. Below it, though, there was now a medal, so discreet it faded when I tried looking at it directly, and only reappeared when I caught it from the corner of my eye. His eyebrows had gotten a little farther away from him than they’d been the first time I’d been in the privacy of his own garden, as if he’d learned to see himself as slightly older than he had then, only a few weeks ago. I guessed a heart attack would do that to a guy. His hairline was flushed, too, from hanging upside down to catch me in the river, but his hair was dark and the wrinkles I knew so well had only just started settling into his face.

“Annie was so lucky,” I blurted, and my old/young friend gave me a sly grin that made me laugh and blush at the same time.

“You’re avoidin’ the question, Jo.” He nodded beyond me at the river and the flittering, dangerous surface that tried to rise from it. I shuddered as I glanced at its alien blend, then lay on my stomach and reached down.

Weight swam up my arm, black and heavy, as if it was trying to drag me into the water. Flutters of magic danced through that weight, a feeling like eyelash kisses on my skin. I yawned, and the lethargic murkiness came to life, no longer content to be slow and drowsy. It rose up, not like water at all, but like a wave of enclosing wings that worked to buffet me into them. Oil-slicked patterns formed in the darkness, delicate purple eyes and blue threads between them, familiar without quite being recognizable. Softness swept in around me, diminutive feathers tickling and bearing a promise of sleep making everything all right.

“C’mon, doll.”

I looked up, eyes glittering from holding back another yawn, to find Gary offering his hand and a smile. The lush trees were gone, and he looked younger than I’d ever seen him, in his twenties. His eyebrows were groomed and his smile was as strong and white as it was when he was in his seventies. His uniform was crisp and new, not yet worn comfortably like it was in his self-image a decade hence. A dance floor lay behind him, uniformed men dancing with women in full-skirted dresses. They looked absurdly young and beautiful to my eye, semiformal atmosphere tinged with hope and desire and the rush of falling in love as quickly as possible. Gary tilted his head, an eyebrow rising in a rather endearing look of puppy-dog anticipation. “Don’t break a soldier’s heart, lady.”

I laughed, unduly charmed, and put my hand in his, discovering I wore wrist-length white gloves. A startled glance down at myself told me I was wearing one of those period dresses, too, in a forest-green that I suspected complemented my skin very well. The dress had a prim collared throat opened just far enough to be not that prim after all, and a nipped waist that fitted over my hips and flattened out into pleats. I had no idea I had so much hourglass to my shape, and wondered briefly just how sturdy my underwear had to be to keep me curved that way. My hair brushed forward against my chin, fat black undercurls, and I touched my forehead to discover bangs, just as well coiffed as the rest of my hair. A mirror on the far wall gave me the startling impression the outfit made me look taller, not something I normally needed, and then I was dancing with Gary and no longer worried about my clothes or hair, or even the fact that I couldn’t dance.

Because I could. Whether it was Gary’s lead or magic shoes or the music lending me its gift, I followed him on the dance floor without thinking or worrying about it, and instead laughed and nestled close when the music slowed, unable to remember being so happy. At breaks between songs, other boys cut in and asked to dance, and Gary let me go graciously, unconcerned, and that was as much a reason to come back to him as anything else. There were young men who scowled when their girls danced with someone else, sulking around the edges of the dance floor, but Gary put a hand in his pocket and got a glass of punch and watched, eyes full of confidence and pleasure.