I tried to put my hand over my throat but couldn’t. The voice wasn’t mine, either, but I thought it was me talking. I turned around in the parking lot, looking to see who was there, and discovered I wasn’t in the parking lot at all.
Stars, distant and meaningless, surrounded me in a place between worlds and dreams. They went on just less than forever, to a horizon so distant it made me feel insignificant. I stood among the blackness and the stars, comfortable with it: I’d traveled there an uncountable number of times already, though this was the first time I’d made the journey on my own. It was dangerous in the way any new territory was dangerous. An unwise show of power could attract things that were never meant to find fragile humans, but a judicious asking could as easily call up protectors for that same delicate psyche. My own protector danced around me even now, lithe and furry and looking for a chance to cause trouble.
Not trouble, I chastised myself, or thought I did. It could as well have been Coyote, shaking his golden head at me. He never caused trouble, only learning opportunities. Who did the learning was beside the point, and the fact that he never seemed to learn himself even more so.
“Welcome, Siobhán,” I said one more time, and finally someone else appeared in the Dead Zone. A girl I knew, all elbows and knees, her black hair cropped short in defiance of the big bangs and perms that were stylish when she was that age. She was more than half asleep, a frown etched between her eyebrows, and she glowered at me suspiciously.
I offered out a brick-red hand and smiled. “This is where it begins. Brightness of body, brightness of soul.”
A doorway opened up in my mind.
CHAPTER 22
I fell through myself and memory and dreams until I was no longer capable of telling up from down or me from him. In every room of memory a brick-red boy waited, golden eyes bright and cheerful while I argued with him. I was thirteen and gawky and even I knew shamans didn’t just happen. You had to do a spirit quest and be guided and be prepared to focus yourself on the good of the community. I barely knew what a community was, much less had any interest in making it healthy. I felt distant and sullen even contemplating it. I was new to North Carolina at that age, still the outsider, and the part of me that wanted desperately to fit in was overridden by the part that just didn’t know how. I never had figured it out.
“That’s why I’m here,” Coyote said over and over again, showing patience far beyond his apparent years. I could see him through my own eyes, a brick-red young man of about eighteen with hair past his shoulders, long and gleaming blue-black in the darkness. The part of my mind able to think about it thought that made sense. A prepubescent girl was more likely to respond positively to an eighteen-year-old knockout than a thirty-something…well. Knockout. Coyote in any form was beautiful, bequeathed with the striking features that seemed par for the course when it came to otherworldly beings. But watching him now had a peculiar echo to it, as if what I saw was somehow being filtered through more than one set of eyes. It didn’t exactly diminish him, but it gave him a slightly more human cast. The red brick of his skin was warmer, sun-kissed instead of masonry, and his golden eyes were touched with brown. Looking too hard made me dizzy.
“You’re unusual,” Coyote said. My thirteen-year-old self snorted with the same lack of delicacy the woman twice her age had at her disposal.
“Siobhán,” he said, and I watched me hunch my shoulders up and shift, as if I was dragging a blanket over them.
“Stop calling me that. My name’s Joanne.”
A wave of sorrow caught me off guard, not my own emotion at all, but Coyote’s. Unexpectedly, it brought clarification. I wasn’t visiting memory on my own. These were Coyote’s memories, not mine, and the double vision was brought on by both of us remembering the same thing from different vantages. I had the impulse to gather up the younger me into my arms and hug her. Rather, Coyote had the impulse. My reluctance might have been what stopped him. I wondered if the me now could affect the him then. I wouldn’t put it past me.
I shook my head without moving his at all, unable to keep my selves straight. “Hang on.” That was actually me, breathing the words while I looked for the coil of power inside me. It felt awkward, tangled up in Coyote’s dreams, especially as his power wasn’t centered the way mine was.
Separating myself felt like making taffy candy, pulling and stretching and bringing it back together. Coyote’s power was recognizable to me, in the same way the Eiffel Tower was: I’d never seen it before, but all the representations and reproductions looked like the real thing. I’d dealt with enough magic from other people to recognize what I was facing.
His magic was all rusty oranges and hard blues, desert colors that had a faint taste of grit to them. Everything that was mine was silver and shot-silk blue. His were a part of him, as natural as breathing, and mine were still bunched together at the center of me, tendrils feeling their way into me as if they weren’t certain they were welcome. A touch of green sprouted in my silver, envy at how easy it was for Coyote, then disappeared again as I folded taffy one more time and found myself untangled from my spirit guide.
For one truly alarming instant I didn’t belong anywhere. I had no attachment to my own body, not even the pulse of silver cord I’d seen when my mother and I had come together to fight the Blade. I hung in the Dead Zone, numbed by a coldness that went beyond anything I’d ever felt before. Even Amhuluk’s presence hadn’t held the bone-draining chill that was death in such a profound manner. Panic clenched my heart and I dove forward, taking up residence behind the eyes of my thirteen-year-old self.
She didn’t notice a thing. I wondered once more if it’d been like this all along and I just hadn’t known I was visiting back then, or if this was only memory, and nothing I did could affect what was to play out. Not that I had the foggiest idea what was going to play out. My subconscious seemed to remember this conversation, but I certainly didn’t.
“Joanne.” I could hear the sadness in Coyote’s voice as clearly as I’d felt it rise in him. My mother had sounded much that way the first time I’d corrected her as to my name. Right after that I’d done something that turned her from being a light-hearted woman with a ready smile into someone with the strength to will herself to death on a specific date. I very much didn’t want a repeat of that scenario.
The younger me didn’t hear anything beyond the brick-red boy in her dreams using the name she wanted him to. It was enough to satisfy her, at least for the moment. “What do you mean, I’m unusual?” The question was cautious, guarded, like somebody’d said Tom Cruise was on the phone for her. She wanted to believe it, but couldn’t fathom it being true. She had half-formed ideas that I remembered, wanting to be told she was really the lost daughter of some insanely wealthy family who would dote on their missing child, not the half-breed daughter of a reclusive father who didn’t know what to do with her. Probably every kid in the universe had that kind of fantasy, whether they’d been abandoned at three months old or not.
The adult me didn’t expect anything at all. I remembered this dream. It’d come the night my period started, and I’d woken up after Coyote’d said brightness of body, brightness of soul. He’d shown up in my dreams a few times after that, never more than an instant or two. I usually woke up as soon as he appeared, to the best of my recollection. I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t already awake, instead of lingering in the Dead Zone. Coyote put his hand out again, inviting.