“Trust yourself.” The words were so bald they made me look up, even as I swayed in the grass. “You’re not alone, Joanne. You have a teacher. Trust yourself.” His voice thinned as he spoke, as did the rest of him. I could feel my net fraying, not because I lacked power, but more as if it felt it had done its job, and the time to hold him was over. “You’ll be all right.”
It was the same promise I’d made to a much younger version of myself. I’d lied. I watched Coyote as he got up, shook himself, and turned to trot away, wondering if he was lying, too.
“Coyote.”
He turned back, furry spots where his eyebrows would be raised in curiosity, one paw lifted in a pretty pose.
“What’s your name?”
A man stood before me, looking back over his shoulder, hip-length black hair swinging free over brick-red bare shoulders. His eyebrows were still lifted, his foot paused in preparation for a step. I could see the coyote form nestled inside him, wholly a part of him. He dropped a wink, then disappeared into the mist, leaving a word lingering in the air: “Cyrano.”
CHAPTER 28
I had actually forgotten about the pruning shears to the face, while traipsing around with Coyote and ruining my younger self’s life. Memory came back to me with blinding vengeance as Coyote’s name rang the round two bell and dropped me into my own body. So little time had passed I was still in the midst of falling over. I twisted in midair, wrenching my back but managing to get my hands under me so I neither smashed into the table nor bashed my head against anything else. That had to count for something. What, I didn’t know, but I was sure it was something. Still, I hit the floor hard enough to jar my whole body, all the nerve endings of which seemed to be centered in my face. Whimpering and rolling over wasn’t very manly, but it was about all I had in my repertoire right then.
Barbara didn’t appear to be climbing back in the window to whack at me with the shears, so I took a moment to lie there and focus on my nose. Not literally. My eyes were too full of tears to see it even if I could’ve gotten them to cross, which hurt too badly to try after the first time. I put my fingers over my nose, gingerly, then tried really hard to think of something else while I yanked it straight.
Turns out you can’t really think of anything else when you’re doing that. I wasn’t surprised, but I was very disappointed. The good news was, once I was done straightening the mashed cartilage, it only took a moment’s visualization for cool blue healing power to suction-cup the dent and pop it back into place. I knew there was a chance I’d bring the darkness back down on my head by healing myself, but I just flat-out couldn’t imagine trying to chase bad guys around with my face throbbing so hard I could barely see straight.
Pain faded so quickly it left me with a headache that felt blissful and frothy in comparison. I braced, waiting for the weight of butterfly darkness to come back, but instead I heard the sound of an engine cranking. I crunched up and climbed to my feet, leaning out Morrison’s shattered kitchen window to catch Barbara backing out of the driveway as if a banshee was after her. She hadn’t thought to stop and slash my tires, which I would’ve done in her position, and which was good for her health. I’d have had to found a way to fly through the air, land on her hood and pull her through the windshield a few times in vengeance. I could feel power settling into my bones, comfortable as if it’d always been there, but I didn’t think a newfound confidence also covered superheroic leaps across wide empty spaces.
It’d be cool if it did, though.
Rather than try, or even go tearing out to Petite to give chase, I turned back to my boss. He lay in the shambles of his kitchen without the slightest awareness of what had transpired around him. I figured if I didn’t get the mess cleaned up before he woke up, he’d automatically assume it was my fault. The idea made my heart cramp. I took a deep breath to push pain away, then crouched to get Morrison into a fireman’s carry and take him to the hospital. Barbara could wait.
I knew Northwest was swamped, but I brought Morrison there, anyway. Even before dawn, the admitting nurse’s hair was sticking to her temples, tiny pin curls taking shape in the dampness of perspiration. She gave me a look bordering on despair and got Morrison into a wheelchair while I filled out paperwork that asked awkward questions about the captain’s weight and general health. I was sure he had a wallet in his pocket that would hold a driver’s license and insurance card, but it took me fifteen minutes to talk myself into looking.
His driver’s license picture was one of the best I’d ever seen. I wondered if police captains got to stand around making the DMV take pictures until one came out well enough to satisfy their vanity, or if Morrison was just photogenic enough to overcome the general awfulness of identification photos. Since I was being nosy, anyway, I looked for a passport to compare pictures with, but he wasn’t that thorough about carrying ID.
The sun was peeking over the horizon by the time I got the paperwork filled out, as much because I kept nodding off and jerking awake as not knowing the answers. I hauled myself to my feet and went back to the admissions desk, where the frazzled nurse gave it a perfunctory glance. “What’s the J stand for?”
“I have no idea. He goes by Michael.” It was Morrison’s first initial. J. Michael Morrison. I’d always assumed Michael was his first name.
Sort of like he’d always assumed Joanne was mine. I crinkled my face at the desk and waited until the nurse signed him in and gave him a room number.
Billy’s room number.
My stomach knotted up again and I reached for the nurse’s hand, astonished at how warm it was. My fingers felt like they were turning blue. “I know the people who were in that room. William and Melinda Holliday. Are they… okay?”
The nurse put her hand over mine momentarily, a gentler gesture than I’d have expected, given that I’d seized her, then extracted her wrist to check the computer. “They’re fine. We’re just finding it necessary to sta—” She cut herself off with a look of dismay.
Relief brought laughter to my lips. “Stack ’em and rack ’em?”
“I would never say such a thing,” she admonished me, then smiled briefly and shrugged. “As you say.”
I nodded, almost reached out to grab her hand again and stopped myself by folding both my hands together on the counter hard enough to turn my knuckles white. “Thank you. Thank you so much. Would it help if I brought Morrison up to the room? I want to see Billy, anyway.”
“You really shouldn’t. Visiting hours don’t start until eleven.” Then she looked around and exhaled. “Just tell the nurse’s station I couldn’t find an orderly and you offered to help. It’s a madhouse around here, anyway. They’ll be too busy to fire me.” She pulled out another smile, this one wry, and handed me Morrison’s chart before turning into the noise to help another incoming patient.
Somebody at the nurse’s station upstairs took Morrison away from me, and I went down the hall to Billy’s room, where a harried-looking orderly was changing sheets and cleaning up as fast as his legs would let him. A third bed had been inserted into the room, making it claustrophobic but worthwhile. Mel’s bed had been pushed up against Billy’s. Robert Holliday was there, and I wondered if he’d stayed the night in the hospital, too, and had simply been elsewhere when I visited, or if he’d found a way in himself. I didn’t know if strict visiting hours counted for immediate family, but they didn’t seem to apply to Brad Holliday, who, it appeared, had never left.
The two of them were hunched over the beds like weary gargoyles, one on each side. I tapped on the door frame and they both looked up, Robert brightening and Brad glowering. I said, “Hey,” before Brad had time to say anything mean, and came into the room pushing my hair back with both hands. “How’re they doing?”