I heard myself whisper, “Oh. Oh, shit,” somewhere in the waking world, and then a little louder, “I’m not—”

Barbara clobbered me over the head.

As far as being hit on the head went, it wasn’t nearly as bad as pruning shears to the face. Stars shot through my vision and I sort of collapsed forward, muffling Mark. He grunted and I tried to get enough focus back to push myself off him. I heard Barb scramble to her feet and run for the door. By the time I sat up, it’d slammed shut. I put a hand on the back of my head and winced. “I’m not whatever this thing thinks I am. I’m not the end of the world.” I was practically certain. I hoped.

Mark didn’t appear to care much. After a couple seconds I realized that was probably because I’d fallen on his face when Barbara hit me, and I’d just bashed his nose in a minute earlier. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. Hang on a second.”

For the second time in as many minutes, I did something really stupid. In my defense, I hadn’t known that letting Barb touch Mark would throw me into a vision, but I did know that trying to heal somebody when all that dark power was waiting to pounce was a bad idea.

Unfortunately, I’d already gone down the rabbit hole toward Mark’s garden when I remembered that.

Just as it had with Gary, overwhelming blackness rose up and followed me, so fast and sure of itself this time I had no way to stop it. I wasn’t carrying topaz, and Mark didn’t have the slightest familiarity with my intrusions to help me fight back with. His aura split apart, all the rainbows colors widening, and butterflies rose from the darkness between color to cloud out the sun.

I thought, quite clearly, this is going to get very confusing, and then it did.

In so far as there was good news, it was in my adversary being no better at planning than I was. My attempt at healing Mark had lit a path for it to follow, and it’d done so without hesitation or compunction. I had the sense that each time I built this sort of link to another person, it gave my enemy strength to draw from, a new route for it to take. I had a sudden awful concern for Ashley Hampton, but worry disappeared again under trying to untangle what my opponent had wrought.

Because it had just driven its own host into deep slumber. I felt Mark’s breathing change, both from inside where I was caught, and from outside where I was sitting on him. Butterflies whirled around me in obvious agitation, their rapid-beating wings making rainbows that danced in the corners of my vision. For the first time I got a feeling for Mark’s own aura, and realized I hadn’t even known I wasn’t seeing it. His was rusty-brown, so flattened that most of the red had been pulled from it. I thought it ought to be warm and friendly with life, but the butterfly colors had ridden it so long it was like he’d lost the ability to recognize himself at all. Standing inside the darkened garden that represented his soul, I felt energy draining out of it, sapped through uncountable needle-fine points. The trees and grasses and bushes in his garden were hole-ridden, as if it’d been attacked by voracious insects that neither knew nor cared that their feasting would ultimately destroy their food source and themselves.

Cold shocked through me, making hairs stand up all over my body. Destroy their food source. I doubted that doing so would be the end of whatever demon was carrying, but Mark was dying.

Standing there in the midst of a butterfly storm, my hands clenched and cold anger built up inside me. Not on my watch. I actually spoke the words out loud, then tilted my head up and shouted them into the sky: “Not on my watch, do you hear me, Goddamn it? Not again! Nobody else! Not on my watch!”

As if I’d thrown a challenge into my opponent’s teeth, half the colors of the rainbow bled down from above, butterflies by their thousands coming to feed off the sheer raw anger I flung out. I felt safe in drawing them to me: as long as Mark slept I thought they couldn’t escape the confines of his garden, which left the link to Morrison untouchable. That I wasn’t sure how I could escape was a matter to be dealt with later.

Rust under paint. In a way, that’s what this thing was, rust encroaching on the metal beneath a vehicle’s painted surface. It could be sanded out, replacement sheets soldered in and polished up, and with a professional job, the car’d be good as new. Mark’s soul needed replenishing and some TLC, but first the damage had to be excised.

I met the onslaught of butterflies with a belt sander. There was something particularly awful about that image if I let myself think about it too hard. Working with the idea of damaged paint was easier, since it didn’t involve delicate beautiful bugs being turned into so much ichor and smeared all over the place. Those that had already landed on my skin dissolved into fine mist, like paint drifting in the air, and I tried not to breathe too deeply at first.

Then I thought better the connection be in me than in Mark, and inhaled sharply, sparks of an otherworldly power crashing into me. Every breath I took replenished me enough to keep pouring power out, and the dark swarm of hungry butterflies kept coming to it, rather literally like moth to flame. The more I took in, the more distinctly I felt recognition, as if I was allowing whatever had ridden Mark to see me, and it knew me for the world-ending herald it had seen within Coyote. A certain delight began to feed through the loop as it drew closer, and I had the unfortunate feeling that my clever plan to rescue Mark from the clutches of sleep might not have been so clever after all. If it got inside me, I might go to sleep, too, and then we were all screwed.

I would just have to hold my ground and drag it out into the real world somehow. It had so much strength, so much weight to it, that I thought I might be able to. I’d brought an immortal child across worlds once, and a demon after that. There was no reason I couldn’t pull it off a third time.

Except those other two had been willing to go, and I wasn’t sure this thing was. I pushed the thought aside with an audible sniff, as if contempt for the details would make them go away.

By that time my whole body was buzzing from running a belt sander over my own skin. My own power was its usual burnished silver-blue, now gleaming over the rainbows of magic I’d obliterated with my psychic belt sander. The colors gleamed as if in defiance or mockery of the prophecy that had gotten me here, and the endless attack of fluttering creatures began to slow. I felt full up of power, like butterfly wings might lift me up from within and carry me away.

Beyond me, the pinprick holes that damaged Mark’s garden were healing, green returning to grayed-out leaves, blue fading back into a pale sky. With the butterflies focused on me, he had a chance. That was all I asked for. Triumphant, I turned my focus back on myself, looking for a way to seal the multi-winged dark power inside me long enough to wake up again.

Barbara, wreathed in red and yellow and violet flame, stepped into the garden of Mark’s soul just as I was about to sever the link, and pulled all the magic I’d stolen from my adversary to herself.