CHAPTER 31

I gasped, wrenching my eyes open, and to my surprise they did open, leaving me awake and breathless and still sitting on Mark’s chest. His nose was no longer mashed in, and Barbara was nowhere to be seen. I got up, the change in pressure reminding me I’d just been hit on the head, and dialed 911 on my way out the door. An ambulance would have to pick up my snoozing paramour. I had to find Barb.

Which would be a lot easier if she would stop running away from me. I gave the emergency services people the address Mark was staying at and climbed into Petite, gnawing on my cell phone. Not that I could blame her for running away: except for the pruning shears thing, I was pretty much on top of things physically. She wasn’t exactly the sort of person who could beat the tar out of me. Keeping the fight from me was the smartest thing she could do.

I straightened up so fast I hit my head on Petite’s roof and said, “Shit!” both because it hurt and because wisdom had fallen down on me like a load of bricks. I pulled out of the parking lot and dialed Gary, telling myself I was grounded from driving for another week.

He wasn’t home. At least, he wasn’t at my home. I whacked the phone against the steering wheel a few times, like it was its fault, and tried calling him at his house. No answer there, either. He’d said he’d be there.

I whispered, “Shit,” one more time, this time with worry. The topaz should be protecting him. He couldn’t have gone to sleep. Then again, I didn’t think Mark would’ve been a potential victim, either, so what the hell did I know?

There were absolutely no cops on the roads. I hoped it was just because I was getting lucky this morning, not because the wave of sleeping sickness had gone beyond the North Precinct and was starting to overtake Seattle. Given the general lack of vehicles at seven in the morning on a Thursday, though, I thought I was probably pipe dreaming. I got home and pounded up the stairs, afraid of what I’d see.

What I saw was an empty apartment with a box of two-day-old doughnuts on the kitchen table. I said something unladylike and ate the last two doughnuts, too hungry to care if they were stale. I couldn’t remember if I’d had lunch the day before. Or breakfast. I knew I hadn’t had dinner. The second half of the last doughnut stuffed in my cheek, I called Gary’s house again, still getting no answer. He didn’t have voice mail or an answering machine, on the logic that if it was important, they’d call back. He was right, but that didn’t do me any good when I wanted to rant worriedly at him.

Which was probably exactly how he’d felt when I’d run off last night and hadn’t called until this morning. Properly chastised, I went and sat at my computer, desperate for a little research on butterflies and nightmares.

Half a minute later I was scrubbing my eyeballs with my fingertips after clicking through to a pair of DVDs that came up with those words in the title. Never once in my life did I suspect butterfly nightmares might be just the ticket for determining just how much of a prude I really was. I tried a second search, using the ill-advised combination of “butterfly dream,” and really should have expected the innumerable Chuang Tsu hits. At least they weren’t brain-scrubbing. It took another couple minutes to find anything something useful.

Butterflies, it turned out, were across-the-board erotic little things. Mythologically and legendarily, they were associated with all sorts of sexiness. Mark and Barb fit that bill very nicely. Of course, butterflies were also associated with insanity, which didn’t make me particularly happy, as well as rebirth and, in fact, sleep. None of it, though, suggested that butterfly demons flapped around the psychic ether putting people to sleep and draining their life forces. I sucked on my teeth and tried another search, adding in the end of the world and some of the elements of my visiondreams. My hands grew cold as I began to get hits.

By the time my door banged open half an hour later, I had an unfortunately clear idea of what I was facing. Gary came in red-faced and huffing, and looked startled to see me there. I got up and went to hug him hard, not caring where he’d gone as long as he’d come back safely. He grunted with surprise and returned the hug. “You okay, doll?”

“I’ve been better.” I spoke into his shoulder, muffled. “I was worried when you didn’t answer the phone. You’re okay?”

“’Course I am. What’s wrong, Jo?”

I breathed a little laugh and held on tighter. “I think I really blew it this time, Gary. I woke up a god.”

Gary extracted himself from my hug and leaned back, looking at me. “You’ve gone up against gods before.”

“Yeah. Except the last one just wanted free of his constraints.” I managed a smile and stepped away. “This one thinks I heralded the end of the world, and he doesn’t like it. Is that interesting enough for you?”

To my never-ending surprise, Gary cracked a grin. “Just about. What are you, crazy, lady?”

“You tell me. I mean, you’ve got to admit, as the pinnacle of half a year’s screwups, bringing the world to an end is hard to beat. I start with the Wild Hunt, I move on to unleashing earthquakes and demons on suburban Seattle, and I wrap it up with signaling a god that it’s time to end the world. I think I’ve got the escalation about right.”

“Yeah,” Gary said, “but what’re you gonna do for an encore?”

Laughter caught me out. “I hope to God,” and for a moment there I wasn’t sure if I should be pluralizing that, or if I had a specific deity in mind, “that when we get through this I’ll have laid all the ashes of my spectacular opening act to rest, and that anything else I get to deal with isn’t quite as cosmic in nature.”

A thread of cold warning slithered down my spine, bringing with it a vivid image: a cave in the lit-up astral realm, a place of real beauty and unending life. That cave was blocked off, its depths cut away from me by my mother’s will, but beyond it lay something that thought of me as a tasty morsel. It knew I was out here, and every time I tripped through that part of the Other worlds, it taunted and teased me. I’d resisted it once, and been forbidden that path by Sheila MacNamarra’s power, but moonlit blue darkness waited for me. I didn’t think it would prove to be a puff of dust to be blown away, not when it was so well buried, so deep in the astral planes.

As if thinking of it—him; I had a sense of maleness about the thing, and if I was right in my summation of connections, the banshee I defeated had called it Master—as if thinking of him brought me to his attention, a soft wave of rich, malign amusement danced over my skin, raising goose bumps. I shuddered off thoughts of that particular monster in the dark. I had others to deal with.

“The visions I’ve been having. The waking visions?” Gary nodded, reassuring me that I’d told him about them. I couldn’t keep my thoughts straight anymore. I was so tired I wanted to cry on general principles. “I thought I was supposed to be fighting those dreams. I mean, the world kept coming to an end. It flooded, it burned, it…kept ending. And there I was trying to fling everything I had against that, to stop the destruction of the world. And I couldn’t. They were Navajo history, Gary.” I looked at him in unhappy exhaustion. “I finally had enough pieces to do research.”

“So what’re we up against, Jo?” That was something else I loved about the old man. He meant it when he said we. Even if I was the world’s biggest screwup, Gary was on my side.

“A god,” I said again. “Begochidi. He led the Navajo from one world to the next. And now he’s come back to do it again. I think I just told him it was time. I think a bunch of physicists working on wormhole theory accidentally set him loose. Like I did with the Lower World demons. I think they made the walls of the worlds thin enough to pass through, and Begochidi was just waiting to step through.” I caught Gary’s expression and shook my head. “The point is he’s here now, to deal with the threat and lead his people to the next world. To deal with me.”