“I’m sleeping,” Morrison said, as if he’d just caught up with that. I pressed my lips together and nodded. His eyebrows rose fractionally. “So what is this? A dream?”
“Are you in the habit of dreaming about me?” My mouth bypassed my brain once more. I considered giving myself an emergency tonguectomy. Morrison’s eyebrows went back down, eyes turning stormy blue, and he didn’t answer, which was probably all to the good. “You’re not dreaming.” I cast my gaze at his workboot-clad feet and muttered the words at them. “I had to shield you, and now the only way I can get you loose of the shield is to take the thing that’s keeping you asleep and hook it up to me instead of you. And I have to do that from inside. I’m sorry. I’ve been trying not to snoop.”
“Hook it up to you,” Morrison repeated. That was the part I hadn’t wanted him to catch. I twisted my lip in discomfort and nodded. He said, “Absolutely not.”
“Morrison—”
“Walker!” Ah. That was the boss I knew. “This isn’t a negotiation.”
“No, sir,” I said with a sigh, “it isn’t. If I don’t do this, when I go to fight this thing it’s going to follow this link right into you and suck you dry. I would rather die. But if you’d like to not be pigheaded about this, for once I don’t actually think I’m going to die, so it’d be nice to just get this done and then I’ll be out of your head. I promise.”
“Why me?” And there was another part I’d hoped he wouldn’t pick up on. “Why not Holliday?”
“Because Billy can shield himself, and he wasn’t the one dating half the monster.”
I saw all the obvious questions and all their answers dart through Morrison’s eyes. What he said, after a measured few seconds, was, “Who’s dating the other half?”
Laughter caught me off guard and I said, “God, I love—” before my tongue fell down my throat and tried to strangle me. I choked, coughed and wheezed “—the way your mind works. Sir,” as I wiped tears from my eyes. “I am. Of course I am. Because what fun would it be if I was just having a normal social life.”
“What was that at the restaurant, Walker?” That was as abrupt a transition as I tended to make. My hands went cold and I skittered a glance toward Morrison. The wind around us still blew wildly, and the light had grown gradually dimmer.
I closed my eyes against the first spatters of raindrops. “Does it really matter, sir?”
“It might,” he said in such a peculiar voice I opened my eyes again. But he’d let it go, or moved on, stepping away from me to look out over the evergreen valley. I half turned, watching him. Lightning split the sky in the distance, and moments later a puff of smoke rose up from the trees. “Barb woke up when you called,” he said eventually. “She said I should be flattered that my officers worried about me that much. She said—” and now he looked back at me, though I wished he wouldn’t “—she said she’d have thought you were jealous, if you weren’t dating her brother. I told her she was being ridiculous.”
My chin came up a little, like I’d taken a hit. That, then, was what I should have said when he’d accused me of the same thing. Pounding on Petite’s horn and confessing to the green-eyed monster hadn’t been the right move. As if that was a surprise. For some reason I said, “Why’d you tell her that?”
“Because it’s what anyone would expect me to say.”
We weren’t high enough in the mountains for the air to suddenly be so thin. I clenched my fists and tried to breathe, not knowing what to say, or how to say it. After a little while Morrison looked out at the valley again. The skies went darker, and rain began to come down harder. “The next thing I remember is this conversation.”
“You’re—” Damnit. I could feel it, a thread that didn’t lie flat in the weaving of his story. It’d bumped up and tangled when I’d found myself unable to speak. I curled my hands into fists and stared at the granite beneath my feet, frustration washing off me in waves. I felt them, and if I’d wanted to slide the second sight on, I had no doubt I’d see them, too, bright silver-blue splashes of power coming off me like a beacon in the dark. “What do I say, Morrison? How am I supposed to get out of this conversation alive? You’re my boss. What do you want me to tell you?”
“The truth,” Morrison said. “I wonder if you’ve got so much as a passing acquaintance with the truth, Siobhán.”
My heart twisted hard, drawing a rough small sound from my throat. My knees seemed to have stopped working, because I was abruptly on them, kneeling on hard rock and reaching for stone to grind my hands against. I still couldn’t breathe easily, or maybe it’d gotten worse. “Not fair, Morrison. Not fair at all.”
He looked down at me. “Isn’t it?”
I could feel more than the wondering, in the air of the wild valley. For a moment, as he asked that, something thin and hard pulled taut, a fishline that made a vulnerable space inside him. A space that the goddamned topaz was supposed to protect. Only he’d given it away, and I only saw one way to seal it up again.
“What kind of truth do you want?” I said, more to the view than to Morrison. “My name is Siobhán Grania MacNamarra Walkingstick. I—” I swallowed the next words, then clenched my stomach muscles, forcing myself to speak. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen—” I cast a quick look at my boss, almost an apology. “Out of stupidity, not violence.” That much, at least, I could give him, for the concern he’d shown more than once in the last couple of days. Every breath was an agonizing challenge to my too-tight throat.
“I had twins, a boy and a girl. Ayita, the girl, died right away. Aidan’s growing up somewhere in Cherokee County. I don’t date because I’m scared of repeating my mistakes.” New thunder rumbled, this time the sound of blood in my ears, and I raised my voice over it. “Which probably leads directly to—” I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t say falling for or loving, and I didn’t want to use a phrase as stupid as crushing on or its ilk. The weaker word I defaulted to was hard enough: “Caring. For someone totally unobtainable.” It took a long time to make myself clarify that further, to push the words out: “For you.”
“I’m dating Mark because he was the nearest cliff for me to jump off, after she turned up looking all cute and perky and…cute.” There was another cliff right in front of me that I could jump off. The idea held appeal. “It is ridiculous, and I’m sorry, and I’m also not particularly proud of my behavior. So if that’s enough truth, if it’d be all right, I’d like to just go get this monster off your back now so you can wake up and I can do my job.”
“I think you already have.” Morrison’s voice was light and hollow, unlike I’d ever heard it before. I looked up, then looked back toward the woods.
Black threads, flowing and alive with butterfly darkness, swam from me into the woods, and far beyond that. They danced beyond Morrison’s personal area and back into the battleground of dreams that I intended to fight in. I stared at the link without comprehension, unsure when I’d slipped myself between Morrison and Begochidi.
Oh, said the sarcastic voice, probably when you played ball and admitted, with your usual lack of grace, the truth. I didn’t know who was more surprised by my answers, Morrison or the sleeping god, but either way, I’d made somebody do a double take, and when the power reattached, it did so to the magical powerhouse instead of the police captain. I said, “Good,” in a harsh small voice, and flapped a hand at Morrison. “Go. Wake up. Get out of here, boss. You wake up and my dream of you will end and then I can go fight this thing.” There was no real reason it should work that way, except I wasn’t traversing the dreamworld as an ordinary sleeper. I could move in and out of my shamanic trances here, and generally when I wanted to wake up from one of those, I did. The rule should hold.