C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

Cooler air melted as easily as tissue paper under the encroaching heat of my search. The weight of my analogy rolled over the hills and hollows, exploring them until a thrill of recognition tingled through me. It was as if the stone where Coyote habitually lay tasted different, flavored with his tang and sarcasm and general irritating habit of never directly answering questions. I wondered suddenly if this rocky little oasis was his garden, but discarded the idea. It felt more like the place he entered this landscape from his garden, like mine was at the center of the crater.

I very much didn’t want to know why he got an oasis and I got the scarred remnants of disaster striking. Rather than pursue that thought, I did the mental equivalent of knock knock, I’m coming in , and poured myself into the spot that had felt most like Coyote.

To my complete surprise, there was no resistance. Coyote’d lectured me up and down and left and right about my shields, so I expected to smack into his and be soundly rebuffed. I’d certainly slammed into Billy’s hard enough to get a headache. But I slid through so easily that for a moment I thought I’d have screwed up and not gone where I’d wanted to at all. There was nothing of a garden around me, just amber-tinted blackness, and a sense of time draining away very slowly. I had no idea where I was, and was trying to cast an apology into the darkness and back away when Coyote walked out of the night.

He came in his brick-red man form, black hair loose and swinging to his hips. For all that I’d gone looking for him, finding him in the black simply astonished me, emotion rising up from within like its own kind of power. He put both hands on my face, thumbs against my cheekbones, looking down at me with such curious seriousness I thought he might kiss me. Spirit guides weren’t supposed to go around kissing girls, were they?

It didn’t matter, because he didn’t do it. Instead he put his forehead against mine, a light touch that carried a staggering order: get the hell out of here, Joanne .

It wasn’t rejection. It was desperation, a single panicked rally to try to keep me safe. I could feel Coyote’s exhaustion behind it, as if he’d been struggling with the darkness for days. I couldn’t tell if he’d been waiting for me, or if my arrival had forced him to split off from what he’d been doing so he could warn me.

Because he hadn’t abandoned me after I’d thrust him out of the Dead Zone when I faced the ancient serpent there. He hadn’t left me to struggle through the aftermath of my failures as a shaman alone. The knowledge washed into me with his touch, all the information he could share inside a moment. He hadn’t been punishing me, these last two weeks.

He’d been a captive. There was something out there, an amorphous being awakened by enormous fluxes in the astral realm. Awakened, to put none too fine a point on it, by my clumsy use of power. It had slept for eons and had been waking for months, and when flickering life in the astral plain sped by it, it reacted, even half asleep. It trapped that life like a tiger in a tar pit, pulling it down into silent stillness until it roused itself fully and could decide what to do with it. My attempt to save Coyote from the serpent had thrust him right into this thing’s arms, and now he slept in amber, neither dead nor alive.

Coyote gave me a push, the action gentle enough to go unnoticed by the thing that held him captive. I drifted out of the place that should have been the garden of his soul, and went bounced like a tumbleweed through the desert, all the way back to Melinda’s bedside.

I spent a little while longer hovering at Mel’s side, trying to get more sense of what was keeping her—and Billy, and Coyote—asleep. The only thing I came out pretty sure of was that whatever it was, it didn’t have any idea Mel had a baby along for the ride. The only energy drain I could find was Melinda’s, with no connection to her daughter. Moreover, there was a sense of sheer, raw power, a shield itself that protected the child’s presence from the dangers of the outside world. I didn’t think it was something she’d cooked up just for this occasion. I was willing to bet there were still remnants of that kind of shielding lingering around all of her children, Melinda’s love made manifest. That was great for the kids, but not useful in the larger sense. I was feeling like a big fat loser when Dr. Brad tapped on the door and let himself in.

“She’ll need to go to the hospital,” I said, hoping to head off any disgruntled lectures. “They won’t be able to do anything for her except keep her fluids up and stuff, but I guess she needs to be there for that. It seems stupid,” I added, mostly to Mel. “Hooking you up to an IV at the hospital will just cost more than hooking you up to one here would.”

“There are other reasons for Melinda to be hospitalized,” Brad said. I looked at the bump that was going to be the Hollidays’ fifth child, and nodded.

“Yeah. I guess so.” I could feel the baby’s energy if I wanted to, all bright and vital and rosy pink. She was busy, that little person, busy growing and being made and buzzing with enthusiasm for the whole process. In another few months she’d be making her mother’s life miserable with great wholloping kicks and punches as she turned somersaults in her confined growing space. My own stomach cramped with sympathy, and I rubbed it, wishing the flutter of power behind my breastbone would let me wipe stuff like that away. Apparently it considered them to be part of the hardships of living, because it showed no interest in responding. “I can stay with the kids if you want to take her over and get her admitted. I don’t work until eleven.”

A silence in which it became very clear Brad Holliday didn’t trust me with his nieces and nephews followed. I finally looked at him, trying to keep my expression neutral.

Apparently it didn’t work. His eyebrows drew down and his mouth tightened, which was enough to allow me an exasperated sigh. “Look, Brad. I’m Billy and Melinda’s friend. Their kids know me. I get you don’t like me, and I even get why. That’s fine. But do you really want to wake four little kids up and herd them while you’re trying to admit their second parent to the hospital? I’m here, and as far as I know, neither of them have any other family in the area. Who’re you gonna call?”

There was one brief moment of camaraderie where Brad and I both all but swallowed our tongues, struggling against the obvious response. Brad passed a hand over his eyes and muttered, “That question is ruined for all time,” under his breath, while I turned a nearly violent grin at my hands. Dr. Brad was human after all. “All right, fine,” he said more loudly and very decisively, as if doing so could wipe away the moment of sympathy. “I should be back well before eleven.”

“I think Robert’s old enough to watch the little ones for a while, if there’s a gap. I—crap.” I turned my wrist up, looking at the watch I’d finally gotten fixed. Now that it worked again, I kind of missed it telling me the time in Moscow. “I guess I’ll call Gary and get him to stop by my apartment for my stuff. That way I won’t have to leave until a quarter till or so.” I wouldn’t be more than a few minutes late, unless traffic on Aurora was critically bad. Morrison would probably want to bust my ass for it, but that was nothing unusual.

I got out of Brad’s way so he could bring Mel to the hospital, and stopped by Robert’s room to tell him, as I’d promised, what was going on. He looked worried and sleepy, but when I whispered, “Shh, go back to sleep, kiddo,” the coil of energy inside me sent a soothing warm splash of power over him that seemed to weight down his eyelids and help him fall asleep again. I actually thought that was kind of cool. It wasn’t anything big or dramatic, but it was the first time I could remember being actively pleased with the gift I’d been given. I’d been relieved in the past, and sometimes glad to have been of help, but this was a little warm bubble of genuine pleasure, and at something as simple as making sure a kid got some sleep. Maybe, just maybe, if I could learn enough to fix the crises that kept lurching into my life, it would all smooth out to little happy-making moments like this one.