C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

Okay, ordered. No wonder I didn’t date much. I had the social skills of a laboratory gorilla.

My next stop was the Ravenna area east of the university. Scraping up my nerve to get out of the car at the ranch-style house I pulled up at was harder than I wanted to admit to. Giving Morrison a topaz talisman face-to-face would’ve been easier than knocking on the door. The house emanated sorrow, old grief mixed with fresh. It didn’t take any particular skill to pick that up. I’d been there barely ten days earlier for the gathering after a funeral.

The young man who opened the door had lost weight since I’d seen him last, his sandy hair grown a little too long and flopping into his eyes. He wasn’t surprised to see me, but he wasn’t happy, either. He leaned heavily on the doorknob, making it clear he was a barrier between me and entering the house. “Joanne.”

“Garth.” I offered a little smile, then pulled my lower lip into my mouth. “How’re you doing?”

His gaze skittered away from me, the shoulder his weight wasn’t on twitching upward in a shrug that was supposed to be dismissive. “Okay. Dunno if Dad said thanks for coming to the funeral, so…” Another twitched shrug. “Thanks.”

“He did.” My voice was hardly a whisper, the smile I tried for weak and unhappy. “It was the least I could do.”

Garth’s gaze flickered back to me, and I saw him swallow the words: yeah. It was . His brother had died because of mistakes I’d made, and I deserved the rejoinder. That he didn’t make it was a lot more than I’d earned. “So what do you want?”

“I don’t know if you’re still part of the coven,” I began. Garth cut me off with a slice of his hand and a harsh sound.

“Yeah, you know, what with everything that went down, between Colin and Faye, the coven kind of decided to take a step back. I’m out of it. That kind of shit doesn’t do anybody any good.” Bile filled his words, the bitterness of a true believer who’d seen his god’s feet of clay. While I would have shared his sentiment not very long ago, it left me with a hollow feeling where I was accustomed to my power being settled.

“I’m sorry to hear that.” My throat had gone all scratchy and my eyes stung with disappointment that struck me as inexplicable, even if it wasn’t really. “You had some real power. Look, I just came by to offer you this.” I took one of the topaz stones from my pocket and held it out. “It’s kind of a good-luck charm. I thought maybe…”

“No. Thanks.” The second word was perfunctory, thrust at me like a weapon. “I don’t want anything else to do with magic or spells or any of that crap.” Garth moved out of the door as he spoke, retreating and rejecting. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

I let the topaz fall from my fingers into the lawn as I walked away, a host of regrets at my back.

Returning home felt anti-climactic. Garth’d rejected me, I hadn’t found Morrison and I still didn’t have any actual answers. I climbed the stairs slowly—for once it might’ve been faster to take the building’s ancient elevator—and bumbled the key into my door’s lock. Turning the knob proved it’d been open and that I’d just locked it, which didn’t strike me as too unusual. I’d been known to forget to lock the door before. But when I reopened it and entered my living room, I found Gary snoozing on my couch. He had his hands folded over his belly and his ankles crossed on the arm, so his knees were locked. My own knees ached in sympathy, but my mouth said, “I know I didn’t give you a key, Gary!”

He cracked one gray eye open. “That ain’t stopped me yet, darlin’. Welcome home.”

“I thought you had to work. Are the kids okay?”

“I thought you had to,” Gary said in a perfectly reasonable rejoinder, kicking his feet off the couch arm. “Called Keith and told him I wasn’t comin’ in today after all. Kids are fine. What’ve I missed? Start with passin’ out.” He sat up and clapped his hands together, making an unexpectedly loud pop.

I dropped into the other end of the couch and pulled my knees up until I could put my chin on them. “Did I tell you I fell asleep on the concrete outside yesterday?”

“Jo,” Gary said in astonishment. I couldn’t tell if there was reprimand in it, too, and had to look up to find Gary’s bushy eyebrows drawn in concern. “What’s goin’ on, doll?”

My hands fluttered, making a useless circle in front of my shins, which were in the way of my stomach. “I don’t know, Gary.” I recounted the larger part of the past twenty-four hours as best I could, a feeling of unease settling inside me. It was centered in that coil of power I carried, the same pressure that’d driven me to find a woman I’d seen from an airplane seven months earlier. I took a breath, trying to dispel it, then moved my legs to press my hands against my stomach. It wasn’t as bad as it’d been then, but that didn’t surprise me. I’d had a whole lifetime of unused magic to tune into then, and now I was at least sort of used to it. “I’d think it was this sleeping sickness, except—”

“’Cept you woke up,” Gary said. “You been dreamin’?”

“About all kinds of things.” I didn’t want to go into dreams of marrying Mark Bragg while Morrison looked on. “Yesterday it was about a coyote. Not a real one. Like a—I guess I dreamed about a spirit quest. But it wasn’t mine. I mean, it wasn’t the one I did with…Judy.” I said the name slowly, a prickle of shame stinging my cheeks. “It was like a real one,” I added more quietly. “Like the one I did for you.”

“Makes sense, don’t it? You got Coyote as your spirit guide. Mebbe he’s just tryin’ to show you the way.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t—have you eaten?” I wasn’t trying to change the subject, though Gary gave me another bushy-eyebrowed look. “All I’ve eaten was cereal this morning. I’m starving.”

“Got any Pop-Tarts?” He followed me into the kitchen and snitched one of the doughnuts he’d brought by the previous morning. “I could use a snack,” he allowed. “Ate lunch before I came over. Now, finish what you were sayin’, Jo.”

I sat down at the table with a glass of water and watched Gary putter around the kitchen while he ate his doughnut. “My Coyote, Little Coyote, doesn’t look like the spirit coyote I saw or like your tortoise or any of the other animals who came when I asked for help for you. They were all luminescent and drawn out of fine lines, like they didn’t exactly have bodies to them. Like constellations. Little Coyote’s solid. I’ve never seen him get all starry like that. So he’s not the same.”

“How ’bout Big Coyote?” One of the things I loved about Gary was that he went along with my terrible naming scheme. Even so, referencing Big Coyote made me shiver and take my hands away from the glass of cold water.

“Big Coyote was like the thunderbird, Gary. Solid ’s too weak a word for him.” The scent of burned sand filled my nostrils, memory so vivid I felt a wash of heat come over me like it was renewing my tan. “Big Coyote and the thunderbird and the serpent, for that matter, are all solid like the earth is solid or like space is empty. You couldn’t move him even if you had the lever and a place to stand, unless he wanted you to. Little Coyote’s just not like that. And the spirits aren’t, either.”

“You’re startin’ to sound pretty sure of yourself, lady.”

“I know,” I muttered at my water glass. “I just wish I knew if I was right.”

“Arright.” Gary came to lean on the table, making knuckles against its hard surface without appearing to suffer any discomfort. “So you’re dreamin’ about spirits quests like one you’ve never done, is that it?”