C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

“I know. Dreams are his domain, Gary. If I don’t meet him on his own ground I’m not going to be able to fight him at all. Barb keeps running away from me.” That made me laugh, huff of sound. “At least that’s something.”

Gary took another breath in protest, then exhaled and slumped his broad shoulders. “You sure,” he said again, but it wasn’t a question this time. “Arright. Lissen to me, Jo. You stay right there.” He got up from the couch and went into my bedroom while I wondered where exactly he thought I would go. I didn’t think dreamland was a place to be entered physically.

He came out of my bedroom with a sword. “Under the bed’s a lousy place to keep a sword, Jo.”

I blinked, getting up to meet him. “It’s a perfectly good place to keep a sword. It’s not like I use it a lot.” He offered to me, so I took it, surprised as always at its heft. The weight hadn’t meant anything to me when I’d first seen it in Cernunnos’s hand, silver metal gleaming beneath prosaic fluorescent lights, but it’d meant a lot later on when the damned thing got shoved through my lung. I’d struck back with iron-based steel, and Cernunnos had fled without his silver blade. It was only considerably after the fact that I brought it to a dealer to have it appraised and found out it really was silver. In retrospect, it made sense, as the Celtic god couldn’t touch anything made of iron.

The dealer had almost literally drooled over the blade. Its swept-silver handle protected the hand easily, the rapier blade impossibly sharp, holding its edge flawlessly despite the metal it was forged of. And that was something else: the forging was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Almost as if it had been cast, like a sculpture. He’d offered me such a ridiculous sum of money for it I hadn’t believed him, and I’d gone home to read up on the Internet about Celtic magic and silver. I’d learned about somebody named Nuada, whose hand, lost in battle, was re-made in silver by a god. I’d tapped a finger on the blade cautiously and wondered.

A week later the dealer called me up and offered twice what he’d offered in the first place. He was still calling occasionally. There had to be a price I couldn’t resist, but so far keeping Cernunnos’s sword beneath my bed was more appealing than cold hard cash. Of course, if the car insurance company didn’t pay up soon, I might start reconsidering my stance.”

“So you don’t go in unarmed,” Gary said to me as I took the sword. My eyebrows rose and I glanced up at him, half smiling, not sure how seriously to take him. He wasn’t smiling at all, eyes serious beneath untamed eyebrows. The lines in his face were deeper, as if the weight of the moment made him seem closer to his seventy-three years. My smile fell away and I just watched him, rapier balanced across my palms as I waited for whatever he had in mind next.

He didn’t disappoint. He pulled a copper cuff bracelet, one that usually sat on my dresser next to the drum, from his pocket. It’d been tarnished and green until recently, when I’d had cause to buy metal cleaner and scrub a silver necklace clean of my own blood. I’d done the bracelet then, too, tracing my fingertip over etched knotwork that might have been Celtic around its borders, and the cut away shapes of Cherokee spirit animals between the borders.

“Gary.” My voice came out small and tight as he turned the bracelet sideways and slid it over my wrist.

“’S from your dad, right?”

I nodded, unable to trust words, and he tapped the metal against my skin. It was already warm from the minute in his pocket. “Left wrist,” he said. “Protects your heart.”

My heart tightened as he spoke, throat closing even more. “Gary,” I said again, scratchy whisper, as if it would stop him, but he wasn’t done. He dipped into his pocket again and came out with what I knew he would, a silver choker necklace I hadn’t worn in months. Hollow tubes of metal rattled gently against its chain, the curved stretches broken apart by triskelions, the Celtic three-way knot that represented the Holy Trinity in modern days, and a much older trio of goddesses from a time before Christianity. The center pendant hung from the chain itself, just far enough to rest in the hollow of my throat: a Celtic cross, a circle quartered by two bars. My mother had given me the necklace as she lay dying, the only thing she’d ever given me besides life. Gary fastened the necklace around my throat with unbelievable delicacy, his big old hands far more certain than mine ever were when I put on jewelry. Something happened as the clasp shut, a soft sparkle of warmth that danced over my skin as powerfully as Gary’s words did.

“To guard your soul,” he said. My heart contracted again, tears blurring my vision, though I managed a painful little smile as I looked down at the sword and the bracelet. The necklace made an uncomfortable pressure against my throat, something I’d never given myself time to get used to. Then I looked up again, smile shaky.

“What about you?” I was trying to tease him, but emotion rode me far too hard. I felt girded for battle, as if I’d been entrusted with a kingdom’s honor and my loved ones had helped me don my armor. “Don’t I get anything from you? Mother’s got my soul covered and Dad’s got my heart, but without you, jeez, Gary, I wouldn’t be here at all. You took the damned sword out of me when I was dying so I could heal myself. And all I get is a lousy little ritual?” I was afraid to blink, for fear tears that burned my eyes would scald my cheeks. My smile was so tremulous I thought it might shake those tears loose, anyway.

A complex expression darkened Gary’s eyes, more facets of sentiment there than I could easily recognize. Pride and love and laughter, mixed up with wry chagrin and just a touch of smugness, and other things that flickered so quickly I couldn’t read them. He slid a hand into his other front pocket and came out with a small, nondescript black velvet box, the kind that makes a girl’s heart slam into her throat when a man pulls it out. My heart did exactly that, cutting off my breath, and I blinked despite all my efforts not to, sending tears rushing down my cheeks. Gary chuckled, barely a sound, and opened the box toward me.

A heart-shaped purple medal, bordered in gold, lay below its ribbon against smooth black velvet, the metal bright by comparison. He only gave me an instant to see what it was before he took it from its case more brusquely than he’d done with the jewelry, and with gruff quick movements pinned it to my shirt. “Never meant that much to me,” he muttered. “Just a way of sayin’ I made it back when a lot of other good fellas didn’t. But since I did, maybe it’ll shield you, too, sweetheart.”

A chime rang out as he dropped his hands, the medal fastened safely to my shirt. I didn’t think he could hear it, but it sounded sweet and loud in my ears, pure tone like silver bells. I felt a click behind my breastbone, profound latching that welded those four items together within me. They whispered recognition to one another: rapier for the hand, to wield in battle. Copper for the wrist, to shield the heart. Silver for the throat, to shield the soul. Bronze for the breast, to shield the body . Four cardinal points burning a bright circle in my mind, heat flaring through each of the items Gary had bestowed on me. With that flare came the Sight, showing me how they shone with purpose and power. When I lifted my eyes to Gary, he blazed with the same resolve, in that moment an icon of all the best things that drove humanity onward.

“My girl,” he added, but less roughly, because I’d dropped the rapier and stepped forward into his arms to let tears run freely down my cheeks. He bowed his head over mine, hand in my hair, and murmured nonsense at me while I held on to him with everything I had. When I finally snuffled and edged back a little, he gave me a soft smile that had nothing to do with the wolfish, toothy grin he liked to disconcert people with, and everything to do with family bonds that couldn’t be broken. “Normally a man don’t like to make a pretty girl cry, but I think maybe this time it means an old dog did somethin’ right.”