C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

“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.

Except it didn’t. Morrison took a breath as if he were waking up, but it caught and held like the blankets were too heavy in the morning. Perplexity danced across his expression and I got the idea that Morrison never had mornings when the blankets weighed too much. “I can’t,” he said in some astonishment. “I never have trouble waking up.”

“You probably never sleep hard enough to,” I muttered. “Come on, Morrison. Wakey wakey.”

“I’m trying,” he said irritably. “I feel like something’s keeping my eyes closed.”

“Begochidi. Damnit!” The first word was under my breath, the second a shout at the skies. “He’s not yours, you redheaded bitch! You want a taste of something that’ll get you through the day, try me! ” Power flared with my outburst, silver burning away the black threads that tied me to the dreamworld. Heat sizzled with a nasty dark smell, and Morrison himself flinched. I couldn’t fight from here, inside his garden. It would destroy his mind or his soul or something equally important. I swore again, taking two long strides over to my boss. “This always works in fairy tales.”

I slid my fingers into Morrison’s hair and brought his mouth down to mine for a kiss.

It turned out an inch in shoe height wasn’t enough for either of us to have to give ground in order to share a kiss. It turned out all the times I’d thought he was close enough to kiss hadn’t been quite right, either. There was a hell of a difference between what I thought of as close enough to kiss and actually closing that last half inch or so. Frustration and anger and needing to get the job done and innumerable other emotions spilled away in the compass of Morrison’s arms, leaving me light-headed and warm and absurdly, blazingly happy. Silver-blue peaked and swooped all around me, a dance of joy that lit the insides of my eyelids.