C.E. Murphy - Coyote Dreams

The herd of them—I was touched at how many people were sitting vigil at my bedside—left me outside Mark’s room. I went in barefoot and cold to find him alone with the sounds of a hospital room. I wondered what had happened to Barb, if she’d suffered the same unexpected coma Mark had. I didn’t think so. I wondered if there was a way for me to find her. The same cool certainty that said she hadn’t collapsed in a coma told me I wouldn’t be able to find her, either. It wouldn’t stop me from looking, but my gut wasn’t on my conscience’s side this time.

The glimmerings of Sight that were with me when I woke deepened as I sat down at Mark’s side. His aura no longer shone with half a spectrum’s colors, but lay quiet against his skin, the rusty brown I’d seen before. I had a pretty good idea already of what had happened, but I put my fingers on his shoulder and slipped out of my body to do a diagnostic. It was only later I realized how easy it was to do that, even without the drum bringing me under.

Mark’s soul lay unguarded, a desert oasis full of blooming cactus and clear sun-warmed water. But no wind blew, the water lay still and lifeless in its pools, and the sun’s warmth faded a little even as I stood there. All around me, the blooms seemed in stasis, not yet dying, but no more living than a shadow. I’d cut off too much, when I’d pulled Begochidi’s power from the gentler side of his human host. The bond Mark held on his own soul was fragile now, barely there.

My vehicle metaphors came back to me with a sense of the ridiculous. The easiest way to fix a lot of problems was with duct tape. I just needed to bind his soul and his body together again, wrapping them tight with tape until they grew strong together again.

The power that flowed through me was far less half-assed than tape would’ve been, though. It had permanence and strength, sticky silver glue binding life to body. I had no sense of how much time it took, but when the ghost of a breeze whispered over me, I knew I’d succeeded. With a small sad smile, I left Mark’s desert garden and stepped into another one, a place between souls in the astral realm. It only took a moment to settle down into a coyote-sized hollow in the rocks, though I fit into it no better than I had before. “Coyote?” The word was hardly a whisper, and the second one even fainter: “Cyrano?” I said nothing else, only sat beneath the violent blue sky and stretched my senses, pouring myself out in hopes of a response.

In time, the wind turned acid with sand, heat intensifying by degrees until the sky was white with it, and the horizons bled with rising, burning waves. The sun settled closer to me, hard and merciless, and I felt the stones I lay curled into shift around me. Rock became sand, gritty and white as salt, baking under the light. I knew without looking up that what I leaned on now was a single bleached tree in the midst of desert, as lonely a thing as ever I’d known. Breath ached in my chest, air so hot it felt too thin to keep life in my body. When tears swam in my eyes against the heat, I opened my mouth and said, very softly into the weight of sun, “I honor you, Trickster. You may as well show yourself. I know you’re here.”

Then he was sitting before me, Big Coyote with his coat made of copper and gold threads, so sharp and vivid I expected to cut myself when I leaned forward to wrap my arms around his bony shoulders. I buried my face in metalcolored wire fur, and poured a lifetime’s worth of thanks and sorrows and fears into Big Coyote’s heart. I scraped up all the love I knew how to and offered that up, starting with my own mother’s hard choice to send me away and my unconscious echo of that decision fifteen years later. I added in everything I’d learned from Gary, and the admission about Morrison I still didn’t like to put into words, and Billy and Melinda and their kids and the mistakes I’d made and every scrap of life my memory and my soul could find to share. I was trembling and light-headed under the relentless sun, still searching for essence to give away, when Big Coyote pulled away very gently and licked tears from my face.

Surprised, I laughed and put my hand out. He licked that, too, solemnly, then stood, his tail wagging slowly at first, then considerably faster. I smiled and tried to pet him one more time, but he turned away with unexpected speed and smacked me in the face with his whipping tail before bounding away into the desert.

The sting was still with me as my eyes popped open and I looked down at Mark Bragg, who gave me a tired, uncertain smile in return. “Do I know you?”

“No,” I whispered after a few long seconds. “Not really. You’ve been sick for a while, but you’re going to be okay now.” The door opened behind me as I spoke. I looked over my shoulder to see Brad Holliday, who was about the last person I expected. I got up, very aware I was wearing a hospital gown beneath my robe. I desperately wanted to ask what he was doing there, but helping out seemed like the obvious answer, so I refrained and said something else obvious instead: “He’s awake, Doctor.”

“I see that,” Holliday said shortly. I cast a rueful smile at the floor and edged toward the door as he came in. He gave Mark a perfunctory look and me a harder one. “Did you do this?”

I slowed and glanced back at him. “Does it matter?”

I saw him struggling with the question, wanting the answer to be yes and not sure it was. After a few seconds he went around the end of Mark’s bed, introducing himself and clearly dismissing me. It was as good a start—or finish—as any, and I let myself out as quietly as possible.

Laurie Corvallis, who was as much the last person I expected as Brad Holliday, was sitting on my hospital bed when I padded back into the room. “I missed something,” she said.

I hung there in the doorway wondering if I could stage a retreat through the whole hospital wearing only a robe. Probably not. “Missed something?”

“You promised me the big break on the sleeping sickness story. Yet here we are, the last sleeper awake again and I’ve got no terrorists, I’ve got no spooky disease, Project Rainbow is buried and I’ve got nothing. What’d I miss, Walker?” The officer part had been dropped. Apparently I’d slid a few points in her estimation.

I opened my mouth to give her the flippant, if honest, answer, and stopped again. I’d written off my knowledge of things as being magic a couple of times already. Corvallis didn’t strike me as the true believer type, but I didn’t like to point her along those lines any more than I already had. So I said, “I’m sorry. It didn’t work out the way I thought it would,” which was true enough. “At least I got you off my back for a couple days.”

To my surprise, that got a smile from her. Pointed, faint, but a smile. “It won’t work again. I smell smoke, Walker.”

“There’s no fire, Ms. Corvallis. I’m sorry.” I came all the way into the room—it was mine, after all—and looked around for my clothes. Corvallis watched me a good long minute or two, until I thought I might end up doing a strip tease for her, then got off the bed and walked out. I’d gotten myself dressed and down to the front desk to check myself out when Gary reappeared from somewhere.

“Had ta drive your pal Bruce home,” he announced. “Guess their Eagle’s actin’ up again.”

I laughed. “I’ll fix it. Elise is making me tamales anyway. What happened to Billy and Mel?”

“They headed out, too. Mel says she’s makin’ dinner for everybody tonight and you’re comin’ over. And Rob says—”

“Robert. He doesn’t like nicknames.”

“Robert,” Gary said with the patience of an old man humoring a young one, which was to say, no patience at all, “says you looked better when you woke up. Not so patchy, he said. He said you’d know what that meant.”