“I take it you’re okay, then.”
Phoebe wrapped her fingers around mine in a strong grip and I hauled her to her feet. “No, I’m not okay.” Her voice squeaked as high as her giggle had. “We just found a dead girl in the showers and I think my butt’s going to be bruised for a month.” She giggled again, then set her mouth and pressed her eyes shut, inhaling deeply through her nostrils. “I’m okay,” she said after several seconds. I nodded.
“I’ll call the cops. You get dressed.”
“Okay.” She gave me a pathetically grateful look that I didn’t like from my fencing instructor, and left me alone with the dead girl. I stole a glance at her over my shoulder, feeling power flutter behind my breastbone, urging me to use it.
I could think of one good reason to disregard it. Well, one reason. Good was debatable, especially since even in my own head I heard it as a whine: but I don’t want to be a shaman!
Except, possibly, when it meant I could save little girls from heatstroke. I sighed and went back to the dead woman, kneeling in the cooling water. The bottom edge of my towel drooped into it, sucking up as much as it could, and I debated running to put some clothes on before doing anything else. Only then I’d be soaking up water with my uniform, which, unlike a towel, wasn’t designed for it. It wasn’t like the police would arrive in the thirty seconds I intended to be out.
“Arright,” I muttered. “One healthy little girl for one esoteric death investigation. I guess that’s fair.” Five more minutes before calling the cops wasn’t going to make a difference to the body. “I’m here,” I said out loud, “if you want to talk.”
There was a place between life and death that spirits could linger in, a place that, with all due apology to Mr. King, I’d started calling the Dead Zone. If I could catch this young woman’s spirit there, I might just be able to learn something useful, like how she’d ended up filling a drain at the University of Washington’s gym locker rooms.
Reaching that world was easier with a drum, but somewhere in the shower room a shower leaked, a steady drip-drop of water hitting water. It was a pattern, and that was good enough. I closed my eyes. The sound amplified, deliberate poiks bouncing off the bones behind my ears. I lost count of the drops, and rose out of my body.
I slid through the ceiling, skimming through pipes and wires and insulation that felt laced with asbestos. The sky above the university was so bright it made my eyes ache, and for a few seconds I turned my attention away from the journey for the sake of the view.
The world glittered. White and blue lights zoomed along in tangled blurs, each of them a point of life. Trees glowed in the full bloom of summer and I could see the thin silver rivers of sap running through them to put out leaves that glimmered with hope and brightness. Concrete and asphalt lay like heavy thick blots of paint smeared over the brilliance, but at midmorning, with people out and doing things, those smears of paint had endless sparks of life along them, defying what seemed, at this level, to be a deliberate attempt to wipe out the natural order of the world.
Don’t get me wrong. Not only do I like my indoor plumbing and my Mustang that runs roughshod over those dark blots of freeway, but I also think that a dam built by man is just as natural as a dam built by a beaver. We’re a part of this world, and there’s nothing unnatural about how we choose to modify it. If it weren’t in our nature, we wouldn’t be doing it.
Still, looking down from the astral plane, the way we lay out streets and modify the world to suit ourselves looks pretty awkward compared to the blur of life all around it. Humans like right angles and straight lines. There weren’t many of those outside of man-made objects.
But even overlooking humanity’s additions to the lay of the land, there was something subtly wrong with the patterns of light and life. I’d noticed it months earlier—the last time I’d gone tripping into the astral plane—and it seemed worse now. There was a sick hue to the neon brilliance, like the heat had drawn color out, mixed it with a little death, and injected it back into the world without much regard to where it’d come from. It made my nerves jangle, discomfort pulling at the hairs on my arms until I felt like a porcupine, hunched up and defensive.
The longer I hung there, studying the world through second sight, the worse the colors got. Impatient scarlet bled into the silver lines of life, black tar gooing the edges of what had been pure and blue once upon a time. I had no sense of where the source of the problem was. It felt like it was all around me, and the more I concentrated on it the harder it got to breathe. I finally jerked in a deep breath, clearing a cough from my lungs, and shook off the need to figure out what was wrong. I suspected it had more to do with procrastination than anything else. I’d been warned more than once that my own perceptions could get me in trouble, in the astral plane.
It wasn’t that I was scared. Just wary. Apprehensive. Cautious. Uneasy. And that exhausted my mental thesaurus, which meant I had to stop farting around and go do what I meant to do.
Coyote had told me that traveling in the astral plane wasn’t a matter of distance, but a matter of will. It seemed like distance to me, always different, always changing. Seattle receded below me, darkening and broadening until the Pacific seaboard seemed to be just one burnt-out city, the sparks of life that colored it faded and scattered with distance. Skyscrapers that seemed to defy physics with their height leaped up around me and crumbled again, and the stars were closer.
A tunnel, blocked off by a wall of stone, appeared to my left, and I felt him waiting there. Him, it—whatever. Something was there, and it tugged at me. It laughed every time I forged past it, and every time I did I felt one more spiderweb-thin line binding me to it. The first time I traveled the astral plane I almost went to him, compelled by curiosity and a sense of malicious rightness. The second time, the stone wall was in place, my dead mother’s way of protecting me from whatever lay down that tunnel. This time I knew he was there, and it was easier to ignore him.
Someday I’m not going to be able to.
The tunnel whipped away into a wash of light, the sky bleeding gold and green around me. New skyscrapers blossomed into tall trees, filled with the light of life, but here that light was orange and red, not the blues and white I was used to. I grinned wildly and lifted my hands, encouraging the speed that the world swum around me with.
Under the gold sky, palaces built like where the Taj Mahal’s wealthy older sister grew up. A tiger paced by, sabre-toothed and feral, watching me like I might be a tasty snack. A man’s laughter broke over me, and the world spun into midnight, the sky rich and blue and star-studded. I relaxed, letting myself enjoy the changing vistas, and in the instant I did, the shifting worlds slammed to a stop.
A red man stood in front of me. Genuinely red: the color of bricks, or dark smoked salmon. His eyes were golden and his mouth was angry. “Haven’t you learned anything?”
I gaped at him, breathless. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re making enough noise to wake the dead.”
“That was kind of the idea.”
“Siobhán Walkin—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“Don’t,” I repeated, “call me that. Not here.”
I’d become uncomfortably protective of that name: Siobhán Walkingstick. It was my birth name, the one I’d been saddled with by parents whose cultures clashed just long enough to produce me. My American father’d taken one look at Siobhán and Anglicized it to Joanne. Until I was in my twenties, no one had called me Siobhán except once, in a dream.
The last name, Walkingstick, I’d abandoned on my own when I went to college. I’d wanted to leave my Cherokee heritage behind, defining myself by my own rules. I was Joanne Walker. Siobhán Walkingstick was someone who barely existed.
But whether I liked it or not, that name belonged to the