So I didn’t like having the two names rolled together in the best of circumstances, and I resented the shit out of having them flung around the astral plane as a form of reprimand by the very same brick-red spirit guide who’d insisted I develop the shields in the first place.
The spirit guide in question flared his nostrils, inclining his head slightly, and inside that motion, shifted. A loll-tongued, golden-eyed coyote sat in front of me, looking as disgruntled about the eyes as the man had.
“Dammit,” I said, “I hate when you do that.”
“This is not about what you hate,” the coyote said, in exactly the same tenor the man owned. His mouth didn’t move, and I was, as ever, uncertain if he was speaking out loud or in my mind. “You haven’t got the skill for this, Joanne.”
I wet my lips. “Looks to me like you’re wrong.”
“Do you really understand what you’re doing?” The coyote’s voice sharpened, making my chin lift and my shoulders go back defensively.
“I’m just trying to see if she can tell me anything about what happened, Coyote.”
“There are more mundane ways to find out. You are a policeman, are you not?”
“I’m a beat cop,” I said through my teeth. “Beat cops don’t get to investigate dead bodies in the women’s shower.”
Coyote cocked his head at me, a steady golden-eyed look that spoke volumes. Then, in case I’d missed the speaking of volumes, he said it out loud, too: “Then maybe you shouldn’t.”
Which comedian was it who said wisdom came from children, especially the mouth part of the face? I felt like he must have when he first thought it: like it would be nice to wrap duct tape around the talking part until nothing more could be said.
Coyote snapped his teeth at me, a coyote laugh. “Wouldn’t work anyway.”
“Oh, shut up.” Yet another incredibly annoying thing: he heard every thought I had, and I heard none of his. “This is supposed to be my dreamscape. Why can’t I hear your thoughts?”
He cocked his head the other way, wrinkles appearing in the brown-yellow fur of his forehead. “First,” he said, “it’s not your dreamscape. Haven’t you learned even that much? The astral plane is a lot bigger than just you or me.”
“I thought it was all basically the same,” I muttered. “How’m I supposed to know?”
“By studying,” Coyote suggested, voice dry with sarcasm. “Or is that asking too much?”
For one brief moment I wondered if it was possible that Coyote might also be my boss, Morrison.
“I’ll have to meet him someday,” Coyote said idly. I winced.
“Sure, he’ll like that a lot. Talking coyotes from the astral plane. That’ll go over well.” Morrison made Scully look like a paragon of belief. Once upon a time, our skepticism for the occult was the only thing we had in common. Then I’d done some unpleasantly weird things, like come back from the dead more or less in front of him, and now the only thing we had in common was neither of us was happy about me being a cop, though our reasons were different. “What was the second thing?” I asked, unwilling to pursue any more thoughts of Morrison.
For a moment Coyote looked blank as a happy puppy. Then he shook himself and stood up to pace, the tip of his tail twitching. “Second, you can’t hear my thoughts because I have shields, and I can hear yours because even after six months of study your shields are rudimentary and poorly crafted.”
“Thank you,” I said, “would you like me to lie down to make it easier to kick me?”
Coyote stopped turning in a circle and flashed, seamlessly, into the man-form. He had perfectly straight black hair that fell down to his hips, gleaming with blue highlights even in the star-studded blackness near the Dead Zone.
I closed up my thoughts like all the windows rolling up in a car at once, and privately admitted to myself that Coyote was a hell of a lot easier to deal with as a coyote. As a man he was almost too pretty to live, and I mostly wanted to look at him, not listen to him.
“Joanne, you took on a great power when you chose life.”
“If you say, ‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ so help me God, I’m going to kick you into last week.”
He gave me the same unblinking gaze that the coyote could. “Try it.”
A beat passed in which we neither moved nor spoke, until Coyote dropped his chin, watching me through long dark eyelashes. “You accepted this life months ago, Joanne. Why do you insist on fighting it?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” I snapped. “Isn’t that something?”
“Something,” he agreed, but shook his head. “But not enough. Speaking with the dead is a dangerous art, and you’re not even doing that. You’re just opening yourself up and offering yourself as a conduit for anybody who has a piece to speak.”
“Yeah, so?” I admired my mature rebuttal. High school debate teams would weep to have me. “It’s all I know how to do.” Ah, a defensive attack. Good, Joanne, I said to myself, and hoped the windows of my mind were still sealed tight enough that Coyote didn’t hear me. That’ll show him you’re really the It girl. Any moment now legions of cheerleaders would leap out and rah-rah-rah their support of my rapier wit and keen discussion skills.
“That,” Coyote said with more patience and less sharpness than I deserved, “is my point. Has it occurred to you, Joanne, that I’d prefer it if you didn’t get yourself killed out here?”
I blinked, and swallowed.
“Why are you so afraid?” he asked, much more softly.
There are questions a girl doesn’t want to answer, and then there are the ones she doesn’t even want to think about. I reached out, around Coyote and beyond him, for the Dead Zone.
The stars shut down and the world went blank.
CHAPTER THREE
In time, stars began winking in and out again, solitary dots of light that made me feel like a single extremely small point on an endless curve of blackness. I was cold beneath my skin, but when I touched my arm, my body temperature seemed normal. I didn’t remember the chill in the Dead Zone before. It was as if it was tainted, too, with the same subtle wrongness that had marred Seattle.
I held my breath and turned, one slow circle, reaching out with my hands and my mind alike. The former felt nothing.
The latter encountered pain.
It rolled through me, a bone-cold ache that settled in my spine at the base of my neck, creating a headache. Ice throbbed into my veins with every heartbeat. My skin was flayed from my flesh and my flesh from my bones, knives thrusting into my kidneys and cutting out my heart. My bones broke, crushed by a weight of regret that lay heavier than the sea. It dragged me down to my knees, too weak from a hundred billion lifetimes of mistakes to bear up any longer.
And rapture shattered through me, turning the ice in my blood to golden heat. I staggered to my feet again, fire in my lungs so pure it seemed I could breathe it. Burning tears scalded my face, tracks following a thin scar to the corner of my mouth. I swallowed them down, not caring that they seared my throat.
Disbelief caught me in the belly, a bowel-twisting moment of realization that culminated in the words, “Oh, shit,” when I knew I couldn’t stop the carcrash-bombexplosionrunawayhorsetrainwreckshipsinking followed by relief and dismay, to put down the burden of a body after secondsminuteshoursdaysyearsdecades-centurieseons of life.
Dimly, I was aware that I was connected, hideously