Of course they were. That’s what happens when you travel on the astral plane. Moving on, then. I looked back to the wall of rocks, eyeing the one I’d initially grabbed. “Joanne,” my mother said in a remarkably good “don’t you dare test my patience one more time, young lady” voice. I dropped my hand and turned to face her, making a point of looking around rather dramatically.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Did you think you had something to say to me that I might listen to? Is there some burning reason that I should pay attention to, I don’t know, what are you, a banshee or something? You’re dead, Mother. We didn’t much like each other when you weren’t dead. Why don’t we just leave it at that and you can go do whatever it is dead people do? I’m busy.”
“Busy.”
“Yes.” I went to work on my rock again, tugging it a few millimeters out of the wall. She clamped her hand around my wrist again. Her fingers were tremendously cold, not just like the dead, but as if she was emitting cold the way a living body emits heat.
“You don’t understand what you’re doing, Joanne.” I hated the warm lilt of her voice, a low alto that I wanted to instinctively trust. I couldn’t possibly have recognized it. She’d abandoned me with my father when I was three months old, but from the moment she’d called me, seven months ago, I’d fought against wanting to curl up in the warmth and safety of that voice and letting myself forget about the world.
“Like you could possibly know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what you’re doing here. Go away.” I yanked my wrist, trying to escape her grasp. I failed in that, but I did manage to loosen the rock I held. The entire wall shifted ominously, deep scrapes of stone bumping down a few inches against one another. My mother hissed, a sound like an angry cat, then lifted her voice in a high keen that made me jerk away again, this time succeeding and clamping my hands over my ears.
“You will not pass this barrier, Siobhán Walkingstick.” Her voice thundered inside my head, making me equal parts angry and dizzy. I set my teeth together and stomped forward, grabbing my stone again.
They always say, “I never knew what hit me.” Technically, I knew what hit me: it was my mother. Beyond that, I really don’t know what happened, except one second I had the stone in my hands and the next I was about forty feet away, lying on my back in the dirt, and she was standing over me like one of God’s avenging angels in a blouse and long skirt. My lip was bleeding. I lifted the back of my hand to it, staring up at her. She crouched, putting a hand on my shoulder. It seemed to carry the weight of the world behind it, as profoundly heavy as the draw that had pulled me toward the cave mouth in the first place.
“You are not yet ready to face what lies beyond that wall, daughter. I haven’t much time to act, and less time still to tell you about it. Get yourself home. I’ve no energy for wasting on sullen little girls who refuse to listen to their mothers.”
Her will hit me like a wall itself, reaching right for the core of energy inside me as if it was her own. She shoved me into the earth with the hand on my shoulder, using my own stored power as her focus point.
I popped out the other side and into my body so hard I fell over backward. Gary stopped drumming and jumped to his feet while I stared at the ceiling and tried to determine if all my parts were where I thought they should be. They were. After a few seconds I said, “Ow,” and thought I’d leave it at that.
There was no part of me that didn’t hurt. It wasn’t the god-awful pain of having a sword driven through me, but I ached, like someone had…well, shoved me through solid ground. I said, “Ow,” again, for good measure, and pushed myself up slowly. Gary hovered over me, nervous but kind enough not to ask.
“What the hell happened?”
All right, kind enough not to ask for a few seconds, at least. I shook my head, exhaustion sweeping over me without warning. The bubble of energy inside me that I spent so much time trying to ignore was depleted again. I felt like I’d been depending on it without knowing about it. “I need food.”
I got up, largely to see if I could, and wobbled to the kitchen door. When I’d reached the frame without mishap, I turned my head to answer Gary’s question. “I don’t think my mother is as dead as I thought she was.”
I refused to say anything else until I’d eaten. Gary finally stopped asking, “Zombie? Vampire? Wraith?” and ate his own dinner, watching me with the eagerness of a kid at Christmastime. I swear, anybody on the planet—except possibly Morrison—would have been better suited to my insane new world than I was. Billy had already lived with something like it his whole life. Gary thought it was cool. I wanted it to all go away so I could sleep in peace at night, and work on Petite by day.
“There’s something out there,” I finally said. Gary gave an evocative snort that made me aim a kick at him under the table. To both our surprise, it connected, and he yelped, looking injured.
“Sorry. I mean, something that wants me to go check it out. My mother was standing sentinel over it tonight. She wasn’t there last time.”
“Last time?”
“I saw it in January. Look, that doesn’t matter. She kicked my ass.”
Gary put a bite of spaghetti—the closest thing I had in the freezer to chicken fettuccine—in his mouth to hide a smirk. I drew my foot back for another kick, then remembered I’d managed to hit him once already and felt guilty. He looked smug, making me annoyed for feeling guilty, so I swung at him again. I missed. “So obviously,” I said through gritted teeth, “she thinks whatever’s behind door number one is dangerous.”
“Then you should stay away from it,” Gary said wisely.
“I don’t even know what it is!”
“Mothers are always right. Don’t you know that?” He wrinkled his eyes into nonexistence as I scowled at him. “Right. I forgot. Sorry.” He paused. “Mothers are always right. You don’t wanna find out what’s behind that door.”
“Gary!”
He lifted his hands defensively. “I’m just sayin’.”
“Well, dammit, I want to know what’s back there.” I hesitated. “She said I wasn’t ready for it.”
Gary’s bushy eyebrows rose. “If you’ll excuse me for coppin’ a phrase from today, duh. You really think you’re ready for the monster in the closet?”
“No, but I’d like to know what it is! Knowledge is half the battle, or something.”
“Look.” Gary pointed his fork at me. “What’d you go in there looking for?”
I shrugged, uncomfortable. “I don’t know. Nothing specific.”
“Okay. There’s your problem. You got no focus. You need to go in there and talk to somebody who knows what’s going on. Your buddy the coyote.”
“Coyote never gives me a straight answer.” I sounded just like the sullen kid my mother had accused me of being.
“Yeah, that’s kinda what the whole trickster thing is all about, Jo.”
I flung my hands in the air. “Why do you know that? Why does everybody on the whole planet know this stuff that I don’t? Why didn’t somebody else get this stupid talent? You can have it. You’d be a lot better at it than I am!”
Gary huffed. “Probably.”
My rant cut off as my jaw dropped. Gary’s gray eyes sparked good humor with a steely undercut. “You done?”
“Uh.” I cleared my throat. “Um. Yes. Thank you.”
“You got something special, kid. You’re gonna have to learn to suck it up and live with it, or walk away. Right now there’s some dead ladies out there that maybe you can help, if you stop your whining and bitching and get on with it. Are you gonna do that, or what?”
“Okay.” I sounded very small and pathetic. And embarrassed.
“Arright.” Gary got up, his plastic spaghetti dish in one hand. “Let’s go try this again, then.” He stalked into the living room, leaving his muttered, “Jeez. Dames,” lingering on the air.
It took longer to go under this time, in part because of chagrin and in part because of the microwaved fried chicken that settled in my tummy and made me more aware of my body than was helpful. After several minutes of drumming, though, I suddenly fell backward into my body and found myself scrambling down a thin tunnel, in search of an internal garden that somehow reflected the state of my soul.