Maybe a fantastic indigo and violet wall of feather-light touches could slam down from nowhere and knock me about a thousand feet to the ground. I slammed against a black shapeless floor, unable to breathe with the weight of butterflies on me. They fluttered about my face, tiny razor touches keeping me from screaming for fear of inhaling them. I batted at them, trying to get free, and those I brushed away ghosted back to amalgamate and create a shape in the darkness. Tall, well-built, sandy-haired, smiling pleasantly. I wanted to cry. “Joanne,” Mark said cheerfully. “There you are.”
“Here I am.” He didn’t look like a god. He just looked like himself, a decent, rather charming young man who cooked as well as he lounged naked in bed. I could fight Barbara. I didn’t like Barbara. I didn’t want to beat Mark up. “You’re not the one I expected. I was kind of hoping for your other half.”
“I was kinda hoping you’d be my other half.” His nose wrinkled and he looked sheepish. “Okay, that was incredibly corny. But it’s true, too. I mean, I like you, Joanne. You’re a little scary with this shamanism thing you’ve got going on, but you really seem to care a lot about what’s going on around you, and I guess it’s better to be a little weird and scary with caring than not. I’d kind of like to stick it out and see if we could make it work.”
I found myself knotting and unknotting my hands like it would lead me to some kind of salvation. Morrison’s sleeping form kept splashing through my vision, as if I needed the reminder. “I meant your twin sister, Mark, not your soul mate.” I barely knew Mark Bragg. Pretty much everything I’d shared with him had been the machination of a god searching for the danger to his people. It wasn’t a normal relationship. It wasn’t even a real relationship. So why in hell did shooting him down make my heart ache?
Maybe because I hadn’t had anything like a real relationship in longer than I could remember.
Maybe because at the bottom of it, he was an ordinary man who’d gotten caught up in the mess of a life I’d led. I didn’t like my magic reaching out and touching people outside my immediate sphere. Mark was god-ridden, and that, plain and simple, was my fault. I might have done better by him.
There were so many people I might have done better by.
The thought made my throat tighten, a cold knot settling in its hollow. Faye Kirkland’s fanatical expression as she died blurred into Colin Johannsen’s pale face, all forming in my mind’s eye. Colin no longer wore the weary good cheer I’d seen in him in the few days I’d known him. He was drawn up thin and tall, much thinner than the boy I’d known had been, with the weight of cancer treatments bloating his body, and his eyes were accusing. Hard eyes, the expression of a young man used, and used badly. Cassandra Tucker, the only way I’d ever known her: blue and cold with death. I couldn’t breathe, cold at my throat burning with despair, but the faces wouldn’t stop.
Three young women, dead at a banshee’s hands, strewn about a baseball field and hidden beneath unseasonable snow. I had memorized their names, too: Rachel and Nikki and Lisa, who had died because I’d distracted my mother from the all-important task of banishing their murderer. And before them a handful of schoolchildren and their teacher and the Quinleys and Marie D’Ambra and shamans whose life’s blood began a legacy of death that tied to me. All of them were people who might have lived, had their paths not crossed mine.
And before that, a strong and determined woman who willed herself to death because I had turned away from the road I was supposed to travel, and before that, a baby girl whose dying breath seemed to give her brother the strength to live.
I could not breathe. Despair brought me to my knees in a jerky fall, pressure at my throat so intense I struggled to lift a hand to claw at it. Dark spots washed through my vision, indigo and violet, like eyes watching my death without remorse or pity. I had not expected this. Had not, for once, thought I was going to die. But the legacy that lay behind me spread so easily before me, so obviously. I could name the faces, count the numbers, now, of those who had died for my mistakes. Now. Soon I wouldn’t be able to, not with the plague sweeping out across Seattle and in time over the world. The end of the world, heralded by my toolate arrival on the psychic stage, by my clumsy use of power that whispered apocalypse to slumbering gods. So many deaths, with me as the focal point.
My fingers snagged in metal, cold and hard and smooth under my hand, and I remembered, incongruously, Suzanne Quinley and Melinda Holliday and Ashley Hampton, all alive and healthy because their paths had crossed with mine. I knotted my fingers around the necklace, feeling the cross press into my palm, and lifted my gaze to stare across butterfly-swarming darkness at Mark Bragg.
“The shamans weren’t my fault,” I heard myself whisper, voice scratchy, as if the cold pressure from my mother’s necklace had scraped my vocal box into disuse. “I probably could’ve done better, but I did my best. And I saved Suzanne Quinley.” I felt a weak, miserable smile tweak my mouth. “That’s got to count for something. I saved Gary.”
A flash of warmth spilled through me at that, make me break out with a hoarse laugh. “I even saved myself. At least, I’m working on it.” I could feel so much of the angry, resentful child I’d been still knotted up inside me, her world taken away from her in the moment I’d reached back through time to borrow the training she’d worked so hard to master. A shattershot image of a spider-webbed windshield flashed through my vision and I laughed again, another coarse sound. “I’m out of balance right now,” I admitted. “More people dead because of me than alive. But I’m working on it. And I’m not the one pulling life force from others to stay awake. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it, Begochidi?”
I knotted my fingers around the necklace, hanging on to it to keep my thoughts in order, and advanced a step toward the god’s avatar who stood before me. “You woke up without meaning to and took strength from the first people you could reach. The Dine. Your people. But you’re supposed to save them, not put them all to sleep forever, so you had to let them wake them up again, didn’t you? They woke up and started getting ready for the end of the world, while you looked for the strength to wake all the way up yourself. The poor bastards at the university.”
I reached out, searching for Mark’s memories and dreams in the darkness. “Is that what happened?” I whispered. I could sense excitement in their dreams—daydreams, night dreams; it didn’t matter. Both could be found in this place. I should know. I’d been offered the stuff of daydreams repeatedly in the last few days. I clung to their anticipation, spinning out misty recollection from the recesses of Mark’s mind, so foggy it seemed he didn’t actively recall the day.
They invited everybody in the department down to the lab to watch the first test of their machine. I’d seen photographs of a machine other physicists had build that could teleport a photon from one place to another. I’d retained a critical disappointment that it hadn’t looked like the beam-me-up sort, and felt similarly about the wormhole-maker. It looked more like a 1980s movie laser than a machine that could tear space and time asunder, and when they turned it on, there was little more than a pulse that rippled the air, and then silence.
Terrible silence, as everyone in the lab fell, soundless, to the floor. Everyone, including Mark and Barbara Bragg. The memory/dream faded into unconsciousness, Mark no longer able to provide information about what had happened, and me with no idea how to draw memory out of a god of sleep.
Mark stood very still, a sign I took as hopeful. I’d fought a god and won once. I didn’t want to put money on pulling it off a second time. “Is that what you had to do all the other times, Begochidi? The world’s ended a lot of times before. Did you have to reach out beyond the People for your strength? It shouldn’t be this hard, should it? If it’s really supposed to be the end of the world, shouldn’t you have just woken right up and gone to save your people? You shouldn’t have to fight so hard, should you?”