He howled with outrage, which would have been satisfying if a heavy wash of black-and-crimson butterflies had not erupted from his mouth, beating at the air so heavily I suddenly couldn’t breathe. Panic swept in and I staggered, releasing his spear as I gagged on soft feathered wings and honey-sweet thickness all around me. It felt hideously like a dream, being too far underwater and unable to claw my way to the surface for air. I’d lost sight of Begochidi entirely, scraping and flailing at butterflies instead. I wanted to run, but my feet were thick and slow and I couldn’t get my legs to move fast enough. I knew there was something horrible behind me, something that would tear me to shreds if it caught me, but I was stuck, and there was nobody there to save me.
White terror closed my throat. I sent out an instinctive thread of power, searching for the help I’d had all the other times I’d faced something awful. The coven had helped me; the thunderbird had. Billy’d nearly given his life to keep me on my feet with the banshee, and my coworkers had banded together, even not knowing what was going on, to help me capture a god with a net woven from our energy. Coyote’d been there to guide me, however cryptically, and Gary’s solid presence had anchored me when I felt most adrift. The whole of Seattle had given me what I needed when I first tuned into the shamanic world.
It was all gone now. There was me in the dark, drowning in butterflies, and nothing else. The only thing responding to the signal for help I’d reached out with was the god I had to defeat, and the butterflies around me grew heavier and stronger as I kept that desperate plea open.
“Idiot,” I heard my own voice say, bitterly. Butterflies erupted in a shower of brightly colored confetti, and I discovered I was on my knees, choking until tears came to my eyes. I looked up to find myself, fifteen and angry, staring down at the me who couldn’t breathe.
“Idiot,” she said again. “You took all that power from me, and you still don’t get it. What’d they tell you, Joanne?” A cord of power thrummed between us, not giving or taking, just linking. Shadows reformed around its brightness like it was food, delicate wings moving in the dark. Joanne-the-younger batted at them, silver-blue light surging, and for an instant they retreated, leaving us alone in a ball of light. “That the only way to win was to fight?”
“Yeah.” My voice scraped. That was the path the dead shamans had set me on: the warrior’s path. I’d tried talking to Begochidi already. I didn’t know what else to do. My younger self sneered.
“Coyote told me that the whole idea was to get somebody to change his perceptions, even just for a second. So you can get inside. So you can heal.”
“He’s a god!” I yelled. “How the hell am I supposed to heal a god? I can’t even tell what’s wrong with him!”
She stared down at me disdainfully. “Who says it’s him you’re supposed to heal?”
A golf club to the stomach couldn’t have been more effective. The air went out of my lungs and I stared back at her wordlessly. “You’re supposed to be your own hero, Joanne. How can you be anybody else’s if you’re not?”
“When’d you get so smart?” I whispered.
“Somebody’s gotta be,” she retorted. “You’re doing a crappy job of it. Get up and figure out a way to live. I don’t want to die this way.”
I could think of a number of ways I’d like her to die. Throttling her was top on the list. I swear I didn’t remember being that much of a shit at her age. “You don’t like me very much, do you?”
“Why should I?” she asked. “You don’t.” Then she was gone, all the demons and darkness she’d been holding back swarming in on me again to take the air away. Great. I was having oxygen-deprivation-induced illusions of my own temperamental teenage self. Just how I wanted to go out, scolded by a bratty me.
Well, she didn’t want me to go out this way any more than I did. At least we had something in common. I climbed to my feet as I spoke, pushing at the darkness with my mind. It felt rather like wrapping myself in bent light, only now I was using that light to send sleeping night into retreat. I held my sword and shield like I was used to them, competent with them. Like I was ready to face the darkness and do battle.
My younger self had told me not to fight. Of all the people in the world, my fifteen year old punk-ass attitude-ridden self…
…had told me not to fight.
I lowered my sword, swaying in the ball of light I’d made in the heart of darkness, trying, for the first time I could remember, to really look at myself.
I couldn’t remember a time when I wasn’t willing to pick a fight. There’d been a chip on my shoulder as long as I’d been able to put two thoughts together. First it was being a gypsy in a comparatively stable world, then being a girl who was into cars. Being a stranger in a strange land when we went back to North Carolina, and God help anybody who’d gotten in my face when my pregnancy started to show. All the way through college, all the way through my job at the department, epitomized by my relationship with Morrison.
Mark had refused to fight with me.
I crouched, carefully, and put down my sword and shield, ending with my face in my hands, my stomach twisting. I wasn’t accustomed to facing anything without a weapon of some kind in hand. In hand didn’t even have to be in hand: it could be my tongue or my fist or my power. It didn’t matter. It was all something to fight with.
I could see where that reckless confrontation could look like the forerunner of doom, especially when coupled with the sign that the Navajo people had been told to watch for. I wondered if the men and women who’d fallen asleep and awakened again to prepare for the end of the world could ever forgive me for being such a mess.
I wondered, sharply, if Coyote had been one of those people, and knew that he would’ve forgiven me.
That, of all things, was what gave me the strength to put my hands on my thighs and push myself upward. I’d blown it badly enough. My heart was sick in my throat, but my younger self’s distaste and dislike weighed even more heavily than fear. I could do one thing right by her at this late date, and I wasn’t going to screw that up. Not now. Not when it was the only way I could say thank you to the girl whose childhood I’d managed to take away.
“I’m not the bad guy, Begochidi.” My voice broke, nothing more than a little laugh. “I’m just a rank beginner. I’m not the rainbow that lasts all day. I’m a healer. Maybe not a very good one, but it’s what I’m supposed to do. And I’m not going to fight you.” The laugh came back, more self-deprecating. “I hope you won’t take advantage of that by sticking a spear through my head.” There wasn’t any answer to my brief laugh. Damn. I curled my hands into loose fists, then relaxed them again. “Go back to sleep, Maker. It’s not time for you to be here yet. There’s gonna be a real rainbow that lasts all day sometime down the line, and your people are going to need you then.” I passed my hand over my eyes. “If you don’t think it’s arrogant of me, I’ll do what I can to keep an eye on things until then. I really am trying to do the right thing,” I added more quietly.
I was about to give it up as a lost cause when white light flashed and left me blinking and blinded in the dark.
CHAPTER 35
Saturday, July 9, 9:39 a.m.
Voices, low and good-natured, mumbled around me in the careful pitch used for sick rooms and hospitals. Once in a while someone broke out of that, a laugh climbing up, or a discussion rising out of polite tones. There were other sounds, too: buzzes and beeps that went on rhythmically. Not the kind of thing I expected to hear in my apartment. It was all muffled, like somebody’d wrapped six or eight scarves around my head. Perhaps they had. That would explain why I didn’t seem to be able to open my eyes, either.