Morrison cropped up a lot, in fact, not just memories from the evening, but from the years we’d known each other, all the way back to him mistaking Petite for a Corvette. That was what had gotten us off on the wrong foot—I simply could not understand how any red-blooded American male could make that mistake, and had said so, loudly, pointedly, and mockingly, shortly before discovering he was the newly appointed Captain of Seattle Police’s North Precinct. Oops, sorry didn’t cover it at that juncture, and we’d spent most of the past four years on the wrong foot.
Which had ended up with me throwing a shoe at him tonight. There was probably cosmic justice in that, but I neither appreciated nor admired its irony. Mostly I wished I could just let the idea of him go, so I could get into the garden that was the center of my soul and talk to Coyote. My apartment had gotten chilly and gray around me, features fading into a nothingness that Morrison wandered through time and again, usually in the suits he wore to work, but occasionally—enticingly—in shirtsleeves or flannel, the latter of which I’d never seen him in. Not in the real world, at least. Just in his own soul’s garden, where bits of hidden personality leaked through even the firmest of reserve.
Coyote, behind me, said, “It’s three in the morning. Could you spare me the dream-wrought fantasies about someone who isn’t me?”
I yelped, Morrison disappeared and the dreamscape suddenly became recognizable in its featureless nothingness. I’d been here before, in a space between dreams, though not for a long time. “I’m asleep?”
“Evidently.” Coyote always sounded much more dry and sour as a coyote than he did as a man, so I wasn’t surprised, when I spun around, to find him sitting there, tongue lolling and his feet placed with catlike mathematical precision, all tight and tidy.
“I haven’t fallen asleep on a psychic journey in months. God, am I regressing?” I prodded at the dreamscape mentally, trying to push myself from sleep into the half-conscious wakefulness of a trance. The quiet gray nothing swirled around me, making halfhearted attempts at forming images, then fell away again, uninterested.
Coyote frowned, an expression that had a lot to do with what would be his eyebrows if dogs had eyebrows, and not so much to do with his long grinning mouth. “You’re not regressing. You’re exhausted. Your aura’s almost flat. What’ve you been doing, Jo?”
“Making new exciting mistakes.”
“Normally I’d say that was better than repeating the old ones, but I’m not so sure, if this is what it does to you.” The nothingness around us shifted as Coyote spoke, drawing away from the realm of dreams into a desert landscape. A hard white sun glared out of an equally hard blue sky, and the earth beneath me warmed to uncomfortably hot. Red rock formations cropped up, offering some degree of shade, and for a moment Coyote disappeared into the heart of his garden, hidden and protected by it.
Then he came over the stone ridges, no longer the eponymous coyote, but a jeans-clad shirtless man with skin colored brick-red and shining black hair that fell unbound past his hips. His eyes, like his coyote form’s, were gold, though I knew in real life both his eyes and skin were softer in shade. Here in the garden of his soul, though, he saw himself as the shamanistic leader he’d been trained as, super-saturated by life.
He walked right up to me, concern still furrowing his eyebrows as it had when he was a coyote, crouched and put a hand over my heart. I’d have slapped anybody else for being fresh, but there was nothing sexual about the gesture at all. Especially when, a moment later, a burst of desert-dune and blue magic swept through me, replenishing some of the energy I’d lost.
If I hadn’t already been sitting, I’d have dropped to the earth with gratitude. As it was I tilted sideways. Coyote caught my shoulder, propping me, then tipped my chin up so he could frown at me more directly. “What happened?”
“Well, first I shot someone. Then there was the dance concert that almost turned me into a coyote, then a psychic murder at the end of the concert drained every ounce of deliberately-awakened power from the dancers, and then I healed somebody with really early-stage breast cancer and saw something screwy in her genetic code and almost fixed it, so I think maybe that was, like, accidentally almost rewriting it to remove the predilection her family has toward the disease.” That sounded like quite enough. I didn’t think I needed to mention offering Morrison the Sight.
Coyote paled, which was quite an event for a man of his red-brick complexion. He sat down with a thump, sand dusting up to coat his thighs, and for a long few moments had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall that happening before, and marked two points on the Joanne has made some truly heinous mistakes today scoreboard.
He finally said, “You shot someone,” in a way that suggested he was only groping for a place to start, rather than it necessarily being the most important topic at hand. I almost felt guilty for bringing it up, but since it had kind of gotten my day off on the wrong foot, and was showing no signs of ceasing to prey at my thoughts, I couldn’t really imagine having not mentioned it.
“She attacked Billy,” was all I said, though. There wasn’t much else to say, not when I’d do the whole thing over again in a heartbeat, if I had to.
To my astonishment, Coyote, who had extremely pointed opinions about what I should be doing with my gifts, paled even further and said, “Is he okay?” Not is she okay, which is what I’d expected, but is he okay. I hadn’t known Billy would rank higher in Coyote’s hierarchy of concerns than somebody that a nominal healer had shot at.
“Yeah, he’s…he’s fine. She missed, she…I was faster. And she’s okay, too. In the hospital. Shattered clavicle, but she’ll be fine. I couldn’t heal her. The power went flat.”
“You said your magic’s responsive to your needs, even when you don’t want it to be. That it has opinions. If your need was an act of violence I’m not surprised it wouldn’t respond. Jo,” Coyote said carefully, “shamans aren’t supposed to hurt people.”
“And cops aren’t supposed to let their partners get a nail through the skull.” I thought it was a pretty inarguable defense.
Coyote stared at me a moment, then closed his eyes, shrugged all over and nodded. I had the impression a lot went unsaid in the context of that shrug, but I couldn’t read it, and what he said next was clearly not a direct follow-up to his thoughts: “Cancer?”
He said it in much the same tone as you shot someone?, like he was really still just trying to find a place to start. I judged it for an opening salvo and remained silent, which let him say, “Cancer is dangerous, Joanne. As healers we’re supposed to show the body a path to health, but the healing strength itself has to mostly come from within the patient. You could—” He swallowed, pulled his hand over his mouth, looked away, and looked back. “You could kill yourself, healing cancer with your magic alone. I know the last spirit quest gave you the focus to effect an instantaneous healing, and you have astonishing raw strength, but…”
“Yeah. I kind of figured that out when I almost fainted. It was like time tunneled forward and I was healing all the potential damage. How do I…” I tilted my head back, wishing I had something nice and hard behind me to thunk it on, like a rock. Beating my skull against stone seemed like the only way anything was ever going to sink in. “I’ve mostly only healed small things, Yote. Things I can use my own power for. I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to use someone else’s strength to help them heal themselves.”
“Jo, you’ve never done a proper shamanic healing in a sweat lodge or healing circle. The setting is important to creating the right mental space for the healer as well as the healed. Don’t you remember anything I taught you?”