It wasn’t that I was scared. Just wary. Apprehensive. Cautious. Uneasy. And that exhausted my mental thesaurus, which meant I had to stop farting around and go do what I meant to do.
Coyote had told me that traveling in the astral plane wasn’t a matter of distance, but a matter of will. It seemed like distance to me, always different, always changing. Seattle receded below me, darkening and broadening until the Pacific seaboard seemed to be just one burnt-out city, the sparks of life that colored it faded and scattered with distance. Skyscrapers that seemed to defy physics with their height leaped up around me and crumbled again, and the stars were closer.
A tunnel, blocked off by a wall of stone, appeared to my left, and I felt him waiting there. Him, it—whatever. Something was there, and it tugged at me. It laughed every time I forged past it, and every time I did I felt one more spiderweb-thin line binding me to it. The first time I traveled the astral plane I almost went to him, compelled by curiosity and a sense of malicious lightness. The second time, the stone wall was in place, my dead mother’s way of protecting me from whatever lay down that tunnel. This time I knew he was there, and it was easier to ignore him.
Someday I’m not going to be able to.
The tunnel whipped away into a wash of light, the sky bleeding gold and green around me. New skyscrapers blossomed into tall trees, filled with the light of life, but here that light was orange and red, not the blues and white I was used to. I grinned wildly and lifted my hands, encouraging the speed that the world swum around me with.
Under the gold sky, palaces built like where the Taj Mahal’s wealthy older sister grew up. A tiger paced by, sabre-toothed and feral, watching me like I might be a tasty snack. A man’s laughter broke over me, and the world spun into midnight, the sky rich and blue and star-studded. I relaxed, letting myself enjoy the changing vistas, and in the instant I did, the shifting worlds slammed to a stop.
A red man stood in front of me. Genuinely red: the color of bricks, or dark smoked salmon. His eyes were golden and his mouth was angry. “Haven’t you learned anything?”
I gaped at him, breathless. “What are you doing here?”
“You’re making enough noise to wake the dead.”
“That was kind of the idea.”
“Siobhàn Walkin—”
“Don’t call me that.”
“It’s your name.”
“Don’t,” I repeated, “call me that. Not here.”
I’d become uncomfortably protective of that name: Siobhàn Walkingstick. It was my birth name, the one I’d been saddled with by parents whose cultures clashed just long enough to produce me. My American father’d taken one look at Siobhàn and Anglicized it to Joanne. Until I was in my twenties, no one had called me Siobhàn except once, in a dream.
The last name, Walkingstick, I’d abandoned on my own when I went to college. I’d wanted to leave my Cherokee heritage behind, defining myself by my own rules. I was Joanne Walker. Siobhàn Walkingstick was someone who barely existed.
But whether I liked it or not, that name belonged to the most internal, broken parts of me, and flinging it around astral planescapes made me vulnerable. I had learned to build protective shields around it, the one thing I’d managed to do to Coyote’s satisfaction over the past six months. I saw those shields as being titanium, thin and flexible and virtually unbreakable, an iridescent fortress in my mind. They were meant to protect my innermost self from the bad guys.
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?”