Coyote Dreams

“Nice robe. You ain’t cookin’ an old man breakfast, are you? ’Cause I brought doughnuts. Besides, I know how you cook.”

I clutched the collar of my robe closed, feeling like a fifties housewife. “Uh. Gary. Uh. Hi. What’re you—ah, shit!” God, my prowess with the language was stunning today. I was an embarrassment to the diploma laying claim to a B.A. in English lying somewhere in my apartment. “Gary, I, uh, forgot.”

He squinted down at me, gray eyes curious. Gary Muldoon was the most solid, real-looking person I’d ever met in my life, and at seventy-three he still had the build of the linebacker he’d been in college. But there was a bit of tiredness in the Hemingway wrinkles, and he was moving slower than he had when I met him, thanks to a heart attack a few weeks earlier.

A heart attack that was my fault, something I couldn’t forget. Even the memory made a nervous flutter in my stomach.

It wasn’t your usual butterflies. It was the way I perceived the power that had awoken in me seven months earlier, when catching sight of a fleeing woman through an airplane window had triggered a series of what I considered to be remarkably unfortunate events. Finding the woman had resulted, more or less directly, in getting a sword stuffed through my lungs. While I was busy dying, a snide coyote dropped by my psyche and gave me the option to survive the skewering—as a shaman. A healer, one with Great Things in store for me.

If I’d known then what I know now…

All right, I’d have made the same decision, because nobody wants to die at twenty-six if there’s a choice in the matter. But I didn’t want to be a shaman. The whole idea that there was a magic-filled alternative to our world made my skin itch. I like rational, sensible explanations for things: that was part of why I was a mechanic by trade. Or had been, anyway. Vehicle diagnostics were simple and straight-forward. Follow a certain set of steps and the vehicle runs better. Et voilà. Normal.

Having an insistent, fluttery coil of power centered right below my sternum, impatient to be used to right the world, is not normal. And that bubble was what shivered in me every time I saw Gary, partly because he was still healing, and partly because his illness really had been my fault.

I’d spent most of the past six months ignoring my power as best I could. It turned out that had been a massive error in judgment. Among other things, it let a very nasty person induce a heart attack in my closest friend so I’d be distracted while the world went to hell in a handbasket. It had worked extremely well.

I was capable of learning from my mistakes. After six months of strenuous denial, I finally realized I was going to have to suck it up and learn to use this power, because otherwise I was going to be used and taken advantage of. Worse, my friends were in danger, and that, if nothing else, was enough to convince me to pull my head out of my ass.

I put my hand over Gary’s heart. A little thread of glee burst free from that coil of power inside me, silver-blue light splashing up my arm, under the skin, as if it followed the blood vessels. It probably did. Through that spatter of power I could feel the steady, comforting strength of an ancient tortoise, sharing its spirit—and, I hoped, its longevity—with Gary. It was the one thing I’d done right recently, bringing a totem animal back to help heal my friend.

The tortoise accepted my offering of vitality, though I got a sense of amusement from it as I worked through my favorite analogy: cars. To me, patching up a heart that’d had an attack was like changing out bald tires. They were worn and tired, just like an attack made the heart, but you couldn’t just switch out one heart for another. I liked the idea of working from the inside, like I could slip a new tire around the hub and slowly inflate it, strengthening the old muscle with newer healthy cells. Every time I saw Gary I threw a little of that idea into him, trying to help fix the damage I’d allowed to be done. I expected his next annual checkup to determine he had the heart of a twenty-five-year-old.

“How could you forget?” he demanded as I let my hand fall again. “We been doin’ this every day for the past ten days, Jo. And your eggs are gonna burn.”

“What’s ‘this’?” Mark came out of the kitchen, all full of tenor good cheer. “Crap, Joanne, are you seeing somebody? I’m sorry if I screwed—oh.” He got a good look at Gary and evidently categorized him as too old. That was new. Half the people I knew were convinced I was involved in a lusty May-December romance.

“The eggs aren’t going to burn,” Mark added with a broad grin, and offered his hand to Gary. “I’m Mark.”

I wrinkled up my face, afraid to look at Gary, but one eye peeped open, unable to look away, either.

He’d all but dropped his teeth, jaw long and eyes googly. He was staring at Mark, but somehow managed to encompass me in that stare, making me squirm. I felt like a teenager caught necking with her boyfriend. Gary put his hand out and shook Mark’s without winding his jaw back up, and Mark gave him another broad smile. “You Joanne’s dad?”

“No!” Gary and I said at the same time. Mark’s eyebrows went up and he rocked back on his heels a bit. “Just a friend,” I muttered. Gary transferred his googly-eyed stare to me, and it was a lot worse than when he’d managed to pull off gaping at me without actually looking directly at me. I squirmed again. “I, um, yesterday was the department picnic, and, um…”

Gary handed the box of doughnuts to Mark and said, in his best deep-voiced dangerous rumble, “Could you excuse us a minute, son?”

Mark retreated to the kitchen while I gave Gary a steely-eyed look of my own, hoping to head him off at the pass. “‘Son’? Women get ‘dame’ and ‘broad’ and ‘lady,’ and he gets ‘son’?”

“It’s part of my charm,” Gary muttered, then scowled enormously at me. “You okay, Jo?” There was no reprimand in his voice at all, just a hell of a lot of concern.

My mouth bypassed my brain entirely and said, for no reason I was willing to admit to, “Morrison was flirting with this redhead.” To my huge irritation, that clearly made sense, because Gary’s expression landed between understanding and sympathy, with a good dose of wryness thrown in. I said “Shit,” and stomped into the kitchen. Gary closed the door behind himself and followed me.

“Hungry?” Mark asked genially. “Plenty where this came from.” He lifted the frying pan and then slid its omelet onto a plate that already had two slices of buttered toast on it. I was in the presence of culinary genius. Gary eyed me, eyed Mark, and shrugged.

“I could eat. ’Cept you sure you want to eat, Jo? You know it’ll ground you.” He put on a solicitous tone, but underneath it I heard: don’t eat anything, we got work to do. Gary had been there, quite literally standing over me, when my powers woke up. Frankly, he handled the entire thing a lot better than I ever had. I was, he’d told me more than once, the most interesting thing that’d happened to him in the three years since his wife had died, and he wasn’t going to miss out on any of it. I wasn’t at all sure I liked being an interesting thing. It was like the proverbial Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. I’d far rather live in really, really boring times. Especially since much of the interesting part seemed to be directly focused on trying to make me dead. Boring was good.

With this in mind, I took the plate like a lifer in prison, hunching myself over it protectively. “Right now I need some serious grounding.”

“What are you,” Mark said, “some kind of electrician or something? I thought you were a cop.” He brought a glass of orange juice to the table and gave me a quirky little grin that went a fair way toward melting my knees, even if I both knew better and was sitting down, anyway. Nobody ever said knee-melting only worked on the vertical.

I managed to mutter, “Thanks,” and tried giving Gary the hairy eyeball to shut him up, but he answered Mark with such blasé cheer I knew he was ignoring me on purpose.

“Not that kinda grounding. Spiritual grounding. Food anchors your soul to your body, makes it a lot harder to go spirit questing. Jo here’s a shaman.” He said it all casual-like, but his gray eyes were sharp and judging as Mark went back to the stove to make another omelet. Me, I just sank down into my chair until my nose practically touched the eggs, and shoveled as many bites into my mouth as I could before Gary took notice of me again.

“No shit,” Mark said curiously. “Like a medicine man? What exactly does a shaman do, anyway?” He grinned, bright and open. “Get hooked up with some peyote, maybe?”

My stomach contracted around the food I’d eaten. I unhunched from over the plate and Mark noticed, speaking a little more quickly, as if he was afraid I’d cut him off. Which was exactly what I’d been going to do, so I couldn’t exactly blame him.

“No, no, look, I’m sorry, I’m kidding. Bad joke, sorry.” He sounded like he meant it, expression all fussed as he looked at me. “I just never met a shaman before. Guess I don’t know what to say. Mom says her grandad was Navajo—”

“What,” Gary said, “not a Cherokee princess? I thought those came standard these days.”

I shot him a look. I actually was part Cherokee, although not through remote ancestors. My father’d grown up in Qualla Boundary and I’d gone to high school there. There were a lot of people there who legitimately could claim Cherokee blood, but most of them weren’t royalty. Mostly it seemed like people from much further away than the Carolinas—or Oklahoma—had managed to land themselves the royal blood. It was like the U.S. version of being descended from Cleopatra.

Mark only laughed. The guy was nine kinds of casual. Maybe he did this for a living, like the kid in Six Degrees of Separation. Never mind his health or my peace of mind. It seemed like I shouldn’t trust him.

I’d start not trusting him as soon as I was done eating breakfast. I hunched over it again, hoping Gary wouldn’t notice.

“Nah. I guess my family came over from England in the early nineteenth century and settled in the southwest during one of the land rushes. Never had a chance to hook up with Cherokee royalty.”

“Just Navajo.”

“Well, she never said he was royalty.” Mark slid me a wink and a bit of an “Overprotective, isn’t he?” look. I avoided Gary’s eyes and stuffed a too-large piece of omelet into my mouth. “Anyway, whether he was or not, that’s like the total of my familiarity with Indian culture.”

“Native American,” Gary said in a tone that sounded remarkably like one I’d employed on him some months earlier, when he’d called me Indian. Mark had the grace to turn red around his jawline and lift his hands in apology.

“Native American. Sorry. Maybe you can tell me about it sometime, Joanne. I’d like to hear about it.”

So he was good-looking, but he was bonkers. Anybody who was that agreeable about the possibility of magic woo-woo stuff in people he’d just met pretty much had to be. I knew I shouldn’t trust him. At least my friends at the police department had gotten mixed up in my séance-thing back in January because they knew me and wanted to help, not because they were buying into a whole big weird world of Other out there.

Gary grunted, a small noise that I couldn’t interpret as pleased or displeased, and saved me from responding by saying, “Not now. We got work to do.”

“Sure,” Mark said easily. “Some other time. I don’t want to get in the way.”

I inhaled a chili bean and started coughing, then washed cough and bean down with a long swig of orange juice. The acidity made my nose sting, and the whole combination made my eyes water, which let me open my eyes all the way. Overall I called it a win and stuffed an entire half slice of toast into my mouth before anybody could expect me to say anything. I didn’t see why I should. Gary and Mark seemed to be getting on just fine.

The doorbell rang.

My social life was not such that the doorbell rang twice in one week, much less twice in five minutes. I stuck my head out, turtle-like, over my omelet, surprise keeping me in the pose for a few seconds. Then, afraid Gary would dump my food if I left it unguarded, I clutched the plate and went to answer the door.

A leggy blond woman and a six-year-old girl stood outside it. The girl noticed neither the bathrobe nor the plate of food I held and squealed, “Ossifer Walker!” before leaping up into my arms with the confidence of a child who’d never been dropped.

Chili-cheese omelet went flying over the door, the rug and the girl as I fumbled the plate while catching her. Her mother looked completely dismayed. “I am so sorry. I thought—it was this morning, wasn’t it? Tuesday, nine-fifteen? We were going to have a tour of the station?”

“Oh, God.” I juggled the girl around until she was sitting on my hip, and gave her a falsely bright smile that she didn’t seem to see through. “Hi, Ashley. You look nice and healthy. Are you keeping hydrated?”

“Yes,” she announced, pleased with knowing the word. “I drink six glasses of water a day.” She held up all ten fingers, demonstratively, and my fakey smile turned into a real grin.

“Good for you. Um, Ashley? We’ve got chili all over ourselves. We should probably get cleaned up.”

“Do we hafta?”

“Yes,” her mother and I said together, and I put Ashley down. I’d encountered her a few weeks earlier, the victim of heat stroke. My power had refused to let me ignore it that time, and once her core temperature was stabilized I’d sent her to the hospital. She’d come away from it with the idea that I was some kind of hero, and that she wanted to grow up to be a “peace ossifer,” just like me. “I’m sorry,” I said to her mother. Allison. Allison and Ashley Hampton. Just the names sounded like they belonged somewhere a lot ritzier than a college apartment turned permanent abode. “I completely spaced it. If you’re not in a time crunch I can get cleaned up and—”

“Wow,” Ashley said dreamily. I wrinkled up my face and looked over my shoulder. Mark, in all his half-naked glory, was leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, grinning. See, when a six-year-old notices that a guy’s gorgeous, you know it’s not just your overactive imagination telling you he is.

“Breakfast, ladies?” He was going to use all the food in my house. “We’ve got omelets and doughnuts.”

“Mommy!” Ashley crowed. “Can I have a doughnut pllleaaaase?”

“You already had breakfast, Ashley,” Allison said automatically. Ashley wriggled all over.

“I know, but plllleaaaaase?”

“Come on in.” A sense of the absurd was blooming over me, forming a stupid amused smile on my face. “Join the party. Mark can feed you,” I said, like that was perfectly normal, “and I’ll get dressed and we can go to the station.” I ushered Allison Hampton into the apartment, leaned on the door and waited for another shoe to drop.

The phone rang, and I laughed out loud. Everyone peered at me curiously as I made my way over chili-stained carpet to pick it up. “Grand Central Station.”

“This is Phoebe,” a woman said. “You’ve been a total flake the last two weeks, so I’m calling to remind you about your—”

“Fencing lesson,” I said with a groan that sounded like a laugh even to me. “I know this is going to shock you, but—”

“You forgot.” Phoebe sounded smug. “That’s why I’m calling. If you’re not here in—” I could imagine her looking at her watch in the pause “—twenty-three minutes,” she went on, “I’m going to come kick your tall skinny ass up and down the Ave. I will never make a fencer of you if you don’t come to practice, Joanne.”

“You sound like my mother,” I said, except she didn’t, because not only did my mother have an Irish accent, but she’d also dumped me with my father when I was three months old, so I’d never had the pleasure, or lack thereof, of being lectured by her. At least, not until after she was dead, which was some more of that lack of normality that I didn’t like about my life. Nonetheless, Phoebe sounded like what I imagined mothers to sound like.

“Twenty-two minutes, Joanne.”

“I can’t make it,” I said with a shrug. Ashley, in the background, squealed with delight. I looked into the kitchen to see Mark flipping an omelet, like he was a real chef or something. “I’ve got company,” I added, although Phoebe knew me well enough she’d never believe it.

“It’s nine in the morning. How can you have company? You’re always saying you have no life.”

I held the phone out toward the kitchen. “Everyone please say hello to Phoebe.”

A chorus of hellos swept over me and I put the phone back to my ear. “See?”

“All right,” Phoebe said in a no-nonsense voice, “but we’re going out clubbing tonight so you can tell me what this is all about.”

“Clubbing,” I echoed. “What, like cavemen?”

“You’re the only person I know who might really mean that. Clubbing as in dance clubbing, after dinner.”

“I see. Are you threatening me into social activities?”

“Yes. And if you say no I’ll beat you up.”

I grinned. “Assuming I ever come to another lesson so you can.” I’d taken up fencing after a sword-bearing god had skewered me. Shaman lessons, those freaked me out. Fencing lessons, those were basically normal. Even I could see the pattern developing. “Okay,” I said, heading off Phoebe’s splutters. “Tonight. We’ll do something. I promise.”

“See you at eight,” she said in a tone that brooked no compromise, and hung up.

The doorbell rang. I turned around and gaped at it. Gary came out of the kitchen, looking as astonished as I did. “I can’t imagine,” I said before he asked, and went back to the door to answer it for the third time that morning.

“Walker.” Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department stood on my doorstep, looking less like a superhero and more like a sunburned, unhappy man than usual. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and the collar of his shirt was loose, neither of which I could remember ever seeing on him before. Even dressed down, he was enough snazzier than me that he took in my moss-green robe and messy hair with a single scathing glance. “Get dressed. Holliday’s in a coma.”

CHAPTER THREE

My hangover returned with a vengeance, a brand-new tire iron slamming into my brain along with Morrison’s words. For a moment my vision doubled, so there were two tense-looking Morrisons looming over me. I checked the impulse to stand on my toes so Morrison’s shod state didn’t make him marginally taller than me. Normally we looked each other in the eye, the same height right down to the last half inch.

“What? I just saw him last night. He was fine. What are you talking about? Is Mel okay?” I backed out of the door even as I asked questions, letting Morrison into my apartment.

“Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” Gary said from the kitchen doorway. Morrison didn’t quite do a double take at the old man, but it was a near thing, his lips thinning and nostrils flaring. “Mr. Muldoon.” Morrison was one of those who thought I had Something Going On with Gary. He transferred his attention back to me, expression saying both, “I knew it,” and at the same time clearly wondering why I wasn’t dressed and ready to go yet. “Melinda Holliday called me this morning to inform me Detective Holliday wouldn’t be in. Sometime after midnight last night he fell into a sleep that he can’t be woken from. She’s all right,” he added a little more gently. “Upset, but all right.”

Panic clutched my heart in quick pulses. Billy Holliday was one of my oldest friends at the department, a big man whose unfortunate name had prompted him to a cross-dressing quirk. At least, that was my theory. I’d never been brave enough, or maybe rude enough, to ask outright why he did it.

Oddly, that wasn’t the thing he got ridden about at work. People had adapted to the nail polish and the occasional appearance in a brightly colored sundress, possibly because Billy’s biceps were bigger than most people’s heads, but also because he was a hell of a detective, and the truth was most people didn’t give a damn what kind of oddnesses you were into if you were good at your job.

That, and he had another quirk that seemed safer to pick on. Billy Holliday was a True Believer when it came to the world of the paranormal. He made Mulder look like a skeptic, and when my universe turned upside down, he was the first one to support me, despite the ration of shit I’d given him for years. I didn’t deserve friends that good.

“He was fine last night,” I repeated. “What happened?” Close mouth, Joanne, and engage brain. I pressed my lips shut, inhaled deeply through my nose, and said, “I’ll get dressed. Did Mel want me there?”

Morrison gave me a sour look and followed me to my bedroom door. I could see the tension in his shoulders as he folded his arms and leaned on the wall, ostentatiously turning his gaze toward the living room. I hesitated, then left the door open, since Morrison clearly intended to keep having a conversation while I was getting dressed. “I—”

“Joanne, will someone else be—oh, Captain Morrison.” Mark’s question overrode Morrison’s answer, and I wished, just briefly, that I was still in the living room so I could see Morrison’s expression. “Mark Bragg,” Mark said cheerfully. I had never heard anybody so cheerful in the morning. Especially someone whom I thought should be suffering from the same kind of brain-pounding headache that I was. He had, after all, shared in the aspirin I’d taken. Maybe his had worked better. “We met yesterday afternoon at the picnic,” he went on. “Barbara Bragg’s my sister.”

“Sure,” Morrison said in such a controlled voice I winced to hear it. “I remember. Nice to see you again, Mark.”

“Mommy, it’s a peace captain!” I heard Ashley come tearing out of the kitchen and looked toward the door in time to see her skid to a stop about six inches from Morrison, beaming up at him. “Hullo! I’m Ashley! Ossifer Walker is going to show me her school! I mean her work.” She wrinkled up her face until her nose looked like a button at the midst of a bunch, then smoothed it out again to smile adoringly at my boss. Her mother came out of the kitchen after her, offering a smile with a hint of apology for Ashley’s enthusiasm.

Morrison couldn’t take it anymore and shot me an incredulous look through my bedroom door. Fortunately for both of us I’d at least pulled on a pair of pants and had managed to get a bra in place. “Did I come at a bad time, Walker?” Sarcasm abounded so mildly that I wasn’t sure anyone else heard it.

“No, sir.” I was standing in my own bedroom half dressed calling a man sir. It really seemed like I ought to at least get laid, if I was doing that.

Then Mark stepped into view, his jeans still falling off his hips, and I remembered that all appearances indicated I had. Dammit. “Why don’t you go ahead and make everybody else some breakfast, Mark,” I muttered. “Since everyone’s here and all. Morrison and I have to go.” I pulled a white T-shirt on because I knew it would set off my tan and went to crouch in the doorway so I could talk to Ashley.

“We’re going to have to reschedule, Ashley. This is my boss, Captain Morrison, and I have to go with him this morning.”

Disappointment flooded the kid’s face, although at the same time she shot a conniving look at Morrison. “Maybe I could come with you!” All the guile was gone from her expression by the time she started speaking, big blue eyes full of hope and charm. I choked on a laugh. Even Morrison cracked a grin, proving he wasn’t entirely immune to feminine wiles.

But his voice was very serious as he answered, “’Fraid not, Ashley.” He crouched, too, so our knees knocked together, and gave Ashley all the respect due an adult. “Officer Walker and I have to take care of some police business by ourselves. But when Officer Walker gets the chance to reschedule and bring you to the station, come by my office and I’ll see if I can’t scare up a case for you to work on, all right?”

I thought the girl was going to lift right off the floor from so much delight and pride. “Okay!” She darted back to her mother to say, “Captain Morrison’s going to make me a police ossifer, Mommy! With a case for my own! I’m going to be a peace captain when I grow up!”