“I don’t understand.” I sounded young and frightened, but even as I made the protestation I moved, without being told, on to the next of my injuries. The cuts and scrapes on my arms and face were a paint job. Using the coyote’s analogy worked: it gave me a way to focus the cool rushing power inside my belly. It was bewilderingly easy, almost instinctive. The surface damage of the cuts and scrapes called for less of that energy than the lung or the ribs had. I felt myself making choices I barely understood, siphoning just a fraction of the power available to deal with the smaller injuries. The rest settled behind the unlocked place above my belly, waiting. When the “paint job” was complete, the extension of energy faded back into me, joining the rest of the power behind my breastbone. I felt a little like a battery charging up.
I opened my eyes uncertainly, looking down at myself. I couldn’t do anything about my clothes. “I think I’m okay now.”
“What about that one?” The coyote poked his nose at the long cut on my cheek from Marie’s butterfly knife. I put my hand over it; the new paint job hadn’t entirely taken care of it. Instead of disappearing, it had scarred over, a thin silver line along my cheek. After a moment I shrugged.
“It wants to stay.”
Very smart dogs can look approving. The coyote did, then snapped his teeth at me. “I’m not a dog.”
“What is it with people reading my mind today?” I looked down at myself, the one lying in the grass. I still looked horrible, my skin a ghastly pallor that made very faint freckles stand out across my nose. My face wasn’t one that did sunken flesh well. My nose is what you might politely call regal, and my cheekbones are high, making my cheeks look very hollow and fallen. Lying there like that, I looked two breaths from dead. The drumbeat, my heartbeat, was still thudding with a degree of uncertainty. I put my hand out over my torso and chewed my lower lip. “There’s still something wrong. Like…” My car analogy almost fell apart. “Like the windshield is all cracked up and burnt from the sun.”
The coyote did the approving look again. “This is the hard part.”
I frowned at him nervously. “What do you mean, the hard part?”
He pushed his nose out toward the me that was dying, there on the grass. “You have to change the way you see the world.”
“Isn’t this place enough proof of that?” I asked, pitch rising. The coyote’s ears flicked back and he sat up primly, offended.
“Is it?” he asked. “Do you believe what’s happening here?”
I looked down at my body again. My heartbeat was drumming much too slowly. “I don’t know. It feels real, but so do dreams.”
“This place shares much with dreams.” The timbre of his voice changed, deepening from a tenor into a baritone. I jerked my eyes up, to discover a red man sitting there on his butt, arms wrapped around his knees, loose and comfortable. He wore jeans with the knees torn out, no shirt, and he was genuinely red. Brick red, not a color skin comes in, not even sunburned skin. Long straight black hair was parted down the middle, and his teeth were better than Gary’s. His eyes were golden, as golden as the coyote’s. I blinked, and the coyote was back.
“Is Coyote even a Cherokee legend?” I kept blinking at him, hoping he’d turn back into the red man. He stayed a coyote. Still, if men like that were wandering around here, I’d take it as a good argument that this garden had a lot in common with dreams.
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Coyote said. “You don’t have a lot of time, Jo. Is this real?”
I scowled down at my body. If this is a dream, I decided, when I look up, he’ll be the guy again. I’m aware, so it’s a lucid dream, so I can affect it, and he’ll be the man because I want him to be.
I looked up. The coyote was sitting there, head cocked, waiting for me.
“Dammit,” I said out loud. A thin line in the spiderweb I felt inside me made a hissing sound like cracking glass, and disappeared. The drum missed a long, scary beat, then fell into a natural, reassuring rhythm.
“Time to go back,” Coyote said, and the garden went away.
CHAPTER SIX
Shit, I thought again, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true. I closed my eyes. The light continued to bore into my eyelids until I opened them again. The paramedic squatting above me clicked the penlight off, announcing, “She’s back,” to someone out of my line of sight.
“I’m back,” I agreed in a croak, and closed my eyes again. Perhaps if I was very lucky I’d go away again.
“Getting the crap beat out of you isn’t gonna make Morrison feel bad enough not to fire you, Joanie,” the someone said, then lifted his voice. “Forget the ECG, Jimmy. She’s back with us. Looks like the other guy got the worst of it. What happened,” he said, addressing me again, “his gang dragged him off to die?”
My arm weighed about twenty thousand pounds, but I picked it up and dropped it on my chest, trying to find the hole the sword had poked in me. I found it by proxy. There was a gash in my shirt, a nasty hole stiffening with dried blood. Beneath it, my rib cage seemed to be unpunctured. I rolled my head to the side, somewhat amazed that it stayed on, and croaked, “Gary?”
All I could see were feet. I didn’t know what kind of shoes Gary wore, but I was pretty sure they weren’t open-toed blue leather heels, absolutely impractical for Seattle in January.
“Who the hell is Gary?”
I rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to focus on the paramedic. “Oh,” I said after a while. “Billy. Cabby.”
“No, Billy Holliday, sweetheart. You’ve always been easily confused.” He squatted by me again, pushing my eyelid back and inspecting my pupil. “How many fingers do you see?”
“I don’t see anything, Billy, somebody’s got his damn thumb stuck in my eye. What happened, you get called in early?”
“How’d you know?” He took his thumb out of my eye and elevated his eyebrows at me.
“The shoes.”
Billy Holliday was, as far as I knew, Seattle’s only cross-dressing detective. I’d met him three days after I was hired: dispatch asked me to rescue an off-duty officer whose car had broken down. Dispatch hadn’t mentioned that the cop in question would be wearing a pale yellow floral print dress and had biceps bigger than my head. Billy looked better in a dress than I did.
Not that I could remember the last time I wore a dress.
Billy inspected his feet. “I shoved my feet into the first thing I found next to the door,” he admitted. “Do you like them?”
I decided I was feeling better, and began to sit up. Billy pushed me back down. “I think they’re great,” I offered, and tried to sit up again. The admiration didn’t appease him, and we had a good little tussle going when Gary’s knees intruded in my line of vision. He crouched while I wondered how I recognized his knees.
“You oughta be dead, lady.”
I let Billy win and dropped
