once not self-conscious about greeting the cardinal directions aloud and asking them to be the points of my power circle. I guessed that meant I was getting better about ritual.
Not that much better, though, because what I really ended up with was a power diamond, with Annie sort of squeezed in the middle. It couldn’t be helped: the room wasn’t big enough and the medical equipment wasn’t mobile enough for anything else, but it emphasized the awareness that my whole shamanic approach seemed to be that rules were made to be broken. I sat beside Annie again and gave Morrison a hopeful look. He got my drum from the corner I’d tucked it in, and he and Gary sat across from me.
Gary did a double-take at the drum, which was fair enough. When he’d first seen it, its broad round surface had been painted with a wolf, a rattlesnake and a raven. Or I’d always assumed it was a wolf, anyway, until the painting had faded and disappeared. Only then did I start to think maybe it had been a coyote, representing my spiritual guide and mentor, whose influence on me had begun to wane. In the past few days I’d found a new spirit animal, a walking stick bug, and a new image had come in strong on the drum, obliterating the coyote: a praying mantis, its sticklike legs folded in its best-known pose. The rest of the drum remained unchanged: crossbars inside it to hold on to, beads and feathers dangling here and there from the four-inch-deep sides and a drumstick padded with raspberry-red-dyed rabbit fur. Morrison spun the drumstick in his fingers with unexpected grace, then, at my nod, began a steady beat.
Energy burst forth, a visible ripple, like sound waves had been given color so ordinary eyes might see them. Not that my eyes were ordinary: I was using the Sight, calling on magic, but the shock of power seemed so natural I was surprised I couldn’t always see it. It leaped from one point of the diamond to the next with each beat of the drum, passing through each of us as it closed the circle. It picked up all our colors—Gary’s solid silver, my gunmetal-blue, Morrison’s blue and purple—and it came together as a soft white wall of magic. That was what white magic really was: additive, the power of many working together. Black magic was subtractive, sucking life away from one or many in order to feed itself.
And that was what was going on inside of Annie Muldoon. The sickness that had been put inside her was eating away at her life and strength for its own benefit, and to the eventual detriment of the world. That wasn’t just about Annie. That was simply how the Master worked. Every spark of love and life he was able to extinguish gave him an incrementally larger hold on humanity. Annie was the poster girl for demonstrative purposes today, but it wasn’t like the entire battle lived or died with her. There would always be other hills to take. Right now, though, taking this particular hill would be enough. I exhaled quietly and let myself slip out of my body, searching for a way through the darkness to heal Annie Muldoon’s body and soul.
An unexpectedly familiar vista came into focus around me as I left my body behind. The first several times I’d spirit-walked, I’d been unable to control it, and had dug my way through to the different metaphysical planes I needed to reach. Literally dug: I’d usually end up in loamy, life-filled earth, my sense of myself turning badger or vole or wormlike as I churned my way through the soil in search of my destination. I was back there again, working through dirt chunked with vast rocks and water-filled drainage points. Back in the day, the impediments probably would have stopped me cold. These days, not so much.
For one thing, back in the day I’d have assumed there was only one path to get to where I was going, and that it lay straight ahead. I smiled faintly at my slightly younger self, then extended my hands upward. I supposed I shouldn’t really have been able to: I was packed into dirt and stone, but I’d always been able to move through it while in an astral realm, and at the moment it made me think of swimming. I wasn’t the world’s strongest swimmer, but I wouldn’t drown in a pool, which was enough. For an instant the dirt surrounding me was pool water, and I was on the bottom of the pool. I bent my knees, pushed off all the way through my toes, and burst upward into the heart of Annie Muldoon’s inner sanctum, into the garden that represented the state of her soul.
Dirt splashed away from me like water, rolling off my skin and streaming from my clothes. I ran my hand over my hair to get rid of the worst of the “wet,” then turned my palm up to watch dirt absorb into the lifeline there, just as water might do. The part of me that would always be six years old wanted to squeak, “So cool!” and do a little dance. Shamanism’s basic tenet was change: to heal someone, it was necessary to change their outlook for just an instant, just long enough to get their attention. It worked that way on every level, so if I could make myself believe, even briefly, that dirt was water, well, then, I could move through dirt like I could move through water.
Magic, when I let myself acknowledge it, was really pretty damned nifty. I shook the last of the dirt away and lifted my eyes, trying to prepare myself for the worst possible visage of Annie’s garden.
Unfortunately, I got it. I had just come off a visit to Aidan’s war-ravaged garden, a place that had been so damaged it crumbled beneath our feet. Annie’s was maybe even worse than that.
What had no doubt once been greenery was infested with black oil. Not just slicked with it, but grayed-out leaves pulsed black ichor through their thin veins like it was sap, and the roots of bleached grass sucked death out of the dry soil. Meadows and scant trees rolled on forever, the size of the place reminding me a little of the jungle that represented Gary’s garden. It appeared a life well-led created a tremendous depth of soul that was represented by vast distances. I thought of my own small, tidy garden, and how the walls that penned it in were only just now crumbling. I had a long way to go to catch up to Gary and Annie. Or even Morrison, for that matter. I was getting there, though, and every step I took through my own garden or someone else’s helped me become a little more of what I wanted to be.
Feeling a bit braver and more confident, I walked into Annie’s meadows, trying not to shiver at the bleak sky above. It twisted in unhealthy purples and blacks, and I had the distinct sense it was pulling at me and at the garden around me. Wonderful. A miniature black hole in the midst of Annie’s garden. Just what we all needed. Even more distressingly, it reminded me of the vortex Raven Mocker had come through, back in Carolina. I did not want to follow that thought to its obvious conclusion.
Instead, I reached out and touched a branch on one of the sickly, sparse trees as I went by. It crumbled, leaving a tacky substance on my fingertips. My own magic glimmered softly beneath the sticky stuff, shields ensuring that it wouldn’t sink into my skin and contaminate me, too.
Which it certainly wanted to do. It smeared across my fingers without help from me, seeking a way in so it could infect this new, healthy territory it had found. I lifted my hand, hoping for a way to get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior, then hesitated. There was always a heart to the darkness, and it was just possible I could let the muck guide me there.
Not all that long ago, the very thought would have gotten me in trouble. I was grateful that the stuff didn’t instantly slide through my shields and gobble up my soul. Even so, I concluded it probably wouldn’t be all that smart to grab another branch and get more of the glop on me. Naturally, that’s what I did: coated both hands in the unpleasant crumbly sticky goo, then closed my eyes and did my best to feel whether it wanted to tug me in any particular direction. It reminded me of driving on a worn road, where the wheels of the vehicle slid into ruts and rumbled along there whether the driver liked it or not. It meant turning aside was difficult, but I wasn’t looking to turn aside just now. I wanted that easy pull, and it seemed like it should work.
Nothing happened.
After standing there long enough to start feeling foolish, I opened my eyes again and swallowed a squeak. Apparently my definition of nothing and the garden’s definition of nothing were not the same. I was no longer in a meadow. I was no longer in a garden, for that matter. I stood on the very edge of a black precipice, wind rushing up to rip tears from my eyes. I couldn’t see a damned thing
