Winter Moon (27 page)

“Hey.” He came into the kitchen to put a hand on my shoulder and turn me around. “No harm meant, Jo. You arright?”

“I just…” I summarized the experience at the park, staring alternately at his feet and my own, not wanting to meet his eyes. “I just hate this shit. And the thing with remembering my mother all of a sudden just freaked me out.” The microwave beeped and I turned back to it, my stomach grumbling. Gary put a hand on the door, keeping me from opening it.

“Let's hit the voodoo stuff first, darlin'. Food grounds you, you know that. You're shooting yourself in the foot by eating first.” He lifted a bushy eyebrow. “Or is that on purpose?”

I squirmed, feeling like I'd been caught being naughty. Gary grinned, bright flash of white teeth that looked like he'd never smoked a cigarette in his life, and steered me into the living room. “Where's your drum?”

“Bedroom.” I dragged a cushion off the couch and stuffed it against the front door, cutting off the draft that circled from beneath it. Gary went into my bedroom like he belonged there and got my drum.

It was the only thing I owned of any intrinsic value. It'd been a gift from one of the elders out in Qualla Boundary, not long after my father and I moved back there. It was painted with a raven whose wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake, and had a drumstick with a soft rabbit-fur end dyed raspberry red, and a knotted leather end that made sharp rich pangs of sound against the taut leather. Even fourteen years after having been gifted with it, I was still amazed anyone would make something like it for me. Gary knew it, and carried it as if it was fragile, a gesture that made my nose sting with embarrassing emotion.

I settled down on the floor as he came out of the bedroom with the drum and a closed fist. “I thought you might want this.”

I turned my hand up and he dropped a silver choker into my palm. Made of tube links intersected
by triskelions, it had an Irish cross—a simple quartered circle, identical to the Cherokee power circle—as its pendant. “What—?”

“Your mom gave it to you, didn't she?”

“Yeah, I…” She'd given it to me the day she died. I'd worn it for two weeks, gradually getting used to the peculiar feeling of having something resting in the hollow of my throat, until the day I'd been stabbed through the lung and the necklace had been blackened with my blood. It'd taken days to get the stains out, and I hadn't brought myself to put it back on in the intervening weeks. “Yeah, all right.” I swallowed nervously and fastened the choker with fingers that suddenly felt thick and clumsy. “You're all Mr. Insightful tonight, aren't you?”

Gary sat down on the couch cushion that hadn't been scavenged, grinning. “Somebody's gotta be. You ready?”

I nodded, fighting the urge to curl my fingers around the necklace and pull it away from my throat to alleviate the alien pressure of jewelry against my skin. “I'll wake up thirty seconds after you stop drumming.” We'd only done this a few times, but establishing the time felt like ritual. Gary started knocking out a heartbeat rhythm, and I let my eyes drift shut, waiting to follow the sound of the drum out of my own body.

I had a deep dark secret. The world I saw through shamanic eyes—the one in which every thing on earth, be it animal, mineral or vegetable, sparked with the essence of life—was a world I dreamed about even when I was dead set against its reality. The world I saw with my spirit eyes was one where I could see Gary's big rumbly presence like a V-8 engine that a girl could rely on. It was one where I could slide through the ceiling and get an alarming look at my neighbors' sexual proclivities—although this time I went through the window when I separated from my body, because I
can
be taught, and I really didn't need another eyeful of somebody else's sex life.

Except for the glimpse that afternoon, I hadn't looked at the world from a spirit's perspective since January, when my life got turned upside down in the first place. There was something off-kilter as I slid
into the Seattle night. Winter had come on too hard, and the life in the city that sped below me felt strained, like the world was being pushed in a direction it wasn't prepared to go in. The blues I'd seen a few months ago seemed darker, the electricity of life dammed up in some way. Streets seemed more congested, as if their purpose had been forgotten. It hadn't been like this a few months ago, and the feel of it made my skin prickle. There was a lingering feeling of familiarity below the wrongness, but when I reached for it, it slipped away.

I spun through the air, weightless and silent, watching sudden flashes of red and orange erupt in backed-up traffic, countered by calm waves of blue that I tried to encourage, clumsily. I passed a stretch of road where a woman's astrally projected spirit hovered above her car, looking down at traffic much like I did. Pure boredom emanated from her, as if driving home had been so dull it'd flung her out of her own body. She didn't seem to sense my presence, and I whisked past her, not knowing how to stop and say hello.

I left the city behind without having a destination in mind, moving as fast as thought itself. Color, vivid and strong, streaked with the coldness of winter, shot past me, sometimes forming into recognizable images, but more often staying abstract. I wondered if the abstraction was due to my lack of direction, but with the thought came a clear pathway that I recognized with a startled shiver.

A bower of trees arched over a single-track path,
white flowers all but glowing under a source of light I couldn't pinpoint. The path was smooth, as if it had been often walked on. I tumbled from flight to run along it, great huge strides so I felt I was still flying. There was a presence in front of me, somewhere buried in the depths of the earth. It carried its own weight, its own gravity well, drawing me toward it. I careened around a corner, pretending I was driving Petite, and came up against a cave, its mouth blocked off with boulders.

The presence beyond the cave mouth had a genial feeling to it, as if it were amused at my audacity and youth.

I hated feeling like people were laughing at me. I glowered at the boulders and reached for the smallest stone I could find, trying to wriggle it out of its lodged position in the ranks of larger stones.

A vise clamp fastened itself around my wrist, hauled me back, and did something that put my feet over my head and my head against the ground. I lay on my face with a mouthful of dirt, not entirely sure how I'd gotten there but pretty certain that any moment now I was going to start to hurt.

“And what is it,” a woman's voice above me asked, “that you think you're doing, Siobhán Walkingstick?” The lilt of Ireland was strong in her voice, almost masking the sarcasm with which the question was delivered.

I was pretty sure she didn't want an answer. I had comparatively little experience with mothers, but the tone suggested to me that she knew perfectly well
what
I was doing, and that the real question was
why
was I doing something she obviously regarded as unbelievably stupid.

The physical pain I was expecting didn't seem to be coming, so I rolled onto my back and stared up at her. She looked remarkably tall from this vantage, and somewhat bustier than I thought of her as being. She also wore an expression of exasperation that was both more vivid than any expression I could remember seeing on her in life, and which, although strictly speaking was entirely new to me, I had felt on my own face any number of times. Distress settled over me. It didn't seem fair that I was turning into my mother when I'd barely even known the woman.

Eventually one of the numerous things crowding my mind and vying to be said won out: “I asked you not to call me that.” It seemed, even at the moment, an awfully calm response to the appearance of a woman I believed to be dead.

I was treated to a second new expression: dismay, which was wiped out almost instantly by the thoughtful, examining gaze that was all I'd really ever seen of her. “Very well, then. Joanne.” Her tone spoke volumes about what she thought of my Anglicized name, but I was almost entirely overwhelmed with not caring. I got to my feet somewhat stiffly, although I suspected any injuries I'd sustained were in my own mind.

Of course they were. That's what happens when you travel on the astral plane. Moving on, then. I looked back to the wall of rocks, eyeing the one I'd
initially grabbed. “Joanne,” my mother said in a remarkably good “don't you dare test my patience one more time, young lady” voice. I dropped my hand and turned to face her, making a point of looking around rather dramatically.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “Did you think you had something to say to me that I might listen to? Is there some burning reason that I should pay attention to, I don't know, what are you, a banshee or something? You're dead, Mother. We didn't much like each other when you weren't dead. Why don't we just leave it at that and you can go do whatever it is dead people do? I'm busy.”

“Busy.”

“Yes.” I went to work on my rock again, tugging it a few millimeters out of the wall. She clamped her hand around my wrist again. Her fingers were tremendously cold, not just like the dead, but as if she was emitting cold the way a living body emits heat.

“You don't understand what you're doing, Joanne.” I hated the warm lilt of her voice, a low alto that I wanted to instinctively trust. I couldn't possibly have recognized it. She'd abandoned me with my father when I was three months old, but from the moment she'd called me, seven months ago, I'd fought against wanting to curl up in the warmth and safety of that voice and letting myself forget about the world.

“Like you could possibly know what I'm doing. I don't even know what you're doing here. Go
away
.” I yanked my wrist, trying to escape her grasp. I failed
in that, but I did manage to loosen the rock I held. The entire wall shifted ominously, deep scrapes of stone bumping down a few inches against one another. My mother hissed, a sound like an angry cat, then lifted her voice in a high keen that made me jerk away again, this time succeeding and clamping my hands over my ears.

“You will not pass this barrier, Siobhán Walkingstick.” Her voice thundered inside my head, making me equal parts angry and dizzy. I set my teeth together and stomped forward, grabbing my stone again.

They always say, “I never knew what hit me.” Technically, I knew what hit me: it was my mother. Beyond that, I really don't know what happened, except one second I had the stone in my hands and the next I was about forty feet away, lying on my back in the dirt, and she was standing over me like one of God's avenging angels in a blouse and long skirt. My lip was bleeding. I lifted the back of my hand to it, staring up at her. She crouched, putting a hand on my shoulder. It seemed to carry the weight of the world behind it, as profoundly heavy as the draw that had pulled me toward the cave mouth in the first place.

“You are not yet ready to face what lies beyond that wall, daughter. I haven't much time to act, and less time still to tell you about it. Get yourself home. I've no energy for wasting on sullen little girls who refuse to listen to their mothers.”

Her will hit me like a wall itself, reaching right for the core of energy inside me as if it was her
own. She shoved me into the earth with the hand on my shoulder, using my own stored power as her focus point.

I popped out the other side and into my body so hard I fell over backward. Gary stopped drumming and jumped to his feet while I stared at the ceiling and tried to determine if all my parts were where I thought they should be. They were. After a few seconds I said, “Ow,” and thought I'd leave it at that.

There was no part of me that didn't hurt. It wasn't the god-awful pain of having a sword driven through me, but I ached, like someone had…well, shoved me through solid ground. I said, “Ow,” again, for good measure, and pushed myself up slowly. Gary hovered over me, nervous but kind enough not to ask.

“What the hell happened?”

All right, kind enough not to ask for a few seconds, at least. I shook my head, exhaustion sweeping over me without warning. The bubble of energy inside me that I spent so much time trying to ignore was depleted again. I felt like I'd been depending on it without knowing about it. “I need food.”

I got up, largely to see if I could, and wobbled to the kitchen door. When I'd reached the frame without mishap, I turned my head to answer Gary's question. “I don't think my mother is as dead as I thought she was.”

 

I refused to say anything else until I'd eaten. Gary finally stopped asking, “Zombie? Vampire? Wraith?” and ate his own dinner, watching me with the eager
ness of a kid at Christmastime. I swear, anybody on the planet—except possibly Morrison—would have been better suited to my insane new world than I was. Billy had already lived with something like it his whole life. Gary thought it was cool. I wanted it to all go away so I could sleep in peace at night, and work on Petite by day.

“There's something out there,” I finally said. Gary gave an evocative snort that made me aim a kick at him under the table. To both our surprise, it connected, and he yelped, looking injured.

“Sorry. I mean, something that wants me to go check it out. My mother was standing sentinel over it tonight. She wasn't there last time.”

“Last time?”

“I saw it in January. Look, that doesn't matter. She kicked my ass.”

Gary put a bite of spaghetti—the closest thing I had in the freezer to chicken fettuccine—in his mouth to hide a smirk. I drew my foot back for another kick, then remembered I'd managed to hit him once already and felt guilty. He looked smug, making me annoyed for feeling guilty, so I swung at him again. I missed. “So obviously,” I said through gritted teeth, “she thinks whatever's behind door number one is dangerous.”

“Then you should stay away from it,” Gary said wisely.

“I don't even know what it is!”

“Mothers are always right. Don't you know that?” He wrinkled his eyes into nonexistence as I scowled
at him. “Right. I forgot. Sorry.” He paused. “Mothers are always right. You don't wanna find out what's behind that door.”

“Gary!”

He lifted his hands defensively. “I'm just sayin'.”

“Well, dammit, I want to know what's back there.” I hesitated. “She said I wasn't ready for it.”

Gary's bushy eyebrows rose. “If you'll excuse me for coppin' a phrase from today,
duh.
You really think you're ready for the monster in the closet?”

“No, but I'd like to know what it is! Knowledge is half the battle, or something.”

“Look.” Gary pointed his fork at me. “What'd you go in there looking for?”

I shrugged, uncomfortable. “I don't know. Nothing specific.”

“Okay. There's your problem. You got no focus. You need to go in there and talk to somebody who knows what's going on. Your buddy the coyote.”

“Coyote never gives me a straight answer.” I sounded just like the sullen kid my mother had accused me of being.

“Yeah, that's kinda what the whole trickster thing is all about, Jo.”

I flung my hands in the air. “Why do you know that? Why does everybody on the whole planet know this stuff that I don't? Why didn't somebody else get this stupid talent? You can have it. You'd be a lot better at it than I am!”

Gary huffed. “Probably.”

My rant cut off as my jaw dropped. Gary's gray
eyes sparked good humor with a steely undercut. “You done?”

“Uh.” I cleared my throat. “Um. Yes. Thank you.”

“You got something special, kid. You're gonna have to learn to suck it up and live with it, or walk away. Right now there's some dead ladies out there that maybe you can help, if you stop your whining and bitching and get on with it. Are you gonna do that, or what?”

“Okay.” I sounded very small and pathetic. And embarrassed.

“Arright.” Gary got up, his plastic spaghetti dish in one hand. “Let's go try this again, then.” He stalked into the living room, leaving his muttered, “Jeez. Dames,” lingering on the air.

 

It took longer to go under this time, in part because of chagrin and in part because of the microwaved fried chicken that settled in my tummy and made me more aware of my body than was helpful. After several minutes of drumming, though, I suddenly fell backward into my body and found myself scrambling down a thin tunnel, in search of an internal garden that somehow reflected the state of my soul.