It was just as clearly not my world. Things rode the wind with me, most of them barely held in one shape, like someone had released spirits from their bodies and set them drifting. A few were more real, for lack of a better word: far below me sunlight glittered off gold wings, reminder of the thunderbird I’d once encountered. I triggered the Sight like it might give me binocular vision, but not only was it not designed to do that, it had no effect anyway. I was already viewing everything psychically, and couldn’t reach any deeper.
There were lots of places to visit, astrally speaking. Out of all of them, I’d spent the least time here, in the Upper World. In fact, the only other time I’d come here, it had also been an accident. It had been a test, then, though I hadn’t known it at the time. I was a little better prepared in terms of knowledge for facing another such test. Sadly, given the events of the evening, I was possibly even less prepared magically, which was saying something.
I was not prepared for a swarm of locusts to buzz out of the pale sky and attack me. Sadly for my dignity, I shut my eyes and screamed like a little girl, flailing in an attempt to get the things off me. Instead they clung with remarkable determination, jillions of little feet sticking to me while I gibbered. I wasn’t precisely afraid of bugs, any more than I was afraid of mice. But something in my hind brain turned me into a fifties housewife when a mouse skittered across the floor, and apparently swarms of green buzzing bugs did the same thing.
Except the bugs kept buzzing, and I could only keep up the shrieking and squirming for so long before I started feeling like an idiot. Last time an animal had come after me in the Upper World, it had eaten me. The grasshoppers weren’t doing that. I pried one eye open to look nervously at them.
They weren’t grasshoppers. Lots of them were green, it was true, but the one sitting on my shoulder was a praying mantis, its odd leaflike limbs crooked like Dr. Evil’s as it watched me. A shudder started at the bottom of my soul and worked its way up to chill my skin. The mantis lifted its feet delicately and put them back down again as goose bumps disturbed him. Somehow it looked disappointed, which was not an expression I was accustomed to seeing on a bug. I mumbled a sheepish apology, and opened my other eye so I could look at the host of insects swarming me.
They had to number in the hundreds, even thousands. Not all of them were mantises, but enough were: I was pretty sure that many carnivorous bugs could make short order of me if they wanted to. Unlike the thunderbird, though, that didn’t seem to be their purpose. They seemed to be waiting on me, which made flailing and shrieking seem even less productive. I pulled my arms in tight, trying not to squish any bugs, and peered at them. Stick bugs, all of them, the sort I’d seen lots of in North Carolina. Those that weren’t mantises were my paternal family’s namesakes, walking sticks. It would be hypocritical to freak out over a bug I was named after, so I made myself unfold an arm and put a hand out to one of the bigger walking sticks. It walked carefully up my arm, paused at my shoulder to smack the mantis away, then put two of its long spindly legs against my face. I bit back a squeal of panic and stared cross-eyed at the thing.
It stared back. I don’t know what I expected from a bug, but that wasn’t it. It should have been it, since bugs weren’t known for their great interspecies communications, but I’d spent a fair amount of time having prolonged discussions with ravens, rattlesnakes, coyotes and occasionally other animals. In my world, a bug that talked to me wouldn’t have been all that unusual. But no, it just sat there gazing at me, and finally dropped its feet and walked back down my arm again, leaving me, once more, with the sensation I’d disappointed an insect.
When it reached my fingertips, it jumped off, and the Upper World disappeared from around me.
I was a little surprised to awaken in Morrison’s garden. I’d forgotten that’s where I’d been headed, before the stick insect interlude. It took a moment to shake off the feeling of hundreds of tiny bug feet crawling all over me, and to take a good look around.
I was in roughly the same place I’d been last time I’d visited his garden: a granite cliff littered with stubborn trees and a vista that overlooked half the world. Precarious for me, perhaps, but it was an easily defensible spot. Morrison could effectively shove an unwanted visitor off the cliff, if he had to protect the core of what he was. The whole garden was wild country, the sort that could kill somebody anyway, if they weren’t careful, and the fact that it reflected Morrison’s soul said a lot about his confidence and competence.
It was also perfect territory for a wolf, but I doubted Morrison would be shapeshifted here. If he was, the situation was a whole lot worse than I thought, and my half-baked ideas of bringing him back to the dance troupe were going to require a great deal more baking, and probably Coyote’s guidance as well. My Coyote, Little Coyote, not the desert-stalking archetype. I didn’t want to bother him for any reason, not if I could avoid it.
Nor did I want to start bellowing for my boss. That seemed inexcusably rude, as if barging into his garden wasn’t already. So I stood there, watching an eagle on an updraft, until I got the spine-itchy feeling of someone looking at me. I turned around.
Morrison sat a few yards away, a magnificent silver wolf with blue eyes and an expression very like Morrison-the-man could wear: one that said, somewhat impatiently, What are you doing here, Walker?
“What I’m not doing is having yet another silent conversation with an animal. Come on, Morrison. I know this place, right here, and if I know it, you can’t be so far gone as to be stuck as a wolf in your own garden. I’m sure it’s very sexy and all, but I need to talk t—”
He shivered into human form somewhere far too close to the beginning of my last sentence, and remained where he was, with the exact same expression he’d had as a wolf. Except now he was—well.
At least he was dressed. Or at least mostly dressed, which he wouldn’t be if he’d shifted back to human in the real world. He was in jeans, which Morrison almost never wore, and a snug tanktop-style undershirt. No shoes. No socks. No shirt over the tanktop, and for some reason the tank was about eight hundred times more provocative than being totally shirtless would have been. It was the whole promise of something more, I guessed, but damn, it worked. A year ago I’d thought he was a little soft around the middle. The softness had disappeared over the course of the past twelve months, but the tanktop provided an opportunity to appreciate just how not-soft he was. Really clean solid muscular arms looped around his knees. Broad smooth shoulders with the shadow of a tattoo on one, though I couldn’t see what it was. The idea of Morrison having a tattoo at all cranked my brain around a few times and set it on a bewildered spin cycle. It was not, however, my brain which was doing most of the assessment of a half-dressed Morrison, so I didn’t really miss it as I licked my lips and kept right on gawking.
After a while he arched one eyebrow, which reminded me he was quite aware of my staring. I cleared my throat, wondering why on God’s little green earth I ever opted to use a word like sexy in relation to my boss within his hearing, and then wondering if that word choice had precipitated his clothing decisions on a subliminal level. It took another long moment or three to get past that idea and finally croak, “Hi.”
“Last time,” Morrison said, “you said this always works in fairy tales. Which one are we in now, Walker? Beauty and the Beast?”