Changing clothes also gave me a minute in private to nerve myself up to handing the drum over to Morrison. I pulled on sweats and a warm shirt, took my contacts out and washed away the kohl eyeliner before putting my glasses on. The woman in the mirror was unfamiliar, straight black hair falling around her face and catching in the glasses’ earpieces. I pulled the wig off, dropped it on the toilet, and scrubbed my fingers through my hair, creating short messy spikes that made me look more like myself. The warrior princess was gone. It was just me, Joanne Walker, and I couldn’t help thinking the other reflection made a much better hero type than I did. For one thing, anybody willing to run around in that outfit had metaphorical balls of solid steel, whereas I only had an uncanny ability to keep staggering forward despite panic and uncertainty.
A bubble of warmth erupted in my belly, a reminder that I had a little more than a knack for keeping on against impossible odds. The damn magic could be comforting, sometimes.
It could also be bossy. I got my drum off my bureau and stood with it for a moment, running my fingers over its dyed surface. A raven’s wings sheltered a wolf and a rattlesnake. Their bright colors were unchanged after half a lifetime, but the wolf looked smeared, as if the drum’s surface had gotten wet. I wiped my fingers against it gingerly, worry making a pit of sickness in my belly. It didn’t blur any further, and there was nothing in the leather’s tension that suggested it had been soaked or damaged. For the first time I wondered if the figure was supposed to be a coyote, not a wolf, and if the smearing had something to do with my mentor’s death. The sickness in my stomach turned to tears burning my eyes, and I clenched my fingers around the drum’s edge, bone and leather denting my flesh. The polished beads that dangled from crossed lengths of leather holding the skin tight against its frame rattled, strain in my hands translating to the drum. It had been a gift for my fifteenth birthday, overwhelming and bewildering: I’d had no waking recollection of the dream-borne shamanic training I was undergoing. The drum was the first thing I’d ever had that made me feel welcome among what were technically, if not emotionally, my people.
My father was about as full-blooded Cherokee as you got in this day and age, and had been born with a wanderlust that’d sent him away from North Carolina and the Eastern tribe as a young man. He’d met my mother in New York, and she’d brought me to him when I was three months old. I took after her in most ways: fair skin and a smattering of freckles, green eyes and black hair, though hers had waves and mine was unrelentingly straight. In color, I looked Irish. In black and white, my bone structure stood out, and I was clearly Native American. The thing is, despite truisms like kids don’t see shades of gray, what they saw when Dad took me home to Qualla Boundary was a tall gangly white girl with a perpetual chip on her shoulder. It wasn’t their fault. It was how I’d seen myself, even though I’d been the one who insisted on settling down somewhere so I could go to high school in one place.
I don’t think my father’d ever intended to go back to the Carolinas, but that was where he took me. We’d gotten by, me with an eternal defiant scowl and Dad with the air of always waiting to leave again. I didn’t know if he was still there. I hadn’t talked to him in years.
The more I looked back and thought about it, the more I knew my exile’d been largely self-imposed. My first memories were of Dad’s big old boat of a Cadillac driving across the country, and my favorite memories were those of him teaching me how to work on that car, and then all the others that came along. We’d rarely stayed in any town long enough for me to make friends at the schools I’d gone to—six weeks here, six weeks there didn’t do the job—and by the time we went to Qualla Boundary I had a hate-on at the world. It hadn’t wanted me, so I didn’t want it.
Truth was, in most ways, I’d only just started getting over that. I touched the smeary colors on my drum again, and, assured that it at least wasn’t going to rupture if Morrison used it, took it out to the living room. Morrison stood up to take it from me, which seemed oddly respectful. I didn’t know how to tell him I appreciated the gesture, and instead tried to steel myself against the vicarious thrill I expected when he took it.
To my supreme disappointment, I got nothing. Maybe I’d steeled myself too well. We both held on to the drum for a second, before Morrison said, “Stick?” in a tone that suggested maybe I wasn’t too bright. I let go with a curse and went back for the drumstick, brushing my fingers against its cranberry-red rabbit-fur end before handing it over to my boss with far less expectation of getting a buzz. I didn’t get one then, either, and sat down on the floor, telling myself I shouldn’t be sullen.
Billy groaned. “Do we have to be on the floor?”
I blinked up at him. “I don’t know. Do you even have to be in the same place I am? I don’t really know what your plan is.”
“You’ve never journeyed inside with anyone?”
“Is that a question that should be asked in polite company?”
Melinda laughed. “Good thing we’re not polite company.”
I wrinkled my nose at her, then shrugged at Billy. “Everybody who’s turned up has just been there. I never invited anyone. I’ve done it the other way, kind of. Been invited in, or sort of fallen in.” From the corner of my eye I saw Morrison’s expression grow increasingly strained, and guilty recollection sizzled through me. “Or barged in.”
Billy frowned. “You need to work on your sense of personal boundaries.”
Guilt crashed right over into irritation. He was no doubt right, but this was a lousy time to bring it up. “I’m under the impression that I need to make sure my brain isn’t haunted. Can we maybe worry about my crappy people skills later?”
Morrison said, “If I start beating this thing will they stop arguing?” to Melinda, and without further ado, did.
My world flipped upside down.
It might’ve been technically more accurate to say I flipped upside down. Or that I turned inside out. Either way, the floor went from below me to above me, leaving me sitting cross-legged on a roof of the earth with a tunnel burrowing down below me. I stayed there a couple of seconds, taken aback at how quickly the transition had happened. I knew Morrison could send me to other planes of existence with a touc…There was no way to get out of that sentence alive. The point was, he helped my transition from one world to another, but even so, I was used to the drumming settling into my skin before it transported me elsewhere. Just blinking from one world to another was disconcerting.
Billy presumably wouldn’t have such a dramatically quick crossover, but that didn’t mean I should stick—so to speak—around on the roof of the earth. I pushed off the ground and dived into the tunnel, squirming my way deeper. Almost instantly, I wasn’t me any longer, not the way I think of myself, person-shaped with two legs and a torso and arms and a head. Industrious paws dug at the earth instead, pushing it aside with far more skill than my weak human hands could’ve done. I wasn’t sure what I was; rodents weren’t much for external awareness of what they looked like, but at least I was efficient.
I popped through to a sunlit garden in record time and staggered around on four feet, getting my bearings. A good shake got dirt out of my fur, and another one whisked me into my usual shape. I thought someday I might, like, get to just walk through a tunnel big enough to hold me, but so far when I’d come into my garden it’d mostly been as one form of vermin or another.
That was a thought I definitely didn’t want to pursue. Instead I lifted a hand to block glare—apparently nobody’d told my inner sanctuary that it was four in the morning—and had a look around.
When I’d first come to this place, it was the most rigid, well-defined little plot of land I’d ever seen. The grass had been mown to a millimeter height, so dry and sparse the ground could be seen between blades. The benches had been austere, uncomfortable things, and the pathways had been narrow and very straight. A pond at the northern end had been shallow with a trickle feeding it, and the sky had been gray. In my defense, I’d been dying at the time, but anybody looking around might’ve guessed I’d been dead a long time already.