Obnoxious little voice or no, I sat down by my pond, trailing my fingers into the water. It struck me suddenly as being a good conduit for reaching Billy, even working into the siphoning of life essence he was experiencing. I could still feel my hand on his shoulder, in a vague, disconnected way, which was interesting. I’d never tried paying attention to my physical body while inside the garden of my mind. Then again, I hadn’t really needed to, and now I was trying to build a bridge between myself and my patient. Trying to find a way inside him so we could get the healing process started.

It was my right hand both on his shoulder and splooshing around in my pond. The most peculiar thing was that having two body awarenesses going on at once only sounded strange when I tried putting it into words; it felt completely natural. I turned my focus to my fingers, calling up the bubble of power that resided inside me.

It responded as easily as it had before, splashing through me in silver-blue joy at being used. Warmth and glee ran up through my torso and into my arm, washing down the blood vessels just as it had done with Gary, and then poured itself into my pond. The charged water glimmered and shone, quicksilver with life and depth of its own. My consciousness spilled into it, and over Billy’s skin, making me aware of his heartbeat, his breathing, first on the surface, and then slowly from within, as if he was permeable and I was water.

I cut the snide little voice off before it could comment, that time. I knew perfectly well the permeation was what I was trying to accomplish, but it didn’t make succeeding any less surprising to me. Still, having my brain back-talk at me when I was trying to concentrate couldn’t be of any help.

The entire sensation was incredibly subtle, like being brushed by fur so soft I couldn’t be sure I’d been touched. It could also have been insanely erotic, and for a moment I was torn between gratitude I was working with Billy and a fantasy about working with Morrison.

God, I wished I would stop thinking things like that. I set my teeth together both literally and figuratively, and concentrated on the idea of permeating my way through flesh and bone and into Billy’s psyche, so I could enter the garden of his soul and work my anti-siphoning magic.

For a minute there, I thought it was going to work. I slid through dreams, trying not to look at them, under the unlikely logic that they weren’t my business. Traipsing around in people’s unconscious minds: my business. Snooping while I’m doing it: not kosher. I had an interesting set of moral boundaries going on there.

But the water metaphor was working, letting me drain down toward his garden. I got the impression that the idea of the garden was something I superimposed on Billy, and that he adapted to because I was the one awake in this scenario. Regardless, it provided the structure I needed, a bright spot at the center of his being, hints of green visible even from my outside vantage point. I exhaled a sigh of relief.

Warm, heavy blackness came down around his garden like a Carolina night, so thick and dark there was nothing left to breathe. There were faint shining prisms in the black, ripples of purple and blue that had the faintest living texture to them when I saw them from the corners of my eyes, and which disappeared entirely when I looked straight at them, too dark to be seen.

My water metaphor held together, leaving me beading against tar, unable to push through the darkness. I gnawed my lower lip, wondering which level of reality I was doing that on, and tried to pull the droplets of myself back together, coalescing into a whole presence lingering within Billy’s mind as a semi-welcome guest.

Sleepy, weighty midnight swam around me, trying as hard—harder—than I was to enter that core of Billy’s self. It brought slow pressure to bear, something about its presence suggesting it had all the time it needed, and that it would eventually prevail. I, on the other hand, was beginning to think I had a limited window in which to save my friend’s life. The sleepy power didn’t seem to be interested in acknowledging me, and I couldn’t tell if Billy knew I was there. If my water metaphor had failed, there had to be another way. Something more direct, something completely the opposite of what the weight that kept Billy asleep was trying to accomplish.

A needle sounded good. I restructured the idea of my approach without putting too much thought into it, half afraid I’d tip something off if I was too noisy about my intentions. Coyote had told me more than once that the psychic planes were dangerous places, and while I felt relatively safe in the confines of Billy’s head, he probably had, too, and now he was stuck in a coma. I made the idea of myself thin, piercing through the uncomprehending darkness with ease as I injected myself toward Billy’s garden. One pinprick hole to carry a healing element into the garden. It made sense.

I smacked into a barrier hard enough to make my head ring and landed back in my own body, holding a hand over my eye. “Ow.”

“Walker?” Morrison was beside me, his hand hovering over my shoulder. I moved my fingers away from my face, brushing his touch away before it happened.

“I’m okay.” My left eye socket hurt. Not like the hangover, which I’d managed to forget about, but as if I’d been smacked with a ball. Or like a needle tip had hit bone instead of forgiving flesh. “I’m all right.” I put my hand over my eye again, squinting the other one at Melinda. “Mel, I think I should talk to you.” I didn’t want to give Brad a significant look, but my squinty eye flashed to him, anyway. “Alone.”

Brad exhaled in noisy exasperation. “She’s one of your insane friends, isn’t she, Melinda?”

“Joanne Walker,” Morrison said in clipped tones, “is a police officer under my command. She is here because I asked her to be. If you have a problem with that, Dr. Holliday, you can take it up with me.”

I wanted to cheer Morrison or hug him or something equally inappropriate, but my mouth had broken into a wide grin and my tummy was jumping with barely contained jiggles of laughter. “Doc Holliday,” I said happily. “I mean, I never got why your parents were cruel enough to call Billy Billy instead of Will or William, but Doc Holliday you did to yourself.”

The look Morrison gave me suggested I wasn’t helping matters. The look Bradley Holliday gave me suggested he’d heard the joke several thousand times now and it wasn’t any funnier than it had been the first time. Me, I didn’t care. For one brief, shining moment, life was good. Still grinning, I turned to Melinda, and all my humor fell away at the scared look in her eyes. “Crap,” I said quietly, and looked at Brad again. “Can you give me a minute with Mel, please?”

“She’ll tell me whatever you tell her,” he said pompously. I glanced at Melinda, who shrugged and nodded. I shrugged, too.

“Okay. There’s something keeping him asleep. Something that’s trying to drain his life energy. You were feeding it with all that pow—” I glanced at Morrison and Brad, shrugged again and modified what I was saying to “—good will you were giving him. I could get through it, but I couldn’t get into Billy’s psyche. He can take care of himself.” I lifted my hand to my eye again, then let it fall. “His own shields kept me out, and they’re keeping that thing, whatever it is, from draining him dry, too. I’ve never had to get through somebody’s shields, Mel. I don’t know how to do it, but I can learn, and then between me and Billy we’ll get that leech off him. It’s going to be okay.”

Melinda began a nod, taking a quick breath to speak, but Bradley beat her to it with a growled “This is preposterous. Bill needs medical care, not a quack with a drum and a mouthful of new-age nonsense.”

Morrison scowled at me, clearly on Brad Holliday’s side of things. I sympathized with them both, which only made everything more complicated. “I’m sorry, Captain. If it was going to be easy, the doctors probably could’ve woken him up. But I’ll figure it out. I really will,” I promised, then offered a hopeful smile and added, “Look at it this way. At least nobody’s dead.”