Chapter Twelve
Jolie and I studied the papers Coyote had arranged on the coffee table. I tried to decipher the writing. Most were illegible chicken scratches made with a ballpoint pen or a pencil. Plus a black Sharpie. Highlighters. Crayons! I recognized a few letters but the words could’ve been English or Spanish. And some of the writing looked Chinese or Korean or Balanese. Hebrew? Maybe ancient Mixtec. Perhaps Martian?
The sketches were just as confounding. Lots of circles and lines and squiggles.
Coyote watched, arms folded, nodding like he was pleased that I understood what he had planned … which I didn’t.
Jolie hunched forward from the sofa and squinted. Her forehead wadded into confused wrinkles. “What exactly are we looking at?”
Coyote fanned his hands. Isn’t it obvious?
Jolie plucked a drawing of The Sun Dagger and held it up. “Let me guess.” She waved her other hand over the table. “All this explains how to use the Sun Dagger?”
He smiled, his thin cracked lips forming an uneven crescent around his crooked, yellow teeth. “Simple, no?”
“Which can only be used during the day?” she asked.
“Why would you ask that?” he replied.
Jolie reached for my knee and squeezed, though I’m sure she would’ve rather rolled her eyes and screamed in frustration.
Coyote stroked his chin. “I see that I lost you.” His voice became very Ivy League, clenched-jaw professorial. The aura over his head formed a mortarboard complete with tassel. “Invoking the Sun Dagger takes one from place to place along the edges of the psychic plane. To do so, we need the rays of the sun, either directly or reflected.”
I recalled last night’s moon. It shined from the sun’s reflected light. Not quite full though certainly bright enough to cast a dagger of light across the petroglyph. I said, “We’ll use the light of the moon to orient ourselves on the Sun Dagger.”
Coyote’s mortarboard morphed into an exclamation mark. “You got it, vato. It’s transcendental astral physics.” His accent returned to barrio Chicano. “In two nights, the Sun Dagger will line up with D-Galtha.”
“Which is what?”
“Where you two are going.”
Following Coyote’s reasoning was like chasing a chicken through a labyrinth. “Is that the planet where Carmen is being held prisoner?”
Coyote rifled through the papers and picked one with a sketch of a circle with an X marked over it. He jabbed at the X. “She’s right here.”
“D-Galtha? Is that a planet? A spaceship?”
“It is where you’ll find Carmen.”
Realizing this was all he would share, I pressed forward. “How do you know?”
Coyote put the paper back on the table. “Long ago, and I mean, long, long ago, un hechicero guajiro—”
Jolie interrupted, “A who?”
“Medicine man. Shaman,” I translated.
“Sí,” continued Coyote. “He was the one who gave me the name coyote, saying that if I was to survive la conquista, I had to be as clever and tricky as my animal tocayo. Said that I wouldn’t be able to get by forever on my good looks.”
“Wise man,” quipped Jolie.
“He taught me about the world beyond what we can see or touch. He showed me las puertas, the portals, into the psychic plane.”
Coyote reached into the shoebox and withdrew a large folded paper. He spread it open. It was a charcoal rubbing of the Sun Dagger.
He cleared a space on the table and laid the paper flat. He gestured to me and tapped his finger at a point on the spiral. “Felix, put your hand here. La derecha.”
I extended my right hand.
He grasped my wrist and tugged my arm, forcing me to get off the sofa and walk around the table to stand beside him. He said, “Spread your fingers,” and adjusted the placement of my hand on the upper left quadrant of the spiral. “You must put your mano exactly like this.” Reaching behind his ear, he produced the stubby remnant of a pencil that had been crudely whittled to a point and traced around my hand.
Coyote made a whisking motion, indicating that I remove my hand and sit back down. He leafed through the papers until he found one with a list of numbers. He wrote along the bottom of the paper. 12:22:00.
“This is the exact time you must put your hand on the Sun Dagger.”
“At night, yes?”
Coyote jotted AM beside the time. He frowned suddenly, looked back at the list of numbers, scratched out the number he’d written, and wrote a new time. 11:43:00 PM.
I stared at the number. “You sure about this?”
He leaned back and crossed his legs and his arms. “Símon. It’s very technical. You summon the portal at the wrong time, boom, you’ll find yourself on Jupiter.”
Jolie asked, “And you’re going to show us how to use the Sun Dagger?”
Coyote sighed. “I’ll teach what I can. It took me years of experimenting con el guajiro just to find the doors. And many more years to open them. And still more to learn how to enter and navigate the psychic plane.”
“Experimenting?”
“With peyote. Much of it.” Coyote’s eyes crossed, then swiveled in opposite directions, spun a few times, and finally aimed straight. “Fortunately, it didn’t affect me at all.”
“Of course not,” I replied.
Jolie asked, “What if we miss the time?”
“Not good.” Coyote grimaced. “It’ll be another one hundred and thirteen years before it aligns again.”
“How do you know Carmen is on D-Galtha?”
“I was in the middle of one my beautiful peyote dreams,” Coyote turned wistful, “when I heard Carmen’s voice.”
“You know her?”
“No. But I heard this voice and I recognized it as hers.”
I asked, “You recognized the voice of someone you didn’t know?”
“Vato, when you’re tripping on peyote, anything is possible.”
Fair enough.
“Tonight we’ll practice with the Sun Dagger. Nothing fancy. Just a quick spin to Alpha Centauri and back. Dress warm.”
“We rescue Carmen and then what? How can she stop Phaedra?”
“Even I have to wait for that answer,” Coyote replied. “But once she is back here, then Phaedra must fight the four of us.”
“What do you know about D-Galtha?”
Coyote turned glum. “Only that it is a dangerous place guarded by the most dangerous aliens in the galaxy.”
“Naturally,” noted Jolie.
“What about Cress Tech?” I asked. “We return to Fajada Butte and shoot through the psychic plane again, won’t we trip their alarms?”
“I’m sure of it, ese. But like I said, tonight we’ll go on a quick trip. We’ll be on and off that pinchi rock before the Cress Tech helicopters and their pendejo guards get a clue.”
“I’d like to know how close the government is to unlocking the secrets of Fajada Butte.” My job as an enforcer for the Araneum was to protect the secrets of the supernatural world. Once humans learned how to enter the psychic plane, then it wouldn’t be long before they discovered what shouldn’t exist. Vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. La Llorona. El Cucuy. Fairies. Then humans would do to us what they did to the dodo birds, the passenger pigeon, and most of the Native Americans.
“Carmen first,” Coyote replied. “Then we fuck with Cress Tech.”
He called for Rainelle. No answer. He got up and looked out back. He returned to the living room, appearing confused. “Her truck is here.” He read his Rolex. “Past eight. Time for dinner.”
I hadn’t been keeping track of Rainelle, and the last time I had seen her was hours ago. Concern nipped at my kundalini noir.
Jolie sensed it too because she got a serious look on her face, reached for her jacket, and slipped it on to prepare for action.
Coyote opened the kitchen door and hollered into the night, “Rainelle.”
No answer except for the bleating of goats. He called for Che. Nothing.
A hunch soured my belly, the acid burn telling me to expect bad news. I put on my jacket.
Something beeped. All three of us glanced at the psychotronic diviner on the coffee table.
The crystal emitted a warning glow.
Phaedra was calling.