I found myself studying her awhile before answering. "You're very brave," I said eventually. "You must be, or you wouldn't be out here offering to help me with only the bare bones of the situation explained to you."

 

She went quiet awhile, too, as we drove up into the park. "Maybe. Maybe I'm a little stir-crazy, too. I haven't been out hiking in weeks, and I promised Jake we could go out during Christmas break? That's not happening if there's still a psychotic cannibal out there. So that's some of it. And some of it is that the Hollidays never ask for anything. Melinda's incredible, with all those kids and the volunteer time she puts in at the school and the extra-curricular activities she helps chaperone…so I thought if I could do this, it would be a good thing?" She made a lot of should-be statements into questions, like she was seeking reassurance about her opinions and commentary, and I wondered if she was even aware of it. I figured it wouldn't go over well if I called her out on it, though, and she went on breathlessly. "Besides, you're cops. Decent people help the police when they can."

 

"I take it back," I said. "You're not just brave. You're also awesome." Mandy flashed a smile, and I went back to her original question, figuring she'd earned an answer. "I can't promise he'll go after me instead of you, but I can promise he's not going to get his teeth into you, and I'm ninety-nine percent certain he'll lose interest in you once I start my thing."

 

"Which you're not going to explain?"

 

"I'd rather not until it's over." And only then if I had to. I didn't want to detail how I could build a shield of my willpower and surround someone else with it, or how in psychic terms I was a much tastier morsel than your average bear. Mandy gave me a careful look, but nodded, and I turned my attention to the park's winter-wonderland cascade of snow and trees. "You know I've never been out here?"

 

"Too many people haven't. We're going up to the Hurricane Ridge visitor's center and we'll head out from there. Hurricane Hill's all paved, not that you can tell right now? So it shouldn't be too bad a walk. Besides, families will have probably broken the trail already. The parks aren't advertising that outdoorsmen are being slaughtered." The SUV gave a sigh when we reached the visitor's center and settled down into the new snow covering the parking lot. We got out into a wind brisk enough to make my eyes water, and I laughed.

 

"Can I change my mind now?"

 

"You'll be fine. You're dressed for it." Mandy took snowshoes from the vehicle's back end and got me into them, then made me stomp around the parking lot like Bigfoot. I felt like a kid borrowing her dad's shoes, and caught myself making crunching noises to accompany the squeak of snow compressing under my feet. In almost no time we were on our way up the hill toward the distant ridge.

 

The sky had turned gray, then gradually clearer as we'd driven, and some minutes into our hike Mandy turned abruptly and said, "Look."

 

I spun around in time to watch the sun break over the horizon, a bright ball of white fire in a pale sky. There weren't enough clouds to turn pink; it was just pure light spreading above and below us. A chime rang out behind me, and I looked back in astonishment to see Mandy swinging a tiny silver-capped bell. "You should always greet the sun with music on the winter solstice," she explained. "It gives it a reason to come back."

 

"You didn't tell me to bring a bell!" To my utter surprise, I kind of wished she had. Greeting the sunrise hardly seemed like a me thing to do, but with the clean light spilling toward us and the music of Mandy's bell shimmering in the air, I wanted to take part. Not to be outdone, I reached for a Christmas carol, skipping straight to the chorus: "Star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright!"

 

Mandy, sounding as happy as I felt, picked up the tune, and we stood there on the mountainside, singing in the solstice.

* * *

When the sun had reached a hand's breadth above the horizon, we tore ourselves away from watching it, and Mandy tucked her bell back into a pocket. I was in too high spirits to let the feeling go and threw the opening line from my favorite carol toward Mandy: "Said the night wind to the little lamb."

 

She gave, "Do you see what I see?" back, and we traded off lines increasingly breathlessly as we tromped up the hill. I fell over laughing and winded when we were finished, and she stood above me with a grin. "You've got a really nice voice."

 

"So do you. We should start a choir." I let her pull me back to my feet and accepted the ski poles she'd packed across her back. "I didn't know snowshoeing was this hard!"

 

"This is nothing. If you're not wiped out when we get to the top I'll take you out on the ridge and make you wish you'd never been born."

 

"You might want to work on your sales pitch." We scrambled farther up the hill, exchanging mutters and jokes until Mandy said, "Almost there," and ran a few steps ahead of me so she could turn back and offer her hand. I took it and she pulled me up over the top of the ridge.

 

Half the world spread out below us, sunlight bouncing hard off snow and sending blue-white flares through my vision. I turned in a slow circle, delight and awe spreading through me. It turned to laughter as I caught Mandy's smug expression, and I put it into words sheerly for her benefit: "This is incredible."

 

"Yeah, I know." She grinned back, broadly, and a shapeless blur of nothing came out of the snow to knock her off the top of the mountain.

CHAPTER TEN

 

The world filled up with sound: Mandy's scream, my shout, and below those, a bone-rattling roar that came from everywhere and nowhere at once. Its depth made my heartbeat do funny things and upset my stomach, like I'd swallowed a stone. My first reaction was to drop to my hands and knees and breathe carefully so I wouldn't throw up, but once there I had a vividly clear thought: this was a hell of a defense mechanism on the monster's part. If its voice could make people sick and rubber-kneed, it would rarely have to fight more than one opponent at a time.

 

Pity for it that I was uniquely well-equipped to fight off sickness. I buried my mittened fingers in the snow and reached past a wobbly heart and sloshing stomach for the healing power that imbued me.

 

Nausea burned away as cool, welcome magic rose up in me. The world went dark with winter, snow rendered invisible through the Sight, which looked into the mountain sleeping beneath it. Sleeping, not dead; winter was a time of rest and renewal up here on the mountain, a time of hibernation. Even the pale blue sky had that same sense of waiting: waiting for spring and warmth that would return birds and insects to it. It was comforting in its quiet way, and I thought that someday I would like to come here to sit at the top of the world when there was nothing more pressing to do than admire it. Fleeting observations, filling my mind and replacing the beast's roar.

 

Peculiarly serene, I sat back on my heels—more of a trick than usual, since I was wearing snowshoes—and reached down the mountain with my power. The real world came back into focus, underlying what I saw with the Sight. The morning sun made pockets of gold in the snow, overruling blue shadows, rich colors tangling with the winter calm of the earth.

 

Mandy was fiery against that calm, both in real vision and with the Sight. Half buried in snow, she poured off heat and life and fury and fear, her aura as vivid as the red coat and black snowpants she wore. Everything she had was being poured into fighting, but the way she flailed told me she couldn't see her opponent.

 

I could barely see it, even with the Sight. It was a massive blur, hardly even a shape. It had tooth and claw, but even those were translucent, like someone was shining light through packed snow. There were no eyes, no visible edges to its body, although it had a sense of weight to it. It had to: it kept pressing Mandy farther into the snow, and I caught an impression of talons lifting to strike.

 

When they fell, it was to reverberate off the glittering hard shell of my magic.

 

I had gotten pretty good at shielding both myself and others over the past year. It was easier, in fact, to protect someone else. My own demons tended to get inside the deepest part of me and work their way out from there, making shields less useful than they might have been. But my friends tended to just face external threats when I was around, and that I could handle.

 

The picture before me could've been an expensive special effect, a give-and-take of power flowing from me to the pair thirty feet down the mountain. Mandy looked like a superhero, wrapped in silver-blue shielding that glowed even in the sunlight. Her scream became a squeak of astonishment, and the creature's dull roar ricocheted into a pained howl.

 

For just a second I felt proud of myself.

 

Mandy won my admiration forever by slamming the mittened heel of her hand upward, straight-arming her invisible assailant. Its head, for lack of a better term—that's where the teeth seemed to be, anyway—cracked backward, briefly illuminated by the power wrapping Mandy. I had a glimpse, nothing more, of a human face badly distorted, and tried frantically to rewind my memory and remember if its teeth had been manlike or more predatory. The idea they'd been both popped up, then retreated again as the infuriated blur of nothing tumbled ass over teakettle down the mountain.

 

Trying to see it—or See it—was giving me a headache. It changed shape and size like it was struggling to figure out what it was. It landed on all fours, facing me, and slid yards before coming to a stop. Claw marks marred the snow, five surprisingly delicate lines from barely-visible paws. Ten seconds earlier it'd had enough weight to drive Mandy into the snow. Now it barely broke the crusted surface, and the gut-clenching low rumble of its roar rolled over me again. I let go a shout of my own, feeble in comparison.

 

The snow under my feet compacted alarmingly, like it was suddenly bored with its current location. I had a vivid realization that I was standing on top of a mountain, and that deep noises could start avalanches. There was a tree line that might help mitigate disaster, but if a good snow slide started, the trees would break like twigs. And so would I.

 

Mandy flinched upward, escaping the worst of the snow's grasp in a sudden poof of color. Snow crunched and cracked beneath her, but she rolled carefully, edging her way toward the ridge at an oblique angle, away from the divots she and the monster had made as they'd rolled down the mountainside. She still shone with the protective glitter of my shielding, but I had no way to reduce gravity within that shield.

 

Maybe I didn't have to. The idea hit me with the same dazzling clarity as sun on snow. I'd made all kinds of shapes with my shields in the past, and it didn't seem impossible that a flattened oval could help spread her body weight over a greater distance. Trusting that the formless monster couldn't move fast enough to eviscerate me in the time it took to rearrange my concept of the shield and Mandy's weight within it, I turned my attention to her alone.

 

I'd never thought about the mass I was protecting when I'd created a shield before. Now I could feel her weight like the shielding was a hammock, drawing down toward the buried earth where her body touched it. But that drop-point could be eliminated by increasing the hammock's tension, pulling its corners farther apart until it was a smooth, stretched-out expanse still capable of bearing the same weight. All the change was in the hammock, rendering its burden unchanged, yet perfectly safe on a taut surface.

 

Mandy's shield popped out wide and thin, just like my image of the hammock. The wind carried her gasp of relieved bewilderment to me as she got free of breaking snow and lay atop it. She went preternaturally still, lying with her arms and legs spread out like she was on thin ice and, intentionally or not, reducing my need to pay attention to her shielding's form.

 

I had exactly enough time to look back toward the featureless monster before it bashed into me.

* * *

Up close it smelled like carrion. I gagged, choking for breath, and aspirated snow. I coughed it out, vision blurring, though I couldn't tell if it was tears or just that the world itself had gone white and cold, with no sense of up or down. I wasn't hurt—the shielding I'd wrapped around Mandy surrounded me, too—but the thing rolled me in the snow, disorienting me further. I grabbed at it, fingers clawed uselessly inside my mittens, and it pulled away without effort.

 

I got a glimpse of it, an outline against the pale blue sky. Its eyes were white, or transparency's closest brother to white, and its mouth was a tear across its head. The teeth, more visible than anything but the claws, were a skull's grin, but the head stretched wider than a human head should have. There was no way this thing had eaten the people we'd found so far.

 

Or, if it had, it was becoming more and more wild, losing any vestiges of humanity that it had once had. I caught a downward strike with my mittened hand, and felt myself sink deeper into the snow. I didn't want to think too hard about how far it might be to the mountain rock below; the idea made me feel like I was drowning in snow, just as I had in my vision the day before.

 

Snow collapsed on my head, which didn't help at all. I gasped for air and got a lungful of rotted meat stench. For something that had landed on the snow crust light as a feather, it certainly was strong and stinky. I tried Mandy's trick, straight-arming it, and caught it solidly in the chest to no dramatic effect except fueling another roar.

 

That time I felt it in the ground, the way it shivered and dislodged a bit of the packed snow it held in place. One more howl like that and the whole mountainside was going to go, which might be okay from my monster buddy's point of view, but which would be a world of hurts for me and Mandy. I reached for a psychic net, an idea that had worked for me in the past. A blue-white mesh burst out of my fingertips and stuck against the monster's mutating form.

 

It reared back, clawing at the net, then simply dissipated like it had never existed. My net collapsed, partly because it had nothing to hold and partly because I was too surprised to keep its idea in mind.

 

Barely a heartbeat later the creature reappeared and clobbered me with a mallet-sized fist. Stars burst in my vision, and right about then I started wondering why I'd been trying to capture instead of kill it. I slammed a hand out to the side, grabbing a fistful of snow and willing it to become my weapon of choice, the silver rapier I'd taken from a god.

 

Power surged, and I held the blade like it had always been there. In a way it had been: it made up part of psychic armor and weaponry grown from gifts I'd been given and tokens I'd won. The first time I'd drawn it had been in a dreamscape plane, but since then I'd learned I could pull it across the real world from its usual hiding place under my bed into my hand when I needed it. It was more convenient than carrying a rapier around in day-to-day life, though its lack of physical presence tended to make me forget about it until I really, really needed it.

 

Like now.

 

Technically it was a stabbing weapon, not a slashing one, but it had an edge and that that was enough for me. I swung wildly, pouring power into the blade. I'd overloaded monsters before, essentially exploding them with magic, but the invisible snowman only squealed and scampered backward. I lurched forward, trying to follow the path it broke in the snow, but a sword in one hand and snowshoes on the feet did not make for easy movement.

 

I burst out of the snow like a bit of a fool, powder spraying everywhere. The critter was out of reach and in arrest, making it almost impossible to see. It shimmered slightly, a miragelike distortion of light, and I couldn't take my eyes off it for fear I'd never locate it again. It was on top of the snow now, no longer breaking it, but the path it had made while escaping me gave me an angle to run up, in so far as I could run while wearing snowshoes. Nothing about the carnivorous beast had suggested it had a sense of humor, or I might've slain it with laughter at my blundering.

 

It crouched, visible only because the distortion in the air lowered: its only two easy markers, tooth and claw, were hidden in mouth and snow respectively. I did a c'mere gesture with my free hand, hoping it'd jump me again, since I already knew which of us was faster. Being on the defensive was just fine with me, when my opponent could cover twenty yards while I blinked.

 

I still wasn't ready when it sprang at me. It came from up high, which I expected, but it was smarter than I hoped: instead of skewering itself on my raised sword, it twisted at the last second, coiling toward my undefended left side. Well, my semi-defended left side; I snapped the blade around, scoring a point-tip slash across what I thought of as the thing's ribs.

 

It didn't so much as flinch, though its howl turned aggravated, like it was smart enough to change its line of attack but not smart enough to imagine I might change mine. This time when it hit the snow beyond me it turned with a snarl, but backed away. I swore and tromped after it, earning another one of its low-bellied rumbles.

 

A crack opened up between me and the thing, and a heavy block of snow slid several yards down the mountain, then edged to a stop. I froze, arms spread wide and eyes even wider, and although I couldn't see the damned critter's face, I got an overwhelming sense of smugness from it. It emitted another low roar, then another, and when the snow began to slide that time, I knew it wasn't going to stop.

 

I'd been in earthquakes, but they had nothing on the sensation of watching the snow before me collapse and surge as it started an irreversible downward trend. Time dropped into a zone that only happened in emergencies, and I watched chunks of snow break loose and surge forward in slow motion as the packed material in front of it gave way. It was utterly beautiful in a purely chaotic way.

 

The half-embodied monster was clearly able to stay on top of the havoc it was wreaking, the impressions its claws made gobbled up by rolling snow. I doubted I could manage the same trick, but even if I could, the nasty beast had put me between a metaphorical rock and a hard place. I could try to go after it.

 

Or I could keep Mandy Tiller from getting killed.

 

I sucked my gut in, made an apology to my sword, and threw it away so that when the snow fell out from under my feet, I could fling myself forward with it. All I had to do was get to Mandy before her part of the shelf turned to icy dust. The slow-time of heightened awareness helped: even though I knew everything was happening impossibly fast, I could see giant snowballs breaking free, big enough for me to throw my weight onto them as I dashed across a shattering snowfield. The avalanche's momentum helped, driving me forward faster than humanly possible. I belly flopped on Mandy, my arms spread wide, just as the snow beneath her collapsed.

 

I snapped a quicksilver shield up around us as the snowslide threw us down the mountain. Mandy rolled over beneath me and wrapped her arms and legs around me, face buried in my shoulder. I knotted my arms around her shoulders and drew my legs up as far as I could with her in my lap, so we made a ball that bounced smoothly—for some value of smoothly—down the thundering wash of snow. I felt like a giant bruise inside about six seconds, and caught myself muttering, "Shock absorbers, shock absorbers," into Mandy's ear as the world spun by in a roar of white and rock and trees.

 

I'd always worked best with car metaphors, and after another couple of bounces the shielding seemed to soften, taking some of our impact against hard snow and harder debris. Mandy made the first sound I'd heard since her earlier screams: a tiny whimper that sounded like relief. I squeezed her a little harder, then closed my eyes against the cyclone of white around us and waited for it to be over.

 

We thumped and rolled and bumped to a stop about a million years later, still utterly buried in white. There was room around us, enough to breath, but not enough to untangle from each other. I lifted my head a few inches and Mandy loosened her grip to say, "We're never going to be able to tell which way is up. People die digging the wrong direction."

 

I whispered, "Actually, not a problem," and, perhaps genuinely grateful for it for the first time, turned the Sight onto the world around me.

 

The torn-up mountain lay at an oblique angle to us, off to my left. It was no longer sleeping, but half awakened through shock and wounds. I could feel fresh gashes in its face all the way down the path the avalanche had taken, and sent out a pulse of sympathetic healing magic, the same way I'd done with Gary after his heart attack, toward the earth's surface. My, "Sorry," was murmured aloud, the confines of my mind seeming too small for an apology to an entire mountain I'd disrupted.

 

Mandy let out a moan, clearly interpreting the apology as meaning I couldn't find our way out of there, but the mountain itself gave a shuddering groan, like I'd soothed an injury. I said, "No, it's okay," to Mandy, and turned my head the other way, nearly bumping noses with her as I did. I hadn't been this intimate with someone in weeks.

 

The calm sky was up there, waiting for us to emerge. I gave a tentative push with the shield, wondering if it would move packed snow, then shoved harder and was rewarded with a sudden increase in breathing room. Heartened, I leaned into it, and seconds later snow burst upward and sunlight rained down on us. Mandy shouted in disbelief and scrambled up the ridged snow with me a few crawling steps behind her.

 

When I got to the top she was lying on her back, arms spread as she gasped at the sky. Not from a lack of air, I thought, but just sheer gladness at being alive. Somehow our snowshoes had survived the tumble, so their narrow backs were poked into the snow, making her legs arc peculiarly as they rose to her bound feet. I smiled and looked up the mountain, at the hideous score of broken trees and boulder-sized snowballs littering the path we'd taken.

 

My sword was somewhere in there. It was an incongruous thought in face of wonder at being alive, but surviving certain death was familiar, and the rapier was important. I put out my hand and whispered a welcome to the blade, inviting it back to me without the strength of panic behind the offer.

 

I was a little surprised when it materialized, bright and undamaged. Mandy, behind me, said, "What the hell?" I turned to face her, twisting the sword behind my back guiltily, like I could pretend it wasn't there. She demanded, "Where did that come from?" anyway.

 

"Um. You ever see those movies with the sword-fighting immortals?" At Mandy's slow nod, I perked up a little. "My sword comes from the same places theirs do."

 

"In other words," she said after a moment, "don't ask." She was still lying on her back with her snowshod feet in the air. "Just like I probably shouldn't ask how we survived that?"

 

"Pretty much." I waited a long moment, wondering if she would accept that. Eventually she gave one tight nod and put a hand into the air. I caught it and pulled her to her feet. "Come on. Let's see if we can get out of here."

* * *

Because there was no one to tell us nay, I told the park officials that we'd been on our way back down when the avalanche struck, and that it had passed behind us offering no more than a thrill. Mandy nodded silent agreement to my version of events, and we both agreed we'd been very lucky when the rangers said, repeatedly, how fortunate we'd been. One of their paramedics even looked us over before they were willing to send us back to Seattle while daylight lasted.

 

My phone, buried deep in a pocket, buzzed a voice mail warning as we came back into full satellite coverage. Mandy glanced at me as I dug the phone out. "If you answer that, is it going to throw you back into something like what just happened?"

 

"There probably won't be an avalanche involved, but…" The missed call was from Billy. "But yeah, it's likely."

 

"Then do me a favor," Mandy said. "Don't answer until you're out of my car."

 

I closed my phone and leaned my head against the window, feeling the rift between myself and the rest of the world all the way back into town.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

 

Wednesday, December 21, 4:55 P.M.

 

I didn't even bother to listen to Billy's message, just went straight to the station after returning Mandy's hiking gear to her. Billy wasn't technically at work today, not any more than I was, but if something new and horrible had gone wrong, he'd almost certainly be at the precinct building to tell me.

 

I ran into Ray just inside the doors, more literally than I would've liked. He stayed planted where he was, like a fireplug, and I bounced off with a grunt. "Ow. What do you do, eat hubcaps for breakfast?"

 

"Plate mail," he said unexpectedly, and looked pleased when I laughed. "That woman yesterday, she's okay. Even agreed to go into a sponsored dry-out program. Guess getting her balls busted with a busted bottle showed her the light."

 

I spent way too long working out the busted bottle balls, then shook myself all over and smiled. "That's great. Sorry for siccing Corvallis on you. How'd that go? I swear, that woman's a betta." I was doing it again, comparing her to vicious fish. At least bettas, like Corvallis, were pretty. Cold and scaly, but pretty.

 

Surprise dug deep wrinkles into Ray's forehead. "You think? I always liked her on the television, the way she doesn't take crap from anybody. A real reporter, not like most of 'em on TV now. Anyway, it went great. We're going out to dinner tonight."

 

I scraped my jaw off the floor soon enough to stutter, "Have fun," before he stumped out the doors, and stood there in the blast of cold air marveling at philosophies undreamed of.

 

A cynical worm crept into my thoughts, wondering if Corvallis had only agreed to go out with Ray as a way to gain inside information into the department and, by proxy, me. Then the worm began eating its own tail until it disappeared into a plonk of nothingness inside my brain, because Ray could most certainly handle himself. I didn't envy Corvallis trying to pump him for information he didn't plan to share.

 

That brought an unfortunately suggestive image to mind. I clutched my head, trying to shake it—both head and image—loose, and went upstairs to see if Billy was around, or if anybody had details on what else had gone wrong.

 

To my dismay, Billy was there, which meant something had gone wrong. I sat on the edge of his desk and waited silently for him to look up, but I wasn't expecting the haggardness in his face when he did. I slid off the edge of the desk into the chair beside it, ice forming inside my stomach. "What happened?"

 

"What happened? My partner disappeared all day and I've been sitting here with my gut turning to acid waiting for her to get back. And to keep my mind off it I've been going over the files of a dozen people eaten alive over the past six weeks, and coming up dry. What the hell do you mean, what happened?"

 

I slumped in the chair, relief turning to a burp that I inexpertly hid behind one hand. "Sorry. From your expression I thought maybe somebody else was dead. Our gambit kind of worked. We flushed the thing out, but it started an avalanche and got away." I related the relevant parts of the day, ending with, "I don't know what it was, Billy. I know what it wasn't. It's not a god. It didn't have that kind of power. It's not even a sorcerer, but it's not exactly human, either."

 

Billy was taking notes and muttering, "Not quite human, eats human flesh, invisible but physical spirit form…you do that."

 

"What?" I cranked my jaw up for the second time, a guilty blush burning my ears. "Oh. God. Yeah, I guess I do." There was no guess about it. Very early on I'd learned to bend light around myself to make a mirage, to suggest I wasn't there. It was a matter of changing perceptions, which was one of the basic precepts of shamanism, and nobody had to know I'd gotten the idea from a comic book.

 

I'd looked at my reflection once when I'd pulled that cloak around me, and I had the sudden disturbing realization that Billy was right: what my opponent had done that morning had looked a lot like my trick. "It's another shaman?"

 

That was disturbing on a lot of levels. One, and rather obviously, shamans weren't supposed to go around eating people, except maybe symbolically. A shaman who went bad wasn't a shaman anymore, but a sorcerer, at least in a lot of Native American myths. But my admittedly limited experience with sorcery had a different feel to it: seductive, rational, sacrificial….

 

I was starting to notice a lot of nasty things came across as seductive. Not blatantly so—no women in red dresses, no rain of wealth from the sky—but seductive nonetheless. Good didn't seem to be quite so charming, which I kind of thought was a mistake on the home team's part. Enlightenment and altruism weren't actually that common, as far as I could tell. People tended to want things, and evil tended to offer those things.

 

"Is that even possible?"

 

I rattled myself out of considering good's ineptitudes and frowned at Billy. "I don't know. I mean, it wouldn't be a shaman anymore, but I don't know if a sorcerer still has the same bag of tricks. Virissong was never trained as a shaman, and he's the only sorcerer I've ever met."

 

"Okay, how about other shamans you've met?"

 

"They've all been dead." I sounded pretty lost and miserable when I said that, and cleared my throat like it would make me bigger and stronger. "Really. The only other living shaman I've ever spoken with was Coyote, and…"

 

"Yeah." Billy sighed. "I'm sorry, Joanie."

 

"Me too." I scrubbed my hands through my hair, itching my scalp and hoping invigorated blood flow would awaken some kind of deep understanding in my soul. "Okay. This is what I know. That thing—" I straightened up suddenly. "Billy, I want to try something. Can astral projections have physical manifestations?"

 

To my chagrin, Billy threw his head back, laughed aloud, then settled back in his chair with a broad grin. "I can't believe I just heard you say that. A year ago you'd have been snorting in your sleeve and rolling your eyes if you'd heard me say something like that. And here you are, full of confidence and completely serious when you ask about physical manifestations of astral projections."

 

A little blossom of embarrassed pleasure burst in my chest. I hunched my shoulders and looked down, but shot Billy a glance through my eyebrows. "You know I think that's the first time you've given me even a little bit of shit about any of this?"

 

His grin got even wider. "I guess I figured you could take it by now." Some of the teasing slipped away, though the smile stayed just as big. "Don't get me wrong, there were times I wanted to say I told you so, but…"

 

"But you're a much better person than that, and you thought sending me off in a sulk would be counterproductive?"

 

"Something like that, yeah." Billy grunted as I scooted my chair forward to lean over and give him a hug. Normally I reserved that kind of soppy behavior for Gary, but just this once I thought we both deserved it.

 

"Thanks, Billy. Seriously. For putting up with all the crap I ever gave you, and for not rubbing my nose in it when I got hit in the teeth with your world. I owe you a lot."

 

"You can fix my car for free for the rest of your life in repayment."

 

"I do anyway."

 

Billy shrugged, still smiling. "Guess that works out, then. All right, Walker. What was that about physical manifestations of astral projections?" He started laughing again, and I couldn't blame him.

 

"Can it be done? Because if it can—" I hadn't often left my body behind. A handful of times, maybe, and always in a crisis. I relaxed into my chair—a task in itself, as it was hard plastic—and thought about the peculiar sensation of standing over there when I could see my body sitting over here. An underlying part of me considered leaving my body behind to be joining the world of the Sight wholesale. I wasn't comfortable with that. I liked my body, and the world the Sight showed me was detached and gorgeous. I was afraid to become too attached to it, for fear I'd become detached myself.

 

The middling detail that I'd spent a significant chunk of my life deliberately detached was not to be considered. Vaguely grumpy at the thought, I got up and walked across the room, arms folded under my breasts and gaze locked downward. "All I need is a—"

 

My voice wasn't. I put my hand on my throat, then turned back to see myself lolling in the plastic chair beside Billy's desk. Billy grabbed my wrist, and I felt the distant pressure of his fingers checking my pulse before he looked around the room, eyebrows drawn down. "Joanie?"

 

It was a few minutes after five, and Homicide was mostly cleared out. Even so, everybody who was left glanced up, then exchanged looks that said they were suddenly in a hurry to go out for coffee and gossip about the Paranormal Pair.

 

Me, I walked back to Billy, silent on weightless feet, and gave his paperwork a push with one finger.

 

My finger slid through it with the sensation of paper cuts. I yelped and drew back, shaking my hand, then glanced at my body. A sliver of red awakened on one fingertip, and I grimaced. A little more determined, I reached for the papers, picked them up, and tapped them into a tidy stack before setting them back down on his desk and snapping back into my body, where I stuck my bleeding finger in my mouth. "Ow."

 

Billy did a fine impression of a goldfish, his eyes bulging and mouth popping. "Did you just—?"

 

I said, "I did," around my finger. "Never tried that before. See what I did?" I stuck my finger out at him and he eyed it.

 

"Aren't you a healer?"

 

"Oh. Right." Something like a paper cut didn't even require a car metaphor anymore. I just wanted the injury sealed, and voilà, it was. In theory I should be able to do that with much graver damage, but I hadn't leveled up that high yet. "So I can affect the physical world even out-of-body. I have this…nasty theory. We keep finding bodies with no signs of foul play in the immediate vicinity. Maybe they're being killed where we're finding the bodies, but the attack is coming on an astral level. The blood and viscera could be feeding back through the spirit into the separate body. No physical mess to clean up."

 

Billy, whom I thought of as being fairly tough, turned a little green around the gills. "Is that possible?"

 

I faced my palms upward. "The murders in Woodland were ugly, but their point was to channel souls to something separate that hungered for them. Same thing with the mess at Halloween. This is a little different, so I don't know that it's possible, but I'm not ruling it out."

 

"Wouldn't it leave a mark? Like Mel's power circle?"

 

I'd never seen Billy seem out of his depth before. Maybe it meant I was finally catching up to the rest of the class. I wasn't sure if it felt good or profoundly alarming. "I just rearranged your desk with almost no effort, much less a power circle, so not necessarily. If you're talking about somebody with a lot of rage or fear, and I'd think we kind of have to be, it's…" My brain caught up with where my mouth was going, and stopped my chatter with a sound of dismay. "Somebody could be doing this without knowing it."

 

"They could be eating bodies, stripping them of their souls, and leaving the corpses on unmarked territory without knowing it?" Billy's voice rose sharply enough that the handful of remaining detectives looked around at each other again, then, to a man, started mumbling about coffee breaks. In a rustle of coats, heavy boots and slamming doors, we were alone. Billy glowered after them. "Nobody offered to bring us a cup back."

 

"I wouldn't have, either. Look, I'm just saying it's possible. Maybe not probable, but the human psyche is messed-up territory. So we need to pursue this, but for the first time I'm thinking maybe we shouldn't go in with all guns blazing."

 

My cell phone gave its six-note warning that a text message was coming in as I finished speaking. So did Billy's. We both went still, my tense expression mirrored on his face, and I silently put a fist on one palm. He echoed the motion and we beat our fists against our palms in tandem, one two three.

 

I came up scissors. He came up rock. I swore and stood up to pull my phone out of my pocket, reading the message out loud: "Possible new victim. Positive identification, oh, shit."

 

"What?" Billy was on his feet, leaning toward me like the tension in his body would negate whatever I had to say. "Who?"

 

I pressed my hand over my mouth, fingers icy, belly cramping. "I'm sorry, Billy. I'm so sorry. It's Mandy Tiller."

 

And it was unquestionably my fault.

CHAPTER TWELVE

 

Mandy was still breathing when we got there.

 

We were fast: the paramedics were only just pulling into the driveway when we reached the Tillers' home, a few blocks away from Billy's. The fact that there were paramedics at all pushed some of the churning terror in my stomach aside and made room for something almost worse: hope. No one else had needed a paramedic. I fell out of Billy's van and ran across the Tillers' lawn, skidding across snow to reach Mandy's side.

 

Unlike the other victims, she had only one bite mark. A stretched-out wound had torn her coat and shirt and left a broad toothy gash in her forearm. A pool of blood stained the stairs under her head, which was both horrible and wonderful. All the others had been found in clean sites, and I knew for certain Mandy hadn't been attacked miles away and been dumped on her own front steps. I'd been with her barely an hour earlier.

 

A paramedic put a hand on my shoulder. "Excuse me, ma'am."

 

I whispered, "Ten seconds. Just give me ten seconds. Please," and let the Sight wash over everything.

 

Blood seeped from her skull, a simple but significant wound that cried out for healing. I clenched my hands, wishing I had time, wishing I didn't have an audience. But the paramedics could care for the head wound; what I was more worried about was the utter nothingness which had surrounded all the other victims. And though unlike them, Mandy still breathed, she also had no spark of life. Her aura didn't even lie flat against her skin, giving me some hint of her well-being. It was just gone.

 

What I could See were vestiges of my own power, familiar silver-blue tendrils still lingering from our adventure earlier in the day. I jerked around to look at Billy with the Sight, searching for similar remnants around him, and found nothing. But it had been weeks since I'd used my power on him, and even then it hadn't been the kind of physical shield I'd used on Mandy. I didn't know if the residue had protected her in some way or not, but even if it had, that didn't exactly balance out setting her up as a potential victim in the first place.

 

While I was looking at Billy, the paramedics swooped in and got Mandy onto a stretcher. Jake Tiller sat on top of the porch steps, wrapped in a huge winter jacket and blank-gazed with fear. One of the paramedics offered his hand. Jake took it blindly, letting the man guide him down the stairs toward the ambulance. The poor boy's aura was static white, shock too great for his true colors to wash through. Billy, a few yards away, was talking to the cop who'd texted us, and I heard the guy say, "The kid came home from ball practice and found his mom lying on the steps. He called 911. Probably saved her life."

 

"He's smart," Billy agreed. "Friends with my son." I let the rest of their conversation fade away as I turned my gaze to the snow-littered steps and yard.

 

Anybody else and I might've thought she'd slipped on the stairs and cracked her head, but I knew Mandy Tiller hadn't received a gash-toothed bite on her arm that morning. I'd have healed it if she had. So the thing had come after her, and somehow, it had failed to walk away with her life. I was less certain about the safety of her soul.

 

There were imprints in the snow on the uncovered porch, just like the ones I'd seen yesterday morning. I didn't touch them this time, afraid I'd flatten them into nothing and destroy any chance of a lead. I'd seen, that morning, how far this thing could jump in a single bound. And it did jump, traversing space like it was real. But then, so did I, when I separated from my body. I didn't float through walls or fly up to rooftops. I walked through the doors and climbed stairs, treating the astral world essentially like the real one.

 

It was a paltry thing to go on, but at least it was something. I stood up and followed their imprints' potential trajectory, scanning the yard and sidewalk and street without finding a hint of where the thing might have landed. Neighbor's yard, across the street, empty. No trees bigger than bushes to ricochet off anywhere in easy sight.

 

A quick wash of snow, unsettled by the rumble of ambulance engines, slid off the roof and poofed into the yard, narrowly missing the porch. I flinched, reminded of the avalanche.

 

More snow flopped down, less vigorously than if someone had shoveled it, but with a certain amount of enthusiasm. A ghost of forensics training came back to me and I crouched again. There was no kickback in the imprint, no spray that suggested the beast had jumped forward. The indentations looked like it had squatted, just as I was doing now. My gaze strayed to the roof.

 

Well. Just because I'd never tried floating up to a rooftop didn't mean I couldn't do it. I pressed my spine against the house, propping myself against it, and for the second time in an hour, slipped the surly bonds of earth.

 

My subconscious had a mean sense of humor. It had let me float through a closed door, but not a wall, because one was meant for walking through and the other wasn't. But that had been nearly a year ago, and I had more control now. Gravity was permitted, I decided, to exert the smallest influence over me, just enough to keep me from floating into the stratosphere and beyond. I weighed in at a little over one-sixty, but there was no reason my astral form couldn't be light as a thought.

 

I stayed firmly stuck to the ground in both body and spirit. I bared my teeth at the sky, willing to admit that thoughts could be depressingly weighty. Better to be light as a bird, with hollow bones and an ability to fly. I could break free from gravity's pull and soar up to the roof on an impulse of will.

 

My astral self, it seemed, was absolutely unimpressed with my puny logic. Eventually, swearing silently, my astral form crawled up a drainpipe and swung onto the roof. There was no way I could've done that physically. Neither the pipe nor my dignity nor my hand strength—which was pretty good, but not that good—would have let me. Astrally, though? No problem. It made no sense at all. On the positive side, it didn't have to make sense. It just had to work.

 

And up there on the rooftop, the monster was waiting for me.

* * *

By all rights I should've woken up dead. I'd thought the thing would've been scared off. It was only once I was up there on the roof, nose to nose with a stinking beast, that I wondered why I thought an invisible ravening magic cannibal would be frightened by a kid with a cell phone or a few police sirens.

 

While I was standing there stupefied, it raised a lazy paw and backhanded me so hard I flew off the roof and slid across Mandy's front yard to smash up against her white picket fence. Little peaks of snow fell off the fence and right through me, making tiny lumps on the frozen lawn.

 

I couldn't remember anything ever doing that before. I tended to think of my astral form as a pretty safe place for me to be. Sure, a god had stuffed a sword through me once when I'd been incorporeal, but we'd been traveling through time and space, too, so under those circumstances it seemed fair that I could be hit. I'd fought another god in a kind of dreamscape, but dreams were a little different. I didn't remember anything ever flat-out belting my astral self while it was just standing around in the Middle World. But this thing had, and I didn't like that at all.

 

It hadn't come after me. I pushed onto my elbows and scowled at the roof, where its form was barely more than a glimmer against white snow and gray skies. It stood on two legs, but its shoulders were hunched forward, like it was devolving toward four legs. It hadn't moved beyond hitting me.

 

A clear, unpleasant thought unfurled itself. Maybe it hadn't come after Mandy. Maybe it had just used her to draw the more powerful agent to it, so it could get another look at me. Size me up, study me. Decide if I was a threat or a tasty morsel.

 

I figured lying on my back in the snow wasn't at all threatening, and got to my feet. The thing watched. Warily, I thought. Hoped. I wanted to be scary enough to set it on edge. That would be a definite score for my side.

 

It had hit my astral form. That suggested maybe my astral form could hit it. All I had to do was get close enough, but I was pretty sure it wasn't going to give me another chance to climb the drainpipe.

 

Which meant I had one chance to convince my recalcitrant brain that the laws of gravity and physics didn't apply to a soul set loose to wander away from its body. I'd crossed great leaps and bounds effortlessly in other planes of reality. I could do it in this one, if I had to.

 

And I had to. The monster on the rooftop was still watching me, and I didn't want its attention to land on anyone else. I muttered, "There is no spoon," took three running steps, and jumped.

 

The creature vanished, I smashed into Mandy's house, and warm fingers touched my face as Morrison said, "Walker," drawing me back into my body.

* * *

I opened my eyes disoriented and confused. The world had tipped over sideways, and a puddle of slush had crept up to envelop my left cheek. Rather a lot of weight seemed to be pressing the slush into my jaw and shoulder, and enough blood rushed to my head to make my nose itch.

 

Morrison was perpendicular to me, feet planted in the same icy water that was crawling over my face, and his forehead was wrinkled with concern. "You fell over, Walker."

 

That explained a lot. The pressure, for example, was my own body weight resting on my head and shoulder, which were at the foot of the stairs, while the rest of me was angled down them. It was profoundly uncomfortable, and I was beginning to fear it might be embarrassing, too. On the other hand, it distracted from the dull ache running from head to toe, which I suspected was the physical response to psychically smacking myself into Mandy's house. I'd been so sure I could make it, too.

 

Morrison offered me a hand up, which proved to be more like putting his hands under my armpits and bodily hauling me to my feet. "You okay?"

 

"Yeah. Sorry, I thought I'd propped myself up well enough that I wouldn't fall. I was…" I made a feeble gesture, which was apparently enough to remind Morrison he was holding me up. He let go and stepped back. I was kind of disappointed.

 

No, not disappointed. A little sad, maybe. I liked being close to my boss; he smelled good. But I'd blown it on that front, and was working on living with the consequences. "I was trying to follow the killer. Hang on a second, okay?"

 

Dismay and confusion spasmed across Morrison's face, leaving his blue eyes darker than usual. The color he'd put in it at Halloween had grown out of his hair, leaving it short and silvering, the way I liked it, and the whole package made for a handsome man in need of some reassurance. Or at least explanation, if I couldn't offer the other. The best I could do was step away and look up at the roof.

 

No monsters. There were tracks, cold trails through the air visible with the Sight, but my prey had run away. I whispered, "Maybe it decided I was tougher than it was," without much hope, and glanced toward the ambulance.

 

Two paramedics were still checking Mandy over. A third stood with Jake at the vehicle's tail end. They had her on an IV already, and I figured it wouldn't be more than another minute before they brought her to the hospital. I wondered if they'd let me in to see her, and if I could be any help if they did, or if I'd be better off trying to track the thing that had attacked her. But I hadn't spoiled the marks this time, so its trail wasn't going to get any colder, and there was something I really had to do before trying to either follow it or help Mandy.

 

It took everything I had to look back at Morrison and say, "This is my fault, boss."

 

Every shred of warmth fled the captain's face, turning him back into the nemesis he'd been for years. A short jerk of his chin said "Keep talking."

 

I did, through knots of anger and guilt. "She volunteered," wasn't much of an excuse, and I knew it as I told him what Mandy Tiller and I had done that morning. "I never imagined it might come after her once we were off the mountain. I should have," I said before he could. "I should have, and I didn't. I completely fucked up. I'm sorry." Sorry didn't begin to cover it, but language was badly suited to expressing handshaking chills of misery and a hollow feeling burning my eyes in a single word. "Sorry," inadequate as it was, had to do the job.

 

"You got a civilian involved in a dangerous case that the media is all over, and now she's hospitalized and you're sorry?"

 

"This one's on me, Captain." Billy put himself between me and Morrison. "I asked Mandy to give us a hand."

 

"Why?" Morrison erupted like a bull seal, and Billy, who was bigger than either of us, somehow seemed to absorb the captain's rage and expand a little with it. "There are dozens of officers who could have—"

 

"Two reasons, sir," Billy said very steadily. "One is that Walker's original plan was to use herself as bait—"

 

"Which she would have needed permission for!"

 

"Not," I mumbled, "if I did it off duty. Which I did." I was sure I wasn't actually helping the situation, but sometimes I talked when I knew I should shut up. It was a character flaw.

 

"And the other," Billy went on as though neither of us had spoken, "is that this is getting worse fast, sir, and even under the best of circumstances, going through the department on this would have added another twenty-four hours to the search. Getting permission from you, possibly having to wait for a green light from your superiors, getting volunteers, getting equipment…this was faster."

 

"That wasn't your decision to make!"

 

"No, sir, it wasn't, and I regret my error in judgment." Billy, stiffly, reached into his coat, withdrew his badge and gun, and offered them to Morrison.

 

Who stared at them, then at Billy and me, and then said, "Shit," more violently than I'd ever heard him speak before.

 

All three of us knew he had to take them. Involving civilians in police business, even surreal police business like the stuff Billy and I handled, was bad enough. Getting a civilian hospitalized, maybe killed, was at the very least a suspension offense, and would likely have both of us up on charges. I fumbled for my own badge and gun, because I couldn't let Billy take the fall for me even if he was technically right. I was still the one who'd gotten Mandy Tiller hurt.

 

Morrison saw what I was doing and made a very sharp, short gesture and pitched his voice bone-scrapingly low: "You have until the nine o'clock news to find a way to make this right. If I get called before then, if I have to make a statement, I'll do it with your badges in my hand. Do I make myself clear?"

 

My knees went weak and I nodded feebly. "At least Corvallis is at dinner with Ray right now, so she's probably not going to be breathing down our necks for a couple hours."

 

Despite his fury, Morrison got an expression very much like the one I'd had when Ray had announced his date for the evening. He eventually said, "Ray Campbell?" like the department might have sprouted another Ray recently that he didn't know about.

 

I nodded, and Billy whistled. "Takes all kinds, I guess." He put his badge and gun away very carefully, offering a quiet, "Thanks, Captain."

 

"Don't thank me. If we get away with this I'm stringing you both up by your toes. If we don't, I'm crucifying you."

 

I'd been skewered more times than I cared to think about, which gave me an uncomfortably visceral idea of what crucifixion might feel like. I looked over Morrison's shoulder, not wanting to read any truth in his eyes. The ambulance crawled out of the Tillers' driveway and stopped a few yards down the street, blocked by a black-haired man standing in its path. The driver leaned on the horn, then rolled down the window to shout at the man, who smiled apologetically and shrugged, but didn't move.

 

A tiny smile of my own was born somewhere around the fine muscles of my eyes, not even getting close to my mouth as it spilled golden happiness, rich and sweet as warm honey, all the way through me. It neutralized the worry bubbling in my belly and revitalized the tiny shred of hope I'd felt at seeing Mandy was alive. I thought my heart was likely to burst, and my chest filled with breathless giggles that I didn't dare let out. Even my hands felt wrong, but in a good way, as they alternated between thrums of thick aching heat and icy coldness with every pulse-beat. For the first time in six months, in a year, maybe for the first time in my whole life, the overwhelming confidence that everything was going to be all right filled me.

 

The ambulance driver swung his door open, angry words a wash of meaningless noise to my ears. The self-imposed obstruction raised his hands placatingly, then shot me a direct look, one eyebrow elevated in amusement. My itty-bitty smile crinkled my eyes enough to turn my vision all blurry with tears, and finally made it to my mouth. I couldn't breathe, not at all, but I felt so light I thought I might be able to fly.

 

"Walker, crucifixion isn't a threat that should make you smile." Morrison sounded justifiably annoyed, like I'd taken the wind out of his melodramatic sails. I wanted to promise that I had no doubt at all he meant he'd crucify us, professionally if not physically, but the little smile he was complaining about blossomed into this huge, foolish, jubilant thing that I laid on him like a blessing.

 

Then I was running just like an ingenue in a bad movie. Running across a snow-covered yard, vaulting the Tillers' low fence, and sliding across the slush-slick asphalt street to crash, joyfully, impossibly, wonderfully, into Coyote's arms.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

 

Coyote caught me with a grunt that sounded like a laugh and squeezed hard enough to take my breath as he swung me around and around in a slushy circle. I squeaked and buried my nose in his neck, and he didn't let me hang on nearly long enough before he set me back, hands on my shoulders.

 

His smile was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, bright and gentle in a face that wasn't nearly as red-brick colored as he was in my dreams. Nor were his eyes golden, but the rest was as I remembered: straight nose, high cheekbones, hip-length black hair. He was a little shorter than me and smelled like the outdoors, and he wiped happy tears away from my cheeks. "We don't have a lot of time. How is she?"

 

I didn't care about the tears, didn't care that they tickled the creases around my mouth where my face was already getting tired from such a big smile, and somehow didn't care that I had a hundred thousand questions that were all going to have to wait. "She's all right physically. Banged up. But her aura, Coyote, it's gone. Like nobody's home."

 

He nodded, and though his joy didn't dissipate, the smile became something more serious. Something trustworthy and confident, something that I suddenly wished I could command myself. He took my hand and said, both apologetically and in a tone that brooked no nonsense, "We need to see your patient. Go ahead and drive us to the hospital, if you want, but I hope it won't be necessary," to the incensed ambulance driver.

 

We let ourselves in while the guy spluttered.

 

Both paramedics in the back gave guttural sounds of protest that faded into uncertainty when Coyote said, "It's all right. We're healers. Excuse us, please."

 

They both moved, and neither of them looked like they had the foggiest idea why. I didn't either, but I wished to hell I could do that. Jake Tiller, his face tear-stained, stared between us like we were aliens, and Coyote gripped the boy's shoulder a moment. "My name's Cyrano. This is my friend Joanne. You're…?"

 

"Jake," he whispered. The ambulance driver threw the back doors shut again as the kid spoke, and a few seconds later we were in motion. "Jake Tiller. This's my mom."

 

Coyote nodded solemnly. "I think Joanne and I can do something for your mom that the paramedics can't, Jake. Will you let us try?"

 

"Will it make her wake up?"

 

"I hope so."

 

The kid nodded. "Then okay."

 

One of the paramedics made another strangled noise, surging forward. "We can't let you—"

 

Trying to sound as calm and reassuring as Coyote, I said, "She's stabilized, right?" At the medic's reluctant nod, I offered a brief smile. "Then if we're right and we can help, you won't have anything to worry about. If we can't, well, this won't take more than a few minutes and we're already on the way to the hospital, so no time will be lost. Okay?"

 

"We could get sued—"

 

"You won't," Coyote said with serene confidence, then reached across Mandy's still form and said, "Have you done a soul retrieval yet? Besides me, I mean?"

 

"Besss—" I bit my tongue on the s and tried to claw shocked thoughts back under control. There would be time later. There had to be time later. "Billy, a few weeks ago. But I know him, Coyote. I know him really well."

 

"I'm here now. You'll be fine. We don't have a drum, Joanne, so I'm going to need you to—"

 

"I can do it." For once I felt as confident as I sounded. "Where are we going?"

 

"The Lower World."

 

I nodded, closed my eyes, and let the rattle of the ambulance over rough roads drop me into a world not my own.

* * *

Red skies and yellow earth, a flat sun and a world more two-dimensional than my own: that was the Lower World, in my rare experiences with it. I was certain there were other ways it could be viewed—roots of a mighty tree, burrows and hollows beneath the earth—but I saw it as one of the strange, not-quite-real worlds-that-had-come-before in terms of Native American mythology. It was beautiful and intimidating, and I knew almost nothing about navigating it safely. I said, "Raven?" into the empty air, hopefully.

 

My raven fell out of the sky, something glittering in his beak. He landed on the ground and dropped it, cocking his head first at me, then it, then back again before he pounced on it with both feet and tore it apart.

 

It was the shiny food I'd left him, Pop-Tarts wrapped in foil. He made delighted burbling sounds in the back of his birdy throat as he stabbed pieces of frosted raspberry tart and shredded the wrapper with his claws. I sat down, laughing, and stole a piece of pastry that had been flung away so I could offer it to him directly. He hopped over, snatched it from my fingers, and scurried back to his feast.

 

Coyote said, "This is a good sign," and licked my ear with a very long wet tongue. I squawked and reached out to grab him around the neck without even looking. I had thousands of questions, and none of them mattered as long as I could hide my face in his neck and hold on.

 

He leaned against me hard, until fur tickled my nose and I sneezed into his shoulder. I sat up to rub my nose, then grabbed him again, scruffing the top of his bony head and pulling on pointed ears. "Where've you been, you dumb dog? I missed you. I missed you so much." I could barely control my voice, even my whispers all shaky, and I tried to push relief so big it exhausted me away so I could ask, "How do we help Mandy?"

 

He rolled over on his back, legs waving in the air and neck stretched to try to nab a piece of my raven's treat. It quarked in agitation, wings spread as it hopped toward him, and he gave a coyote laugh and rolled away to sit up, prim and proper as a cat with his feet all in alignment. "I'm not a dog."

 

"You look like a dog." I never thought I'd be so happy to have that same stupid conversation again. Bewilderment and relief and joy knocked me flat again, and I toppled against him, hanging on to his skinny coyote form. He pressed a surprising amount of weight back into me, and we sat together for a moment, watching the raven stuff himself.

 

When the bird was finished, Coyote stood up and shook himself all over, then cocked an ear at me. "You arrived first, and your spirit animal came to join us. You lead the retrieval."

 

"But I don't know how!" It struck me that I'd spent six months fumbling through even when I didn't know how, and that probably relying on Coyote for all the answers was a crutch I couldn't afford, even if he was back. Lips pursed at the idea, I stood up and offered an arm to my raven. "A woman who greets the sunrise with music is lost, Raven. Will you help me find her?"

 

He bounced from the earth to my shoulder with a half-assed flurry of wings, like he could've made the jump without them but instinct forced them to spread anyway. Then he opened them farther, the better, I thought, to smack me in the head with one, and urged me into a run with strides so enormous it was almost like flying.

 

Coyote chased along behind in a long-legged lope. We tore across the landscape, leaving yellow fields and purpley forests for low hills that became rolling blue mountains. There was an odd flatness to them, as though, if we crested a peak too suddenly, we'd find ourselves looking down on plywood and two-by-fours propping up stage scenery rather than the back side of a proper mountain, but it never happened. Instead a storm came up, white howling blurs of snow that blocked out the mountains entirely. The raven leaped off my shoulder and flew ahead, cawing excitedly.

 

He was good at blizzards, was my raven. I wondered why he hadn't been on hand to help in the avalanche, though to be fair, one little bird against all that rolling chaos didn't seem like an equal fight. The fact that I'd have put money on the raven was beside the point.

 

I heard a woman's voice crying through the storm and followed it, aware that other cries were gaining in strength as I came closer. They weren't like hers: she was asking for help, and the others were shrieking for blood. They had a terrible hunger, and Mandy, it seemed, could feed it.

 

We found her huddled in a snow-scoured igloo, though its protective curve seemed to have been born of her body providing something for drifts to lodge against, rather than from deliberate construction. A thing danced in the snow, no more than a formless blur in the white. It plucked at Mandy's hair, at her hunched back, at her exposed arms, and where it did, welts and blood rose up.

 

There was probably some kind of formal ritual phrasing to gain the attention of demons chewing up living souls. I yelled, "Hey, knock it off, you bastard!"

 

Even I knew it lacked elegance, but it got the thing's attention. It swung to face me in a disjointed ugly way that somehow suggested it had once been human, but that too many ligaments and tendons had slipped loose, and nothing could be counted on anymore. I repressed a shudder and stood my ground, hoping like hell Coyote would back me up when I got in over my head. "This woman isn't yours to torment."

 

"She is marked for me," it said unexpectedly. Its voice was a scream around too many teeth, words slurred but comprehensible. "She has the scent, the taste, the blood, of the wild world in her."

 

Outrage turned the snowstorm red, and I fought it down, pretty certain that fury in the Lower World did other things more good than it did me. "She's not marked for anybody. I'm bringing her home safe and sound."

 

"But she lives. She knows her path. She walks it. She shows me. I follow. I hunger. I eat. She is mine." There was a gleam of ruthless greed in its half-visible eyes. Like the creature on Hurricane Hill, on the rooftop—and I was sure this was the same thing—all I could really see were claws and teeth, like they were the only thing tied to any level of reality at all.

 

"She isn't yours." A flicker of an idea came to me. "She's an outdoorsman. Is that what you mean? Is that why she's yours?"

 

It swung its head heavily, whole body shifting with the motion. "They are all mine."

 

Man, if it had marked all the outdoorsy types in Seattle as its own personal smorgasbord, I needed to get this thing six feet under a whole lot sooner than later. The eight or so deaths we'd seen were nothing in the face of how many people were going to die if it kept hunting. I swallowed and shook the thought off. I had to save Mandy first. "But she's not really what you want. She's weak. I see how you're looking at me. You can tell how much stronger I am, can't you? You know it from when we fought. That's why you didn't kill her straight out. You wanted me to come, so you could test me."

 

A certain animal cunning came into the creature's eyes, and I wasn't sure if I was right, or if it was a new and enticing thought to the monster. "You couldn't find me on your own, could you? Even with all my power, you hunt the ones that go into the woods, and I don't. So you needed her. But you don't need her anymore. You can have me."

 

Raven, I whispered deep enough inside that I hoped no one beyond me could hear. Raven, will you play in the snow? I showed it a picture of what I wanted, and heard Coyote's teeth snap, the sound audible above the sobbing wind. Emboldened, I took a half step back, beckoning the beast. "All you have to do is come and get me."

 

It pounced, slower in this world than it was in mine, or I was faster. I flung myself to the side, hitting a snowbank in a spray of cold and ice, and lurched to my feet barely in time to duck another attack. Coyote and the raven zipped around each other a few yards away, gamboling in the storm, and I did my best to watch them while avoiding being eaten.

 

A figure grew up between them, a snowman in jeans and a sweater and with my short-cropped hair. The raven alighted on its head and shook itself, and color fell into the snowman: black hair, black coat, black pants, black boots. Coyote leaped up and slurped his tongue across its face, and a blush of flesh tones filled its rounded features and its blunt snowman hands.

 

The final time the monster jumped for me, I ducked, and it knocked my simulacrum to the earth with a howl of triumph, rending it with tooth and claw.

 

I surged forward and snatched Mandy's cowering soul in my arms, lifting her with no trouble at all. It was tiny, almost weightless, like a very young child, and I hoped that didn't mean it was dying.

 

Coyote said, "Quick, come on," and I turned and ran after him out of the snowstorm, a raven winging above us.

* * *

I woke up still cuddling Mandy's spirit. The woman on the paramedic's stretcher looked thin and wan, while the ephemeral thing in my arms was bright but fading fast. I leaned forward without thinking, hugging her body close, and felt her soul slip away, settling back into the form meant to hold it.

 

Color sprang up around her, flat against her skin but visible: her aura returning a little worse for the wear, but indicative that all would be well. Coyote murmured, "Well done," and when I glanced up at him, his eyes were gold and his smile wide. "The rest is easy. Finish it."

 

The blow to her head was nasty blunt trauma, a radial fracture like what happened when a rock hit a windshield. There was no blood below it, no sign of deeper trouble, and I tended the fracture with the images I was most comfortable with: new bone filling the cracks like it was heated glass melding a window together. Reluctantly, I left some of the bruising in place so she still had a goose-egg lump on her head. I'd offer to fix it later, but utterly obliterating the signs of injury when there were paramedics standing by seemed excessively complicated.

 

The bite on her arm, unexpectedly, was harder. It had a cold core to it, like winter had lodged in the bone and seeded there, difficult to root out. I looked at Coyote, but he only raised an eyebrow, a none-too-subtle hint that this was a test, and that it'd be better if I passed.

 

Vehicle analogies didn't work so well with cold spots, though the idea of a faulty heater crept in. It gave me a place to start, at least: from inside, like the wiring had gone bad, rather than from the outside where all I'd be doing was poking around at an external symptom of an internal problem.

 

I put my palm over the bite and let magic sink all the way through, until I could see through her arm the same way I'd seen through mine a handful of times. Skin and sinew and blood and muscle and bone all lit up in shades of life, Mandy's colors gaining strength now that the greater physical damage was healed. But there were dark spots inside the wound, those seeds of cold, and delicate trails danced out of them and led into the world.

 

Marking her. Marking her more literally than I'd thought. It wasn't just that she was outdoorsy, not anymore. The bite connected her to the monster, so if I didn't get those tendrils cleaned out, it would come for her again. I gathered them up and tugged gently, just to see if they would loosen. They didn't. I hadn't thought it would be that easy.

 

The trick—the real trick, the most effective expulsion—would be to convince her body to reject the seeds itself. Thoughtful, cautious, I murmured, "Mandy? Can I come in?"

 

After a brief hesitation, I felt—not agreement, exactly, but a lack of resistance, and with that invitation, stepped inside the garden of Mandy Tiller's soul.

* * *

I wasn't in the least bit startled to find myself in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest for the second time that day. This time, though, it was summertime, the sky a blaze of blue glory and the mountainside green and ripe with life. Mandy, lithe and athletic in hiking shorts and a tank-top, was climbing toward a host of pine trees. A backpack was slung over her shoulders and a hiking staff was in one hand, making her the epitome, in my opinion, of wilderness chic.

 

She waved when she noticed me. "Come on over here, take a look at this? See that clinging moss? These trees are going to be dead by the end of the year if we don't give them a hand."

 

I almost said, "Isn't that the natural cycle?" but bit my tongue before the words escaped. There was sickness in her garden, and she had the wherewithal to be rooting it out on her own. I hurried after her.

 

"It spreads," she told me with a sort of resigned dismay. "One tree to another, blocking their ability to draw down sunlight. The hard part's getting it off the tree without damaging the bark, but if you can they'll survive? Here's a knife." She tossed me a relatively blunt blade and showed me how to work it under the moss, how to loosen its clinging runners, and ultimately handed me the backpack so I could stuff the moss we'd cleared away into it. "I take it home and burn it."

 

On a whole different level, I felt one of the seeds of cold in her arm loosen, then shrivel and die.

 

It was good hard honest work, both of us sweating and swearing cheerfully as we scrambled up thin-trunked trees to find far-spreading gobs of moss. Every time a tree came clean, another seed fell away, until suddenly the whole grove brightened, fresh green needles sprouting instantly on all the afflicted spruce. Mandy stood back, brushing her hands with satisfaction, and gave me a sharp, pleased nod. "Thanks!"

 

The great Northwest faded out, leaving me in the back of an ambulance with Mandy Tiller blinking up at me.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

 

Jake Tiller squeaked, "Mom?" and threw himself forward. I lurched back, getting free of paramedics and kid alike. The latter didn't care what had happened, but the former rushed in to check Mandy's vitals, then turned to Coyote and me with expressions raging between incomprehension, anger and relief.

 

"What are you?" one of them said. "Some kind of faith healers?"

 

Coyote shrugged a shoulder, graceful smooth movement. The truth was he probably could've picked his nose and I'd have thought it was gorgeous because I was just so glad he was alive. My heart sped up again like it was going to burst, then kind of exploded with messy joy inside me like it had burst. It was the happiest thing I'd ever felt, and it made the corners of my mouth turn up in an idiot smile. Again. Coyote said, "Something like that, without the religious overtones," and the medic who'd asked crossed himself anyway.

 

The ambulance thumped over speed bumps and came to a stop. The doors flew open, two new paramedics ready to help unload the injured person, and were greeted by six fully awake, undamaged human beings. Mandy'd gotten half her restraints off and was alternating between hugging Jake and prodding at the goose egg on her head. She looked at the new medics, then at the ones on either side of her. "I'm not sure I really need to be checked into the hospital?"

 

"You do," the one who hadn't spoken said, firmly. "I want to get those injuries X-rayed, maybe do a CAT scan. Or an MRI."

 

What he wanted, really, was an explanation for her recovery. He wanted something to tell him he'd been wrong, that she'd never been hurt as badly as it had seemed, even though he'd seen it with his own eyes. He didn't want a miracle. He wanted something comprehensible.

 

"I want Mom to come home!"

 

Mandy put her hand on Jake's head. "It's okay, Jake." She fingered the torn sleeve of her shirt and the still-raw wound beneath it. I hadn't healed that all the way, either, though it was neither as deep nor as dangerous as it had been. "I had a bad fall on the stairs," she said to no one in particular. "Maybe a neighborhood dog bit me while I was out, I don't remember? But with that cannibal everybody's talking about, and me being an outdoors type, it got a little out of hand?"

 

Tight-mouthed and unhappy, the second paramedic muttered, "Please stay on the stretcher, ma'am. We'll wheel you into the hospital for your examination."

 

"If you have to." She lay back down and the paramedics lifted her out. Jake jumped after them and grabbed her hand as they abandoned Coyote and me to the ambulance.

 

We sat in the vehicle's back end, watching with an air of detached interest. The part of me that wasn't bubbling with glee said, sensibly, "Her insurance is going to have a field day with this. I didn't heal everything all the way, but it's going to look pretty lame in light of ambulance rides and MRIs."

 

I heard the smile in Coyote's answer: "Yeah. Sorry I didn't get there before the ambulance did."

 

"Oh," I said lightly, "it's okay. I didn't, either. Our timing was off."

 

Just like that, with a handful of frothy words, all the composure I'd been holding in place shattered. Every emotion the paramedics had shown, anger and bewilderment and relief and fear, erupted through me. My hands turned into a shaking mess and tears wiped my vision out entirely. I turned on Coyote in the worst display of Girl Behavior I'd ever manifested, sloppy fists slapping at his shoulders and chest as my voice shot into a squeaky register. "Where have you been? What happened? I thought you were dead! It's been six months, Coyote! You disappeared, you saved my life and you disappeared and I thought you were dead!"

 

I couldn't have hurt a bug with the power behind my smacks, but he grabbed my wrists, then hauled me against his chest, capturing my flailing hands between us. "Shh, shh, hey hey hey. It's all right, Jo. I was only mostly dead, hey? Hush, hush, shh. It's okay."

 

Wracking sobs stole my ability to flail at him anymore, even if I'd wanted to. Coyote put his chin on top of my head and held on while I ran through the stages of a crying jag, ending with exhaustion so profound it left me nauseated. It was quick, as that kind of thing went, and no one bothered us. I figured people sobbing in the back of ambulances wasn't that uncommon a sight, and that paramedics would rouse us if they needed to go on a run. I finished crying before that happened, and looked up at Coyote feeling all red-nosed and swollen-eyed and hideous.

 

He smiled, a sort of rueful, fond expression, which was as much as any woman could possibly ask from a man when she's just cried all over him. In relationship terms, in fact, it probably meant the guy was a keeper. This particular guy got up and rooted around in the ambulance until he found paper towel that could double as a tissue, and brought it back to me. Definitely keeper material. I honked my nose clear and hiccuped an, "I'm okay now," that made him smile again.

 

"Why don't we go get some takeaway and go back to your place to talk?"

 

That sounded like the best idea in the entire universe, ever. I nodded and snuffled and said, "There's a great Chinese place on University. I'll call Gary and he can…" pick us up, then join us for dinner, was how that scenario would realistically end, although it wasn't what I'd had in mind. I stared blankly at the distance, trying to think of another cab company I could call. It wasn't that I didn't want to share Coyote with Gary. I just wanted to find out what had happened on my own, first. I was in no fit state to juggle more than one man in my life.

 

Right on cue, Morrison pulled into the parking lot with Billy in the car.

* * *

I got out of the ambulance and tried to make myself look presentable. There was no chance of that, not with my face puffy and red from crying, but I tried. The captain had on his Dread Morrison face as he got out of his car, and Billy just looked worried. I said, "We managed the hat trick, boss," before either of them got close enough to start yelling.

 

"Hat trick?" Whatever Morrison had expected me to say, that wasn't it. I was deeply grateful. Any chance to derail a lecture was a win.

 

"Mandy Tiller's okay."

 

Billy let out a sigh that came from the bottom of his soul, and dropped his chin to his chest. I wanted to hug him, but Morrison was still glowering at me. "She had a bad slip on the stairs, that's all."

 

That's what she'd said in the ambulance, and I had absolutely no doubt it was the party line she was going to feed anybody who tried bleeding her for information. I thought she'd offered it up a little bit to help me, but much more to help herself. A fall on the stairs wasn't newsworthy, whereas surviving an attack by a mad killer unquestionably was. If she caught wind of the story at all, Laurie Corvallis would no doubt discover Mandy and I had been out hiking together, but there would be nothing for Laurie to hear about, if Mandy stuck with her version of events. God knew I wasn't about to dispute them.

 

Morrison, however, gave me a gimlet eye. "Is it now."

 

I shrugged, willing enough to feed the party line to someone like Corvallis, but I'd made an unhealthy habit of telling my boss the truth. "No. It was the—"

 

"Wendigo," Coyote put in unexpectedly. I jolted around to gawk at him, then twitched back to face Morrison again and pretended like I hadn't missed a beat.

 

"It was the wendigo, and I had to do a soul retrieval to save her life. Which," I said much more softly, "I did put in danger, yeah. I drew its attention to her. If it's worth anything, I'm not sure it really wanted to kill her as much as it wanted to flush me out."

 

It didn't help. I could tell from Morrison's expression. But he snapped his attention from me to Coyote, clearly expecting to get more answers there. "What the hell's a wendigo?"

 

"A—" Billy and Coyote spoke at the same time, and I saw a little battle of will and surprise, mostly on Billy's part, before he gestured for Coyote to continue. "A man who's gone mad and developed the taste for human flesh," my mentor said. "It usually happens in times of famine, but sometimes other circumstances trigger it. He's becoming a monster, a physical transformation. The wendigo is drawn to the forests. That's why your victims are outdoorsmen."

 

Morrison shot me a look that said "How come you didn't know that?" and "How come this guy knows so much?" in equal parts. What he said aloud, though, was, "Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department. And you are…?" as he offered his hand.

 

Coyote said, "Cyrano Bia of the Diné," and although he was flawlessly polite, I could have sworn he was laughing at Morrison. He arched an eyebrow at me, and added, "Jo might've mentioned me as 'Coyote.'"

 

For the countable space of a breath, there was goggle-eyed silence, and then all hell broke loose.

 

Morrison and Billy started trying to out-shout each other, both of them asking the same questions: "Walker's Coyote? The one who's dead? What are you doing here? Well, I guess that explains the scene at the Tillers' house. How did you get here? I thought you'd died! What the hell is going on? Joanie? What's going on? Walker, what the hell—"

 

I hadn't known that only two people could make that much noise. Worse, Coyote started trying to answer them, not that they were listening, and finally somebody bellowed, "Enough!"

 

For some reason everybody looked at me after that. It took a few seconds to realize my throat was sore from the shout, and that my hands were fisted hard enough to ache. I said, "Enough," again, much more quietly this time, but my voice was trembling. "You know what, Morrison? Billy? You don't get to have the answers right now. I don't know how Coyote got here or how he's alive, and God knows I spend way too much time imagining it's all about me, but this time, you know what? This time it is. I get to find out first. He's my mentor, my friend, he's the one who was in my head, you don't know him, and you don't get to have him right now."

 

To my embarrassment, I was crying again. Real girl tears for the second time, these ones born out of frustration. That didn't happen to me very often, but I hated when it did. It was faulty wiring in the female body, tear ducts attached directly to the frustration meter. Trying to explain to men that no, I wasn't being manipulative, I just couldn't stop my eyes from leaking salt water, only added to the aggravation.

 

In this particular case, though, even if I hadn't been angling for it, Billy and Morrison backed down looking shamefaced and uncomfortable, and I was nothing but glad for it. I was exhausted all the way down to the bottom of my soul. Not just physical tiredness from being thrown down a mountain as an avalanche that morning, not just the shaky emotional collapse of Coyote's arrival, but fundamentally, flat-out spent.

 

Coyote, who was fast earning rank as the number one most fantastic man in the universe, took my hand and gently uncurled it from its fist before slipping his fingers through mine. "Jo's probably right. Not only do I owe her a lot of explanation, but she's just done her first full-fledged soul retrieval, which isn't something I'd usually suggest trying in an ambulance. She needs a sacred place and some food, so I'd like to take her home. It's good to finally meet you, Captain. Detective Holliday." He nodded at my partner, despite having not been introduced, then drew me away from the ambulance and hospital and pressure presented by my friends.

* * *

I went into the hospital and used one of their dial-a-cab phones to call a taxi company Gary didn't work for. We were both silent on the drive to my apartment, because the only cab driver on earth I'd have a "So you're back from the dead, how's that working for you?" conversation in front of was Gary. As much as I loved him, right then Gary fell into the same category as Morrison and Billy: I was not ready to share Coyote with anybody, not until I got a chance to hear and assimilate some answers on my own. The whole drive home I watched Coyote, half afraid he'd disappear if I took my eyes off him. I was so exhausted even the joy had drained out of me. Coyote had to guide me out of the taxi when we got to my apartment building, or I'd have sat there all night.

 

We took the world's slowest elevator up to my fifth-floor apartment because I couldn't face that many stairs. Once ensconced in my apartment, I handed Coyote the phone and a menu from Mrs. Li's Chinese restaurant on the Way, and he placed an order for what sounded like every item of food on the menu while I, mindful of his comment about sacred space, went to lie down in the middle of my living-room floor. The draft from under the front door turned my skin to goose bumps, but once down, I couldn't summon the will to move.

 

Coyote, who was bordering on suspiciously perfect, looked at me, went and dragged the quilt off my bed, and lay down behind me, the cover draped over both of us.

 

I didn't remember falling asleep, but I woke up when the delivery guy rang the doorbell. Coyote got up again, paid the guy, and came back to sit on the floor with me and spread two paper grocery bags worth of Chinese food around us in a veritable moveable feast. I ate all the Mongolian beef, half the cashew chicken, two egg rolls, a carton and a half of white rice, eight slices of barbecue pork, and drank a sixteen-ounce glass of milk before I felt even vaguely stable enough to whisper, "I'm really, really glad you're okay. What, um…? The last time I saw you…really saw you…was when I went into the Dead Zone and fought that snake thing."

 

"Fought." Coyote ducked his head over a heap of rice and sweet-and-sour pork. "Is that what you call it?"

 

"I got you out of there, didn't I?" All of a sudden I wasn't sure. "Didn't I?"

 

He looked up, dark eyes tempered with sympathy. "You did. Not very well, Jo. You shouldn't have even been there in the first place, not without me or at least a guide like Raven. But you did get me out."

 

"And then?" I really didn't want a scolding about where I should or shouldn't have been, or what I should or shouldn't have done. I was sure I had plenty of those in store. But my hands were cramping around the chopsticks and my tummy was getting upset waiting to hear where my mentor had been the past six months. "You just never came back, Coyote. I thought…I don't know what I thought. That you were mad at me. Or in trouble."

 

Coyote sighed. "I wasn't well enough prepared when I met you in the Dead Zone—that's a terrible name for it, Jo."

 

"Do you have a better one?"

 

He shrugged his eyebrows and went on. "I'd been in too much of a hurry, maybe, to meet you, but I wasn't shielded well enough. When you threw me out I never woke up from the dream state, not entirely. I got…lost on my way back to my body."

 

I took a shaking breath and put my box of rice aside. "I'm sorry. I was afraid that snake was going to eat you."

 

"It was going to." His smile was bright and sudden and made me want to crawl over and hide in his arms. "You were doing your best. It was messy, but you did your best."

 

That didn't make me feel as much better as I hoped. "And with…what happened with Begochidi, Coyote? I was dreaming about you all the time, but I wasn't sure any of it was happening…then." That sounded so absurd I put my head in my hands, fingertips pressed hard against my hairline. "Every time I saw you in those dreams it seemed like another time, another place. Your memories, or even your dreams. Sometimes my dreams, from when I was a kid. And I know something happened there, a closed time loop of some kind, because I had to take all of my younger self's memories of studying with you and bring them forward so I could use them now. Time got all fucked up, Coyote, and then you—"

 

I jerked my gaze up, heart thudding again, but not in the nice way it had earlier. Now it just made me feel like I'd eaten way too much and should probably run to worship the porcelain god. "You let go so much power," I whispered. "You got me out of that amber place where the night had butterfly wings, but…you died. I thought you died, Coyote."

 

He sighed again, that explosive sound that I'd heard from his coyote form more than once. "I almost did, but I was betting on Begochidi never deliberately harming one of the Diné. I thought it was worth the risk of drawing her attention to me, but she was stronger than I thought. Or maybe less strong, in the end, because if she'd been at her best, I think I would have woken up. Instead I've been sleeping all this time."

 

"There must be healers—"

 

"My grandfather," Coyote said. "He's a shaman, too. He spent every day at my side, keeping me strong, but what he saw when he tried a soul retrieval on me was Begochidi standing before the rainbow that lasts all day. It wasn't a path he could travel. He knew then that someone else would guide me home. She nodded to him once, though."

 

I whispered, "Her. I saw Begochidi as a man."

 

Coyote shrugged. "We see in the god what is different from ourselves. In her acknowledging him, my grandfather believed he was allowed to keep my body strong, so he did, and he waited for you."

 

"I didn't do a soul retrieval, Coyote…."

 

"Didn't you?" He looked up, strands of fine black hair falling across his face. "I heard you calling, and saw your raven guide me from the storm."

 

I stared at him slack-jawed. "That—in Mel's power circle? That was you? The one who went running the other direction?"

 

His smile broke again. "Guilty as charged. It wasn't a classic retrieval like you did today—the Tar Baby was a good idea, by the way—"

 

I mumbled, "It wasn't my idea," guiltily. "I got it from a seven-year-old."

 

"A sss—I'd like to meet that kid!"

 

"Her name's Ashley. She's kind of amazing." A little grin worked its way over my face as I thought about Ashley Hampton and her ambition to be a "peace ossifer." "I'll introduce you."

 

"I'd like that." Coyote shoveled a couple more bites of pork into his mouth. "So I woke up yesterday morning with my grandfather sitting beside me. He'd done well. I was a lot stronger than I should have been, after all that time. I spent about six hours in one of our own sacred places—" He broke off, eyeing my living room floor dubiously.

 

I snatched up a new box, feeling defensive as I investigated its contents. Ban mian, full of noodles and greens. I stuffed my chopsticks in and ate several bites before muttering, "It's all I've got, okay? It's where I do most of my work. I just usually put a blanket in the door so there's no draft."

 

"Whatever works." He gave me another one of his bright smiles and went on with his story. "Anyway, I spent the morning eating and sweating out the results of lying in bed for months, and in the afternoon I left to drive up here."

 

"You just took off? What about the rest of your family? Didn't they care?"

 

A wash of old, resigned pain sluiced across Coyote's features. "It's just me and my grandfather. My parents died a long time ago. I'll tell you about it, but it's not a happy story, and these should be happy times." He reached out like he'd catch my hand, but he was too far away, and dropped his hand before I could meet it with my own. "I was worried about you, so I came as fast as I could. Grandfather understood."

 

"I've been worried about you for months. I didn't even know where to go to try and find you. There's three hundred thousand people in the Navajo Nation." Guilt was spoiling the food I'd eaten. "I'm sorry."

 

"Hey." Coyote put his box of pork down and crawled over to me, loose hair sliding around his shoulders. Honestly, if just watching that didn't make me feel a little better, nothing would. Fortunately, it did. Then the way he hopped around one of the depleted grocery bags reminded me of his Coyote form, and I laughed before he got to me. He sat at my side, knocking his shoulder into mine. "That's better. Jo, it's okay. I didn't expect you to come looking for me. You had things to do here. And judging from what I saw today, you've been doing all right."

 

I shook my head. "I've been scrambling to just keep my ass covered, Coyote. I've felt like a walking disaster. I really wish I'd had your help."

 

"Well." He looked abruptly serious. "You will now. And I hate to say it, but this time you're going to need it."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

I hated for him to say it, too. If a wendigo was a nasty enough piece of work that I, who had fumbled along facing gods and demons, was going to have trouble with it, then I really just wanted to hide under the bed until it was gone. On the other hand, that approach hadn't worked in the past, and if I had fumbled through before, having Coyote actually at my side now ought to be a major confidence booster.

 

Somehow it wasn't. "Why is it so bad? I've gone up against some pretty powerful things, Coyote…"

 

"Gods," he said quietly. "Sorcerers. But the wendigo used to be human, Jo. It's easier to stand against the immortal and corrupt than it is to face a ruined human soul. And we're mean, humans are. When you put us in a corner there's no telling what we'll do. Wendigos are like that, too."

 

I wished I hadn't asked. "Okay, so is this a 'Joanne would get dead if Coyote wasn't here' scenario? Because I don't like those."

 

"No. No, nothing like that. I mean, maybe," Coyote said less than reassuringly. "But it's not what I meant. You can't wait for a wendigo to come to you. They take hunting, Jo. Not like a murder case, but real hunting."

 

"Like out in the woods with a rifle and an orange jacket hunting? I don't look so good in orange."

 

"More like out in the woods with a spear and—"

 

"Magic helmet?" I asked hopefully.

 

Coyote, exactly like his furry counter-self, whacked his shoulder against mine hard enough to hurt. "If you have one, wear it."

 

I rubbed my shoulder, too glad to experience that again to sulk about the pain. "Did you come up here because you knew I had a wendigo on my hands?"

 

"I thought you might be more willing to believe it was me if I showed up in the flesh. Besides, I haven't seen you in real life since you were about five. I wanted to see how your mental image stood up to the real thing."

 

My heart lurched with sudden nerves. "And?"

 

He leaned away so he could examine me, then smiled. "I haven't seen your astral self in half a year. There's no comparison. You were a mess then. Angry spikes shooting out of a wraith trying to stay unseen. Now…"

 

I thought of the spiderwebbed windshield that reflected the state of my soul. "I'm still a mess."

 

"Nah." Coyote traced a fingertip down the scar on my right cheek. I startled, then startled myself even more by closing my eyes and tipping my head into the touch. "You don't have this," he said. "I didn't know you had a scar."

 

"Sure you did. It's the one that didn't want to heal that very first day, when Cernunnos stuck a sword through me."

 

"Oh, yeah." He dropped his hand and I opened my eyes again to see him shrug thoughtfully. "Guess I didn't expect it to leave a real scar, since you don't have one in your image of yourself."

 

"Well, I did live twenty-six and a half years without one. And I don't really see it when I look in the mirror." I took a deep breath. "We're procrastinating, aren't we?"

 

"Are we?" Coyote sounded amused. "On what?"

 

I took a breath to say on dealing with the wendigo, and instead ran up against the disconcerting idea that he was flirting with me. I'd never considered the possibility that he might find me attractive. I found him attractive, but then, I figured anyone female, heterosexual and breathing probably would. For his hair, if nothing else, but it was only one of a number of what I considered to be very fine features.

 

Instead of answering, I blushed. Coyote's grin, of which I was becoming very fond, blossomed. He said, "Ah," in a very wise and sagely tone, "procrastinating on that," and leaned in to kiss me.

 

We left the Chinese food to be cleaned up in the morning.

 

Thursday, December 22, 4:07 A.M.

 

My room was lit up by the glowing numbers on my alarm clock and their reflection in the shining ceramic of the bedside lamp. Coyote was a comfortable, steadily breathing lump between me and the light. His hair, braided—we'd twisted it into loose plaits before falling asleep—was wound over his shoulder, where I couldn't roll on it, and the red light made thick shadows of his eyelashes. I didn't know why men so frequently got to have lashes like mascara companies advertised, although the idea that it was to keep dust out of their eyes while they hunted antelope on the savannah popped to mind. It didn't matter. In modern terms they were just attractive, and I stopped myself from brushing a fingertip over them. I didn't want to wake him up. I just wanted to lie there for a while, head propped on my hand, and smile stupidly while I watched him.

 

Some vaguely rational part of my brain said this was not like me. That Joanne Walker, Reluctant Shaman, did not fall into bed with a guy a few hours after meeting him. That Joanne Walker didn't succumb to stupid, giddy, exciting infatuation.

 

Truth was, Joanne Walker couldn't think of a single reason why she shouldn't. I could even build a nice rationalization if I wanted to, because I'd technically known Coyote half my life, what with the shaman's training he'd given me in the dream world when we were both teens.

 

For once in my life, I wasn't even vaguely interested in rationalizations. I was just happy. I was iridescent bubble, fluffy bunny, rainbow sky happy. I was happy Coyote was alive. I was happy we'd saved Mandy. I was happy he thought I was pretty. I was happy—bizarrely—that this was one guy who was neither unduly interested in nor threatened by nor uncomfortable with my aggravatingly esoteric set of talents. I could be me with Cyrano Bia, even if I hardly knew who that was.

 

And this was a possibility that Suzanne Quinley hadn't shown me. I liked that. I'd become resigned to feeling like there was some kind of destiny awaiting me, something I didn't have much control over, but was going to have to face. The simple fact that there were still surprises in store, that there were paths untaken, even unimagined, made me feel like maybe I had a little bit of choice after all. For the first time that I could remember, I was just plain happy to see where the road took me. It felt good.

 

I lay back down, put my nose against Coyote's shoulder and my arm over his ribs, and went back to sleep.

 

Thursday, December 22, 7:58 A.M.

 

There was an Indian in my parking lot.

 

All right, technically there were three, if you wanted to count me and Cyrano, but I wasn't interested in us. I was interested in the low-slung, shiny green beauty that had no business at all being outdoors in a Seattle winter. I approached with the reverence due a vehicle old enough to be my grandfather, and knelt in the slush, not caring that my knees got soaked.

 

I knew cars, not motorcycles, but I also knew beautifully restored work when I saw it. "It's a, uh…What is it? Early forties? You didn't…drive it up here. Not through the mountains. Not in winter." I twisted to look over my shoulder at Coyote, who looked as nervous and hopeful as a six-year-old.

 

"It's a 1938 Chief. There's a sidecar, but I didn't want it to slow me down." He shook his head, all but digging his toe into the slurry on the ground. "I shouldn't have driven, I know. I should've flown. But…"

 

The idiotic grin that'd been peopling my face for a lot of the past twelve or fourteen hours popped back up. "But you wanted to show off, didn't you."

 

Sheepish little boy voice: "I thought you'd like it."

 

I turned back to the bike, smiling so widely my ears hurt. There was a fringe on its leather seat, and the rich forest green paint job was highlighted by white over the wheels. The poor thing's engine was exposed, fine for someone living in the Navajo Nation, but less than fantastic for December in Seattle. "How the hell did you get through the Rockies without killing yourself? Without freezing to death?"

 

He sounded guilty. Pleased, but guilty. "I shanghaied a friend with a pickup into driving me over into California and then came up the I-5 as fast as I could." We both looked at the Indian, and the guilt in his voice turned smug: "Which was pretty damned fast."

 

"You weren't on this yesterday when you showed up at Mandy's house. I'd have noticed." The world could have been ending and I'd have noticed. There was a small, indiscreet part of me that wanted to lick the bike. That's how gorgeous it was.

 

"No, I parked it here and took a cab to where I felt you. I didn't want to bring you home on this without the sidecar. Or at least a helmet."

 

"You knew where I lived?" That didn't bother me, for some reason, but I grinned over my shoulder at him again. "You were going to put me in a sidecar? Not you?" Okay, honestly, the idea of riding around in a sidecar built for a 1938 Indian Chief, wearing one of the old-fashioned leather motorcycle helmets, was pretty appealing. But I was used to being the driver, so I had to give him hell.

 

"The apartment building felt like you. You've lived here a long time, haven't you?" His smile broadened a bit, too. "I'll let you drive the Chief the minute you hand over Petite's keys."

 

I raised my hands and stood up, defeated. "You drive. Except not in this weather. C'mon, we're going to have to move him inside. You're lucky it didn't snow last night."

 

"Inside? Do you have a storage unit?"

 

I wrinkled my eyebrows. "No, I have an apartment. We can bring him over to Chelsea's garage tonight, and our beloved but impractical-for-winter vehicles can keep each other company until the weather breaks." Or until Coyote went home, but I didn't want to think about that just yet.

 

He said, "Your apartment will smell like gas and oil if we store him in there," but he was heading for the bike when he said it.

 

I beamed. "Yeah. It'll be great."

 

My apartment building was mostly filled with college students—Coyote was right; I'd lived there a long time, since I was one of them—and the few who were up at eight in the morning clearly thought nothing of someone wrestling a classic motorcycle into the slow-moving elevator, nor of wheeling it down the building hallway on the fifth floor. The Chief looked a lot bigger inside my apartment than it had in the parking lot, and we had to move my computer desk and the smaller couch to fit it in, but he was safer and warmer inside, so I was satisfied. Of course, doing that took all the extra time we'd bought by getting up early, and the bus delivered us to the precinct building ten minutes late. It wasn't the optimum way to start a day when I needed a favor from my boss.

 

Billy was already at work, head down over a stack of files, and though he glanced at his watch when we came in, he didn't say anything. Possibly he didn't say anything because it was we, and not just me, who came in, but I counted my blessings anyway, and made the introduction I'd failed to yesterday: "Coyote, this is my partner, Billy Holliday. Billy, this is Coyote. Cyrano. Cyrano Bia." I noticed I was holding Coyote's hand, and let go so he and Billy could shake.

 

Billy looked like he was swallowing back seven or eight hundred questions as he shook Coyote's hand. "It's good to meet you. I'm glad you're all right. Joanie's missed you a lot."

 

Coyote mouthed, "Joanie?" at me, and aloud said, "Good to meet you, too. She thinks a lot of you. Sorry about the melodramatics yesterday. Have you heard from Ms. Tiller?"

 

"She sent an e-mail late last night. She and Jake are home and okay. Looks like the news didn't pick up on her adventure. Morrison still wants to see us."

 

Some of my good mood drained away. "Us, or me? Because this wasn't really your fault."

 

"Us, and it was as much mine as yours."

 

I started to argue, then subsided. We were both in trouble, and Billy apparently wasn't going to let me be the fall guy. "When's he want us?"

 

"About ten minutes ago."

 

I pulled a hand over my mouth, turned to Coyote, said, "Crap," turned back to Billy, then walked in three little circles while trying to figure out what to do with myself. "All right. He's going to kill me either way. I guess I should go get it over with. Hang tight, okay, Coyote? I'll be back soon, if I'm not dead."

 

"We don't have a lot of time, Jo. The wendigo knows there's someone of power hunting it now."

 

"Oh, it more than knows. It checked me out while we were at Mandy's." I bet that was an important detail I should've mentioned earlier. I tried for an apologetic smile, managed a grimace, and added, "But it ran away," hopefully. "Maybe it didn't think it could take me."

 

Coyote's expression suggested I definitely should have mentioned this earlier, and that I was probably also a moron for having made the hopeful suggestion. "If it's already retreated, Joanne, it's going to be all the harder to find. And it'll get worse the longer we let it run."

 

"Right. So I better go talk to Morrison." Who was going to kill me. Rightfully. I gave Coyote an impulsive kiss and scurried out of Homicide.

 

Billy caught up, looking between me and where we'd left Coyote so sharply I thought he'd give himself whiplash. All he said, though, was, "'Jo'?"

 

My face wrinkled up entirely of its own accord. "Yeah. I didn't used to like it, so everybody calls me Joanie. Everybody but Gary. He started calling me Jo and I guess I got used to it."

 

"Cyrano," Billy said, as if he was afraid he was pointing out something dangerous, "isn't Gary."

 

The stupid little smile cranked the corner of my mouth up again. "I know."

 

Billy said, "I see," and any further commentary was lost because Morrison flung his office door open and we slunk in.

* * *

The captain left us standing there long enough that my feet began to itch from holding still. Under almost any other circumstances it would have started to be funny, and I would've turned into a smart-ass, but I was vividly aware that I wasn't the only one in trouble. I was afraid to look away from Morrison, though I didn't much want to look at him, either. I fixed on his right shoulder, judging it close enough to meeting his eyes. I could certainly still see his face, which was florid.

 

"I don't know what to do with you two," he finally said. "I'm used to Walker being an idiot, but this is new territory for you, Holliday."

 

A modicum of wisdom suggested this was not the time to defend myself. Besides, it was a legitimate statement. I'd spent quite a bit of time making an idiot of myself in front of Morrison.

 

For some reason that made me think of Coyote, and I smiled, which wasn't really the smartest thing to do. Morrison snapped, "You think this is funny, Walker?"

 

"No, sir." I honestly didn't, except possibly in a "the tension is getting to me, I must either laugh or scream" way. I had the presence of mind—barely—not to say that. And to bite my cheek when another dippy smile started to come out of nowhere. I was hopeless.

 

That, at least, was a sentiment Morrison would agree with. "The only reason you're not both suspended is Mandy Tiller is alive and well. I should suspend you anyway." But there was a killer out there that only his paranormal detective duo was equipped to find, so he couldn't afford to draw attention to us or the department by suspending us from a case we pretty much had to work on anyway.

 

He didn't say any of that out loud. He didn't need to. Instead, he snapped, "You'd better goddamned well consider yourselves on probation. You will do nothing without clearing it with me first, and I mean nothing. I don't want you taking a coffee break without my permission."

 

Billy, sensibly, said, "Yes, sir." I, less sensibly, said, "Aw, hell, Captain, look, in that case I need permission to go haring off into the woods for a few days, because I'm going to anyway."

 

Morrison's eyebrows shot toward his silvering hairline, and I had the distinct impression Billy was trying to run away without actually moving a muscle. "You what?"

 

"This thing, the wendigo, Coyote and I are going to have to hunt it, but it's not a city creature. I can't stay here and report in and still do my job." There was a certain irony to that, but Morrison didn't look like he was buying.

 

"You're not going anywhere, Walker, and if you were, it wouldn't be with a stranger who's not on my force. I don't care how well you think you know this guy. All I know is he's showed up in the middle of a serial murder case claiming to know things about the killer that, frankly, I'm not sure he could know if he wasn't involved."

 

I laughed. It was bad form, but I laughed. "Are you serious?"

 

Morrison's ears turned red. "Walker, you told me your mentor was dead. And now this guy with all the answers just happens to show up, wrapped in a package only you can recognize? You tell me if that isn't suspicious."

 

Phrased that way, it was. Phrased that way, it also sounded just a little like jealousy, a trait which Morrison hadn't exhibited over Edward Johnson while I'd been dating him. I wrote it off as amusing but unlikely. "It's Coyote, boss. I know him. He taught me for months. He saved my life, for Pete's sake. I trust him. And we can stand here all morning going around on this, but in the end I'm going to do this, so you might as well give me permission so you can feel like you're retaining some kind of control."

 

Morrison's voice went very low: "I could fire you."

 

A pit of regrets opened up in my belly. "Are you going to?"

 

I heard Billy take a surreptitious breath and hold it, like he might not draw attention if he was utterly still. Morrison stared at me, the raging color gone from his face, and I stood there on the edge of a coin, waiting to see which way it, and my fate, fell.

 

The door opened behind us without so much as a knock of warning, and I caught Coyote's scent as it closed again. Morrison clenched his jaw, but Coyote beat him to the punch: "I'm sorry for the intrusion, Captain, but Joanne and I can't wait any longer. We really have to go."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

I'd kind of gotten used to Morrison and Gary posturing at each other. It was a testosterone thing that made no sense, given that one was my boss and the other was forty-six years my elder. They'd also laid off the worst of it recently.

 

So I was really in no way prepared for the explosiveness of two young men with equal interest and stakes in me facing off. The air actually got heavy, like it did just before a storm, and I shot a compulsive glance out the window, wondering when Seattle had started featuring dead-of-winter thunderheads.

 

"Detective Joanne Walker is an officer under my command—"

 

"Cosmically," Coyote said, "I've got you trumped."

 

The way he said it reminded me, dismayingly, of me. I could never be that calm or casual, or manage to put that much weight behind a handful of on-the-surface silly words, but in terms of picking just the right thing to inflame Morrison, it could've come straight off my short list.

 

Equally dismaying, Morrison responded just like he would've to me. His whole head turned crimson and he stepped forward to invade Coyote's personal space, clearly expecting me and Billy to give way. Billy did. I almost did.

 

My knees locked up, though, and my core went solid with determination I didn't know I had. Gary and Morrison fluffing their feathers at each other was one thing. It was something else entirely with Coyote and Morrison, and I very much didn't want to see either of them take it in the teeth. I didn't want much of anybody fighting over me, but especially not these two, because God forbid somebody should lose, and someone would have to. I forgot I was a police detective and a shaman. For a minute I just ran with being a girl, and got between the men in my life. "Guys. Come on. Knock it off."

 

Standing between them was like getting into one of those static electricity balls. Morrison radiated challenge, sparks physically stinging me. The Sight reacted to all that aggressive emotion, awakening to show me vivid darts of red exploding through Morrison's usually purple-blue aura. Every time one of those jagged bolts zipped outward, I felt it against my skin, sharp and uncomfortable.

 

But if he was the lightning in the storm equation, Coyote was the thunder. I'd never Seen another shaman before. Even if I hadn't already, I'd have known instantly that this was someone of power. His aura was dune-colored, with slashes of desert-sky blue, and it rolled toward Morrison's like he'd flatten him and be done with it. I could all but hear his presence in the small bones of my ears.

 

Morrison was about the last person on earth, though, who could be flattened easily. I said, "Guys," again, and lifted my hands, palms facing each of them. "That's enough."

 

My boss, who didn't often say stupid things, said, "Walker, this isn't about you. Back off."

 

Astonished, vaguely insulted, I said, "Really. Who exactly is it about, then?"

 

Coyote, very calmly, said, "Don't worry. We'll get it settled," which ranked pretty high up there in stupid things, too, as far as I was concerned. Neither of them was moving, and despite the fact that I was tall enough to be in their lines of vision, my presence between them didn't seem to be stopping them from a world-class stare-down. I was afraid that, given another few seconds, they were going to start peeing on things. I was not about to get peed on.

 

Billy, cautiously, said, "Joanie, maybe you should just get out of the way," which for some reason pissed me off beyond belief. What was I, the fragile female who needed protecting?

 

It was a good enough question that I repeated it out loud: "What the hell is wrong with you two? Do you think I need a big strong guy to take care of me, or something?"

 

"I said this isn't about you, Wal—"

 

I said, "Oh for Christ's sake," and made like Moses and the Red Sea.

 

A shimmering silvery-blue wash of magic flared on either side of me, right in Morrison's and Coyote's faces. I expected Coyote to see it. I was more surprised when Morrison's eyes widened, but I straight-armed both of them before he had a chance to speak. Sheets of magic pushed Coyote up against the door and Morrison all the way back to his desk, which hit him in the ass and stopped his backward slide. "Have I got your attention now, gentlemen?"

 

I pretty clearly had everybody's attention. Gratifyingly, both objects of my pique nodded obediently. So did Billy, for that matter. I felt a nudge of resistance against my magic from Coyote's quarters, and glared at him. The probe faded away and he looked genuinely contrite.

 

"Good. Let me make something clear. I don't require rescuing. I don't require protecting. I frequently require help, which this pissing-match behavior in no way qualifies as. Now understand something else. I found out the hard way that this power of mine doesn't cotton to being used as a weapon." Cotton to. Get my dander up and I fell just a smidge toward the Southern in my choice of dialect and dialogue. It wasn't my fault. Four years in North Carolina will do that to a girl.

 

Morrison was looking slightly relieved around the eyes, which wasn't what I was after. I stopped dissecting my own verbal tics and finished my explanation: "I'm pretty sure bashing the two of you up against the walls a few times wouldn't actually trigger a super-psychic alarm saying oh my God, Joanne's using her powers for evil, but I'd kind of like to see if I'm right. Anybody else interested?"

 

For some reason they all three shook their heads rapidly. I thought they weren't any fun at all. Still pissed off, I let the magic go. Morrison, whose posture had been extremely erect while I'd held him in place, sagged a little, then scowled at Coyote. "Couldn't you stop her?"

 

"Couldn't you?"

 

I'd become the common enemy. It wasn't exactly what I'd been going for, but it was better than the two of them at each other's throats. Billy just gaped at me like I'd sprouted another arm, or a second head. Apparently ostentatious displays of power were not what he'd come to expect from his partner in crime. Anti-crime. Whatever.

 

I turned to Morrison and said, "Sorry," with about as much emotional integrity as he could expect after behaving like a hormone-ridden teenager. "Boss, this hunting party is the best shot we've got at stopping this thing. I'm your best shot at it. We know I'm going anyway, so may I please have permission?"

 

Morrison suddenly looked older than his thirty-eight years. I probably would, too, if I had me to deal with on a regular basis. "How often are we going to do this, Walker? How many times are you going to walk into my office and tell me how it is, even if it's against every rule and regulation we stand by?"

 

"I don't know." I wasn't angry anymore. I wasn't bubbling over with goofy happies, either. I was almost sad, really, like I was losing something I barely recognized. "Until neither of us can take it anymore, I guess."

 

The captain looked between me and Coyote, and when he looked back at me again I wasn't sure we were still talking about the same thing, even though nothing more had been said to change the slant of what I'd just offered.

 

More, and worse, something subtle happened in Coyote's face, as if he'd heard and understood the change in subtext, too. My heart spasmed and I glanced away from both of them.

 

That might have been okay, except there was somebody else in the room, and he'd followed the unspoken conversation just as clearly as the rest of us had. Billy met my gaze with the deepest, most tempered expression of compassion I'd ever seen, and the small sadness inside me burgeoned into something so big I had a hard time swallowing around it.

 

Billy was the one who broke the silence, which hadn't dragged out for long, but a lot had been said inside it, and none of it had been easy to hear. "You want me along on this, Joanne?"

 

His timing was perfect. Half a second earlier I wouldn't have trusted my voice. Half a second later I'd have fallen over into a sniffle that would've belied my tough-girl antics. "I think it'll be just me and Cyrano on this one. Thanks, though." I looked in Morrison's general direction without actually going so far as to meet his eyes. "We'll rent a car, or something. Keep it off the department books entirely."

 

"Something happen to Petite?"

 

I hadn't fully realized Morrison knew my car's name. I mean, yes, her license plate said PETITE in big block letters, but given he felt my relationship with her was pathological, I wouldn't have expected to hear him call her by name. A pinprick hole released some of the ache inside me, and I crooked a smile. "She's in the garage. The insurance paid up after that Doherty guy came by in October, so I've got enough money to switch out her transmission to a manual. It's my winter project."

 

There was no way on earth Morrison cared about any of that. I'd never met an American male with less interest in cars than my boss. But he nodded like it meant something to him, then nodded a second time, this time at the door. Not at Coyote. At the door. And said, "Take care of yourself, Walker."

 

"Yes, sir." I left his office with Coyote on my trail, confusingly aware that last time I'd walked away from Morrison with another man, he'd told the guy to take care of me. I had the uncomfortable sensation that last time, he'd been willing to relinquish—ownership, for lack of a better word, though it wasn't a good one—because he hadn't seen Thor as a threat. This time I was responsible for myself, which suggested, awkwardly, that Morrison was still in the game.

 

My life had been a lot easier when I was emotionally stunted.

 

Coyote waited until we got all the way out to the parking lot before he said, "So. That's how it is with Morrison, huh?" like that should mean something to me.

 

Aggravatingly, it did. "It isn't any-how with Morrison. He's my boss." Butter wouldn't melt in my mouth.

 

"You called me Cyrano, back there."

 

My life had been a lot easier when I was emotionally stunted. I knotted my hands into balls and glared at the ground. "Okay, yes, fine. That's how it is with Morrison. Jesus Christ."

 

"What about last night, then?"

 

I did not want to do this. God, how I did not want to do this. I walked a dozen steps away, shoved a hand through my hair, and came back a few feet. Coyote, slim and lean and beautiful, just stood there watching me. His brown eyes had a gold tint to them: he was watching my aura, reading more from it than my body language would tell him. I wondered if it showed my heart as an aching, tender, beat-up point inside me, bleeding red through my usual colors.

 

"Why does there have to be some kind of big explanation for last night? I've had a crush on you since I was about thirteen. You came back from the dead and, I don't know, Coyote, I kind of like the idea of being stupid in love with you. You had me at hello. Why can't that be enough? Morrison's my boss. Nothing's going to happen there as long as he is, and I'm not planning to quit my job. So why does it have to matter?"

 

"Maybe because you just chose him over me." Coyote's voice was remote. I utterly refused to look at him with the Sight and find out how much or little of that was an act. I didn't want to see him hurting, too. I was confused enough already.

 

Except on one thing: "I didn't choose anybody, Cyrano. But you should have known better."

 

Coyote snapped his gaze up to mine, astonishment mixing with injury. "Me? I should've known better? Why me? Why not him?"

 

"Because you're on his territory. For that reason alone you shouldn't have walked into his office and tried laying down the law, and you know it. That wasn't about us needing to get going. It was about who gets to tell Joanne what to do, and honestly, Coyote, in the scheme of things, he does. If that's choosing him, then yeah, I choose him, because he's my boss. We have our issues, but we get it figured out, and we would've gotten this one figured out. So if nothing else, you should've respected being on somebody else's playing field. Instead you had to push it." And spoil everything, I didn't say out loud.

 

We stood there a long time. A wind came up, making my cheeks cold but failing to get under my jacket and wool sweater. Finally Coyote mumbled, "I'm sorry," and looked up with credible puppy-dog eyes.

 

It was more or less the last thing in the world I expected him to say, and the excessively mournful gaze was enough to break the tide of my anger. In fact, it was nearly enough to make me giggle, which I resented enough that it almost made me angry again. I said, "Stop that," with enough asperity that he did. "People who actually possess puppy-dog eyes in another shape aren't allowed to use them to get themselves out of trouble. I say so. It's the rules."

 

"Okay." Despite the promise inherent in the word he gave me another puppy-dog look, though this one more said "Am I forgiven?" than "I'm sorry."

 

I glowered at somebody's Jeep, trying hard not to fall for manipulative men with big brown eyes, and gave up with a snorted laugh. "Okay. You're forgiven. But if you do something that stupid again, Coyote, I swear to God…"

 

"I won't." He sidled up to put his arm around my waist and his nose on my shoulder. I fought off another giggle, and he repeated, "I won't. You're right. I was being a dick, and I'm sorry. You've changed a lot, Jo."

 

I eyed him, which was difficult given his proximity. "You mean, six months ago if you'd shown up and tried going to the mat with Morrison over what my responsibilities were, I'd have been delighted to let you play hero so I didn't have to face up to any of those decisions or responsibilities myself?"

 

He cleared his throat. "I wouldn't have said it like that, but yeah."

 

I turned in to him, catching his coat in my hands and bumping my nose against his. "You're right. I've changed. I'm a superhero now." I stole a kiss, then smiled against his mouth. "So let's go save the world."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

That kind of line needed a supersonic jet to swoop down and pick us up, just for the drama of it, but I was obliged, much more prosaically, to call Gary and wait fifteen minutes for him to pick us up. We spent most of the time taking turns being the one to lean our rear ends against the cold hoods of other people's cars, and being the one to warm up our hineys by getting to lean on each other. I was sure it was an affront to his masculine dignity, but we fit together better when Coyote leaned on me, since I had a two-inch height. Furthermore, my arms were slightly longer than his, so I could get a better grip on him than he could on me. I'd just stuck my cold nose in the corner of his neck and was holding him so he couldn't squirm away when Gary pulled up. His disgruntled, "Did I miss somethin'?" rose over the sound of his Chevy's engine, and I let Coyote go with a grin.

 

Gary gave us the fish eye through the rolled-down driver's side window. "Who's this, doll?"

 

If I'd been hanging on to any resentment, it dissipated. Gary was like my own personal cheer-o-meter. I jolted forward and whispered, "This is Coyote," like it was a tremendous secret. "He's not dead. He got better."

 

Gary gawked at me, then got out of the cab looking like he couldn't decide what to ask first. I interrupted with, "Coyote, this is Gary. My best friend. The best thing that's ever happened to me. I wouldn't have made it through the last year without him."

 

Coyote, looking unexpectedly nervous, stepped forward to shake Gary's hand. Gary seized his shoulders, looked him up and down, then hauled him into a rib-popping hug instead. "Heard a lot about you, son. Glad to see you alive. How the hell'd that happen?"

 

Coyote said, "Joanne set me on the path home during a spirit walk," like it was a perfectly rational thing to say, and I said, "'Son'? I get 'doll' and 'dame,' and he gets 'son'?", which was a perfectly rational thing to say.

 

"Ain't my fault. Language's got a lot more oddball words for women than men." Gary set Coyote back, hands on his shoulders again, and examined him for a second time. "Knew she was getting better at that spirit quest stuff. What're you two kids up to?"

 

"We need to go—" That was both of us. I said, "To Olympic National Park," and Coyote said, "Home," and we looked at each other while Gary ping-ponged between us. "I fought with it at the park," I said after a few seconds. "It's our best lead."

 

"If it came into the city to study you, it's smart enough to not return to the place you hunted it, Jo. We need to create a sacred space and search for it in the Lower World. That should help us pinpoint its location in this world."

 

"Don't you think I've been trying that?" I snapped off a description of my power circle adventure, and the Space Needle-based search of Seattle. "The power circle was how I rescued you, but I didn't get any kind of bead on where the thing was."

 

"Yes, but I'm here now," Coyote said with an air of authority all the more aggravating for being apropos.

 

I'd become aware of Gary drawing breath to speak every time one of us finished a sentence, and that we'd kept running over whatever it was he had to say. I finally looked at him, eyebrows arched, and he said, "You wanna go to Rainier National Park."

 

A flicker of polite patience crossed Coyote's face. "How do you know that?"

 

One of the many things I loved about Gary was his inability to bear fools. He gave Coyote a look that reminded me sharply of the throw-down in Morrison's office, but instead of turning it into a thing, he just said, "Because that's where the news just reported a new cannibal murder, kid."

 

Downgraded from son to kid in less than two minutes. Maybe it was some kind of throw down after all. Either way, Gary said, "I'm drivin'," and thirty seconds later we were on the road to Mount Rainier.

 

Thursday, December 22, 10:16 A.M.

 

It turned out we were actually on the way to my apartment. It took the drive over, plus time for Coyote and me to pack up some clothes and my drum, minus several minutes of Gary cooing over the Chief and heating toaster pastries while trying to find something in my apartment that would serve as on-the-road lunch, just to explain Coyote's return. Gary kept saying, "I'll be damned," in a tone that suggested being damned was about the niftiest thing possible. By the time we got back out the door, he and Coyote were old friends, and some of the explosive joy I'd felt earlier had returned. More quietly, maybe, but it still felt awfully good.

 

For a girl who'd grown up on the road and who loved driving as much as I did, I didn't get out into the countryside nearly enough. I'd driven out to western Washington to test the promise of some of its long straight stretches at high speeds, but I'd never headed south.

 

The road to Rainier National Park wasn't a speed demon's dream, but even in the dead of winter it was beautiful. Bare-armed trees reached over the black strip of road cutting through white countryside, every curve and hill promising more of the ever-changing same. Gary and Coyote rattled on about a variety of things, starting with Coyote's resurrection and touching on Gary's misspent youth as a saxophone player: things I knew about, by and large, which let me just slip into the thoughtless rhythm of the road.

 

It reminded me of being a kid, traveling all over America with my dad. He'd had an old boat of a Cadillac that never broke down, but we'd taken the engine apart eight or ten times I could remember, just so I could learn how to do it.

 

Those had been the good times. We'd stopped at junkyards all over the country, Dad chatting up the owners—he'd been good-looking, tall and rangy with hair almost as long as Coyote's—and getting them to let me, or teach me to, work on the old beasts they had lying around. I'd gotten into the bellies of cars most people my age didn't know existed. I'd loved it.

 

That wasn't something I remembered often. Mostly, looking back at my childhood, I tended to focus on the changing schools every six weeks, the inability to make friends in such a short time, the weird period when I was seven or eight when Dad had been teaching me Cherokee, and I'd almost forgotten how to speak English. Since then I'd made up for it by almost forgetting how to speak Cherokee. But long car trips made me think about the good stuff, especially if I wasn't driving, and for the first time in a long while I wondered how Dad was doing. I hadn't talked to him in years. Last I'd known he was still in Cherokee County back in North Carolina, but it was hard to imagine he'd stayed on after I left for college. He'd grown up there, but he'd never given any impression of wanting to stay. He'd never given any impression of wanting to stay anywhere, particularly after a year-long stint in New York had given my mother a chance to relocate him and drop me on his metaphorical doorstep.

 

These days I suspected she would have found him if he'd been on the lam in Timbuktu, but I certainly hadn't known that growing up. Besides working on cars and moving around a lot, my real, lasting impression of childhood was that my father often looked like he neither knew how he'd ended up with a daughter, nor what to do with one now that he had it. He'd been the one who called me "Jo" in the first place, which was why I didn't like it. Once I'd gotten old enough to think about it, I'd suspected he'd used that nickname so he could pretend he was just talking to himself. It had more recently occurred to me that maybe he'd been trying to find another point of similarity for us to build on, but I hadn't been anything like that forgiving as a kid. In retrospect, I was probably lucky he hadn't drowned me. Thoughts like that slipped away at the speed limit, following hard on one another like the dashed lines on the road. It was as close to meditation as I ever got.

 

For some reason when we got to the park entrance Coyote and Gary both looked at me like they expected me to pay the fee for all three of us. I'd paid it at Olympic, but Mandy'd been doing me a huge favor. This time we were all in it together, although Gary was more all in for fear of missing something than for standing the line. Not that he wouldn't. He was a good guy to have at my back when things got rough, a fact I knew from experience.

 

Somehow that talked me into paying the fee, and we drove into the park with me feeling like I'd been Jedi-mind-tricked. "Wait a minute, where are we, anyway? Which entrance was that?"

 

"Nisqually." Coyote looked over his shoulder at me. "Weren't you listening? The body was found near the Longmire museum."

 

"Wouldn't the pickings be richer at Paradise?" That was the only section of the park I'd ever really heard about, mostly thanks to the occasional news story about the visitor's center. It looked like a flying saucer, and the roof kept threatening to collapse under the snowfall. They were going to build a new one any minute now.

 

"There's a lot of old growth forest around Longmire. The wendigo's probably drawn to it."

 

I said, "Ah," then squinted at him. "You're from Arizona. How can you possibly know this?"

 

He held up a PDA with a Wikipedia entry visible on its little square screen. "Oh. That's not very mystical of you."

 

"No, but it's handy." He flashed me a grin underscored by Gary's chuckle, and we fell into a companionable game of glimpse-the-mountain wherever there was a gap in the trees. Not too much later we pulled into the parking lot of what a sign proclaimed was the National Park Inn, which, from the outside, was a genuinely gorgeous rustic-looking building with the mountain serving as a dramatic backdrop.

 

Gary whistled. "Damn, that's something."

 

I said, "It is," except my eyes had fallen right off the vista and landed on a black 1967 Chevy Impala. It didn't belong up here in the woods any more than Petite might've, but it was a beautiful car. Gary parked a few spaces down from it and I got out to walk circles around it. Kansas license plates. I patted the Impala's hood and mumbled, "Long way from home, aren't you, baby?" before reluctantly turning away.

 

Laurie Corvallis, evening anchor for Channel Two News, stood right behind me with a smile as pointy as a crocodile's. "And so are you, Detective Walker."

* * *

In any other circumstances I'm sure I would've seen the news van another fifteen feet down the lot, and suggested to Coyote and Gary that we get the hell out of there. But I was weak in the face of classic cars, and truthfully, we couldn't have escaped anyway. This was where the job was, for us just as much as for Laurie Corvallis.

 

Which was hardly something I could say to her. I fished my best genuine smile out of somewhere and said, "Fancy meeting you here. You up for the Christmas break?"

 

"I'm not," she said, every bit as pleasantly. "And neither are you."

 

"Really? I thought I was. I'm going to be disappointed, then. So why am I here?" She didn't have a microphone, so I didn't much care that I sounded like a babbling idiot.

 

"You're up here following the Seattle Slaughterer, just like I am, Detective. And the fact that you're here makes me all the more certain I'm going to get my story. I'll be watching you."