“She’s come a long way on our faith,” the tart voice said. It sounded like Granny Smith apples. “She hasn’t got any of her own.”

“She’s a newborn,” a third voice broke in. He sounded like mellow cheese. “She didn’t mean to invite us, but she’s willing to help.” Two more voices chimed in, everyone bickering and sniping at one another until they sounded like a flock of geese. I turned around in a full circle twice, trying to see the people the voices belonged to. The starlight jabbed at my eyes unrelentingly, no shadows or shapes to go with the voices clouding them. It suddenly felt weirdly familiar.

I hadn’t seen Coyote until I believed in him. I had a sinking feeling in my gut that I’d better believe in the voices, because I was pretty sure I had invited them to do…whatever they’d done. Hauled me out of my body to somewhere that horribly murdered people hang out.

My brain just shut down around that thought.

“Look,” I finally said. It got very quiet in the star field. I turned around one more time to find a handful of people behind me, all staring at me with wide, curious eyes. “You’re wrong. I can see you.” I wasn’t sure which one was the Granny Smith, so I fixed them all with a gimlet eye. “And I’m not all that inclined to help somebody who called me a cosmic bed wetter, when you get right down to it.” A tall woman’s long nose twitched. I guessed her to be Granny Smith and removed the gimlet eye from the others to give it just to her. Her nose twitched again.

“Sorry,” she said after being elbowed in the ribs by a short man whom I guessed to be the James Earl Jones voice. He didn’t look anything at all like Jones. I was hideously disappointed.

“You’ll have to forgive Hester,” he said. “She’s not taking well to having been interrupted.”

“Interrupted.” My eyebrows flew up. “You mean murdered?” I was sure these five were the files I had lying on my kitchen table. They were all the right general sizes and shapes, even if I’d only seen photos of their corpses.

He made a moue. “I suppose so. It’s really just an inconvenience, but Hester is young.”

I peered at Hester. She looked like she was well into her fifties, at least. Her mouth pursed up like she’d bitten into one of the apples she sounded like. “Not as young as this one,” she sniffed. I scowled, and suddenly there was an enormous distance between myself and the five, the star field endlessly expanded. I could see, with sharp-edged clarity, the alarm on all five faces.

“Dammit, Hester,” one of the others said, “you’re going to put her off us entirely before she’ll agree to help us at all.” Her voice was absolutely clear despite the distance between us, like she was standing on a sound stage. It echoed faintly. Hester flared her nostrils, then lifted her chin.

“I’m sorry.” It was much less grudging this time. “Roger is right. I was in the middle of something important, and I’m not sure I’d done enough to make it last. But that’s no reason to be rude. You’ve been extraordinarily generous with your invitation already, even if you didn’t know it.” Her voice was still tart, but it was more like the tart of apple pie. I began to wonder if I was hungry. “Will you stay long enough to let us tell you what we know?”

“Well, I’m here,” I said. Distance contracted again, so that the five and I were only a few feet apart, stars glittering around us. “I might as well listen. Maybe you can tell me what the hell is going on.” There was a note of miserable confusion in my voice. I straightened my shoulders and pretended I hadn’t really sounded that pathetic.

“You almost died this morning,” a petite blond woman said. She had dumpling cheeks that went with Earth Mother curves. I remembered from the file that her name was Samantha.

“Yeah, I was there for that part.” I rubbed my breastbone uncomfortably and screwed up my face.

“Do you know that near-death experiences often open people’s eyes to another world?”

“I know that’s what they say,” I replied. Samantha smiled a tolerant little smile. It occurred to me that my current position was a fragile one for argument. “All right.” I gritted my teeth and pushed the words out. “So maybe there’s more than meets the eye.” I rubbed the heel of my hand over my breastbone again and took a deep breath. “All right, there is more than meets the eye,” I said defensively. “Normal people don’t start burning and smoking when you stick a knife in them. The guy who stabbed me this morning was definitely not normal.”

Hester snorted faintly. Roger elbowed her again. “Be quiet. That’s quite an admission for her.”

“Must it be an admission to come around to stating the obvious?” Hester asked. Apparently sour was just her nature. The moment of grace earlier must have come hard-won. It had worked to make me stay, but she wasn’t earning any brownie points.

“Give me a break, Hes,” I said. She looked up sharply. I bet nobody had called her that since third grade. “Yesterday the world made sense and today I’m standing in a star pit talking to ghosts.” I looked back at Samantha. “So what happened to me?”

“You got to make a choice. Most people don’t get to.”

I spread my hands. “Why me?”

“You must have a lot to offer,” she said. “Many times, those who need the most healing are the ones who can in turn heal the most.”

I took a step backward, a scowl falling down my face like pitch, until I was glaring at her through my eyebrows. “What do you mean, need the most healing,” I said. She was clever enough to withhold an answer. Instead, she spread her hands, a polite mimicry of my earlier gesture.

“I did not mean to intrude,” she said so deferentially that the anger drained out of me again. “What do you know about shamans, Siobhan Walkingstick?”

My eyebrows went up and my jaw went down until my face was as long as a donkey’s. My father had taken one look at the unpronounceable Gaelic first name my mother had bestowed on me and had given me another one. I’d looked up the pronunciation when I was a teenager, but I actually hadn’t been sure that the bizarre combination of letters was pronounced She-vaun, not See-oh-bawn, until my mother used the name when she called to ask to meet me. Aside from that one conversation, not even she’d called me Siobhan. It was even less a part of me than the Walkingstick name I’d abandoned a decade ago. “How did you know that name?”

Samantha drew an outline around me with her fingertip, a loose general shape. “It’s a part of you that you’ve been denying your whole life, and now it’s spilling over. Think of it like a floodlight shining on you, illuminating all the information you’ve been keeping filed away. It’s very clear to anyone who knows how to read it. It’s eager to be acknowledged. You have a remarkable heritage, Siobhan. You ought to explore it, not turn your back on it.”

I stood there and stared at her. After a while I tried to crank my jaw back up. Part of me wondered why I was reacting physically when my body, as far as I could tell, was tucked safely in bed, back at home. Wherever back at home was, from here. “Right,” I said eventually. “This is getting a little too thick for me.” It came out exactly right, casual bullshit. I was very pleased. The thing was, right down in my gut, I believed her.

“You’re not a very good liar, are you?” The fifth person finally spoke up. He was taller than me and had a wonderful Grecian nose and broad cheekbones. He hadn’t looked so good in the murder photos. It was too bad he was dead, or I’d have asked him on a date. His mouth curved in half a smile, and I had the sinking feeling he’d somehow heard that. Coyote and Cernunnos had certainly heard things I hadn’t said out loud.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody. But thanks.” He winked, and the half smile turned into a grin. I told myself I couldn’t possibly blush, without a body handy. I think it even worked.