“Let me show you, Joanne.”

I got up, rubbing my eyes like a much smaller kid, and put my hand in Coyote’s, feeling grubby and gangly next to him. He dropped a wink and said, “Down the rabbit hole!”

The Dead Zone opened up a funnel and zipped me down a swirling tube at about a thousand miles an hour. Wind ripped through my hair and the tube took a rise and dip, making me squeal and laugh and reach for support that wasn’t there. The adult me thought there ought to be friction burns on my thighs—I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, my usual sleeping apparel as a kid—and the younger me thought she’d never been on such a totally excellent roller coaster. Light suddenly enveloped us and Joanne shrieked gleefully as we exploded out of the tunnel over a body of water. We were in the air just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of greenery, and then we hit the pond with a tremendous splash and a whole lot of giggling. Joanne came to the surface laughing and wiping her eyes, merrier than I could ever remember being, and stood there looking around, thigh-deep in water.

A lush, misty garden spread out in front of me, cobblestone paths wending through it into a foggy distance. Enormous trees grew up, branches braiding together to make arches over the pathways. A scent of cherries filled warm air, blossoms drifting down like soft rain, and thunder filled my ears. There were lily pads and floating cherry blooms on the water’s surface, and Joanne trailed her fingers through the water, scooping one of the flowers up. She actually tucked it behind her ear, a feminine gesture I couldn’t imagine doing, and turned to look behind her while she waded out of the pool.

I knew what I’d see: a waterfall filling the pool from the garden’s northern end. I thought maybe it’d been the water-slide we’d come in on. But the falls I was accustomed to tended to be a trickle, or a thin sheet of water over granite facing, hardly enough to play in.

Joanne’s waterfall ran higher than I could see, blue sky and pounding mist obscuring its top. For all its enthusiastic fury and the white water it made when it hit the pond, the pool itself was remarkably still, so clear I could see the depths it plunged to near the waterfall’s foot.

Joanne backed up until a bench hit her in the knees and she sat, arms braced as she smiled at rainbows brought into relief by sunlight playing over the falls. “What is this place?”

“Your soul, for lack of a better word,” Coyote said. He was sitting beside me on the bench, apparently unconcerned with having temporarily disappeared, and he wore the coyote form I was most familiar with. Joanne did a double take that even I found funny, and Coyote himself snapped air in a doglike laugh.

“I’m not a dog,” he said, nearly before the thought was finished, and I laughed while Joanne wriggled sheepishly. Some things, it seemed, hadn’t changed.

“Sorry.” She sounded like she meant it, which was more than I’d ever done. “Does everybody have a garden like this one?”

“Everyone has a garden,” Coyote said with a bony-shouldered shrug. “Nobody’s exactly alike. It’s the source of who you are, Joanne. The heart of your power.”

Joanne curled a lip, the expression familiar to me. I’d tried hard to train myself out of it once I’d grown up, for a couple of reasons. One was that sneering only looked good on James Dean. The other was that I’d eventually figured out nobody wanted to be friends with somebody who perpetually looked like she’d bite your head off if you spoke to her. But that was years ahead of the girl I was right now, and she sneered with the best of them. “I don’t have any power. I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

Oh, God. Reliving being thirteen was going to be a lesson in humiliation I could do without. I tried closing my eyes and putting my hands over my ears, but it was amazingly ineffective against things that were happening in my own head. Coyote cocked his ears, as if doing so would explain the logic behind the younger me’s statement, then rolled out his tongue and let it go. “Close your eyes, and tell me what you feel.”

Joanne eyed him, then shrugged and did so, straightening her spine as she did. I didn’t remember having such good posture at her age. Then again, being tall had kept me out of some fistfights, so there were reasons to stand up straight.

Being tall and standing up so straight had come across as arrogant, the snide voice in my head reminded me, and had gotten me into a lot more fights than it’d gotten me out of. I told the voice to shut up and go away, even if it was right. Especially because it was right. I’d learned, too, to never let them know they’d beaten you, and standing up straight went a long way toward that. I’d stood up so straight every goddamned day of my pregnancy that my back hurt again just thinking about it. Pride had kept me stiff-spined for eight months. I guessed maybe it’d been doing that for a lot longer than I cared to think about.

“I feel like I’m going to puke,” the younger me announced in the midst of all that introspection. She rubbed her hand over her stomach and opened her eyes again, nose wrinkled. “Like somebody hit me in the stomach with a golf club.”

Coyote’s mouth opened and his tongue lolled out, as if he’d been about to say something and Joanne’s comment had caught him off guard. “Golf club?”

“Yeah,” she said, oblivious to his surprise, while I remembered the club sinking into my diaphragm like it was meant to be there, hooking under the breastbone with a solid whump. It’d been an accident, the kid who hit me considerably younger than I was, but the club’s backswing had still taken the breath out of me for what seemed like hours on end. Even now, more than fifteen years later, the memory made a sick little pit beneath my breastbone, and I realized Joanne was right. The power, when it wanted to be noticed, did feel a lot like that had. It wasn’t something that could be ignored. “It feels kind of connected to something,” she added. Coyote shook off his curiosity about the golf club and looked pleased.

“Connected to what?”

“I dunno.” Joanne turned around in a circle, still rubbing her tummy. “Maybe to this whole place. Maybe to you.” She let go a sudden burp, clapped a hand over her mouth and looked back at Coyote with wide eyes. “Feels better now,” she said through her fingers. “Maybe it’s just gas.”

Humor creased Coyote’s long face and he lifted his chin, ears pricking up. “Close your eyes and try again. Imagine reaching out with that feeling so you can touch everything with it.”

“You want me to puke all over everything?” Joanne asked dubiously, but closed her eyes. I couldn’t see when she closed her eyes, and twitched impatiently, trying not to order myself to open my eyes again. I could feel the power inside her—us—respond when she reached for it, flowing cool and silver-blue out from her center. There was nothing sluggish or reluctant, as there’d been in the worst moments of my denying it, nor did it feel in any way gleeful or glad to be used. It just was, as much a part of my younger self as breathing or messing around with cars was. For an instant I envied her, and wished there was a way to get her not to make the mistakes I’d made.

Joanne didn’t even have to open her eyes. The world began to come into focus through closed eyelids, the gorgeous, powerful neon colors I’d become so fond of spilling into her vision through the power of magic. I’d never tried looking at my garden with the second sight, and wouldn’t have thought an imaginary place representing my soul would have all the colors of life inside it, vibrating with excitement and potential.

The waterfall was made of crystal, crashing down with a liquid music that raised hairs on my arms. The pool it splashed into rippled into prisms, colors riding tiny waves to the pool’s edge, where they crawled up over the banks and spilled into grass and trees with all the joie de vivre imaginable. I could see Coyote in both his forms at once, the lanky good-natured animal shape seeming to settle inside the young man’s torso. His own power, his aura, was less tempered through Joanne’s eyes than through his own, burnt sienna and bright cobalt-blue, but it was infused with joy and patience.