“Open your eyes,” he murmured, and Joanne did, very slowly, until the spirit world and the normal world amalgamated and became one in her vision, neither seeming complete without the other. I felt raw delight rise up in her, so overwhelming her throat tightened and tears swam in her eyes as she split a smile broad enough to hurt her cheeks.

“It’s magic!”

“It’s your birthright,” Coyote said. “I’ve got a lot to teach you.”

Joanne turned that blinding smile, an expression I couldn’t remember ever having, on the coyote, then reached out to hug him so hard I could feel bony ribs and shoulders digging into my cheek and arm. There was greed and hope and excitement in her voice as she said, with more enthusiasm than I’d ever shown, “I want to learn.”

CHAPTER 23

The sun had set when I became aware of it again. I didn’t know why no one had disturbed me, the scene-causing woman standing mindlessly still in the middle of the restaurant’s sidewalk, but then, I didn’t know why nobody’d awakened me when I was sleeping beneath Petite a couple of days earlier, either. I had the sensation of being veiled, as if I were sleepwalking, or maybe as if everyone around me was. I’d have thought Morrison would see through the veil, and the idea made my stomach clench. Me being cosmically attuned to him in some way hardly meant the reverse was true.

I remembered, now. I remembered Coyote dreams so clearly I could barely fathom why I’d forgotten them for so long. I remembered his patience in teaching me how to draw my powers out, how to heal, starting with the most superficial of wounds and working toward the most profound. I remembered that even as a kid I’d had a hard time with the idea of simply seeing something as whole and it being that way. I had never quite achieved that to Coyote’s satisfaction, and I remembered that back then, I’d used the same tire-patching and car-fixing analogies to rebuild bone and sinew as I did now.

I remembered the tricks I’d shown him: the way I’d learned to bend light around me so I was invisible, the idea taken from some comic book I’d read. I remembered a night when it’d been pouring rain in my garden and I’d changed the rain to flowers, daisies and sunflowers and dandelions spilling out of the sky, and I’d realized then that I could do that in the waking world, too. I remembered touching on a river so deep and fast I’d almost drowned in it before Coyote put his teeth into my belt and tugged me back. I remembered learning to create things from my will alone, and I remembered that the basic rule of magic was the same one a coven had taught me a couple of weeks earlier: do what thou wilt, and it harm none. Neither the coven nor I had done so well with that, but it was still the immutable rule.

What I did not remember was walking through school every day, cocky and proud of my knowledge and power. I didn’t remember using it to make myself popular or stronger or better, to push myself into the place I’d always wanted to be: belonging. I turned my palm up, creating a silver-shot ball of blue energy there. It swam around my fingers, darting and dancing like it had life of its own, and I wished it was sheer moral superiority that had kept me from making a place for myself in Qualla Boundary. That was what my fictional Chinese heroine would’ve done, kept her gifts quiet and worked silently in the background to the betterment of the people around her.

I was nowhere near that good a person. I hadn’t eked out a position for myself using my power because in the waking world, I didn’t even know about it. I could just about see it now, a thin line across my psyche that Coyote had drawn, keeping my awareness of burgeoning power apart from the often bitter, sullen teenager I was in day-to-day life. On one side of that line lay the memories of dreams, and on the other was what I’d been meant to remember until I’d grown beyond the emotional maturity of a turnip. On that side, I remembered Coyote visiting a handful of times, always waking me up immediately, until the day he’d stopped visiting at all.

I thought I should be bubbling over with resentment at my spirit guide, for all the trouble he’d put me through by walling up my power until I was grown-up enough to use it. It was arrogant, high-handed and officious, assuming I wouldn’t have been able to handle the responsibilities he was offering me.

It was unquestionably the right move.

I walked back to Petite, my body stiff from standing motionless on concrete, and crawled into my car. I wanted to stay there, small and hidden, and sleep until I understood everything that had ever happened to me. Dreaming would help sort it all out. That was what dreams were for.

Only lately, they seemed heavy and dangerous, too, and I didn’t think this was a good time to risk letting my subconscious do all the work. I put my hands on the steering wheel and let intellect unfold creases of memory I was too drained to deny.

The advantage of being a new soul, Coyote’d told me not that long ago, was I didn’t have the burdens of past lives to weigh me down. The disadvantage was I didn’t have the experiences, either. I had thirteen short years of existence behind me when we first met, and in all that time I’d never really belonged anywhere. Maybe someone with a little more history would have felt the weight of smart choices and understood that shamanic gifts weren’t for personal gain. I’d known that on an intellectual level at thirteen, but I wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass, and Coyote knew it.

The bitch of the thing was there wasn’t much choice about whether I’d have those powers or not. I’d been built that way by a Maker I wasn’t quite convinced existed, but Grandfather Sky and Mother Earth didn’t care if I believed in them or not. They believed in me. That was all that mattered. So Coyote’d been stuck teaching a kid who’d use her powers in all the wrong ways if she’d known she had them. In his position, I’d have kept me in the dark, too.

I’d like to think I’d have grown into learning the truth. In retrospect it was clear other people did—the drum that lay at home on my dresser was proof of that. It’d been a gift when I turned fifteen. Maybe it’d been a sign that the elders saw that I was finally coming into myself.

But then I met Lucas, and everything went to hell.

I leaned forward, putting my forehead on Petite’s steering wheel, my eyes closed. I didn’t let myself think of him by name, not since he’d hightailed it back to his mother’s people in Canada when I told him I was pregnant. The First Boy. That was how I thought of him. It was safer that way, as if he was a symbol more than a person. School had just started and he was new, newer than even me, visiting his father and cousins in North Carolina. Even now, almost thirteen years later, when he came to mind I still thought he was beautiful, with broad cheekbones and a white smile. I’d hoped going to bed with him would make him like me, or make me fit in better. It hadn’t worked, though it’d lost me the only best friend I’d ever had.

I wasn’t dumb enough to pretend not to know what a missed period meant, under the circumstances. Lucas had left at Christmastime, maybe as he’d always intended. It certainly gave him a legitimate excuse to be far away from Qualla Boundary before it became obvious I was pregnant. It didn’t really matter: I hadn’t told anybody but him and my friend Sara, and still haven’t. The father’s name is left unknown on the birth certificate, and that was probably as much the reason for Morrison’s concern as my lousy phrasing yesterday morning. Part of me wanted to get out of the car and go find Morrison and tell him right then that it hadn’t been rape, just a stupid mistake, but I knew I’d never do that. I hadn’t even told my father I was pregnant, just let it become obvious as time went on. He never asked.