“No!” Rage and pain and fear split her voice in a shriek, and she jumped at me. I reared back onto my heels and caught her in a hug, my arms over hers. In the garden that we shared, neither of us had the psychic advantage, but I was an adult woman, physically powerful from years of working on cars, and I held her easily as she twisted and sobbed against my chest.
“I’m not taking him,” I whispered, knowing it was completely useless. “I’m not even taking your ability to talk to him, Jo. I just need to be able to do it myself in my time, and I need your power. Your skill. Your training. I am so sorry, Joanie. Don’t let it ruin you. Coyote’s not gone. You’re not alone, sweetheart. You’re not alone.”
“What do you know about it!” Her voice was a hoarse scream, making my own throat ache. “You’re a grown-up, you don’t understand! You don’t know anything!”
“I was there, Jo. I do know. I lived it. I do know. You don’t have to let it drive your choices. You’re going to be okay, Joanie. You really are.” I sounded so soft and confident that even I believed me for a moment.
But I did know. I had been there. I knew that the fifteen-year-old girl I held wouldn’t remember her dreams about Coyote, or my visitation, when she woke up. She’d only remember that she felt more outcast and abandoned than ever, because she thought I’d taken her one friend away.
And that loneliness would drive her choices, just as if I’d deliberately wiped away every other path she might have taken. The beautiful skin drum lying on her dresser would go unused. The power she had such control over would be shut away, left to fester, its only release the creation of impenetrable shields and a stubbornness so profound it might well have been born of magic. She would take desperate actions to try to fit in during her sophomore year of high school, and she would pay for what I had done here for the next thirteen years. Just as I’d made my mother a woman who could will herself to death, I’d made myself into the ragingly lonely, angry young woman I was in high school, and the ill-adjusted, reluctant shaman I’d grown up to be. It was a closed circle, endless, flawless.
I lied, “You’ll be okay,” into Joanne’s hair, and let her go.
Time pulled me back to where I belonged.
The net I’d cast out shone with a power I’d never seen before, not without help from my friends. It felt as if I’d been breathing without one lung for half a year and simply hadn’t realized it. I still had a sense of centering, the healing magic resting behind my breastbone, but it wasn’t any more separate from me than my heart was. I didn’t need to blink or concentrate to bring auras into focus, the young Joanne’s training fully accessible to me. I should have been glad.
Instead, every heartbeat felt heavy, regret weighing it down. There had to have been a better way, and the closed loop of time and paradox told me even if there was, it was too late for me, too late for Joanne. We’d traveled the path we needed to in order to arrive here and now, and without starting completely anew, I saw no way around it. I hoped Grandfather Sky was happy with what he’d wrought, and wondered if I’d ever be what the Makers of the world had intended for me to be.
I drew my net in with the skill of an ancient mariner, fistful after fistful of shimmering blue and silver light, waiting to see what I’d caught. Weight burdened it as I pulled it in closer, thin air coalescing into familiar shape. When I’d gathered all the particles spread through the atmosphere together, they became Coyote, translucent and tired in the mist of my waterfall. We looked at each other awhile, both silent and weary, his eyes gold and mine green, for all I couldn’t see them. Magic in the outside world might make them gold, but my idea of myself had hazel eyes, and I would not relinquish that to the power.
When I finally spoke, it wasn’t what I expected to say. “When are you?” came out, as if it made perfect sense.
“I’m not sure.” He lifted a hand to examine it, turning his fingers this way and that. I could just see his face through his fingers, and from his glance, he could just see me through them, too. Disconcertingly, the coyote form mixed with the man, bones and paws and heads twisted to work together until I couldn’t quite tell which was which. Joanne had seen him this way, and I wondered if I always would now, or if he’d be able to hold to one form in my eyes when he was at full strength. “I don’t remember this,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean I’m now.” He lowered his hand, turning his golden focus on me. “So now you know.”
“You didn’t warn me.” I couldn’t bring heat or accusation to the words, much as I wanted to. “Couldn’t you have done something to change how it happened?”
“I tried. I tried, Joanne. I did try.”
Dreams filled my mind, seeing myself from the outside as a raven fell down from the sky to sweep me up. Then Big Coyote, settling himself between two paths, the raven down one and a comprehensible future down another. The sweat lodge, and my grandfather, a man that Joanne didn’t know, but Coyote did. The path I’d taken in dreams, following the raven in hopes of somehow guiding the black-haired little girl who had stared at me from beside her father’s Oldsmobile, twenty years earlier. I stared through the dream images at Coyote’s thin form and shook my head, eyes wide with incomprehension. “What are you?”
He smiled, tired and sad. “A shaman. A guide. Your guide.”
“But—” I shook myself, trying to clear my mind. “But…you’re…” Certainty filled me, washing away an abstract concept: the grandfather who’d guided me in Coyote’s dreams was not the Maker Grandfather Sky, but Coyote’s own grandfather, a kind wise man of flesh and blood.
“Human?” His smile came again, brief and brighter this time. “You never asked, Jo.”
“I asked if you were a spirit guide!”
His smile crinkled a third time. “I am.”
“But—but—you’re—!” I wasn’t doing well with clearing my mind, much less getting a coherent thought out. “But I thought you were magic! Not real!”
He lifted one eyebrow. “After all this, you still think there’s a difference between real and magic?”
“Coyote!” Frustration burst through my voice and he laughed, gentle sound beneath the rumble of waterfalls.
“I wondered for a long time why you never asked my name. You always called me Coyote. Even when you were a girl. I finally realized you thought I was something else. A power animal. No wonder you kept thinking I was a dog.”
“Coyotes aren’t dogs,” I said, so automatically I surprised myself. Coyote’s eyes widened and he threw his head back in another laugh.
“After all this time, you’ve finally learned that. There may be hope for you yet, Siobhán Walkingstick.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” My voice rose and broke like a kid’s. “You tricked me!”
Coyote flashed into his animal form, lolling a cheerful tongue at me. “I am a coyote.”
Spluttering outrage stopped my throat while he cocked his head, tail wagging in admonishment. “There isn’t a lot of time, Jo. You’re coming into your own now. I don’t know what’s going on around you, so tell me. What do you need me for?”
All the burgeoning betrayal fled, leaving me on my knees in the garden clutching at grass again. “The usual,” I heard myself say in a small voice. “Save the prince, fight the dragon, be home in time for dinner. I’m all alone, Coyote. You…” I didn’t want to tell this Coyote, whenever he was from, that in my time he was dead. His golden burst of power, whatever he’d done to stave off the butterfly darkness and free me, suddenly made more sense. It hadn’t been a spirit creature at all, and it felt like me because he was like me. Human. Only human. I didn’t see how he could have survived. “You can’t answer me,” I said to the grass. It was longer than I remembered, halfway up my forearms as I knotted my fingers in it. “I set something loose, something that was sleeping and is awake now, and it’s got you. It’s getting everybody. I don’t know how to stop it.” I laughed, thin little sound, and shook my head. “And I haven’t slept in days, except for these magically induced comas that I dream and dream during. I’m tired. I’m tired and I don’t know what to do.”