Spirit Dances

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jenn gave me a ride back to Petite, and I drove myself home with the vague intention of getting some sleep. But for the second time that day, the mirror arrested me when I went into the bathroom. I wasn’t accustomed to noticing myself so often: mostly my vision of me was a quick glance to make sure my hair wasn’t actually frightening, and then I went out the door. But I kept seeing the sliver of a scar on my right cheekbone. Someone had opened my face with a butterfly knife the day I became a shaman, and the injury had preferred not to be completely healed. The scar was a subtle reminder that I’d left my old life behind.

So were the pieces of jewelry I’d slowly taken to wearing over the past year. My mother’s silver choker necklace, embedded with traditional Irish symbols, and the copper bracelet with pictographic animals rushing its circumference that had been a gift, years ago, from my father. Even Coyote’s earrings, not just the dangling ivory coyotes themselves, but the stylized gold ear wraps, one a snake and one a raven, which my short hair could never hide. They were all outward signs of the path I was walking, things that not so long ago I’d refused to wear because I so fervently disliked where they were pointing me.

Oh, how the mighty had fallen. I turned the shower on and stood there staring at myself until steam clogged my view, then stripped off my clothes and climbed in to sit in the bottom of the tub. Moody introspectiveness was not a headspace I wanted to fall asleep with, and showers were wondrous for either clearing my mind or waking me up. Either would do just fine.

Patty Raleigh’s pale, shocky expression planted itself behind my eyelids as soon as I got under the water. I made a fist and hit the tub, not hard, but muttered, “Okay, fine. I’ll go see her when I’m done showering. Subtle much?” to my brain.

Astonishingly the image faded, though it was replaced with Naomi Allison’s collapsing form. This time I smacked my temple, exasperated. Taking a shower did not constitute avoiding responsibilities. I knew that, but my brain was apparently eager to keep me on point, which would have been more helpful if I could instantaneously step it up in the magical tracking department. Short of miraculous improvements in that regard, I wasn’t sure what else I could do. Maybe try to contact Coyote again and ask for more guidance in the shapeshifting realm, but my mentor was clearly unhappy with me. Besides, if my experiment with the rattlesnake was any indicator, I didn’t really need Coyote’s help. I just wanted his reassurance.

I flashed on the idea of the rattlesnake as a hunter, wondering if the fascinating heat-sensing ability could be turned to a magic-sensing skill. That was something Coyote probably could help me with, if he was so inclined. I just didn’t figure he was inclined.

“You really do have the most peculiar mental processes,” he said mildly. I surged backward with a yelp, scraped my back on the tub faucet and howled a mix of genuine pain and utter indignity as my mentor cocked a pointy ear at me. “How was your shapeshifting lesson?”

I folded a washcloth behind my back to daub at the scrape, then peered at the cloth miserably, convinced by the shock of pain that I’d find gushing blood. Disappointingly, there was just a bit of dead skin. “I know I’m not asleep this time. What are you doing here? I’m in the shower! And what is it, you can read my mind? How come I can’t read yours? It’s not fair.”

“It’s not like I haven’t seen you in the shower before, Jo.”

That was true enough to make me blush, although the first several times he’d seen me in the shower it had been just like this, with him a spirit-guide coyote and me in some kind of uncontrolled trance. Which shouldn’t be happening, at this stage in my shamanic career.

“You’re right. It shouldn’t be. The odd thing is your shields are up, which they never were back at the beginning. They’re just very weak. What have you been doing?”

“Nothing. Reading auras, that’s it. Shapeshifting this morning, but that was really easy. Rattler helped, and it didn’t feel like it took a lot.” I couldn’t see the scrape on my back no matter how hard I twisted. Sullen, I laid a paint job touch-up image over it, and the pain faded. “Can you read my mind?”

“When your shields are this weak, yes.” Coyote paused, then did a doggy shrug. “All right, most of the time, for that matter. I’ve known you a long time, Joanne.”

I curled my lip and hunched forward, arms wrapped around my shins as water beat a rhythm down my back. “I’ve known you just as long. How come I can’t read your mind?”

“Maybe you want me to read yours.”

That seemed deeply unlikely, a thought which made Coyote quirk a challenging eyebrow. I muttered, “Oh, shut up,” and put my head on my knees. Coyote wasn’t really there, for all that I felt entirely awake. He’d be soaking wet by now if he was, which image cheered me enough to say, “I’ve been wrung out since the healing last night. Maybe it’s screwing with my shields and my…dimension-hopping abilities.”

“Planes. They’re planes of existence, not different dimensions. I shudder at the thought of you hopping dimensions.”

A rush of lives I’d chosen not to lead, shown to me by the granddaughter of a god, swept through my memory. “What’s the difference between a dimension and a timeline? No, never mind, it doesn’t matter. What are you doing here? I thought you were…” Pissed at me, was how that sentence ended, but I kept the thought stuffed behind my eyes, where hopefully Coyote wouldn’t hear it.

I was pretty sure he didn’t, but on the other hand, it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what I’d been going to say. He said, “I was, but it occurred to me I was being a dick,” and the timbre of his voice changed as he spoke.

I looked up, pink-cheeked again because I expected, and got, the handsome brick-red man instead of the coyote form. “You came to me for advice and help, and got a temper tantrum in return. I’m sorry about that.”

I mumbled, “It’s okay,” because it was hard to stay angry at someone who insisted on recognizing and apologizing for his wrongdoings. That was probably a lesson I should take note of. “I wanted to ask you if shamans have a predilection for a specific shape, if they’re changing form. Because I started turning into a coyote last night when I was taken off guard, but this morning I didn’t even think about choosing a shape. I just slipped into Rattler’s skin. Metaphorically speaking.”

“You should have chosen a shape.” For once the chiding was barely that, more just a worried reminder. “Shifting with a spirit animal’s guidance is much less dangerous, but you should always have a firm idea of what animal you want to become before you begin. If you’d tried without Rattler’s presence you might have become anything.”

“Like a coyote.”

“Or a flounder, which probably would have drowned in the air before you figured out how to get back to your own form. This isn’t to be done lightly, Joanne.”

The possibility or the dangers of becoming a flounder had not occurred to me. I blinked at Coyote, who, despite his solemn warning, smiled. “Okay, a flounder was unlikely. We do tend to unconsciously gravitate toward animals we’re fond of or have some kind of link to.”

“Like I have with coyotes, because of you,” I said hopefully.

His smile got a little bigger, then faded a bit. “That’s very flattering. But you see the risk?”

“Yeah. I’ll keep a specific animal in mind in the future. Okay. I had another idea this morning, a—” I took a breath, stopped myself, and said, quietly, “I’m glad you popped into the shower, Coyote. I had questions, but I was afraid you’d be too pissed to answer if I called. So thanks.”

He wrinkled his nose, an expression that worked better on his long-faced coyote form. “Some shamanic mentor I am, if I leave you afraid to try contacting me.”

“Emotions,” I said in the understatement of the year, “complicate things. Okay, so my other question was this: is it possible to track magic when shapeshifted? Can it be scented, if that’s the right word? The whole process of changing from one form to another, I mean, part of the reason you do that is to access other abilities, right? Better hearing, faster running, whatever. And it’s pure magic. It can’t be done in the normal world. So it seems like there must be aspects of the shift that would help me to track or hunt magic itself, just through attunement…”

I trailed off because Coyote was looking at me like my nose had expanded to three times its usual size. I peeked at it surreptitiously just to be sure, then arched my eyebrows at him.

“I never thought to try.” My mentor, the source of much, if not all, of my shamanic wisdom, sounded dumbfounded. That was not how this was supposed to work. He was supposed to be the repository of all knowledge and clever thoughts, whereas I was supposed to be at the back of the class, scrambling to catch up.

Then again, fighting the wendigo had, bit by bit, shown me that Coyote was as limited in his own ways as I was in mine. We weren’t following the same destiny, no matter how much I wanted to fall in step behind someone who understood what he was doing. I’d been told very early on that while I was a shaman and part of my duties were to heal, ultimately my path was that of a warrior. Coyote was the gentler soul, and unquestionably a healer. I wanted him to have the answers, but in all honesty, there was very little reason a healer would need to think in terms of tracking and hunting.

Which didn’t put a damper on his enthusiasm now that the idea had been introduced. He was bright-eyed, and, despite being in human form, darned near bushy-tailed as he leaned forward to speak rapidly. “It’s a brilliant idea, Joanne. I have no idea if it would work, but it’s certainly worth pursuing. I should have flown up there after all. This is something you’d need two shamans to safely explore the possibilities, one to track and one to be tracked. I can catch a flight tonight—”

Beneath his excitement, I said, “Two adepts.”

Coyote broke off with a squint. “Two what?”

I exhaled, regretting having to burst his balloon. “You said two shamans. It doesn’t need two shamans, it needs two magic-users. Billy’s friend Sonata called them—us—adepts. Coyote, if you want to come up, that’s great, but I can’t wait for you. I’ve got to start the hunt tonight, before anybody else gets hurt.”

“You don’t even know if it’ll work, Jo. This isn’t something you should field-test before trying it in controlled conditions.”

I quirked a sad smile. “I’ve been field-testing all along, Yote. This is how I work. I won’t say it’s ideal, but I haven’t quite killed myself yet, and I don’t have a lot of time to spare right now. I can try tracing Billy’s talent as an experiment before the big production number, but I’ve only got a few hours before it’s all going to hit the fan.”

“Detective Holliday is a medium, isn’t he? It’s a passive magic, Jo. It depends on external forces reaching out to him. It’s not the best way to test this.”

“I don’t do much of anything the best way. It’ll be fine.” I reached out to take his hand, wondering how I’d become the one offering reassurance.

He caught my hand and squeezed, golden eyes still worried. “Joanne, I want to be there for this.”

“I wish you were.” I wished a lot of things, but they all kept coming back around to the awareness that I would say no, when he’d half asked me to join him in Arizona. He couldn’t stay, I couldn’t go. We’d both known it, and we’d both left an opening for later, for the chance that I might not say no a second time. “You wouldn’t be happy here, would you,” I said very softly. “In the city, instead of out there in the desert and smaller towns.”

He gave a stiff, tiny shrug. “Coyotes are better off in the wild.”

So it would have to be me. I’d be the one leaving my life behind, if he asked again. He wasn’t going to be coming north to try his hand at being a city shaman. It wasn’t that I couldn’t, or even that I wouldn’t: I’d loved the desert when my father and I had driven through the southwest when I was a kid. It was just…

Well, it wasn’t fair, which was childish and inane, but it was also sort of the crux of the matter. If I was willing to consider giving up my life and moving a thousand miles to be with somebody, I wanted him to be willing to consider the same. Poorly acquainted as I was with relationships, I wasn’t quite bad enough to generally think of them as power-balancing scenarios. In this case, though, the balance of power struck me as out of whack. Figuratively, because if we went to the literal on that particular topic, it had become clear it was out of whack in my favor.

And maybe that meant I should be willing to bend further, but instead it made me just a little more rigid. I couldn’t help the amount of magical potential I’d been granted. Making allowances for that talent with regards to someone else’s within the context of a romance looked to me like a surefire recipe for long-term resentment and misery. I was pretty sure normal people faced this kind of problem over career trajectories or having children, but I’d left normal far enough behind that I didn’t have a problem with where I landed on the Richter scale of bizarre.

I had a lot more problem with watching slow understanding come into Coyote’s golden gaze as he recognized where my thoughts were going. He said, “We need to talk,” cautiously, and I shook my head.

“I’m not sure we do, Yote. And even if we do, now isn’t a good time. I’ve got to get to the theater and make sure nobody gets killed tonight. I’ll check in with you later to let you know I’m all right.” I squeezed his hand and let go, but at least Coyote smiled.

“That sure of yourself, are you?”

To my surprise, I grinned back. “Know what? Yes, by God, I am.”

He gave me a broad wink and disappeared as the shower water turned cold. I got out, and, watching myself in the mirror, removed the dangling coyote earrings.