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Coyote frowned, an expression that had a lot to do with what would be his eyebrows if dogs had eyebrows, and not so much to do with his long grinning mouth. “You’re not regressing. You’re exhausted. Your aura’s almost flat. What’ve you been doing, Jo?”

“Making new exciting mistakes.”

“Normally I’d say that was better than repeating the old ones, but I’m not so sure, if this is what it does to you.” The nothingness around us shifted as Coyote spoke, drawing away from the realm of dreams into a desert landscape. A hard white sun glared out of an equally hard blue sky, and the earth beneath me warmed to uncomfortably hot. Red rock formations cropped up, offering some degree of shade, and for a moment Coyote disappeared into the heart of his garden, hidden and protected by it.

Then he came over the stone ridges, no longer the eponymous coyote, but a jeans-clad shirtless man with skin colored brick-red and shining black hair that fell unbound past his hips. His eyes, like his coyote form’s, were gold, though I knew in real life both his eyes and skin were softer in shade. Here in the garden of his soul, though, he saw himself as the shamanistic leader he’d been trained as, super-saturated by life.

He walked right up to me, concern still furrowing his eyebrows as it had when he was a coyote, crouched and put a hand over my heart. I’d have slapped anybody else for being fresh, but there was nothing sexual about the gesture at all.Especially when, a moment later, a burst of desert-dune and blue magic swept through me, replenishing some of the energy I’d lost.

If I hadn’t already been sitting, I’d have dropped to the earth with gratitude. As it was I tilted sideways. Coyote caught my shoulder, propping me, then tipped my chin up so he could frown at me more directly. “What happened?”

“Well, first I shot someone. Then there was the dance concert that almost turned me into a coyote, then a psychic murder at the end of the concert drained every ounce of deliberately-awakened power from the dancers, and then I healed somebody with really early-stage breast cancer and saw something screwy in her genetic code and almost fixed it, so I think maybe that was, like, accidentally almost rewriting it to remove the predilection her family has toward the disease.” That sounded like quite enough. I didn’t think I needed to mention offering Morrison the Sight.

Coyote paled, which was quite an event for a man of his red-brick complexion. He sat down with athump, sand dusting up to coat his thighs, and for a long few moments had nothing to say. I couldn’t recall that happening before, and marked two points on theJoanne has made some truly heinous mistakes todayscoreboard.

He finally said, “You shot someone,” in a way that suggested he was only groping for a place to start, rather than it necessarily being the most important topic at hand. I almost felt guilty for bringing it up, but since it had kind of gotten my day off on the wrong foot, and was showing no signs of ceasing to prey at my thoughts, I couldn’t really imagine having not mentioned it.

“She attacked Billy,” was all I said, though. There wasn’t much else to say, not when I’d do the whole thing over again in a heartbeat, if I had to.

To my astonishment, Coyote, who had extremely pointed opinions about what I should be doing with my gifts, paled even further and said, “Is he okay?” Notissheokay,which is what I’d expected, but isheokay. I hadn’t known Billy would rank higher in Coyote’s hierarchy of concerns than somebody that a nominal healer had shot at.

“Yeah, he’s…he’s fine. She missed, she…I was faster. And she’s okay, too. In the hospital. Shattered clavicle, but she’ll be fine. I couldn’t heal her. The power went flat.”

“You said your magic’s responsive to your needs, even when you don’t want it to be. That it has opinions. If your need was an act of violence I’m not surprised it wouldn’t respond. Jo,” Coyote said carefully, “shamans aren’t supposed to hurt people.”

“And cops aren’t supposed to let their partners get a nail through the skull.” I thought it was a pretty inarguable defense.

Coyote stared at me a moment, then closed his eyes, shrugged all over and nodded. I had the impression a lot went unsaid in the context of that shrug, but I couldn’t read it, and what he said next was clearly not a direct follow-up to his thoughts: “Cancer?”

He said it in much the same tone asyou shot someone?,like he was really still just trying to find a place to start. I judged it for an opening salvo and remained silent, which let him say, “Cancer is dangerous, Joanne. As healers we’re supposed to show the body a path to health, but the healing strength itself has to mostly come from within the patient. You could—” He swallowed, pulled his hand over his mouth, looked away, and looked back. “You could kill yourself, healing cancer with your magic alone. I know the last spirit quest gave you the focus to effect an instantaneous healing, and you have astonishing raw strength, but…”

“Yeah. I kind of figured that out when I almost fainted. It was like time tunneled forward and I was healing all thepotential damage. How do I…” I tilted my head back, wishing I had something nice and hard behind me to thunk it on, like a rock. Beating my skull against stone seemed like the only way anything was ever going to sink in. “I’ve mostly only healed small things, Yote. Things I can use my own power for. I didn’t even know I didn’t know how to use someone else’s strength to help them heal themselves.”

“Jo, you’ve never done a proper shamanic healing in a sweat lodge or healing circle. The setting is important to creating the right mental space for the healer as well as the healed. Don’t you rememberanythingI taught you?”

Feebly, I said, “I thought she was in the right headspace,” but the question was a depressingly legitimate one. I did remember. Hell, after the antics I’d gone through to access the memories of his teachings from back when I’d been a teen, I’dbetterremember. Much of my bad attitude and mucked-up view of the world was my own fault, in a way that blithely disregarded the usual linear development of time. But I remembered discussing healing circles and the mental transport created by sweat lodges, how those things readied a human mind for the extraordinary. I’d just never applied them in my own roughshod shamanic practices.

In fact, I had the sudden sinking feeling that I’d been arrogantly assuming the rules didn’t apply to me.Otherpeople had to build sweat lodges and use healing circles, butIcould just go larking off doing what I wanted, because Grandfather Sky had seen fit to pump me full of extra-special magic mojo.

Coyote’d told me early on I was a new soul, mixed up fresh. The advantage to that was I had no baggage from previous incarnations, and could focus all my strength and power going forward. The disadvantage was I had no baggage from previous incarnations, and got to make great huge rutting mistakes thata more-experienced lizard brain might warn me about ahead of time.

I said, “Okay,” very quietly. “No more healing, especially big stuff, without the right preparations.”

Coyote’s shoulders dropped so far I half thought he was going to slide right out of his man shape and into dog form. He lifted his eyes to give me a sharp look and I smiled a little. “I know. Coyotes aren’t dogs.”

Instead of scolding, he said, “Tell me about the shapeshifting.”

“It was completely involuntary.” I outlined the dances and the collected power I’d felt, and somehow accidentally left out the detail that Morrison had been my date and he was the one who’d noticed me changing. “As soon as I got away from the theater I started reverting, but I could feel the potential still under my skin.” I rubbed my hands, remembering it even now, and in absolute, utter denial of what I’d experienced, whined, “People can’tshapeshift,Coyote.”

“Of course they can, although you’re so ungodly stubborn about it I might have believed you couldn’t. What’s your newest spirit animal, Joanne?” Coyote sounded tired, which made me feel guilty for whining, and my answer was subdued.

“A rattlesnake. You know that.”

“And what do rattlesnakes do?”

“They bite things. All right, all right, sorry. Mine’s a symbol of healing. And he gave me super reflexes in the Lower World, at least. Snakelike reflexes.Whssht, whssht.” I made a couple of karate chops, mimicking my snake-granted speed, and subsided at Coyote’s heartfelt sigh.

“What else, Jo?”