Page 33

My shoulders dropped about six inches. “Thank you. I’ve got a side door propped open so we can get backstage. We should probably go. The show starts in a few minutes. Enjoy it,” I said to Billy and Melinda, and Mel veritably sparkled her eyes at me as they went one way and Morrison and I went another. I kicked the stone out of the side door and closed it behind us, warned Jim Littlefoot that Morrison would be backstage with me and showed Morrison my hiding place next to the fly ropes, where we were well out of the way and surrounded by darkness.

He waited until the performance began and there was no chance at all of, “Bring you back to yourself?” being overheard before he spoke.

“You saved my life at least once.” My shoulders hunched again, rock solid with tension, and I kept my gaze locked onthe stage. “The morning I found Cassandra Tucker in the locker room, I went chasing after her spirit, and I couldn’t get back to my body. Phoebe kept trying to wake me up— yelling at me, shaking me—but she couldn’t. You, though. You just put your hand on my shoulder and I woke up. Right before a monster ate me. It’s happened a couple other times, too, besides last night.”

My poor boss was magnificently silent a moment. “And you didn’t think to mention this?”

“It was awkward.”

Morrison snorted laughter. “Unlike the rest of our interactions.”

I said, “You’re a very confusing man,” under my breath, and did my best to focus on the dance performance after that.

Its impact was lessened by dint of being on the sidelines rather than in the audience. A few things—the thunderbird’s entrance, flying across the stage as she did, for example— were even more dramatic, because she came straight at us. But mostly, I couldn’t see the structure of the dances building to the shapeshifting climax, and that helped me retain a degree of control. The dancers still buzzed with, and built, enormous energy, but it was directed outward, not into the wings, so instead of being body-slammed by it, I could just siphon off dregs.

The atonal music, the drums, the heat of stage lights—impressive even from the wings—made my skin tingle, lifting me out of myself in a gentle, reverent way. I was held to my body by threads, a double-existence I’d only experienced a few times before. It had never been so comfortable, or filled my chest with so much delight. For the first time I could remember, I washappyto hold myself in two planes of existence. I was aware of my body, of the heat and the smell of makeup and sweat, of my sweater’s soft nub and the rougher cotton denim of my jeans. My feet felt heavy in their bulky shoes, and I found the idea thatthey anchored me amusing. As long as I kept my shoes on, the dancers couldn’t take me away.

But the detached-from-my-body self watched them with a shaman’s eyes. I Saw the creatures they made themselves into instead of the human forms throwing themselves across the stage. Their auras were extraordinary: even tinged with grief—or possibly because they were saturated with it—they leaped high and wide, a metaphysical echo and prediction of what the dances themselves did and would do. It took effort not to join them, spiritually if not physically, but my presence would mar the patterns of light and power they built. I felt magnificent, much better than I had since the healing the night before. This was what Coyote had tried to impress upon me, about ritual and drum circles and sweat lodges: power combined and shared and focused was much more effective than anything I could draw on by myself. Passion like this could be drained, of course, but it also renewed itself by its very nature. The fact that the dance troupe had lost a member less than twenty-four hours earlier, and were still able to waken and share depths of magic from within themselves, was existential proof of that.

Morrison touched my shoulder very lightly. I turned toward him, pleased I retained sufficient bodily awareness to do so even when floating just outside of myself, drawn to the dancers. He tapped a finger beside his eye, indicating—indicating what, I wasn’t sure. That my eyes were gold, probably, but that was practically standard operating procedure now.

Oh. No. He was asking ifhecould see what I Saw, a revelation which came like a heady thunderbolt. God, we’d changed, both of us. Maybe we’d even changed since last night, given that it didn’t seem likely the man I’d thrown a shoe at would be asking for a repetition of the performance leading to the shoe-throwing.

On the other hand, I couldn’t see me from the outside— well, actually, I could if I wanted to, but looking at Morrison was moreinteresting—and I suspected I was sort of flushed and joyous and possibly like everything was going to be right with the world. If I was standing next to someone who looked like I felt, I’d want in on some of that happy juice, too, and Morrison knew I could share if I felt like it.

I didn’t bother with the silly rhyme, this time. I just tugged him close, his feet on mine, and put my hand on top of his head as I whispered some of that replenished power out of myself and into my boss.

Right then, the first act ended. A tremendous surge of shifting magic flooded from the dancers, hitting me in the spine and crashing through me in waves. It was intensely, exotically erotic, and I ducked my head against Morrison’s shoulder, trying to keep my breathless laugh silent.

I got a nose full of fur. I jerked back, sneezed and came face-to-face with an armful of silver-furred, blue-eyed, deeply bewildered wolf.

Chapter 16

As a rule, wolves, like coyotes, were not human-size. Then again, as a rule, wolves were not found in the wings of a Seattle theater, much less wearing a three-piece suit and standing on somebody’s feet with their front paws sliding frantically around that somebody’s waist.

I grabbed two fists full of suit jacket at the nominal shoulders, trying to catch enough fur to keep my boss from falling down. Trying to catch enough to keep him from tearing off into the audience, for that matter, but the combination of clothes and fur made for a poor grip. On the other hand, neither of us wanted him to be standing upright, so we sank to the floor together, nose to nose as the dancers poured off stage.

Bewilderment faded from Morrison’s blue eyes, panic replacing it. He jerked violently when the first dancer gasped upon seeing him, and reared back as more of them by turns jolted and pushed to a stop. I didn’t even need an animal’s senses to catch the fear and confusion in their scents: it was pungent, pouring off sweating bodies and from heaving lungs.

In face of all that, two fists full of suit-covered fur were not enough to keep a hundred and ninety pounds of wolf in place.His claws scrabbled on the floor—no soft rubber mat here, just black-painted pine—and I was hauled under him, gathering a whole host of splinters in my backside as he lurched toward the rear of the backstage area. I swallowed a gurgle of pain and held on, determined not to make this worse by allowing my boss to run amok on four legs through the streets of Seattle. My brain was already shriekingyour fault your fault this is your fault!and miserably, there was no doubt about that at all. Morrison had the magical aptitude of a horseradish.

This was not a condemnation. It was simply the way of things, and it was probably part of why he could ground me so fast. He was absolutely, solidly connected to the ordinary world. Or he had been, until last night’s unfortunate thought that he’d make a very pretty wolf had met up with me working a bit of magic on him tonight while two dozen dancers poured out a river’s worth of power meant entirely to soften an audience up for a transformative experience.

God, I was an idiot.

Morrison gave a truly magnificent surge which almost shook me loose. I snatched at his haunches as they passed over me and managed to de-pants him, which presented me with a much more up-close-and-personal encounter of canine genitals than I’d ever hoped to have. I said “Aaghg,” and hauled myself over his ribs, trying to crawl up his bony, furry spine. It gave me a glimpse of our location—the stage’s absolute darkest, farthest-back corner, with nowhere in particular to go, for which I was grateful. There was a door only a few yards away, but it was closed and I didn’t think Morrison was quite up to knobs just then.

The entire dance troupe was crowded as far away from me and Morrison as they could get without spilling back onto the stage. Not one of them had made a sound, though several had stuffed knuckles into their mouths to accomplish such silence.I perversely admired the training that ranked “shut the hell up backstage” above “OH MY GOD THERE’S A WOLF BACK HERE!” and tried to keep my grunts quiet as I got some leverage, flung myself forward and wrapped my arms around Morrison’s neck.

It wasn’t a particularly natural direction of attack on a wolf, and I had no idea how much of Morrison was in control. Enough that he hadn’t bitten my face off in the first seconds after transformation, but the panicked retreat to a defensible corner seemed pretty lupine to me. So did the snarling, snapping, writhing attempt to chew my arms off once I got a neck lock on him. I’d put sleeper holds on people before. I’d never tried it on a dog.

Somewhere very far at the back of my mind, I whisperedwolves aren’t dogs,and that part of me produced a shrill giggle as I folded one elbow around Morrison’s neck and grabbed that wrist with my opposite hand. Humans tapped out or went unconscious from a well-applied carotid restraint within about ten seconds. Canines, it turned out, were a whole hell of a lot less obliging.

Morrison slithered backward and to the side, not quite escaping my grasp only because I was pretty much sitting on top of him when he started. I slid to the side, still trying to keep a grip around his throat, but his neck-to-head ratio was all off, from a chokehold perspective: thick neck, streamlined skull, certainly compared to a human. Furthermore, humans usually required some degree of training to get out of a sleeper hold, either by learning early on to duck the chin so a lock couldn’t be made, or—more usefully, after the fact—by doing something like slamming their heel into their attacker’s instep, which could easily hurt enough to make an assailant loosen his grip.

Wolves, I discovered, just naturally went for alet me try to disembowel you with my hind feetattack. My bowels were,thank God, not quite in his line of fire, but my thigh was. Denim shredded under his claws and I shrieked like a little girl, letting go so my quadriceps weren’t also shredded.

Morrison leaped out of reach, careening down the length of the backstage with his tie flying over one shoulder and his suit jacket flapping wildly along his back. I was amoron.I should have grabbed thetie.This piece of information now solidly in mind, I took off after him without considering the futility of a two-legged creature trying to catch a four-legged one. The stage scrim rippled wildly as we bolted alongside it. I hoped the curtains were closed so what audience remained in the theater during intermission wouldn’t see the artistic, shadowy rendition of Woman Chasing Wolf across the stage.