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“And I can’t?” she asked with the faintest trace of humor.

I wished I had some of that humor to spare, but it hit me like a flat iron. “That’s not what I meant.”

She put her hand on my arm. “I know, Joanne. It’s all right. Michael will be fine.”

Possibly, but as I watched them retreat to the theater, Billy’s shoulders knotted with angry tension, I wondered if he and I ever would be again.

Chapter 17

Idid not enjoy the second half of the performance one little bit at all. I’d wrapped shields around myself until I could barely breathe, just so I wouldn’t be a scar of angry frustration on the psychic plane, but my heart rate spiked every time I remembered Morrison, which was constantly. After twenty frustrating minutes, I started a deep breathing practice, which was as close as I got to meditation. It almost certainly wouldn’t hurt my long-term prospects to get much closer than that to meditation, but for the moment, it had to be enough. Once I got my heartbeat slowed down, the music helped, drums drawing me into a different state of mind whether I wanted them to or not. And to be fair, I did. I just also wanted to be in two places at once, which I didn’t think even the limits of my talent would provide for.

Winona looked very small and fragile out there on the stage, centerpiece of power that she was. That actually helped, too: she was a smaller person than Naomi had been, and her physical delicacy made her seem that much more vulnerable. It drove home both just how open to disaster, and how extraordinarily brave, she was. I focused on her, and by the time the last dancebegan, I’d reached the same semi-detached state I’d been in during the first act. I tingled with magic, filled up by the drums and the dancers. I glanced at my hands, unsurprised that my skin held a familiar translucence that showed silver and blue power running through my veins like blood. I didn’t glow: it wasn’t something anyone who didn’t have the Sight could see. In fact, my shields were so solid that even to a Sighted person, my accumulating power shouldn’t be more than the faintest blip on the radar. But to my own eyes, I was alight, and the potential for disrupting a dark magic felt good.

I wanted very badly to pry and prod at the theater, to see if I could edge the killer out of the shadows. If he was there, if he was watching, waiting for the moment to pounce on the troupe’s outpouring of power, then he almost certainly would have some kind of psychic presence. As flush with energy as I was, I thought I should sense it if I went looking.

Except every time I’d tried something like that it had been an abject failure. This was not the right place to run yet another disastrous experiment, particularly when the dancers were doing exactly what was necessary to draw him out. Even more particularly when me doing anything untoward, psychically speaking, could very well warn him off and make the whole evening a wash. I knew that. Iknewit, but knowing didn’t make waiting any easier.

I crept forward to just outside the line of sight in the wings without fully realizing I’d moved. The final dance was in its last minutes, and my heart, already strained, ached with the power the dancers were accumulating. I felt it from the audience as well as the dancers themselves, something I hadn’t noticed the night before. I’d thought it was just the dancers, but there was already a huge wash of positive feedback radiating from the audience, edge-of-the-seat involvement in the dance preparing for an explosive climax.

The sexual connotation there didn’t escape me, and I had just enough time to wonder if that was part of what the killer was after before the dance ended and my attention went in a million different directions at once.

I’d created nets and shields with other peoples’ offered energy before. The magic’s strength had varied accordingly to whether they’d been adepts themselves, and to some degree on my own skill. I had never, though, had the opportunity to direct the magnitude of power the dancers had deliberately collected and were now releasing. It rode outward, incandescent white to the Sight, and all I had to do was turn its leading edge solid by adding my own talent, my own vision of an impenetrable silvery shield, to their outpouring.

Hunter-moon orange slammed into that leading edge with killing intensity, and shattered with a purely animal yelp of pain.

Triumph shot through me, as hot and white as the dancers’ magic. I held the shield: that was easy, easy,easy, with the power flooding from the stage, and I spared a glance for Winona and the others. They were radiant with hope and fear, still waiting to see if the attack would come. Waiting to see if they might yet mourn their friend in the best way they knew how, by giving everything they had to an audience prepared to accept anything. The window was so narrow, the moment between cutting down their attacker and still permitting their power to make a difference, and the killer’s fractured magic was still whimpering with pain against my own.

Then it retreated. There was no sensation of conscious decision, just an instinctive flight from something larger and stronger. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed: everything was stretched and clear and slow to me, but I thought the rebound was almost instantaneous, that the pause between pain and withdrawal was merely my own unhurried sense of time allowing me to see—and See—what was happening.

I bet it all on that being true, and let the ghost dance magic flood the audience.

Part of me felt them surge to their feet, felt the wall of roaring approval as power in itself, crashing back into the dancers, assuring them that they’d succeeded. That same part of me felt something within Winona and Littlefoot and all the othersbreak, not in a bad way. Just the sudden painful release of emotion they’d both used and bottled up, an abrupt permission for tears, even as they held their places on stage, chests heaving, muscles trembling, holding their final poses until such a time as the audience’s cheers began to wane.

From the slow-time place I was in, that dwindling seemed unlikely to ever come. That was okay, so long as my injured opponent didn’t come slinking back to try for another feeding. I didn’t think he would: the hunter-moon colors were still in retreat, though not yet out of view. All I had to do was follow them.

As if they’d heard me, they winked out, a shield dragged into place. I snapped my teeth, as animalistic a response as the killer’s yelps and whimpers, and whisperedRattler?inside my head.

He was there, waiting, all sibilant interest, as if I’d already prepped to call on him. Maybe I had: the drums and the dances were powerful things, and after more than a year of shamanic practice, my hind brain was well-trained to associate drumming with transition. Grateful, I saidThank you for coming so quickly. I need your hunting skills and your shapeshifting guidance. Will you share them with me?

I’d never thought snakes, by nature, looked pleased, but the glowing white-line spirit animal in my mind looked pretty damned pleased.I shift. I ssstrike. I heal. It is rare, shaman, that sssomeone thinks to ssseek my hunting ssskillsss. I shall ssshare what I can.

He was getting better at his S’s, at least the SH-ones. I grinned, oddly delighted by that, then repeated,Thank you. I need another shape this time, not a snake. Four legs for swiftness, and a keen nose for hunting.Oh, God. I was doing the bizarre phraseology that seemed to overtake people when they started dealing with magic. I didn’t know if there was some kind of ritual or formula in speaking affectedly, but it seemed to be pervasive, and I hated it, even when I did it. Maybe especially when I did it.

Rattler, however, managed to look increasingly amused, and bobbed his head once in a remarkable approximation of a human nod. I built a very clear mental picture of what I wanted to become, then whispered, “Crap!” out loud and started scrambling out of my clothes.

I got the sweater and underlying T-shirt off, at least, before power welled up around me and changed what I was forever.

A snake’sview of the world was hot and cold, alien enough to my warm mammalian mind that the morning’s transformation had merely beendifferent, not lacking or improved in any manner. A hunting mammal, though, with hyper-acute senses…that was something else. That was the difference between seeing the world and Seeing it: I had always feared getting lost in the shamanic view of my surrounds. Suddenly, with my hearing and scenting opening up in extraordinary ways, I knew just how limited my human perception of the world really was. Part of me, in those very first seconds, knew I would never want to go back to being fully human. That I would lose something when I did, and the anticipation of that loss filled me with regret in a way leaving the Sight behind never did.

Coyote senses: eyesight much sharper than I’d expected, with the slightest movement becoming of great interest to me.Scents were incredibly strong—I could smell Morrison, both as a man and a transformed wolf, even through the dancers and the audience and the dust/makeup/heat of the theater. I could pick out Billy and Melinda from the crowd, and I’d never known I had any particular sense of what they smelled like. There was so much noise I almost couldn’t hear anything, though the slightest twitch of my ears—which had to be enormous, given that I was pretty sure I was a hundred-and-sixty-five-pound coyote—honed in on tiny abstractions of sound that I’d never have caught as a human. The near-silent creak of fly ropes, a cough from the audience audible beneath the roaring applause and a swallowed squeak of astonishment from one of the dancers whose gaze strayed my way.

I didn’t think more than ten seconds had passed since the dance ended. No more than five seconds since I’d transformed, but even so, I was already losing time. I was also already panting. I didn’t know what my body temperature was, but backstage was warm enough without wearing a fur coat.

The obvious answer was to leave the backstage. I backed up—awkward as hell when I was still tangled in my pants—and kicked the jeans off to leave them behind. God had not intended a coyote to open round-knobbed doors any more than he’d intended wolves to, but I had an advantage over Morrison in that I’d retained my intellect.

Stainless steel polished by thousands of human hands twisting it open had the most ungodly salty flavor I’d ever encountered. I gagged on my very long tongue, trying to spit it out, and was incredibly grateful for the bar handles on the outside doors so I didn’t have to tastethatagain.

Outside, Morrison’s scent was bright and clear, wind playing with it but in no danger of reducing it to a faintness I couldn’t follow. My gut seized up, impulse at war with promises. I could find him. I could find himquickly, reducing the danger he’d behurt or killed—assuming he hadn’t been already, and I had to assume that. I wanted to so badly I could taste it in great gulps that washed away the door-handle flavor. I’d gotten him into the mess he was currently in. I should be the one to get him out.