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Teeth bared, anger directed entirely at myself, I deliberately turned out of the wind and whispered another plea to Rattler:Can you show me how to See? I hunt a hidden magic and a shaman’s eyes are not enough to flush it out.I was doing it again, the weird semi-ritualistic speech patterns. On the other hand, Rattler exuded a sense of approval from somewhere behind my frontal lobes, so maybe stilted language wasn’t such a bad idea.I’m shifted,I whispered,magic personified. I’m a coyote, predator personified. Teach me to hunt magic, Rattler. I need your guidance.

Triggering the Sight, even in shifted form, wasn’t difficult, but nor was it quite normal, even for the Sight. In my own full-color vision, I saw the animistic world as a deepening of the physical world around me. Auras lit up from within, typically, each object proclaiming its own particular duty by whatever color it shone with. My coyote-sharp eyesight didn’t have the color range the human vision spectrum did, but I lost none of the brilliance I was accustomed to Seeing. It just…moved. Moved deeper into my brain, where it resided as information separate from but related to the physical world. It looked as though someone had painted the entire landscape in light, the way it could be done with long camera exposures, and then set the entire image inside my head where it could be consulted at need without interfering with my real-world coyote vision.

I was pretty certain that was entirely Rattler’s doing, not my own. It lingered a moment, letting me get used to it, before fading. For a disorienting moment I caught a glimpse of the warm/cold world the rattlesnake saw, entirely at odds with my still-mammalian brain’s expectations. Then even Rattler’s viewtransmogrified, and the overlay of heat sensing made sudden vivid sense.

Warm-blooded creatures left heat trails where they moved. They didn’t last for long, but to a rattlesnake, the difference between a few seconds’ visible heat trail and the lack thereof could mean the difference between dinner or going hungry. Similarly, with ordinary Sight, the whole world lit up, but with Rattler’s pared-down heat sight, only the left-behind trails of old magic glowed. To me, hunting magic, the difference was between finding a killer and letting one go.

Or finding Morrison and letting him go. His trail, like his scent, was clear. Both would fade, possibly before I could get back to this starting point and follow him to wherever he’d gone. But there was a better chance of tracing his physical scent later than there was of chasing the hunter-moon orange blaze that even now retreated from the theater. The killer had crept up on it, shielded but questing: he had to be open and aware of the dancers in order to time his attack perfectly, so couldn’t hide himself as well as I’d done. All I’d had to do, after all, was watch: an advantage to working from the inside.

And all I had to do now was follow him. I snarled at the wind, at the scent that promised I could find my wayward boss, and turned away from it. The killer’s fading streak of color, the mark left from his shielded approach and retreat, wasn’t something I could put my nose down and follow. It was somewhere between my mind and my Sight, and it didn’t tidily use city streets to get between points A and B. It went as the crow flew—a stupid phrase for anyone who’d ever seen a crow fly to use, since they hopped and flitted and winged their way all over the place, rather than going in the straight line implied by the colloquialism, which tangent made me wonder how much of it was me and how much of it was the irritated musings of a coyote which had tried to hunt crow,none of which was importantright then.I hauled my brain back on track and trotted through the parking lot, focused on a halfway point between the real world and the Sight which allowed me to follow a killer’s trail. My nose and ears, not especially useful in this particular tracking attempt, informed me that patrons were beginning to leave the theater, a piece of information I took in stride until a woman started screaming bloody murder.

Like everybody else, I jumped about four feet into the air—well, no, not like everybody else, because I actuallydidjump four feet into the air, possibly more, which I hadn’t known was in a coyote’s repertoire—and came down with my heart racing as I looked around for whatever the hell had inspired her shrieking.

A fist-size stone caught me in the ribs, and a scared, angry male bellowed, “G’wan, get out! Get out of here!” at me as he scooped up another rock. From the flower beds, no less. That wasn’t fair. I yelped as the second stone hit home, then fled, tail tucked between my legs, for the self-same copse Morrison had retreated to. Apparently there was at least one disadvantage to retaining human intellect in a shapeshifted body: completely forgetting that everyone would see a gigantic, potentially dangerous wild animal. Following the killer’s trail was going to be harder than I thought, but for reasons I hadn’t even considered.

Grumpy and with brambles sticking to my fur, I crept out of the trees on my belly, keeping to the shadows. In human form, I could bend light around me to make myself almost invisible, but I was reluctant to try layering magic like that outside of a controlled environment. Coyote would be proud of me. And coyotes, small-c, were decent at skulking and dodging, so I skulked and dodged until I was in a pool of dimness between two streetlights. Theater traffic hadn’t started pouring out yet, so the road was relatively empty. The nearest traffic light was red, a couple vehicles idling at it, and the headlights approaching thetraffic light had a fair distance to travel. I took a good hard look both ways and bolted across the street.

A semi truck blew through the red light and caught me in the teeth of its grill.

Chapter 18

Truly astonishing pain erupted in my left hip and thigh bone. In my whole left side, in fact, though it radiated from the hip joint. The world went white with agony and gravity briefly lost its hold on me. That was bad, because eventually it was going to demand its due, and I already hurt more than I could remember ever hurting in the past. I’d been impaled repeatedly, but somehow in comparison that seemed localized, whereas pain was now ricocheting down through my feet and up along my ribs into my arm. I thought there must be streamers of red flowing from my toes and fingertips. Not blood, just a visible arc of pain, like a manga comic book character might show.

Rattler hissed,Apologies, Sssiobhán Walkingssstick,and my world went away in new and exciting ways.

Everything twisted:the earth, my bones, my memories. The latter enveloped me, a comforting cushion to take me far from the deep wrenching dreadfulness that wasnow.

Then,I was a kid barely big enough to see out the window of my father’s big old boat of a Cadillac. Vast trees with leaves sorich in shade they shimmered blue-green reached over the road, making a canopy for us to drive through.LaterI would associate stretches of road like that with Anne Shirley’s White Way of Delight, butthenI was too small, and only enamored of the colors and how sunlight filtered through them. My father was talking, something I didn’t remember him doing all that often, and since time had rearranged to give me the opportunity, I paid attention.

“…almost home. Your grandmother will be glad to see you. Do you remember her, Joanie?”

I shook my head. Grandmothers were an abstract concept, just like mothers were: mine had deposited me with Dad when I was six months old, and I hadn’t seen her again until I was twenty-six. I’d spent the intervening years resenting her for dumping me with a father who had no apparent interest in me, though this was a revelatory and completely unremembered moment. Joanne Walker of the present day had no memory at all of a grandmother, nor of visiting North Carolina until I was a teen. Now that he said it, though, I recognized the roads and trees my small self was being driven down: we were, in fact, almost to Qualla Boundary, the Cherokee land trust where I’d gone to high school.

“Well, she remembers you. Thinks I’m terrible for keeping you away. Am I terrible, Joanie?”

“Nuh-uh!” I leaned out of my seat belt to stretch way across the car’s bench seat and pat Dad’s thigh. “Drandma’swrong!”

Dad grinned at me, flash of white teeth in a warm brown face, and time slid forward a ways, landing me in a kitchen I recognized from my teen years.

The woman in it, though, was completely unfamiliar. She wore bell-bottom jeans over rough bare feet, and a square-cut cotton tunic with an embroidered slash at the collar. It reminded me of commercially-made shirts intended to look handmade,except it somehow seemed authentic, like she, or someone, actuallyhadmade it. She was tall and strong-featured, with a beaky nose like my own. Her black hair was barely threaded with white, and her brown eyes were extremely serious.

So serious, in fact, that they couldn’t be taken seriously, especially when I’d just watched her plate up a bunch of cookies and knew she was holding them behind her back. “Which hand?”

I pronounced, “Bof!” with a three-year-old’s utter confidence. The woman—presumably my grandmother, though she didn’t really look old enough to be a grandmother—laughed and turned around, revealing she was indeed holding the cookie plate in both hands. I nabbed two and stuffed both of them into my mouth, giving myself strained chipmunk cheeks.

My father, somewhere behind me, said, “Joanne,” in a mildly chiding tone, but it was too late: spitting them out would be infinitely more disgusting than slowly mashing my way through them. I mumbled, “Sowwy,” and “Thank you” when I’d cleared my mouth enough to do so, and amends were made.

Grandmother said, “You’re welcome,” and gave me two more cookies, which I gnashed into happily. The now-me, the adult, saw the whole thing as a distraction from Grandmother’s gentle, “You should settle here, Joe,” addressed to my father in an obviously trying-not-to-be-pushy manner. “I’d love to have her near.”

Dad stepped in for a couple cookies himself, nodding as he did so. “I’ve been thinking about it. The mountains are a good place to grow up.”

“And there’s…” Again, the adult-me heard a significant pause there: Grandmother had no intention of finishing the sentence, but every confidence Dad knew what she meant.

And he did, though he stopped any chance she might continue with a wave of one of his absconded-with cookies. “Not now, Ma. Maybe later.”

Acceptance flickered through her dark eyes, and time bounced forward again. A matter of hours, maybe: certainly not more than days. Dad held my hand, his voice terribly neutral as we looked at the mangled wreck of a blue 1957 Pontiac Star Chief. That was what he was telling me, what kind of car it was, and, “I remember when your grand mother bought it. I was five. My father and I used to work on it together. You wouldn’t remember him, Joanie. He died a long time before you were born. I think she’d like it if I put this old beast back together, but I can’t, sweetheart. Not right now.” Then he picked me up and hugged me, and although as an adult I remembered none of the rest of it, I did remember that hug as the only time I ever saw my father cry.

We left Qualla Boundary in the Cadillac a few days later, and I didn’t see the place again for ten years, when I demanded he cast off his wanderlust and settle down in one location long enough for me to go to high school. Dad had looked at me like he’d never seen me before. We hadn’t been getting along for a couple years at that point, and I’d always thought that expression was borne of him being uncertain of how he’d ended up with a kid at all, much less one with opinions and demands.