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Now, faced with the idea that he’d almost done just that— settled down to raise me in one place and had instead lost his mother to a horrible car crash—put a whole new spin on that expression. Maybe we could have settled anywhere, but maybe Qualla Boundary was the only place he’d ever thought of as home. Maybe facing that place again without his family there was a little harder than angry-at-the-world teenage Joanne Walker had ever considered.

There was a lot I hadn’t considered. Things I would have to take a look at, assuming I survived being hit by a semi.

Memory warped away, as if I’d reminded it I didn’t belongthen.Pain flooded back, no longer just setting my left side afire,but blazing through my entire body. My bones were jerking, reforming, shaping themselves in new dreadful ways, and I heard Rattler’s sibilant apology again. I wanted to say it was okay, except I wasn’t at all sure it was. There were afterimages in my mind, shucked snakeskins built from thin strips of light, my own broken form flailing in anti-gravity, a coyote fur lying bedraggled on the ground. Every one of the images wrenched my whole body, yanking things in and out of alignment, changing the shape of my spine, my bones, my skin.

Coyote, my Coyote, my golden-eyed mentor, appeared in the midst of all the chaos, human form bristling with fear just the way his coyote shape might do. “Joanne?Siobhán?What’s happened?”

I wailed, “You said it’s not supposed to hurt!” as I writhed again, leaving yet another snakeskin behind. Everyone was calling me by my real name, the one on my birth certificate, rather than the use-name I’d carried most of my life. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, the Irish-Cherokee disaster bestowed upon me by my mother, who had given no thought to how an American might viewSiobhán Grainne.Even I’d been half convinced my own name was pronounced Seeobawn Grainy until Mother confirmed the correct way of saying it, Shevaun Grania. But since she hadn’t raised me, Dad had taken one look at the whole mess and dubbed me Joanne. I’d started using Walker instead of Walkingstick the day I graduated high school, cutting all ties with who I used to be.

Or maybe not quite all. The shamanic heritage I’d boxed off and forgotten about had burst through eventually, and was right now stripping me to my skin, to the muscle, to the very bone, and rebuilding me from the inside out. I’d shapeshifted twice, and itwasn’t supposed tohurt!

“You’re not shifting,” Coyote whispered, though that was manifestly untrue. Even he sounded like he wasn’t sure of what he was saying. “Joanne, whathappened?”

Rattler’s apology hissed through me a third time as my back arched like a chest-burster was about to, well, burst out of my chest. I screamed this time, something I didn’t think I’d been doing, but there was nowhere else for the pain to go. One more snakeskin fell away, and the white-hot agony drained from my vision so I could see the real world again.

So I was fully aware that the final twist of earth/body/memory was gravity calling me home. I smashed into asphalt and bounced down the street to the scent of burning rubber. Metal shrieked somewhere very close and voices rose above it in fear and dismay. I kept rolling after I’d stopped bouncing, and finally came to a stop as a bruised, huddled mass on the roadway.

I hurt everywhere. Not the explosive pain from the impact, but like I’d been thrown forty feet and bounced off the street a few times. People survived that all the time in the movies, but I never thought they should. I wasn’t entirely certain Ihad. The toes of my right foot twitched involuntarily, and I was grateful even though it made every muscle even distantly attached to my toes hurt. I twitched my fingers experimentally, and that worked, too, although it hurt all the way to my spine. Big girl that I was, I whimpered instead of actually screaming.

The rattlesnake coiled in front of me, looking unusually mortal and real, and bent his blunt head down to tickle my face with his tongue. It did tickle, which made me flinch, which made me hurt. I did my big-girl whimper again, and the snake, against all laws of snaky nature that I knew about, slithered to my feet, then uncurled himself against me, following every body curve he could get to. I was a pretty small ball for someone nearly six feet tall, and he was unusually large; after a few seconds I wasalmost entirely wrapped in cool, sympathetic snake.Ssiobhán Walkingstick,he said inside my head.Thisss wass not meant to happen thiss way, and I am sssorry.

He shuddered—Ishuddered—and the physical became metaphysical, Rattler melting deep into my skin.

Most of the pain vanished, or retreated so far as to become inconsequential by comparison. I cried out, a weak little startled sound mostly of relief, then dragged in a deep breath and let go a much gustier howl. A barbaric yawp, to steal a phrase. It was undignified and angry and pain-ridden and an announcement that against all odds, I was still alive.

And in the midst of that yell it came to me, quite clearly: Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick had only just now been born.

On the upside,despite needing glasses which were no longer on my face, I had better vision than your average newborn. The first thing I saw when I lifted my head was the semi’s bed swung across half the intersection, its head lights glaring down on me. The second thing was that the arm supporting me was bare, which made me crane my neck, wincing, to take a look at myself.

I was quite, quite naked. Quite human, and quite naked, with road rash in places I didn’t even know I had places. I closed my eyes and very carefully put my forehead against my forearm, resting there a moment while my muscles screeched protest at being used, and then took a second look at myself.

Still naked. Well, yes, of course: I’d shed my clothes in the theater whilst changing into a coyote. Clearly I hadn’t considered the full ramifications of that decision, although even if I had, they would not ultimately have led to the conclusion I would shortly be lying starkers in a city street while a panicked truck driver thundered toward me. I was going to have toreassure him, which at that very moment seemed a task well beyond my capabilities.

The poor guy dropped to his knees a few feet away and skidded over asphalt on sheer momentum, tearing up his jeans in his bid to not run me over a second time. He was huge in a manner which suggested he both ate way too much truck-stop food and that he spent all his off time at a gym turning grease into fat-lined muscle. He was the Kobe beef of truck drivers, except I had the vague idea Kobe beef involved massages rather than exercising.

Mr. Kobe Beef had a high tenor voice which had no business coming from a body that size, and it said “Oh my god oh my god I swear I seen a dog a big fucking dog I didn’t mean to hit it Jesus Christ it couldn’t have been a dog I hit you you must be dead are you dead please don’t be dead oh Jesus oh God oh Jesus God” until I croaked, “I’m not dead yet,” and waited for Monty Python to finish the rest of the scene.

Monty Python were disobliging, and did not appear. Other people were starting to: theater-goers, the people from the cars that had been at the traffic light, and in the very far distance, sirens. I couldn’t quite determine which branch of public safety they belonged to—cops or fire department or paramedics—and a thin wave of regret mentioned that my coyote hearing would have picked them out clearly.

“Miss,” Kobe Beef said in a tone somewhere between reverent and befuddled, “you’renaked.”

Ah, yes. I was not dead, and therefore it was more important that I was naked than it was that he’d just run a red light and knocked somebody forty feet down the road. Such was human nature. I said, “Yes, I am,” after a few moments. “I don’t suppose you have a coat I can borrow?”

Kobe lumbered to his feet and rushed back to his truck at a pretty good clip, for such a big guy. I sat up very cautiously. Tinypointy stones poked me in the ass, adding insult to the road-rash injuries I’d already taken. I was covered in black smears and road burn, the former of which manifestly refused to disappear under my insistent shamanic imagery of a car wash. Sullen and aching, I dragged every last ounce of reluctant power to the fore and succeeded in giving myself a new paint job that removed the road rash before Kobe Beef returned with an enormous flannel-lined jacket that smelled like French fries. He draped it over my shoulders and I shivered hard, surprised at how cold I’d gotten without noticing. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Did I, ImeanIguessIdidIhadtohavebut did I hit you, miss? I was drivingtoodamnedfast I’msorryit’slateI’mtired justtryingtogethome Ididn’tnoticethelight you should bedead?—!”

I stared over his head toward the traffic lights. There were cameras on all four crossbars above each street, making it almost certain that the whole wreck had been filmed. Everything, including my transformation from coyote to woman. For a moment, I longed for a world in which magic wasn’t something that could be caught on camera, but I knew from personal experience that it could be. Somebody—probably my periodic nemesis, news reporter Laurie Corvallis—could make a big stinking story out of this.

Except Laurie wouldn’t. Not after what had happened with the wendigo. Maybe I could get her to tread on a few toes and make sure nobody else turned it into a story, either. Or maybe I could get somebody in traffic control to accidentally wipe a magnet over tonight’s traffic tapes, or whatever the modern equivalent thereof was. That would be better all around.

“I’m not dead.” Interrupting Kobe’s squeaking, alarmed rant felt better than it probably should. “Obviously you didn’t hit me. I’d be dead if you had.”

His jaw flapped, but there was a certain infallible logic to my statement, and relief started creeping across his thick features. “I’m probably just some crazy woman,” I went on. “Out crossing the street naked in the middle of the night. Probably your truck’s impact against…” I looked around, trying to find something the truck had actually hit, and settled on the median strip. “…against the median had enough concussive effect to knock me off my feet and down the road a bit.”

“That…must’ve been what happened…” Kobe’s forehead sank into deep wrinkles, and I almost felt sorry for him.

Almost. Not quite sorry enough to go try to straighten out the witnesses’ stories, for example. My largesse ended with climbing stiffly to my feet—the paint job that cleared my rash up hadn’t dealt with the pain of muscles abused by bouncing down the street—and patting Kobe’s shoulder. “If you ever drive tired or above the speed limit again, God Himself is going to come down on you like a load of bricks. Trust me. I have connections.”