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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 taste that again.

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 him quickly , reducing the danger he’d be hurt 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.

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 view transmogrified, 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 important right 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 actually did jump 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 the traffic 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.