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I hit the nearest cave wall with my spine and slithered down whimpering with pain and confusion.

The wicker man’s firewood ring was fully ablaze, pouring off heat that turned dampness on walls to steam, and though the wicker man himself wasn’t yet on fire, his occupants were shrieking bloody, terrified murder.

That seemed perfectly reasonable, and any second now I was going to extricate my backbone from stone and leap forth to rescue them. Any second now. Honest.

Rather than engaging in that activity, though, my brain insisted on whirring around the idea that setting the wicker man alight now, before the fullest moon, made no sense.

There were five human beings in that thing.

Just the right number for points of a pentagram, if that sort of thing was important, though if the poor bastard in the torso had been in the head I’d have thought it more likely to be relevant.

On the other hand, the torso was probably sturdier.

A sufficiently motivated kidnap victim might be able to wrench the head off.

Or maybe Lynn really had been intended to fill that last space, and the guy in the torso represented heart’s blood.

Given what had happened to Naomi’s heart, that didn’t seem impossible, either.

This was a lousy time to hypothesize. I tried straightening up and discovered part of the reason I’d been sitting there was for the second time that night, moving hurt like hell.

The healing magic within me was going gangbusters again, and I kind of didn’t want to know just how much damage I’d sustained bashing into the rough cave walls.

I could almost hear Coyote’s scolding: “If you would remember your shields, Joanne, this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.

” I nodded obediently, trying to make a note.

Mental shields were all well and good, but when someone had been put on a warrior’s path, she probably ought to make a habit of permanent physical shields as well.

I promised myself I’d get on that as soon as I could walk again.

A deep breath made my back crack, and I thought maybe I had another thirty seconds or a minute before I trusted all my parts to properly do their thing.

Thirty seconds was a long time in terms of dry wood and smoke inhalation. Teeth gritted, I shoved myself upward. Black swam through my vision and I clenched my eyes shut, determined not to pass out. I was not going to let people die because of a measly cracked spine.

Tia Carley put her hand around my throat and strong-armed me up the wall.

Her eyes were fire-gold, like she drew on magic to have the strength to hold me there.

Like the flames behind her fed her, for that matter: she was beautiful in their light.

Dangerous, bonkers and scary, but beautiful.

I clawed my hands around her wrist, trying to loosen her fingers, but she squeezed a bit harder, making it difficult to get purchase.

“Shaman. Healer. You’re even better than the dancers. That was you there tonight, wasn’t it? Shielding them? I tried, ” she said with a note of petulancy. “I tried to scoop your magic last night after you healed me.”

Ah. That had been the nosing-about I’d felt.

It hadn’t felt like an attack, but perhaps she’d been being careful.

Or maybe my shields had been well in place for once.

If I had a time machine I’d go back and check, but I didn’t, so I just hung there on the wall clawing at her wrist while she added, “Breast cancer,” incredulously.

“What kind of bullshit is that? I’m barely even human, and you waltz up and tell me I’m going to die of breast cancer?

That I’ve got a predisposition for it? That bitch queen screwed us even more than I knew. ”

I said, “Bitch queen?” except with her hand crushing my larynx, it came out a lot more like “Kakghk agggh?” Pain erupted in my stomach, the familiar feel of fishhooks hauling me somewhere else.

I wished they’d haul me out from Tia’s grasp, but they weren’t nearly that accommodating.

They didn’t really have to be, though: she’d grabbed me too high, under the jawbone, which meant I wasn’t going to choke out anytime soon.

I only needed another ten seconds or so to get my spine in alignment and then I was going to kick her naked pansy ass from here to eternity.

“Doesn’t matter. I’ve got you now. I won’t need the dancers tomorrow.”

Goddamn it. Three nights of power. Three nights of ghost dances.

Three nights of sacrifices. I’d prevented Winona’s death earlier, which was probably why the wicker man’s denizens were getting toasty tonight.

They’d almost certainly been intended for tomorrow night’s party.

But I’d shown up on the scene, so Tia was improvising, and damned if she wasn’t doing it well.

I stiff-handed her in the throat.

It wasn’t what I wanted to do. I really wanted to kick her in the gut so hard she’d fly back and land in her own bonfire, but I didn’t have room to pull my legs up that far.

Besides, it would’ve been telegraphed, whereas unwrapping one hand from the grip at my throat and jabbing the eighteen inches to her throat took almost no effort.

Her grip weakened satisfyingly and she dropped me. I fell to my hands and toes and sprang forward, tackling her. I had two inches and at least twenty pounds on her. One solid slam against stone and a fist to her jaw should have been all it took.

Except instead of landing on top of a wheezing, gasping woman, I landed on top of a snarling, snapping wolf, and the fist I was driving toward its face suddenly looked very small and vulnerable in comparison to all those teeth.

I pulled the punch and got a paw across my face for my troubles.

My glasses went flying and pain erupted where claws scored their mark.

Half a second later we’d both twisted and flung ourselves aside to land on our feet, Tia on all fours, me on just the two.

I couldn’t see well out of my left eye, puffy flesh and tears already marring my vision.

Aggravatingly, that was the eye I had better vision in, so although I was by no means debilitated, Tia’s edges were a little softer than I might have liked.

It didn’t matter. If I could see well enough to drive without my glasses, I could certainly see well enough to beat a werewolf into next week without them.

She leaped at me and I ducked into the attack, shouldering up to catch her chest and use her own momentum against her.

She went a lot farther than either of us expected, hitting the ground with a yelp that turned to furious growling.

I spun, ready to catch her the same way again, but she darted around me and came in for my hamstrings, moving faster than I’d known wolves could do.

I jammed my hips forward, narrowly keeping my legs out of her teeth, and it struck me, a little belatedly, that an unarmed human versus a wolf was probably shit out of luck.

I reached for my sword, and got a shock when it refused to come at my call.

Tia circled around and flattened me in the moment I stood there dumbstruck, her full weight bearing down as she drove her teeth at my throat.

Smacking my head against stone was a sufficient wake-up call to get me in action again, though my brain was a static mess of bewilderment.

Fighting, though, wasn’t necessarily a brainy thing to do.

I grabbed two fistfuls of Tia’s ruff and kicked her in the belly, using leg strength to throw her over my head.

I caught a glimpse of a magnificent aerial twist and she landed on her feet, facing me but still skidding backward from momentum.

It gave me enough time to roll to my own feet and try again to call my sword to me.

I got a sensation of magnets interacting: magics rejecting each other, rebounding when they tried to meet.

Then Tia had her feet under her again and was charging forward.

I threw myself sideways, landing alarmingly near the bonfire.

It was picking up serious heat, now that I noticed it: all the cave’s dampness had been sucked away and the close quarters were making air thin and dry.

I doubted Tia had considered that when she chose the cavern as her magical roasting pit.

Her captives were screaming and coughing, and frustration tore through me.

Short of bringing down the ceiling, I didn’t know how to magically put a fire out, and any experimentation would give Tia more than enough opportunity to chew me into little bits.

It had to be one crisis at a time, but I didn’t see how I was going to get everybody out of there alive, that way.

Not without throwing myself wholesale into a magic whose topped-up, shiny new strength didn’t yet have any grasp on consequences or limitations.

Tia came at me again, and the time for debate ended. I whispered, Rattler, help? , and when Tia hit me, it was a coyote she rolled backward over the broad stone floor.

There was something to be said for the element of surprise.

She had, perfectly reasonably, expected to smash into a six-foot-tall, hundred-and-sixty-five-pound woman.

The same amount of coyote was a whole different mouthful, pretty much literally: her teeth snapped on where my throat should have been, but I’d changed shape so radically she caught air half a foot from my skull instead.

Almost without losing momentum, she jumped away again, then spun back to gape at me, an expression as comical on a wolf as it was on a human.

Then she fell back a few more steps, hackles rising warily.