Shaman Rises

Chapter Nineteen

I wished I could say I rallied. That I’d anticipated it all along and was prepared.

I didn’t. I hadn’t. I wasn’t. Black wings smashed into me and I fell, too stunned to think, much less act. The floor hit me vindictively, knocking what breath remained out of my lungs. I couldn’t inhale again, nor was I even sure I wanted to. My world meant very little, maybe nothing, if Coyote was one of the bad guys. It might be better to never breathe again. To never think beyond staticky white shock rushing through my mind, drowning out the sound of blood in my ears.

Someone was screaming. Not outside my head: inside it. Probably me, then. Screaming bewilderment, fear, loss, horror. Screaming at the vast black wings battering our little keep-it-in circle. Screaming as Gary fell beneath the beating wings. Screaming as Morrison fumbled for the gun he’d borrowed from Billy, then fell, too, all of us huddled lumps of confusion and pain.

Coyote stepped over us and knelt beside Annie, his terrible wings encircling her as he crooned, “Forgive me, my love. They would not let me hold you. Wake now and join me at long last. Let us call our master together. Let us—”

Gary, bless him, roared, “That’s my wife!” and bashed into Coyote from the far side. They both slammed across the little circle, crashed into its wall directly above me and slid down in a writhing, wrestling four-hundred-plus-pound mass that landed more or less on my rib cage.

I hadn’t had any breath to lose anyway, but the impact shook off the shocked paralysis holding me in place. I shoved upward, aware that while I was pretty strong, there had to be magic helping me throw that much weight off in one go. That was fine. Better than fine, since it was nice to know the magic chose wisely even if I felt like I was flatlining. But Coyote rose much higher than even a magic-assisted boost could account for, massive wings slamming the circle’s walls as he lifted himself out of our reach. There was far too little space for him to fly, but men with wings held no more accountability to physics than rain-born fire. His face contorted with hatred as he searched for room to maneuver, a way to reach Annie without exposing himself to the rest of us. I put a hand out to Gary, making sure he was all right.

He grunted. I took that as man-speak for “I’m fine,” and folded myself into a crouch. Raven!

Raven couldn’t give me wings, not here in the Middle World. Not unless I was willing to shape-shift, and I wasn’t at all sure I could shift into an angel anyway. Natural creatures, yeah, but nobody had—Coyote hadn’t—given me a primer on shifting into supernatural beings. Of which werewolves didn’t count, since a wolf was technically a normal animal.

But I didn’t need wings. I just needed to jump high enough to catch Coyote and bring him down to fighting level. I thrust out of my crouch and gained far more height than I should have, a sensation of wings crazy around my spine.

Coyote backhanded me the moment I came in reach, then battered me down to the floor again with his wings. I lay there wheezing and wincing for a couple seconds, trying to come up with a better plan. Renee?

It would not be safe to slip through time, she responded, which made me cross my eyes like I could see her inside my head. “Seriously? Because it’s not so safe out here, either.”

You spoke of your enemy unraveling you from time. Now you lie cheek by cheek with two of his most powerful creatures. This is not the time to take that risk.

Ah. The voice of sense and practicality that I’d needed for the past fifteen months had finally arrived. Her timing was not, I thought, spectacularly good. Rattler?

Ssssomeday, my sibilant spirit companion said, you will learn to think first of me when we mussst fight, Joanne Walker. My friend, he said to Raven in a much less scolding tone than he’d used with me. My brain was still wondering what messages to send to my muscles when I leaped upward again, snake-strike fast, and body-checked Coyote against the power circle’s wall.

Rather to my petty satisfaction, the circle went BZOT! like a magically powered electric fence, and for a heartbeat Coyote went slack-jawed and vacant-eyed, his wings turning to black mist.

I took the chance I was given, and rudely invited myself into his garden.

It was not the place I remembered. Oh, the parts were all still there: the hard desert sky, the endless reshaping dunes, the rock garden that held hidden cool spaces for a coyote to wait out the heat of day. But it was subtly wrong: the sky was the wrong color of hard blue, the dunes ever-changing but showing black dust with each shift of wind. The rocks weren’t just cool, but cold, the cold of dead things and dank places. I stood alone in that unpleasantry for a moment, fingers steepled against my lips, before daring to whisper, “Coyote?”

For a long time I thought he wouldn’t come at all. When he finally did, it was over the rocks, which clicked and knocked together as he climbed them. He had always been silent in his approach before.

He had also always been brick-red with golden eyes before, or a coyote. Now he was neither: the rich color of his skin was cracked and blackened, burned at the edges. He had always been beautiful, but that beauty was ruined now, pain leaking through to corrode the surface.

Wings, black and sooty, trailed across the rocks behind him.

“Coyote.” My voice was as broken as his beauty. “Coyote, what happened?”

“Do you really need to ask?”

I did. I thought I did. But I waited before asking again, waited for the answer to come to me. It made no sense. He’d been with me since the beginning. Since long before the beginning. Since my childhood, and his youth. Since I was a little girl standing under the desert sun, all unknowing as I showed him the path that lay before him. Since I dreamed coyote dreams as a young teen, learning magic in my sleep. Since I had walked away from those dreams, only to waken to them again with Coyote as my guide. He had helped me, protected me, saved me—

—and the final time he had saved me, I had broken his heart. He had fought the werewolf infection with me, for me, and we had taken me all the way down to the bones to do it. Bones that didn’t lie; bones that said my choice was Morrison.

Coyote had retreated in that moment, leaving me alone. He’d come back, but I knew now he had come back broken. He hadn’t saved me, when we fought the werewolf infection together. He had sacrificed himself. He’d taken that infection into himself—

His laughter broke over my understanding, shattering it. “You think I’m that noble, Jo? Even now, you think I’m that good?”

“You’ve always been good. The best,” I whispered.

“No. Second best.” The whole of his garden flickered with those snarled words, dark images dancing across the sky. Me, surpassing him. Morrison, being chosen over him. Other faces and places I didn’t know, though one old man appeared repeatedly. I bet on it being Coyote’s grandfather, though I’d never met him. From what little I knew of him, it seemed impossible that he might have belittled Coyote in any way, but imagined slights could be more poisonous than real ones. I, of all people, knew about that.

“I didn’t take the infection,” he spat. “I’m not that good a person. I broke, Joanne, and it got in. I broke, and it left an opening. My master took it—”

“The Master.” I interrupted him in a soft, dangerous voice. “The Master, Coyote. Not your master.”

“My master.”

“I do not accept that. I don’t accept this, Cyrano—”

“And what did you expect of a man called Cyrano?” he demanded, which made me stare and then made me laugh, though not happily.

“I don’t buy that, either. Cyrano. Coyote. ’Yote.” I went through the names deliberately, from the one I called him when I was mad or serious, to the name I used all the time, and finally to the nickname I’d settled on, the one that made me feel closest to him. “We aren’t defined by our names. I should know.”

“Siobhán.” He snarled that, too, like its weigh could curse me.

“Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. God, what a mouthful, right? Or just plain old Joanne Walker. I’m both of them. Siobhán’s got all this legacy to it and Joanne is who I choose to be. Cyrano has legacy. Who do you choose to be?”

In hindsight, that was a stupid thing to ask just then.

The force of his attack took me off my feet. I went ass over teakettle, bouncing across the dark-laced sand, and skidded to a stop with my feet pointing up a sand dune. “...Ow.”

The second attack was just as startling as the first. The earth exploded beneath me, dropping me a dozen feet into Coyote’s garden, and I realized if I didn’t get my act together he could very easily tear me apart. This was a place where his will ruled supreme, and the only reason I wasn’t dead yet was—

Well, probably because hardly anybody could resist their No, Mr. Bond confession moment. And I had every intention of drawing that moment out until I got through to Coyote, my Coyote, because no way in hell was I leaving him like this, possessed, infected and one of the bad guys. “Coyote...”

This time when the blow came, I blocked it. It reverberated off my shields hard enough to make sand slip and fall into the pit he’d dug for me. I tapped my snake-speed and jumped, feeling the sensation of wings as I leaped farther out of the pit than even I expected. I landed a dozen feet from him in a perfect three-point superhero crouch. The coat, which knew its duty, settled around me like it had been choreographed.

Coyote also knew its duty, and rolled his eyes with a level of disdain usually only attainable by six-year-olds exasperated with their parents. “The coat, Joanne. Really?”

“Really. Maybe you should borrow it, ’yote. It makes me feel heroic, and I’d say you could use a little of that right now.” I didn’t want to try a full-on assault. Not here, in Coyote’s garden. Instead I sank tendrils of healing magic, pure blue, into the sand. If I could burn away some of the infection—because I refused to accept it was anything but an infection—then maybe I could get through to him.

Dune-colored magic rose up, seized my threads and yanked downward. I slammed face-first into the sand. It filled my mouth, my nose, my eyes, and tasted worse than grit. It tasted of bitter oil and dry decay, and it clawed its way down my throat, trying to gain purchase.

Vomiting sand was not high on a list of things I wanted to try again. I spat out mouthfuls, shuddering before clean healing magic washed the flavors away. Coyote snarled as I got to my feet and lobbed fresh magic at me. It hit me square in the chest, but I braced and only skidded backward, rucking up sand, instead of getting knocked halfway across creation. “Coyote, I don’t want to fight you.”

“Oh, but do. Your defeat will be so much more satisfying to my master if you struggle before it ends.” Stone burst from the sand and slammed shut around me. Blind panic turned my vision red for a few seconds. I hated being enclosed, and the knowledge that it was a new fear and where it had come from did nothing at all to alleviate babbling terror.

It is only stone, Renee said, and stone wears away with time.

Before I could remind her that she’d just warned me not to mess with time, my encasement dissolved into fine blue-tinged particles. They felt old, as if they’d aged thousands of years, and they settled into a pool under my feet. A surge of confidence rushed me. The shining sand beneath my feet was my territory, even here in the heart of Coyote’s garden. I’d made it my own, and maybe even reclaimed a little something of my friend.

His black-laced golden eyes narrowed. “How did you do that?”

I couldn’t help it. I grinned brilliantly and said, “Magic!” in the perkiest tone I could.

A gigantic earthen hand rose up, seized my ankle and slammed me all over the landscape. I wasn’t exactly hurt; my shields and the shimmering pool of space I’d claimed for myself saved me from that, but nor was I exactly functional when he finally lost interest in bashing me around. I lay on my back, whimpering at the dark sky, and tried to remember when I’d last gotten my ass kicked this thoroughly. Less than a week ago, probably, because it had been a bad couple of weeks, but even then I’d known I was facing the Master, and now—

Now I wasn’t able to accept that, because the Master was working through my friend. And I really didn’t want to fight my friend, even if the smart part of me recognized that I kinda needed to.

Dimly, it occurred to me that this was the reason he’d been able to fight Suzy. He wasn’t using healer’s magic. He was using Raven Mocker magic, and Raven Mocker was—

Raven Mocker was the reason I’d lost Marcia Williams in the Lower World. Coyote hadn’t been there to save me. He’d been there to save her. But he had saved me. He’d used healing magic on me, even though that couldn’t have been part of the Master’s game plan.

Which meant Coyote still had to be in there. He had to be, because I wasn’t going to take any other answer. My confidence surged, then plummeted again as cold horror made me dig my fingers into the sand. “Oh, God. Oh, God, Coyote. You killed Laurie. You murdered Laurie Corvallis.”

“I was so hungry.” The confession was a sigh. “You were so busy trying to save your ridiculous Annie, and the reporter was so vulnerable. So delicious, with her will to fight and her fearlessness. The girl saw me, of course, but it was easy to steal her tongue for a little while. To siphon her mind, and taste her magic. I didn’t dare drink it all, of course. Not with my master’s touch on her already, but the taste was enough to numb her thoughts long enough to mislead you.”

“How—?” I could move now, and did, rolling over to hands and knees while my chest filled with pain and sorrow. “How did you...numb her mind?”

“What is Raven Mocker but a vampire, Jo? Not the silly things they tell modern stories about, with hearts and passions, but a thing that lives on the blood and viscera of others. A thing that hypnotizes so it can feed more easily. All I had to do was fog her mind for a little while. This power is...” He closed his eyes, spreading arms and wings alike. “It’s all I’ve ever imagined. All I’ve wanted to be.”

“No. My teacher is a good man. He’s never craved power for its own sake.”

“How would you know?”

“Because a man who wanted power for its own sake would never have let me find my own path.” I raised my gaze to his. “He would have kept me far closer than you did. He would have kept me dependent on him. You let me make far too many mistakes for somebody who wanted power for its own sake. I cursed you for it about a million times, but right now I’m glad you did, because it means I’m sure about this.”

“Maybe I’m smarter than you think, Joanne.”

“I think you’re pretty smart, Coyote. Even if I’m wrong, hero worship does tend to make a girl think that way, and I worshiped you for a long time. Let me help you, ’yote.” That came out a lot more softly. “Let me help, because I don’t want to have to take you down.”

“You think you can?”

“Let’s find out.”

I slammed back to the Middle World.