He was going to be very disappointed if I came home from Ireland a werewolf.
Coyote nominally had the healing gig in hand. I didn’t try to usurp it. I just ripped down all the shells and shields and protective barriers and finally, finally let my fresh new topped-up Siobhán Walkingstick magic flow in behind his, his robin’s-egg-blue flooding forward on a tide of steely-blue, his hot-desert-gold cooled by a rush of my silver.
For just an instant there I was raw to him. Exposed, open, vulnerable. It was mostly about Morrison, between us. My former boss, silver-haired, blue-eyed, solid as the earth. My laughter, my tears, my safety and my future. My everything, these days.
For the space of a breath, his presence between us cut too deep. Coyote retreated, leaving me all alone against the black magic running through my veins. I staggered, shocked at its strength. I thought I could beat it, but not easily. I couldn’t do everything alone, after all. I’d found that out the hard way. But I’d do this alone, if I had to, because I was not going to go home to Morrison all furry and toothy.
Then the breath was gone and Coyote’s power surged back to the fore, leading mine in a ferocious battle against the wolf. Two coyotes on the mesa now, and the black wolf dwindled simply because of my attention, my presence, in the battle. I sensed its rage as the infection grew less profound, sensed the threads that had slowly bound me closer to the Master shriveling and sensed his fury that one of my lineage had once more slipped through his fingers.
But not all of us. Crystal-clear thought in the midst of his anger. Master’s meal was a little wild, bore herself a wee boy child. The one precious piece of information Sheila had garnered while still in his thrall. The one thing she’d shared with the Master, before her bones were burned and he lost most of his hold on her.
I could all but feel his promise: that he would find and destroy Aidan not for the sake of damaging the family line, but sheerly for revenge against me. Me, the one who had helped Sheila MacNamarra get away thirty years ago and just last night. The one who had thrown down a gauntlet a few months ago, a gauntlet the Master had declined—or been unable—to take up.
I whispered, “Like hell. I’m coming for your witch Morrígan and then I’m coming for you.”
Raucous laughter answered me. Raven’s laughter, harsh and unkind. Heard a challenge in that laughter, a dare: if I met the Morrígan, he would come to me himself. Right here, right now. We could finally go mano a mano, and if I won, well, then. He would leave Aidan be.
“You’d have to, you stupid bastard. I’m gonna kick your ass so far back into the caves even the cavemen won’t be able to find you. I’ll see you at Tara, you son of a bitch.”
The Master cackled again and the threads along which we communicated were suddenly gone. So was the ache, the infection, the terrible redness in my arm. The black magic receded, and in the planescape of psychic battle, the wolf simply disappeared. I snapped back to the hanging tree, still dangling upside-down, and Coyote, limping, disheveled, his hair in tangles, came across the mesa and sat at the foot of the tree with a thud.
Big Coyote, who hadn’t been there before, but who was also always here in this desert, meandered up and shoved his nose into Coyote’s hand, which made him chuckle and drag the gleaming animal into a hug. They were astonishing together, Big Coyote’s every strand of fur a bristling wire of gold or copper or brass, and his eyes full of stars, while my Coyote was a sweat-stained red-skinned tangle-haired dirty mess. Or he was at first. All of it washed away under Big Coyote’s lean, and my Coyote looked refreshed when he let the archetype go. “Seriously,” he said as I rotated in another slow circle: tree, desertscape, blinding sky, more desert, tree and coyotes again. “Seriously,” my Coyote repeated, “you thought I was him?”
They wobbled out of my view as I spun again. Twisting my head toward them only made an impending headache worse, so I stopped trying and mumbled, “Well, yeah. Back in the day. I didn’t know better.”
Big Coyote snorted. So did Little. I tried shrugging, but that made my head hurt, too. Hanging upside-down was not my favorite place to be. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? But we won, right? Does that mean someone’s going to let me down now?”
The two coyotes exchanged glances in a way that didn’t bode well for the home team. But then Coyote, my Coyote, got up and did something I couldn’t see to the ropes. They went elastic-y and dropped me on my skull, which was moderately better than hanging upside-down. It wasn’t good, though, and I spent a minute with my arms curled around my head, trying to get past the starbursts in my vision. When I finally looked up, both coyotes looked like I was their idea of a great afternoon’s entertainment. I started to say something caustic, then thought better of it. “You guys saved my bacon. Thank you.”
Big Coyote’s tongue slurped halfway around his head, like not even amazing animistic representations of archetypes were immune to the power of bacon. I had another dizzy moment of wondering when, exactly, I’d last eaten something worth calling food, and hoped all this not-eating would have knocked off the five or so pounds I’d put back on recently. If it had, I promised I wouldn’t eat so many doughnuts once I got home. And that I would take up jogging. And follow through on whatever other rash promises I’d made over the past several days. “Coyote?”
One pricked his ears and the other sat up a little straighter. I chuckled, but it was the second one I spoke to, humor fading fast. “I’m supposed to say goodbye to you f—”
“What? Joanne, no, you—”
Okay, that hadn’t been the best way to launch into the goodbye. I sat up, grateful my head had stopped throbbing, and waved my hands in the face of his protests. “Listen! Stop freaking out! I’m supposed to say goodbye from…me. From me fifteen years ago, from me you started teaching when I was a kid. She’s…”
Little Coyote looked uncomprehending while I searched for the right way to explain, but Big Coyote’s star-filled eyes were sad and acknowledging and maybe a little proud. He, at least, understood what had gone on between my younger and current self. Probably understood better than I did, for that matter. And he was certainly in a position to be watching over time loops, so he must have known this one was coming to an end.
“She’s been this annoying little voice of reason at the back of my skull for ages now,” I said after a while. “My dream self, the part of me that remembered your teachings even after I went and ripped them away from myself mid-lessons. But she says no matter what, she would have ended up here, fighting this fight in Ireland, and that means we’re coming to the end of her. I’m…integrating. Siobhán and Joanne and magic and…all of it. So she—” In the middle of the sentence I understood. She, the younger Joanne, the one who’d been in love with Coyote, was the one saying goodbye. Another loop closed. I faltered, then swallowed and, helpless, said, “She loved you. She loves you. And she’s…”
“Gone.” One rough low word from my mentor, and suddenly even Big Coyote’s brilliance wasn’t enough to make Little Coyote reflect shining glory. He turned his face away, giving me a profile shot: strong nose, strong jaw, restless black hair, brick-red skin against the bleached desert whiteness. Beautiful. Perfect. Very literally the man of my childhood dreams.
And then, because this was a landscape of the mind, and because magic let us do things that we couldn’t otherwise, because of those things, and because I’d finally and for the last time broken his heart…
…he was gone.
Chapter Thirty-One