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Astonishing agony slid into my belly, wiping away disappointment and nervousness. I looked down, gaping, at Virissong’s bloody fingers wrapped around the hilt of his bone knife. The blade I had carved for him over one cold winter. Buried deep in my stomach, piercing what would have been my own center of power, had the body been mine. I wrapped my fingers around the hilt, over his hand, and looked up again, pain turning my vision white.

Virissong smiled at me, cold and inhuman, not at all the man I loved, and turned away to let me fall to the earth and spill my life’s blood there.

Dying took longer than I thought it would, and hurt less. The cold seeped into my body, taking the edges of pain away until I could roll onto my back with my fingers clutched around the knife. Visions danced in the pale blue sky, spirits crashing against walls that I couldn’t see, as if trying to break in and finish what Virissong had begun. He was right, I realized distantly. There was power in the circle. Pride filled me, then drowned under confusion. Nothing good could come of a power that had to be fed by death.

Taking the knife out of my belly almost didn’t hurt at all. The part of me that was Joanne Walker struggled to separate herself from Nakaytah so I could reach for my own power, the healing magic that would save my/our life. But the body I inhabited was Nakaytah’s, and she had no such power. Heedless of my attempts, she rolled to her stomach and slowly pushed herself to hands and knees, then staggered to her feet. Virissong stood a few feet away, head thrown back and arms spread wide in exultation. I wanted to surge forward and slam the knife through his ribs, but Nakaytah had no intention of becoming a killer.

Beyond the shielding I could see the serpent, rising higher and higher against the icy winter morning. Pale sunlight bled around it, making a glowing, gorgeous aura, like a benevolent god looking down at its people. Even against the back lighting, I could see its individual scales glittering and shifting against one another, my vision still too acute for a human’s. Especially for a human with no magic of her own. I stared up at the monster, trying to absorb the import of that, as Nakaytah whispered, “Amhuluk,” and then, in despair, “But where is Wakinyan?”

Trapped. The answer came to me—or to Nakaytah; I wasn’t sure which—with absolute certainty. Virissong’s sacrifice was to Amhuluk, the ancient serpent, not for his Enemy. That, at least, was something the coven had done right. Or wrong, since it was unlikely that Virissong had intended for us to invite the good into the world along with the bad. Maybe some of those intentions the road to hell was paved with had come through despite our blindness and our guide.

While I was thinking that, Nakaytah gathered herself and tottered toward the edge of the power circle, her hands outstretched for balance.

One thing Virissong told me was true: it was Nakaytah’s blood that brought down the circle. She fell toward it, strength draining from her body, and with a hiss and a spatter the shielding came down. Even she felt it, and through her, so did I, a buzz of power shorting out, like a circuit breaker flipping. It knocked her askew, and she sprawled across the circle’s line, landing on her back so that she and I together watched Amhuluk come smashing down to close its massive jaws over Virissong. I saw a fang slash through his right arm, and another bite through his torso, just where he’d shown me the scars that he’d claimed Nakaytah had caused. Which, technically, I guessed she had.

“Wakinyan,” Nakaytah croaked. “We need you.”

For the second time in as many moments, liquid gold burst forth from my chest and I turned inside-out.

Minutes of memory-surfing meant nothing to the world outside: no more than a blink of time had passed when I resurfaced from the thunderbird’s memories. And theywere the thunderbird’s memories, I realized. Powerless or not, Nakaytah’s plea and her blood had made the creature’s passage into the Middle World possible, a dying wish granted by the very gods themselves. Her memories had played in such vivid, inhuman color because the thunderbird had partaken of the gift she offered, just as it’d gobbled through me in the skies of the Upper World. We were all in this together, shaman, spirit, and mortal alike.

I folded my wings back and tucked my claws up, plunging through the thick atmosphere. My eyes had no tears in them as wind ripped by, a thin membrane shuttering over red pupil as protection from the speed. Color dimmed only slightly with the membrane, but my focus changed, telescoping in on the serpent beneath me, its writhing form the only matter of importance in my world.

Its stubby wings drove it upward in short, twisting bursts as it strove to reach me, its Enemy, in turn. I could sense fury and hatred pouring off it, helping to fuel its passage through the sky, and knew as long as I kept it angry I had the advantage. It was in the lake below that it would come into its own, where its long serpentine form would play in and out of the water with ease while I struggled with the weight of liquid on my wings.

Backwinging, claws extended, shocked me with the force of gravity denied. It tore my breath away, making me want to laugh, wide-eyed, like a child, but the thunderbird was in control, and it had no time for my youthful glee. Wind slammed against the undersides of my wings, supporting me as my claws pinched into—no, around—the serpent’s body. Irritation surged through me, that I hadn’t drawn blood, but even so, I had the thing in my talons and flung myself skyward, wings crashing heavily against the air.

The monster in my claws twisted and struck, spires on its back rigid with rage. One bite landed and I screamed as venom shot through the wound. The sound shattered the thickness of the air, cracking the sky with its strength. I released the serpent, watching it fall away beneath me, struggling to keep aloft with its vestigial wings. I struggled as well, burning heat of poison cauterizing my blood. As a bird I had no jaw to set, but the same feeling of resolution washed through me. The bite had to be ignored, and the Enemy defeated. I turned on wingtip again, and thought, rather incongruously, hey.

Hey. I was a healer.

Hey. I had something the spirit creature didn’t.

Water in the gas line. The idea came easily, silver-sheened power rising through me even though my body wasn’t my own. I wondered briefly where the hell my body was, and if it was alive, because I didn’t see how I could’ve actually shape-shifted into a gigantic bird. The mass equation just wouldn’t work, even taking hollow bones into account. Then my heartbeat faltered as the first of the tainted blood came to it, and I stopped fucking around with little details like physics and started worrying about staying alive.

It would have been easier with a siphon, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea well enough to make it work. Hell, it would’ve been easier if I could see what I was doing, but I didn’t think asking the thunderbird to nip in for a quick landing so I could step out of its body and take a look inside it would go over well.

Instead I clung to the idea of water in the gas line, one liquid floating on top of the other. Blood below, poison on top: I could tell when it began to work because the pain intensified, pure venom corroding the vessels and veins it touched. I figured the next few seconds might make me a little dizzy, but as the thunderbird folded its wings and went into another dive, it seemed as good a time as any to risk it.

It took pressure to squeeze the poison out, like a thin tube with a semisolid matter in the bottom, the liquid on top squishing its way forward. I was right: dizziness crashed through me, and instead of diving I suddenly realized I was just plain falling. The thunderbird’s heartbeat hung motionless for a terribly long time as I squeezed water from the gas line with all my concentration.