“Is time slowing down?”
“No,” the coyote said, “your heart is.”
Damn.
The stream disappeared without warning, sinking into stone, and the tunnel veered up at a steep angle. I dug unaccustomed claws into the hard rock, scrabbling for a purchase, and wriggled my way up the tunnel, shouldering past the coyote. Stone gave way and I burst through the earth into a pool of numbingly cold water. I kicked frantically toward the bright surface, dragging myself onto the bank a few seconds later. My hands were hands again. I wasn’t a coyote anymore. It felt strange.
The drumbeat, my heartbeat, ricocheted around me, shockingly loud. The coyote ran out of the pool and shook himself furiously on the bank, then trotted through a sparse, stingily kept garden to an unmoving lump on the ground. I rolled onto my stomach and pushed to my hands and knees, watching him.
He nosed the lump on the ground, then sat down beside it, head cocked at me, expression full of expectation. “Physician, heal thyself.”
I crawled over to the lump, still shivering. “Jesus Christ!” I reared onto my knees, backing away.
The lump was me. I looked like hell. Blood matted my hair, which hadn’t been clean to start with. The bandaged cut on my face was almost lost among dozens of other tiny, glass-infested nicks and scratches. My shining new silver necklace was stained red, the cross settled in a pool of blood at the hollow of my throat. My ribs on the left side looked deflated, bent inward, and the sword was still stuck in my right lung.
I—the one sitting, not the lump—fell onto my butt and began crab-walking backward. “I’m dying!”
“I thought we’d established that,” the coyote said. He hopped over my body—the one lying there—and grabbed my shirt in his teeth, tugging me forward again. “Heal yourself. It’s in you.”
“Dammit, Jim, I’m a mechanic, not a doctor.” The coyote was strong, pulling me forward even as I resisted. “I don’t know how.”
He let go of my shirt and lay down with his chin on his front paws. “You know how to fix cars, right? You know where everything goes.”
I nodded. He lifted his bony shoulders in a shrug. “Pretend you’re a car. It’s a nice analogy.”
Are spirit guides supposed to know what analogies are? The coyote grinned at me, even though I hadn’t spoken aloud, and tipped his head toward my body. “You don’t have much time.”
“Pretend I’m a car. Right. Okay.” I scooted closer to my body, hesitantly, mouth pressed closed. “A car. Right. Start with the obvious.” My co-workers tell me I talk to myself when I’m working. I’d never noticed it before. “I’m leaking. What leaks? Oil filters leak. Great. I’m an oil filter.” I put a hand on my chest, grabbed the sword’s hilt with the other, and tugged. It stuck for a moment, grating against my ribs, and the drumbeat stopped entirely.
“No!” I yanked the sword harder, and it slid out with a liquid sound. I threw it to the side, and hit myself in the chest. I—the one on the ground—coughed, and the drumbeat made a sad little thump. Dark, important-looking blood spurted out, covering my hands.
“Patch it up,” the coyote said.
“I don’t know how,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I could imagine an oil filter, emptying itself onto the ground. I ran through the process of changing it—loosening the drain, oiling the gasket on the new filter, screwing it back onto the filter pipe. Uncertainly, I tried overlaying those images on my body, envisioning my torn lung as the old, burned-out filter, imagining the new one sliding into place.
Something clicked in the center of me, below my breastbone and just above my diaphragm in exactly the same place, the sickness that had impelled me to help Marie had been. It felt like cartilage popping, a thick painful feeling, as if a lock, stiff with age, had reluctantly opened. I felt it in both my bodies, the one I was consciously inhabiting, and the one lying all but lifelessly on the bloody grass. Energy surged through that place with the same cool feeling as drinking water on an empty stomach. It lined the in-sides of me and reached out, connecting my kneeling self to the dying body under my hands. For a few seconds I thought I could see through myself, the ridiculous oil filter analogy at work repairing my lung. The energy I felt was centered there, coiling inside the ruined cavity and patching it. Then the sensation faded and dizziness swept through me. I tilted over sideways, suddenly exhausted. “I don’t think it worked.”
“Take a look,” the coyote murmured. I pried my eyes open and looked down at myself. Ichory black blood still covered my chest and my hands, but when I pushed my shirt out of the way, the hole was gone, the skin unscarred.
“Holy shit.”
The coyote chuckled. “Now reinflate your lung.”
“What, like a tire?”
“Just like that.” He sounded approving.
Flat tire. Filled tire. It doesn’t take that long to fill a tire, but I had the horrible idea that I would explode my lung if I filled it too fast. The drumbeat thumped unsteadily, then fell into a more reassuring pattern as I envisioned air being pushed into a tire. I felt the same energy coil behind my breastbone again, shimmering through both bodies. It spilled out as I dragged in a deep breath. Beneath my hands, the other me did the same thing, and the alien pool of energy went dead again. This time it left me with the faintest sensation of still being there, waiting. I swallowed hard. “What is that?”
“It’s your destiny,” the coyote said.
My heartbeat missed another pulse, but overall it was much better. I let out a high-pitched laugh. “My destiny. I’m a car and I’m fixing me and it’s my destiny? Great, that’s just great, in a completely fucked-up surreal way.”
“The ribs next, I think.” The coyote sounded serene. I reached for the unlocked knot of energy more deliberately this time, and laughed again, a little hysterically, when it responded.
“How can I be doing this?” My broken ribs were like a body frame that had been torn apart. I pressed them back into shape, cautiously realigning them, welding the weak points carefully. Pressure I hadn’t consciously realized existed slowly eased, and I could breathe more easily. My whole body felt more aligned, stronger, just like a car felt solid with its frame intact. The energy I was using spilled from me like it was part of my bone structure, like it was integral to my being, but I’d never felt anything like it before.
“You’re finally beginning to accept a path you abandoned a long time ago,” the coyote answered. “You have gifts, Joanne Walker, that your spirit cries out to use. Healing is chief among them.”
“I don’t understand.” I sounded young and frightened, but even as I made the protestation I moved, without being told, on to the next of my injuries. The cuts and scrapes on my arms and face were a paint job. Using the coyote’s analogy worked: it gave me a way to focus the cool rushing power inside my belly. It was bewilderingly easy, almost instinctive. The surface damage of the cuts and scrapes called for less of that energy than the lung or the ribs had. I felt myself making choices I barely understood, siphoning just a fraction of the power available to deal with the smaller injuries. The rest settled behind the unlocked place above my belly, waiting. When the “paint job” was complete, the extension of energy faded back into me, joining the rest of the power behind my breastbone. I felt a little like a battery charging up.