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.Whosever dreams I was sharing, he hadn’t yet experienced some of the things I’d dreamt, our disjointed realities not yet converged.I crunched up, hoping to pull my spirit into a sit so I could twist and look down at myself and see whose body I inhabited.Instead I snapped free and flew up to the stars on raven wings.They say stars appear to be different colors because of interference in the atmosphere.Maybe it was my nearsightedness, but I’d never thought stars twinkled yellow and blue and the various other colors people assigned to them.I always thought they pretty much looked white, up there in the night sky.I supposed it was a limited existence, but I’d gotten used to it.So the stars taking a clear bend toward amber struck me as noticeably odd.They left tracks in my vision, streaks of warm gold as I passed through them, and instead of the night getting darker it turned warmer and thicker, until I felt like I was struggling through honey.In time I stopped moving, wings straining to beat against the weight that held them, and the stars began to take shape.They coalesced into a slow golden form, shining as brightly as Big Coyote’s every hair did, though without the pinprick edge that made him seem more than real.Shoulders, hips, a mane of long hair; they were familiar to me, though I was used to seeing them in Little Coyote’s normal colors, brick-red and black, not starlight and sable.Triumph should have welled in my breast, except my plan in finding Little Coyote had not included getting stuck in amber-laden stars.He was much, much larger than life, as if I was seeing him from a raven’s point of view, and the expression he turned on me was sad and worried.I drew breath to tell him it was all right, when I realized how very all right it wasn’t.Night’s blackness had butterfly eyes in it.All the hints and shapes of colors I’d seen in my dreams and visions, when I’d tried searching pulling Billy and then Mel out of sleep, when I’d drawn this demon toward Gary, finally resolved into something recognizable.I’d known the form without recognizing it; butterflies weren’t something that I thought of as malicious, and the familiarity of form had simply slipped by me.Little Coyote’s hair, strung out through the sky like a spiderweb, was caught by indigo and violet spots, watching us.If I took my gaze away from the darkness and concentrated on Coyote, I could see the ripple of life that went through the watching eyes, like endless wings fluttering in a breeze I couldn’t feel.Under different circumstances, the living night might have been overwhelmingly beautiful, traces of green and blue so dark they could hardly be seen washing through the empty spaces of sky.Instead, the feeling of being examined sent a stab of fear directly through the center of my power, beneath my breastbone.It hurt in an almost familiar way, like the cold of a silver blade being slammed through my chest.For a painful, unfunny moment, laughter bubbled up through that familiarity.Karmically speaking, it was probably less like having a sword shoved through me than a butterfly collector’s pin.I focused hard on Coyote, afraid if I let that idea get too far out of hand I’d see a giant needle piercing me through.To my relief, I didn’t see any such thing in Coyote’s starry self, just an outline of sorrow and regret written in the stars.He’d told me to stay out of the ether.Just then it struck me that he might’ve had a good reason for doing that.I could feel amber hardening around me, sticking me in place, and behind my breastbone, the slow build of panicked power.My only thought was to release it like a grenade, a concussive explosion that might shatter the golden warmth that held us, but there were a number of problems with that plan.First, I didn’t know if my power could even be used that way.I remembered, as if through someone else’s mind, an already-dead shaman telling me there was more than one path to be had, and that some shamans chose the warrior’s path.The implication had been that that was the road I was expected to travel, and I could make an argument for it with my experiences thus far.Whether that meant I could go commando on a sleepy butterfly monster’s ass was not a question I’d thought to cover in Shamanism 101.Second, and somewhat more important, I had a sinking feeling that if I went the blow shit up route, Coyote and I would get blown up, too.That was the problem with grenades.They weren’t picky about who they exploded.Coyote and I both knew how to shield ourselves, but me going kerblewy struck me as the psychic equivalent of friendly fire.It didn’t really matter how friendly the fire was if it went off on your side of the barricade.I’d needed answers, but coming to Coyote to find them might very well have killed both of us, and now I didn’t know how to get out of it.We stared at each other across what felt like an impossible distance, the space between stars, and Coyote inclined his head, slow movement in the amber.It looked horribly like a goodbye.CHAPTER NINETEENI came awake with my heart sick in my throat and my ears ringing.My vision had streaks of golden stars in it, the aftermath of a rupture of power that looked like something I would do accidentally, not something my irritable guide would do deliberately.The butterfly darkness had swept over him so quickly it’d seemed to devour him, one moment his lanky form and starlit eyes saying goodbye and the next all the sarcasm and smart-mouthing drowned in blackness.My eyes burned and my chest hurt, like I was waiting for tears.“Jo?” Gary crouched in front of me, a big mass of man that I could only see as an abstract shape, my gaze still focused on things that had happened in other worlds.“Jo,” he said again, more urgently, then took a big breath and blew it in my face as if I were a baby screaming the last air from her lungs.It worked just as effectively, too, making me drag in a sharp, startled breath and blink, which went a long way toward relieving the pain in both my lungs and eyes.It did nothing for the sickness in my heart, though, and the second breath I took exited again as a shuddered, “Oh, God.”“What happened, Jo?” Gary’s bushy eyebrows were drawn in concern and he had both hands on my shoulders, grip tight enough to hold me up.I diverted my gaze to him, still staring almost sightlessly, then leaned forward to wrap my arms around him and knot my hands in his shirt.I was afraid I might collapse if I let go.“Joanie? What the hell’s goin’ on, sweetheart?”“I think Coyote just committed suicide to keep me safe.” My belly knotted as I spoke and I lurched to my feet, scrambling for the bathroom.A minute later I wasn’t sure if I was grateful to Gary or not, as it was largely his fault I had nothing in my stomach to heave up.I tried, anyway, stomach twisting and clenching as tears fell from my eyes
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