Thunderbird Falls

Possibly, just possibly, I still had some inner-garden nurturing to do.

Immediately behind me, my badger hole folded in on itself and smoothed out again, leaving lawn behind. “Well, that’s something,” I said out loud, as the world around me stained with color. The pool faded from mercury to clear, its earthy bottom refracting brown through reflected gray skies. I rolled onto my back, briefly missing the extraordinary strength of the badger’s legs, and closed my eyes. “Coyote?” I tried to picture him, long-legged and golden-eyed, then laughed silently as the image slid between Coyote-the-man and Coyote-the-coyote. Straight black hair drooped over perked furry ears. He looked like a character from Disney’s Robin Hood gone terribly wrong.

A rustle hissed over the grass like wax paper sliding against itself. I sat up, grinning. “You’re always reading my mind,” I said. “So get a load of how I think of…you?”

A rattlesnake swayed in front of me, black eyes reflecting the sudden paleness of my skin.

A snake in my garden.

For one hysterical moment I looked for an apple tree. Then panic took over and I crab-walked backward, elbows and knees going everywhere. It took another few seconds to make myself stop by asserting enough control to dig my fingers into the earth. “My garden,” I croaked. “You can’t be here.”

The rattler slithered forward a few inches, dry scrape against the short grass. “You can’t be here,” I repeated. It lifted its head and hissed at me, long tongue darting in and out. I shot to my feet, barely keeping myself from leaping to one of the stone benches and screaming like a ’50s housewife. It was my garden. My rules were supposed to apply. I bit the inside of my cheek and closed my eyes, reverting to the car metaphor I was most comfortable with. Rolling up the mental windows and making a shield of glass around myself reminded me of movies where the venomous animal was kept away from the actors by a sheet of glass.

The snake bonked its nose against the glass, striking out and coiling back as I opened my eyes. Its tongue thrust out again, and it reared back, expressionless flat eyes somehow looking offended. I grinned in a breathless combination of triumph and fear, and waggled my fingers at it. “G’bye, then.”

For once I let myself forget the vehicle metaphor, and instead spun glass. Heat poured off my body as I willed it to soften the shield between myself and the snake. I blew air through pursed lips and the glass expanded, spilling clear and delicate over the lawn as I protected my garden. The snake squiggled backward, forced to the edges of the garden.

I nearly had the thing vanquished when it shifted.

It didn’t change like Coyote did, inside a blink. Instead it reared up, making a long slender line of itself, balancing on a single coil of muscle. A hood flared, cobralike, then widened farther, broadening until it became shoulders. The body thickened, arms sprouting and waist narrowing. Hips splayed, legs splitting from the expanding breadth of muscle that had been its body. The coil upon which she had balanced became feet, small and bare. I jerked my eyes up to her face.

The rattlesnake’s dead eyes gazed back at me; like Ra, she was human-shaped with a snake’s head, large enough to fit the body. She flicked her tongue at me once more and completed the transformation into a brisk-looking Native American woman whose age I couldn’t judge. Her eyes were still very black, though bright with reflected sunlight. She had salt-and-pepper hair and wrinkles around her eyes. Her cheeks were round over a thin mouth that looked like it was used to smiling, but which was at the moment pushed out in a thoughtful moue. “Well, you certainly are a handful.”

“What?”

“You’re a handful,” she repeated. “Sliding around the astral realm, leaving psychic debris all over the place, and with such terrible shields I could walk right in here. I can see what needs to be done. At least you have potential,” she added, shaking her head. “You nearly pushed me out just now.”

I set my teeth and reared my head back, reestablishing the crystalline wall. It glimmered, becoming a solid curve of glass between the snake woman and myself. Her eyebrows—straight and slightly angled, like Spock’s—rose a fraction of an inch, and she took a step back. “You see?” She sounded pleased.

“Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

“My name is Judy Morningstar,” she said. “I’m going to be your teacher.”

CHAPTER SIX

“The hell you are.” Guilt mixed with incredulity in my voice. Coyote’d just finished telling me I needed a teacher, and I hated to admit he might be right. “Get out of my head. I’m doing just fine on my own.” Ah, yes. The petulant, spoiled child tone. That always went over well.

Judy sat down with irritating grace, as if she’d had it drilled into her by a dance instructor when she was too small to protest. “You’ve regressed from what your abilities six months ago were,” she disagreed. “Even three months ago. You haven’t accepted your power or the responsibility that comes with it.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I stopped Cernunnos, didn’t I? I fought the banshee. That all took power.”

“Oh yes.” She nodded. “In the moment of crisis, you did what had to be done, with the tools at hand. You used enormous power, but without regard for the consequences.”

A thin trickle of apprehension dribbled down my spine. “I was careful. The hospitals and the airport, all the power stayed on so people would be okay.” Chills swept over my arms regardless of the heat, oppressive even here in my own garden. I tried rubbing the goose bumps away without success.

“Consequences aren’t always so easily seen as that, Joanne. You know there’s something wrong, yet you ignore it.”

The discolored streets and life-lights I’d seen with my second sight flashed through my memory, streaky vision of wrongness. “I saw it,” I said reluctantly. “I don’t know what it is, though.”

“It’s you,” Judy said. “The power you used six months ago disrupted weather systems all over the world, and worst of all in Seattle. How long did it take the snow to melt, Joanne?”

Seattle, not notorious for snow, had seen a storm that began the week after I gained shamanic powers and hadn’t stopped worth mentioning until April. When spring hit, it did so overnight, temperatures soaring into the seventies. There’d been flooding for weeks, and since then it’d been drier than bones. I wrapped my arms around myself, shaking my head. Denial: it wasn’t just a river in Egypt. The worst part was the uncomfortable, shoulder-hunching suspicion that she was telling God’s own truth. I knew something was wrong, and I hadn’t been able to find its center. I also hadn’t looked at myself. Dammit.

“You’ve left a mess to clean up, Joanne. You used tremendous power once or twice, and what have you done since then?”

My shoulders hunched again, without my permission. I hated body language. Most of it didn’t pass through my brain for a spot-check on what I wanted to give away.

It wasn’t that I’d done nothing with the gifts that had been catalyzed in me. I’d done detail work, fixing up chips in peoples’ paint, so to speak. My coworker Bruce got a hairline fracture on his ankle and the doctors had been astounded at how quickly he healed. Not quite overnight, but within a few days he was running again, without discomfort. I took a perverse pleasure in smoothing over hangnails and papercuts when I shook hands. One of the books I’d read said those who needed healing had to believe the healing could be done. I’d discovered that for small physical injuries, being unaware that healing was taking place was just about as good.

But none of it was earth-shattering, world-saving stuff, and the truth was, most of it made no long-term difference to the people I’d helped.

My shoulders inched farther toward my ears. “Look, I promise I’ll do better, okay? Go away.”

“I can’t do that, Joanne. I’m committing myself to teaching you, and unlike you, I take that responsibility seriously.”

Anger flared in my belly, sending blood up to stain my cheeks and make my ears hot. “It’s not that I don’t take it seriously. I just never asked for this in the first place—”

“But you accepted it.” There was a note of smugness in her voice, almost as unlikable as my whining. “Do you accept me as your teacher, Joanne Walker?”

I scowled at the pond. Coyote wanted me to have a teacher. “Did Coyote send you?”

“I beg your pardon?” Genuine surprise filled her voice. “You called out for help twice today. Traditionally it takes three cries, but I thought you might not want to wait. You expected someone as powerful as Coyote to send you a teacher?”

My shoulders couldn’t hunch any farther, so I tightened my arms around my ribs. “It seemed likely. Anyway, I didn’t know I was yelling for help.”

Judy pursed her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “If you’re on casual terms with Coyote, maybe I misinterpreted your need for help.” She got to her feet as smoothly as she’d sat, bowing her head toward me. “I hope I’ll see you again, Joanne.” She began to fade, again not like Coyote, but as if she were a ghost.

I gritted my teeth and dug my fingers into my ribs. “Wait.”

The fade stopped and she lifted her head again, one eyebrow raised in question. I clenched my jaw a couple of times before asking, “Who are you? I mean, how do I know you’re qualified to teach me? Do you even exist outside here?” I swept the fingers of one hand in a circle, more meaning to encompass the astral realm than my garden.

Judy gave me a very brief, wry smile. “You mean, would I answer if you dropped me an e-mail message? Not usually. I’m terrible about checking it. As for qualified…” She spread her hands and lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “I’ve practiced magic for most of my existence. We could try a handful of lessons and you could decide if I’m the teacher for you.”

“Most of your existence?” I thought that was a weird word to choose, and it showed in my voice. Judy’s smile went less wry and more open.

“You, of all people, should know that life is too limited a term for those who walk in other realms.”

I remembered, quite vividly, a sour-faced shaman who was irritated at her untimely death because she was young in the practice of shamanism, and others who had been tolerant of her because they had far more experience, even though some of them looked much younger in years. I rubbed my hand over my eyes. “Yeah. I guess so. All right.” I pressed my lips together and looked at her again. “All right, fine. We’ll see how it goes for, like, three lessons, okay? And then I get to reevaluate.” The crystal wall I’d built had dimmed during our conversation, a physical sign that I was relenting mentally.

Judy smiled and ducked her head in another semibow. “Wonderful. We’ll meet here tomorrow at six to begin.”

“Six? In the morning?”

“The mind is clearer and less burdened after dreaming.”

I groaned. “Okay. Six. God.”

Judy grinned, took one step backward, and disappeared.