away, leaving depressions for my fingers. The whole place reminded me of Arizona, only more so.
“This isn’t even the kind of Indian I am,” I protested. The drumbeat sped up a moment, getting louder. I twisted toward the north, where it was coming from. I wondered if I really should follow it.
“You should,” the voice said helpfully.
“Why? I can’t even see you. Why should I listen to you?” I looked around through my eyebrows, trying to find the voice’s origin. “Why can I listen to you? Hear you, I mean. What are you?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions. You can’t see me because you don’t believe in me. You can hear me because you’re dying, and it’s letting me slip in.” The voice sounded like this was a normal thing to say.
Despite the burning sunshine, shivers ran through me, and the drumbeat faltered. “Am I really dying?”
“Oh, yeah. You’re really dying.” The voice had a casual bedside manner. “You can choose not to, if you want.”
“Why the hell would I choose to die?” I climbed to my feet. He had to be around here somewhere.
“Because living means changing your entire worldview. That can be a very difficult thing to do.” His voice came from the same direction as the drumbeat.
“Oh, and dying is easy?” I began walking toward the north, glowering at the invisible voice.
“Dying is remarkably easy. Just stop going toward the drum, and in a few minutes, it’ll stop.”
“And then I’ll be dead?” I didn’t exactly break into a run, but I picked up the pace a bit. The drumbeat accelerated. “That’s my heart, isn’t it?”
“Yep,” the voice said.
“Are you a spirit guide?”
There was a pause that felt considering. “Yep.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘yep’?”
He laughed. “Yep.”
“How far is it to my-” I couldn’t say, to my heart. “To the drum?”
“Not too far. Would you like me to lead you there?”
I took a deep breath. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
A small coyote bounded in front of me, like he’d always been there. I looked behind us. His tracks were tangled with mine, across the sand. He yipped, and I looked forward again. He smiled a coyote smile, and leaped out across the sand in a long, lean run. “I can’t keep up with a running dog!”
“I’m not a dog. Come on.” He stretched out and I swore, but I began to run. The drumbeat sped up again, and my strides got longer, until I was running an easy fast lope across the dunes, my feet kicking up sprays of sand. The coyote stayed a few yards in front of me, cresting over a dune.
I followed recklessly, and the earth dropped out from under me. It turned scarred and pitted, like an asteroid crater with deep, sharp sides. I hit the ground where it began to slope again and rolled ass over teakettle, trying to protect my head as I bounced. The drumbeat sounded once, then stopped again, a rare staccato. The coyote ran on, much more gracefully than I, then looped back to snap his teeth at me.
“Hurry. You don’t have time for this.”
“I fell! ”
He bared his teeth in a snarl and pranced away, jerking his head to urge me on. I stumbled to my feet and began to run again. The coyote snapped his teeth again, satisfied, and forged ahead.
The crater narrowed into an impact spot, less than a foot across and plummeting into blackness. The coyote dove into it, just barely fitting. I couldn’t possibly squeeze into it.
On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly be running across an uber-Arizona landscape inside my head, either, and that seemed to be happening without the slightest regard to what was possible. I took a deep breath and dove after the coyote-
— and the impact spot got much bigger, or I got much smaller. It turned into a tunnel, plunging downward. A trickle of water appeared. I loped after it, running on four feet like I’d always done it. My hands felt like hands, but as I watched them flash under my nose, they were pawed and clawed, like the coyote’s. The water widened, becoming a stream. I ran along the bank after the coyote, feeling a tail swishing behind me. The sand turned into rich dark topsoil, and then into solid granite, the stream cutting a swath through it. Every once in a great while I felt my heartbeat shaking the stone around us.
“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 insides 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
