distracted when he did. How a dog could look distracted, I didn’t know, but there you had it.
“I’m not,” he said for the umpteenth time, “a dog.”
One of the few thoughts I seemed to be able to keep to myself around him was the private glee at being able to get on his nerves with something as simple as calling him a dog. It made me feel better right away. I even managed a bright grin. “Sorry. I need your help.”
“God helps those who help themselves, Joanne.”
I startled. “What, you’re a Christian now?”
“Is that so strange?”
“Is it strange that my shape-shifting coyote spirit guide is a Christian? You tell me.”
He finally looked at me, little spots of brighter-colored fur above his eyes lifting like eyebrows. “No,” he said. “It’s not. You’ve got too many preconceptions, Walkingstick.”
“I wish you people would stop calling me that.” I didn’t like having my original last name bandied around. Especially not when I was dealing with psychic realms I didn’t really understand. The idea that names had power was one I could grasp, if nothing else. Which actually brought me to my point: “I need to know how to protect myself, Coyote.”
He snapped his teeth at me and got up to pace toward me, looking alarmingly like a predator instead of a scavenger. “You should’ve been learning that for most of the last three months.”
“So sue me. Are you going to throw me to the wolves just because I’m slow on the uptake?” More than slow, I admitted. One might go so far as to say recalcitrant. Deliberately recalcitrant.
I could live with that.
At least, I could live with it as long as he gave me the help I needed now. Possibly, very possibly, this was not a good long-term game plan. I promised myself I’d think about that later. Preferably much later. I did my best puppy-dog eyes on Coyote.
Note to self: puppy-dog eyes work better on people who do not actually possess puppy-dog eyes themselves. Coyote looked disgusted. I retreated on the puppy-dog defense and tried a verbal one. “All I need to know is how to protect the very core part of me, Coyote. My name. That kind of thing. I don’t want the bad guys to be able to get to it easily.”
“A thought which only strikes you now that a bad guy is looming.”
“Yeah.”
Coyote dropped his head in a very human motion, and sighed so deeply I was surprised he didn’t start coughing. “You know how to do it, Joanne. Think in metaphors.”
“What?” I found myself grinning just a little. “Like airbags and steel frames keeping my little ol’ name safe?”
He gave me a look that would reduce a lesser woman to blushes of embarrassment. I valiantly ignored the burning in my cheeks and mumbled, “Oh.”
“I don’t know why I put up with you.” He snapped his teeth at me again, and was gone.
“Because I’m cute and irresistibly charming,” I said to the empty garden. No one, not even a mockingbird, responded.
“Please tell me dinner isn’t going to suck as much as the rest of today has.” I leaned over the top of Billy’s computer, sighing. He looked up, offended.
“Are you dissing Mel’s cooking?”
I snorted a laugh. “No. I just feel useless.” I put my hands on his desk, letting my head hang. “Find anything about the Blade?”
Billy let out an explosive sigh and creaked back in his chair, hands folded behind his head. “Comic book references. Stuff about some swordsman named Bob Anderson. Wesley Snipes pictures.”
“Really?” I perked up, edging around his desk to try to get a look at the screen. “Any half-naked ones?”
“Joanie!”
I drooped. “I didn’t think so. There wasn’t nearly enough half-naked Wesley in those movies, anyway.”
Billy gave me a flat look. “Any luck with the psychic stuff?”
My cheeks went hot with discomfort. “No. I…can’t get there.” My jaunt to see Coyote had tapped me out. I couldn’t get any further out of my body than your average caterpillar could. In fact, a caterpillar, with its whole transformation process, was probably going to have more success than I was right now.
“Oh.” Billy’s silence stretched out a few long moments. “All three of the dead women are from the greater Seattle area,” he said eventually. “The Captain went to visit their families. To tell them. I was hoping we’d have something for him when he got back.”
“Way to lay the guilt on, Billy.” I slumped again, my head heavy enough to strain my neck. “All right. Look. I’m going to go down to the park and, um…” I wet my lips. “You remember that thing I did in the garage in January?”
Billy let out a huff of laughter. “How could I forget?”
“A lot of people seem to have. Or they’re trying hard to.” I shook my head. “I thought maybe I’d try something like that again down at the park. Having you along would be helpful. You, uh. Know how to put your energy out there.” Pulling my tongue out with forceps would have been more fun than saying that sentence. Billy, bless his pointy little head, didn’t laugh. He just stood up and grabbed his coat.
Fresh snow glittered over paths that had been stomped down by a lot of police officers in the past twenty- four hours. The sky was clearing, leaden gray clouds parting to let sparks of sunlight through. I squinted at the ground, kicking up sprays of snow as I tromped through the park, a few steps ahead of Billy.
I could feel Billy walking behind me on a more than physical level. In January I’d asked people to offer up their energy to help me net a god. Billy was getting ready to do that again, coiling his own essence into a ball that he’d be able to share with me when I needed it. Not, I thought, unlike what I’d done for my mother, in the memory/dream connection that morning. I blurted, “Sheila didn’t defeat that thing by herself,” filling up the silence of the snow-covered field with my voice. “I was there.”
“Of course you were there.” Billy sounded confused. “She was pregnant with you.”
“No, I mean, I was there…twice.” Such a gift I had for explanation. “He was kicking her ass. I threw her some power. It went right through…me…into her.”
“You boosted your fetal self so your mom could draw enough power to defeat the Blade?”
Billy made it sound so succinct and sensible that I had to look over my shoulder at him to see if he was kidding. He wasn’t. I nodded. “Yeah. And then he noticed me, the adult me, and came after me, which distracted him enough that Sheila could…get him.” I didn’t really know what she’d done, besides stab a sword of light through his spinal cord. Maybe that was enough to set your average evil minion back thirty years.
“So,” Billy said, “when you’ve got this time-travel thing down pat, you want to slip back to about, oh, ’85 and tell me to invest in Microsoft?”
I laughed. “Only if you promise to share the proceeds with me.” I hunched my shoulders, trying to rid myself of the itchy sensation between the shoulder blades. My interference with Sheila’s confrontation twenty-seven years ago felt important. I just wasn’t sure why.
I bounced off a wall that wasn’t there and crashed back into Billy’s chest. He oofed, catching me, then frowned down at me. “Joanie?”
“I have no fucking clue.” I put my hand out and encountered resistance. I prodded, then stepped forward and leaned into it, feeling like a mime. Billy fought a grin and completely lost the battle.
“Gonna grow up to be Marcel Marceau?”
“I sure as hell hope not. Can you, um…?”
Billy, showing a remarkable ability to understand Jo-speak, edged around me and walked through the wall I’d hit. He turned, eyebrows lifted.
“Shit,” I said in my best thoughtful tone. And, “What the fuck.” Apparently crashing into invisible walls brought out the naughty words in me. Curious, I pulled my glove off and put my hand against it directly.
A dangerous burst of dull red flashed around the entire baseball diamond, so quickly it was gone almost before I registered it. A tingle of malicious familiarity made the nerve in my elbow ache.
Morrison was right. The Blade had found a way to recognize me.
