you don’t have any problems, what are you doing shouting for me?”
“I—” I took a deep breath and stood up straighter. “I need some, um, help. Guidance!” I latched on to the word, feeling rather proud of myself. “Please,” I added hastily. “If you could.” Nice Mr. Coyote Man, I thought but didn’t say. I didn’t have to: he snapped his teeth at me like I was an annoying fly.
“I heard that.”
My shoulders sagged. Coyote could hear anything I thought, while I heard nothing of what he thought. Sometimes I thought that meant I’d made him up. Other times I was equally certain it meant I hadn’t.
“You did not make me up,” Coyote said.
“No,” I muttered. “You’d be cuter and less annoying if I had.”
He grinned a coyote grin at me and stretched, long and lazy. When he was done stretching, he wasn’t a brown and gold beast any longer. Instead an Indian man sat there, his skin as red as bricks and his hair blue-black and long and falling to his hips. He wore jeans and was barefoot, looking incredibly comfortable in his own skin. Only the eyes were the same, bright gold and full of mirth. “Is this better?”
It was certainly cuter. He laughed even though I hadn’t spoken out loud, and stood up to go drag a hand through the bubbling pool at the end of my garden. “What do you need, Jo?”
“There’ve been some murders. And…my mother is alive. Or something. I—can you help me find her?”
He lifted his head in a swift motion, more like a coyote than a man. “Your mother?”
“Is up there in the astral realm or whatever it is, bossing me around.”
“Wow.”
I was practically certain spirit guides were not supposed to say wow. “’Cause you know so much about spirit guides,” he said. “I’ll see if I can—”
“You won’t be needing to, lad.”
“Jesus Christ!” I whipped around, unbalancing myself with the motion, to find my mother standing directly in front of the mouse hole that I could’ve sworn closed up when I arrived. She ignored me momentarily, focused on Coyote.
“Sheila MacNamarra,” she said to him. “A pleasure, and aren’t you the handsome one. Joanne’s a lucky girl.”
My dead mother was matchmaking me with a dog. Great.
“I’m not a dog.”
“I’m hardly matchmaking, Joanne. You opened up the conduit. I’m just here to say hello.”
I set my teeth together and waited a few seconds before I trusted my voice. “Hello, Mother.” I waited a few more seconds before it burst out of me: “What the hell are you doing alive?”
A trace of surprise and injury darkened her eyes. “I’m not alive, Joanne. You saw me die.”
“Then what are you doing here? Besides kicking my ass back into my body, which hurt, thank you very much.”
“Not nearly so much as facing down that enemy would have hurt. Joanne—” Sheila made a small and elegant gesture, bringing her hands in toward her heart, as if collecting sorrow there. “There’s very little time, and a great deal to tell you. I’d hoped we could talk before, but you weren’t ready—”
“Before what?”
“Before I died,” Sheila said, nonplussed. “That was why I asked you to come, of course. I never dreamed you’d be so closed off. If you’d been ready, I could have explained so much.”
“Ready for what?” I felt very small and young suddenly, a feeling that was reflected in the garden: it grew around me dramatically, until Coyote and my mother both towered over me, and even the sparse blades of grass seemed much larger in comparison to my own height.
My mother cast a glance at Coyote that clearly said she despaired of me, but she brought her attention back to me in an instant. “To accept your heritage, at least on my side. What you’ve got to face. You’re still not ready to hear it, but the moon is changing and I’m out of time. Siobhán, listen to me. I’m a gwyld, a—”
“Shaman,” I interrupted dully. I’d heard the word before, only directed at me, not my mother. “Some kind of druidic version of a shaman. You came back from the dead to tell me that? Like it could possibly matter? Like I could care?” I was not, I knew, being fair. Part of me did care. Part of me cared so much it hurt to breathe, and that was the part that lashed out at her. It was perversely like finding out there was a Santa after all.
Frustration creased her forehead. “I left the mortal world to protect you, Siobhán. I’ve known since before you were born what you might be, what it was you’d have to face. But you were so unprepared I saw no other choice. You needed protecting.”
“What,” I said, “if you strike me down I’ll become more powerful than you can ever imagine? Is that your gig?”
Complete incomprehension flitted across her expression. I set my teeth together, about to lash out again, but a shriek of wind erupted, sounding in my ears but going unfelt against my skin. My gaze went to the sky even as a shadow, dark and red, fell across my vision again. A full moon hung above me, one that hadn’t been shining on my garden moments before. One with blood spilling down its face, and with a piece of darkness falling from it like a scythe. A deep sense of malignancy boiled up inside me, as if a thing of hatred was being born. Cold, raging hands seemed to clench around my heart, and I listened frantically for the rhythmic drumbeat that would let me know I was still alive.
My mother let go an inhuman screech, like a car braking too hard, and flung herself at the sky. Her hair spread out like raven’s wings, blocking my view of the bloody moon. The slice of night that had fallen from it was enveloped by the black spiderweb of her hair. I heard another yowl, as gut-wrenching as the earlier ones, and the barbs that had knotted in my heart loosened.
A small, furry bundle of bone crashed into my chest, knocking my heart into pounding again as sweat stood out on my body in cold terror. Coyote stood over me for a moment or two, his golden gaze fixed on mine before he brought his head down to smash it against mine with tremendous force.
For the second time in a single evening, I slammed out of the realm of Other and back into my body, aching all over with pain and confusion.
CHAPTER 4
It took the better part of an hour to get Gary out of my apartment, which both made me feel better and worse. When he was gone I sat on the couch with a pillow hugged against my chest, staring blindly at nothing.
It was inconceivable to me that my mother had been some sort of mystic. The woman I’d known for a few scant months had held her cards close to the chest, always judging and never commenting. I’d spent four months with her and, when she died, felt as though I’d known nothing more about her than she liked Altoids. There’d been no real mourning, at least not on my part. Confusion, yes, and, not to be delicate about it, a whole lot of resentment. She’d disrupted a life in which I had not missed her to any noticeable degree in order to have me witness her death. She’d been young, only fifty-three, and in extremely good health. I’d been left with the impression that she was bored of life, and as such saw fit to leave it under her own power.
It appeared that the power in question was more literal than I’d thought. I mean, anybody who could will herself to death wasn’t a person whose emotional state was one I wanted to tangle with. She might decide it was time for me to die, and I might not be tough enough to argue. I hadn’t even tried arguing in favor of her life, which probably made me a very bad daughter.
Not that there was any really compelling reason to be a good daughter to the woman who’d abandoned me when I was a few months old. We hadn’t liked each other as adults. I could only assume she hadn’t much cared for me as a baby, either.
A fine thread of emptiness wove through me, an ache that I’d spent the better part of my life resolutely ignoring. I hadn’t been given up for adoption by a mother who thought it was best for me. I’d been dumped on a father who hadn’t known I existed until that moment, by a mother who evidently didn’t like me very much. It was not something I enjoyed thinking about.
Especially as it reminded me, inevitably, of a boy growing up in North Carolina, whom I had known full well I
