Page 21 of Spirit Dances

Scales slithered across concrete, a rasping sound that wore away at my calm. I’d spent years in North Carolina, where that sound—the softwhishof a snake’s movement, not necessarily over concrete—meant stand still and pray. A decade and more later, that instinct was still well in place, even if I’d called up the rattlesnake deliberately. He coiled around me from behind, wrapping into my lap before lifting his snaky head until his eyes were level with mine.

Like my raven, within the power circle he was made of glowing lines of magic, solid but also not quite there. We would have to move to another plane for him to take on a less ephemeral shape, but I was pretty certain I needed his guidance in the Middle World. Shapeshifting in the Lower or Upper Worlds, or even in my garden, was a spiritual matter. I was looking at physical transformation, entirely within the world my body belonged to.

Apparently I’d been sitting and thinking too long: the snake’s darting tongue tasted my nose, which was sufficiently odd to make me smile. I offered a rub along his jaw, and he leaned into it like a cat with no purr.

“I understand your gifts are threefold, Rattler. I’m supposed to learn how to shapeshift today, if I can. Will you help?”

He tasted my nose again, then tilted farther forward, neck bending until his forehead touched mine. A splash of light obliterated my vision. I blinked it clear, but the rattler was no longer in my lap.

I could feel him inside me, though, coiled up in my mind. A wonderful itchy sensation came over me, so intense I wriggled with it. My skin, and within my mind, the snake’s skin, started wrinkling away in the simplest, most basic, most instinctive transformation a reptile could offer. Beneath the shedding layer, I felt slick and damp, easing the passage from one skin to another. My impulse to help tear away the changing skin was stymied by a sudden lack of arms, startling enough that I flinched forward, breaking free of the old skin and rearing up in my new.

The sanctuary looked odd. I could still See the power circle, but its vivid colors had faded to a grayscale aurora, of absolutely no interest. The walls, however, glowed interestingly: I could see—not with a capital S—hot water pipes and heating vents in them, and even the warmth of electricity zipping from one place to another. There were no dangerous hot spots, but it all gave off an ambient warmth.

Melinda herself was much brighter, a human-shaped blob of heat. She was on her feet, pressed against the comparatively cool wall, and she swallowed twice before whispering, “Joanne?”

I didn’t quite hear the question. I saw its shape on her lips, and felt it tremble over my skin, peculiar enough to make me look at myself. Look and look and look andlookat myself, infact, because I was a rattlesnake at least fifteen feet long and as big around as my thigh typically was. I could tell, because my clothes had all sort of slithered down around me and my copper bracelet was lying on the floor with my glasses. My shirt had plenty of room, but I was nicely fitted into one pants leg without much room to spare.

I snapped my head around, searching for my socks, and rattled one off the tip of my tail. I spent a few seconds trying to count the number of rattles before giving it up as a bad job. There were a lot. That was all that mattered. I also took a look around for a Joanne-shaped shed skin somewhere in the circle, and was incredibly, incredibly glad to not find one. The gross factor there would’ve been off the scale.

I swung my head back around, trying to focus on Melinda with something besides the heat vision. I could see relatively well—not that I needed to in hunting terms, with the infrared kicked in—but I felt my eyeballs flexing in a completely unnatural way as I worked on examining my friend. She looked tiny and appetizing, not that I had any intention of making her an appetizer. Still, I had to be a good three times her length, and rattlesnakes of normal size would take down and eat a rabbit, given the opportunity.

That was not a good direction for my thoughts to be wandering in. I looked at myself again, astonished at how easy shifting had been, and wondered if my rattler guide’s template had made it simple or if I could do something totally different, like a coyote, with equal ease.

Of course, I would make a very large coyote, just as I made a very large snake, unless I learned how to transfer some of my mass into a waiting zone. But then, I’d never seen Coyote in his coyote form in real life. It was entirely possible he was a human-weight coyote, which would be downright mythological in its own right. I flashed on Big Coyote, the archetype tricksterI’d met once or twice, and tried to put a size to him. Since I’d mostly met him when I was at a tremendous disadvantage, my general impression was that he was Bigger Than God, which, if a measly little shaman-turned-coyote was a massive human-size beast, made sense.

On the other hand, it kind of suggested that if I shifted into a bear, I’d probably better choose a black bear instead of a grizzly. My hundred-and-sixty-five-pound self would make a pretty pathetic-looking brown bear. I was going to have to look up animals in my weight class so I had some idea of what species I’d be relatively normal as.

Oh, what my life had come to, that such a thought even crossed my mind. I laughed—hissed, more accurately—and turned to the silent waiting rattler in my mind. “How do I—aghglt!”

Snakes were not meant to talk in human languages. Ikakkedand hissed and spat the handful of words I tried, then sank down in a giant puddle of embarrassed snake and hid my nose in my coils.

Snaky laughter buzzed through my skull.Sssilly ssshaman. Ssspeak inssside.

My “Easy for you to say” came out another series of choking hisses and coughs, and I hid my face farther into my coils. They were nice raspy coils, warm with the heat of Melinda’s sanctuary, and I was just as happy to stay there being humiliated by an inability to talk out loud. Plaintively, silently, I asked,How do I change back?

Ssshed thisss ssskin, too, of courssse. The ssshaman liesss within.

Of course I did, or I’d have probably tried eating Melinda by now. I tried pressing my eyes shut, but having no eyelids made that tricky.Okay. Before I do, is it always going to be this easy?

My rattler made a sound of amusement.Nothing is easssy with you, Sssiobhán Walkingssstick. Today, in this moment you are frightened of missstakes, and are unusually ressseptive. Perhaps confidenssse from this transssition will carry over. Perhaps in the future you will fight it. I cannot sssay. Time isss not mine to travel in sssuch a way.

“I gueack—”I guess I’ll just have to try, then. Thank you, Rattler. This has been…very interesting.

He made another sound of amusement and didn’t disappear, but went quiet inside my mind, clearly waiting to see if I could get back to human shape on my own. Well, not on my own: he was right there to help, as he would presumably always be. I concentrated on the idea of molting again, as the drone of Melinda’s voice bumped over my skin a second time. I couldn’thearher properly—rattlesnakes apparently didn’t have ears—and hastened my shedding process so I would catch what she had to say.

“—othes. Oh, dear. Too late.” The last words were muffled behind Melinda’s hands, which did nothing to hide the laughter in them.

Nor did I require any kind of translation, as I was lying constricted in my own clothing. Both my arms were inside my shirt, which wasn’t so bad. They were also both inside my bra, which was not meant to be stretched around another dozen inches of width. I wasn’t entirely certain the bra hadn’t come unfastened and that I wasn’t entangled in straps, but I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, the upper half of my body had nothing on my lower half’s troubles, as both my legs were stuffed into one leg of my jeans. The fabric should have, by all rights, exploded. Instead it had stretched to its three-percent-spandex-maximum, and the seams were strained to bursting. The other leg of the jeans flopped to one side like an empty sausage skin. I was afraidto wonder what had happened to my panties. My feet were bare and rapidly going numb from lack of circulation.

I said, “Help?” in a very small voice, and Melinda collapsed on the floor, weak with laughter. I wanted to be annoyed, but my predicament shot straight past irritation into the absurd, and I, too, began to giggle.

Giggling while bound up in denim and underwires had to be one of the least comfortable things I’d ever done, which only made it funnier. I struggled to free an arm so I could wipe my eyes, and succeeded mostly in rolling myself over. My pants leg gave up any hope of molecular cohesion and tore with a sound unfortunately similar to passing an enormous amount of gas.

Melinda’s shriek of laughter covered the denim’s last gasps. I kicked myself free of the shredded fabric, discovering in the process that the elastic on my panties hadn’t been nearly so stubborn as the jeans and had already given up the ghost. I crunched up to sitting and wormed a hand up to wipe my eyes. Melinda threw a pillow at me. “Cover yourself, woman! You’re indecent!”

I threw the pillow back, but it bounced off the keep-things-in circle. “What’m I going to do! I don’t have any extra clothes with me! And I loved this shirt, well, I guess the shirt’s okay…” I got myself free of it and shook off the remainders of my poor bra, which would never cup another breast in its life. “Apparently shapeshifting is to be done naked.”

“Did I hear somebody say naked?” Billy came down the stairs and I shrieked like a teenager, scrambling to yank my shirt back on.

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