Page 59 of Spirit Dances

I shot a compulsive glance at the night sky. The moon was quartered, just enough to spill light through the wide-spaced trees. Not, certainly, the full moon werewolves were legendarily bound to.

The three women leaped into canine form again, leaving one another behind. I followed one, inhumanly quick on my feet as I often was in gardens; no need to change form here, for which I was grateful. My quarry stopped often, becoming human, seducing and killing men—always men, never women—and moving on. Time and again she met with her sisters, all ofthem vicious with killing pleasure, and as weeks rolled into years it because obvious these beasts were by no means tied to the moon. Their power came from somewhere else: from the cave they’d crawled from, and from the being who lay somewhere within it. A banshee had called him the Master, and what little I knew about him said that if werewolves were his creatures, the world would be a better place if they were eradicated.

Time, as if in response to my thought, warped forward. The three wolf sisters came together and faced a woman with light-colored hair. She was unarmed and unafraid, waiting on three killers beneath the light of what was now a full moon, and when they were within a dozen feet of her, she knelt and put her hands in the earth.

Shockingly, I recognized the gesture. I’d used it myself, calling up a power circle to contain a wendigo only a few months earlier. Magic sprang up for her as it had done for me, flares bringing my attention to a huge circle of standing stones so distant from us and from one another that I’d never have noticed them without the magic suddenly flowing through them.

I didn’t understand a word of the language she shouted in, but I didn’t need to: its effects were vivid and obvious. The wolf sisters collapsed in on themselves, writhing, howling, twisting as their very bodies were reshaped. As the magic inside them was countermanded by someone else, their master howled up out of the darkness to object. The fair-haired woman slapped his presence away as if he was nothing more than an annoying bug. The moon rose and set and rose again as the woman worked her magic, and on the final night, the third night of the full moon, she left the sisters beaten and battered, but not dead. Come morning, they staggered to their feet and tested their shapeshifting skills, and found themselves as werewolves of legend were: bound to human form all but three nights of the month.

Cursedto human form: that was the word Tia had used. The fair-haired woman had cursed them to near-mortality, and in doing so used more magic than I’d ever seen anyone do. My stomach lurched, pulling me toward that show of power, and for the first time in my life I actually wanted to follow. To find out who she was, and to study with her, learning what more I might be able to do.

I would, I promised myself. Very soon, I would. But time twisted again, dragging me out of the midnight garden I thought represented the past, and thrust me into a spiky angry garden I was reasonably certain represented Tia’s current situation. Thorns dragged at me, prickling protests that told me what she’d been trying to do, though having touched on the Master’s presence in a world gone away, I almost knew already.

So much power necessary to break the fair-haired woman’s spell. The troupe with their transformative dances, with the enormous gathering of healing magic meant for so many people, offered her almost the only chance she would ever have to break the magic binding her to a mostly-mortal life. She was sick, from her ancestors’ points of view; all the werewolves through history were, tied as they’d been to the moon. Only healing magic could cure that. Three nights of the dancers’ power sucked up might have been enough to counter the ancient magic. Failing that, having discoveredme, my own talent might be enough to rip apart a spell set millennia ago.

And only the death of innocents could feed the Master, who was weak. I’d interrupted his feeding a year ago; my own mother had done the same, almost thirty years prior to that. He had to be starving by now, but a wicker man full of people who’d done nothing to deserve death might have offered him enough appetizer to lend Tia’s desperate transformative magic a little strength. It would certainly endear her to him, so if he should ever loosen himself from the rubble holding him down, he mightturn some aspect of his power to freeing her from the constraints her kind had been put under centuries ago. As far as hedging bets went, it was a good call.

Except I wasn’t going to let her do it. Not on any level, not tonight, not ever. I reached for Rattler, feeling his comforting presence, and turned my attention to Tia.

Judge, jury, executioner. That was the role I’d seen Big Coyote in, in his white-hot desert. I played the same one now, without compunction. I knew now what the anomaly I’d seen in her DNA was. Not the cancer which had attacked her, but a twist of genetics that made her other than human. Iunwoundthat spur, unthreaded it and filed it down with a rattlesnake’s rattler made raspy, made it smooth and even, nothing unusual about it. It felt almost gentle, the push of magic that slowly altered the wolf under my hands into a woman again, but I wasn’t kidding myself. There was nothing gentle or kind about what I was doing. It was ruthless and brutal and I had no doubt at all Tia would probably rather die than be changed the way I was changing her.

That would have to be her choice, though. I wasn’t going to make it for her.

I finally sat back, letting go the magic that pinned her down as I let go the healing—if I could call it that—magic as well. Tia’s eyes opened and I saw—only saw, didn’t feel— her reach for the shapeshifting magic; saw her try to become what she’d been, a massive, dangerous beast who preyed on those weaker than herself.

Saw her try, and saw her fail, the magic no longer hers to command. No longer an active part of her, though I wasn’t really certain I’d stripped it away entirely; I wasn’t sure that could be done. But it would take years at best for her to find it again, and I thought a lifetime might not be enough.

Her screams tore at my skin as I got up to find my clothes.

Chapter 30

The cavern, which I had by and large failed to pay any attention to, was filled with enough smoke to provide me some degree of modesty. Not that I knew where Billy or Morrison were, and not, at the moment, that I particularly cared if everybody got an eyeful of Mostly Naked Joanne. I found my shredded sweater and nearly gave up on even trying to wear it, but shapeshifting, it turned out, didn’t heal all wounds, and I was too tired and much too dull-witted to heal myself right then. I stripped my T-shirt off, wrapped it around the worst of my injuries, discarded another blown-out bra and yanked my sweater on. It wasn’t quite as revealing as nudity, so I called it good and shoved around for my jeans.

They were in wretched condition, torn up from Morrison’s antics at the theater, and then from me shifting in them again. But, like the sweater, they were slightly better than parading around naked. My shoes, at least, were unscathed, and I found the copper bracelet Dad had given me, though my glasses had disappeared entirely. Still, once dressed, I was afforded some degree of decency, which was about as much as I could ask for.Only then did I look around, trying to think what else needed to be done, now that the werewolf was neutralized.

It took a moment to realize there was no more fire. Smoke, yes, lots of it, but the fire itself had blown out. Not because of lack of oxygen, though given the cave’s dimensions and the fire’s size, that would’ve been my first guess. The way I wasn’t lying on the floor choking for air, however, suggested something else had happened, and it seemed likely the something had been me. Even the wholly internal magic of shapeshifting had whooshed enough power over the room to almost obliterate the flames once. For all I knew, building my power circle—which still shimmered around the cave—had sucked up the fire’s energy and converted it to something less harmful. Maybe Billy had a better idea of what had happened, or maybe I could reconstruct it once I sat down to clear my head. Either way, it fell under yet another thing I didn’t have to worry about at that red-hot second, which was all that really mattered.

The wicker man was next. I sluffed back toward him with half-formed intentions of pulling his branches apart by hand if necessary, and arrived at one of his hollow thighs to find it unoccupied. That made no sense, so I went to the next one, which was empty, too. Not burned, not full of dead men, just a bit broken apart and empty. So, when I tilted my head back, were the cages and the wicker man’s torso. I couldn’t wrap my mind around that, but Tia was still screaming, which gave me something else to do. I crossed to her, crouched, and said, very gently, “If you don’t shut up I’m going to disconnect your vocal cords, Tia.”

My magic gave a disapproving thump that turned the world white with its emphaticness, but Tia didn’t know that. When my vision cleared again she was enraged but silent. I patted her cheek and stood up, knowing I was a world-class asshole and absolutely, utterly unable to give a shit.

Billy, from about a million miles away, said, “Joanne?”

I turned around, waving my hands in the air to clear smoke, and the world began to resolve in a manner which made sense again. My partner was mooshed up against the boundary of my power circle, wolfy Morrison on one side of him and five goggle-eyed homeless guys on his other side. I should have known he’d deal with the rescue while I dealt with the werewolf. That was just basically the kind of person Billy was.

“We’re stuck,” Billy said cautiously. “Something’s holding us in.”

“That’d be me.” I was a little afraid to bring the power circle down. I’d leeched magic from the very walls of the cavern to build it, and I was uncomfortably aware that the cave was a magical creation itself. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I dissolved the circle, particularly with the way my power was exploding in and out. In theory, the circle’s magic would just melt back from whence it came, but theory wasn’t working out so well for me right now.

“I’m going to shield you,” I said after a minute. “I think the shield will let you walk through the power circle unscathed. Then just get out of here, okay? I’ll be right behind you.”

Nobody on earth would believe that line, including my partner. He gave me a very hard look, but nodded. I pulled up my favorite pearlescent Star Trek style shield idea and wrapped all seven of them in it, whispering encouragement to the circle that while it was a keep-things-in circle, my magic could and should be let out. Then I nodded at Billy, who edged forward, rolling the shield with him. It bumped against the circle, which hesitated, sighed, and let him out. The five guys he’d rescued hurried after him.

Morrison, damn his wolf eyes, stayed. The shield popped around him as the others got farther away, and he just sat there, waiting, his expression patient.

“I can’t change you back while we’re down here, Morrison. I mean, I think right now I could, but you’d be naked.”

His ears flattened and he looked at himself in such a Morrison-the-man way that I surprised myself with a laugh. “It’s a long walk home, naked. You might as well go with them. Get Billy to drive home…” Not that Billy could, because he’d come downtown in Petite with me, and I was still in the round room beneath the lake with no absolute sure method of escape. “Okay, get Billy to call Gar…shit.”

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