Thunderbird Falls. C.E. Murphy

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СКАЧАТЬ course at the academy, rattling over speed bumps placed too closely together.

      The tunnel shot to the left, leveling out and narrowing. I was aware that, like the tunnel, I became smaller and smaller as I scurried along it. In what little studying I’d done, I’d read that shapeshifting inside one’s own psyche was the first step toward a complete and physical shape-change. The book had talked earnestly about transforming into an eagle, a bear, a wolf—the usual World Wildlife Fund Charismatic Megafauna sorts of creatures. Nothing I’d read ever mentioned people turning into badgers or earthworms.

      I realized with a dismayed jolt that the tunnel had disappeared entirely and I was grinding my way through the earth blindly, gnawing on dirt to move forward.

      Earthworm. I really needed to learn to be careful about what I was thinking in trance states.

      Badger, I thought encouragingly, and a few seconds later burst upward through the earth in a flurry of dirt and strong claws. I scrambled out of my tunnel and shook myself all over, bits of grass and soil plopping to the grass around me.

      Everyone has an inner landscape, shaped by the events and thoughts that make a life. The first time I’d been in mine, it had been stiff and parched. Now it looked distorted, seen from only several inches above the ground and in faded grayscale. To the right was a thick, shimmering pool of mercury, ripples wobbling over the surface to break against the shore. Behind it was a tall granite-streaked bluff, too high to easily see the top of from a badger’s vantage point. To the left, a lawn manicured so short it was nearly dead spread out, a handful of dark-leafed hedges sprouting up in asture blocks of green. Stone pathways and stone benches made straight lines through the garden.

      Possibly, just possibly, I still had some inner-garden nurturing to do.

      Immediately behind me, my badger hole folded in on itself and smoothed out again, leaving lawn behind. “Well, that’s something,” I said out loud, as the world around me stained with color. The pool faded from mercury to clear, its earthy bottom refracting brown through reflected gray skies. I rolled onto my back, briefly missing the extraordinary strength of the badger’s legs, and closed my eyes. “Coyote?” I tried to picture him, long-legged and golden-eyed, then laughed silently as the image slid between Coyote-the-man and Coyote-the-coyote. Straight black hair drooped over perked furry ears. He looked like a character from Disney’s Robin Hood gone terribly wrong.

      A rustle hissed over the grass like wax paper sliding against itself. I sat up, grinning. “You’re always reading my mind,” I said. “So get a load of how I think of…you?”

      A rattlesnake swayed in front of me, black eyes reflecting the sudden paleness of my skin.

      A snake in my garden.

      For one hysterical moment I looked for an apple tree. Then panic took over and I crab-walked backward, elbows and knees going everywhere. It took another few seconds to make myself stop by asserting enough control to dig my fingers into the earth. “My garden,” I croaked. “You can’t be here.”

      The rattler slithered forward a few inches, dry scrape against the short grass. “You can’t be here,” I repeated. It lifted its head and hissed at me, long tongue darting in and out. I shot to my feet, barely keeping myself from leaping to one of the stone benches and screaming like a ’50s housewife. It was my garden. My rules were supposed to apply. I bit the inside of my cheek and closed my eyes, reverting to the car metaphor I was most comfortable with. Rolling up the mental windows and making a shield of glass around myself reminded me of movies where the venomous animal was kept away from the actors by a sheet of glass.

      The snake bonked its nose against the glass, striking out and coiling back as I opened my eyes. Its tongue thrust out again, and it reared back, expressionless flat eyes somehow looking offended. I grinned in a breathless combination of triumph and fear, and waggled my fingers at it. “G’bye, then.”

      For once I let myself forget the vehicle metaphor, and instead spun glass. Heat poured off my body as I willed it to soften the shield between myself and the snake. I blew air through pursed lips and the glass expanded, spilling clear and delicate over the lawn as I protected my garden. The snake squiggled backward, forced to the edges of the garden.

      I nearly had the thing vanquished when it shifted.

      It didn’t change like Coyote did, inside a blink. Instead it reared up, making a long slender line of itself, balancing on a single coil of muscle. A hood flared, cobralike, then widened farther, broadening until it became shoulders. The body thickened, arms sprouting and waist narrowing. Hips splayed, legs splitting from the expanding breadth of muscle that had been its body. The coil upon which she had balanced became feet, small and bare. I jerked my eyes up to her face.

      The rattlesnake’s dead eyes gazed back at me; like Ra, she was human-shaped with a snake’s head, large enough to fit the body. She flicked her tongue at me once more and completed the transformation into a brisk-looking Native American woman whose age I couldn’t judge. Her eyes were still very black, though bright with reflected sunlight. She had salt-and-pepper hair and wrinkles around her eyes. Her cheeks were round over a thin mouth that looked like it was used to smiling, but which was at the moment pushed out in a thoughtful moue. “Well, you certainly are a handful.”

      “What?”

      “You’re a handful,” she repeated. “Sliding around the astral realm, leaving psychic debris all over the place, and with such terrible shields I could walk right in here. I can see what needs to be done. At least you have potential,” she added, shaking her head. “You nearly pushed me out just now.”

      I set my teeth and reared my head back, reestablishing the crystalline wall. It glimmered, becoming a solid curve of glass between the snake woman and myself. Her eyebrows—straight and slightly angled, like Spock’s—rose a fraction of an inch, and she took a step back. “You see?” She sounded pleased.

      “Who are you? And what are you doing here?”

      “My name is Judy Morningstar,” she said. “I’m going to be your teacher.”

      CHAPTER SIX

      “The hell you are.” Guilt mixed with incredulity in my voice. Coyote’d just finished telling me I needed a teacher, and I hated to admit he might be right. “Get out of my head. I’m doing just fine on my own.” Ah, yes. The petulant, spoiled child tone. That always went over well.

      Judy sat down with irritating grace, as if she’d had it drilled into her by a dance instructor when she was too small to protest. “You’ve regressed from what your abilities six months ago were,” she disagreed. “Even three months ago. You haven’t accepted your power or the responsibility that comes with it.”

      “What the hell are you talking about? I stopped Cernunnos, didn’t I? I fought the banshee. That all took power.”

      “Oh yes.” She nodded. “In the moment of crisis, you did what had to be done, with the tools at hand. You used enormous power, but without regard for the consequences.”

      A thin trickle of apprehension dribbled down my spine. “I was careful. The hospitals and the airport, all the power stayed on so people would be okay.” Chills swept over my arms regardless of the heat, oppressive even here in my own garden. I tried rubbing the goose bumps away without success.

      “Consequences aren’t always so easily seen as that, Joanne. You know there’s something wrong, yet you ignore it.”

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