Spirit Dances

by C. E. Murphy

  Coyote said, “She can be taught,” to the hard blue sky, which was probably kinder than I deserved. “I should be there for this, Jo. To teach you this in person. Shapechanging can be dangerous.”

  Everything was dangerous. I just barely restrained myself from the snarky comment, reforming it into something slightly more constructive: “Like healing cancer dangerous or different dangerous?”

  “Different. Overdrawing the healing power could kill you. Shapeshifting magic can make you forget who and what you are.”

  That was twice in a row he’d subdued me with a look or a handful of words. I hunched my shoulders. “Like the wendigo?”

  “No, the worst thing about wendigos is they remember, in some part, what they were. Uncontrolled shifting can just turn you into an animal for good. You got lucky tonight. Look, if I leave right now I can probably catch a six o’clock flight and be up there by noon. Can you promise not to do anything stupid before noon?”

  What I really wanted to do between now and noon was sleep. I rubbed my eyes, which reminded me that in the waking world I hadn’t taken my contacts out before falling asleep, which meant my eyelids would be glued together when I actually woke up. I wondered if a little healing magic could lube up my eyeballs, a thought that had never occurred to me before, but I was fairly certain the magic would place a failure to remove contacts under the heading of my own dumb damned fault and be mysteriously unavailable to ease the discomfort. “I can probably manage not to do anything stupid before noon, but…is there anything you can just teach me now?”

  Coyote went quiet. Not a good quiet, but the kind that worked its way through a lot of silent guesses and unspoken commentary and arrived at a conclusion it didn’t like. “You don’t want me to come up. Who’d you say your date this evening was?”

  “I didn’t even say I had a date.”

  “So it wasn’t Gary.”

  “Gary’s in California for the weekend. Something about old army buddies and a pool of green beer. I didn’t want the details.” Actually I was dying for the details, but my septuagenarian buddy had sparkled his eyes at me, mimed zipping his lips, and jet-set off to San Diego for three days. My only consolation was imagining his profound disappointment at missing me learning to shapeshift.

  “Morrison, then.”

  “Cyrano, I didn’t even say I had a date!”

  Bitter triumph flashed in Coyote’s eyes. I dropped my head into my hands. My mentor’s real name was Cyrano, but I’d spent most of our relationship thinking he was a spirit animal, the very coyote I usually saw him as. Consequently, even after learning he was a more or less ordinary human with a more or less ordinary name, I called him Coyote. Except, as he’d all-too-sagely noticed, when I was upset with him. “All right, fine, yes, I had a date, and it was with Morrison, and if you want to know so much he’s the one who noticed I was shapeshifting and got me out of the theater before I turned into a dog in front of everybody!”

  “Coyotes aren’t dogs!”

  “That’s what he said!”

  I’d been right. That wasn’t a piece of our banter Coyote wanted to share with Morrison. He looked about five years old and utterly betrayed for a couple of seconds, then popped into his coyote shape so fast I was left with the afterimage of a man shadowing the beast.

  “Shapeshifting,” he said through a mouthful of very pointy teeth, “is about control, and knowing yourself, and giving yourself up completely to the magic. It requires incredible focus if you don’t want to lose yourself, which is why it’s most safely done within the confines of a power circle, even when you’re as good at it as I am. The rattlesnake will help you make the shift and retain your sense of self, so call on him any time you even think about changing shape. Never make the change unless you’re alone or with someone you trust with your life, because you’ll be incredibly vulnerable in the moments of transition.

  “It doesn’t hurt unless you fight it. It’s a flow from one state of being to another. Until you have absolute control over the skill, it’s possible for someone else to force you into the change, either deliberately or accidentally, so you’d better keep your shields at full strength, if you even remember how to do that.” He snapped his teeth on the last word sharply enough that the sound reverberated against hot stone.

  I whispered, “I never said I didn’t want you to come up,” but I was talking to a dreamscape.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SATURDAY, MARCH 18, 6:32 A.M.

  No decent person would show up on a friend’s doorstep at six in the morning. Not even if they were reasonably certain that the friends, who had a four-and-a-half-month-old baby, would be awake. That was why I’d sat in Petite for half an hour on the street by my partner’s house, growing steadily chillier because the idle on a 1969 Mustang was at best a dull roar. I didn’t dare leave her on for warmth and risk annoying the neighborhood.

  Billy, who had refused days off after his near-death experience—better to get back on the horse, he said—had to be at work at eight-thirty like I normally would be, so even sans the newborn he was likely to be up by six-thirty or seven. I still hadn’t talked myself into going and knocking, though, when their front door opened and his berobed wife appeared to crook a finger and tilt her head in obvious invitation. I slunk out of Petite feeling silly for not having wanted to bother them.

  She whisper-called, “Close the gate behind you,” and I made sure to, securing myself inside a white picket fence that enveloped a large yard littered with mostly-melted snowmen. I picked a hat up from one of them and brought it to Melinda like an early-morning apology, and she laughed quietly.

  “Robert won’t forgive you for rescuing this. He thinks he’s too cool to wear a winter hat now.”

  “I thought he must have hit that age when I saw it on the snowman right before Christmas. How’re you doing?”

  Melinda crushed me in a hug, which took some doing, as I was taller, broader and stronger than she was. Still, I grunted, and after a long rib-squeezing moment, she said, “Thank you,” into my chest. “Thank you, Joanne.”

  My whole head got stuffy with the threat of tears, and I snuffled as I squished her back just as hard. “You’re welcome. How’s Billy?”

  “Fine. He was antsy last night, but that’s no surprise. We spent a lot of time trying not to think about what might have happened.”

  Which almost certainly meant they’d talked about nothing else once the kids were put to bed, and that they’d said, again and again, “But it turned out okay,” and probably held on to each other harder than usual. I gave Melinda another tight hug and whispered the fortunately-true platitude myself: “It turned out okay.”

  Mel nodded and finally let me go, backing farther into the house. Her eyes were bright, cheeks flushed, but high emotion looked good on her. Most things did, honestly: Melinda Holliday was most of a foot shorter than me, had enviable hourglass curves that even a bulky terry-cloth robe couldn’t hide, and her vivid Hispanic coloring made her film-star radiant even in predawn light after what had probably been a very long night. I was pretty happy with my tall build, but if I ever needed to trade in for another shape entirely, I wanted to look like Melinda.

  “How about you? Are you okay?” She invited me in and I got rid of my clompy boots right inside the door, hoping not to wake any of the kids. Melinda gave an approving nod that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside, and I murmured, “I’m doing okay, all things considered. It’s been a long day.”

  Melinda arched a concerned eyebrow. “It’s six-thirty in the morning. It’s a new day.”

  “I might have forgotten to get any sleep.”

  “Oh, Joanne.” Melinda pointed toward the kitchen. “Billy’s in there with Caroline and a pot of coffee.”

  “You are an angel among women.” I followed Mel down the hall into a kitchen that still looked brand-new, seven months after being rebuilt. There were no scars on the walls from the monster that had nearly broken their house apart, and the whole room—the whole house, re
ally—had a warm and comforting ambience. I had no earthly use for a sprawling suburban home, but I never once visited the Hollidays without wishing I lived in a place like theirs.

  Melinda picked up the coffeepot and waved it in my direction, her eyebrows elevated. I desperately wanted a cup, but I shook my head as I sat down at the kitchen table across from Billy and Caroline. The latter was happily sucking down a bottle of milk, big brown eyes focused on her daddy, and Billy gave me a quick smile before returning his own besotted gaze to the baby girl. Melinda put the coffeepot down and her hands on her hips. “Lurking in the driveway at six in the morning and now refusing coffee. Did your date with Michael go that badly?”

  Although I knew Morrison’s given name was Michael— James Michael, in fact; I’d seen it on his driver’s license—I’d never gotten used to the fact that Melinda actually called him by it. At work he was Morrison, Captain, Sir or Boss, and it continued to seem peculiar that someone would call him by any other appellation. I inhaled, searching for an appropriately cheeky response, but what came out was an all-too-honest, “You have no idea.”

  “Oh dear.” Melinda sat down and Billy went so far as to drag his attention from Caroline to me.

  I sat there for a moment, hands folded on the scarred table surface—five kids left a lot of stories on the battered wood— and finally, inanely, said, “Actually the date part wasn’t so bad. Even after the murder.”

  My hosts made spluttering noises as I described the evening, up to and including Coyote’s snit fit, before pulling my glasses off to clean them—I’d finally taken my contacts out when I woke up—as I transferred a helpless look to Melinda. “So I spent the last few hours reading about shamanic shapeshifting on the Net and in some of my books and then I came here. I was hoping I could use your sanctuary to give this a try under controlled circumstances. It’s the only way I can think to have some idea of how to stop it accidentally happening again.”

  Billy cast his gaze skyward. “Sure, she gets suspended from duty and gets to spend the morning learning to shapeshift while I have to go to work and miss all the fun. Where’s the justice in that?”

  I grinned. “You sound like Gary. He’s going to pop a vein when he gets back from California. I was under strict instructions to not do anything exciting without him.”

  “I’m calling him,” Billy threatened.

  “And interrupting his weekend with beer and the boys? I don’t think so. I’ll try to do anything interesting in the next hour, before you have to leave, okay?” I got up, and Melinda nodded me toward the kitchen door, stopping to kiss Billy on her way by.

  His attempt at pique failed, and he smiled at his wife. “You two be careful.”

  “We will be. Come on, Joanne. Come downstairs.”

  Six months earlier I hadn’t even known Melinda Holliday had a sanctuary in the daylight basement of their rambling home. I’d barely even known that Melinda, like Billy, had long-established ties to the world of weird which I’d only recently entered. Even now I still wasn’t entirely certain what Melinda was, in Magic Seattle terms. An adept of some kind, and not a shaman like myself or a medium like Billy, but she wouldn’t even go so far as to call herself a witch. She’d said she was just a wise woman, when I’d asked her about it, and while I couldn’t argue, I also had the feeling that title barely scratched the surface.

  Her sanctuary was a simple room filled with candles and pillows, its concrete floor and spackled ceiling painted with matching power circles. Magic brought to life within those circles was fully contained, as safe as it could be, and with Coyote’s tetchy warning still echoing in my mind, I was all for playing safely.

  I prodded the edge of the circle, feeling no residual power. Melinda hadn’t called up magic any time recently. I caught her watching me with an expression of amusement and folded my hands back, embarrassed. “Sorry. I should’ve asked. May I enter?”

  Her eyebrows elevated. “Of course, but what do you want from me here, Joanne?”

  I stepped inside the power circle, pausing to nod in each of the cardinal directions before answering. “I know I’ve awakened it before, but I’d like you to do it this time, with a keep-things-in intent. If I lose my mind to a coyote shape I’d rather not be able to escape and chew anybody up.”

  “Do you think that’s likely?”

  “I sure as hell hope not.” I sat in the middle of the circle, cross-legged, and Melinda made a pile of cushions to settle down on, just close enough that she could reach forward and touch the painted lines on the floor. At the last moment, I triggered the Sight, curious to see what her active magic looked like.

  Buttercup-yellow flickered around her, a sunshine color that went hand in hand with her personal warmth. The painted circle came alight, flickering up to meet its match on the ceiling. I watched the power dance, as mesmerized by it as I would be by any fire. Calm seeped around me, a gentle cushion protecting me from the world. I wanted to bask in it, to catch up on the sleep I’d missed in this quiet reserved space.

  That, however, wasn’t in the cards, though I indulged for a few minutes, absorbing some of the tranquility. Relaxed and content seemed like a good way to start a shapeshifting attempt.

  I’d felt nothing untoward when the dancers had triggered my transformation, and Coyote had said the process shouldn’t hurt. That was well and good, but I needed to be aware in a way that I clearly hadn’t been the night before, and so from a pleasant centered place I murmured, “Rattler, can you guide me?”

  Scales slithered across concrete, a rasping sound that wore away at my calm. I’d spent years in North Carolina, where that sound—the soft whish of 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 t
he 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 and look at myself, in fact, 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 trickster I’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.