I chose a patch of sand that looked as much like where I’d lay dying as anywhere else, and flopped onto my back. Grit seared through my shirt and jeans, bringing stinging prickles of heat rash to my skin, but I ignored it. The suntan I sported was thanks to a mystical desert heat considerably more antagonistic than this one, so I figured I could handle a little itching. I dropped my elbow over my eyes so the sun didn’t make red spots through my eyelids, took a deep breath, and bellowed “Coyote!” into the desert air.

Only that wasn’t what I did at all. It was the equivalent, maybe, but it felt completely different. It felt as if I was spread thin as hot butter over the sand, sending my consciousness over the whole surface of the desert. I could feel lumps and scrapes of earth beneath me, all over and everywhere. Curious lizards ran over my skin, hardly aware I was there. Water bubbled up through me in a few precious locations, and the dry earth considered whether I was something that could be drunk down for nourishment. It found the coil of power beneath my breastbone and tugged at it curiously, but I envisioned titanium shields protecting that power. Shot-blue sworls slipped into place, blocking the desert’s hold, and it relinquished it without argument.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, very privately, I wished to holy living hell I had a nice sturdy-vehicle analogy to work with here, but my psyche and my power seemed to be getting along just fine without my metaphorical grasp on things. I didn’t want to think any of it too loudly, in case my brain should notice I didn’t really know what I was doing, and stop doing it. I had this idea I’d end up like so much hamburger all over the highway if the desert-wide awareness stopped suddenly.

Crap. Now I had the idea of a car wreck smeared across the desert in my mind. Well, I’d wanted a car analogy. That was what I got for wishing. Since I was stuck with the idea, anyway, I leaned on the horn, vibrating out a call to my spirit guide with all my will.

A tiny reverberation of recognition bounced back at me from what felt like somewhere around my left knee. I gathered the idea of the smashed-up car together in my mind, rebuilding the vehicle, purple paint shimmering bright in the harsh desert sun, in that place where I’d felt an answer.

The sensation that followed felt very much like watching Stan Laurel take a long slithering step across the movie screen. It began with inching a black-clad foot across the floor, then slowly whiplashing his whole tall thin body to its new destination. I expected to hear a bloop! sound effect, or at the very least a soft pop of air, as I reconverged on a completely different spot in the desert.

Usually I wasn’t so much for telling one spot of desert from another, but this one had potential shade from rounded rocks piled up into wobbly pillars and hills, sculpted and buffeted by wind until they looked soft to the touch. The sun came down at enough of an angle to drop cooler shadows into hollows in the stone, a few of them big enough for a coyote to curl up in. Add a water source, and it would be a perfect hideaway in the landscape of the mind.

I should have been able to curl myself up in the idea of becoming a coyote, and fit into one of those little hollows all comfy and snug. That was one of the things about shamanism, shapeshifting on at least a psychic level. I’d read it could be done in the real world, too, but I wasn’t exactly a believer on that particular topic yet. Thus far, my internal shapechanges had been either accidental or the result of having been eaten by a particularly huge and powerful spirit animal, the latter of which was not on my list of things to do again. I wanted to be able to coil up in one of the coyotesize shallows in the rock, but not enough to convince myself I was a coyote. Instead, with a sigh, I fit my Joanne-shaped-self into one of them, folding my arms against a higher curve of stone and resting my head on them. It wasn’t all that comfortable, but as I settled in, I started to feel like I at least belonged there.

All I needed was a way to search the area. The heat made me think of waves boiling off a car’s hood on a hot summer day, the physical pressure of over-warm air something that could be used. I slid myself into the idea of that pressure, trying to feel the world from its perspective instead of mine. I wanted a hint of Coyote, something I could follow back to his consciousness. I wasn’t sure what I’d do after that— probably read him the riot act for not talking to me for weeks on end—but I had to start with finding him.

Cooler air melted as easily as tissue paper under the encroaching heat of my search. The weight of my analogy rolled over the hills and hollows, exploring them until a thrill of recognition tingled through me. It was as if the stone where Coyote habitually lay tasted different, flavored with his tang and sarcasm and general irritating habit of never directly answering questions. I wondered suddenly if this rocky little oasis was his garden, but discarded the idea. It felt more like the place he entered this landscape from his garden, like mine was at the center of the crater.

I very much didn’t want to know why he got an oasis and I got the scarred remnants of disaster striking. Rather than pursue that thought, I did the mental equivalent of knock knock, I’m coming in, and poured myself into the spot that had felt most like Coyote.

To my complete surprise, there was no resistance. Coyote’d lectured me up and down and left and right about my shields, so I expected to smack into his and be soundly rebuffed. I’d certainly slammed into Billy’s hard enough to get a headache. But I slid through so easily that for a moment I thought I’d have screwed up and not gone where I’d wanted to at all. There was nothing of a garden around me, just amber-tinted blackness, and a sense of time draining away very slowly. I had no idea where I was, and was trying to cast an apology into the darkness and back away when Coyote walked out of the night.

He came in his brick-red man form, black hair loose and swinging to his hips. For all that I’d gone looking for him, finding him in the black simply astonished me, emotion rising up from within like its own kind of power. He put both hands on my face, thumbs against my cheekbones, looking down at me with such curious seriousness I thought he might kiss me. Spirit guides weren’t supposed to go around kissing girls, were they?

It didn’t matter, because he didn’t do it. Instead he put his forehead against mine, a light touch that carried a staggering order: get the hell out of here, Joanne.

It wasn’t rejection. It was desperation, a single panicked rally to try to keep me safe. I could feel Coyote’s exhaustion behind it, as if he’d been struggling with the darkness for days. I couldn’t tell if he’d been waiting for me, or if my arrival had forced him to split off from what he’d been doing so he could warn me.

Because he hadn’t abandoned me after I’d thrust him out of the Dead Zone when I faced the ancient serpent there. He hadn’t left me to struggle through the aftermath of my failures as a shaman alone. The knowledge washed into me with his touch, all the information he could share inside a moment. He hadn’t been punishing me, these last two weeks.

He’d been a captive. There was something out there, an amorphous being awakened by enormous fluxes in the astral realm. Awakened, to put none too fine a point on it, by my clumsy use of power. It had slept for eons and had been waking for months, and when flickering life in the astral plain sped by it, it reacted, even half asleep. It trapped that life like a tiger in a tar pit, pulling it down into silent stillness until it roused itself fully and could decide what to do with it. My attempt to save Coyote from the serpent had thrust him right into this thing’s arms, and now he slept in amber, neither dead nor alive.