Wow. There wasn’t anything wrong with the thought, exactly, but it brought me to all sorts of places I just wasn’t prepared to go. I fought down a blush, totally without success, and hoped Gary didn’t see it. It took a while to get my heart rate back to normal after that, and visions of Morrison kept popping up in my head. I hadn’t gone out with him. It didn’t seem right for him to hang around my brain, clouding things up.

Wow, again. I’d had a real, honest-to-gosh date. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone on a date. It’d been before my mother died, which meant at least a year ago. My social life was an absolute disaster. I was going to have to call Phoebe and see if she wanted to go out again, although maybe not to the club Thor had seen us at.

Then again, maybe. I felt a grin creep over my face and tried to push it away. I was sitting in the middle of my living room listening to a drum. It was not supposed to be the time to reflect on my personal life. This was the bit where it was all deep and dark and serious and mystical, so I could get inside my own head, or outside of it, and maybe meet a few spirit animals out there in the black.

That was, of course, the problem with trying to think of nothing. All sorts of somethings kept crowding around in my mind, vying for attention. Morrison, Mark, Thor…for a moment I paused to admire all the men suddenly in my life, then shook my head. Morrison was certainly not a man in my life. I mean, he was, what with being a man and in my life, but he wasn’t a Man in My Life. And a compliment from Thor probably didn’t make him a Man in My Life, either. I was getting a big head.

Mark, on the other hand. Mark was nice to think about. He was quirky and charming and absolutely no doubt too good to be true, and made a warm little bubbly place in my tummy that I liked. I let out a tired, content sigh and thought about Mark until his image dissolved and let me drift thoughtlessly in the dark behind my eyelashes.

Warmth and comfort and safety gradually surrounded me, all caught up in the sound of the drumbeat. My heart had staggered into the drum’s pattern, or maybe the other way around. Both felt languid and unworried, a part of me but not to be terribly concerned with. Distant sparkles glittered and faded in the dark, almost familiar now. I sat myself down, folding my legs yoga-style, and resolved in a laid-back kind of way to be patient. Judy’d said it was easier to do spirit quests for others than for yourself, and while I had good reason not to trust most of what she’d told me, that part actually resounded with some of what I’d read.

I’d asked for help for Gary—and for Colin, though that was something I didn’t want to think about in the middle of my own spirit quest—but doing so now seemed presumptuous somehow. My spirit animals, if they wanted to come to me, might take their own sweet time about it. I just had to be patient.

One of the distant shimmers took on a harder glimmer, making a seared sharp edge of brightness in the darkness. It brought with it color, desert-blue sky meeting red stretches of earth, coalescing at a horizon that seemed a thousand miles away. A road, straight and narrow and plumed with dust, cut toward that horizon, and the hard line of light glinted again. I walked forward, raising a hand against the shadowless skies, and squinted at puffs of dirt ambling up from the far-off vehicle.

I could hear people behind me, voices rising and falling with as much enthusiasm as could be generated in the heat. Someone was keeping an eye on me, not worried, but because I was a kid, and so someone had to watch out for me. I felt a hand on my shoulder as an adult stopped to watch the car with me, then a double-pat as he left me on my own.

Time folded, the car pulling up in a cloud of dust. It was an enormous old boat of an Oldsmobile, built in the seventies, four-doored and powered by a massive V8 engine. A fleeting thought, this is not your father’s Oldsmobile, scampered through my mind, but as the driver’s-side door pushed open and a young man got out, an unsettling jolt made my stomach cold.

It was my father’s Oldsmobile. The car I’d grown up in was out there in the desert, my dad climbing out to hail one of the adults behind me. I shook myself, realizing that for the second time, I was having a dream in which I was somebody else. I hadn’t known it this time, though, until I saw Dad. I knew him, but whomever I was dreaming as didn’t.

He was tall, taller than I thought of him as being. That was the kid’s perspective; I remembered Dad from my adult height, only an inch or two shorter than his. He gave me an impersonal nod before he passed me, offering to shake someone’s hand. I turned to watch him a few seconds, unused to strangers.

His height was compounded by a ranginess that I shared, both of us lacking my mother’s elegance. He wore his hair long and smooth beneath a bandanna, just as he had all through my childhood. I’d loved it when I was little, though not enough to try to grow my own out. Long hair on men was in at that time, and it suited my father’s angular Cherokee features. The rest of his clothing was conventional, nothing native about it, but his hair and cheekbones set him apart. He couldn’t have been older than I was now, if that.

I turned away from him when another car door slammed. A little girl, maybe five years old, came around the vehicle’s enormous hood from the passenger side, her palm flat against the hot gold-painted surface. Blunt-cut black bangs were nearly in green eyes, the sides of her bobbed hair hitting a baby-round face just at chin length. She stopped in front of the Oldsmobile’s left headlight and stared at me, defiant to the point of excluding curiosity. My stomach did another lurch and flip, though the reaction seemed in both cases to be my own; the dreamer wasn’t surprised or confused at all. How I could separate myself from the dreamer, I didn’t know, and for a moment teetered on the precipice of a mental death spiral about the philosophy of dreamers and dreams.

The kid saved me from it by thrusting her chin out and saying, “Hello. I’m Joanne.”

A thunderclap sounded, ripping the sky asunder. Starlight fell down from the blue, making a blazing path that ran from me and under the little girl’s feet, then farther and farther into a blazing future I couldn’t see. A coyote appeared before me, standing between little Joanne and myself, his every strand of fur so sharp and vivid it might have been etched in pure copper. He brought with him air too hot to breathe, the weight of it pressing down and making the sky turn white with expectation. I swallowed against the dryness in my throat, wondering how I kept my feet as he paced forward to stalk around the dreamer me. I watched him as best I could without moving more than my head, and when he’d made a full circle, he stopped and let out a single bark that broke the world in half.

A second path shot up out of the darkness that made up the earth’s insides. It ran at right angles from the first one, burning through the sand into a different future. I could see farther down that path: the little Joanne wasn’t in the way, and I got sparks of information: family, community respect, long life, satisfaction. I felt joy down that road, and a lot of years of laughter. Looking back at the other, all I could see was the little girl, so vivid and clear that nothing beyond her was visible.

Coyote sat down between the two paths, arranged his paws mathematically, and waited.

A warning of imminent danger splashed over me, darkness suddenly cutting through the brilliant sky and the brighter paths that lay before me. I flung a hand up, knowing which road I intended to travel, but before a step could be taken, a raven made of thin glowing white lines and avian grace fell down out of the sky and dug its claws into little Joanne’s shoulders.