Billy let out a sigh that came from the bottom of his soul, and dropped his chin to his chest. I wanted to hug him, but Morrison was still glowering at me. "She had a bad slip on the stairs, that's all."

That's what she'd said in the ambulance, and I had absolutely no doubt it was the party line she was going to feed anybody who tried bleeding her for information. I thought she'd offered it up a little bit to help me, but much more to help herself. A fall on the stairs wasn't newsworthy, whereas surviving an attack by a mad killer unquestionably was. If she caught wind of the story at all, Laurie Corvallis would no doubt discover Mandy and I had been out hiking together, but there would be nothing for Laurie to hear about, if Mandy stuck with her version of events. God knew I wasn't about to dispute them.

Morrison, however, gave me a gimlet eye. "Is it now."

I shrugged, willing enough to feed the party line to someone like Corvallis, but I'd made an unhealthy habit of telling my boss the truth. "No. It was the—" "Wendigo," Coyote put in unexpectedly. I jolted around to gawk at him, then twitched back to face Morrison again and pretended like I hadn't missed a beat.

"It was the wendigo, and I had to do a soul retrieval to save her life. Which," I said much more softly, "I did put in danger, yeah. I drew its attention to her. If it's worth anything, I'm not sure it really wanted to kill her as much as it wanted to flush me out."

It didn't help. I could tell from Morrison's expression. But he snapped his attention from me to Coyote, clearly expecting to get more answers there. "What the hell's a wendigo?"

"A—" Billy and Coyote spoke at the same time, and I saw a little battle of will and surprise, mostly on Billy's part, before he gestured for Coyote to continue. "A man who's gone mad and developed the taste for human flesh," my mentor said. "It usually happens in times of famine, but sometimes other circumstances trigger it. He's becoming a monster, a physical transformation. The wendigo is drawn to the forests. That's why your victims are outdoorsmen."

Morrison shot me a look that said "How come you didn't know that?" and "How come this guy knows so much?" in equal parts. What he said aloud, though, was, "Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department. And you are…?" as he offered his hand.

Coyote said, "Cyrano Bia of the Diné," and although he was flawlessly polite, I could have sworn he was laughing at Morrison. He arched an eyebrow at me, and added, "Jo might've mentioned me as 'Coyote.'"

For the countable space of a breath, there was goggle-eyed silence, and then all hell broke loose.

Morrison and Billy started trying to out-shout each other, both of them asking the same questions: "Walker's Coyote? The one who's dead? What are you doing here? Well, I guess that explains the scene at the Tillers' house. How did you get here? I thought you'd died! What the hell is going on? Joanie? What's going on? Walker, what the hell—"

I hadn't known that only two people could make that much noise. Worse, Coyote started trying to answer them, not that they were listening, and finally somebody bellowed, "Enough!"

For some reason everybody looked at me after that. It took a few seconds to realize my throat was sore from the shout, and that my hands were fisted hard enough to ache. I said, "Enough," again, much more quietly this time, but my voice was trembling. "You know what, Morrison? Billy? You don't get to have the answers right now. I don't know how Coyote got here or how he's alive, and God knows I spend way too much time imagining it's all about me, but this time, you know what? This time it is. I get to find out first. He's my mentor, my friend, he's the one who was in my head, you don't know him, and you don't get to have him right now."

To my embarrassment, I was crying again. Real girl tears for the second time, these ones born out of frustration. That didn't happen to me very often, but I hated when it did. It was faulty wiring in the female body, tear ducts attached directly to the frustration meter. Trying to explain to men that no, I wasn't being manipulative, I just couldn't stop my eyes from leaking salt water, only added to the aggravation.

In this particular case, though, even if I hadn't been angling for it, Billy and Morrison backed down looking shamefaced and uncomfortable, and I was nothing but glad for it. I was exhausted all the way down to the bottom of my soul. Not just physical tiredness from being thrown down a mountain as an avalanche that morning, not just the shaky emotional collapse of Coyote's arrival, but fundamentally, flat-out spent.

Coyote, who was fast earning rank as the number one most fantastic man in the universe, took my hand and gently uncurled it from its fist before slipping his fingers through mine. "Jo's probably right. Not only do I owe her a lot of explanation, but she's just done her first full-fledged soul retrieval, which isn't something I'd usually suggest trying in an ambulance. She needs a sacred place and some food, so I'd like to take her home. It's good to finally meet you, Captain. Detective Holliday." He nodded at my partner, despite having not been introduced, then drew me away from the ambulance and hospital and pressure presented by my friends.

I went into the hospital and used one of their dial-a-cab phones to call a taxi company Gary didn't work for. We were both silent on the drive to my apartment, because the only cab driver on earth I'd have a "So you're back from the dead, how's that working for you?" conversation in front of was Gary. As much as I loved him, right then Gary fell into the same category as Morrison and Billy: I was not ready to share Coyote with anybody, not until I got a chance to hear and assimilate some answers on my own. The whole drive home I watched Coyote, half afraid he'd disappear if I took my eyes off him. I was so exhausted even the joy had drained out of me. Coyote had to guide me out of the taxi when we got to my apartment building, or I'd have sat there all night.

We took the world's slowest elevator up to my fifth-floor apartment because I couldn't face that many stairs. Once ensconced in my apartment, I handed Coyote the phone and a menu from Mrs. Li's Chinese restaurant on the Way, and he placed an order for what sounded like every item of food on the menu while I, mindful of his comment about sacred space, went to lie down in the middle of my living-room floor. The draft from under the front door turned my skin to goose bumps, but once down, I couldn't summon the will to move.

Coyote, who was bordering on suspiciously perfect, looked at me, went and dragged the quilt off my bed, and lay down behind me, the cover draped over both of us.

I didn't remember falling asleep, but I woke up when the delivery guy rang the doorbell. Coyote got up again, paid the guy, and came back to sit on the floor with me and spread two paper grocery bags worth of Chinese food around us in a veritable moveable feast. I ate all the Mongolian beef, half the cashew chicken, two egg rolls, a carton and a half of white rice, eight slices of barbecue pork, and drank a sixteen-ounce glass of milk before I felt even vaguely stable enough to whisper, "I'm really, really glad you're okay. What, um…? The last time I saw you…really saw you…was when I went into the Dead Zone and fought that snake thing."

"Fought." Coyote ducked his head over a heap of rice and sweet-and-sour pork. "Is that what you call it?"

"I got you out of there, didn't I?" All of a sudden I wasn't sure. "Didn't I?"

He looked up, dark eyes tempered with sympathy. "You did. Not very well, Jo. You shouldn't have even been there in the first place, not without me or at least a guide like Raven. But you did get me out."