She is not sure when or how it happens. Nor has she any idea how long she has sat watching the steady, repetitive motions of the creature’s search. She only knows that somehow the light has changed around her. The intermittent fall of sunlight through the branches has become a steady, golden glow without visible source. Colors have grown deeper, the pale grey water become vivid blue, the rough grey bark of her sycamore a rich and varied umber. The sky, where she can see it between the forking trunk of her sycamore, has turned the impossible shade of perfect turquoise, clouds like feathers drifting lightly along under its canopy. Beside her, Asi has fallen still, whuffling softly in his dream.

With a lunge almost too fast to see, the raccoon splashes into the stream and emerges with a small silver fish, still wriggling, in his mouth. On the bank again, he shakes the water from his coat, and, quiet deliberately, begins to clamber over the uneven ground directly toward Kirsten herself. Kirsten holds herself motionless, scarcely breathing. Part of her mind is screaming that this is abnormal behavior, and that she is about to be bitten by a rabid animal. The other part waits in stillness, a frisson running over her skin like electricity. She does not know what is about to happen, but even she knows magic when she sees it. Asi never stirs.

When the raccoon is no more than a yard from her, he sits back on his haunches again. Golden eyes never leaving hers, he takes the fish from his mouth with one long-fingered hand and calmly bites its head off. He chews thoughtfully, swallows, and says, “Well damn, it took you long enough. What kept you?”

For a moment the tingle of anticipation turns to real fear. Nothing in her zoology courses has prepared her for talking animals. She is either mad or dreaming.

Or she was right the first time, and it is magic.

She says, “What do you mean, long enough? Do you have any idea what I’ve been doing the last three months? It’s not like we had an appointment.”

“Oh, we had an appointment, all right. You just didn’t know it.”

“Not any appointment I made. I don’t pencil hallucinations into my schedule.”

“I am not,” the raccoon says, enunciating very carefully, “an hallucination.”

“Then what are you? A dream? Something I ate?”

The raccoon pauses with the fish halfway to his mouth again. “What do I look like, you idiot human? Chopped liver?”

“You look like—”

“I,” he interrupts, speaking with extreme dignity, “am Wika Tegalega.”

He waits, as though he expects the name to mean something to her. When the silence threatens to become awkward, she says, “Pleased to meet you. Kirsten King, here.”

“I know that. Since you apparently don’t speak Real Human yet, I’ll tell you what my name means. It’s ‘Magic One with Painted Face.’ You can call me Tega. I’m your spirit animal.”

“My what?”

“Your spirit animal. Your guide. Think of me as your guardian angel if you have trouble getting your head around a Real People idea.”

“Aaallll riiight,” she drawls. “So what did I do to acquire a spirit animal?. Or guardian angel? Or whatever?” She makes a dismissive gesture with one hand. “In case you haven’t noticed, I have a guardian animal. He chases the likes of you up trees.”

The raccoon shows all his teeth, which are very white and very sharp and very many, in what would be a grin if he were human. There doesn’t seem to be anything humorous in it now, though. “Him and whose army? Looks like tomorrow’s stew to me.”

“What!” She starts to stand, to escape from this surreal conversation, but finds that her muscles will not obey her. It is not paralysis; it is mutiny by her own body, acting on its own wisdom.

“Okay. Look, I’m sorry. Nobody’s going to eat your mutt.” Wika Tegalega raises the fish to his mouth again, then holds it out to her. “Want some?”

Kirsten may not be able to get to her feet and bolt, but she can still cringe. “Uh, no. No, thank you.”

Tega tilts his head to one side as if to say “Your loss” and takes another bite. Scales and bones make small, metallic crunching sounds between his teeth as he chews. Kirsten shudders.

“Good,” he says, running his tongue around his muzzle. “Sure you don’t want some?”

A sense of familiarity has begun to grow on Kirsten. Gingerly she sorts through her memories of her near-death, caught in the downward spiral of a self-destructing android, the code that burned its circuits searing destruction along her own nerves. There had been a red-haired woman warning her back toward life; that she remembered. And there had been another woman, older, clad in vermilion robes that blew about her stooped body and a cap of the same color above her wizened, nut-brown face. And there had been a shape like this creature, holding up a long-fingered hand like a benediction, speaking above the howl of the vortex that threatened to consume her: Go back. The time is not yet.

“You were there!” she blurts. “The time I almost died!”

“I was there,” he acknowledges.

“So what are you doing here now? Am I—” she lets the question trail off in a shiver of unadmitted fear. She cannot let herself go now. Not with the work she has yet to do, not with the first real friend she has ever made in her life. Real friends, she corrects, though one is—she searches for a word that is not too extravagant—special.

“Ahh,” Tega says. “So you’ve gotten around to telling yourself the truth. Some of it, at least.”

‘What? You mean about—about—?”

“About Dakota Rivers. Your friend.”

“Well, I’ve never really had one before. It’s a new experience.”

Crunch goes another mouthful of bones and scales. “It’s even newer than you think, and older, too. Do you want me to tell your future? Your past? Cross my paw with mussels and Wika Tegalega will Reveal All.” The raccoon has no eyebrows, but the stripes around his eyes waggle lecherously.

Kirsten sniffs. “I know my past, thank you very much. And if any of us have any future at all, it will be what we make it. I don’t need a talking four-footed bandit with a bushy tail to tell me that.”

Crunch again. “All right.” Tega shrugs, a very human gesture. “But I’ll tell you this anyway. Think Moebius strip.”

“What?”

“Moebius strip. You know, one of those little thingies you made back in grade school. Twist the loop and glue it together so it only has one surface. Neat trick, actually.”

“I know what a Moebius strip is, dammit. I’m a scientist. Why should I think about one now?”

The last of the fish disappears and a faraway look comes into Tega’s eyes. “Round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows. The front is the back, the past is the future. Round and round, life after death after life. What has been, will be. And there is nothing new under the sun.”

Kirsten frowns, at the cryptic words, and at the chill that passes over her skin. Someone walking on my grave, her grandmother had always said. “I don’t understand.”

“No, of course not.” The remote gaze has gone, and the raccoon’s eyes are on her face, here and now. “Not yet. But you will.”

“I—” Kirsten is not quite sure what she means to say. Demand an explanation? Deny causality? Proclaim her belief in a random universe of random events without pattern that sometimes just happen to give the illusion of purpose?

“You will,” Tega repeats. “What you need to know now is that three drunken idiots with their brains in their tiny, tiny balls have just shot a she wolf at the gate. Koda is caring for her at the clinic and will need to go search for her pups. She needs your help.”

“What? How can I—?”

“Go to her. Go now.” Tega drops to all fours again, the non-human grin splitting his face. “Hasta la vista, baby.”

The golden light fades, and Kirsten finds herself sitting once again on an ordinary root in an ordinary wood with ordinary snow powdering the ground. A dream, that’s all. An extremely vivid dream, but just a dream.

She rises and stretches, Asi with her. “C’mon, boy, let’s—” She stops, frozen, in mid-sentence. Printing the snow in front of her, one string coming and another going, are the marks of long-fingered hands and agile feet. A raccoon’s tracks.

“Come, Asi!” she cries, and begins to run.

CHAPTER TWENTY

KIRSTEN LOOKS UP from her pacing as the door to the vet clinic opens and Koda steps out into the waning sunshine. She runs up to the other woman, noting the grim set to her jaw and the thin, bloodless line of her lips. “I just heard,” she says softly. “How is she?”

“Stable for now,” Koda replies, distracted. “I need to go. I have to find her pups.”

“I’m going with you.”

“No. I’ll go alone. Stay with Shannon and keep watch over the mother.”

“Please. I…I want to help.” She holds up a hand to forestall comment. “I know you don’t need it. Hell, you’ve probably done this a million times before, but….I’d like to help anyway.”

Kirsten receives her answer by way of a handful of blankets being pressed into her chest and a curt “let’s go”. Peering over top of the blankets, she settles them more tightly against her front and starts off at a brisk trot, trying her best to keep up with Koda’s long-legged strides.

Within moments, they’ve breasted the snowy crest, and both stop, though for different reasons. Koda cocks her head, scenting the air and listening to the area around her. All is silent, save for the wind rustling through branches yet to have seen the first touch of spring green.

Kirsten, on the other hand, is staring at a large bird roosting atop the very tallest of the trees ahead. “Koda,” she whispers in her softest voice.

Hearing her, Dakota slowly turns her head until she is looking down at the woman at her side. Her eyebrow lifts in silent inquiry.

“That bird…it’s a hawk, isn’t it? If it’s anywhere around the pups….”

Koda grabs Kirsten’s hand as she lifts it and returns it to her side. She softly utters an odd, three-note whistle With a heavy, almost sub-sonic, beating of wings, Wiyo lifts up from the tree’s top and glides effortlessly onto Koda’s upraised arm. Kirsten stares on as if her sockets are the only things keeping her eyeballs from popping out and rolling around like marbles on the ground. Giving Kirsten a look that could freeze a volcano, Wiyo calmly sidesteps up to Dakota’s shoulder, barely missing her Stetson, and settles there, looking regal as a queen on her throne.

Koda continues on, leaving Kirsten staring after her, slack-jawed, until a soft “coming?” floats back to her and spurs her feet into motion once again.

*

By Kirsten’s reckoning, it is ten minutes later when they once again stop, Koda’s upraised hand giving her direction better than a verbal order. These ten minutes have been silent though, at least from Kirsten’s perspective, far from uninformative. In that short space of time, watching Dakota tracking the wolf pups, Kirsten has received a flash of insight—though perhaps “flash” isn’t the right word. It is as if an elusive puzzle piece has finally slipped into place, providing her with the answers to several questions she’s been asking herself for these months in the other woman’s company.

Watching Dakota’s profile, its sharp lines softened by descending twilight, the image of the blue-eyed wolf, her guardian, comes to her again, superimposing itself over the noble, striking features of the woman before her. She finds herself flushing, shamed at having come to this rather obvious conclusion so late in the game.

Some scientist. Can’t even see what’s in front of my face. God.

The answers, however, raise even more questions, but Kirsten pushes them to the back of her mind as she watches Koda gracefully lower herself to her haunches and stare down at the snow-covered ground for several long moments. When she rises again, her face is carved of granite, absolutely expressionless save for her eyes, which are burning embers glittering with an anger that takes Kirsten aback and has her wishing desperately that this reaper’s gaze will not set itself upon her.

It does, though only briefly, and she feels almost faint with relief as it passes on, leaving her untouched.

Silent as the grave, Dakota resumes her pace, leaving Kirsten struggling to keep up. But not before looking down at the place that had lit the fires of Dakota’s anger.

There, in a small pile, is a heap of bones and bits of fur. Tiny bones, so very tiny, and yet unmistakable even to a city-bred girl like Kirsten. The bones of a wolf-pup; predator turned prey. She slaps a hand over her mouth as her gorge heaves, threatening to expel whatever remains of her breakfast—the only meal she’s eaten today. After a long moment, her stomach settles itself and she takes her hand away, forcibly ripping her gaze from the tiny mound of bones at her feet. Dakota is a dozen yards ahead and pulling away rapidly. Kirsten breaks into a run to catch up.