The last time I’d held it, I had felt its thirst for blood, and its magic had thrummed in my bones. Now, the wood was cool under my fingers, and it might as well have been something I bought at Walmart for all the magic I sensed.
“It knows how to hide itself better,” Coyote murmured, sounding like a proud parent.
I watched the dogs, but they didn’t seem to hear him as he continued talking. “I taught it a few tricks and gave it an education. It helped me out of a few jams.”
I was going to have to return the walking stick to Lugh’s son, and tell him that Coyote had taught it a few things. Why did I think that might not go over too well?
“Do you remember what the walking stick’s original magic was?” asked Coyote.
“Makes sheep have twins,” I told him. The dogs didn’t react to my voice, either.
“And?”
“That was it,” I told him. “Lugh made three walking sticks. This one makes twin lambs. One of them helps you find your way home, and the third allows you to see people as they really are.”
“Hmm,” said Coyote. “Are you sure your source was reliable?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“I think,” said Coyote, “that you should recheck your source. Maybe there were three staves that all did the same thing, or maybe there was only ever one. Or maybe”—he gave me a sly look—“I was just able to teach it to ape its brethren. I suppose it doesn’t really matter. Look at the dogs.”
I tightened my grip on the walking stick and looked. “It’s hard to see anything with those stupid lights,” I complained.
Coyote gave me a look, then glanced at Gary. “Okay. But look fast.”
I frowned at him—and Gary sighed, rose to his knees. In his hands he rolled two small rocks, like the ones he’d been playing with when Coyote and I had first come upon him. He lobbed them, one right after the other, and took out the big lights.
Both dogs surged to their feet, glanced at the lights, then right where the three of us crouched.
“Gary,” said Coyote conversationally as he turned around and raised his butt in the air until he was crouched like a runner in a sprint at the Olympics. “You should stay until the end of this story. Sometimes the end of the adventure is much better than the beginning. Besides, you might be more useful than you know if you stick around.”
Gary answered something, but I’d finally remembered that I was supposed to be looking at the dogs. Under my hand, the staff warmed, and I realized it was happy to be back with me. Then I looked, really looked at the dogs, and the walking stick’s affection and Gary’s and Coyote’s voices were abruptly secondary.
The dog nearest me was female; I could see her form inside the dog’s body—sort of wrapped in the flesh of the larger animal. She had a woman’s body, naked and made more disturbing by a head that was a smaller version of the dog’s. She had dog’s paws from her ankle on down. She crouched on all fours. Binding magic wrapped her from head to paw in a shimmering pinkish fabric—since joining the pack, I was getting pretty good at spotting those. Pack bonds were part of my daily life, and what held her was a magic very similar but not the same. If the pack bond was spider silk woven into a chain, this was a Mandarin’s robe used as a straightjacket.
That was not all I saw, though, because my seeing of her was not limited to what I could sense with my eyes. Age. She was so old, this dog. Older than the structures around her by millennia or more.
Her eyes glistened red in the night and focused on us. She opened her mouth, displaying sharp teeth that were too many and too long to fit in her mouth. She barked at us, the noise bigger than it should have been and with an odd whistling sound to it that made me want to cover my ears—it wasn’t that unearthly and terrifying sound that Coyote had said was the tibicenas, but it was something akin to it. Everything about the tibicena was bigger, more powerful than the lines of the body she presented to the real world.
The other dog … the other dog was Joel. If the woman’s binding magic was a robe, his were silk ties. They wrapped securely around him but did not envelop him completely. They weren’t part of him yet.
Like the female, he saw us, too. The dog’s body that encompassed him was poised on the deck, watching us, but silently. While the dog was motionless, Joel was not. He pulled and tugged at the bindings, peeling them back and leaving gaping wounds that bled behind. As soon as he cleared one place and started on another, the bindings grew back.
I wondered how old the man I’d killed when I shot Juan Flores’s dog had been.
Coyote leaned forward, and whispered into my ear, “When it looks like a mortal creature, the mortal flesh encompasses the tibicena and may be killed as any mortal creature. When it is wrapped in the tibicena’s form, it cannot be harmed by mundane means.”
And when he said the word “tibicena,” the head of the walking stick sharpened into the blade of a spear. My eyesight sharpened, too, and I saw that there was a third layer I had not been able to distinguish before. Surrounding each dog was a shadow that grew more solid as my hand clenched tighter on Lugh’s walking stick, a shadow that was large and hairy with red eyes, as in the story Kyle had told. Huge—polar-bear huge. Four or five times as big as any werewolf I’d ever seen. Gradually the other, smaller forms disappeared inside the giant dogs—both of whom were looking directly at me.
Coyote slipped back, grabbed my ankle, and dragged me backward, out from under the hedge like I was a rabbit he’d caught. He dropped my ankle, grabbed my elbow, and hauled me to my feet. Before I could catch my balance, he all but threw me down the cliff face we’d come up. I managed to stay on my feet, using the bottoms of my shoes like skis and leaning my weight back on the walking stick for balance in a mockery of glissading.
As a kid, glissading down steep, snow-covered mountain slopes had been an upgrade in difficulty and fun to simply sledding. “Fun” wasn’t a term I applied to glissading down a cliff that had no snow for padding in case of accident and using an ancient artifact that might break—and wasn’t that a lovely thought? I had a pretty good idea about what would happen when an old fae artifact was destroyed. At least the spearhead had returned to its more usual form, so I wasn’t likely to stab myself with it, too.
I didn’t fall until I was almost at the bottom. So when I rolled, I hit that improbably soft ground and emerged not much worse for wear. Gary landed on his feet beside me, and on the other side, Coyote grabbed my arm—exactly where he’d grabbed me before so I was sure to have bruises—and hauled me to my feet, again.