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hunt the ones that go into the woods, and I don't. So you needed her. But you don't need her anymore. You can
have me."
Raven, I whispered deep enough inside that I hoped no one beyond me could hear. Raven, will you play in the
snow? I showed it a picture of what I wanted, and heard Coyote's teeth snap, the sound audible above the
sobbing wind. Emboldened, I took a half step back, beckoning the beast. "All you have to do is come and get
me."
It pounced, slower in this world than it was in mine, or I was faster. I flung myself to the side, hitting a
snowbank in a spray of cold and ice, and lurched to my feet barely in time to duck another attack. Coyote and
the raven zipped around each other a few yards away, gamboling in the storm, and I did my best to watch them
while avoiding being eaten.
A figure grew up between them, a snowman in jeans and a sweater and with my short-cropped hair. The raven
alighted on its head and shook itself, and color fell into the snowman: black hair, black coat, black pants, black
boots. Coyote leaped up and slurped his tongue across its face, and a blush of flesh tones filled its rounded
features and its blunt snowman hands.
The final time the monster jumped for me, I ducked, and it knocked my simulacrum to the earth with a howl of
triumph, rending it with tooth and claw.
I surged forward and snatched Mandy's cowering soul in my arms, lifting her with no trouble at all. It was tiny,
almost weightless, like a very young child, and I hoped that didn't mean it was dying.
Coyote said, "Quick, come on," and I turned and ran after him out of the snowstorm, a raven winging above us.
* * *
I woke up still cuddling Mandy's spirit. The woman on the paramedic's stretcher looked thin and wan, while the
ephemeral thing in my arms was bright but fading fast. I leaned forward without thinking, hugging her body
close, and felt her soul slip away, settling back into the form meant to hold it.
Color sprang up around her, flat against her skin but visible: her aura returning a little worse for the wear, but
indicative that all would be well. Coyote murmured, "Well done," and when I glanced up at him, his eyes were
gold and his smile wide. "The rest is easy. Finish it."
The blow to her head was nasty blunt trauma, a radial fracture like what happened when a rock hit a windshield.
There was no blood below it, no sign of deeper trouble, and I tended the fracture with the images I was most
comfortable with: new bone filling the cracks like it was heated glass melding a window together. Reluctantly, I
left some of the bruising in place so she still had a goose-egg lump on her head. I'd offer to fix it later, but
utterly obliterating the signs of injury when there were paramedics standing by seemed excessively
complicated.
The bite on her arm, unexpectedly, was harder. It had a cold core to it, like winter had lodged in the bone and
seeded there, difficult to root out. I looked at Coyote, but he only raised an eyebrow, a none-too-subtle hint that
this was a test, and that it'd be better if I passed.
Vehicle analogies didn't work so well with cold spots, though the idea of a faulty heater crept in. It gave me a
place to start, at least: from inside, like the wiring had gone bad, rather than from the outside where all I'd be
doing was poking around at an external symptom of an internal problem.
I put my palm over the bite and let magic sink all the way through, until I could see through her arm the same
way I'd seen through mine a handful of times. Skin and sinew and blood and muscle and bone all lit up in
shades of life, Mandy's colors gaining strength now that the greater physical damage was healed. But there were
dark spots inside the wound, those seeds of cold, and delicate trails danced out of them and led into the world.
Marking her. Marking her more literally than I'd thought. It wasn't just that she was outdoorsy, not anymore.
The bite connected her to the monster, so if I didn't get those tendrils cleaned out, it would come for her again. I
gathered them up and tugged gently, just to see if they would loosen. They didn't. I hadn't thought it would be
that easy.
The trick the real trick, the most effective expulsion would be to convince her body to reject the seeds itself.
Thoughtful, cautious, I murmured, "Mandy? Can I come in?"
After a brief hesitation, I felt not agreement, exactly, but a lack of resistance, and with that invitation, stepped
inside the garden of Mandy Tiller's soul.
* * *
I wasn't in the least bit startled to find myself in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest for the second time that
day. This time, though, it was summertime, the sky a blaze of blue glory and the mountainside green and ripe
with life. Mandy, lithe and athletic in hiking shorts and a tank-top, was climbing toward a host of pine trees. A
backpack was slung over her shoulders and a hiking staff was in one hand, making her the epitome, in my
opinion, of wilderness chic.
She waved when she noticed me. "Come on over here, take a look at this? See that clinging moss? These trees
are going to be dead by the end of the year if we don't give them a hand."
I almost said, "Isn't that the natural cycle?" but bit my tongue before the words escaped. There was sickness in
her garden, and she had the wherewithal to be rooting it out on her own. I hurried after her.
"It spreads," she told me with a sort of resigned dismay. "One tree to another, blocking their ability to draw
down sunlight. The hard part's getting it off the tree without damaging the bark, but if you can they'll survive?
Here's a knife." She tossed me a relatively blunt blade and showed me how to work it under the moss, how to
loosen its clinging runners, and ultimately handed me the backpack so I could stuff the moss we'd cleared away
into it. "I take it home and burn it."
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