“I hate you,” Gary said with feeling. He threw a small rock and nailed a T-post on the side of the road. He picked up another, tossed it into the air, and caught it on the way back down.

Coyote threw his head back and laughed. “I wondered how much longer you’d stay locked up in the gray box. You didn’t used to let them hold you for so long.”

“Knowing I was safe from you there,” Gary said, throwing the rock in his hand with barely controlled violence, “I planned on staying inside as long as I could. My conscience drove me out before then.”

“Conscience,” mused Coyote. They looked alike, he and Gary Laughingdog. “I wonder where you got that?”

“Quit tormenting him,” I said sternly.

Gary twisted half-around to look at me. “Go tell the sun not to rise.” He stood up and dusted off the back of his jeans. “Looks like you got too interesting, Mercy. But did you have to let him include me?”

“I have a gift for you both,” said Coyote grandly. “Come along, children.” He started off down the road.

“We might as well,” said Gary in the voice of experience. “If we don’t, something horrible will come out of the night and chase us. We’ll end up dead, or doing exactly what he wanted anyway. Cooperation saves all of us a lot of trouble.”

Coyote snickered.

“What?” Gary said, sounding aggravated.

Coyote turned around and walked backward. He held up a hand. “You.” He held up another hand as far from the first as he could. “Cooperation.”

Gary sneered at him. Coyote sneered back, and I saw that Coyote’s eyes and Gary’s were the same shape. Then the moment was over, and Coyote turned around and faced the way he was going.

Gary started to follow, but I stepped in front of him and stopped, shaking my head. I waited until Coyote was far enough ahead of us so we could talk in relative privacy before starting down the road. Relative, because I was certain Coyote could still hear us; he wasn’t that far ahead.

“Why aren’t you asleep?” I asked Gary.

“Because I’m a fugitive from the law, and there was a lawyer sleeping in the same room with me,” he said with feeling.

“Kyle wouldn’t have turned you in.”

Gary shook his head. “Eventually, he’ll realize who I am, and, if he doesn’t want to lose his license to practice, he’ll have to turn me in.” We walked a little while, and he said, “I don’t really want to get any of you in trouble for harboring an escaped prisoner. I’ve done what I needed to do, told you what I knew, and it is time to make myself scarce. It isn’t the first time I’ve been on the run from the law.”

He looked down at his feet, then gave me a rueful smile. “Though most of the time I’ve deserved it more. I can head over to one of the Montana reservations, and they’ll let me stay until the state of Washington decides it isn’t so concerned with some idiot held on a nonviolent crime. If I’d walked while on parole, they might not even look for me. Once the fire dies down, I’ll get a fake ID and show up somewhere else as someone else. About time to do that anyway.”

“All that was true earlier when you said you’d spend the night,” I said.

He looked at me, then away. “One of your wolves saw me looking at Honey and told me about her husband. That’s who she’s got following her around, right? She’s not going to be able to see anyone else until she lets him go.”

I’d had the thought that it was Honey’s fault that Peter’s shade was still hanging around, too. “Probably not, no,” I agreed. “He died not very long ago.”

“She’s interested in me,” he said. He flashed me that grin again, but I saw behind it to how alone he was. “I’m not just being vain, though I own that as well. But it hurts her that she’s interested, and I think she’s been hurt enough. It was time for me to leave.”

Coyote began whistling a song that sounded suspiciously like “London Bridge Is Falling Down.”

“Screw you and the horse you rode in on,” Gary yelled, and Coyote laughed. To me Gary said, “So I’ll leave. I’ll become someone else and maybe stop by in a few years.” He didn’t mean that last sentence, I could tell, and he knew it—so the lie was for himself and not me.

“Fingerprints?” I said. “DNA? Facial-recognition software? Hard to lose yourself in this day and age.” That had been the main reason that the werewolves had finally come out to the public.

He raised an eyebrow. “You mean you don’t know how to fix those?” Then he shrugged, gestured with his chin toward Coyote. “He taught me a trick or two. He can teach you, too. Gary Laughingdog is no more. I’ll pick a different name and be someone else.”

“Sounds lonely,” I said.

He shrugged again.

I saw a beer can that looked like one I’d passed earlier. I kicked it gently and sent it rolling to the side of the road. “If you’d gotten me up, I could have taken you to the bus station and bought you a ticket.”

“Hitchhiking is safer.” He looked at Coyote. “Usually. If Honey didn’t live out in the middle of freaking nowhere. I had to go looking for a less rural area that might have someone who’d pick up a hitchhiker—”

Coyote briefly interrupted his whistling to say, “Or a car to hot-wire.”

Gary clenched his jaw. “Or a car to hot-wire,” he agreed. The clenched jaw told me it bothered him to steal a car—and that he’d have done it if necessary. Oddly, both of them made me like him a little more. I’ve done some hard things in the name of necessity.

“If I had started earlier or not had to walk so far, maybe I could have just gotten a ride instead of walking the same half mile over and over again until I finally realized that the reason the road looked the same wasn’t just because around here a lot of roads look the same. I probably hiked two hours before I noticed. I have a little experience with odd happenings; mostly it means that matters are out of my control. Again. So I sat down and waited for Coyote to show up.”

Sympathy didn’t seem the right response, so I just kept walking.

Eventually, the stiffness left his shoulders, and he seemed to mellow a bit. He asked me, “Did you get a chance to ask him about the fae artifact you need from him?”

“No,” I said.

“Shh,” said Coyote, trotting back to us. “Time to be quiet now. This way. Come with me.” He stepped off the road into the darkness.

We climbed a little hill—a hill I hadn’t noticed until Coyote took us off the road. It was, like most uninhabited places around the Tri-Cities, covered with rock and sagebrush. We crested the hill, then followed a trail down a steep gorge. At the bottom of the drop, a thicket of brush grew, the kind that occasionally flourishes around water seeps that are sometimes at the centerof ravines around here. The brush covered the faint trail we’d been following. Coyote dropped to his hands and knees to crawl through. After a deep breath, as if he planned on diving underwater instead of under a bunch of leaves, Gary did the same.

I followed. The soil under my knees was softer than I expected. No rocks, no roots, no marsh, nothing with stickers—not that I was complaining. But if I hadn’t already known Coyote was manipulating the landscape, the lack of nasty plant life would have proved it. There were no signs of any other people or animals despite the way this trail looked like some kind of thoroughfare for coyotes or raccoons.

A high-pitched wailing cry broke the silence of the night and sent unexpected, formless terror through my bones, leaving me crouching motionless under the cover of bushes like a rabbit hiding from a fox. The first howl was answered by another.

I wasn’t the only one who froze; Gary had stopped, too. Coyote sat down and turned to face us.

“His children break the night with their hungry cries,” Coyote said. “That we hear them in this, my own land, means that they have hunted this night, and there are more people on their way to the other side.”

“Dead,” said Gary. “You mean Guayota has killed more people.”

Coyote nodded, as solemn as I’d ever seen him. “You need to understand this, both of you. Once Guayota took the first death, he can never stop. He will kill and kill and, like the wendigo, never be free of the terrible hunger because death never can satisfy that kind of need. He cannot stop himself, so he needs to be stopped.” He lifted his head and closed his eyes. “They are quiet now. We need to keep going.”

The pitch of the trail changed to an uphill climb, gradually getting steeper and steeper until I was scrabbling up a cliff face. I could no longer see Coyote or Gary, and I hoped they were still ahead. I dug in my fingernails and shoe edges and hauled myself up. Sweat gathered where sweat generally gathers and rolled in jolly, salt-carrying joy all across the burns I’d acquired fighting Guayota.

Eventually, I chinned up over the edge of the cliff and rolled onto … a lawn. In front of me was a hedge, and under the hedge were Coyote and Gary, lying side by side. There was space between them, and I elbow-crawled forward until I was even with them but still under the hedge. Beyond the hedge was a manicured lawn just like the one I’d crawled over.

That cliff edge had been a barrier between Coyote’s lands and the real world. I hadn’t noticed the transition on the way out here, but now, lying beneath the hedge, my senses were crawling with information that hadn’t been available—the sounds of night insects and the scents of early-spring flowers.

Coyote’s road had looked and smelled exactly as I expected—but real life doesn’t do that. Real life is full of surprises, big and small. I’d keep that in mind the next time Coyote showed up.

That we were out of Coyote’s place meant that the hedge we lay under was real, as was the yard and the house it surrounded. The back of the house was lit by bright lights. I saw the silhouettes of trees and bushes. Between us and the house was a kidney-shaped pool encased in a walkway of cement. In the night, with the house lights shining in my eyes, the water looked like black ink.

The house was a high-end house, not rich-rich but nothing that a mechanic’s salary would have touched. Maybe there were some distinguishing features on the front of the house—like an address. But from my viewpoint, the house looked like any of a hundred other expensive houses. The deck, jutting out fifteen or twenty feet from the house and three feet off the ground, was the most interesting feature, that and the dogs.

The two dogs were chained at opposite ends of the deck, each chewing on rawhide bones as long as my calf. At least I hoped they were rawhide bones.

Coyote shoved something in my hand. I didn’t have to look down to know that I held the walking stick, but I did anyway. It looked much as it had the last time I’d seen it: a four-foot-long oak staff made of twisty wood, with a gray finish and a ring of silver on the bottom. The silver cap that sometimes became a spearhead was covered with Celtic designs. It looked like something I could have bought at the local Renaissance fair for a couple of hundred dollars.

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.