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?”