I wasn’t certain, but I thought stick bugs were a bit like crocodiles: an evolutionary path that got it right early on, and didn’t mess with anything afterward. I thought they’d been pretty much the same animals for tens of millions of years. From that perspective, unchanging and being associated with time travel made a certain amount of sense. I’d been able to haul myself through time by fixating on something as comparatively new as a Neolithic cairn. If stick bugs had twenty million years of unchanging evolution to draw on, they were probably damned fine focal points for time travel.
It made me wonder if some of the other animals whose fossil records were relatively unchanged were also time-traveling spirit animals. I was just as glad my last name was Walkingstick and not Sharkbait. “Right,” I said out loud, to stop myself going down that line of thought. “You’re...I mean, welcome. Welcome to our funny little magic family. It’s, um...it’s nice to meet you.”
A smooth talker I was not. But then, despite all my hopes, nobody had ever shown up with that Shaman’s Handbook I’d been asking for. Spirit animals, like everybody else, had to make do with my clumsy, if usually well-meant, expressions of greeting and methods of coping. “This is Raven,” I said to the stick bug, as politely as I could, “and this is Rattler. Guys, this is...”
Stick was a lousy name, and I couldn’t exactly call her Walker, because that’s what Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department, formerly my boss and with any kind of luck shortly to be my partner, called me. Besides, I had Rattler and Raven. “Walker” didn’t fit with that, alliteratively speaking. “Renee,” I decided. “This is Renee the stick bug. She’s the last of our merry band, and...” My shoulders slumped. “Does this mean we’re going to do more time traveling?” I perked right up again, though, suddenly eager. “Oh, but maybe with you along it’ll be easier. It might be kind of cool if I’m not fighting against the tide so much. Can we go see the Library at Alexandria? There must be stick bugs of some sort in Egypt to cross-reference...”
Renee still didn’t blink, but she kind of looked like she wished she could. I wondered if spirit animals knew what they were getting themselves into when they signed on, or if like most people, only realized after the fact that something had gone horribly wrong. I took a deep breath, straightened my shoulders, and tried hard to look like a shaman she’d want to stick with.
No pun intended. I dissolved into giggles at myself. Raven flapped around my head in delight while Rattler and Renee exchanged expressions of despair. It was no use. I was never going to be the proper dignified medicine woman of legend. They would have to take me as I was. I got up, Renee still balanced on my arm, and bowed to the legions of stick bugs still flooding the Lower World. “Thank you,” I said to all of them, but especially Renee. “Thank you for putting up with me, for coming when I needed you, and for facing whatever hell you’re likely to go through with me until we’ve got this thing beat. I’m a terrible ingrate, but I do know how much I owe you. All of you,” I added to Rattler. He slithered around my ankles, effectively pinning me in place, but accepting me, too. Raven plonked down on my shoulder and stuck his beak in my hair, so I was spirit-animaled from head to toe.
It felt pretty good, actually. I felt pretty full of life and confident, which was a damned sight better than I’d felt facing the Nothing in the Middle World.
A Nothing that was still up there, but maybe now I had the weapons to fight it. I stroked Renee’s long heart-shaped head with a fingertip and she tipped her chin up to do something that registered as smiling at me. “So what do you think?” I asked her. “Can you help me snip that stuff out of time? If you’re unchanging, then maybe time doesn’t mean anything to you, so you’re not constrained by it.... Raven, can you take us home?”
He kloked with surprise, since I usually asked him to take me in and out of the Dead Zone, not the Lower World. But I figured anything that could transition between life and death probably shouldn’t be too stymied by mere world-walking. Nor was he, springing off my shoulder to lay down a path of yellow bricks with each wing beat. I followed along behind, Renee and Rattler fading with each stride, until I stepped back out of the Lower World and into the Carolina holler with no visible signs of having been on a spirit quest. I felt the three of them at the back of my mind, though, murmuring and examining one another, and, I suspected, giving me a good hard once-over as they decided whether I was redeemable.
The whole trip to the Lower World had taken about as long as it took for Aidan to back off from me by a couple of steps. I was never going to really get used to that: traveling within the space of my head while my body stood there in the real world like an empty puppet. It usually only lasted a few seconds—longer spirit journeys did, or at least should, involve safe territory and someone to watch over me—but it was always disconcerting to realize I’d gone through a transition while other people were scratching their noses.
Usually, though, nobody else noticed. Aidan, however, froze midstep, toes planted in the dirt and heel still elevated as he stared at me. Then he surged forward again, eyes full of golden fire.
This time, however, he slammed into shields that were strong enough to keep young gods at bay, and bounced off hard enough that he actually lost his balance. I snagged a hand out to catch his biceps, and kept my voice low. “Not twice, kid. You caught me off guard once and bullied your way into my garden, but not twice. First off, that’s rude. Second, it’s rude. And third—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it, it’s rude.”
“Dangerous. You don’t know me, and you don’t know what’s inside my head or what I’ve faced. For all you know, I’m set up with a guard dog at the gate, and the only thing that kept it from attacking you was me knowing who you were.”
“Attack? What kind of shaman would attack somebody?”
“One who’s on the warrior’s path.” I let him go at the same time he yanked his arm out of my grip, and he couldn’t decide if that meant he’d escaped or if I’d relented. Either way, he pushed his lower lip out in a pout that was all too familiar, and muttered, “I’ve never heard of somebody being on the warrior’s path. Shamans are healers.”
“Lucky for you I am. Ever met a sorcerer, Aidan? They use shamanic magic. It’s just corrupted. If you go blowing into somebody’s soul space like that—”
A disdainful sneer appeared. “Now you’re trying to scare me. It won’t work.”
“—then you might open yourself up to let that corrupted magic in. Or do you think that—” and I jabbed a finger at the Nothing “—is just something the earth spat out after eating too much spicy food? Don’t go making yourself vulnerable if you can avoid it. Having said that—”
“Why do you think you get to tell me something like that? You’re not my mother!”
Of all the conversations I didn’t want to have with half of Cherokee looking on, this one was close to the top of the list. But I’d already had it with Ada once and it wasn’t like the answer had changed in the half hour since then. “I know I’m not your mother. I am a shaman, though, and I probably have more experience with black magic than most. I’m sure I’ve got more experience rushing in where angels fear to tread, and in paying the consequences for that. Forget being careful because I’m asking you to. Be careful so your mother doesn’t have to worry about you.”
Aidan scowled like he thought I was trying to pull a fast one, hiding my own concern for him under the mask of the word mother, which could technically mean either me or Ada. I wasn’t, actually, because I wasn’t that clever, or at least not that manipulative. I was concerned about him, but my concern landed in the grand scheme of “Hi, kiddo, I accidentally let the Major Bad Guy know you existed, so along with trying to find both of our missing fathers, I’d also like to make sure you don’t get creamed by monsters” rather than what I imagined were Ada’s more standard maternal worries.