“I dunno. You’ve been rubbing your arm for the last few hours.” He leaned into the SUV. “You have tearstains on your face. You’ve been . . . crying?”

He said that like I never cried. I cried. I cried anytime I needed to. I pulled up my sleeve and extended my arm. “I think I’m hurt.”

Eli paled. I made a face, swung my legs over from the floorboard to the street, and started to stand. My knees buckled. Eli caught me, sliding his arms under my legs and around my back, lifting me from the SUV. The jolt drew out a gasp, and I cradled my hurt arm across my chest. Eli kicked the door shut with a foot. “Let’s get you inside and check you out. I have a feeling you need to change into your mountain lion form. Fast.” I didn’t reply, and Eli carried me into the house.

At his desk, Alex was rolling back and forth in his new desk chair, with the energy drink cans in a different formation at his feet. “You two get married?” he quipped.

“No. Something’s wrong with Janie. She needs to shape-change, and I don’t know how to get it done.”

“Ummm. You think I do, bro?”

“Yeah, bro, you nosy bastard, I think you do.”

“That’s a bad word,” I said, massaging my arm through my sleeve. I held up my hand. “Look. I’m turning colors.” My hand and arm were traced with red, like vines growing under my skin, and blooms of purple bruises flowered between the vines. It was pretty.

“Never mind,” Eli said. “She’s worse than I thought. Get in the SUV. We’re taking her to that Cherokee shaman she goes to. Move!”

I was suddenly tired. So tired. I lay my head against Eli’s shoulder, and then down on the backseat of the SUV. After that I was being jostled by the movement of the seat beneath me, jerked around, pulled this way and that. At some point I began to moan as darkness spread beneath my skin. “Hurts,” I murmured. “Hurts bad.”

“I know. We’re getting you to help. Hang on.”

I felt someone remove the rest of my weapons and harnesses. My boots. And then I was being carried again. And undressed, but it was okay because Aggie One Feather was doing that, not the Youngers. And then, dressed in something white that itched on my skin, I was carried outside again and into a dark, heated, smoky-smelling place.

I heard drums, soft and slow. I smelled stuff burning, green things, dried things. Coarse and acrid and cleansing, stronger than the wood of my soul home fire. Rosemary, juniper, mugwort, something lemony, something coarse, like camphor, and wormwood. White sage. I breathed the herbed smoke in, and Molly’s voice came to me from some long-ago visit in her herb garden behind her house. “Artemisia absinthium, Artemisia ludoviciana—white sage species. Nicotiana tabacum—wild tobacco. Each has a different scent and a different medicinal usage. Some are used in shamanism . . .”

“Aggie’s a shaman,” I said. But it came out all mumbled.

“Drink this, Jane Yellowrock. Drink, Dalonige‘i Digadoli.”

“Holy crap.” I spat and struggled against the taste, pulling away from the hands that held me. “That tastes like something you killed and let rot.”

“Not far from the truth,” Aggie said. “Now, drink, or I’ll hold your nose and force it down your throat.”

I sat up and managed to open my eyes, holding her away from me with the hand that ached and thrummed with pain. A hand that felt both cold and feverish. “Last time someone tried to dose me against my will, I called her a bitch. I think I was fourteen.”

“And did she hold you down and force it into you?”

“Yes. Not fair.”

“Look at your hands, Jane.”

I looked. The fingers of my right hand were traced with red lines and massive purple bruises. The coldness and improbable heat I had sensed in it was aching and heavy, a cold that burned. My left hand was similarly damaged, but not quite so far along—just red lines so far. I looked at my feet and saw the red lines traced there too. “All over?”

“Yes. Now, drink. I may be able to help you. If not, Eli will take you to the hospital.”

“Yunega medicine won’t help me, lisi. They’ll put me in a cage to study.”

“Yes. That is a possibility.”

“This sucks.”

“Yes.”

Feeling wobbly, as if I’d fall over at the slightest brush of wind, I scrutinized Aggie, who sat next to me in the sweathouse, the firelight warming her coppery skin. She had a few more strands of silver in her black hair now than when I’d first met her, but her black eyes were bright and sharp and full of mischief. “Your hair’s getting long,” I said.

“You’re dithering.”

She was right. I held out my good left hand for the fired clay bowl Aggie One Feather held. She passed it to me and I cupped it to my mouth. Drank. It was like drinking something that had died last fall. Like mold and feathers and moss and clay and horrible, unnameable, vile . . . stuff.

“Drink,” Aggie demanded when I tried to lift the bowl from my lips.

I gagged twice, but I got it down. Immediately the world swirled around me, drunkenly, and the light in the dim room brightened, sharp and fierce and painful to my eyes. “Holy crapoly. What’s in that? Eye of newt?”

“Sleep,” Aggie said, taking my injured hand in both of hers.

Pain sparked through me like a brushfire, and I pulled away. My mouth went dry and the sweathouse spun again. “Cold. Hurts,” I said. Sickness spiraled up my throat in an acidic surge. “Need my Beast. Need . . .” Beast? I called.

Deep in my mind I heard panting, the pained gasp of my other self. Foolish kit. We are hurt.

“Aggie?”

“Listen,” Aggie whispered. “Listen to the drums. Let them show you the way to healing.”

The drums were slow, a beat-beat-beat-beat, beat-beat-beat-beat. Slower than my heartbeat. Slower than the soft dripping of water in my cave soul home. Slower than the panting of my Beast. Beat . . . beat . . . beat . . . beat . . .

“Oh . . . crap,” I murmured again on a soft sigh. Or I thought I murmured. Blackness and the smell of smoke overtook me.

Beast’s panting melded with my breathing. Her heartbeat synced with mine. And to the drum beating. The cold that had been wrapping around me eased. My fingers curled into her pelt, gripping the loose flesh beneath. Pulling it around me, rough and coarse and smooth and warm. So warm. I sighed, my breath brushing the longer hairs at my/our jaw, tickling. Warm.