feather is a sign that we must work ceremony together.” But she didn’t sound too happy about it.
She went on. “Aggie One Feather and her mother have led you through many ceremonies and I am not certain that you can be healed. It is possible that you have walked a path into death for so long that you are no longer able to find a way to life, to healing, to Full Circle. But I will guide you as well as I am able.”
“Thank you, Lisi,” I said.
She frowned harder. “At least you have learned humility. We will start with masks.” She indicated my pelted body.
“I am willing, Lisi.”
She made a strange, ruminative sound. “Today we will talk about this mask and your totem and your guide.” She blew through her nose again, but not so hard, not so full of negativity. “You wear a mask, the mask that all others would see as the face of a monster. Two questions. Why do you not conform more to human shape? And how do you see yourself?”
“I’m dying in my human form,” I said, touching my face. It was pelted and slightly numb from the cold. “I was stupid and that stupidity gave me cancer.”
“Stupid or foolish?”
“Probably a lot of both. I’ve spent my life taking chances. That resulted in some spectacular wins and some really bad losses.”
Savannah was opening a packet of dried herbs and said nothing, so I went on.
“My skinwalker magics are my own. My . . . my totem, what I call my spirit animal, brought magics of her own,” I said, speaking of Beast without naming her. “She is a real and tangible presence inside me.”
Walkingstick didn’t disagree with my words, but I could tell she disagreed in principle. I thought about telling her that I was two-souled but let it go. If she asked, I’d tell. Maybe.
I said, “There are things I can’t talk about, because they aren’t my secrets to tell, but suffice it to say, I fought a coven of black magic witches, and their magic . . . I guess you could say it pierced me. It left a trace of darkness inside me. It’s been there for something like three years. And then, after I met rainbow dragons called arcenciels, I was given the ability to timewalk by an angel of the light, one called Hayyel.”
Savannah paused in pinching out bits of dried herbs and dropping them into a mortar for grinding, her fingers unmoving. “Dragons?” Her voice went up in pitch. “Angel? Timewalk?”
“Yeah. I can stop time. I can move outside of time. But every time I do, every time I did, I ripped my DNA. It’s shredded and doubled. When I look at my genetic structure, instead of a double helix, I see four strands. The magics and cancer that are tangled up in my human middle are in the shape of a star—a witch’s pentagram. I’m a mess. So yeah. I’m dying in my human form. I just discovered that I’m not dying in my half-form or my Beast form, so I’m staying in them for now.”
“The angel . . . You saw this being? In person? Face-to-face?”
“Yes, Lisi.”
She was silent for a while, adding herbs, but more slowly, and hesitant, as if she had lost her place. I wondered if she was a Christian or a pagan or a . . . whatever. Angels weren’t necessarily considered real by all religions. She might now think I was concussed or nutso in addition to being a monster. Not a good combo.
“You can move back in time,” she clarified. Not as if she didn’t believe me, which was odd enough, but in a hopeful tone. Her eyes lifted from her own fingers to my face, hers filled with fear and hope and grief. “You can change things that happened in the past.” Her words were laden with import, with dread and apprehension and agitation.
She saw the answer in my face, and her eyes went wider, then unfocused, her breathing shallow and fast. Her fear morphed into something different, and the scent of excitement erupted from her pores. This woman would go back into the past no matter the cost, if she could save someone, a particular loved one, who had suffered an injury or who had died unexpectedly. I nodded slowly. “There’s a high price for timewalking. And sometimes you only make things worse.”
Savannah dropped her eyes again. Her voice was without emotion when she said, “My daughter was