shape,” Occam warned, “even when you start to feel better. We’re in the null room. I don’t know what skinwalker magics, death and decay, and a null working might result in. You could end up with three legs and a wing.”
FireWind closed his eyes and shivered with what looked like pain.
Occam shifted his eyes to me. They were glowing softly yellow, which I found odd since we were in a null room. “What’s wrong with your tree?” he asked.
I looked down at the potted plant, which I was still holding, and said, “It didn’t like the death and decay energies.”
“Join the club.” Occam pulled his chair closer to mine and sat. He put the pot on the floor, took my hands, and absentmindedly massaged my cold fingers as we watched FireWind. “I really shoulda brought in that bag of sandwiches.”
“How can you stand the stench enough to want to eat?”
He shrugged. “Cat.”
* * *
* * *
Nearly an hour later FireWind’s breathing had evened out and slowed to what looked like normal for a big dog. Occam was satisfied with FireWind’s pupils and his heart rate, and he was awake and no longer whining in pain, so that seemed good. But he looked exhausted and his limbs were quivering as if he’d been hit with an electric current.
“You ready to change shape, boss man?” Occam asked him. FireWind looked at the door. Occam tapped and T. Laine opened it, one hand moving unconsciously in a seeing working.
“Clear,” she said.
Occam carried the St. Bernard outside, into the shadows, where he laid the big dog on the grass. Curious, not knowing what to expect, I followed. FireWind closed his eyes, and . . . things happened. A cloud of glowing grayish mist seemed to lift from his furry coat and swirled slowly around him. The mist was shot through with darker bits of something, but it was hard to see, impossible to focus on. It had to be some kind of magical energies. I stuck my fingers into the Soulwood soil, but that didn’t help me any. Occam had no trouble seeing the magics, however, his eyes roving over FireWind and inspecting the air around him.
I heard a sharp snap that echoed off the nearby house. FireWind, draped in shadows and hidden by the silver mist, panted again. He began to re-form out of the St. Bernard. His bones cracked and snapped and he whined and grunted, breathing faster, though, despite the snapping bones, the sounds didn’t sound like agony, more like hard exertion. However, it looked excruciating. FireWind had been a skinwalker for around a hundred seventy years, and he had shifted shape all that time. I wanted to turn away because it was too horrible to watch. But it was a teaching and a learning and something I needed to see, even though it hurt.
Eventually, after a good ten minutes, FireWind was human, on the ground in the fetal position, naked, his black hair like a veil over him. He looked skinnier than he had before, the muscles clearly defined, his cheeks and jaw and prominent nose sharp in a spare face. Naked glory.
“Not as good as bison roasted over a fire at night, but I’ll take it,” FireWind said, beginning to uncurl. I left for the house, feeling as if I had just witnessed something spiritual and wonderful and terrifying and maybe even holy—though it was a very different form of holy from that preached by the church.
Back inside, I told T. Laine the boss was human, opened the foot-long roast beef sandwich, and spread the paper wrapping on the island countertop. I poured a glass of water, which I placed by the sandwich. It was busywork while I considered what I’d seen. When FireWind and Occam entered, FireWind was dressed, down to the polished leather dress shoes I had put in the expandable pouch. His hair was loose and fell down to his hips, a lustrous wash of black, darker than the night. I wondered what would happen if he cut his hair. Would he shift back with cut hair? If it was all DNA, how did his body know? Why didn’t he come back with fingernails two feet long or hair that was no more than a buzz of black roots? Still caught up in the thing I had witnessed, I didn’t ask.
Moments later, my boss had inhaled the sandwich much like his dog had inhaled the jerky. When