Selena was surprised to see Snake-Eater take a step back from the dark-feathered spirit. Then he seemed to gather himself, and the fire cast a saurian shadow behind him. “Elsewhere, you might be stop me,” he said. “But this is my home ground, my territory, not yours, for all you might pass overhead. In this place, I am still stronger than you all combined.”
“Barely,” said the striped god.
“But enough.”
Hawk stirred. “There is no point fighting a battle with a foregone conclusion. Then, if that is all—”
“I will speak,” said a small voice.
The spirits drew back from a strange person, no larger than a child, who matched the voice. They were very pale, with soft, bloated flesh and hands, and when Selena gazed into their face, she seemed to see too many eyes. Her instinct was to recoil. There was something dreadful and alien about that face, something that went directly to her spine and whisperedenemy, like the buzz of a rattlesnake’s rattle.
And yet Old Man Rattlesnake was, for a moment, her ally, and so was ...
“Scorpion?” asked Ocotillo.
“Defending a human?” Snake-Eater seemed genuinely nonplussed. “They kill your kind whenever you meet. It is the way of things.”
“This one has not,” said Scorpion, in that small venomous voice. From the way they peered around, Selena thought that they were nearly blind, despite their many eyes. “And you, Snake-Eater, have eaten many of my kind, have you not?”
“It is the way of things,” Snake-Eater said again.
“If a human can change the way of things, perhaps so can we.”
Snake-Eater stamped the ground and his shadow grew. “You are a small god,” he said. “You will not be enough either.”
Scorpion smiled gently at him. “If I am so small,” they said, “come closer.”
Yellow Dog began to laugh. So did DJ Raven. Old Man Rattlesnake smiled, showing white gums.
This can’t be working,Selena thought.The god of scorpions can’t be helping me just because I kept taking those scorpions outside instead of squashing them.
“Well?” said Hawk, her golden eyes fixed on Snake-Eater. “Now what?”
With an inarticulate cry, Snake-Eater seemed to spin in place, shedding even the appearance of humanity. What remained was all sharp points and savage claws, streaked with red and blue, a distillation of bottomless hunger and blinding speed.
The spirit lunged toward Selena. Before she even had time to register it, other spirits pushed between them, one sinuous and streaked with lightning bolts, one sending long green tendrils up from the ground, and the largest by far, arching over all of them on long black wings.
Is this what they truly look like? Were they all just appearing human for my benefit? Or was my mind doing something so I could understand them at all?
Only Yellow Dog seemed to retain his own shape. He bounded into the fray, barking, and plunged his muzzle into Snake-Eater’s shadow. Selena put her hands over her mouth.
It was impossible to tell what was happening within the roiling mass of spirits. Selena saw claws pierce scaled flesh, saw Yellow Dog’s teeth ripping out feathers, saw beaks clashing like swords.
With a bark of her own, Copper charged. Selena snatched for her collar too late. “No—!” The black dog joined the yellow one, darting in and out, teeth snapping. Selena would have flung herself after, but she lacked sharp teeth or claws and even Grandma Billy’s shotgun had vanished or been lost somewhere on the way to the spirit world.
“She chooses to fight for you in her own way,” a voice said in her ear. “Would you ask strangers to fight for you, but deny your friends?”
“I don’t want her to get hurt. I don’t wantanyof them to get hurt!”
“Would you bear her hurts if you could?”
“Yes, of course!”
A soft, maternal chuckle. “Then grant her the same thing. You cannot stop others from loving you, you know, or from being noble about it.”
Selena tore her eyes away from the melee to see who was talking. It was a woman, late middle-aged, and although there was nothing overtly inhuman about her, Selena had seen features like hers stamped across the face of a friend.
“Are you Father Aguirre’s mother?”
