I wondered how old the man I’d killed when I shot Juan Flores’s dog had been.

Coyote leaned forward, and whispered into my ear, “When it looks like a mortal creature, the mortal flesh encompasses the tibicena and may be killed as any mortal creature. When it is wrapped in the tibicena’s form, it cannot be harmed by mundane means.”

And when he said the word “tibicena,” the head of the walking stick sharpened into the blade of a spear. My eyesight sharpened, too, and I saw that there was a third layer I had not been able to distinguish before. Surrounding each dog was a shadow that grew more solid as my hand clenched tighter on Lugh’s walking stick, a shadow that was large and hairy with red eyes, as in the story Kyle had told. Huge—polar-bear huge. Four or five times as big as any werewolf I’d ever seen. Gradually the other, smaller forms disappeared inside the giant dogs—both of whom were looking directly at me.

Coyote slipped back, grabbed my ankle, and dragged me backward, out from under the hedge like I was a rabbit he’d caught. He dropped my ankle, grabbed my elbow, and hauled me to my feet. Before I could catch my balance, he all but threw me down the cliff face we’d come up. I managed to stay on my feet, using the bottoms of my shoes like skis and leaning my weight back on the walking stick for balance in a mockery of glissading.

As a kid, glissading down steep, snow-covered mountain slopes had been an upgrade in difficulty and fun to simply sledding. “Fun” wasn’t a term I applied to glissading down a cliff that had no snow for padding in case of accident and using an ancient artifact that might break—and wasn’t that a lovely thought? I had a pretty good idea about what would happen when an old fae artifact was destroyed. At least the spearhead had returned to its more usual form, so I wasn’t likely to stab myself with it, too.

I didn’t fall until I was almost at the bottom. So when I rolled, I hit that improbably soft ground and emerged not much worse for wear. Gary landed on his feet beside me, and on the other side, Coyote grabbed my arm—exactly where he’d grabbed me before so I was sure to have bruises—and hauled me to my feet, again.

“Run,” he said.

Gary grabbed my hand and pelted down the path, pulling me in his wake. The path still had its cover of greenery, but now the ceiling of leaf and stem was tall enough for us to stand upright in.