“But what is it?” I pleaded, almost whining.
“Sorry.” The young man seemed more at ease than he had a moment ago. He leaned back against the tree, snugged under the blanket, and regarded the pages of the message like it had told him something wonderful. Maybe if I was fast enough I could grab it from it. Run away with it just long enough to see what it said. Maybe.
“Well. What’s your name, then?”
He offered half a grin. “Can’t tell you that, either.”
A key from fifty years ago. A safe-deposit box from ten years ago. A guy who wasn’t born yet in the first case and would have been just a teenager in the second, and certainly not living anywhere near where the postcard had marked his location . . . “None of this makes sense. It’s not, like, time travel—”
“I’ll say this much,” the were-coyote said. “Mr. Crow sends his regards.”
I fumed. Clenched my hands into fists and set my jaw. I wanted to yell. “And who is Mr. Crow?”
He just grinned, for all the world like a coyote yipping in mockery.
I glared a challenge. “My Wolf could have totally taken you, if she’d wanted to.”
“I’m sure she would,” Coyote said, grinning.
“Kitty, we should go,” Cormac said.
But I hadn’t gotten the whole story. I wanted to know. I said, “My pack runs in the foothills south of Boulder. You know, if you ever want to come visit.”
“Maybe I will. But he’s right, you should get going.”
Cormac was already walking away. In the end, I knew a wall when I saw one. And this guy . . . he had a big story, I could tell. As much as him not telling me might drive me crazy, I couldn’t do much about it. So I followed Cormac back to the tiny cabin, found my shoes, and we left.
We spent the drive back in silence, at least until we hit I-70. Returning to the reality of big highways and traffic seemed to break a spell.
“It’s not time travel,” he said, abruptly.
“No,” I confirmed. “It’s not time travel, because if time travel existed, then it would always already exist and would never not exist and we would know about it.”
He stared at me. “I don’t think I understood a word of what you just said.”
“It’s not time travel,” I reiterated.
“So what was it?”
“Coyote and Crow,” I said softly. “Tricksters. We’re in someone else’s story.”
He tilted his head, as if listening. Amelia, explaining to him, maybe. “It’s probably for the best we don’t know more,” he said finally.
“Probably, yeah.”
“It’s probably messy. Messier.”
“Yeah.”
“We don’t really want to know.”
“That’s right.”
“Goddammit,” he muttered.
We stared ahead, driving away from the westering sun.
Sealskin