The Spirit Seducer

Chapter 2

My head pounded at Mom's loud command. I scrunched my eyes and gripped my hair in my hands and tugged, trying to release the incredible ache.

"Oh, my . . ." Layla's quiet voice had me turning. I squinted against the pain and the late afternoon sunshine. The puffs of innocuous white clouds had thickened, roiling into patterns and shapes. Not the normal, this-looks-like-a-rabbit shapes from the game I'd played as a child.

No. Something was in the cloud. Something big and dangerous.

Layla gripped my hand, her chest rising and falling too quickly against the back of my arm as I tried to breathe through a wave of dizziness.

"Oh, holy . . . Echo, move!" Layla's voice split through the buzzing in my ears, but I couldn't get my body to cooperate with her command. My legs trembled, and I gaped as the shapes I'd glimpsed solidified and the thick, stormy vapors settled over my yard.

I clutched at my pounding skull, my vision tunneling and dotting. I cringed back, away from the one image left to me: those clouds.

Creatures didn't live in clouds. I had to be hallucinating. I was twenty-one years old and madder than the Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

Layla's fingernails dug into the back of my hand but did little to relieve the persistent stabbing sensation taking place in the roof of my mouth. I needed to focus on Layla and pull back from the abyss my brain had conjured.

"Echo," Layla whispered. "We're running out of time!"

Why would she say that? She couldn't be in my crazed, broken head.

I swung to the left, away from Layla and my mom. Something was there. I could feel it.

From the far edge of the yard, a shaggy-furred coyote trotted forward. This one had yellow eyes. They were unblinking and intense, focused on the porch where my mother stood, frozen.

She looked so small. Alone. She raised her chin, her lips set in a defiant sneer.

Dios mio. This wasn't good.

As the coyote got closer to the house, it swelled, rising onto two legs—human legs covered in some type of leather pants. In the next stride, his back straightened and thickened at the shoulders, stretching and molding into a masculine form. He stepped forward again, his feet clad in beaded, knee-high moccasins. I looked up—way up—into the face of a twenty-foot-tall warrior.

Layla's sharp gasp didn't help ward off the building panic.

"You see him, too?" I breathed. "It's not in my head?"

At my words, the giant turned. His eyes, deep-set and golden, pierced through me, leaving me uncomfortably hot. Thick, brown brows slashed across a high forehead. His nose was long; his nostrils flared as if he'd caught some scent.

His lips were ripe, plump, and surrounded by a grizzled beard. His facial hair was well trimmed and peppered with gray, blond, and bits of dark brown. It looked soft. I wanted to run my fingers over it. I managed to rip my gaze from his perfect features.

"How . . . Oh, my God. He was a coyote."

"No," Layla said. "He is Coyote."

It took me a moment to catch on. "The god?" I squeaked.

"The one and only," she muttered.

Coyote, the trickster, prankster, god of sensuality. I knew this from all the library books I'd read in my younger days, and later, from textbooks I'd studied. But my mom had the best collection of literature on the gods—rare, old, hand-printed tomes she said priests had transcribed hundreds of years before.