“Jane?”

I ignored the warning question in Jo’s tone. The smell of spiders hit the wind. Laz laughed at whatever he saw in my eyes, and suddenly he smelled like many animals all at once. Skinwalker? I lifted the blade that had pierced his neck and sniffed the traces of his blood on the steel edge. No. Not skinwalker, Beast thought at me. I do not know what it is.

“I don’t know what you are,” I said, stealing Beast’s line, my pitch still half-growl, “but you stink something not-quite-right. And whatever you are, Beast really wants to gut you now and be done with it all.”

“What does he smell like,” Jo asked carefully.

“Like wolf and spiders and snakes. And now like raccoons and nutria and swamp water full of crawly things. He can change his scent at will and he’s playing with us.”

Jo said, “Jane, look, he—” She stopped, exhaled noisily, then muttered, “Look, let me try something, okay? I’m a shaman, right? You’re okay with that?” She waited an instant for me to nod, then nodded in return and said “Keep your nose open.”

Her eyes went gold as she spoke. Mine were gold all the time. Hers were green most of the time, but I could practically smell her pulling power down, and with the pull came the color change.

And a scent change. It was like she was pulling Beast, or something like Beast, into her. She smelled of snakes, all of a sudden, and then of coyotes, and for half a second I even got an avian smell off her. Not a bird I knew. Something huge. Something dangerous. Her skin shivered a little, but she didn’t change into any of the things I smelled. They were still part of her, right under the skin.

After a minute she let the magic go and wheezed a bit. “Okay, that was horrible. I don’t usually do that. But—look, did my scent change?”