tiptoe after dark

@Feather or @Lucy , whichever you prefer! And probably any Coyote Gang folks or desert wanderers. :)

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Shiloh didn’t wish to turn out like the Cholla Burr Coyote, but he’d been eying a cluster of squat, spineless cacti for the better part of the evening. He was pretty sure the spines didn’t pop out like cat claws, but he watched and waited to be sure. Then, when the growling of his belly became too intense, he prodded at one with the shiny stick, then his paw, then the end of his nose. Nothing happened, so he snatched one of the little round succulents and skittered a short distance away with it. After dropping it on the sand, he returned for his shiny stick, then trotted back to his plucked cactus.

Both would not fit in his mouth, so he pawed the cactus and chased after it, until finally he was hunkered in some scrubby grass and the knife was set neatly at his side. He held the cactus in his paws and chewed it, lips curling back when the bitterness hit. But he persisted, and ate this cactus, then another, then a third, then he tilted his head back and watched strangely colored clouds rolling in to cover the moon.

And everything.

The oasis stretched away — he watched it flee into the far distance with his ears flat against his head. His tail curled between his ankles and he trotted back toward the knife, but for the life of him he couldn’t find the grass he’d been resting in. His nose quivered excitably, but not even the olfactory world made sense. It smelled like storm and winter and rain and bear and coyote den all at once, and were his legs becoming shorter?

Shiloh spun in a circle, then flattened himself to the sand with a soft whine.

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They spent a lot of time together — Kincaid needed Shiloh to sleep, now. Not just to get him there, but to keep him under, too. And to curl up against when something roused him. But they were well into the shoulder hours, when most of the oasis' residents woke and went about their business. Kincaid needed to hunt, for example, but instead he sought his lover.

“Hey, wildflower,” he called when he had tracked him down, and was graded with the rare sight of Shiloh without a stick in his mouth. It must've been hidden somewhere, he thought, but it was really none of his concern. Shiloh was, especially when he was cowering like the great auk was coming down carry him away.

“Shy?” he said as he moved closer, trying to nose him out of his anxious crouch.

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Up to you if he got skin or just hairs!

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The coyote put his chin close to the sand and swung his head one way, then the other, then spun around again with a short snarl without quite lifting his belly off the ground. He couldn’t put a paw on them, but he got the feeling he was pursued and hunted by a number of huge, white-faced owls. He could only see one of them clearly, when he lifted his eyes toward the east where the bold face of the moon looked down over the desert.

He heard Wildflower, and that was him, and the voice was Kincaid, but when he looked at him in the near distance he was less sure. It was better to hide and wait, he thought, so he slouched completely to the sand and sprawled his limbs to get as close to the earth as possible. From the wolf’s vantage, this was a bizarre looking posture, as if he’d been crushed flat like an insect with his legs stuck out all around him.

The whites of his eyes showed as he raised his gaze at Kincaid, with even his ears pressed down against his skull. He held his breath when the shadowy figure bent over him, and didn’t seem conscious of it when his tail began to wag. Then his wolf’s nose was probing at his ribs and he jerked violently, teeth snapping closed on the scruffy fur of his neck before the proximity forced him to smell that this was Kincaid.

Then Shiloh was on his feet again in an instant, whimpering an apology while he tried to slot himself underneath Kincaid’s long legs. If he was permitted this invasion of personal space, he stuck his head up against his chest between his forelegs, ears flattened against the underside of his body.

“I’m sorry,” he said gently, worried that this transgression would send his wolf loping off into the night without him. He didn’t think he could keep up now that his legs were so short. “I didn’t mean to — I thought you were one of the owls. Did I hurt you?”

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First cowering, and then scuttling around like a beetle — Kincaid was pretty sure he knew what was going on before he even got to the other canid. So perhaps he should have known better than to go jabbing his nose into things. He was met with bared teeth, and the pair clashed briefly before Shiloh seemed to get ahold of himself.

He was allowed to serry up underneath him, where a few drops of blood dripped from underneath Kincaid's jaw onto the tip of Shiloh's muzzle. He had hurt him, but it would scab over soon. Kincaid had already forgotten, too busy worrying over the state of his coyote.

“I'll protect you from the owls,” said Kincaid, ducking his head to clean up Shiloh's face. “You got into somethin', huh? Don't seem like it's treatin' you too well.” But he thought he could do something about that.

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The coyote was awfully sorry, especially when a coppery drop redder even than Lucy's red something splattered on his snout. He twitched his nose and tried once to lick it away, but then turned his focus back to Kincaid and the nonexistent owls.

Owls had not been an issue for Shiloh since he was younger, and he didn't remember anything specific. Just a healthy sense of avoidance, amplified now into genuine terror. He was not a coward, though; just equipped with a knack for self preservation he shared with the rest of his kind. He wouldn't dart off and leave Kincaid to the owls, even though he didn't think they could pluck an entire wolf off the ground. They were still unpleasant, moon-faced and circling up above like vultures would in the heat of the sun.

“No,” he insisted, then went silent to reflect on the sensation of having his face licked clean. It didn't feel like it ordinarily did, but like something wet and hot was wrapping around him, primed to drag him into the sand. He realized for the first time since stepping foot in the sand that he had not been born in a desert. Then he knew. He changed his response to a guilty, “...Yes.” Shiloh didn't appreciate feeling so witless. There was nothing to be done for it, now, however, because he couldn't quite wrap his head around what was happening. Did the cactus snack summon the owls, or had he contracted the same disease he just vaguely recalled watching some other coyote succumb to? It'd been ugly before he finally died. Muscle spasms, frothy jaw hanging open, droopy ears. Hallucinations.

“I ate plants.” (So that was why his love of vegetarian cuisine earned him so many weird looks.)

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“Yeah you did,” Kincaid agreed, vehemently and with the slightest edge of amusement. But it was hard to see any fun in it when poor Shiloh was in such a state; he booped his nose against the coyote's and began trying to scuttle them both along like some kind of armored vehicle — the Popemobile, perhaps, if only the pope rode on the underside like a baby kangaroo, or a spy clinging to the undercarriage of a Brinks van.

Anyway similies aside, it was very weird-looking. He said,

“I know a safe place,” to try and compell Shiloh to cooperate. “I'll show you. Don't worry. I got you, baby.”

His "safe place" was only the space between a few sagebrush clusters, where it felt almost like a den without fully closing them in. Kincaid had to crouch to keep from disturbing the branches above them, but he could still see some stars through the fragrant leaves.

“This alright?” he asked, hoping the danger would not then switch from owls to rabbits, or something equally asinine.

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At least Kincaid didn't sound angry, but Shiloh couldn't shake the feeling he was about to get dragged by the scruff. (He forgot he kinda liked getting dragged by the scruff.) At least he was safe from the birds; he crouched low so his back was flush with Kincaid's chest and belly and sheltered away into the scrub. Any time he slowed down, one of the wolf's feet was there to knock his hind leg and propel him forward again. And there were comforting words, too, to persuade him to hunker down by the sparse bush.

Except it wasn't a tunnel in some bushes; it was circular walls closing in. What kind of place was this? It felt like a trap.

Shiloh plopped down and pawed at his eyes, which he thankfully closed. He still managed to get scratchy sand in them before he gave this up and collapsed on his side, now squinty eyes roaming the inside of the makeshift den.

“It's good,” he said, because he was a polite coyote. But now his eyes hurt, and he wondered if the owls hadn't picked them before they got here. His tail curled up against his belly and his legs tremored, but it was all merely a fear response. His cactus munching hadn't physically harmed him. Shiloh didn't know this, of course, though he had to wonder at Kincaid's nonchalance. “Is it gonna be like this forever?” he couldn't help asking, trying to follow his wolf with his eyes without lifting his head off the packed sand.

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Shiloh didn't seem to like being closed in any more than he did, but moving him had been enough of a chore that Kincaid wasn't in a hurry to do it again. Besides — the red clay beneath them was good for this sort of thing, sometimes.

“Naw,” he said, keeping his own worries and irritation out of his voice so as to keep Shiloh calm. “It's like anything else you eat. It'll come out eventually.” Trying to inject some humor into the situation, Kincaid gave Shiloh's shoulder a gentle get it? sort of nudge. But he did not find it very funny at the moment. Not when he was preoccupied wondering what Shiloh had eaten and why.

“How come you're eatin' plants, huh?” he asked, trying to keep his tone conversational. “Y'sick or somethin'?”

Kincaid didn't know what he'd do, if this was the case. Try and fix it, of course, but sick often meant dead I'm Kincaid's experience. If anything happened to Shiloh. . .

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“I don’t wanna wait that long,” Shiloh confessed without quite whining, apparently failing to realize it was a joke. He cocked his head at an awkward angle so he could squint at the wolf after he was nudged. This was Kincaid, he reminded himself, and tried to ignore the fact he looked like a gigantic owl hunched over him with devil horns in lieu of soft, chewable ears. (And so, so many sharp teeth crowded into his beak.)

Shiloh suspected nothing based upon his wolf’s question. He said, “I like to.” Then, as if it were a great confession that had been weighing on him, he added, “I like eating plants. But I won’t ever eat that plant ever again.”

He dizzily picked his head up, rolled onto his belly, and crawled toward Kincaid in tiny increments. He still had wide, terrified eyes and flattened ears, and his hackles were prickly and raised, but he was pretty sure this was not a demon owl.

He tried to crowd on top of Kincaid’s forepaws and raised his muzzle to lick the bloody spot he’d bitten earlier clean. (That is, if he was permitted to approach bristled up like he was.)

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Kincaid wasn't sure he'd want to, either. He'd occasionally eaten the odd orange flower for a spot of R&R, but this didn't seem like a very good trip.

“Eat some dirt,” he said to Shiloh, sitting up a fraction to dig at the hard packed clay. “It'll help. Not right away, but — it should make things a bit shorter, at least.” He was pretty sure, anyway.

It did not really shock him that Shiloh liked something as strange as eating plants. Maybe it was even a coyote thing — but Kincaid was comfortable assuming it was just a Shiloh thing, and it was weird but it was also endearing.

“Flower-eater,” Kincaid could not help but tease as he warily allowed Shiloh into his space. It was a little nerve-wracking to have an especially frightened and bitey coyote close to his throat, but he relaxed into being cleaned up quickly enough. “We'll set a while and see if you feel any better, and then we can head down to the water for a drink. Maybe get you something real to eat, if all else fails. But don't worry — we'll fix it, angel.”

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It was none of her business, but she was pretty sure the knife was not supposed to be here. It seemed dangerous to leave it someplace where just anyone could pick it up —

So she picked it up, and carried it along the path that Shiloh and Kincaid had taken. He didn't like them, and she thought that Shiloh was rather strange, but they had taken her in and Kincaid had cared for her injured leg, and Lark was friendly with them, so it didn't make sense to make them her enemies. Lucy wasn't sure she knew how to have enemies, anyway.

They were hiding in a cluster of desert sage, speaking in low voices that carried to her all the same. He sneered to himself, but outwardly, Lucy was calm and curious and slightly confused.

“Shiloh?” she said as she dropped the knife, making herself small at the "entrance" to the little bush hideout. It look cozy in there, actually. Lucy missed her old den, and all her brothers and sister and crazy uncle Yossarian. She gave a tiny wag of her brushy tail. “You forgot your knife.”

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This clean-up wasn’t Shiloh’s best work, but he wasn’t running at a hundred percent. After a short while he sprawled himself across the wolf’s forelegs, then craned his neck to lick up a tongueful of clay. He was working at getting this down — it all glued itself to his tongue and none of his scissor-like teeth were much good for chewing — leaning melodramatically against Kincaid’s chest to be consoled,  when Lucy appeared at the entrance.

She did not look like Lucy, but like a wisp of pale smoke. He stopped struggling with the clay to watch her with his tongue hanging, eyes wide and reflective like a pair of moons.

Then he struggled up onto his paws, hind legs slouchy at first. His hackles were beginning to flatten, but still arched unmistakably as he took a few steps closer to her. The wag of her white tail looked like cometails; it was mesmerizing.

Managing to shut his mouth, he marvelled at the gritty, earthy taste as he tried to approach her. All he seemed to want was to stick his nose into the fur between her shoulder-blades, which assured him the smoke was Lucy and not something even more haunted. Shiloh sat on his haunches without meaning to, and picked himself back up again.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been poisoned,” he said casually in the way of explanation, then pawed at the knife as if it were a trick and she might snatch it back again. “But if I don’t die, I’ll owe you.”

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The arrival of Lucy was instantly enough to set Kincaid's teeth on edge. He flashed a sliver of them at her in warning, but then seemed more concerned by Shiloh as he crept toward her. He half-rose, ready to snatch the coyote back if he proved as dangerous to her as he had been to him, but thankfully, Shiloh behaved himself.

“Thanks, Luce,” said Kincaid, amused in spite of himself by Shiloh's estimation of the situation. “He'll be just fine.”

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Lucy likewise tensed, made nervous both by Shiloh's strange behavior and by Kincaid's tense demeanor. But she made herself small and easy to sniff, and then tucked her head down close to her body when the knife was pawed away from her.

“Poisoned,” she repeated, unfamiliar with the concept until the gunslinger elaborated. “Oh,” she said with deep concern, but since no one else (gunslinger included) seemed to think it was a big deal, she didn't fly into a panic, either. Instead, she peered into the hidey-hole of bushes and began creeping inside along with them, ready to turn tail and flee if either male showed signs of being territorial over the little hovel.

“My uncle Yossarian ate a toad once that made him see little tiny mushroom people all over the place,” she told them as she poked her skinny paws around, trying to make room for herself in the cuddle puddle. “Can you see strange things?”

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Shiloh’s sniffer wasn’t working at its usual speed — or maybe the bandwidth carrying its data to his pea brain was throttled by the effects of his snack. His nose and audible sniffs froze when Lucy began to move, then there was a sliver of his teeth. But he was looking out, away from her, through the arch of the brush. After a few moments, his ears turned flat and pinched close together, rabbitlike, and he followed with his uncoordinated, push-puppet-on-the-fritz gait.

He ended up slumping onto her delicate operation, pinning her to Kincaid’s side if she didn’t finagle herself out of the way in time.

“Yes,” he answered, looking right at her. So closely, in fact, he had to angle his muzzle downward. Fortunately, that did not last long. Soon he tilted his head back, ears touching the fur on his shoulders, and left his jaw slack as he contemplated all the things he could see. Lucy was a strange thing, for starters, but so was Kincaid, and, he found when he looked down at his own paws, which he turned sideways to inspect the bottoms of, so was he.

“What happened to Uncle Yossarian?”

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Lucy seemed uncertain about being squished for a moment, but once she rearranged her legs it was quite comfortable, and so she didn't try to escape. She did slick her ears back when Shiloh's face came too close to hers, because now she could smell that Kincaid was bleeding, and the blood was in Shiloh's mouth — but everyone else seemed to be relaxing, so she made herself do the same.

She said, “I was very small. Uncle Yossarian was supposed to be watching us while my mother and father hunted. We were all in the den, but he was concerned that the blue men might try to take us. So he took us from the den, and one of my brothers was taken by the night bird, Xotchi, and another drowned in the canyon waters that he wanted us to cross. When my mother returned, he was shunned for sixty days and sixty nights, because she said that this is how long she carried us in her womb.”

She licked her lips, remembering her mother's great wrath, and settled down deeper into the wolf-and-sage den. “But he recovered. From the — the poisoning and from being shunned. He did it many more times, but we knew not to follow him after that.”

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Shiloh laid his knife down on his paws, then listened to Lucy with one ear drooped to the side. He seemed to forget about the shiny stick just moments later, when he moved his paws in agitation and placed them on top of it instead. She said the blue men, but he did not think about mushroom people — he thought of blue coyotes, swirling up around one another, surging up to pluck pups from their dens.

He dropped his chin down to the flat top of the blade and put his paws on his muzzle, ears pinching close together. There was no white water in his memory but he knew the hushed swoop of owl wings in the dark, and hunkering down just like this in a row. The gentle brush of feathers and the cold nothing left behind, and a pup squealing off into the night.

“It’s hard,” he said after a moment, “to keep pups alive once they’re on the outside.” Lucy’s mother shouldn’t have counted the time she carried them, in Shiloh’s unqualified opinion, because that was the easy time.

So, that was why there were always so many in the beginning. It was foolish to have decided on just one, but he couldn’t do much better than that, and he’d already promised.

He gave the dusty ground a lick, remembering Kincaid’s advice, but became distracted again by Lucy. He gave her a rude sniff on the cheek before casually going to town cleaning one of his hallucinated, gigantic paws.

“You can have pups, soon,” he told the white coyote.

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Kincaid did not protest their boys' night being crashed. Lucy was not really his type — she was a bit to delicate and compliant to make the cut — but she belonged to Shiloh, and that meant she was okay in his book.

When she collapsed against him, he cleaned behind her ears with a few perfunctory licks, and then returned his attention to preening at Shiloh between his shoulder blades. Her story washed over him, the same one he'd heard a thousand times with a few surprise twists and add-ons. It seemed that coyotes had the same troubles as wolves, which only made sense — but he wondered where the prejudice came from, if they were really just the same.

His ears pricked when Shiloh turned conversation to Lucy's burgeoning fertility. He, too, gave her a cursory sniff, and beneath the plain-jane coyote scent layered overtop his own and Shiloh's, he thought he could detect what the other coyote was talking about. At this fledgling stage, it garnered little interest in the male.

“How old are you, anyway?” he asked, because she was very small and therefore very young in his eyes. But she did not smell terribly young. He thought she must be nearly two, on second thought.

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Lucy did not mind being sniffed, but the gunslinger seemed to mind it a great deal. She had not been uncomfortable before, but his irritation began to put her on edge. “Yes,” she replied, halting, as if she was not sure whether or not she wanted to own up to the fact. Really, she was just distracted by the gunslinger, who thought it a terrible rude thing to say.

To Kincaid, she said, “I am a year old.” This was old enough, for a coyote. She had seen her first estrus at nine months old, and her mother and her sisters had sat with her in the den to keep her from her uncle, and they had shared stories and sung songs until it had passed.

A cold sorrow burrowed itself in her breast when she realized she would have to pass her next cycle alone. Or, perhaps, with Lark and Oryx and Aplomado. She needed to make friends, she knew. More friends than Shiloh and Kincaid.

“It was my birthday,” she said to the two males. “It was a year from the day I was born, when I came here.”

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Lucy was awfully young, but it could work. She had taught him the art of the deal, and now he needed her help. His interest in her was not immediate nor pressing, but now the gears were turning. He would simply have to guard her like he guarded the knife — but better, because she had just returned it to him. But it was the cacti. It wasn’t like he was so irresponsible he couldn’t even look after himself.

The effects were beginning to taper off, anyway, and it became easier to buy that he really was talking with Lucy and Kincaid. That was cozier than a pair of demonic entities, so his hackles began to settle even as Kincaid groomed him.

“Why did you come here?” he wanted to know. “Alone.”

He’d come here alone, but he didn’t remember why. He also didn’t remember his birthday, or how many winters he’d seen. It felt like many — like ten times as many as tis coyote body had experienced — but even if he’d had fingers, he wouldn’t have been able to put one on it.

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This question made the young coyote turn her head to peer at Shiloh, speculative and searching. The gunslinger had warned her to be careful and secretive with this information, but to subtly advertise that she knew something — in this way, he said, they could convince others to tell them their secrets, and perhaps find out more about their own situation in the process.

“I was never alone,” she said after a moment of soul-searching, allowing the gunslinger to feed her her lines. “I came with company. The same company I keep, now.” Which could just mean Shiloh, but of course, if he had his own secret gunslinger, he would understand something else entirely.

And, looking into his eyes, the gunslinger thought he saw a flash of something; something desperately familiar and unknowable in turns. But of course, Lucy was there to point out that Shiloh was quite handsome — she had never seen a coyote with such blue, blue eyes before.

“When I came, it was very sudden,” she went on, this time speaking her own words. “I was in one place — my home — and then another. Here. I was in one place and I turned my head to the side, and I was in another, and I thought that if I looked behind me, I would still see my mother and my sister, but I looked behind me and they were not there. I remember that I stumbled, and when I stood again, everything had changed. I came to the water and you found me there. And I have been here ever since. Even when I turn my head, all I see is you and you.”

She laid her head on her paws, silver eyes flashing whalebone at the edges to look up at her two companions.

“How did you come to this place?” she asked them.

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A year! That was much younger than Kincaid would have guessed. Perhaps he was reading her scent all wrong — he was not yet adept at interpreting coyote scents — or perhaps it was Lark who was soon to come into her time, and Lucy had merely been close with her earlier that day. Either way, the subject soon passed, and Lucy was telling them a very strange and yet very familiar tale.

He said, “The same way,” in a quiet, thoughtful voice, “I was in one place and then another. And when I got lonely, I cried — and Shiloh answered. I summoned him.” The last words were said with no small amount of possessive self-importance. “Maybe we summoned you, too.”

Lucy seemed to accept this, and Kincaid was quite pleased. He laid his head across them both, chin tucked over Shiloh's shoulders and throat stretched across Lucy's back. Whatever had happened, they were here together, now.

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Unfortunately, Shiloh had no gunslinger. He had something going on, but he couldn’t put his paw on it. It wasn’t feeding him any scripts — wasn’t talking to him at all. Just making him sort of hungry and crazy and magnetically attracted to Kincaid. He also had cactus madness, which was detectable in his huge black pupils that swallowed the blue of his eyes to flimsy little rings.

The cactus problem made Lucy’s explanation incredibly difficult to follow. He found himself looking around the inside of the enclosed space, albeit with minimal moving of his head.

And it was the same for Kincaid — except he put his story more simply, and it encompassed the first real memory Shiloh had of this place, too.

“Kin brought me here,” he agreed after a long lull. Then, as if just then realizing Kincaid’s power, he added, “Me, and the shiny stick.” Then he yawned and his maw was impossibly wide and toothy before everything settled back into its more placid and nonthreatening place. His voice was sleepy when he reminded Lucy, “And you came with the red something.” As rattly as his little coyote brain was, even Shiloh could piece together they must have gotten these Somethings from Somewhere Else.

He closed his eyes tight and breathed in deep — and like Lucy had said, this world was nothing but them. Them, and all the other small-of-body, big-of-ears folk Kincaid ran with.

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