Moonburn by Alisa Sheckley

my front lawn just the other night,” Jeromesaid. “Thought I was losing my mind, because I couldn’t figure if it was human or animal.”
    “Surely, that could just have been a therian,” said Malachy to the older man. Red raised his eyebrows inquiringly, so Mal elaborated, “a shapeshifter?”
    Jerome pulled himself up in his chair. “Don’t you think I know what a shapeshifter looks like? What am I, a greenhorn? It wasn’t one thing or the other.” Kayla came by with his check and he pulled out his wallet.
    “Shifters and wereanimals have a fair amount of human in them. I don’t think that what I saw had much human about it,” Red said. “But I do think it was dual-natured. Like one of those inkblots you look at, and one way it’s a fox, and the other way it’s a man.”
    “Like a Rorschach test? But if it was a spirit shadow thing, how did it do this?” I pointed at the wound I’d just bandaged shut, and Red hesitated.
    “It’s only a spirit thing in the spirit world,” said Red. “It’s in our world now.” Red absently peeled the label off his beer. “And there’s a lot more where that one came from.”
    I leaned forward. “What do you mean?”
    “Those new houses up on Old Scolder Mountain cut across a sacred hunting ground. For as long as anyone can remember, there’s been no man-made roads up there—only animal trails, and spirit pathways. You know what happens when you build a road over a corridor that animals use on their migrations?”
    Jerome stood up and put Kayla’s tip on the table. “Sure. You get a lot of moose and bear coming into town.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s what we’re going to get. Except it won’t be a moose. It’ll be the great-granddaddy of all mooses.”
    I resisted the urge to tell him that the correct plural of moose is moose. At that moment, Jerome said good-byeand Kayla arrived with our dinners, and there was a pause in the conversation as she served each of us.
    “Just let me know if there’s anything you want,” she said, looking at me.
    Red reassured her that we would and she finally left us in peace.
    “You know, Doc, that girl wants to be your friend,” he said, picking up his burger.
    “Don’t even go there.” I stabbed a piece of pasta, and looked up. “And don’t make this about me being the bad guy.”
    “Of course you aren’t the bad guy, but what I can’t figure is why you seem more riled up about her than about Magda. I mean—” He broke off when I pointed the tines of my fork at him.
    “Red? Drop it. Unless you have some special reason for caring about Kayla so much.” There was no way I could explain my antipathy for Kayla. Maybe the problem was that she reminded me of every popular girl who had ever made my life hell back in high school and college. Or possibly it was just safer to dislike her than it was Magda, since she didn’t have the ability to tear my throat out. In any case, I didn’t feel like examining it too closely.
    “Hang on a moment, Doc, all I was saying was—”
    “I suggest you do as Abra suggests,” Malachy interrupted, “or you’ll wind up with a set of fork punctures to go with your bite marks.” Taking out his little vial of mystery pills, Mal reached for a glass of water. “Now, you said before that the animals in the old Native American stories were really manitous, correct?”
    “Uh huh.”
    “Well, as I recall, Raven and Bear and Coyote and the others were always hungry.” Malachy shook two capsules out onto his palm. “If that turns out to be accurate,then what do spiritual beings eat when they visit the physical world?”
    I didn’t know the answer to that, but Red did. “Sacrifice,” he said simply.
    Sometimes I forget that Red isn’t just a simple, good old boy—that’s one of his guises, but not the only one.
    None of us was terribly hungry after that. Kayla asked us if anything was wrong when she took our plates away, and I let Red assure her that the food had been