"Ms. Corvallis." I rubbed a finger over my eye. I hadn't been smart enough to take my contacts out at the apartment. Three hours of staring out the window and forgetting to blink made me wish I had. Glasses were more forgiving of that behavior. "If I were up here on police business I'd be here with my partner, not friends. Call Captain Morrison, if you like. I'm here on my own."
"That doesn't mean you're not where the story is, Detective. I look forward to seeing more of you soon." She walked away, leaving me with an increasing pit of dread in my tummy.
Coyote caught up to me, carrying his own bag, but not, I noticed, mine. "Cute. Who is she?"
"The devil."
"Really. I thought the devil would be taller." He jogged into the lodge after Corvallis. I bent, scooped up a handful of snow, and caught him in the back of the head with it just before the doors closed behind him.
Gary, who was carrying my bag, stopped at my side. "What's the deal, Jo?"
"Nothing, it's just that woman is going to make this a lot more complicated."
His bushy eyebrows went up and he glanced after Coyote. I don't know how I knew he was looking at Coyote and not Corvallis, but I did. "Is that a that woman like a woman means it, or like a cop means it?"
I took my bag from him as an excuse to give him a hard, considering look. "Whoever said men don't understand women obviously never met you. It was a cop that woman. I don't care if Coyote thinks she's cute. She is cute. She's also going to get herself killed."
"Nah. She ain't the outdoorsy type." Gary, clearly satisfied with his line of reasoning, marched into the lodge. I stared after him, then, because there was nothing else I could do, shrugged assent and followed him.
Corvallis was at the front desk, trying to flirt with Coyote, who arched an eyebrow at me over her head. She looked to see who he was making eyes at, and her smile went flat. It went flatter still when I gave my name and the desk attendant pulled up our reservations. I saw no reason at all to tell Corvallis they'd been made from the phone on the drive down. Better to let her think we'd had them for weeks. Maybe it would throw her off the scent, although I didn't really think anything could.
Certainly she didn't fail to notice we were all staying in one room, which clearly, in her opinion, put the kibosh on any potential romance between me and Coyote. I sort of had to agree with her, but on the other hand, if we were going to fight monsters, I didn't want the team split up even for sleeping. That was how people got picked off in horror movies.
Corvallis, who wasn't privy to my line of thought, cozied up to Coyote a little more. I resisted the urge to drop my bag on her foot, but only because it was a soft-sided backpack that wouldn't do her any damage. Coyote gave me another look over her head. Gleeful, I said, "Cut it out, Corvallis. He's with Gary."
I couldn't decide which of the three looked more shocked, but it left me grinning as the girl behind the counter offered me room keys. "It's a bed-and-breakfast package. Just give them your room number in the morning. Welcome to the National Park Inn, and please let us know if there's anything we can do to make your visit more comfortable."
A blast of cold air dropped the lobby's temperature by about ten degrees. We all turned to see a petite park ranger with a grim expression holding them open. Her face was pale, cords standing out in her throat, but she lifted an extremely steady voice to say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to have to ask everyone to stay inside for a little while. I'm afraid we've had another incident."
Coyote, Gary, Laurie Corvallis and I all ran for the door.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I had to give Corvallis credit for chutzpah, anyway. She was easily the least physically threatening of the four of us, but she was quick on her feet, and got in the park ranger's face first. The poor woman took a breath to argue and the rest of us went galloping by like wolves to the slaughter.
I don't know what I was expecting. A gnawed-on body spread all over the parking lot, maybe, staining the snow red and fixing nightmares in holiday-makers minds for the rest of their lives. If I'd taken half a second to think I'd have known there'd be no such scene. If nothing else, we had yet to encounter a victim who'd actually been allowed to bleed out.
The only saving grace was Coyote and Gary both looked like they'd had expectations similar to mine. Coyote glowered around, dumbfounded, then turned on his heel to face me. "We're going to need to find out where the body is. The faster I can get to one and take a look, the more likely I am to be able to track it."
A sting of possessive envy caught me in the gut and left me trying to catch my breath. For months I'd been wishing Coyote was on hand, metaphysically speaking, to show me the path. To take responsibility. Now, finally, he was, and I had the un-charitable thought that this was my territory, my game, and I should be the one taking charge.
I had the unpleasant sensation that I now knew just exactly how Morrison had felt a few hours earlier.
"I almost had it yesterday. Before we saved Mandy." I was trying really hard not to sound petulant. Judging from Gary's carefully neutral expression, I wasn't succeeding.
"Almost had it how?" Coyote either didn't care about or hadn't noticed my churlish tone. I wasn't sure what I thought of that, either. It was good, of course, except it sort of meant he either wasn't listening, or was blowing me off.
God, if I was going around in circles like that I'd blow me off, too. Exasperated with myself, I threw my head back and glared at the sky until I felt some modicum of rationality return. "I'd been about to follow it across the astral plane when—" When Morrison touched me and woke me up. I was glad for the cold. It made a legitimate excuse for my face to be pink. "When I got pulled back to the normal world. You showed up a minute later."
"What were you going to do when you found it?" The way he asked wasn't a good sign. It suggested I'd screwed up beyond belief without even knowing it. Given that that had been my modus operandi for most of the last year, it was a perfectly legitimate assumption, but it didn't sit well. I hunched my shoulders and turned my scowl at the snow.
"I was going to kick its ass. I don't know, Ro." I'd barely ever called him Cyrano, much less shortened it to "Ro," but it rhymed and I was childishly pleased with that. "I hadn't thought that far ahead."
"You've got to start." Now he was the stern, slightly worried teacher. I had no idea how he fit so many personalities into so few words, or so little time. "The astral plane's an incredibly dangerous place to take on a wendigo, Jo. It's its home turf. Out there it'd be simple for it to cut you away from your body, and for something like this creature, you'd be a seven-course meal. You can't afford that kind of mistake."
"Well, how was I supposed to know? It's not like you left me a shaman's primer to study! There's no fricking handbook for all of this! I'm doing my goddamned best!" Frustrated, I scooped up a handful of snow and whipped around to fling it across the parking lot with as much strength as I could muster.
It hit the defenseless Impala, twenty feet away. I said, "Fuck," and went to wipe the marks of my temper tantrum away.
Coyote, very mildly, asked, "Would you have felt that bad if you'd hit me?"
"No." A better person than I would've apologized, but I was by definition not that person. "C'mon. Let's go find the body."
"I'll tell you where it is," Laurie Corvallis said from behind me, "but you have to take me with you."
* * *
I was really beginning to hate how she kept doing that, turning up behind me or off to one side with a pithy statement and a microphone. I snapped, "No," and then because I was stupid, added, "How do you know where it is?"
The park ranger came out of the inn looking a little like she'd been bulldozed, saw us, shook herself, and put purpose in her stride as she approached. I said, "Ah," under my breath, and turned back to Corvallis. "Why is this turning into a you'll-tag-along instead of us trying to sneak after you while you go get your story?"
She studied me for a long moment, during which the park ranger reached us and began, firmly, insisting that we return to the lodge, everything was under control, but it was imperative that we not be outdoors for the immediate future. I made accommodating noises and didn't move. Corvallis just ignored the woman entirely, no more interested in her than she might've been in a silent rock face. Eventually the ranger faltered, then went to try her spiel on Coyote and Gary.
Only when she was gone did Corvallis say, "Inexplicable things happen around you, Detective Walker. Inexplicable, dangerous things. We both know there's a story there, and someday I'm going to get it. But let's pretend for a minute that I'm not after that right now."
I rocked back, bemused at her frankness. "Okay…?"
"My job is to go somewhere and learn more about the situation. The best way to do that is to make some kind of connection with the people I'm investigating. Sometimes it's dangerous. I've done gangland exposé pieces, I've gone to the Middle East, I've—"
"I watch the news, Laurie. I don't need your résumé."
She shrugged her eyebrows, a more ordinary expression than I was used to seeing from her. "The point is, when you're following a story into a world you don't know a lot about, you try to make friends, or at least allies, with somebody who can show you the ropes. Somebody who's going to offer a degree of protection, because they've got a vested interest in the story being presented."
"And then you hang them out to dry."
"Less often than you think. You can't keep going into investigative situations and expecting to get your story, your truth, if you've built a reputation for selling out the people who open their doors to you."
"My door is not open to you, Corvallis."
"But it is. You have no idea how much research I've done on you, Siobhán."
Nausea ruptured inside me, backwash of acid climbing up my throat. Siobhán was the name my mother'd given me at birth. Siobhán Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick. Dad took one look at Siobhán, determined nobody in America was ever going to say it correctly, and gave me a whole different use-name, Joanne. Technically it was an Anglicization, as Siobhán more or less translated as Joanne, but nobody could tell that by looking at it.
I'd abandoned Walkingstick of my own accord, the day I graduated high school. It hadn't been much of a trick to hack the school records so I was Joanne Walker on them, and that's the name I'd used for more than ten years. I'd always known the full name was out there if somebody wanted to research it—Morrison had—but I'd never imagined anybody would want to. Moreover, recently I'd become aware of the power of true names, which made me particularly uncomfortable with anybody bandying mine about.
If Corvallis knew my full name, she certainly knew plenty of other things about me that I'd left, deliberately, on the eastern side of the Mississippi. I wanted them to stay there. I might've been growing up and getting in tune with myself and other garbage like that, but there was plenty I planned on leaving alone.
And Laurie Corvallis wasn't going to let that happen.
Carefully—very carefully, because I was honestly afraid of what I might do if I let go—I triggered the Sight. I did it because I wanted to see her aura, to see if I could read her intentions, and I did it forgetting that it made my eyes change color. Hazel to gold; I'd watched it happen in Coyote's eyes, and once in Billy's when I'd lent him the ability to See. I thought it wasn't half as disturbing as the blind bone-white that rolled over the eyes of people who could see the future.
Judging from how Corvallis blanched, it was disturbing enough. Her aura was yellow, incredibly clear and tightly focused, and for the second time I had to give her credit for cajones. Spikes of red panic, every bit as clear as the yellow, shot through her aura and made loops as she sucked them back down, controlling them. Her whole body was rigid, blue eyes round and lips pale, but shots of green rushed across her aura, like she was recording every second of her emotion. Recording it, mastering it, ultimately subsuming it: her whole range of flipping out lasted about a nanosecond, and then she was back to clear yellow.
And almost all I could read out of that was ambition. No urge to hurt people, but no particular desire not to, either. She wanted one thing above all else: the story. Maybe other things came to the fore when she was off duty, but I'd never seen her anything but on. I closed my eyes, letting the Sight go. "Sorry. I didn't mean to scare you."
She scoffed. "You didn't scare me."
I opened my eyes again, concentrating on not letting the Sight filter my vision. Concentrating on my eyes staying the color they belonged. "Yes. I did."
Discomfort flickered across her face and, like her spurt of panic, was buried. "So we have a deal? I go with you to check out the body?"
A tiny bubble of amusement burst inside me, replacing the acid burn of sickness. "You think you're blackmailing me? Corvallis, the important people in my life—and that includes Captain Morrison, in terms of job security, in case you're wondering—already have the information you've dug up. There's no bandage to rip off. There's no wound to expose." That wasn't entirely accurate, but it was close enough to take the wind out of her sails. I hoped. "You still haven't told me why you're even making the offer. Is it to get a chance at that story you think I'm hiding?"
She gave me a long look that I interpreted as "Your eyes just changed color and you're still pretending there's no story there?" but what she said aloud was, "You've walked away from some extraordinary events, Detective. I want the Slaughterer story, but I'm not stupid. This guy's dangerous. I don't want to put myself on the line without some kind of backup, and you strike me as the right kind."
"Now, see, wouldn't it have just been easier to say that in the first place?"
"You wouldn't have agreed."
"Corvallis, the only reason I'm agreeing now is it's faster to hitch along with you than to go find out on my own where the victim is." I turned my wrist up, glancing at where my watch was hidden beneath the weight of my winter coat. "Or it would've been five minutes ago, anyway. The body's getting cold. We need to go."
* * *
The FBI had gotten there before us.
I didn't know why I was surprised. Up until that morning, all the bodies had been found within the greater Seattle area jurisdiction, but these last two were on federal parkland. It was their case now, which meant I was going to have to avoid explaining the truth to a whole new branch of law enforcement. Other people had to worry about whether they'd remembered to feed the cat. I got to worry about telling lies to people who could throw me in jail for it.
There were only three agents, though I was sure there were more on the way. One, a woman, was down beside a body we were no doubt not allowed to see. The other two were men, one of whom was really tall and the other of whom was really cute. I waved at, and stomped toward, the cute one, while Corvallis and her camera guy, who'd joined us before we left the lodge, headed for the tall one. Coyote and Gary exchanged glances and stayed where they were. I thought Coyote should've tried to go chat up the woman, but she was on the other side of yellow cordoning tape, and he had no badge to legitimize himself.
I waved my SPD badge at the cute Fed, then left my hand up, palm toward him, in apology. "I know, I'm way out of my jurisdiction, but I've been on this case for weeks, and the last body before the ones up here was found in the park across from my apartment. I want to do what I can."
He jerked his thumb toward the woman. "Hey, I don't care if you're here. Just don't cross her, man. Can I help you?"
"Yeah, maybe. Are there any tracks?" I turned on the Sight and stood on my toes to look over his shoulder, which only caused me to sink into the snow. It was compacted from traffic, but not that much. I wished I still had Mandy's snowshoes.
There were marks deep under the snow, against the surface of the buried earth, but for the first time I could see indentations in the snow, too. They were barely there, like bird tracks, and my eyes crossed as I tried to See them more clearly. "Holy crap, there are."
"You've got real good vision." The Fed sounded less than thrilled, and I glanced back at him. His aura was flat and wary, like I'd done something unexpected and definitely not right. His voice dropped to a warning tone: "What are you?"
For a couple seconds I stared at him in bewilderment, then swore under my breath and pinched the bridge of my nose, deliberately hiding my eyes. Whoever'd had the bright idea of tying a physiological change to magic use was an idiot. "I'm a shaman, and I do have good vision, I can See things—"
I dropped my hand again, scowling, and his aura flared up into something more normal. The distrust fell out, replaced by a different kind of discomfort, like he'd gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. I blinked at that for a moment, trying to understand it, and it abruptly came clear.
He wasn't supposed to be there, in much the same way I wasn't. I smiled crookedly. "For example, I can See that you're lying, aren't you? You're not really a Fed."
His jaw tightened, not quite guilty, not quite defiant. "Yeah, well, not a Fed doesn't mean not supposed to be here. We didn't expect the real ones to get here so fast."
Auras made pretty good lie detectors, and what he said was absolutely true. He didn't have power, not like Coyote, not like me. Not even like Billy, but he still knew the score. He knew there were things that went bump in the night, and I was pretty damned sure that he bumped back.
Somehow that made my whole day, my whole world, a better place. I didn't know why. It just came as a load off my shoulders, a huge shocking relief that there were other people out there fighting the monsters. I mean, I'd kind of known there had to be, but I'd never expected to randomly encounter any of them while on the job. My mouth bypassed every mental roadblock I'd ever had and said, quietly, "We think it's a wendigo."
In any sane world, those weren't words to inspire a crooked little smile at one corner of his mouth, but one appeared. "Yeah, we know. We were heading into Seattle when the police scanner mentioned the kill up here. It's got the earmarks."
"More like the tooth marks."
His smile opened up to full-fledged. I had the nigh-irresistible urge to take him home and feed him. Instead, grinning back, I jerked my thumb toward the road. "Look, why don't you get out of here before somebody figures out you're not really with the Feds. At least I've got a genuine badge to wave. We've got this one under control."
"You sure?"
"Yeah, we're cool. Thanks."
"Figures. I meet a hot chick out hunting and she's already got a team." He blasted a piercing whistle that made both the tall not-a-Fed guy and the actual agent down by the body turn around. The man headed toward us, but my new pal swung his finger in a lasso and threw the motion down the road, and his friend took a sharp turn that way.
The woman stood up and I muttered, "Better scram."
"Scrammin'." He gave me another take-him-home-and-feed-him grin, then jogged after the taller guy, boots squeaking against the snow. Coyote and Gary shot curious looks after them, then at me, before the female agent reached my side.
"Is there a problem with my men? Who are y—" She swallowed the question, staring up at me, then yanked her hat off, like it would help her see me better. Dark honey hair collapsed around her shoulders in classic salon-commercial style, but there was nothing particularly inviting about her expression. "Joanne?"
There'd been a lot of things I wanted to leave east of the Mississippi. The woman standing in front of me had been one of them. We'd been best friends for about thirty seconds, about a million years ago, and it had gone all to hell over a boy. I scraped a few brain cells together and managed, eventually, to produce a witty response no doubt years in the making:
"Hi, Sara."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"What are you doing here, Joanne? Where'd you send my men?"
"Your m—what'm I—what're you doing here? I live in Seattle. Don't tell me you live in Seattle. Your men? Really?" I turned to look after the duo beating feet down the road. "You brought them in?"
"No, they were here when I arrived, but I've got rank. What're you—"
I pulled out my SPD badge again and earned a credible sneer from the woman who'd once been my best friend. I said, "Oh come on now," sort of vaguely. "Don't tell me you're going to play that whole federal/state jurisdiction superiority thing."
"Not as long as you stay out of my way."
That had a peculiarly school-yard ring to it. I stood there watching snow melt in Sara's hair and reeling at the idea that we hadn't moved past that. I mean, I was no great shakes in terms of emotional maturity, but dwelling on rivalries that had exploded almost fifteen years earlier seemed a little much. It didn't mean I wanted to be bosom buddies again, but I could hardly fathom getting in jurisdictional fights because I'd nailed the boy she'd wanted in high school.
Coyote, a bit diffidently and from a safe distance, said, "You two know each other?"
I said, "Yes," and Sara said, "No," at the same time, and Coyote looked like he wished he hadn't asked. I said, "Yes," again more firmly. "We went to high school together. This is Sara Buch—"
"Isaac."
I wasn't moving, but my feet slipped anyway. I lurched upright again, clutching the air for support, and turned goggly eyes on Sara. "You're kidding. The same—?"
She drew herself up, all but hissing. She was taller than she'd been in school, though still quite a lot shorter than I was. I'd thought she was beautiful, back then. She'd grown up just as pretty, except for the pinch of anger between her eyebrows. She'd been buckwheat blonde in school, but the dark honey tones suited her better, playing up her cheekbones and skin tones. "Yes, the same Isaac. Just because you got everything you wanted in high school doesn't mean you—"
I lost the rest of what she said to gales of laughter. Her cheeks flushed and her eyes went bright, making her even prettier, but I couldn't stop laughing. I doubled over, still whooping, and finally braced my hands on my thighs so I could peer up at her. "I'm sorry. Are you serious? You really think I wanted to get pregnant and have twins at fifteen? I just wanted him to like me, Sara, and I was a moron. You said you didn't like him. I swear to God, I had no idea you were just playing it cool. I wasn't that good at reading people. I'd never had a real girlfriend before, with Dad moving us around all the time. I swear I didn't get it. I tried telling you this back then. I'm really sorry. I had no idea." I straightened up and offered a hand in peace. Handshakes were formal gestures, but I'd never felt like I was participating in ritual before when I initiated one. I'd been wanting to say that for a long time.
Sara didn't look like she'd been waiting to hear it a long time. "Oh, I'm not just talking about Lucas. It was you and that stupid drum you were so proud of, you and all your stories from all over the place, like you were some kind of hot shit because you'd traveled—"
I had never previously experienced the phrase my head was spinning in a literal sense, but I began to feel as if someone had taken a stick and was liberally stirring my brains. The world went zipping to the left and I clutched my skull with both hands, trying to steady it. "Wow. You're serious. That's…really not how I meant to come across."
If I'd meant anything, it had been to keep people from picking on me. I recognized now that I'd had a massive chip on my shoulder. I could see how it could've come across as arrogance, but the idea was—to me, anyway—laughable. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be a prick."
"Like it matters now."
Apparently it did, but I was smart enough not to say that. The smart part of me, in fact, thought I should maybe focus on the dead person a couple dozen feet away so that we could sort out what could be sorted, and then go inside and have Irish coffees to ward off the cold. The teenage girl inside me, though, said, "But he went back to Canada. How'd you guys get back in touch?"
Sara's pretty face went shifty. "We never lost touch. We wrote letters after he went home."
All the air whooshed out of me like I'd taken a solid gut-punch to the diaphragm. It wouldn't unknot enough for me to inhale again, even when I hunched over, trying to find a little more room to exhale so I could convince the whole breathing process to restart properly.
I hadn't really blamed Lucas for leaving. I'd never been sure that he wasn't supposed to be in North Carolina for just the one semester anyway, since he'd left at Christmas, which was a perfectly reasonable time to go back home. It also meant he was gone weeks before I'd started to visibly show, and because teenagers frequently aren't too smart, very few people had bandied his name around as the possible partner to my predicament. Nobody counted backward to figure out when the deed was done; they just gossiped and suggested names of boys I had no interest in. Sara and Lucas were the only two who actually knew. The idea that he'd just walked away, disappeared entirely, was one I was okay with. My mother had done more or less the same thing with me.
Somehow him walking away from me and keeping in touch with Sara was a whole lot less okay. I wasn't sure if I wanted to cry or throw up. So much for emotional maturity.
I don't know what Sara saw in my face, but it apparently fed whatever jealous beast she'd been keeping in her heart all these years, because what I saw in hers was a flash of triumph. Revenge, best served cold. I'd never cried over that particular fiasco in my life. For the first time I wanted to. Might have, if I could've gotten the breath, but my head was starting to hurt from a lack of oxygen, and my belly still wouldn't unknot.
Coyote put his hand on my shoulder, and a pulse of dry desert air rolled through me. It unwound my stomach, letting me catch a breath and pull myself upright, and warmed my extremities a smidge. I'd given people little hits like that, but I'd never received one. It felt good, all strengthening and compassionate. I hoped that's what it was like when I was the healer, rather than the healed.
Once I was stable, Coyote put his hand out. Sara took it, which she hadn't done with me. "It's nice to meet you, Agent Isaac. I'm Cyrano Bia, and this is Gary Muldoon. We need to take a look at your victim."
"Seattle Police Department hasn't got jurisdiction here."
"That's okay," Coyote said easily. "We're not police." He stepped over the police line and ambled toward the body without waiting for a response. Sara shot me a withering look and went after him.
In most ways, that was helpful. It meant I could shake off astonishment and take a look at the marked earth again. Or it would have if I was the kind of person who had her shit that much together, but I never had, still didn't, and probably never would. Gary came up beside me and said, "Jo?" as tentatively as I'd ever heard him speak.
"Later, okay? I…later."
"Arright." The big old cab driver put an arm around my shoulders, squeezed carefully, and let go again. "See anything out there?"
Every answer I wanted to give revolved around Sara Isaac, formerly Buchanan, and the one-up she'd just pulled on me. I thought I would've been pleased, honestly. If she and Lucas had just managed to end up together, I would've thought it was kind of cool. Finding out they'd never lost touch was manifestly not cool, and I pretty much wanted to bury myself in snow and let the cold numb me while I worked myself up to dealing with it.
If I'd learned anything in the last year, it was that the world very rarely put itself on pause to let people cope. "It's getting realer," I said quietly. "When I faced it in Olympia Park it made marks in the snow, and now, here…there's blood on the snow down there. I can still see where it left prints on the earth, but it's getting realer."
"What is?" Laurie Corvallis had disappeared for a few minutes, maybe chasing the false Feds down, but she was back, and had been long enough to hear my faltering explanation. "How can something not real be doing this?"
"Do you believe in God, lady?" Gary asked unexpectedly. Corvallis looked around like she thought he must be talking to someone else, then wrinkled her eyebrows at me. I shrugged and tipped my head, inviting her to answer. I certainly wasn't going to. "Angels?" Gary asked. "Demons?"
"I believe there are good people and bad people and that there's some of both in everybody. I believe the world's got a lot of power to fuck us up." It was the second time she'd sworn, and I glanced toward her camera guy to see if he was recording. The little green light blipped at me, but presumably the whole thing would be edited for PG viewing. "Are you saying this is a demon?" She sounded skeptical in a sell-me-the-story way: not like she unconditionally disbelieved, but like she wasn't going to accept wooden nickels.
Gary shook his head. "Nah. Just curious. Wondered if that reporter's mind of yours kept itself open or if you made up your mind before you went in."
I heard myself say, "It's a spirit," and wondered what exactly I thought I was going to accomplish by telling Laurie Corvallis our hypothesis. "A very angry, hungry spirit who's either being controlled by, or who is, someone powerful. I'm sure you know there's been no blood at any of the scenes. I'm afraid the thing has been feeding psychically, maybe trying to strengthen or create a physical body. The stronger it gets the more it takes on the ability to chow down mass in the real world, which is why this one's messier. I don't know how bad it'll get if we don't stop it."
Corvallis's gape became a sharp scowl. "No wonder Morrison doesn't want you talking to me." She climbed over the police tape and stomped through the snow toward the body, cameraman trailing behind her.
I pursed my lips, watching them go. "Next time I wonder why I don't just tell people the truth, remind me of this."
"Doll, I didn't know you ever wondered that."
"Not often, and now I know why." Coyote, Corvallis and the cameraman were being hustled away from the murder site, none of them looking happy about it. Given the increasing number of FBI agents and forensics experts appearing on the scene, I thought they should be grateful none of us had been arrested yet. Sara was glaring at me from the dip where the body had been found, like the reporter and the nosy Indian were my fault. I shrugged and slipped my way back down toward the road, waiting for them to catch up.
"They're not going to recognize it as the same killer," Coyote said as soon as he did. "I got close enough to look at the cusp marks. It's more like a wild animal. That, and there's blood this time, and pieces of torn flesh in the snow around the body. It's getting more savage."
Corvallis all but lit up and pulled a sleek phone from the pocket of her coat. "A copycat killer? We can call it mountain madness. Christmas killer? No, that's been done." She hurried ahead of us, shaking her phone like that would help her pick up a signal.
Gary chuckled in her wake. "Think she ever met a story she couldn't tackle?"
"I think she's going to if she stays out here." I stopped in the snow and Coyote knocked me into motion again. "Ow. Look, I don't know if you saw anything, Ro, but—"
"Do you have to do that?"
"You call me Jo, I get to call you Ro."
"I like Coyote better."
"You don't look so much like a coyote in the real world. Did you see anything?"
He bared his teeth at me, the expression surprisingly close to that of his coyote-form self, then shook it off in much the same way I'd seen him do on the astral plane. "Aside from a body that doesn't fit the physical signs of the other murders, no. It is the wendigo," he said, like I'd been going to argue. "There's no hint of soul left to the corpse at all. Like Mandy was." His mouth thinned, eyes gone grim. "But much too late to save her."
"I believe you. I think every time it feeds it's getting more distorted." I puffed my cheeks and followed Corvallis down the mountain listlessly. "The bite marks on Charlie Groleski were rounder than the ones on Karin Newcomb. If it had managed to take Mandy out, it might've looked like a different case, too. Wait, what are we doing?" I stopped following Corvallis and frowned. "We're going the wrong way. Its tracks went up the mountain. We should get them out of here, but we should stay."
Gary, in a low rumble, said, "'Should' is one of those funny words that don't mean what you think it means," and pointed behind us.
CHAPTER TWENTY
A shadow paced on the snow, clearly watching us. Tooth and claw and red raging eyes; the rest was white and translucent and almost impossible to see. The Sight snapped on, making it more visible, though I instantly wished it hadn't.
Rivulets of blood dripped and flowed from its teeth, never falling far enough to stain the snow. Its claws were tangled with shredded souls. The tatters could have been anything from cobweb to gauze, fragile against the beast's bulk, but the healer's magic within me knew I was seeing the last vestiges of what had once been human beings. It was all much, much more clear than it had been on the mountain yesterday morning. Clearer, even, than it had been on Mandy's rooftop the evening before. I had the gut-sinking feeling that having sized me up, it had decided it was time to get serious about manifesting in the real world.
It was still nominally manlike, in that it had arms and legs, but its shoulders and neck had disappeared into a massive head with a wide-gaping, grinning mouth. Even the humanoid features were stunted: the arms were short, the chest incredibly thick, the legs seeming too small to carry its weight.
It stank. From thirty yards away, it smelled of rotten meat and offal. It had smelled like roses yesterday, by comparison. The transition toward more real wasn't doing it any favors.
Very, very quietly, I said, "Gary, what do you see?"
He said, "A bear," in a way that let me understand how utterly inadequate, how completely wrong, the description was, and yet that it was the best he could do. It was no more bearlike than I was, but with its shifting, fluid white form almost impossible to focus on, I thought bear was as close as any non-magically-gifted person was going to get.
"Coyote?"
"…not a bear." He sounded like Gary did: unable to express what he saw any more clearly. "What do you see?"
"A trap." The only problem was, I didn't know for whom. "Gary, back up really slowly. Just a few feet. I want to see if it…cares."
"That don't fill me with confidence, doll." He backed up anyway, a few slow steps down the road. The wendigo went very still, thick torso lifted like it was scenting the air. It cared, in other words. I swore under my breath, and Gary froze again. "That don't, either."
"It shouldn't. Don't move again." The wendigo relaxed when Gary stopped inching backward, though it began pacing back and forth, a few steps at a time, as it stared down the mountain at us. I had the unpleasant and probably accurate feeling it was assessing us in terms of easy pickings, and I very carefully began building a shield.
The heat of desert sand, delicious when I stood in the middle of a snow-covered forest, washed over me. Dune yellow and sky blue became a part of my shield, strengthening it beyond measure. I'd only ever made a weaving with so much power one other time, when I'd borrowed my dead mother's talent to fight a banshee. It felt terrific, and despite the wendigo I shot a smile toward Coyote. He didn't exactly smile back, but the heat of his magic intensified a moment, making me feel welcome.
The wendigo snarled, the same low threatening sound that had started an avalanche the day before. There were more trees along the road here, maybe enough to stabilize the snow, but it wasn't a risk I wanted to take. Not with a news crew and a couple dozen FBI agents who could be swept away.
Right on cue, they noticed the wendigo. Half a dozen people voiced variations on, "What the hell?" and Sara bellowed, "Jesus Christ, Joanne, what're you doing now?" like a semi-visible slavering monster was obviously all my fault.
I decided she would rather I kept her alive than give her an answer. Our shield stretched across the road, making a wall between ourselves and the wendigo, but I'd seen the thing jump. "The shield has to go over us, too."
"I can do that if you've got a plan for the wendigo." Coyote sounded strained, which surprised me. I was used to thinking of him as well-nigh omnipotent, but I could feel the intense concentration in his magic as he stretched the shield back in a wide curve. The whole investigative area, including the road, covered a good forty square yards, maybe a little more. I didn't think we needed a bubble unless the wendigo was smart enough to leap the shield and attack from behind, but I'd never dreamed that sustaining a shield that big might wear my mentor out.
Especially when I had plenty left to give. I poured more into the shield, feeling it strengthen, and turned some of Coyote's energy toward my favorite catch-all. Tight bands of magic wove together, creating a net with much greater holding capacity than the one I'd built yesterday. "I've got a plan."
It would've been a better plan if a net had worked the day before, but I saw no reason to burden Coyote with that knowledge. "If this works, I want you to try to get everybody off the mountain, Gary. Back down to the lodge, at least. I don't think Mister Stinky here cares much about whether he's noshing on outdoorsmen anymore."
"If what works?"
Crap. I'd forgotten he couldn't See what I was doing. "I'm going to try to catch it in a net. I just want to hold it in place until everybody's safe. It didn't work yesterday, but it's more real now and Coyote's backing me up."
"Joanne Walkingstick, what the hell are you doing?" Sara'd caught up to us, but I still didn't think it was a good time to answer her questions. I almost hoped she'd grab me. I had this idea that power would zot off me like an electrical arc, and she'd end up ten feet away in the snow with her hair all frazzled. It wasn't nice, but it was funny.
Gary was apparently down with ignoring the Feds, too. His voice dropped to a low enough grumble that it raised hairs on my nape: "And if it don't work?"
"Then we're all fucked."
"Gotcha. Just tell me when, darlin'."
Coyote eyed me. "Are you always this inspiring?"
"You should see me on a bad day. Ready?"
"Joanne, what are you doing?"
Nobody paid Sara any heed at all. Coyote nodded, tensing in preparation. I launched the net and yelled, "Run!" at Gary as the wendigo leaped.
Time, as it so often did, collapsed into infinite slow motion as everything went to hell.
* * *
I understood immediately that my mistake had been in making the shield one-way. It was meant to keep wendigos out, not FBI agents in. Not, as it turned out, FBI agents and over-eager television news reporters. Laurie was there all of a sudden, cameraman in tow, two steps behind Sara and on the wrong side of the shield.
A part of me was given over to admiring Sara's weapon stance as she slapped her duty weapon from its holster and brought it up, firing repeatedly at the wendigo. Her honey-blond hair made her vivid and living against white snow and black trees, real in a way the wendigo wasn't. I saw flashes from the muzzle of her weapon, bright imprints in dilated time, and I could almost watch the bullets spin through the air.
I could without question see how they utterly failed to impress the wendigo. They didn't seem to strike it at all: no shudder of impact, no mist of blood, no slowing of its headlong rush. Middle World means clearly couldn't stop it, even if it was more connected than it had been yesterday.
Corvallis and her cameraman were Sara's civilian mirrors. The guy was on his knees, face stretched with enthusiasm and terror, but his camera light was flashing and the lens was angled to catch the wendigo's leap. Corvallis, as admirable and idiotic as Sara, shouted breathless commentary while five hundred pounds of monster barreled toward her.
I swear to God, people like them should've gotten my shiny weird power set. They were delighted to throw themselves into danger's face, ready and eager to take on the world, happy to do stupid, stupid things in the name of truth, justice, and getting the story. I had no desire for that much excitement in my life.
That was probably why I got it, and they didn't.
I flung my net forward, putting all my will behind it: it had to hold. Its cables were steel, titanium, unobtanium, whatever couldn't be broken. I had held gods with that net. I could, by God, hold one nasty little demon spirit.
Wendigo and net collided, and the net stretched, pulled out of shape by the wendigo's need to feed. I let out a wordless roar that felt every bit as deep and earth-shattering as anything the wendigo had voiced, and surged forward a step, holding the line.
The net rebounded from its stretch, knocking the wendigo ass-over-teakettle back up the mountain road. It bumped and crashed and shuddered to a stop, thrashing and snarling as it fought the psychic bonds that held it. Over its screams I heard Sara shouting, "What the hell? What the hell!?" as she fired her gun again and again.
I yelled, "Get behind me! Get behind me!" Instead, a dozen more federal agents ran forward to join her in trying to shoot to death a creature that only barely had a corporeal body.
Exasperation erupted in my chest and I had sudden, bone-deep sympathy for Coyote and everybody else who'd dealt with me in the first months of my shamanistic career. The federal agents simply would not accept that were facing something they were completely unprepared for, which was the moral equivalent of me utterly refusing to accept my talents. It was incredibly frustrating, and I made a note to apologize to everyone I knew.
Right after we got out of this alive.
I kept feeling pops in my power, like soap bubbles exploding in the air. A bit of the wendigo, an elbow or a claw or an ear or a tooth, broke through the net every time it happened. The net resealed itself, drawing more power each time, and I got a double-vision impression that the monster was slipping between its physical and psychic form. I had its tangible self under control, but if it pulled itself just a little farther into the spirit realm I wasn't sure I could hold it. The nets I'd cast in the past had held physical things, not spirits.
A small, weary part of myself thought I should probably be able to hold spirits, as well, and that we were going to pay heavily for my lack of skill. But slowed-down time or not, I didn't have the luxury of dwelling. "Coyote, can you kill it?"
"Me?" Incredulous horror spiked through the question, though he toned it back down with the next question: "With what?"
I shot a sideways glance at him. He looked like breathing and maintaining his part of the shield was just about the limit of his capability, which made my brain cramp again. He was my teacher, for pity's sake. I wasn't supposed to walk all over him in the sheer wattage department.
On the other hand, again, not such a good time to worry about it. I turned my attention back to the wendigo and the popping net. One hand fisted of its own accord, like I was holding on tighter, and the rest of me divorced itself from the wendigo just long enough to reach across space and seize my rapier.
It became real in my hand, a solid silver weight. I threw it to Coyote and hissed, "With this."
He caught it clumsily, and stood agog for what seemed like a horribly long time, maybe a whole second or so. Then he bolted forward, black braid bouncing against his spine, and I found myself the unhappy maintainer of both the entire shield and the net.
Screw it. We didn't need the shield as long as the net held. I let it go and focused on the rippling power containing the wendigo. The popping stopped, and relief lightened my heart. We were going to win.
The whine and roar of gunshots ceased abruptly as Coyote tore past the federal agents. Only Sara's protests followed him, unexpectedly thin after the world-shattering noise of the guns. The wendigo still howled, but the mountain was a bastion of silence, compared to what it had been an instant earlier.
Coyote's attack was cinematic. Two quick steps up the wendigo's bulk and he was on top of it, sword lifted in both hands. Power sparkled around him, dune yellow and sky blue connecting with the net, glimmering along the length of the sword, though I could See he hadn't infused the blade with power the way I'd once done. He froze there, captured in time like the Iwo Jima photo, and I Saw sudden gut-churning reluctance splash through his aura.
I was already roaring approval, a tremendous yawp of sound, and it hit him like a physical thing. He flinched and drove the blade downward.
The wendigo vanished.
Gary's whoop of triumph echoed mine. Coyote stood on air for the briefest instant, levitating before he crashed to the snow where the wendigo had been. The rapier plunged deep, leaving him kneeling over it like a king of old, and Gary snatched me up and spun me in a circle, both of us shrieking like idiots.
The others—the federal agents, the news crew—were less excited, their questions an endless round of what the hell? Coyote stood up slowly, expression grim as he pulled my sword from the snow and came back to us. He offered me the blade and I took it happily, turning it this way and that to examine it. There was no blood, nothing but a shimmer of melted water against silver. Coyote, unexpectedly softly, said, "Where did that come from?"
"It's the one I got skewered with. I kept it. Spoils of war." I peeked toward Corvallis, trying to make sure the camera wasn't on me, and whispered it home again. It disappeared as readily as the wendigo had, sending a little thrill of glee through me. Healing powers were handy and all, but a magic sword was six kinds of awesome. I wanted one. I had one, and I still wanted one. That's how cool it was.
Laurie elbowed me in the ribs and shoved her microphone in Coyote's face. "Laurie Corvallis, Channel Two News. You are?"
Coyote gave me a genuinely panicked glance, and I insinuated myself between them. Her camera guy's light turned the world to a bright blur, but I figured I was too close to focus on, which was a small favor. "He's not part of your story, Laurie."
"The hell he isn't. He just killed that thing with a sword. A sword! Where'd he get a sword? Where'd it go? What was that thing? Where did it go? I could barely see it. Did you see how it bounced back during the attack? Like it hit an invisible wall—"
I was going to have to ask Gary what that whole thing had looked like with unSighted eyes. "Ms. Corvall—"
"This is not a case open for discussion." Sara got between me and Laurie, which more or less put her nose against the camera lens. She put her hand over it, too, blocking any hope of a picture, focused or not, and repeated, "I'm sorry, Ms. Corvallis, but this is a federal situation and I'm going to have to ask you to respect the on-going nature of the investigation. I'll be happy to release what information I can, when I can."
I stepped backward gratefully, removing myself from sight and, I hoped, from Corvallis's mind. All the major cases I'd been involved in so far had been cover-up-able with some kind of vaguely plausible story. I couldn't think of a damned thing to explain away the apparent reversal of certain laws of physics, like an object in motion will remain in motion after everybody'd seen the object in question hit an invisible wall and bounce off. Nor could I explain where Coyote'd gotten the sword, or even more importantly, how he'd slain a monster which disappeared upon being skewered.
As it turned out, I didn't have to. While I was worrying about it, the wendigo rose up out of the snow and snatched Gary.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The old man roared louder than the wendigo did, though it sounded more like surprise than pain. I dived at them with no plan beyond save Gary, and passed right through both of them to face-plant in the snow beyond. I shoved up to my hands and knees, spitting ice, and twisted around to gape helplessly as an epic battle erupted.
The wendigo was in no way damaged from the sword thrust. It had to have gone incorporeal, losing cohesion just as Coyote drove the blade down. Either that or having a four-foot-long pointy thing stuck through it simply didn't have any effect at all, which was not a happy thought.
Sara had her damned gun out again. I wasn't sure I could help Gary, but I could at least keep him from getting shot. I flung up my shield again, this time willing it to be visible. I knew it could be—a few hundred partygoers had gotten an eyeful of it at Halloween—but visible wasn't its natural state. It worked, though. Sara cupped the gun's butt and pointed the muzzle toward the sky as silver-blue burst into being all around her. Around her and everybody else, in a sort of doughnut with Gary and the wendigo in its hollow center. Sara, for the hundredth time, yelled, "What the hell?"
I got to my feet. "Don't shoot. I don't know if the shield will hold bullets or ricochet them. And don't touch it. You might get fried." I was sure she wouldn't, but I hoped it would keep her out of the way while I figured how to answer her.
For something I'd fallen through, the wendigo looked pretty damned substantial. It seized Gary in its mouth and shook him wildly, and when he refused to bend or break, flung him to the ground again in a huge poof of snow. I cried out, but he just rolled to his feet, a slow pedantic action that went well with the way his shoulders gathered in a methodical hunch. He muttered, "Let's dance," and the wendigo paused a moment, like it was smart enough to be surprised at the phrase.
Gary charged it, a slow run that slammed a broad shoulder into its gut. They both went flying off the side of the road and bounced through the snow. Like everybody else, I rushed over to watch. They bashed into two pine trees, breaking first their fall, and then the trees, which creaked and shuddered and collapsed in a rain of snow and needles.
The wendigo was on its feet first, but Gary swung a fist up, catching the thing in its enormous jaw. The crack reverberated up the hillside and everybody around me hissed in a painful, impressed breath. Me, I wasn't breathing at all, and didn't know if I ever would again. Gary was a tough old coot, and still had the linebacker build of his youth, but it seemed utterly impossible that he could hold his own against a semi-embodied, soul-sucking, flesh-eating monster.
I flung power toward them, not even so much as a net. More like a lasso, just to find out if my magic had more effect than my physical attack had. It whistled through the wendigo harmlessly, which didn't surprise me, and whooshed through Gary as effortlessly, which did. I lurched toward the incline, heart hammering so hard I could barely see. If Gary was as unaffected by my magic as the wendigo was, I was horribly afraid he wasn't exactly alive anymore.
Coyote's hand on my shoulder stopped me. I jerked away, but he caught me again, pulling me around so I could see astonishment curving his lips into a smile. "Your friend's spirit is strong."
That sounded so much like hokey-jokey Indian crap that I nearly decked him. Then a tiny bit of cleverness caught up and I whipped around again, trying to See more clearly. I'd been using the Sight all along, but I'd been paying attention to the wendigo, not Gary.
Who was carrying a great big beautiful tortoise shell on his back. More than on his back: it was somehow larger than he was, solid plates protecting him all around. A tortoise's huge snapping jaws translated into enormous physical strength, far more than an ordinary man could command. He got to his feet ponderously, every action deliberate, and when the wendigo leaped at him again he ducked, caught it on his back, and did the nicest back-slam I'd ever seen outside of pro wrestling.
The wendigo screamed. Gary rolled over, unscathed by its tiny clawing arms, and lifted a heavy fist to drive it down, not fast, but implacably, into the beast's chest.
It wasn't bone that splintered, but souls. The fragments and tattered remains of the wendigo's meals contracted and shriveled, becoming part of its body as it tried frantically to repair itself. Gary hit it again, then again, and its screams turned to panicked squeals as it twisted, trying to escape. Gary held it where I couldn't, caught between corporeality and insubstantiality. Even now I couldn't get my magic to take hold, though a glimmer of understanding finally washed over me.
I was used to fighting in one realm at a time. There were frequently metaphysical manifestations that cropped up during physical battles, but mostly, I fought in the Middle World. I wasn't used to switching wholesale from one level of reality to another in the middle of a fight. The wendigo, though, was completely unconstrained in its ability to move from the physical world to the spirit. I couldn't catch the damned thing because I couldn't keep up. Watching Gary and his tortoise spirit, I thought maybe, maybe, if I gave myself over to Raven entirely, I might be able to slide between realities as freely as Gary and the wendigo were now doing.
I wasn't sure I trusted Raven that much. I wasn't sure I trusted anything that much. I admired the hell out of Gary, that he could let himself be so subsumed by the tortoise spirit. I'd asked the tortoise to protect him, but I didn't think either of us had anticipated just how far the totem animal would go to do that.
I also wondered, briefly, if giving myself to Raven that completely would be as effective as Gary's tortoise was against the wendigo. I didn't exactly think of tortoises as deadly predators, but their sheer size and strength made them worth reckoning with. Ravens were more likely to peck somebody to distraction than destroy them with slow relentless determination.
Determination that the wendigo couldn't stand against. It broke free, shrieking with pain and terror, and Gary's lunge at it was just that much too slow. Hope springing eternal, I flung a net around both of them, encompassing whole yards of sky and earth within it, but the wendigo slipped to spirit form and disappeared through my lashings without a trace. "God damn it! Where'd it—is it coming back? Coyote? Is it going to—?"
"I don't know. Maybe it's too badly hurt."
I whispered a prayer to a deity I didn't entirely believe in, and slid down the mountainside until I reached Gary. He was on his knees, gray eyes wide and uncertain. His tortoise spirit was retreating, no longer needing to encompass him with its protective strength. I crashed into him, hugging him hard, and poured a pulse of my own healing magic through him. Even if the tortoise had taken the brunt of that fight, getting chewed on by a wendigo couldn't be good for anybody. "Gary, are you okay?"
"Right as rain, doll."
His eyes rolled up and he fell over in a faint.
* * *
He woke up again almost instantly, a face full of snow apparently just about as effective as smelling salts. I got myself under his arm and we clambered back up the hill, huffing and puffing like two old geezers. Well, like one old geezer and one young one. Close enough.
Somehow I was surprised to find a couple dozen federal agents and a news team waiting for us at the top. I said, "Don't ask," and of course everybody did anyway. Under their babbling, I said, "Mind playing up being fragile? At least some of them will volunteer to help get you back down the hill, and that leaves me fewer to deal with."
Gary whispered, "I donno," back. "Am I fragile?"
I snorted, trying not to let it turn into an out-loud laugh. "About as fragile as a bulldozer, I think."
"In that case I don't mind at all." He lifted his voice a little and put a convincing quaver in it, sounding more like a querulous old man than I'd ever heard him. "Somebody gimme a hand? I ain't feelin' so good. I think I hit my head…."
More Feds than I expected stepped forward. A few just looked like they wanted to be anywhere but here, but one, a woman about my age, looked a little starstruck. If Gary hooked up with a girl forty years his junior I was never going to hear the end of it. Either I'd lost my old silver stallion to a younger, prettier model, or I'd set him on the road to being a dirty, dirty old man. He came out ahead and I looked like a dork either way.
Oh well. It wasn't like I didn't have a lot of practice at that. About eight of them, including the young woman, opted to help carry him down the mountain. I didn't think any of them saw the roguish wink he gave me as they carted him off.
Sadly, eight still left me with about fifteen agents and two news reporters to deal with. Corvallis looked like her brain was collapsing in on itself as she tried to process what she'd seen, or maybe more accurately, hadn't quite seen.
Sara said, "Get back to work," to her team, then gave me a sharp look. "Is it safe?"
I wondered what it had cost her to ask, and wished I had a better answer than, "I think so."
She nodded, and her people reluctantly dispersed. I hated to think how much mess had been made of their crime scene, though on the positive side they weren't going to find anything useful anyway. When we were alone, she said, "What was it?"
"A wendigo." I mostly wanted to see if it meant anything to her. It wouldn't have to me not that long ago—like, yesterday—but the skin around her eyes tightened a little, as if she at least recognized the word.
"Don't tell me you're still into that mystical crap, Joanne."
I started to say, "It's a soul-eating demon," only it came out "Woo-woob-wha? Mystical crap? Me? Into it?"
"You were totally into it. Freaky into it. You were always talking about these big meaningful dreams you had." She made quote marks around half the words in that sentence, while I reeled and tried to match my teenage memories with Sara's violently clashing ones. "Your 'spirit guide,'" she said. "Your 'shamanic training.' You were so full of shit."
I put away trying to reconcile disparate memories and looked down at her for a while. I was tall enough that just looking at people could get them to back off sometimes, but she had federal agent training and, more important, remembered me as an awkward teenager. One she apparently hadn't liked as much as I thought she had. That's what I said, actually. "Wow. You really didn't like me very much, did you? I had…no idea." It stung, the same way learning she and Lucas had kept in touch. I was willing to admit I'd screwed it up. Unintentionally, maybe, but I'd screwed it up. Still, the idea that we'd never really been friends cut a lot deeper than it should've, all these years later.
She glanced away, a trace of guilt slithering across her pretty features. It made me feel a little better, not because I wanted her to feel badly, but because maybe it meant we had been friends and she'd just heaped a lot of after-the-fact resentment onto the relationship. I was coming to realize I knew more than a little about that kind of behavior.
"It doesn't matter. I guess I am still into it." I had no recollection at all of being into mystical stuff in high school, and wondered if those memories had faded the same way my Coyote dreams had faded. Wondered, in fact, whether they'd had help in fading, which made me want to kick Coyote's shin just in case. "It's kind of what I'm doing now. It doesn't really matter if you believe in it or not, but you're not going to f…" I trailed off because Laurie Corvallis had worked her way into my line of vision, and was staring at us very nearly hard enough to set my hair on fire. I'd forgotten she was there. "Shit."
Sara glanced at her like she was of slightly less significance than a bug. "Don't worry. I can seize her tapes under the Patriot Act if I need to."
For the first and possibly the last time in history, Corvallis and I started spluttering in outrage for the same reason. Sara said, "Oh, great, you're still a bleeding-heart liberal, too," and grabbed my arm to haul me several steps away. Corvallis tried to follow, but two of Sara's agents materialized—a word I should've use more cautiously, given the wendigo's vanish-and-reappear act—between us. Corvallis bounced on her toes, trying to see what was going on. A mean little part of me snickered. Sadly, that part was attached to my voice box, so it happened out loud, but Sara only smirked and didn't chide me. "You were saying?"
"That you're not going to find a conventional killer. I know there's no point in asking you to step back, but unless the FBI has its own paranormal investigative team, you're not going to find an answer." A sudden childish hope sparked in me. "Do you? Is there really like an X-Files department? I would've made a great—"
"Mulder," Sara finished, which was not at all what I'd been going to say. "If we've got X-Files, I don't know about them." And don't want to, her tone said. "Are you for real? You think there's some kind of mythological monster out here in the woods killing people?"
"Can you give me a logical explanation, a clear definition, of what you saw in the last half hour?" I raised a hand, blocking any answer she might give to what was effectively a rhetorical question. "Seriously, Sara, what did you see? Because I can hardly see this thing myself, and it's probably easier for me than most people." That sounded better than "for you."
Her upper lip curled and flattened again, almost invisible signal of frustration. "A wolf," she finally said, in much the same way Gary'd named it a bear. "I don't know, Joanne. I could barely focus on it. It had teeth, that's all I know, and all my victims have been eaten. Let's say I believe you."
Way, way, way under my breath, I mumbled, "I believe you," obediently. People hardly ever thought that was as funny as I did, though, so I hoped she hadn't heard, but mostly I wished life came with emoticons, so I could stamp a disembodied smiley face in the air next to me as an indication that other people should think I was funny, too.
"If I believe you, and this isn't something bullets can handle, what am I supposed to do? Go back to my bosses and say sorry, no idea what happened, but I promise it's over? What are you going to do? And how are you going to prove you're right if you kill this thing?"
"By Seattle not being the epicenter of cannibal killings anymore? Honestly, I don't know yet how to stop this thing." That was clearly the wrong thing to say. Sara's jaw tensed and she turned her shoulders in a way that indicated closing-off body language. I hurried along, words tumbling over each other. "It's coming at me from a different place than anything else I've gone up against, Sara. I'll take it down. I always have before. But it's a lot easier if I don't have civilians around to worry about."
I'd forgotten her quirky lifted eyebrow. She didn't raise it up high like most people did. She only twitched it just enough to indicate she was amused, and that hadn't changed in thirteen years. Hopeful, I smiled back just a little. "I use the word 'civilians' advisedly."
"You better. Look, Joanne. I can't pull out. You know that."
"Yeah, I do. Just…if you believe me at all, just drop when I say get down, okay?"
She sighed, the sound starting somewhere around her ankle bones. "Okay."
"Good," I said. "Great. Get down!"
Sara hit the deck, and the wendigo came tearing over us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It smelled of desperation, a scent I'd only associated with humans before, and even that as a parable rather than an actual definable stink. But its stench was sour, and there was no method to its behavior, just a frenzied launch at those closest to it. Sara was facedown in six inches of snow, and the thing rebounded off me, sending me into a backward stagger.
I could feel the agents' life-pulses so clearly I didn't need to see them, and snapping fresh shields up was by now instinctive. The wendigo leaped from body to body, bouncing off, and finally, with a howl, turned back to me. Shields or not, it landed on me like a ton of bricks. I sank down but shot my hands upward, grabbing at its thick neck.
Thick, but smaller than it had been. Gary'd done a lot of damage in his brief battle, and I knew it was starving for lack of souls, for lack of flesh.
Given that it had backed off from me twice now, it had to be desperate to attack me when it had been weakened. It made sense: I could probably power it back up to its previous size, all in one tidy snack, but I didn't think it was happy about its range of choices. It swung its head, hot saliva spattering my face as it pressed down, trying to make my arms buckle. I wasn't about to falter, but neither did I know exactly what to do now that I had it by the throat. Using my magic as a weapon was a cosmic no-no, and I didn't dare let go so I could draw my sword. I had unpleasant visions of lying here in the snow for the rest of eternity, trying to throttle something that wasn't exactly alive.
Coyote appeared, a silhouette against the blue sky, and clobbered the wendigo with a tree branch. It howled, whacked him away, and fled. I heard Coyote hit the snow, and then silence broken only by the harsh breathing of those around us. Even that faded after a minute, and there was nothing but wind and the occasional plop of snow falling from trees to the ground. I ventured, "Sara?" and got a muffled grunt in reply.
"I think it's gone. I think maybe you and your people should go back down to the lodge and keep anybody from going hiking or skiing or whatever. What do you think?"
"I think that sounds like a good use of federal resources." She sounded almost like the girl I'd been friends with a lifetime ago. Snow squeaked as she got up, and I lay there listening to the brief, unconvinced and unconvincing arguments presented by her forensics team. A couple of them decided to stay behind, with a handful of others offering to stand guard while they worked. I didn't think any of them imagined they were going to find anything, but I admired their work ethic. The rest took Corvallis and her cameraman, the former complaining bitterly, and headed back to the hotel to keep tourists from getting themselves eaten.
I was pretty sure I should join them, but staring at the sky as I lay deep in what would be a snow angel if I could muster the energy to wave my arms and legs had its appeal, too. "So," I said eventually. "Nice job there at the end, scaring it off."
Coyote's voice drifted up out of the snow. "I think it was trying to escape and went after you because it was desperate. That wasn't a real attack."
"Yeah, I know. Still, you got it off me." I lay there awhile longer, replaying the last several minutes in my mind, and coming up repeatedly against Coyote's expression of distaste and terror as he struggled with the wendigo. In time, I repeated, "So. This fighting thing. You're not actually very good at it."
"No." Coyote sounded like he'd like to say a lot more, and yet like he knew absolutely none of it was of any use.
I nodded. Snow creaked under my head. "Interesting."
"It's not—"
"No," I said, "really. It's interesting. I'm not mad." I considered that, then decided it was true. "You're a teacher. You're a healer. A guide. Right after this all started I was told I was on a warrior's path. I'm guessing nobody ever said that to you."
He said, "No," again, and then, "People usually don't, to shamans. It's sort of anathema to the purpose."
"Yeah, no, I get that. It's cool. It's okay." I stared at the sky for another little while, making a half-hearted effort to formulate a plan, or an opinion about me being a fighter when my mentor wasn't, or in fact to do anything besides lie there in the snow. I was pretty content with lying there, really, except, "My butt is freezing."
Coyote let out a sharp, barklike laugh. "Mine, too."
I sat up, hunching my shoulders against snow falling down my spine. "I vote we regroup back at the hotel with hot soup and carbs and a boiling-temperature bath."
"Yeah." Coyote sat up, too. "All except those last three things. We've got some work to do first."
I whimpered, and we got up and went back to the hotel.
* * *
Gary was sitting by the fireplace in the hotel lobby with an enormous cup of tea in his hands and the twenty-five-year-old FBI agent perched on his knee. He spilled both in his haste to get up when we came in, but instead of looking abashed he gave me a broad wink and a wicked smile. I had to look away to keep from giggling, and when he got close enough I whispered, "You Lothario, you."
"Keeps me young, darlin'. Keeps me young. What happened after I left?" He waved goodbye to his FBI agent as we headed for the room, filling in details as we went. "You left 'em up there with no protection?"
I spread my hands, defenseless and helpless alike. "I think it's gone for now, and there are other things we need to do. You were the only one who even laid a hand on it out there, much less—" We got to the room and I stopped to gaze up at the old cabbie while Coyote unlocked the door. "I don't think I said it before, Gary. You were fantastic out there. You were amazing."
Red curdled along his cheeks and he all but dug a toe into the floor. "Wasn't me, mostly. It was that tortoise you found for me, Jo. I never felt him like that before. The way I figure it, you did all the heavy lifting. I was just the vehicle."
"No." We stepped into the room and I turned to give him a hard hug. "That was you, Gary. It was all you. You kicked ass, took names, and saved a lot of lives."
"You can thank your protector during our spirit journey," Coyote said. "He'll hear you. Jo, when was the last time you slept?"
I gave him a look. Gary peered between us all bright-eyed and curious. Coyote had the grace to blush, which warmed his already-warm skin tones attractively. "Right. It'd be better if we hadn't—"
I gave him another look, this one explaining how he was going to die unpleasantly if he came anywhere near suggesting the phrase this was a mistake. "If we hadn't slept," he said firmly. Gary brightened up even more, his low-brow suspicions apparently confirmed. I averted my eyes so I wouldn't revert to grinning like an idiot, and grinned like an idiot anyway. Coyote, in his best superior teacher tone, said, "You should know by now that spirit journeys are easier when you're sleep deprived."
"Oh." Heh. I did know that. My stupid grin fell away in embarrassment, and I stared at nothing for a moment. "We could get high instead."
There was a little silence while we sat there, none of us quite believing I'd said that. First, as far as I knew, we had nothing to get high on except the overpriced alcohol in the hotel bar. Second, and far more importantly—
"That'd go over great with the random drug tests at work," Gary said. "You lost your mind, Jo?"
"I'm beginning to think so, yes."
"We did bring your drum," Coyote said tartly. "Unless that's not recreational enough for you."
"Oh, bite me. I don't know why I said that. It just popped out." I was a stick in the mud when it came to drug use, and had been long before I became a cop. I just flat-out didn't get why anybody would risk the high when there was always the very real possibility that the low would include sudden and permanent death. That, obscurely, reminded me that I couldn't remember the last time I'd snitched a cigarette, which somehow made me feel like I had the moral high ground. Satisfied, I got up to unwrap my drum and hand it over to Gary.
Coyote intercepted me halfway, his palms turned up and his expression unexpectedly shy. "May I? I've never seen it, and I remember how excited you were when you got it."
I almost tripped over my own feet fighting off the urge to cling to the instrument. It had been in my bedroom the night before, but we hadn't exactly stopped to admire it. I'd never imagined it might be an object of interest to my mentor, and I wasn't in the habit of letting people besides Gary handle it. Morrison had, a couple of times, and the first time he'd picked it up I'd felt it from across the room. I thought I would have felt it from across the world. Given that history, handing it to Coyote was a lesson in anticipation.
Magic spilled through me as he took it. Not like what I'd felt with Morrison: that had been warmth bordering on sensuality. With Coyote it was the heat and clarity of the desert, like the colors of his aura were pouring into me in short, intense bursts. Hairs stood up on my arms and his gaze, gone gold, jerked to mine. The wendigo—in fact, the entire world—faded from relevance, and I took a half step toward him.
Gary, very politely, cleared his throat. I jumped backward, cheeks flaming with teen-level angsty guilt. Coyote flinched, stared at Gary like he'd appeared from the ether, then hastily transferred his attention back to me. "What—?"
"The drum, it has, I guess it has—" Opinions. I couldn't quite bring myself to say that, and instead started whistling the Matchmaker song from Fiddler on the Roof. Coyote's eyebrows went up and I stopped whistling to rub my face. I wondered if Morrison had felt anything when he'd picked up my drum. I wondered what would have happened if I'd let Thor handle it. I wondered if I really wanted to know in either case. "Look, just nevermind, okay? Can we just get on with it?"
Coyote's eyebrows remained elevated, which left me to imagine all sorts of things we might get on with, none of which were hunting down a wendigo. Gary, who had as dirty a mind as I did, gave an indiscreet snort that probably masked a much less discreet guffaw. I cast an exasperated glance skyward, then put my hand out for the drum. "Come on, Ro."
He put his eyebrows back down where they belonged and otherwise ignored me, concern creasing lines into his forehead as he examined the drumhead. "What happened?"
"The wolf—the—" I gave up and sat on the end of Gary's bed. "I always thought it was a wolf there. A wolf and a rattlesnake under the raven's wings." They were painted beautifully, raven wings following the drumhead's curves, and the colors were gorgeous, as bright as they'd been the day I received the drum. But the wolf was smeared, like it had gotten wet and was fading away. "But it started changing after you—died—and so I've been wondering for months if maybe it was a coyote, not a wolf at all. I don't know what it means, especially since you're not dead."
"If it was a coyote, maybe it means I have less influence over your future than I used to." Coyote gave the drum a gentle shake, rattling its beads, then offered it to Gary. "Or maybe it just means the elders who gave it to you saw wrong, and it's changing itself so it's more in tune with your needs."
"It's an inanimate object, Coyote, it can't…" Logic held sway in the completion of that sentence, but like it or lump it, my life encompassed a great deal more than just logic these days. "Yeah, okay, maybe. Can we get started?"
He gave me an odd little smile. "That's the third time you've said that. What happened to the woman who didn't want anything to do with magic?"
"She nearly got her mentor killed, and a lot of other people did die. Come on, Coyote. What are we doing here? Guide me."
His smile fell away into apology. "Right. Okay, so I've seen your—" he broke off, eyed Gary, and euphemized what he'd been about to say "—your spirit animal, so I—"
"My raven," I interrupted petulantly. The idea of excluding Gary from the small circle of people who knew what my spirit guide was seemed all wrong. I resented Coyote's attempt, even though the smarter part of me knew he was trying to protect me. Spirit animals, like true names, were not to be taken lightly.
Coyote gave me a brief, steady look, then corrected himself. "Your raven. So I know you've managed at least one successful spirit quest, which is heartening."
"You don't have to sound so surprised."
For some reason he ignored me. "You need a second for this, Joanne. The kind of soul retrieval we're looking at doing here is significant. The raven is a very good guide, but I want you to have something whose purpose is to protect you, as well."
Worry began to loose worms in my tummy. "I thought any spirit guide protected you in the astral realm."
"They do, so maybe you see my point. I don't think one's enough. I wish you had three, but this kind of quest usually only brings them one at a time."
"There were—" I swallowed, heat suddenly burning my face. Three spirit animals had turned up when I'd done a quest with Judy Morningstar, but that entire situation had gone to hell in a handbasket. Odds weren't good that any of them had been real, even if a raven had legitimately chosen me later, as it had seemed to then. "Okay. One quest, one guide. Is that going to be—" I was having a hard time getting through sentences. That one was supposed to finish enough? but Coyote's tense-jawed expression made me swallow it.
He was afraid. My mentor, my golden-eyed, laughing Coyote, who had saved my life and taught me most of what I knew about shamanic magic, was scared of the monster in the woods. It was a bigger bad than he was accustomed to dealing with, and he'd only just woken up from a special kind of hell that had a lot in common with what the wendigo was doing to people. I'd been staggering along for months, desperate for reassurance, and now the guy I'd expected to provide it wasn't in any shape to do so.
"It'll be enough." I hardly recognized my own voice, though there was something vaguely familiar in the tone. "One guide, one shield, and besides, I've got these." I touched the silver necklace at my throat, garnering a smile from Gary and a look of incomprehension from Coyote. "Talismans of faith. They'll help. Trust me."
Coyote's shoulders relaxed a little and, bemused, I recognized the tone I'd taken. It was exactly the same one he'd used to convince the paramedics to let us help Mandy Tiller: utterly reasonable and calm and certain, even if the words themselves were preposterous. He gathered himself, then nodded, equilibrium regained. "This is dangerous, Jo. The wendigo is hunting in two worlds, so during a spirit quest you're going to be particularly vulnerable. For this journey, I'll be your protector as much as the raven."
God. No wonder he was freaked out. Hunting monsters was scary enough, but hanging around waiting for them to attack had a particular kind of nerve-wrackingness to it. "I'll try to hurry."
"It's not the kind of thing you can rush." He slid to the floor, making himself, by all appearances, less comfortable, and I reluctantly joined him. I didn't see why I couldn't sack out on the bed and do my spirit quest in comparative luxury, but I bet he'd argue that comfort invited complacency. Even I didn't want to invite complacency in the face of a soul-eating demon.
He said, "We should wake up naturally," to Gary, who nodded, lifted the drum, and began the familiar heartbeat cadence.
For the first time ever, I had instantaneous company in my journey to the other worlds.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Coyote was at my side, trotting along in his animal form. The sky above lingered between Middle World blue and Lower World red, shading to warm purple before we fully entered the Lower World.
I had no recollection of following a path, the other times I'd come here. It wasn't man-made, but more like some ancient streambed, rocks smoothed over until they were cobbles, patch-worked together by nature's hand. That was Coyote's presence, stabilizing my generally awkward entrance to other realms. I wondered if I'd ever be as competent.
We followed the streambed up a low mountainside, Coyote's tongue lolling as it got hotter. I said, "You could always switch out of the fur suit," idly, and he managed to slam his entire body weight into my knee without arresting his forward motion at all.
"Four feet are easier than two on this kind of surface. Besides, I'm a better hunter and protector in this form. You could try it."
"Being a coyote?"
"Or a raven."
I liked how he said that. Like it was not only within the bounds of reason, but in fact utterly reasonable. "I can't shape-shift."
"Not with that attitude you can't."
"I meant people can't shape-shift." This despite the obvious evidence to the contrary. But we were in the Lower World, where rules didn't hold true quite the same way they did in our world. "Or are you going to tell me you can do that at home, too?"
"I wouldn't dare." We crested the mountain and the Lower World spread out before us, a multicolored valley of forests and meadows. Mist took the distance even though the low sun burned steadily in the sky, but I doubted little things like terrestrial weather patterns meant anything here. Coyote sat, wagging his tail, and snapped at a seed dancing on the air. "Does anywhere call to you?"
"Just the local telephone exchange."
He snapped at me that time, and I raised my hands placatingly while I studied the view.
I honestly wanted somewhere to jump out at me, for some small hollow or meadow to brighten in invitation. I wanted to feel like I belonged somewhere here, that some place in this strange odd-colored world welcomed me. Nothing did. Yellow rivers cut their paths across orange-and-purple earth, blue trees stretched toward red skies, all of them disproportionately close to one another, but none of them said c'mere, Jo, this is a safe place for your spirit quest. I sighed and gestured a little ways down the mountain. "Nowhere, really. We might as well just use one of the hollers."
"One of the what?"
"The hollers, the…" I stumbled over the explanation, having never imagined needing to give it. "The mountain hollers. One of the little valleys down there. You know, if you holler it echoes? It's a…it's a holler."
Coyote turned his face toward me to give me the direct upward look that made such effective puppy-dog eyes, except there was no soulful hope in his expression. It looked a lot more like "What the hell are you on about?"
The phrase I shrank in on myself was more literal in the Lower World than at home. I curved my shoulders defensively, becoming physically smaller with unhappiness. "It's what my dad calls them. I thought everybody did. Maybe it's just a North Carolina thing."
I didn't know why Coyote's disdain made me feel so bad. I just hadn't expected to be called out over a regionalism. He looked awfully big now, compared to me, and his furry eyebrows bunched together in the worried way that dogs had. He poked his head toward me, long tongue wrapping around my wrist, and although it should've been impossible for him to speak that way, he said, "I'm not a dog," very gently. "Sorry. I just never heard the phrase before. Mountain hollers."
"Doesn't matter." Still hunchy, I turned down the mountain, but Coyote tangled himself in my legs and wouldn't let me move.
"It does matter. This is supposed to be a spiritual journey, a peaceful one, not another tit for tat one-man-upmanship. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make fun of you."
"Yeah, you did." I wasn't trying to be childish. I just figured if he was going to apologize it should be for the right things, or it didn't mean diddly-squat. He looked up at me for a moment and then his big pointy ears flopped over.
"Okay, you're right. I did. I shouldn't have. I'm sorry."
That sounded more sincere somehow, and I sat down to bash my head against his and hug him. "Okay."
"You've been doing a good job, Jo. I don't know if I said so. You've been doing all right without me."
"I've been a huge flailing mess without you." I got up again, feeling much better about the world, and we slipped and climbed our way down into the nearest holler, where I threw my head back and, well, hollered. "Halloo the reverberate hills!"
Echoes bounced back all around me, and Coyote, after throwing me a startled glance, tilted his sharp nose to the sky and howled. I joined him, shouting nonsense and howling myself, until we were both breathless and our ears rang with the shadows of our voices. Then, smiling and yet feeling strangely formal amidst all the noise, I oriented myself toward the north, where I bowed extravagantly. The other three directions got equal acknowledgment before I sat in the center of a power circle inscribed by echoes.
"All I've brought," I said to no one in particular, "is the song of our hearts. I'm sorry I haven't got any other gifts today, but liveliness and fun ought to count for something." It certainly did with my raven friend, who could be outright silly. I closed my eyes and, a little more solemnly, added, "I seek a second guide today, another spirit to protect me on the warrior's path. I'm grateful to anyone who considers me, and I'll do my best to honor one who might choose to walk with me. I'm pretty bad at that," I admitted, because it seemed like I ought to be honest, "but I'm getting a little better, and Raven means a lot to me even if I'm an ingrate."
I didn't dare open my eyes, for fear Coyote would be gaping at me. I wasn't exactly Ms. Formality, but my little speech was heartfelt, which was a long way from the bastion of refusal I'd been six or twelve months ago.
In the silence that followed I became aware of my drum, its rhythm steady enough that it seemed to define the boundaries of the world. The earth rattled softly with its thrum, mountains picking up the reverberations and rattling them through me. Even the air shimmered with the beat, dancing against my skin. Trees rustled in time with it, and I thought if I opened my eyes the sun itself would skip to the drum's sound.
Instead, though, I drew in closer to myself, concentrating on how my heart fell into time with the external beat. My blood pulsed with its time, red brightening and dimming in my eyelids, until slowly the dimmer aspect became black, and then so too did the bright. I could barely hear the drum anymore, could barely even hear my own heartbeat, assuming they weren't one and the same. Sparks danced against my eyelids, tiny colorless fireworks that were alien and familiar at the same time.
The drumbeat turned to hope in my chest, filling me until I had no sense of my body left. I floated, nothing more than a spark myself, and then the spirit animals came darting through the dark to investigate me.
Most came only once. A badger dug his way by, stopping to snuffle me and then move on. I thought I'd seen him before; he'd come to consider Gary as a companion. The fleet deer that leaped by me, though, had not, and I was unsurprised when its spirit-white form continued on. Solid stodgy badgers seemed a more likely fit for me than quick-hearted flighty deer.
Others came and went, spilling by in a river of possibility, and I became slowly aware of the one animal who returned again and again. It wound its way toward me as if it were the riverbed, long thin lines of white glowing and fading away. Once, twice, three times, and the fourth it stayed. I said, "You—well, one of your brethren, anyway—came the first time, too. In the false quest."
A rattlesnake folded himself up to strike, narrow head held motionless as he met my gaze. "There isss no sssuch thing assss a falssse quessst, ssshaman. There are only falssse prophetsss. We come becaussse your ssspirit isss true, and alwaysss wasss, even when you were led assstray." He dipped his head and I mimicked the gesture, profound thanks sending a chill over me.
"I mussst tessst you," he said. "Sssee if you are worthy. Thisss will hurt," he warned, and struck.
* * *
Hurt didn't begin to cover it. I'd taken a sword through the gut more than once, had been punctured through the hand—also more than once, now that I thought about it, and overall any lifestyle that involved being gutted and stabbed repeatedly really needed a good hard look taken at it—and I'd fought off an ancient serpent's poison while in the form of a thunderbird.
The rattler's bite managed to combine all of that into one excruciating wound. My hand, where his fangs had sunk into me, throbbed so hard I thought it would explode. Poison scored my veins, stripping them of blood. They shriveled inward, constricting my heart, and agonizing sickness threatened to split my belly open. I gasped for air and instead wheezed toxins, my throat burning raw.
I didn't know what the hell I was supposed to do to prove myself worthy. Playing the stoic seemed like the obvious answer, but with screams ripping my voice box to shreds, I was clearly not taking that road. A spasm seized me, flinging me down and arching my back until bone cracked, but when tears spilled along my cheeks they burned too, poisoned water. Stoic was right out.
That left me with two choices. I could heal myself, or I could die. I didn't think dying would prove anything, and I'd managed to survive poisonings before. It was a complex process involving separating blood from poison and pushing the venom out. Water in the gas line was how I thought of it, and it was time-consuming and uncomfortable.
I think I actually said, "Oh, fuck this shit," out loud instead of keeping it safely behind my teeth. Then again, my teeth were rotting and falling from my mouth thanks to the contamination swirling through me, so they weren't keeping much behind them anyway. I reached deep inside myself, past the belly-twisting bleak horror my life had become, and seized hold of the healing magic that was part and parcel of who I was now.
Nobody'd ever mentioned if shamans had any real use for spell working, for a focus of magic through words. Then again, nobody had mentioned a lot of things, and I'd found words to be handy a time or two. I set my raw bleeding gums together, snarled, "Physician, heal thyself!" and commanded my magic go.
It erupted through me, silver-blue light brilliant against the darkness. Poison splashed out of me and sizzled into nothing. Pain faded instantly, my bones whole again, my body no longer wracked with pain. Something glittered in my vision, a glimpse of fractured, spiderwebbed glass. Bits of the web were sealing up, coming closer to the center. Then the image faded, replaced by a growing sense of astonishment.
I'd known almost since the beginning that real shamanic healing didn't have to go through all the tiddly steps I took, all the metaphorical stretches that I used to convince myself any of it was possible. Knowing it, though, and experiencing the pure blowout of power, the instantaneous transformation from broken to whole, were two very different things. I took a deep breath, marveling at how it didn't hurt, how my lungs weren't melting inside my chest, and sat up beaming.
Snakes were not creatures well-known for their expressive faces, but my rattler managed to look pleased anyway. "That was sssatisssfactory. Ssstrength you have, ssshaman. Ssstrength, but little sssense. You would be wissse to heed the raven."
Bemused, I said, "Yeah? I'm trying. What do you bring to the table?" and winced at my own lack of gratitude. "I mean, um…"
"You mean asss you sssay. Sssnakesss, like you, are sssimple creaturesss. We ssstrike when it isss necssesssssssary. It isss sssomething I like about you. Asss for my giftsss, they are plain to sssee, if you ussse a little sssenssse."
I wasn't sure I liked being a simple creature, but I did like how his forked tongue got all excited and tangled around a word like "necessary," with all those ess sounds. I bet if I could get him to do the "she sells sea shells" tongue twister he'd get such a hiss going he couldn't ever stop. I also bet he wouldn't appreciate it at all, and bit my lip against trying. "The healing," I said instead. "I couldn't do it like that before."
He inclined his head quite elegantly, and I reached out, tentatively, to see if snakes liked being scratched on the jaw. This one evidently did; he preened and tipped his head like a cat, leaning into the scritch. "There isss more. It will come to you when you need it mossst."
"More? Instantaneous healing is kind of a lot."
"Yesss, but it isss not all of what you are." His snaky eyes lidded contentedly and he began coiling down on himself, clearly ready for a nap. "Sssoon you will sssee."
"I can't wait to find out." I even sort of meant that. "One more question. How come you talk to me? Raven doesn't."
The rattler swayed his head to the side, examining me as if I were a fool. "Becaussse ravensss can talk in your world, sssilly ssshaman." He bumped me with his blunt nose, and I awakened to the Lower World, and chaos.
* * *
It wasn't the wendigo, if I wanted to count small favors. There was none of the blood stench, none of the bitter cold, none of the almost-human drive for food. Instead, Coyote staved off wolves, for a metaphorical if not literal description.
I had some familiarity with the demon denizens of the Lower World, having accidentally released them into Seattle one time. Coyote faced them and their brethren: chimeras of terrible form and shape ranging from vicious-toothed, segmented worms to giants whose bodies were twisted with hate. One of those, a stone giant called an a-senee-ki-wakw, locked gazes with me as I woke, and I saw from the depths of rage in its eyes that it knew me. I'd released it and then I'd put it back, and it intended on having its revenge. They all did, and knew they only had to go through Coyote to get to me.
Now would be a good time for whatever other gifts the rattlesnake had offered to show up. I drew my sword and rushed forward to join Coyote in battle. He was bleeding and his jaws were red, and my appearance at his side was shock enough that he snarled and turned on me for an instant before he knew who I was. Then relief sagged his features and he turned back to the demon spirits, hunched low in preparation for attack. "You need to get out of here. We can't kill them, not here, but they won't stop hunting until your spirit has been extinguished. You really pissed them off."
"It's a feature." I fell into step with him, backing up, but the holler wasn't built to scramble out of backward. "You go first. Get up there so you can give me a hand out."
He barked a protest and the twisted giant surged forward, slamming a huge first into the ground. The drumbeat faltered, then sped up, shaking the earth as if somewhere out in the real world, Gary knew what was happening and was trying to help. "Coyote, go! I've got the reach weapon!"
He snarled again, but my logic apparently swayed him, because he suddenly turned tail and raced up the back side of the holler. The demons, eager for their prey, leaped as one, converging on a single point.
Me.
I twitched to the side, faster and more graceful than I knew I could be. My sword lashed out, whipping like a saber, and blue power flared along it to score a mark against the giant's hide. One of the others, a flint-winged monstrosity, turned on a wing tip and jumped at me again. I flattened against the earth, rolled, and came up again in a fighting stance, all while my brain was still shrieking in panic and waiting to get crushed. "I am not your enemy!" My staccato shout bounced off the holler's walls until the only word left was enemy. The a-seneeki-wakw seemed to feed on it, getting stronger and taller with each repetition. I darted back and forth, avoiding scorpion tail stings and gnashing worm teeth sheerly by the grace of God, while Coyote stood above me barking his fool head off.
I wanted to scurry up the hill after him. I really did. But aside from the fact that I didn't think I'd make it, the blinding need to do something about these creatures, the simple wish to succeed in defeating something, since the wendigo kept kicking my ass, had grown stronger than the impulse to run. The misses got narrower, and I got angrier, until I flung down my rapier and bellowed, "Fine! You think you can take me? Come and get me, motherfuckers!"
It was awesome. I felt like Samuel L. Jackson, right up until the motherfuckers came and got me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I didn't know there was anywhere below the Lower World to get dragged down into. It turned out there was, and the best word I had for it was Hell.
The Lower World, for all its bizarre proportions and colors, was a comparatively friendly place. Dangerous, sure, but I'd yet to encounter a plane of existence that wasn't. The Lower World, though, didn't shove knives into my chest when I breathed. It didn't smell of sulfur and brimstone and fire, and it didn't reflect a gory sky in its obsidian surface. There was no sun, but where there was light, it shone dull red through dark translucent rock.
Demons roamed the gleaming black earth. They fought each other, they bled, they rose again. Some reached for the bleak sky, trying to claw their way free. There were rents where a few had succeeded: where a handful had been sufficiently inspired by my presence to tear through to another realm.
Peculiarly, now that they had me, they seemed reluctant to attack. My sword was lying on the ground in front of me, glowing so brightly it hurt my eyes. It struck me that the blade was really the only source of light. I could see the sky because of its brilliance, and where black stone looked red, the rapier also reflected there. I squatted to lift it, and the monsters shrank back, mewling and twisting their gazes away.
Demons didn't strike me as particularly smart, but my limited experience suggested they wouldn't, of their own volition, have brought me somewhere that I had the upper hand by dint of a glowy sword. Slowly, semi-consciously, I looked to my left. Followed the beat of my heart in that direction, half knowing, half dreading, what I would see.
A cavern, black maw in a black mountain, made one dark shadow against another. It looked warm, somehow. Warm and not exactly inviting, but more comfortable than a jagged plain filled with things that wanted to eat me.
"Oh no." My voice came out light and shaky, an alien thing in a world made for screams. "No. I'm dumb, but not that dumb. And I don't believe you're Lucifer, God damn it, even if this is Hell." I didn't believe it was the devil because I didn't believe there was any way, on any level of reality, that I could ever go head-to-head with The Devil Himself, and I knew someday I was going to have to face the thing under the mountain. Therefore, it couldn't be the devil. Cogito, ergo sum.
Rich laughter rolled from the cavern, deep enough to make glassy rock crack and shatter against the ground. I bared my teeth, feeling very much like a mouse facing down a lion, and repeated, "No."
The earth rumbled, a scrape of stone on stone. A trapped sound, I thought with a tiny surge of hope. My mother'd done a thorough job of kicking the Master's ass, if he couldn't wriggle free from his mountain cave even in what looked to me like the depths of Hell. It gave me a little confidence, and a little, compared to what I'd had, was a lot.
I didn't know what the creature in the stone was, besides an enemy. He commanded the banshees, feeding on the blood of their victims. Feeding on their souls, maybe, though I had the impression that was an act of desperation on his part, after my mother and I had thwarted his more usual dinner plans. He was weak, but he was interested in me, and I was going to have to deal with him someday.
Personally, I wanted that someday to be as far away as humanly possible. The monster in the mountain commissioned death cauldrons and frightened gods. I was in no way a match for him.
He knew it, of course. He'd caught my attention, or I'd caught his, the very first time I'd used any kind of power as an adult. I'd known instantly that I was part of some game to him, and that if he could destroy me while I was young and stupid he'd be happy to. He almost had, too, but my dead mother had taken him to the mat, and ever since he'd been lingering at the edges of my mind, unable to break through.
I didn't like that he kept turning up in the shadows. It made me think I was being investigated for weaknesses, and I had more than enough to show. It also made me afraid that Sheila MacNamarra's smackdown was losing its hold. If he worked his way free before I was up to full speed, I was pretty sure it wouldn't be just me who suffered.
On what constituted a positive side, the best he could do right now was send minions—assuming they were his minions, and not just foolish demons who hadn't thought through their attack clearly enough—to drag me around and try to scare me. I was, by increments, becoming less scared and more pissed off. I leveled my sword at the cavern, willing power to carry my words to him. To weigh him down, too, as much as I could. Mom had pinned him. I should be able to reinforce that, at least. Silver and blue coalesced in the blade, almost humming, then leaped forward in a surge to rush the mountain like a locomotive. "You aren't ready for me yet, buster, and I'm not ready for you. One of us is going to pull a trump card sooner or later, but until then, quit dicking me around. I'm not in the mood."
His presence retreated under the weight of my power, and all the amusement I was accustomed to sensing from him went flat. Triumph blared through me.
And was followed hard by a tremendous heave from my bound enemy. The whole mountain range shook, earth roaring protest at rough treatment. Glass exploded everywhere as the Master's rage surged outward as if it were suddenly a living thing given body of its own. My own puny magic went thin and terrified, riding the upswell, trying frantically to pin it back down.
It couldn't, but neither could he quite break through my silvery power clinging furiously to the earth and keeping him from bursting through. All my bravado went up in smoke, and I whispered, "Raven, please, get me out of here."
The sky broke open under enormous talons. Red light bled through, sending demons squealing and scattering. My raven dived through the tear in the heavens and caught my shoulders to drag me back into the worlds I knew.
* * *
Coyote and Gary were both kneeling over me when I opened my eyes. Coyote had two black eyes, a split lip and a host of other small injuries I couldn't see. I felt them, though, as wrongnesses in his aura, in his power. Without thinking, I clapped my hand against his face.
His yowl of pain turned to a gurgle of astonishment as I pushed a torrent of healing power through him. The bruises cleared up, cuts sealing over, and it was only as a distant second that I thought of patching the paint job on a vehicle; the metaphor hadn't been necessary. He fell back on his rear, prodding at himself, and raised wide brown eyes to me. Gary did just the opposite, leaning forward all bright-eyed, like he couldn't wait to hear what had happened.
"A snake," I said before either of them asked. "A snake, like on my drum. They're symbols of healing, did you know that? It, I mean, he, it, um. Just cleared away all the cobwebs, kind of. Whoomp, no more messing around with metaphor. I can just do it." Oh God. I needed a swoosh, now.
"They're symbols of renewal," Coyote said in a deliberately pedantic tone. "They can also represent shape-shifting, Jo. The shedding of the old skin, coming into the new…."
I sat up. I didn't know when I'd fallen over, but I sat up. "He said there were other gifts I'd discover when I needed them. Maybe shape-shif…" Nope. I couldn't get through the sentence "Sorry. I just don't believe people can shape-shift, Ro. Maybe when you're traveling through the other worlds, yeah, okay, because I usually end up a mole or something when I'm trying to get to my garden, but not for real."
Muscle went tight along his jaw before he bobbed his eyebrows in a shrug. "All right, then. Some other gift, then, if he's offering more." I felt somehow chastised, and, contrary to the last, suddenly as if maybe I did so believe in shape-shifting, neener neener. Coyote, probably just as well for me, couldn't read my mind, and continued on with, "You should thank him for the healing, though." He glanced at himself, and muttered, "I should thank him."
"I should thank you. I had no idea those demons had come up, Coyote." Augh. He was right. I called him Coyote when I was trying to make an emotional connection and some variation on his real name when I was annoyed or trying to impart information. Good thing I never played poker. "I wasn't aware of anything except the quest. They'd have torn me apart if you hadn't been there. Thank you."
He said, "It's my job," but he sounded pleased. "But then what happened? You were playing them like a pro and then you threw down your sword and they jumped you and you disappeared."
I'd already forgotten it was my own moxy that had let the demons pull me into Hell. I wondered if the Master could've influenced me, made me pull a stupid stunt like that, but the sad truth was, I just wasn't too bright sometimes. It'd been all me. "Know anything about someone called the Master?"
"From about six different science fiction television shows, sure." Coyote's humor faded away when I didn't laugh. "Sorry. I didn't know it was important. Never heard of him. Who is he?"
"The bad guy." I shook my head. "I don't really know. My mother faced him a long time ago, and it's going to be my turn sooner or later."
"'Unto every generation a Slayer is born'?"
Gary, who was apparently more up on pop culture than I was, guffawed. I glared at them both, but mostly at Coyote. "You told me I was mixed up fresh. No baggage like whatever you're talking about. This isn't a generational thing, not like that." Actually, for all I knew, it could be. Maybe the women in my family had been fighting monsters in the dark all the way back to the beginning of time. I hoped they'd generally been more competent than me, if that was the case.
"No, no, that's not how it works on B…nevermind. What about the Master?"
"He was trying to get my attention again. That's where I went. It doesn't matter that much right now. I don't think he's influencing the wendigo." I rolled that statement around in my mind, testing it for veracity. It seemed accurate: as far as I could tell, the wendigo was after flesh and soul for its own survival, not for someone else's benefit. I'd been afraid something had been controlling it, but there'd been no hint of a link to another entity in my encounters with it. Besides, a soul-eating demon working for itself was plenty bad enough. "We can talk about him later. Right now you tell me, Ro. Am I in good enough shape to try this soul retrieval now? Can we take this thing before it kills anybody else?"
He said exactly what I didn't want him to: "I don't know. That you found a second spirit animal is a good sign. That it's a snake is probably even better."
"The third one was a horse." I spoke without meaning to, and looked over my shoulder like I'd see someone else to blame. Or maybe like I'd see a horse, I wasn't sure. Coyote made a curious noise a lot like his dog-form snuffle, and I said, "When I did spirit quests with Judy. I know they weren't right, but two of the three animals I saw were a raven and a snake. A copperhead, not a rattlesnake like came to me today, but a snake, anyway. And the third was a horse. Do you think maybe that's right? That maybe I should…" I wasn't sure where that question ended, but Coyote got up to take my drum off the bed—Gary must've put it down while I was still under—and tapped his fingers against the smeared animal on its head.
"Raven and rattler. I don't know, Jo. If you're right, if this third animal was a coyote, then I don't think you'll find your third spirit guide until this has resolved."
"Or maybe it won't resolve until I find my third guide."
"Look, you kids are talkin' chicken and eggs here. It don't matter." Gary reached out to thunk the drum with a fingernail. "We work with what we got, and right now that's Jo's two spirit animals and whatever you bring to the table, son."
Coyote had upgraded to "son" again. I wondered if he'd gotten the promotion in the moment he'd picked up my drum and I'd almost thrown myself on him. It seemed possible. Gary worked hard at supporting my emotional well-being. Harder than I did, really. "It's gonna be enough," he went on, "'cause it's what we've got."
"Don't discount yourself," I said. "We'd have already lost, without you."
"Maybe so. So tell me what we know. It eats people, flesh and soul, and it ain't constrained to the physical world. What else do we know?"
Coyote and I exchanged glances, and I muttered, "Gary ought to be the detective here," before saying, "It's cold. Everything about this wendigo is cold and snowstormy. Is that normal? I should've brought a computer."
"My BlackBerry will do." Coyote got it from his coat and sat on a bed, poking at the tiny screen with the stylus. "Cold, wendigo, what else?"
"It didn't just try eating Mandy. It stole her spirit, but it could be retrieved. None of the other bodies have had ghosts, which isn't normal with violent death, so maybe theirs were too lost. Too eaten," I said grumpily. "Maybe she wasn't lost, just lucky there were still bits of my shield hanging around. Or maybe it was more interested in getting a look at me than finishing her off. Or may—"
Coyote said, "Lost souls," firmly. "Mine was lost and you found it in the snowstorm. We'll use it. I can always take it out again if it narrows the search parameters down too much. Give me a few minutes, okay?"
"Yeah." I finally got off the floor, which was less drafty than mine at home, and pulled my coat back on. I was hungry, but I didn't want to eat in case we had to do more spirit stuff in the near future. Instead I went out to the balcony and looked up at the stars, whose presence vaguely surprised me. It had still been daylight when we'd begun the journey to the other realms. I waved at the Big Dipper, then knocked snow off the balcony railing and put my forearms on it, weight leaned forward as I lowered my head and waited for the inevitable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It took almost five minutes before the sliding glass door opened behind me and Gary, tentatively, said, "Joanie?"
It wasn't a good sign that he called me Joanie. The only other time he'd done it, I'd been completely falling apart. I waggled my fingers, inviting him out to the balcony, and he took up a post next to me, weight on his forearms against the rail, just like I stood. I knew what he wanted, but I wasn't quite man enough to broach the topic myself, so we stood there in silence awhile before he took a deep breath, released it as fog, and said, "I don't mean to be nosy, Jo, but…"
I laughed even though I knew what was coming. "You do, too. You're dying to be nosy. It's killing you. I'm amazed you lasted this long before cornering me."
"We been kinda busy."
"That we have." I still wasn't quite ready to talk, but Gary was unfailingly discreet for approximately forever, giving me time to work up to speaking. "Dad moved us around a lot when I was a kid, so I'd kind of never been anywhere long enough to have real friends. We moved to Qualla Boundary right after I turned fourteen, because I told him I wanted to go to high school in one place. So we went home. To his home. Where he'd grown up. It wasn't my home. Anyway. We'd been there about a year, and I was…Sara was my best friend. My only friend, I guess, except that sounds pathetic. I'd known who she was my whole freshman year, and I thought she basically walked on water, so when we started hanging out that summer, the year I turned fifteen, I thought I was in heaven. That was when I got the drum, too." Those couple months there had been some of the happiest I could remember, in fact. Up until this past six months, I wasn't sure I'd ever been happier in my life. It was an interesting thought.
"Anyway, so that fall there was a new boy in school. Lucas. And I had the worst crush on him. I'd never really had a crush and I was just…man. Stupid. And Sara said she didn't like him, and I wasn't anywhere near smart enough to figure out she was playing it cool. I don't think I knew people really did that. It was like something that happened on TV, to me. Anyway, I was desperate for him to like me, so I did the number one stupid thing that girls do and I slept with him."
Gary took a breath like he was going to say something, and didn't. It was just as well. I was afraid I'd either get angry or burst into tears, no matter what he said, and I'd had enough of both lately. "It didn't work. I mean, he was okay with sleeping with me, but it didn't make him like me any better. And I got pregnant, and I told him and Sara, and he went back to Canada where he'd come from, and Sara never spoke to me again. Until today."
I really wanted that to be the end of it, but it wasn't. Rushing through it all didn't really help, not after twelve and a half years of never mentioning this to anybody. It wasn't like ripping a bandage off. It hurt. It hurt so much I had to hurry and try not to let myself feel anything, which was how I'd been coping with my whole life for thirteen years. "I planned from the beginning to give them up for adoption. My mom abandoned me when I was a baby and my dad didn't seem to want me much, either, so I wanted them to go somewhere they were wanted, and I was, I mean, I was fifteen and basically a mess even before I got pregnant. So I wasn't going to keep them. I wouldn't have been any good for them. I wasn't much good for me until recently. Anyway." I was saying that word a lot, using it like a wall between myself and my emotions. I honestly didn't regret my choices, but that didn't make thinking about them any easier.
"They were early, they were twins, and…the little girl, Ayita, she…died. She was so tiny, and she wasn't strong, and I…wasn't what I am now. I don't know if I could've saved her even if I was. The doctors couldn't." My hands had turned to claws around the balcony railing. I kept my gaze fixed ahead, but my vision was blurred, nearby trees swimming and the distant stars dancing. For some reason my voice remained very steady. "It always seemed to me that there just wasn't enough life force for both of them. That it was going to be one or neither, and that Ayita decided…I mean, I know she couldn't have, she wasn't even old enough to think, but I just always felt like she decided that okay, Aidan was stronger, he could make it if he just had a little more to draw on, so she…gave him hers."
"Oh, Jo…"
I shook my head, violent little motion that tangled tears in my eyelashes. Sympathy was more than I could handle. "It was like it made it almost okay. I mean, it wasn't okay, it was horrible, but it was like…her gift to him, the only thing she could do. And mine was to give him to a family who was ready for him. He's twelve now, and he doesn't believe in vampires."
"You keep in touch?" Gary sounded rightfully surprised.
I shook my head again. "No, I just…I had a vision of him a couple months ago, when Suzy was here. That's all." That's all. Like it was normal to have visions of anybody. "I found Petite in somebody's barn that summer," I added inanely.
Gary, very softly, said, "Ah," like that cleared everything up. "Anybody else know about this?"
I shrugged. "Sure. Everybody in Qualla Boundary. But nobody out here, no. Morrison, maybe. Probably. Maybe Laurie fucking Corvallis, since she's been looking me up. But no."
"Hell of a thing to keep secret, doll."
"Like it comes up in casual conversation? 'Oh, and by the way, did I mention I had twins when I was fifteen?' I never wanted to talk about it, Gary. I left that whole life behind a long time ago."
"What'd your dad think?"
"I never asked him."
Something in my tone warned Gary off pursuing that path any further, because he made another one of those ah sounds and there was a brief awkward silence before he rolled his head back toward the room and said, "Your pal in there know?"
"I doubt it. Not before today, anyway. I wasn't studying with him anymore by the time I got pregnant." I sounded tired and bitter and angry to my own ears. Just this summer, I'd reached through time and stolen my younger self's expertise, leaving her with nothing more than a vague memory or two of coyote dreams. I could see a cycle there, a closed loop through time: I'd taken the one thing that a young Joanne Walkingstick thought made her special. Less than two months later that girl was pregnant, putting her well and truly on the path to becoming the adult woman who had to steal her own younger self's understanding of magic in order to deal with the world she'd been thrust into.
"Can I ask you somethin' else?"
"You going to anyway?" I smiled a little and invited the question with a nod.
"Think you ever woulda told me?"
"Yeah." That was about the weariest confession I'd ever made. I turned around and put my butt against the railing, arms folded under my breasts. "I actually almost did last summer when you were in the hospital. You said, um. You said something about wanting grandkids, and I…" Words were hard. I dropped my chin to my chest and reached down to grab the railing hard. "It was the first time in my whole life I ever even thought about telling somebody."
"Aw, Joanie." Gary put his arm around me and kissed my hair, and we stayed there, quiet and together, until a knock on the door forced us back into the now.
Thursday, December 22, 7:16 P.M.
Coyote slid the door open a few inches and latched his gaze downward, like he didn't want to intrude. "I think I found something. You, um, you want to come in?"
I felt bad for him. He had to have a pretty good idea of what we'd been talking about, and he'd decided he didn't belong in the conversation. Truth was, he probably belonged as much as Gary did, maybe more. On the other hand, Gary had been a real, solid person in my life for the past year, and Coyote'd been out of my life or mostly dead since I was a teen. Either way, I'd never heard him sound so diffident. I said, "Yeah," almost as carefully, then walked forward into him and put my forehead against his shoulder. I hadn't known I was going to. Neither had he, and he grunted quietly before putting his arms around me. Gary slipped past us into the room, and Coyote exhaled over my head, a small worried sound.
"You okay?"
"Not even a little." All I wanted was to crawl into bed and pull him up close behind me while I slept for about a week. The idea forced a tiny cough of laughter from my chest. "On the positive side, I'm emotionally drained and exhausted, which is practically like sleep deprived. Perfect for hunting monsters."
Coyote set me back a few inches and crooked a smile. "Great. Watch out, wendigo." He took my hand and led me inside. I sat down beside Gary so I could focus on Coyote, trying to push away melancholy and worry about the problem at hand.
He took his BlackBerry out again and glanced at it, though more as a prop than a prompt. "Okay. So there are Yu'pik stories about people who've been 'made cold by the universe.' It's something that happens in the winter, people get lost on the snow flats and they go…between. To this place that's not in any of the planes I'm familiar with. It's just described as a constant storm. Sometimes we can see them in our world, but they don't leave tracks and they're almost impossible to call back. They have to find their own way home, and while they're searching, they're neither dead nor alive."
"So they're like Schrödinger's People?" The idea amused me enough that it actually did alleviate my moodiness. Coyote looked faintly exasperated, but Gary chuckled, so I called it a draw and went on. "Okay, sorry. But that sounds right, with the storm and no tracks and not being able to catch it with either magic or bullets. Do these things hunt people?"
"Not as far as the stories I can find say, but that doesn't mean it's not happening now. Especially if it's someone of power who became lost. Someone who might have had an understanding of what was happening, and who knew there was a path home if he could just find it."
I dropped my chin to my chest. "Score one small point for the home team. I thought it might be someone who knew what they were doing." Of course, I'd also thought it was someone using a power circle for nefarious ends, so it was only a very small point. "Tell me they have a reliable solution for rescuing or otherwise stopping these cold universe people."
"Nope."
I glanced up with a little smile. "Are spirit guides supposed to say 'nope'?"
I would never understand how he could look so much like his coyote self in his human form, but the grin he gave back was toothy and pointed like a coyote's. "Yep." Then he wrinkled his nose. "But no, they don't. These people either find their own way home or they don't. I think a soul retrieval is still our best option."
"A soul retrieval for someone whose body we don't have? How does that work?"
My mentor looked pained. "If we're lucky he'll find his way back to his body. If we're not…"
"If we're not, the body's long since dead and we've just got a spirit who won't die," Gary concluded. "That sound about right?"
Coyote nodded and we were all quiet a few seconds, contemplating that, until my stomach rumbled loudly enough to make Gary sit up straight. I clapped a hand over it, and must have looked unusually pathetic, because Coyote shook his head without me saying anything. "We shouldn't eat. I'd put this off until we'd been up a full twenty-four hours if I thought we had time, but I'm afraid that'll just give it a window to regain strength."
"You mean, to eat people." I didn't want to sugarcoat any of this, particularly if I was using it as an explanation for my belly as to why my throat had, from my stomach's perspective, apparently been cut. Also I hoped the idea of eating people might make me less hungry, but my stomach growled again. Guess not. Let's hear it for long pig.
Which was exactly what the wendigo was thinking. I picked up a pillow and hit myself in the head with it a few times, much to the bemusement of the men. I said, "Nevermind, forget it," into the pillow, then dropped it and scrubbed my hands through my hair. "Okay, if we have to do this thing, why don't we get it done so we can hit the hotel restaurant before it closes? I'm going to become very unreasonable if I don't get to eat until tomorrow."
Coyote, sotto voce but not very, said, "As opposed to how she usually is?" to Gary, who snorted laughter.
I hit them both with the pillow. "I don't know if you have any bright ideas, Ro, but I do." His eyebrows shot up skeptically, which I didn't think was very nice. Justified, maybe, but not very nice. "Soul retrieval happens in the Lower World, right? And it's dangerous for everybody. So we're going to want as much protection as we can get on every level."
He said, "Okay," in a dubious tone which suggested I was making sense but that he didn't quite believe I could be.
I got no respect. Fine. I was just going to have to be right. That would show him. "So we're going to want a power circle, and I think it needs to be drawn outside in the snow."
Coyote drew breath like he was going to argue, then let it out in a slow dismayed sound. "I think you're right."
"I think she better have some kinda good frostbite cure ready. Are you two nuts? It's ten degrees and fallin' out there, not to mention there's a man-eatin' monster roamin' around."
"I can handle the frostbite," I said with a blithe confidence I hadn't had a few hours ago. "And luring the man-eating monster out is kind of the point. Know anything about trapping demons in a power circle, Coyote? I figure if we limit its range of motion we're going to be in better shape than if it's able to run free. What happens if someone doesn't want his soul retrieved?"
"Ever tried picking two cats up out of a fight?"
"Er, no."
"Me either, but that's about what it sounds and looks like. Only the cats are as big as you are, in this case."
Whatever confidence I'd had turned tail and ran. "I definitely think a power circle is in order."
"You going to build it?"
I stood up, trying to look and sound like I knew what I was doing. "As a matter of fact, I am."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We tromped down to the hotel lobby armed for battle, which was to say bundled up like snowmen and Gary carting my drum in a pack over his shoulder. The lobby was deserted except for one floppy-haired desk attendant who raised his eyes despondently when we came in. "Checking out?"
I said, "Not even metaphorically," cheerfully, hoping to counter his Eeyore impression, but he looked at me with the emo gaze of a youth for whom all hope is gone. No sense of humor at all. I muttered, "Right, then," under my breath, and tried again. "We're just going out for a moonlight hike. We'll be back in a few hours. Why, have a lot of people left?"
"Everybody but the federal agents and you." The lobby wasn't deserted after all. Laurie Corvallis had been hidden in one of the chairs, its back to the front desk, but giving her a line of sight to the front door. She scooted the chair so she could see me, and so I could see her camera guy in the next chair beyond her. "Interesting decision," she said. "Going hiking out in the mountains in the middle of the night with a killer around."
"I'm an interesting person." I turned to the emo desk attendant. "I'll give you a hundred-dollar tip if you can keep her from following us."
Gary muttered, "Since when do you have a hundred bucks to be throwing around?" and I elbowed him. He grunted, but the kid missed it, his dull gaze lighting up as he looked at Corvallis.
She gave him one of her devastating barracuda smiles, and he shrank back behind the desk. "Sorry, ma'am, I can't stop the guests from coming and going."
"I can." Sara Buchanan—I had to stop thinking of her that way—came down the stairs in a thump of boots. "No one's going out there without my authorization. Joanne, one of my men didn't come back from the crime scene this afternoon."
"Shit."
"Shit? What does shit mean?"
I bit back a scatological explanation, pretty sure she wouldn't be amused. "It means he's probably dead. I'm sorry."
I had to hand it to her: she didn't even blink. "Probably?"
"Only one person's survived one of these attacks, and she…" Sudden hope seized my heart. The Sight flashed on, sending the whole room into surreal bright colors. Corvallis was about to fall out of her chair, she was so eager to hear what I had to say. Her aura stretched toward me like the borealis reaching for earth, like it would find the culmination of its being in touching me. Sara was tightly wound caution, afraid even to hope. Coyote blared with an unexpected combination of professionalism and awe, like he had a job to do but was a little overwhelmed. It was disconcerting to realize the awe was inspired by me. I was a mess, not somebody who should be able to impress a shaman with a whole lifetime's study behind him.
Gary, on the other hand, was his usual solid reliable eight-cylinder self. There was a fight out there and he was willing to take it on. I owed him more than I'd ever be able to express.
The desk attendant maintained his bored above-it-all expression, but his aura leaped and jumped with excitement. He didn't know what was going on, but he felt like he was a part of something big. I wanted to either pat him on the head or send him home to safety, maybe both, and fought back the snickering urge to do so. That wasn't in my bizarre job description.
Healing and protecting were, though, and everyone in the room except the desk attendant had traces of my magic lingering against their skin, just like Mandy Tiller had. I pressed my eyes closed, still able to See everyone in the room, and said, "Your guy, Sara. He was with us this afternoon?"
"We all were."
"Okay." I made myself meet her gaze. "Then maybe there's a very small chance he's still alive. He was there when I…" Corvallis was still leaning out of her chair, desperate to hear what could be heard. I said a word nice girls shouldn't know, then repeated it more loudly.
There was just no way this was going to end well. Short of clobbering her, which would get me up on assault charges, I couldn't see how to get rid of Corvallis. On the other hand, I had no doubt she would happily do a story on the Seattle Police Department's very own magic-using detective, and make me look like a complete fool.
Oddly enough, I didn't mind that. I was a believer these days, not because I particularly wanted to be, but because the world wouldn't have it any other way. The world, though, wasn't giving object lessons to most of its citizens. Even if Corvallis could be persuaded to do the most sympathetic possible story—which she wouldn't, because her point would be to make me look like an idiot, not to make herself look like a believer—I was going to come across as a complete kook. That was okay. I'd never wanted to make other people accept that magic was real. It was better if they just thought I was crazy. Hopefully the harmless kind of crazy, but crazy either way.
What I couldn't abide was the backlash Morrison would get. He couldn't come out of this alive. Either he knew he'd hired a detective who thought she worked magic, or he didn't. If he knew, I'd goddamned well better be the harmless kind of crazy, because otherwise my boss's neck was on the chopping block. And the truth was, people ended up dead around me a lot. Mostly they were bad guys, but not always. Marie D'Ambra and Henrietta Potter hadn't been bad guys. Neither had Colin Johannson, and Faye Kirkland had been…complicated. I knew the truth behind all of those stories, but on the surface, put those things together and I didn't look harmless at all.
And if Morrison didn't know he'd hired a dangerous detective who thought she could do magic, well, then, he was incompetent. Frankly, I'd prefer to force the world to believe in magic than to let them think my boss wasn't good at his job.
Sara folded her arms, waiting with impatience that wasn't so much ill-concealed as worn on her sleeve. She was my out: a federal agent in a country besieged with the Patriot Act. She could get Corvallis out of my hair, off my back, and out from under my feet, which was about as thorough a clichéd removal as I could come up with. And she would, too. Not because we were old high school buddies and not because she believed in magic, but because she wanted her man back, and if I said Corvallis couldn't be there or I couldn't get him back, Corvallis would be out on her ear faster than a fast thing.
And then the story would be about SPD Detective Joanne Walker getting a federal agent to oust a local news reporter from the heart of the action. The investigation would be about what I was hiding, and in the end, it would come out exactly the same way. Maybe magic wouldn't be involved, but the way people found themselves dead after not very long in my presence would be more than enough to screw me over and nail Morrison in the process.
Rock, meet hard place. I exhaled and finished my sentence: "He was there when I shielded everyone this afternoon. You have vestiges of the shielding clinging to you. The only person who's survived this thing did, too. It might not be enough, Sara."
She nodded once, sharply. "It's more than I've got right now. The rest of us will break up into teams of three to search—"
"Don't be stupid." That was probably not the most politic thing I could've said, and it wasn't likely to earn points for honesty, either. I barreled on before Sara had much chance to protest. "I can barely keep this thing off me. You saw how little effect bullets had. Everybody, and I mean you when I say that, is going to be a lot safer if you stay inside. The fact that your guy's gone missing should tell you that." My stomach lurched. "He was outside when he went missing, wasn't he?"
"Yes, he was. I have people on patrol, Joanne. I can't leave this thing—"
"You have to. Sara, you can't go out there—"
"Yes, I can."
"No, you can't."
"Yes I can!"