by Kevin Hearne
“Now what, sensei?” Granuaile asked, sotto voce.
“Now we have a long, sleepless night ahead of us. And if they start thrashing the hogan again, I repair it. Just keep it up until sunrise, when we hope they’ll go away.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Then I try to figure out a way to mess with them magically without doing any direct harm. But I think they’ll go. The thing that makes their eyes glow doesn’t like light.”
With a flourish of Frank’s hand and a final shout in unison, the first song ended. Frank sank down, exhausted. Before he could say anything, the skinwalkers’ litany changed, and this started a series of murmurs among the Navajos.
Frank shook his head though as they came to the end and began to loop once more. “That’s all bullshit,” he said, his voice rasping a bit more than it had before. He looked around at Ben, Sophie, and the others. “Even if we could be sure they’re not lying, which we can’t, they’d never be honest with the deal.”
Let’s wait and see.
Sophie said, “But what if he’s alive, Frank? If there’s a chance we could save him, shouldn’t we at least try to figure something out?”
Frank’s voice was full of sympathy. “He’s not alive, Sophie.”
“But how do you know?” she said, her tone desperate.
“I’ll tell them to prove he’s alive right now. You’ll see.” Frank set aside his sand for the moment and carefully rose to his feet, coming over to stand next to Granuaile on the north wall. He faced the wall and shouted something in Navajo.
I get it now. The skinwalkers want to trade Darren for me. Frank thinks they’re bluffing and Darren is already dead. He’s asking them to prove Darren is still alive.
We’ll have to do more than sit here and wait for dawn. We’ll have to try to save him.
The skinwalkers hissed, apparently upset that Frank wasn’t interested unless Darren was breathing. They spat out something else, and, whatever it was, it set Sophie to crying anew. Frank shot her a look that said, “I told you so,” but then the lines on his face rearranged themselves into the topography of regret. He gingerly knelt down next to his jish and announced he would begin to sing again.
Darren’s dead, I told Oberon. You don’t need to worry about me.
I was sorry too. But I wasn’t going to be allowed to mourn him now, nor was Frank going to get started on that new song.
A sound like steel tearing erupted from the throats of the skinwalkers and they attacked the wall again, this time with spirit-juiced human fists. They weren’t as effective as the bobcat forms, and I had no difficulty rebinding any damage they did.
The futility of it sank in after a few minutes and they subsided, but while everyone else was comforted by this, it worried me. I’ve met more than my fair share of demons and monsters, and usually they’re so full of juvenile rage that they’re incapable of dialing down the aggression until they’ve killed something. You can’t ever talk your way out of a fight with creatures like that, but you can predict their behavior reliably and use it against them. Up to now they’d attacked us using the “Hulk smash!” school of martial arts. Silence and peace just meant they were going to try something else. But what? The ground was covered. The door was safe. The walls were getting there. That left … the roof.
The roof wasn’t finished by a long shot. That plastic sheeting wouldn’t slow them down much, and those lads were so slim they could drop down through the trusses and beams without any trouble. But they’d have to stand still for a moment to tear a hole through the plastic, and during that time they’d be vulnerable. I rose from my crouch and addressed the room.
“Does anyone have a gun?” The looks I got in response suggested that I’d asked about something profoundly distasteful, like trickle-down economics or the poetry of William Blake. “Okay, how about a knife?”
Ben had a decent knife clipped to his belt. He nodded at me and handed it over, hilt first.
“Thanks,” I said. I grabbed the shovel Granuaile had used and unscrewed the wooden handle from the blade. I used the knife to whittle the end of the handle down to a sharpened point, unbinding the cellulose a bit to make the work go easier. I had a makeshift javelin in less than thirty seconds. Switching the javelin and knife between my two hands, I held the tip of the javelin over the fire to heat it up a bit and kept an eye on the ceiling.
Granuaile and Oberon figured it out by watching me.
“Oh, no, the roof …” she breathed.
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s their best shot.” I gently tossed the knife at her feet. “If they get through, they’re coming after me because of the compulsion Hel put on them. And once they do that, stab ’em in the back and duck.”
“Will that kill them?”
“Probably not. But it will distract them, maybe give me a chance to draw my sword or save my life—you know, that kind of thing.” I flashed a quick grin at her to try to lighten up the message. It didn’t seem to relax her very much. The tip of the javelin was beginning to smoke and glow orange: good. I moved back to the north wall to encourage the skinwalkers to attack on that side, if they were coming at all. I boosted my reflexes and strength with temporary bindings, hoping they would be enough to let me get a decent shot. I’d get only one.
My guess is an alley-oop. One of them will toss the other up. They’re strong enough to manage it. They proved it a few seconds later.
Take two Fords from the 1940s and scrape them against each other at an excruciating three miles per hour, then feed that sound through the amps at a Motörhead concert: That’s what the skinwalker sounded like when he landed on the roof directly above me and tried to paralyze us all with fear as he tore at the plastic sheeting. Most everyone flinched, startled by the noise and the direction it came from. I didn’t hesitate once I saw the skinwalker silhouetted against the dark cobalt of the starlit sky; I threw the javelin straight up, hoping it would connect, then reached back to draw Moralltach from its sheath.
The javelin flew true, but the skinwalker was so fast that it was able to jerk back and take it in the shoulder joint instead of the middle of the chest. My boosted strength served me well; the javelin plowed straight through to the other side, no doubt ruining the skinwalker’s shoulder, and the impact bowled him backward off the roof. He shrieked as he fell. He missed the ward of the Blessing Way, unfortunately, but I figured neither of them would view attacking the roof as a good idea anymore.
Gods Below, Oberon, that was horrendous! You just violated the Schwarzenegger Pun Reduction Treaty of 2010.
Yes, it did. Any pun relating to a weapon’s destructive capabilities or final disposition of a victim’s body is a Schwarzenegger pun, by definition. That’s negative twenty sausages according to the sanctions outlined in Section Four, Paragraph Two.
My hound whined.
You can’t argue with this. Your pawprint is on the treaty, and you agreed that Schwarzenegger puns are heinous abominations of language that deserve food-related punishments for purposes of correction and deterrence.
Who started it is immaterial. You violated the treaty by continuing it.
That is a ridiculous figure, Oberon. One.
Three.
Fine. You may discount five penalty sausages by virtue of your minor victory.
Oberon lay down and put his paws over his eyes.
His words were more true than he realized, but for far weightier reasons than the loss of meat products. If I was reading things right, skinwalkers were the worst nightmares of the Navajo world, all their other monsters having been dispatched long ago by Monster Slayer, and I am sure there was nothing more horrifying in their minds than being taken by one. It was a nightmare for me too, because there wasn’t anything I could do magically to defeat these guys, and physically they were far faster and maybe stronger than me. I was unprepared, like a bad Boy Scout. Their magic was as old as mine, if not older, crafted independently and far removed from the European traditions with which I was familiar.
I remembered a bizarre day of my education, when the archdruid taught me how to unbind vampires, beguile dragons, and tame manticores. “You’ll probably never need to use this,” he said, “but if you ever run into one of the beasties, you’ll be glad I took the trouble. Now, stop looking at that girl over there and pay attention, gods blast you!”
I had been an unruly and easily distracted apprentice at times. But I was fairly certain there was nothing in Druid lore that would help me deal with this. It would take days or weeks of experimentation to come up with something new and effective, but I didn’t have that luxury. Nor did I have anything to chuck skyward should they try the roof again; I was fresh out of shovels or anything else that could be converted to a projectile weapon. Well, maybe I could fling the discarded shovel blade like a square Frisbee.
Thankfully, the skinwalkers had no intention of attacking again. They had plenty of wounds to lick, not to mention a sharpened stick to yank out of a torso, and they weren’t (yet) hungry enough for my flesh to continue their assault in such a state. They made plenty of spitting and cursing noises as they staggered away, and mildly hopeful expressions bloomed on the faces of the Navajos.
Frank let that feeling settle in and get comfortable before he said anything. “They’ll be back. If not tonight, then tomorrow.” That caused some restless shifting of feet. “An’ if you’re thinkin’ you might call in sick tomorrow, think about it again. This project here can’t fail. It ain’t just your job at stake, it’s everyone’s. Besides, that man out there woulda wanted us to finish. An’ you know we can finish it right.” The workers all nodded solemnly, Sophie choked back a sob, and Frank led them in a new song.
Granuaile shot a querying glance in my direction. “That man?” she whispered.
I replied in the same low tones. “He’s talking about the construction foreman. The one the skinwalkers killed.”
“You mean Dar—”
“Shh!” I held up a hand to stop her. “Some cultures, including Navajos, don’t speak the names of the dead.”
Granuaile checked to see if our murmured conversation was being overheard. “Why not?”
“The reason varies from culture to culture. But with the Navajos, they don’t want to attract the ghost of the man by calling his name. They call the ghosts ch’įįdii, and they’re not benevolent. You take all the bile and discord and unrest a person has inside of them, every evil thought and all the impulses they repress during their life, and that’s what escapes upon death to become a ch’įįdii.”
“Ew. Those things are just floating around?”
“Well, they disperse if nothing keeps them here. But they have to be in the open to do that. When someone dies inside a hogan, no one will live there anymore, unless it gets blessed and renewed.”
“Oh, because it’s haunted? Things that go bump in the night? Like poltergeists and such?”
“No, nothing like that. Ch’įįdii can make you sick with their malevolence. They call it ghost sickness or corpse sickness. Skinwalkers use it, actually, to kill people.”
“How do they do that?”
“You heard Frank tell me he reversed a curse on a skinwalker long ago by shooting a bone bead into it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what they’re really doing by shooting pieces of bone into you is inviting a ch’įįdii into your body. Ch’įįdii linger around the bodies, see; they’re anchored to them until they have a chance to disperse. So if you’re shot with a piece of a corpse, you’ll get corpse sickness and die. And there are stories about witches sneaking up to hogans and dumping corpse powder down chimneys—that’s ground-up bones mixed with ash. Everyone inside breathes it in, and the family is wiped out. That’s all part of the Witchery Way.”
“That is some seriously evil shit,” Granuaile said. “Are these witches like you’re used to in Europe?”
“No, the Navajo witches are mostly men. And what they’re doing is inverting the wholesome rituals of the Blessing Way—they’ll make their paintings using ash instead of sand, for example. It’s similar to conducting the Black Mass.”
Granuaile frowned. “I’m starting to see why you don’t like witches.”
“Yeah. I keep hearing that there are good ones out there, but I haven’t met any, with the possible exception of Malina’s coven.”
“Have you ever seen a ch’įįdii? I mean in the magical spectrum?”
“No, I’ve never had occasion to.”
She looked down at the ground and said quietly, “Guess you’ll have a chance in the morning.”
Chapter 9
Most of us managed to get three or four hours’ sleep once the skinwalkers were gone. Frank called a temporary halt to the ceremony and told us to get some rest. My sleep was plagued by troubling dreams of shapeless, smoky demons that never felt the bite of my sword but whose claws and teeth found ample purchase on my skin. They were like congealed darkness, and I could neither bind them in place nor unbind their substance—for how does one control an absence of light?
Once dawn arrived, the Navajos greeted the sun—a tradition that stems from their belief that the gods rise with the sun, and the reason that hogan doors always face east—and we went to see what happened to Darren.
We found him lying on the road, torn from his truck and his body savaged by the skinwalkers. His blood had sunk into the earth, red dust made doubly red. Down the hill, north of the road, Darren’s truck was a mess of crumpled metal and shattered glass.
Sophie Betsuie lost her composure and returned to the hogan, crying. She was beating herself up with a club made out of the words if only, and I knew what it felt like. If only I hadn’t done this. If only someone else hadn’t done that. I hoped she would learn sooner, rather than later, that you can’t unchoose anyone’s choices, least of all your own. All you can do with your past is try to grow out of it.
Darren’s crew gave the body a wide berth as they walked down to their trucks, some of them already talking on cell phones, calling the police and perhaps family members.
“Can you see it?” Granuaile asked, one hand absently petting Oberon. “The ch’įįdii?”
“Let me check.” I flipped on my faerie specs and looked at the space above Darren’s body. What I saw made me shudder. It reminded me uncomfortably of my dreams.
“Atticus, what is it? Can you see it?”
“Yeah. Sit down, I’ll bind your sight to mine.”
She sat cross-legged on the ground next to Oberon, and I concentrated on her aura until I could isolate the threads of her consciousness. Choosing the ones that represented her sight, I bound them to mine, and she breathed in sharply as her vision was wrenched from her perspective to mine. Then she scrambled backward, crablike, once she saw the ch’įįdii.
“Gah! That thing—it looks evil!” she cried.
“I know,” I said. An inky cloud—funnel-shaped and with a pair of pale, blank eyes that faced us consistently—swirled counterclockwise ov
er Darren’s body. It was unnerving to see such steady regard in the midst of that restless motion.
“But he seemed like such a nice guy,” Granuaile said. “How could that have been inside him?”
“We all have our dark sides.”
“You mean I have something like that inside me? That will float above my body when I die?”
“Not unless you believe it will. That which is immortal in us all must express itself somehow when we die. He believed in ch’įįdii, and thus you see it here.”
“That is so fucked up.”
“Eh, let’s not be so quick to judge. It’s not that bad. The way he saw it—the way the Navajos see it—the good parts of him were already in harmony with the universe, see? Much of their spiritual lives are spent trying to achieve that which is hózh, or spiritually balanced and beautiful—and isn’t that what we all want, regardless of what we call it? This remnant is nothing but the shadow of his baser nature. Contrast that with some people who send their entire souls to a plane where they are tortured and burned for eternity. You could judge that if you wanted, but it would be nothing compared to how they judged themselves.”
Granuaile sat in silence for a while, digesting this. She’d never confronted anything so concrete in her philosophy classes. Frank Chischilly came over and stood next to her but didn’t say anything. He could see we were studying Darren’s body. When next she spoke, Granuaile’s voice was sad and subdued. “What are we going to do about him?”
“You’re going to sit there,” I replied. “I am going to see if I can help this ch’įįdii disperse a bit quicker, send him on to his peace. We cannot wait for it to disperse on its own—I don’t know the half-life of things like this, anyway.”
“What? Hey,” Frank protested, spurred to speech by my intrusion on his territory. “You can see the ch’įįdii?”
Granuaile spoke over him. “You’re going to unbind it somehow?”
“Not with any spell. I’m merely going to give it a taste of cold iron.” I took a few steps forward and the ch’įįdii shifted, eyeing my approach.