River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  I ran the first mile or so as fast as I could, then dropped down to a dog-trot.

  I couldn’t let him treat me like his first wife. I couldn’t live surrounded by cotton wool.

  But he knew that.

  I trusted him. What he’d kept from me hadn’t been life threatening. He was right. The fae would not offend the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. One werewolf was a tough creature—but the real power of the werewolves lay in their packs. I could understand him wanting to make sure our honeymoon was worry-free.

  Okay. Okay.

  So at what point had our discussion turned into an argument that left us both angry? And left me with an ache in my chest that felt as if he’d punched me instead of snapped at me. He hadn’t even worked up to a good rage, and I felt miserable.

  A rabbit bolted right out in front of me. I hadn’t really intended on hunting, but if the stupid things want to present themselves for dinner ... With a fresh turn of speed, I gave chase.

  I WAS EATING THE LAST OF THE RABBIT WHEN ADAM showed up in his glorious furred form. Adam is a beautiful man, and his wolf is beautiful, too. He is colored like a Siamese cat, though in bluish grays that deepen to near black.

  He dropped a second rabbit at my feet and lay down in front of me, nose on his paws and his ears flattened.

  Nothing says you’re sorry like a dead bunny.

  I remembered his first wife. Christy had made him apologize a lot, apologize for things that were not his fault. I didn’t want an apology. I wanted to know why we’d just had a fight, and I hadn’t even enjoyed it.

  I liked to fight with Adam.

  He’d been mad first.

  I considered that.

  Adam got mad for three reasons. The most common, and my personal favorite, was frustration. Usually, when Adam was mad at me, frustration was the spark that set him off. Adam frustrated and angry with me usually started with fireworks and ended in good ways with a lot of adrenaline engendered and spent along the way.

  The second was if anyone was trying to harm someone under his protection. We’d established that the fae were probably not planning our deaths or even near-fatal entrapments.

  The third was pain—physical or otherwise.

  Having established that he wasn’t frustrated and neither I nor anyone else was in any danger—I must have hurt him somehow.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. Usually, Adam was pretty straightforward. It was one of my favorite things about him. Figuring out why he’d been mad should have been a lot easier.

  He’d tried to protect me, and I objected. We did that all the time, and he seldom got mad unless or until I got hurt.

  He’d tried to make sure our wedding and honeymoon were fun. He’d thought that I’d fret about borrowing the van from Uncle Mike but that I’d also have a better time out here than I would have in a more typical honeymoon.

  He’d gotten mad when he thought I was going to get mad at him for not telling me about the trailer. It was his belief that I would get mad about it that had hurt him. I wiggled my hips into a more comfortable position and tried to think like Adam—a very smart person poisoned by testosterone.

  First—he knew I’d get mad if he kept anything big from me, but that wouldn’t hurt his feelings.

  And suddenly I understood what had happened.

  I got up and stepped over my kill, then over his. I licked his muzzle—and then shifted back into human.

  “You made some assumptions,” I told him. “Take a note: it usually works better if you wait until I do something stupid before getting mad at me.”

  Adam stared at me. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “This building a marriage is an ongoing project,” I told him. “And we’ll both make a lot of mistakes along the way. I did worry about borrowing the trailer. But after a half minute’s thought, I knew you’d never borrow anything from any fae without making sure you had a handle on the consequences.” I blew out a huff of air. “You got mad because you thought I wouldn’t trust you to know the difference. Not fair. Not fair at all.

  “Me, I keep important stuff from you all the time.” I grinned at him. “But I know you’re a better person than I am. Still, I think that my frailty means you don’t owe me an apology for doing something I would do, so we’re even as far as keeping information from me is concerned.”

  Now it was he who narrowed his eyes at me.

  “Right,” I said as if he’d spoken. It was chilly in bare skin with the sun down, so I stretched out against him and let him keep me warm. “I know what I said before I took off—but I was provoked. No apologies from me or from you—but I’ll take the rabbit on account. However, if you try that patronizing sh-stuff on me again, not even a fat juicy rabbit is going to stop the fight we’ll have.”

  Since it was unfair for me to keep being the only one who could talk, I shifted back into the coyote. And since I have a policy of accepting gifts graciously, I ate his rabbit. Besides, fighting always made me hungry, and there was no chocolate handy.

  He thought it was funny that I ate the second rabbit without accepting his apology—so we were okay again. I expected that we’d have a lot more fights, and mostly I looked forward to them. Life with Adam wasn’t going to be boring, either.

  WE WERE HEADED BACK TO THE CAMPSITE WHEN WE found the boat. On the way out, I hadn’t run right along the river. Instead, I’d followed one of the ridges that lined the gorge, avoiding the few houses and vineyards scattered here and there, and Adam had followed my trail. On the way back, though, we ran along the edge of the river. The moon was new, just a sliver in the sky, and the stars reflected in the black water.

  The highway on the Oregon side was always busy, and this night was no exception. Our side, the Washington side, was a lot quieter: the river was wide, the noise of the cars a distant symphony accompanying the sounds of the night. One of those sounds was made by a boat bobbing against the shore.

  I paused because this wasn’t a place I’d have expected to find a boat. As soon as my attention was drawn to it, I could smell blood and terror—the aftermaths of battle. A glance at Adam told me he’d noticed it, too. The fur along his spine was raised though he was silent.

  The boat was tucked under the edge of three or four trees and accompanying brush that grew along the bank. From what I could see, and I wiggled a lot closer than Adam could, it was one of the small fishing boats, a bass boat, the kind that maybe two or three people could use to fish in. Small enough to row though there was a small outboard motor on the back of this one. I couldn’t see into the boat because of the underbrush, but I could smell a man’s fear and hear him talking.

  “Don’t let it find me. Don’t let it find me.” Over and over again, very softly, barely even a whisper. I hadn’t been able to pick up his exact words until I was within a stone’s throw of the boat, and I have very good hearing. The boat hitting the rocks with the gentle rise and fall of the river’s waves was louder than his voice.

  I backed out of the brush and met Adam’s eyes. Naked was going to be hard to explain, and I knew all about what those bushes were going to do with my skin. But Adam took too long to change, would be equally naked—and if whatever this man was afraid of came back, Adam the werewolf was our best defense.

  Maybe other people wouldn’t have automatically assumed that whatever this man was afraid of would need a werewolf to fight it. There were no werewolves around here, vampires tended to be more of an urban monster, and the fae reservation was an hour the other side of the Tri-Cities—two hundred miles or more away from us. But the sheer magnitude of the terror he still felt made me think I wasn’t being paranoid.

  I shifted to human. “Hey,” I called. “You in the boat. Are you okay?”

  The man’s voice didn’t alter. He hadn’t registered my words at all.

  “I think I’ll have better luck reaching him from the river side,” I told Adam. “That boat’s still floating. If he’s as badly hurt as all the blood I’m smelling makes me think he is, i
t’ll be easier if we’re not trying to drag him through the underbrush anyway.”

  The nearest bit of clear riverbank was about thirty feet downstream. The sun long gone, the water was icy. I stumbled on a big rock on the river bottom and made a splash when I fell. I made some noise, too—frigid water on nice warm skin when I’m not expecting it tends to make me squeak. The man in the boat screamed—from the hoarseness of his voice, it wasn’t the first time he’d screamed tonight.

  “It’s all right,” I said, regaining my feet. “You’re safe.”

  He quit screaming, but I don’t think it was because he’d understood me. Sometimes fear is too big for that—so much of your being is focused on survival that anything else falls to the side. I’ve been there a couple of times.

  The rocks under my feet were sharp, but once I was waist-deep, my weight didn’t press me down on them quite so hard. If I’d been headed downstream instead of upstream, I could have swum instead. Adam paced back and forth unhappily on the river’s edge.

  The trees hung over the river, and the shore curved back under them. Finding a path through the debris that had collected in the small backwater along with the boat forced me to wade in through a bunch of underwater plants I didn’t see until I was in the middle of them.

  My eyesight is pretty darn good at night, but the river was an impenetrable black veil, and anything below the surface was hidden. I hated not seeing. Who really knew what was in the Columbia?

  Something brushed against my leg with a little more force than the rest of the weeds, and I let out an involuntary yip. Adam, invisible on the other side of the tree, whined.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I told him. “I’m fine. Just caught my leg on one of those clumps of plants. I can’t see a damned thing under the water, and that and this guy reeking of fear has me all hopped up. Sorry.”

  The stupid plant was persistent. It clung to my calf as I approached the boat, resisting my halfhearted attempts to shake it loose. The tendency of some water plants to wrap around arms and legs of unsuspecting swimmers is one of the leading causes of drowning. However, I reminded myself, I had my feet on the river bottom, so this one was only an irritant. Nothing to panic about.

  I forgot about the plant as soon as I grabbed the side of the boat and got down to business. My eyes just barely cleared the side of the boat, so I couldn’t get a good look at the wounded man.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “We’ll get you out of this.”

  I gave an experimental tug on the boat, but I was now up to my chest in the water, and the current threatened to push me off my feet. When I pulled on the boat, it was I who moved.

  I shifted my grip, moving nearer to the bow. If I pulled the boat the way it was designed to move instead of sideways, it should require a lot less effort. As a last resort, I could climb in and use the motor—but the tree limbs were only a few inches above the gunnel, and I didn’t really want to scrape myself up getting in the boat.

  I heard something and jerked my head up.

  Four small heads poked out of the river about a dozen yards from the boat. Otters.

  Great, that was just great. Just what the night needed.

  “Otters,” I told Adam, my teeth beginning to chatter with the effect of the water. “If I start screaming, it’s because the otters have come to get me.”

  He growled, a low, menacing sound, and the four heads disappeared. It wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been. But there were no sharp teeth fastened on any of my parts that were underwater, not yet anyway. The only thing grabbing me was the damned weed, which was still wrapped pretty tightly around my ankle.

  I had a friend who swam once with sea otters just off the California coast. She said it was an unbelievable experience. They apparently were regular comrades to the divers in the area, playful and cute. They played a little rough—divers who swam with them regularly often had to replace their quarter-inch neoprene diving suits because otter teeth and claws are sharp—but most of the divers counted it worth the price.

  River otters are smaller and even cuter than their oceangoing cousins. They also have the sweet temperament of a badger with a hangover. It wouldn’t have worried me much—I have sharp teeth when I want them, too. But right now I was in their environment and not mine.

  I couldn’t see them. Worse for me, I couldn’t smell them or hear them, either. I could wait around for them to attack, or I could get the heck out of the river.

  I got a good grip on the nose of the boat and managed to persuade it to move out a little. Five or six feet more, and I’d have it out where the river current would push it the way I wanted it to go.

  The man in the boat began thrashing. It took me a second to realize he wasn’t just panicking—he’d gone for the pull on the engine. As the sudden roar of the engine broke the night, I grabbed onto the boat as hard as I could and let my feet leave the river bottom.

  The boat lurched forward, and the weed around my ankle tightened painfully, and for a second I felt as though—But no weed is that tough, and the boat jerked me out of its hold and drove about fifteen feet downstream before I pulled myself into the boat. By that time he’d collapsed again, and his hand fell off the tiller just as I grabbed it.

  I balanced on the seat and turned the boat back to shore, where Adam paced.

  The man grabbed my arm, and I almost tipped the boat over before I braced against his weight. If I’d had shoes on, my feet would have slipped off the wet wood, and I’d have landed on him.

  “Got to get away,” he said. His skin was as dark as mine—he was Indian, too, now that I finally had a good look at him—and still his lips managed to look pale.

  “Got to get you to shore,” I yelled at him over the noise of the engine. “Before you bleed to death.”

  There was a crunch as the bow of the boat hit the shoreline, then a mighty jerk as Adam grabbed a bowline I hadn’t seen or else I’d have used it. He pulled us up and all of the way out of the water onto the bank.

  I managed to kill the engine because I’d already started the motion, and when the boat stopped suddenly, I used the momentum to roll all the way out of the boat and onto the ground. My other option would have been to land on the man we were trying to rescue. The drop was not far. I hit the ground with my unprotected shoulder, which was going to bruise, but mostly managed not to hurt myself.

  Adam came over to me.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Check him.”

  He raised himself over the side of the boat to look in. I got up at the same time. Either blood loss or the shock of seeing a huge wolf with big sharp teeth had finally driven our man, who was bleeding from the remaining half of his right foot, unconscious.

  Adam glanced from me to him—and then bolted. In that brief glance, he told me to stay put while he went for help. Wolves communicate much more clearly than humans do in an emergency.

  Adam would run all out, but we were probably five miles or more from the campsite. It would take him ten minutes to get there, maybe ten more to change back to human if he pushed it. I had no idea where the nearest hospital was or how long it would take for them to get the man there. Adam would figure it out.

  With the sun down, the air was chilly, the river cold, and both the wounded man and I were wet and freezing. But there was nothing I could do about that at the moment.

  I pulled him back down in the boat and propped up the damaged foot on the wooden cross member that doubled as a seat. The wound was just oozing blood, which seemed odd to me. Maybe the cold was useful, even if it was dangerous.

  I was debating the benefits of shifting into coyote and sharing what warmth my wet fur would gain us both against trying to figure out how to get his wet shirt off and use it to bandage his foot without a knife. Both moves were likely to be useless or worse ... when I heard the hum of an engine out in the water.

  Lights tracked over the shore and stopped on the white boat I was standing in. I waved my arms to call them in to shore. There were excited voices, but I cou
ldn’t tell what they were saying because the sound of their engine drowned out the meaning. A small but much sleeker and more modern boat complete with lights approached us at speed.

  Help was here. Unless these were the guys who’d sliced off the man’s foot. And me wearing nothing but Adam’s dog tags. Ah, well, it couldn’t be helped; my modesty wasn’t worth a man’s life.

  The boat hadn’t quite beached itself when three men hopped into the river. One of them grabbed the bowline, and as soon as he did, the fourth man, who’d been staying the boat, cut the engine and jumped in, too.

  “Benny?” “Faith?” and “Who are you?” gradually resolved themselves into Hank and Fred Owens, Jim Alvin, and Calvin Seeker—introduced to me by Jim Alvin, easily the oldest of them though only Calvin qualified as young.

  It was only after the Owens brothers pulled out a first-aid kit and started to work on the wounded man that I realized we were all—victim, me, and the four in the rescuing boat—Indian.

  Jim Alvin was in his sixties and smelled of woodsmoke and old tobacco. Calvin was somewhere in his late teens or early twenties. Hank and Fred were around my age, I thought, and close enough in appearance that they might well have been twins, though Hank didn’t talk at all. I don’t know if I would have noticed their dog tags if I hadn’t just received Adam’s. But I would still have noticed that they had some sort of emergency training by the efficiency of their movements and their focus as soon as they saw Benny Jamison.

  Benny was the hurt man.

  Jim interrogated me—for all that his questions were softspoken and quiet—while the Owens brothers did their best to save Benny.

  “No sign of anyone else?” he asked me, after I told him how Adam and I had found the boat—and how Adam had run back to camp to get help and left me to do what I could.

  “No.” I pulled the blanket they’d given me more securely around myself.

  Benny woke up briefly when they started wrapping his foot with vet wrap. It sounded like it hurt.