River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  He set me down in front of the trailer and opened the door for me. When I sat down on the leather sofa, he turned on the interior lights and rolled my pant leg up to my knee. In the bright light of the trailer, it looked a lot worse than it had. Yellow stuff and blood crusted the cut, which was about an inch wide and deeper than I’d thought. The first hint of bruising was beginning to show up above and below the cut, and the edges had puffed up.

  Adam put his nose down to my leg and sniffed again. He took a fluffy towel out of a cupboard and put that over his leg. Then he propped my calf on his thigh and poured liquid fire over the cut. I know some people claim that hydrogen peroxide doesn’t hurt. Goody for them. I hate the stuff.

  I jumped when the hydrogen peroxide hit and shrank down into the couch as it continued to bubble ferociously. Adam used the damp towel to clean my leg, then he sniffed again.

  “That was no rope,” he growled. “There was something caustic or poisonous on whatever grabbed you—I can smell it.”

  “Is that why it itches?” I asked.

  “Probably.” He handed me a couple of pills from a bottle in the kit.

  “What is this?”

  “Antihistamine,” he said. “In case the swelling is an allergic reaction.”

  “If I take these, I’ll be asleep in three minutes.” I took them anyway. The need to dig my fingers into that cut and scratch was almost unbearable as soon as the burn of the hydrogen peroxide had worn off.

  “We need to call Uncle Mike,” I said in a small voice. I didn’t want to start an argument again.

  He must have heard it in my voice because he patted my knee. “I’ll call as soon as I’m through here, but I doubt that Uncle Mike sent us here for this.”

  “Just to be clear,” I said. “I didn’t misunderstand you, right? You and the Owenses are thinking that there is some kind of fish that ate Benny’s foot.”

  “Too soon to make assumptions,” said Adam. “Maybe they stopped onshore for lunch and met a bear.”

  “Are there even bear around here?”

  “Probably not here,” Adam acknowledged. “But up where we were hiking there are. No telling how far Benny got his boat from the initial attack.”

  “So what was it that grabbed my leg?” I asked.

  “That is something that Uncle Mike might know,” Adam said. “How much of those otters did you see?”

  I blinked, my brain already starting to haze from the antihistamine. Otters.

  I sat up a little straighter. “Those weren’t river otters.” Their heads were a little differently shaped. I hadn’t paid much attention to that at the time.

  Adam nodded. “I saw one when I got back to the boat. What do you bet that they’re a European species? Werewolves aren’t the only shapeshifters in Europe.”

  “I’ve heard of selkies and kelpies,” I said. “But not shapeshifting otters.”

  “Nor have I,” said Adam, frowning at my calf. “But selkies interacted with people a lot. Kelpies are rarer, I’m told, but terrifying. You can see why there would be stories about them. Otters just aren’t scary.”

  So speaks the man who hadn’t been naked in the river with them. They may be small, but they are agile and mean.

  There was a knock on the door, and Adam and I both stared at it in shock. The gate by the highway was shut, and it wasn’t so far from the trailer that we wouldn’t have heard someone stopping there. He glanced at me, and I shook my head—I hadn’t heard anyone coming, either. Adam reached into his luggage, quietly pulled out a handgun, and tucked it into the back of his jeans, tugging his shirt down over it.

  The quiet knock came again.

  “Who is it?” asked Adam.

  “I am Gordon Seeker, Calvin’s grandfather, Mr. Hauptman. He said that your wife got hurt helping Benny, who is a young friend of mine.”

  Adam opened the door warily. He stepped back, and I saw the man at the door for the first time. His voice hadn’t sounded old, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone older outside a rest home.

  Sharp brown eyes peered at me out of a face that looked as though it had been left out in the sun to dry too long. Skin like beef jerky and white hair caught back in a smooth French braid down his back. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and small gold studs in his ears. His back was bent, and his hands were curled up from arthritis, his fingers bent and knuckles enlarged. But his movements were surprisingly easy as he climbed into the trailer without invitation.

  He wore jeans and a plain red T-shirt under a Redskins jacket. I’m not sure if he was a football fan, if he wore it as a statement, or if it was just something to keep out the cool night air.

  Over his shoulder he carried one of those leather bags that should look like a purse but doesn’t. On his feet were the most lurid pair of cowboy boots I’ve ever seen—and that is saying something because I come from cowboy country, and cowboys wear some really gaudy stuff. The boots were bright lipstick red, each with a United States flag beaded in red, white, and blue across the top.

  He smelled of fresh air and tobacco. But his tobacco hadn’t come out of a cigarette. A pipe maybe—something without all the additives that make cigarettes smell so bad. It reminded me of my father’s ghost.

  “He told me about you, Mr. Hauptman,” said Calvin’s grandfather. “Been a long time since I saw a werewolf. Not a lot of them in this part of the country. And this must be your wife, Mercedes—” Then he looked at me and drew in a breath.

  “You,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you. Calvin said you were Blackfeet married to an Anglo werewolf. I should have asked myself how many Blackfeet women would associate with a werewolf, shouldn’t I? I had wondered what happened to you.” He narrowed his eyes. “You don’t look like Old Coyote. Oh, I can see him some in your eyes and in your coloring, but you look more Anglo than I’d expected.”

  He had known my father.

  Suddenly, antihistamine or no antihistamine, I wasn’t at all sleepy. But there was a disconnect between my tongue and the questions that were galloping through my head. I looked at Adam. His eyes were half-lidded, and his expression was neutral. His body language said, “Isn’t he interesting? Let’s see what he does.”

  The old man looked down at my leg and hissed. “That looks bad. River Devil is back for sure.” He sat beside me and opened the purse that wasn’t a purse and pulled out a bundle wrapped in a silk scarf. He opened it up and began singing.

  If you’ve never heard Native American music, it is hard to convey the feel of it. Sometimes there are words, but Gordon Seeker didn’t use any. The music flowed up from his chest and resonated in his sinuses—as had the music made by the dancing ghost of my father. Still singing, Gordon Seeker took out a homemade honeycomb wax candle and lit it. It looked as though he lit it with magic, but I can usually sense when someone uses magic. I didn’t see a match though I could smell sulfur.

  I sniffed suspiciously and he grinned at me and I noticed he was missing one of his front teeth. Still singing, he held up his empty hand and closed his fingers. Then he opened the hand, and he held a burnt matchstick.

  Then he pulled a segment of leaf out and held it to the candle. It was dry and lit fast. He let it go, and I tensed to grab it before it burned the trailer—but the flames consumed the leaf before it hit the carpet, leaving only a smattering of ash and a surprising amount of smoke.

  I recognized the plant by its smell when I hadn’t recognized the leaf. Tobacco. I guess he didn’t smoke a pipe.

  Gordon leaned forward and blew the smoke from the tobacco and the candle toward my leg. The blowing didn’t seem to affect his song. He tilted his head, and I could only see one of his eyes.

  And in his eye I saw a predatory bird that looked somewhat like an eagle. It was so darkly feathered that at first I thought it was a golden eagle, which, despite the name, often looks almost black; but it moved differently.

  He closed his eyes, blew again, and when his eye opened, it was bright and predatory—but it was also just an eye in
which no bird flew. I decided the antihistamine I’d just taken must have been affecting me more than usual.

  He opened a jar and took some yellowish salve out and spread it on the mark the not-a-hemp-rope-not-a-weed had left on my leg. The relief was almost immediate.

  He stopped singing, wiped his greasy fingers on his jeans. Then he put the candle out.

  Adam looked at me.

  “It feels a lot better.”

  “Magic?” Adam asked our visitor.

  The old man grinned. “Maybe.” He still had the little earthenware jar and tipped it toward me. “Or maybe it’s the Bag Balm. I use it on all my cuts and burns.” I’d thought that salve had smelled familiar. He’d added something to it, but the base was definitely Bag Balm. My foster mother had used Bag Balm as a cure-all, too. I kept a tin of it at work. “I understand your feet took quite a beating, too. Why don’t you get them out where we can see them?”

  “How do you know me?” I asked, peeling off my shoes and socks.

  Adam had decided to judge this frail old man a possible threat. I could tell because he’d taken a step back out of reach. He was standing guard, ready to do whatever the circumstances required, trusting me to handle the rest. Likewise, I’d trust his judgment about the threat.

  Our opponent might be an old man, but both Adam and I had lived around very old things that were dangerous. We wouldn’t underestimate this man who smelled of tobacco, woodsmoke ... and magic. It wasn’t fae magic, so I hadn’t noticed it right away. This was sweeter and subtler, though I didn’t think it was any less potent.

  Charles smelled a little like this sometimes.

  The old man smiled at me and held the unguent pot. “And how would I not know Mercedes Thompson who is married to Adam Hauptman, Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack?”

  He did the not-lying thing very well. There are a lot of Other creatures who know when you are lying. Some of the fae, werewolves, some of the vampires—and me. The art of not lying without telling the truth is a valuable skill if you’re going to have to deal with people who are Other.

  He hadn’t known who I was when he came into the trailer. But he’d taken one look at me, and his surprised recognition had been genuine.

  “You know what I am,” I said, suddenly certain of it. My heartbeat picked up with the excitement of it. He knew what I was and who my father had been.

  “Use that salve on your feet,” he said. “They look sore.” He canted his head toward Adam without taking his eyes off me. “Do you have something for an old man to drink?”

  “Soda or apple juice.”

  “Root beer?” The old man’s voice was hopeful.

  Adam got a cloth out of a drawer near the little sink and dampened it. Then he opened the miniature fridge and pulled out the silver can and handed it over Gordon’s shoulder. He tossed me the damp cloth, then went back to his self-appointed observation post.

  I wiped my feet. My calf was still sore, but it wasn’t the bonedeep throbbing, and there was no itching. It felt like a rope burn and nothing worse. There had been some sort of magic on whatever had cut my calf, magic that the old man had nullified.

  I’m immune to a lot of magic—but not all. Usually, the worse the magic is, the less likely I am to be immune.

  The old man opened his pop can and drank it down. He drank the whole thing without taking a breath. When I was a kid, we used to say anyone who could drink a can or bottle dry had killed it. We’d tried it a lot, but the only one of us who could do it was one of the older boys. I’d forgotten his name. He died before I left Montana—a victim of the Change.

  Gordon Seeker and I could bandy words back and forth all night—I grew up in a werewolf pack; I knew how to not-lie, too. However, sometimes straightforward was more useful.

  “I’m a walker,” I told the old man as I rubbed his magic Bag Balm on my feet. “How did you know what I was?”

  He laughed, slapping his hands on his thighs. “Is that what they call it?” he said. “After those abominations down south, I suppose? You don’t go around wearing the skins of those you kill, do you? How can you be a skinwalker, then? Abominations.” He hissed through his teeth, and the sound whistled a little as the air escaped in the gap where the tooth was missing.

  “Not a skinwalker but a shapechanger, you are. Coyote, right? Ai.” He shook his head. “Coyote brings change and chaos.” His head tilted sideways, and he looked as though he was listening to someone I couldn’t hear. I glanced at Adam, but he was frowning at the old man.

  Gordon Seeker laughed. “Better than death and destruction, surely—but those often follow change anyway. Very well.” The eyes he turned to me were fever-bright.

  He reached out and tapped my injured leg. “River marked. It meant for you to be its servant—good thing for you that coyotes don’t make good servants. But it means more than that. It tells me that tomorrow you need to go to Maryhill Museum. Enjoy the art and the furniture built by the foreign queen—and then go see what they have in their basement. At noon, you meet my young grandson at Horsethief Lake, and he’ll take you to see She Who Watches.”

  I knew what She Who Watches was though I hadn’t ever actually seen her in person. She was the most famous of the pictographs at Horsethief Lake.

  “The tours are only open on Fridays,” commented Adam. “At ten in the morning.”

  The old man grunted. “Indians go anytime they want to—it is our place.” He tapped me. “She’s Indian, no matter what she believes. My grandson is Indian. The two of them can take one Anglo wolf who belongs to an Indian coyote girl.”

  He stretched and tossed the empty pop can to Adam—who caught it. “Time for this old Indian to go.” He looked at me again. “If you are going to use white man’s words to describe yourself, ‘avatar’ is more accurate than ‘walker.’”

  He took his bag and indicated the little pot with his chin. “Better you keep that, little sister. A coyote will get herself hurt a lot if she runs with wolves.”

  And then he left.

  Adam and I both waited, holding our breaths, but we heard neither footsteps nor car or boat.

  After a moment, I shed my clothes and took coyote shape—and I had about one more change in me tonight. But it was better that I changed than Adam. He opened the door of the trailer and walked out behind me as I put my nose to the ground and scent-trailed the old man. He’d headed for the river and not the road.

  I followed him down to the little backwater where Adam and I had played in the river. About ten feet from the drop-off to the beach area, Gordon Seeker’s scent and the imprint of his cowboy boots just disappeared.

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK? WAS HE A GHOST?” ASKED ADAM, as he scrubbed my feet again while I sat on the couch.

  I’d told him they were fine. But he’d ignored me and insisted on cleaning them again after I’d gone out running around on them, even though I’d been on paws and not bare feet. It didn’t hurt as much as it should have because the salve had healed the minor cuts better than any mundane Bag Balm could have. All I had left was a whole bunch of bruises.

  “I think that there is more in heaven and earth, Horatio,” I said. “I can usually tell if someone is a ghost. Or if I can’t, I’ve never found out. How about you?”

  “He smelled like woodsmoke and predator,” said Adam. “He breathed, and I could hear his heart pump. If I had to guess, I’d say not a ghost. But I’ve never actually seen a ghost, so it’s just a guess. A ghost was the first explanation that occurred to me for his disappearing act.”

  “You’ve never seen a ghost?” I saw them all the time, so I forgot how seldom other people could perceive them.

  “No. So what do you think Gordon Seeker was?”

  “You know,” I told him, “there’s an old Indian custom that Charles told me about once. If a visitor comes to your lodge and admires something out loud, you are supposed to give it to them. Charles says there are three reasons for the custom. The first”—I held up a finger—“is because generosity is a v
irtue to be encouraged. The second”—I put up another finger—“is to teach you not to be too attached to or too proud of things. Family, friends, community are important. Things are not. Can you guess the third one?”

  He smiled. “Charles told me that one. Be careful who you invite into your lodge. I didn’t think of it until after Seeker was already in the trailer. Maybe he was the Indian version of a witch. Medicine man.”

  “Charles says that medicine men and witches aren’t very much alike.”

  My leg itched, and I pulled up my pant leg and contemplated scratching.

  “River marked,” said Adam, touching the mark lightly.

  “He was as bad as the fae,” I complained. “He didn’t answer anything and just left us with more questions.”

  Adam kissed my knee, which should not have done anything to my pulse. I mean—the kneecap is as far from an erogenous zone as I know of. But it was Adam, so my heart rate picked up nicely.

  He put my feet down. “The magic salve did its job. I don’t think you’ll need another application tonight. I have a funny feeling that you might need it more later. Speaking of the fae, though, when we start getting people missing and bloody, it’s probably time to give Uncle Mike a call and see what he’s set us into the middle of.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Uncle Mike’s number. I heard the sound of loud music, and someone answered in Cornish.

  “It’s Hauptman,” Adam said. “Get Uncle Mike for me.” He started pacing the length of the trailer as he sometimes did when he was on the phone. I pulled my feet up—resting them on the towel to keep the couch clean. Without my feet on the floor, Adam had an extra half pace to use. My eyes drooped, and I had to fight to keep them open.

  There were several clicks, and the music died down abruptly, as if Uncle Mike had gotten on a quieter extension.

  “Adam,” he said. “Congratulations. And why would you be calling me while you’re on your honeymoon?”

  “Otters,” said Adam. “More precisely, otters that look like they’d be more at home in the Old Country and who smell of glamour.”