River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

I propped Adam against the shower-stall wall and dried him as quickly as I could. I kept a wary eye on him while I did the same to myself and dressed.

  “You could shift now,” I suggested.

  He shook his head. “Not until I eat. The wolf is riled up. Can’t protect you, and there’s danger around. Too easy to hurt you when I’m like that.”

  I snorted inelegantly. “Me, fragile? You’ve got the wrong woman. I don’t break; I bounce. Besides, we’re mates, remember? Your wolf won’t hurt me.”

  “Not always true,” he grunted, as I helped him into a pair of sweatpants. “Ask Bran. Not going to risk it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Let’s get you back to the truck,” I said.

  “Shirt,” he insisted.

  “No one is going to see that mark and know you’ve been wounded.” I didn’t say that no one would have to as badly as Adam was staggering. Willpower was all well and good, but there were limits. “Anyway, there’s no one here to see you but me.”

  “Shirt,” he insisted.

  Arguing was taking up energy neither of us had to spare. So I grabbed the button-up shirt I’d brought and helped him into it. The Italian silk shirt looked a little odd paired with the sweatpants, but who was going to look?

  Back at the trailer, he sat at the little table and ate with a ferocious and silent intensity. I gave him the last of the hamburger and the thawed steaks before going to work on the frozen stuff. Happily, there was a microwave in the Trailer of Wonders. When I’d finished slicing the frozen meat, I watched the speed with which he was eating and knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  So I made pancakes on the nifty little stove and had a hot stack waiting for him when he finished the frozen meat. He gave me a look when I set it in front of him, but he ate the pancakes with the same steady rhythm as he’d eaten the rest of the food. Meat was better, but calories were calories.

  He finished before I’d gotten the last of the batter in the pan, pushing the plate away so I’d know.

  “Okay,” I said. “Change already.”

  “You need to go,” he said. “This is going to hurt. Give me about twenty minutes.”

  I left and waited outside five minutes while our bond let me know just exactly how much pain he was in. Changing for the wolves was bad enough when they weren’t hurt. Five minutes was all I could take. I couldn’t help him, but I couldn’t bear to leave him alone, either.

  “I’m coming back in,” I told him, so he wouldn’t think it was some stranger. The only concession I made to safety was to sit on the far side of the trailer until the wolf heaved himself up on all fours. He started to shake himself free of the last tingles of the change and stopped abruptly. It must have hurt.

  “Bedtime,” I told him firmly. “Do you need help up?”

  He sneezed at me, then trotted up the steps to the bed with only a slight hitch in his gait. If I hadn’t been there, it would probably have been a limp, but that he was bothering to hide it from me was a good sign that he’d be okay.

  I climbed into bed and settled next to him, touching him gingerly. But he wiggled closer with an impatient sigh, so I quit worrying about hurting him. After a moment, I pulled the covers over both of us. He didn’t need them, but I did. The night was warm. I should have been warm, too, especially curled around Adam’s big furry self. But I was cold.

  I waited until he’d fallen asleep before I started to shake.

  He could have been dead. If Fred had been a half instant slower or Hank a smidgen faster.

  Mine. He was mine, and not even death would take him from me—not if I could help it.

  I WAS PRETTY SURE I WAS DREAMING WHEN I CLIMBED out of the bed, leaving Adam sleeping under a pile of blankets. He looked hot, his long tongue exposed to the air, so I pulled the blankets off him.

  I put on my clothes and followed the odd compulsion that pulled me out of the trailer and out to the river. It must have been very late because there were only a few semitrucks on the highway on the other side of the Columbia.

  On the west end of the swimming hole was a big rock formation. I climbed up and sat on the top, my feet dangling over the edge. My toes were ten feet above the river, which rushed darkly along toward the Pacific.

  When the man came up and sat beside me, it didn’t startle me. His face in shadows, he held out something to me—a piece of grass. I took it and stuck the end in my mouth. From his silhouette, I could see that he was chewing on his own piece, the seed heads bobbing leisurely in the air.

  Just a couple of hayseeds in the moonlight. It could almost have been romantic; instead it was peaceful.

  We must have been sitting there in a companionable silence for ten minutes before he said, “You aren’t sleeping, you know.”

  I took the grass out of my mouth and dropped it into the river—or that’s what I meant to do. A stray gust of wind caught it, and it flew onto the riverbank on the swimming-hole side instead.

  “Shouldn’t I feel the need to scream and run?” I asked.

  “Do you?” He sounded mildly interested.

  “No.” I considered it. “I am pretty convinced that I am probably dreaming, though.” Apologetically I shrugged. “Despite your assertion that I’m not.”

  He looked up at the half-moon and squinted at it, as if he might see something in it I couldn’t. “I’d guess that’s because you were sleeping when I called you out here. I didn’t know if it would work. I can’t do a lot of the things I used to do. Still, I am not lying. You are quite awake.”

  The moon lit the face of a man who’d died more than thirty years ago. A man who had been a ghost, dancing for me in broad daylight. He was handsome and young with a devil-may-care air that was obvious even on such short acquaintance.

  “Are you my father?” I asked.

  He shook his head, the movement emphasized by the grass in his mouth. “Nope. Sorry and all that. But your father was Joe Old Coyote.” He pronounced it as two syllables instead of three. Kye-oat not Kye-oat-ee. “He died in a car wreck and a mess with a pair of vampires. They don’t like walkers very much, and they liked him rather less than most.”

  I’d thought I knew why until no one but me had seen the ghost tonight. If you can see ghosts in the daylight, you can find where vampires are sleeping no matter what magic they use to hide. I’d always attributed it to being a walker, but if the other walkers hadn’t seen it, maybe there was something to what Gordon Seeker had been implying so heavily.

  “Oh, that,” he said, as if I’d spoken aloud. “Just because you can see something doesn’t mean you have to. I’d have thought that anyone who hangs out with werewolves would know that. I mean, who but an idiot would look at a werewolf and think, ‘dog.’ Yet they do.”

  “That’s pack magic,” I told him.

  He nodded. “Some is. Sure. But still. Walkers see ghosts, but those two taught themselves not to see the dead quite a while ago in a ‘galaxy far, far away.’ A man can’t fight a war if he can see the dead and still stay sane. So they made a choice.”

  “You watched Star Wars?” I asked.

  “Joe did,” he answered as if that made sense. “Loved it. A cowboy-and-Indian story where the Indians are the good guys and everyone fights with swords.”

  “Cowboys and Indians?” I asked while I chewed on the first part of the sentence.

  He grunted. “Think about it. Good versus evil. The foe has better armament and seems impossible to defeat—the invading Europeans. The good guys are few in number and restricted to a few bold heroes with an uncanny connection to the Force. Indians.”

  I’d never thought about it that way, but I supposed I could see where someone might. Of course, people said that “Puff the Magic Dragon” was about doing drugs, too. For me, Star Wars was space opera and “Puff” a kid’s song about growing up and leaving your dreams behind.

  “What about the Ewoks?” I asked. “Aren’t they supposed to be the Indians?”

  He grinned at me, his sharp teeth flashing white from the moonlight. �
��Nope. Indians aren’t cute and furry. Ewoks were a good marketing ploy.”

  I took a deep breath of the night air and smelled him. The ghost who’d danced for me, then turned into a coyote.

  “Why did you dance? I thought you were a ghost.”

  “That was a ghost,” he said. “That was Joe. He worried because you were headed into danger.” He slanted a laughing glance at me. “Not that you haven’t been in danger any number of times since you were born. But this is different because I’m called to this one for some reason. Things that involve me tend to be chaotic—and chaos can be fatal for the innocent bystanders.”

  “Not an innocent bystander,” I told him.

  “But he is your father. He’s entitled to worry.”

  “What did the dance mean?” I asked.

  “Not a spell,” he said. “Sometimes dancing is a spell—like the rain dance or the ghost dance. This was a celebration dance. An Indian might describe it as ‘Look, Apistotoki, here is my daughter. See her. See her grace and her beauty. Preserve this child of mine.’” He gave me a sly look. “Or he might describe the dance as ‘Look, God, see what I made. Pretty cool, eh? Could you watch out for it?’”

  For me. That dance had been for me.

  “Tell me,” I said, swallowing down the feelings that were roiling around inside me. There was so much I needed to know, and this might be my only chance. “Tell me about Joe Old Coyote.” There was something odd going on. Some connection between my father and Coyote, and I couldn’t quite figure it out. Direct questions hadn’t worked so well; maybe I could get him to elaborate if I went at it sideways. And maybe I’d learn more about my father than my mother had been able to tell me.

  The man who looked like my father grunted. “He was a bull rider.”

  I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say. “I did know that,” I prompted him.

  “Wasn’t Blackfeet. Or Blackfoot, either.”

  That was new information. “He told my mother he was.”

  “Nope.” He shook his head. “No. I’m pretty sure he told her he was from Browning. All the rest was her conclusion.”

  “Was he from Browning?” I asked. My heart hurt, and I wasn’t sure for whom. My mother who’d been so young? Maybe.

  “I was bored and lonely,” he said with a sly shyness. “So maybe I decided to be just another guy for a while. Maybe. Joe made his entrance at a bar in Browning. He kicked around with some other folks for a while, then entered a rodeo.” He made a pleased noise. “Chaos made commercial is a rodeo. He loved it, too. Loved the smells, loved the ache after a good ride, loved fighting the bulls, mostly ’cause those bulls had a good time with him up there. They pitted their strength against his. I could have ridden them for hours, and they could have killed me afterward. But Joe, he was different. Sometimes he won; sometimes they did. Like counting coup. He played by the rules, and they loved him for it.”

  Coyote had decided to be Joe Old Coyote? Then why did he say he wasn’t and speak of Joe Old Coyote in third person?

  “So Joe was born in Browning,” I said slowly.

  “You might say that,” agreed Coyote. “Joe usually did.”

  “Joe was a person you became.” I said it as if I were certain, and he nodded.

  “Exactly.”

  “So you were Joe Old Coyote but Joe wasn’t you.”

  “Sort of.” Coyote tapped the soil with his hands. “This explaining stuff isn’t where my talents lie. I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn’t me, and I wasn’t him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him—though he never knew that. There were just things he didn’t worry about very much—like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me—and he was dead.”

  Maybe it was the night, maybe it was because I was sitting in the moonlight next to Coyote—but suddenly it all sort of made sense. Like that bug-thing in the Men in Black movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug’s human suit, Coyote’s had had a life of his own.

  “Joe was real?”

  Coyote nodded. “And so is his ghost—even though that is me as well.”

  I made a command decision not to question that remark. I was feeling like I understood, and a ghost of a real person who wasn’t really a person would throw me off my game again.

  “If he was born in Browning,” I told Coyote, “maybe that makes him Blackfeet. Piegan.” I suddenly realized where Joe got his name, and it made me shake my head. “The Blackfeet tell stories about the Old Man, don’t they? He’s their trickster. It’s the Crow and the Lakota in that part of the country who tell Coyote stories. For the Blackfeet, the Old Man plays the part of Coyote. Old Man and Coyote. Old Coyote. Joe, because he was just another Joe.”

  The man beside me laughed, a soft, pleased sound. “Maybe it does make him Blackfeet. Some anyway. He liked Browning—they know how to party, those Indians in Browning.”

  “And then he met my mother.” My father was a construct of Coyote’s boredom. Or loneliness, maybe. It should have made me feel like less of a person, but somehow it didn’t. My father had always been this unreal person to me, a black-and-white photo and a few stories my mother told. But I had seen him dance, had heard the echoes of his voice in Coyote’s.

  Coyote threw his head back and laughed, and I heard the chorus of coyote howls up and down the gorge, called by his laughter.

  “Marjorie Thompson. Marji. Wasn’t she somethin’.” There was an awed sort of reverence in his voice. “Who’d have thought such a child would be so tough without being hard? If someone could have settled Joe down, it would have been Marji. He thought she was the one, anyway.”

  “But coyotes don’t mate for life, do they?” I tried to keep my voice neutral.

  “He would have,” said Coyote. “Oh, he would have. He loved her so much.”

  His voice, sincere and deep, hit me hard. I had to rub my eyes.

  “If he’d known about her sooner, he wouldn’t have killed the vampire nest over in Billings,” he said after a while. “But they needed killing, and he was there. Joe always thought of himself as a hero, you know—not the kind of hero I am, but the Luke Skywalker sort. Rescue the princess, kill the evil villains.”

  He looked down at the water, and said, as if it were a new discovery, “Maybe that’s where you get it. I always assumed it was just too much Star Wars, but maybe it was genetic.” After a moment’s thought, he shook his head. “No. I know where his genes came from. I think it must have been Star Wars.”

  “The vampires?” I said tightly.

  “Right. He knew taking out that seethe would set the vampires after him, but he wasn’t too worried because it was just him. And then Marji came along, and he wasn’t thinking about anything. Especially not about vampires. Not until he saw a pair of them talking to her one evening. At that moment he started thinking about vampires pretty damn hard. He let them catch a glimpse to draw them off and led them away on a merry chase. He was doing pretty well until he blew a tire.”

  He tossed his piece of grass away with a violent gesture, and his grass fell into the river.

  “Don’t know if the vampires engineered that or not. But they found him when he was trapped, and they killed him.”

  The story made my heart hurt, but not in a bad way. More like a wound that has just been scrubbed with iodine or hydrogen peroxide. It stung pretty badly, but I thought it might heal better in the end. “So when my father was dead, you were left?” I asked.

  “Just me,” he said. We sat in silence again for a bit; maybe both of us mourned Joe Old Coyote.

  The man who looked like my father broke the silence. “He didn’t know about you.”

  “I know. Mom told me.”

  “I didn’t know about you until a lot later. Then I stopped in to check you out. You looked happy running with the wolves. They looked bewildered—which is as it should be when a coyote plays with wolves. So I knew you were okay.” He glanced at me. “Whic
h is what Charles Cornick told me when he saw me watching you. Sent me packing with a flea in my ear.” His eyes laughed though his face was perfectly serious. “Terrifying, that one.”

  “I think so,” I told him truthfully.

  He laughed. “Not to you. He’s a good man. Only an evil man needs to fear a good man.”

  “Hah,” I said. “You obviously never had Charles catch you doing something he disapproved of.”

  We lapsed into silence, again.

  “What can you tell me about the thing in the river?” I asked finally.

  He made a rude sound. “I can tell you she’s not a poor misunderstood creature. Gordon is right. She’s Hunger, and she won’t be satisfied until she consumes the world.”

  She. That answered several things. There was only one. That seemed more manageable than a swarm of monsters that could bite a woman in half and make a man shoot Adam.

  “How big is it?” I asked.

  He looked at me and poked his tongue into his cheek. “You know? That’s a good question. I think we ought to find out.”

  And he knocked me into the river.

  9

  THE WATER WAS ICY AND CLOSED OVER MY HEAD, encasing me in silence and darkness. For a moment the shock of the fall, of the cold, and of sheer surprise froze my muscles, and I couldn’t move. Then my feet hit the riverbed, and the motion somehow woke up every nerve into screaming urgency. I pushed off and up, coming to the surface and sucking in air.

  I could hear him laughing.

  Son of a bitch. I would kill him. I didn’t care if he was Coyote or the son of Satan. He was a dead man walking.

  I struck out for the swimming hole even though it meant fighting the river. But for the next mile downstream or so, the riverbank was cliff face, and I didn’t want to stay in the river that long: there was a monster out here somewhere.

  A toddler walking along the bank could have beat me, for all the forward progress I made. I was only a fair swimmer, strength without technique. It was enough to beat the slow flow of the Columbia, but not by much.

  Two otter heads poked up beside me, and I growled at them. Somehow knowing they were fae made them less of a threat than real river otters though I expect the opposite was actually true. I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.