River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  Raven smiled at him. “I do know who the FBI are,” he told Jim. “Coyote is not the only one who still wanders.”

  While they were talking, the others had left. Some of them seemed to walk away, but I saw Wolf disappear, probably because he did it while still staring at Adam. Who belonged to me.

  “Thank you, Raven,” said Coyote, after a quick glance to see that the other animal spirits, including Gordon, were gone.

  “We may all die forever tomorrow, old friend,” said Raven. “But it will be interesting, anyway.”

  ADAM AND I LEFT TO CHANGE AND GET DRESSED, too—but I was the only one doing any changing. Adam’s panicked gaze met mine as I was putting on my jeans.

  “Hold on,” I told him. “There’s help about.”

  I pulled on my clothes, stuck my shoes on my feet, and grabbed Adam’s clothes as fast as I could. Then I bounded back up the hill, hoping like heck that Coyote hadn’t already vanished like the rest of them.

  Why I was so sure that Coyote knew anything about werewolves was a mystery to me, but it seemed right. He’d known Adam would have trouble shifting when the earth magic was singing.

  The candles were all out. Jim and Calvin were gone; Fred and Hank had left before we’d headed out to change. Stonehenge looked deserted.

  “Coyote?” I called.

  “Mercy?”

  I’d been almost certain he was gone, but he and Raven had apparently been sitting on the altar playing a card game in the dark. Hard to believe I’d missed them, but Coyote was that sort, so I didn’t worry about it. I had other things on my mind.

  “Adam can’t change back. Would the earth magic have done something that keeps him from shifting?”

  “He can’t change back to human?” Coyote folded up his hand of cards and set them on the bronze plaque, giving us his full attention. “That’s awkward, this being your honeymoon.”

  “He can’t change,” I said, ignoring the last sentence. “Is it the earth magic? Will the effects go away after we leave here?”

  Coyote considered it. “The earth magic shouldn’t do anything unless directed by a shaman, and I think Jim likes you.”

  Raven gave his head a birdlike twitch. “It wasn’t Jim, and it wasn’t the earth magic.” His voice left no room for doubt. “Your werewolf bit our Wolf, remember?”

  Raven grinned at me, a big warm expression that was infinitely reassuring though I could think of no reason I should trust him. “Wolf takes things like that personally. But he’s not one to cling to his angers, either.” His face became a little pensive. “Not like Owl.”

  Coyote snorted. “He still bearing a grudge for that? That happened a long, long time ago.”

  “How was I to know that it was his favorite thing?” Raven’s eyes twinkled with starlight. “It was shiny.” He glanced at me. “But it was heavy, so I dropped it in the ocean. It was an accident.”

  “You think that this is something Wolf did?” I had a good grip on the ruff around Adam’s neck. It was a habit I’d developed over the past few months because I found it reassuring.

  Adam didn’t look worried or nervous, but he wouldn’t, not in front of people who were essentially strangers. I was doing the worried and nervous for both of us.

  A werewolf can stay wolf for a while. A couple of days, no trouble. A few weeks . . . well, not so good, but most of them will be okay afterward. Months were possible—one or two. After that, he would be all wolf with no human. Bran’s son Samuel had experienced that, and his wolf had behaved in a mostly civilized fashion for a couple of weeks without losing it, astonishing everyone. It was unlikely that Adam, who had not seen his first century, could do the same.

  “How long?” I asked.

  Coyote sighed. “Mercedes, it takes power to pull forward Adam’s wolf so strongly that his human half cannot change. We . . . None of us has a lot of that kind of power over here anymore, which is probably why Wolf did it: to show that he is not to be trifled with.” Coyote looked at Adam. “He could have killed you had he desired. It would have been easier. After tomorrow’s battle, I should be very surprised if Wolf’s punishment does not fade away. It would be easy to be angry with him—but he and the others have agreed to sacrifice themselves. It is, I think, unlikely that he will return to this place soon after that.”

  “If ever,” agreed Raven quietly. He had picked up all the cards and laid out a solitaire pattern. Spider, I thought, or some variant. “So give him his dignity and don’t worry.”

  “Thank you,” I told them both. I started to go, then I remembered something. “Hey, Coyote?”

  He had just scooped up the cards again and was in the middle of shuffling. “Yes.”

  “Your sisters told me to tell you that they thought your plan was a good one.”

  “Did they tell you what it was?” He resumed shuffling, but there was a rapidity to his movement that told me he was feeling something strongly.

  “Yes.” I took a deep breath. “Weak link here, I think. But I’ll do my best.”

  He smiled. “Yes, I expect you will.”

  WHEN SOMETHING WOKE ME UP FROM A SOUND SLEEP in the middle of the night, I assumed it was Coyote again. This time I woke Adam up, too.

  “Someone wants me outside,” I told him, tapping my head. “I think Coyote might want to talk again.”

  When I got out of bed, I tripped over the walking stick. I picked it up gently, instead of swearing at it, and leaned it against the wall. Swearing at ancient artifacts seemed a little unwise. Not something I’d do unless I’d carefully considered all the possible effects.

  Adam and I made our way out to the swimming hole, where the call was coming from. But it wasn’t Coyote.

  Out in the darkness I could see her—or at least her wake. The roiling water burbled and swirled as she swam in lazy circles.

  Mercedes Thompson. Her voice was in my head.

  I sat down on the ground with a thump, in the faint hope that it would somehow make it harder for her to get me into the water. Coyote had been too precipitous in declaring me immune to her charms. Perhaps she couldn’t make me drown my own children—and Jesse, thank goodness, was a hundred miles away. But she could call me out to her, and she could speak to me.

  I thought as hard as I could, Go die.

  Mercedes, she said again, her voice like a cool liquid in my head, giving me the mother of all ice-cream headaches. Are you listening to me? Do you see what I want you to see?

  “Do you hear her?” I asked Adam.

  He looked out toward the river.

  “No.” I tapped him, then tapped my head. “She’s in here.”

  His teeth gleamed white in the darkness.

  MacKenzie Hepner was eight years old as of four days ago. She was supposed to be in the tent with her little brother, but something had woken her up. She hitched up her nightgown and waded in the cold water. On her arm she could see the mark that that weed had left when she went swimming too far out in the river, and her stepdad had to swim out and rescue her. It made her reconsider how she felt about her stepdad. He hadn’t even yelled at her, just hugged her. It took her a while to figure out he was scared, too . . .

  Do you see what I want you to see, Mercedes?

  My breath started coming in panicked gulps. I hadn’t been just dreaming about the ill-fated Janice and her family. The river devil had fed me the details afterward. Maybe that hadn’t been on purpose. Maybe. But they had been real, and this eight-year-old named MacKenzie was real, too.

  I hid my forehead against Adam and told him what was happening, giving him the words when she gave words to me, describing the rest. He whined unhappily.

  Gesture to me if you see what I want you to see. Did you see her?

  Evidently, she couldn’t read my thoughts. Like Bran, she could only shove things at me.

  MacKenzie’s feet were numb, and the rocks made the bottoms hurt. She shouldn’t be out here in the river in the dark. She knew it was against the rules—

  I waved my han
d weakly. I didn’t want to know any more about a child who was going to walk into the river and get eaten.

  I will let her live.

  “She says she’ll let the child live,” I told Adam.

  He got it, I think, before I did, because he lunged up and snarled at her—at me, then bumped me with a hip in a clear order to go back to the trailer.

  I felt her laughter. She’d seen Adam’s reaction. She knew I’d heard her.

  Bargain. A bargain. A bargain. You for her. You come die tonight, and I will let the little girl and her little brother live.

  Adam planted himself between me and the river devil.

  “She offers a bargain,” I told him. “Me for the little girl—and apparently her brother. If I die, they won’t.”

  Adam looked at me, his heart in his eyes.

  “She’s eight,” I told him. “Just. Yesterday her stepfather proved that he might be okay. She’s willing to give him a chance. She has a younger brother that she could go get and bring with her.” I swallowed. “What would you do, Adam? Would you die so that little girl could live?”

  I knew the answer—and from his body language, so did he. Then he looked at the monster out in the water and back to me with a flicker of his ears. He couldn’t do it because she didn’t want him. I couldn’t do it, either. No matter how much I wanted to. Without me, Coyote’s plan wouldn’t work.

  “Would she lie?” I said, while the river devil chanted her promises in my head. “I’m worth more to her than the child, I think. She knows about Coyote and his interest in me, and it worries her. But after I’m dead? Would she keep her word? Who would know?”

  “She would keep her word.” Coyote came up to stand beside Adam. “I can’t let you do it, anyway.”

  “I know. Your sisters made it clear that you need me.”

  Adam whined again.

  “I’ll tell you about them,” I promised. I’d forgotten to let him know what had happened; we’d both been tired.

  Choose, Mercedes.

  “For an ancient evil, she speaks awfully good English,” I said.

  “She’s been eating English-speaking people.” Coyote sat next to me.

  “Can you hear her?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. She can’t mark me.”

  “Could you save her?” I asked Coyote. “Could you save that little girl? Didn’t you carve the way for the waters to flow and move mountains? Raven hung the stars.”

  “That was a long time ago, under the Great Spirit’s direction,” he said, sounding sad. “I’m on my own here.”

  “Why doesn’t the Great Spirit take care of this?”

  “Why should He?” Coyote asked. “All that is mortal dies. Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death.”

  “I like my god better than I like yours,” I told him.

  “Don’t you know, child? He is one and the same.” Coyote watched the river devil wait for my response. “The Great Spirit has given us our wits and our courage. He sends helpers and counsel. He sent me to you, didn’t he? I talked to my sisters tonight. It was a good thing.”

  “Can you save this girl?”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “A campground near the river,” I said. But was it a campground? There were a lot of places you could just go camping. “No.”

  “Then no.”

  “Damn it,” I said.

  You or they die. Bargain. You die, they live.

  “Is there anyone else who could take my role?” I asked.

  “None that I know of. I was surprised that you were not controlled by her mark. You are the only creature who is wholly of this realm that I have seen resist her.”

  “If I weren’t here, what would you do?”

  He sighed. “One of us would take your place. But there are only seven of us who can or will help. I believe that a time will come when the Great Spirit will send us back out into the world again, entrusted with tasks to accomplish. But many of us were hurt when the Europeans swept through here. Disease took so many of our children, then the vampires singled out those who managed to survive and brought more death upon them . . .” He sighed. “We were allowed to retreat and lick our wounds—and for many it will take the Great Spirit to pry them out of their safe dens.” He scuffed his bare foot on the ground, rolling a rock a dozen feet. “I won’t lie. We may not have enough to do what we need, even with you. Without you?” He shook his head.

  Mercedes. The demand was angry and impatient.

  I picked up a rock and chucked it in the river as my answer.

  Coward to save yourself at the expense of a child. You shall see what you have done.

  I learned a lot in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I learned that MacKenzie’s little brother was named Curt, like my stepfather. He was four—and marked as MacKenzie was, so he didn’t fight when his sister carried him on her hip out into the river. As a treat especially for me, I think, the river devil released her hold on their minds before she killed them. But maybe it was because MacKenzie’s screams had her parents tearing out of their tent and into the water after them.

  I learned that I could have exchanged my life for four people’s lives. Four.

  12

  I DIDN’T SLEEP. WHAT WAS THE POINT? I COULD HAVE nightmares while I was awake just as well as when I was asleep.

  I had made the right decision, the only decision. But that didn’t make it any easier to live with the deaths of four people I could have saved.

  I fed Adam, and when he grunted at me, I fed myself, too. I had to keep my strength up. If four people had died to give me a chance to help kill the river devil, it wouldn’t do to fail because I hadn’t eaten.

  About 5:00 A.M., when the first pale hint of dawn touched the sky, Adam and I got in the truck and headed back up to Stonehenge. Without Adam to converse with and nothing much to do, I would drive us both crazy if we stayed at the campsite. Stonehenge needed to be cleaned up. I could do that and save Jim and Calvin some work.

  It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. when we’d packed up that morning, and Jim had looked like a man who’d been rode hard and put away wet. I didn’t expect him to arrive until a more civilized hour. But he and Calvin drove up about ten minutes after I finally found the step stool so I could get high enough to remove the candles from the tops of the standing stones. Chin-ups on forty-five monoliths (I counted them while contemplating how to get the candles down) had struck me as too energetically taxing when I had a monster to kill later.

  Calvin waved at me and hopped in the back of the truck to grab two boxes. He jumped back out and trotted over while Jim got out of the truck and shut the door.

  “Hey,” said Calvin. “Didn’t expect—” He saw Adam and stopped dead. “Uhm. What’s wrong with him?”

  Even happy werewolves are scary in broad daylight if your eyes let you really see what they are. Adam was not a happy werewolf.

  “Wolf took offense at the bite,” I said. “So Adam can’t change back to human right now.”

  “Jeez,” said Calvin. “That sucks—and it’s your honeymoon.” Then his face flushed darker with embarrassment.

  That was not what had Adam’s hackles up, though. I’d told him about Coyote’s sisters after Coyote left. And whispering very quietly what the plan to kill the monster was. Adam couldn’t talk to tell me what he thought. I knew that he understood that it was the best plan we could come up with. I also knew that he didn’t like it. At all. Amazing what body language can convey.

  “Coyote is sure it is temporary,” I told him, getting the next candle down while Calvin started to set them in the boxes he’d brought. The boxes were like the ones moving companies use to pack glasses, with cardboard inserts that kept each of the candles separate from the others. “Just don’t look him in the eyes, okay?”

  It took us about an hour and a half to get the place cleaned up and l
ooking the way it had before we’d come. Hardest was getting the coarse dark gravel out of the much finer pale gravel.

  “You could have used a plywood board,” I told Jim, who was sitting on the altar criticizing Calvin and me while we picked up gravel one piece at a time and put it in a wheelbarrow.

  “No,” he said. “I could not have. The fire had to rest on earth. Even the gravel was cheating a bit.”

  “Next time.” Even Calvin the Ever Cheerful was getting grumpy. “Next time I vote we put the fire on the ground. I’ll dig it out afterward and put fresh gravel that matches the original back over the top.”

  Jim grunted. “That is more work. We did it that way for a few years until I started to do it this way.”

  “What about a gunnysack?” I asked. “Something porous but not so loose a weave that the big gravel can drop through. Or use gravel that would blend in better with what is already here.”

  “Might work,” agreed Jim. “But then what would I use to keep my apprentice busy? I suppose I could do what my teacher did and teach him beading.”

  “I’ll pick up gravel, Uncle, thank you,” Calvin said meekly.

  The medicine man laughed. “I thought you might feel that way.”

  I STOPPED AT THE GAS STATION IN BIGGS AND GOT A pair of ice-cream cones—banana and strawberry—and a notebook. We ate the ice cream in the truck until Adam was finished with his strawberry cone because I couldn’t feed myself and Adam and drive at the same time.

  As I drove back over the bridge, still licking my banana ice cream, I could see the Maryhill Campground, full of tents, trailers, and RVs. Had MacKenzie been staying there with her family? Or had they been somewhere more private? I hadn’t noticed any other campers. But if it had been the Maryhill Campground, Coyote might have been able to get to her in time to save her while I kept River Devil busy. If she’d been at the Maryhill Campground, and we had known where she was.