River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

Mercedes. His voice was a howl of grief that I couldn’t answer, not if I wanted to save myself.

  I remembered, from seeing her head above the water, that the teeth in the front of her mouth were spiky and stuck out almost like the quills of a porcupine. They were also long, and I hoped that she couldn’t open her mouth wide enough to engulf me as long as I kept my feet braced on the outside of her lower jaw and my grip on the upper tooth.

  You make things harder than they should be, she told me. You are caught and cannot get away.

  She snapped her teeth together with wicked speed—but I am wicked fast, too. I bent and straightened with her. The water helped as well. When she snapped her mouth closed, the water pushed out.

  She changed tactics and tried to use her tentacle to shake me loose. I noticed that this close to her, the tentacle seemed to be operating a little less efficiently, like a rubber band that was too loose. It could hold on to me, it could pull me—but it couldn’t push me.

  I didn’t know why she didn’t try to grab me with another tentacle. Maybe she was just too angry right now. But when she did, I was dead. If this stalemate lasted much longer, I was dead anyway. My abilities didn’t extend to breathing water, and I’d been underwater for a while.

  On a particularly hard jerk, I took a chance and stopped resisting with my legs. She was pulling so hard that she yanked my legs up past her upper teeth. She quit pulling as soon as she realized what she had done, but too late. She’d already given me enough slack to twist my tentacle-caught leg around one of the long spikelike teeth at the front of her mouth. The next time she pulled her tentacle, she’d be pulling on her own tooth instead of my leg.

  All well and good, but if I didn’t get air soon, all the cleverness in the world wouldn’t help me. I wiggled until I was on top of her muzzle instead of in front of it. I’d managed to pull open Adam’s shirt while she was hauling me to her, and now I slipped a knife out of the bandoleer and sliced the tentacle just around my ankle.

  Her tentacles must have been extremely sensitive. Just as she had when Adam freed me, she jerked her head up out of the water. Since I was on top, the motion catapulted me out of the river, off her head, and into the air. I landed about fifteen feet from where I’d started and plunged back into the water. She’d thrown me upstream, so the current would bring me right back to her. I broke surface again just about the time she let loose with a shriek that hurt my ears.

  She saw me and dropped back into the water, disappearing under the surface. I swam as fast as I could, but, not being a fish, I was pretty sure I was going to be food.

  Something grabbed my shoulders and I screamed, reaching up to grab whatever it was as it yanked me out of the water. I quit screaming as the river devil’s open mouth appeared on the surface of the water below my toes, which were now about five feet in the air. My hands closed around two leather-covered steel-strong bones that could only be the legs of a very, very big predatory bird.

  My food, my food. Thief! The river devil’s voice in my head made me tighten my grip on the great bird’s legs and draw my feet up as far as I could.

  He shouldn’t have been able to bear my weight, even as big as he was—and with his wings outspread, he was huge. But he wasn’t just a thunderbird—he was Thunderbird—and I supposed that made a difference.

  The river devil broke the surface but had misjudged her strike because Thunderbird swooped sideways at the last moment. She hung where she was a moment before toppling sideways and crashing into the river like a whale breaching. Thunderbird carried me to the river’s edge and dropped me, gently, next to where Adam should have been waiting.

  And wasn’t.

  “Adam,” I shrieked, wiping the water out of my eyes. She couldn’t have him. He was mine. I staggered into a run toward the river about the time Adam emerged, knocking me over and drenching me further with the water held by his fur.

  I swore at him. “You have got to stay out of the water,” I told him through gritted, chattering teeth. “If she gets you, she won’t have to bother killing me—she can make you do it.”

  It scared me. I understood why he’d done it, understood it viscerally, but he had to stay out of the river. I tried to roll out from under him, but a big paw on my shoulder held me down and he snarled at me.

  That’s when I realized that I wasn’t dealing with Adam. Adam knew why he had to stay out of the water. But the wolf didn’t understand, and the wolf had taken over.

  We didn’t have time for this. I had to get my fins on and be ready to swim out to wherever the river devil was when she went comatose.

  I heard a war cry—someone had made it out to her.

  “Adam,” I said. “Let me up.”

  Instead, he lay down on top of me. Damn Wolf. If Adam had been in his human shape, the wolf would never have gotten this much of an upper hand.

  But I knew how to deal with this—if I calmed down, he would, too. He was responding as much to the frantic beat of my heart and my fear as he was to seeing me jerked underwater. He hadn’t seen me fight underwater with something I couldn’t see, where I could only feel those sharp spiky teeth and—that wasn’t going to help me quiet down at all.

  I closed my eyes and sought that calm place I’d learned to find in the dojo. It came in handy both when working on engines and when dealing with unhappy customers.

  It took longer than it might have because I couldn’t help but listen to the sounds of the battle I couldn’t see, but eventually my pulse settled down, and I was relaxed under Adam.

  “Okay,” I told him. “I’m okay. You need to get off of me before I’m squished.”

  The wolf growled.

  “Adam,” I said sharply. “Get off me.”

  He closed his yellow eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Adam?”

  When his eyes opened it was Adam who looked back at me. He stood up and backed off.

  “Thank you,” I said, rolling to my feet a little less gracefully than I meant to.

  Out in the river there was a feeding frenzy going on. There was blood in the water; I could smell it even though I couldn’t see. I could hear the cries of the birds—Hawk, Raven, and Thunderbird as they attacked from above, but the devil was too far out in the middle of the river. Even with my night vision, I had trouble seeing what was going on. I grabbed my water socks and pulled them on my feet, ignoring the rough tear that wept blood on the foot I’d managed to brace on the river devil’s teeth.

  The fight was moving gradually toward the little swimming hole, and I felt Adam’s attention focus as he figured out what she was doing. Our bond allowed me to understand it, too: she was herding them into the cove because she didn’t want anyone to escape, and it would make it easier for her to locate body parts if she missed anything.

  It would make my job easier, too.

  I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to get Adam to let me back in the water. I was pretty sure I was going to be terrified—

  She was close enough I could see her bright green eyes—which meant that Adam and I were too close to the river.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s—”

  There was a tremendous splash and her head lifted out of the water. Speared on her teeth was a man with a canine head. She opened her mouth as a single tentacle pulled him off the teeth that impaled him. She threw him into the air, and, tipping her head back, caught him in her rear teeth and chewed him to bits.

  Adam collapsed, like a puppet whose strings were cut. Coyote howled a tribute.

  She had eaten Wolf.

  I didn’t know what had happened to Adam. He was breathing, his heart was steady—he was just unconscious. I was kneeling beside him, looking for any injury, when pain rushed over me, and I understood why he’d fallen.

  My skin was on fire, and I felt as if someone had poured boiling water over me. I screamed, stumbling to my feet. And this time it was I, tears sliding down my wet face, who howled a tribute—and Coyote who died.

  It didn’t last long aft
er that. I think that when they were all alive, they’d been able to harry her, to play off one another’s strengths. But as they died, they lost the ability to distract her.

  Raven died trying to keep Snake alive—the distraction allowed Snake to drive his spear deep into her side, but not deep enough. Watching her, I realized why she’d only grabbed me with one tentacle—she could only use one of them at a time. The unused tentacles bobbed about her head as if she had thick wire hair. She dove on top of Snake, and I didn’t see him again. The only ones that seemed to be remaining were Thunderbird and Hawk.

  Thunderbird dove like an F-15, striking with both taloned feet extended. I’d seen him score a deep furrow on her nose a few moments before. But this time, she whipped her tentacle around his legs and snatched him out of the air and into the water.

  Suddenly she shrieked—neither she nor I had seen Hawk, and he’d managed to take out an eye while she was concentrating on Thunderbird. But Hawk’s talons were stuck, and she dove abruptly. For a moment, the river was still, and Thunderbird floated alone on the surface, bobbing gently with the current. Then he disappeared under the water, tugged by something underneath him.

  Wait until she surfaces and is still, Coyote had cautioned me as he ate a couple of fast-food burgers in the backseat of the truck—one greasy sandwich in each hand. If there aren’t enough of us to cause her to go belly-up, there’s no sense in you dying, too.

  I’d asked him what to do if she didn’t react the way he’d hoped.

  Maybe then it might be time to bring in the nuclear warheads, he’d said. For all that there was a smile on his face, I had been pretty sure he hadn’t been joking.

  I stripped off Adam’s shirt. When I saw blood, I realized that Thunderbird had opened up a good slice under one arm when he rescued me. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t going to complain. I checked the knife belt. There were a few knives missing, but I still had eight left. Hopefully, that would be enough.

  I waded out into the river until I was knee-deep, then put on the long, bright pink fins. And then I waited, nearly in the same spot as I’d waited before.

  I’d have expected that the water would keep the smell of carnage to a minimum, but I could smell blood. Something bumped my knee, and I fell over backward trying to scramble away in my clumsy fins, landing with a splash on my backside. The bandoleer jerked and I grabbed the otter with one hand and threw him as far as I could before I stood up. I checked the sheath, but it seemed to be okay except for a bite mark on one edge. There were still eight knives.

  A long, pale shape appeared on the surface about ten feet from me. It waved lazily back and forth as the current caught it. It was joined by another and another, then her head appeared—half her head anyway, the rest lurking beneath the water—one eye skyward and her mouth open wide. Finally, her body surfaced, limp and huge. Really, really huge. I was pretty sure it was longer than Coyote’s estimate of ninety-odd feet.

  Showtime.

  I waded out, ignoring the otterkin who were circling me. If they could have attacked me before this, they would have. Whatever the fae had done to this cove, it was serving my purposes now.

  As soon as the water was thigh-deep, I dove forward and let the fins do the work of getting me to the river devil.

  I’d expected that I would have to chase her downstream, but her greed for the last bit of flesh kept her in the backwater of the swimming cove. It didn’t matter for my task—but if I was successful, it might mean that I’d have a lot easier time getting back to Adam.

  I noticed that there were flashing lights on the big highway—someone had seen a disturbance over here, I thought. We’d known there was a good chance that people would notice eventually. If I killed her, then it wouldn’t matter. If I didn’t, it would likely give her a whole slew of victims, but I wouldn’t care. Coyote might, just might, come back from the dead—but I wouldn’t.

  Her body floated about three feet above the river surface, the pectoral fin stuck straight up in the air. I couldn’t get to it from the underside. I swam around her head—because it was the shortest way—but I tried not to look too closely at her open mouth. Her bad eye, the eye Hawk had hit, was the one that I could see.

  I don’t know how long she’ll stay somnolent, Coyote had told me on the way here. I don’t even have a best guess. All we can do is feed her everyone we can and hope it is enough. Then he’d grinned. She might sleep for a week digesting me alone.

  Something brushed against me, and I spun to look, expecting an otterkin. But it was just a feather. A feather as long as my forearm attached to a piece of skin and caught between her teeth. I swam faster.

  Her topside was rougher than her underbelly had been. I might have been able to scale it, but I didn’t have to. A spear sunk deep into her flesh gave me an easier way up. I pulled off my fins and gave them to the river before I started to climb.

  Her skin was cold and faintly mucous. She smelled like fish and magic. I’d thought she would have big scales, but they were small, even finer than a trout’s on her underbelly. On her back, they were more like a snake’s. I put my hand on the base of her pectoral fin and measured out four hand spans, then I pulled out one of my knives and made the first cut.

  I held my breath as the skin parted reluctantly, but she was still as death. If it weren’t for the faint pulse beneath my knees and the fluttering of her gills about three feet in front of me, I might have thought she was already dead.

  The first knife made it through the tough skin before it lost its edge. I didn’t notice at first, wasting precious time dragging the dull rock against her unyielding flesh. By the fourth knife, my cut was nearly a foot deep and twice that wide. I braced it open by tucking my knee in the fissure while watery pink blood filled the bottom. I had to stop and empty it out a couple of times so I could make sure that the knife was still cutting.

  You have to get it wide enough to get to the heart, Coyote had told me, holding his hands about two feet apart. She doesn’t have ribs—she’s a fish. But she doesn’t need them. Her flesh is made of magic as much as flesh. That’s why the steel didn’t work, that’s why bullets won’t work, that’s why a grenade wouldn’t work. I’m not sure a nuclear strike would work—but it would be interesting to try. Of course, after that no one could use water from that river for a hundred years or so . . .

  The otters swam around, tugging at her tentacles and doing something with magic—I could feel it. Fae magic felt different to me from the magic that kept the river devil alive. They were trying to wake her up.

  I kept looking out on the beach, but Adam hadn’t moved.

  What are you doing, Mercedes? Her voice rang in my head, and I froze, certain that I’d failed, that she was awake.

  You are not strong enough for the task you were given, she said. You should have come to me this morning and let those children live. At least then your death would mean something.

  The tissue under my blade was surging with the beat of her heart, a sign, Coyote had told me, that I was close. I switched to a new blade—I had three left—and kept working.

  My hands were cold and numb, and I’d slipped a couple of times. There was at least one cut that would need stitches if I survived. The new blade broke. I tossed it at one of the otterkin and hit it in the head. It chittered at me, and I stuck my tongue out at it as I grabbed another knife.

  Two left.

  Not enough, Mercedes, she said. Not good enough. Poor Coyote died in vain and took with him the last of the spirit warriors who walk our Mother Earth. You fail, but don’t worry—you won’t have to live with your failure.

  That blade dulled. And then there was only one. Had she moved underneath me?

  I took it out and went to work. It would either be enough, or it wouldn’t. The ankle that she’d grabbed me by throbbed in time with the beat of her heart. The hip attached to that ankle ached dully—I must have pulled a muscle in it. The cut under my arm burned every time I moved my hand.

  And the tissue par
ted, exposing her heart.

  It didn’t look like any heart I had ever seen—it was black and veined with gray, and the magic of it was so strong it stung the tips of my fingers.

  It’s no use trying to stab her heart. Coyote had chewed for a while, then swallowed. It’s too hard. You need to go for the connective tissue.

  So I did. There were four webs of gristle that held the heart in place. Once I took care of that, the veins and arteries were soft enough I could pull them out with my bare hand, or so Coyote had assured me.

  I set my knife to the first of the webs—and right about that time, she woke up.

  13

  SHE DIDN’T AWAKEN ALL AT ONCE—OR ELSE I’D HURT her badly enough that she couldn’t react right away. The first thing she did was stretch. When she did, her pectoral fin fluttered and hit my hand, knocking the knife out of my hand. I watched it hit the water and disappear.

  The otterkin all pulled back into a semicircle about fifteen feet from her. Under me she writhed, and the back half of her body disappeared underwater. I was going to have to jump and get swimming if I wanted a chance to live through this.

  Yes, Mercedes, you should run now, she said. I like to chase my prey.

  Instead, I grabbed the edges of her skin and dug my fingers in so she couldn’t knock me off. Coyote died to give me this chance, and I had failed him. MacKenzie, who would never grow older than eight years and four days old, had died to give me this chance, and I had failed her and her family. Faith Jamison had come to me, and I had failed her, too.

  I had failed them all. But they were dead; they wouldn’t care. Adam would care.

  I wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Not with Adam waiting for me.

  A single tentacle snapped back and hit my shinbone with a crack, and the pain didn’t touch me. I flattened my hand just as I would have to break a board and hit her heart. My form sucked because I was trying to stay put on a slippery fish who wasn’t cooperating, and I might as well have hit her with one of Thunderbird’s feathers. I reached in and pulled on her heart with my fingers and got nothing except for a mild zap of magic that felt like I’d grabbed onto an electric fence.