River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

  I needed a weapon, something that could penetrate the river devil’s magic, and all I had was my bare hands.

  Her struggle to wake up pulled me underwater, making it obvious, if I needed to be reminded, that if I changed to a coyote to gain teeth, I’d never manage to stay on her long enough to do anything. I wasn’t even sure I could change to a coyote—Coyote was dead. I had nothing.

  I was up and out of the water again when a stray thought brushed across my awareness.

  Lugh never made anything that couldn’t be used as a weapon, the oakman had said.

  Maybe I did have a weapon.

  Jump, the river devil urged. Run. Swim for shore. I might even let you make it all the way if you swim fast enough. Or maybe I’ll decide that living with your failure would be punishment more fitting what you have attempted here.

  I opened my hand, and said, “Come on. Now. I need you.” Then I reached behind my hip and grabbed the silver-and-oak walking stick.

  The river devil writhed, and the section I was on lifted well up out of the water. I used the force of her movement to aid mine as I stabbed down with the end of the staff. As I plunged it down to the heart, I saw the silver-shod end re-form into a spearhead. The spear slid six inches into her heart and stopped as if it had hit something solid. As we began to drop back to the water, the river devil twisted, rolling upright.

  All the metal in the staff flared white-hot. My feet slipped off the slick side of the river devil, and instinct had me grab the shaft with all I was worth, even as the heat seared my hands. I doubt I could have held on for another second, but a second was all it took.

  The staff started to shift relative to the monster, and I thought my weight was pulling it out, but a frantic look showed me something else, just before water closed over my head.

  The staff had sucked the heat from her flesh, turned her black heart to white ice. The weight of my body had given more torque to the staff; the heart cracked and pulled loose from the river devil’s body.

  Somehow, I ended up under the river devil, and she carried me to the bottom, which was not too deep. I wiggled and pulled to get out from under her—it would be too ironic to end up dead after all of this, dead in less than six feet of water.

  I lost track of the walking stick, but that was all right: it would be back. Once I was free, it took me almost too long to decide which way was up. I finally went limp and assumed that up was the direction I floated. I surfaced eventually. Had we been any deeper, I might not have.

  There were chunks of ice melting in the water. They reeked of magic and blood and I avoided touching them as I swam very slowly back to shore. When the water was too shallow to swim, I crawled. Getting to my feet was just way too much work.

  I struggled out of the water and found a last spurt of strength to get to where Adam lay. With a hand buried in his thick fur, I had enough courage to roll over to look at the river devil. She was floating still, her body moving with the motion of the water. The wound I’d made was still there; it wasn’t healing.

  “Adam,” I said to his unconscious body. “Adam, we did it.”

  I put my forehead down on his side and let myself believe.

  “I should let you live,” a man’s voice snarled, unconsciously echoing the river devil’s words—or maybe he’d heard her, too.

  I looked up to see a man standing between me and the river. His features were all wrong, like a bad drawing. Almost human, but not quite. He wore a dry pair of jeans and a WSU sweatshirt, but his feet were bare. He had a ragged beard that was a slightly darker color than his hair. Though there had been all sorts of emotion in his voice, there was none on his face. It was peculiarly blank, like a particularly strong form of autism: a trait, I decided, with two examples to draw from, that must be common to all otterkin.

  “What?” I asked him stupidly because his words didn’t quite make sense.

  “You blooded one of Lugh’s creations in the heart of a creature even older and more magical than the walking stick is,” he said. “I should just let you live with what you have made. But you must pay the price for killing our creature, she whom we awakened at great cost from her deep sleep.”

  I was too tired for this. I hurt. There wasn’t any part of me that didn’t hurt, but especially my hand where I’d hit the river devil’s heart. Actually, both hands throbbed wickedly from grabbing the staff while it was hot. The leg that the river devil had smacked with her tentacle ached, too, that kind of deep ache that told me I’d suffered real damage. I was also bleeding from quite a collection of slices and cuts. It belatedly occurred to me that my weariness might stem from blood loss as much as the energy I’d expended killing the river devil.

  “You woke her up.” I could sit up, I told my body firmly. It protested, but finally managed. I was going to pull my legs up, too, but, after the first attempt to do so, I decided to leave them where they were for the moment.

  “It took us two months and all our magic—and you just killed her? Arrogant vermin interfering in something that is no business of yours.” He was holding something in his right hand, I thought, but I couldn’t tell what because it was slightly behind him, and I couldn’t make my body move again to see what it was just yet.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “I killed her. It seemed like the proper thing to do at the time—as she was killing a lot of people. Why did you release her?”

  “She was ours,” he said indignantly. “She was sleeping in our home.” He paused, contemplating that, I think, though it was hard to read thought in his face. When he spoke again, his voice was a soft croon. “So beautiful and deadly, my lady was. We woke her up to see her beauty living—and, as we petitioned her to do, she hunted humans until we all fed in the wealth of her hunting. She was everything our hearts could desire. She fed us and we her. She was our weapon of perfect vengeance.”

  The brush next to him rattled a bit, and more people came out of the bushes. One of them was the woman who had attacked me in Wal-Mart, and she was holding her bronze knife. She was crying, which looked really odd on her blank face.

  Uncle Mike said there were seven of them, but I only saw six.

  “There should be one more of you, shouldn’t there?” I asked.

  “One was sacrificed when our Goddess came to life,” said the man.

  I thought of the dream I’d had, the one where I’d eaten an otter. I’d been river marked then. It never occurred to me that that dream, too, had been a true dream.

  Behind him, all of the otterkin’s mouths moved at the same time, as if they were mouthing his words as he spoke them. They brought with them an air of menace that was not entirely owed to the weaponry they carried.

  There was one big man in the group. I noticed him because over his shoulder he was carrying a big, dark, and shiny stick shaped something like a golf club. I didn’t recall ever seeing a shillelagh in the flesh before.

  “He died, our brother, exalted by the gift his sacrifice brought to his people.” The bearded man who was apparently the spokesman for them all paused again. It didn’t seem to be an affectation for emphasis, but something integral to his speech. Maybe he was translating, or maybe his thoughts were just that slow. “And you have ruined that.”

  He swung whatever he’d been holding behind his back at me without much warning. But I’d been watching for something of the sort, and I surged to my feet, my weight entirely on my good leg. I caught the blade of the bronze sword on the walking stick that had been lying just under Adam’s body instead of buried in the river devil because that was where I needed it to be.

  It hurt. If I hadn’t been so worried for Adam, who was unable to protect himself, I doubt I could have done it. Even so, I knew it was useless. There were six of them and only one battered, damaged me. But I’d made a promise in my letter to Adam, and I was determined to keep it.

  The bronze sword flared with an orange light and broke. Whatever magic it had held wasn’t up to dealing with Lugh’s walking stick.

  Th
en something really disconcerting happened. The walking stick buried its suddenly sharp-again end in the otterkin’s throat with no help from me. The lunge it made forced me to come down hard on my bad leg. I might have blacked out a bit after that.

  I opened my eyes and found myself face-to-face with the bearded otterkin, my cheek resting in the dirt and his warm blood. He was laughing at me as he died.

  My ears started to work about then, and I realized that there was a battle taking place behind me. I heard Adam’s baleful, softest growl, the one he uses only when he is beyond angry. The power of his rage lit my soul with its singular goal: none of the otterkin would survive this night.

  He was awake, and that meant I was safe. I started to turn over, but there must have been something really wrong with my leg because the moment I tried to move it, I passed out again.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was looking at a dead otter instead of a dead man. His blood was still warm, so I couldn’t have been out of it for too long. There was no sound behind me, but I knew better than to try to turn over.

  “Adam?” I asked. My voice was weak and had this annoying quiver in it. When no one responded, I didn’t ask again. Exhaustion should have made me numb, but I hurt too much for that. I should have been triumphant, but I hurt too much for that, too.

  For a bare instant, I was afraid that the otterkin had somehow hurt him. I reached for the bond between us with all of my heart—and found him nearby, changing from wolf to man. Relieved, I settled in to wait for him, absorbing his fear for me, his rage, and his love with something approaching euphoria. If I could feel all of that, I wasn’t dead, and that seemed as remarkable an accomplishment as I’d ever achieved.

  I MUST HAVE SLEPT FOR A LITTLE BECAUSE THE BLOOD under my cheek had cooled and there were gentle hands running over me.

  “Adam,” I said. “You need to get some clothes on before those police officers get down here.” I’d been hearing their sirens approaching for a few minutes.

  “Shh,” he told me. And as if a curtain had been drawn back, I could feel his feverish need to make sure I was okay. He’d sounded so calm, so sane—when he was none of those things.

  “Please?” He needed something to help him, or he was going to kill anyone who came within a dozen feet of me. Sometimes the thought had occurred to me that Adam dressed so civilized in his silk shirts and hand-tailored suits as a shield against the wildness within him.

  Besides, if the police showed up to find Adam naked, they were going to have some sort of strong reaction—and Adam needed everyone to be as calm as possible.

  He hesitated.

  “I’m okay,” I told him. “Really I am.” I tried to move, then rethought what I’d said. “Okay. I hurt, and I think my leg is broken. And maybe my hand. But I’m not going to bleed to death, and I think we’ll have an easier time with the police and the FBI and whoever else is about to descend upon us if you are wearing jeans.”

  “I don’t want to leave you here,” he said. “And I’m not moving you without a more careful look.”

  “If you can’t put jeans on and be back here in under a minute, I’d be surprised,” I told him. Then I had a bright idea. “I don’t want anyone but me seeing you naked,” I told him, a little surprised that it was the truth. “Not when I can’t defend my claim.” It was stupid, and I knew it—but I also knew he’d understand.

  “Damn it, Mercy,” he said—and then he was running.

  I found myself smiling as I heard the door of the trailer open and realized I was smiling into the face of the otterkin whose eyes were clouded with death and whose blood made the ground sticky under my face. Tomorrow, I’d have nightmares about that, maybe. But tonight, he was dead, and I wasn’t. That was good enough for me.

  It was a good thing the otterkin apparently turned back into otters when they died. If the police had come here and found six human bodies, we might have had a lot of trouble. The walking stick dug into my ribs, and I tugged it out from under me, regarding it soberly.

  I’d figure out what I’d done to the walking stick in time. How bad could it be? The oakman had used it to kill a vampire, and it hadn’t changed. Whatever the walking stick had become, it couldn’t be as bad as the river devil.

  THE REST OF THAT NIGHT WAS KIND OF FUZZY.

  Adam, dressed only in a pair of jeans, examined me carefully to make sure I hadn’t damaged anything that moving would make worse. Then he picked me up and carried me over to the camp chairs, where he’d laid out one of the blankets to bundle me up in. He called his office and had them remotely open the gate and let in the cops—who were gathered outside the gate like hornets at their nest.

  He was cleaning my face, very gently, when the police came in and all sorts of official cars drove to us.

  Adam did the talking, implying a lot of not-quite-true things without ever lying. Everyone got pretty tense when Adam introduced himself as the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack. But they seemed to find it perfectly acceptable to hear that a few people believed that the recent spate of deaths by the river were not the work of a human serial killer but of a real monster.

  In the interest of privacy, he told them, he couldn’t reveal who called him in.

  One of the sheriff’s men murmured, “When I first met him, he was with Jim Alvin and Calvin Seeker.” From his words, I was pretty sure he was the one who’d given us a ride back to our campground when we’d found Benny, but I could only look out of one eye at this point, the other having swollen shut.

  At the sound of Jim’s name, the local cops all looked wise and quit asking questions. One of them murmured, “Native American medicine man,” to the FBI agents, and suddenly no one asked Adam any more questions about why we were here. Apparently, no one wanted to create an incident with the Yakama Nation.

  The less the officials knew about magic, fae otterkin, and Coyote, the more likely they would be to attribute all the deaths to a prehistoric creature—I’d heard one of the FBI say that phrase when talking on his cell phone to someone—and go home. More important to me at this point, they would let me go home, too.

  I closed my good eye, and when I opened it, Adam had a cup of hot cocoa and was making me drink it. I fussed at him for waking me up until I got the first mouthful down. It tasted really good, and it was hot.

  “Where’s everyone else?” I asked when I was done because it looked as though we were alone.

  “Down staring at the river devil.” Adam set the mug aside and kissed me gently on the forehead. “They got pretty excited when they realized it was still just lying there. They have about three minutes before I take you to the emergency room.”

  He was holding on to civilization by the skin of his teeth. A proper mate would be meek and subservient until he recovered.

  “I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I whined. I didn’t want to move for at least a hundred years now that I was finally warm. If I didn’t move, I didn’t hurt. Much.

  “You don’t get a choice.” His voice was oh-so-calm, but I could feel the huge storm that lay behind all that control.

  “I killed the nasty monster. I think I should get to say no,” I told him. To my embarrassment, tears welled in my eyes. I had to blink fast to make them go away. I was done, no reserves left at all. I just couldn’t bear any more tonight.

  “You are in shock,” he said grimly. “You need stitches in half a dozen places, and your leg is broken. Where do you think you should be going?”

  “Home?”

  He sighed, leaned forward, and rested his forehead on mine for a moment. “I’ll take you home tomorrow,” he promised. “Tonight, you’re going to the emergency room.”

  THEY CUT MY OLD SWIMMING SUIT OFF ME AT THE hospital, where a tired-eyed female doctor and a pair of nurses (one of them a man) scrubbed, stitched, stapled, and otherwise abused my body. I made them leave Adam’s dog tags on my neck. The doctor and both nurses flirted shamelessly with Adam even though he was now wearing a shirt and shoes with his jeans. But Adam d
idn’t seem to notice, so that was okay.

  By the time the sun rose, I had a bright pink cast on my leg and orders to have it checked over by an orthopedic doctor ASAP. The tibia was certainly broken, so was my kneecap, and the X-rays also showed a suspicious-looking shadow on my ankle. I had more stitches than a Raggedy Ann doll and hands wrapped up like mummies. Not only was my right hand broken, but both hands were sliced, diced, and burned. I had two black eyes. The first was the remnant of the fight in Wal-Mart. I had no idea when the second one happened. Maybe it was when the river devil landed on me after she was dead, or before that, when she was flopping around. I didn’t feel it when it happened, and I wasn’t feeling it anymore because I also had the best drugs in the known universe. I was very happy and didn’t care much that my leg still ached. It wasn’t just the drugs that made me happy; the river devil’s mark was gone.

  Once I quit hurting, Adam lost the soft edge in his voice that worried me so much, and his eyes darkened until they approached their usual color. Of course, once I quit hurting, I also quit worrying about Adam losing control and killing someone he’d feel bad about later.

  “Hey,” I asked Adam, as he took the paperwork the nurse handed him, “is this the hospital they took Benny to?”

  So Adam rolled me through the hospital in a wheelchair to go visit Benny. When we got to his room, Benny was sleeping deeply in his bed, a tired-looking woman was drowsing in a tired-looking chair, and Calvin was sitting in the wide windowsill staring out at the dawn.

  One of the wheels on the chair had a squeak; it caught Calvin’s attention. He turned his head, then darn near fell off the window.

  “What happened to you?” he asked. Then, his expression lightening, he said fiercely, “Did you do it?”

  “We are minus one monster,” I said, accidentally waking the woman in the chair—and Benny, too.

  “Pain meds,” murmured Adam in explanation of something. I think it was the giggling. “As you can see, taking out the monster was a close-run thing.”