by C. E. Murphy
“Jake,” he whispered. The ambulance driver threw the back doors shut again as the kid spoke, and a few seconds later we were in motion. “Jake Tiller. This’s my mom.”
Coyote nodded solemnly. “I think Joanne and I can do something for your mom that the paramedics can’t, Jake. Will you let us try?”
“Will it make her wake up?”
“I hope so.”
The kid nodded. “Then okay.”
One of the paramedics made another strangled noise, surging forward. “We can’t let you—”
Trying to sound as calm and reassuring as Coyote, I said, “She’s stabilized, right?” At the medic’s reluctant nod, I offered a brief smile. “Then if we’re right and we can help, you won’t have anything to worry about. If we can’t, well, this won’t take more than a few minutes and we’re already on the way to the hospital, so no time will be lost. Okay?”
“We could get sued—”
“You won’t,” Coyote said with serene confidence, then reached across Mandy’s still form and said, “Have you done a soul retrieval yet? Besides me, I mean?”
“Besss—” I bit my tongue on the s and tried to claw shocked thoughts back under control. There would be time later. There had to be time later. “Billy, a few weeks ago. But I know him, Coyote. I know him really well.”
“I’m here now. You’ll be fine. We don’t have a drum, Joanne, so I’m going to need you to—”
“I can do it.” For once I felt as confident as I sounded. “Where are we going?”
“The Lower World.”
I nodded, closed my eyes, and let the rattle of the ambulance over rough roads drop me into a world not my own.
———
Red skies and yellow earth, a flat sun and a world more two-dimensional than my own: that was the Lower World, in my rare experiences with it. I was certain there were other ways it could be viewed—roots of a mighty tree, burrows and hollows beneath the earth—but I saw it as one of the strange, not-quite-real worlds-that-had-come-before in terms of Native American mythology. It was beautiful and intimidating, and I knew almost nothing about navigating it safely. I said, “Raven?” into the empty air, hopefully.
My raven fell out of the sky, something glittering in his beak. He landed on the ground and dropped it, cocking his head first at me, then it, then back again before he pounced on it with both feet and tore it apart.
It was the shiny food I’d left him, Pop-Tarts wrapped in foil. He made delighted burbling sounds in the back of his birdy throat as he stabbed pieces of frosted raspberry tart and shredded the wrapper with his claws. I sat down, laughing, and stole a piece of pastry that had been flung away so I could offer it to him directly. He hopped over, snatched it from my fingers, and scurried back to his feast.
Coyote said, “This is a good sign,” and licked my ear with a very long wet tongue. I squawked and reached out to grab him around the neck without even looking. I had thousands of questions, and none of them mattered as long as I could hide my face in his neck and hold on.
He leaned against me hard, until fur tickled my nose and I sneezed into his shoulder. I sat up to rub my nose, then grabbed him again, scruffing the top of his bony head and pulling on pointed ears. “Where’ve you been, you dumb dog? I missed you. I missed you so much.” I could barely control my voice, even my whispers all shaky, and I tried to push relief so big it exhausted me away so I could ask, “How do we help Mandy?”
He rolled over on his back, legs waving in the air and neck stretched to try to nab a piece of my raven’s treat. It quarked in agitation, wings spread as it hopped toward him, and he gave a coyote laugh and rolled away to sit up, prim and proper as a cat with his feet all in alignment. “I’m not a dog.”
“You look like a dog.” I never thought I’d be so happy to have that same stupid conversation again. Bewilderment and relief and joy knocked me flat again, and I toppled against him, hanging on to his skinny coyote form. He pressed a surprising amount of weight back into me, and we sat together for a moment, watching the raven stuff himself.
When the bird was finished, Coyote stood up and shook himself all over, then cocked an ear at me. “You arrived first, and your spirit animal came to join us. You lead the retrieval.”
“But I don’t know how!” It struck me that I’d spent six months fumbling through even when I didn’t know how, and that probably relying on Coyote for all the answers was a crutch I couldn’t afford, even if he was back. Lips pursed at the idea, I stood up and offered an arm to my raven. “A woman who greets the sunrise with music is lost, Raven. Will you help me find her?”
He bounced from the earth to my shoulder with a half-assed flurry of wings, like he could’ve made the jump without them but instinct forced them to spread anyway. Then he opened them farther, the better, I thought, to smack me in the head with one, and urged me into a run with strides so enormous it was almost like flying.
Coyote chased along behind in a long-legged lope. We tore across the landscape, leaving yellow fields and purpley forests for low hills that became rolling blue mountains. There was an odd flatness to them, as though, if we crested a peak too suddenly, we’d find ourselves looking down on plywood and two-by-fours propping up stage scenery rather than the back side of a proper mountain, but it never happened. Instead a storm came up, white howling blurs of snow that blocked out the mountains entirely. The raven leaped off my shoulder and flew ahead, cawing excitedly.
He was good at blizzards, was my raven. I wondered why he hadn’t been on hand to help in the avalanche, though to be fair, one little bird against all that rolling chaos didn’t seem like an equal fight. The fact that I’d have put money on the raven was beside the point.
I heard a woman’s voice crying through the storm and followed it, aware that other cries were gaining in strength as I came closer. They weren’t like hers: she was asking for help, and the others were shrieking for blood. They had a terrible hunger, and Mandy, it seemed, could feed it.
We found her huddled in a snow-scoured igloo, though its protective curve seemed to have been born of her body providing something for drifts to lodge against, rather than from deliberate construction. A thing danced in the snow, no more than a formless blur in the white. It plucked at Mandy’s hair, at her hunched back, at her exposed arms, and where it did, welts and blood rose up.
There was probably some kind of formal ritual phrasing to gain the attention of demons chewing up living souls. I yelled, “Hey, knock it off, you bastard!”
Even I knew it lacked elegance, but it got the thing’s attention. It swung to face me in a disjointed ugly way that somehow suggested it had once been human, but that too many ligaments and tendons had slipped loose, and nothing could be counted on anymore. I repressed a shudder and stood my ground, hoping like hell Coyote would back me up when I got in over my head. “This woman isn’t yours to torment.”
“She is marked for me,” it said unexpectedly. Its voice was a scream around too many teeth, words slurred but comprehensible. “She has the scent, the taste, the blood, of the wild world in her.”
Outrage turned the snowstorm red, and I fought it down, pretty certain that fury in the Lower World did other things more good than it did me. “She’s not marked for anybody. I’m bringing her home safe and sound.”
“But she lives. She knows her path. She walks it. She shows me. I follow. I hunger. I eat. She is mine.” There was a gleam of ruthless greed in its half-visible eyes. Like the creature on Hurricane Hill, on the rooftop—and I was sure this was the same thing—all I could really see were claws and teeth, like they were the only thing tied to any level of reality at all.
“She isn’t yours.” A flicker of an idea came to me. “She’s an outdoorsman. Is that what you mean? Is that why she’s yours?”
It swung its head heavily, whole body shifting with the motion. “They are all mine.”
Man, if it had marked all the outdoorsy types in Seattle as its own personal smorgasbord, I needed to get t
his thing six feet under a whole lot sooner than later. The eight or so deaths we’d seen were nothing in the face of how many people were going to die if it kept hunting. I swallowed and shook the thought off. I had to save Mandy first. “But she’s not really what you want. She’s weak. I see how you’re looking at me. You can tell how much stronger I am, can’t you? You know it from when we fought. That’s why you didn’t kill her straight out. You wanted me to come, so you could test me.”
A certain animal cunning came into the creature’s eyes, and I wasn’t sure if I was right, or if it was a new and enticing thought to the monster. “You couldn’t find me on your own, could you? Even with all my power, you hunt the ones that go into the woods, and I don’t. So you needed her. But you don’t need her anymore. You can have me.”
Raven, I whispered deep enough inside that I hoped no one beyond me could hear. Raven, will you play in the snow? I showed it a picture of what I wanted, and heard Coyote’s teeth snap, the sound audible above the sobbing wind. Emboldened, I took a half step back, beckoning the beast. “All you have to do is come and get me.”
It pounced, slower in this world than it was in mine, or I was faster. I flung myself to the side, hitting a snowbank in a spray of cold and ice, and lurched to my feet barely in time to duck another attack. Coyote and the raven zipped around each other a few yards away, gamboling in the storm, and I did my best to watch them while avoiding being eaten.
A figure grew up between them, a snowman in jeans and a sweater and with my short-cropped hair. The raven alighted on its head and shook itself, and color fell into the snowman: black hair, black coat, black pants, black boots. Coyote leaped up and slurped his tongue across its face, and a blush of flesh tones filled its rounded features and its blunt snowman hands.
The final time the monster jumped for me, I ducked, and it knocked my simulacrum to the earth with a howl of triumph, rending it with tooth and claw.
I surged forward and snatched Mandy’s cowering soul in my arms, lifting her with no trouble at all. It was tiny, almost weightless, like a very young child, and I hoped that didn’t mean it was dying.
Coyote said, “Quick, come on,” and I turned and ran after him out of the snowstorm, a raven winging above us.
———
I woke up still cuddling Mandy’s spirit. The woman on the paramedic’s stretcher looked thin and wan, while the ephemeral thing in my arms was bright but fading fast. I leaned forward without thinking, hugging her body close, and felt her soul slip away, settling back into the form meant to hold it.
Color sprang up around her, flat against her skin but visible: her aura returning a little worse for the wear, but indicative that all would be well. Coyote murmured, “Well done,” and when I glanced up at him, his eyes were gold and his smile wide. “The rest is easy. Finish it.”
The blow to her head was nasty blunt trauma, a radial fracture like what happened when a rock hit a windshield. There was no blood below it, no sign of deeper trouble, and I tended the fracture with the images I was most comfortable with: new bone filling the cracks like it was heated glass melding a window together. Reluctantly, I left some of the bruising in place so she still had a goose-egg lump on her head. I’d offer to fix it later, but utterly obliterating the signs of injury when there were paramedics standing by seemed excessively complicated.
The bite on her arm, unexpectedly, was harder. It had a cold core to it, like winter had lodged in the bone and seeded there, difficult to root out. I looked at Coyote, but he only raised an eyebrow, a none-too-subtle hint that this was a test, and that it’d be better if I passed.
Vehicle analogies didn’t work so well with cold spots, though the idea of a faulty heater crept in. It gave me a place to start, at least: from inside, like the wiring had gone bad, rather than from the outside where all I’d be doing was poking around at an external symptom of an internal problem.
I put my palm over the bite and let magic sink all the way through, until I could see through her arm the same way I’d seen through mine a handful of times. Skin and sinew and blood and muscle and bone all lit up in shades of life, Mandy’s colors gaining strength now that the greater physical damage was healed. But there were dark spots inside the wound, those seeds of cold, and delicate trails danced out of them and led into the world.
Marking her. Marking her more literally than I’d thought. It wasn’t just that she was outdoorsy, not anymore. The bite connected her to the monster, so if I didn’t get those tendrils cleaned out, it would come for her again. I gathered them up and tugged gently, just to see if they would loosen. They didn’t. I hadn’t thought it would be that easy.
The trick—the real trick, the most effective expulsion—would be to convince her body to reject the seeds itself. Thoughtful, cautious, I murmured, “Mandy? Can I come in?”
After a brief hesitation, I felt—not agreement, exactly, but a lack of resistance, and with that invitation, stepped inside the garden of Mandy Tiller’s soul.
———
I wasn’t in the least bit startled to find myself in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest for the second time that day. This time, though, it was summertime, the sky a blaze of blue glory and the mountainside green and ripe with life. Mandy, lithe and athletic in hiking shorts and a tank-top, was climbing toward a host of pine trees. A backpack was slung over her shoulders and a hiking staff was in one hand, making her the epitome, in my opinion, of wilderness chic.
She waved when she noticed me. “Come on over here, take a look at this? See that clinging moss? These trees are going to be dead by the end of the year if we don’t give them a hand.”
I almost said, “Isn’t that the natural cycle?” but bit my tongue before the words escaped. There was sickness in her garden, and she had the wherewithal to be rooting it out on her own. I hurried after her.
“It spreads,” she told me with a sort of resigned dismay. “One tree to another, blocking their ability to draw down sunlight. The hard part’s getting it off the tree without damaging the bark, but if you can they’ll survive? Here’s a knife.” She tossed me a relatively blunt blade and showed me how to work it under the moss, how to loosen its clinging runners, and ultimately handed me the backpack so I could stuff the moss we’d cleared away into it. “I take it home and burn it.”
On a whole different level, I felt one of the seeds of cold in her arm loosen, then shrivel and die.
It was good hard honest work, both of us sweating and swearing cheerfully as we scrambled up thin-trunked trees to find far-spreading gobs of moss. Every time a tree came clean, another seed fell away, until suddenly the whole grove brightened, fresh green needles sprouting instantly on all the afflicted spruce. Mandy stood back, brushing her hands with satisfaction, and gave me a sharp, pleased nod. “Thanks!”
The great Northwest faded out, leaving me in the back of an ambulance with Mandy Tiller blinking up at me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jake Tiller squeaked, “Mom?” and threw himself forward. I lurched back, getting free of paramedics and kid alike. The latter didn’t care what had happened, but the former rushed in to check Mandy’s vitals, then turned to Coyote and me with expressions raging between incomprehension, anger and relief.
“What are you?” one of them said. “Some kind of faith healers?”
Coyote shrugged a shoulder, graceful smooth movement. The truth was he probably could’ve picked his nose and I’d have thought it was gorgeous because I was just so glad he was alive. My heart sped up again like it was going to burst, then kind of exploded with messy joy inside me like it had burst. It was the happiest thing I’d ever felt, and it made the corners of my mouth turn up in an idiot smile. Again. Coyote said, “Something like that, without the religious overtones,” and the medic who’d asked crossed himself anyway.
The ambulance thumped over speed bumps and came to a stop. The doors flew open, two new paramedics ready to help unload the injured person, and were greeted by six fully awake, undamaged hu
man beings. Mandy’d gotten half her restraints off and was alternating between hugging Jake and prodding at the goose egg on her head. She looked at the new medics, then at the ones on either side of her. “I’m not sure I really need to be checked into the hospital?”
“You do,” the one who hadn’t spoken said, firmly. “I want to get those injuries X-rayed, maybe do a CAT scan. Or an MRI.”
What he wanted, really, was an explanation for her recovery. He wanted something to tell him he’d been wrong, that she’d never been hurt as badly as it had seemed, even though he’d seen it with his own eyes. He didn’t want a miracle. He wanted something comprehensible.
“I want Mom to come home!”
Mandy put her hand on Jake’s head. “It’s okay, Jake.” She fingered the torn sleeve of her shirt and the still-raw wound beneath it. I hadn’t healed that all the way, either, though it was neither as deep nor as dangerous as it had been. “I had a bad fall on the stairs,” she said to no one in particular. “Maybe a neighborhood dog bit me while I was out, I don’t remember? But with that cannibal everybody’s talking about, and me being an outdoors type, it got a little out of hand?”
Tight-mouthed and unhappy, the second paramedic muttered, “Please stay on the stretcher, ma’am. We’ll wheel you into the hospital for your examination.”
“If you have to.” She lay back down and the paramedics lifted her out. Jake jumped after them and grabbed her hand as they abandoned Coyote and me to the ambulance.
We sat in the vehicle’s back end, watching with an air of detached interest. The part of me that wasn’t bubbling with glee said, sensibly, “Her insurance is going to have a field day with this. I didn’t heal everything all the way, but it’s going to look pretty lame in light of ambulance rides and MRIs.”
I heard the smile in Coyote’s answer: “Yeah. Sorry I didn’t get there before the ambulance did.”
“Oh,” I said lightly, “it’s okay. I didn’t, either. Our timing was off.”