by C. E. Murphy
“Look, you kids are talkin’ chicken and eggs here. It don’t matter.” Gary reached out to thunk the drum with a fingernail. “We work with what we got, and right now that’s Jo’s two spirit animals and whatever you bring to the table, son.”
Coyote had upgraded to “son” again. I wondered if he’d gotten the promotion in the moment he’d picked up my drum and I’d almost thrown myself on him. It seemed possible. Gary worked hard at supporting my emotional well-being. Harder than I did, really. “It’s gonna be enough,” he went on, “’cause it’s what we’ve got.”
“Don’t discount yourself,” I said. “We’d have already lost, without you.”
“Maybe so. So tell me what we know. It eats people, flesh and soul, and it ain’t constrained to the physical world. What else do we know?”
Coyote and I exchanged glances, and I muttered, “Gary ought to be the detective here,” before saying, “It’s cold. Everything about this wendigo is cold and snowstormy. Is that normal? I should’ve brought a computer.”
“My BlackBerry will do.” Coyote got it from his coat and sat on a bed, poking at the tiny screen with the stylus. “Cold, wendigo, what else?”
“It didn’t just try eating Mandy. It stole her spirit, but it could be retrieved. None of the other bodies have had ghosts, which isn’t normal with violent death, so maybe theirs were too lost. Too eaten,” I said grumpily. “Maybe she wasn’t lost, just lucky there were still bits of my shield hanging around. Or maybe it was more interested in getting a look at me than finishing her off. Or may-”
Coyote said, “Lost souls,” firmly. “Mine was lost and you found it in the snowstorm. We’ll use it. I can always take it out again if it narrows the search parameters down too much. Give me a few minutes, okay?”
“Yeah.” I finally got off the floor, which was less drafty than mine at home, and pulled my coat back on. I was hungry, but I didn’t want to eat in case we had to do more spirit stuff in the near future. Instead I went out to the balcony and looked up at the stars, whose presence vaguely surprised me. It had still been daylight when we’d begun the journey to the other realms. I waved at the Big Dipper, then knocked snow off the balcony railing and put my forearms on it, weight leaned forward as I lowered my head and waited for the inevitable.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It took almost five minutes before the sliding glass door opened behind me and Gary, tentatively, said, “Joanie?”
It wasn’t a good sign that he called me Joanie. The only other time he’d done it, I’d been completely falling apart. I waggled my fingers, inviting him out to the balcony, and he took up a post next to me, weight on his forearms against the rail, just like I stood. I knew what he wanted, but I wasn’t quite man enough to broach the topic myself, so we stood there in silence awhile before he took a deep breath, released it as fog, and said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, Jo, but…”
I laughed even though I knew what was coming. “You do, too. You’re dying to be nosy. It’s killing you. I’m amazed you lasted this long before cornering me.”
“We been kinda busy.”
“That we have.” I still wasn’t quite ready to talk, but Gary was unfailingly discreet for approximately forever, giving me time to work up to speaking. “Dad moved us around a lot when I was a kid, so I’d kind of never been anywhere long enough to have real friends. We moved to Qualla Boundary right after I turned fourteen, because I told him I wanted to go to high school in one place. So we went home. To his home. Where he’d grown up. It wasn’t my home. Anyway. We’d been there about a year, and I was…Sara was my best friend. My only friend, I guess, except that sounds pathetic. I’d known who she was my whole freshman year, and I thought she basically walked on water, so when we started hanging out that summer, the year I turned fifteen, I thought I was in heaven. That was when I got the drum, too.” Those couple months there had been some of the happiest I could remember, in fact. Up until this past six months, I wasn’t sure I’d ever been happier in my life. It was an interesting thought.
“Anyway, so that fall there was a new boy in school. Lucas. And I had the worst crush on him. I’d never really had a crush and I was just…man. Stupid. And Sara said she didn’t like him, and I wasn’t anywhere near smart enough to figure out she was playing it cool. I don’t think I knew people really did that. It was like something that happened on TV, to me. Anyway, I was desperate for him to like me, so I did the number one stupid thing that girls do and I slept with him.”
Gary took a breath like he was going to say something, and didn’t. It was just as well. I was afraid I’d either get angry or burst into tears, no matter what he said, and I’d had enough of both lately. “It didn’t work. I mean, he was okay with sleeping with me, but it didn’t make him like me any better. And I got pregnant, and I told him and Sara, and he went back to Canada where he’d come from, and Sara never spoke to me again. Until today.”
I really wanted that to be the end of it, but it wasn’t. Rushing through it all didn’t really help, not after twelve and a half years of never mentioning this to anybody. It wasn’t like ripping a bandage off. It hurt. It hurt so much I had to hurry and try not to let myself feel anything, which was how I’d been coping with my whole life for thirteen years. “I planned from the beginning to give them up for adoption. My mom abandoned me when I was a baby and my dad didn’t seem to want me much, either, so I wanted them to go somewhere they were wanted, and I was, I mean, I was fifteen and basically a mess even before I got pregnant. So I wasn’t going to keep them. I wouldn’t have been any good for them. I wasn’t much good for me until recently. Anyway.” I was saying that word a lot, using it like a wall between myself and my emotions. I honestly didn’t regret my choices, but that didn’t make thinking about them any easier.
“They were early, they were twins, and…the little girl, Ayita, she…died. She was so tiny, and she wasn’t strong, and I…wasn’t what I am now. I don’t know if I could’ve saved her even if I was. The doctors couldn’t.” My hands had turned to claws around the balcony railing. I kept my gaze fixed ahead, but my vision was blurred, nearby trees swimming and the distant stars dancing. For some reason my voice remained very steady. “It always seemed to me that there just wasn’t enough life force for both of them. That it was going to be one or neither, and that Ayita decided…I mean, I know she couldn’t have, she wasn’t even old enough to think, but I just always felt like she decided that okay, Aidan was stronger, he could make it if he just had a little more to draw on, so she…gave him hers.”
“Oh, Jo…”
I shook my head, violent little motion that tangled tears in my eyelashes. Sympathy was more than I could handle. “It was like it made it almost okay. I mean, it wasn’t okay, it was horrible, but it was like…her gift to him, the only thing she could do. And mine was to give him to a family who was ready for him. He’s twelve now, and he doesn’t believe in vampires.”
“You keep in touch?” Gary sounded rightfully surprised.
I shook my head again. “No, I just…I had a vision of him a couple months ago, when Suzy was here. That’s all.” That’s all. Like it was normal to have visions of anybody. “I found Petite in somebody’s barn that summer,” I added inanely.
Gary, very softly, said, “Ah,” like that cleared everything up. “Anybody else know about this?”
I shrugged. “Sure. Everybody in Qualla Boundary. But nobody out here, no. Morrison, maybe. Probably. Maybe Laurie fucking Corvallis, since she’s been looking me up. But no.”
“Hell of a thing to keep secret, doll.”
“Like it comes up in casual conversation? ‘Oh, and by the way, did I mention I had twins when I was fifteen?’ I never wanted to talk about it, Gary. I left that whole life behind a long time ago.”
“What’d your dad think?”
“I never asked him.”
Something in my tone warned Gary off pursuing that path any further, because he made another one of those ah sounds and there was a br
ief awkward silence before he rolled his head back toward the room and said, “Your pal in there know?”
“I doubt it. Not before today, anyway. I wasn’t studying with him anymore by the time I got pregnant.” I sounded tired and bitter and angry to my own ears. Just this summer, I’d reached through time and stolen my younger self’s expertise, leaving her with nothing more than a vague memory or two of coyote dreams. I could see a cycle there, a closed loop through time: I’d taken the one thing that a young Joanne Walkingstick thought made her special. Less than two months later that girl was pregnant, putting her well and truly on the path to becoming the adult woman who had to steal her own younger self’s understanding of magic in order to deal with the world she’d been thrust into.
“Can I ask you somethin’ else?”
“You going to anyway?” I smiled a little and invited the question with a nod.
“Think you ever woulda told me?”
“Yeah.” That was about the weariest confession I’d ever made. I turned around and put my butt against the railing, arms folded under my breasts. “I actually almost did last summer when you were in the hospital. You said, um. You said something about wanting grandkids, and I…” Words were hard. I dropped my chin to my chest and reached down to grab the railing hard. “It was the first time in my whole life I ever even thought about telling somebody.”
“Aw, Joanie.” Gary put his arm around me and kissed my hair, and we stayed there, quiet and together, until a knock on the door forced us back into the now.
Thursday, December 22, 7:16 P.M.
Coyote slid the door open a few inches and latched his gaze downward, like he didn’t want to intrude. “I think I found something. You, um, you want to come in?”
I felt bad for him. He had to have a pretty good idea of what we’d been talking about, and he’d decided he didn’t belong in the conversation. Truth was, he probably belonged as much as Gary did, maybe more. On the other hand, Gary had been a real, solid person in my life for the past year, and Coyote’d been out of my life or mostly dead since I was a teen. Either way, I’d never heard him sound so diffident. I said, “Yeah,” almost as carefully, then walked forward into him and put my forehead against his shoulder. I hadn’t known I was going to. Neither had he, and he grunted quietly before putting his arms around me. Gary slipped past us into the room, and Coyote exhaled over my head, a small worried sound.
“You okay?”
“Not even a little.” All I wanted was to crawl into bed and pull him up close behind me while I slept for about a week. The idea forced a tiny cough of laughter from my chest. “On the positive side, I’m emotionally drained and exhausted, which is practically like sleep deprived. Perfect for hunting monsters.”
Coyote set me back a few inches and crooked a smile. “Great. Watch out, wendigo.” He took my hand and led me inside. I sat down beside Gary so I could focus on Coyote, trying to push away melancholy and worry about the problem at hand.
He took his BlackBerry out again and glanced at it, though more as a prop than a prompt. “Okay. So there are Yu’pik stories about people who’ve been ‘made cold by the universe.’ It’s something that happens in the winter, people get lost on the snow flats and they go…between. To this place that’s not in any of the planes I’m familiar with. It’s just described as a constant storm. Sometimes we can see them in our world, but they don’t leave tracks and they’re almost impossible to call back. They have to find their own way home, and while they’re searching, they’re neither dead nor alive.”
“So they’re like Schrodinger’s People?” The idea amused me enough that it actually did alleviate my moodiness. Coyote looked faintly exasperated, but Gary chuckled, so I called it a draw and went on. “Okay, sorry. But that sounds right, with the storm and no tracks and not being able to catch it with either magic or bullets. Do these things hunt people?”
“Not as far as the stories I can find say, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening now. Especially if it’s someone of power who became lost. Someone who might have had an understanding of what was happening, and who knew there was a path home if he could just find it.”
I dropped my chin to my chest. “Score one small point for the home team. I thought it might be someone who knew what they were doing.” Of course, I’d also thought it was someone using a power circle for nefarious ends, so it was only a very small point. “Tell me they have a reliable solution for rescuing or otherwise stopping these cold universe people.”
“Nope.”
I glanced up with a little smile. “Are spirit guides supposed to say ‘nope’?”
I would never understand how he could look so much like his coyote self in his human form, but the grin he gave back was toothy and pointed like a coyote’s. “Yep.” Then he wrinkled his nose. “But no, they don’t. These people either find their own way home or they don’t. I think a soul retrieval is still our best option.”
“A soul retrieval for someone whose body we don’t have? How does that work?”
My mentor looked pained. “If we’re lucky he’ll find his way back to his body. If we’re not…”
“If we’re not, the body’s long since dead and we’ve just got a spirit who won’t die,” Gary concluded. “That sound about right?”
Coyote nodded and we were all quiet a few seconds, contemplating that, until my stomach rumbled loudly enough to make Gary sit up straight. I clapped a hand over it, and must have looked unusually pathetic, because Coyote shook his head without me saying anything. “We shouldn’t eat. I’d put this off until we’d been up a full twenty-four hours if I thought we had time, but I’m afraid that’ll just give it a window to regain strength.”
“You mean, to eat people.” I didn’t want to sugarcoat any of this, particularly if I was using it as an explanation for my belly as to why my throat had, from my stomach’s perspective, apparently been cut. Also I hoped the idea of eating people might make me less hungry, but my stomach growled again. Guess not. Let’s hear it for long pig.
Which was exactly what the wendigo was thinking. I picked up a pillow and hit myself in the head with it a few times, much to the bemusement of the men. I said, “Nevermind, forget it,” into the pillow, then dropped it and scrubbed my hands through my hair. “Okay, if we have to do this thing, why don’t we get it done so we can hit the hotel restaurant before it closes? I’m going to become very unreasonable if I don’t get to eat until tomorrow.”
Coyote, sotto voce but not very, said, “As opposed to how she usually is?” to Gary, who snorted laughter.
I hit them both with the pillow. “I don’t know if you have any bright ideas, Ro, but I do.” His eyebrows shot up skeptically, which I didn’t think was very nice. Justified, maybe, but not very nice. “Soul retrieval happens in the Lower World, right? And it’s dangerous for everybody. So we’re going to want as much protection as we can get on every level.”
He said, “Okay,” in a dubious tone which suggested I was making sense but that he didn’t quite believe I could be.
I got no respect. Fine. I was just going to have to be right. That would show him. “So we’re going to want a power circle, and I think it needs to be drawn outside in the snow.”
Coyote drew breath like he was going to argue, then let it out in a slow dismayed sound. “I think you’re right.”
“I think she better have some kinda good frostbite cure ready. Are you two nuts? It’s ten degrees and fallin’ out there, not to mention there’s a man-eatin’ monster roamin’ around.”
“I can handle the frostbite,” I said with a blithe confidence I hadn’t had a few hours ago. “And luring the man-eating monster out is kind of the point. Know anything about trapping demons in a power circle, Coyote? I figure if we limit its range of motion we’re going to be in better shape than if it’s able to run free. What happens if someone doesn’t want his soul retrieved?”
“Ever tried picking two cats up out of a fight?”
“Er, no.”
/> “Me either, but that’s about what it sounds and looks like. Only the cats are as big as you are, in this case.”
Whatever confidence I’d had turned tail and ran. “I definitely think a power circle is in order.”
“You going to build it?”
I stood up, trying to look and sound like I knew what I was doing. “As a matter of fact, I am.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
We tromped down to the hotel lobby armed for battle, which was to say bundled up like snowmen and Gary carting my drum in a pack over his shoulder. The lobby was deserted except for one floppy-haired desk attendant who raised his eyes despondently when we came in. “Checking out?”
I said, “Not even metaphorically,” cheerfully, hoping to counter his Eeyore impression, but he looked at me with the emo gaze of a youth for whom all hope is gone. No sense of humor at all. I muttered, “Right, then,” under my breath, and tried again. “We’re just going out for a moonlight hike. We’ll be back in a few hours. Why, have a lot of people left?”
“Everybody but the federal agents and you.” The lobby wasn’t deserted after all. Laurie Corvallis had been hidden in one of the chairs, its back to the front desk, but giving her a line of sight to the front door. She scooted the chair so she could see me, and so I could see her camera guy in the next chair beyond her. “Interesting decision,” she said. “Going hiking out in the mountains in the middle of the night with a killer around.”
“I’m an interesting person.” I turned to the emo desk attendant. “I’ll give you a hundred-dollar tip if you can keep her from following us.”
Gary muttered, “Since when do you have a hundred bucks to be throwing around?” and I elbowed him. He grunted, but the kid missed it, his dull gaze lighting up as he looked at Corvallis.
She gave him one of her devastating barracuda smiles, and he shrank back behind the desk. “Sorry, ma’am, I can’t stop the guests from coming and going.”