by C. E. Murphy
She struck again, this time with both fists raised, bringing them down in an X meant to slice me apart. I was too busy gawking at myself to parry, but for the second time I folded in on myself, taking my body just out of reach.
This time I snapped my rapier out, not so much for the kill as to gain space and time. It whipped toward her so quickly it vibrated, almost unfurling as though it were liquid or leather, and it cracked when I reached full extension. Power surged through me into the blade, making it a weapon worth reckoning, and the wendigo skittered back, avoiding the shining silver.
Impulse drove me forward in a series of quick attacks. She countered, catching the sword on her talons every time, all of it so fast my mind lagged behind what our bodies were doing. By the time we broke apart again I was panting through a grin splitting my face.
Snakelike reflexes. The rattler had promised me a second gift to be discovered when I needed it. The tremendous healing ability belonged to the Middle World, a place of physical bodies. But a significant percentage of the things I encountered belonged to spirit worlds, where the laws were defined by what they believed they could do.
Defined by what I believed I could do, and by what my power animals were willing to grant me as gifts. I felt a hiss of snakeskin over my own, and grinned wildly. I would never have dreamed of moving so fast, but to a rattlesnake, it was second nature. First nature, even, and so it became for me. I loved it.
The wendigo, on the other hand, didn’t like it one little bit at all.
We came together again with a great crashing roar that was equal parts her shrieks and my laughter. I was sure I’d get over it soon enough-as soon as she landed a blow, for example-but in the first moments, the speed was glorious. I ducked under her claws and dragged my blade across her belly, dismayed when its silver edge drew no blood. Probably I wasn’t supposed to be eviscerating people, but she hadn’t seemed inclined to listen. Sometimes a sharp knife to the gut could get somebody’s attention. At least, it had always gotten mine.
She somersaulted over the rapier and rolled to her feet, striking backward toward my unprotected spine. I snapped forward again, just avoiding her talons, then jerked around and grabbed her arm, trying to get a better look at the claws.
They’d belonged to a bear, once upon a time, or some similar massive predator. A mountain lion, maybe, but I thought their curve was too shallow for that. Certainly a creature of at least that size, though: they were black and as long as her fingers. They were strong, too, stronger than any mortal remains should be. My sword should have sliced through them, not bounced off.
I wasn’t used to being Ms. Intuitive, but comprehension slid through me, a clear and bright rain. “Did they belong to your spirit guide?”
Rage turned her eyes red, ending our brief moment of arrest. She stuffed her free hand into my gut, the punch hard enough that I went cold with breathlessness, but we were both surprised when she pulled back unbloodied fingers. I looked down to see bloodless gashes closing in my torso, and clenched my fist around her wrist all the harder. She squealed and tried to pull away, but in a fit of morbid curiosity I slammed my forearm onto her black talons.
Cold sliced through my arm, making muscle cramp with its intensity. I drew back and the cold faded as the wounds sealed flawlessly. Nothing but an inexorable sense of rightness accompanied the healing, no rush of power, no silver-blue aura hurrying to fix what was wrong. I knew I could bleed in the Lower World; I’d done it before.
I’d done it before Raven and Rattler had come to protect me. Healing wasn’t Raven’s purview, but Rattler had already proven what his presence could offer. “Your spirit animals give you the weapons,” I said slowly. “Mine protect me from the wounds.” I let her go, and turned a considering look on my sword.
I’d struck her with it any number of times, in both her wendigo form in the Middle World, and her more-human shape here in the Lower. It wasn’t precisely a power animal, but it did, unquestionably, represent my power. It was part of a circle of magics which protected me and offered me weaponry to fight with. It was a thing of spirit, whether it was an animal or not.
And it was useless to me in this fight. Her bear-spirit would drive her past whatever wounds I inflicted with it, the rapier’s slim blade too delicate to disturb such a great force. Maybe if I managed a heart-shot, but I wasn’t actually here to kill this woman. I was going to save her, if I could. I released the rapier from my thoughts, and it faded away. “C’mon, sister. It’s just you and me.”
She screamed and kneed me in the belly, which was more effective, overall, than her talons had been. I doubled over, coughing, and she brought her fisted hands down on the back of my neck. I hit the yellow earth teeth-first and came up spitting dust. Mandy had not put up this kind of fight, when I went after her soul. Then again, Mandy hadn’t turned into a slavering flesh-eating monster, either. I said, “Oh my God, is that Chuck Norris?” and pointed dramatically past the wendigo’s shoulder. To my amazement, she actually turned to look, and I knotted my hands together, swinging for her temple.
She dropped and I pounced on her, pinning her arms. She smelled worse than humanly possible, and flung herself up and down with a lot of enthusiasm for such a skinny thing. Still, I had the upper hand and shook her entire torso, not caring that her head bounced off the ground like a bowling ball. “I am trying to help you!”
Her eyes cleared for an instant. Triumph shot through me, sharp enough that I didn’t care about her stench. “You’re in there! Come on, let me-”
The dusty yellow earth turned white beneath her, and the broiling Lower World sun fled behind sudden thick clouds. Wind howled up around us, cutting through my flimsy summertime clothes and icing my skin. My nose hairs froze, and my eyebrows went stiff inside a single breath, the air colder than I’d ever felt. The wendigo’s human shape warped, twisting under my hands to become the monster once again, as loose-jointed and dangerous as it had been when I’d entered the cold universe searching for Mandy’s soul.
This time, though, its face was stretched in agony, and its voice was that of the storm’s. It had been the predator, then; now it was something else, not even prey. It needed protecting, rescuing from the cold threatening to tear us both apart. I hauled myself closer to its face to shout, “Let me take you out of here! Let me take you away from the-”
From the storm was how that was supposed to end, but the last few words were already shouted into silence. Even without the wind, the cold intensified to a killing temperature so extreme it seemed malicious. My exposed skin went numb, and the breath I drew through an open mouth hurt my lungs, like cold lead had been poured down my throat.
I let the wendigo go and shoved to my feet. The storm still raged around us at a distance as great as the circle I’d made in the Middle World, but it was quiet now, its screams pushed away.
Loneliness crashed over me, a feeling of isolation that expanded beyond my most melodramatic childhood moments. There was no way free from the circle of silent snow, and its featureless blur made my gaze unfocus. Disoriented, I reeled around, bewildered at how the silence and lack of wind could be worse than the battering storm itself. I wanted to escape, but my body was failing me, thick icy limbs refusing to respond, frozen thoughts running evermore sluggishly.
Someone stepped through the storm, joining me in the relentless white circle.
The wendigo gave a gleeful shriek and rose up out of the snow, racing for the distant sky.
I tried to follow, and failed.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I was too cold to be afraid. Too cold to be surprised, even, like the oncoming storm had taken away my capacity for emotion. There were things I should be able to do. Command my healing aspect to heat my blood, to shake off the malaise of ice. Imagine myself in warmer clothes and have them appear. I’d done them, or things like them, in the past, but my thoughts were sluggish and my magic frozen, just a solid lump inside me where it should have been reassuringly alive.
If this wa
s what the wendigo had experienced, then I had a hideous bleak appreciation for the sheer willpower that had brought her back into the mortal world to feed. I was lost and too numb to care. My rattlesnake friend could do nothing for me here; he would freeze even more quickly than I did, cold blood turning to slush in his veins. Maybe that was how the wendigo had survived, if her claws had been a bear’s. Maybe she had the gift of hibernation, of holing up and storing energy until she’d conserved enough to break free. It wasn’t how hibernation worked in the Middle World, but this place was something else entirely.
Someone else was here. Someone else had crossed into the circle. It was something to focus on, a way to force myself to move. My own safety, apparently, wasn’t quite enough, but if someone else had wandered into the storm, they needed rescuing, and there was nobody but me to do the job.
“Here.” My voice cracked in the cold like I’d been without water for a week. “Here, can you hear me? Can you see me?” The wendigo had left a dent in the snow when she’d fled. I tripped on it, my legs too heavy to move properly, and I splayed facedown in the ice.
It almost felt warm. That was wrong, dangerously wrong; my dull mind recognized that much. It meant I’d lost too much of my own heat. It meant, in fact, that I was dying, and while I had plenty of experience at dying, it was usually accompanied by a certain amount of anger which sparked me through the unpleasant parts and back out the other side.
This was not a place for fire of any kind. I was willing to let mine fade, just to evade the terrible cold. I sighed into the snow, my breath not even warm enough to melt it, and my eyes drifted shut as sound finally broke through the silence: squeaking, coming ever closer. My curiosity sputtered, then died again, frozen out of existence.
Hot hands rolled me over like a giant rag doll, and Laurie Corvallis put her face close to mine to whisper, “Detective? Is that you?”
Ice cracked at the back of my mind, like amazement had the strength to punch through cold. Of all the people I might have dreamed up to accompany me into a frozen hell, Corvallis was about the bottom of the list. It suggested she was real, which was both good and bad. Good because she was substantial, something to focus on. Bad because I was quite certain her physical body had crossed to this plane, just like mine had, and it was a short dash to death from where we currently stood.
At least she was still dressed for the weather. Her cheeks were reddened by cold, but her eyes were bright, and her face was framed by the soft fur of her expensive coat. It was fitted, but not so snugly she couldn’t wear layers under it, and from the way her breath steamed warmly I figured she probably was. Her hands were mittened, which told me a lot about both the amount of heat she was putting out and how very cold I was: even through the mittens they’d been hot on my skin. She muttered, “Where’d your coat go?” and started to shrug hers off.
“No, don’t.” I was surprised I could talk, then relieved that I could be surprised. It was like her presence offered enough warmth and life to reawaken me. Given my peculiar talents, that seemed fairly probable. She stopped mid-action, her coat still on, and I shook my head against the snow. “It wouldn’t fit anyway. Just stay close to me, okay? I’ll get you out of here.”
“Where’s here? I was following you through the forest when it all went twisty and I got dumped in this field.”
It all went twisty sounded like something I would say. I started to say so, then shoved up on my elbows, suddenly actually awake. Herne had said some were closer, others were farther away and would take longer to guide to the power circle. It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d meant there were other people out there besides Gary and Sara. “You were following me? You were supposed to be asleep!”
“I woke up.” Three little words shouldn’t sound like portents of doom, but somehow they did. Well, there’d be time for a reckoning later, if we were lucky. I resisted the urge to hug her-for warmth, although I was kind of happy to see her, too-and instead blew into my hands, trying to get some feeling back.
“Did you see the others? Coyote and-” She was shaking her head no, and I echoed the motion, then said, “Shit. I wonder if that means you just got dropped directly between.”
“Between what?”
“Between here and there. Between life and death. Between the cold.” I sounded like an idiot. I felt like an idiot. “Don’t worry about it. All right, look-”
“Don’t worry about it? Don’t worry about the fact that a minute ago I was in a snowy forest under a clear night and now I’m in a field someplace in the eye of a blizzard? Fine. I won’t worry about it. I’ll just figure out how to get out of here, since you’re no use at all.” She stood up, a small figure full of fire. Admiration, which was not an emotion I wanted to associate with Corvallis, bloomed in me. She wasn’t a woman who would get trapped by the cold universe. She’d build a flameth-rower out of snow and blast her way free.
I could hardly do less. I got up, ice crystals forming on my arms, and tried not to shiver too hard. “Can you hear a drum?”
Corvallis glared at me. “Of course I can’t hear a drum. All I can hear is you. I can’t even hear that.” She jabbed a finger at the storm whirling outside the circle’s boundaries. Then wariness came over her face and she said, “Why? Can you hear a drum?” like it would be a very bad sign if I could.
I envisioned Police Detective Loses Mind! as the headline, and sighed. “No. I wish I could.” It would give me a direction to head in, or at least provide some kind of promise there was still a world outside this one. “Corvallis, come over here and put your arms around me, and whatever happens, don’t let go.”
She stayed right where she was. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to freeze to death if you don’t.” While true, that was less than half the reason I wanted her to hold on to me. It did, however, sound much more reasonable than the real explanation, and after a few seconds of looking for its flaws, Corvallis did as I asked.
Heat rushed through me so fast it hurt. I swallowed a whimper and did my best to not curl up around the smaller woman like she was a teddy bear. If I did, odds were we’d both find ourselves frozen lumps in no time. I doubted she could sustain enough warmth for one very long, much less two. Instead I mumbled, “Thanks,” and folded my arms around her shoulders. It wasn’t as warm as her hugging them against me, but I didn’t trust she’d keep hanging on if this worked the way I hoped.
I said, “Raven, it’s me again,” over Laurie’s head. She jerked like I’d stuck a pin in her, and I tightened my arms. “Shh. It’s okay.”
She hissed, “You’re talking to ravens,” which I had to agree sounded a little crazy, especially since there weren’t actually any ravens around. On the other hand, stopping to explain just seemed tedious, so I didn’t. I tilted my head back, concentrating on my heartbeat as a substitute for a drum.
“Raven, I know you were there when I entered the Lower World. I felt you. Raven and Rattler both. But I lost you when I came here, and now I need you or I’ll be lost, too. So will this woman, and she’s only here because of me.”
“That is not true. I’m following a story, a-” I felt Corvallis shift, turning her head to glance around the storm-bound circle before she muttered, “Fine. Being here, wherever here is, might be because of you. You owe me an explanation, Detective.”
“I already gave you one.” That was not helping. I made a disgusted sound in my throat and bared my teeth at the sky. Raven was out there somewhere, and he was good at storms and at passing through the flimsy barrier between life and death. I only had to give him a way to find me, and he’d come for us. There had to be a path somewhere.
I tipped my chin down and looked at the top of Corvallis’s head. She didn’t strike me as the type who would get stuck between, not by any natural means. In so far as natural means applied to my life or scenarios like this one, anyway. “Tell me exactly what happened when you came here.”
“I already did,” she said in exactly the same snappy, impatient tone
I’d used on her a moment earlier. I swear to God, karma was not supposed to be an instant payback thing. I wanted to beat my head against something, but the only thing available was Corvallis’s head, which I didn’t think would help the situation.
“Laurie, please.” People were supposed to respond well to the sound of their own names. I hoped it worked.
Corvallis gave me a look which suggested she knew exactly what I was doing. She probably did. News reporters probably used that kind of trick all the time. But she answered, which was all I asked for. “I told you. The forest twisted in on itself, and when it unfolded we were-”
“We?”
“Jeff and me. My cameraman.”
“You brought your cam…” I reminded myself that this was not the time. “When it unfolded you were what?”
“We were here.” She glanced around, and I could all but see the gears whirling in her little reporter mind. Then she closed her eyes, and when she spoke again she sounded like the woman on the six o’clock news every night, her voice crisp and concise. “We stepped out of the forest into a clearing about thirty yards across. There was a path of trodden snow right in front of us, and…four. Four people about halfway across the clearing. Jeff stepped across the path and I followed after. Then I was here, in the middle of this storm.”
She opened her eyes again, looking up at me. “Back to you at the studio, Jo.”
“You,” I said, “are one hell of a reporter. When Jeff stepped across the path, did he scuff it?”
“It’s snow.” Corvallis managed to look pleased at the compliment and sound irritated all at the same time. “How can you scuff snow?” But she closed her eyes again, making me think she was rebuilding the image in her mind, then nodded. “His snowshoes left a line from the forest’s edge to the path. Is that important?”