by Kevin Hearne
The skinwalkers were disappointed that Granuaile’s shiny new vehicle didn’t fall through — so disappointed that they took inhuman leaps to land on top of the undercarriage of the SUV and start jumping up and down on it in an attempt to make it happen. The Blessing Way ward didn’t flow over the foreign object, as I’d feared. But my bindings didn’t allow the SUV to budge either. Frustrated there, the skinwalkers began to tear away at the muffler and all those other thingies underneath a car I never learned about, to get into the passenger area. That wouldn’t end well for us if they succeeded. They could bust through the windows and slaughter us all, or just tear through the roof with that inhuman strength of theirs and drop down onto the floor.
I moved off the wall and focused on the steel frames of the bunk beds. I unbound the screws as I ran, not having time to find a screwdriver and disassemble them politely, and yanked one of the support poles free. To Frank and everyone else, it must have looked like I simply tore a hollow tube of steel from the frame of a bed with my bare hands. Drawing on the earth — bless them for sticking to tradition and not pouring a foundation here — I found the crossbar for the passenger cage and thrust upward on it with the pole, using all the strength Colorado allowed me, which was rather a lot. The SUV creaked and lurched upward at my prodding, sending the skinwalkers tumbling gracelessly off the vehicle and onto the edges of the roof, where they promptly got burned by the light of the Blessing Way and let go, falling to the ground to get burned some more. Their tortured howling was far louder than anything they’d screamed before, but now I rather enjoyed it. I allowed Granuaile’s SUV to sink back to its former resting place and gestured to Frank to hurry over so I could tell him something. Sophie, I noticed, had missed all of this. She was crouched down near the wall, facing away, still trying to talk her grandmother into retreating indoors, where it would be safe.
Frank shuffled forward and I told him, “Threaten them in your language.”
“With what?”
“I don’t know. Make something up. We need to intimidate them right now so they won’t keep attacking all night. Tell them we have spears made of light. Whatever you think will scare them.”
Frank began to shout something incomprehensible, and I asked Ben Keonie if I could borrow his knife again. He handed it over without question, and I began to whittle quick stakes out of a small pile of firewood. Granuaile came over to squat down beside me and looked up at her SUV embedded in the roof.
“Easy come, easy go, eh?” she said.
“Let’s hope they got burned bad and Frank can talk a good game,” I said to her. “They’re a whole lot smarter than they were before, and I don’t have anything to throw at them. This magic is beyond me.”
“Can’t Colorado pump you up to match them?” she asked. “Seems like you’re holding your own so far.”
Her tone lacked concern, and that concerned me. “No, Granuaile, it’s the Navajo magic that’s far more effective than mine,” I said. “Whatever spirits are driving those men, they are old. They are able to juice up those bodies more than Colorado can juice up mine. I might be stronger, but they’re much faster. All I’m doing is using the leverage Frank provided us. Druids aren’t omnipotent — not even close! Gaia gives you an edge over the average person, but it will always be your wits and your paranoia that help you see the sunrise more than brute strength or speed. If magic was the answer to everything, you wouldn’t need a twelve-year training period in languages and lore to become a Druid. It’s your mind that matters. Clear?”
Chastened, she nodded. “Clear.”
“All right. Listen,” I said in a lower voice as I continued to sharpen stakes. “Fear is a weapon. Leaders use it to manipulate the people they lead and to cow other nations. Your enemies will use it to manipulate you. So that means you might be averse to using it yourself, because in your experience it’s only bullies and bad guys who use it. But I’m using it right now to manipulate the skinwalkers, because it’s not exactly the kind of ethic that stands up when your survival is on the line. Frank is threatening them with light, because they’ve been burned by the Blessing Way ward and they don’t want to get burned again. That might prevent them from attacking us further, or it might just delay the next attack; we’ll see. But is it only the light from the magical spectrum that scares them?”
“Well, the way you ask that, I’m going to say no, but what do you mean? That we can go out there with flashlights and scare them away?”
I gave her a tiny shake of my head, then jerked my chin toward the fire pit.
“Oh …” she said. “If we’re sitting in a structure made of wood, why haven’t they burned us out and picked us off?”
“Exactly.”
“They must be really scared of fire. But you would think the human side of them wouldn’t have a problem with it.”
“I don’t think the human side of them is running the show right now.”
As if to confirm that, the skinwalkers roared defiantly at something Frank said.
“They don’t sound very scared,” Granuaile observed.
“Rage is a tonic for fear. They have plenty of both, I think. I need you to set up a chair or tables under your SUV so we can get to the cab area, all right?”
Looking at her SUV sagging into the structure, she considered the assignment doubtfully. There wasn’t enough space for someone to crawl inside, and broken glass lined the edges of the windows, which were slightly compacted from the impact with the roof. But she shrugged and said, “Okay, sensei.”
“Thanks.”
As Granuaile moved underneath her vehicle and Ben came forward to ask if she needed any help, Sophie Betsuie finally communicated enough information to her grandmother to hang up, turn around, and see what had caused all that unholy racket. And she promptly freaked out.
She knew at a glance that there was no possible way the roof could continue to support that vehicle, yet two people were walking right underneath it. She heroically shouted at them to move out of the way and demanded an explanation. “Why didn’t it fall through?” she wondered aloud.
No one had an answer for her. I wasn’t about to explain that I magically reinforced the roof with steel. Granuaile doggedly continued to set up a makeshift access to the cab area, ignoring Sophie’s assertions that she’d be squashed like a roach.
I called Ben Keonie over and asked him a question. “Are you guys required to have a fire extinguisher in a structure like this, considering that you have a fire pit in here and all?”
“Yeah, we have a small one stashed in that locker over there,” he said, gesturing near the door.
“Excellent,” I said. “Would you mind grabbing it for me?”
“What are you planning to set on fire?” he asked.
“Skinwalkers. Extinguisher is just in case.” He looked at me as though I might have gone mad, but then he shrugged and moved to get the extinguisher. I gathered up the stakes I’d made and dumped them on the floor of the hogan underneath the SUV’s roof, ignoring the escalating argument between Sophie and Granuaile and the continued shouting match in Navajo between Frank and the skinwalkers outside. I started for one of the kerosene lanterns to extinguish it but then had a better idea.
“Hey, Ben, do you have extra containers of lamp oil in there too?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Great. Need some of those.”
I dumped a whole container of the lamp oil over the stakes and then started handing them up to Granuaile after she got herself perched on a chair.
“Just sort of arrange them in the center of the roof area,” I said. “They need to be touching one another.” I would have preferred to bind the stakes to the SUV’s roof so that they would point upward, but the manufacturer had lined the roof with a synthetic material I couldn’t work with, and it was impossible to get in there and tear it out. The stakes would simply have to serve as kindling.
“I can’t get them to always lie on top of one another,” Granuaile reported. �
��We need to throw some in from the other side too. Plus a lot of them are rolling to the front, because it’s not exactly level in there.”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll get over there,” and I went to get another chair. Sophie protested.
“Look, we heard your dire warnings, and if we die it’s not your fault, okay?” I said. Sophie threw up her hands and turned her back on us, muttering about idiots.
“Hey, Mr. Collins,” Frank interjected, “whatever you’re gonna do, you might wanna hurry. They ain’t buyin’ what I’m sellin’.”
I hopped up on the chair and asked Granuaile to hop down from hers and hand me some stakes. No sooner was I up there than the SUV shuddered. The skinwalkers had leapt on top of it again, taking advantage of the dead space in the Blessing Way ward. This time they’d be ready for unexpected shifts and were hanging on; taking such care would slow them down, but they were also determined to rip through the chassis to get to us.
I tossed a few more stakes in the window and saw what Granuaile meant. Most of the stakes had rolled down to where the roof met the front windshield. But I could fix that, since no one could see what I was doing. I bound the stakes together end to end and then crosswise so that they spanned the roof in a rough grid — or a grill would be a better image. A grill primed with kerosene. A tearing noise and starlight above me indicated that the skinwalkers had punctured the cabin. They were wrestling with the seats now.
“Need a lighter, quick!” I said. “Or matches!” This was one of those times I wished Druids could do neato things with fire. Maybe I should try to figure out how to make friends with a phosphorous elemental.
Ben and Frank patted themselves down helplessly and looked around. Granuaile didn’t have anything, I knew. “How’d you guys get the lanterns lit without matches?” I asked.
The driver’s seat disappeared with a shriek of metal, and a skinwalker in human form dropped down onto the roof. I saw a flash of orange eyes and ducked as he took a swing at me through the window.
“Here!” Someone pressed a lighter into my hand. It was Sophie. I didn’t have time to thank her. I bobbed back up and socked my left hand through the window, not caring if I hit him or not. He dodged back easily and began to turn, considering an exit out the passenger side, because the confined space wasn’t to his advantage. And then I lit the nearest stake and watched the flames travel along my improvised grill, even as the second skinwalker landed next to the first.
They burned and screamed and climbed on top of each other in an attempt to escape, which only made it worse. They eventually exited through the roof and forgot, in their haste, that the roof of the hogan was still warded. The Blessing Way burned them again and they tumbled off the hogan, howling.
Frank grinned at me as their cries of pain faded; they were clearly retreating.
“Think that got ’em,” he said.
“For the night, anyway,” I agreed. “They’ll be back tomorrow night. We didn’t do any permanent damage to them, but now they have this hole in your ward, and they’ll probably just sit back and make new ones until they can get to us.”
Ben Keonie offered me the fire extinguisher. “Ready for this?”
I looked at the fire and the smoke billowing out of the windows. “Yeah, good idea,” I said.
Chapter 25
Dawn brought us a scene of chaos. The site looked like the aftermath of a natural disaster, except that we all knew there was nothing natural about the destruction. Sharp knives of wood lay strewn about like Van Helsing’s personal weapons depot, and vehicles had been forcibly disassembled into their component parts. All that was missing was a gloomy heavy metal band to film a music video in the ruin, wind blowing dramatically through their spectacular manes of product-laden hair as they humped their guitars and lovingly fondled their favorite minor chords.
When Sophie, Ben, Frank, and the crew saw what was left of their trucks, they began to chirp “Fuck” in various registers like a small flock of birds — perhaps a new species of finch. The calls were varied and delivered with gusto. Granuaile joined in the morning chorus when she saw the skeleton of her ride nestled in the magically reinforced roof of the hogan.
“Fuckity fuck fuck!” she sang.
Sophie was especially dismayed to see that all the surveying stakes for the plant site down in the flat had been pulled up and destroyed. “We’re going to have to start all over,” she moaned. “And it’ll probably just get torn up again. This project is doomed. Fuck.”
Cell phones came out and voices began asking friends for a ride into town. I wondered if anyone was going to call Coyote — Mr. Benally — and let him know that the skinwalkers had trashed the site. I wondered if Coyote would make an appearance today at all.
Trucks began showing up to collect us after about a half hour. Granuaile and I climbed into the bed of a Ford half ton along with Sophie Betsuie. Frank got to ride shotgun, and he directed the driver — a friend of his — to drop us all off at the Blue Coffee Pot for breakfast. The place was hopping again, because the coal mine was shut down for the second time. It was good to have visual confirmation of my success; Colorado should be in a good mood when I settled down to have another chat.
Once we were seated near a window with cups of strong coffee in front of us, I asked Frank if he could tell me anything more about skinwalkers and how they operated — anything at all that might help me understand them better. I carefully did not imply that this knowledge might help me to defeat them somehow, because Sophie had never been told I was anything but a geologist. But, surprisingly, Frank tilted his head at Sophie and said, “She can actually tell you more’n I can. She’s got some privileged information regarding those two.”
“You know them?” I said.
“Maybe,” Sophie admitted. Her fingers danced nervously around the edges of her coffee mug and she eyed Frank, asking him if it was truly okay to share this information with me. He gave her a nod to go ahead.
“It’s speculation, not hard fact,” she stressed.
“Understood,” I said.
“I only know this because of my clan,” she began. “And all the workers, including Ben, are from my clan, if that helps you understand why we’re on board with Frank here. There was a murder about ten years ago, and it was a big deal. Divorced woman killed in her home. So, uh … wait. I need a pen.”
She fished a retractable gel pen out of her jacket pocket and then grabbed a napkin out of the dispenser lying on the table. Before she could continue, the waitress arrived to take our order, and we paused to do that. It was a bit depressing for me, because I had nothing to order for Oberon; I asked for an extra side of bacon anyway in his honor.
When the waitress departed, Sophie began to write on her napkin. “All right,” she said, “I don’t want to say the names of the dead or attract the attention of those who may still be living”—and here Frank nodded sagely at her caution—“so I’m going to just show you these names and explain from there. You don’t read them aloud or anything, okay?”
Granuaile and I murmured our agreement. Sophie flipped around the napkin and pointed with her pen to the name at the top, which read Millie Peshlakai.
“This person was the murder victim, distantly related to me and the rest of the crew. She was only about forty, and the cause of death was clearly violent. Nicest lady. Nobody could figure out why she’d ever be a target. And these two here,” she paused, pointing to the names Robert and Ray Peshlakai, “were her sons. Twins in their late teens. They disappeared. Haven’t been seen since the day their mother was found. Most people figured they were kidnapped by their father, and they thought he’d done the murder too. He’s a bad sort, lives up in Utah. But once they tracked him down and interrogated him, it was obvious he had nothing to do with it. Ironclad alibi and everything. So the murder’s been unsolved all this time, and we still don’t know what happened to the boys.”
“So you think …?” I said.
“Anybody can start followin’ the Witchery Way
whenever they want. But there’s only one way to become one of those things we’ve been dealin’ with,” Frank rasped. “Only one way to make your soul so black you attract a spirit from First World and gain powers nobody oughtta have.”
Sophie circled the two boys’ names and then drew an arrow to their mother’s name. “You have to kill a family member,” she said. “You become pure evil.”
Chapter 26
“Hold on a second,” I said. “If they’re so evil, how come they haven’t been going around killing people?”
“ ’Cause they haven’t had to go around anywhere to do that,” Frank explained. “Plenty of people climb Tyende Mesa for the hell of it. You know how those climbers are. They see a rock that looks cool, an’ their life won’t be complete until they manage to stand on top of it. They bring their pitons an’ rope an’ shit an’ walk around town smiling at everybody ’cause there’s a decent chance they’ll fall down an’ go splat. Well, for the last ten years, some o’ them people never came back. They don’t go splat, they simply disappear, gear and all.”
“The skinwalkers are burying them?”
“The bones, maybe. After all the meat’s off ’em.”
“They’re cannibals?” Granuaile said.
“Aw, I don’t know for sure,” Frank said. “But cannibalism is part of the Witchery Way that they follow. Besides that, I don’t know what else they’d be eatin’. Ain’t like the shepherds ’round here been missin’ sheep. Nobody’s missin’ their veggies or their breakfast cereals. So what are they eatin’ up there? It ain’t delivery pizza.”