River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “And the nearest flowing water to White Sands is the Rio Grande,” Truly observed. “So it flowed down the river and wound up here, and that’s why this is their new battleground.”

  “At a guess, something like that. Plus this is where I found him in the first place, and he said it was a place that had special significance to the Kethili. We figured the old guy could control them whenever they were reborn, or reemerged, whatever, because he was the one who brought them back. What we didn’t count on was that the ritual itself sapped the life out of him. He lived for thirty-three more hours, give or take, and then he died.”

  Truly had been expecting the blind man to be the old guy Brewer was talking about. He spared a glance for that old man, sitting in the puddle drawing designs on the air.

  “That’s right,” Brewer said, answering the question Truly hadn’t asked. “He died, but he wouldn’t lie down. He remained animate. He couldn’t see or hear or talk, his brain function was at zero and holding, he didn’t need food or sleep or anything else. Once the doctors had put him through every test they could think of, we locked him into a room inside the peak. When it became obvious—because he was doing what you see now—that he was trying to draw something, we stuck a pencil in his hand and some paper in front of him, and he started making drawings. We kept the pencil and paper coming. He kept drawing. A lot of it was meaningless, but every now and then he seemed to tap into something, and we tried to follow up on what we could. He drew the Berlin Wall in rubble weeks before it happened. Before 9/11 he drew airplanes and buildings, but that didn’t give us enough to go on, and we couldn’t predict the attacks.

  “Because I was the one who brought him in and convinced him to perform the ritual, I became his keeper. I’ve killed to protect his secret, and that includes your friend Millicent. You’d probably like me to say I’m sorry, but there’s not a chance in hell of that. If this thing worked, if it became real, it was too big to let some psychic bitch get in the way of it. She was starting to clue in on me, despite my blocking her, and she had to go.”

  Truly swallowed his rage. Given the circumstances, it would be counterproductive. “Well, it’s real enough now. Where’s the control?”

  “We didn’t expect him to die,” Brewer said, indicating the old man. “Or that having died, he would stick around this long. When I realized the Kethili really had come back, I brought him out in case there was anything he could do to rein them in.”

  The old man sat in the puddle, drawing in the air with his fingers.

  “Not looking that way.”

  Given the timing, and the connection to the Rio Grande, Truly had to guess that the disturbance in the ley lines that had caught Lawrence Ingersoll in what must have been some sort of psychic feedback was related to the reemergence of the Kethili into the world. Certainly an occult event of such magnitude would be beyond the experience of any of the people in his network.

  “He said he knew spells,” Brewer went on. “He could command them. But he hasn’t spoken a word since he died, and his drawings don’t communicate anything as substantial as specific spells. I don’t think we can control them now. I think we’re just fucked.” He paused, then added, “Unless you want to try shooting them.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “Shoot them?” Truly asked. “You think?”

  “I’ll do it,” Brewer said. “If you’re okay with that.”

  Truly twitched his Colt in a shoulderless shrug.

  “Reaching for my weapon,” Brewer said. His movements were slow, exaggerated. He drew an automatic from a holster concealed beneath his winter coat, holding it between his thumb and index finger until it was pointed safely away from Truly. There was something comforting, Truly thought, about dealing with professionals.

  Truly moved closer to the vantage point from which Brewer had been watching the Kethili. The battle raged on. Both gods were hurt now, purple blood flowing freely from numerous wounds. Kethili-anh, the one who had been Ginny’s friend Wade, seemed to have taken the worst of it. They had also done significant damage to the rock around them, exposing enough fresh, pale stone to make the place resemble a small-scale strip-mining operation.

  The weird, disconcerting chatter between them continued, too, a combination of screeching, whining, and hissing noises, clicks and pops and low, almost subsonic moans.

  Truly had been fighting his nerves, struggling to hold his weapon steady, but Brewer seemed to have no such problems. He aimed his pistol at Kethili-cha, his arm still and relaxed. He squeezed the trigger. The report echoed off the surrounding rocks and the bullet slammed into the back of Kethili-cha’s right shoulder. She spun around, clapping one of those long freaky hands over the wound, and glared up at them. Brewer fired again.

  This time the bullet hit her squarely in the chest. Purple blood bloomed there for a moment, but ceased to flow almost instantly.

  With a furious scowl, Kethili-cha made a throwing motion directly toward Brewer. The army officer ducked behind the boulder he had been leaning on. The top of it exploded, spraying sharp-edged stone all over the three people hiding behind it.

  Brewer turned back toward Truly, wiping blood off his face. “Guess that just pissed her off.”

  “It looks that way,” Truly agreed.

  “Maybe if we both try—”

  “Maybe you should put that thing away,” Truly said. Shooting a goddess with regular bullets wouldn’t do the job. She had felt their impact, but hadn’t been terribly disturbed by them, and if the mystical bolt she’d hurled had hit Brewer, it would have taken his head off. “Before someone gets hurt.”

  Brewer tucked the gun back into its holster under his coat. “You got any better ideas? The only other weapon I brought is an old blind man. A dead old blind man. And that’s about how useful he turned out to be.”

  Truly looked at the old man again, and a thought flickered through his mind. “Maybe…” he said. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere, and don’t try to engage them again.”

  He didn’t have any control over Brewer except when he had a gun pointed at him, but he hoped the man would see reason and do as he was told. Following the same route he had taken before, more confident than ever, he made it back to Ginny in just a few minutes.

  “Did you shoot at her?” she asked when he climbed into view. She helped him up the last bit, her grip powerful.

  “Not me. Another guy, an army intelligence officer.”

  “Military intelligence. Greatest oxymoron ever. He a friend of yours?”

  “Not in the least. In fact, he killed a friend of mine. But right now he’s the only ally we have, and he’s got someone with him I think you should meet.”

  “Are you sure?” She looked over the side again, as if she didn’t want to be torn away from the spectacle.

  “It’s important,” he said. “Trust me.”

  “I don’t even know you.”

  “We all want the same thing here, Ginny.” He waved a hand at the stormy sky. From everything he had heard, insane amounts of rain were falling on rivers all over the world and they were all rising, like the Rio Grande, to potentially murderous levels. Most of the world’s population lived in relatively close proximity to rivers. “Unless we want to build some arks, we have to try to stop this.”

  She chewed her lower lip, shaking her head, obviously wanting to disagree. “I want a warm bed, and maybe temporary amnesia,” she said. “Never mind, you’re right. Let’s go, before I change my mind again.”

  Truly led her along the now-familiar route, up and down the rocks, past water cascading from the upper reaches, showing her the hand- and footholds he had discovered, a reversal of their first journey up into the rocks.

  Together they completed the return trip in no time. Brewer and the old man hadn’t budged, except that Brewer was back in his position looking down at the Kethili.

  Truly hopped down into the rocky depression with considerably more grace than he had displayed the first time. “Ginny Tupper, this
is Captain Brewer,” Truly said as he helped her down—help she clearly didn’t require. His father had always stressed good manners, even when they did they seemed wildly unnecessary. He pointed at the old man. “And that’s…”

  “Daddy?” Ginny said.

  The old man didn’t respond. Ginny dropped to her knees in the puddle, took his hands in hers. “Daddy, it’s me, Ginny.”

  “He can’t hear you, miss,” Brewer said.

  “Is he…? Daddy? What’s the matter?” She looked into his face, his lifeless eyes.

  “He’s dead, Ginny,” Truly said. “I’m sorry. He has been for a long time.”

  Tears bubbled from her clear green eyes. “But he’s…he’s right here. He’s sitting up.”

  “And that’s more impossible than anything else around us? I thought maybe this was your father, when Brewer told me about him being an expert on the Kethili, especially given the timing of when you said he disappeared. He’s the one who summoned them in the first place, but he didn’t survive the ritual. I hoped you might be able to get through to him, even if no one else could.”

  “He looks just like I remember him.”

  Truly didn’t bother pointing out that the man hadn’t aged a whole lot since she’d last seen him. She threw her arms around the dead man, her back quaking with sobs. He could hardly imagine the grief she must be feeling, the pain of looking for him for years, not knowing, assuming he must have died but keeping the flame of hope burning for his survival, and now finding him at last only to realize that he really had been dead all along.

  Then the ground shifted under his feet.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “The Kethili?” Brewer said. He didn’t sound certain, and he peered over the side. “No, they’re still at it, but they’re not… oh, shit.”

  The ground moved again, like an earthquake, but slow, rocking once, then resettling. “What?” Truly asked. He hurried to Brewer’s side.

  Brewer pointed down past the battleground of the gods. The river had overrun its banks and kept rising, to the point that fast water, which looked like it was being shot out of a high-pressure water cannon, was ramming against the base of the rocks that made up Smuggler’s Canyon, tearing away the earth beneath them and even chewing up chunks of the rock itself. It carried trees, vehicles, and small buildings in its current, and it smashed those against the rocks too, helping to break them down. It was erosion at high speed, and it was shaking what had seemed, only moments ago, a stable platform.

  “The river,” Brewer said. “We really are fucked.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “What is it?” Ginny asked.

  Truly explained briefly. “We need to get down from here.”

  “What about my father? What about the Kethili?”

  “Unless we can come up with a way to stop them, it’s only going to get worse up here. And everywhere else there’s a river. Kethili-cha seems to be having her way, and it doesn’t look like Kethili-anh can stop her. He needs…I don’t know, reinforcements.”

  Ginny released her father and stood up, taking another look down at the Kethili. “James, I might know a way to reach my father.”

  “How?”

  “It’ll mean interrupting them.”

  “The Kethili? That’s crazy.”

  “It’s suicide,” Brewer said. “I tried to shoot one of them and she nearly took my head off.”

  “I know the risks,” she said. “But he’s my father. If there’s any chance at all, I’ve got to try it.”

  She told the others her idea. Truly listened, impressed at her audacity if nothing else.

  It didn’t stand much chance of working, he was sure. But she wasn’t going to be dissuaded, and the sooner she tried it the sooner they’d be able to put some distance between themselves and that river.

  A few minutes later, they had worked their way down to the level on which the Kethili were locked in combat, hiding behind some of the tall boulders ringing the natural amphitheater. Kethili-cha still had the upper hand. Kethili-anh looked weakened, injured, favoring his left leg and right arm. The ground at his feet was slick with blood, black in the light cast by the spells they hurled and the still-frequent lightning bolts.

  Ginny gave her father’s hand a squeeze and then walked out from behind the rocks, into the arena.

  Kethili-anh was doing something with his hands, weaving a spell of some kind, but he stopped and stared at her. Kethili-cha did the same.

  Ginny stopped, a dozen feet before Kethili-anh, looking directly at him, hands at her sides. “Wade,” she said. “I need your help, Wade.”

  There was a shift in Kethili-anh’s posture, a loosening of the shoulders.

  “It’s me, Wade. Ginny. I know you recognize me.”

  “She’s nuts,” Brewer whispered. “He’ll tear her to pieces.”

  Truly didn’t answer. Ginny’s courage was inspiring, even if her plan had little hope of success.

  “Wade, I need you to look inside yourself. I need you to help my father, okay? He summoned you here, and he needs your help.”

  “That’s our cue,” Brewer said. He took the old man—Hollis Tupper—by the arm and started walking him around the boulder. “If they come for me, kill me.”

  “No problem,” Truly said. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that, but he kept the Colt in his hand.

  Brewer and Hollis Tupper stepped into full view of the Kethili. Both inhuman gods turned to stare at them, Kethili-cha’s posture threatening and aggressive.

  “Wade,” Ginny said, gesturing toward Hollis. “This is my father. He brought you here. But doing that killed him.” Kethili-anh gazed at her, then him. He might have been listening to her.

  He might just as easily have been sizing her up, debating whether to eat her whole or take two bites.

  “Wade, if there’s anything you can do for him, please do it now. He can help you. He knows all about you.”

  Kethili-anh took an ungainly step toward her. Brewer brought Hollis beside her, released his arm, and left him there. She took her father’s hand and held it tightly in hers. “His name is Hollis Tupper, Wade. He’s studied the Kethili for a long time.”

  Kethili-cha screeched something to which Kethili-anh apparently took exception. She began the gathering motions that preceded throwing a spell. Before she could do so, Kethili-anh closed the gap between him and Hollis, and reached out, laying one many-fingered hand on Hollis’s head.

  Truly hoped he didn’t snap it off.

  * * *

  Wade Scheiner felt like he was lost in an impenetrable maze. Some small part of him had been conscious through the whole encounter with Kethili-cha—Molly—so far, but only just. He hadn’t been able to affect the outcome, and that was more terrifying, he suspected, than being entirely oblivious to the whole situation. Each blow Kethili-anh took hurt him, but he couldn’t respond, couldn’t react.

  Then Ginny had come out from hiding, speaking words that Kethili-anh didn’t understand. Kethili-anh’s first impulse was to strike her down, to rid himself of the distraction with a quick blast. Wade had wanted to cry out, to plead for her life, but he didn’t know how to reach the god-being that had grown inside him, taken him over, then utterly transfigured him.

  He had settled for feeling, for trying to convey emotionally what he couldn’t express verbally. Don’t hurt her. She’s a friend. She can help.

  Wade heard her words, muffled and indistinct, as if he were several feet underwater listening to someone speaking to him from a boat. He saw only through Kethili-anh’s eyes, which reacted more to subtle differences in heat and texture than light. But he understood her. He understood that the old man who was led out by another man was her father. Kethili-anh reacted to the old man’s presence in a way that Wade didn’t grasp, with a kind of familial warmth.

  Then it clicked—the old man, Hollis Tupper, had summoned the Kethili. Even though he had died long before his ritual took full effect, his psychic fingerprints were a
ll over it. Kethili-anh and Kethili-cha would both look on him as something like a father figure.

  Kethili-cha, apparently, was a big fan of patricide.

  She prepared to strike at him, to blast him out of their arena and out of existence. Kethili-anh moved between them, shielding the old man with his body. As if in response to Wade’s silent, desperate, emotional urging, Kethili-anh reached for the man, cupping his head in one hand, and speaking quiet words that Wade could only get the rawest sense of.

  But they worked.

  The old man became aware. The patterns of his skin changed as heat flowed into his body, especially at his chest and head as his heart and brain began to function for the first time in decades.

  “Virginia,” he said. “Is it really you? All grown up?”

  “It’s me, daddy!”

  “Hide, Virginia,” he said. “It’s not safe here!”

  “But—”

  “Now, child!”

  She dashed off the battlefield. The old man stayed behind. Kethili-anh turned away from him, his attention diverted away from his foe for too long.

  Kethili-cha had taken advantage of the opportunity to gather a powerful blast, drawing kesineth (mystical energy) from the air, the rocks, the plants, and the forgotten ones who had worshipped here, coiling it all in her hands like wool. As Kethili-anh turned to face her again, still somewhat off-balance, she released it. The ball of energy screamed through the air and landed hard, bursting into a thousand shards of power that sliced him like glass. Kethili-anh fell to one knee, a nauseating wave of pain washing through him—and Wade.

  Behind him, the old man started to speak.

  No, not speaking. He was reading.