River Marked Part 16

"Nope." He shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure he told her he was from Browning. All the rest was her conclusion."

"Was he from Browning?" I asked. My heart hurt, and I wasn't sure for whom. My mother who'd been so young? Maybe.

"I was bored and lonely," he said with a sly shyness. "So maybe I decided to be just another guy for a while. Maybe. Joe made his entrance at a bar in Browning. He kicked around with some other folks for a while, then entered a rodeo." He made a pleased noise. "Chaos made commercial is a rodeo. He loved it, too. Loved the smells, loved the ache after a good ride, loved fighting the bulls, mostly 'cause those bulls had a good time with him up there. They pitted their strength against his. I could have ridden them for hours, and they could have killed me afterward. But Joe, he was different. Sometimes he won; sometimes they did. Like counting coup. He played by the rules, and they loved him for it."

Coyote had decided to be Joe Old Coyote? Then why did he say he wasn't and speak of Joe Old Coyote in third person?

"So Joe was born in Browning," I said slowly.

"You might say that," agreed Coyote. "Joe usually did."

"Joe was a person you became." I said it as if I were certain, and he nodded.

"Exactly."

"So you were Joe Old Coyote but Joe wasn't you."

"Sort of." Coyote tapped the soil with his hands. "This explaining stuff isn't where my talents lie. I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn't me, and I wasn't him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him-though he never knew that. There were just things he didn't worry about very much-like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me-and he was dead."

Maybe it was the night, maybe it was because I was sitting in the moonlight next to Coyote-but suddenly it all sort of made sense. Like that bug-thing in the Men in Black Men in Black movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug's human suit, Coyote's had had a life of his own. movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug's human suit, Coyote's had had a life of his own.

"Joe was real?"

Coyote nodded. "And so is his ghost-even though that is me as well."

I made a command decision not to question that remark. I was feeling like I understood, and a ghost of a real person who wasn't really a person would throw me off my game again.

"If he was born in Browning," I told Coyote, "maybe that makes him Blackfeet. Piegan." I suddenly realized where Joe got his name, and it made me shake my head. "The Blackfeet tell stories about the Old Man, don't they? He's their trickster. It's the Crow and the Lakota in that part of the country who tell Coyote stories. For the Blackfeet, the Old Man plays the part of Coyote. Old Man and Coyote. Old Coyote. Joe, because he was just another Joe."

The man beside me laughed, a soft, pleased sound. "Maybe it does make him Blackfeet. Some anyway. He liked Browning-they know how to party, those Indians in Browning."

"And then he met my mother." My father was a construct of Coyote's boredom. Or loneliness, maybe. It should have made me feel like less of a person, but somehow it didn't. My father had always been this unreal person to me, a black-and-white photo and a few stories my mother told. But I had seen him dance, had heard the echoes of his voice in Coyote's.

Coyote threw his head back and laughed, and I heard the chorus of coyote howls up and down the gorge, called by his laughter.

"Marjorie Thompson. Marji. Wasn't she somethin'." There was an awed sort of reverence in his voice. "Who'd have thought such a child would be so tough without being hard? If someone could have settled Joe down, it would have been Marji. He thought she was the one, anyway."

"But coyotes don't mate for life, do they?" I tried to keep my voice neutral.

"He would have," said Coyote. "Oh, he would have. He loved her so much."

His voice, sincere and deep, hit me hard. I had to rub my eyes.

"If he'd known about her sooner, he wouldn't have killed the vampire nest over in Billings," he said after a while. "But they needed killing, and he was there. Joe always thought of himself as a hero, you know-not the kind of hero I am, but the Luke Skywalker sort. Rescue the princess, kill the evil villains."

He looked down at the water, and said, as if it were a new discovery, "Maybe that's that's where you get it. I always a.s.sumed it was just too much where you get it. I always a.s.sumed it was just too much Star Wars Star Wars, but maybe it was genetic." After a moment's thought, he shook his head. "No. I know where his genes came from. I think it must have been Star Wars Star Wars."

"The vampires?" I said tightly.

"Right. He knew taking out that seethe would set the vampires after him, but he wasn't too worried because it was just him. And then Marji came along, and he wasn't thinking about anything. Especially not about vampires. Not until he saw a pair of them talking to her one evening. At that moment he started thinking about vampires pretty d.a.m.n hard. He let them catch a glimpse to draw them off and led them away on a merry chase. He was doing pretty well until he blew a tire."

He tossed his piece of gra.s.s away with a violent gesture, and his gra.s.s fell into the river.

"Don't know if the vampires engineered that or not. But they found him when he was trapped, and they killed him."

The story made my heart hurt, but not in a bad way. More like a wound that has just been scrubbed with iodine or hydrogen peroxide. It stung pretty badly, but I thought it might heal better in the end. "So when my father was dead, you were left?" I asked.

"Just me," he said. We sat in silence again for a bit; maybe both of us mourned Joe Old Coyote.

The man who looked like my father broke the silence. "He didn't know about you."

"I know. Mom told me."

"I didn't know about you until a lot later. Then I stopped in to check you out. You looked happy running with the wolves. They looked bewildered-which is as it should be when a coyote plays with wolves. So I knew you were okay." He glanced at me. "Which is what Charles Cornick told me when he saw me watching you. Sent me packing with a flea in my ear." His eyes laughed though his face was perfectly serious. "Terrifying, that one."

"I think so," I told him truthfully.

He laughed. "Not to you. He's a good man. Only an evil man needs to fear a good man."

"Hah," I said. "You obviously never had Charles catch you doing something he disapproved of."

We lapsed into silence, again.

"What can you tell me about the thing in the river?" I asked finally.

He made a rude sound. "I can tell you she's not a poor misunderstood creature. Gordon is right. She's Hunger, and she won't be satisfied until she consumes the world."

She. That answered several things. There was only one. That seemed more manageable than a swarm of monsters that could bite a woman in half and make a man shoot Adam.

"How big is it?" I asked.

He looked at me and poked his tongue into his cheek. "You know? That's a good question. I think we ought to find out."

And he knocked me into the river.

9.

THE WATER WAS ICY AND CLOSED OVER MY HEAD, encasing me in silence and darkness. For a moment the shock of the fall, of the cold, and of sheer surprise froze my muscles, and I couldn't move. Then my feet hit the riverbed, and the motion somehow woke up every nerve into screaming urgency. I pushed off and up, coming to the surface and sucking in air.

I could hear him laughing.

Son of a b.i.t.c.h. I would kill him. I didn't care if he was Coyote or the son of Satan. He was a dead man walking.

I struck out for the swimming hole even though it meant fighting the river. But for the next mile downstream or so, the riverbank was cliff face, and I didn't want to stay in the river that long: there was a monster out here somewhere.

A toddler walking along the bank could have beat me, for all the forward progress I made. I was only a fair swimmer, strength without technique. It was enough to beat the slow flow of the Columbia, but not by much.

Two otter heads poked up beside me, and I growled at them. Somehow knowing they were fae made them less of a threat than real river otters though I expect the opposite was actually true. I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.

They disappeared under the water for a few minutes before one popped up again, watching my slow progress with cool appraisal.

"I'd swim faster if I were you," observed Coyote.

Rage fueled my strokes, and I finally made it around the bend and into the shallower, slower water. I swam until the water was waist-deep and staggered toward sh.o.r.e on my feet. Coyote waded in knee-deep and stopped to watch me.

"What did you find out?" he asked.

"That you are a jerk," I told him, my voice vibrating involuntarily with the chill. "What in-"

Something wrapped around my waist and jerked me off my feet, and my head was underwater again. I fought, digging my feet in deep, but it pulled me slowly back out toward the deeper water. I managed to get my face out of the river and gasped for breath. As soon as I got oxygen in my lungs, I screamed Adam's name with a volume that would have done credit to a B-movie actress in a horror film.

Coyote grabbed my wrists, then s.h.i.+fted his grip until his arms were wrapped around my torso. He began to pull me back toward sh.o.r.e, and the strands around my waist tightened until I couldn't breathe.

"Let's see what we caught," he murmured breathlessly in my ear. "It should be interesting."

I didn't hear Adam. He was just suddenly there, a shadow of fur and fang. He closed his mouth on something just below the surface of the water, and his weight on the thing that wrapped around me jerked Coyote and me off our feet and back down into the river. The too-tight bands released me, then Coyote grabbed my arm and hauled me up.

"Run," he said.

But I looked around for Adam. I wasn't leaving him in the river with the monster. The wolf b.u.mped my hip, safe and sound, so I let Coyote pull me out of the river and ran with him as fast as I could up the bank to the steep ridge that separated the swimming beach from the rest of the campground, Adam keeping pace with us. Coyote kept us running about four long strides on the gra.s.s before turning around.

The river lay quiet and black, the surface hiding anything that lay beneath.

Beside me, Adam roared a challenge that would have done credit to a grizzly bear. Coyote joined in with a high-pitched cry that hurt my ears, his face exuberant and laughing.

Something wet and squishy rolled down my leg and fell on my bare foot. It looked like a chunk of limp fire hose, if that fire hose was made from the stuff they make gummy worms from and covered with short, silver hair that glittered in the moonlight. One end was all jagged, where Adam had severed it, and the other narrowed, then widened in a ball about the size of a softball.

Something else, neither wolf nor coyote, bellowed like an enraged bull. And the river devil revealed itself . . . herself, if I could believe Coyote. Up and up she rose, like a snake charmer's cobra. Though her body resembled a giant snake's, the overall impression I had was, as it had been looking at the petroglyph, of a Chinese dragon. A huge, ginormous, towering, and ticked-off Chinese dragon.

Her head could certainly have inspired the petroglyph. It was triangular like a fox's, with huge green eyes. Encircling her head at the base of her skull, like a ruff of snakes or petals of a flower, long tentacles twisted and writhed like a wave, not precisely in unison, but not independently, either.

On the very top of her head were two s.h.i.+ny black horns, twisted and rolled back, like a mountain sheep's. From the front, it looked very much like she had a pair of ears.

The full impact of her coloring was muted by the moonlight, and though I could see here and there a hint of green or gold, mostly she just looked silver and black.

She opened her mouth and let out a second angry roar. Unm.u.f.fled by the water, it dwarfed Adam's howl, just as her bulk dwarfed the three of us. But it wasn't the sound that scared me.

The front of her mouth was littered with long, spiky teeth-like the petroglyph's had been. Teeth designed to spear and hold her prey. Her back teeth were just as nasty. Not grinders but huge spade-shaped sawing teeth. Teeth that could slice off a man's foot, and she wouldn't even notice until she swallowed.

She threw herself at us, and her head landed with an impact that almost knocked me off my feet again. Tentacles stretched forward- "The land is mine," said Coyote. "Here you do not reign. Not yet, and not ever." He stepped between us and her, long, saw-toothed knives suddenly in his hands. "Just you try it. Just you try it."

Head in the dirt, she jerked her tentacles back and screamed at him, a wicked, high-pitched sound, while she gave us an up-close and personal view of sharp teeth. Abruptly, she jerked her head back into the river, faster than such a large thing should have been able to move, and disappeared into water that roiled and drove great waves onto the sh.o.r.eline.

Coyote turned to me. "That big."

I opened my mouth. I was cold and wet, my middle burned where the river devil had grabbed me-and I had nothing to say. He waited for me to find some words, then shrugged and walked down to the indentation she'd left on the ground about fifteen feet from us.

"About six feet from one side of her jaw to the other," he commented. "Nine feet from where her head started until the end of her nose. More or less."

Adam watched him with pinned ears, then sniffed me over carefully. When he was satisfied I wasn't too badly damaged, he grumbled at me.

"It wasn't my idea," I protested. "He threw me in."

The grumble turned into a full-throated growl, and Adam took a step toward Coyote, head lowered and muzzle displaying his generous-sized ivory teeth. I hadn't intended to send Adam after Coyote with my response. I hadn't had a chance to let Adam know just who we were dealing with, not that it would matter to him anyway. I caught Adam by the ruff on the back of his neck in a mute request for restraint.

"Simmer down, wolf," Coyote said absently, making the "wolf" sound like an insult. "I wouldn't have let the creature hurt her."

"Really?" I asked doubtfully. "What could you have done about it if she'd caught me a little faster?"

"Something," he said airily. "Look at all the information we've managed to gather. Hey, did you see those otters? I've never seen otters that look like that."

"They're fae," I said.

He grunted. "Never a good idea to plunk down introduced species without knowing what you're doing."

And he resumed pacing off distances, walking right out into the water. I couldn't have gone that close to the river right then even if my life depended upon it.

"a.s.suming," Coyote said, "that she strikes like a snake, we can estimate that she struck with half her body length." He held up a finger as if to forestall an imaginary protest. "Yes, I know that a third is probably more accurate, but I believe in erring on the side of caution. Surprising as that might be to some people."

He stopped knee-deep in the water and counted again on the way back to us. "That's not good," he muttered. "That's bigger than I remember. I suppose she might have grown-or my memory is faulty." He pursed his lips and frowned at the indented soil.

"Thirty-two feet from where I stopped to here," he said. "That means between sixty-four and ninety-six feet long. Pretty big."

His eyes traveled down my wet and bedraggled self and landed on the chunk of slimy fire hose at my feet.

"Hah!" he said, trotting over to me. "Good. I thought we might have lost that in the river." He reached down and picked up the piece of the river devil.

"I feel like I'm lost in an anime movie," I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. "One of the tentacle-monster ones." Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.

Coyote rubbed the thing he held with his fingers, then pulled my s.h.i.+rt up with one hand, ignoring Adam's growl and my "Hey."

Sure enough, there was a swirl of damaged flesh all the way around my waist twice. I'd been afraid to look because these wounds seriously hurt. They looked like acid burns, I decided.

"Mmm," he said, dropping my cold, wet s.h.i.+rt back down over the burns-which didn't help, even though the cold should have worked as an anesthetic.

He took the tentacle in both hands and held it up, comparing it to me-and I saw what he had noticed. The chunk he held was about two feet long and it had wrapped twice around my waist.

"Must be elastic." He started with two fists together and pulled it until he had both arms outstretched. "Yes. Stretchy, all right. What else do we need to know?"

He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his jeans-a smaller, less-threatening knife than the ones he'd pulled on the monster. "Werewolf teeth evidently are sharp enough to make an impression," he murmured. "But steel?" The blade bounced off the rubbery, gummy thing.