River Marked Part 18

I flushed. "We just got married," I announced, then felt even stupider, so I hurried to escape in the aisles.

The Wal-Mart in Hood River wasn't as big as any of the three in the Tri-Cities. But it had jeans and s.h.i.+rts, and that was all I was worried about.

I grabbed four dark-colored T-s.h.i.+rts and three pairs of jeans in the proper size and headed for the dressing rooms. I didn't need to try on the T-s.h.i.+rts, but I never buy jeans without putting them on first. It doesn't matter what size they say they are-some of them are shaped differently than others.

The lady working the dressing rooms gave me a bored look, handed me a plastic "6" and a "1," and sent me in. Apparently, they were out of "7"s.

The only other occupant of the rooms was a harried mother and her teenage daughter arguing about how tight the girl's jeans were. They stood in the larger area in the center of two rows of small rooms in front of the big mirror.

"They are fine, Mom," the girl said in the long-suffering tones used by put-upon teens everywhere, probably back to the dawn of time.

"You'll sit down and the seat will split, just like happened to your aunt Sherry when we were in high school. She has never gotten over it."

"Aunt Sherry is a . . . Well, anyway, I am not Aunt Sherry. These are mostly Lycra, Mom. They're supposed supposed to fit tight. Look." to fit tight. Look."

I squeezed past the girl, who was doing deep knee bends.

I found an empty room, then tuned them out. I don't know about normal folks, but if I wanted to, I could have listened in on the conversations of everyone in the store. I'd had to learn early to ignore them or I'd have gone crazy. Adam paid attention attention to all that noise because he worried about safety, but I wasn't worried enough to put up with the discomfort. to all that noise because he worried about safety, but I wasn't worried enough to put up with the discomfort.

The first pair of jeans had a puzzling bulge halfway down my thigh on the left leg. I tried turning around to see if it was just my imagination, but the left-leg bulge stayed where it was.

The teenager and her mother had left the changing rooms when I went out to look in the bigger mirror, so I had the whole thing to myself. Unless I'd mysteriously gained a lump on the side of my thigh, there was a problem with these jeans.

I went back into my room and pulled them off. Then I checked in the smaller mirror to make sure that I hadn't hadn't suddenly mutated. To my relief, without the jeans, my thighs looked like a matched pair. The river mark was still curled around my calf-I'd have to remember to ask Coyote if he could get rid of that one, too. suddenly mutated. To my relief, without the jeans, my thighs looked like a matched pair. The river mark was still curled around my calf-I'd have to remember to ask Coyote if he could get rid of that one, too.

The second fit better, no odd bulges, and my b.u.t.t didn't look bigger than it ought to in them-but it had fake pockets on the front. I use use my pockets. No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear. my pockets. No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear.

The third pair didn't fit as well as the second one had, but they had pockets that worked. I could live with them. If they bothered me too much, I'd just wear them to work until they were ripped and greasy enough I didn't feel bad throwing them away.

I had fifteen minutes to pay and get out to the parking lot. I hung up the rejects and pulled my own pants on. I b.u.t.toned them just as something dropped onto my shoulders, knocking me to my knees. I caught a glimpse of a blade in the mirror and grabbed the hand that held it even as I fell.

I jerked my head back hard and pulled the hand forward at the same time-connecting with some body part that was also hard, a chin, I thought, though I couldn't be sure. Her chin, because it was a woman's body that had hit me. I slammed her wrist on the wooden bench along the back wall, and the bra.s.s-bladed knife fell out of her hand.

I dropped my hold on her, grabbed the knife, and tossed it back up through the hole in the ceiling she'd come from: I didn't want to be caught with a knife in Wal-Mart. I was the wife of the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack-knife fighting was not an acceptable activity. If she tried to crawl back up there and get it, I'd use the time to run out to the main store, where cameras could catch me defending myself against an armed foe.

"You leave her be," she said. "Finders, keepers. She belongs to us."

The river devil? I thought, but I had no chance to ask her. I thought, but I had no chance to ask her.

She ignored the knife and threw herself at me. I let her momentum pull me to my feet and carry us into the larger area between the changing rooms. The big mirror showed me her face-it was the odd woman who'd been staring at Adam and me the day before yesterday at the restaurant. I'd been right. She had been fae-more specifically water-type fae, because she smelled of it. Dollars to doughnuts, she was one of the otterkin.

She fought like an otter, too. Coming in close-inner circle-fast and furious, trying for my throat with fingernails and teeth. Fortunately for me, we were not in the water, and she was not an otter but a fae-though she smelled like both.

Glamour has never made sense to me. It is a kind of magic the fae use to change their appearance. According to Zee, the ability to use glamour is what makes a fae a fae instead of some other kind of thing that uses magic. Glamour is an illusion-but not. Because with glamour, a twenty-five-pound otter is a hundred-and-forty-pound woman.

Tactics that work really well for an otter don't work as well for a human, not even a human with a knife-particularly since I have a brown belt in karate. I was not not helpless. The thought that Adam would never again let me out without a keeper if I got hurt made me determined to win this fight. helpless. The thought that Adam would never again let me out without a keeper if I got hurt made me determined to win this fight.

In the couple of minutes we engaged, I ended up with a bunch of bruises-including what was going to be an awesome s.h.i.+ner from where she ran me into a doork.n.o.b-a split lip, and a b.l.o.o.d.y nose. On the other hand, I broke her her nose, and while she grabbed it, I got a really good kick into her ribs. If she didn't have a broken rib out of it, she had one or two cracked ones, which should slow her down some. nose, and while she grabbed it, I got a really good kick into her ribs. If she didn't have a broken rib out of it, she had one or two cracked ones, which should slow her down some.

I heard the footsteps behind me and the flushed face of the formerly bored changing-room lady appeared. At the sight of us, she exclaimed, "What's going on here?" "What's going on here?"

The otterkin woman screamed-not in terror but in anger. Then she turned into an otter and ran up the wall into the ceiling and was gone.

As the fae woman's scent faded from here here to to was here was here, I turned to the clerk. Her mouth was opened unattractively as she stared up at the ceiling.

"You don't get paid enough to deal with this," I told her firmly. I didn't borrow authority from Adam for fear that it would worry him, but I know how it sounds and can imitate it when I have to.

"She's gone and won't be back." I looked around, and except for a dent in the drywall where her knee had hit the wall, there wasn't any extra damage. There was blood all over, but I was betting that Wal-Mart had cleaners to get all sorts of things out of their carpets.

I grabbed the jeans I wanted as well as the T-s.h.i.+rts. I put the darkest T-s.h.i.+rt up to wipe my nose. It hadn't been a hard hit, and it had mostly stopped bleeding.

"I'll just go pay for this," I said. "You can put those other jeans back where they go, then call someone in to clean up."

I walked out like I knew what I was doing and paid for the clothes-with cash so there was no awkward name-left-behind-at-the-scene-of-the-crime thing. The clerk was too occupied looking at my split lip to notice that one of the s.h.i.+rts was b.l.o.o.d.y. As I took the receipt, I noticed a general migration toward the changing room on the part of the employees. At least one of them looked old enough to be a person of authority.

I smiled at the clerk and tried to look innocent, grab my bags, and make a quick getaway.

"Honey," said the cas.h.i.+er, who was half my age. "You get rid of that man. You don't have to put up with being a punching bag."

"It was a woman," I told her. "And you are absolutely right."

I walked briskly out of the store and kept going across the parking lot as I called Adam. "I saw a sandwich shop in the little mall above Wal-Mart," I told him. "I'll meet you there."

"It's a little early for lunch," he said. We'd eaten breakfast just before he'd dropped me off at Wal-Mart.

"You're a wolf," I informed him. "You can eat anytime."

"What did you do?"

I heard a siren and hoped that it wasn't someone coming looking for me. I made my brisk walk a little brisker. "Got in a fight with my girlfriend, apparently." I hung up before he could ask me anything else.

The nice lady at the sandwich shop had been happy to fill a plastic bag with ice and accepted my story about a jealous girlfriend with a sympathetic ear (I kept my wedding ring hidden). She made me two large chicken sandwiches, and I paid for them and a pair of juices.

When Adam drove up, I was watching the police cars at Wal-Mart-it must have been a slow day-with the ice bag wrapped in my new bloodstained black T-s.h.i.+rt. Bloodstains on a new black s.h.i.+rt were more a matter of texture and smell than color.

"I think we ought to go back to the camp," I told him.

He pulled the ice down from my eye and took a good look before he let me put it back up again. Then he examined my hands, and brought my free hand up to his lips so he could kiss the bruises. He led me to the truck and buckled me in.

It was a good thing that there weren't many cars in the parking lot, or he'd never have gotten the big truck back out of it. I never had that problem with my Rabbit.

He didn't say anything, just drove the quarter of a mile toward the highway on-ramp in silence. I made it mostly to The Dalles before I broke.

"I didn't know anyone wanted to kill me when I made you leave me alone."

"I smelled fae," he said neutrally-the sneak. That was why he'd kissed my knuckles.

"She jumped me in the changing room," I told him reluctantly. I'd known after the doork.n.o.b hit my eye that I wasn't going to be able to hide the fight from Adam. Not that I'd really been planning on keeping the attack secret; it had just been an option I'd wanted to keep open if I could. "I think it was one of the otterkin-and she was the weird lady from lunch the day before yesterday."

"Did you leave the body?" he asked.

"No body," I told him. "I wasn't trying to kill her. And once I got rid of the knife, I was pretty sure she couldn't kill me. She wasn't any stronger than a normal human." I thought a moment. "I don't think so, anyway. As soon as the clerk came in, she glamoured back to otterkin and left through the ceiling. She might have used magic to get up there, but otters are pretty agile."

He squeezed his nose. Then he laughed. "I guess you proved your point," he told me. "You can take care of yourself."

"I wonder why the otterkin are trying to kill me?" I said.

"I don't think that we'll call in the fae to help us against the river devil," said Adam. "I think the chances are that they may come down on the wrong side."

"You were thinking of asking the fae for help help?" I squeaked. Help was even worse than a favor.

He gave me an exasperated look. "I said I wasn't."

"It sounded like you might have been before I was attacked."

"You're trying to distract me," he said. "You don't need to. I'm not going to yell at you because you were attacked-especially since you won the fight."

"She ran away," I said.

"Without accomplis.h.i.+ng her purpose. That's losing in my book. Especially since you got rid of her knife before she stuck it in you."

I gave him a wary look, but he honestly didn't appear upset.

"Mercy," he said, "in a fair fight between near equals, I'll back you every time. It's the demons, vampires, and river devils I worry about, and I'm working on that."

I could live with that if he could.

10.

UNLIKE THE MARYHILL MUSEUM OR SHE WHO WATCHES, Stonehenge was a place I had been to many times over the years. It's right on the way to my mom's house in Portland. Sam Hill had been told that the henge at Salisbury had been used for human sacrifice and decided that it was a fitting memorial for the men who were sacrificed in World War I.

Adam and I parked the truck next to a deserted orchard down by the river and walked over hill and dale to the high place where Sam Hill's conceit looked out over the gorge.

I never could decide if Stonehenge was beautiful, spiritual, or merely a roadside oddity. Certainly it was impressive-a ma.s.sive exact-sized replica cast in concrete of a place half a world away.

The original Stonehenge took about sixteen hundred years to build. The one at Maryhill took a little more than ten years to complete. It is a monument to commemorate thirteen young men of Klickitat County who died in a war nearly a hundred years ago, a silent testament of a man who knew how to dream big, and, I'd been told, a magical collection site of great power to those who knew how to access it.

I'd always taken that last bit with a grain of salt. After all, I'd have thought a powerful place would have attracted witches or something nastier (and there is not a whole lot nastier than a black witch), and in all the years I'd been visiting, I'd never seen anything dangerous. The other reason I'd doubted was because I am pretty good at sensing magic-and it had never felt any more magical than my garage.

In the night, it was different.

The minute my foot landed on the flattened area around the monument, I could feel the pulse of magic under my feet. Adam sensed it, too-though werewolves don't usually feel magic other than their own. He lifted his head and took a deep breath.

"I thought this was an awfully public place to be meeting," I told Adam. "You can see up here from all the way over the river on the main highway. Suddenly, though, Coyote's desire to meet here makes better sense. I've heard talk of ley lines since before I could walk-Bran might be a werewolf, but he understands the working of magic even if he doesn't do witchcraft or wizardry himself."

I paused, frowning. "I don't think he does, anyway. I've been here a lot over the years, and this is the first time I've ever felt magic."

"Ley lines?" said Adam. "I can feel something." He closed his eyes and breathed in, as if trying to pick up that little bit more that isolating his senses might give him. "Ley lines, huh? Feels like someone stroking my hair in the wrong direction."

"Is that a good thing or a bad thing?" I asked.

He snorted. "No flirting. We're here on business."

We'd come early; my husband, the eternal tactician, had determined that would be the better course. I liked those two words together. "My" and "husband."

"What are you grinning about?" he asked.

I told him, and he grinned, too. "Hopeless," he said. "You are hopeless. We are supposed to be getting the lay of the land, not making goo-goo eyes at each other. I suppose it won't do much harm, though, since it has already been scouted." He tucked his arm around me and nodded toward the tall stone outer ring of Stonehenge, where a pair of hawks perched, watching us.

"Ah," I said. "But are they enemy scouts or friendly ones?"

"Friendly," said Jim Alvin, coming out of the shadows like . . . well, like a good Indian scout. "Hank found that as a hawk he can better resist the river devil, so we thought it would be safer for everyone if he stayed in his feathered form."

It takes a lot to sneak up on a coyote-upwind, silent, and cloaked by darkness and stillness. From Adam's expressionless face, I knew he hadn't sensed Jim, either. I reached up and tipped an imaginary hat to him. "Are all medicine men as adept at sneaking around as you are?" I asked.

In one of those coincidences that happen only once in a while, Calvin came tromping down the gravel driveway, making as much noise as any human possibly could. "Uncle Jim? Are you around here somewhere? I parked the car where you told me-" He stumbled over an uneven spot in the road. "And why can't we use flashlights again? Because we want want to break our necks?" That last was said quietly; I'm not sure he intended anyone else to hear. to break our necks?" That last was said quietly; I'm not sure he intended anyone else to hear.

"Not all of us," said Jim unnecessarily.

"Where are are you?" Calvin asked. you?" Calvin asked.

He couldn't see us though we were no more than forty feet away, and the half-gone moon lit the night. I tried to imagine what it would be like to wander around the night half-blind to everything around you.

Vulnerable.

No wonder people look for monsters in the dark.

"We're over here," Jim said, and Calvin changed his trajectory. About half the way over, he saw us. I could see it in his body. Evidently his uncle could, too. "The Hauptmans are already here. Hank and Fred are waiting in the monument."

Calvin increased his pace. "Everyone is early. Do we have to wait until midnight?"

"We'll see. The earth is rich tonight," Jim said. "Waiting for us."

"Nature abhors a vacuum," I said. "Why aren't there nasty things out here sucking up this magic?"

"Because it is ours," said Calvin.

"Shamanistic-not accessible to witch, wizard, or fae?" asked Adam in fascinated tones. "I've heard about this kind of place, but never with any detail. I a.s.sumed they'd be hidden places."

"Not accessible to other kinds of magic users without a lot of work," said Jim. "And more time than they are allowed-this is a pretty public place. My grandfather cleaned out a coven. Burned the whole town to do it, and Maryhill never recovered-but they haven't tried again. I'm not sure that the fae can't access it; but if they do, they probably can find a place nearby that is more private and almost as powerful. Ley lines are lines-they don't just stop in one place. From what I've heard, a wizard wouldn't hurt anything, but I've not seen one here."