River Marked Part 22

I thought as hard as I could, Go die. Go die.

Mercedes, she said again, her voice like a cool liquid in my head, giving me the mother of all ice-cream headaches. she said again, her voice like a cool liquid in my head, giving me the mother of all ice-cream headaches. Are you listening to me? Do you see what I want you to see? Are you listening to me? Do you see what I want you to see?

"Do you hear her?" I asked Adam.

He looked out toward the river.

"No." I tapped him, then tapped my head. "She's in here."

His teeth gleamed white in the darkness.

MacKenzie Hepner was eight years old as of four days ago. She was supposed to be in the tent with her little brother, but something had woken her up. She hitched up her nightgown and waded in the cold water. On her arm she could see the mark that that weed had left when she went swimming too far out in the river, and her stepdad had to swim out and rescue her. It made her reconsider how she felt about her stepdad. He hadn't even yelled at her, just hugged her. It took her a while to figure out he was scared, too . . .

Do you see what I want you to see, Mercedes?

My breath started coming in panicked gulps. I hadn't been just dreaming about the ill-fated Janice and her family. The river devil had fed me the details afterward. Maybe that hadn't been on purpose. Maybe. But they had been real, and this eight-year-old named MacKenzie was real, too.

I hid my forehead against Adam and told him what was happening, giving him the words when she gave words to me, describing the rest. He whined unhappily.

Gesture to me if you see what I want you to see. Did you see her?

Evidently, she couldn't read my thoughts. Like Bran, she could only shove things at me.

MacKenzie's feet were numb, and the rocks made the bottoms hurt. She shouldn't be out here in the river in the dark. She knew it was against the rules- I waved my hand weakly. I didn't want to know any more about a child who was going to walk into the river and get eaten.

I will let her live.

"She says she'll let the child live," I told Adam.

He got it, I think, before I did, because he lunged up and snarled at her-at me, then b.u.mped me with a hip in a clear order to go back to the trailer.

I felt her laughter. She'd seen Adam's reaction. She knew I'd heard her.

Bargain. A bargain. A bargain. You for her. You come die tonight, and I will let the little girl and her little brother live.

Adam planted himself between me and the river devil.

"She offers a bargain," I told him. "Me for the little girl-and apparently her brother. If I die, they won't."

Adam looked at me, his heart in his eyes.

"She's eight," I told him. "Just. Yesterday her stepfather proved that he might be okay. She's willing to give him a chance. She has a younger brother that she could go get and bring with her." I swallowed. "What would you do, Adam? Would you die so that little girl could live?"

I knew the answer-and from his body language, so did he. Then he looked at the monster out in the water and back to me with a flicker of his ears. He couldn't do it because she didn't want him. I couldn't do it, either. No matter how much I wanted to. Without me, Coyote's plan wouldn't work.

"Would she lie?" I said, while the river devil chanted her promises in my head. "I'm worth more to her than the child, I think. She knows about Coyote and his interest in me, and it worries her. But after I'm dead? Would she keep her word? Who would know?"

"She would keep her word." Coyote came up to stand beside Adam. "I can't let you do it, anyway."

"I know. Your sisters made it clear that you need me."

Adam whined again.

"I'll tell you about them," I promised. I'd forgotten to let him know what had happened; we'd both been tired.

Choose, Mercedes.

"For an ancient evil, she speaks awfully good English," I said.

"She's been eating English-speaking people." Coyote sat next to me.

"Can you hear her?" I asked.

He shook his head. "No. She can't mark me."

"Could you save her?" I asked Coyote. "Could you save that little girl? Didn't you carve the way for the waters to flow and move mountains? Raven hung the stars."

"That was a long time ago, under the Great Spirit's direction," he said, sounding sad. "I'm on my own here."

"Why doesn't the Great Spirit take care of this?"

"Why should He?" Coyote asked. "All that is mortal dies. Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death."

"I like my G.o.d better than I like yours," I told him.

"Don't you know, child? He is one and the same." Coyote watched the river devil wait for my response. "The Great Spirit has given us our wits and our courage. He sends helpers and counsel. He sent me to you, didn't he? I talked to my sisters tonight. It was a good thing."

"Can you save this girl?"

"Do you know where she is?"

"A campground near the river," I said. But was it a campground? There were a lot of places you could just go camping. "No."

"Then no."

"d.a.m.n it," I said.

You or they die. Bargain. You die, they live.

"Is there anyone else who could take my role?" I asked.

"None that I know of. I was surprised that you were not controlled by her mark. You are the only creature who is wholly of this realm that I have seen resist her."

"If I weren't here, what would you do?"

He sighed. "One of us would take your place. But there are only seven of us who can or will help. I believe that a time will come when the Great Spirit will send us back out into the world again, entrusted with tasks to accomplish. But many of us were hurt when the Europeans swept through here. Disease took so many of our children, then the vampires singled out those who managed to survive and brought more death upon them . . ." He sighed. "We were allowed to retreat and lick our wounds-and for many it will take the Great Spirit to pry them out of their safe dens." He scuffed his bare foot on the ground, rolling a rock a dozen feet. "I won't lie. We may not have enough to do what we need, even with you. Without you?" He shook his head.

Mercedes. The demand was angry and impatient. The demand was angry and impatient.

I picked up a rock and chucked it in the river as my answer.

Coward to save yourself at the expense of a child. You shall see what you have done.

I learned a lot in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I learned that MacKenzie's little brother was named Curt, like my stepfather. He was four-and marked as MacKenzie was, so he didn't fight when his sister carried him on her hip out into the river. As a treat especially for me, I think, the river devil released her hold on their minds before she killed them. But maybe it was because MacKenzie's screams had her parents tearing out of their tent and into the water after them.

I learned that I could have exchanged my life for four people's lives. Four.

12.

I DIDN'T SLEEP. WHAT WAS THE POINT? I COULD HAVE nightmares while I was awake just as well as when I was asleep.

I had made the right decision, the only decision. But that didn't make it any easier to live with the deaths of four people I could have saved.

I fed Adam, and when he grunted at me, I fed myself, too. I had to keep my strength up. If four people had died to give me a chance to help kill the river devil, it wouldn't do to fail because I hadn't eaten.

About 5:00 A.M., when the first pale hint of dawn touched the sky, Adam and I got in the truck and headed back up to Stonehenge. Without Adam to converse with and nothing much to do, I would drive us both crazy if we stayed at the campsite. Stonehenge needed to be cleaned up. I could do that and save Jim and Calvin some work.

It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. when we'd packed up that morning, and Jim had looked like a man who'd been rode hard and put away wet. I didn't expect him to arrive until a more civilized hour. But he and Calvin drove up about ten minutes after I finally found the step stool so I could get high enough to remove the candles from the tops of the standing stones. Chin-ups on forty-five monoliths (I counted them while contemplating how to get the candles down) had struck me as too energetically taxing when I had a monster to kill later.

Calvin waved at me and hopped in the back of the truck to grab two boxes. He jumped back out and trotted over while Jim got out of the truck and shut the door.

"Hey," said Calvin. "Didn't expect-" He saw Adam and stopped dead. "Uhm. What's wrong with him?"

Even happy werewolves are scary in broad daylight if your eyes let you really see what they are. Adam was not a happy werewolf.

"Wolf took offense at the bite," I said. "So Adam can't change back to human right now."

"Jeez," said Calvin. "That sucks-and it's your honeymoon honeymoon." Then his face flushed darker with embarra.s.sment.

That was not what had Adam's hackles up, though. I'd told him about Coyote's sisters after Coyote left. And whispering very quietly what the plan to kill the monster was. Adam couldn't talk to tell me what he thought. I knew that he understood that it was the best plan we could come up with. I also knew that he didn't like it. At all. Amazing what body language can convey.

"Coyote is sure it is temporary," I told him, getting the next candle down while Calvin started to set them in the boxes he'd brought. The boxes were like the ones moving companies use to pack gla.s.ses, with cardboard inserts that kept each of the candles separate from the others. "Just don't look him in the eyes, okay?"

It took us about an hour and a half to get the place cleaned up and looking the way it had before we'd come. Hardest was getting the coa.r.s.e dark gravel out of the much finer pale gravel.

"You could have used a plywood board," I told Jim, who was sitting on the altar criticizing Calvin and me while we picked up gravel one piece at a time and put it in a wheelbarrow.

"No," he said. "I could not have. The fire had to rest on earth. Even the gravel was cheating a bit."

"Next time." Even Calvin the Ever Cheerful was getting grumpy. "Next time I vote we put the fire on the ground. I'll dig it out afterward and put fresh gravel that matches the original back over the top."

Jim grunted. "That is more work. We did it that way for a few years until I started to do it this way."

"What about a gunnysack?" I asked. "Something porous but not so loose a weave that the big gravel can drop through. Or use gravel that would blend in better with what is already here."

"Might work," agreed Jim. "But then what would I use to keep my apprentice busy? I suppose I could do what my teacher did and teach him beading."

"I'll pick up gravel, Uncle, thank you," Calvin said meekly.

The medicine man laughed. "I thought you might feel that way."

I STOPPED AT THE GAS STATION IN BIGGS AND GOT A pair of ice-cream cones-banana and strawberry-and a notebook. We ate the ice cream in the truck until Adam was finished with his strawberry cone because I couldn't feed myself and Adam and drive at the same time.

As I drove back over the bridge, still licking my banana ice cream, I could see the Maryhill Campground, full of tents, trailers, and RVs. Had MacKenzie been staying there with her family? Or had they been somewhere more private? I hadn't noticed any other campers. But if it had been the Maryhill Campground, Coyote might have been able to get to her in time to save her while I kept River Devil busy. If she'd been at the Maryhill Campground, and we had known where she was.

I drove back to camp and started writing. A letter to my mother and one to each of my sisters. I did not, of course, mention Coyote. A long letter to Samuel and Bran. A letter to Jesse. A letter to Stefan. A lot of pages that I'd burn if I survived the night.

Jesse called Adam's phone while I was in the middle of writing the letter to her. He brought his phone to me so I could answer it-after a little fumbling.

"I need Daddy," Jesse said intensely. "Now."

"He can't talk." Adam put his chin on my leg.

"I don't care. Take the phone to him in the bathroom."

"He's a wolf, Jesse," I told her patiently. "He can't talk. Is there something I can do for you?"

"Why is he a wolf?" she said, sounding shocked. "It's your honeymoon."

"Jesse. Much as I'd love to discuss my honeymoon with you-what do you need?"

"It's Darryl," she wailed. "He's impossible. Auriele left to do something or other, and he says I can't go shopping. My favorite store has a four-hour sale, from noon to four, and he won't let me go."

Jesse, to my certain knowledge, had never cared about shopping. There were other things she did worry about, and I could think of only one of them that would put that frantic tone in her voice.

"Gabriel wants to go do something," I interpreted. "Maybe a movie? Darryl would be an inconvenience, and you thought if you figured out something that he would not do, he'd let you do it without him."

"Darryl's right here, you know?" she said.

"Your father might have bought your story, but I doubt it," I told her. "Where are you going?"

"Darryl critiques movies," she said. "Loudly. During During the movie, and Gabriel . . ." the movie, and Gabriel . . ."

Gabriel had changed in the last half year. He'd been kicked out of his house by a mother he loved (and who loved him back-that was part of the problem) and held captive by a fairy queen. Things like that change a person. Mostly he was a little more wary and a lot more somber.

Gabriel was living in the house that replaced my old one, so he and Jesse were now neighbors. But he'd lost the easy confidence that everything would turn out right-once he'd seen the monsters being monsters. Around some of the werewolves he was very . . . cautious. Adam didn't seem to bother him, but Darryl did.

"How about Kyle and Warren?" I asked. Warren had that whole aw-shucks-ma'am going for him and was nearly as good at hiding his dominance as Bran. People tended to like Warren, and he and Gabriel got on just fine.

There was a little silence. "Kyle's important important, Mercy. He and Warren can't just take the time to go to a movie with a couple of kids."