River Marked (30 page)

Calvin brought out a rolled-up rug, a small drum, and a beaded parfleche bag. Parfleche—untanned hide—was more commonly used by the plains Indians than the plateau Indians like the Yakama, I thought. However, I supposed a medicine man could use whatever implements he wanted to.

Calvin set the bag to one side of the prepared but as-yet-unlit fire. Then, with great formality, he unrolled the carpet, aligning it with the altar stone. He took the drum with him to sit next to Adam.

Jim stood in front of the carpet and closed his eyes. It looked like a prayer, but whatever he did caused the magic to sit up and take notice—I could feel it even through the cement I perched upon.

He stepped onto the carpet and held a hand over the stacked wood. “Wood,” he said, “who swallowed the flame of the Fire Beings, it is time to burn.”

When the little fire burst into flame, Adam flinched a bit, but it didn’t seem to surprise Calvin or Jim.

Jim gave a small nod to Calvin, who began to play the drum. At first he played with a simple, one-handed beat. It wasn’t a steady sound but tentative and irregular—until he caught the beat of the magic that ran beneath us. He stayed with that for a while, then began to speed up, accenting the simple beat with grace notes. When the magic followed his additions, he switched up the cadence to a driving, syncopated rhythm. And the magic followed his lead.

The wind chose that moment to pick up and throw smoke from the fire into my eyes. I blinked but I must have gotten some ash in with the smoke. Putting my muzzle down on top of the stone, I scrubbed at my face with my paws. It helped. I lifted my head as soon as I could see—and I was alone.

I STOOD UP IN A PANIC, THE BEAT OF CALVIN’S DRUM still strong—but the bond between Adam and me was strong and reassuring. It gave me courage to stay where I was, take a deep breath, and look around to see if I could figure out what had happened to everyone else.

The fire burned, the candles were lit, and the night sky overhead was clear and star-spangled. However, there was a thick fog at ground level, and I could see nothing beyond the outer ring of the henge. About that time I realized that I was in my human shape, wearing the clothes I’d taken off and carefully folded a little while ago. They felt real under my fingers—even the slight roughness where I’d dripped a little mustard on my jeans that afternoon.

But I was pretty sure this was a vision. I couldn’t think of any other reason that I could still hear the drum.

The rising hair on the back of my neck told me that somewhere, someone was watching me. I couldn’t hear or smell them, but I could feel eyes on me.

Maybe they were waiting for an invitation. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mercedes.”

I turned around and found that there were four women walking in through the largest of the staple-shaped rocks. All of them were dressed in identical white doeskin wedding dresses complete with fringe and elk teeth. Their feet were bare and callused, and the pale dust from the light gray gravel covered their feet as if they had been walking in it a long time. They smelled clean and astringent, like sage or witch hazel, but sweeter than either.

I was no expert on native peoples, despite a bit of heritage searching while I was in college. But I was sufficiently well versed to know that each of them was from a very different tribe, despite their too-beautiful-to-be-real features. The first woman looked Navajo or Hopi to me—or maybe even Apache. Her skin was darker than any of the others, and her features were soft. She wore her hair in Princess Leia-like buns on either side of her head, which I thought was a traditional Hopi style—the style of one of the Pueblo Indians, anyway.

The second woman had the rounded, low cheekbones of the Inuit, and her eyes crinkled at me in a friendly fashion. Her hair was separated into two thick braids that hung down to her shoulders.

The third woman looked like someone from one of the Plains tribes, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what made me think so. Her face was a little less soft than the first two, her gaze clear and penetrating. Like the second woman, she wore her hair in a pair of braids, but hers hung down past her waist. She had bone earrings in her ears—the only one of the four to wear jewelry of any kind.

The fourth woman wore her dark hair pulled loosely back from her face, but otherwise it was free to flow halfway down her back. It was thick and wiry, like the mane of a wild horse. I could not tell what people she was from, except that she was Indian. Her features were sharp, her nose narrow, and her lips full. She was the one who spoke first.

“Mercedes is not a proper Indian name.” Her tone, like her words, was critical, but not emotionally so. I’d have expected to hear such a tone from a woman in a market looking at fruit. She pursed her lips briefly, evidently considering my name. “She is a mechanic. We should call her She Fixes Cars.”

The first woman, the one who might have been Hopi, shook her head. “No, sister. Bringer of Change.”

The woman who looked like one of the Plains Indians but not quite Crow, Blackfeet, or Lakota, frowned disapprovingly. “Rash Coyote Who Runs With Wolf. We could shorten it to Dinner Woman.”

The merry Inuit woman laughed. “Mercedes Who Fixes Volkswagens, we have brought you to see us since our brother would not bring us to see you.”

“Your brother?” I asked carefully. I was still standing on the altar, which had me looking down on them. That felt wrong, so I stepped off onto the sand and the magic in the ground promptly turned my knees to rubber.

“Coyote,” they said at the same time, while the Inuit woman kept me from falling.

I couldn’t help but think that it would be a bad thing to sit on the ground if just standing on it had this much of an effect. I sat on the altar and pulled my feet up.

“We cannot tell the future,” said the sharp-featured woman whose tribe I couldn’t place at all. “But we know what our brother is planning. Would you tell him that it is very dangerous, but it is also the only thing that we could think of that might work?”

“What is he planning?” I asked.

“We can tell you here.” Inuit Woman sat beside me but left her feet on the ground. “But he can’t tell you until he rids himself of her spies. That’s actually why we brought you here—that, and we wanted to get a look at you. He Sees Spirits—you know him as Jim Alvin—has opened this way between us for a short time. Coyote needed privacy to speak to the others, to Hawk and Raven, to Bear and Beaver, and to the rest. We decided that you should know what he says.”

“River Devil,” said the Hopi-Navajo-possibly-Apache woman, “is a creature who lives in your world and ours at the same time. In ours she is immortal, but she can be killed in yours. Once she is dead, she cannot go back unless she is summoned. But at that time she returns bigger and more dangerous than before. The last time our brother confronted her, he trapped her rather than killing her in the hope that it would be more effective than killing her had proved.” I decided she was Hopi, and as I did so, her features changed just a little until there was no possibility of her being anything else.

“Who would summon that thing?” I asked.

The Inuit woman shrugged. “There will always be fools, and the river devil can be persuasive to the minds of men.”

The sharp-featured woman.

“Cherokee,” I said, suddenly certain I had it right.

She smiled a small secret smile, the kind that always makes me want to smack Bran. “If you like.” She tilted her head, and said, “River Devil is Hunger because living between worlds for those without a hold in either is costly. She must consume food for both her aspects: meat for the flesh and for the spirit.”

The Hopi woman continued, “All life is rife with possibilities. Seeds have possibilities, but all their tomorrows are caught by the patterning of their life cycle. Animals have possibilities that are greater than that of a fir tree or a blade of grass. Still, though, for most animals, the pattern of instinct, the patterns of their lives, are very strong. Humanity has a far greater range of possibilities, especially the very young. Who will children grow up to be? Who will they marry, what will they believe, what will they create? Creation is a very powerful seed of possibility.”

The Plains woman who was not Lakota, Crow, or Blackfeet said, “River Devil feeds on possibilities.”

Inuit Woman reached up to place her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “She feeds on the death of those possibilities. For this reason, she must feed upon people rather than animals, animals rather than plants. But best of all, she loves to feed upon children.”

“She feeds on the end of possibilities,” corrected the Plains woman—Shoshone, I decided. She looked Shoshone to me. She smiled as if she’d heard me think it aloud. It was a big smile, like her brother’s. “The greater the possibilities, the better her hunger is sated. When she is full, she must digest her prey both here in the world of spirits and also there in the world of flesh. While she is doing that, she is vulnerable.”

“Coyote and his kind—Hawk, Bear, Salmon, Wolf, Thunderbird, and others—they have more possibilities than even a newborn child.” The Cherokee woman turned in a graceful circle as if to encompass all that Coyote and those like him were. “If Coyote can persuade enough of them to allow River Devil to consume them, they may be enough to force the river devil to overeat. And she will be helpless until she digests them all.”

“While she is helpless, someone needs to kill her.” The Inuit sister looked at me with her big dark eyes, and I knew, with a sinking feeling, who they were talking about.

“What about Fred or Hank?” I asked. Adam couldn’t do it. His strength might make him a better candidate, but werewolves don’t swim. I wouldn’t risk Adam to the river.

“They are vulnerable to the river devil’s mark,” she said. Then she paused and addressed my unvoiced thought. “I do not know about the werewolf. Alone, he would be like the others, but his pack might keep him safe . . .”

“Or she might gain the whole pack.” The Hopi woman shook her head. “No. That would not be wise. Nor is water the werewolf’s element for all that it is an element of change.”

Shoshone Woman said, “She must die, then. As she eats, she grows in power. If she does not die before she digests such a meal as our brother will provide, she will be much, much more destructive than she is now.”

“What about an airstrike,” I said. “Or nuclear weapons. I know people who might be able to get the military in on this.” Bran could. He might not be out—but he knew how to get things done when he wanted to.

Hopi Woman shook her head. “No. Modern weapons will not harm her. Only the most simple thing, a symbol of the earth that opposes her water: a stone knife.”

“Our time is short now,” Cherokee Woman said. “You must go back.”

Shoshone Woman touched my cheek. “Tell our brother he is wise, that we have no further words of wisdom to add to his.”

“He says that you are not speaking to him,” I said.

She laughed, but it was a sad laugh. “Coyote doesn’t usually lie, but sometimes he forgets. It is he who is angry with us. We gave him advice he did not like, and he got mad.”

Cherokee Woman narrowed her eyes at me. “We told him nothing good could come of letting Joe Old Coyote take the Anglo woman to his bed.”

Inuit Woman smiled and touched my leg. “Obviously, we were wrong.”

“Coyote is like the river devil,” I said. “Right? He walks in both places. So why doesn’t he eat everything in sight?”

“Coyote walks in one world at a time,” Cherokee Woman told me. “He can do this without being trapped because we wait for him here, and you and his other descendants anchor him there.”

“Coyote understands that the Universe is all one.” Shoshone Woman’s voice was indulgent.

“Coyote,” said Hopi Woman dryly, “doesn’t much worry about understanding anything, which is why he understands so much.”

“What happens when the river devil eats them? Coyote and the others.” In the stories, Coyote died and was reborn the next day, but there was an air of resignation that clung to these women that hinted at something more dire this time.

They exchanged looks that I could not read.

“We don’t know.” Inuit Woman stared out into the fog that surrounded us. “As I told you, it is not given to us to know the future. We are merely wise advisors.”

“It may be that this is the last time for Coyote to walk your world,” said Cherokee Woman in a low voice. “So much has changed, it is impossible to know what those changes mean.”

“There are some who do not walk either world any longer.” Shoshone Woman’s eyes glistened with tears. “River Devil is of both worlds and so could send them back scattered into the universe.”

“Do not worry about that which cannot be changed.” Hopi Woman sat on the ground and patted my tennis shoes. “Even if Coyote is not reborn with the morning sun, there is always hope of a new dawn. Come now, sisters, it is time to send her back.”