River Marked (8 page)

His hair hung in two thick braids that were finished with a red leather tie and stopped just below his shoulder blades. I recognized some of the dancing moves from the two or three powwows I’d attended in college, when I was still trying to hunt down my heritage. As he danced, he became more and more real to my eyes and to the rest of my senses. Until, at last, if it had not been that I’d seen him slowly materialize, I would have sworn he was a living person though he kept his head turned from me so I just got glimpses of his features.

The rhythm of his dance changed from furious to achingly slow and back. At all times, his weight was evenly distributed on the balls of his feet—this was a warrior’s dance, full of power and magic and the promise of violence. The warrior was who he was, though, and the dancer’s nature didn’t stop it from being a joyous celebration.

The ghost stopped dancing with his back to me, his whole body working to regain the oxygen he’d spent in his dance. I wondered how long ago he had performed his dance in the flesh and why he’d done it here.

“Hey,” I said softly.

There are ghosts that just repeat important moments of their lives. I was pretty sure that this was one of those because self-aware ghosts who can act independently are rarer—and they tend to interact right off. This had all the hallmarks of a repeater; that dance, full of passion and emotion, had looked as though it had been done at a pivotal moment in someone’s life.

But my voice made his shoulders stiffen. Then he turned slowly toward me until I stared into the face of a man I’d never met, whose face was as familiar as the one I looked at in my own mirror, even though I only had one black-and-white photograph of it from a newspaper report of his death.

My father.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. It felt just like someone had belted me in the diaphragm, so my lungs couldn’t work.

He stared at me, unsmiling. Slowly, almost ceremonially, he bowed his head to me. Then he slid into a coyote shape as easily, as quickly, as I can. The coyote appeared, oddly, more solid than the man had been. He looked at me with the same bold stare he’d had when he appeared human. Then, without warning, he bolted across the grounds and into the bushes a dozen yards away.

In the photograph, my father had been wearing the uniform of a rodeo cowboy—jeans, long-sleeved Western-cut shirt, and a cowboy hat. My mother, a teenager fighting free of strict parents, had met him in a rodeo where she was winning prize money barrel racing her best friend’s horse when she was younger than Jesse. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him she was pregnant before he’d been killed in a car accident. The name he’d given her was Joe Old Coyote.

I’d never seen my father’s ghost before. He hadn’t come to me when I slunk out of Montana, fleeing the only home I had ever known. He hadn’t come when I graduated from high school or college. Hadn’t come when I’d fought for my life against fae and demons and all sorts of nasty creatures. He hadn’t come to my wedding.

I looked for footprints. I might feel pretty confident of my knowledge of werewolves, marginally comfortable with what I knew of vampires. The fae are another matter—and I knew that there were other things I knew nothing about, some of them unique, some of them just well hidden.

I’d been certain what I’d seen was a ghost until I had a moment to wonder how my father, who’d died hundreds of miles away in eastern Montana, would have gotten here. He’d turned into a coyote, just like I could, and run off into the bushes. Most ghosts don’t need to run away; they just dissipate. But there were no tracks—and I know how to track. Not even in the soft dirt right in front of the bushes he’d run into.

I had gooseflesh on my arms though it was still hot out.

“SO YOU DON’T THINK IT WAS A GHOST?” ADAM ASKED, then took a big bite of his hot dog.

The trailer had a stove and an oven, but there were both a fire pit and a grill next to our spot, and we’d decided to roast hot dogs for dinner in the pit. He’d run until dusk, stopped by and given me a sweaty kiss, then grabbed clean clothes and a towel before heading to the showers.

But the time he came back, I had a fire going in the pit and the food ready to cook.

There were camp chairs tied to the back of the trailer, but we sat on the ground next to each other anyway. If I didn’t notice that we were cooking right next to the Behemoth Trailer and sitting on a manicured lawn, I could pretend we were really camping. This was like “the good parts version” of camping. I could get used to it.

“Umm,” I answered, then swallowed so I could talk. “I didn’t say that exactly—my father is dead, after all. If it was my father, it was a ghost. But maybe it was something else. There are stories about the Indian supernatural population, but a lot of the old knowledge was lost when the government tried to assimilate the tribes into the Amer-European culture. A good portion of what
is
known was made up on the spot—no one tells a tall tale like an Indian—and no one knows for certain anymore which are the really old stories and which were faked.”

Charles, Bran’s half-Indian son born sometime in the early eighteen hundreds, could have shed some light on the subject—but, to my intense frustration, he seldom talked about his Native American roots. Maybe I could have pushed him into it, but Charles was one of the very few people who really intimidated me. So even back when I was looking into that half of my family history, I’d never prodded him too hard, much as I’d have liked to.

“You think it might have been some local spirit imitating your father?” Adam asked.

He’d finished his hot dog and was in the middle of cooking another. He liked them burnt on the outside—I liked mine just shy of hot.

I watched my hot dog warm and tried to pretend I could believe that. “Maybe. Maybe there is something like a weird doppelganger who appears to other people or a backward foreganger—a death’s-head who appears after a man dies instead of three days before.”

Adam tilted his head at me, then shook it. “If you really thought it was some native critter, you’d be calling Charles.”

Adam was right. If Charles thought I was really in trouble, he’d help however he could. He might be scary, but he was family. Sort of.

Adam gave me a shrewd look. “You just don’t like the idea that your father visited you, and you don’t know why.”

And why Joe Old Coyote hadn’t shown up sooner.

Damn it,
I chided myself. I knew better than that. A ghost wasn’t a person; it was just the leftovers. That ghost might be the ghost of my father, but he
wasn’t
my father.

He’d died before I was born. But I hadn’t suffered. I’d been raised by Bryan and Evelyn, my foster parents, and they had loved me. When they died, Bran and the rest of his pack had stepped in—and then my mother. I’d never been unloved, never mistreated. I was an adult—so why did the sight of a ghost who looked like my father make me feel so raw?

“Okay,” I said. “Yep. You’re right. If he could visit anytime, why didn’t he? Why now when I don’t need him?” I’d rather have believed it wasn’t my father.

He put his arm around me. “Maybe it was some sort of vision quest without the fasting part.”

I shook my head. “Nope, I already did my vision quest.”

He pulled back, so he could see my face. “Really?”

“Uhm,” I answered. “The summer Charles taught me to fix cars. One day he just took me out into the forest. We fasted for three days, then he told me not to shift into a coyote and sent me off into the mountains.”

“What did you see?” Adam asked. “Or is that supposed to be a secret?”

I snorted. “Sacred, not secret, I think.” Though the only person I’d ever told what I saw had been Charles. “But mine was pretty weird. I asked Charles if I did it wrong, and he just gave me that look—” I tried to freeze my face into an emotionless but somehow terrifying mask—and Adam grinned.

“What did he say when you showed him that expression?” he asked.

Only an idiot would make fun of Charles to his face. Adam knew me so well.

“He asked me if I’d eaten something that made me sick,” I said. “Though he turned his head, so I couldn’t see his expression. I think he might have smiled.”

Adam laughed. “So back to your vision.”

“Right,” I said. “So my vision was a little ... Charles told me that there was no right or wrong way to have a vision. It just was. Then he told me about some guy who had a vision and found out he could talk to spirits. Elk Spirit came to him and told him he had to serve Elk Spirit and to do that he had to dress only in yellow. Or maybe that was blue. So this guy, he did that for a few years until Bear Spirit came and told him he’d been talking to Elk Spirit and decided that it should be Bear Spirit he listens to. So Bear Spirit told him to paint his face red and walk backward. When Charles’s grandfather, the medicine man, met this man, he had been walking backward for years and years. Charles’s grandfather heard the man’s story, and told him, ‘Just because you listen to spirits does not mean you must obey them.’” I’d almost forgotten that Charles had shared that story with me. It was a sign, I suspect, of how upset I’d been that I hadn’t had the kind of vision quest I had expected—one with eagles and deer who guide me to enlightenment.

“What happened?” Adam asked.

“Your hot dog is on fire,” I told him.

He pulled the black thing out of the fire, tapped it on the ground, and it broke into pieces. He got another hot dog and stuck it on the campfire fork, while I ate mine.

“Mercy, what happened to the guy who was walking around backward?”

“He washed his face and started walking forward. After about five steps, he tripped and broke his leg.”

“You are making that up,” said Adam, pulling his hot dog in for inspection. It wasn’t black, so he stuck it back in the fire.

I lifted my hand. “Scout’s honor, that’s the story Charles told me. You ask him if you can’t tell if I’m lying or not.” That was sort of a put-down among werewolves. Only a very new werewolf wouldn’t be able to sense truth from falsehood. “Charles said that the man never did go back to walking backward, though.”

“You have to be a boy to say, ‘Scout’s honor,’” Adam told me.

“Nah-uh. Girl Scout leader, here.” I pointed my thumb at my breastbone. “Sort of. When my mom couldn’t do it. Anyway, you wanted to hear about my vision.”

“Yes.”

I opened my mouth to tell him a funny version, but what came out was different from what I’d intended.

“One moment I was sitting alone in the middle of a forest; the next I was walking in a different place. Everything was gray, almost like a black-and-white film except there was no white or black, just odd shades of gray. There was no grass or trees, just endless mounds of sand. It felt ... empty. Like those postapocalyptic horror films, you know? Empty but scary, too.”

I could feel it now as I had then: the tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe, the way the hair on the back of my neck had stood up because I knew that there was evil lurking, watching.

Adam pulled his hot dog out of the fire, but instead of eating it, he forced the blunt end of the fork into the ground, so it stuck up like a bizarre garden ornament. Then he pulled me against him, and my tension eased so I could breathe normally again.

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t expect it to bother me so much.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“No,” I said. “But I want to.” It felt right. Charles had told me I’d know when it was time to share what had happened to me. Some people were required to tell their experience to every person they met, but most of us only shared with a few people.

“So I was wandering through this desolate place. The only thing I could see besides sand were remnants of buildings. In the beginning, some of the buildings were modern—tall structures made of glass and steel. On those, the glass was cracked or broken and the steel rusted nearly through. As I continued on, the ruins started to be older buildings, houses. I clearly recall seeing what was left of an old Victorian, tipped awkwardly on its side as if it had been a giant dollhouse some child had kicked over. Then it was like something you’d see on a Western film set, but decades later. Blackened poles from adobe buildings half-buried in the sand, hitching posts and broken boardwalks, with dead weeds poking out.

“I’m the only living thing in the place.

“Eventually, there are only tent poles, and I am walking by them, crying, sobbing, with snot dripping from my nose—the whole wretched business though I don’t know what I am grieving for.”

“How old were you?” Adam asked.

“That was after Bryan died,” I answered. “Just after, I think.” Just talking about what I’d seen rattled me, my jaw vibrating as if I were cold, though Adam was warm and solid against me. He was real, but somehow that long-ago vision was real, too. “So fourteen or thereabouts.”

Telling Adam was almost like living through it again. The emotions had been real and powerful, maybe the most real thing about the whole vision.