Widdershins (71 page)

“They’d have to go through me first,” I tell her.

She smiles. “What would you do? Once upon a time them into kinder, gentler canids? Somehow I doubt that’d take. I think it only works here, on the things that you’ve been carrying around in your head.”

“I guess.”

“So, what are you going to do now?” she asks.

I give her a blank look.

“With Del,” she says. “With this place. Are you going to shut it down and make it all go away?”

“I don’t know that I should.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

I shake my head. “All of this is a part of who I am. I already tried to cut it out of my memories and hide it away. And you see how well that turned out.”

“So you’re just going to let him run free in here?”

“No. Him I’ll once upon a time into something better. But this place, the memories . . . I’m just going to accept that it all happened. That it wasn’t my fault. And get on with the real business of my life.”

“Living.”

I nod.

“You ever wake up in a cold sweat, thinking you’re back in those days?” she asks.

“That never went away. It probably never will. But if it happens again, I’m not going to pretend it never happened. I’m going to hold it up to the light and tell myself that it happened, but it’s done now.”

“I hope it works.”

“It has to,” I say.

She smiles. “Yeah. And you’re a tough little cookie. If anyone can make it happen, you can.”

“What about you?”

She shrugs. “Like I told you. I’ve been done with it since I saw him in the trailer park. Sometimes I still wake up from the bad dream that I’m just a kid again and he’s coming into my room, but I deal.”

“You’re the tough one,” I say. “If you’d been here before I figured out how to stop him, you’d have just shut him down with a look.”

“And a good kick in the balls.”

“That, too.”

She stands up. “We should go. I think we’re done here.”

I nod. “I’ve just got a couple more things I need to clean up before I go.”

“Do you need a hand?”

“No, I’m good.”

She cocks her head. “So, are you really going to hook up with Geordie?”

“I hope so.”

“Well, whenever you talk about him it’s pretty damn obvious you’re head over heels.”

She catches me off guard with that.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

But she just laughs. “Good luck, sis.”

I start toward her, and she shakes her head.

“Don’t go getting all mushy on me,” she says.

Except she lets me hug her. She even puts her arms around me and sort of pats me on the back. But she seems relieved when I let her go.

“Call me when you’re home,” she says.

“I will.”

She just stands there.

“Well?” she says after a moment. “You brought me here—aren’t you going to send me home?”

“Oh. I didn’t think about that.”

“I was dreaming about Johnny Depp, if that helps. We were about to—”

I give her a smile. “I don’t think I need to know the details.”

Once upon a time, I think.

And then she is gone, and I’m alone on the porch.

I stay for a moment longer, looking out over the fields. I watch a hawk slowly circling above, following its flight until it sinks below the far trees. Then I turn back into the house, the boards of the porch creaking under my feet.

Joe

Coming back to the plain
where the buffalo had gathered didn’t work the way Joe had expected it would. Instead of Anwatan putting him back in his body, they were a pair of spirits, invisible to all except each other.

Joe’s gaze lingered for a long morbid moment on his body, his head cradled in Cassie’s lap. The blood from his wound had made a mess of her clothes, but she didn’t seem to care. She just held him in the crook of one arm while she stroked his hair with her free hand, avoiding the area that had been bashed in. Zia and Maida sat on either side of his body—more still and serious than he could ever remember seeing that pair of crow girls. Raven stood behind Cassie, his gaze fixed on the cliffs on the far side of the plains. He, too, was still, but in him, it was as though he’d turned to stone. He seemed more statue than corbae.

Beyond Raven he saw the humans—the three musicians he’d met back at the hotel in Sweetwater when he went to find Cassie. They stood in an uneasy group, the two men on either side of the woman, protective, though there was no longer a threat in evidence. But that was from Joe’s own viewpoint.

Their anxiety probably came from the cousins that still remained. Unlike Raven and the crow girls, the cousins wore their animal heritage on their human shapes. Walker and Ayabe both had their tall racks of antlers, lifting up into the sky. Jack was a coyote’s head on a man’s body, his dark, unblinking gaze on Minisino’s body as though he expected the dead cerva to get up at any moment.

“This is depressing,” Joe said, turning to Anwatan.

It was too much like watching his own funeral.

The deer woman nodded. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Go ahead. Just climb back into that body of yours.”

“Climb back into it, huh? Just like that.”

She gave him another nod. “Can’t you feel it reaching for you?”

That immobile, dead thing? Joe thought. It wasn’t reaching for anything. It just lay there with its head in Cassie’s lap, a limp, lifeless thing.

But as soon as she’d said it, he realized Anwatan was right. He
could
feel a pull and then he saw the loose, silvery thread that ran from where he stood to the corpse Cassie was holding.

He glanced back at Anwatan.

“You’ll get back to me on this business with your bogan?” he asked.

“Soon,” she told him. She looked past him to where her father stood. “Will you . . . will you tell him goodbye?”

“You don’t want to do it yourself?”

She shook her head. “It’s why I brought us here like this. I don’t want him to see me again. It hurts him too much, and I feel every ache that lies in his heart.”

“It hurts him not to see you, too.”

“I know. But he has to get used to it.”

“I’ll give him your message,” Joe said.

And then she was gone.

He stood for a long moment, staring at the dead body in Cassie’s arms.
His
dead body.

It was funny, he realized. He could accept it. He didn’t feel any personal need for another chance at life.

But his time on this wheel wasn’t done. He could feel it straining to turn. He could sense all the connections, all the lives that were a part of this turning that needed him to be here before he could go on to see what the next world held for him.

Never thought getting killed could be a selfish act, he thought.

And then he let himself go. The silver thread went tight and reeled him back toward his body. A moment later and the corpse shivered in Cassie’s arms. He opened eyes that were caked shut with dust and salt. The first thing he saw was the blurry image of Cassie’s face as she leaned down to kiss him.

“Don’t you ever scare me like that again,” she whispered.

He sensed movement on either side and realized it was the crow girls dancing around when he heard their voices.

“He’s back, he’s back!”

“Should we fix him, Lucius?”

“Should we, should we?”

“Oh, say we can!”

And then there was Raven’s gruff voice: “Didn’t I bring you here to do just that?”

“Well, yes.”

“But what if you’d changed your mind?”

“Then there’d be shouting.”

“It’d be all bad Maida. Bad Zia.”

“Would you just get to it,” Raven told them.

Cassie’s face left his field of vision, replaced by the merry faces of the crow girls.

“Hello, crow dog,” Maida said.

Zia nodded. “Hello, hello.”

They put their hands on his head, running their fingers through his hair to where his scalp was split open. He winced when they touched the open wound.

He was about to complain. He heard Cassie warning them off. But then he felt the wound close, the flesh knit. The sharp ache in his head vanished.

He didn’t just feel healed. He felt renewed.

His vision cleared and the crow girls came into sharp focus above him. Zia winked before they pulled their faces away.

“Careful,” Cassie said as he started to sit up.

“Don’t have to be,” he said. “There’s not a damn thing wrong with me anymore.”

Zia smirked.

“Better than new,” Maida said.

Joe sat all the way up and nodded. “No kidding. What did you do to me?”

His gaze went from one to the other.

“Filled you with a bit of Grace,” Zia said.

Maida just stuck out her tongue. The pair of them bounced to their feet and did a little stomp dance around him and Cassie, then they leapt into the air and two crows sped off, vanishing before they’d gone more than a few dozen yards into the sky.

“You really okay?” Jack asked.

Joe stood and gave Cassie a hand up. He put his arm around her shoulders.

“Like Maida said: better than new.”

Jack wore a man’s face again, and a big grin like he’d just drawn a fourth ace to match the three in his hand.

“Man,” he said. “I could’ve used those girls that time Zella’s old man beat the crap out of me. It took me weeks to get back on my feet.”

“Zella’s that puma girl Jack can’t stay away from,” Joe said to Cassie.

“I remember.”

But the desire to crack jokes fled Joe when he saw Walker approaching him.

“Did you see my daughter?” he asked.

Joe nodded. “She showed me the way back to my body, but . . . “ He hesitated, then added the lie: “She’s gone on. She told me to say goodbye for her and to give you her love.”

The cerva sighed, the ache plain in his eyes.

“There’s blood between us now,” Joe told him. “You, your family—they’re my family now. You ever need anything, all you have to do is say the word.”

“Goes for me, too,” Jack said.

“I just want my daughter back. I want to see her running with the herd. I want to hear her voice.”

Joe glanced at Raven.

It was too late for her
, the gruff voice said in his mind.
You know that.

Joe turned back to Walker and put his hands on the cerva’s shoulders.

“That’s the one thing I can’t do,” he said, “though it’s the one thing I would do if I could.”

Walker nodded. “I know.”

There was so much hurt in his voice, in his eyes. Joe felt a pang of guilt. Why should he come back when she couldn’t? But he knew the answer. Never mind whether your time on the wheel was done or not. If you had to die, do it while helping power players like Raven and Ayabe who could see that you were brought back again, better than new. Anwatan had died alone, and there hadn’t been enough left of her body before anyone knew she was dead.

Thinking of the cerva spirit who’d shown him the way back reminded him of what she’d told him when they were still in the holding ground.

Joe returned his gaze to Raven.

“Anwatan told me something on the other side,” he said. “She says there was a cousin running with those bogans—giving them safe passage through our territories and teaching them how to shapechange.”

Raven nodded. “I know. Odawajameg of the salmon clan.”

What, now he chose to be omnipresent? Why couldn’t he have played that card before all of this began?

“How’d you know?” he had to ask.

“Grey brought him to us. I have him in custody at my roost. He will go up before a council of air and water cousins.”

Standing beside Joe, Jack started to roll a cigarette, pulling out that Zippo lighter of his when he was done.

“How do you think that’s going to work out?” Jack asked.

“It’s not for me to say,” Raven said. “But if I had my way . . . “ He sighed. “There’s history between Odawa and the corbae—old, unhappy history in which we’re not entirely blameless. But it should have been finished by now. And I should probably learn a cerva’s ability to forgive, but I can’t find it in me.”

“Everybody’s got their own nature,” Jack said, “and what you’re talking about, well, right there you’ve got the big difference between herbivores and carnivores.”

It looked like Raven was going to argue the point, but after a moment, he simply nodded.

“We need to close the door on this,” Jack said.

He put the cigarette he’d rolled between his lips. A flick of his Zippo got it lit. Taking a drag, he passed it around, sharing the tobacco smoke, sealing the moment among them all. Everybody had a drag, even the humans who probably only had the barest inkling of what it meant. But Joe knew he shouldn’t be too hard on them. They’d come here to stand with Cassie and him when none of them thought they’d survive the day.

When the cigarette was done and the butt stowed in Jack’s pocket, Ayabe put his arm around Walker’s shoulders.

“You should come with me,” he said. “There are quiet places of retreat by my lake—places to let your sorrow run its course without interference or distraction from the world at large. You can stay on any of them for as long as you need.”

“I . . .”

Walker’s gaze went to Minisino’s body, then returned to the moose lord’s face. He straightened his shoulders and nodded.