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Poor Stefan had tried to curl up and die because Marsilia had sold him out—and he’d done his best to take the remnants of his menagerie with him. And Rachel was worried about him.
“So she did,” said Darryl. His voice had softened to molasses and gravel. “We try to give you the air you need to breathe, Mercy. But it is hard. You are so fragile and—”
“Your ability to survive anything that gets thrown at you sometimes leaves the rest of us swallowing ulcer medication for days afterward. I don’t like the taste of Maalox.”
“Zee wanted to have the honor of giving you away,” said Bran, Samuel’s father, the Marrock who ruled all the wolves anywhere I was likely to ever go, and the Alpha of the Montana-based wolf pack who had raised me. “But I had prior claim.”
My mother, the traitor seated in the front row of pews, sent my stepfather up to pin a silk Monarch butterfly on my bouquet.
“Pup,” he said into the sudden silence, “today, I’m giving you one of my treasures. You see that you take proper care of her.”
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 knew they wanted us here for some reason. I could have refused—I had reservations in San Diego—but I thought you’d enjoy this more than a hotel, and I knew I would.”
There was an interesting snap in her voice, and I wondered how often Bran had gotten her to do what he wanted her to. Not as often as he wanted, I’d bet, but evidently more than she was happy about.
He knows in his head and his heart that you are an equal, but his instincts were instilled a long time ago. You are going to have to help him with that and be patient with him.” My mother would not be nearly as terrifying if she weren’t right so often.
He dropped a second rabbit at my feet and lay down in front of me, nose on his paws and his ears flattened. Nothing says you’re sorry like a dead bunny.
I wiggled my hips into a more comfortable position and tried to think like Adam—a very smart person poisoned by testosterone.
It was only after the Owens brothers pulled out a first-aid kit and started to work on the wounded man that I realized we were all—victim, me, and the four in the rescuing boat—Indian.
Naked wrapped in a blanket among strangers didn’t use to bother me. Maybe if Calvin would have quit staring at the various pieces of me that the blanket didn’t cover, it still wouldn’t have bothered me.
“River marked. It meant for you to be its servant—good thing for you that coyotes don’t make good servants.
Edythe, whoever she was, had a premonition once a century or so—and had had one about us being here.
I dreamed that I was freed at last, and I feasted on an otter that filled me more than an otter should, appeasing my hunger for a moment. So I didn’t eat the other otters who swam around me.
She struggled for a moment more, then grew calm. Peaceful. The water rushed past her and took all of her cares away.
“My uncle Jim is a medicine man. It runs in the family, usually in sibling lines. None of his kids have the ability to become what he is, and neither did his father. But his uncle did. It runs like that.”
Even now, I don’t know of any werewolves living in Asia—there are things over there that don’t like us, and they can make their dislike fatal. Yet there he was.
So what if an old Indian thought my father was Coyote? My father had really been Bryan, the man who’d raised me. He’d been there for me when I needed him, until Evelyn died and he hadn’t been able to survive the loss. After that, I’d had Bran. If Bran and Coyote battled it out, I’d put my money on Bran. The thought restored my usual cheery outlook.
“You know, in the story, all the first people the river monster ate came back to life after it was dead.”
“Felt like you got shot,” Darryl said dryly. “I know what a bullet feels like. You had a misunderstanding on your honeymoon that resulted in your getting shot? We could be there in a couple of hours.”
As the sole representative of monsters here, it is my . . . obligation to make certain we are looking at this with a balanced perspective.
“Understandable,” said Fred unexpectedly. “My wife would take a baseball bat to someone who shot me.” “Has,” said Jim. “I remember. It was Hank that time, too, wasn’t it?”
Besides, we’re mates, remember? Your wolf won’t hurt me.” “Not always true,” he grunted, as I helped him into a pair of sweatpants. “Ask Bran. Not going to risk it.”
Mine. He was mine, and not even death would take him from me—not if I could help it.
But still. Walkers see ghosts, but those two taught themselves not to see the dead quite a while ago in a ‘galaxy far, far away.’ A man can’t fight a war if he can see the dead and still stay sane. So they made a choice.”
This was a celebration dance. An Indian might describe it as ‘Look, Apistotoki, here is my daughter. See her. See her grace and her beauty. Preserve this child of mine.’”
I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn’t me, and I wasn’t him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him—though he never knew that. There were just things he didn’t worry about very much—like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me—and he was dead.”
“But coyotes don’t mate for life, do they?” I tried to keep my voice neutral. “He would have,” said Coyote. “Oh, he would have. He loved her so much.”
“I didn’t know about you until a lot later. Then I stopped in to check you out. You looked happy running with the wolves. They looked bewildered—which is as it should be when a coyote plays with wolves. So I knew you were okay.” He glanced at me. “Which is what Charles Cornick told me when he saw me watching you. Sent me packing with a flea in my ear.”
“You stop baiting him—or I’ll call my mom.” Coyote froze, his face blank, and I almost felt bad—except that he’d been threatening Adam. After a moment, he inhaled.
“Because every once in a while, especially after a full moon hunt, he’d forget that I could see in the dark, and he’d run around naked in the backyard.” He laughed silently. “I never forgot you could see in the dark,” he admitted.
“Did you really tell Coyote this was a wolf print?” “To you, it is a coyote print,” I said firmly. “For him, it is a wolf print. Only I and my tattoo artist know for sure.”
“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.”
“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 assumed they’d be hidden places.”
He told me that in the past three weeks there have been twenty-six people who are presumed drowned between the John Day Dam and the one at The Dalles, not including the family of four that was reported missing late this afternoon when their car was found at a state park on the Oregon side of the Columbia. That’s more people than we’ve lost on the river in the last five years combined.”
It is proper that men listen to the counsel of women.”
“I thought you were not her father,” Gordon said placidly. “That makes him not your son by marriage.”
“Thunderbird,” said Calvin reverently. “Grandfather said you were Thunderbird, but that was when he was calling me by my father’s name more often than not.”
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.”
Then something really disconcerting happened. The walking stick buried its suddenly sharp-again end in the otterkin’s throat with no help from me.
I want you to know that I fought to get back to you. I didn’t take the easy way out. I didn’t give up. I fought this death because I had you waiting for me on the shore. If it had been possible to drag this puny mortal flesh back to you, I would have done it, if I had to crawl to do so. I would have walked through Hell to get back to you, and only failed because of the weakness of my body, not of my heart.
