When he first came out to the car, he had this absurd hope that Xochi would still be there, silently waiting astride her Hayabusa. He’d gotten into his head that if he saw her, he’d give her what she wanted. In spades. Toss her in the back seat of the Impala and prove to her that he wasn’t so hung up on the past he couldn’t have a little harmless fun. Prove it to himself. But she wasn’t there. So he sat in the car alone, drinking himself maudlin. Still hung up on the past.
He took out his cell phone. Lisa’s number remained on the screen from the previous dozen times he’d looked at it but didn’t dial it. He stared at it until the little screen went dark to conserve power, then put the phone back in his pocket.
TWELVE
Xochi had parked the Hayabusa beside a dying Joshua tree and hiked off into the desert. She had nothing with her but a thin bedroll, a canteen and a small pouch containing sacred tools and herbs. She had a flashlight, but didn’t use it. She didn’t need it. Her night vision was sharp as a cat’s, but she wasn’t following a visible path. She was following ley lines. Veins of psychic energy that flow like blood just beneath the skin of the world. Leading her to a powerful nexus point where her prayer to Huehuecoyotl would be most likely to be heard.
The sky above her was cloudless, a heavy three-quarter moon low on the horizon. She searched the scatter of stars for the Tianquiztli cluster out of childhood habit, feeling reassured and centered when she found it. She could hear the frantic, high-pitched yipping of coyotes in the distance.
The harsh, moonlit landscape gave no indication that humans had ever existed and seemed to actively resent her presence. The slithering sand filled in her footprints seconds after she made them.
It took several hours for her to reach the nexus. As she walked, she thought of the two big green-eyed gringos. So infuriatingly American in their approach, all cowboy muscle and cocky, self-centered entitlement, yet she could clearly see that their destinies were inextricably intertwined with her own.
The older brother was going to be a problem, but he was a problem that intrigued her. Sure, he was distractingly handsome, a ripe mango, and she couldn’t deny a certain raw physical attraction. But there was so much more going on under the surface. He was complicated, a haunted warrior. She knew she couldn’t just break into a man like that the way she’d broken into his cheap motel room. She needed to find a way to earn his trust, and cheap seduction was not the way to do it.
As for the younger, soulless brother, she knew from the first second she saw him that he was the key. But why couldn’t she see the shape of the lock?
The area around the nexus was no different visually than the hundreds of miles of surrounding desert. A slight indentation in the sand, to the left of a pair of large squarish boulders like dice thrown by bored gods. To the right, a thick stand of spindly creosote, an impossibly long-lived desert dweller that was already ancient back when the great city of Tenochtitlan was still young.
She unrolled her striped woolen blanket near the center of the indentation and started gathering kindling for a small fire. Once she’d collected enough, she dug a shallow pit, ringed it with smooth stones and stacked the gathered branches in a loose basket shape with the smallest underneath and the thickest at the top. She tucked a handful of dried leaves under the kindling and lit them with a silver Zippo. She was an old-fashioned girl, but not above modern convenience.
Once she got the fire started, she began to lay out ritual tools on the blanket. Bundles of herbs. A chunk of turquoise. A wooden cup. A pale flint knife with a handle shaped like a coiled snake.
She started with a spiritual cleansing, bathing her body in sage smoke and releasing all worldly thoughts from her mind. She mixed several of the dried herbs in the wooden cup, crushing them with the turquoise and then adding water from her canteen. The resulting brew was bitter and earthy, but she drank it down without hesitation. It left flecks of grit on her lips and tongue.
After throwing a handful of copal into the fire, she took the blade of the knife and held it to her sternum. It felt cold against her skin. Pulling in a slow, centering breath, she drew the razor-sharp stone blade across the tattooed heart on her chest. She clenched her teeth, hissing against the sting. Her blood gathered on the blade and she held it over the fire, letting fat droplets fall sizzling into the flames. A symbolic sacrifice to Huehuecoyotl.
“Let me be open,” she said, speaking in her ancient native tongue.
Then she waited.
It started with the coyotes. First one, then three, leggy gray shadows lurking around the perimeter of her vision. Soon more than a dozen, silently watching. Waiting, like she was. She was not afraid.
When Huehuecoyotl came, his form was human, a diminutive old man, as gnarled and brown as dried venison. Naked except for a tattered blanket clutched around his hunched and bony shoulders. But his eyes were young, dancing with wicked humor.
“Little Xiuhxochitl,” he said, calling her by her full name.
“Huehuetque,” Xochi replied, respectfully addressing him using the term for a wise elder. “You honor this humble huntress with your presence.”
“You are a woman now,” he said, his face flickering from canine to human and back again in the orange glow of her dying fire. “A shadow warrior, like your mother. The flower blooms.”
He held out his knobby brown hand, cupping a lick of fire in his palm. He swirled a fingertip though the captive flame and it began to coil itself into petals. When he handed it to her, it had become a flower, a lush yellow dahlia. After a few heartbeats, the flower became a fat horned lizard, regarding her with a cocked head and suspicious little eyes. When she moved her hand to put the lizard down, it shot angry jets of blood from its eyes, leaping away and leaving her arm streaked with crimson.
Huehuecoyotl laughed, flashing toothless gums and slapping his skinny shank like that was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. Xochi was familiar with his childish pranks and kept her cool, trying to stay focused on the matter at hand.
“I need your advice, Huehuetque,” Xochi said.
“What will you give me in return?” he asked. “A kiss?”
He was no longer a scrawny old man. In the swift flicker of a shadow, he’d become Dean Winchester. Still nude, his tattered blanket now thrown back off one muscular shoulder. Xochi looked away, focusing her gaze on the heart of the fire.
“A kiss is what started this trouble,” Xochi said.
“Trouble is what makes eternity worth enduring,” he replied.
“Not this kind of trouble.” Xochi raised her head to meet his gaze. “This isn’t a joke. People are dying.”
“Child,” he said. “Your people are always dying. That’s what makes you human.”
“But even you must sense the wrongness of these events. It’s unnatural. Balance must be restored.”
“Must it?”
He was no longer Dean. Now he was a giant black coyote, standing on its hind legs and towering over her with a disturbingly human posture. But he still had Dean’s green eyes.
“This world lost all sense of balance hundreds of years ago,” he said. “It was lost when the greedy priests of Tenochtitlan started using their sacrificial rituals for political and personal gain. You and your family are backward artifacts of a lost age. Adhering to principles that mean nothing in this modern world of unchecked chaos and destruction. Your mother knew this. That is why she took her own life.”
“Your lies can’t hurt me,” Xochi said. “My mother died in battle. The death of an honored warrior.”
“Your mother gave up. She couldn’t face her own obsolescence.”
He’d shifted again, this time taking the form of her mother. The intimidating, barely remembered beauty who’d never held Xochi. Never tucked her in at night and soothed her fears. Who’d always been too busy hunting to bother with mundane things like birthdays or skinned knees. Who was gone before Xochi was old enough to hold a knife.
“With respect, Huehuetque,” Xochi said, strugg
ling to keep her voice level. She couldn’t let him get to her. “I did not call you here tonight to talk about my family. I want to talk about your family. This Borderwalker is your own spiritual granddaughter. She has become corrupted, lost in hate and fear. Help me find her and take away her pain.”
“You must go home to find her.” He was an old man again. “Go home, huntress. This is not about my family.”
Xochi studied him, trying to squint through the smoke of lies and catch a glimpse of the truth.
“Does she bite with coyote’s teeth?” he asked. “Or is she driven by the wind of beating wings?”
“I don’t understand...?”
“She is just the song. Ask yourself, who is singing?”
Then he was gone.
THIRTEEN
Whoever was banging on the motel door needed to die. It felt like they were banging directly on the inside of Dean’s skull.
“Up and at ’em, Sunshine,” Sam said, whipping the covers off Dean’s aching head. “Your girlfriend is here.”
“Tell her I’m indisposed,” Dean groaned.
“Tell her yourself,” Sam said, throwing the motel door wide open and letting in a vicious blast of sunlight like napalm.
“Aw, man!” Dean said, pulling the covers back over his face.
“Good morning, Sam,” Xochi said. “Dean. I brought some presents for you two boys.”
“You should give them to me,” Sam said. “Dean’s been naughty.”
“Close the damn door, will ya?” Dean said from under the thin motel bedspread.
Once the evil sun had been banished from the room, Dean peeled open his dry sticky eyes and peered out from under the covers. The first two knuckles on his right hand were scabbed and sore. Did he get into a fight the night before? He certainly felt like he’d gotten his ass kicked.
Dean had a vague recollection of killing the bottle of whisky, then making the brilliant decision to stagger over to the bar across the road from the motel. He remembered trying to pick up a woman who didn’t speak English and failing miserably. He remembered kicking a juke box that only played “Amor Prohibido” by Selena over and over no matter what songs he picked. After that, nothing.
When he looked up, he saw Xochi standing by the door, still dressed in the same clothes as the night before. She had a large, padded olive-green rifle bag slung over her shoulder and that same look of arch amusement in her eyes.
Dean sat up gingerly, put his sock-clad feet on the carpet and his aching head in his hands, running his fingers through his hair. He noticed that he was still dressed in last night’s clothes too.
“Give me one of those bottles of water,” Dean said. “My mouth tastes like demon ass.”
“You’d know,” Sam replied, tossing Dean the bottle.
Dean cracked open the water and hit it hard, downing more than half in one swallow.
“Well, do you want your presents or don’t you?” Xochi asked.
She handed the rifle bag to Sam.
“What the hell do you have in here?” Sam asked, weighing the bag in his hand, surprised by its weight. “Gold bars?”
“A hundred pounds of aspirin?” Dean asked. “That’d just about do it.”
“Open it,” she said.
Sam unzipped the bag and removed what looked at first like a baseball bat. But it was wider and flattened out, the wood darker. It took a second for Dean’s sluggish brain to process what it really was. There were several wickedly sharp, obsidian blades set into the edges of the bat in matched pairs, eight on each side, like a frozen chainsaw.
“This is Maquahuitl,” Xochi stated.
“Mack what?” Dean asked.
“Maquahuitl,” she said again. Dean didn’t feel any closer to being able to repeat that word than he had been when she first said it. “You can strike with the flat sides or cut with the sharp. In our case, you will want to cut. Edged weapons will inflict more damage to our Borderwalker than bullets and obsidian will be more effective than silver or steel. It is no guarantee, but it is better than empty hands.”
Sam swung the bat appreciatively.
“Nice,” he said. “There’s one here for you too, Dean.”
“And I have another gift,” Xochi said. “Outside.”
“This one is aspirin, right?”
She shook her head.
“A witness,” she said.
She opened the door and walked out into the parking lot. Sam set the strange weapon on the table with a weighty clunk and went after her. Dean got himself upright, shoved his feet into his unlaced boots and reluctantly followed them out into the bright morning. The mindlessly beautiful day seemed like a personal affront to his current condition.
There was another rider sitting on the back of Xochi’s Hayabusa. Helmet on, hands behind his back. It wasn’t until Dean got closer that he realized that the man’s hands were handcuffed to a bolt set into the frame of the bike.
Xochi pulled the helmet off his head, revealing a chinless, unshaven face and large, bulging eyes. One of them was blackened, swollen shut. He was gagged with a red bandana.
“I want you to meet my friend Ojon,” she said, pulling out a ring of keys and unlocking the cuffs. “Watch him. He’s a runner.”
Sam stepped up and took Ojon by the wiry arm, helping him down off the bike.
“Ojon was there the night of the first murders,” she said. “He’s seen our Borderwalker in action and he’s anxious to tell us all about it.”
Ojon was jittery, twitching like he was about to crawl out of his skin. His shirt was soaked with foul-smelling amphetamine sweat. His one good eye pinballed around the parking lot like he was trying to watch every angle at once. Like he was sure the Borderwalker was about to show up and eat his face.
Dean stepped up and took Ojon’s other arm and he and Sam tossed their witness into the motel room like bouncers giving him the bum’s rush in reverse. Xochi followed close behind, closing and locking the motel room door.
Ojon got up off his knees, untied the gag and pulled it out of his mouth. The second Xochi stepped away from the door he sprinted across the room and grabbed the door knob, frantically yanking and twisting. The lock was about an inch up from the knob and if he wasn’t so fixated on the doorknob, he could have just unlocked it and run.
Dean traded disbelieving looks with Sam and Xochi.
“Okay, okay,” Dean finally said, stepping up and putting his hand over Ojon’s. “Take it easy there, genius. We’re not gonna hurt you.”
“Keep her away from me,” he said, turning and flattening himself out against the door. His voice was high and reedy, his accent thick.
“I’ll try,” Dean said, leaning in close and dropping his voice. “But, between you and me... Well I’m sure you’ve seen Q.”
He looked at Dean like he’d just stepped off a flying saucer. Sam swallowed a snorting half-laugh.
“Come on, Ojon,” Dean said. “Relax. Have a seat. We just want to ask you a few questions.”
Ojon gave Dean a wary look, then scuttled over and sat on the corner of Sam’s unused bed, as far away from Xochi as he could be while still remaining in the same room.
“I’d offer you a drink,” Dean said. “But I don’t think there are any alcoholic beverages left in this county after last night.”
“I don’t know nothing,” he said, hands battling in his lap like he was a kid making invisible action figures fight.
“Just tell us what you saw that night,” Xochi said.
“Nothing,” he said again.
Xochi spoke to him in Spanish, her tone both intimate and menacing.
“A woman,” he said. “I saw a woman.”
“What did she look like?” Sam asked.
“Pretty at first.” He looked up at Sam, then away. “Then...” He shrugged. “Not so pretty.”
“Look, we’re not paying by the hour here,” Dean said. “Get on with it.”
“You pay?” Ojon looked suddenly hopeful.
Xoc
hi hissed in Spanish and took a step closer to him, gloved hand raised.
“Okay, okay!” Ojon threw both hands up, shoulders hunched up to his ears. “I see a woman. She is pretty, with light skin and curly black hair. This CBP guy, he look to her and he know her. He know her. Then she change. She change to a monster. Like... like...”
He turned to Xochi and said something in Spanish.
“What?” Dean asked.
“Something about scorpions?” Sam said.
Xochi nodded. “He says the woman became a hole full of scorpion tails.”
“Charming,” Dean said. “Can’t wait to meet her.”
“Tell us what happened to the SUV,” Sam said.
“I no look. I run,” Ojon said. His gaze stayed locked on his hands.
“Is there anything else you can tell us about her?” Dean asked. “Anything at all?”
“She... she had a tattoo.”
“A tattoo?”
“Yes, a tattoo. On her neck. Una mariposa.”
“A butterfly?” Sam said, looking to Xochi for confirmation.
She nodded.
“Right,” Dean said. “Sam, make sure you write that down.” He turned to Xochi. “Look, he’s not telling us anything we don’t already know. I don’t think we’re gonna get anything useful out of this speed freak.”
“One more thing,” Xochi said. “I want his blood. For divination.”
That sent him flying over to the door again. This time he realized he could unlock it and was halfway out before Sam grabbed him around the waist and dragged him back in. He was flailing and kicking, shrieking like a howler monkey. Dean kicked the door closed and picked up the soggy gag, stuffing it back into Ojon’s mouth.
Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss Page 6
