Supernatural 8 - Coyote's Kiss

by Christa Faust

  “I know the pain of all my daughters,” she said. “Elvia’s pain, it is unspeakable.”

  “Then help me help her,” Dean said.

  “How?”

  Dean frowned. For some reason, in all the time he’d spent scoping her snakeskin cleavage, he never noticed she was not wearing a necklace. Not until that moment.

  “Huehuecoyotl said that you still have the lump of white copal that he gave you.” Dean touched his sternum. “He told me you kept it in a deerskin pouch around your neck, but...”

  Her mouth twisted into a smile and Dean heard a low smoky laugh echo inside his head.

  “A necklace?” she said. “That’s what he told you?”

  She delicately circled her own sternum with a clawtip. The heart beneath her skin began to flicker, pulsing with a hot, ruddy glow.

  “That lump of copal is deeply embedded inside my heart,” she said. “Just like the man who gave it to me. I cannot give it to you any more than I could give you my own beating heart.”

  Dean made a solemn promise to kick that shifty coyote in the nards the next time he saw him.

  “You know him,” Dean said. “Probably better than anyone.” Dean tried to remember what Xochi said about Huehuecoyotl. “His lies are more revealing than the truth, right? What do you think he really meant?”

  “I have never tried to take away my affliction,” she said. “Only share it.”

  Dean thought back to the cure Bobby had mixed up for him when Dean had been turned into a vampire. One of the main ingredients was the blood of the vamp that turned him. Clearly the Borderwalker that turned Elvia was dead, killed in the transition, but if these Borderwalkers have copal smoke for blood, then maybe all of them share the same smoke flowing through their veins. Smoke from the original piece of copal, currently burning inside the Alpha’s heart.

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Okay, look,” Dean said. “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, but can I...? Well...” He thought of the Monty Python sketch where they take out that guy’s liver while he’s still alive. There was really no good way to ask a question like this. “Can I have some of your blood?”

  “My blood?”

  “I know it’s a lot to ask on a first date—” Dean began.

  “Give me some of your blood, human,” she replied. “Or how about I just take it? All of it.”

  She took a step closer and he backed up, showing his palms.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “What I mean is, I think that’s what Huehuecoyotl was talking about when he said I could use the lump of copal he gave you to cure Elvia.” He knew he was on a highwire with this. One wrong step and he was screwed. “He didn’t really mean I should take the whole thing. He wanted you to give me some of your blood.”

  “And if I do...”

  He waited, afraid to push too hard.

  “You understand that my blood is smoke?” She tilted her head. “How do you propose to carry smoke?”

  “Right,” he said. “Yeah, well...”

  Good question. How the hell was he going to carry smoke? More than that, how was he gonna get it out of her body and into whatever he was going to carry it in?

  She slid one of her hands around his body and down over his butt cheek. For a second he though she was trying to cop a feel, but she took Xochi’s flask out of his back pocket and unscrewed the cap.

  “Hey wait...” he tried to say, but she emptied the flask into the sand before he could finish. “What did you do that for? I could have emptied that for you.”

  “You will have to breathe my blood,” she said.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Breathe my blood,” she said. “And then blow it into this flask.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Dean frowned.

  “Do you want my blood or don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Remember,” she said. “I do this for him. Not for you.”

  Dean considered himself to be pretty open-minded, but what happened next was probably up there in the top ten weirdest things he’d ever done with a naked woman. Well sort of naked. Sort of a woman. Anyway it was pretty damn weird.

  She wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck, claws sliding up through his hair in a way that was kind of sexy and kind of creepy at the same time. With her other hand, she pressed the claw of her index finger to her left breast. Her skin parted between the snake scales and thick, perfumed smoke began to flow from the cut. She pulled his head down to her breast.

  “Breathe,” she said.

  As he put his lips around the edge of the cut, it occurred to him that he really shouldn’t actually breathe the smoke into his lungs. He was no Bill Clinton, but he had no way of knowing if any kind of microscopic particles of it might be absorbed into the tissues of his lungs, diluting and weakening the blood that he exhaled. It had to be full strength and they weren’t likely to get a refill.

  He could feel his cheeks puffing up like Satchmo as he sucked at the smoke, trying very hard not to think about how utterly weird and wrong this was in every possible way. When he’d filled his mouth up as much as he possibly could, he pulled away, eyes watering and motioning for the flask. She handed it to him and he wrapped his lips around the neck, letting the smoke flow out, filling the flask. He screwed the cap on tight.

  He coughed, feeling sure that he’d gotten her blood up his nose. That heavy amber scent felt embedded in his sinuses. The tissues inside his mouth felt dry and strange. He was so thirsty that sucking on the sand where the Alpha had poured out Xochi’s whisky was starting to seem like a really good idea. He pocketed the flask and tried to think of something clever to say. Nothing came to mind. Talk about awkward.

  “Wow, yeah, okay,” he said. “So, thanks for that. I’ll call you sometime.”

  She didn’t answer. She just stretched out her arms in a crucifixion pose, closed her eyes and fell backward. Before she hit the sand, the sky opened and swallowed her. In an instant, she was gone.

  Dean really hoped this was going to work.

  When Dean finally made it back to the Rover, it was full dark. Xochi and Claudia were still shooting, using the headlights for illumination. Xochi was standing behind Claudia, shaking the girl’s shoulders to try and loosen up her posture. Claudia still looked tense, her whole body flinching with every shot. But she was hitting the plastic bottles more often than she was missing.

  When Dean called out to them Claudia turned to him, gun pointed unthinkingly in his direction. Xochi grabbed Claudia’s arm and pushed it down so the barrel pointed at the ground, slapping the girl in the back of the head with her free hand.

  “Don’t ever point a gun at something you don’t intend to kill,” Xochi said.

  “Sorry,” Claudia said, scolded puppy eyes all remorseful for a fleeting second, then bounding enthusiastically over to Dean.

  To his surprise, she didn’t throw her arms around him, although she obviously wanted to.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “What can I say?” he asked, pulling the flask and shaking it. “Chicks dig me.”

  “What is it?” Xochi asked. “Not whisky?”

  “Blood,” he said. “From the Alpha Borderwalker. Let’s get on the road and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  Dean took the first shift driving, explaining what had happened with the Alpha, but leaving out the details of how he had talked her into helping him.

  “So let’s say this works,” Sam said. “Which we really have no way of testing until it’s too late. But say it does, how are we supposed to administer this blood to our Borderwalker? You can’t put smoke in a syringe. Or can you?”

  “Maybe you need to breath it into her mouth,” Xochi said.

  “And you think she’s just gonna let me make out with her?” Dean asked. “What if she bites my lips off?”

  “I thought you said chicks dig you,” Xochi said. “I’m sure you can convince her.”

  “Hey,” Claudia said. “Th
is is my mom we’re talking about here.”

  “Sorry,” Dean said.

  “I’ll call Bobby,” Sam said. “We’ll see if he has any ideas. Meanwhile, we’d better stop for chow and supplies.”

  A while later they pulled into a strange little roadside stand that was the only thing open for miles. It was mostly outdoors with a tin roof on four poles covering a few cheap tables and a terrifying out-house kind of toilet with an old lady sitting on a lawn chair by the door. She had a moustache like Burt Reynolds. It took Dean a second to realize that she was selling toilet paper. By the individual square.

  Xochi and Claudia ordered a big mess of mysterious food, which turned out to be blazingly spicy and amazingly good, even after Dean found out that it was actually goat meat.

  After they finished their meal, Dean and Xochi headed over to the cooler for more beer. Claudia was buying something from a candy vendor. When she turned toward Dean, he saw that it was a pack of cigarettes. He watched her open it and stick one in the corner of her mouth.

  “Hey,” he said. “You can’t smoke.”

  “Why not?” She pulled out a lighter and lit the cigarette. “Because it’s bad for me? We’re all probably gonna die anyway.”

  Dean took the cigarette out of her mouth and dropped it to the ground, crushing it under his boot heel.

  “Because you’re fifteen,” Dean said. “And because I say so.”

  He held out his hand for the pack. She frowned.

  “What,” Claudia said. “It’s okay for you to get all bombed every night, but I can’t have one cigarette?”

  “That’s right,” Dean said. “You know why? Because I’m over twenty-one and you aren’t. Don’t like it, you can write your local congressman.”

  “We’re not even in America,” Claudia said.

  “I said no,” Dean said. “And that’s final. Now gimme.”

  Dean was expecting a big teenage tantrum, but she just bowed her head and handed him the pack. Dean handed the cigarettes back to the vendor, who gave Claudia a ziploc bag full of strange pastel-colored candies instead.

  “You are a good daddy,” Xochi said to Dean, watching Claudia walk back to their table with her candy.

  Xochi paid the beer lady, handed a beer to Dean, then took one for herself and cracked the cap using an opener on a chain locked to the handle of the cooler. Dean thought about his own father. About Ben and what Huehuecoyotl had said. He opened his beer.

  “I think that’s what her crush on you is really all about,” Xochi said, taking a swig from her bottle. “She just wants someone to zip her up inside his jacket.”

  Dean nodded. He took a swallow of his beer. There wasn’t anything he could do about that. He was going to do everything he could to protect that kid, but it would ultimately be up to her to sink or swim.

  FORTY

  Before they left, Xochi bought a bottle of tequila and some purified water. While Sam gassed up the Rover, Dean bought three weird, bootleg CDs from a blind kid who had his wares spread out on a plastic tablecloth by the side of the road. Dean paid a dollar for all three. Probably outrageously over-priced, but he didn’t care.

  “We’re covered tune-wise for the rest of the drive,” Dean said, showing the CDs to Xochi. “Check this out. This is gonna be Sam’s new favorite disk right here.”

  He held up a disk that was hand-labeled “SEX ROCK!!!” No information at all about what was actually on the disk. The other two were labeled “Lo Mejor de Led Zeppelin” and “Los Grandes Exitos de CLASSIC ROCK.”

  When they got back on the road, Xochi took the wheel and Dean rode shotgun, playing DJ with his new disks. The Zep CD was just what you’d expect and the “Classic” one was an interesting mix of obvious hits with more obscure tracks, but the “SEX ROCK” disk was the clear winner of the bunch. An astoundingly cheesy grab-bag of dirty hair-metal songs that seemed scientifically engineered to the precise specifications that would most annoy his brother.

  Three songs in and Sam and Claudia were ready to stage a bloody mutiny against Dean. He responded to their threats by singing along. When “Hot Cherie” by Hardline came on, it got immediately rewritten by Dean as “Hot Xochi.”

  “You get me hot, Xochi,” he sang, loud and shamelessly off-key. “I want what you’ve got all over me.”

  “You want this all over you?” she asked, showing him a gloved fist.

  Dean ignored her, singing even louder.

  “I’m ready to rock you long and rough!”

  Xochi swore in Spanish and hit the skip button on the CD player. Next up was “Smooth Up In Ya” by the Bulletboys.

  “Dean,” Sam said from the back seat. “I’m about ready to throw that damn CD out the window. I never thought I’d actually say this, but why don’t you put Led Zeppelin back on.”

  “Witnesses!” Dean said, pointing to Xochi and Claudia. “You both heard him say that.”

  “If I have to hear ‘Misty Mountain Hop’ one more time,” Claudia said. “I’m going to shoot everyone in this car. I can do that now, you know.”

  “In fact,” Sam said. “You know what? Pull over. It’s my turn to drive. Claudia, you got shotgun. I’m leaving the tunes up to you.”

  “Yes!” Claudia said, fist in the air.

  “No way,” Dean said. “This is not a musical democracy.”

  “It is now,” Sam said.

  The fact that Dean was still able to get on Sam’s nerves with his musical selection was weirdly reassuring. It was one of the few connections that he still had with this stranger in his brother’s skin. It gave him hope that Sam really was still in there.

  Xochi pulled over onto the dusty shoulder and got out from behind the wheel, stretching her arms up high above her head. Dean got out too.

  “You giving up?” Dean asked Xochi. “Just like that? I thought you were on my side.”

  “I’m not giving up,” she said. She pulled out the bottle of tequila and cracked the cap. “I just know when it’s time to let someone else drive.”

  She took a slug and then handed the bottle to Dean.

  “Good point,” he said. “I’ll drink to that.”

  Settled into the back seat with Xochi and the bottle, Dean realized that he was probably in for another night of sleeping with her but not really sleeping with her. This was going to require very careful calculation of alcohol consumption on his part. It either had to be less than the amount that would having him thinking it would be a good idea to make a play for her right then and there or else it had to be so much that something like that wasn’t even an option and he’d just pass out. Judging by the size of the bottle and the fact that he was sharing it with a thirsty girl like Xochi, he was thinking he’d better go with option A.

  Claudia was searching across the radio dial when a lush, dream-like song came on featuring a melancholy male singer crooning in Spanish.

  “This is Caifanes,” Xochi said. “‘Los Dioses Occultos.’ I love this song.”

  “Cool,” Claudia said. “Sounds almost like a Mexican version of The Cure.”

  This sort of music was way too girly for Dean, but he wasn’t really listening anyway. He looked out the window at the black nothingness they were driving through and then down at the bottle. Thought about what they were driving into. About the fact that this was probably the calm before the storm. Their last quiet night. He took his last swallow of tequila and handed it back to Xochi. Watched her drink. She offered the bottle back to him and he shook his head.

  “I’m good,” he said.

  She looked at him with questioning eyes, then shrugged and took another pull.

  The hypnotic, drowsy music had a soporific effect on everybody in the car. Everyone but Sam, driving silently and lost in his own unknowable thoughts. Claudia had curled up like a cat in the front seat. Dean felt weary and tired, but still wound-up and unable to completely relax. There was nothing to look at in the dark cocoon of the Rover except Xochi. He watched her wrap her lips around the mouth of the nearly empty
bottle, the muscles in her long neck working as she swallowed. She was making short work of that tequila.

  “It is funny, no?” she asked.

  She was watching him too.

  “What’s funny?” he asked.

  “I will admit to you something about myself,” she said. As she drank, her English got rougher, blurry around the edges. “I have never sleep together with a man as many times as I sleep with you.” She shook her head, waving the hand that held the bottle. “Only one other man. My husband. Ex-husband.” She shrugged. “With lovers, I do not sleep. I make love, and then I leave.”

  “Yeah,” Dean said. He looked away, at the dark nothing outside the window. “Me, too.”

  She downed the very last of the tequila and let the empty bottle drop to the floor behind the driver’s seat.

  “Sex is not trust,” she said. “Sleep is trust. And trust is difficult for me.”

  He didn’t say me too again. He didn’t need to.

  “But I trust you, Dean,” she said. “You and Sam. I shouldn’t, but I do. You are like my family.”

  Dean had no idea what to say in response to something like that. She clearly had quite a buzz going and was veering dangerous close to I frickin love you, man kind of drunk buddy talk. Under different circumstances it would be way too easy for Dean to steer that kind of talk in an entirely different direction.

  “Speaking of sleep,” he said instead. “We should probably get some. It’s gonna be dawn before you know it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You are right.”

  She slid across the seat and laid her head down on his chest. He just sat there for a minute, stunned and unsure what to do with his arms. Eventually, he gave in and put them around her so he wouldn’t have to keep holding them up the air. She snuggled against him with a wordless, sleepy noise, her hand sliding across his belly and around his waist. He looked up and saw Sam watching him in the rearview mirror with smug amusement. It was going to be a long night.

  FORTY-ONE