Demon Hunts

by C. E. Murphy

  Pain blackened his face. “I’m pleased. Tell her, if the time is ever right, that I am sorry.”

  “I will.” I fell silent, entirely at a loss as to how to proceed, then turned my palms up. “Why did you bring us here?”

  “The demon hunts in my forests and leaves scars of wrongful death behind, holes in the fabric of life. It cannot be fought easily, not even with the magic and myth you command. To do battle with this demon requires strength bound to the earth and yet so flexible it can reach for the sky.”

  “Bound to the…I hope that’s a really poetic way of describing a shaman, Herne, or we’re screwed. All I’ve got is a pocketful of attitude. My sword’s not even useful.”

  He blinked at me, slowly. “Swords are forged, Siobhán, not grown, and will do you no good. But here: at the least, I would have the beast drawn to where its only prey are those who might successfully stand against it.”

  I breathed a laugh. “At the least. Thanks.” I reconsidered my tone and said, “Well, no, really, thanks. I mean that. But you know you left our friends out there to get eaten, right? Can you bring them here?”

  He tilted his head, fey motion that made him look more animalistic. “Some are closer than others, and none are as attuned to the old ways as you. It will take time.”

  “Better that than letting them wander around while the wendigo’s hunting. I don’t even know how we’re going to find our way back when this is over.” I liked how I said that, making the assumption that it would be we who were returning, and not it.

  “The forest will guide you.” Herne moved back, and I took a hasty few steps after him, tripping over my own snowshoes.

  “Hey. Hey, wait a second.” I glanced at Coyote, but he stood rooted where he was, his hands knotted around the bits of branch Herne had left behind. That was okay, as I wanted a private conversation. I dropped my voice to murmur, “You’re doing better, huh? The last time I saw you…”

  “I was wounded.” Gods, it seemed, had a gift for deprecation. Technically the last time I’d seen him he’d been dead, although that was only a mortal shackle he’d left behind. “I am still not well, Siobhán Walkingstick, not as well as I might be. Should the day ever come when I gain full strength, it may not be man who must fight man to set the forests aright.”

  “I look forward to it.” I did, too, in a perverse kind of Jimmy-crack-corn way. “Is there anything I can do?”

  A smile creased his woody features. “I think you, too, are ‘doing better,’ shaman. Rid this forest of its demon and you will have done enough.”

  A zing of doubt turned my lungs cold, even in comparison to the icy air. “Really?”

  Silence drew out long enough that I became aware I couldn’t even hear Coyote breathing. I was alone in the quiet of the woods, with its god standing over me to make judgment. “No,” he finally said. “No. Our slate may not be yet wiped clean. We shall see, Siobhán. We shall see.”

  I nodded, and Herne afforded me a nod of his own, deep enough to almost be a bow. I returned the honor, and when I straightened he was gone.

  Only then did I realize that, like the wendigo, he had left no tracks in the snow.

  ———

  “Joanne.” There was a strained note to Coyote’s voice, and I figured he’d noticed the same thing I had about the tracks. I turned around, searching for some kind of reassurance, and swallowed anything I had to say.

  Instead of the bits of broken branch he’d had, Coyote held a spear half again his own height in his hands. It was made of a white branch stripped of bark and polished, though knots and whorls marked its surface, so the haft wasn’t a straight smooth shaft like I thought of spears as having. Its head was black wood, so dark and shining that moonlight reflected off it like metal. A feathered leather strip bound haft and head, but I was quite certain that if the leather was taken away there would be a seamless transformation from the white wood to the black.

  I, Joanne Walker, master of the obvious, said, “Holy crap, you’ve got a spear! Where’d that come from?”

  From Herne, obviously, but not even Coyote’s expression managed to say that much. He just shook his head, then wordlessly extended the weapon to me.

  I actually backed up a few steps. “No way. He didn’t give it to me.”

  He gave the spear a couple of shakes and came toward me, obviously trying to get rid of it. I tucked my hands behind my back. “When gods give you gifts, Coyote, you do not go around handing them off to the nearest sucker you can find.” A lightbulb went off, and I almost ran forward to seize the spear regardless of what I’d just said. “Bound to the earth and able to reach for the sky. Trees. Duh. That thing’s meant to fight the wendigo with, and he gave it to you.”

  “But this isn’t what I do! I don’t—I don’t fight! I don’t even know how to use this!”

  “I think traditionally you stick the bad guy with the pointy end. My path’s changed, Ro. Maybe yours is changing, too.”

  I swear to God, you’d think I’d said maybe your grandmother has recently contracted syphilis from the way he glared at me.

  “Donno about his,” Gary said from out of nowhere, “but ours sure as hell did. Where are we, doll? How’d we get here?” He broke through the trees a dozen yards away, and I lifted my hands with a squeak.

  “Stop! Wait! We have all this unbroken snow, we should use it!”

  Gary froze with Sara a step behind him, both of them wideeyed as startled deer. I said, “Herne brought you here to keep you safe from the wendigo,” like it was a perfectly normal explanation. The funny thing was Gary’s eyes lit up and he went ah like it was, in fact, a perfectly normal explanation. Sara didn’t look so understanding, but nor did she push it, for which I would thank her later. For the nonce I pointed imperiously in opposite directions. “Both of you go that way. Make a circle. But take a jump forward so your footsteps don’t run into it.”

  There was a small kerfuffle while they got who was going which way sorted out, but peculiarly, they did as I ordered without asking why. I eyeballed the handful of steps Coyote and I had taken, then tromped a circumference slightly larger than that around them. “Mash everything inside this down, will you?”

  Coyote eyeballed me, but did as I asked while I turned around, trying to get my bearings. I had no sense of direction; Rainier was off to my left, but that didn’t mean anything, particularly under a sky too bright with moonshine to show me the North Star. After a second I stopped looking with my eyes and reached out with the Sight, trying to get the same sense of place in the Middle World that I could achieve in the Lower.

  The earth itself gave a confident thump when I settled on true north. I said, “Thanks,” out loud, and struck off that way, making a thick spoke in the snow. “Only walk inside these, okay, guys? I want the rest of it pristine.”

  Sara, more than forty feet away, muttered, “She’s nuts. She’s completely bonkers,” and the snow carried it to me clear as day.

  Carried it to Gary, too, who said, “Nah, she knows what she’s doing,” which heartened me more than I could’ve imagined. I marched back the other way, extending the line south, then ran around behind Sara to the most westerly point so I could make a cross-path to the east. I was sweating and panting by the time I was done, and everybody else was sitting in the middle admiring Coyote’s spear. My eyebrows waggled entirely of their own volition, and I rejoined them, trying not to giggle.

  Coyote looked up at me, eyes gold in the moonlight. “Is this circle meant to keep things in, or out?”

  I swallowed the temptation to give him the same answer Melinda’d given me, and said, “Some of both,” instead as I trod a little path at the outer edge of the inner circle. It was about ten feet across, plenty big for the four of us, and the snow was well-packed. I took my snowshoes off and stomped a smaller cross like the one I’d just beaten into the unbroken snow, only with the spokes at the lesser cardinal points. My footprints were deep, dark blue shadows—imperfect, but pretty. “Everybody, and when I
say everybody I mean you, Sara, and then Gary and then Coyote, in that order, stay inside this circle. This is going to be the keep-things-out circle.”

  Sara, sounding very much like a petulant teen, said, “Why me most of all?” but also blew the question off with a raspberry, which I translated loosely as because I’m not a magical fruit-cake and the rest of you are.

  “The larger one will be the keep-things-in circle.” I slipped mostly free of my body, letting my astral form rise up above the snow so I could see my circle’s shape.

  It was surprisingly—no, strike that—unbelievably perfect. I’d known I was keeping to straight lines with my spokes, but I had the advantage of following the earth’s magnetic fields when I was doing that. Gary and Sara were just winging it, but they’d done an incredible job. There were tiny wavers in the circle’s outer edges, but no obvious bulges or indentations. It felt strong and ready to accept whatever power I poured into it.

  I dropped back into my body to beam foolishly at Gary and Sara. “You guys are amazing. The circle’s amazing. Thank you. Okay. I’ve never really done this before….”

  The truth was I’d never done it at all. Melinda’s promise to teach me how to open a power circle loomed large, and I wished to high heaven that we’d had time to do that. That we’d made time to do it. I’d gone home and gone to bed two days ago when I could’ve gone back to her house to learn. That hadn’t seemed like an oversight at the time, but it left me with a thimbleful of experience where I needed a vat-full. Accidentally reactivating Mel’s power circle with Raven’s help wasn’t exactly in the same league as what I was about to try.

  I knelt where I was, tugging my mittens off to place bare hands against the snow. It was very cold, almost ice, and despite having been mashed down, sharp edges poked my palms. I resisted the urge to stuff my hands into my armpits to warm them up, and instead reached inside myself, eyes closed as I whispered to my power.

  Keep-things-out. I was good at that; I could build shields and sling them around with the best of them, these days. But I needed something more from the magic, now. I needed it to come alive outside of myself, to live within the circle until I called it back. I needed to not have to concentrate on it, to trust that the form I’d given it was strong enough to hold shape and protect my friends while I dealt with terrible things beyond its defensive walls.

  Purpose came first, in waking it. I felt my needs sinking through the snow, sinking into the earth, where they were absorbed and considered. I recognized in its strength an aspect of my need, and asked that it share with me what it could.

  I felt its pride in its own power, at the very idea that I should come to it and ask for help. There was spirit in all things; that was a tenet of shamanism, and I’d come to appreciate it more and more as time went on. Everything was imbued with purpose, and one of the many things the earth itself coveted was to give life. My desire to protect life wed nicely to that, and with a roar of silence, power rushed upward, greeting me, leaping into the boundaries set by my circle. My own power answered, containing it, tempering it, drawing vitality, until the two dancing magics balanced each other: my need and the earth’s willingness to offer. Rich clay brown wove through silver-blue, pushing and pulling against one another in an endless, sustainable flux of magic. It would hold, robust and true, until I brought it down again with the same deliberation it had taken to raise it. It would keep things out as long as I needed it to.

  I whispered, “Thank you,” for the second time, and clenched my fists in the snow in an awkward attempt to hug the mountain itself. My hands were blue and my fingers didn’t want to uncramp once I’d closed them.

  Behind me, Gary said, cautiously, “Jo? You’re…glowin’.”

  I glanced over my shoulder, realizing too late it might be a bad idea. Using magic made my eyes turn gold, and given how much I’d just called, I had no idea what “glowing” might constitute.

  Then I did a double-take at my hands. They were still blue, but not from cold, after all. It was magic running through me, becoming my lifeblood. This had happened before, me pulling down enough power to see through my own skin. I hadn’t thought anybody else could see it, though. “Sorry. Gimme just another minute and I’ll be…” Back to normal seemed like asking a lot. I’d left normal behind a long time ago.

  The second circle was easier. Keep-things-in. A net, a cage, a blockade. I knew those things pretty well, and the earth was, a second time, willing to give. It knew everything about closed mountain passes, about treacherous land that turned to silt beneath the feet, about all the tricks that could keep a man or a beast stuck where he was. Sides of a coin, keeping things out and keeping them in, and the world was willing to lend me its power on both sides. The larger circle closed with a flare so large that even on my hands and knees, I staggered, its sheer size taking more out of me than I’d expected to give. The burning power disappeared from beneath my skin, drained far enough to fade.

  Not an ideal way to start a fight. I dropped my head until my forehead almost touched the ground. “Coyote?”

  He was there beside me, offering a hand that I took gratefully. “Soul retrievals are supposed to happen in the Lower World, right?” He’d said so at least fourteen times, so I kept talking without waiting for an answer. “Can you open a door for me, if I need you to? You’re a lot better at it than I am, and I’m a little…dizzy.”

  “I’m not surprised. I think I can, yes. Just ask.”

  I’d never heard him sound quite so grim, and cranked my head up to study what I’d done that worried him that much.

  The circles I’d created danced like waterfalls from the heavens. Ever-shifting rainbows ran across them, my power mixed with all the hues the earth chose to offer. I could almost hear the magic hissing and crackling, eager to do as it had been bidden: keep things out, keep things in.

  And in the distance, I felt it: deep in the forest, Herne released frozen trees from his willpower, letting them relax back into the root-deep places they knew best. I felt how they had been a maze, a thicket, a briar, confusing and confounding the wendigo: fairy-tale trees fighting against the dark, refusing to let it pass during the brief minutes it took for me to make a haven in the snow. How, with their rushing branches carrying the wind elsewhere, the beast couldn’t scent us. I hadn’t known that was in the woodland god’s power, and I whispered thanks that he’d held the monster back as long as he could.

  I took up my sword, and stepped beyond the inner circle to meet the wendigo in battle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  More accurately, I jumped out of the inner sanctum, not wanting to disrupt the power lines I’d drawn. I landed in an easy crouch a few feet beyond its edge, and Gary began to play the drum. Its reassuring thump was higher than usual in the cold air, but it was familiar. The circle walls shimmered with its music, embracing it and growing stronger. I caught glimpses of the magic’s movement far above my head: the circles rose forever, ensuring the wendigo couldn’t leap in or out.

  It came for me in a straight line, unimpeded by trees, drawn by the drum’s song and driven by Herne’s command of the forest. It slipped in and out of moonlight, shadows rendering it black, but I could finally see it, a massive ruffed thing that ran lightly on the snow. It had regained its size, which boded poorly for Sara’s agents. Regret slammed through me before I set it aside to better face the wendigo.

  It was all tooth and fur and talon, with tiny crimson eyes. If it had anything left of humanity, it was buried under a raging animal. And that was a blessing: the beast disregarded the outer power circle’s border, charging across without slowing. Magic sputtered, allowing it entrance, and I saw a vestige of rational thought break through. It skittered on the snow, making as tight a turn as it could, and rushed back the way it had come.

  The circle held. Magic fluxed, colors intensifying where the wendigo hit, and it bounced back, knocked ass over teakettle by my wish to keep it there. I heard Sara very carefully not scream, the sound no more than a tin
y sharp intake of breath. Apparently they could see it, too. That was…probably good. I told myself it was good, and waited for it to get back on its feet. It wasn’t that I had any pride tangled up in a mano a mano fight with a wendigo. I just wanted to see how clearly it was thinking, or if it was at all.

  It rolled over, breaking snow as it went, and fell back to nearly the edge of the circle, staying just far enough away that the circle’s power couldn’t electrify its fur. That suggested another hint of cognative capability, which gave me hope that there was a spirit worth rescuing somewhere in the beast.

  A snarl broke from its throat, like it had heard my thought. It leaped sideways, not attacking, but exploring. Long loping steps took it halfway around the larger circle. I followed on the outer edge of the smaller, able to keep pace only because I had so much less distance to travel. Once the fight was met, I put all my money on it, speedwise, so even a few seconds to study its movements was a win for me.

  Increasingly physical or not, it seemed barely constrained by the laws of gravity. Its legs lacked the power to drive it in the massive jumps it took, but that appeared to be supremely irrelevant. It answered to someone else’s physics.

  Like the Lower World’s. I’d known I had to take the battle to it there, where I might have a hope of performing the soul retrieval, but I hadn’t quite thought of the wendigo itself as a denizen of that world. The idea struck me just before the creature did, and with almost as much force. Almost. Made physical, the beast had to weigh three hundred pounds, and it slammed me against the inner circle with all that weight plus momentum. We both grunted, and I choked on its fetid breath, but rather than attack again it skittered back, swinging its heavy head as it studied me, then the three behind me.