Blood Oath, Blood River (The Downwinders Book 1)

by Michael Richan

  “We’ve got to finish off that skinrunner first,” Winn said. “Your mother can’t keep digging bones out of her skin forever.”

  “Dayton talked like it was going to finish me off,” Deem said. “I don’t see it. Based on everything Awan has told us, I’ve got the thing on the ropes already. We just have to deliver the knockout.”

  “Maybe it’s got more tools to use against you than Awan knows about,” Winn said. “They’re mutations; they change constantly. I think the best thing we can do is eliminate the skinrunner as quickly as we can, especially now that we know Dayton considers it a threat to you.”

  “We’ve got to figure out who the skinrunner killed,” Deem said. “When I get home, I’ll get on the computer and start researching.”

  “Let me know when you have a name,” Winn said, “and I’ll call Awan so he can hook us up with his sister.”

  “Speaking of Awan, did you two do anything in that motel room?” Deem asked.

  “If we did, I wouldn’t tell you,” Winn said. “It’d just get you upset.”

  “Maybe not,” Deem said, trying her best to be cavalier about the subject. She resented that Winn thought she was a prude.

  “I’m not falling for that,” Winn said. “You would get upset, I know you.”

  Deem knew he was right. She decided to let it drop and finish her meal quickly, so she could return home and start researching.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  “So your sister is gifted, too?” Deem asked, sitting in the front seat of Awan’s car. They were bouncing down a dirt road about a mile outside of Littlefield, headed to a small trailer in the distance. The sun was starting to go down.

  “A little,” Awan said. “Not as much as me. I think her personality didn’t mesh well with her ability.”

  As Deem wondered what that meant, Winn leaned forward from the back seat and pointed out the window ahead of them. “Are those cop cars?”

  “Shit,” Awan said. “She’s always in trouble.”

  Two police cars were heading back down the dirt road toward them. Awan edged his car to the side of the road so they could pass. He observed who was in the back seat of one of the cars.

  “They took Theron,” Awan said.

  “Who’s Theron?” Deem asked.

  “My sister’s boyfriend,” Awan said. “Wonder what happened. Well, we’ll find out. I should warn you, my sister is a little strange. It might be a good idea to let me do most of the talking.”

  Deem looked back at Winn, concerned. Winn was just smiling, as though meeting Awan’s sister was something he was looking forward to.

  At the end of the dirt road was an old trailer. Awan pulled his car up next to it and they all got out. There were junked cars and piles of metal garbage surrounding the trailer. Deem thought it reminded her of Mad Max.

  “Aggie?” Awan called as they approached the trailer. The trailer door opened, revealing part of a woman – just the part that the doorway could reveal. There was obviously much more of her beyond.

  “Aggie, these are my friends, Winn and Deem,” Awan said, walking toward the trailer. “What was that all about with the police?”

  “Theron was pissing me off,” Aggie said from the doorway. “So I cut myself and told them he’d done it. They hauled his ass away for domestic abuse.”

  She turned, the doorway revealing her side and then back. There was no seeing past her into the trailer. She was immense.

  “Aggie, I need you to find out something for me,” Awan said.

  The figure in the doorway turned, and sat. Aggie still filled the doorway, even five feet back from it. Deem realized they were not going to enter the trailer.

  “What?” Aggie said.

  “Deem here has got a skinwalker on her,” Awan said. “We need to know who the skinwalker killed, where he’s buried.”

  “Oh, I don’t like skinwalkers,” Aggie said, shaking her head. Large pockets of flesh on either side of her face continued to jiggle after she’d stopped shaking it.

  Awan produced a bottle of Johnny Walker Red and placed it on a wooden picnic table.

  “Just the one?” Aggie said, eyeing the bottle.

  “I’ll bring you another for your birthday,” Awan said.

  “These new skinwalkers, Awan, they’re bad news,” Aggie said, snorting a little. “You sure?”

  “We’re already down that road, Aggie,” Awan said. “She’s got to get rid of it. Talk to Bune.”

  “Name?” Aggie asked.

  “Evan Eugene Braithwaite was the victim,” Awan said. “John Carl Braithwaite is the skinwalker.”

  “You got something he can smell?” Aggie asked.

  Awan walked to Deem and took the banker box from her, then walked up to the trailer’s door and handed the box to Aggie. She stood up and took the box, then turned and slowly waddled deeper into the trailer.

  Awan returned to the picnic table and sat. “This might take a while,” he said. Deem and Winn joined him at the table. Deem felt little pieces of peeled paint crush under her butt as she sat down on the bench.

  “So what’s she doing in there?” Winn asked.

  “The only way Aggie has ever used her gift,” Awan said, “is with Bune. He lives in an abandoned well under her trailer. When she discovered Bune, she moved out here to be next to him. Placed the bedroom of her trailer right over the well.”

  “Bune is a ghost?” Deem asked.

  “Something between a ghost and a demon,” Awan said. “The radiation has actually mellowed him out. He killed the people who dug the well, years ago.”

  “How did Aggie find him?” Deem asked.

  “She was dating a guy who lived in Littlefield and was obsessed with metal detectors,” Awan said. “She was much thinner back then. He’d take her all over these parts, looking for coins and metals. She found this well when they were out here, and she struck up a relationship with Bune. Eventually she moved this trailer out here to be next to him. Like I said, it’s the only way she knows how to exercise her gift. They’ve come to some kind of mutual arrangement. They help each other out. I think, over the years, they’ve come to really like each other. Aggie’s put on a lot of weight, as you can see. She’s got the diabetes. I don’t think she’ll live much longer. But she’ll stay out here with Bune until her last day.”

  Deem stifled a cry of shock as a figure materialized across the table from her. It had the body of a man, nude, but the head of a dog – it looked like a pit bull. In a flash it climbed on top of the table and the dog’s head pressed itself against Deem. Its nose slid down between her breasts. She fell back off the bench, onto the ground. The man, on all fours, leapt off the table onto her, and ground its dog-nose into her crotch.

  Awan and Winn shot to their feet. All of the windows of the trailer were open, and from inside they could hear Aggie. “No, Bune! No!”

  The dog head continued to sniff Deem. She wanted to swing at the dog, but wasn’t sure if that would just anger the creature. Dogs stick their noses on people all the time, she thought, but this one has the body of a man. What the fuck do I do?

  Winn moved to pull the creature off Deem but Awan stopped him. “You don’t want to touch it,” Awan said.

  The dog lifted its head and moved up Deem’s body. When it got to her face, it began to lick her. The man part of the creature was now positioned over her body. The body was big, lean, and muscular. Deem could feel its erection pressing against her.

  “Goddamnit, Bune!” they heard from inside the trailer. “Get off her. Bune! No!”

  The dog lifted its head to look at the trailer. As quickly as it had appeared, it faded away and was gone.

  Winn raced to Deem’s side and helped her up.

  “What the fuck?” Deem said.

  “Sorry about that,” Awan said. “I forgot he can be a little exuberant around females. I’ve never seen him that excited.”

  “It’s ’cause she’s gifted,” they heard Aggie say from inside the trailer. “You didn’t tell me s
he was gifted, Awan.”

  “Oh,” Awan said. “I didn’t realize it mattered.”

  “Of course it matters,” Aggie bellowed. “Bune goes for us girls with the gift, don’t you, boy?”

  Deem shuddered, sitting back down on the picnic table bench.

  “You OK?” Winn asked.

  “I’m fine,” Deem said. “Just feel a little violated.”

  “I’m sorry,” Awan said. “It didn’t occur to me he might do something like that, or I would have warned you.”

  “So he’s a dog?” Deem asked, brushing herself off.

  “No,” Awan said. “Just a dog head. He’s much more than that. You know how, if you trance, you can get at information you normally can’t see?”

  “Yeah,” Winn said.

  “Well, you and I need proximity to do that,” Awan said. “I can’t just trance and start observing Paris or London. I can only observe around here, where I’m at.”

  “Bune can go further?” Deem asked.

  “If he has a scent,” Awan said. “If you give him something someone has touched, he can follow the scent anywhere. Including the past.”

  “Like a dog,” Deem said.

  “I think he was originally a rock demon,” Awan said. “Let loose by the people who dug the well. There’s a reason there’s no one else out this way; for years he terrorized the place. Somehow Aggie was able to communicate with him. He won’t talk to anyone but her.”

  “So she’s Bune’s master, in a way?” Winn asked.

  “Kind of,” Awan said. “He’s nice enough to her. But he can be trouble if he’s angry. That’s why I didn’t want you to touch him. I know a guy who lost an arm that way.”

  Winn gulped.

  “So Aggie has never done anything more with the gift?” Deem asked, her voice lowered.

  “No,” Awan whispered back. “Her whole life has been Bune, ever since she met him. It’s one of the reasons she let herself go. She really doesn’t care about anything else.”

  “Not even her boyfriend?” Winn asked.

  “The one she just had falsely arrested?” Awan said.

  “Point taken,” Winn said.

  “How long will this take?” Deem asked. “And do you think he’ll attack me again?”

  “I don’t think he will,” Awan said. “Aggie’s got a hold of him now. I’d give it twenty or thirty minutes.”

  Deem watched as the bats began to fly overhead, rapidly collecting the day’s bugs. She remembered when she was a little girl and thought they were “night birds,” fast little birds that flew only at dusk. She remembered a day when she was about ten, and one of them had gotten inside the house somehow. It flew rapidly from room to room, including her bedroom. At first she thought it was a bird, and she was delighted. Then it landed on her bedspread, a few feet from her face, and she saw its wings and little mouth, opening and closing, exposing sharp little teeth. She screamed, and her father came running. When he entered her room, he grabbed the first thing he could find – a large, thick bible that Deem had been given in Primary. He swung at the bat, and it fell to the ground in Deem’s bedroom doorway, stunned. Her father pulled the bedroom door over it and trapped it under the edge of the door. Deem hopped out of bed and examined the bat while her father went to get a bag to put it in. Having been whacked with a five pound bible, it didn’t have much fight left in it. Deem could see its eyes move and its mouth open and close. Suddenly she felt bad for it. It wasn’t the bat’s fault it had gotten inside the house. It didn’t deserve to die, just because she’d screamed when she saw it. She got closer to the bat, intending to pet it with her finger, maybe make it feel better. As she got close to it, it snapped at her and she screamed again. Her father told her to leave the bat alone, scooped it into a paper bag, and took it outside, where he dumped it onto the lawn. It sat there for hours. Deem would check on it every few minutes, waiting to see if it would regain its senses and fly away, like a trout that’s been caught and released but hadn’t yet started to swim. Eventually she forgot about it. When she checked on it the next day, it was gone. She worried the bat would remember her and hunt her down. Now, whenever the bats came out at dusk, she had a faint fear that they’d seek revenge for the one she’d harmed.

  “Alright,” Aggie said, reappearing at the doorway. “Here’s the scoop.”

  They all turned to face her. She sat in the doorway as before, filling all available space.

  “Somebody write this down, I ain’t gonna repeat it,” she said.

  “I’ll remember it,” Deem replied.

  “Alright,” Aggie said. “He took his brother down to an old mining shack south of Devil’s Throat. His brother was allergic to bee stings. He trapped him inside the shack, then he took a log and banged on the walls of the shack to stir up a hornet’s nest. His brother was stung hundreds of times, and died from the poison. Once the hornets died down, he buried him about fifty feet from the shack. That’s your guy.”

  “Can you tell me where the shack is, exactly?” Deem asked.

  “Well,” Aggie said, “you know the road that goes south from Devil’s Throat? Not the one that goes east, but the one that goes south?”

  “Yeah, I know it.”

  “Well, you take that road. It’s gonna go a ways. When you get near the end of it, it’s gonna jog a bit to the left,” Aggie raised her hands to illustrate the jog, her arm flesh reverberating from the hand movements. “Well, you go past that, and there’s another jog to the right. You go past that, and there’s a wash you drive over. You walk up that wash about a quarter mile, then go up a hill on the right.”

  “Sounds like the Hardesty Mine,” Deem said. “Is that it?”

  “I don’t know the name of it, honey,” Aggie replied. “But at the top of the hill is a rock. You go around it, and there’s the mine. Go further up the hill, and there’s the shack. You trance at the shack, you’ll find him.”

  “Thank you,” Deem said. “I really appreciate it.”

  Aggie extended her hand, wiggling her fingers. At first Deem thought she might be wanting to shake hands, but then she realized Aggie had her hand pointed at the bottle on the picnic table.

  “Awan,” she said. “I’ll take that Johnny Walker now.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Deem heard Winn honking in front of her house. She’d just removed a bone fragment from her mother’s arm, with Aunt Virginia looking on.

  “I’ve got to go,” Deem said. “Keep an eye on her,” she said to her aunt. “She should improve quickly, just like before.”

  “We’ve got to call the exterminator,” Virginia said. “Really Deem, we can’t go on like this.”

  “I’m working on it,” Deem said. “Trust me.” She left her mother’s bedroom and raced to the door. Winn was waiting in his Jeep.

  “Morning,” he said as she jumped in.

  “7-11, then off to Devil’s Throat,” Deem said.

  “Good morning to you, too, Winn,” Winn said.

  “Sorry,” Deem said. “I’ve been rushing around. Mom’s still under attack by the skinrunner. My aunt thinks its spider bites, at least that’s what I’ve told her. I’m worried she’ll get sick of digging the bones out and try something else instead. We’ve got to shut this guy down.”

  Winn pulled into the 7-11 and they both went inside. Winn returned with a coffee, and Deem with her usual Big Gulp.

  “You should get one of those refillable mugs,” Winn said. “At the rate you go through pop, you’d save money.”

  “I’m not middle aged yet!” Deem said. “Please!”

  “What, you’re saying only middle aged women use refillable mugs?”

  “Yes, haven’t you noticed?”

  “So you use a new cup each time, even though it’d be cheaper to do the refill, just because you think it would make you look old?”

  “I’m not carrying around a nasty old mug.”

  Winn shook his head. “Whatever.”

  They drove toward Bunkerville and then do
wn the small roads to Devil’s Throat. It was slow going, but they were used to the route.

  “I wonder how Jason is doing?” Deem said as they passed Devil’s Throat, remembering the events that had occurred there.

  “You should give Eliza and Steven a call and find out,” Winn said.

  “Or you could,” Deem said. “Been kinda busy.”

  “I wonder if Roy has tried out the EM gun yet,” Winn said. “He told me he’d let me know how it worked.”

  “I don’t know about you,” Deem said, “but Jason didn’t seem a hundred percent to me when they left. I mean, I don’t know the guy, so I don’t know what he was normally like, but he just seemed a little off.”

  “He’d just been ripped out of St. Thomas,” Winn said. “And then all that with Michael. He was bound to be a little off.”

  “It’s not that,” Deem said. “Something else.”

  “Oh, the residual stuff?”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m wondering how he’s doing back in Seattle.”

  “Are you sure you’re not just wondering if he remembers you?”

  Deem shot Winn a skeptical look.

  “Hey, he’s a good looking guy,” Winn said. “I can see why you’d be interested in him.”

  “I didn’t say I was interested in him,” Deem said. “Really Winn, you always assume everything’s about sex.”

  “I said ‘interested in him,’ not that you wanted to fuck him.”

  Deem winced when Winn said ‘fuck.’ Winn noticed.

  “What, I can’t say ‘fuck’ now?” Winn said. “You say it all the time.”

  “Not in that context.”

  “So it’s alright to say as a swear word, but not if it refers to sex?”

  “Right.”

  “That’s really kind of fucked up, no pun intended.”

  “You’ll never understand because you’re so crude,” Deem said.

  “And you’re just hung up on it,” Winn said.

  “No, quite the opposite. I merely think that sex is more personal and private. Doesn’t need to be discussed the way you do.”