Demon Hunts wp-5

by C. E. Murphy

  Sara shook her head, little more than a shadow in the dark. “I’m not. You haven’t changed, that’s all. You still hit things when you get pissed and you still think the world’s full of mystical crap only you can see. What’s to take?”

  If she was right I was going to spend the next three months in a depressive funk. I thought I’d changed rather radically in the past year or so. “You know, I really don’t remember that. Being into magic when I was a teenager.”

  She shot me a disbelieving look. “Seriously? You don’t remember making me do a drum circle with you?”

  “Not at al-oh, God. Maybe.” I put the heels of my hands against my temples, a sluggish memory rising. “Maybe. Yeah. Right after I got my drum.” Shaky relief slipped through me. I was pretty certain I hadn’t been freaky into the magic thing, despite Sara’s recollection. I had, though, been very excited about the drum, and maybe a little desperate to share it with someone. “You thought I was insane.”

  “You were trying to find my spirit animal.” Sara glanced away again. “I even almost thought it was going to work. That it might make me more like you.”

  “Like me?” I said incredulously. “I wanted to be like you. Pretty. Smart. Everybody liked you. I was all elbows and knees.”

  “No, you were tall and strong, and you’d seen the whole country. I thought you were cool.” That was a whole different slant on what she’d said earlier, and it gave me a little hope that maybe we had been friends after all. It shouldn’t matter, but somehow it did. “I mean, you were a jerk,” she added, “but man, you were brave. Never backed down from a fight, even after-” Whatever opening-up she’d been about to do, it shut down hard, with Lucas Isaac between us like he’d always been.

  My shoulders slumped. “Well, it turned out I was right about the world being full of mystical crap only I can see, anyway. I’m sorry about the rest of it, Sara. I really am.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said. Nothing’s changed. When we were kids you drummed up a badger and I couldn’t explain it. Today you say there’s a wendigo and I sure as hell can’t say you’re wrong, so there you are. Where Joanne Walker goes, so do outrageous answers.”

  I said, “A badger,” rather quietly, and Sara looked uncomfortable. I ducked a smile at the snow, just barely smart enough not to push it any further. We creaked through the snow in comparative silence after that, breaking the cold night with curses when trees shivered snow from their loaded branches onto our shoulders.

  I didn’t have a plan, but my feet were taking me up toward the mountains. Off the beaten trail, so I was grateful for the snowshoes. I bet some pencil pusher somewhere would be surprised to find out the FBI was now providing winter gear to members of the Seattle Police Department and a couple of civilians. Well, hopefully nobody would get killed and there would be no missing snowshoes to account for.

  Oh, what my life had come to, that I was casually hoping nobody would get killed. I stopped to thunk my head against a tree trunk, which was a tactical error on many levels. First, it rained snow on me. Second, it sent Sara on ahead without me. Third, and by far the worst, it gave Coyote a chance to catch up. “You can’t do what you did back there, Jo.”

  “Apparently I can.” I shook snow off myself and hurried after Sara. Gary got between me and her, leaving me to walk with Coyote. Some friend he was. Foolish friend, actually, since there was a good reason to have an-adept, as Sonny’d called us-paired up with a non-adept. Coyote and I could shield ourselves and a partner.

  Or at least I could. It came naturally to me, and pretty clearly didn’t come so naturally to Coyote. I let myself become aware of the Sight, its brilliance lighting the dark night as I slipped shielding forward to wrap around Sara and Gary. Coyote, grumpily, said, “That’s not going to change my mind.”

  For a couple seconds I considered taking the low road and being the old me that Sara remembered so clearly. Belting my mentor was probably in no way the right choice, but it did have brief, glowy short-term satisfaction in its favor.

  I took the high road, although doing so required letting a deep breath out through my nose before I dared speak. “I’m not trying to change your mind. You know what happens when I abuse my power, Ro? It bitch-slaps me. It stopped working entirely this summer when I screwed up with Colin and Faye. It knocked me on my ass when I used it as a weapon a few weeks ago. If putting Corvallis to sleep was out of bounds, I would’ve gotten a magical anvil dropped on my head. I’m not breaking any rules.”

  “Jo, this is serious. You can’t-”

  “Coyote, I’m being serious!” I stopped to face him. To get in his face, more accurately. To wave my hands in frustration, aware that with the winter coat and mittens, I looked more like a frenetic gingerbread man than a convincing orator. “Maybe you can’t, Coyote. Maybe it’s against your rules. But I’m not playing the same game you are. You can’t do this easily.” I gestured after Gary and Sara, meaning to highlight the shielding that encompassed them. “You can’t fight. You’re a hell of a lot better at the transitions to the other realms than I am, and you’re worlds beyond me in dealing with what you find there, but maybe that’s your job. Teach, heal, guide, con…con…consort, convert, con…” I rubbed a mitten over my face, trying to think of the word I wanted. “You know. Be the UN, in celestial terms. Talk to people.”

  Coyote, oh-so-drily, said, “Converse?”

  Boy. Nothing ruined a good rant like your vocabulary failing you. I said, “Yeah, that’s it,” despondently. “You’re my teacher, Coyote. You’re not my boss.”

  His eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. “Did you just use the infallible you’re not the boss of me as an argument, Jo?”

  My shoulders sagged. “Yeah.”

  “So who is the boss of you?”

  “Morrison” sprang to mind, but it wasn’t the right answer. Not under these circumstances. I could see Coyote waiting for it anyway, but I shook my head. “I don’t know. You’re the one who told me a Maker mixed me up fresh. Maybe that’s my boss.”

  I was growing increasingly convinced that creating new souls for any purpose was just plain mean. Ordinary people didn’t have active memories of past mistakes, maybe, but the impression I’d been given was that the choices made in previous lives did affect who people were this time around. Being told straight off that I had neither mistakes nor successes to draw from, consciously or not, could be a bit of a burden. Every single cock-up was one hundred percent me, no-holds-barred. I supposed it meant every single accomplishment was all me, too, but somehow that didn’t seem as impressive. “Or maybe none of us have a boss at all.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t know what I believe, Coyote. How about you?”

  “I believe you’re calling me Coyote again. That mean I’m back in your good graces, even if you’re yelling at me?”

  I scrunched my face and tilted it back to the sky, blinking into unshadowed moonlight. “I think it means I default to ‘Coyote’ when I’m thinking about you, but that it seems like a weird name to actually call you by.” I tipped my chin back down, frowning around me. “Coyote…?”

  “What?”

  “…where did the trees go?”

  He glanced around, glanced at me, and without saying anything else we rotated to stand back-to-back, eyeing the copse around us distrustfully.

  We stood in the center of a mountain glade without so much as footprints speaking to how we’d arrived. The trees were present, but distant-a good stone’s throw away, and I was certain we’d been surrounded by them when we’d started talking. I knew we had been. I still had snow on my shoulders from getting dumped on. Moonlight poured over us, undiminished by branches or clouds. Everything was colored as it should be, aside from the blue tint offered by the moon, and the sky wasn’t unnaturally close or alarmingly distant, as it might have been in the Lower or Upper Worlds. We hadn’t gone anywhere, then. Hadn’t fallen from one plane of existence to another, at least. Whether we’d gone anywhere was debat
able.

  I thought about it carefully, then whispered, “This is new,” to Coyote. “I never transported anywhere in the real world before.” I’d been knocked out and slid from one realm of reality to another, had journeyed vast distances inside the gardens of people’s souls, and had once chosen to physically get on a magical beast of burden and ride to another world, but the Middle World itself had never just up and changed on me.

  Coyote whispered, “Me neither,” which didn’t surprise me. I seemed to have far more dramatic adventures than he did. I had more dramatic adventures than most people. I could have gotten a lot of angstful mileage out of that thought, but Coyote hissed, “So what do we do?” and yanked me out of it.

  The glade was as silent a place as I’d ever been. Wind hissed over the snow, making the loose stuff on top dance, but beyond that it was so quiet my ears ached trying to hear something. Pine needles rustling against each other, the soft paff of snow falling from branches to hit the ground; the trees were too far away for those sounds to carry. And it was winter, and night, so any animal noises there might have been were already muffled or nonexistent. I had no easy way to tell if danger approached. Even the Sight told me nothing, just showed me a world ablaze with winter sleep, quiet black light offering nothing useful.

  Mount Rainier was closer than it had been, a gorgeous cone rising winter blue and black toward a sky so brilliant with moonlight I could see for miles. Awed laughter caught in my lungs, and for a little while, I forgot to worry.

  The stars only came clear near the edges of the world, cold moonlight swallowing them closer in. There were no city lights visible anywhere, no touch of humanity, and the snow-brisk wind smelled faintly of astringent sap. It seemed very possible that Coyote and I were the first, the only, human beings to have ever set foot on this particular bit of earth; that we had been brought somewhere utterly unspoiled so that someone might have a chance to marvel at its wonder. I said, “It’s okay,” as softly as I could, not wanting to disturb the quiet.

  Coyote made an incredulous noise at the back of his throat, but I caught his hand and squeezed it reassuringly. “Really. It’s all right.” My breath fogged on the air, wisps drifting away, and, smiling, I brushed my fingers through that faint mark of my presence. “Normally I’d say we were in trouble, because we don’t belong here, but this time I think we’ve been invited.”

  “Invited? Invited by-”

  I raised my mittened fingers to my lips, the gesture meant to shush my mentor. “Invited by him.”

  I nodded into the woods, and was unsurprised when a god melted free of the trees and came to join us.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  He was a woodland creature made of gnarled barky skin and dark tangling hair of knots and branches. His features were rough, little more than the impression of a face in a tree trunk, but his eyes were as I remembered them: brilliant emerald-green, like his father’s before him. He said, “Siobhan Walkingstick,” and extended a thin-branched hand the way a human might, the gesture all the more alien for its familiarity.

  “Herne.” I took his hand, breathless with delight and surprised by that. “It’s good to see you.”

  Amusement was a rare expression on a tree, but he wore it well. “Is it?” His voice was wind and rain on leaves, deep sound of eternity. “I think last time we met it was not so welcome.”

  “I was different then. You were different.” The understatement forced a laugh from my throat. “Right. Hey, Coyote, I’d like you to meet the Green Man, Herne. He’s, ah. Um.” I stopped talking, because my mentor was trembling, with tears spilling down his cheeks.

  “Spirit of the forest,” he whispered, and dropped to his knees in the snow. “Soul of the world.”

  I don’t know who was more appalled, me or Herne. Me, apparently, because Herne managed a kind chuckle, and put his leafy-fingered hands beneath Coyote’s to draw him up. “Spirit of the forest,” he agreed. “But I would not take on the burden of soul of the world, not for any reward you might offer. And I know something of rewards, and causes lost. There is an evil in the forest, shaman.”

  He hadn’t taken his gaze off Coyote, but I knew he was talking to me. I said, “Only one?” under my breath.

  He let go Coyote’s hands with the sound of branches snapping, and turned my way with sorrow etched into his craggy visage. “Many, but most are the works of man, and for now can only be fought by other men. This is an older hurt than those, and needs an older touch.”

  “Older-” I seized on that, hoping it was profound intelligence regarding the thing we were facing, but optimism died a-borning. If I was the “older” solution, then he meant mystical, not ancient. I didn’t qualify as old except by the standards of anyone under the age of eighteen. “Right. Older. I never heard anybody call magic ‘old’ before.”

  “Is it not easier in your day and age to follow the old ways rather than express it in laughable terms of magic and might?”

  Just what I needed. A woodlands god telling me how to euphemize my way around the difficult topic of my talents. I stared at Herne a moment, then smiled. It was just what I needed, in fact. I could tell Laurie Corvallis I was following the old ways and she could sit and spin for months trying to figure that one out. It was perfect. “It is. It’s a lot easier. I’ll remember that. Thanks. When did you get so wise?”

  What I really wanted to ask was when he’d gotten pompous, because he hadn’t talked like this last time we’d met, but I figured I already knew the answer. Being a god automatically pomped a guy. Besides, there was something useful about the airs and high-minded speech patterns: they helped remind me I was dealing with something a long way from mortal.

  As if him being a walking, talking tree wasn’t reminder enough. Herne gave his odd gentle chuckle again, and shrugged rough shoulders that shed flakes of bark onto the snow. “At the same time, perhaps, that you became comfortable walking the old paths.”

  “Comfortable? I don’t know that I’m ever going to be comf-oh.” So maybe he wasn’t so wise after all. I dipped a grin at my snow-shod feet, then looked up again. Kevin Sadler had been shorter than me, or at least, he’d come across that way. Herne seemed to be rather a lot taller, sort of oaklike in stature, except somehow he was compressed down to a less alarming size. I thought if I turned the Sight on him, he would overflow my vision as both his father and daughter had done. “Suzanne’s doing well, by the way.”

  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, Siobhan, 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, Siobhan 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, Siobhan. 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.