Her head could certainly have inspired the petroglyph. It was triangular like a fox’s, with huge green eyes. Encircling her head at the base of her skull, like a ruff of snakes or petals of a flower, long tentacles twisted and writhed like a wave, not precisely in unison, but not independently, either.
On the very top of her head were two shiny black horns, twisted and rolled back, like a mountain sheep’s. From the front, it looked very much like she had a pair of ears.
The full impact of her coloring was muted by the moonlight, and though I could see here and there a hint of green or gold, mostly she just looked silver and black.
She opened her mouth and let out a second angry roar. Unmuffled by the water, it dwarfed Adam’s howl, just as her bulk dwarfed the three of us. But it wasn’t the sound that scared me.
The front of her mouth was littered with long, spiky teeth—like the petroglyph’s had been. Teeth designed to spear and hold her prey. Her back teeth were just as nasty. Not grinders but huge spade-shaped sawing teeth. Teeth that could slice off a man’s foot, and she wouldn’t even notice until she swallowed.
She threw herself at us, and her head landed with an impact that almost knocked me off my feet again. Tentacles stretched forward—
“The land is mine,” said Coyote. “Here you do not reign. Not yet, and not ever.” He stepped between us and her, long, saw-toothed knives suddenly in his hands. “Just you try it. Just you try it.”
Head in the dirt, she jerked her tentacles back and screamed at him, a wicked, high-pitched sound, while she gave us an up-close and personal view of sharp teeth. Abruptly, she jerked her head back into the river, faster than such a large thing should have been able to move, and disappeared into water that roiled and drove great waves onto the shoreline.
Coyote turned to me. “That big.”
I opened my mouth. I was cold and wet, my middle burned where the river devil had grabbed me—and I had nothing to say. He waited for me to find some words, then shrugged and walked down to the indentation she’d left on the ground about fifteen feet from us.
“About six feet from one side of her jaw to the other,” he commented. “Nine feet from where her head started until the end of her nose. More or less.”
Adam watched him with pinned ears, then sniffed me over carefully. When he was satisfied I wasn’t too badly damaged, he grumbled at me.
“It wasn’t my idea,” I protested. “He threw me in.”
The grumble turned into a full-throated growl, and Adam took a step toward Coyote, head lowered and muzzle displaying his generous-sized ivory teeth. I hadn’t intended to send Adam after Coyote with my response. I hadn’t had a chance to let Adam know just who we were dealing with, not that it would matter to him anyway. I caught Adam by the ruff on the back of his neck in a mute request for restraint.
“Simmer down, wolf,” Coyote said absently, making the “wolf” sound like an insult. “I wouldn’t have let the creature hurt her.”
“Really?” I asked doubtfully. “What could you have done about it if she’d caught me a little faster?”
“Something,” he said airily. “Look at all the information we’ve managed to gather. Hey, did you see those otters? I’ve never seen otters that look like that.”
“They’re fae,” I said.
He grunted. “Never a good idea to plunk down introduced species without knowing what you’re doing.”
And he resumed pacing off distances, walking right out into the water. I couldn’t have gone that close to the river right then even if my life depended upon it.
“Assuming,” Coyote said, “that she strikes like a snake, we can estimate that she struck with half her body length.” He held up a finger as if to forestall an imaginary protest. “Yes, I know that a third is probably more accurate, but I believe in erring on the side of caution. Surprising as that might be to some people.”
He stopped knee-deep in the water and counted again on the way back to us. “That’s not good,” he muttered. “That’s bigger than I remember. I suppose she might have grown—or my memory is faulty.” He pursed his lips and frowned at the indented soil.
“Thirty-two feet from where I stopped to here,” he said. “That means between sixty-four and ninety-six feet long. Pretty big.”
His eyes traveled down my wet and bedraggled self and landed on the chunk of slimy fire hose at my feet.
“Hah!” he said, trotting over to me. “Good. I thought we might have lost that in the river.” He reached down and picked up the piece of the river devil.
“I feel like I’m lost in an anime movie,” I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. “One of the tentacle-monster ones.” Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.
Coyote rubbed the thing he held with his fingers, then pulled my shirt up with one hand, ignoring Adam’s growl and my “Hey.”
Sure enough, there was a swirl of damaged flesh all the way around my waist twice. I’d been afraid to look because these wounds seriously hurt. They looked like acid burns, I decided.
“Mmm,” he said, dropping my cold, wet shirt back down over the burns—which didn’t help, even though the cold should have worked as an anesthetic.
He took the tentacle in both hands and held it up, comparing it to me—and I saw what he had noticed. The chunk he held was about two feet long and it had wrapped twice around my waist.
“Must be elastic.” He started with two fists together and pulled it until he had both arms outstretched. “Yes. Stretchy, all right. What else do we need to know?”
He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his jeans—a smaller, less-threatening knife than the ones he’d pulled on the monster. “Werewolf teeth evidently are sharp enough to make an impression,” he murmured. “But steel?” The blade bounced off the rubbery, gummy thing.
“Here,” he said. “You hold this end on the ground here.” And he grabbed my hand and had me kneel and hold one end of the tentacle while he stretched it out. With tension and the solid earth beneath it, he managed to stick the end of the knife through the flesh.
“Okay. Steel isn’t a good weapon,” he said. “Good to know.”
The small knife went away to be replaced by one of the larger jaggedy knives. Like Gordon’s, the knife was obsidian. It wasn’t as big as I’d first thought, but it wasn’t small, either. It sliced into the tough skin just fine.
“Ah,” he said. “Inconvenient because these things are a pain, and they break. But at least they still work.”
He looked at me. “How are your hands?”
I looked down at them. “Cold. Wet. Fine?”
He grunted and stood up, tucking the piece of tentacle into his belt. “As I thought. Whatever makes that burn stopped as soon as Adam bit through it—otherwise, he’d be feeling it by now. Means it’s magic rather than poison or acid or something. Good for you and Adam, bad for us, I’m afraid.”
“Why?” Adam let me use him to lever myself to my feet. His ears were pinned back, and he’d kept his eyes on Coyote in a way that made me a little nervous.
“Because I can do this.” Coyote pulled my shirt up and set one hand against my bare stomach.
Icy chill spread from his hands—and the burns disappeared, leaving only my pawprint tattoo. He bent down to take a good look at my midriff and grinned at me. “Coyote. Cool tattoo.”
“It’s a wolf pawprint,” I said coolly, jerking my shirt down over it.
“Still mad about the unexpected swim, huh?” he said, whining a little, a noise that would have been more at home coming from a canine throat. “All in the name of information.”
“So why is the magic component bad for us?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Because we have a sixty-four- to ninety-six-foot monster to kill—and it uses magic.”
I had a thought. “Can you fix Hank like this?”
He shook his head. “No. He’s not one of mine. But I know someone who can. We’re going to need help here, kids.”
He pursed his lips and tapped his toes impatiently. “I know. We need Jim Alvin and his sidekick, that Calvin kid, to meet us at the Stonehenge at midnight tomorrow. Tell him to bring Hank. I’ll tell him what he needs to do, but he’s not going to believe in me. Sad that a medicine man will believe in werewolves, ghosts, and vampires and won’t believe in Coyote, but that’s what it is these days.”
“I don’t have his number.”
“Where’s your cell phone?”
“In the trailer.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled a felt-tipped pen out of an empty pocket and wrote a phone number on my hand. “Here. Call him in the morning. If you don’t, he’ll think I’m just a dream.”
He patted me on the head, ignoring Adam’s low growl. “Go in and get warmed up.” He wiggled his eyebrows at Adam. “I bet you know how to warm her up, eh?”
Adam had very nice big white teeth, and he showed most of them to Coyote.
Coyote veiled his eyes and showed his teeth in return. “Go ahead. Just try it. You’re out of your league.”
I touched Adam’s nose and frowned at Coyote. “You stop baiting him—or I’ll call my mom.”
Coyote froze, his face blank, and I almost felt bad—except that he’d been threatening Adam. After a moment, he inhaled.
“I’ll see you at Stonehenge,” he said, and walked off without a look back.
We were most of the way to the trailer when I saw what Adam had done.
“Wow,” I said.
A rocket bursting out of the window wouldn’t have done more damage. The window and its frame were toast, and a little of the outside skin had been bent up.
At least all the glass was on the outside. “Be careful you don’t step on the shrapnel,” I told him, taking the long way around the trailer to keep him away from it. My tennis shoes might be wet, but they were proof against a few shards of glass.
In the trailer, I stripped out of my wet clothes and put them in the sack with the bloody clothes from earlier.
“I’m going to need clothes,” I said, sorting through my suitcase. When I looked over, Adam had started to shift back to human, so I grabbed clean underwear and a T-shirt and gave him some room.
After I dressed, I found a towel big enough to cover the broken window frame and taped it up using some of the first-aid tape from the kits because I couldn’t find any duct tape. I keep a couple of rolls of duct tape in all of my cars. The first-aid tape wasn’t the wussy kind, though. This was the stuff that needed WD-40 to get off skin once it was taped down. I hoped the repair people would be able to get it off without damaging the trailer further.
If this kept up, I thought, noticing where a spot of blood had dropped on the carpet—it could have come from any number of things in the past forty-eight hours—we might just be buying a trailer soon. While I was staring at the stain, Adam spoke.
“You could have died.” His voice was rough from the change.
“So could you have when Hank shot you,” I said, trying not to sound defensive when he hadn’t yelled at me. Yet. Adam wasn’t the only one who had to learn not to get mad about something that hadn’t happened.
He wasn’t completely human yet. He knelt on the carpeted floor on the far side of the trailer, his head bowed as he waited for the last of the change.
Even when he was finished, he stayed there, his back to me. “I cannot . . .” he began, then tried again. “When I heard you scream, I thought I’d be too late.”
“You came,” I told him in a low voice. “You came, and I am fine. When you were shot, I would have killed the man who took your life and not cared. Not even knowing it was not his fault would have made me feel bad about it.” I took a deep breath. “And when I knew you’d be okay, I wanted to yell at you for not moving faster, for not being invincible.”
“What in hell were you doing in that river?” He still wasn’t looking at me, and his voice had dropped even further.
“Trying to get out of it as fast as I could,” I assured him fervently. I could feel his emotion, a huge tangle I couldn’t decipher except to sense the atavistic power of it. “Adam, I can’t promise not to get into trouble. I managed it for most of my life, but these last couple of years have more than made up for it. Trouble seems to follow me around, waiting to club me with a tire iron. But I’m not stupid.”
He nodded. “Okay. Okay. I can deal with not stupid.” But he still didn’t turn around. And then he added in a quiet voice, “Or I hope so.”
After a moment, he said, “I was not tracking straight through most of this. That was Coyote? The Coyote?”
“That’s what he said—and I’m inclined to believe him.” I paused. “It also appears that he is . . . or some aspect of him was . . . my father. It was complicated. I understood it, mostly, but I had to think a little sideways to do it.”
Adam laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it was a real one. “I bet.”
Adam was trying to come down from the wolf’s anger. I tried to find something to say that didn’t hurt me and wouldn’t make him mad.
“I guess Coyote playing at being human is why I am a walker, even though Mom’s not Indian,” I said.
“Your father’s not dead,” he said. “Your mom is going to be . . .”
“Yeah,” I agreed, clearing my throat and trying to sound casual. My father wasn’t dead—and he was. Had I really even had a father? Better to think about my mother.
“As much as I have this pressing urge to get back at Mom for orchestrating our wedding without consulting me, I can’t do that to her,” I said, looking at my bare feet. They’d been inside the wet shoes long enough to gain that wrinkled look and corpselike color. “She really loved Joe Old Coyote and . . . Curt is wonderful. But Joe, he rescued her, he treasured her.”
I thought of Coyote’s voice as he talked about my mother, and added, “I’m not sure that Curt could compete with the man she remembers—maybe even Joe couldn’t. And Joe is dead, really dead.” I cleared my throat. “He wasn’t really Coyote, just a suit Coyote wore for a while. Real to himself and everyone around him, but in the end he was a construct, and Coyote . . . Mom would figure it out eventually. But by the time she did, Curt might not be waiting around.”
Adam stood up then and came over to me. He put both arms around me. He didn’t say anything, just held me.
“My life used to be normal,” I told his shoulder. “I got up. Went to work. Fixed a few cars, paid a few bills, and no one tried to kill me. My father was dead; my mother was six hours away by car—I could even manage to make that trip last eight or nine hours if I worked at it.”
“Argued with your back-fence neighbor,” Adam said, his voice very gentle.
“And watched him when he wasn’t looking,” I agreed. “Because every once in a while, especially after a full moon hunt, he’d forget that I could see in the dark, and he’d run around naked in the backyard.”
He laughed silently. “I never forgot you could see in the dark,” he admitted.
“Oh.” I thought about it for a while. “That’s pretty good. Not quite up to my slowly eroding Rabbit, but you get points for that.”
Adam was a neat and tidy person, the kind of man who walks into a room and straightens the paintings. For years I used the junker car in my backyard to exact revenge for high-handed orders I had to follow. Had to follow because they weren’t just high-handed—they were smart. When I was particularly annoyed, I’d remove tires—never all four—and leave the trunk open or one of the doors, just to bother him.
He, evidently, had run around naked to bother me. I thought about that a moment more.
“Thank you for the years of entertainment,” I said.
“No trouble,” he responded in a serious voice. “Now that we’re married, are you finally going to do something with that car? Like tow it away or store it somewhere out of sight?”
I took a deep breath—and my lungs seemed to be working just fine with the awful my-father-who-wasn’t-my father lump in my st
omach gone.
“I’ll think about it,” I told him. “Maybe you should put it on your What I Want for Christmas List?”
“You okay now?” he asked.
“Okay.”
He tightened his arms and lifted me off my feet. “Mercy?” he growled into my ear.
I wrapped my legs around his waist. “Yeah,” I said. “Me, too.”
Adam could have died last night. I could have died twenty minutes ago. I wasn’t willing to waste a moment more.
At some point in the night he kissed my pawprint tattoo and laughed. “Did you really tell Coyote this was a wolf print?”
“To you, it is a coyote print,” I said firmly. “For him, it is a wolf print. Only I and my tattoo artist know for sure.”
* * *
I WOKE IN THE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF ADAM’S stomach growling under my ear.
“Sorry,” he said. “Too many changes and not enough food.”
I patted his hard belly and kissed it. “Poor thing,” I told it. “Doesn’t Adam treat you right? No worries. I’ll go feed you.”
My head bounced when Adam laughed.
“Let’s go find someplace to eat breakfast and get some groceries.” And then he proved that even when he was distracted, he still listened to me. “And some clothes for you.”
* * *
WHILE I WAS DRESSING, I NOTICED THE NUMBER WRITTEN on the palm of my hand and remembered I was supposed to make a phone call.
“Yes?” Jim’s voice was wary.
“Coyote told me to call you,” I told him. “He said that you wouldn’t believe that he was real unless I did.”
The man on the other side of the phone didn’t even breathe.
Adam grinned at me as he buttoned up his shirt.
“How is your husband?” Jim asked politely.
“He’s fine.” Even the red mark was gone. How fast a wound healed varied from wolf to wolf and wound to wound. As Alpha, Adam tended to heal even faster than most. I’d expected that to change since we were so far from the pack, but evidently it hadn’t.
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