Demon Hunts (13 page)

Morrison saw what I was doing and made a very sharp, short gesture and pitched his voice bone-scrapingly low: “You have until the nine o'clock news to find a way to make this right. If I get called before then, if I have to make a statement, I'll do it with your badges in my hand. Do I make myself clear?”

My knees went weak and I nodded feebly. “At least Cor
vallis is at dinner with Ray right now, so she's probably not going to be breathing down our necks for a couple hours.”

Despite his fury, Morrison got an expression very much like the one I'd had when Ray had announced his date for the evening. He eventually said, “Ray
Campbell?
” like the department might have sprouted another Ray recently that he didn't know about.

I nodded, and Billy whistled. “Takes all kinds, I guess.” He put his badge and gun away very carefully, offering a quiet, “Thanks, Captain.”

“Don't thank me. If we get away with this I'm stringing you both up by your toes. If we don't, I'm crucifying you.”

I'd been skewered more times than I cared to think about, which gave me an uncomfortably visceral idea of what crucifixion might feel like. I looked over Morrison's shoulder, not wanting to read any truth in his eyes. The ambulance crawled out of the Tillers' driveway and stopped a few yards down the street, blocked by a black-haired man standing in its path. The driver leaned on the horn, then rolled down the window to shout at the man, who smiled apologetically and shrugged, but didn't move.

A tiny smile of my own was born somewhere around the fine muscles of my eyes, not even getting close to my mouth as it spilled golden happiness, rich and sweet as warm honey, all the way through me. It neutralized the worry bubbling in my belly and revitalized the tiny shred of hope I'd felt at seeing Mandy was alive. I thought my heart was likely to burst, and my chest filled with breathless giggles that I didn't dare let out. Even my hands felt wrong, but in a good way, as they alternated between thrums of thick aching heat and icy coldness with every pulse-beat. For the first time in six months, in a
year, maybe for the first time in my whole life, the overwhelming confidence that everything was going to be all right filled me.

The ambulance driver swung his door open, angry words a wash of meaningless noise to my ears. The self-imposed obstruction raised his hands placatingly, then shot me a direct look, one eyebrow elevated in amusement. My itty-bitty smile crinkled my eyes enough to turn my vision all blurry with tears, and finally made it to my mouth. I couldn't breathe, not at all, but I felt so light I thought I might be able to fly.

“Walker, crucifixion isn't a threat that should make you smile.” Morrison sounded justifiably annoyed, like I'd taken the wind out of his melodramatic sails. I wanted to promise that I had no doubt at all he meant he'd crucify us, professionally if not physically, but the little smile he was complaining about blossomed into this huge, foolish, jubilant thing that I laid on him like a blessing.

Then I was running just like an ingenue in a bad movie. Running across a snow-covered yard, vaulting the Tillers' low fence, and sliding across the slush-slick asphalt street to crash, joyfully, impossibly, wonderfully, into Coyote's arms.

Coyote caught me with a grunt that sounded like a laugh and squeezed hard enough to take my breath as he swung me around and around in a slushy circle. I squeaked and buried my nose in his neck, and he didn't let me hang on nearly long enough before he set me back, hands on my shoulders.

His smile was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, bright and gentle in a face that wasn't nearly as red-brick colored as he was in my dreams. Nor were his eyes golden, but the rest was as I remembered: straight nose, high cheekbones, hip-length black hair. He was a little shorter than me and smelled like the outdoors, and he wiped happy tears away from my cheeks. “We don't have a lot of time. How is she?”

I didn't care about the tears, didn't care that they tickled the creases around my mouth where my face was already getting tired from such a big smile, and somehow didn't care that I had
a hundred thousand questions that were all going to have to wait. “She's all right physically. Banged up. But her aura, Coyote, it's gone. Like nobody's home.”

He nodded, and though his joy didn't dissipate, the smile became something more serious. Something trustworthy and confident, something that I suddenly wished I could command myself. He took my hand and said, both apologetically and in a tone that brooked no nonsense, “We need to see your patient. Go ahead and drive us to the hospital, if you want, but I hope it won't be necessary,” to the incensed ambulance driver.

We let ourselves in while the guy spluttered.

Both paramedics in the back gave guttural sounds of protest that faded into uncertainty when Coyote said, “It's all right. We're healers. Excuse us, please.”

They both moved, and neither of them looked like they had the foggiest idea why. I didn't either, but I wished to hell I could do that. Jake Tiller, his face tear-stained, stared between us like we were aliens, and Coyote gripped the boy's shoulder a moment. “My name's Cyrano. This is my friend Joanne. You're…?”

“Jake,” he whispered. The ambulance driver threw the back doors shut again as the kid spoke, and a few seconds later we were in motion. “Jake Tiller. This's my mom.”

Coyote nodded solemnly. “I think Joanne and I can do something for your mom that the paramedics can't, Jake. Will you let us try?”

“Will it make her wake up?”

“I hope so.”

The kid nodded. “Then okay.”

One of the paramedics made another strangled noise, surging forward. “We can't let you—”

Trying to sound as calm and reassuring as Coyote, I said, “She's stabilized, right?” At the medic's reluctant nod, I offered a brief smile. “Then if we're right and we can help, you won't have anything to worry about. If we can't, well, this won't take more than a few minutes and we're already on the way to the hospital, so no time will be lost. Okay?”

“We could get sued—”

“You won't,” Coyote said with serene confidence, then reached across Mandy's still form and said, “Have you done a soul retrieval yet? Besides me, I mean?”

“Besss—” I bit my tongue on the
s
and tried to claw shocked thoughts back under control. There would be time later. There
had
to be time later. “Billy, a few weeks ago. But I know him, Coyote. I know him really well.”

“I'm here now. You'll be fine. We don't have a drum, Joanne, so I'm going to need you to—”

“I can do it.” For once I felt as confident as I sounded. “Where are we going?”

“The Lower World.”

I nodded, closed my eyes, and let the rattle of the ambulance over rough roads drop me into a world not my own.

 

Red skies and yellow earth, a flat sun and a world more two-dimensional than my own: that was the Lower World, in my rare experiences with it. I was certain there were other ways it could be viewed—roots of a mighty tree, burrows and hollows beneath the earth—but I saw it as one of the strange, not-quite-real worlds-that-had-come-before in terms of Native American mythology. It was beautiful and intimidating, and I knew almost nothing about navigating it safely. I said, “Raven?” into the empty air, hopefully.

My raven fell out of the sky, something glittering in his beak. He landed on the ground and dropped it, cocking his head first at me, then it, then back again before he pounced on it with both feet and tore it apart.

It was the shiny food I'd left him, Pop-Tarts wrapped in foil. He made delighted burbling sounds in the back of his birdy throat as he stabbed pieces of frosted raspberry tart and shredded the wrapper with his claws. I sat down, laughing, and stole a piece of pastry that had been flung away so I could offer it to him directly. He hopped over, snatched it from my fingers, and scurried back to his feast.

Coyote said, “This is a good sign,” and licked my ear with a very long wet tongue. I squawked and reached out to grab him around the neck without even looking. I had thousands of questions, and none of them mattered as long as I could hide my face in his neck and hold on.

He leaned against me hard, until fur tickled my nose and I sneezed into his shoulder. I sat up to rub my nose, then grabbed him again, scruffing the top of his bony head and pulling on pointed ears. “Where've you been, you dumb dog? I missed you. I missed you so much.” I could barely control my voice, even my whispers all shaky, and I tried to push relief so big it exhausted me away so I could ask, “How do we help Mandy?”

He rolled over on his back, legs waving in the air and neck stretched to try to nab a piece of my raven's treat. It quarked in agitation, wings spread as it hopped toward him, and he gave a coyote laugh and rolled away to sit up, prim and proper as a cat with his feet all in alignment. “I'm not a dog.”

“You look like a dog.” I never thought I'd be so happy to have that same stupid conversation again. Bewilderment and relief and joy knocked me flat again, and I toppled against him,
hanging on to his skinny coyote form. He pressed a surprising amount of weight back into me, and we sat together for a moment, watching the raven stuff himself.

When the bird was finished, Coyote stood up and shook himself all over, then cocked an ear at me. “You arrived first, and your spirit animal came to join us. You lead the retrieval.”

“But I don't know how!” It struck me that I'd spent six months fumbling through even when I didn't know how, and that probably relying on Coyote for all the answers was a crutch I couldn't afford, even if he was back. Lips pursed at the idea, I stood up and offered an arm to my raven. “A woman who greets the sunrise with music is lost, Raven. Will you help me find her?”

He bounced from the earth to my shoulder with a half-assed flurry of wings, like he could've made the jump without them but instinct forced them to spread anyway. Then he opened them farther, the better, I thought, to smack me in the head with one, and urged me into a run with strides so enormous it was almost like flying.

Coyote chased along behind in a long-legged lope. We tore across the landscape, leaving yellow fields and purpley forests for low hills that became rolling blue mountains. There was an odd flatness to them, as though, if we crested a peak too suddenly, we'd find ourselves looking down on plywood and two-by-fours propping up stage scenery rather than the back side of a proper mountain, but it never happened. Instead a storm came up, white howling blurs of snow that blocked out the mountains entirely. The raven leaped off my shoulder and flew ahead, cawing excitedly.

He was good at blizzards, was my raven. I wondered why he hadn't been on hand to help in the avalanche, though to be fair, one little bird against all that rolling chaos didn't seem like
an equal fight. The fact that I'd have put money on the raven was beside the point.

I heard a woman's voice crying through the storm and followed it, aware that other cries were gaining in strength as I came closer. They weren't like hers: she was asking for help, and the others were shrieking for blood. They had a terrible hunger, and Mandy, it seemed, could feed it.

We found her huddled in a snow-scoured igloo, though its protective curve seemed to have been born of her body providing something for drifts to lodge against, rather than from deliberate construction. A
thing
danced in the snow, no more than a formless blur in the white. It plucked at Mandy's hair, at her hunched back, at her exposed arms, and where it did, welts and blood rose up.

There was probably some kind of formal ritual phrasing to gain the attention of demons chewing up living souls. I yelled, “Hey, knock it off, you bastard!”

Even I knew it lacked elegance, but it got the thing's attention. It swung to face me in a disjointed ugly way that somehow suggested it had once been human, but that too many ligaments and tendons had slipped loose, and nothing could be counted on anymore. I repressed a shudder and stood my ground, hoping like hell Coyote would back me up when I got in over my head. “This woman isn't yours to torment.”

“She is marked for me,” it said unexpectedly. Its voice was a scream around too many teeth, words slurred but comprehensible. “She has the scent, the taste, the blood, of the wild world in her.”

Outrage turned the snowstorm red, and I fought it down, pretty certain that fury in the Lower World did other things more good than it did me. “She's not marked for anybody. I'm bringing her home safe and sound.”

“But she lives. She knows her path. She walks it. She shows me. I follow. I hunger. I eat. She is mine.” There was a gleam of ruthless greed in its half-visible eyes. Like the creature on Hurricane Hill, on the rooftop—and I was sure this was the same thing—all I could really see were claws and teeth, like they were the only thing tied to any level of reality at all.

“She isn't yours.” A flicker of an idea came to me. “She's an outdoorsman. Is that what you mean? Is that why she's yours?”

It swung its head heavily, whole body shifting with the motion. “They are all mine.”

Man, if it had marked all the outdoorsy types in Seattle as its own personal smorgasbord, I needed to get this thing six feet under a whole lot sooner than later. The eight or so deaths we'd seen were nothing in the face of how many people were going to die if it kept hunting. I swallowed and shook the thought off. I had to save Mandy first. “But she's not really what you want. She's weak. I see how you're looking at me. You can tell how much stronger I am, can't you? You know it from when we fought. That's why you didn't kill her straight out. You wanted me to come, so you could test me.”

A certain animal cunning came into the creature's eyes, and I wasn't sure if I was right, or if it was a new and enticing thought to the monster. “You couldn't find me on your own, could you? Even with all my power, you hunt the ones that go into the woods, and I don't. So you needed her. But you don't need her anymore. You can have me.”

Raven,
I whispered deep enough inside that I hoped no one beyond me could hear.
Raven, will you play in the snow?
I showed it a picture of what I wanted, and heard Coyote's teeth snap, the sound audible above the sobbing wind. Emboldened, I took
a half step back, beckoning the beast. “All you have to do is come and get me.”

It pounced, slower in this world than it was in mine, or I was faster. I flung myself to the side, hitting a snowbank in a spray of cold and ice, and lurched to my feet barely in time to duck another attack. Coyote and the raven zipped around each other a few yards away, gamboling in the storm, and I did my best to watch them while avoiding being eaten.

A figure grew up between them, a snowman in jeans and a sweater and with my short-cropped hair. The raven alighted on its head and shook itself, and color fell into the snowman: black hair, black coat, black pants, black boots. Coyote leaped up and slurped his tongue across its face, and a blush of flesh tones filled its rounded features and its blunt snowman hands.

The final time the monster jumped for me, I ducked, and it knocked my simulacrum to the earth with a howl of triumph, rending it with tooth and claw.

I surged forward and snatched Mandy's cowering soul in my arms, lifting her with no trouble at all. It was tiny, almost weightless, like a very young child, and I hoped that didn't mean it was dying.

Coyote said, “Quick, come on,” and I turned and ran after him out of the snowstorm, a raven winging above us.

 

I woke up still cuddling Mandy's spirit. The woman on the paramedic's stretcher looked thin and wan, while the ephemeral thing in my arms was bright but fading fast. I leaned forward without thinking, hugging her body close, and felt her soul slip away, settling back into the form meant to hold it.

Color sprang up around her, flat against her skin but visible: her aura returning a little worse for the wear, but indicative that
all would be well. Coyote murmured, “Well done,” and when I glanced up at him, his eyes were gold and his smile wide. “The rest is easy. Finish it.”

The blow to her head was nasty blunt trauma, a radial fracture like what happened when a rock hit a windshield. There was no blood below it, no sign of deeper trouble, and I tended the fracture with the images I was most comfortable with: new bone filling the cracks like it was heated glass melding a window together. Reluctantly, I left some of the bruising in place so she still had a goose-egg lump on her head. I'd offer to fix it later, but utterly obliterating the signs of injury when there were paramedics standing by seemed excessively complicated.

The bite on her arm, unexpectedly, was harder. It had a cold core to it, like winter had lodged in the bone and seeded there, difficult to root out. I looked at Coyote, but he only raised an eyebrow, a none-too-subtle hint that this was a test, and that it'd be better if I passed.

Vehicle analogies didn't work so well with cold spots, though the idea of a faulty heater crept in. It gave me a place to start, at least: from inside, like the wiring had gone bad, rather than from the outside where all I'd be doing was poking around at an external symptom of an internal problem.