Demon Hunts (24 page)

Now would be a good time for whatever other gifts the rattlesnake had offered to show up. I drew my sword and rushed forward to join Coyote in battle. He was bleeding and his jaws were red, and my appearance at his side was shock enough that he snarled and turned on me for an instant before he knew who I was. Then relief sagged his features and he turned back to the demon spirits, hunched low in preparation for attack. “You need to get out of here. We can't kill them, not here, but they won't stop hunting until your spirit has been extinguished. You really pissed them off.”

“It's a feature.” I fell into step with him, backing up, but the holler wasn't built to scramble out of backward. “You go first. Get up there so you can give me a hand out.”

He barked a protest and the twisted giant surged forward, slamming a huge first into the ground. The drumbeat faltered, then sped up, shaking the earth as if somewhere out in the real world, Gary knew what was happening and was trying to help. “Coyote, go! I've got the reach weapon!”

He snarled again, but my logic apparently swayed him, because he suddenly turned tail and raced up the back side of the holler. The demons, eager for their prey, leaped as one, converging on a single point.

Me.

I twitched to the side, faster and more graceful than I knew I could be. My sword lashed out, whipping like a saber, and blue power flared along it to score a mark against the giant's hide. One of the others, a flint-winged monstrosity, turned on a wing tip and jumped at me again. I flattened against the earth, rolled, and came up again in a fighting stance, all while my brain was still shrieking in panic and waiting to get crushed. “I am not your enemy!” My staccato shout bounced off the holler's walls until the only word left was
enemy.
The
a-seneeki-wakw
seemed to feed on it, getting stronger and taller with each repetition. I darted back and forth, avoiding scorpion tail stings and gnashing worm teeth sheerly by the grace of God, while Coyote stood above me barking his fool head off.

I wanted to scurry up the hill after him. I really did. But aside from the fact that I didn't think I'd make it, the blinding need to
do
something about these creatures, the simple wish to succeed in defeating
something,
since the wendigo kept kicking my ass, had grown stronger than the impulse to run. The
misses got narrower, and I got angrier, until I flung down my rapier and bellowed, “Fine! You think you can take me? Come and get me, motherfuckers!”

It was awesome. I felt like Samuel L. Jackson, right up until the motherfuckers came and got me.

I didn't know there was anywhere below the Lower World to get dragged down into. It turned out there was, and the best word I had for it was Hell.

The Lower World, for all its bizarre proportions and colors, was a comparatively friendly place. Dangerous, sure, but I'd yet to encounter a plane of existence that wasn't. The Lower World, though, didn't shove knives into my chest when I breathed. It didn't smell of sulfur and brimstone and fire, and it didn't reflect a gory sky in its obsidian surface. There was no sun, but where there was light, it shone dull red through dark translucent rock.

Demons roamed the gleaming black earth. They fought each other, they bled, they rose again. Some reached for the bleak sky, trying to claw their way free. There were rents where a few had succeeded: where a handful had been sufficiently inspired by my presence to tear through to another realm.

Peculiarly, now that they had me, they seemed reluctant to attack. My sword was lying on the ground in front of me, glowing so brightly it hurt my eyes. It struck me that the blade was really the only source of light. I could see the sky because of its brilliance, and where black stone looked red, the rapier also reflected there. I squatted to lift it, and the monsters shrank back, mewling and twisting their gazes away.

Demons didn't strike me as particularly smart, but my limited experience suggested they wouldn't, of their own volition, have brought me somewhere that I had the upper hand by dint of a glowy sword. Slowly, semi-consciously, I looked to my left. Followed the beat of my heart in that direction, half knowing, half dreading, what I would see.

A cavern, black maw in a black mountain, made one dark shadow against another. It looked warm, somehow. Warm and not exactly inviting, but more comfortable than a jagged plain filled with things that wanted to eat me.

“Oh no.” My voice came out light and shaky, an alien thing in a world made for screams. “No. I'm dumb, but not that dumb. And I don't believe you're Lucifer, God damn it, even if this is Hell.” I didn't believe it was the devil because I didn't believe there was any way, on any level of reality, that I could ever go head-to-head with The Devil Himself, and I knew someday I was going to have to face the thing under the mountain. Therefore, it couldn't be the devil.
Cogito, ergo sum.

Rich laughter rolled from the cavern, deep enough to make glassy rock crack and shatter against the ground. I bared my teeth, feeling very much like a mouse facing down a lion, and repeated,
“No.”

The earth rumbled, a scrape of stone on stone. A trapped sound, I thought with a tiny surge of hope. My mother'd done
a thorough job of kicking the Master's ass, if he couldn't wriggle free from his mountain cave even in what looked to me like the depths of Hell. It gave me a little confidence, and a little, compared to what I'd had, was a lot.

I didn't know what the creature in the stone was, besides an enemy. He commanded the banshees, feeding on the blood of their victims. Feeding on their souls, maybe, though I had the impression that was an act of desperation on his part, after my mother and I had thwarted his more usual dinner plans. He was weak, but he was interested in me, and I was going to have to deal with him someday.

Personally, I wanted that someday to be as far away as humanly possible. The monster in the mountain commissioned death cauldrons and frightened gods. I was in no way a match for him.

He knew it, of course. He'd caught my attention, or I'd caught his, the very first time I'd used any kind of power as an adult. I'd known instantly that I was part of some game to him, and that if he could destroy me while I was young and stupid he'd be happy to. He almost had, too, but my dead mother had taken him to the mat, and ever since he'd been lingering at the edges of my mind, unable to break through.

I didn't like that he kept turning up in the shadows. It made me think I was being investigated for weaknesses, and I had more than enough to show. It also made me afraid that Sheila MacNamarra's smackdown was losing its hold. If he worked his way free before I was up to full speed, I was pretty sure it wouldn't be just me who suffered.

On what constituted a positive side, the best he could do right now was send minions—assuming they were his minions, and not just foolish demons who hadn't thought through their attack clearly enough—to drag me around and try to scare me.
I was, by increments, becoming less scared and more pissed off. I leveled my sword at the cavern, willing power to carry my words to him. To weigh him down, too, as much as I could. Mom had pinned him. I should be able to reinforce that, at least. Silver and blue coalesced in the blade, almost humming, then leaped forward in a surge to rush the mountain like a locomotive. “You aren't ready for me yet, buster, and I'm not ready for you. One of us is going to pull a trump card sooner or later, but until then, quit dicking me around. I'm not in the mood.”

His presence retreated under the weight of my power, and all the amusement I was accustomed to sensing from him went flat. Triumph blared through me.

And was followed hard by a tremendous heave from my bound enemy. The whole mountain range shook, earth roaring protest at rough treatment. Glass exploded everywhere as the Master's rage surged outward as if it were suddenly a living thing given body of its own. My own puny magic went thin and terrified, riding the upswell, trying frantically to pin it back down.

It couldn't, but neither could he quite break through my silvery power clinging furiously to the earth and keeping him from bursting through. All my bravado went up in smoke, and I whispered, “Raven, please, get me out of here.”

The sky broke open under enormous talons. Red light bled through, sending demons squealing and scattering. My raven dived through the tear in the heavens and caught my shoulders to drag me back into the worlds I knew.

 

Coyote and Gary were both kneeling over me when I opened my eyes. Coyote had two black eyes, a split lip and a
host of other small injuries I couldn't see. I felt them, though, as wrongnesses in his aura, in his power. Without thinking, I clapped my hand against his face.

His yowl of pain turned to a gurgle of astonishment as I pushed a torrent of healing power through him. The bruises cleared up, cuts sealing over, and it was only as a distant second that I thought of patching the paint job on a vehicle; the metaphor hadn't been necessary. He fell back on his rear, prodding at himself, and raised wide brown eyes to me. Gary did just the opposite, leaning forward all bright-eyed, like he couldn't wait to hear what had happened.

“A snake,” I said before either of them asked. “A snake, like on my drum. They're symbols of healing, did you know that? It, I mean, he, it, um. Just cleared away all the cobwebs, kind of. Whoomp, no more messing around with metaphor. I can just do it.” Oh God. I needed a swoosh, now.

“They're symbols of renewal,” Coyote said in a deliberately pedantic tone. “They can also represent shape-shifting, Jo. The shedding of the old skin, coming into the new….”

I sat up. I didn't know when I'd fallen over, but I sat up. “He said there were other gifts I'd discover when I needed them. Maybe shape-shif…” Nope. I couldn't get through the sentence “Sorry. I just don't believe people can shape-shift, Ro. Maybe when you're traveling through the other worlds, yeah, okay, because I usually end up a mole or something when I'm trying to get to my garden, but not for real.”

Muscle went tight along his jaw before he bobbed his eyebrows in a shrug. “All right, then. Some other gift, then, if he's offering more.” I felt somehow chastised, and, contrary to the last, suddenly as if maybe I did so believe in shape-shifting, neener neener. Coyote, probably just as well for me,
couldn't read my mind, and continued on with, “You should thank him for the healing, though.” He glanced at himself, and muttered, “
I
should thank him.”

“I should thank you. I had no idea those demons had come up, Coyote.” Augh. He was right. I called him Coyote when I was trying to make an emotional connection and some variation on his real name when I was annoyed or trying to impart information. Good thing I never played poker. “I wasn't aware of anything except the quest. They'd have torn me apart if you hadn't been there. Thank you.”

He said, “It's my job,” but he sounded pleased. “But then what happened? You were playing them like a pro and then you threw down your sword and they jumped you and you disappeared.”

I'd already forgotten it was my own moxy that had let the demons pull me into Hell. I wondered if the Master could've influenced me, made me pull a stupid stunt like that, but the sad truth was, I just wasn't too bright sometimes. It'd been all me. “Know anything about someone called the Master?”

“From about six different science fiction television shows, sure.” Coyote's humor faded away when I didn't laugh. “Sorry. I didn't know it was important. Never heard of him. Who is he?”

“The bad guy.” I shook my head. “I don't really know. My mother faced him a long time ago, and it's going to be my turn sooner or later.”

“‘Unto every generation a Slayer is born'?”

Gary, who was apparently more up on pop culture than I was, guffawed. I glared at them both, but mostly at Coyote. “You told me I was mixed up fresh. No baggage like whatever you're talking about. This isn't a generational thing, not like that.” Actually, for all I knew, it could be.
Maybe the women in my family had been fighting monsters in the dark all the way back to the beginning of time. I hoped they'd generally been more competent than me, if that was the case.

“No, no, that's not how it works on B…nevermind. What about the Master?”

“He was trying to get my attention again. That's where I went. It doesn't matter that much right now. I don't think he's influencing the wendigo.” I rolled that statement around in my mind, testing it for veracity. It seemed accurate: as far as I could tell, the wendigo was after flesh and soul for its own survival, not for someone else's benefit. I'd been afraid something had been controlling it, but there'd been no hint of a link to another entity in my encounters with it. Besides, a soul-eating demon working for itself was plenty bad enough. “We can talk about him later. Right now you tell me, Ro. Am I in good enough shape to try this soul retrieval now? Can we take this thing before it kills anybody else?”

He said exactly what I didn't want him to: “I don't know. That you found a second spirit animal is a good sign. That it's a snake is probably even better.”

“The third one was a horse.” I spoke without meaning to, and looked over my shoulder like I'd see someone else to blame. Or maybe like I'd see a horse, I wasn't sure. Coyote made a curious noise a lot like his dog-form snuffle, and I said, “When I did spirit quests with Judy. I know they weren't right, but two of the three animals I saw were a raven and a snake. A copperhead, not a rattlesnake like came to me today, but a snake, anyway. And the third was a horse. Do you think maybe that's right? That maybe I should…” I wasn't sure where that question ended, but Coyote got up to take my drum off the
bed—Gary must've put it down while I was still under—and tapped his fingers against the smeared animal on its head.

“Raven and rattler. I don't know, Jo. If you're right, if this third animal was a coyote, then I don't think you'll find your third spirit guide until this has resolved.”

“Or maybe it won't resolve until I find my third guide.”

“Look, you kids are talkin' chicken and eggs here. It don't matter.” Gary reached out to thunk the drum with a fingernail. “We work with what we got, and right now that's Jo's two spirit animals and whatever you bring to the table, son.”

Coyote had upgraded to “son” again. I wondered if he'd gotten the promotion in the moment he'd picked up my drum and I'd almost thrown myself on him. It seemed possible. Gary worked hard at supporting my emotional well-being. Harder than I did, really. “It's gonna be enough,” he went on, “'cause it's what we've got.”

“Don't discount yourself,” I said. “We'd have already lost, without you.”

“Maybe so. So tell me what we know. It eats people, flesh and soul, and it ain't constrained to the physical world. What else do we know?”

Coyote and I exchanged glances, and I muttered, “Gary ought to be the detective here,” before saying, “It's cold. Everything about this wendigo is cold and snowstormy. Is that normal? I should've brought a computer.”

“My BlackBerry will do.” Coyote got it from his coat and sat on a bed, poking at the tiny screen with the stylus. “Cold, wendigo, what else?”

“It didn't just try eating Mandy. It stole her spirit, but it could be retrieved. None of the other bodies have had ghosts, which isn't normal with violent death, so maybe theirs were
too lost. Too eaten,” I said grumpily. “Maybe she wasn't lost, just lucky there were still bits of my shield hanging around. Or maybe it was more interested in getting a look at me than finishing her off. Or may—”

Coyote said, “Lost souls,” firmly. “Mine was lost and you found it in the snowstorm. We'll use it. I can always take it out again if it narrows the search parameters down too much. Give me a few minutes, okay?”

“Yeah.” I finally got off the floor, which was less drafty than mine at home, and pulled my coat back on. I was hungry, but I didn't want to eat in case we had to do more spirit stuff in the near future. Instead I went out to the balcony and looked up at the stars, whose presence vaguely surprised me. It had still been daylight when we'd begun the journey to the other realms. I waved at the Big Dipper, then knocked snow off the balcony railing and put my forearms on it, weight leaned forward as I lowered my head and waited for the inevitable.