Supernatural: Coyote's Kiss (19 page)

“The
Nagual
are a race of shapeshifting witches,” Xochi said. “Both male and female. They can take on various animal forms, but cannot imitate other humans. Not all are evil; it depends on which gods or goddesses they serve. Why they are helping Teo capture the Borderwalker remains to be seen.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Next step?”

“We should go to Mexico, find my sister and the Borderwalker,” Xochi said. “We can find a place to talk to Huehuecoyotl along the way. But first...” She turned to Claudia. “I need to ask you something important.”

“Okay,” Claudia said.

“What do you know about the night of your real mother’s death?”

“Xochi, come on,” Dean said. “Do we have to get into that right now?”

“I have my reasons,” Xochi told him. “Please, Claudia, it’s important.”

“Nothing,” Claudia said. “All I know is that she died trying to cross the border. We have this... I don’t know what to call it, this weird kind of link, but I can’t see anything about what happened to her that night. It’s like she’s blocking that part from me.”

Xochi closed her eyes, pressing her fingers into her temples. She really wished there was some other way to do this. With everything else that Claudia was going through, she didn’t need be confronted with her father’s awful secret.

“I’m so sorry to ask you this,” Xochi said. “But I need information about what happened to your mother, and there are only two people who witnessed her unnatural transformation. One of them is dead, by his own hand. The other is you.”

“Me?” Claudia frowned. “But I was just a baby. I don’t remember anything about that night.”

“You don’t consciously remember,” Xochi said. “But the memories are there inside your head. I can help you access them if you agree to let me in. I think there is a larger force behind what is happening to your mother. If I can see exactly what went wrong that night, it will help us find who is responsible. Find them and stop them.”

“All right,” Claudia said quietly. “What do I have to do?”

“I don’t know about this,” Dean said over his shoulder.

He was back in the driver’s seat, where he clearly belonged. Sam rode shotgun, as usual. Xochi was in the Impala’s back seat with Claudia. She felt more than a little apprehensive about linking minds with the young girl, but she also knew that the world was full of hurt and heartbreak. No one could be protected from that ugly truth forever.

Xochi herself was hunting full time by the time she was Claudia’s age, staring death in the face every single day. More than that, Xochi was beginning to understand that Claudia was going to be a critical piece of the puzzle. As important to the success of the hunt as Sam. Maybe even more important.

“I’m okay,” Claudia said.

Xochi hoped she was right.

“Just remember,” Dean said. “Your dad—he was a good person. He saved your life. What you see that night, it wasn’t really him, okay?”

“Whatever,” Claudia said. “I’m fine.” She turned to Xochi. “I’m ready.”

Xochi gently cupped the back of Claudia’s head, pressing her palm to the girl’s forehead.

“This may feel... strange,” Xochi told her. “Don’t fight it, just try to relax.”

Then she began to recite the spell, easing her way slowly in.

The first thing Xochi encountered was a flood of memories, not of the Borderwalker, but of Irma, Claudia’s adopted mother. A woman with kind hazel eyes and gentle hands. Thick brown hair swept up into a simple twist at the nape of her long neck. A heart-shaped locket on a gold chain. She had an almost ethereal beauty, delicate, girlish and a little too thin, but always smiling. She stood in the kitchen with Claudia’s grandmother, cooking a huge pot of
menudo
on Sunday after church. In the backyard wearing a yellow dress, laughing and raising a hand to shade her eyes from the sun. In the living room, reading on the couch with her slim legs curled up underneath her, holding the book far away from her eyes because she refused to “throw money away” on new reading glasses when the ones she had were “perfectly fine.” In Claudia’s room, helping her make tea for dolls. Her father was there too, winking and pointing to his scratchy cheek, asking for a kiss. Lifting her up so high, seeming impossibly big and strong. Teaching her funny songs with bad words in them and her mother chasing him out of the kitchen with a wooden spoon. Him taking her mother’s hand and kissing it.

There were also memories of her mother in the hospital. A skeleton in pink terrycloth, barely breathing and lost in morphine haze. Claudia standing there nauseous and wracked with guilt for wanting to run away. For not wanting to touch that cold, wasted hand. For wishing she’d just hurry up and die already.

Xochi worked her way backwards, moving like liquid flowing through the years. As the memories got older, they became more disjointed, non-linear. Flashes and blurred images that Xochi had to pick apart and decipher. When she came upon what seemed to be a memory of being tucked inside a zipped-up windbreaker, she decided to dig deeper. There were other feelings associated with this memory, warmth and safety and a smell of drugstore aftershave. She worked through the tangled strands of this memory and into what preceded it. That was where she found what she was looking for.

Claudia is alone. Alone and cold and frightened in the middle of the night. Sand under her cheek and scratchy branches and curious insects and she wants to cry but is petrified, frozen in terror. Men are running, huge boots thundering past the place where she is hidden. The men’s eyes are all wrong, hot and glowing from within, like cinders. She can see Elvia, her mother. The men are hurting her, kicking her and tearing her clothes. Doing other things that Claudia doesn’t understand.

Xochi breathed a sign of relief when she realized that the men in Claudia’s memory are just looming monstrous shapes. She carefully kept her own thoughts about the unfolding scene to herself, trying to stay detached as she watched and waited.

The men seem to be finished with Elvia. They step away, one by one, but the last man reaches down and touches her. Touches Elvia on the neck and a terrible dark stain forms, like an inky bruise. The stain takes the shape of wings. A butterfly.

A cold, creeping dread surged through Xochi’s veins. How could she have missed all the signs? How could she have been so blind when the answer was right there all along?

The men walk away, heads hung low and eyes no longer glowing, slump-shouldered shadows disappearing into the night. Then, a woman. A tall, silent woman with no clothes on. The woman crouches over Elvia, comforting her and whispering, shifting fluidly from human to coyote and back again. Elvia reaches out to take the woman’s hand and the black butterfly on her neck begins to spread like a disease across her pale skin, ugly barbed tendrils that reach out to infect the coyote woman. There is a hole opening in the night sky, a huge pulsing wound between the stars. The coyote woman lets out a shriek of unbearable agony as the black tendrils begin to eat into her flesh like acid, exposing raw, smoking bone. A torrential gush of strange power is flowing like blood from the coyote woman and into Elvia’s convulsing body as the two of them slowly levitate into the air, falling away from the bloody sand beneath them. Then the coyote woman bursts into a shower of wet black rags that disintegrate before they hit the sand and Elvia disappears into the wound in the sky, a long crooning howl echoing through the desert night.

Then the big man in the windbreaker, and Claudia zipped up safely inside.

Xochi fought to keep her breathing calm and steady as she gently withdrew, disengaging herself from Claudia’s memory. She came slowly back to herself in the back seat of the Impala, taking her hand off Claudia’s forehead. The girl’s smeary soot-ringed eyes flickered, then opened.

“Trippy,” she said. “Was that real?”

“I’m afraid so,” Xochi said.

“Well?” Sam asked.

“It is so much worse than I thought,” Xochi told him.

“So,” Dean said. “Let’s hear it.”

“It is
Itzpapalotl
,” Xochi told them. Just saying the name out loud made her skin crawl. “The Clawed Butterfly. Queen of the
Tzitzimimeh
.”

Dean didn’t know what he was hoping to hear from Xochi about her spelunking into Claudia’s head, but that definitely wasn’t it.

“Wait a minute,” Dean said. “These zee-zee... whatdayacallits, aren’t they those Star Demons you told us about? The soul-eaters?”

“Yes,” Xochi said. “Those are the ones. And
Itzpapalotl
is the most powerful of them all. It was she who possessed those men and made them rape Elvia. It was she who put her unclean mark on the dying woman’s neck so that her rage would be intensified and her transformation corrupted. I believe she is planning to use Elvia’s unnatural power to transport her and her sisters through the Borderland and into our world. The
Nagual
helping Teo are obviously her servants.”

“Wait a minute,” Claudia said. “Who were those men who attacked my mother? Are those the men she’s been hunting?”

“Oh boy,” Dean said softly under his breath. “Here we go.”

“That’s right,” Sam said, oblivious to the awkwardness.

“Well, then why did she come after my dad?”

Dean looked at Claudia in the rearview mirror. She wasn’t stupid. He could see in her face that she already knew the answer to her own question.

No one said anything. They didn’t have to.

“Remember what I told you,” Dean said. “Your father saved your life. Hell, he saved all our lives today. He’s a good man. What happened that night wasn’t his fault.”

Dean took one more look in the rearview. Claudia’s expression was conflicted, but he knew that there was nothing he more he could do for her. She’d either find a way to come to terms with what her father had done, or she else wouldn’t and there was nothing that Dean could say that change that. So he changed the subject instead.

“So, Xochi,” he said. “Where does your crazy sister fit into all of this?”

Xochi took a breath. “My family has always worshiped the moon goddess
Coyolxauhqui,
” she explained. “All female children are dedicated to her from birth, including Teo. But when she wasn’t chosen to be the head of the family, she renounced
Coyolxauhqui
and all things relating to the spiritual realm. She said she cared only for the carnal pleasures of this life. I will never forgive her for what she did, but I still can’t imagine her becoming involved with something as loathsome and deadly as the
Tzitzimimeh.
Teo is not evil, she is just misguided.”

“I realize that she’s family and all,” Dean said. “But I got news for you. If she’s an active part of a plan to ferry these Star Demons into our world, that’s straight-up evil my book.”

“I’m with Dean on this,” Sam said. “Just a scratch from a dead one’s tooth almost killed my brother. What’s gonna happen when we have a whole pack of these things on the loose? And not only will we have the
Tzitzimimeh
to contend with, but we’ll also have all their soulless, zombified victims running around. Am I right?”

“Right,” Xochi said. “It would be the end of civilization as we know it.”

“End of civilization as we know it?” Dean asked. “Sam, didn’t we just stop an apocalypse last Tuesday? There’s gotta be a quota for that kind of thing, right? You know, one per family?”

Dean glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of Xochi’s face. She wasn’t laughing.

“Okay, before we start waxing apocalyptic,” Dean said. “A more practical question. Where are we going, exactly?”

“We need to cross the border,” Xochi said. “Not Tijuana. Nogales, I think would be best. I have a friend there who can help us.”

“I’m tired,” Claudia said in a very small voice.

Dean’s head was so full of everything he’d just learned that he had almost forgotten she was there. They had to be crazy bringing a young girl like her into a dangerous hunt like this. But without her, he realized, they would never be able to find the Borderwalker in time to stop her from opening the gate for the Clawed Butterfly and her minions. They had to face that Claudia could get killed on this hunt or wait and get killed along with the rest of the human race once the Star Demons had been unleashed. But the fact that they didn’t seem to have a choice didn’t make the idea of something happening to Claudia on Dean’s watch any more appealing.

“Get some sleep, kid,” Dean said to Claudia. “It’s gonna be a long drive.”