River Marked

HANK HELD THE GUN LIKE HE KNEW WHAT HE WAS doing with it. I bolted for him, but no matter how fast I moved, I had to cross twelve feet, and he only had to pull the trigger. But I wasn't the only one moving--his brother hit Hank's gun hand as he shot a second time.

Fred grabbed the gun and jerked it down toward the ground, where Hank spent his third shot. "What are you doing? Hank? Stop it."

Hank didn't get a fourth shot because I grabbed the stick I'd almost tripped over like a baseball bat and hit him in the back of the head, knocking him cold.

I wouldn't have cared if I killed him--and I might well have because the stick I'd grabbed was the fairy walking stick that had followed me--however it follows me--ever since I'd first encountered it.

No matter that it didn't have feet and wasn't alive, it was old fairy magic, and that was apparently enough for it to trail after me like a faithful dog. Though it was graceful and slender, the end was shod in silver and heavy. I might as well have hit Hank in the back of the head with a lead pipe.

Lugh never made anything that couldn't be used as a weapon, the oakman had told me just before he'd used the stick to kill a very nasty vampire. Lugh was an ancient hero of the Tuatha de Danann--I'd looked him up later. If the oakman had been right about the walking stick's origins, it predated Christ's birth and then some. It might even be older than Bran.

I dropped the artifact that had been old when Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas on the ground as if it were garbage and returned to my mate's side before anybody else moved.

Hank had shot Adam.

Adam hadn't even moved. He'd just slumped over on the stupid camp chair. That told me it was bad. Very bad. I could smell his blood.

As I reached Adam, Gordon was on the other side, plucking Adam off the chair with an ease no old man would ever be able to imitate. Adam was solid muscle and heavy, even in his human form, and Gordon couldn't weigh half what Adam did.

It didn't seem to slow him down, though.

I ripped Adam's shirt open so I could see the damage.

There was a neat hole with a sliver of bone sticking out of his chest. The good news was that his heart was still beating because the blood was pulsing. The bad news was there was no exit hole in his back, and there was too much blood.

"There's no exit wound," Gordon muttered.

"Noticed that," I said shortly. "Got to get it out yesterday." No telling if it was silver or lead, but I had to assume the worst. They all knew Adam was a werewolf, and the silver-bullet stuff was common lore.

I bolted for the truck and the supercomprehensive-when-hell-breaks-out first- aid kit stored behind the backseat in three backpacks. One of them had a surgical kit. One had bandages of all sizes. Another had various ointments and miscellaneous first-aid paraphernalia. I didn't stop to try to figure out which one was which, though they were color- coded. I grabbed them all and hauled them back to Adam.

I dropped them down beside him and knelt by his head--just as Gordon used a very small but wicked-looking black blade to slice into skin because the entry wound had already started to close. That could be good news; wounds made by silver tended to heal as slowly as they did for the rest of us.

"Hold him," grunted Gordon. "Jim, Fred--Hank will keep. He's not dead. Get over here. If he wakes up, we're going to need you all."

"He's awake," I told them. "He'll keep still. Probably better off if everyone else stays back. He'll sense them, essentially strangers, and come up fighting--and the four of us wouldn't be able to hold him if he decides he needs to."

I'm not sure if Fred or Jim had moved toward us when Gordon called them over, but they stayed back out of the way after I told them to. However helpful in getting the bullet out, unconscious was not a good sign. I found an explanation for it when I turned his head and discovered a bloody cut along his temple where the second shot had creased him.

It was already healing, so that bullet, at least, had been lead. Even so, if Hank had hit Adam in the forehead with it, it still stood a good chance of killing him. I owed Fred because I wouldn't have been fast enough.

I stroked my fingers over Adam's face, where he would smell me and know that I was watching out for him, then turned to watch what Gordon was doing. Adam was conscious; I could feel it. But he was trusting me to help him while he did his best to keep his body alive. Even if the first bullet had been lead, it needed to come out, or Adam would be sicker than a kid at Halloween for days until it festered out.

It was about then that I realized the knife Gordon was using wasn't some sort of fancy thing, painted black to make it look military. It was an honest-to-goodness obsidian knife. Stone knives, I remembered inconsequentially from Anthropology 101, were both sharper and more fragile than most steel knives. More important to me than the oddity of the knife was that Gordon looked like he knew what he was doing.

"Remove many bullets?" I asked, just to be sure. I scrambled in the bags until I found the surgical kit and a probe and a pair of forceps.

He gave them a look when I held them up for him. "Usually do this with my fingers," he told me.

Infection wasn't a concern with werewolves--or apparently to Gordon.

"A probe and forceps do less damage when you have to go in deep," I told him firmly. "I can do it if you don't want to."

I had so far in my life avoided pulling bullets out of people, and had no illusions that I'd be good at it. But me with forceps would be better than Gordon's fingers.

He gave me a gap-toothed grin and took the probe.

"Have to work quickly on a werewolf," I told him.

"Healing pretty fast," he grunted, sliding the instrument into the wound he'd reopened with the odd little knife. "Good news, I think, as long as we get the bullet out."

"Dominant werewolves do," I said. "And they don't come much more dominant." Thank goodness. Despite his earlier words, he looked like he knew what he was doing. "You've used a probe before."

He switched hands, holding the probe with his left and taking the forceps with his right. "Only a hundred or two," he said, closing his eyes. "Got it. It's up against his shoulder blade."

A silver bullet doesn't mushroom like a lead bullet does. If it had made it all the way through Adam, it would have left a neat hole going in and an equally neat hole going out. The bullet Gordon pulled out of Adam was squashed and had doubtless bounced around inside and torn up muscle and organs. More painful but infinitely less lethal.

As soon as Gordon's hand was out, I dried my hands on my jeans and hauled out my phone to call Samuel.

"Who are you calling?" asked Gordon.

"A doctor friend of mine," I told him. "And his."

A hand wrapped around the phone, and Adam said hoarsely, "Don't. Not until we know what's going on." He sat up, using his stomach muscles and not his arms. He didn't do it for effect-- moving his shoulder would be painful for a while yet. He looked at Gordon. "Thanks for the surgery. That felt like the fastest extraction I've had."

Gordon raised an eyebrow. "Do you find yourself saying that often? If so, I advise a different lifestyle."

Adam smiled to acknowledge Gordon's point, but when he spoke, it was on another subject. "You said something last night about river marked --about how Mercy wouldn't be a good slave. What's special about that mark? Did the river devil do it?"

He hurt; I could feel just how much. But he wasn't going to show it in public.

"River marked," Gordon said. He looked over to where Fred was exploring the back of Hank's head. "I do see why you are asking. There was once a place where a band of Indians lived. `Don't go to that village; they are marked by the river,' the people would say. `If you go there, you will not come back. They will feed you to the river.' All the people of that village wore a brown mark on their bodies, and they obeyed the hungry river in all things. I've forgotten the rest of the story."

"Check Hank," Adam said, his voice only a little more breathy than normal. "He didn't strike me as the shoot first and negotiate later kind of person. Even those crazy jarheads usually need a reason to pull the trigger."

Fred didn't protest the slur, just stripped off Hank's jeans and shirt--and found a dark brown oozing sore across Hank's back that looked a lot like what my calf had looked like before Gordon and his salve had come along.

I jerked up my pant leg. "Looks like what I've got."

"Could have happened when he was coming onshore with our boat last night," said Jim. "He didn't say anything about getting hurt--but Hank's like that. Coyote walkers are immune to the effects?"

Gordon grunted. "This coyote walker, evidently."

And when Hank groaned and started to move, Jim added, "I have a rope in the truck." And he jumped up to get it.

"We don't want the pack here," Adam said very quietly to me, explaining why he hadn't let me call Samuel, I thought. "First--wolves don't do well in water. Second--just think what this thing could do if he controlled a pack of werewolves."

"Wouldn't pack magic stop that?" I asked. If the river devil could control Hank, another walker, maybe it wasn't the walker part of me that had kept it from doing that to me. Maybe it was the pack--or even my mate bond with Adam.

Adam shook his head. "Maybe. But I'm not willing to risk it. Not unless things get a lot more desperate." "You heal fast," said Jim neutrally as he returned with a rope.

"Werewolves do," I said--and remembered that one of the side effects of rapid healing was an even larger than usual need for food. Adam needed to eat meat--lots of it, the rawer the better. He was holding on to his control, which couldn't be easy, with his wound exposed to all of these possibly hostile strangers. Alpha wolves can't afford that kind of weakness. He hid his pain well, but they all knew he'd been shot and they could see the blood.

"I'll get some food," I told him.

"No," Adam said, holding on to my arm before I could go. "Not yet. We'll get this meeting over with first."

He didn't want to betray any more weakness among these people. I supposed I could understand it, but it didn't make me happy. But he was Alpha, and I was his mate. I'd argue with him in private . . . Okay, who was I kidding? I'd argue with him in front of the pack. But not in front of strangers. Not when he was hurt, anyway.

He glanced at the others, who were mostly working on restraining Hank with Jim's rope. Gordon had gone over to supervise the others.

Adam raised his good hand to me, and said quietly, "Give me a hand up."

I did, and tried not to show how much strength it required to get him on his feet. He walked--only a little stiffly--to the picnic table and leaned a hip on it. Apparently, he was satisfied with the job Fred was doing because he didn't say anything until Fred had finished hog-tying his brother.

It is difficult to tie up a person so he can't escape. When I was about ten, a whole bunch of us kids in Aspen Creek, inspired by some movie or other, spent a whole month tying one another up at recess with jump ropes until Bran came and put a stop to it. He probably wouldn't have bothered if we hadn't left Jem Goodnight tied to the swing set after the bell rang. We felt pretty justified because Jem told us that no girl could tie him up in such a way that he couldn't get out of it. "Girls," he'd pronounced, "can't tie knots."

It had taken us three recesses to get it right, but after a half hour of working on it, it had taken Bran's knife to finally free Jem. I could tie knots, girl or no. Bryan, who'd once been a sailor on the tall ships with sails, had worked with me since I first tied my own shoes.

Adam's phone rang, and he glanced at the screen before he answered it. With a grimace he opened it, and said, "I'm fine, Darryl. Just a misunderstanding." Pack bonds could be a nuisance sometimes, like when Adam had been shot and didn't want the pack to come running.

"You're hurt," said Darryl's voice, and I think the only person who didn't hear him was Jim.

"It's minor."

"Felt like you got shot," Darryl said dryly. "I know what a bullet feels like. You had a misunderstanding on your honeymoon that resulted in your getting shot? We could be there in a couple of hours."

"It was a misunderstanding," growled Adam, speaking slower, as if that would make Darryl more compliant. "Stay where you are. I'll call you in if I need you."

There was a pause. "Let me talk to Mercy."

"Who is Alpha?" Adam's voice was a low threat.

"You are," I told him, and snatched the phone out of his hand. "But this is payback for your making poor Darryl watch out for me when you were in D.C. Hey, Darryl. He got shot with a .38 in the shoulder, lead. We're not sure exactly what's going on right now other than the excitement is over for the night. If we need you, we'll call you. Right now, that's looking like it might not be a really good idea."

"Boss man is okay?"

"Grumpy," which was shorthand for hurt, which I wouldn't say, and Darryl would understand that. Wolves never admit how badly they're hurt. "But he's okay. We are safe and not in need of rescue."

"Good enough. I'm keeping the bags packed in case something changes." "How's Jesse?" I asked. "Has she been throwing parties and living wild?" Jesse made a good change of topic because both Adam and Darryl relaxed as soon as Darryl responded.

"She dyed her hair orange, and it has these glittering purple strings in it," he said, sounding moderately aghast and intrigued at the same time. "I figured since she does it when Adam is in charge, he wouldn't kill me. Does she know that too much dyeing could make her hair turn green?"

I snorted. "Her hair was green. Did you miss it?"

"I forgot," he said. "Maybe not having kids is a good idea after all. Tell the boss all is okay here."

"Will do," I said. "Good night."

I handed the phone back to the wolf who was my mate. "They'll stay home."

He put his phone away without a word, but I could see his dimple peeking out. Jesse's disconcerting the intellectual and physical giant who was Adam's second was pretty funny to think about.

"Sorry," Adam said to the others. "Urgent business, unless you want to be neck-deep in werewolves."

"He knew you were hurt?" Fred asked.

"He's pack," Adam told him. Then, maybe to forestall questions about things Bran didn't want the public to know about werewolves, he continued briskly, "Here's what we need to figure out about whatever is in the river. How much harm is this creature doing? We don't really have a lot of data to go on other than a lot of scary talk about monsters. As the sole representative of monsters here, it is my . . . obligation to make certain we are looking at this with a balanced perspective. I am sorry that Benny's sister was killed and Benny injured. However, people are injured by"--he hesitated--"bear attacks, too. Just because something is dangerous does not make it evil. Was it defending its territory? Are we correct that it is a single beast? How intelligent is it? Can we bargain to keep people safe? Should we kill the last or near last of its kind because it has killed a woman and hurt her brother? Is there a way to salvage this situation with no more deaths?"

When you are a werewolf, I thought, it's a little hard to point at another predator, and shout, "It's a scary monster, kill it! Kill it!" I rubbed my calf though it wasn't itching at the moment.

Hank's eyes were open, but he didn't say anything or look at anyone. Instead, he stared at the river with such intensity that I shivered.

"I have a friend in River Patrol," said Fred. "I can find out how many casualties there have been in the river." He looked at Gordon. "Is there any story about how someone is freed from this mark?"

Gordon shook his head. "I do not know. But I will ask around." He looked at Adam. "It is not something you can bargain with, Mr. Hauptman. It is Hunger."

"I'm a werewolf," Adam told him. "People would have said that about me a century ago, too."

"This," said Gordon, "is nothing so benign as a werewolf or a grizzly bear."

Fred, kneeling on the ground next to his hog- tied brother, frowned suddenly at Gordon. "I thought you'd come with them"--he tipped his head toward the trailer, so he meant Adam and me --"until you named yourself Calvin's grandfather. But Calvin Seeker's father's father is dead. I know his mother's father. How is it you are his grandfather?"

Gordon smiled, the gap in front making him look as harmless as I was suddenly certain he wasn't. "I'm an old man," he told Fred. "How should I remember this?"

"I'll vouch for Gordon," said Jim, though he didn't sound enthusiastic or certain of it. "And so will Calvin. I think we ought to get Hank to the hospital, where they can check him. He doesn't seem to be tracking very well."

"I hit him pretty hard," I said, almost apologetically, which was as good as I could do, given that he'd shot Adam. "I didn't realize I'd grabbed my walking stick and not just some random stick until afterward."

"Understandable," said Fred unexpectedly. "My wife would take a baseball bat to someone who shot me."

"Has," said Jim. "I remember. It was Hank that time, too, wasn't it?"

"He didn't mean to," said Fred. "It was in Iraq-- Desert Storm. I startled him on sentry-go, and he shot me. Meant I beat him back by a month. He showed up at my house to see how I was, and my Molly chased him around the front yard with my boy's bat until she got him in the backside. Good thing it was a plastic bat, or Hank wouldn't be walking now."

THEY LEFT. JIM, FRED, AND HANK TOOK JIM'S TRUCK with Hank bound and laid out as comfortably as possible in the truck bed, with his brother to steady him. I rode up with them to let them out, and by the time I got back, Adam was alone. He was standing up--I think because if he sat down, he was worried he couldn't get up again.

"Food," I told him. But he shook his head. "No. Shower. Then food. After I eat, I'll want to sleep. Can't safely sleep covered in blood and risk the wolf waking up without me and panicking him."

He was worried that he'd be weak enough when he slept that he couldn't control his wolf. For the wolf, all the blood would be all it took to wake up defensive and ready to fight. He had a point--the dark hid the worst of it, but there was no denying that he and I were covered in his blood.

"Okay," I said, and ran into the trailer to grab clean clothes and towels. I got back out and made him get in the truck because "I can't carry you if you go down hard." He didn't argue much, which showed me how badly he was hurting.

We showered together in the men's room, because that was the direction he headed and, well, there was no one else in the campground, so what did it matter which side we went in? The men's room was done in browns rather than greens, but it had the same huge shower stalls with big showerheads. By the end of the shower, he was leaning on me pretty heavily.

"Maybe I should have just washed up with a wet cloth and changed clothes," he admitted.

The mark on his chest, where Gordon had opened a path to the bullet, was a dark, angry red, but it would heal as soon as the rest of the damage did. Shift to wolf, food, and sleep would see him right.

"Mercy," he said. "I'll be okay."

I controlled myself because he had enough to worry about without me setting his wolf off. "Sorry. I know you will." I growled a little, not seriously, just enough so he knew I wasn't happy. "I don't like it that you are hurt. I like it even less that it could have been worse."

"Good." He lifted his head into the water. "I'll try to make sure that you always feel that way. My mother used to threaten to shoot my father."

He could barely stand up, and he was making jokes.

I nipped his shoulder. "I can see why she might feel the urge. Tell you what. If you make me mad enough to aim a gun at you--I'll aim for right between your eyes."

"So I won't feel it?" he asked.

I nipped him again, but gently, just a scrape of my teeth. "No. So the bullet will just bounce off your hard head."

He laughed. "Birds of a feather, Mercy."

If Hank had loaded his gun with silver, I might never have heard that laugh again.

Two years ago, silver bullets meant someone had to make them--I'd made my share. After the wolves had come out, suddenly people could buy silver bullets at Wal-Mart. Cops were unhappy about it because silver works pretty slick as an armor-piercing round, but without legislation, anyone who wanted to spend thirty dollars on a bullet could get one. Hank had known what Adam was, and still his gun had been loaded with lead. To me that indicated that he hadn't been planning on shooting Adam--or else he was really broke and couldn't afford the thirty bucks.

Another question occurred to me. Why had he shot Adam instead of Fred, Jim, Gordon, or me?

Assuming he was under the control of the river devil or whatever it was, maybe he or it or they together had decided that the werewolf was the greatest threat. I could understand that reasoning at least as far as Fred and I were concerned. Who would worry about a hawk and a coyote when there was a werewolf in the party? Yo-yo Girl's premonition indicated that Adam was important. Maybe the river devil knew why that was.

I propped Adam against the shower-stall wall and dried him as quickly as I could. I kept a wary eye on him while I did the same to myself and dressed.

"You could shift now," I suggested.

He shook his head. "Not until I eat. The wolf is riled up. Can't protect you, and there's danger around. Too easy to hurt you when I'm like that."

I snorted inelegantly. "Me, fragile? You've got the wrong woman. I don't break; I bounce. Besides, we're mates, remember? Your wolf won't hurt me."

"Not always true," he grunted, as I helped him into a pair of sweatpants. "Ask Bran. Not going to risk it."

"Fine," I said. "Let's get you back to the truck," I said.

"Shirt," he insisted.

"No one is going to see that mark and know you've been wounded." I didn't say that no one would have to as badly as Adam was staggering. Willpower was all well and good, but there were limits. "Anyway, there's no one here to see you but me."

"Shirt," he insisted.

Arguing was taking up energy neither of us had to spare. So I grabbed the button-up shirt I'd brought and helped him into it. The Italian silk shirt looked a little odd paired with the sweatpants, but who was going to look?

Back at the trailer, he sat at the little table and ate with a ferocious and silent intensity. I gave him the last of the hamburger and the thawed steaks before going to work on the frozen stuff. Happily, there was a microwave in the Trailer of Wonders. When I'd finished slicing the frozen meat, I watched the speed with which he was eating and knew it wouldn't be enough.

So I made pancakes on the nifty little stove and had a hot stack waiting for him when he finished the frozen meat. He gave me a look when I set it in front of him, but he ate the pancakes with the same steady rhythm as he'd eaten the rest of the food. Meat was better, but calories were calories.

He finished before I'd gotten the last of the batter in the pan, pushing the plate away so I'd know.

"Okay," I said. "Change already."

"You need to go," he said. "This is going to hurt. Give me about twenty minutes."

I left and waited outside five minutes while our bond let me know just exactly how much pain he was in. Changing for the wolves was bad enough when they weren't hurt. Five minutes was all I could take. I couldn't help him, but I couldn't bear to leave him alone, either.

"I'm coming back in," I told him, so he wouldn't think it was some stranger. The only concession I made to safety was to sit on the far side of the trailer until the wolf heaved himself up on all fours. He started to shake himself free of the last tingles of the change and stopped abruptly. It must have hurt.

"Bedtime," I told him firmly. "Do you need help up?"

He sneezed at me, then trotted up the steps to the bed with only a slight hitch in his gait. If I hadn't been there, it would probably have been a limp, but that he was bothering to hide it from me was a good sign that he'd be okay.

I climbed into bed and settled next to him, touching him gingerly. But he wiggled closer with an impatient sigh, so I quit worrying about hurting him. After a moment, I pulled the covers over both of us. He didn't need them, but I did. The night was warm. I should have been warm, too, especially curled around Adam's big furry self. But I was cold.

I waited until he'd fallen asleep before I started to shake.

He could have been dead. If Fred had been a half instant slower or Hank a smidgen faster.

Mine. He was mine, and not even death would take him from me--not if I could help it.

I WAS PRETTY SURE I WAS DREAMING WHEN I CLIMBED out of the bed, leaving Adam sleeping under a pile of blankets. He looked hot, his long tongue exposed to the air, so I pulled the blankets off him.

I put on my clothes and followed the odd compulsion that pulled me out of the trailer and out to the river. It must have been very late because there were only a few semitrucks on the highway on the other side of the Columbia.

On the west end of the swimming hole was a big rock formation. I climbed up and sat on the top, my feet dangling over the edge. My toes were ten feet above the river, which rushed darkly along toward the Pacific.

When the man came up and sat beside me, it didn't startle me. His face in shadows, he held out something to me--a piece of grass. I took it and stuck the end in my mouth. From his silhouette, I could see that he was chewing on his own piece, the seed heads bobbing leisurely in the air.

Just a couple of hayseeds in the moonlight. It could almost have been romantic; instead it was peaceful.

We must have been sitting there in a companionable silence for ten minutes before he said, "You aren't sleeping, you know."

I took the grass out of my mouth and dropped it into the river--or that's what I meant to do. A stray gust of wind caught it, and it flew onto the riverbank on the swimming-hole side instead.

"Shouldn't I feel the need to scream and run?" I asked.

"Do you?" He sounded mildly interested.

"No." I considered it. "I am pretty convinced that I am probably dreaming, though." Apologetically I shrugged. "Despite your assertion that I'm not." He looked up at the half-moon and squinted at it, as if he might see something in it I couldn't. "I'd guess that's because you were sleeping when I called you out here. I didn't know if it would work. I can't do a lot of the things I used to do. Still, I am not lying. You are quite awake."

The moon lit the face of a man who'd died more than thirty years ago. A man who had been a ghost, dancing for me in broad daylight. He was handsome and young with a devil-may-care air that was obvious even on such short acquaintance.

"Are you my father?" I asked.

He shook his head, the movement emphasized by the grass in his mouth. "Nope. Sorry and all that. But your father was Joe Old Coyote." He pronounced it as two syllables instead of three. Kye-oat not Kye-oat-ee. "He died in a car wreck and a mess with a pair of vampires. They don't like walkers very much, and they liked him rather less than most."

I'd thought I knew why until no one but me had seen the ghost tonight. If you can see ghosts in the daylight, you can find where vampires are sleeping no matter what magic they use to hide. I'd always attributed it to being a walker, but if the other walkers hadn't seen it, maybe there was something to what Gordon Seeker had been implying so heavily. "Oh, that," he said, as if I'd spoken aloud. "Just because you can see something doesn't mean you have to. I'd have thought that anyone who hangs out with werewolves would know that. I mean, who but an idiot would look at a werewolf and think, `dog.' Yet they do."

"That's pack magic," I told him.

He nodded. "Some is. Sure. But still. Walkers see ghosts, but those two taught themselves not to see the dead quite a while ago in a `galaxy far, far away.' A man can't fight a war if he can see the dead and still stay sane. So they made a choice."

"You watched Star Wars?" I asked.

"Joe did," he answered as if that made sense. "Loved it. A cowboy-and-Indian story where the Indians are the good guys and everyone fights with swords."

"Cowboys and Indians?" I asked while I chewed on the first part of the sentence.

He grunted. "Think about it. Good versus evil. The foe has better armament and seems impossible to defeat--the invading Europeans. The good guys are few in number and restricted to a few bold heroes with an uncanny connection to the Force. Indians."

I'd never thought about it that way, but I supposed I could see where someone might. Of course, people said that "Puff the Magic Dragon" was about doing drugs, too. For me, Star Wars was space opera and "Puff" a kid's song about growing up and leaving your dreams behind.

"What about the Ewoks?" I asked. "Aren't they supposed to be the Indians?"

He grinned at me, his sharp teeth flashing white from the moonlight. "Nope. Indians aren't cute and furry. Ewoks were a good marketing ploy."

I took a deep breath of the night air and smelled him. The ghost who'd danced for me, then turned into a coyote.

"Why did you dance? I thought you were a ghost."

"That was a ghost," he said. "That was Joe. He worried because you were headed into danger." He slanted a laughing glance at me. "Not that you haven't been in danger any number of times since you were born. But this is different because I'm called to this one for some reason. Things that involve me tend to be chaotic--and chaos can be fatal for the innocent bystanders."

"Not an innocent bystander," I told him.

"But he is your father. He's entitled to worry."

"What did the dance mean?" I asked.

"Not a spell," he said. "Sometimes dancing is a spell--like the rain dance or the ghost dance. This was a celebration dance. An Indian might describe it as `Look, Apistotoki, here is my daughter. See her. See her grace and her beauty. Preserve this child of mine.'" He gave me a sly look. "Or he might describe the dance as `Look, God, see what I made. Pretty cool, eh? Could you watch out for it?'"

For me. That dance had been for me.

"Tell me," I said, swallowing down the feelings that were roiling around inside me. There was so much I needed to know, and this might be my only chance. "Tell me about Joe Old Coyote." There was something odd going on. Some connection between my father and Coyote, and I couldn't quite figure it out. Direct questions hadn't worked so well; maybe I could get him to elaborate if I went at it sideways. And maybe I'd learn more about my father than my mother had been able to tell me.

The man who looked like my father grunted. "He was a bull rider."

I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say. "I did know that," I prompted him.

"Wasn't Blackfeet. Or Blackfoot, either."

That was new information. "He told my mother he was."

"Nope." He shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure he told her he was from Browning. All the rest was her conclusion."

"Was he from Browning?" I asked. My heart hurt, and I wasn't sure for whom. My mother who'd been so young? Maybe.

"I was bored and lonely," he said with a sly shyness. "So maybe I decided to be just another guy for a while. Maybe. Joe made his entrance at a bar in Browning. He kicked around with some other folks for a while, then entered a rodeo." He made a pleased noise. "Chaos made commercial is a rodeo. He loved it, too. Loved the smells, loved the ache after a good ride, loved fighting the bulls, mostly 'cause those bulls had a good time with him up there. They pitted their strength against his. I could have ridden them for hours, and they could have killed me afterward. But Joe, he was different. Sometimes he won; sometimes they did. Like counting coup. He played by the rules, and they loved him for it."

Coyote had decided to be Joe Old Coyote? Then why did he say he wasn't and speak of Joe Old Coyote in third person?

"So Joe was born in Browning," I said slowly.

"You might say that," agreed Coyote. "Joe usually did."

"Joe was a person you became." I said it as if I were certain, and he nodded.

"Exactly."

"So you were Joe Old Coyote but Joe wasn't you."

"Sort of." Coyote tapped the soil with his hands. "This explaining stuff isn't where my talents lie. I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn't me, and I wasn't him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him-- though he never knew that. There were just things he didn't worry about very much--like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me-- and he was dead."

Maybe it was the night, maybe it was because I was sitting in the moonlight next to Coyote--but suddenly it all sort of made sense. Like that bug- thing in the Men in Black movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug's human suit, Coyote's had had a life of his own.

"Joe was real?"

Coyote nodded. "And so is his ghost--even though that is me as well."

I made a command decision not to question that remark. I was feeling like I understood, and a ghost of a real person who wasn't really a person would throw me off my game again.

"If he was born in Browning," I told Coyote, "maybe that makes him Blackfeet. Piegan." I suddenly realized where Joe got his name, and it made me shake my head. "The Blackfeet tell stories about the Old Man, don't they? He's their trickster. It's the Crow and the Lakota in that part of the country who tell Coyote stories. For the Blackfeet, the Old Man plays the part of Coyote. Old Man and Coyote. Old Coyote. Joe, because he was just another Joe."

The man beside me laughed, a soft, pleased sound. "Maybe it does make him Blackfeet. Some anyway. He liked Browning--they know how to party, those Indians in Browning."

"And then he met my mother." My father was a construct of Coyote's boredom. Or loneliness, maybe. It should have made me feel like less of a person, but somehow it didn't. My father had always been this unreal person to me, a black- and-white photo and a few stories my mother told. But I had seen him dance, had heard the echoes of his voice in Coyote's.

Coyote threw his head back and laughed, and I heard the chorus of coyote howls up and down the gorge, called by his laughter.

"Marjorie Thompson. Marji. Wasn't she somethin'." There was an awed sort of reverence in his voice. "Who'd have thought such a child would be so tough without being hard? If someone could have settled Joe down, it would have been Marji. He thought she was the one, anyway."

"But coyotes don't mate for life, do they?" I tried to keep my voice neutral.

"He would have," said Coyote. "Oh, he would have. He loved her so much."

His voice, sincere and deep, hit me hard. I had to rub my eyes.

"If he'd known about her sooner, he wouldn't have killed the vampire nest over in Billings," he said after a while. "But they needed killing, and he was there. Joe always thought of himself as a hero, you know--not the kind of hero I am, but the Luke Skywalker sort. Rescue the princess, kill the evil villains."

He looked down at the water, and said, as if it were a new discovery, "Maybe that's where you get it. I always assumed it was just too much Star Wars, but maybe it was genetic." After a moment's thought, he shook his head. "No. I know where his genes came from. I think it must have been Star Wars."

"The vampires?" I said tightly.

"Right. He knew taking out that seethe would set the vampires after him, but he wasn't too worried because it was just him. And then Marji came along, and he wasn't thinking about anything. Especially not about vampires. Not until he saw a pair of them talking to her one evening. At that moment he started thinking about vampires pretty damn hard. He let them catch a glimpse to draw them off and led them away on a merry chase. He was doing pretty well until he blew a tire."

He tossed his piece of grass away with a violent gesture, and his grass fell into the river.

"Don't know if the vampires engineered that or not. But they found him when he was trapped, and they killed him."

The story made my heart hurt, but not in a bad way. More like a wound that has just been scrubbed with iodine or hydrogen peroxide. It stung pretty badly, but I thought it might heal better in the end. "So when my father was dead, you were left?" I asked.

"Just me," he said. We sat in silence again for a bit; maybe both of us mourned Joe Old Coyote.

The man who looked like my father broke the silence. "He didn't know about you."

"I know. Mom told me."

"I didn't know about you until a lot later. Then I stopped in to check you out. You looked happy running with the wolves. They looked bewildered --which is as it should be when a coyote plays with wolves. So I knew you were okay." He glanced at me. "Which is what Charles Cornick told me when he saw me watching you. Sent me packing with a flea in my ear." His eyes laughed though his face was perfectly serious. "Terrifying, that one."

"I think so," I told him truthfully.

He laughed. "Not to you. He's a good man. Only an evil man needs to fear a good man."

"Hah," I said. "You obviously never had Charles catch you doing something he disapproved of."

We lapsed into silence, again.

"What can you tell me about the thing in the river?" I asked finally.

He made a rude sound. "I can tell you she's not a poor misunderstood creature. Gordon is right. She's Hunger, and she won't be satisfied until she consumes the world."

She. That answered several things. There was only one. That seemed more manageable than a swarm of monsters that could bite a woman in half and make a man shoot Adam.

"How big is it?" I asked.

He looked at me and poked his tongue into his cheek. "You know? That's a good question. I think we ought to find out."

And he knocked me into the river.