Chapter 13 #4
The first sign that what I’d done had worked was the now-familiar burn in my chest as the pack absorbed another member.
Joel staggered, and for a moment his weight pressed down on me unbearably.
I think I blacked out because my vision did that weird jump thing, where one moment I was staring at one thing, then the next I was looking at something different, though I couldn’t remember moving my gaze.
The tibicena who was Joel was no longer standing over me, but fighting with the other tibicena. I couldn’t see Darryl, but Auriele was lying with a knee bent in the wrong direction, and she wasn’t moving.
“What did you do?” Guayota’s voice was oddly slurred, but I could hear the anger in it. I couldn’t turn my head, but Guayota moved into my field of view.
The huge fiery-dog form that Guayota wore was oddly lopsided.
His left side looked exactly as I remembered.
Glowing red eye, crackled skin that showed the moving currents of molten substance that flowed just beneath.
The other side was dark, the light beneath wholly extinguished, and as he staggered, half dragging himself from the battleground to where I lay, the outer surface of the dead side began to lighten to gray and crumble when he moved.
“How did you steal—” said Guayota—and then Adam was there, a great blue-silver wolf. Adam and Warren and Honey, who landed on Guayota at the same time, their fury as bright and shining as Guayota had ever been.
“Screw me and stake me out.” Gary’s voice was in my ear.
“I think she’s dead. How could she be burned this badly and not be dead?
” He was talking about me, I realized, but I didn’t remember getting burned.
Coyote had told me my neck was broken. Gary was still talking.
“I’ve sent back steaks that were this overdone. Mercy?”
There were other noises in the background: growls and howls and cries of pain.
“Not dead yet,” I told Gary. I had to say it again before he understood me.
He huffed half a laugh. “Finally found a sibling I could stand to talk to for more than ten minutes, and . . .” He didn’t finish that sentence. “I gotta tell you, you look bad, Mercy.”
I licked my lips. They cracked, but I talked anyway. “Got here sooner than expected. You did, I mean. Did you get a call?” Is Adam here? I’d be safe if Adam was really here. But that wasn’t true, was it? Coyote had told me I was dying.
“No, but someone’s phone was going off every two minutes until one of the werewolves killed it.
Please save me from being trapped in a car with that many angry werewolves ever again.
They were all mostly changed to wolf, barely, when I had another Seeing, one of the big ones.
Saw you and a couple of werewolves fighting Guayota on Honey’s front lawn and realized why I had to go with the wolves.
Took me a while to get them to understand.
And once they did, I had to drive because they were all too much werewolf already—and let me tell you, oncoming headlights when you have a migraine are no kind of fun. ”
A cry, the same kind of bone-chilling cry that Gary and I had heard once before, cut through the sounds of battle and Gary’s soothing voice like a knife.
Gary turned to look, and that let me see one of the tibicenas bite deep into the other and shake it until it turned into a much smaller thing.
I recognized the mutated woman that the walking stick had once shown me.
Joel, the tibicena who was Joel, dropped her to the ground. She writhed once, then was still.
“Look,” Auriele said, and I was happy to know she wasn’t dead. “Look at Guayota.” I strained my eyes to the side until I could see the wolves fall away from the thing that had been Guayota. One of those wolves was Adam. Something inside me loosened. Adam was alive.
Guayota’s dog form dissolved around the man whom Christy had known as Juan Flores.
Though there were wolves all around him, it was my eyes Guayota sought. “I’m so hungry,” he said. “Where is she? She was supposed to be here.” And then there was just nothing where he’d stood. Nothing. No wisp of clothing falling to the ground, no dust or ash. He was just gone.
Adam turned to look at me, and I tried to get up. But the movement sent sparkles through my vision, and I was lost in darkness.
________
THE SMELL OF CLEANING SOLUTION WOKE ME brIEFLY.
“. . . broken neck blah-blah-blah.” It sounded like Samuel, but there was something wrong with his voice. He sounded so sad, so I tried to listen. Maybe I could cheer him up. “And the burns . . . I’m sorry, Adam—”
Adam said something, and I sank into his voice like it was a warm sea.
________
“IT’S PROBABLY BETTER IF YOU TALK TO ME AND DON’T pay attention to all of that,” said Coyote.
I was lying on a thick field of new-mown grass that smelled a lot better than the cleaning fluid had. I watched the sky where small groups of clouds chased each other like little ducks.
“Mmmm,” I said dreamily.
Coyote chuffed a laugh. “They do have you on some strong stuff. But you’ll remember this anyway.
Guayota isn’t dead. You can’t kill one of his kind unless you destroy what he represents.
That need not concern you—although I wouldn’t be in a hurry to go visit the Canary Islands for a while.
A few years, and he’ll forget. He shouldn’t have worn a human-seeming for so long. ”
“Like you did when you became Joe Old Coyote,” I said.
“Not at all,” he told me indignantly. “That cloud looks like me, don’t you think?”
“The bigger one?” I asked.
“Yes, that one that looks like it’s about to eat an egg.”
“No. That one’s a rabbit.”
“Rabbit,” he said indignantly. “That’s a coyote.”
I laughed, but that was a mistake. My vision went black for a few minutes, then, slowly, the sky, clouds, and grass were back.
“Don’t do that,” said Coyote. “It makes it difficult to hold you here. I break things, a lot of things, but I don’t want one of them to be you. So just rest here.”
“What about . . .” It was difficult to be worried; most of me wanted to just watch the clouds drift by.
“Let me talk,” Coyote said. “You don’t know what questions you want to ask.
Unusual decision to bring Joel into the pack.
You could have used the walking stick to cut the threads of Guayota’s spell, and that would have done the same thing as you managed to do with the pack spell.
” He paused. “Maybe. Maybe it would have just burned to ashes. I don’t know.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the pack with a tibicena in it. ”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I told him. “I gave the walking stick back to Beauclaire.”
“Did you?” said Coyote. “Hmm. Anyway, Guayota, being separated from that which gave him life—the volcano—needed two anchors to hold him in his human-seeming and allow him his power. Two anchors who were connected to his island. Why two? Why male and female? Who knows. Doubtless there is a reason, and if you meet him again, you might ask because the answer interests me.”
“Never,” I told him. “I am never going to the Canary Islands.”
There was a little silence beside me, and I realized that he was lying in the grass, too. “It’s supposed to be beautiful in the Canaries,” he said a little wistfully. “There’s this underground lake lit by torches . . .”
“No,” I told him.
“Maybe Gary will go,” Coyote said contemplatively. “But in any case, when you claimed Joel, tibicena and all, it threw the magic that allowed Guayota to live away from his island out of balance, and it unraveled.”
“Then Joel will go back to being just human?” I asked.
“That depends,” Coyote said.
“On what?” I turned my head, glimpsed his face, then my world went black again.
________
“WHY DON’T YOU JUST DIE?” HISSED SOMEONE IN MY EAR.
After a moment, I realized it was Christy.
“I know it was you. I know it. And now I look like a freak.” Something dripped on my cheek and touched my lips with salt.
“Mom,” said Jesse. She sounded appalled and . . . amused.
“She’s nasty and vindictive,” Christy said. “Everyone thinks she farts rainbows—and look what she did to me. I’m blue.” She wailed the last.
Christy had used the bottle of shampoo she’d left in my bathroom. I hoped the dye hadn’t stained the tile, but it would be worth it if it had. There were some noises, then Jesse’s breath was warm on my ear.
“She’s gone to get coffee, Mercy,” she told me.
“I love her, but—the dye was inspired.” She giggled.
“You are terrifying. I can’t believe you got her while you were .
. .” She cleared her throat. “While you were in the hospital.” She laughed again.
“I told her she should leave it. I’d dye my hair blue again, and we could be twins.
Even Auriele laughed at her expression, though she turned her head so Mom couldn’t see. ”
There was a long, peaceful silence, and then Jesse said, “I want so badly for her to be happy. But I can’t make her happy. All I can do is love her. Do you think that’s all right?” She patted the pillow beside my head. “You need to wake up pretty soon, though. Dad needs you. So do I.”
________
THE SHEETS WERE VERY WHITE AND SCRATCHY AND the blankets too thin. My toes were cold, and I was lying on my side. I wiggled to try to pull my feet up and get them warm.
“Mercy?” Adam said.
“We need to get new blankets,” I told him, and he laughed.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
I took a deep breath and realized that I really was awake because it hurt. The sun was shining, the AC was on too high, and I was in a hospital bed.
Adam leaned forward and kissed me. Then I kissed him back. With interest. He laughed and rested his forehead on mine, and I felt his whole body go limp.
“You are so stoned, baby,” he said.
“Am I fried?” I asked.
“What?” He rolled his head a little so he could see my face.
“Burned like a crispy steak,” I clarified.
“No. Not as bad as it could have been.” He hesitated.
“Not as bad as it was, I think, is a better answer. The cheek scar will have a companion on your forearm, and I’m afraid the shotgun-pellet scars have some company.
Might be a while before you are happy about walking on your left foot, but that was just blisters, and Samuel says it should heal with no scarring. ”
“No modeling contract,” I said mournfully.
“Not in your future, no,” he said, and his dimple flirted with me. “You’ll have to make do with me.”
“Coyote said I was dying,” I told him. “And Christy wanted me to.”
“Coyote, eh?” He gave me an odd smile. “I went to grab some coffee that first night you were here, and when I got back, he was sitting on the edge of your bed. As a coyote.” He rubbed his face and took a deep breath.
“Samuel said the first X-rays showed that you’d broken your neck.
He . . . wasn’t optimistic. But after Coyote had his visit, things got better.
As for Christy—” His skin next to mine flushed, and his eyes lightened to amber for just a moment.
His voice was calm, though. “Christy has been banned from the hospital. She decided to stay at Auriele’s until she figures out whether she is going to move back to Eugene or job search over here.
They managed to get the blue off her skin, but she had to dye her hair black. You are not her favorite person.”
“Auriele’s okay?” I asked, suddenly anxious.
“Shh,” he said. “Auriele is a werewolf. She was down for a couple of days, but, as of yesterday, she’s fine.”
The muzzy feeling was retreating. “How long have I been out?”
“Three days,” he said. “And you’ve only been mostly out. Samuel said you wouldn’t remember much of it, though. He also said that they’d probably let you out tomorrow morning. Since there are now no signs of a broken neck.”
“Joel?”
He laughed, a happy uncomplicated laugh. “And I thought I threw the fox in the henhouse when I brought you into the pack. Joel is . . . yesterday he stayed human for almost an hour.”
“Coyote said something about Joel.” But try as I might, I couldn’t remember what it was. “Coyote also said we should avoid visiting the Canary Islands for a couple of years.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.” He was quiet for a while, resting his upper body alongside mine. Eventually, he sat up. “If I don’t move, I’m going to fall asleep,” he said. He looked tired. Beautiful, but tired. “I’m going to go find some food, and I’ll bring some back for you, okay?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t cause any trouble.”
“Me?”
The dimple came out again. “I’ll be back soon.”
As soon as he left, I sat up and started unwiring myself. I had to pee, and I had no intention of letting my bathroom activities be a public event ever again. I wasn’t as bad off as I had been after the fight with the river devil. As long as I didn’t need a wheelchair—everything else was gravy.
I sat up and swung my legs down—and realized that Adam’s recitation of my injuries had limited itself to the burns.
My left leg was encased from my toes to about six inches above my knee.
My right forearm was bandaged, but my left elbow was immobilized by something with more structure.
That I hadn’t felt them meant that I was still on a lot more drugs than I’d figured.
I gave the IV still hooked to my right hand a look of respect and decided not to pull those out the way I’d intended to.
The IV stand was on wheels—it could come, too.
I slid off the bed and got about six feet when it occurred to me that this might have been a bad idea. I wobbled, recovered, wobbled again, and would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed the walking stick at the last minute.
“Well, hello,” I told it. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”