River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(13)
Author: Patricia Briggs

The scuffs were rhythmic now, almost like a very slow polka. Scuff-scuff, pause, scuff-scuff, pause. The scent grew stronger–and I could pick out one more. Coyote.

I must have stood there for three or four minutes as the sound of dancing grew more solid before I saw him. I saw his leathers first; the rest of him was shadowy and dreamlike. But the fringe and the quill patterns on his sleeves and the outsides of his leggings were clean and distinct.

The leathers weren’t the kind you see at powwows. Those are well-tended, best-dress kinds of costumes, mostly. Beautiful, brilliantly colored, handcrafted clothing brought out for special occasions.

These leathers looked as though he’d worn them long enough that they fit him like a second skin. Thin patches were rubbed on the insides of his legs, as if he’d ridden on horseback a lot. The hide was darker under his arms and in the small of his back, where sweat from his dance would have gathered. He wore a porcupine quill-worked belt from which a coyote tail swung freely at his hip. The colors on the quillwork were faded, and the coyote tail was a little ragged.

I started to hear the music he danced to, no mystical drummers or flute players. He was the musician, accompanying himself with his own song, a nasal, wordless tune that resonated in my bones. About the same time, I could see his hands. They were a workingman’s hands, rancher’s hands, callused and scarred. A man’s hands, but not an old man. One finger had been broken and reset crooked.

His hair hung in two thick braids that were finished with a red leather tie and stopped just below his shoulder blades. I recognized some of the dancing moves from the two or three powwows I’d attended in college, when I was still trying to hunt down my heritage. As he danced, he became more and more real to my eyes and to the rest of my senses. Until, at last, if it had not been that I’d seen him slowly materialize, I would have sworn he was a living person though he kept his head turned from me so I just got glimpses of his features.

The rhythm of his dance changed from furious to achingly slow and back. At all times, his weight was evenly distributed on the balls of his feet– this was a warrior’s dance, full of power and magic and the promise of violence. The warrior was who he was, though, and the dancer’s nature didn’t stop it from being a joyous celebration.

The ghost stopped dancing with his back to me, his whole body working to regain the oxygen he’d spent in his dance. I wondered how long ago he had performed his dance in the flesh and why he’d done it here.

"Hey," I said softly.

There are ghosts that just repeat important moments of their lives. I was pretty sure that this was one of those because self-aware ghosts who can act independently are rarer–and they tend to interact right off. This had all the hallmarks of a repeater; that dance, full of passion and emotion, had looked as though it had been done at a pivotal moment in someone’s life.

But my voice made his shoulders stiffen. Then he turned slowly toward me until I stared into the face of a man I’d never met, whose face was as familiar as the one I looked at in my own mirror, even though I only had one black-and-white photograph of it from a newspaper report of his death.

My father.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe. It felt just like someone had belted me in the diaphragm, so my lungs couldn’t work.

He stared at me, unsmiling. Slowly, almost ceremonially, he bowed his head to me. Then he slid into a coyote shape as easily, as quickly, as I can. The coyote appeared, oddly, more solid than the man had been. He looked at me with the same bold stare he’d had when he appeared human. Then, without warning, he bolted across the grounds and into the bushes a dozen yards away.

In the photograph, my father had been wearing the uniform of a rodeo cowboy–jeans, long- sleeved Western-cut shirt, and a cowboy hat. My mother, a teenager fighting free of strict parents, had met him in a rodeo where she was winning prize money barrel racing her best friend’s horse when she was younger than Jesse. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him she was pregnant before he’d been killed in a car accident. The name he’d given her was Joe Old Coyote.

I’d never seen my father’s ghost before. He hadn’t come to me when I slunk out of Montana, fleeing the only home I had ever known. He hadn’t come when I graduated from high school or college. Hadn’t come when I’d fought for my life against fae and demons and all sorts of nasty creatures. He hadn’t come to my wedding.

I looked for footprints. I might feel pretty confident of my knowledge of werewolves, marginally comfortable with what I knew of vampires. The fae are another matter–and I knew that there were other things I knew nothing about, some of them unique, some of them just well hidden.

I’d been certain what I’d seen was a ghost until I had a moment to wonder how my father, who’d died hundreds of miles away in eastern Montana, would have gotten here. He’d turned into a coyote, just like I could, and run off into the bushes. Most ghosts don’t need to run away; they just dissipate. But there were no tracks–and I know how to track. Not even in the soft dirt right in front of the bushes he’d run into.

I had gooseflesh on my arms though it was still hot out. "SO YOU DON’T THINK IT WAS A GHOST?" ADAM ASKED, then took a big bite of his hot dog.

The trailer had a stove and an oven, but there were both a fire pit and a grill next to our spot, and we’d decided to roast hot dogs for dinner in the pit. He’d run until dusk, stopped by and given me a sweaty kiss, then grabbed clean clothes and a towel before heading to the showers.

But the time he came back, I had a fire going in the pit and the food ready to cook.

There were camp chairs tied to the back of the trailer, but we sat on the ground next to each other anyway. If I didn’t notice that we were cooking right next to the Behemoth Trailer and sitting on a manicured lawn, I could pretend we were really camping. This was like "the good parts version" of camping. I could get used to it.

"Umm," I answered, then swallowed so I could talk. "I didn’t say that exactly–my father is dead, after all. If it was my father, it was a ghost. But maybe it was something else. There are stories about the Indian supernatural population, but a lot of the old knowledge was lost when the government tried to assimilate the tribes into the Amer-European culture. A good portion of what is known was made up on the spot–no one tells a tall tale like an Indian–and no one knows for certain anymore which are the really old stories and which were faked."

Charles, Bran’s half-Indian son born sometime in the early eighteen hundreds, could have shed some light on the subject–but, to my intense frustration, he seldom talked about his Native American roots. Maybe I could have pushed him into it, but Charles was one of the very few people who really intimidated me. So even back when I was looking into that half of my family history, I’d never prodded him too hard, much as I’d have liked to.