River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(14)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"You think it might have been some local spirit imitating your father?" Adam asked.

He’d finished his hot dog and was in the middle of cooking another. He liked them burnt on the outside–I liked mine just shy of hot.

I watched my hot dog warm and tried to pretend I could believe that. "Maybe. Maybe there is something like a weird doppelganger who appears to other people or a backward foreganger–a death’s-head who appears after a man dies instead of three days before."

Adam tilted his head at me, then shook it. "If you really thought it was some native critter, you’d be calling Charles."

Adam was right. If Charles thought I was really in trouble, he’d help however he could. He might be scary, but he was family. Sort of.

Adam gave me a shrewd look. "You just don’t like the idea that your father visited you, and you don’t know why."

And why Joe Old Coyote hadn’t shown up sooner.

Damn it, I chided myself. I knew better than that. A ghost wasn’t a person; it was just the leftovers. That ghost might be the ghost of my father, but he wasn’t my father.

He’d died before I was born. But I hadn’t suffered. I’d been raised by Bryan and Evelyn, my foster parents, and they had loved me. When they died, Bran and the rest of his pack had stepped in –and then my mother. I’d never been unloved, never mistreated. I was an adult–so why did the sight of a ghost who looked like my father make me feel so raw?

"Okay," I said. "Yep. You’re right. If he could visit anytime, why didn’t he? Why now when I don’t need him?" I’d rather have believed it wasn’t my father.

He put his arm around me. "Maybe it was some sort of vision quest without the fasting part."

I shook my head. "Nope, I already did my vision quest."

He pulled back, so he could see my face. "Really?" "Uhm," I answered. "The summer Charles taught me to fix cars. One day he just took me out into the forest. We fasted for three days, then he told me not to shift into a coyote and sent me off into the mountains."

"What did you see?" Adam asked. "Or is that supposed to be a secret?"

I snorted. "Sacred, not secret, I think." Though the only person I’d ever told what I saw had been Charles. "But mine was pretty weird. I asked Charles if I did it wrong, and he just gave me that look–" I tried to freeze my face into an emotionless but somehow terrifying mask–and Adam grinned.

"What did he say when you showed him that expression?" he asked.

Only an idiot would make fun of Charles to his face. Adam knew me so well.

"He asked me if I’d eaten something that made me sick," I said. "Though he turned his head, so I couldn’t see his expression. I think he might have smiled."

Adam laughed. "So back to your vision."

"Right," I said. "So my vision was a little … Charles told me that there was no right or wrong way to have a vision. It just was. Then he told me about some guy who had a vision and found out he could talk to spirits. Elk Spirit came to him and told him he had to serve Elk Spirit and to do that he had to dress only in yellow. Or maybe that was blue. So this guy, he did that for a few years until Bear Spirit came and told him he’d been talking to Elk Spirit and decided that it should be Bear Spirit he listens to. So Bear Spirit told him to paint his face red and walk backward. When Charles’s grandfather, the medicine man, met this man, he had been walking backward for years and years. Charles’s grandfather heard the man’s story, and told him, `Just because you listen to spirits does not mean you must obey them.’" I’d almost forgotten that Charles had shared that story with me. It was a sign, I suspect, of how upset I’d been that I hadn’t had the kind of vision quest I had expected–one with eagles and deer who guide me to enlightenment.

"What happened?" Adam asked.

"Your hot dog is on fire," I told him.

He pulled the black thing out of the fire, tapped it on the ground, and it broke into pieces. He got another hot dog and stuck it on the campfire fork, while I ate mine.

"Mercy, what happened to the guy who was walking around backward?"

"He washed his face and started walking forward. After about five steps, he tripped and broke his leg."

"You are making that up," said Adam, pulling his hot dog in for inspection. It wasn’t black, so he stuck it back in the fire.

I lifted my hand. "Scout’s honor, that’s the story Charles told me. You ask him if you can’t tell if I’m lying or not." That was sort of a put-down among werewolves. Only a very new werewolf wouldn’t be able to sense truth from falsehood. "Charles said that the man never did go back to walking backward, though."

"You have to be a boy to say, `Scout’s honor,’" Adam told me.

"Nah-uh. Girl Scout leader, here." I pointed my thumb at my breastbone. "Sort of. When my mom couldn’t do it. Anyway, you wanted to hear about my vision."

"Yes."

I opened my mouth to tell him a funny version, but what came out was different from what I’d intended.

"One moment I was sitting alone in the middle of a forest; the next I was walking in a different place. Everything was gray, almost like a black- and-white film except there was no white or black, just odd shades of gray. There was no grass or trees, just endless mounds of sand. It felt … empty. Like those postapocalyptic horror films, you know? Empty but scary, too."

I could feel it now as I had then: the tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe, the way the hair on the back of my neck had stood up because I knew that there was evil lurking, watching.

Adam pulled his hot dog out of the fire, but instead of eating it, he forced the blunt end of the fork into the ground, so it stuck up like a bizarre garden ornament. Then he pulled me against him, and my tension eased so I could breathe normally again.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn’t expect it to bother me so much."

"You don’t have to tell me."

"No," I said. "But I want to." It felt right. Charles had told me I’d know when it was time to share what had happened to me. Some people were required to tell their experience to every person they met, but most of us only shared with a few people.

"So I was wandering through this desolate place. The only thing I could see besides sand were remnants of buildings. In the beginning, some of the buildings were modern–tall structures made of glass and steel. On those, the glass was cracked or broken and the steel rusted nearly through. As I continued on, the ruins started to be older buildings, houses. I clearly recall seeing what was left of an old Victorian, tipped awkwardly on its side as if it had been a giant dollhouse some child had kicked over. Then it was like something you’d see on a Western film set, but decades later. Blackened poles from adobe buildings half-buried in the sand, hitching posts and broken boardwalks, with dead weeds poking out.