River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(32)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Adam smiled, showing his teeth. I couldn’t actually see him do it, but Calvin’s face told me he had clearly enough. Adam had put away his civilized face and let Calvin see the real one.

"Can’t lie to werewolves," I told the young man. "You might as well have shouted, `Yes, but I don’t want you to ask me about it.’"

Calvin swallowed, his fear pressing on my nose like perfume.

"Mercy?" asked Adam.

He was going somewhere with this–and I trusted him as long as his temper held. Werewolves are monsters. I grew up with them, and I loved Adam–and he would never hurt me. That did not apply to people he didn’t care about. The faster the situation–whatever the situation was–was defused, the safer for everyone.

Information can sometimes be gotten when the opponent thinks you know all about it anyway. That was what Adam had been asking me to do– tell Calvin who I was.

"I can turn into a coyote," I said. "My mom tells me I must get it from my father."

Calvin’s jaw dropped, then his face froze. "Your mother was a white woman," he said urgently. "You can’t turn into a coyote."

"Can, too," I said indignantly. It was one thing for me to tell him he was lying–I knew I was right. It was an entirely different matter for him to tell me I was lying.

"Can’t."

"Can." "Can’t."

"Can, too."

"Mercy," said Adam with exaggerated patience tinged with humor. He knew I was doing it on purpose. That was okay because he wasn’t angry anymore.

"Cannot," said Calvin.

"Knock it off, both of you. Neither of you is five." He glanced at Calvin. "He answered what I wanted to know anyway. That hawk was no natural animal, and this one knew it."

No one reads body language like a werewolf, I thought. And then I realized what Adam was saying.

The blood shot from my head so fast that I had to step sideways to keep my feet–and sideways was three feet down the hillside. Adam jerked me back on the trail before I managed to fall. "Okay?" he asked.

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure it was true.

I’d never met another one of my kind. After more than thirty years, I’d sort of assumed that there were no more left, that I was the only one.

I’d also assumed they’d be coyotes like me. Hadn’t the old man last night kind of implied that? He’d known I was a coyote, and I’d only told him I was a walker.

I didn’t know much about being a walker. Only what Bran had told me, and he hadn’t known much–or he’d told me exactly as much as he intended to. I’d grown up thinking the last was true, but over the past year or so had come to believe the first.

"She is a walker," Adam told Calvin. "Coming up with reasons it can’t be so doesn’t help, and neither does arguing. I should know: I was bitten and Changed by a bandit warlord in Vietnam. Even now, I don’t know of any werewolves living in Asia–there are things over there that don’t like us, and they can make their dislike fatal. Yet there he was. Mercy changes into a coyote. You can’t argue with fact. Just accept it and get over it. Was that your grandfather?"

If Gordon Seeker was a walker who turned into a red-tailed hawk, that would explain why he was able to disappear so effectively. There still should have been a pile of clothes where he’d changed, but being a walker would answer most of my questions.

"Grandpa Gordon changes," said Calvin. He looked as though he had sucked on a lemon as he stared at me.

He didn’t not-lie very well, either. Maybe it was something medicine men learned when they were older. I had a feeling that his uncle Jim could not- lie as smoothly as any fae, and I’d seen that his grandfather could do the same. So why had they sent Calvin out with us? Unless they wanted us to share their secrets.

And the reason they might want us to know was tied up with Gordon Seeker, Yo-yo Girl Edythe’s prophecy, and whatever had happened to Benny and his sister that Calvin wanted to wait until later to tell us.

Someday, I’m going to meet some supernatural creature who tells me everything I should know up front and in a forthright manner–but I’m not going to hold my breath.

"That hawk wasn’t Gordon," said Adam, who could tell a bad not-lie as well as I could. "Who was it?"

If Gordon could change, and the hawk wasn’t Gordon, then there were three of us. Three walkers. Gordon had known about me, about my existence, and the only reason we had met was chance. Engineered by Yo-yo Girl, but not by any desire on their part. Fine. They hadn’t wanted anything to do with me. I would extend them the same courtesy.

Calvin looked at me a moment and threw up his hands in surrender. "Coyote, huh? Maybe that explains a few more things about why Grandpa Gordon wanted you to see this." He rubbed his face. "Look. Let me take you to see She Who Watches–I don’t know if she’s something you needed to see or not. Uncle Jim wasn’t exactly forthcoming, but she’s the best and best-known of the pictograms. Then I’ll take you on to the petroglyphs. I’ll tell you Benny’s story–and I’ll give you Uncle Jim’s phone number, and you can call him about anything else you need to know, all right?"

It sounded fair enough to me, and Adam nodded.

He turned around and led us back down to where the trail split, and we followed the path of the woman I’d seen earlier. There were more drawings on the rock faces we passed.

"There’s no lichen on the places where the pictograms are," commented Adam.

Calvin nodded. He’d calmed down a lot, and his fear no longer made me ache to give chase. "Right. They had some way of clearing off a bare patch and keeping it clean a thousand years later. It might have been something as easy as scraping the rock clean. Lichen needs a certain amount of roughness to grow. There are a few bare patches of rock that were obviously cleared off." He pointed. "But they don’t have anything on them. Maybe someone mixed the paint wrong, or maybe they didn’t get around to using them. You can see a bit of pigment on some of the bare patches when the light is just right."

"Do you know which tribe the people who lived over there belonged to?" Adam asked.

Calvin shook his head. "When the Europeans came, everybody moved. Lots of bands and a few tribes died off entirely. Most tribes kept their histories orally, and many of those stories were lost. We have some good guesses, but so do other tribes, and their guesses and ours don’t always line up."

We turned a corner, onto the same trail down which the woman had disappeared. I could scent her. The trail paralleled the fence. On the other side of the fence were the railroad tracks that ran along the river. The fence and the trail ended abruptly, leaving us in a corner between the fence and a basalt rock wall. On the rock, looking out at the Columbia, was the biggest, clearest pictogram I’d seen. She could have been drawn a decade ago rather than centuries.