River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(45)
Author: Patricia Briggs

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.

Chapter 9

THE WATER WAS ICY AND CLOSED OVER MY HEAD, encasing me in silence and darkness. For a moment the shock of the fall, of the cold, and of sheer surprise froze my muscles, and I couldn’t move. Then my feet hit the riverbed, and the motion somehow woke up every nerve into screaming urgency. I pushed off and up, coming to the surface and sucking in air.

I could hear him laughing.

Son of a bitch. I would kill him. I didn’t care if he was Coyote or the son of Satan. He was a dead man walking.

I struck out for the swimming hole even though it meant fighting the river. But for the next mile downstream or so, the riverbank was cliff face, and I didn’t want to stay in the river that long: there was a monster out here somewhere.

A toddler walking along the bank could have beat me, for all the forward progress I made. I was only a fair swimmer, strength without technique. It was enough to beat the slow flow of the Columbia, but not by much.

Two otter heads poked up beside me, and I growled at them. Somehow knowing they were fae made them less of a threat than real river otters though I expect the opposite was actually true. I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.

They disappeared under the water for a few minutes before one popped up again, watching my slow progress with cool appraisal.

"I’d swim faster if I were you," observed Coyote.

Rage fueled my strokes, and I finally made it around the bend and into the shallower, slower water. I swam until the water was waist-deep and staggered toward shore on my feet. Coyote waded in knee-deep and stopped to watch me.

"What did you find out?" he asked.

"That you are a jerk," I told him, my voice vibrating involuntarily with the chill. "What in–"

Something wrapped around my waist and jerked me off my feet, and my head was underwater again. I fought, digging my feet in deep, but it pulled me slowly back out toward the deeper water. I managed to get my face out of the river and gasped for breath. As soon as I got oxygen in my lungs, I screamed Adam’s name with a volume that would have done credit to a B- movie actress in a horror film.

Coyote grabbed my wrists, then shifted his grip until his arms were wrapped around my torso. He began to pull me back toward shore, and the strands around my waist tightened until I couldn’t breathe.

"Let’s see what we caught," he murmured breathlessly in my ear. "It should be interesting."

I didn’t hear Adam. He was just suddenly there, a shadow of fur and fang. He closed his mouth on something just below the surface of the water, and his weight on the thing that wrapped around me jerked Coyote and me off our feet and back down into the river. The too-tight bands released me, then Coyote grabbed my arm and hauled me up.

"Run," he said.

But I looked around for Adam. I wasn’t leaving him in the river with the monster. The wolf bumped my hip, safe and sound, so I let Coyote pull me out of the river and ran with him as fast as I could up the bank to the steep ridge that separated the swimming beach from the rest of the campground, Adam keeping pace with us. Coyote kept us running about four long strides on the grass before turning around.

The river lay quiet and black, the surface hiding anything that lay beneath.

Beside me, Adam roared a challenge that would have done credit to a grizzly bear. Coyote joined in with a high-pitched cry that hurt my ears, his face exuberant and laughing.

Something wet and squishy rolled down my leg and fell on my bare foot. It looked like a chunk of limp fire hose, if that fire hose was made from the stuff they make gummy worms from and covered with short, silver hair that glittered in the moonlight. One end was all jagged, where Adam had severed it, and the other narrowed, then widened in a ball about the size of a softball.

Something else, neither wolf nor coyote, bellowed like an enraged bull. And the river devil revealed itself . . . herself, if I could believe Coyote. Up and up she rose, like a snake charmer’s cobra. Though her body resembled a giant snake’s, the overall impression I had was, as it had been looking at the petroglyph, of a Chinese dragon. A huge, ginormous, towering, and ticked-off Chinese dragon.

Her head could certainly have inspired the petroglyph. It was triangular like a fox’s, with huge green eyes. Encircling her head at the base of her skull, like a ruff of snakes or petals of a flower, long tentacles twisted and writhed like a wave, not precisely in unison, but not independently, either.

On the very top of her head were two shiny black horns, twisted and rolled back, like a mountain sheep’s. From the front, it looked very much like she had a pair of ears.

The full impact of her coloring was muted by the moonlight, and though I could see here and there a hint of green or gold, mostly she just looked silver and black.

She opened her mouth and let out a second angry roar. Unmuffled by the water, it dwarfed Adam’s howl, just as her bulk dwarfed the three of us. But it wasn’t the sound that scared me.