River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(46)
Author: Patricia Briggs

The front of her mouth was littered with long, spiky teeth–like the petroglyph’s had been. Teeth designed to spear and hold her prey. Her back teeth were just as nasty. Not grinders but huge spade-shaped sawing teeth. Teeth that could slice off a man’s foot, and she wouldn’t even notice until she swallowed.

She threw herself at us, and her head landed with an impact that almost knocked me off my feet again. Tentacles stretched forward–

"The land is mine," said Coyote. "Here you do not reign. Not yet, and not ever." He stepped between us and her, long, saw-toothed knives suddenly in his hands. "Just you try it. Just you try it."

Head in the dirt, she jerked her tentacles back and screamed at him, a wicked, high-pitched sound, while she gave us an up-close and personal view of sharp teeth. Abruptly, she jerked her head back into the river, faster than such a large thing should have been able to move, and disappeared into water that roiled and drove great waves onto the shoreline.

Coyote turned to me. "That big."

I opened my mouth. I was cold and wet, my middle burned where the river devil had grabbed me–and I had nothing to say. He waited for me to find some words, then shrugged and walked down to the indentation she’d left on the ground about fifteen feet from us.

"About six feet from one side of her jaw to the other," he commented. "Nine feet from where her head started until the end of her nose. More or less."

Adam watched him with pinned ears, then sniffed me over carefully. When he was satisfied I wasn’t too badly damaged, he grumbled at me.

"It wasn’t my idea," I protested. "He threw me in."

The grumble turned into a full-throated growl, and Adam took a step toward Coyote, head lowered and muzzle displaying his generous- sized ivory teeth. I hadn’t intended to send Adam after Coyote with my response. I hadn’t had a chance to let Adam know just who we were dealing with, not that it would matter to him anyway. I caught Adam by the ruff on the back of his neck in a mute request for restraint.

"Simmer down, wolf," Coyote said absently, making the "wolf" sound like an insult. "I wouldn’t have let the creature hurt her."

"Really?" I asked doubtfully. "What could you have done about it if she’d caught me a little faster?"

"Something," he said airily. "Look at all the information we’ve managed to gather. Hey, did you see those otters? I’ve never seen otters that look like that."

"They’re fae," I said.

He grunted. "Never a good idea to plunk down introduced species without knowing what you’re doing."

And he resumed pacing off distances, walking right out into the water. I couldn’t have gone that close to the river right then even if my life depended upon it.

"Assuming," Coyote said, "that she strikes like a snake, we can estimate that she struck with half her body length." He held up a finger as if to forestall an imaginary protest. "Yes, I know that a third is probably more accurate, but I believe in erring on the side of caution. Surprising as that might be to some people."

He stopped knee-deep in the water and counted again on the way back to us. "That’s not good," he muttered. "That’s bigger than I remember. I suppose she might have grown–or my memory is faulty." He pursed his lips and frowned at the indented soil.

"Thirty-two feet from where I stopped to here," he said. "That means between sixty-four and ninety-six feet long. Pretty big."

His eyes traveled down my wet and bedraggled self and landed on the chunk of slimy fire hose at my feet.

"Hah!" he said, trotting over to me. "Good. I thought we might have lost that in the river." He reached down and picked up the piece of the river devil.

"I feel like I’m lost in an anime movie," I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. "One of the tentacle- monster ones." Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.

Coyote rubbed the thing he held with his fingers, then pulled my shirt up with one hand, ignoring Adam’s growl and my "Hey."

Sure enough, there was a swirl of damaged flesh all the way around my waist twice. I’d been afraid to look because these wounds seriously hurt. They looked like acid burns, I decided.

"Mmm," he said, dropping my cold, wet shirt back down over the burns–which didn’t help, even though the cold should have worked as an anesthetic.

He took the tentacle in both hands and held it up, comparing it to me–and I saw what he had noticed. The chunk he held was about two feet long and it had wrapped twice around my waist.

"Must be elastic." He started with two fists together and pulled it until he had both arms outstretched. "Yes. Stretchy, all right. What else do we need to know?"

He pulled a knife out of the pocket of his jeans –a smaller, less-threatening knife than the ones he’d pulled on the monster. "Werewolf teeth evidently are sharp enough to make an impression," he murmured. "But steel?" The blade bounced off the rubbery, gummy thing.

"Here," he said. "You hold this end on the ground here." And he grabbed my hand and had me kneel and hold one end of the tentacle while he stretched it out. With tension and the solid earth beneath it, he managed to stick the end of the knife through the flesh.

"Okay. Steel isn’t a good weapon," he said. "Good to know."

The small knife went away to be replaced by one of the larger jaggedy knives. Like Gordon’s, the knife was obsidian. It wasn’t as big as I’d first thought, but it wasn’t small, either. It sliced into the tough skin just fine.

"Ah," he said. "Inconvenient because these things are a pain, and they break. But at least they still work."

He looked at me. "How are your hands?"

I looked down at them. "Cold. Wet. Fine?" He grunted and stood up, tucking the piece of tentacle into his belt. "As I thought. Whatever makes that burn stopped as soon as Adam bit through it–otherwise, he’d be feeling it by now. Means it’s magic rather than poison or acid or something. Good for you and Adam, bad for us, I’m afraid."

"Why?" Adam let me use him to lever myself to my feet. His ears were pinned back, and he’d kept his eyes on Coyote in a way that made me a little nervous.

"Because I can do this." Coyote pulled my shirt up and set one hand against my bare stomach.

Icy chill spread from his hands–and the burns disappeared, leaving only my pawprint tattoo. He bent down to take a good look at my midriff and grinned at me. "Coyote. Cool tattoo."

"It’s a wolf pawprint," I said coolly, jerking my shirt down over it.