River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(55)
Author: Patricia Briggs

Jim stood in front of the carpet and closed his eyes. It looked like a prayer, but whatever he did caused the magic to sit up and take notice–I could feel it even through the cement I perched upon.

He stepped onto the carpet and held a hand over the stacked wood. "Wood," he said, "who swallowed the flame of the Fire Beings, it is time to burn."

When the little fire burst into flame, Adam flinched a bit, but it didn’t seem to surprise Calvin or Jim. Jim gave a small nod to Calvin, who began to play the drum. At first he played with a simple, one-handed beat. It wasn’t a steady sound but tentative and irregular–until he caught the beat of the magic that ran beneath us. He stayed with that for a while, then began to speed up, accenting the simple beat with grace notes. When the magic followed his additions, he switched up the cadence to a driving, syncopated rhythm. And the magic followed his lead.

The wind chose that moment to pick up and throw smoke from the fire into my eyes. I blinked but I must have gotten some ash in with the smoke. Putting my muzzle down on top of the stone, I scrubbed at my face with my paws. It helped. I lifted my head as soon as I could see– and I was alone.

Chapter 11

I STOOD UP IN A PANIC, THE BEAT OF CALVIN’S DRUM still strong–but the bond between Adam and me was strong and reassuring. It gave me courage to stay where I was, take a deep breath, and look around to see if I could figure out what had happened to everyone else.

The fire burned, the candles were lit, and the night sky overhead was clear and star-spangled. However, there was a thick fog at ground level, and I could see nothing beyond the outer ring of the henge. About that time I realized that I was in my human shape, wearing the clothes I’d taken off and carefully folded a little while ago. They felt real under my fingers–even the slight roughness where I’d dripped a little mustard on my jeans that afternoon.

But I was pretty sure this was a vision. I couldn’t think of any other reason that I could still hear the drum.

The rising hair on the back of my neck told me that somewhere, someone was watching me. I couldn’t hear or smell them, but I could feel eyes on me.

Maybe they were waiting for an invitation. "Hello?"

"Hello, Mercedes."

I turned around and found that there were four women walking in through the largest of the staple-shaped rocks. All of them were dressed in identical white doeskin wedding dresses complete with fringe and elk teeth. Their feet were bare and callused, and the pale dust from the light gray gravel covered their feet as if they had been walking in it a long time. They smelled clean and astringent, like sage or witch hazel, but sweeter than either.

I was no expert on native peoples, despite a bit of heritage searching while I was in college. But I was sufficiently well versed to know that each of them was from a very different tribe, despite their too-beautiful-to-be-real features. The first woman looked Navajo or Hopi to me–or maybe even Apache. Her skin was darker than any of the others, and her features were soft. She wore her hair in Princess Leia-like buns on either side of her head, which I thought was a traditional Hopi style–the style of one of the Pueblo Indians, anyway.

The second woman had the rounded, low cheekbones of the Inuit, and her eyes crinkled at me in a friendly fashion. Her hair was separated into two thick braids that hung down to her shoulders.

The third woman looked like someone from one of the Plains tribes, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what made me think so. Her face was a little less soft than the first two, her gaze clear and penetrating. Like the second woman, she wore her hair in a pair of braids, but hers hung down past her waist. She had bone earrings in her ears –the only one of the four to wear jewelry of any kind.

The fourth woman wore her dark hair pulled loosely back from her face, but otherwise it was free to flow halfway down her back. It was thick and wiry, like the mane of a wild horse. I could not tell what people she was from, except that she was Indian. Her features were sharp, her nose narrow, and her lips full. She was the one who spoke first.

"Mercedes is not a proper Indian name." Her tone, like her words, was critical, but not emotionally so. I’d have expected to hear such a tone from a woman in a market looking at fruit. She pursed her lips briefly, evidently considering my name. "She is a mechanic. We should call her She Fixes Cars."

The first woman, the one who might have been Hopi, shook her head. "No, sister. Bringer of Change."

The woman who looked like one of the Plains Indians but not quite Crow, Blackfeet, or Lakota, frowned disapprovingly. "Rash Coyote Who Runs With Wolf. We could shorten it to Dinner Woman."

The merry Inuit woman laughed. "Mercedes Who Fixes Volkswagens, we have brought you to see us since our brother would not bring us to see you."

"Your brother?" I asked carefully. I was still standing on the altar, which had me looking down on them. That felt wrong, so I stepped off onto the sand and the magic in the ground promptly turned my knees to rubber.

"Coyote," they said at the same time, while the Inuit woman kept me from falling.

I couldn’t help but think that it would be a bad thing to sit on the ground if just standing on it had this much of an effect. I sat on the altar and pulled my feet up.

"We cannot tell the future," said the sharp- featured woman whose tribe I couldn’t place at all. "But we know what our brother is planning. Would you tell him that it is very dangerous, but it is also the only thing that we could think of that might work?"

"What is he planning?" I asked.

"We can tell you here." Inuit Woman sat beside me but left her feet on the ground. "But he can’t tell you until he rids himself of her spies. That’s actually why we brought you here–that, and we wanted to get a look at you. He Sees Spirits–you know him as Jim Alvin–has opened this way between us for a short time. Coyote needed privacy to speak to the others, to Hawk and Raven, to Bear and Beaver, and to the rest. We decided that you should know what he says."

"River Devil," said the Hopi-Navajo-possibly- Apache woman, "is a creature who lives in your world and ours at the same time. In ours she is immortal, but she can be killed in yours. Once she is dead, she cannot go back unless she is summoned. But at that time she returns bigger and more dangerous than before. The last time our brother confronted her, he trapped her rather than killing her in the hope that it would be more effective than killing her had proved." I decided she was Hopi, and as I did so, her features changed just a little until there was no possibility of her being anything else.

"Who would summon that thing?" I asked.