For a few minutes, we were at a stalemate, the tibicena and I. I couldn’t hurt it, but I was moving too fast for it to hit me. As long as I could keep the speed up, and my coyote could sense its attacks, I was okay. A few minutes is a long time in a fight—and all I had to do was hold out long enough for Darryl to come.
But there were two tibicenas. I caught a glimpse of the second one when it slapped me on the head with its paw.
I stood on cracked blacktop in a school yard. There was a swing set in front of me, and Coyote sat on the only swing, moving it back and forth a few inches by wiggling his bare toes on the ground. It was one of those swings you see in parks and schools, with thick chains attached to a big, flat strip of rubber. The pink scrunchie was gone, his braid bound by a strip of white leather.
“I’m dreaming,” I said flatly.
“You’re dying,” corrected Coyote, lifting his head from where he’d been watching his feet, to meet my eyes. “Your neck is broken. Do you feel any different? I always wondered what other people feel when they are dying. For me it is usually like this—” He let go of the chains and clapped his hands once. “And I’m back to normal except not quite where I was a moment ago.”
“How do I kill Guayota?”
He shook his head and backed up slowly, letting the swing ride up his back. “You can’t. It isn’t possible. Besides, you are dying.” It didn’t sound like my death bothered him very much. He tilted his head, and said, “Do you know that burn on your cheek looks like war paint?”
“Gary thinks you’re just playing with us,” I told him.
Coyote nodded soberly as he hopped gracefully on the swing and let it carry him forward, then back. “Gary has reason to, but he doesn’t think like you do. He thinks—Coyote hates me and has me thrown in jail.” He leaned into the swing and used his legs and back to build momentum. “You think—what good comes from Gary Laughingdog in jail with the gift of prophecy he hates so much? Could it be that perhaps, just perhaps, both of Coyote’s children have a chance of surviving if they are working together?” He gave me a sly look. “Not that it wasn’t funny to see his face when he realized we’d stolen a police car, and he was parked in front of the police station.”
I thought about what he’d said. “Why did you show me the tibicenas?”
“Didn’t you want to save your friend Joel?”
“You answer a lot of questions with questions.”
“Do I?” His smile turned smug, and he leaped out of the swing, landing on his feet but letting his body fall forward until his hands rested lightly on the ground. He lowered his eyelids and suddenly there was nothing lighthearted, nothing funny about him, just a primordial fierceness that burned down my spine.
“I guess you aren’t dead yet, are you?” he whispered, and the words wrapped around me as my vision went dark. “Good thing coyotes are hard to kill.”
I opened my eyes and realized I was crumpled on the cool damp grass, and there was a tibicena crouched over me, licking the long wound in my arm. I couldn’t move. My body knew that moving would hurt, and it just wouldn’t respond to my urgent demands that it do so.
I could hear fighting, but it was Auriele’s battle cry that let me take my eyes off the tibicena guarding me.
I’d never seen Darryl and Auriele fight together, and they were beautiful. For the first time in my life, I wished I were a singer like the Marrok and both of his sons were because only music would do them justice.
Auriele was still in human form and she held my pitchfork as a weapon. Her clothes were burned, and, I imagined, hidden by the night, there were also burns on her skin. She was muscle and grace and speed as she stabbed and pivoted, jumped and dodged around her husband.
Darryl’s brindle coat made him nearly as hard to track as the tibicenas’ magic made them. Most wolves fight with instinct. Some, as I had tonight, fight with instinct and training. But a rare few hold on to enough humanity to use strategy. And that strategy was what made him and Auriele so impressive. He charged and leaped, she struck and rolled, and somehow neither of them was where they’d been when the tibicena who wasn’t guarding me lunged and tangled herself up with Guayota.
If it had only been the tibicena they fought, I would have had no fear.
Guayota, even in his fiery-dog form, was not as large as his tibicena, but there was no question who was the nastier predator. While the tibicena, Darryl, and Auriele fought with everything in them, Guayota played. Darryl bled from a dozen small wounds and, as I watched, Guayota struck him again, and a shallow cut stretched from Darryl’s shoulder to his hip. It was a wound from Guayota’s claw only, without the heat he could generate, though the wet grass smoked, and he left blackened patches wherever he stood for longer than a breath.
Are you going to let them die while you watch? Impossible to tell if the voice was Coyote’s or my own.
My muscles would just not move. I struggled like a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were a hundred pounds too heavy, and the effort built up to a growl in my chest and out my throat.
The tibicena quit licking my arm and growled back.
I stopped struggling as I met its eyes briefly and saw Joel in them. The tibicena shook his head, and the long, rocklike hairs that ruffed his neck rattled together. The connection broken between us, he went back to my arm. He had worked a piece of skin loose and was tearing it away, swallowing it.
I had a terrible, wonderful idea.
“Joel,” I said, and the tongue that had been traveling back to my arm paused, and his eyes met mine, again, eyes that were a dark, sullen red that was more like garnets than rubies.
Didn’t you want to save your friend Joel? Coyote had asked me when I asked him why he’d shown me what the tibicenas were. And I’d seen that the spells that tied Joel to Guayota’s immortal child were a lot like pack bonds.
I didn’t have the walking stick, but I could see the struggle that Joel still fought. Stefan had said something about bonds when he’d been apologizing for not breaking the one between us. He’d implied that a bond taken willingly was stronger than one that was forced.
“Answer the questions I ask you, and I can help,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth. I had practice drawing on my mate’s power, and now I drew it around me, finding that I could borrow a little strength. That was useful, but the important part of Adam’s power that I preempted was his authority. “You don’t have to say your response out loud. Joel Arocha, I see you.”
Garnet eyes glittered with borrowed light.
“Will you join with us, the Columbia Basin Pack, to hunt, to fight, to live and run under the full moon?” There were ritual words, but I’d been taught that the ritual was secondary to intent in all werewolf magic. I thought of Joel—tough, thoughtful, and big-hearted—and welcomed him into my family.
I paused but held his eyes. “I claim you,” I told him, feeling the familiar gathering of pack magic until it burned in my throat, until the next words were determined more by the magic than by me. “We claim you, Joel Arocha, son of Texas, son of the Canary Islands, guardian of four-footed cousins. By my flesh and blood that is the flesh and blood that belongs to the Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack is our bond sealed. From this day forward, you are mine to me and mine.”
Pack ties, mating ties did not break the bond between Stefan and me because they were two different magics: vampire and werewolf. But the spells I’d seen wrapping around Joel were similar to pack bonds.
The first sign that what I’d done had worked was the now-familiar burn in my chest as the pack absorbed another member. Joel staggered, and for a moment his weight pressed down on me unbearably. I think I blacked out because my vision did that weird jump thing, where one moment I was staring at one thing, then the next I was looking at something different, though I couldn’t remember moving my gaze.
The tibicena who was Joel was no longer standing over me, but fighting with the other tibicena. I couldn’t see Darryl, but Auriele was lying with a knee bent in the wrong direction, and she wasn’t moving.
“What did you do?” Guayota’s voice was oddly slurred, but I could hear the anger in it. I couldn’t turn my head, but Guayota moved into my field of view.
The huge fiery-dog form that Guayota wore was oddly lopsided. His left side looked exactly as I remembered. Glowing red eye, crackled skin that showed the moving currents of molten substance that flowed just beneath. The other side was dark, the light beneath wholly extinguished, and as he staggered, half dragging himself from the battleground to where I lay, the outer surface of the dead side began to lighten to gray and crumble when he moved.
“How did you steal—” said Guayota—and then Adam was there, a great blue-silver wolf. Adam and Warren and Honey, who landed on Guayota at the same time, their fury as bright and shining as Guayota had ever been.
“Screw me and stake me out.” Gary’s voice was in my ear. “I think she’s dead. How could she be burned this badly and not be dead?” He was talking about me, I realized, but I didn’t remember getting burned. Coyote had told me my neck was broken. Gary was still talking. “I’ve sent back steaks that were this overdone. Mercy?”
There were other noises in the background: growls and howls and cries of pain.
“Not dead yet,” I told Gary. I had to say it again before he understood me.
He huffed half a laugh. “Finally found a sibling I could stand to talk to for more than ten minutes, and…” He didn’t finish that sentence. “I gotta tell you, you look bad, Mercy.”
I licked my lips. They cracked, but I talked anyway. “Got here sooner than expected. You did, I mean. Did you get a call?” Is Adam here? I’d be safe if Adam was really here. But that wasn’t true, was it? Coyote had told me I was dying.
“No, but someone’s phone was going off every two minutes until one of the werewolves killed it. Please save me from being trapped in a car with that many angry werewolves ever again. They were all mostly changed to wolf, barely, when I had another Seeing, one of the big ones. Saw you and a couple of werewolves fighting Guayota on Honey’s front lawn and realized why I had to go with the wolves. Took me a while to get them to understand. And once they did, I had to drive because they were all too much werewolf already—and let me tell you, oncoming headlights when you have a migraine are no kind of fun.”
A cry, the same kind of bone-chilling cry that Gary and I had heard once before, cut through the sounds of battle and Gary’s soothing voice like a knife.
Gary turned to look, and that let me see one of the tibicenas bite deep into the other and shake it until it turned into a much smaller thing. I recognized the mutated woman that the walking stick had once shown me. Joel, the tibicena who was Joel, dropped her to the ground. She writhed once, then was still.
“Look,” Auriele said, and I was happy to know she wasn’t dead. “Look at Guayota.” I strained my eyes to the side until I could see the wolves fall away from the thing that had been Guayota. One of those wolves was Adam. Something inside me loosened. Adam was alive.
Guayota’s dog form dissolved around the man whom Christy had known as Juan Flores.
Though there were wolves all around him, it was my eyes Guayota sought. “I’m so hungry,” he said. “Where is she? She was supposed to be here.” And then there was just nothing where he’d stood. Nothing. No wisp of clothing falling to the ground, no dust or ash. He was just gone.
Adam turned to look at me, and I tried to get up. But the movement sent sparkles through my vision, and I was lost in darkness.
The smell of cleaning solution woke me briefly.
“…broken neck blah-blah-blah.” It sounded like Samuel, but there was something wrong with his voice. He sounded so sad, so I tried to listen. Maybe I could cheer him up. “And the burns … I’m sorry, Adam—”
Adam said something, and I sank into his voice like it was a warm sea.
“It’s probably better if you talk to me and don’t pay attention to all of that,” said Coyote.
I was lying on a thick field of new-mown grass that smelled a lot better than the cleaning fluid had. I watched the sky where small groups of clouds chased each other like little ducks.
“Mmmm,” I said dreamily.
Coyote chuffed a laugh. “They do have you on some strong stuff. But you’ll remember this anyway. Guayota isn’t dead. You can’t kill one of his kind unless you destroy what he represents. That need not concern you—although I wouldn’t be in a hurry to go visit the Canary Islands for a while. A few years, and he’ll forget. He shouldn’t have worn a human-seeming for so long.”
“Like you did when you became Joe Old Coyote,” I said.
“Not at all,” he told me indignantly. “That cloud looks like me, don’t you think?”
“The bigger one?” I asked.
“Yes, that one that looks like it’s about to eat an egg.”
“No. That one’s a rabbit.”
“Rabbit,” he said indignantly. “That’s a coyote.”
I laughed, but that was a mistake. My vision went black for a few minutes, then, slowly, the sky, clouds, and grass were back.
“Don’t do that,” said Coyote. “It makes it difficult to hold you here. I break things, a lot of things, but I don’t want one of them to be you. So just rest here.”
“What about…” It was difficult to be worried; most of me wanted to just watch the clouds drift by.
“Let me talk,” Coyote said. “You don’t know what questions you want to ask. Unusual decision to bring Joel into the pack. You could have used the walking stick to cut the threads of Guayota’s spell, and that would have done the same thing as you managed to do with the pack spell.” He paused. “Maybe. Maybe it would have just burned to ashes. I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the pack with a tibicena in it.”
“I didn’t have a choice,” I told him. “I gave the walking stick back to Beauclaire.”
“Did you?” said Coyote. “Hmm. Anyway, Guayota, being separated from that which gave him life—the volcano—needed two anchors to hold him in his human-seeming and allow him his power. Two anchors who were connected to his island. Why two? Why male and female? Who knows. Doubtless there is a reason, and if you meet him again, you might ask because the answer interests me.”
“Never,” I told him. “I am never going to the Canary Islands.”
There was a little silence beside me, and I realized that he was lying in the grass, too. “It’s supposed to be beautiful in the Canaries,” he said a little wistfully. “There’s this underground lake lit by torches…”
“No,” I told him.
“Maybe Gary will go,” Coyote said contemplatively. “But in any case, when you claimed Joel, tibicena and all, it threw the magic that allowed Guayota to live away from his island out of balance, and it unraveled.”
“Then Joel will go back to being just human?” I asked.
“That depends,” Coyote said.
“On what?” I turned my head, glimpsed his face, then my world went black again.
“Why don’t you just die?” hissed someone in my ear.
After a moment, I realized it was Christy.
“I know it was you. I know it. And now I look like a freak.” Something dripped on my cheek and touched my lips with salt.
“Mom,” said Jesse. She sounded appalled and … amused.
“She’s nasty and vindictive,” Christy said. “Everyone thinks she farts rainbows—and look what she did to me. I’m blue.” She wailed the last.
Christy had used the bottle of shampoo she’d left in my bathroom. I hoped the dye hadn’t stained the tile, but it would be worth it if it had. There were some noises, then Jesse’s breath was warm on my ear.
“She’s gone to get coffee, Mercy,” she told me. “I love her, but—the dye was inspired.” She giggled. “You are terrifying. I can’t believe you got her while you were…” She cleared her throat. “While you were in the hospital.” She laughed again. “I told her she should leave it. I’d dye my hair blue again, and we could be twins. Even Auriele laughed at her expression, though she turned her head so Mom couldn’t see.”
There was a long, peaceful silence, and then Jesse said, “I want so badly for her to be happy. But I can’t make her happy. All I can do is love her. Do you think that’s all right?” She patted the pillow beside my head. “You need to wake up pretty soon, though. Dad needs you. So do I.”
The sheets were very white and scratchy and the blankets too thin. My toes were cold, and I was lying on my side. I wiggled to try to pull my feet up and get them warm.
“Mercy?” Adam said.
“We need to get new blankets,” I told him, and he laughed.