Kingfisher(16)

She was still trembling, her hands still icy, when she stopped the truck beside Zed’s cabin. She couldn’t move except to wipe away the stray tears that told her she wasn’t entirely a solid lump of ice. A solitary thought surfaced now and then from what seemed the completely functionless tangle of her brain. Why am I surprised? was one of them. Another came eventually, when she saw Zed’s car lights turn onto the slough road: How long ago were there wolves around Chimera Bay?

After another silence, she heard her door open, felt Zed’s hands tug at her.

“Hey. It’s me. Carrie. What’s wrong? Why didn’t you wait inside? You’re so cold . . .”

He took her inside, wrapped her in a blanket, and gave her something hot in a cup to thaw her fingers. She couldn’t seem to stop shaking. Finally, he took her shoes off and pulled her into bed under the covers, where he could wrap himself around her.

“What happened? Carrie? Do you want me to call 911? Is it your dad? Did something happen to him?”

She drew a long breath, finally feeling bits of her—a lung, a nostril, an earlobe—begin to come back to life.

“No,” she whispered. “And yes. Either I’m going crazy, or my father turned into a wolf in front of me.”

She felt his chest rise as he sucked breath. “No. Merle’s a werewolf?”

That had not occurred to her; she thought about it.

“No. I don’t think so. It wasn’t like that. It was more like— We were arguing in the Kingfisher parking lot—and he needed—he needed a different way to get me to understand what he was saying. Or not saying.”

“Wow.” He pulled up, leaning on an elbow, gazing down at her. “That is so cool.”

She felt her face melt, remember how to smile. “So. No 911.”

“Where’d he learn to do that? What is he?”

“I don’t know.” Both eyes heated at once; the candles he had lit blurred and swam. “Another unanswered question.” The tears broke; she wiped at them, smiling again. “I hope he doesn’t run around Chimera Bay like that and get himself shot. I should have known. I should have known by now not to be surprised at anything he would do. He talks to crows. He talks to the moon. Sometimes he makes me wonder exactly how long he’s lived in this world. He says things—things that seem to go so far back that I don’t understand how he can know them.”

“It’s so amazingly bizarre. Like the life cycle of a salmon.”

“What?”

“That old, that strange. Or like sharks that never seem to sleep. Orcas. The leviathans of the deep that take your hook and don’t let go until you’re the one struggling on the end of the line, and they’ve changed the way you look at the world.”

A shiver ran over her, gossamer and cold as a ghostly finger.

“I wonder,” she whispered, “what leviathan is making my father afraid.”





5


On a stretch of coast road between towns, where traffic was light and the wind from the sea soughed through thick stands of hemlock and spruce, the Metro blew a tire. The small car shivered under Pierce’s grip and tried to crawl up a tree trunk. Pierce turned the wheel wildly, got it stopped before they met, but not before something groaned under the car and he heard a crack like a bone breaking. He sat a moment, breathing raggedly. Nothing passed him on the road, which, he realized belatedly, was fortunate since the rear bumper was angled out into the lane. He moved finally, opened his door, and got out to survey the damage.

The right front tire was in a ditch and pretty much flattened. The right back tire seemed to have run over a milepost, which had not gone down without a fight; the metal had taken a bite out of the tire as it warped. The broken bone had been a sapling caught under the car as it slewed off the road. The slender trunk had splintered above the root; the rest of it was wedged under the car.

Pierce swallowed dryly. He stood for a moment, listening, and heard only wind, no traffic. He reached inside the car, loosed the handbrake, then got behind the car and pushed. It rocked a moment wearily, then moved abruptly, mowing down whatever it had left standing, and rolling the front tire deeper into the ditch. At least the rear end was out of the road. He stood another moment, looking helplessly at the car, then pulled out his cell phone to call a tow truck. The phone rang in his hand, and he started. He should, he realized, have expected the call.

“Hi.”

“Pierce! Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I’m fine. You must know that already.”

“Where are you?” Heloise asked. “I don’t recognize anything.”

He glanced around, looking for her borrowed eyes. A jay squawked at him suddenly, harshly, as if he had trashed the neighborhood on purpose.

Mom? he thought, then saw the hawk circling high above the trees, silent, dark-winged against the blue.

“I’m fine,” he said again. “I just had a blowout. I’ll call a tow truck to take me to the nearest town, stay there until the car is fixed.”

She was silent a breath, circling with the hawk. “Wait. I think I know—”

“Mom—”

“That little town. Biddie Cove. I stayed a night there a long time ago, when I ran away from Severluna. It has the highest sea stack on the Wyvernhold coast, and a wonderful old diner that served the best chowder—”