Night Broken (Mercy Thompson, #8)(77)

And when he said the word “tibicena,” the head of the walking stick sharpened into the blade of a spear. My eyesight sharpened, too, and I saw that there was a third layer I had not been able to distinguish before. Surrounding each dog was a shadow that grew more solid as my hand clenched tighter on Lugh’s walking stick, a shadow that was large and hairy with red eyes, as in the story Kyle had told. Huge—polar-bear huge. Four or five times as big as any werewolf I’d ever seen. Gradually the other, smaller forms disappeared inside the giant dogs—both of whom were looking directly at me.

Coyote slipped back, grabbed my ankle, and dragged me backward, out from under the hedge like I was a rabbit he’d caught. He dropped my ankle, grabbed my elbow, and hauled me to my feet. Before I could catch my balance, he all but threw me down the cliff face we’d come up. I managed to stay on my feet, using the bottoms of my shoes like skis and leaning my weight back on the walking stick for balance in a mockery of glissading.

As a kid, glissading down steep, snow-covered mountain slopes had been an upgrade in difficulty and fun to simply sledding. “Fun” wasn’t a term I applied to glissading down a cliff that had no snow for padding in case of accident and using an ancient artifact that might break—and wasn’t that a lovely thought? I had a pretty good idea about what would happen when an old fae artifact was destroyed. At least the spearhead had returned to its more usual form, so I wasn’t likely to stab myself with it, too.

I didn’t fall until I was almost at the bottom. So when I rolled, I hit that improbably soft ground and emerged not much worse for wear. Gary landed on his feet beside me, and on the other side, Coyote grabbed my arm—exactly where he’d grabbed me before so I was sure to have bruises—and hauled me to my feet, again.

“Run,” he said.

Gary grabbed my hand and pelted down the path, pulling me in his wake. The path still had its cover of greenery, but now the ceiling of leaf and stem was tall enough for us to stand upright in.

As soon as I was running all out, Gary dropped my hand. I tucked the walking stick under my free arm, put my head down, and ran as the howls of the dog became baying and a second dog joined in the chorus. Joel had evidently lost his battle for control—and Coyote’s trick with the landscape didn’t stop the dogs from hunting us in it.

Speaking of Coyote … I glanced over my shoulder in time to see that a four-footed coyote had stopped in the middle of the path behind us. He was a little bigger than the usual coyote, but if I’d seen him out my window, I wouldn’t have given him a second look. He gave me a grin and a wag of his tail before running the other way.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Gary chanted as he ran. “Stupid freaking Coyote. Always getting me in trouble.”

I bumped him with my shoulder. “Accept some responsibility for your own life,” I panted, finally. “You could have stayed sitting in the middle of the road. You chose to come with us.”

Gary gave me an irritated look. “Whose side are you on anyway?”

He wasn’t as out of breath as I was. Maybe he had more practice running.

“I didn’t know there was a side to be on,” I grunted.

I could still hear the dogs. No. Not dogs. I thought of the giant forms, the ones that Coyote said could not be harmed by mundane means. These were Guayota’s children. They were tibicenas.

“They sound like they’re getting closer,” Gary said. I wished he hadn’t, because I’d been thinking the same thing.

“I thought Coyote was going to divert them.” My voice was breathy because I didn’t have much air to spare.

“Right,” said Gary. “Just like he diverted the police when I ended up in jail. I think we’re the intended diversion here.”

“He dumped me in a river where there was a monster killing things,” I told him.

“There you go. That’s the Coyote I know and hate.”

The woods and brush thinned, and we were running on the hill down to the gravel road we’d traveled before.

“Which way?” said Gary.

I looked frantically, but there was nothing to distinguish one direction from another. Although the moon had been in the sky when we ducked into the tunnel of brush, there was no sign of her now. I felt down the pack bonds and the bond I shared with Adam. Though I could tell they were somewhere, I got no sense of where they were in relation to me. The connection was foggy, as if they were a lot farther away than an hour’s walk.

“You pick,” I said, as we hit the bottom of the hill—and he jerked my hand and pulled me to the right.

I made the mistake of looking up the hill and caught sight of one of the tibicenas cresting the top—the female. She saw us and bayed twice before plunging down the hillside after us. I quit looking back and concentrated on running—and on hoping that she didn’t give that cry we’d heard before, the one that had frozen me in my tracks.

“Isn’t that walking stick supposed to take you home?” Gary asked. “Why don’t you say the magic words? ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’”

Where did he get enough breath to be sarcastic? If he wasn’t being sarcastic, then he didn’t know fae artifacts as well as I did.

“They aren’t Dorothy’s ruby slippers,” I said. “Fae artifacts have a mind of their own, and this one is particularly contrary.”