River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(16)

But my voice made his shoulders stiffen. Then he turned slowly toward me until I stared into the face of a man I'd never met, whose face was as familiar as the one I looked at in my own mirror, even though I only had one black-and-white photograph of it from a newspaper report of his death.

My father.

I couldn't speak, couldn't breathe. It felt just like someone had belted me in the diaphragm, so my lungs couldn't work.

He stared at me, unsmiling. Slowly, almost ceremonially, he bowed his head to me. Then he slid into a coyote shape as easily, as quickly, as I can. The coyote appeared, oddly, more solid than the man had been. He looked at me with the same bold stare he'd had when he appeared human. Then, without warning, he bolted across the grounds and into the bushes a dozen yards away.

In the photograph, my father had been wearing the uniform of a rodeo cowboy--jeans, long- sleeved Western-cut shirt, and a cowboy hat. My mother, a teenager fighting free of strict parents, had met him in a rodeo where she was winning prize money barrel racing her best friend's horse when she was younger than Jesse. She hadn't had a chance to tell him she was pregnant before he'd been killed in a car accident. The name he'd given her was Joe Old Coyote.

I'd never seen my father's ghost before. He hadn't come to me when I slunk out of Montana, fleeing the only home I had ever known. He hadn't come when I graduated from high school or college. Hadn't come when I'd fought for my life against fae and demons and all sorts of nasty creatures. He hadn't come to my wedding.

I looked for footprints. I might feel pretty confident of my knowledge of werewolves, marginally comfortable with what I knew of vampires. The fae are another matter--and I knew that there were other things I knew nothing about, some of them unique, some of them just well hidden.

I'd been certain what I'd seen was a ghost until I had a moment to wonder how my father, who'd died hundreds of miles away in eastern Montana, would have gotten here. He'd turned into a coyote, just like I could, and run off into the bushes. Most ghosts don't need to run away; they just dissipate. But there were no tracks--and I know how to track. Not even in the soft dirt right in front of the bushes he'd run into.

I had gooseflesh on my arms though it was still hot out. "SO YOU DON'T THINK IT WAS A GHOST?" ADAM ASKED, then took a big bite of his hot dog.

The trailer had a stove and an oven, but there were both a fire pit and a grill next to our spot, and we'd decided to roast hot dogs for dinner in the pit. He'd run until dusk, stopped by and given me a sweaty kiss, then grabbed clean clothes and a towel before heading to the showers.

But the time he came back, I had a fire going in the pit and the food ready to cook.

There were camp chairs tied to the back of the trailer, but we sat on the ground next to each other anyway. If I didn't notice that we were cooking right next to the Behemoth Trailer and sitting on a manicured lawn, I could pretend we were really camping. This was like "the good parts version" of camping. I could get used to it.

"Umm," I answered, then swallowed so I could talk. "I didn't say that exactly--my father is dead, after all. If it was my father, it was a ghost. But maybe it was something else. There are stories about the Indian supernatural population, but a lot of the old knowledge was lost when the government tried to assimilate the tribes into the Amer-European culture. A good portion of what is known was made up on the spot--no one tells a tall tale like an Indian--and no one knows for certain anymore which are the really old stories and which were faked."

Charles, Bran's half-Indian son born sometime in the early eighteen hundreds, could have shed some light on the subject--but, to my intense frustration, he seldom talked about his Native American roots. Maybe I could have pushed him into it, but Charles was one of the very few people who really intimidated me. So even back when I was looking into that half of my family history, I'd never prodded him too hard, much as I'd have liked to.

"You think it might have been some local spirit imitating your father?" Adam asked.

He'd finished his hot dog and was in the middle of cooking another. He liked them burnt on the outside--I liked mine just shy of hot.

I watched my hot dog warm and tried to pretend I could believe that. "Maybe. Maybe there is something like a weird doppelganger who appears to other people or a backward foreganger--a death's-head who appears after a man dies instead of three days before."

Adam tilted his head at me, then shook it. "If you really thought it was some native critter, you'd be calling Charles."

Adam was right. If Charles thought I was really in trouble, he'd help however he could. He might be scary, but he was family. Sort of.

Adam gave me a shrewd look. "You just don't like the idea that your father visited you, and you don't know why."

And why Joe Old Coyote hadn't shown up sooner.

Damn it, I chided myself. I knew better than that. A ghost wasn't a person; it was just the leftovers. That ghost might be the ghost of my father, but he wasn't my father.

He'd died before I was born. But I hadn't suffered. I'd been raised by Bryan and Evelyn, my foster parents, and they had loved me. When they died, Bran and the rest of his pack had stepped in --and then my mother. I'd never been unloved, never mistreated. I was an adult--so why did the sight of a ghost who looked like my father make me feel so raw?

"Okay," I said. "Yep. You're right. If he could visit anytime, why didn't he? Why now when I don't need him?" I'd rather have believed it wasn't my father.