River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(53)

The moon lit the face of a man who'd died more than thirty years ago. A man who had been a ghost, dancing for me in broad daylight. He was handsome and young with a devil-may-care air that was obvious even on such short acquaintance.

"Are you my father?" I asked.

He shook his head, the movement emphasized by the grass in his mouth. "Nope. Sorry and all that. But your father was Joe Old Coyote." He pronounced it as two syllables instead of three. Kye-oat not Kye-oat-ee. "He died in a car wreck and a mess with a pair of vampires. They don't like walkers very much, and they liked him rather less than most."

I'd thought I knew why until no one but me had seen the ghost tonight. If you can see ghosts in the daylight, you can find where vampires are sleeping no matter what magic they use to hide. I'd always attributed it to being a walker, but if the other walkers hadn't seen it, maybe there was something to what Gordon Seeker had been implying so heavily. "Oh, that," he said, as if I'd spoken aloud. "Just because you can see something doesn't mean you have to. I'd have thought that anyone who hangs out with werewolves would know that. I mean, who but an idiot would look at a werewolf and think, `dog.' Yet they do."

"That's pack magic," I told him.

He nodded. "Some is. Sure. But still. Walkers see ghosts, but those two taught themselves not to see the dead quite a while ago in a `galaxy far, far away.' A man can't fight a war if he can see the dead and still stay sane. So they made a choice."

"You watched Star Wars?" I asked.

"Joe did," he answered as if that made sense. "Loved it. A cowboy-and-Indian story where the Indians are the good guys and everyone fights with swords."

"Cowboys and Indians?" I asked while I chewed on the first part of the sentence.

He grunted. "Think about it. Good versus evil. The foe has better armament and seems impossible to defeat--the invading Europeans. The good guys are few in number and restricted to a few bold heroes with an uncanny connection to the Force. Indians."

I'd never thought about it that way, but I supposed I could see where someone might. Of course, people said that "Puff the Magic Dragon" was about doing drugs, too. For me, Star Wars was space opera and "Puff" a kid's song about growing up and leaving your dreams behind.

"What about the Ewoks?" I asked. "Aren't they supposed to be the Indians?"

He grinned at me, his sharp teeth flashing white from the moonlight. "Nope. Indians aren't cute and furry. Ewoks were a good marketing ploy."

I took a deep breath of the night air and smelled him. The ghost who'd danced for me, then turned into a coyote.

"Why did you dance? I thought you were a ghost."

"That was a ghost," he said. "That was Joe. He worried because you were headed into danger." He slanted a laughing glance at me. "Not that you haven't been in danger any number of times since you were born. But this is different because I'm called to this one for some reason. Things that involve me tend to be chaotic--and chaos can be fatal for the innocent bystanders."

"Not an innocent bystander," I told him.

"But he is your father. He's entitled to worry."

"What did the dance mean?" I asked.

"Not a spell," he said. "Sometimes dancing is a spell--like the rain dance or the ghost dance. This was a celebration dance. An Indian might describe it as `Look, Apistotoki, here is my daughter. See her. See her grace and her beauty. Preserve this child of mine.'" He gave me a sly look. "Or he might describe the dance as `Look, God, see what I made. Pretty cool, eh? Could you watch out for it?'"

For me. That dance had been for me.

"Tell me," I said, swallowing down the feelings that were roiling around inside me. There was so much I needed to know, and this might be my only chance. "Tell me about Joe Old Coyote." There was something odd going on. Some connection between my father and Coyote, and I couldn't quite figure it out. Direct questions hadn't worked so well; maybe I could get him to elaborate if I went at it sideways. And maybe I'd learn more about my father than my mother had been able to tell me.

The man who looked like my father grunted. "He was a bull rider."

I waited, but it seemed like that was all he had to say. "I did know that," I prompted him.

"Wasn't Blackfeet. Or Blackfoot, either."

That was new information. "He told my mother he was."

"Nope." He shook his head. "No. I'm pretty sure he told her he was from Browning. All the rest was her conclusion."

"Was he from Browning?" I asked. My heart hurt, and I wasn't sure for whom. My mother who'd been so young? Maybe.

"I was bored and lonely," he said with a sly shyness. "So maybe I decided to be just another guy for a while. Maybe. Joe made his entrance at a bar in Browning. He kicked around with some other folks for a while, then entered a rodeo." He made a pleased noise. "Chaos made commercial is a rodeo. He loved it, too. Loved the smells, loved the ache after a good ride, loved fighting the bulls, mostly 'cause those bulls had a good time with him up there. They pitted their strength against his. I could have ridden them for hours, and they could have killed me afterward. But Joe, he was different. Sometimes he won; sometimes they did. Like counting coup. He played by the rules, and they loved him for it."