River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(54)

Coyote had decided to be Joe Old Coyote? Then why did he say he wasn't and speak of Joe Old Coyote in third person?

"So Joe was born in Browning," I said slowly.

"You might say that," agreed Coyote. "Joe usually did."

"Joe was a person you became." I said it as if I were certain, and he nodded.

"Exactly."

"So you were Joe Old Coyote but Joe wasn't you."

"Sort of." Coyote tapped the soil with his hands. "This explaining stuff isn't where my talents lie. I created Joe, then I lived in him until he died. He wasn't me, and I wasn't him, but we occupied the same skin for a while. As long as Joe walked this earth, I walked it with him-- though he never knew that. There were just things he didn't worry about very much--like his childhood. When he died, I was reborn as me-- and he was dead."

Maybe it was the night, maybe it was because I was sitting in the moonlight next to Coyote--but suddenly it all sort of made sense. Like that bug- thing in the Men in Black movie, Coyote had worn a Joe suit. Unlike the bug's human suit, Coyote's had had a life of his own.

"Joe was real?"

Coyote nodded. "And so is his ghost--even though that is me as well."

I made a command decision not to question that remark. I was feeling like I understood, and a ghost of a real person who wasn't really a person would throw me off my game again.

"If he was born in Browning," I told Coyote, "maybe that makes him Blackfeet. Piegan." I suddenly realized where Joe got his name, and it made me shake my head. "The Blackfeet tell stories about the Old Man, don't they? He's their trickster. It's the Crow and the Lakota in that part of the country who tell Coyote stories. For the Blackfeet, the Old Man plays the part of Coyote. Old Man and Coyote. Old Coyote. Joe, because he was just another Joe."

The man beside me laughed, a soft, pleased sound. "Maybe it does make him Blackfeet. Some anyway. He liked Browning--they know how to party, those Indians in Browning."

"And then he met my mother." My father was a construct of Coyote's boredom. Or loneliness, maybe. It should have made me feel like less of a person, but somehow it didn't. My father had always been this unreal person to me, a black- and-white photo and a few stories my mother told. But I had seen him dance, had heard the echoes of his voice in Coyote's.

Coyote threw his head back and laughed, and I heard the chorus of coyote howls up and down the gorge, called by his laughter.

"Marjorie Thompson. Marji. Wasn't she somethin'." There was an awed sort of reverence in his voice. "Who'd have thought such a child would be so tough without being hard? If someone could have settled Joe down, it would have been Marji. He thought she was the one, anyway."

"But coyotes don't mate for life, do they?" I tried to keep my voice neutral.

"He would have," said Coyote. "Oh, he would have. He loved her so much."

His voice, sincere and deep, hit me hard. I had to rub my eyes.

"If he'd known about her sooner, he wouldn't have killed the vampire nest over in Billings," he said after a while. "But they needed killing, and he was there. Joe always thought of himself as a hero, you know--not the kind of hero I am, but the Luke Skywalker sort. Rescue the princess, kill the evil villains."

He looked down at the water, and said, as if it were a new discovery, "Maybe that's where you get it. I always assumed it was just too much Star Wars, but maybe it was genetic." After a moment's thought, he shook his head. "No. I know where his genes came from. I think it must have been Star Wars."

"The vampires?" I said tightly.

"Right. He knew taking out that seethe would set the vampires after him, but he wasn't too worried because it was just him. And then Marji came along, and he wasn't thinking about anything. Especially not about vampires. Not until he saw a pair of them talking to her one evening. At that moment he started thinking about vampires pretty damn hard. He let them catch a glimpse to draw them off and led them away on a merry chase. He was doing pretty well until he blew a tire."

He tossed his piece of grass away with a violent gesture, and his grass fell into the river.

"Don't know if the vampires engineered that or not. But they found him when he was trapped, and they killed him."

The story made my heart hurt, but not in a bad way. More like a wound that has just been scrubbed with iodine or hydrogen peroxide. It stung pretty badly, but I thought it might heal better in the end. "So when my father was dead, you were left?" I asked.

"Just me," he said. We sat in silence again for a bit; maybe both of us mourned Joe Old Coyote.

The man who looked like my father broke the silence. "He didn't know about you."

"I know. Mom told me."

"I didn't know about you until a lot later. Then I stopped in to check you out. You looked happy running with the wolves. They looked bewildered --which is as it should be when a coyote plays with wolves. So I knew you were okay." He glanced at me. "Which is what Charles Cornick told me when he saw me watching you. Sent me packing with a flea in my ear." His eyes laughed though his face was perfectly serious. "Terrifying, that one."

"I think so," I told him truthfully.

He laughed. "Not to you. He's a good man. Only an evil man needs to fear a good man."