River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(69)

Hopi Woman shook her head. "No. Modern weapons will not harm her. Only the most simple thing, a symbol of the earth that opposes her water: a stone knife."

"Our time is short now," Cherokee Woman said. "You must go back."

Shoshone Woman touched my cheek. "Tell our brother he is wise, that we have no further words of wisdom to add to his."

"He says that you are not speaking to him," I said.

She laughed, but it was a sad laugh. "Coyote doesn't usually lie, but sometimes he forgets. It is he who is angry with us. We gave him advice he did not like, and he got mad."

Cherokee Woman narrowed her eyes at me. "We told him nothing good could come of letting Joe Old Coyote take the Anglo woman to his bed."

Inuit Woman smiled and touched my leg. "Obviously, we were wrong."

"Coyote is like the river devil," I said. "Right? He walks in both places. So why doesn't he eat everything in sight?"

"Coyote walks in one world at a time," Cherokee Woman told me. "He can do this without being trapped because we wait for him here, and you and his other descendants anchor him there."

"Coyote understands that the Universe is all one." Shoshone Woman's voice was indulgent.

"Coyote," said Hopi Woman dryly, "doesn't much worry about understanding anything, which is why he understands so much."

"What happens when the river devil eats them? Coyote and the others." In the stories, Coyote died and was reborn the next day, but there was an air of resignation that clung to these women that hinted at something more dire this time.

They exchanged looks that I could not read.

"We don't know." Inuit Woman stared out into the fog that surrounded us. "As I told you, it is not given to us to know the future. We are merely wise advisors."

"It may be that this is the last time for Coyote to walk your world," said Cherokee Woman in a low voice. "So much has changed, it is impossible to know what those changes mean."

"There are some who do not walk either world any longer." Shoshone Woman's eyes glistened with tears. "River Devil is of both worlds and so could send them back scattered into the universe."

"Do not worry about that which cannot be changed." Hopi Woman sat on the ground and patted my tennis shoes. "Even if Coyote is not reborn with the morning sun, there is always hope of a new dawn. Come now, sisters, it is time to send her back."

"I think she looks like me," said Shoshone Woman. "What do you think?"

AND HER WORDS STILL RANG IN MY EARS WHEN I found myself back where I had started. Time had passed--I could tell because Jim was kneeling on the rug feeding tobacco leaves into the fire. He sang, the words unintelligible to my ears, but not foreign. Adam licked my nose, then nipped it--he'd noticed I was gone, then. I'd ask him later if my body had disappeared with me or if it had just waited there for me. I nuzzled him to let him know I was fine.

One of the hawks--Fred and Hank were hard to tell apart when they were human; as hawks I figured I might have a fifty-fifty chance--fluttered his wings and cried out softly. We were apparently bothering him.

Adam hopped up on the altar where I was sitting and stepped over me with his front paws. He lowered his head and showed the hawk his teeth. Both hawks retreated to the far edge of the altar because neither was stupid, and maybe because Adam had great big teeth.

I glanced first at Jim, who seemed to be very focused on his song and on feeding the last of the tobacco leaves into the fire, then out at Coyote and Gordon--who were gone.

Adam licked my ear, then lay down between me and the hawks. His front paws hung down over the front of the altar, and I suspect his back paws were off on the other end. The three feet of cement that was the width of the altar was generous for me but wasn't nearly enough to hold a whole werewolf.

Jim closed his eyes and held up his right hand. When he closed his fist, the drumbeat stopped-- and with it, the overwhelming pulse of magic. It was like someone had pulled the plug at a nightclub, and all the music stopped. As suddenly as if someone had slammed a door, Stonehenge was as mundane as an exact model of a neolithic calendar could be.

No magic, no mystery, just a gray cement monument that suddenly had a lot more people in it than there had been when the drum had been sounding.

Gordon and Coyote in their human guises were standing in front of the monoliths they'd started out on top of. Between us and them, six Indian men I'd never seen before stepped away from the monoliths.

One man, who looked no older than Calvin, was in a three-piece suit. Adam had taught me to recognize good suits, and this one was several thousand dollars of very nice. Another, like Gordon, was wearing a modern cowboy look, though his was toned down a fair bit. Brown boots, jeans, earth-tone striped shirt, and a brown Montana-style (narrow-brimmed) cowboy hat. Iron gray hair was braided tightly and fell over his shoulder and almost to his knees.

The other four wore traditional native garb, though unlike Coyote's sisters, no two of them were dressed alike. There were two in hunting leathers of slightly different styles. The older one, whose wrinkled face and white hair made Gordon look like a young man, wore leathers that were nearly as pale as the doeskin Coyote's sisters had worn. Except for the fringe around the shoulder seams, his leathers were very plain. The other man's hunting leathers were a rich dark brown with ornate quillwork around his neckline. There were stains on his clothes, as if he'd gone hunting many times wearing that particular shirt and leggings.