River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)(74)
Mercedes. The demand was angry and impatient. I picked up a rock and chucked it in the river as my answer.
Coward to save yourself at the expense of a child. You shall see what you have done.
I learned a lot in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I learned that MacKenzie's little brother was named Curt, like my stepfather. He was four --and marked as MacKenzie was, so he didn't fight when his sister carried him on her hip out into the river. As a treat especially for me, I think, the river devil released her hold on their minds before she killed them. But maybe it was because MacKenzie's screams had her parents tearing out of their tent and into the water after them.
I learned that I could have exchanged my life for four people's lives. Four.
Chapter 12
I DIDN'T SLEEP. WHAT WAS THE POINT? I COULD HAVE nightmares while I was awake just as well as when I was asleep.
I had made the right decision, the only decision. But that didn't make it any easier to live with the deaths of four people I could have saved.
I fed Adam, and when he grunted at me, I fed myself, too. I had to keep my strength up. If four people had died to give me a chance to help kill the river devil, it wouldn't do to fail because I hadn't eaten.
About 5:00 A.M., when the first pale hint of dawn touched the sky, Adam and I got in the truck and headed back up to Stonehenge. Without Adam to converse with and nothing much to do, I would drive us both crazy if we stayed at the campsite. Stonehenge needed to be cleaned up. I could do that and save Jim and Calvin some work.
It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. when we'd packed up that morning, and Jim had looked like a man who'd been rode hard and put away wet. I didn't expect him to arrive until a more civilized hour. But he and Calvin drove up about ten minutes after I finally found the step stool so I could get high enough to remove the candles from the tops of the standing stones. Chin-ups on forty-five monoliths (I counted them while contemplating how to get the candles down) had struck me as too energetically taxing when I had a monster to kill later.
Calvin waved at me and hopped in the back of the truck to grab two boxes. He jumped back out and trotted over while Jim got out of the truck and shut the door.
"Hey," said Calvin. "Didn't expect--" He saw Adam and stopped dead. "Uhm. What's wrong with him?"
Even happy werewolves are scary in broad daylight if your eyes let you really see what they are. Adam was not a happy werewolf.
"Wolf took offense at the bite," I said. "So Adam can't change back to human right now."
"Jeez," said Calvin. "That sucks--and it's your honeymoon." Then his face flushed darker with embarrassment.
That was not what had Adam's hackles up, though. I'd told him about Coyote's sisters after Coyote left. And whispering very quietly what the plan to kill the monster was. Adam couldn't talk to tell me what he thought. I knew that he understood that it was the best plan we could come up with. I also knew that he didn't like it. At all. Amazing what body language can convey.
"Coyote is sure it is temporary," I told him, getting the next candle down while Calvin started to set them in the boxes he'd brought. The boxes were like the ones moving companies use to pack glasses, with cardboard inserts that kept each of the candles separate from the others. "Just don't look him in the eyes, okay?"
It took us about an hour and a half to get the place cleaned up and looking the way it had before we'd come. Hardest was getting the coarse dark gravel out of the much finer pale gravel.
"You could have used a plywood board," I told Jim, who was sitting on the altar criticizing Calvin and me while we picked up gravel one piece at a time and put it in a wheelbarrow.
"No," he said. "I could not have. The fire had to rest on earth. Even the gravel was cheating a bit."
"Next time." Even Calvin the Ever Cheerful was getting grumpy. "Next time I vote we put the fire on the ground. I'll dig it out afterward and put fresh gravel that matches the original back over the top."
Jim grunted. "That is more work. We did it that way for a few years until I started to do it this way." "What about a gunnysack?" I asked. "Something porous but not so loose a weave that the big gravel can drop through. Or use gravel that would blend in better with what is already here."
"Might work," agreed Jim. "But then what would I use to keep my apprentice busy? I suppose I could do what my teacher did and teach him beading."
"I'll pick up gravel, Uncle, thank you," Calvin said meekly.
The medicine man laughed. "I thought you might feel that way."
I STOPPED AT THE GAS STATION IN BIGGS AND GOT A pair of ice-cream cones--banana and strawberry--and a notebook. We ate the ice cream in the truck until Adam was finished with his strawberry cone because I couldn't feed myself and Adam and drive at the same time.
As I drove back over the bridge, still licking my banana ice cream, I could see the Maryhill Campground, full of tents, trailers, and RVs. Had MacKenzie been staying there with her family? Or had they been somewhere more private? I hadn't noticed any other campers. But if it had been the Maryhill Campground, Coyote might have been able to get to her in time to save her while I kept River Devil busy. If she'd been at the Maryhill Campground, and we had known where she was.
I drove back to camp and started writing. A letter to my mother and one to each of my sisters. I did not, of course, mention Coyote. A long letter to Samuel and Bran. A letter to Jesse. A letter to Stefan. A lot of pages that I'd burn if I survived the night.