Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

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.”
    “Hah,” I said. “You obviously never had Charles catch you doing something he disapproved of.”
    We lapsed into silence, again.
    “What can you tell me about the thing in the river?” I asked finally.
    He made a rude sound. “I can tell you she’s not a poor misunderstood creature. Gordon is right. She’s Hunger, and she won’t be satisfied until she consumes the world.”
    She. That answered several things. There was only one. That seemed more manageable than a swarm of monsters that could bite a woman in half and make a man shoot Adam.
    “How big is it?” I asked.
    He looked at me and poked his tongue into his cheek. “You know? That’s a good question. I think we ought to find out.”
    And he knocked me into the river.

9

    THE WATER WAS ICY AND CLOSED OVER MY HEAD, encasing me in silence and darkness. For a moment the shock of the fall, of the cold, and of sheer surprise froze my muscles, and I couldn’t move. Then my feet hit the riverbed, and the motion somehow woke up every nerve into screaming urgency. I pushed off and up, coming to the surface and sucking in air.
    I could hear him laughing.
    Son of a bitch. I would kill him. I didn’t care if he was Coyote or the son of Satan. He was a dead man walking.
    I struck out for the swimming hole even though it meant fighting the river. But for the next mile downstream or so, the riverbank was cliff face, and I didn’t want to stay in the river that long: there was a monster out here somewhere.
    A toddler walking along the bank could have beat me, for all the forward progress I made. I was only a fair swimmer, strength without technique. It was enough to beat the slow flow of the Columbia, but not by much.
    Two otter heads poked up beside me, and I growled at them. Somehow knowing they were fae made them less of a threat than real river otters though I expect the opposite was actually true. I was too busy fighting the river to worry about adjusting my beliefs in accordance to reality.
    They disappeared under the water for a few minutes before one popped up again, watching my slow progress with cool appraisal.
    “I’d swim faster if I were you,” observed Coyote.
    Rage fueled my strokes, and I finally made it around the bend and into the shallower, slower water. I swam until the water was waist-deep and staggered toward shore on my feet. Coyote waded in knee-deep and stopped to watch me.
    “What did you find out?” he asked.
    “That you are a jerk,” I told him, my voice vibrating involuntarily with the chill. “What in—”
    Something wrapped around my waist and jerked me off my feet, and my head was