Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

underwater again. I fought, digging my feet in deep, but it pulled me slowly back out toward the deeper water. I managed to get my face out of the river and gasped for breath. As soon as I got oxygen in my lungs, I screamed Adam’s name with a volume that would have done credit to a B-movie actress in a horror film.
    Coyote grabbed my wrists, then shifted his grip until his arms were wrapped around my torso. He began to pull me back toward shore, and the strands around my waist tightened until I couldn’t breathe.
    “Let’s see what we caught,” he murmured breathlessly in my ear. “It should be interesting.”
    I didn’t hear Adam. He was just suddenly there, a shadow of fur and fang. He closed his mouth on something just below the surface of the water, and his weight on the thing that wrapped around me jerked Coyote and me off our feet and back down into the river. The too-tight bands released me, then Coyote grabbed my arm and hauled me up.
    “Run,” he said.
    But I looked around for Adam. I wasn’t leaving him in the river with the monster. The wolf bumped my hip, safe and sound, so I let Coyote pull me out of the river and ran with him as fast as I could up the bank to the steep ridge that separated the swimming beach from the rest of the campground, Adam keeping pace with us. Coyote kept us running about four long strides on the grass before turning around.
    The river lay quiet and black, the surface hiding anything that lay beneath.
    Beside me, Adam roared a challenge that would have done credit to a grizzly bear. Coyote joined in with a high-pitched cry that hurt my ears, his face exuberant and laughing.
    Something wet and squishy rolled down my leg and fell on my bare foot. It looked like a chunk of limp fire hose, if that fire hose was made from the stuff they make gummy worms from and covered with short, silver hair that glittered in the moonlight. One end was all jagged, where Adam had severed it, and the other narrowed, then widened in a ball about the size of a softball.
    Something else, neither wolf nor coyote, bellowed like an enraged bull. And the river devil revealed itself . . . herself, if I could believe Coyote. Up and up she rose, like a snake charmer’s cobra. Though her body resembled a giant snake’s, the overall impression I had was, as it had been looking at the petroglyph, of a Chinese dragon. A huge, ginormous, towering, and ticked-off Chinese dragon.
    Her head could certainly have inspired the petroglyph. It was triangular like a fox’s, with huge green eyes. Encircling her head at the base of her skull, like a ruff of snakes or petals of a flower, long tentacles twisted and writhed like a wave, not precisely in unison, but not independently, either.
    On the very top of her head were two shiny black horns, twisted and rolled back, like a mountain sheep’s. From the front, it looked very much like she had a pair of ears.
    The full impact of her coloring was muted by the moonlight, and though I could see here and there a hint of green or gold, mostly she just looked silver and black.
    She opened her mouth and let out a second angry roar. Unmuffled by the water, it dwarfed Adam’s howl, just as her bulk dwarfed the three of us. But it wasn’t the sound that scared me.
    The front of her mouth was littered with long, spiky teeth—like the petroglyph’s had been. Teeth designed to spear and hold her prey. Her back teeth were just as nasty. Not grinders but huge spade-shaped sawing teeth. Teeth that could slice off a man’s foot, and she wouldn’t even notice until she swallowed.
    She threw herself at us, and her head landed with an impact that almost knocked me off my feet again. Tentacles stretched forward—
    “The land is mine,” said Coyote. “Here you do not reign. Not yet, and not ever.” He stepped between us and her, long, saw-toothed knives suddenly in his hands. “Just you try it. Just you try it.”
    Head in the dirt, she jerked her tentacles back and screamed at him, a wicked, high-pitched sound, while she gave us an up-close and personal view of sharp teeth. Abruptly, she jerked her head back into the river, faster than such a large thing should have been able to move, and disappeared into water that roiled and drove great waves onto the shoreline.
    Coyote turned to me. “That big.”
    I opened my mouth. I was cold and wet, my middle burned where the river devil had grabbed me—and I had nothing to say. He waited for me to find some words, then shrugged