He was sincere. He didn’t want to hurt her. I thought of Kyle’s story and wondered if perhaps he had not meant to hurt the goddess he’d kidnapped and raped. Intention and results are often different.
“No,” I said.
As soon as I refused, Flores’s eyes flared red, and his face, though still human-featured, lost any resemblance to a real human expression. “Take her,” he said.
Something dark and hot moved in the darkness, and I raised the gun and fired at the tibicena charging from my right as rapidly as I could, though even with my night vision, all I could see were its red eyes, as if it somehow drew the darkness around itself like a cloak.
This was not the dog that I’d killed in my garage; this was the bigger, faster version I’d seen the possibility of when Coyote had taken me to visit Guayota’s house. As Coyote had promised, the bullets—and I knew from the bright spots that appeared and vanished on the tibicena’s body that I was hitting it—didn’t even slow it down. When I felt its too-hot breath, I dropped the gun and dove for my pitchfork.
And then we danced.
I could not trust my sight to tell me where it was, but the coyote knew, and I let her guide my steps. The pitchfork was a better weapon against the tibicena than the mop, crowbar, or wrench had been against Guayota. The long wooden handle didn’t heat up, and the metal ends didn’t burn as long as I didn’t leave them on the tibicena too long, because it had quickly become apparent that the tibicena, like Guayota, was a creature of fire, of the volcano where it had been birthed. As a test, I hit the beast hard, sinking the tines in a few inches, then jerking them out.
The wounds glowed red, and something bubbled out for a moment, but it took two seconds—I counted—for the holes to close. I didn’t dare hit it any harder, or I’d lose my weapon. The wounds also disturbed whatever it was that kept me from seeing the tibicena, and I caught a glimpse of it, huge and hairy.
Guayota was turning in a slow circle, ignoring my fight with his tibicena as he searched for something—Christy.
I danced faster.
For a few minutes, we were at a stalemate, the tibicena and I. I couldn’t hurt it, but I was moving too fast for it to hit me. As long as I could keep the speed up, and my coyote could sense its attacks, I was okay. A few minutes is a long time in a fight—and all I had to do was hold out long enough for Darryl to come.
But there were two tibicenas. I caught a glimpse of the second one when it slapped me on the head with its paw.
I stood on cracked blacktop in a school yard. There was a swing set in front of me, and Coyote sat on the only swing, moving it back and forth a few inches by wiggling his bare toes on the ground. It was one of those swings you see in parks and schools, with thick chains attached to a big, flat strip of rubber. The pink scrunchie was gone, his braid bound by a strip of white leather.
“I’m dreaming,” I said flatly.
“You’re dying,” corrected Coyote, lifting his head from where he’d been watching his feet, to meet my eyes. “Your neck is broken. Do you feel any different? I always wondered what other people feel when they are dying. For me it is usually like this—” He let go of the chains and clapped his hands once. “And I’m back to normal except not quite where I was a moment ago.”
“How do I kill Guayota?”
He shook his head and backed up slowly, letting the swing ride up his back. “You can’t. It isn’t possible. Besides, you are dying.” It didn’t sound like my death bothered him very much. He tilted his head, and said, “Do you know that burn on your cheek looks like war paint?”
“Gary thinks you’re just playing with us,” I told him.
Coyote nodded soberly as he hopped gracefully on the swing and let it carry him forward, then back. “Gary has reason to, but he doesn’t think like you do. He thinks—Coyote hates me and has me thrown in jail.” He leaned into the swing and used his legs and back to build momentum. “You think—what good comes from Gary Laughingdog in jail with the gift of prophecy he hates so much? Could it be that perhaps, just perhaps, both of Coyote’s children have a chance of surviving if they are working together?” He gave me a sly look. “Not that it wasn’t funny to see his face when he realized we’d stolen a police car, and he was parked in front of the police station.”
I thought about what he’d said. “Why did you show me the tibicenas?”
“Didn’t you want to save your friend Joel?”
“You answer a lot of questions with questions.”
“Do I?” His smile turned smug, and he leaped out of the swing, landing on his feet but letting his body fall forward until his hands rested lightly on the ground. He lowered his eyelids and suddenly there was nothing lighthearted, nothing funny about him, just a primordial fierceness that burned down my spine.
“I guess you aren’t dead yet, are you?” he whispered, and the words wrapped around me as my vision went dark. “Good thing coyotes are hard to kill.”
I opened my eyes and realized I was crumpled on the cool damp grass, and there was a tibicena crouched over me, licking the long wound in my arm. I couldn’t move. My body knew that moving would hurt, and it just wouldn’t respond to my urgent demands that it do so.
I could hear fighting, but it was Auriele’s battle cry that let me take my eyes off the tibicena guarding me.
I’d never seen Darryl and Auriele fight together, and they were beautiful. For the first time in my life, I wished I were a singer like the Marrok and both of his sons were because only music would do them justice.
Auriele was still in human form and she held my pitchfork as a weapon. Her clothes were burned, and, I imagined, hidden by the night, there were also burns on her skin. She was muscle and grace and speed as she stabbed and pivoted, jumped and dodged around her husband.
Darryl’s brindle coat made him nearly as hard to track as the tibicenas’ magic made them. Most wolves fight with instinct. Some, as I had tonight, fight with instinct and training. But a rare few hold on to enough humanity to use strategy. And that strategy was what made him and Auriele so impressive. He charged and leaped, she struck and rolled, and somehow neither of them was where they’d been when the tibicena who wasn’t guarding me lunged and tangled herself up with Guayota.
If it had only been the tibicena they fought, I would have had no fear.
Guayota, even in his fiery-dog form, was not as large as his tibicena, but there was no question who was the nastier predator. While the tibicena, Darryl, and Auriele fought with everything in them, Guayota played. Darryl bled from a dozen small wounds and, as I watched, Guayota struck him again, and a shallow cut stretched from Darryl’s shoulder to his hip. It was a wound from Guayota’s claw only, without the heat he could generate, though the wet grass smoked, and he left blackened patches wherever he stood for longer than a breath.
Are you going to let them die while you watch? Impossible to tell if the voice was Coyote’s or my own.
My muscles would just not move. I struggled like a bodybuilder trying to lift weights that were a hundred pounds too heavy, and the effort built up to a growl in my chest and out my throat.
The tibicena quit licking my arm and growled back.
I stopped struggling as I met its eyes briefly and saw Joel in them. The tibicena shook his head, and the long, rocklike hairs that ruffed his neck rattled together. The connection broken between us, he went back to my arm. He had worked a piece of skin loose and was tearing it away, swallowing it.
I had a terrible, wonderful idea.
“Joel,” I said, and the tongue that had been traveling back to my arm paused, and his eyes met mine, again, eyes that were a dark, sullen red that was more like garnets than rubies.
Didn’t you want to save your friend Joel? Coyote had asked me when I asked him why he’d shown me what the tibicenas were. And I’d seen that the spells that tied Joel to Guayota’s immortal child were a lot like pack bonds.