Thunderbird Falls. C.E. Murphy
me in the face. New, fresh pain blossomed, shattering all the old. I clapped both hands to my nose, doubling over and shrieking.
Note to self: grabbing a broken nose does not, in any fashion, help. Lightning shot through my head in blinding stabs of agony. I made a retching noise and fell to the ground, knocking my forehead against the featureless planescape. Brightness flashed in my eyes. I closed them, grateful for the ache in my skull that took a little away from the shards of pain in my nose. “Mother of Christ.”
I rolled onto my side, panting, and gingerly put my hand over my nose, envisioning a Mustang with a dented hood as I did so. Undenting it was easy: stick a suction cup over it and ratchet up the pressure until it popped back into place. In my mind’s eye, the dent banged into shape. I opened my eyes, relieved.
Pain slammed through my nose and stabbed me in the pupils. I shot to my feet, clutching my nose more cautiously, and stared accusingly at Coyote.
“This is the realm of the dead, Joanne,” he said with a shrug. He was back in coyote form, his narrow shoulders twitching lankily. “It’s not a place for healing.”
None of the things that came to mind were very ladylike. I managed to hold my tongue, but Coyote tilted his head at me and gave a very human snort of derision. “Nice girls don’t think things like that.”
“Thank you for getting me out of that,” I said without the slightest degree of genuine gratitude. I hadn’t felt even a hint of the healing power that normally boiled behind my breastbone when I envisioned fixing my nose. I should’ve known it hadn’t worked.
“You’re welcome,” Coyote said, not meaning it any more than I had. “Can we go now?”
“No, we’re here. I might as well see if I can find her.”
Coyote sighed, a tremendous puff of air. “All right. What’s her name?”
“I don’t know.”
I didn’t know dogs could look scathing. I thought they were supposed to be all about supportive looks and hopeful puppy eyes. Coyote turned a scathing look on me anyway.
“I’m not,” he said through his teeth, which seemed larger and whiter and much pointier suddenly, “a dog. How do you expect to find someone in the realms of the dead if you don’t even have a name to start with?”
“The others just met me here,” I said uncomfortably. Coyote said something in an Indian language I didn’t know, but I didn’t really need a translation. The tone was enough.
“When you get out of here,” he went on, “if you don’t find a teacher I’m going to…” He snapped his teeth.
“Bite me?” I supplied, as helpfully as I could. He snapped his teeth again.
“The others met you here,” he said, instead of completing the threat, “because you invited them to contact you. They drew you here through their skill. This time you’re on your own.”
“Am not. I have you.”
This time he said, “Ministers and angels of grace defend us,” in English, and shifted back into his human form, stepping forward to put his hands on my shoulders. I blinked. Aside from hitting me in the face a few minutes ago, I couldn’t remember him having touched me before. “Have you no sense of self-preservation at all, Joanne? Are you—” Sudden clarity lit his gold eyes to amber, and his chin came up with evident surprise. “Ah,” he said more quietly, and let me go.
“What? What? Am I what?”
“I think we’d better try to do what you came to do, and get out of here.” He stepped away from me. A strangled sound of frustration erupted from my throat. “This is a dangerous place for you, in more ways than one. Tell me what you know about this girl, and we’ll see if we can find her.”
I told him what I knew: young, black, dead in the shower of the women’s locker room. It was pathetically little, and I began to feel embarrassed. “Focus on her,” Coyote said. “Focus on what she looked like. If we’re lucky she won’t have lost her body sense yet, and we’ll be able to find her that way.”
“And if we’re not?”
“Then we’re going home and you’re going to have to do your research the old-fashioned way. I don’t want you to be here.”
I muttered under my breath as I closed my eyes, constructing an image of the dead girl behind my eyelids. She’d been pretty, with round cheekbones and a pointed chin. Her hair was short with kinky curls, a few of them bleached and dyed fire engine-red. She was dark-skinned, even in death, and I tried to imagine away the ashy blue that had tinged full lips and discolored her fingernails.
A chill slid down my back, slow and thick, like cold blood wending its way around my spine. Fine hairs stood up all over me, sweeping in waves until I shivered and shook my hands. “I’m sorry,” I said, eyes still closed. “I can’t do any better.”
Coyote’s voice came from a long way away, echoing as if through a cavernous chamber. “I think you’ve done more than well enough.”
I opened my eyes.
Snakes.
Snakes were everywhere, winding through the empty blackness of the floor like sanguine rivers, curdling in spots and making pools of heart’s-blood red. They wrapped around my ankles and crawled up my thighs, invasive and intimate. One twisted itself around my waist and ribs and lifted its face to mine, a hissing, flickering tongue tasting my breath. Smelling me and seeing me. Fangs curved dangerously past its wide-open lower jaw, drops of venom forming and splashing away. It didn’t blink; I couldn’t. “Coyote?” I could barely hear myself.
“I can’t help you.” He sounded even farther away. I dared to turn my head, the smallest motion I could manage, very aware that doing so exposed my jugular to the snake. It hissed softly, dropping its jaw wider.
Coyote was no longer off to my right. No, he was, just at an impossible distance, a speck of man-shape among the sea of snakes. They roiled and bubbled over one another, making the floor a living thing, and as I watched they began to drip from the emptiness above me.
I was caught in a Salvador Dali painting gone horribly wrong.
I laughed. It reverberated, short and broken, off the nonexistent walls of the Dead Zone. The snake around my middle tightened and hissed, bringing its head closer to my throat. My laughter cut off with a shudder.
Garter snakes, crimson and russet, crept up my body, tangling around my fingers and extending like writhing talons. They nestled through my hair until I could see them wriggling in my line of vision, making me a modern-day Gorgon. “Coyote, what’s happening?” My voice was scared and thin, just the way I hadn’t liked hearing Phoebe sound.
There was no answer from the trickster.
The snake at my waist still watched me. I felt my pulse jumping in my throat like a frightened mouse and ducked my head, trying to hide it from the snake. “What do you want?”
It drew its head back, flaring a hood, and hissed at me. My knees locked up, keeping me from bolting, but I didn’t know if that was good or bad. “What do you want?” I managed a second time. The snake spat, venom flying past my face so close I thought I could feel it burn. Then it twisted its head away from me without releasing its grip around my middle, focused on something I couldn’t see.
The Dead Zone heaved with a bloody mass of bodies, seething and knotted reptiles washing around one another in sea-sickening motion. A wave broke through them, like a submarine cruising just beneath the surface, displacing water without being visible. Then the surface ruptured, spraying frightened, twisting snakes through the air. They wriggled frantically, clutching at unsupportive sky, and collapsed soundlessly back down into the melting mess of serpents.
The thing that looked down at me was not at all like a submarine. Monster leaped to mind, and then a narrower classification: sea serpent. Why I was worried about the very specific kind of monster