C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

My raven fell out of the sky, something glittering in his beak. He landed on the ground and dropped it, cocking his head first at me, then it, then back again before he pounced on it with both feet and tore it apart.

It was the shiny food I'd left him, Pop-Tarts wrapped in foil. He made delighted burbling sounds in the back of his birdy throat as he stabbed pieces of frosted raspberry tart and shredded the wrapper with his claws. I sat down, laughing, and stole a piece of pastry that had been flung away so I could offer it to him directly. He hopped over, snatched it from my fingers, and scurried back to his feast.

Coyote said, "This is a good sign," and licked my ear with a very long wet tongue. I squawked and reached out to grab him around the neck without even looking. I had thousands of questions, and none of them mattered as long as I could hide my face in his neck and hold on.

He leaned against me hard, until fur tickled my nose and I sneezed into his shoulder. I sat up to rub my nose, then grabbed him again, scruffing the top of his bony head and pulling on pointed ears. "Where've you been, you dumb dog? I missed you. I missed you so much." I could barely control my voice, even my whispers all shaky, and I tried to push relief so big it exhausted me away so I could ask, "How do we help Mandy?"

He rolled over on his back, legs waving in the air and neck stretched to try to nab a piece of my raven's treat. It quarked in agitation, wings spread as it hopped toward him, and he gave a coyote laugh and rolled away to sit up, prim and proper as a cat with his feet all in alignment. "I'm not a dog."

"You look like a dog." I never thought I'd be so happy to have that same stupid conversation again. Bewilderment and relief and joy knocked me flat again, and I toppled against him, hanging on to his skinny coyote form. He pressed a surprising amount of weight back into me, and we sat together for a moment, watching the raven stuff himself.

When the bird was finished, Coyote stood up and shook himself all over, then cocked an ear at me. "You arrived first, and your spirit animal came to join us. You lead the retrieval."

"But I don't know how!" It struck me that I'd spent six months fumbling through even when I didn't know how, and that probably relying on Coyote for all the answers was a crutch I couldn't afford, even if he was back. Lips pursed at the idea, I stood up and offered an arm to my raven. "A woman who greets the sunrise with music is lost, Raven. Will you help me find her?"

He bounced from the earth to my shoulder with a half-assed flurry of wings, like he could've made the jump without them but instinct forced them to spread anyway. Then he opened them farther, the better, I thought, to smack me in the head with one, and urged me into a run with strides so enormous it was almost like flying.

Coyote chased along behind in a long-legged lope. We tore across the landscape, leaving yellow fields and purpley forests for low hills that became rolling blue mountains. There was an odd flatness to them, as though, if we crested a peak too suddenly, we'd find ourselves looking down on plywood and two-by-fours propping up stage scenery rather than the back side of a proper mountain, but it never happened. Instead a storm came up, white howling blurs of snow that blocked out the mountains entirely. The raven leaped off my shoulder and flew ahead, cawing excitedly.

He was good at blizzards, was my raven. I wondered why he hadn't been on hand to help in the avalanche, though to be fair, one little bird against all that rolling chaos didn't seem like an equal fight. The fact that I'd have put money on the raven was beside the point.

I heard a woman's voice crying through the storm and followed it, aware that other cries were gaining in strength as I came closer. They weren't like hers: she was asking for help, and the others were shrieking for blood. They had a terrible hunger, and Mandy, it seemed, could feed it.

We found her huddled in a snow-scoured igloo, though its protective curve seemed to have been born of her body providing something for drifts to lodge against, rather than from deliberate construction. A thing danced in the snow, no more than a formless blur in the white. It plucked at Mandy's hair, at her hunched back, at her exposed arms, and where it did, welts and blood rose up.

There was probably some kind of formal ritual phrasing to gain the attention of demons chewing up living souls. I yelled, "Hey, knock it off, you bastard!"

Even I knew it lacked elegance, but it got the thing's attention. It swung to face me in a disjointed ugly way that somehow suggested it had once been human, but that too many ligaments and tendons had slipped loose, and nothing could be counted on anymore. I repressed a shudder and stood my ground, hoping like hell Coyote would back me up when I got in over my head. "This woman isn't yours to torment."

"She is marked for me," it said unexpectedly. Its voice was a scream around too many teeth, words slurred but comprehensible. "She has the scent, the taste, the blood, of the wild world in her."

Outrage turned the snowstorm red, and I fought it down, pretty certain that fury in the Lower World did other things more good than it did me. "She's not marked for anybody. I'm bringing her home safe and sound."

"But she lives. She knows her path. She walks it. She shows me. I follow. I hunger. I eat. She is mine." There was a gleam of ruthless greed in its half-visible eyes. Like the creature on Hurricane Hill, on the rooftop—and I was sure this was the same thing—all I could really see were claws and teeth, like they were the only thing tied to any level of reality at all.

"She isn't yours." A flicker of an idea came to me. "She's an outdoorsman. Is that what you mean? Is that why she's yours?"

It swung its head heavily, whole body shifting with the motion. "They are all mine."

Man, if it had marked all the outdoorsy types in Seattle as its own personal smorgasbord, I needed to get this thing six feet under a whole lot sooner than later. The eight or so deaths we'd seen were nothing in the face of how many people were going to die if it kept hunting. I swallowed and shook the thought off. I had to save Mandy first. "But she's not really what you want. She's weak. I see how you're looking at me. You can tell how much stronger I am, can't you? You know it from when we fought. That's why you didn't kill her straight out. You wanted me to come, so you could test me."

A certain animal cunning came into the creature's eyes, and I wasn't sure if I was right, or if it was a new and enticing thought to the monster. "You couldn't find me on your own, could you? Even with all my power, you hunt the ones that go into the woods, and I don't. So you needed her. But you don't need her anymore. You can have me."

Raven, I whispered deep enough inside that I hoped no one beyond me could hear. Raven, will you play in the snow? I showed it a picture of what I wanted, and heard Coyote's teeth snap, the sound audible above the sobbing wind. Emboldened, I took a half step back, beckoning the beast. "All you have to do is come and get me."

It pounced, slower in this world than it was in mine, or I was faster. I flung myself to the side, hitting a snowbank in a spray of cold and ice, and lurched to my feet barely in time to duck another attack. Coyote and the raven zipped around each other a few yards away, gamboling in the storm, and I did my best to watch them while avoiding being eaten.

A figure grew up between them, a snowman in jeans and a sweater and with my short-cropped hair. The raven alighted on its head and shook itself, and color fell into the snowman: black hair, black coat, black pants, black boots. Coyote leaped up and slurped his tongue across its face, and a blush of flesh tones filled its rounded features and its blunt snowman hands.