C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

We stood there a long time. A wind came up, making my cheeks cold but failing to get under my jacket and wool sweater. Finally Coyote mumbled, "I'm sorry," and looked up with credible puppy-dog eyes.

It was more or less the last thing in the world I expected him to say, and the excessively mournful gaze was enough to break the tide of my anger. In fact, it was nearly enough to make me giggle, which I resented enough that it almost made me angry again. I said, "Stop that," with enough asperity that he did. "People who actually possess puppy-dog eyes in another shape aren't allowed to use them to get themselves out of trouble. I say so. It's the rules."

"Okay." Despite the promise inherent in the word he gave me another puppy-dog look, though this one more said "Am I forgiven?" than "I'm sorry."

I glowered at somebody's Jeep, trying hard not to fall for manipulative men with big brown eyes, and gave up with a snorted laugh. "Okay. You're forgiven. But if you do something that stupid again, Coyote, I swear to God…"

"I won't." He sidled up to put his arm around my waist and his nose on my shoulder. I fought off another giggle, and he repeated, "I won't. You're right. I was being a dick, and I'm sorry. You've changed a lot, Jo."

I eyed him, which was difficult given his proximity. "You mean, six months ago if you'd shown up and tried going to the mat with Morrison over what my responsibilities were, I'd have been delighted to let you play hero so I didn't have to face up to any of those decisions or responsibilities myself?"

He cleared his throat. "I wouldn't have said it like that, but yeah."

I turned in to him, catching his coat in my hands and bumping my nose against his. "You're right. I've changed. I'm a superhero now." I stole a kiss, then smiled against his mouth. "So let's go save the world."

That kind of line needed a supersonic jet to swoop down and pick us up, just for the drama of it, but I was obliged, much more prosaically, to call Gary and wait fifteen minutes for him to pick us up. We spent most of the time taking turns being the one to lean our rear ends against the cold hoods of other people's cars, and being the one to warm up our hineys by getting to lean on each other. I was sure it was an affront to his masculine dignity, but we fit together better when Coyote leaned on me, since I had a two-inch height. Furthermore, my arms were slightly longer than his, so I could get a better grip on him than he could on me. I'd just stuck my cold nose in the corner of his neck and was holding him so he couldn't squirm away when Gary pulled up. His disgruntled, "Did I miss somethin'?" rose over the sound of his Chevy's engine, and I let Coyote go with a grin.

Gary gave us the fish eye through the rolled-down driver's side window. "Who's this, doll?"

If I'd been hanging on to any resentment, it dissipated. Gary was like my own personal cheer-o-meter. I jolted forward and whispered, "This is Coyote," like it was a tremendous secret. "He's not dead. He got better."

Gary gawked at me, then got out of the cab looking like he couldn't decide what to ask first. I interrupted with, "Coyote, this is Gary. My best friend. The best thing that's ever happened to me. I wouldn't have made it through the last year without him."

Coyote, looking unexpectedly nervous, stepped forward to shake Gary's hand. Gary seized his shoulders, looked him up and down, then hauled him into a rib-popping hug instead. "Heard a lot about you, son. Glad to see you alive. How the hell'd that happen?"

Coyote said, "Joanne set me on the path home during a spirit walk," like it was a perfectly rational thing to say, and I said, "'Son'? I get 'doll' and 'dame,' and he gets 'son'?", which was a perfectly rational thing to say.

"Ain't my fault. Language's got a lot more oddball words for women than men." Gary set Coyote back, hands on his shoulders again, and examined him for a second time. "Knew she was getting better at that spirit quest stuff. What're you two kids up to?"

"We need to go—" That was both of us. I said, "To Olympic National Park," and Coyote said, "Home," and we looked at each other while Gary ping-ponged between us. "I fought with it at the park," I said after a few seconds. "It's our best lead."

"If it came into the city to study you, it's smart enough to not return to the place you hunted it, Jo. We need to create a sacred space and search for it in the Lower World. That should help us pinpoint its location in this world."

"Don't you think I've been trying that?" I snapped off a description of my power circle adventure, and the Space Needle-based search of Seattle. "The power circle was how I rescued you, but I didn't get any kind of bead on where the thing was."

"Yes, but I'm here now," Coyote said with an air of authority all the more aggravating for being apropos.

I'd become aware of Gary drawing breath to speak every time one of us finished a sentence, and that we'd kept running over whatever it was he had to say. I finally looked at him, eyebrows arched, and he said, "You wanna go to Rainier National Park."

A flicker of polite patience crossed Coyote's face. "How do you know that?"

One of the many things I loved about Gary was his inability to bear fools. He gave Coyote a look that reminded me sharply of the throw-down in Morrison's office, but instead of turning it into a thing, he just said, "Because that's where the news just reported a new cannibal murder, kid."

Downgraded from son to kid in less than two minutes. Maybe it was some kind of throw down after all. Either way, Gary said, "I'm drivin'," and thirty seconds later we were on the road to Mount Rainier.

Thursday, December 22, 10:16 A.M.

It turned out we were actually on the way to my apartment. It took the drive over, plus time for Coyote and me to pack up some clothes and my drum, minus several minutes of Gary cooing over the Chief and heating toaster pastries while trying to find something in my apartment that would serve as on-the-road lunch, just to explain Coyote's return. Gary kept saying, "I'll be damned," in a tone that suggested being damned was about the niftiest thing possible. By the time we got back out the door, he and Coyote were old friends, and some of the explosive joy I'd felt earlier had returned. More quietly, maybe, but it still felt awfully good.

For a girl who'd grown up on the road and who loved driving as much as I did, I didn't get out into the countryside nearly enough. I'd driven out to western Washington to test the promise of some of its long straight stretches at high speeds, but I'd never headed south.

The road to Rainier National Park wasn't a speed demon's dream, but even in the dead of winter it was beautiful. Bare-armed trees reached over the black strip of road cutting through white countryside, every curve and hill promising more of the ever-changing same. Gary and Coyote rattled on about a variety of things, starting with Coyote's resurrection and touching on Gary's misspent youth as a saxophone player: things I knew about, by and large, which let me just slip into the thoughtless rhythm of the road.

It reminded me of being a kid, traveling all over America with my dad. He'd had an old boat of a Cadillac that never broke down, but we'd taken the engine apart eight or ten times I could remember, just so I could learn how to do it.

Those had been the good times. We'd stopped at junkyards all over the country, Dad chatting up the owners— he'd been good-looking, tall and rangy with hair almost as long as Coyote's—and getting them to let me, or teach me to, work on the old beasts they had lying around. I'd gotten into the bellies of cars most people my age didn't know existed. I'd loved it.

That wasn't something I remembered often. Mostly, looking back at my childhood, I tended to focus on the changing schools every six weeks, the inability to make friends in such a short time, the weird period when I was seven or eight when Dad had been teaching me Cherokee, and I'd almost forgotten how to speak English. Since then I'd made up for it by almost forgetting how to speak Cherokee. But long car trips made me think about the good stuff, especially if I wasn't driving, and for the first time in a long while I wondered how Dad was doing. I hadn't talked to him in years. Last I'd known he was still in Cherokee County back in North Carolina, but it was hard to imagine he'd stayed on after I left for college. He'd grown up there, but he'd never given any impression of wanting to stay. He'd never given any impression of wanting to stay anywhere, particularly after a year-long stint in New York had given my mother a chance to relocate him and drop me on his metaphorical doorstep.