C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

I said, "A badger," rather quietly, and Sara looked uncomfortable. I ducked a smile at the snow, just barely smart enough not to push it any further. We creaked through the snow in comparative silence after that, breaking the cold night with curses when trees shivered snow from their loaded branches onto our shoulders.

I didn't have a plan, but my feet were taking me up toward the mountains. Off the beaten trail, so I was grateful for the snowshoes. I bet some pencil pusher somewhere would be surprised to find out the FBI was now providing winter gear to members of the Seattle Police Department and a couple of civilians. Well, hopefully nobody would get killed and there would be no missing snowshoes to account for.

Oh, what my life had come to, that I was casually hoping nobody would get killed. I stopped to thunk my head against a tree trunk, which was a tactical error on many levels. First, it rained snow on me. Second, it sent Sara on ahead without me. Third, and by far the worst, it gave Coyote a chance to catch up. "You can't do what you did back there, Jo."

"Apparently I can." I shook snow off myself and hurried after Sara. Gary got between me and her, leaving me to walk with Coyote. Some friend he was. Foolish friend, actually, since there was a good reason to have an— adept, as Sonny'd called us—paired up with a non-adept. Coyote and I could shield ourselves and a partner.

Or at least I could. It came naturally to me, and pretty clearly didn't come so naturally to Coyote. I let myself become aware of the Sight, its brilliance lighting the dark night as I slipped shielding forward to wrap around Sara and Gary. Coyote, grumpily, said, "That's not going to change my mind."

For a couple seconds I considered taking the low road and being the old me that Sara remembered so clearly. Belting my mentor was probably in no way the right choice, but it did have brief, glowy short-term satisfaction in its favor.

I took the high road, although doing so required letting a deep breath out through my nose before I dared speak. "I'm not trying to change your mind. You know what happens when I abuse my power, Ro? It bitch-slaps me. It stopped working entirely this summer when I screwed up with Colin and Faye. It knocked me on my ass when I used it as a weapon a few weeks ago. If putting Corvallis to sleep was out of bounds, I would've gotten a magical anvil dropped on my head. I'm not breaking any rules."

"Jo, this is serious. You can't—"

"Coyote, I'm being serious!" I stopped to face him. To get in his face, more accurately. To wave my hands in frustration, aware that with the winter coat and mittens, I looked more like a frenetic gingerbread man than a convincing orator. "Maybe you can't, Coyote. Maybe it's against your rules. But I'm not playing the same game you are. You can't do this easily." I gestured after Gary and Sara, meaning to highlight the shielding that encompassed them. "You can't fight. You're a hell of a lot better at the transitions to the other realms than I am, and you're worlds beyond me in dealing with what you find there, but maybe that's your job. Teach, heal, guide, con…con…consort, convert, con…" I rubbed a mitten over my face, trying to think of the word I wanted. "You know. Be the UN, in celestial terms. Talk to people."

Coyote, oh-so-drily, said, "Converse?"

Boy. Nothing ruined a good rant like your vocabulary failing you. I said, "Yeah, that's it," despondently. "You're my teacher, Coyote. You're not my boss."

His eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. "Did you just use the infallible you're not the boss of me as an argument, Jo?"

My shoulders sagged. "Yeah."

"So who is the boss of you?"

"Morrison" sprang to mind, but it wasn't the right answer. Not under these circumstances. I could see Coyote waiting for it anyway, but I shook my head. "I don't know. You're the one who told me a Maker mixed me up fresh. Maybe that's my boss."

I was growing increasingly convinced that creating new souls for any purpose was just plain mean. Ordinary people didn't have active memories of past mistakes, maybe, but the impression I'd been given was that the choices made in previous lives did affect who people were this time around. Being told straight off that I had neither mistakes nor successes to draw from, consciously or not, could be a bit of a burden. Every single cock-up was one hundred percent me, no-holds-barred. I supposed it meant every single accomplishment was all me, too, but somehow that didn't seem as impressive. "Or maybe none of us have a boss at all."

"You believe that?"

"I don't know what I believe, Coyote. How about you?"

"I believe you're calling me Coyote again. That mean I'm back in your good graces, even if you're yelling at me?"

I scrunched my face and tilted it back to the sky, blinking into unshadowed moonlight. "I think it means I default to 'Coyote' when I'm thinking about you, but that it seems like a weird name to actually call you by." I tipped my chin back down, frowning around me. "Coyote…?"

"What?"

"…where did the trees go?"

He glanced around, glanced at me, and without saying anything else we rotated to stand back-to-back, eyeing the copse around us distrustfully.

We stood in the center of a mountain glade without so much as footprints speaking to how we'd arrived. The trees were present, but distant—a good stone's throw away, and I was certain we'd been surrounded by them when we'd started talking. I knew we had been. I still had snow on my shoulders from getting dumped on. Moonlight poured over us, undiminished by branches or clouds. Everything was colored as it should be, aside from the blue tint offered by the moon, and the sky wasn't unnaturally close or alarmingly distant, as it might have been in the Lower or Upper Worlds. We hadn't gone anywhere, then. Hadn't fallen from one plane of existence to another, at least. Whether we'd gone anywhere was debatable.

I thought about it carefully, then whispered, "This is new," to Coyote. "I never transported anywhere in the real world before." I'd been knocked out and slid from one realm of reality to another, had journeyed vast distances inside the gardens of people's souls, and had once chosen to physically get on a magical beast of burden and ride to another world, but the Middle World itself had never just up and changed on me.

Coyote whispered, "Me neither," which didn't surprise me. I seemed to have far more dramatic adventures than he did. I had more dramatic adventures than most people. I could have gotten a lot of angstful mileage out of that thought, but Coyote hissed, "So what do we do?" and yanked me out of it.

The glade was as silent a place as I'd ever been. Wind hissed over the snow, making the loose stuff on top dance, but beyond that it was so quiet my ears ached trying to hear something. Pine needles rustling against each other, the soft paff of snow falling from branches to hit the ground; the trees were too far away for those sounds to carry. And it was winter, and night, so any animal noises there might have been were already muffled or nonexistent. I had no easy way to tell if danger approached. Even the Sight told me nothing, just showed me a world ablaze with winter sleep, quiet black light offering nothing useful.

Mount Rainier was closer than it had been, a gorgeous cone rising winter blue and black toward a sky so brilliant with moonlight I could see for miles. Awed laughter caught in my lungs, and for a little while, I forgot to worry.

The stars only came clear near the edges of the world, cold moonlight swallowing them closer in. There were no city lights visible anywhere, no touch of humanity, and the snow-brisk wind smelled faintly of astringent sap. It seemed very possible that Coyote and I were the first, the only, human beings to have ever set foot on this particular bit of earth; that we had been brought somewhere utterly unspoiled so that someone might have a chance to marvel at its wonder. I said, "It's okay," as softly as I could, not wanting to disturb the quiet.