Thunderbird Falls

CHAPTER 3

In time, stars began winking in and out again, solitary dots of light that made me feel like a single extremely small point on an endless curve of blackness. I was cold beneath my skin, but when I touched my arm, my body temperature seemed normal. I didn’t remember the chill in the Dead Zone before. It was as if it was tainted, too, with the same subtle wrongness that had marred Seattle.

I held my breath and turned, one slow circle, reaching out with my hands and my mind alike. The former felt nothing.

The latter encountered pain.

It rolled through me, a bone-cold ache that settled in my spine at the base of my neck, creating a headache. Ice throbbed into my veins with every heartbeat. My skin was flayed from my flesh and my flesh from my bones, knives thrusting into my kidneys and cutting out my heart. My bones broke, crushed by a weight of regret that lay heavier than the sea. It dragged me down to my knees, too weak from a hundred billion lifetimes of mistakes to bear up any longer.

And rapture shattered through me, turning the ice in my blood to golden heat. I staggered to my feet again, fire in my lungs so pure it seemed I could breathe it. Burning tears scalded my face, tracks following a thin scar to the corner of my mouth. I swallowed them down, not caring that they seared my throat.

Disbelief caught me in the belly, a bowel-twisting moment of realization that culminated in the words, “Oh, shit,” when I knew I couldn’t stop the carcrash­bombexplosion­runawayhorse­trainwreck­shipsinking followed by relief and dismay, to put down the burden of a body after seconds­minutes­hours­days­years­decades­centuries­eons of life.

Dimly, I was aware that I was connected, hideously and intimately, to everything that had ever died.

More immediately, I understood that nowI was going to die. Again. For good.

Then somebody hit 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 I was facing was beyond me, but the label hung in my thoughts as the thing reared up above me.

It was massive. It had a weight to it unlike anything I’d seen in the Dead Zone, a heaviness that seemed to bear down like the guilt and pain I’d experienced moments ago. There was no sense of being dead about the serpent. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anything so alive or so filled with purpose. It lived, and it lived to kill.

Its scales were black, fastened together like intricate armor, and gleamed so hard against the darkness of the Dead Zone they hurt to look at. It flared out a ruff, exposing gills that glittered and sparkled with hard edges. Tentacles, like Medusa gone mad, waved around its head. It had no legs, but the wordsnake fell pitifully short. Ridges crested its back, sharp and deadly. Even in the half-light, it looked as if the spires glistened with poison. It coiled higher, enough strength visible in its body to crush a ship. If this was the kind of thing that had inspired ancient mariners to their warnings ofHere Be Dragons, I couldn’t blame them for wanting to avoid the unknown areas of the sea. It opened its mouth to hiss at me.

Its fangs were nearly as long as I was.

I wondered if I would stop feeling right away, or if I’d be alive a while inside the serpent’s maw, feeling the muscle of its throat crush me as it swallowed me down.

The smaller snakes began to drop off me, slithering down my arms and legs again and falling to the floor. I couldn’t blame them: I didn’t want to be facing their lord and master, either. One wriggled under my shirt and down my spine, then panicked, thrashing around, when it met the taut muscle of the snake around my ribs, blocking its passage. The snake around my ribs whipped its head around, pinning my arm against my body as it sank its teeth into the littler one under my shirt. The smaller reptile spasmed, flailing under my shirt in its death throes. Its cold terror seeped in through my skin, leaving me in an icy sweat. I stared up at the monster, feeling the snake die, little and boneless against the small of my back.

The rib-hugging viper began to unwind from me. Above me, the giant serpent swayed and moved closer, snakes below it squirming away from the weight of its huge body.

“Coyote,” I said once more, but this time I knew he wasn’t going to answer. The viper fell away from me. For the second time that morning, my hand reached out without consulting my mind. I caught the creature at the base of the neck, below its jaw, like I’d seen snake handlers do on the Discovery Channel. It hissed and spat and writhed, effectively neutered.

The thing above me went still.

“Oh good.” My voice cracked like a teenage boy’s. “You’re not a cannibal.”

It hissed. I wanted to look down to see if it had tiny impotent arms like a T Rex, waggling angrily at me, but I didn’t dare. Around me, the sea of snakes backed away, making a circle of blackness with the sea serpent at its head. Like their master, the ones closest to me reared up, and unlike the monster creature, swayed menacingly, as if to remind me I wasn’t the one in charge here.

I really didn’t need the reminder.

“So maybe now we make a bargain,” I said. It blinked at me, an action that in another creature might have read as surprise. In the giant serpent, it only served to make me aware that I could see my entire body reflected in the empty blackness. “You let us go,” I said hopefully, “and I’ll let it go.”

“Usssss.” The serpent’s voice was a river of sound, pounding behind my ears.

“Us,” I said again. “Me and Coyote.” Distance and space in the Dead Zone were malleable. I’d learned that the first time I’d visited, though I hadn’t been able to deliberately affect it. Now I swallowed against the tightness in my throat, clung to the idea of Coyote, and told the universe to change.

My feet went out from under me like I’d hit a patch of ice. My gut lurched with panic and I tightened my stranglehold on the snake in my fist. Space contracted into a needle point, then expanded again, snakes slithering down into that point like a sucking drain, and reappearing all around me. The dragon-thing slid with me, and so did the snake I held knotted in my fingers, but all the other snakes were new.

How I recognized one wriggling field of snakes from another, I didn’t know, but there it was.

The sea serpent flicked its tongue, long enough to wrap around me, and at my elbow, Coyote growled, “What,” and in an audible pause I heard him not saying “the hell” before he finished, “do you think you’re doing?”

“Rescuing us,” I said with all the confidence I could muster. My voice didn’t break again, so I counted that as good enough, and brandished my captive snake. “It for us,” I said to the waiting sea serpent. It flickered its tongue again, weaving back and forth to examine me from one side, then the other.

“There isss one of it,” it answered. “There are two of you.”

Crap. I’d been afraid it would notice that. “I don’t suppose you’ll give me time off for good behavior?”

It stared at me, unblinking.

Crap.

“Joanne,” Coyote said, a warning in his voice.

“Then let this one go,” I said, jerking my head at the red man beside me.

“Jo,” Coyote said again. “Don’t.”

The monster flattened its snout, tongue darting out, as if it were flaring its nostrils. “The sssacrifisse is ssweetesst when the victim isss willing.”

“I’m willing.” I waved the smaller snake at it. “This little guy for Coyote, and I’m all yours.”

“Done,” it said.

I released the little snake and shoved Coyote away from me with all my will, like the recoil from a car crash.

For an instant, Coyote resisted. He knew me; he knew that I work through the medium I know best, cars. In fact, he’d taught me to do that. So for a moment, the recoil of that car wreck was met by his own image, the steadfastness of a mountain, absorbing the energy I tried pushing him away with.

Then power surged through me, blood-red and deep and cool, a link from the serpent as it bent its will to the same ends I pursued. There was no metaphor to its desire, only the intent to remove that which it had promised to.

Coyote flickered like the serpent’s tongue, and disappeared.

The viper I’d dropped whipped around and hissed at me, striking forward so quickly I didn’t stand a chance.

The serpent spat, venom splashing over the smaller snake before it completed its attack. It shrieked, a high thin sound, and flipped onto its back, writhing and whining in pain.

“Yeah!” I spat at it, too, to much less effect. “I’m only a meal for the big guy!”

The serpent lifted its head and spread its hood, staring at me. It struck me that gloating was not a snakely trait. I cleared my throat. “Never mind. It’s just, you know, if you’ve got to go out, might as well get taken out by the…never mind.”

It reared up and doubled forward, jaws gaping. As I stared into its descending maw, my last thought was,isn’t there a Shel Silverstein poem appropriate to this situation?