Demon Hunts

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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.

These days I suspected she would have found him if he'd been on the lam in Timbuktu, but I certainly hadn't known that growing up. Besides working on cars and moving around a lot, my real, lasting impression of childhood was that my father often looked like he neither knew how he'd ended up with a daughter, nor what to do with one now that he had it. He'd been the one who called me "Jo" in the first place, which was why I didn't like it. Once I'd gotten old enough to think about it, I'd suspected he'd used that nickname so he could pretend he was just talking to himself. It had more recently occurred to me that maybe he'd been trying to find another point of similarity for us to build on, but I hadn't been anything like that forgiving as a kid. In retrospect, I was probably lucky he hadn't drowned me. Thoughts like that slipped away at the speed limit, following hard on one another like the dashed lines on the road. It was as close to meditation as I ever got.

For some reason when we got to the park entrance Coyote and Gary both looked at me like they expected me to pay the fee for all three of us. I'd paid it at Olympic, but Mandy'd been doing me a huge favor. This time we were all in it together, although Gary was more all in for fear of missing something than for standing the line. Not that he wouldn't. He was a good guy to have at my back when things got rough, a fact I knew from experience.

Somehow that talked me into paying the fee, and we drove into the park with me feeling like I'd been Jedimind-tricked. "Wait a minute, where are we, anyway? Which entrance was that?"

"Nisqually." Coyote looked over his shoulder at me. "Weren't you listening? The body was found near the Longmire museum."

"Wouldn't the pickings be richer at Paradise?" That was the only section of the park I'd ever really heard about, mostly thanks to the occasional news story about the visitor's center. It looked like a flying saucer, and the roof kept threatening to collapse under the snowfall. They were going to build a new one any minute now.

"There's a lot of old growth forest around Longmire. The wendigo's probably drawn to it."

I said, "Ah," then squinted at him. "You're from Arizona. How can you possibly know this?"

He held up a PDA with a Wikipedia entry visible on its little square screen. "Oh. That's not very mystical of you."

"No, but it's handy." He flashed me a grin underscored by Gary's chuckle, and we fell into a companionable game of glimpse-the-mountain wherever there was a gap in the trees. Not too much later we pulled into the parking lot of what a sign proclaimed was the National Park Inn, which, from the outside, was a genuinely gorgeous rustic-looking building with the mountain serving as a dramatic backdrop.

Gary whistled. "Damn, that's something."

I said, "It is," except my eyes had fallen right off the vista and landed on a black 1967 Chevy Impala. It didn't belong up here in the woods any more than Petite might've, but it was a beautiful car. Gary parked a few spaces down from it and I got out to walk circles around it. Kansas license plates. I patted the Impala's hood and mumbled, "Long way from home, aren't you, baby?" before reluctantly turning away.

Laurie Corvallis, evening anchor for Channel Two News, stood right behind me with a smile as pointy as a crocodile's. "And so are you, Detective Walker."

In any other circumstances I'm sure I would've seen the news van another fifteen feet down the lot, and suggested to Coyote and Gary that we get the hell out of there. But I was weak in the face of classic cars, and truthfully, we couldn't have escaped anyway. This was where the job was, for us just as much as for Laurie Corvallis.

Which was hardly something I could say to her. I fished my best genuine smile out of somewhere and said, "Fancy meeting you here. You up for the Christmas break?"

"I'm not," she said, every bit as pleasantly. "And neither are you."

"Really? I thought I was. I'm going to be disappointed, then. So why am I here?" She didn't have a microphone, so I didn't much care that I sounded like a babbling idiot.

"You're up here following the Seattle Slaughterer, just like I am, Detective. And the fact that you're here makes me all the more certain I'm going to get my story. I'll be watching you."

"Ms. Corvallis." I rubbed a finger over my eye. I hadn't been smart enough to take my contacts out at the apartment. Three hours of staring out the window and forgetting to blink made me wish I had. Glasses were more forgiving of that behavior. "If I were up here on police business I'd be here with my partner, not friends. Call Captain Morrison, if you like. I'm here on my own."

"That doesn't mean you're not where the story is, Detective. I look forward to seeing more of you soon." She walked away, leaving me with an increasing pit of dread in my tummy.

Coyote caught up to me, carrying his own bag, but not, I noticed, mine. "Cute. Who is she?"

"The devil."

"Really. I thought the devil would be taller." He jogged into the lodge after Corvallis. I bent, scooped up a handful of snow, and caught him in the back of the head with it just before the doors closed behind him.

Gary, who was carrying my bag, stopped at my side. "What's the deal, Jo?"

"Nothing, it's just that woman is going to make this a lot more complicated."

His bushy eyebrows went up and he glanced after Coyote. I don't know how I knew he was looking at Coyote and not Corvallis, but I did. "Is that a that woman like a woman means it, or like a cop means it?"

I took my bag from him as an excuse to give him a hard, considering look. "Whoever said men don't understand women obviously never met you. It was a cop that woman. I don't care if Coyote thinks she's cute. She is cute. She's also going to get herself killed."

"Nah. She ain't the outdoorsy type." Gary, clearly satisfied with his line of reasoning, marched into the lodge. I stared after him, then, because there was nothing else I could do, shrugged assent and followed him.

Corvallis was at the front desk, trying to flirt with Coyote, who arched an eyebrow at me over her head. She looked to see who he was making eyes at, and her smile went flat. It went flatter still when I gave my name and the desk attendant pulled up our reservations. I saw no reason at all to tell Corvallis they'd been made from the phone on the drive down. Better to let her think we'd had them for weeks. Maybe it would throw her off the scent, although I didn't really think anything could.

Certainly she didn't fail to notice we were all staying in one room, which clearly, in her opinion, put the kibosh on any potential romance between me and Coyote. I sort of had to agree with her, but on the other hand, if we were going to fight monsters, I didn't want the team split up even for sleeping. That was how people got picked off in horror movies.

Corvallis, who wasn't privy to my line of thought, cozied up to Coyote a little more. I resisted the urge to drop my bag on her foot, but only because it was a soft-sided backpack that wouldn't do her any damage. Coyote gave me another look over her head. Gleeful, I said, "Cut it out, Corvallis. He's with Gary."

I couldn't decide which of the three looked more shocked, but it left me grinning as the girl behind the counter offered me room keys. "It's a bed-and-breakfast package. Just give them your room number in the morning. Welcome to the National Park Inn, and please let us know if there's anything we can do to make your visit more comfortable."

A blast of cold air dropped the lobby's temperature by about ten degrees. We all turned to see a petite park ranger with a grim expression holding them open. Her face was pale, cords standing out in her throat, but she lifted an extremely steady voice to say, "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to have to ask everyone to stay inside for a little while. I'm afraid we've had another incident."

Coyote, Gary, Laurie Corvallis and I all ran for the door.