River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6)

River Marked (Mercy Thompson #6) Page 6

ONE OF THE REASONS I HATE TO TAKE ANTIHISTAMINES is because of the dreams. They never make any sense, but they are consuming and difficult to throw off the next day.

That night I dreamed I was encased in stone. No matter how hard I struggled, no matter how hard I fought, I could not move. I grew hungry, and there was no surcease, no ease of the great appetite of my captivity.

I dreamed that I was freed at last, and I feasted on an otter that filled me more than an otter should, appeasing my hunger for a moment. So I didn't eat the other otters who swam around me.

They looked like the otters who had watched me pull Benny's boat out of the brush.

I woke up with the dry mouth and feeling of impending doom that were not unfamiliar after I'd taken antihistamines. I felt the same way after vampire, demon, or fae attacks, too. After, because, not being prescient, I never knew when the sword of Damocles was going to fall.

It didn't matter that I knew quite well that the dream meant nothing. It didn't take a Carl Jung to see where the otters had come from. And I suspected that the imprisoned feeling was the effect of the antihistamine itself, which left me sluggish. The hunger? That was even easier. I'd been hopping back and forth from human to coyote yesterday; it would make anyone hungry.

I almost matched Adam's appetite when we sat down for breakfast--cooked in utter civilization on the quarter-sized stove.

"Bad dreams," he said matter-of-factly. The mating bond had clearly given him insight at an inappropriate time again.

"Are we ever going to be able to control the mating bond when it does that?" I asked, shoveling in hash browns as fast as I could without having them dribble out the side of my mouth. "Did you get the whole thing?"

He smiled and nodded. "Otters and all. At least you ate one of them." He ate almost as fast as I did, but he was better at it. Unless I really paid attention, I never noticed him getting the food from his plate to his mouth. It was not so much a matter of speed but of exquisite manners and distraction.

"How's your leg and feet?" he asked as I washed up. He'd cooked, so I cleaned. I wiggled my bare toes and did a few deep knee bends. "The calf aches a little, but the feet are fine."

"ARE WE DOING THIS BECAUSE GORDON SEEKER TOLD us to?" I asked Adam, as he drove us the short distance to the Maryhill Museum of Art.

"I'd intended to take you this morning," he answered slowly. "But I have to admit that I'm curious."

I put my hand on his thigh, and said, "We could head home--or drive to Seattle, Portland, or even Yakima and find a nice hotel." I looked out from the highway and down onto the river. From where the highway was, the river looked small and relatively tamed. "I have the feeling that if we stay, things might get interesting."

He gave me a quick smile before looking back at the road. "Oh? What gave you that feeling? People getting their feet bitten off? The ghost of your father? A mysterious old Indian who disappears at the river without a sign of how he left? Maybe Yo-yo Girl's prophecy of the apocalypse?" "Yo-yo Girl?" I yelped. "Edythe is Yo-yo Girl? Yo-yo Girl sent us here?"

He showed his teeth. "Feeling scared yet? Want to go somewhere safe?"

I couldn't help myself. I set my cheek against his arm and laughed. "It won't help, will it?" I said after a moment. "We'd just run into Godzilla or the Vampire from Hell. Trouble just follows you around."

He rubbed the top of my head. "Hey, Trouble. Let's go find out what your mysterious Indian wanted us to know."

IN SEATTLE OR PORTLAND, THE MARYHILL MUSEUM would have been a nice museum. Out in the middle of nowhere, it was spectacular. The grounds were green and well tended. I didn't see any of the peacocks as we walked from the parking lot to the entrance, but I could hear and smell them just fine. I'd seen it from the highway on the other side of the river while driving to and from Portland, but I'd never actually been in it before.

The first time someone tried to tell me about the museum, I thought they were crazy. In the middle of eastern Washington state, a hundred miles from Portland, a hundred and fifty miles from the Tri-Cities, the museum contained the furniture of the Victorian-era Queen of Romania and work by Auguste Rodin.

That was the first question answered by the slick brochure they handed us at the front door. Sam Hill, financier and builder of roads and towns --and this museum, which was meant to be his home--was a friend of Lo?e Fuller. Lo?e Fuller was a dancer of the early nineteen hundreds, famous in Europe for her innovative use of fabric and veils--and she was a friend of royalty and artists, notably Marie, Queen of Romania, (who designed furniture as a hobby) and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin.

Thus came the furniture of the Queen of Romania and a good-sized collection of Rodin's sculptures to the middle of nowhere.

Given its isolation, I expected that Adam and I would be the only ones in the museum, but I was wrong. In the first room, where the furniture and assorted memorabilia of the Victorian age held court, there were several groups of people. A pair of older women, a family of five that included a stroller, and a middle-aged couple. The room was big enough that it didn't seem crowded at all.

I found the heavily carved furniture beautiful, but stark and uncomfortable-looking--more suitable for a stage production than as something to have in your living room. Maybe a few cushions would have softened the square contours and made it more inviting.

The remainder of that floor was given over to a collection of paintings displayed in a series of interconnecting rooms.

Adam and I separated in the first room of paintings, taking different paths around the artwork. Most of it was very good, if not spectacular, until I came to an oil piece by a familiar painter. I must have made a noise because Adam slid up beside me and put his face against my neck.

"What?" Adam asked, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb the other visitors.

"Do you see that?" I said, nudging him toward the painting I was looking at.

It wasn't the most beautiful painting in the room, not by a long shot. There were also others more detailed, better executed even, but it spoke to me in a way the others did not. Here among English and Greek landscapes, portraits of maids and wildflowers, the cowboys looked a little out of place.

Adam leaned forward, which pressed him more tightly against me without being too flagrant, to read the display information. I snorted at him in mock dismay. "I can see that you are not a true Westerner, or you'd have recognized him right off."

"No, ma'am," he drawled mildly, though I could see a dimple peeping out. I loved his dimple--and I loved it even more when he dropped into the accent of his youth. I especially loved the warm strength of him against me. I was so easy. "I'm a Southerner."

"Just like most of the cowboys he painted," I told him. "The West was populated by Southerners who didn't want to fight in the War Between the States--or who came here after they lost. That, my dear uncultured wolf, is a Charlie Russell--cowboy turned artist. Without him, Montana's history would just be a footnote in a Zane Grey novel. Charlie drew what he saw--and he saw a lot. Not a romantic, but a true realist. Every once in a while, some old Montana rancher still finds a few of his watercolors rolled up and forgotten in the bunkhouse. Like winning the lottery, only better."

Adam's shoulders shook. "I sense passion," he said, his voice soft with laughter, tickling my ear as he spoke into it. "But is it the art or the history that speaks to you?"

"Yes," I said, shivering. "I showed you mine. Which one is your favorite?"

He pulled away and directed me to a painting on the next wall. The woman sat in a cave, a dim waterfall to the left and behind her, a pool of water at her feet. The extraordinary thing about the work was the luminescence of the central figure achieved by some alchemy of the color and texture of her skin and of the fabric of her clothing combined with the shape of her pose. Solitude was its title.

This had none of the dirt and roughness of detail that appealed to me in the Russell painting. This wasn't a woman who had to get up and wash her clothes and fix dinner. Yet . . .

"Okay," I said. "I wouldn't get tired of seeing that on a wall, either. But I'm warning you, it will look odd next to my Charlie Russells."

He kissed my ear and laughed.

The American Indian exhibit was in the basement. Sam Hill had, apparently, collected Native American baskets along with his artwork. Lots and lots of baskets. Over the years, other things had been added--some terrific photographs, for instance, and large petroglyphic rocks. Still, the overall effect was a million baskets and a few other things, too.

Here, too, we weren't alone. The family from upstairs was examining the petroglyphs. The oldest, a girl, pulled free of her parents and put her face against one of the Plexiglas display cases.

There was a middle-aged Indian woman on her own. Her face was serious, though it was a face that was more comfortable with smiles than with grimness. There were lines of laughter and weather near her eyes and mouth, and all of her attention was on Adam and me.

It made me a little uncomfortable for some reason. So I turned from the stone carvings near the doorway to the baskets, putting my back toward the woman.

The baskets were extraordinary. In some of them, the designs of almost-stick-figure animals were surprisingly powerful in a way I wouldn't have thought possible with such extreme stylization as required by the weaving.

"It's a good thing I wasn't born back then," I told Adam. "I took an art course in college, and one of the projects was weaving a basket. Mine looked sort of like a disproportionate hammock complete with holes. I never could get the handle to stay on both sides at the same time."

But not even my history-driven passion could keep me interested in the million and twelfth basket, as beautifully made as they were--and I outlasted Adam by a fair bit. These weren't the kinds of baskets used on a daily basis. Most of them were made to sell to collectors and tourists.

They reminded me of a history professor of mine who mourned the loss of everyday things. Every museum, she said, had wedding dresses and christening dresses galore, Indian ceremonial robes and beaded or elk-tooth dresses worn only on the most special occasion. People don't save Grandma's work dress or Grandpa's hunting leathers.

I couldn't help but wonder what Gordon Seeker had wanted us to see here. The family had moved on--I could hear the children talking in the hallway outside this exhibit room. I didn't see the woman who'd been watching us.

I paused by the big chunk of stone near the hall that led to the rest of the basement exhibits. There were several blocks of stone, with petroglyphs incised into their surfaces, in the room. From one, a giant predatory bird glared at me.

"I wonder when this was done," I said, letting my fingers hover over the stone. I could have touched it--others were touching the gray rocks --but I couldn't quite make myself do it. As if the press of my fingers might damage it, when hundreds and maybe thousands of years of wind and rain had not. "And how long it took to carve it."

"These were taken out of the original site when the river was dammed, and the canyon they were in was flooded," Adam said thoughtfully, reading the little card next to the exhibit. "I'd figure it was carved a long time ago, or you'd see more roughness from the creation process. A thousand years almost certainly. Could be ten thousand, I suppose."

We had sandwiches in the museum deli, right next to the Rodin exhibit, then headed out to Horsethief Lake, about fifteen miles west of the museum.

JANICE LYNNE MORRISON WAS A THIRD- GRADE TEACHER and a camera nut. Her photos would never grace a museum, but she loved to scrapbook her adventures. This adventure, in particular, needed scrapbooking because she was unhappily certain that her life was about to fall apart.

They had stopped at a picnic area on the Columbia for lunch--after this it would be restaurants until they reached Lee's parents' house in Wyoming. Everyone had eaten, the remnants of the food were packed away for snacks, and the boys were playing on the rocks.

Lee was in the car taking a phone call. She wasn't sure when she first noticed the phone calls, maybe after school got out, and she was home more often. Her husband worked from home, and it was not unusual for him to get business calls and take them in private. But these calls came at the same time every day--eleven fifteen. When he got off the phone, he would make a great effort to do nice things for her-- the kinds of things that someone who was feeling guilty would do. More damningly, he wouldn't meet her eyes, not right after one of the calls. Either he had a bookie or someone on the side.

After their vacation, she would talk to him about it-- so she wanted to save all the memories she could.

She couldn't get both of the boys in the shot with the right light, so she kicked off her sandals and waded out into the water a few feet and tried it again. The light hit her digital screen so she had to use the regular viewfinder and put the camera up to her eye. It still wasn't quite right. She needed just a little more field of view. She took one more step back--and there was nothing beneath her feet.

As she fell backward, something snagged her leg and pulled her upstream. She struggled for a moment more, then grew calm. Peaceful. The water rushed past her and took all of her cares away.

Green eyes examined her with interest while some light-colored and fluttery tentacles that formed a fringe around its sharp nose caressed her. It opened its mouth, and she saw long spiky teeth before a wave caught her and pushed her away.

She didn't want to go away from the creature but had no will to fight its need. She staggered out of the water, coughing and choking from the water she'd swallowed. Blood dripped from a gash that wrapped all the way around her thigh just below the line of her shorts. Her head ached, and her eyes burned, but she was calm and happier than she'd ever been before.

It wanted her.

"Mommy, Mommy, are you all right?" A young boy --her son, she thought, what was his name?--held her arm. "Are you all right? Where's your camera?"

She reached out and took his hand--and the hand of the little boy who hadn't said anything, too. He was only wearing his pull-ups and one shoe. Another time, she knew that one shoe would have bothered her. But nothing bothered her anymore.

"Janny?" A man interrupted her before she got the boys to the river, and she frowned at him. Her husband, that was who he was. "Janny, what happened to you? Are you all right?"

He wouldn't let her take the boys, she knew, so she let them go until she understood what the new plan should be.

"Janny?" His voice was soft, gentle, and for some reason, that made her really mad. "Janny, you're bleeding. Did you fall into the river?"

"I need to rinse off the blood," she told him. Her voice came out a little garbled, but she didn't think it would matter. "Can you help me?"

He followed her into the river, though he wasn't happy about it. "It's probably not sanitary, Janny. There's water in the car."

While he argued, she took him deeper and deeper. The monster took him a few feet from where she'd fallen, dragging him under so fast he had no time to cry out.

"Daddy?"

The boys stood on the shore, and when she took their hands again, they followed her in. The habit of obedience and trust stronger than their instincts.

"Mercy."

"Mommy, what happened?" the older one wanted to know.

"Mercy, wake up."

"Daddy went swimming," she told him with a peaceful smile. It wanted Janny, but she hadn't been enough, so Janny had been sent back for more. But the monster was still hungry. "Why don't we go swimming with Daddy?"

I OPENED MY EYES, CONSCIOUS THAT I WAS BREATHING too fast and that I was drooling on Adam's leg.

"Sorry," I said groggily. "I didn't mean to fall asleep."

"I kept you up too late," Adam said in a tone that was not at all apologetic. "Satisfied" might be a better word. Smug. We hadn't been living celibate before we got married, but it was hard to get much privacy when Adam was pack Alpha and had a teenage daughter. Maybe we should buy a trailer of our own.

"Got to catch your sleep while you can," Adam continued. "I didn't get the full effect this time, but it sounded like another nightmare."

"Oh yeah," I agreed. The sick feeling in my stomach wasn't leaving very quickly. "Creepy in that slow-motion I-can't-stop-this kind of way. I think that Gordon's little talk about the cut on my leg has me thinking about old horror movies."

Coyotes don't make good slaves, he'd said right about the same time he'd said I was river marked. I'd forgotten about it in the oddity of his visit, but it must have stuck in my subconscious and given me that chilling little episode. I wonder what he thought had marked my leg. Maybe someone would tell us more that afternoon.

"I'm assuming since we aren't there yet, I wasn't sleeping for long."

"About ten minutes," he said. "Here's our park."

"It doesn't say Horsethief Lake," I told Adam, as he turned off the highway toward the river, and we started down a long, gently bending road after passing a sign that said "Columbia Hills State Park."

"Name sanitized in 2003," Adam told me. "Both the states and the U.S. Geological Survey are PCing geographical names all over the place. Just ask Bran. He'll go on for as long as you want to listen about Jackass Creek--he claims he knew the jackass it was named after."

"Good thing the USGS doesn't speak French, or they'd rename the Grand Tetons," I said.

Adam laughed. "You just know those French trappers were missing home when they named them, don't you?"

The drive through the park took us past an Indian graveyard that was still being used--I could tell from all the balloons and items left on the graves. It looked almost like a birthday party had gone on there, and all of the guests had departed without taking away their presents. There was a tall chain-link fence around the graveyard with "No Trespassing" signs on it.

I can see ghosts. But I've never actually seen one in a graveyard. Graveyards are for the living. In my experience, ghosts tend to hang out in the same places they did while they were alive.

So what had my father been doing in a campground beside the Columbia all the way out here when he was supposed to be from Browning, Montana?

Calvin Seeker was leaning against a chain-link fence when we parked the car on a gravel lot next to a boating dock. He looked tired and older than he'd appeared last night--like almost twenty. Without moving, he watched us lock up the car and cross the road.

The chain-link fence he was leaning on ran until it met up with the railroad that went along the edge of the water, then it followed the track of the railroad out of our sight around the bluffs. There was a sign behind Gordon, but I couldn't read it.

"Uncle Jim told me to meet you here at noon," he said, a little more politely than his posture indicated. "I'm going to be your tour guide, apparently."

"Thank you," I said.

He shrugged. "No trouble. Sometimes I volunteer to guide people on tourist days during the summer."

He scuffed his shoe in the dirt and gave Adam a wary look. "How did you manage to get in touch with Uncle Jim? He told me while we were waiting in the hospital to see how Benny was doing, but I didn't see him pick up his phone--and I know you didn't get his phone number while we were waiting for the ambulance last night."

"We didn't," said Adam. "We talked to your grandfather."

Calvin came off the fence and stood up straight, his eyes a little wide. "My grandfather?" he asked, sounding startled. "Which one?"

"He called himself Gordon Seeker," I said. "He came by last night, said your uncle had sent him. He gave me some stuff that really helped with my leg."

"Ah, that grandfather." He didn't seem too happy about it, and I was pretty sure it was the thought of Gordon Seeker that had jolted him off the fence. "I should have known."

"Something wrong?" Adam asked.

"Something's always wrong when Grandpa Gordon stirs up the water," Calvin said. He looked at me, then looked at Adam. "Werewolf, huh?"

Adam nodded.

"Okay. Well, if Grandpa Gordon sent you, I'm going to do this a little differently. Did he say why he sent you?" He shook his head before he answered. "What am I asking? Of course not. He'd rather watch us all run around like chickens when the fox comes calling. I guess he thinks it's funny."

"You were at the hospital last night?" I asked. "Is Benny going to be all right? Did he tell you what happened?"

"Yes," Calvin said. He squinted against the sun, and the little gesture let me see the family resemblance between him and the old man who'd come to my trailer. "Benny'll survive. I think . . . I think I should tell you his story after I've played guide if you don't mind. I don't know that it will make more sense that way, but at least you'll know why he wanted you to come out here." He frowned at me and Adam. "I'm not sure why he thinks it's important that you know anything. I might question Uncle Jim, but only a fool asks Grandpa Gordon anything: He just might answer."

He looked out across the river as if for inspiration, and when he spoke again, his voice was low. "My uncle Jim is a medicine man. It runs in the family, usually in sibling lines. None of his kids have the ability to become what he is, and neither did his father. But his uncle did. It runs like that."

"Is Gordon a medicine man?" I asked, trying to work out the lineage. The answer should be no, if Gordon was his grandfather and shared his last name--unless Jim was Calvin's uncle on his mother's side. Which, I suddenly thought, was probable since they didn't share last names.

"Is the night dark?" Calvin grinned, which robbed his face of its sulky cast and made him look likeable. "Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on what you mean and in whose eyes. He is something, that's for sure. Anyway, I'm Uncle Jim's apprentice. I'm going to start this tour just like I would if you were a pair of tourists, but if I'm doing it right, some things might change along the way." He cleared his throat, looked a little embarrassed, and said, "As inspiration strikes me. Or not.

"So." He took a deep breath. "Welcome to this sacred ground. Speak softly and show respect while you are here, please. Twenty years ago, we fenced it and closed it to strangers because of vandalism. But that made no one happy because these were left behind to share the stories of those who have gone before with those who are now. So the decision was made to make it accessible, but under specific circumstances. If you were to come on your own . . ." He paused and looked at me, and when he continued, he'd lost the practiced flow of his voice. "You'd probably be okay. You look Indian. But people here without permission get jail sentences; we are serious about keeping this place safe."

He turned and started walking on a trail, and we followed him through the gate. It was almost like being in a maze except the hedges were walls of lava and huge rocks.

"This is the Temani Pesh-wa trail," Calvin said, leading the way, though there was really no need for a guide because the path was obvious. "Which means `written on rock.' The pictograms here were probably painted between five hundred and a thousand years ago."

He took us up a fairly brisk climb, speaking as we walked. "In earlier times, there were a lot of Indians in this area. Lewis and Clark mention stopping very near here, and from their journals, people estimate that there were nearly ten thousand Indians in the vicinity. We do know that one of the many villages was over there."

He pointed back the way we'd come, where, in the distance, a rounded section of land jutted out into the river. From its edges, basalt cliffs dropped several hundred feet to the water below. I couldn't tell from where we were whether there was a body of water between us and the land he'd pointed to. The landmass looked like nothing so much as a wedding cake, complete with a second, much smaller layer in the center.

Just as I was turning to look back at Calvin, I noticed that we weren't the only ones on the trail. The Native American woman who had been in the museum was taking a fork in the trail that we had not. Even as I watched, she crossed behind a big bunch of rock and disappeared into the landscape.

"Twice a year they'd hold a potlatch," Calvin was saying, "a party, to which they invited people from near and far. As part of the potlatch, young men and women of twelve or thirteen would hold their vision quests. Afterward, they would come here and record a reminder of their vision quests upon the rock."

He took us up to a basalt wall of cliffs--a baby cliff compared to the one he'd just pointed out. He stopped but didn't say anything, so I looked up. It took a moment to understand what I was seeing, even though I'd been looking for them. The old paint blended into the rocky cliff as if it belonged there, and I was the outsider. As soon as I saw one, I saw that they were everywhere.

There were dozens, parts of dozens at least. Some of them were clearly identifiable as human or various other animals. Others were impossible to decipher, either because some of the paint had grown too faint or because whatever symbolism they'd used was too alien for me to understand. There were some symbols that were obvious-- like flowing water was a series of parallel squiggly lines. Some were less obvious: a red and white target, long wavy lines, circles.

I stepped close, my hands behind my back like a child told not to touch. Hundreds of years ago someone had stood where I was and touched their fingers to the rock. Five hundred years ago. A thousand years ago.

I had the odd thought that Bran the Marrock had been alive when these were painted. Five hundred years I was certain he was. I was almost sure of a thousand.

Still. I wondered if the long-ago girl or boy who had drawn the bold red and white target had known how long their artwork would remain, the last testament that they had once walked the earth.

Beside me, Adam stiffened and took a deep breath. He turned slowly until he looked down where we'd been standing a few minutes ago. I followed his gaze until I saw it, too.

Crouched on a rocky promontory that overhung the lower part of the trail, a red-tailed hawk stared at us. Like the pictograms, it belonged there. But there was something odd about its interest in us. It reminded me a little too closely of the woman in the museum. The bird took flight and passed right over our heads before veering off over the river, then out of sight.

As it flew, I realized that the unease I felt reminded me of my vision quest and the animals who had hunted me, making me unwelcome, until I'd come upon Coyote. A vision quest like those of all the long-ago artists. Maybe, I thought in sudden whimsy, I should draw a La-Z-Boy on one of the rocks. Somehow, I was pretty sure no one would understand that I wasn't vandalizing--just continuing tradition.

If Calvin hadn't been there, I'd have told Adam. I looked over at him and found him watching Calvin with gold eyes that danced with temper.

I put my hand on his arm. Gold eyes weren't a good thing when we were among friends.

Adam put his hand over mine and took a step so he was between me and Calvin. "In your ongoing education as a medicine man, have you ever heard of people who can change into animals, Calvin?" he asked in a surprisingly civil voice.

I frowned at Adam and gave his arm an invisible squeeze. I didn't know Calvin; there was no reason to make him question what I was. Something had happened that I'd missed while my eyes had been on the hawk, and I wasn't sure what it was.

Whatever it was, Adam was pretty mad at Calvin. I wondered if he pulled me behind him to protect me--or to keep me from protecting Calvin.

"No," said Calvin--which was a mistake. He should have learned how to not-lie from his grandfather. Besides, I knew enough Native American legends to know that there were lots of stories about people who turned to animals--and animals into people, for that matter. And he knew about Adam, who was certainly a person who changed into an animal.

Adam smiled, showing his teeth. I couldn't actually see him do it, but Calvin's face told me he had clearly enough. Adam had put away his civilized face and let Calvin see the real one.

"Can't lie to werewolves," I told the young man. "You might as well have shouted, `Yes, but I don't want you to ask me about it.'"

Calvin swallowed, his fear pressing on my nose like perfume.

"Mercy?" asked Adam.

He was going somewhere with this--and I trusted him as long as his temper held. Werewolves are monsters. I grew up with them, and I loved Adam--and he would never hurt me. That did not apply to people he didn't care about. The faster the situation--whatever the situation was--was defused, the safer for everyone.

Information can sometimes be gotten when the opponent thinks you know all about it anyway. That was what Adam had been asking me to do-- tell Calvin who I was.

"I can turn into a coyote," I said. "My mom tells me I must get it from my father."

Calvin's jaw dropped, then his face froze. "Your mother was a white woman," he said urgently. "You can't turn into a coyote."

"Can, too," I said indignantly. It was one thing for me to tell him he was lying--I knew I was right. It was an entirely different matter for him to tell me I was lying.

"Can't."

"Can." "Can't."

"Can, too."

"Mercy," said Adam with exaggerated patience tinged with humor. He knew I was doing it on purpose. That was okay because he wasn't angry anymore.

"Cannot," said Calvin.

"Knock it off, both of you. Neither of you is five." He glanced at Calvin. "He answered what I wanted to know anyway. That hawk was no natural animal, and this one knew it."

No one reads body language like a werewolf, I thought. And then I realized what Adam was saying.

The blood shot from my head so fast that I had to step sideways to keep my feet--and sideways was three feet down the hillside. Adam jerked me back on the trail before I managed to fall. "Okay?" he asked.

I nodded, though I wasn't sure it was true.

I'd never met another one of my kind. After more than thirty years, I'd sort of assumed that there were no more left, that I was the only one.

I'd also assumed they'd be coyotes like me. Hadn't the old man last night kind of implied that? He'd known I was a coyote, and I'd only told him I was a walker.

I didn't know much about being a walker. Only what Bran had told me, and he hadn't known much--or he'd told me exactly as much as he intended to. I'd grown up thinking the last was true, but over the past year or so had come to believe the first.

"She is a walker," Adam told Calvin. "Coming up with reasons it can't be so doesn't help, and neither does arguing. I should know: I was bitten and Changed by a bandit warlord in Vietnam. Even now, I don't know of any werewolves living in Asia--there are things over there that don't like us, and they can make their dislike fatal. Yet there he was. Mercy changes into a coyote. You can't argue with fact. Just accept it and get over it. Was that your grandfather?"

If Gordon Seeker was a walker who turned into a red-tailed hawk, that would explain why he was able to disappear so effectively. There still should have been a pile of clothes where he'd changed, but being a walker would answer most of my questions.

"Grandpa Gordon changes," said Calvin. He looked as though he had sucked on a lemon as he stared at me.

He didn't not-lie very well, either. Maybe it was something medicine men learned when they were older. I had a feeling that his uncle Jim could not- lie as smoothly as any fae, and I'd seen that his grandfather could do the same. So why had they sent Calvin out with us? Unless they wanted us to share their secrets.

And the reason they might want us to know was tied up with Gordon Seeker, Yo-yo Girl Edythe's prophecy, and whatever had happened to Benny and his sister that Calvin wanted to wait until later to tell us.

Someday, I'm going to meet some supernatural creature who tells me everything I should know up front and in a forthright manner--but I'm not going to hold my breath.

"That hawk wasn't Gordon," said Adam, who could tell a bad not-lie as well as I could. "Who was it?"

If Gordon could change, and the hawk wasn't Gordon, then there were three of us. Three walkers. Gordon had known about me, about my existence, and the only reason we had met was chance. Engineered by Yo-yo Girl, but not by any desire on their part. Fine. They hadn't wanted anything to do with me. I would extend them the same courtesy.

Calvin looked at me a moment and threw up his hands in surrender. "Coyote, huh? Maybe that explains a few more things about why Grandpa Gordon wanted you to see this." He rubbed his face. "Look. Let me take you to see She Who Watches--I don't know if she's something you needed to see or not. Uncle Jim wasn't exactly forthcoming, but she's the best and best-known of the pictograms. Then I'll take you on to the petroglyphs. I'll tell you Benny's story--and I'll give you Uncle Jim's phone number, and you can call him about anything else you need to know, all right?"

It sounded fair enough to me, and Adam nodded.

He turned around and led us back down to where the trail split, and we followed the path of the woman I'd seen earlier. There were more drawings on the rock faces we passed.

"There's no lichen on the places where the pictograms are," commented Adam.

Calvin nodded. He'd calmed down a lot, and his fear no longer made me ache to give chase. "Right. They had some way of clearing off a bare patch and keeping it clean a thousand years later. It might have been something as easy as scraping the rock clean. Lichen needs a certain amount of roughness to grow. There are a few bare patches of rock that were obviously cleared off." He pointed. "But they don't have anything on them. Maybe someone mixed the paint wrong, or maybe they didn't get around to using them. You can see a bit of pigment on some of the bare patches when the light is just right."

"Do you know which tribe the people who lived over there belonged to?" Adam asked.

Calvin shook his head. "When the Europeans came, everybody moved. Lots of bands and a few tribes died off entirely. Most tribes kept their histories orally, and many of those stories were lost. We have some good guesses, but so do other tribes, and their guesses and ours don't always line up."

We turned a corner, onto the same trail down which the woman had disappeared. I could scent her. The trail paralleled the fence. On the other side of the fence were the railroad tracks that ran along the river. The fence and the trail ended abruptly, leaving us in a corner between the fence and a basalt rock wall. On the rock, looking out at the Columbia, was the biggest, clearest pictogram I'd seen. She could have been drawn a decade ago rather than centuries.

She Who Watches looked like a raccoon's face. Two little tulip ears perched on top of her head, and her mouth was open in a wide smile. A square of faded black was set in the middle of her mouth. It might have been a faded tongue or a long-ago attempt to cover up something, but whatever it was, it looked out of place in the rest of the face. Faintly, I could see where fangs had once been drawn in the mouth--and I bet she didn't look so friendly long ago, when those were more obvious.

Most of the pictograms we'd seen were cruder, two-dimensional stick figures. This had depth and real artistry. "There are a lot of stories about She Who Watches," Calvin said. He opened his mouth and stopped. "But that's not why it was important to come here." He looked startled, as if he'd surprised himself with what he'd said.

"Why don't you tell us the story anyway?" Adam invited. "We have time."

Calvin looked uneasily over his shoulder but there was no one behind us. "All right." He took a deep breath. "All right. It's a Coyote story, so I suppose it's appropriate, right? One of several about how she came to be here--all the ones I know are Coyote stories.

"One day, Coyote came walking up the Columbia and he found this Indian village. He walked among the people, but he couldn't find their leader. So he went up to an old lady making a fish trap. `Where is your leader?' he asked her.

"`Tsagaglalal, She Who Watches, is our leader,' said the old woman. `She is up on the hill.'

"So Coyote, he comes up to this place and found a woman standing just where we are.

"`What are you doing up here?' he asked her. `Your people are down in the village.'

"`I am watching,' she told him. `I watch to see that my people have enough to eat. I watch so they have good homes to sleep in. I watch to see that they are safe from enemies.'

"Coyote, he thought that this was a good thing. So he took her and threw her up against this rock so that she could keep a watch over her people always."

"I bet there is more to the story," said Adam. "Coyote wouldn't throw her on the rock unless she made a smart-aleck comment or two."

"Well," I said, because he'd been looking at me, "I suppose if I were doing my job, and some stranger came up and started questioning me, I might be tempted to say something a little rude." I'd said quite a bit to Adam over the years, and I saw in his eyes that he was remembering it, too.

"Maybe so," said Calvin. "Let me take you back to the petroglyphs."

He started back down the trail, and I hesitated. I turned to look at the little corner we'd been stuck in and took a deep breath, but I didn't smell her. I'd caught her scent at the fork in the trail, and there was nowhere else she could have gone. Even if she had climbed over the fence, she'd have left her scent behind.

"Did either of you notice the woman who was out walking the trail a little ways behind us?" I asked. Maybe she'd been the hawk we'd seen.

"What woman?" asked Calvin.

Adam shook his head. "Who did you see?"

"The woman from the museum, from the Indian exhibit there," I told Adam, expecting him to have seen her, too. Adam notices things. Part of it is being werewolf, but a bigger part of it, I think, comes from his time as a member of a Long- Range Reconnaissance Patrol in the jungles of Vietnam.

"A family," he said. "Father, mother, three kids."

"And a middle-aged Native American woman wearing a bright blue shirt with a pair of macaws embroidered on the back," I told him. "She smelled like mint and coffee."

He shook his head. "I didn't see her."

He'd walked right past her.

"What does that mean?" asked Calvin.

"I'm not sure yet," I told him. Calvin couldn't smell a lie. You could see it in his face that he believed what I said. I bet his uncle Jim would have called me on it. Adam gave me a sharp look.

There was a lot going on. Too much of it was mysterious and made no sense at all. And there were two other walkers, at least one of whom had known all about me before we met. The disappearing woman was one mystery too much. Though I was pretty sure she was my mystery and not something engineered by Gordon Seeker or anyone else we'd met there.

"Why don't we go to the petroglyphs, then you tell me about Benny," I told Calvin grimly. "I'll see if the woman fits in anywhere."

It wasn't his fault. I had the feeling that he was even more in the dark than Adam and I were. Someone was playing games, and I was tired of it.