He raised an eyebrow. “You mean you don’t know how to fix those?” Then he shrugged, gestured with his chin toward Coyote. “He taught me a trick or two. He can teach you, too. Gary Laughingdog is no more. I’ll pick a different name and be someone else.”
“Sounds lonely,” I said.
He shrugged again.
I saw a beer can that looked like one I’d passed earlier. I kicked it gently and sent it rolling to the side of the road. “If you’d gotten me up, I could have taken you to the bus station and bought you a ticket.”
“Hitchhiking is safer.” He looked at Coyote. “Usually. If Honey didn’t live out in the middle of freaking nowhere. I had to go looking for a less rural area that might have someone who’d pick up a hitchhiker—”
Coyote briefly interrupted his whistling to say, “Or a car to hot-wire.”
Gary clenched his jaw. “Or a car to hot-wire,” he agreed. The clenched jaw told me it bothered him to steal a car—and that he’d have done it if necessary. Oddly, both of them made me like him a little more. I’ve done some hard things in the name of necessity.
“If I had started earlier or not had to walk so far, maybe I could have just gotten a ride instead of walking the same half mile over and over again until I finally realized that the reason the road looked the same wasn’t just because around here a lot of roads look the same. I probably hiked two hours before I noticed. I have a little experience with odd happenings; mostly it means that matters are out of my control. Again. So I sat down and waited for Coyote to show up.”
Sympathy didn’t seem the right response, so I just kept walking.
Eventually, the stiffness left his shoulders, and he seemed to mellow a bit. He asked me, “Did you get a chance to ask him about the fae artifact you need from him?”
“No,” I said.
“Shh,” said Coyote, trotting back to us. “Time to be quiet now. This way. Come with me.” He stepped off the road into the darkness.
We climbed a little hill—a hill I hadn’t noticed until Coyote took us off the road. It was, like most uninhabited places around the Tri-Cities, covered with rock and sagebrush. We crested the hill, then followed a trail down a steep gorge. At the bottom of the drop, a thicket of brush grew, the kind that occasionally flourishes around water seeps that are sometimes at the center of ravines around here. The brush covered the faint trail we’d been following. Coyote dropped to his hands and knees to crawl through. After a deep breath, as if he planned on diving underwater instead of under a bunch of leaves, Gary did the same.
I followed. The soil under my knees was softer than I expected. No rocks, no roots, no marsh, nothing with stickers—not that I was complaining. But if I hadn’t already known Coyote was manipulating the landscape, the lack of nasty plant life would have proved it. There were no signs of any other people or animals despite the way this trail looked like some kind of thoroughfare for coyotes or raccoons.
A high-pitched wailing cry broke the silence of the night and sent unexpected, formless terror through my bones, leaving me crouching motionless under the cover of bushes like a rabbit hiding from a fox. The first howl was answered by another.
I wasn’t the only one who froze; Gary had stopped, too. Coyote sat down and turned to face us.
“His children break the night with their hungry cries,” Coyote said. “That we hear them in this, my own land, means that they have hunted this night, and there are more people on their way to the other side.”
“Dead,” said Gary. “You mean Guayota has killed more people.”
Coyote nodded, as solemn as I’d ever seen him. “You need to understand this, both of you. Once Guayota took the first death, he can never stop. He will kill and kill and, like the wendigo, never be free of the terrible hunger because death never can satisfy that kind of need. He cannot stop himself, so he needs to be stopped.” He lifted his head and closed his eyes. “They are quiet now. We need to keep going.”
The pitch of the trail changed to an uphill climb, gradually getting steeper and steeper until I was scrabbling up a cliff face. I could no longer see Coyote or Gary, and I hoped they were still ahead. I dug in my fingernails and shoe edges and hauled myself up. Sweat gathered where sweat generally gathers and rolled in jolly, salt-carrying joy all across the burns I’d acquired fighting Guayota.
Eventually, I chinned up over the edge of the cliff and rolled onto … a lawn. In front of me was a hedge, and under the hedge were Coyote and Gary, lying side by side. There was space between them, and I elbow-crawled forward until I was even with them but still under the hedge. Beyond the hedge was a manicured lawn just like the one I’d crawled over.
That cliff edge had been a barrier between Coyote’s lands and the real world. I hadn’t noticed the transition on the way out here, but now, lying beneath the hedge, my senses were crawling with information that hadn’t been available—the sounds of night insects and the scents of early-spring flowers.
Coyote’s road had looked and smelled exactly as I expected—but real life doesn’t do that. Real life is full of surprises, big and small. I’d keep that in mind the next time Coyote showed up.
That we were out of Coyote’s place meant that the hedge we lay under was real, as was the yard and the house it surrounded. The back of the house was lit by bright lights. I saw the silhouettes of trees and bushes. Between us and the house was a kidney-shaped pool encased in a walkway of cement. In the night, with the house lights shining in my eyes, the water looked like black ink.
The house was a high-end house, not rich-rich but nothing that a mechanic’s salary would have touched. Maybe there were some distinguishing features on the front of the house—like an address. But from my viewpoint, the house looked like any of a hundred other expensive houses. The deck, jutting out fifteen or twenty feet from the house and three feet off the ground, was the most interesting feature, that and the dogs.
The two dogs were chained at opposite ends of the deck, each chewing on rawhide bones as long as my calf. At least I hoped they were rawhide bones.
Coyote shoved something in my hand. I didn’t have to look down to know that I held the walking stick, but I did anyway. It looked much as it had the last time I’d seen it: a four-foot-long oak staff made of twisty wood, with a gray finish and a ring of silver on the bottom. The silver cap that sometimes became a spearhead was covered with Celtic designs. It looked like something I could have bought at the local Renaissance fair for a couple of hundred dollars.