River Marked

Her tentacles must have been extremely sensitive. Just as she had when Adam freed me, she jerked her head up out of the water. Since I was on top, the motion catapulted me out of the river, off her head, and into the air. I landed about fifteen feet from where I’d started and plunged back into the water. She’d thrown me upstream, so the current would bring me right back to her. I broke surface again just about the time she let loose with a shriek that hurt my ears.

She saw me and dropped back into the water, disappearing under the surface. I swam as fast as I could, but, not being a fish, I was pretty sure I was going to be food.

Something grabbed my shoulders and I screamed, reaching up to grab whatever it was as it yanked me out of the water. I quit screaming as the river devil’s open mouth appeared on the surface of the water below my toes, which were now about five feet in the air. My hands closed around two leather-covered steel-strong bones that could only be the legs of a very, very big predatory bird.

My food, myfood. Thief! The river devil’s voice in my head made me tighten my grip on the great bird’s legs and draw my feet up as far as I could.

He shouldn’t have been able to bear my weight, even as big as he was—and with his wings outspread, he was huge. But he wasn’t just a thunderbird—he was Thunderbird—and I supposed that made a difference.

The river devil broke the surface but had misjudged her strike because Thunderbird swooped sideways at the last moment. She hung where she was a moment before toppling sideways and crashing into the river like a whale breaching. Thunderbird carried me to the river’s edge and dropped me, gently, next to where Adam should have been waiting.

And wasn’t.

“Adam,” I shrieked, wiping the water out of my eyes. She couldn’t have him. He wasmine. I staggered into a run toward the river about the time Adam emerged, knocking me over and drenching me further with the water held by his fur.

I swore at him.“You have got to stay out of the water,” I told him through gritted, chattering teeth. “If she gets you, she won’t have to bother killing me—she can makeyou do it.”

It scared me. I understood why he’d done it, understood it viscerally, but he had to stay out of the river. I tried to roll out from under him, but a big paw on my shoulder held me down and he snarled at me.

That’s when I realized that I wasn’t dealing with Adam. Adam knew why he had to stay out of the water. But the wolf didn’t understand, and the wolf had taken over.

We didn’t have time for this. I had to get my fins on and be ready to swim out to wherever the river devil was when she went comatose.

I heard a war cry—someone had made it out to her.

“Adam,” I said. “Let me up.”

Instead, he lay down on top of me. Damn Wolf. If Adam had been in his human shape, the wolf would never have gotten this much of an upper hand.

But I knew how to deal with this—if I calmed down, he would, too. He was responding as much to the frantic beat of my heart and my fear as he was to seeing me jerked underwater. He hadn’t seen me fight underwater with something I couldn’t see, where I could only feel those sharp spiky teeth and—that wasn’t going to helpme quiet down at all.

I closed my eyes and sought that calm place I’d learned to find in the dojo. It came in handy both when working on engines and when dealing with unhappy customers.

It took longer than it might have because I couldn’t help but listen to the sounds of the battle I couldn’t see, but eventually my pulse settled down, and I was relaxed under Adam.

“Okay,” I told him. “I’m okay. You need to get off of me before I’m squished.”

The wolf growled.

“Adam,” I said sharply.“Getoff me.”

He closed his yellow eyes and took a deep breath.

“Adam?”

When his eyes opened it was Adam who looked back at me. He stood up and backed off.

“Thank you,” I said, rolling to my feet a little less gracefully than I meant to.

Out in the river there was a feeding frenzy going on. There was blood in the water; I could smell it even though I couldn’t see. I could hear the cries of the birds—Hawk, Raven, and Thunderbird as they attacked from above, but the devil was too far out in the middle of the river. Even with my night vision, I had trouble seeing what was going on. I grabbed my water socks and pulled them on my feet, ignoring the rough tear that wept blood on the foot I’d managed to brace on the river devil’s teeth.

The fight was moving gradually toward the little swimming hole, and I felt Adam’s attention focus as he figured out what she was doing. Our bond allowed me to understand it, too: she was herding them into the cove because she didn’t want anyone to escape, and it would make it easier for her to locate body parts if she missed anything.

It would make my job easier, too.

I was worried I wasn’t going to be able to get Adam to let me back in the water. I was pretty sure I was going to be terrified—

She was close enough I could see her bright green eyes—which meant that Adam and I were too close to the river.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s—”

There was a tremendous splash and her head lifted out of the water. Speared on her teeth was a man with a canine head. She opened her mouth as a single tentacle pulled him off the teeth that impaled him. She threw him into the air, and, tipping her head back, caught him in her rear teeth and chewed him to bits.

Adam collapsed, like a puppet whose strings were cut. Coyote howled a tribute.

She had eaten Wolf.

I didn’t know what had happened to Adam. He was breathing, his heart was steady—he was just unconscious. I was kneeling beside him, looking for any injury, when pain rushed over me, and I understood why he’d fallen.

My skin was on fire, and I felt as if someone had poured boiling water over me. I screamed, stumbling to my feet. And this time it was I, tears sliding down my wet face, who howled a tribute—and Coyote who died.

It didn’t last long after that. I think that when they were all alive, they’d been able to harry her, to play off one another’s strengths. But as they died, they lost the ability to distract her.

Raven died trying to keep Snake alive—the distraction allowed Snake to drive his spear deep into her side, but not deep enough. Watching her, I realized why she’d only grabbed me with one tentacle—she could only use one of them at a time. The unused tentacles bobbed about her head as if she had thick wire hair. She dove on top of Snake, and I didn’t see him again. The only ones that seemed to be remaining were Thunderbird and Hawk.

Thunderbird dove like an F-15, striking with both taloned feet extended. I’d seen him score a deep furrow on her nose a few moments before. But this time, she whipped her tentacle around his legs and snatched him out of the air and into the water.

Suddenly she shrieked—neither she nor I had seen Hawk, and he’d managed to take out an eye while she was concentrating on Thunderbird. But Hawk’s talons were stuck, and she dove abruptly. For a moment, the river was still, and Thunderbird floated alone on the surface, bobbing gently with the current. Then he disappeared under the water, tugged by something underneath him.

Wait until she surfaces and is still, Coyote had cautioned me as he ate a couple of fast-food burgers in the backseat of the truck—one greasy sandwich in each hand.If there aren’t enough of us to cause her to go belly-up, there’s no sense in you dying, too.

I’d asked him what to do if she didn’t react the way he’d hoped.

Maybe then it might be time to bring in the nuclear warheads, he’d said. For all that there was a smile on his face, I had been pretty sure he hadn’t been joking.

I stripped off Adam’s shirt. When I saw blood, I realized that Thunderbird had opened up a good slice under one arm when he rescued me. Under the circumstances, I wasn’t going to complain. I checked the knife belt. There were a few knives missing, but I still had eight left. Hopefully, that would be enough.