Choose, Mercedes.
"For an ancient evil, she speaks awfully good English," I said.
"She's been eating English-speaking people." Coyote sat next to me.
"Can you hear her?" I asked.
He shook his head. "No. She can't mark me."
"Could you save her?" I asked Coyote. "Could you save that little girl? Didn't you carve the way for the waters to flow and move mountains? Raven hung the stars."
"That was a long time ago, under the Great Spirit's direction," he said, sounding sad. "I'm on my own here."
"Why doesn't the Great Spirit take care of this?"
"Why should He?" Coyote asked. "All that is mortal dies. Death is not such a bad thing. What would be a bad thing would be living without challenges. Without knowing defeat, we cannot know what victory is. There is no life without death."
"I like my god better than I like yours," I told him.
"Don't you know, child? He is one and the same." Coyote watched the river devil wait for my response. "The Great Spirit has given us our wits and our courage. He sends helpers and counsel. He sent me to you, didn't he? I talked to my sisters tonight. It was a good thing."
"Can you save this girl?"
"Do you know where she is?"
"A campground near the river," I said. But was it a campground? There were a lot of places you could just go camping. "No." "Then no."
"Damn it," I said.
You or they die. Bargain. You die, they live.
"Is there anyone else who could take my role?" I asked.
"None that I know of. I was surprised that you were not controlled by her mark. You are the only creature who is wholly of this realm that I have seen resist her."
"If I weren't here, what would you do?"
He sighed. "One of us would take your place. But there are only seven of us who can or will help. I believe that a time will come when the Great Spirit will send us back out into the world again, entrusted with tasks to accomplish. But many of us were hurt when the Europeans swept through here. Disease took so many of our children, then the vampires singled out those who managed to survive and brought more death upon them . . ." He sighed. "We were allowed to retreat and lick our wounds--and for many it will take the Great Spirit to pry them out of their safe dens." He scuffed his bare foot on the ground, rolling a rock a dozen feet. "I won't lie. We may not have enough to do what we need, even with you. Without you?" He shook his head.
Mercedes. The demand was angry and impatient. I picked up a rock and chucked it in the river as my answer.
Coward to save yourself at the expense of a child. You shall see what you have done.
I learned a lot in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. I learned that MacKenzie's little brother was named Curt, like my stepfather. He was four --and marked as MacKenzie was, so he didn't fight when his sister carried him on her hip out into the river. As a treat especially for me, I think, the river devil released her hold on their minds before she killed them. But maybe it was because MacKenzie's screams had her parents tearing out of their tent and into the water after them.
I learned that I could have exchanged my life for four people's lives. Four.
12
I DIDN'T SLEEP. WHAT WAS THE POINT? I COULD HAVE nightmares while I was awake just as well as when I was asleep.
I had made the right decision, the only decision. But that didn't make it any easier to live with the deaths of four people I could have saved.
I fed Adam, and when he grunted at me, I fed myself, too. I had to keep my strength up. If four people had died to give me a chance to help kill the river devil, it wouldn't do to fail because I hadn't eaten.
About 5:00 A.M., when the first pale hint of dawn touched the sky, Adam and I got in the truck and headed back up to Stonehenge. Without Adam to converse with and nothing much to do, I would drive us both crazy if we stayed at the campsite. Stonehenge needed to be cleaned up. I could do that and save Jim and Calvin some work.
It had been nearly 2:00 A.M. when we'd packed up that morning, and Jim had looked like a man who'd been rode hard and put away wet. I didn't expect him to arrive until a more civilized hour. But he and Calvin drove up about ten minutes after I finally found the step stool so I could get high enough to remove the candles from the tops of the standing stones. Chin-ups on forty-five monoliths (I counted them while contemplating how to get the candles down) had struck me as too energetically taxing when I had a monster to kill later.