been introduced-slid over to intercept her.
“Ain’t nothin’ we can do for Darren except hope he figures it out and turns around,” he said. “Anyone who goes out that door will die. Ain’t nothin’ faster than a skinwalker.”
He was right. Those things were faster than Leif and therefore faster than anything I could manage with the aid of magic. Moralltach or no, I couldn’t keep them from taking me down. They were so alien to the magic I was familiar with that I wondered if even the Tuatha De Danann could handle them.
Oberon commanded.
Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere.
Granuaile fished her cell phone out of her jeans and hope bloomed on her face. “There’s actually a signal here!” she said. “We can call him.”
It was far too late for that, signal or no. The hammering on the hogan ceased, and we heard a thunderous impact against metal and shattering glass. I rushed to the east wall, where the door faced the road, and peered through a gap in the door’s hinges. Frank kept chanting over Darren’s startled cries. Through the wee gap, I couldn’t see much except for his truck’s headlights cresting the lip of the mesa. The lights shuddered violently as the skinwalkers rocked the vehicle. A yell, two gunshots-he must have had a pistol in his glove compartment-more broken glass, a bobcat scream, then a human one, and then the headlights reeled crazily and disappeared. A rolling, crashing noise followed, as Darren’s truck tumbled off the graded road and down a half mile of rocky hillside. I doubt he survived it; my only hope was that one or both of the skinwalkers had taken the plunge with him.
Frank kept singing, but everyone else had fallen silent. Sophie was doing her best to be stoic about it, but I saw tears on her cheeks and she’d probably be plagued by guilt for years if she didn’t get help.
I patched up all the logs with bindings while we waited to hear something that would tell us the fate of the skinwalkers. There were no more bobcat growls or attacks on the hogan. A tense half hour passed with no sounds from outside, all of us wishing the silence would last another minute and yet feeling that it couldn’t possibly last any longer. What broke the silence, finally, wasn’t a bobcat. It was a human voice-or, rather, two of them, on the outer edge of what could be called human. The voices were hoarse and throbbing with menace, and they spoke in Navajo on the north side of the hogan.
Peering through the cracks, I saw the skinwalkers in their human form. Though they kept moving from place to place in a blur, they would stop briefly here and there, as if they were following some unseen connect-the-dots pattern on the mesa. In their brief flashes of stillness, they were lean, of stunted stature, and unclothed. That didn’t mean they were underwhelming; their menace was simply concentrated, like frozen orange juice fortified with Vitamin Evil, and their eyes kind of reflected that, a liquid fire glowing out of their sockets with no pupils. The bobcat skin was gone, so now it was just them with that spirit wrapped all around and through them; their human auras were tainted with black ichor. I was curious to see where Hel must have cut them, but neither of them looked wounded. Whatever it was they were saying, they kept repeating it, and lots of eyes shifted briefly in my direction before looking away, pretending that I wasn’t there. Frank winced the first time he heard it but then grimly continued to work on his sandpainting and lead the singing.
I flipped my faerie specs off. “What are they saying, Sophie?” She pretended not to hear and, in so doing, set an example for the others. No one would meet my eyes. They began chanting in time with Frank-he’d apparently reached a sort of call-and-answer section in his “sing.” And I think it would have been a casual passage under normal circumstances, but in this case they were belting it out and supporting from the diaphragm, an unconscious agreement that they should drown out the skinwalkers with their raised voices. Somehow, the skinwalkers’ voices cut through it without increasing their volume.
Oberon asked.
I don’t know, buddy. I don’t speak their language.
“Sophie. I need to know what they’re saying.” I got no reply. “Come on, somebody help me out here. I can handle it.”
The man who’d prevented Sophie from going out to save Darren-and getting herself killed in the process- finally took a step toward me and offered his hand. I shook it and nodded once to him gratefully.
“Ben Keonie,” he said.
“Um… Reilly,” I said.
“I think Sophie wants to finish the sing,” he explained, as she and the rest of the crew continued to chime in at the appropriate places. “But I can tell you what those things out there are saying if you like.”
“Yes, I’d appreciate that.”
“They’re saying, ‘Feed us the white man.’ ”
Chapter 8
Fucking Hel.
Oberon leapt in front of me and began to growl at Ben, teeth bared and hackles raised.
Whoa, calm down, Oberon. Stop growling. You can see he’s not even considering it.
Okay, I’m sure he gets the idea. “Stop growling,” I said aloud. Oberon quieted and wagged his tail contentedly, looking up at me.
That’s it. I’m using parental controls and blocking the Food Network.
“Sorry about that,” I said to Ben. He shook his head and gave a tight little smile. It was no big deal.
“Who are you, man? How do those skinwalkers even know you’re here?”
“Well, that’s… um…” I didn’t want to explain to him that I was on several gods’ Most Hated list and that one of them had recently turned me into a bobcat Fancy Feast. Because then I’d join Sophie in shouldering blame for Darren’s death, plus I’d feel guilty about endangering the lives of everyone there, even though they had intended to lure the skinwalkers out in the first place. “We should probably wait and talk to Frank about that. He knows why, and he can explain it best, I think.”
“At-I mean, Reilly?” Granuaile said. “If they’re in human form now, what’s stopping them from opening the door?”
That was an excellent question. Aside from the hinges, plenty of wire bound it shut, but I thought they would have at least tried it by now.
“I don’t know,” I murmured. “Let’s go see.” I flipped my faerie specs back on, so as I got closer I could see the door silhouetted by the white glow of magic. The glow wasn’t at the very top, but it was on either side and definitely at the bottom. “It’s the ward laid down by the Blessing Way,” I marveled. “It starts at ground level and then moves up, starting with the door. Hogan doors always face east, so it would be simple to structure the spell that way. Clever. If they reach for the door now, they’ll be burned.”
Granuaile nodded but had no further questions. I switched back to normal vision and waited for the song to end, as the skinwalkers continued their creepy loop of demanding extra-rare Druid.
I tried to squat out of the way on the north side. It kept the skinwalkers lurking over there, since Hel’s damned knife had somehow turned me into ambulatory ambrosia. Oberon and Granuaile came over to squat beside me.
“Now what, sensei?” Granuaile asked, sotto voce.
“Now we have a long, sleepless night ahead of us. And if they start thrashing the hogan again, I repair it. Just keep it up until sunrise, when we hope they’ll go away.”
“What if they don’t?”
“Then I try to figure out a way to mess with them magically without doing any direct harm. But I think they’ll go. The thing that makes their eyes glow doesn’t like light.”
With a flourish of Frank’s hand and a final shout in unison, the first song ended. Frank sank down, exhausted. Before he could say anything, the skinwalkers’ litany changed, and this started a series of murmurs among the Navajos.
Frank shook his head though as they came to the end and began to loop once more. “That’s all bullshit,” he said, his voice rasping a bit more than it had before. He looked around at Ben, Sophie, and the others. “Even if we could be sure they’re not lying, which we can’t, they’d never be honest with the deal.”
Oberon asked.
