“Gold. You know the price o’ gold has tripled since 2000 or so?”
“You want me to create a gold vein on the rez so you can mine it?”
“That’s right.”
I didn’t have to pretend to look distressed. “You know I can’t really do that, right? I’ll have to ask an elemental to do it, and it might not agree.” I could move small amounts of earth myself through some basic binding, just shifting topsoil around, but I wasn’t particularly fast at it. Finding large amounts of gold, concentrating it, and moving it long distances through the earth was far beyond my compass.
“I don’t need to hear your problems, Mr. Druid. All I need to hear is that you’ll get it done, because that’s the trade we agreed to.”
“I’ll do my best, of course. But if the elemental says no-”
“Then you’ll convince it to change its mind. There ain’t no room here for negotiation. A deal’s a deal.”
“All right,” I said, holding up my hands in surrender. I hoped the elemental in this part of the state would be amenable to a scheme like this. It wasn’t Sonora, with whom I’d worked for years, but rather Colorado, and I’d had very little contact with it, or her… whatever. Granuaile had me questioning all my pronouns.
Mollified, Coyote changed the subject. “You still friends with that vampire down in Tempe?”
I narrowed my eyes. He was referring to Leif Helgarson. “Yes,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”
Coyote shrugged. “How’s he doin’ these days?”
“He’s recovering from a strenuous journey. Jet lag, I guess.” Which was true, if jet lag equaled getting his head smashed to pulp by Thor.
Coyote smirked. “Right, Mr. Druid. Let’s call it jet lag.”
“What about it?”
“Well, I’ve noticed he ain’t protectin’ his territory like he used to. We got us vampires all over the place now.”
“All over the place? Which place? Can you be more specific?”
“Well, we got us two right here in Tuba City, which is two more than anybody needs. There’s one in Kayenta and a couple more over in Window Rock. I bet there’s three or more in Flagstaff, and that’s only northern Arizona. That’s seven or eight more vampires than there used to be for sure, and your friend ain’t doin’ a damn thing about it. Who knows how many you got crawlin’ ’round Phoenix and Tucson? Probably a whole lot more.”
“Are they killing people here?” Granuaile asked.
“Not yet,” Coyote replied, shaking his head. “They’re just takin’ little sips and scaring people.”
“I’ll ask about him next time I talk to my lawyers,” I said. Hal Hauk, my attorney, was now alpha of the Tempe Pack and could get an update from Dr. Jodursson posthaste. “Maybe he’s getting better.”
“Maybe he ain’t, and that’s why we have all these new ones lookin’ to take over.”
“Anything’s possible,” I agreed.
A trio of servers arrived with our food and looked curiously at Coyote, the guy who’d ordered twelve sides of meat. The tabletop quickly filled up with plates, and Coyote ogled them greedily.
“Can I get you anything else?” the waitress asked, a curious half smile on her face.
“Yeah, wow, this sausage is really good,” Coyote said. He was already chewing on an entire patty he’d folded into his mouth. “Four more orders o’ that, if ya don’t mind. I’ll be ready when it gets here, I promise.”
Oberon said.
Yes, she did. Hold on, it’s coming.
The waitress returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, and I passed my bacon over to Coyote so he could put it on the seat for Oberon.
My omelet looked scrumptious, and I promptly showered it with Tabasco to perfect it. Granuaile slathered her pancakes in butter and maple syrup and sighed appreciatively. For a while we did nothing but celebrate gluttony. After we’d tucked in long enough to take the edge off, I broached a subject that had been pestering me.
“What I don’t understand,” I told Coyote, “is how you came up with this idea in the first place. This long- range planning, this sudden altruism-well, it doesn’t sound like your sort of enterprise, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Umf,” Coyote grunted around a mouthful of ham. He held up a finger, telling me to wait, there was more to come after he’d swallowed. After he gulped down the ham and chased it with a swig of coffee, he said, “Know what you mean, Mr. Druid. It’s a fair question. An’ it came about because I asked myself a differ’nt question, like why I’d never bothered to do somethin’ good for my people.”
“Hold up,” I said. “What made you ask yourself that question? I mean, you’ve been around a long time, Coyote, and you could have asked yourself that centuries ago if it was in your nature. What changed your outlook?”
“Oh. That.” He looked shamefaced and mumbled something about oompa loompas.
“Pardon me?” I asked.
“I said Oprah Winfrey,” Coyote growled, his irritation clear. Granuaile’s jaw dropped, and Coyote pointed a finger at her. “Not a word outta you, Miss Druid.” She wisely took a large bite of her pancakes and chewed as if he’d been discussing nothing more than the nice weather outside. Oberon chimed in.
Coyote and I chuckled over this, and Granuaile knew Oberon had said something amusing, but she refrained from asking what it was. She was still trying to keep her amusement over the Oprah revelation from showing on her face.
Sensing this, perhaps seeing the flicker of a smile at the corners of Granuaile’s mouth, Coyote chose to move on. “Look, Mr. Druid. A long time ago, I fucked things up for people. Brought death to the world, you know, made it permanent. It’s tough to live that down. I’ve always done things to satisfy my own hungers; seems like I’m always hungry,” he said, gesturing to the stack of empty plates in front of him. He paused as the waitress arrived with his four additional orders of sausage and cleared away his dishes. Then he continued, “But I see now there are other hungers than mine to feed. An’ I want to do somethin’ about it. I want to do somethin’ that is one-hunnert percent good. People will look an’ say, where’s the downside? What trick is Coyote playin’ now? But there won’t be any. An’ that’ll be my finest trick of all.”
Coyote ate his sausage even faster than before, then got up to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back. That meant I got stuck with the bill; I should have seen that one coming. The trickster was waiting for us out in the parking lot with a grin on his face.
“Took you long enough,” he said. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.”
Coyote called shotgun and was visibly surprised when I moved to the rear door. “She’s driving?”
“Yeah. It’s my car,” Granuaile said, then arched an eyebrow. “Is there a problem?”
“Hell, no.”
“Good.” She beamed at him briefly, then ducked into the driver’s seat.
Oberon said.
At Coyote’s direction, we drove on 160 northeast toward Kayenta, but before we got there we turned off on a dirt road just on the far side of a massive sandstone wonder called Tyende Mesa. It was rough, dry country, covered in red rocks and infrequent attempts by plant life to make a go of it. The trees were scrub cedars and junipers; there wasn’t the cactus you’d find to the south in the Sonoran Desert. People tend to picture the state of Arizona as all saguaros and rattlesnakes because that’s the sort of postcards they keep seeing, but saguaros don’t grow on the Colorado Plateau. Parts of the plateau are pretty lush with pine, like the southern tip of it known as the Mogollon Rim, but on the reservation the topsoil is shallow and sandy and mostly unable to support large trees, except in the bottoms of old washes.
The road was extremely rough in places. Discarded tires bore mute testimony to the fact that the thin layer of sand covered sharp rocks. We crossed a one-lane metal bridge that spanned a narrow defile-a flash-flood canyon that eroded anew every time it rained and the water trailed off the bare rock of the mesa-and, shortly after that, Coyote directed us to pull over onto a cleared patch on the left side of the road. There, the mesa rose up steeply in a sort of terraced fashion until it flattened out again, then two magnificent buttes jutted up almost like the dorsal fins of some massive, mad creature, an avatar of erosion swimming in sand. The flash-flood wash we had crossed no doubt began between those buttes. In the other direction, the plateau was flat and covered with various bunch grasses and a few stunted trees, all the way to Kayenta and beyond. We took some canteens with us and began hiking up the mesa toward the buttes.
