[A much longer section. Don't know what to say about it, but sometimes trying to be a nice guy is an awkward thing.]
I didn’t have to pull so hard anymore. In fact, she was running ahead of me. Part of me was laughing that the same girl who had been ready to go down into a cabin of crazy shaman-wanna-be’s with nothing more than a handgun was now outpacing me, and I go running regularly. Well, semi-regularly.
There was enough moon to see by, and the underbrush was sparse in this area, so she was able to keep a pretty straight course, but it was a course in the wrong way if we wanted to get off the mountain alive.
“Left!” I called to her.
She glanced back at me and I pointed on the angle. I was starting to get winded, but the Pine Dogs aren’t the most subtle of men when they hunt, and their howls dug down straight through my stomach into my legs and pushed me ahead. The night was strange with silver and shadow, dips that looked deep punching up shallow under my feet, other patches collapsing down under my weight. I felt a stab up through my back muscles with one particularly off misstep and, when I didn’t swear, I realized that Gretchen had really done wonders with my head in the years we’d been married.
I also realized there was something I could do about the uneven terrain. I tried to let my breathing fall into a steady rhythm, told the passengers in my head to be nice and quiet, and I reached out to the spirits of the mountain.
For a double handful of heartbeats there was nothing, which was usual. Natural spirits had never been my forte, which said more about me than about nature, I’m guessing. I gave it time, though--as much time as you can give when running up a mountain and toward a very dubious safety--and my patience paid off. At first I felt the flickering, quick animal spirits around me, hidden in the pines and aspens like still flames, quick and pure and uncomfortable against my mind like a lick of oil. I had come to realize years ago that animal spirits and I would never manage more than an uneasy peace that comes from pretending the other doesn’t exist. I ignored them, caught a quick few breaths, then hissed out slowly between my teeth. It was painful trying to do all this while running up a slope, but downhill was not an option--well, at least not my favorite option. As some great man said, he who turns and runs away, lives to fight another day. Unless that was from some movie.
My deeper breathing and further patience paid off. Suddenly, like a rising flood of deep mountain green, I felt the spirits of the slope’s plant life lift up and surround me. Me breath evened out and my steps became more sure. Step here, through the tight branches there that suddenly weren’t so tight, another pace here, breathe in, breathe out. I felt the heart of an old, old pine flicker at me with all the curiosity that ancient wood can muster, then it settled back into the quiet sway of the night. It wasn’t much--compared to Takugara, I’ve got all the finesse with plants that a wrecking ball has with concrete--but it was enough. I caught up with Annabel in time to put a hand under her elbow as she stumbled. She would have recovered just fine, I’m sure, but I felt a strange rush of manly pride in being there at just the right moment--ah, not manly pride: fatherly pride. Hm, not just fatherly pride. The other that was riding inside me had also noticed how attractive Annabel was, but that was a not of emotion I would have to sort out later. In some ways my life had been easier when any spirits I brought back from the road had just been food and cannon fodder.
The emotions inside me were in harmony, though, all seeking to protect Annabel, all at one with the flora surrounding me and my companions, and I heard the sound I’d been hoping for: the stream. Heavy snowpack and spring rains meant the countryside was waterlogged, and that water seeped out of the pores of the mountain and into the streams like blood into icy veins. It would be cold, I knew, but it was our best chance to avoid a fight, and that was my top priority. I could probably handle myself all right, but I had no idea how good Annabel was with that gun, and I didn’t want to have to find out. Get home, get safe, figure out the time and place to fight later, if at all.
My manly pride and natural harmony lasted for another three strides before it all evaporated as the muddy stream bank crumbled out from under us, dropping us into the stream that was rougher, higher, and much closer than I had expected. How had I missed it? My moment of mental shock disappeared into a rough moment of extreme physical shock as the freezing water crushed my arms and legs. No, not crushed. Just cold. Extremely cold. Annabel yelped and I hissed, our little frigid duet.
“Cold!” she said, beginning to struggle to her feet and toward other side. I couldn’t let her. I scrambled to my feet in the thigh-deep water, grabbed her by the shoulder, and pulled her back into and under the silver mirror. She came up spluttering as I dunked myself under. My ears and jaw ached from the cold, and she was saying something to me--apparently outraged, based on the way her forehead crinkled down--but I ignored it and started pulling her upstream, wading against the rough flow of the water.
“Are you crazy?” She had to shout over the rush of the stream. “We can’t go up this!”
“But it’s easier to go downstream, so they’ll look downstream.”
“They’re not going to be looking in this river at ALL!” Her body was starting to shake and her teeth were chattering. “And there’s no way we can go upstream against this.”
I blinked at her and looked back a the bank where we’d fallen in. I’d managed to pull us a total of perhaps eight feet. “You’re right,” I called at her. “Downstream it is, then.”
“No way! OUT it is!”
I shrugged, grabbed her across the front of her shoulders, and pulled us both over backwards into the stream. She kicked against me, but I had about seventy pounds on her and a solid advantage in upper body strength, so I managed to keep us both floating on our backs as the stream carried us down through the dark.
A drier winter and spring and the stream would have been too shallow for us to float at all. I’d fished up here as a child in a year the flow had been more rocks and mud than it had been water, but my father had insisted, so we’d gone. It was a ‘bonding experience,’ he informed me, and my mother agreed. Go bond with your father. I don’t know why they’d been so keen on bonding that summer. It had been so very, very optional every other year, though I’m not trying to blame my choices as an adult on some kind of parental neglect. There’s a point where my choices became my choices, and one fishing trip one way or another really didn’t matter any more. We hadn’t caught anything.
This stream was a different beast entirely, and I do mean beast. I didn’t even try to reach out to the spirits of the water; not only is running water particularly disruptive to the life of souls brought back untimely from the Road, but I’m willing to admit that water spirits frighten me. Animals may not like me, but they’re typically straight forward in their desires: feed, fight, flee. People, for all the layers of seeming and civilization that we use to cover over it all, we still are responding to just those same things: feed, fight, flee. Water, though, is unpredictable. Take a ship wreck: you never know what will be sucked down to be buried in the black trenches that are the ocean’s deepest secrets, and what will be thrown up on the shore, miles and miles away. I’d read about a poodle, once, that had arrived in Hawaii on a carton of beer. The owner’s boat had gone down off the coast of California. I couldn’t remember if the poodle had lived or not.
The point, though, was that water has never been something I’ve understood, let alone been able to control, so I didn’t bother trying. It would have been ideal to float downstream with my feet out front, pushing off any obstacles, and turning the whole thing into a kind of alpine water-slide. Ideal didn’t take into account that I had to keep a struggling teenager from climbing onto the banks and leaving a scent trail for the Pine Dogs to pick up on. So instead of ideal I settled on second best, or fifth best, and tried to keep my eyes back over my shoulder so as to avoid the worst of everything.
Instead it seemed like everything tried to find me. Things went well enough for the first thirty seconds, with just a bang or two to my calf from rocks tucked out of sight by the flooding. The water was splashing up into my eyes in shadowy sprays and waves, but I kept us in the middle of the flow and I think prevented Annabel from taking any blows. She wasn’t happy with me, from what I could tell--there were a few words I tried to close my ears to, but I could tell that John, inside my head, wasn’t pleased with what he was hearing. Unless he wasn’t pleased with me, but again, some things can’t be done by committee, such as using a stream-become-river to run away from a pack of human hunting dogs.
That’s when the everything I mentioned started seeking me out. I jerked and flailed as I rock punched up out of the silver sheet of the stream and tried to strike me in the face. With a heroic contortion I managed to twist my body enough to take the blow on the side of my head--not too hard, but not comfortable--and then we were turning sideways to the flow of the stream. I realized I couldn’t do much to shelter Annabel at that angel, so I let go, probably more due to my numbing arms and the pain from the blow than from any real plan. In fact, I was beginning to think that escape by becoming human popsicles was a terrible idea, but it had been the only one I had, and it was too late by that point to do much else.
The rocks became more plentiful, the stream more rapid in both senses of the word, and it was the best I could do to keep sight of Annabel. Water battered my face, my fingers had either fallen off or become completely numb, and it was one of those times where a wiser, deeper individual might have taken the time to consider the kind of life choices that had brought him to this moment.
The shallow person that I am, I did my very best to stay alive.
After something between three minutes and three hours, the water slowed and I pulled my thoughts together long enough for John’s fatherly instincts to kick into overdrive. I did something like an attempt at swimming and turned myself around, looking for the girl I had dumped into the river with me. There she was, pulling herself up onto the bank, thirty feet behind me. It was the same side of the stream that held the Pine Dogs cabins, but I wasn’t going to be picky. Besides, maybe the Dogs would assume that we’d crossed the river, and wouldn’t think to look for us on the same side. Whatever. I was too cold to be picky.
By the time we were both up on the shore and face to face, my teeth were clacking together and Annabel was glaring at me. I thought about offering her my jacket, but decided that was idiotic. Her whole body was shaking, and another piece of soaked clothing wasn’t going to do much to change that.
“Why?” She managed to croak the word out through the shakes.
“They hunt by smell,” I said, shaking right along with her. “Now we’re downwind from them and we’ve washed off our scent in the river.”
“We froze it off,” she said.
I tried to nod in agreement, but my head was already quivering so I think I just ended up looking cold. Er. Colder. “We need to get moving. I think there are more cabins down this way.”
I’m pretty sure Annabel started nodding, but she was facing the same problems I was, her arms wrapped around her body to try to block out the cold and hold in what warmth was left. Thankfully, the evening wasn’t much more than cool. It was just the snowmelt that had stiffened our joints and pounded its way into the marrow.
“I parked by those cabins,” she said.
“Why were you uphill from the Pine Dogs?”
“I figured they wouldn’t expect an attack from uphill when the road is downhill.”
“There’s a road up above, too. That’s where I parked.”
“Oh.”
“Doesn’t matter.” I swept my hand out, palm up, toward what I figured was the right way to the cabins. I was pretty sure Annabel didn’t want me touching her again so I didn’t offer my arm, even though it was the kind of thing my father had done with my mother. I wasn’t sure if it was out of genuine affection or cold formality, but I’d had it drilled into my head. I stifled that instinct and walked next to her through the cool air.
Actually, ‘hobbled’ might have been a better word to describe what we were doing. I beat at my chest, trying to get my body warm, but feeling was starting back into my fingers and the impact of the blows stung and ached in my knuckles, all at the same time.
“So you were going to run down this way after you killed a few?” I was trying to make conversation, though I wasn’t sure why. I don’t think you really need conversation when running for your life. The nicer rules of society might not be so applicable, I’d think.
“I lost the gun,” said Annabel. “In the water.”
“Ah.” She hadn’t answered my question, which said to me she hadn’t thought that far ahead. I could understand not planning ahead. I was in the same boat, taking us downhill away from my car. My car that was full of my scent. They might not be able to find me just off of that, but it was a good bet they’d recognize me if we ever met again. If I had any say in the matter, that wouldn’t happen.
“I think we’re almost there,” said Annabel, pointing at a shape in the moonlight. My brain caught up and recognized it as the A-frame of a cabin, two long slopes that I’d never liked in architecture, just as a general rule. “I think I’m parked near the next one. No, two after that. I don’t know.”
She was sounding tired, and I knew what she was feeling. I was getting there myself after too little sleep, a ride in a freezing river, an argument with Gretchen, a greenhouse full of dead plants, and, just to be complete, getting buried alive and bringing back two souls with me from the Long Road. I rubbed at my face. I was starting to hear things, too.
No I wasn’t. There were voices behind us--not the calls of dogs anymore, but voices all the same, and as far as I knew, there wasn’t anyone on this mountain that we wanted to take the chance of meeting.
“This way,” I said quietly, taking Annabel’s elbow.
She jerked it out of my grip. I’d been right: she didn’t want me touching her. I pulled my hands back in surrender, up by my shoulders, but then put a finger over my mouth with one hand and waved her toward a clump of bushes with another. Annabel looked skeptical at first, but then her head twisted around as she heard the voices, too, and she followed me quickly. There wasn’t much space between the wall of the cabin and the scrub oak, but there was enough to crawl in--just barely. The gap I had found ended after not much more than my body length. I tried to push a pathway for myself but the branches were too dense.
“Keep going!” whispered Annabel.
“I can’t.”
“I’m out in the open!”
“I really can’t.”
She shoved my feet to the side. “I’m coming in.”
I blinked, John’s soul a shocked silence in my head as my other passenger seemed to radiate amused approval. Annabel grabbed onto my jeans with one hand to pull herself along, and I tried to flatten myself against the cabin and think chaste thoughts. No, I needed to do more than that. If those voices were pine dogs, we needed cover. Helped by a body that was still deciding whether hypothermia were a good idea or not, I valiantly put aside the fact that, for the first time in years, a woman was lying next to me, and tried to still my breathing.
It didn’t work. “Not there,” I said, wincing.
“Oh! Did I--”
“No, you didn’t. Just a bruise.”
“Sorry.”
My face felt hot, and I realized I was blushing. Also, feeling was starting to come back into my toes with all the enjoyment of a massage with a pin cushion. Annabel finally settled into place next to me in some parody of thirteen-year-olds dancing, trying to be far apart but, by necessity, closer than arms’ length. I set all that aside again and breathed. Years of habit worked for me, and it wasn’t long before the spirit of the bushes warmed around me in a pale, silvery-green wash. The pain eased out of my fingers and toes and I stopped shaking, a benefit of working with natural things that never came with the darker practices. It became a simple pleasure to lie on the ground, like my soul had eaten enough and was filled. I almost laughed--not a humorous laugh--remembering the dark hunger that was all that ever came with necromancy. I was glad to be rid of that. I wanted it desperately.
The voices were closer, and with my heightened senses I could see that they were Pine Dogs. Their souls moved like crouching wolves or hunting hounds, frayed at the edges and dripping, pooling away onto the ground but never running out as more darkness bubbled up at the core. There were three of them, pacing through the trees. They weren’t bothering to hide their voices, too excited, too overconfident, to be quiet hunters. Too young. They must have been in their twenties by the sound of their laughter.
“They’re not down this way,” said one. “Jack and Musk will chase them down across the stream. I’m sure that’s where they went.”
“Maybe,” said another, a large one with an oversized soul-head that seemed to be dragging along the ground. “But I still say I smelled something this way, so we’re looking.”
“Whatever,” said the first voice, but there wasn’t much defiance in it. It was clear who was the alpha in this trio. I didn’t get a good view of the third, but I decided it was time to stop looking and start hiding. I pulled the green warmth of the plants’ spirit around me, around Annabel, drew it close and let the feeling of nature and harmony smooth away our scent and our contrary nature as humans. My thoughts went pale and soft, my body calm and ready, my eyes open and alert.
The hunting trio jogged up toward our hiding place, were there, then were past. Moments slipped away and they came back.
“There’s something not right here,” said the third voice, and I felt Annabel stiffen ever so slightly next to me. I reached out to her with my thoughts and the slow patience of growing things, and she relaxed again.
“What do you mean not right?” asked the first voice. I decided to call him Whiny. “I can’t smell anything.”
“Shut up,” said Cranium, my new name for the alpha, though from what I could tell, he spent more time exercising his physical body than the what passed for brains between his ears, but that soul-head was just too big for me to notice much else. “What are you seeing?”
The Thinker was paused, looking right at us. “I don’t know. A bush.”
“A bush?” laughed Whiny. “Get ‘em, boys! It’s a bush!” Whiny yelped as a large fist clipped him on the ear.
“I told you to shut up.” Cranium looked back at us. “I don’t smell anything, either.”
“I know,” said Thinker. “But it seems like we should smell something here. Don’t you get that feeling?”
They might have come closer. They might have pulled back the branches and found us, and then we would have discovered what kind of violence was still wrapped up in bone and iron and buried in my gut behind promises and dreams--dreams of being a good man tangled with dreams of remembered addictions--but they didn’t. A howl went up out in the night and it was only a heartbeat before the trio was running, bounding through trees and over dips, off toward the stream.
My breath trailed out of my mouth and I let my sense of the plant spirit fade away. I realized that Annabel was pressed along the length of my body, her face against my neck and damp hair under my chin.
“You’re warm,” she said.
My hand was on her shoulder and I jerked it away guiltily. I was already certain that John and I would be having a conversation the moment I fell asleep, but I wasn’t going to do anything to make that conversation more difficult that it was already on track to be.
“We should go.” She nodded against my neck and the last of the cold rushed out of my body in a flood of good, old-fashioned hormones. “We should go now,” I added, and flattened myself against the cabin awkwardly. In fact, awkwardly was the only way of getting us out of this particular arrangement. She’s barely older than my daughter, I thought. But she’s not your daughter, added a voice that might have been helped along by the dark companion in my head.
I held very still as Annabel worked her way out of our hiding place.
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