Granuaile said, “There’s a couple of brooms in the hogan. I’ll go grab them.” As her footsteps crunched behind me, I felt foolish standing there with a na**d sword, so I gingerly crept back into the circle, keeping my distance from the skinwalker’s body, and recovered the scabbard. I sheathed Moralltach and slung it over my back. Coyote tossed his manila envelope onto the ground behind him; whatever was in there wasn’t important to him right now.
Inside Joe’s jish were some feathers, rattles, pouches of herbs, and two sacred buckskins. He divided the contents with Coyote.
When Granuaile returned with two brooms, we carefully brushed all the caltrops to the south side against the wall. She saw Frank there and quietly said, “He was such a sweet man. How did he die?”
“Heart attack. They didn’t get him, though. Other way around.”
She didn’t reply, only nodded, and then leaned her broom up against the wall of the butte. The two Coyotes were murmuring to each other in their own language. When they finished, Joe set off toward the other skinwalker, who had fallen to his death some thirty yards away to the west. Coyote stepped closer to the blackened one that Frank had killed and motioned us over.
“Wanna tell ya somethin’ in case somethin’—well, just in case, all right? See, in the beginnin’, me an’ Joe weren’t much differ’nt than that thing you see there.” He pointed at the boiling blackness of the First World spirit. “Except we were a whole lot sexier, o’ course. First Man and First Woman, they were spirits of the air too. We were people of mist, if you wanna think about it that way. An’ as we rose up through the worlds, we changed, an’ these bodies were given to us by the Holy People.” He tossed his head toward the spirits before continuing, “These f**kers, however, came up with us from First World, but they never got their bodies. They’re unevolved, see? Unless you wanna count the fact that they’ve turned from plain ornery to pigshit evil. Thing is, like Joe said, we can’t do anything to ’em when they’re spirits. So we’re gonna give ’em bodies. Their own bodies, not somebody else’s body they can possess and turn to the Witchery Way. Then we step on ’em.”
“Beg your pardon?” Granuaile said.
“They’re insects,” Coyote said. “Not sure what kind. Could be ants, could be those hard-shelled bigass beetles, could be dragonflies or locusts, but insects no matter what. When we get through with this ceremony, they’ll be bugs, and we can kill ’em easy and send ’em back to First World. They won’t be coming back, though. So you two can help by kinda standin’ over there.” He pointed to a space between the two skinwalker corpses. “Once they’re bugs, they’re gonna try to get away—they’ll skitter around or fly or somethin’—and we could use your help to chase ’em down.”
“What if they do get away?” Granuaile asked.
Coyote shrugged. “Ain’t that big a deal. What’s the average life span of a bug? They’ll die eventually. A bird will eat ’em if we’re lucky. They’ll be on the slow train to First World instead of the express, that’s all. The important thing is they’ll be mortal and won’t be able to harm anyone after this. We’re gonna get started now before the ch’įįdii start to disperse, all right?”
He bent down and grabbed a pouch of corn pollen and an eagle feather.
“Um—” I said, but Coyote started to sing before I could form a coherent question, and I knew he wouldn’t stop for my benefit now that he’d begun. Joe’s voice joined in from over by the other skinwalker, and that left Granuaile and me with nothing to do but worry.
My apprentice asked the philosophical question first. “Is he trying to create something out of nothing, sensei? Can he do that?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe.”
“But how?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go stand over there where he asked us to.”
Granuaile kept talking as we moved. “Don’t you know how the stories went? How did First Man and First Woman get their bodies? You can’t tell me you don’t remember.”
“Well, I’m fairly certain the process didn’t involve gasoline,” I said, watching the two Coyotes sprinkle gas on the skinwalkers’ bodies as they sang and danced around them clockwise.
She snorted. “That’s a safe bet.”
“I understand why they’re doing it: They have to unbind the spirit from the ch’įįdii before they can shove it into a body. It just seems to be a very modern way to do it. You’d think they’d use some pine or juniper or something.”
Granuaile frowned. “Yeah, that is weird. He seemed like he was in a hurry, though.”
“True. And it’s not an important part of giving the spirit a body. The buckskin has a lot to do with that.” Both Coyotes had set the bodies on fire now and the spirits were billowing, straining to get away. They definitely did not like the light. Nor did they want to be bound to those ch’įįdiis anymore.
“What do they do with the buckskin?”
“In the Diné Bahane’, there are a few different stories where the Holy People gave spirits a corporeal form. Usually they covered up corn or special stones with sacred buckskins and then invited the Wind to blow underneath the skin. Nilch’i was the name of the Wind, and it always had to blow four times—four was an important number. But the idea was that you had a Breath of Life thing going on there, like you see in many creation stories.”
“Oh, cool.” Granuaile flashed a quick smile at me. “I like how certain ideas seem to be almost universal.”
“I dig that too. It’s cool how almost every culture has some sort of trickster figure like Coyote, who’s always cocking something up—oh, shit.” I paled.
“What?”
“This could be very bad.” The Coyotes had unfurled their sacred buckskins over the burning bodies and briefly let them rest on top, smothering the flames before lifting the buckskins and letting the Wind blow underneath them for the first time. The resulting plume of smoke and ash was made worse by the enraged ch’įįdiis and spirits.
“Coyote is one of the First People, not one of the Holy People,” I pointed out. He didn’t have the same powers of creation. Granuaile understood right away.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed, as the Coyotes dropped the buckskins a second time and lifted them again, inviting the Wind to blow. In my magical sight, I saw the ch’įįdiis weakening and the spirits straining mightily to break free.
“Yeah. And there’s a whole series of tales where Coyote tries to imitate Badger and Wolf and so on, and every time he does, he fails spectacularly.”
“Fails as in nothing happens, or fails as in something explodes?”
The Coyotes dropped their buckskins a third time, and when they rose again to invite the Wind to blow, the ch’įįdiis were almost gone. The spirits would be free the next time they raised those skins. Or they’d be trapped inside the form of a bug.
“Depends on the story. A bit of both.” Without realizing it, I had drawn Moralltach and set myself in a defensive stance.
“Gah! Can’t we do something?”
“Hope nothing happens,” I said, watching the buckskins fall for the fourth time. But when the Coyotes lifted them from the fire, something happened: Instead of smoke and ch’įįdiis and spirits, giant locusts the size of half-ton pickups erupted from underneath them, and the source of that torn-metal skinwalker scream became woefully clear. It was also clear we would not be stepping on these bugs.
“Run for the hogan!” I shouted over the noise, giving her a tiny shove in that direction. She would have to run around, because Coyote’s locust was between us. I began a charge at it but then halted as it fluttered enormous wings—the sound and wind was like a helicopter taking off—and leapt out of the fire. It pivoted and seized Coyote with its front legs and bit off his head, hat and all. A fevered glance backward showed that Joe was also abruptly on the menu. Occupied as they were with their Coyote Crunch ’n’ Munch, the horrors didn’t forget about us. They shifted their giant back legs a bit and fixed their nasty compound eyes on our progress. Granuaile and I were next.
Chapter 31
I admit that I froze, and it wasn’t just because I was scared. I was woefully unprepared.
Locusts of Unusual Size weren’t supposed to exist. I had seen a large insect fairly recently, but it was a type of assassin beetle called a wheel bug, and it wasn’t really a bug at all but rather a demon using that shape to scare the bejesus out of people. Demons don’t belong on this plane, and Gaia has no trouble giving me an assist in dealing with them. I could use Cold Fire on them or summon the local elemental to throw down for me—which is what Sonora had done in that case. But these weren’t demons; as far as Gaia was concerned, they were natural creatures—just big’uns—so that meant magic was off limits, and Colorado wouldn’t lift a pebble to help me fight them directly. I turned off my faerie specs since they wouldn’t help me anymore, but left night vision on.
Normally bugs don’t grow more than six inches in length, due to the limitations of their tracheal systems, and all that heavy chitin they have to lug around has got to be a drag. Coyote had screwed that all up. He gave these bugs plenty of Wind—way too much, in point of fact—and those old First World spirits took full advantage of the chance to be on top of the food chain. The spirits of these locusts hadn’t been raised on a diet of grains but rather on human flesh whenever they could get it. If they lived to reproduce, cities would have to invest in antiaircraft batteries to protect their citizens from swarms. Locusts would descend on small towns and eat people like corn on the cob. Did FEMA have a contingency plan in place for something like that?
I found myself missing Mr. Semerdjian and his garage full of rocket-propelled grenade launchers. And again I missed Fragarach—I doubted Moralltach would make a dent in the locusts’ armor. It was green and sleek and looked like it was made of that impenetrable counter-top material. But … maybe I could pull a Rancor? You don’t find hard, chitinous exoskeleton on the inside of a bug. I almost immediately discarded that thought, because those multiple mandibles—blades and feelers and way more moving parts than a mouth should have—were alarmingly efficient at chewing up Coyote. But after checking to make sure Granuaile was still running for the hogan, I charged anyway, yelling as I went to snare its attention.
When one doesn’t have Fragarach handy, the answer to strong armor is stronger blunt force; a baseball bat will do more damage than a sword blade. Confined to a large, bulky body, the spirit didn’t have unnatural speed anymore—it had the speed of a grasshopper, to be sure, but that wasn’t impossible for me to match. Boosting my speed and strength and transferring Moralltach to my left hand, I bent down and scooped up a stone the size of a softball, like a shortstop on a 6–3 play. First base in this case was the locust’s left eye. I whipped it at him, but he saw it coming and flinched away. Rather than hitting his eye, the stone caught him on the side of the mouth, knocking the lower half of Coyote’s body loose with a slurping noise, which was quickly followed by a keening screech. One of those little twitching maxilla thingies was hanging loose and slack now, and the creature leapt away, fluttering its wings with a low rumble of thunder.
“Aw, he got a widdle toof ache.”
The spirits probably had to deal with pain in a whole new way now that they had their own physical housings—dealing with it, period, would be a new sensation for them. I figured they’d let their human hosts feel most of the pain before—even with the fire, they’d fled the light more than the heat—but now they didn’t have a choice. Casting a quick glance at the hogan, I saw Granuaile disappearing around to the east side, where the door was. That seemed like a good idea, with one hopper distracted and the other one still munching away on Joe, so I swerved in that direction myself.
I swerved too soon.
The locust decided that the best way to deal with pain was to go after the thing that caused it. It wasn’t the correct lesson I’d wanted it to learn from the experience—but, then, if they weren’t used to feeling pain, then they weren’t used to fearing it either. The sound of its wings gave me a warning, but it was in the air so quickly that it was almost on me before I could spot it—directly above my head.
“There are only three things you can do when something falls from the sky,” my archdruid used to say. “Get out of the way, get underneath some shelter, or give it some reason to change its mind about falling on you.” Then he threw a pissed-off rooster at me.
I had no shelter from the locust except for the hogan, which might as well have been in New Zealand for all the good it would do me now. Trying to scramble out of the way when the hopper literally had the drop on me would only give it more convenient access to my flesh. So I would let it fall on top of my sword.
I dropped to my back, using my left arm to cushion the impact while thrusting Moralltach directly above my face and locking my elbow. If Coyote’s demise offered any clue, it wanted my head. It tried to brush aside the sword with a leg as it fell, but instead of properly doing so by slapping the flat of the blade, its leg caught the edge and neatly severed itself. That meant it took the point directly in its nasty ten-part grasshopper gob, falling directly down the blade until Moralltach erupted through the back of its head and kept going—gahh—
I hit my own head on the rock of the mesa and lost a fraction of a second there, during which the damn thing continued to slide down my sword. I admit that I lost my shit at that point, because the hilt didn’t stop anything and my hand and forearm disappeared into its mouth while its heavy, ichor-filled body thumped against mine like the world’s heaviest water balloon. It was dead and already turning black from Moralltach’s enchantment, but I couldn’t move. Something was dreadfully wrong with my hand and arm—I couldn’t move either of them, and it hurt like hell. My blood was leaking down my arm, and though I logically knew I had won, my instincts were screaming that I was being eaten by the grossest thing in the entire world—which pretty much meant that I was screaming, period.