Chapter 8

 

I followed the raven south to a wooded area full of low, unnatural hills. “What is his obsession with cemeteries?” I muttered. The dogman’s usual stomping ground was another set of these hills closer to my old home—Indian burial mounds. I could sense death in the air, but it was old, like a lingering trace of cologne that announced his presence in another time.

I nearly bit my own tongue off when the large, hairy form of my doggy mentor emerged from the shadows beneath a nearby tree. “Shit!” I put a shaking hand to my chest. “Look, Doggie, what if I accidentally touched you or something? I’m not kidding about personal space.”

He held up something in the dark, and I could just make out his terrifying grin. “Put it down.” I pointed to the ground at his feet, then waited until he had placed whatever it was on the ground and backed up a step before I bent to pick it up. My hands met smooth glass and plastic and I let out my first real laugh in what felt like a hundred years.

I stood and turned on the tablet. It was surreal to hold human technology in my hands after so long in the wild. He had already typed a lengthy message for me, a process that I knew took time with his big clumsy paw-pad fingers.

There is a way to move you and those of your army who cannot use the shadows to travel. However, I need you to be able to control the death in your touch. The creature that will help you is very old and very rare. I would hate to see him taken from the world.

I handed the tablet back to the dogman, careful to keep my grip to the edge, giving him plenty of room to grasp it in one big mitt. “Okay…but how do I learn to turn off the death-touch thing? Sure, this is better than being transported one at a time by a hunter, but not really helpful if I can’t control my freakishness.”

He shrugged and made a muffled chuckling-wuffling sound. Ahanu landed and assumed bird form. “I don’t like this plan,” he said the moment he was semi-solid. “The old ones are passing from this world every day. You risk too much.”

I glared at him. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, there little buddy. Geesh.”

He turned his hallow gaze on me. “I know you will prevail and become who and what you were meant to be, Tess. But the cipelahq is dangerous, and you are dangerous to him as well.”

I waved this away as irrelevant and turned to the dogman. “Will this thing be able to move us all across the country so I can get rid of the monsters?”

He nodded.

“And is it going to try to eat me or skin me or something?”

He tilted his head as if considering, then finally gave it a shake.

“Okay, so probably not, then.” Great odds, given my penchant for creating shit-storms in my life.

Now I just had to figure out how to control this thing inside of me that even now was trying to overwhelm me and break free.

I had no clue how to do that.

I could feel dawn lingering on the horizon, and with the approach of the cursed sun, the last of my energy was running out. Hunger burned through me, and the blackness roiled, but the fatigue was more powerful than either of them. I needed sleep.

Then we could worry about the saving the world.

The dogman huffed and turned on his tablet, likely stolen from somewhere.

Sleep, he typed. Tomorrow we will call the cipelahq.

I rolled my eyes at him. He expected me to magically figure out how to control the power inside me in a day?

A tiny chirruping sound drew my attention and I glanced down, near my feet. A little glowing white…thing…was impatiently waiting for my attention. It stared up at me with hallow eyes much like my ghostly bird boy’s. I glanced at Ahanu. “Another ghost?”

He shrugged. “Forest spirit. It may have been a living being once. I’m not really sure how they come into being, only that they are…different than me. It wants you to follow it.”

I sighed and tromped after the bobbing white thing as it scurried across the forest floor. It was vaguely person-shaped. At least, it had something like a body, with something like a head and arms and legs. It was amorphous, though, not quite solid. I followed it as it chattered to me. Other little beings similar to this one joined us, marching in a tiny, glowing line, some of them making clicking noises, some chattering like the one in front. They led me to a nest. The creatures in the woods hovered at the periphery and I smiled into the dark forest. They had made me a stinking nest.

It looked like heaven.

“Thank you!”

I crawled into a bower of moss, dried grasses and feathers, pulled my fur cloak up over myself and curled into a ball. I felt my creatures about me, keeping watch as I drifted off to sleep.

 

Strange images filled my mind as I slept. I knew none of it was really happening, but it certainly felt real, as distant times and places swirled through my memory with the cool taste of Death’s presence in my mind.

I was a child with no memories, capering on four feet through a meadow with grasses taller than my head, darting among creatures that boggled the mind, things I had never seen before in my waking life. They were massive, and the thought dinosaur floated through my mind. But I had been here before them. I wasn’t afraid of them.

I reached out a paw and touched one massive, rough-skinned leg of the towering giant in front of me. Its heart was heavy. Its body was tired. I cut the strings tying it to those things. I gave it freedom.

The massive body hit the ground in a slow motion fall that shook the place where I stood. Its essence went wherever they went. Up.

I continued on, laughing, with no memories and no worries to slow my steps, touching things here and there as I went and reveling in their freedom.

I was a teenager, long and lithe and amorphous, with thinning fur and legs that sometimes let me walk upright like the big ape-creatures. I ran with the moonlit wind. I watched a beautiful youth my own age bend over a nest where a brightly-colored bird crouched, hidden among tall ferns. She caressed the spotted eggs the bird guarded, and the shells began to crack.

Curious about her antics, I moved closer to peer into the nest. Little beaks and wet down-covered bodies began to emerge, ugly and beautiful at the same time.

She frowned at an egg that wasn’t hatching and reached to touch it again, but I beat her to it. I picked up the egg, cradled in my long, multi-fingered appendages. A bird’s spirit emerged and winged into the night.

The girl stared at me. I knew she hated that I had let the spirit go, but I thought it beautiful as it rose up over the trees in the moonlight.

She didn’t know. This one had wanted to be free most of all. Even more than the ones who had fought their way out of their hard prisons and into the cool night air and the prison of their solid bodies.

I turned away and lost myself in the night and the endless wonders of the world around me.

I was a young man. I strolled the streets of a town. The sunlight warmed the brick pavers on the street and sidewalk. No one saw me. Except a few whose souls were getting ready to fly.

The girl was there again, clothed in white. She was my age, and her golden hair tumbled about her hips in wild abandon as she hurried toward me on bare feet. She beckoned to me and I followed, already feeling that familiar pull. She was my sister, and though we sometimes disagreed, I felt…some attachment to her. As if we were learning to be like these other beings whose form we sometimes took on.

She led me up a narrow flight of stairs and through a door to a room where a young man rested. His blue eyes were glassy and sweat plastered his hair to his skin. It was beautiful. He kept trying to sit up, but he was too weak. He coughed blood, but he stared with determination at a black and white photograph on his bedside table. His soul was tired, but he was determined not to give up.

I did not understand these beings. They were somewhat out of step with the Great Spirit. Why struggle so?

I crouched by his bed and glanced at the girl, who waited behind me with a smile on her face. She nodded. This time she understood.

I reached out a hand and pressed it to the youth’s chest, feeling all of his pain well up to meet me. His body was on fire and his entire being ached. It was torture, cruelty, that he tried to remain in this shell. I pressed him back toward the thin mattress. His eyes went round and he sighed as he lay back, finally relaxing into a place where there was no pain.

His soul left his body and I turned to look at the woman in white, expecting her anger or disapproval. Instead she gave me a soft, wistful smile, nodded, and disappeared.

I was a man full-grown. And I watched a child weep as I liberated her mother from a world of suffering. The child and her father were angry, hurt. I didn’t understand. Why were human beings so contrary? Couldn’t they see the beauty in this eternal dance?

I stood by her, trying to understand. And she looked at me.

A human saw me.

It didn’t happen often, maybe once every thousand years or so, and usually they thought they had imagined me.

The little child saw me and she kept on seeing me. I stood by her side and wanted to make her tears stop.

I found the child again, my thoughts drawn back to her continuously. She was so tiny and human. And my magic told me she would be a part of me someday. I watched her frolic in the woods. I showed her the beautiful things I knew were hidden there. A place where a deer had fallen asleep peacefully, thinking of cool grass and clean water before it left to go up wherever the others went. I showed her all the pretty shapes of its skull. The gleam of its powerful teeth. What art there was in the forms of the beings in this world. How clever the Great Spirit was in her fancies.

The girl child laughed and cried, and sang nonsensical songs.

I watched her grow.

I started seeing the world through her eyes. How humans lived their lives in search of an idea called “love.” Something I didn’t understand.

I eased the suffering of her child as he left this plane. But she was angry with me, I knew. She didn’t understand. She couldn’t see how beautiful the child’s spirit had been, smiling and free from the pain of being trapped in a physical body.

She stopped seeing me. But I stayed.

I held her hand when I pulled her mate from his broken body.

And when she was nearly taken from the world by a creature she didn’t know existed…I moved without thinking. I pushed against my nature. I kept her there. I denied her the death that was hers.

Her body recovered and grew stronger and I knew I had done something wrong. But I was glad. I thought I might know now, what that thing “love” was. It was a feeling. And it was powerful.

The Great Spirit didn’t punish me. But she told me I could never do such a thing again. She saw my loneliness. And my curiosity and wonder. She gave me this child.

I saw myself kneeling in the forest, a tall man with silver-streaked black hair and ancient eyes, sobbing. I had never felt emotions before. Not like this. “Having a child often means your heart will ache,” the Great Spirit had warned. And she was right. I was irreparably changed. My heart had once been untouched by things around me. Curiosity had drawn me here or there, my mind filled with wonder for the world, like a child.

Now I wept, for I could feel. And it would make my purpose, and my unending existence, so much harder to bear.

I woke with a start. I had slept through the day. Darkness was falling. And Death sat at my side.

I opened my mouth to tell him to fuck off. Or to demand answers. But my mind was still swimming with memories that weren’t my own. Remnants of the piece of himself the god had shared with me.

With his child.

I rubbed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to ground myself and remember who I was. I wasn’t death. I was Tess. And I was fucking pissed.

Right?

“It was a gift,” the dapper gentleman god at my side said, stroking a finger over one of the feathers in my nest. “I gave you some of my power. But I wasn’t supposed to interfere anymore. There is a whole world that needs me. And I can’t decide who lives and dies…that is power beyond my reach.”

I listened to his cool voice and shook my head. “I don’t want this gift. It…I kill everything I touch!”

He sighed. “You are strong enough. I know you are. I have seen and felt the emotions inside your heart. You are very strong, my Tess.”

I snorted. “I don’t want to be strong. I want to be normal.”

He tilted his head. “Do you really?”

He had just called me on my shit, and I sat in mutinous silence. I wanted to be normal. That was my mantra.

Only….

“You tell many untruths with your words,” Death observed. “Humans still confuse me, even after all this time.”

I glared at him. “Well, excuse me. So sorry to confuse you. I suppose it is hard to understand when you are immortal.”

He shrugged, the motion so practiced and human that it was chilling. “I am not evil, Tess.” He paused. “And neither are you.”

I lifted my hand. “What happens if I touch you?”

He lifted an eyebrow, then opened his arms in invitation. “I would enjoy that, I think. No one has ever given me a…hug.”

My mouth dropped open. “What?”

He scooted closer. “You can touch me. It won’t hurt me. And now, since you share my power, it won’t hurt you either!” He suddenly sounded like an eager child. “It never occurred to me that you would want to touch me—that it was now possible.”

I rolled my eyes. Now Death sounded like a lost child. And I was a damned sucker for lost children. Sighing, I shuffled around and slipped my arms around his narrow waist, then rested my head on his shoulder. His arms came around my back and squeezed, hard.

I grunted.

He laughed, the sound like a clear, cool brook over shiny pebbles—evoking nature and cold, but beauty and comfort all at once. “A hug!”

I rolled my eyes again and made to pull away, then realized death was crying. Oh my god. Gods. Whatever. I patted his back soothingly. There, there little ancient death god. Geesh.

“Uh,” I sat up and he finally let me go. “Look, this is touching and all, adopted pops. But I still have a bunch of darkness inside that I can’t control and a world to save so….”

He looked down at me with his clear blue eyes, but there was less of that ancient sadness there than before. “I believe your problem is that you see death as a curse.”

He stood and held out a hand to me. “Come. I will show you.”

I stared at his hand for a moment, hunger raging inside me, urging me to go hunt. Preferably in a human town.

I took his hand and let him pull me to my feet. The one person I could touch without killing was a god who thought he was my daddy. Figures.

He pulled me into the shadows, into that space inbetween. When we reemerged in the real world, I shook off the cold sensation that kind of travel always caused and stood up straight. We were in a hospital. A god damned hospital! My old anxiety rose up and I almost had a panic attack then and there, just like I’d developed in another life, when my husband and son died.

Death tugged me along behind him as he entered a curtained room. An old woman lay there in bed, shriveled and wasting. She slept, and I took a moment to let myself look. She had a catheter bag and she was on an IV. I sighed. “She shouldn’t be here.” I said out loud. Then I clapped a hand over my mouth. That was asinine and loud.

Death nodded at my side. You feel it? He asked in my head. Do you hear her?

At first I wanted to tell him he was crazy on a monumental level. But he was right. If I listened, I could hear her. It wasn’t like hearing a voice, nothing so clear. It was more a…sense. I intuitively knew that she was tired, that it was time for her to leave. But she was stuck, either because her soul was afraid to leave its body, or because the humans were keeping her alive with their needles and machines, and medicine. I leaned forward and touched the back of her soft, wrinkled hand.

The woman’s soul floated up, and she felt light, free. Then it dissipated.

I was shocked at what I had just done. But it had felt so right, in the moment.

I glanced at Death. “Get me out of here.”

He tilted his head, studying me. Probably trying to understand my thoughts. After a moment, he reached out a hand and squeezed my shoulder, drawing me closer to him. Then he whisked me away into the inbetween place once more.

This time we materialized somewhere high, and I felt Death holding us back, keeping us from becoming solid. I was going to fucking kill him if he had taken me along only so I could fall to my death. I took a deep breath to tell him to take me back to the woods, then I stopped and stared.

We were standing on the roof of a tall building with an arched dome and spire—most likely a cathedral. We looked out over a large city, its narrow streets and walkways crammed with people and cars. The blackness in me came alive again, responding to something the god was doing. It crawled along my skin and through my being with his cold magic.

Listen, he said in my head. Hear them.

And all of the sudden, I did.

It was a cacophony of mental chatter, sound, emotions, lives—souls. It was hard to narrow the focus down to individuals among all the clamor of emotion. There was elation, contentment, love, boredom, fatigue, exuberant motion, and there was sadness, illness, a sense of waiting, of wanting to go…somewhere else.

“The call out to me,” Death’s voice whispered on the night breeze. “They know when it is time to move on. Sometimes they can manage on their own…and sometimes they need my assistance.” He closed his eyes and I felt what he felt. Here and there those voices, those emotions, winked out of existence, simply gone to be replaced by other voices and feelings.

I let it all wash over me. Until I realized that I could feel new voices and beings added to the maelstrom of life around me, as well as the ones who were leaving. It had a rhythm. A…rightness to it. “It’s…oh for fuck’s sake, the lion was right.”

I felt Death’s confusion and he tilted his head at me, no doubt wondering what new human quirk this was. “The lion?”

“It’s all a cycle…the circle of life.” And I was so glad that no one else was here to hear me spout this Disney mumbo-jumbo.

Death was silent as he looked out over the world below. It wasn’t only people. Animals and trees and plants and tiny insects all hummed with that ever ebbing and flowing energy.

When we returned to the forest, I sat on the ground and looked up at Death. “Did I eat mushrooms? I don’t remember eating any mushrooms. But then, maybe I wouldn’t remember.” Cause this was some trippy shit.

Death looked at me with his ever-patient and calm face. “I do not believe you have eaten any fungus this evening.”

I rolled my eyes. “So I’m not hallucinating. What was the point of all this?”

He sank down, bending his long legs into a crouch. “There is chaos…but it is a balanced chaos. There are patterns where your mortal eyes see none. And the actions of a few sometimes have the potential to interrupt that. The Organization that is studying the supernatural creatures is small, but it threatens to throw everything out of balance.”

I stared at him while both the monster and the blackness in me paused in fear. “Okay, so we get rid of the science experiments. But that doesn’t solve my problem. I would like to not be an uncontrollable killing machine, please.”

He stared right back. “It will come. The power has to settle in you. And you have to accept it.”

I blinked. “Oh, is that all? Why didn’t you just say so. Okay, I accept this crap.” I reached out a hand and touched a nearby fern. It went all limp and wilted and slowly fell over sideways. “Oh, look at that—still a monster with death-skin.”

Emotion flickered over the god’s face for a moment, surprising me. It had almost looked like he was feeling extreme frustration. But this was me after all. It seemed I could try the patience of the gods. Good to know.