“That was my SUV, wasn’t it?” Granuaile said, reacting to a noise that had a new-car crunch to it. “Damn it, how am I going to explain that to the insurance company?”
“Maybe you lost control and rolled it?” Ben suggested.
“Possible, but it’s probably going to have claw marks or handprints or something on there, and then what am I going to say? If I get that little gecko on the line and tell him that a skinwalker smooshed my SUV, is he going to cut me a check? I kind of doubt it.”
Frank Chischilly stood next to me and spoke in low tones. “Makes me wonder why they didn’t do this before.”
“They’re not under the Famine curse now,” I explained in the same quiet voice. “I think that kept them pretty single-minded. Now they’re healed from their injuries, they want us to leave their territory, and they’re making it expensive for us to stay.” Sophie Betsuie climbed down from her bunk to join us as I continued talking to Frank. “They’re more dangerous like this. Clever. If we don’t leave after this, I bet they’ll start coming down off the mesa and messing with people down in the flats, adding a human cost on top of the one we’ve already lost.”
“That could be really bad,” Frank said. “Lot of ranches along the base of the mesa.”
“They’re all protected by the Blessing Way, right?”
“Yeah, but those people don’t necessarily know to stay inside from sundown to sunup. An’ even if they do, the skinwalkers could go after their sheep an’ shit like that. Ruin their livelihoods. Some of them are barely scrapin’ by as it is.”
Sophie caught the end of this conversation and added, worry in her voice, “My grandmother lives below the mesa.”
Gods Below. How could Coyote drive off and say his work was done here?
Frank hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and sighed. “You got any ideas on how to stop ’em, Mr. Collins?”
Sophie looked confused. “Why are you asking him?”
“Well … he’s pretty smart,” Frank said.
This intelligence flabbergasted her. Sophie cast a bewildered gaze at me, trying to discern how Frank’s assessment could possibly be true — and, even if it was, how I could know more about skinwalkers than did a hataałii. Her eyes flicked down to my tattoos, and disapproval floated over her features like storm clouds. Perhaps she thought anyone who spent that long under the needle couldn’t be all that bright. “Well, I’m pretty smart too,” she finally said.
“What has Mr. Benally said about this skinwalker situation?” I asked, hoping to distract attention from my questionable IQ. Sophie, Ben, and the rest might know all about the skinwalkers, but they didn’t know what I was other than a strange man who could make a rock disappear and a good guy to have around when monsters jumped on the roof. Gods knew what they thought Coyote was. As far as I could tell, none of them apart from Frank knew they were working with one of the First People.
“He’s kinda hopin’ I’ll take care of it, like I said a few days ago,” Frank said. “But I don’t have any ideas. Except you should call your grandma,” he told Sophie, “and tell her to lock herself in until this is over.”
Sophie pulled out her cell phone and walked away from us for some privacy. As she did so, the demolition noises from the east increased dramatically, and I figured I’d better investigate. The ear-shredding screams were revving up there too. I opened a peephole in time to see both skinwalkers attempting to lift Granuaile’s SUV above their heads, quivering and shrieking as they did so. The remains of the other trucks lay strewn about like a parts graveyard.
“The good news is, that wasn’t your SUV you heard earlier, Granuaile,” I said. “The bad news is, it’s going to be dropping on us soon if they’re planning what I think they’re planning.”
“Please say you’re just teasing me again.”
The skinwalkers got the SUV over their heads, and they looked at each other and nodded, beginning a countdown. While I marveled that those unholy noises could be coming from human throats, I also admired their strategy: They might not be able to touch the hogan now, but the Blessing Way did nothing to protect against damage from mundane objects.
“Not kidding!” I yelled. “Everybody move to the other side against the wall, now!” Granuaile rounded up a very confused Sophie while Frank and Ben got the crew moved over quickly enough. I turned around and looked up at the beams above us. With the earth piled on top, there was a chance the roof would absorb most of the force with a few cracks and splinters and allow the vehicle to slide off the roof. Then again, a half-ton vehicle thrown with force would probably exceed the stresses allowed for in the building code. I wondered what would happen to the Blessing Way ward if the structural integrity of the hogan was breached. Would that provide the skinwalkers a hole in the magic to jump through? Better not to find out. I decided to go for the Gregor Samsa option and let the apple sink into the back — or, in this case, the SUV into the roof. A crescendo of rage from the skinwalkers told me Granuaile’s ride was on its way, and I began whispering bindings to strengthen the beams, leaving the targets until last.
The SUV hit almost right on top of me, just past the wall, where the space between beams was widest. I hurriedly looped the target for the binding around the area as the beams and trusses began to crack and splinter apart, then I energized it, which just barely kept the whole mess from dropping down on my head. A few startled screams reached me from the other side of the hogan, but I blocked these out; the structure was still unstable and slowly sinking down upon me. There wasn’t enough material to support the vehicle, magically strengthened or not. The roof of the SUV could be seen clearly, and wood splinters littered the floor. I couldn’t do any more to strengthen the existing construction … unless I made the SUV a part of it. Yes.
Large portions of modern automobiles are made of synthetic materials — fiberglass body panels and plastic everything. But the chassis and most of the undercarriage, thankfully, are still made of materials mined from the earth. The hood and the well of the front tire descended into the hogan, and it was there that I saw the metal I needed. I unbound and promptly rebound to the cellulose in the strained timbers whatever metal I could scavenge, the same way I had bound the silica from the lava rock to the logs of the wall a few nights ago. It turned those broken, splintered logs and beams into steel-reinforced rattan. It was enough to stop the cracking and splintering and support the weight of the vehicle. Barely.
The skinwalkers were disappointed that Granuaile’s shiny new vehicle didn’t fall through — so disappointed that they took inhuman leaps to land on top of the undercarriage of the SUV and start jumping up and down on it in an attempt to make it happen. The Blessing Way ward didn’t flow over the foreign object, as I’d feared. But my bindings didn’t allow the SUV to budge either. Frustrated there, the skinwalkers began to tear away at the muffler and all those other thingies underneath a car I never learned about, to get into the passenger area. That wouldn’t end well for us if they succeeded. They could bust through the windows and slaughter us all, or just tear through the roof with that inhuman strength of theirs and drop down onto the floor.
I moved off the wall and focused on the steel frames of the bunk beds. I unbound the screws as I ran, not having time to find a screwdriver and disassemble them politely, and yanked one of the support poles free. To Frank and everyone else, it must have looked like I simply tore a hollow tube of steel from the frame of a bed with my bare hands. Drawing on the earth — bless them for sticking to tradition and not pouring a foundation here — I found the crossbar for the passenger cage and thrust upward on it with the pole, using all the strength Colorado allowed me, which was rather a lot. The SUV creaked and lurched upward at my prodding, sending the skinwalkers tumbling gracelessly off the vehicle and onto the edges of the roof, where they promptly got burned by the light of the Blessing Way and let go, falling to the ground to get burned some more. Their tortured howling was far louder than anything they’d screamed before, but now I rather enjoyed it. I allowed Granuaile’s SUV to sink back to its former resting place and gestured to Frank to hurry over so I could tell him something. Sophie, I noticed, had missed all of this. She was crouched down near the wall, facing away, still trying to talk her grandmother into retreating indoors, where it would be safe.