But now I had his blade trapped.
And I had steel.
One-two-three. The clack-clack-clack of the butterfly knife sounded very loud to me, over the pounding blood in my ears. I coughed, and that made the sword scrape up and down my lung. I spat a mouthful of blood at Cernunnos, pleased that he flinched back. I dragged myself forward along the blade, and took a handful of his shirt, half-expecting it to slip away through my fingers like melting cotton candy. But it held, and as his horse neighed and reared up again, I kept my fist in his shirt and pulled him down. He fell, weighing more than I expected. My knife slid between his ribs, and he screamed.
The windows shattered. My eardrums shattered. I shrieked back, soundless into the overwhelming, unearthly noise that he made. I could see the scream vibrating from his throat even when blood slid from my ears and down my chin. His eyes weren’t compelling anymore. They were filled with seething rage, green fire boiling over. I waited for it to spill out onto me, to set me on fire, and after a few seconds I smelled it: flesh burning. It was sick and sweet and horrible.
It took a long time to look down and see that it was the hole I’d put in Cernunnos’s ribs that burned, not me. Silk singed around the knife, sticking and reeking. Beneath the fabric, his skin blackened and festered, bubbles beginning to burst. I screamed again, and jerked my hand back. The knife came out, and Cernunnos dropped to the floor. I began a long, slow collapse, Cernunnos’s sword still stuck in my lungs. Beyond it, I could see his mouth moving, and even though I couldn’t hear anything else, I heard him promise, “You will pay for this, little mortal.”
The floor came up in a rush and hit me very hard.
CHAPTER 5
For a few moments it was very, very dark, and then it was very, very bright. I thought, So this is what it’s like to be dead, and then, Shit, man, I didn’t want all that crap about a white tunnel to be true.
I squinted. The brightness wasn’t really very much like a white tunnel. It was actually a lot like staring directly into the sun. I closed my eyes, and a giant ball of green danced behind my eyelids. It turned red, then blue with red outlines as I squinted my eyes open again. Outside of the white light there was blue that looked suspiciously like the sky.
Lying there, under the suspiciously ordinary sky, I heard a drumbeat. It faltered, unsteady, like the drummer didn’t know what he was doing. I turned my head toward it, scraping my cheek against hot earth. Tears from staring at the sun ran over my nose and wicked away into desert sand.
My cheek didn’t hurt. I rubbed it against the ground a little, and it kept on not hurting. In fact, none of my body hurt, and that seemed wrong. I was pretty sure that only a minute ago there’d been all kinds of holes in it.
Overall, not hurting was an improvement. The sun was hot, and the sand, for ground, was comfortable. I closed my eyes again and relaxed. The drumbeat missed a beat.
“I wouldn’t advise going to sleep right now.”
My eyes popped open and I blinded myself with the sun again. Dammit. I pushed up on one elbow and looked around. No one was there.
Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. I flopped onto my back again.
“Do you hear the drumbeat?”
“Of course I do,” I snapped. The drumbeat sped up for a few beats, then slowed again.
“You should get up and follow it.”
“I’m comfortable.” I closed my eyes more firmly. I was not having a discussion with an invisible man.
“I’m not invisible. You just can’t see me.”
There was a lovely piece of logic. I sat up, glaring around.
If this was my subconscious’s idea of paradise, I needed my head checked. Sulfur-colored sand dunes swept up against robin’s egg-blue sky, both broken periodically by huge outcroppings of rough red stone. Wind hissed across the sand, smelling dry and old. Under my hands, fine particles of earth gritted against each other and melted away, leaving depressions for my fingers. The whole place reminded me of Arizona, only more so.
“This isn’t even the kind of Indian I am,” I protested. The drumbeat sped up a moment, getting louder. I twisted toward the north, where it was coming from. I wondered if I really should follow it.
“You should,” the voice said helpfully.
“Why? I can’t even see you. Why should I listen to you?” I looked around through my eyebrows, trying to find the voice’s origin. “Why can I listen to you? Hear you, I mean. What are you?”
“You sure ask a lot of questions. You can’t see me because you don’t believe in me. You can hear me because you’re dying, and it’s letting me slip in.” The voice sounded like this was a normal thing to say.
Despite the burning sunshine, shivers ran through me, and the drumbeat faltered. “Am I really dying?”
“Oh, yeah. You’re really dying.” The voice had a casual bedside manner. “You can choose not to, if you want.”
“Why the hell would I choose to die?” I climbed to my feet. He had to be around here somewhere.
“Because living means changing your entire worldview. That can be a very difficult thing to do.” His voice came from the same direction as the drumbeat.
“Oh, and dying is easy?” I began walking toward the north, glowering at the invisible voice.
“Dying is remarkably easy. Just stop going toward the drum, and in a few minutes, it’ll stop.”
“And then I’ll be dead?” I didn’t exactly break into a run, but I picked up the pace a bit. The drumbeat accelerated. “That’s my heart, isn’t it?”
“Yep,” the voice said.
“Are you a spirit guide?”
There was a pause that felt considering. “Yep.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought. “Are spirit guides supposed to say yep?”
He laughed. “Yep.”
“How far is it to my—” I couldn’t say, to my heart. “To the drum?”
“Not too far. Would you like me to lead you there?”
I took a deep breath. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
A small coyote bounded in front of me, like he’d always been there. I looked behind us. His tracks were tangled with mine, across the sand. He yipped, and I looked forward again. He smiled a coyote smile, and leaped out across the sand in a long, lean run. “I can’t keep up with a running dog!”
“I’m not a dog. Come on.” He stretched out and I swore, but I began to run. The drumbeat sped up again, and my strides got longer, until I was running an easy fast lope across the dunes, my feet kicking up sprays of sand. The coyote stayed a few yards in front of me, cresting over a dune.
I followed recklessly, and the earth dropped out from under me. It turned scarred and pitted, like an asteroid crater with deep, sharp sides. I hit the ground where it began to slope again and rolled ass over teakettle, trying to protect my head as I bounced. The drumbeat sounded once, then stopped again, a rare staccato. The coyote ran on, much more gracefully than I, then looped back to snap his teeth at me.
“Hurry. You don’t have time for this.”
“I fell!”
He bared his teeth in a snarl and pranced away, jerking his head to urge me on. I stumbled to my feet and began to run again. The coyote snapped his teeth again, satisfied, and forged ahead.
The crater narrowed into an impact spot, less than a foot across and plummeting into blackness. The coyote dove into it, just barely fitting. I couldn’t possibly squeeze into it.
On the other hand, I couldn’t possibly be running across an uber-Arizona landscape inside my head, either, and that seemed to be happening without the slightest regard to what was possible. I took a deep breath and dove after the coyote—and the impact spot got much bigger, or I got much smaller. It turned into a tunnel, plunging downward. A trickle of water appeared. I loped after it, running on four feet like I’d always done it. My hands felt like hands, but as I watched them flash under my nose, they were pawed and clawed, like the coyote’s. The water widened, becoming a stream. I ran along the bank after the coyote, feeling a tail swishing behind me. The sand turned into rich dark topsoil, and then into solid granite, the stream cutting a swath through it. Every once in a great while I felt my heartbeat shaking the stone around us.