River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (46 page)

So he had passed his adult life with Hollis Tupper and a succession of acquaintances, drinking buddies, football buddies, whores, and strangers.

Now, finally, Hollis Tupper had succeeded in bringing back the
Kethili
, as he had promised so many years ago, and when it turned out to be a clusterfuck of genuinely legendary proportions, he was trying—still postmortem—to put things right. With, apparently, the assistance of everyone in Truly’s calling circle.

And it wasn’t good enough.

But look, Ginny Tupper had cried, enthusiastically enough to stomp all over Brewer’s last tiny shred of nerve, there’s another fucking dead guy!

Byrd McCall—his ghost, anyway, his form possessing about as much substance as a politician’s promise—appeared from nowhere and stormed up to the grunting, struggling
Kethili
and stopped with his little fists on his semi-opaque hips. He glared like a pissed-off televangelist about to rip into the flock for not emptying their wallets fast enough. Then he spoke.

“You took my sister!” he shouted.

For a ghost, the guy had a hell of a voice. It boomed from him like a cannonball, bounced up one side of the stones and echoed back from the other.

Kethili-cha
stopped what she was doing, which Brewer believed was ripping off
Kethili-anh
’s head, a little at a time.

“Nobody hurts my sister!” Byrd screamed. “Give her back!”

Kethili-cha
gave
Kethili-anh
’s head a last, sudden jerk and hurled him aside, neck still more or less intact but with the flesh torn and bleeding heavily. She did that thing with her ugly hands, scooping up energy from the air, and Brewer had seen this happen enough times to know whoever was on the receiving end when she hurled it was going to be hurting.

On the receiving end this time, was Byrd McCall. His ghost, anyway.

An enormous blast sent rock flying thirty or forty feet into the air and coming down again, rain of a different, harder kind—a cloud of dust.

At the end of it, the ghost hadn’t budged. “You let her go!” he insisted again.

There was something different about him now, though. Brewer could still see through him, at least a little. On the other side of Byrd,
Kethili-anh
tried to regain his feet, but he was weak, barely able to support himself.

But now Byrd glowed, like the images painted on the walls. A pure white light seemed to emanate from somewhere inside him.

It wasn’t just him either. It came from the old man now, from Hollis. Even Truly’s cell phone glowed. Light beamed from Hollis and the phone over to Byrd, and across open space to the dozens of petroglyphs, linking them all in an insubstantial chain that brightened the killing field to near-daylight levels.

Kethili-cha
blasted Byrd again. This time, the magical bomb didn’t even reach him; his glow rebuffed it.

The voices chanting the ritual grew louder, and as they did Hollis and Byrd glowed brighter. The pictographs almost seemed to have burst from the walls, floating free inches from their former locations.

Trying to read
Kethili-cha
’s expressions and body language was difficult, but Brewer would have sworn that she was—for the first time—afraid.

Then Byrd did something that changed everything, that made it clear why she might fear him.

He raised his hands, moving them around each other rapidly, and his glow grew, extended, burst toward her. She flew back from the blow as if it had solidity and weight. If not for the overbearing chanting, Brewer thought he might have heard the impact when it hit her.

She regained her feet, wiping the back of her hand across her lips in disturbingly human fashion and glaring at Byrd with undisguised, if alien, hatred.

“I told you to give her back,” Byrd said. “And I
meant
it.”

She stared at him, took a swing at him with one of those huge, clawed hands. He blocked it with a hand encased in armor made of light so white it hurt Brewer’s eyes, returned it with a jab of his own. This one slammed home, made her squeal in pain.

Watching Hollis, Brewer noticed that he moved, ever so slightly, when Byrd did, his arms swinging a little when Byrd threw a punch, his feet shuffling when Byrd took a step. The glow within him echoed Byrd’s, or vice versa. The two were clearly linked in some significant fashion.

Then he saw
Kethili-cha
notice it, too. He could tell by the cock of her head toward Hollis as she feinted at Byrd. Maybe he was learning to read her, after all.

The import of her noticing struck Brewer almost physically.

He shoved past Ginny and ran out onto the stone floor. He’d seen the difficulty Truly had moving through the almost viscous air, but something—maybe the glow shared by Byrd and Hollis, or the ever-louder chant from Hollis and the phone and the drawings on the walls—had lightened it, and he barely felt a difference when he entered the miasma of light and heat that was the battlefield. The air smelled like scorched copper.

As he ran,
Kethili-cha
turned her attention away from Byrd, who continued to rock her with one glowing bolt of light after another. Brewer saw her gathering for another assault, saw her raise the sparking, amorphous energy mass, and he put on a final burst of speed.

He had spent his adult life with Hollis Tupper. Using the man, many would have said. But also protecting him. That was his job, his mission, his duty. Protect the old man, he had been told, and he had done so without question or complaint.

Kethili-cha
threw her missile.

Brewer lunged.

Protect.

* * *

“Brewer!”

The soldier hurtled between Hollis Tupper and
Kethili-cha
, blocking the mystical blast just before it hit the old man. It crashed into Brewer instead, full on. The shock wave blew Truly onto his ass. The phone jumped from his hand and skidded across the rock, and Truly tried to reach for it but it was beyond his grasp and Brewer was—

Brewer was
coming apart
, flesh and muscle and organ and bone and cartilage and tissue and blood all driven to the stone floor, coating the phone, coating the floor, coating Truly on the periphery of the spray. Brewer was like a water balloon hitting the sidewalk.

And Truly realized it didn’t matter if he held the phone close to Hollis’s mouth, because the chanting had taken on its own life, and it
had
to be helping because—

It
had
to be helping because Byrd’s ghost was four feet off the ground now, pummeling
Kethili-cha
with one glowing fisted blow after another, and
Kethili-anh was
on his feet again, and he was bigger than he had been before, bigger than
Kethili-cha
now, and he snatched magic right out of the air and smashed it down on her, using mystical energy like so many whips or clubs or maces. The chant roiled through the amphitheater and Byrd and
Kethili-anh
beat
Kethili-cha
mercilessly, and even though Truly couldn’t understand what she said, there was no hiding the fact that she was afraid, terrified, and she was—

She was
shrinking
…
Kethili-anh
had grown but
Kethili-cha
was smaller, not much bigger than Byrd now, and getting smaller all the time.

And one other thing:

The images from the pictographs, designs someone had painted on rock walls ten thousand years ago, had come off the walls. Glowing with the same white heat as Byrd and Hollis, warriors on horseback and others wearing masks frightening or comical or spiritual, a tall, elongated man with his face painted half white and half black, headless men holding spears and bows and shields…all had stepped out of the walls and surrounded
Kethili-cha
, tearing at her, stabbing her, pummeling her, and her wails of pain and terror reached to the heavens.

Byrd was screaming, too, something Truly couldn’t make out.
Kethili-anh
screamed. Ginny was probably screaming. Only Truly was silent, sitting there on the wet ground, soaked in rain and Vance Brewer’s bodily fluids, bits of skin and brain and bone stuck to him like sand at the beach.

Kethili-cha
blinked out once, twice, and then was gone.

Kethili-anh
raised his voice in what sounded like a roar of triumph. Then he too flickered.

The rain fell again, no longer blocked by magic or heat or whatever had kept it from reaching the ground within the little clear space. In the sudden downpour, Truly couldn’t see anyone or anything for several seconds. He stood, extended his arms, let the rain wash him clean.

Then it tapered off.

A few drops.

Nothing.

The rain had stopped.

* * *

Wade Scheiner sat up on the puddled rock floor, naked and trembling from the cold and wet. The motion made his head screech in pained protest, his stomach lurch. He managed to raise a fist to his mouth, belched into it, fought to keep from vomiting.

Slowly, he turned his agonized head. A man he didn’t know stood watching him, water running off his raincoat. Another man, Hollis Tupper, stood near him, his hands limp at his sides, eyes blank, mouth hanging open. Ginny Tupper crossed the floor toward her father. All of them were blessedly silent. The silence was healing, church silence, “Sunday-afternoon-in-the-park” silence, the silence of a quiet street on a hot summer day.

Molly was beside Wade, lying on the ground, also naked. Still. Dead. He didn’t have to check her to know that, which was good because that much effort might finish him off, too. He could see there was no breath in her, no heartbeat, that her eyes—eyes that had seen so much of what he had seen during their lives—stared up at nothing, as blind as Hollis Tupper’s.

He remembered some of what had happened, although it had all been filtered through
Kethili-anh
’s senses. He remembered the long battle against
Kethili-cha
. He remembered that he had been losing. He remembered Byrd’s ghost joining the fray, and making the difference.
As usual,
he thought. That was Byrd, protector to the end. Past the end.

He laughed when he remembered Byrd’s last words. After all the books, all the lines he had tried out on his nurses and friends, his last words—uttered well after his death—had been, “Nobody fucks with my sister!”

That was Byrd.

Ginny reached her father and threw her arms around his lifeless form, and as if that contact finished the job that nothing else could, he collapsed. She lowered him gently to the ground, sat down with him, softly weeping. And yet, when she caught Wade’s eye, smiling, at the same time.

He returned her smile. Gave the slightest nod of his head—as much as he could bear.

“Yeah,” he said, answering a question no one had asked. “I think it’s over.”

EPILOGUE

James Livingston Truly didn’t fly straight back to Washington. Instead, he went to Mission Viejo with Ginny. She wanted to tell her mother in person what had become of her father: why he had vanished all those years ago, why he hadn’t been in touch, and what he had accomplished, heroically, two decades after his death. Marguerite Tupper turned out to be a remarkable woman, lively and quick-witted, with an intellect as fierce as her daughter’s and a lack of patience for stupidity that made Truly smile when he saw it in action. They spent a week in California, during which time Ginny took him to Disneyland—entertaining, but somehow not as magical as he might once have found it, given recent events—and Hollywood, the beach, cold and windy on a November afternoon, and what seemed an endless landscape of malls and cars and businesses, many advertising “after-flood sales.” The part he liked best was sitting in their old Orange County home, talking about who Hollis had been while he lived.

During that week, which culminated in a slightly early Thanksgiving dinner that left Truly genuinely satiated, he didn’t call Ron Loesser. He didn’t know if he still had a job. The one time he called his father, he changed the subject when the topic came up, and ended the call before it cycled around again.

He would confront Ron face-to-face and work out a renewal of Moon Flash. If Willard Carsten Truly still had the pull he seemed to, there wouldn’t be any problem. If there was a problem? Well, he was a young man, and the world had other challenges to offer. Maybe none as dramatic as the last, but he’d done all right with that one. He had accomplished something that not many people ever could—or would ever know about. But
he
knew. He would meet whatever came up on his own terms, out of his father’s shadow at last, casting a shadow of his own.