CVU1

Chapter 29: Bitch in My Corner

After a few minutes of silence the spirit looked back at me and hunched down. Leaning against the pine tree with sap adhering to my back, I watched with fake casualness, the same attitude that I had used when surrounded by the Old Christian's flock. The guardian's face was now almost fully human, long straight black hair snaking around like Medusa's locks, the body still unsure. The voice was cloying, the black lips stretched into a grin.

"You want to ask me for help, but you know that I'll say no."

If she could just read my mind then I decided to keep my mouth shut. She reared up and giggled, putting hooved hands on her anorexic hips.

"But my own power is only against men, and Nocome is more dangerous than a man." She pronounced the wendigo's name differently than the Old Christian. "Your manitou has grown a little bit, especially up and down the spine I notice, but that's not enough to matter. I couldn't hit you today because of the old lady gardener you have swirling inside you right now. My strikes are also weakened against you because you are a virgin - I should have otherwise killed you easily that first night." Those big dark eyes were filled with teasing amusement.

I scowled. "Virginity is for chicks."

She skimmed my mind and stole a nascent bit of fake-humor. "I think it's wonderful that you'll meet your end as a vampiric incel by a lady literally named 'No-come'."

I had to get focused and mechanical, not letting this bitch getting under my skin. "Would a dreamcatcher be of any use against her?"

"Ha ha, no. Dreamcatchers can only protect someone else, not the person who creates them."

"Silver?" I still had some of that silverleaf foil in my backpack.

Deer Woman scoffed, irritated by my attempt at Vulcan logic. "You're dead, kid. Just bend over and take it like a man. I see your next hopeless thought: throwing away the blood diamond, thinking that's what attracts her. It certainly has more blood in it than you do by yourself, but she can't pull that kind of power from the diamond without you as the ... interface, let us say. So she'll sniff it out wherever you drop it, pick it up, then grab you. Milk the cow, then eat the cow. You're still dead."

"Would I get more than taunts from you if I made a vow?" I kept my voice flat.

The grinning, sneering, teasing thing froze completely for just half a second, and then came back to life more viciously than before, leering down and suddenly crawling on hands and feet like a succubus on the prowl, about to mount a sleeping man. I thought that the difference between vampires and whatever she was could not be very great - she might be a 'protector' of nature, but she played with her trespassers.

That's right, little virgin, a voice said in my head, colder and crueler than ever before. My sisters are Patasola in the Amazon, Sihuanaba in Panama, and Llorona in Mexico. I was born two hundred years ago in the land now called Nevada, and back then I was not always a deer.

I thought back at her, seeing up close that the human she was almost turning into looked more Mexican than First Nations Canadian.

You're a skinwalker, a bit far from home.

Deep laughter, barely feminine, not human at all, filled my ears and head like a fog.

The mind-voice growled: I could make you come in about two minutes, and when a man comes with me he dies. That is how I take. But then Nocome would open me up, because none may take what she wants to eat. That is her greatest weakness - for all her wounds, and the wrong time of the year, she comes for you anyway. That is why you live.

The face hovering over me was a human woman's face that twitched occasionally, each twitch bringing a near-subliminal impression of another face: deer, bear, coyote, fox, cougar. A tongue that was too long to be human was snaking out and poking me in the forehead. Inside my skull Helen was appalled like an old lady seeing a cockroach in the kitchen.