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.
But when she eats you, she’ll eat more than just you.
Her hooves were on my heart.
Poison … this … bait …
Thunder sounded down, hammering me into the earth, my heart struggling under magic that I could not resist.
The skinwalker holding me down to the earth had become a man-sized gila monster. Black and orange scales scraped up and down my front. A cold blue forked tongue as large as a canoe paddle tickled my nose. It was breathing in my face and making me sick.
Only room for one top bitch in this land … do keep running as fast as you can, little virgin. Can’t let her get suspicious before the first bite. After that she’ll know … but the hunger rules her, and she won’t stop eating the poisoned bait.
I passed out, and came to with Helen screaming in my ears.
Night had fallen and I was alone, lying underneath my pine tree with strange tracks all around, not one fully committed to a single animal’s form. Four legs, two legs, and some multitude of tiny prints retreating to the woods that could have been the skinwalker’s last shape: a giant tarantula or centipede. The smell of the Gila monster’s breath was still a memory in my nose, but there were two leaking bites on my neck that were from whatever she had changed into after I had passed out. The two wounds were nearly a foot apart, so that was one big bug.
Extra venom? Or something to counter the first venom’s killing effects upon myself? Performance-enhancing venom?
This was enough reason to fear, but something just as unnatural was falling down from the troubled sky.
It was the middle of July … but it was snowing.
I heard cracking sounds from the stream at the end of the deer-trail, freezing sounds. Chirping crickets singing in the night fell silent as they died.
And the wind that brought the snow said, in my grandmother’s voice:
“Hungry.”
Just that one word, over and over again.
This was an emergency worthy of that blood diamond. If she was less than three minutes away I was a dead vampiric incel. But I needed to take and I needed power to run, run with winter and death and famine clawing at my back.
Sinking to the soil that was already hardening into permafrost, I regained consciousness from the red foggy swarm of African misery not long after the blood diamond bounced off my knuckle, and put the ring back on. My thirst had evaporated; my bug-bite was hot and itchy and making every part of me twitch, and I would give Nocome some challenge.
I ran. When it got colder I ran harder.
“Hungry,” my grandmother’s voice said through the rising wind that beat the tops of the pines and made them hiss against each other. “Hungry.” And the screaming wind was sounding more and more anguished.
I hurled myself through the pines, faster than ever before, leaping off cliffs and running as I landed, tearing up soil and pebbles. These boots wouldn’t be lasting long. The power ripped from the blood and sweat of miners and child soldiers and smugglers half a world away was enriching my legs, which had strengthened after my three-day hike and nap. But I didn’t bother with the usual evasive tricks – doubling back, wading into rivers to erase scent trails, none of that. Nocome was too fast and too sharp-sighted, and this land had been her home long before I was born. And soon there would be enough snow on the ground for tracks.
“I’m past all the farms now, in the woods with you, and I am hungry,” my grandmother said on the wind. Not long after she said, with a louder voice, “I’m past the great cat’s lake now, and I’m very hungry.”
The cold lash on my back grew more tongues, striking like a cat-of-nine-tails. Trees I sprinted past groaned as their internal water suddenly froze. When I passed by a hump of exposed granite erratics there were gunfire cracks inside wet crevices, like the sound of some monstrous egg hatching. The horizon in the east was blurring into the grey sky with the intensifying blizzard, and the stars and crescent moon that had hovered over me minutes before were devoured, turning the grey to black.
I soon realized that I was seeing by the light of my own manitou/template/true body’s blood leaking out of me in my furious exertion, a fine misty effusion leaving my body like a sweaty aerosol, the sign of general fatigue rather than a singular wound. I saw this clearly in the unnatural darkness, the dawn’s coming hidden because between me and the dawn was Nocome the wendigo. She was ripping through the trees, and all lights died when she drew near.
A scary aesthetic, very deadly for humans with their senses … but more darkness was exactly what I needed. And in a flash of sudden surprise and tenuous hope I realized this: she didn’t know that I was a vampire. She knew I was something changed from human that fed on blood, but that wasn’t specific enough to tell her to stop darkening the sky.
As St. Elmo’s fire threatened to dribble out of my calves and the soles of my feet again, she said, “I’m at Lac Forbes now, and I’ve very, very hungry.”
But the dawn should have taken my speed by now, I was very sure. I was still with the strength of the night, an extended local night that darkened further as she neared, taking away the trees from my vision one by one, giving me mere tens of yards of seeing space behind me as my eyes struggled against the suffocating snow and wind and clouds.
I stopped running.
Chapter 30: Nocome
Image credits: Douglas Knisely, William Skinner and Paddy Gibson, Edwin Henry Landseer