River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (39 page)

He needed to figure out what was going on and why, and he needed to do it while he was still Wade Scheiner. For lack of anyplace better to go, he raced back to the safety of his hotel room.

Entering the room, he froze in the doorway.

The walls were covered in half-legible scrawls. Used-up markers, their caps off, were scattered everywhere. Some of the words had been scrawled in other media than ink—in brownish red letters that looked like blood. Wade looked at his palms and saw fresh cuts there that he didn’t remember. He didn’t recall any of this, writing all over his room, but the handwriting, while done rapidly and without concern for neatness, was clearly his.

“Kethili inth kusili tia ti niala,”
one line said. There was no punctuation, only spaces between what appeared to be different words and phrases.
“Ina talaka ni Kethili-anh kinistero. Koni ni tia tilistira katala.”
It went on like that, none of it making any sense to him…and yet distressingly familiar at the same time.

He put out the Do Not Disturb sign, then closed and bolted the door. Standing near the bed, he turned in a slow circle, scanning the walls. The writing was everywhere. When could he have done this?

After Ginny Tupper left, obviously. She would have taken one look and run away screaming.

He wouldn’t have blamed her a bit. He wanted to do the same. But he couldn’t, not now.

He had come here to call her from relative privacy, not knowing that stepping into his own room would chill him to the core. He sat on the bed—trying not to look at the scribbling on the walls—and dialed her number. She answered on the second ring.

“Ginny?”

“Wade…I don’t think—”

He cut her off midsentence. “I was an asshole, Ginny. I’m sorry. I can explain—well,
maybe
I can explain. The point is, I had a reason for what I did, for sending you away. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“Hurt me?”

“Look, I can’t go into it over the phone,” Wade said, fighting the desperation he heard in his own voice. “I would never hurt you of my own accord, I can promise you that. And I don’t pretend to understand all of this myself, but there’s a possibility that it ties in to your father’s disappearance. I think maybe it’s connected to Smuggler’s Canyon, anyway.” That part was a wild guess with only the vaguest hunch to back it up.

But
something
unnatural was going on. His earliest encounter with the supernatural was the night his dad had chased them into the cave at Smuggler’s Canyon. If Byrd had been right, then what happened to them that night had some kind of long-term repercussions they couldn’t know until they manifested.

Maybe
Kethili-cha
and
Kethili-anh
were those manifestations, for Molly and himself.

He had nothing better to go on. If Ginny’s father was an anthropologist studying Smuggler’s Canyon, maybe he had turned up something helpful. “I have a quick question. That word you asked about,
Kethili
. You said he used it in letters and notebooks. Do you know if he went into any more detail about it?”

“I have boxes and boxes of notebooks, journals, and reports,” Ginny said. Wade heard the sounds of traffic in the background. “They’re all back in my motel room in Palo Duro.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m still in town, getting ready to head back down there. Turns out there are a lot of things you can’t buy in Palo Duro. Like, you know, everything.” She paused, considering a newfound idea. “You want to go back there with me? Maybe together we can get through them faster, see if anything more on this mystery word turns up.”

He hadn’t imagined she would offer such an invitation. Not that long ago he had scared her half to death in his hotel room. Now she wanted him to come to hers?

“Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”

“You seem to have this flawed notion that I couldn’t kick your ass if I needed to,” Ginny said. “Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve spent most of the last decade or so sitting or standing in front of a TV camera, right? I’ve spent it hiking to remote locations, scrambling up and down mountains, surviving the elements…I think I can handle a pretty newsboy.”

In spite of himself, he had to smile. “Okay. If you can swing by my hotel, we can take my car, and maybe we can figure this out together.”

“Your car? You don’t trust mine?”

“Mine’s a rental and CNN’s buying the gas.”

“We’ll take yours,” Ginny said.

He glanced up at the walls again, defaced by madness. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” he said, “so we can leave right away.”

* * *

“Wade?”

He snapped to attention, realizing that the car was drifting toward the highway’s centerline. He shook his head to clear it, corrected course. “Sorry.”

“Are you falling asleep?”

He had to think about it for a second. “No, it’s not that. It’s…hard to explain.” He was afraid he knew, although he didn’t want to go into it with Ginny. Wade had faded away because
Kethili-anh
had crowded out his consciousness. Ginny had brought him back. But from what he’d seen of Molly, that wouldn’t always be an option.

There was an upside, he reminded himself; if he was being possessed by some ancient entity, it meant he wasn’t turning into his father.

In the half-light of merged memories, he grasped at some that threatened to flicker away.
If
Kethili-anh
can mess around in my head,
he thought,
why shouldn’t I dig into his?

One overwhelming sensation buried all the rest, and it tied into something
Kethili-cha
had suggested.
Kethili-cha
and
Kethili-anh
were ancient enemies, engaged in a war that had been interrupted millennia before. He remembered towered cities being razed, villages burning to the ground, swollen rivers flooding through narrow, winding streets and carrying off children, mules, everyone and everything in their path. He remembered the wails of the living and tears shed for the dead. All of it, the effects of that war between gods. Now that they were released from their mystical imprisonment deep beneath the earth, the conflict would begin anew.

Maybe it already had.

“I thought explaining things was what this was all about,” she reminded him. “And if I recall correctly, you promised some explanations.”

“I did. But there’s only so much I know. Most of it, I need your dad’s notes for.”

“Tell me what you can, Wade. That’ll help me know what to look for.”

“It’s hard to even know where to start. Something happened to me—to us, really, me and my friends, the ones you met the other day at Smuggler’s Canyon. Now Byrd is dead and Molly is changing into something else, something monstrous and murderous, and I’m afraid the same thing is happening to me.” He stopped, glanced at her in the passenger seat. Outside, a curtain of rain blocked everything more than a dozen feet away. “That sound ridiculous enough?”

“Anthropologists learn pretty early in the game that we don’t know everything. What’s bizarre and implausible in our culture is everyday and commonplace in others.”

“Including magic, or, I don’t know…paranormal weirdness?”

“
Especially
magic.”

Her ready acceptance surprised him. “Okay, here’s one more thing. The thing that I said happened at the canyon? It happened twenty years ago. A year after your dad disappeared. And it also involved my dad, who…well, I guess you could say he disappeared.”

Her jaw was as tight as if it had been wired shut. She stared straight ahead, looking at something that was not in the road, but in her past. “I always knew that he might be dead. I never wanted to admit it, but I’m a practical girl.”

“I’m not saying I know that anything happened to him. I only know about my own case and what happened to my father.”

“I get it, Wade. I’m just telling you I’m ready for whatever we find out. One thing, though. I’ve seen some strangeness at Smuggler’s Canyon myself, now that you mention it. I think maybe we should split up after all.”

“Split up how?”

“You can drop me at the motel and go on to the canyon. I can dig through Dad’s stuff and see if I can find anything pertinent. But it sounds to me like this all begins and ends at Smuggler’s Canyon, and I’d hate for us to waste a lot of time in the room.”

“But if you learn anything, how will you let me know?” he asked. “There’s no cell phone reception out there.”

“I’ll…I don’t know. I’ll hitch a ride.”

He couldn’t hold in a chuckle. “Because there are so many people headed that direction on a good day, much less one like this.”

“You have a better idea?”

“You drop me at the canyon, then backtrack to the motel. That way you’ll have wheels.”

“That’ll work,” she said. “It’s not too far back to the motel.”

Through the downpour, the three signs for the Palo Duro Motel loomed like lonely roadside ghosts. Wade pulled off at the exit, passed the motel, and took Palo Duro to River Road. His life’s history unspooled out the windows, painted in runny watercolors.

They couldn’t make it all the way to the canyon. The irrigation ditches that usually diverted much of the river’s current into farm fields had swollen from the heavy rain. Chocolate-colored water washed across the road, carrying branches and other plant matter. The bridge was underwater, almost invisible.

“This car can’t make it through that,” Wade said, stopping on the near side of the flood. “It’s got no ground clearance at all. And there’s another ditch after this one.”

“What do we do, then?”

“I think I can get across on foot,” he said, hoping to sound more confident than he felt. “I used to be pretty good at navigating rivers. You go back to the room. Maybe by the time you come back for me, this will have receded. If not, don’t try to run it in this car.”

“Okay.”

When he opened the car door, Ginny put a hand on his arm.

“You’re sure about this?”

“I think you’re right, Ginny. The answers are at Smuggler’s Canyon, somewhere. Anyway,
Kethili-anh
wants to be there and I can’t hold him back much longer. If you learn anything, hurry back.”

She looked at him curiously, but didn’t ask what he meant. “I will. You be careful.”

Instead of answering, he slammed the car door. The time for being careful had passed long ago.

FORTY-FOUR

Ginny backed away from the irrigation canal and turned the car around. She wiggled her fingers at Wade as she drove away.

He faced the submerged bridge with trepidation. This was a flash flood, not a river, and the rules were different. He couldn’t boat across. The water was probably no more than three feet deep, but since the banks had disappeared he couldn’t know for certain. The water’s speed was hard to gauge, but it could have been running at thirty or forty miles an hour, gaining speed and strength minute by minute. Under the surface, he might encounter anything—rats, rattlesnakes yanked from their cozy homes by the current, rocks, bigger branches. The bridge itself might be damaged, and his foot might crash through it and get stuck, pinning him there while the water rose around him.

The whole point of river running was that you tried to stay in the boat and out of the wet. It didn’t always work out that way, and Wade had spent more time in rivers—some fast-flowing—than he cared to remember. Some of those dunkings had been purposeful, an afternoon swim to cool off, but many had not been.

He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, a leather coat, and casual leather shoes. A far cry from his river clothes.

On the bright side, he was already soaked to the skin by the rain. No matter what happened, he couldn’t get much wetter.

He stepped in, felt the sudden shock of cold water against his legs, and kept going. The water ran fast and hard, threatening to yank his feet out from under him. He leaned into it and pushed on. He kept his feet close to the bottom, taking small, shuffling steps. Water splashed against his legs, trying to bowl him over. A branch slammed into him. Before it could trip him, he shoved it away with one hand.

Then he felt the relative solidity of the bridge beneath his feet and relaxed a bit. There was still the possibility that the bridge wouldn’t support his weight, but he had recently crossed it in an SUV. Fast water could knock down a bridge, but he didn’t think it’d had enough time to work on this one yet.

A few minutes later, the first canal was behind him. One more to go. He approached this one with more confidence, and he made good time across it.

Finally, so drenched that he might as well have been naked, Wade reached the rocks. Water tumbled down from the higher reaches, mini waterfalls running everywhere. The answers were here, Ginny had suggested.
Kethili-anh
seemed to think so, too. But where?