Tricked (15 page)

I looked up and around. There were any number of places to the north and west where the skinwalkers could be hiding, all kinds of little holes up in the mesa, lots of water-carved caves and the like. If Frank Chischilly had known precisely where they were, I’m sure he would have told me. Hell, if Coyote had known where they were, he wouldn’t have had to resort to tricking me like he did. So now we had two choices: We could spend all day searching for them, with the distinct possibility of finding nothing, or we could go back to the hogan and approach the problem from a different direction.

Oberon and I went around lifting our legs on scrub cedar, boulders, and the javelin.

Granuaile wrinkled her nose at us. “That’s really classy, sensei.”

Oberon and I chuffed at her.

Plan B was to get the gold moved under the mountain and then get out of there so that the skinwalkers would pursue me—the cure for Famine’s curse—and leave the Navajos alone. The problem was, once I returned to the proposed site and broached the subject, Colorado didn’t feel like cooperating.

//Reluctance / Discord / Hate mines// he told me. Well, fair enough. But I had to get him to agree, not only to fulfill my obligation to Coyote but to give myself a free hand to deal with the skinwalkers.

//Necessity / Urgency// I replied.

//Query: What necessity?//

It took some time to explain why Coyote’s plan for solar and wind power was far superior to the current coal mining operation going on. To Colorado, a mine was nothing more than a giant hole with unconscionable water usage and a surefire way to destroy the habitat of anything living nearby. But he conceded that generating power from clean energy was better than generating it from coal—even if the government wanted to call it “clean coal,” an Orwellian oxymoron if ever there was one. Still, he flatly refused to provide material for a precious metals mine while the coal mine continued to operate.

//Query: Coal mine ends, gold mine begins?// I asked.

//Yes / Coal mine must remain closed//

//Agreed / Harmony// I said.

//Harmony// Colorado gave the equivalent of a mental nod.

When I came out of it, the workers were breaking for lunch. They’d been working on the roof with a sense of purpose since Darren’s body had been taken away, and Sophie Betsuie had stayed down in the flat with the surveying crew, laying out whatever plans Coyote had cooked up. Coyote himself had yet to make an appearance. Granuaile was working on her Latin, and Oberon had found someone game enough to play tug-of-war with him on a piece of rope. It was Ben Keonie, and he was now the foreman for the crew.

he asked.

Yes. You’d better let him win, Oberon. If you pull him down, he’ll lose face with his crew
.

Play nice with him and you’ll earn back a sausage. Negative fourteen
.

I called Granuaile over for a confab and explained that I’d need a ride down to Black Mesa. “Colorado’s forcing me to pull a Monkey Wrench Gang before he’ll agree to move gold here.”

“What’s a Monkey Wrench Gang?”

“You’ve never read Edward Abbey?”

Granuaile shrugged. “Nope.”

“Well, they call it ecoterrorism now, and I would agree that if you blow stuff up you’re being terrifying. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to sabotage their machinery in a completely safe manner. It will effectively
shut down their operation and they’ll have to replace everything before they start again.”

“You can do that?”

“Sure. They can’t stop me. All I have to do is sneak in there and unbind the steel in the engines. Or bind the pistons to the cylinder walls. Turns ’em into big hunks of scrap metal, no way to repair it.”

“Well, why don’t you do that more often? Wouldn’t that protect the earth?”

“I could spend my entire life doing it, shifting from place to place, and I still wouldn’t stop them. I can do one big mine, maybe two, a day. So that’s 730 mines a year if I don’t take a day off and never spend two nights in the same place. Do you know how many mines there are in this country alone? Tens of thousands. And for every mine I shut down, another one will start somewhere else. Even the ones I shut down will reopen after a while. And that’s doing nothing about developing and dams and overfishing and oil spills and clear-cutting virgin rain forest for cow pasture so some fat man in Rio can have a steak. There’s no way I can keep up.”

Granuaile tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear and sighed. “Kind of depressing when you put it like that.”

“On the bright side, what Coyote’s proposing to do here is a step in the right direction. He’s right, you need a lot of capital to create a new energy infrastructure. The problem with generating so much electricity in a concentrated area is that there’s no efficient way to transfer it to the rest of the country, and the government’s not going to step up and do the right thing anytime soon.”

“Been meaning to ask you about that, sensei.”

“Ask what?”

“How do we know Coyote’s going to use the gold the way he says he is? What if this is just a scheme to get rich and make a fool of you, and all that talk in Tuba
City was one big con job? He knows what you are and what buttons to push. Why are you buying his story at face value?”

I pointed down the hill. “They’re certainly investing in something down there.”

“Yeah, but it could be a casino for all you know. Or Coyote’s paying them to put down stakes in an impressive pattern for our benefit.”

“All right,” I conceded, “it bears investigation. Coyote certainly deserves the skepticism. I’ll have Oberon spy on them, because people say all kinds of crazy stuff to dogs.” I switched mental gears to talk to my hound, who was still playing with Ben Keonie.
Hey, Snugglepumpkin!

Heh! Granuaile and I are going off site for a while. I want you to stick next to Sophie Betsuie this afternoon and report later on everything she talks about. Listen especially for anything regarding the project she’s working on. I want to know what they’re building
.

We’re treating this like nuclear-arms reduction. Trust, but verify
.

Whatever, you big baby. Negative thirteen sausages
.

Thirteen, with a possible bonus if your report is satisfactory
.

Oberon dropped the rope suddenly and Ben Keonie staggered backward a bit with the sudden release of tension.
“Whoa!” he said, as he watched Oberon bound away down the hill.

“Come on,” I told Granuaile. “Let’s go.” I filled her in on the plan, such as it was, on the way down to the Black Mesa mine. It was located about twenty miles south of Kayenta. She’d drop me off at a gas station located on the highway; I’d camouflage myself and run in the rest of the way to the mine property. She’d come back to pick me up at five. If I wasn’t there by five-thirty, she was to get a room in Kayenta and I’d catch up with her at the hogan the next morning.

I left Moralltach in her car, because deadly Fae swords aren’t very useful in disabling heavy machinery. Jogging in along the access road, I got passed by a couple of trucks but nothing else. It was the middle of a shift; they worked it round-the-clock six days a week, shipping the coal to a power plant in Page and producing a good chunk of the state’s electricity. Since it was Saturday, I’d be hitting it right before they had a day off.

It was more of a sprawling complex than I’d anticipated. First up was a gated area full of hauling trucks and yellow machines of various stripes. The gate was open, and I slipped through unnoticed to pay special attention to every vehicle in the lot. I needed line-of-sight to complete the unbinding, and it wasn’t a simple process like triggering one of my charms either. It took two minutes with the hoods or engine covers open to make it happen.

I had to get clever once I got around the running machines. I started banging on the engine covers loudly with a crowbar I’d found, and panicked operators would turn off their earth-shredding behemoths or conveyor belts to investigate the noise before it got any worse. They’d obligingly come down, open the engine compartment for me, and I’d unbind and then rebind the pistons, fusing them to the engine block while they
stared uncomprehendingly at it. Once they were satisfied and returned to their station or cockpit to turn it back on, all they got were little red lights telling them of an engine failure. More investigation would ensue, and I’d move on to the next target.

Before I got to the end, they had shut down all the machines to preempt whatever mysterious mechanical failure was afflicting all the engines. Foremen were losing their minds because they were thinking about all the lost revenue for every minute those machines weren’t stripping coal out of the earth. It would take them a while to figure out precisely what the problem was; they’d have to bust open the engine casings to discover that their pistons and cylinders were permanently wedded.

They had a coal-washing facility too, and I sabotaged that for good measure, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary; without a steady supply of new coal coming in, it would run out of work in a day or so.

I allowed myself a satisfied grin. Public Relations men could sugarcoat it all they wanted, but strip mining was foul, and monkey-wrenching it felt good. Nobody had been injured, much less killed, yet I’d shut down the entire operation. Unfortunately, I’d also lost track of time. The sun was sinking below the horizon when I finished, which meant I’d already missed my rendezvous with Granuaile. I’d have to make my way back to Kayenta on foot. I could fly there as an owl, but then I’d have to steal a new set of clothes before I could show myself in public, and that sort of thing always made me feel cheap and sketchy. (Costing a corporate mining operation millions in lost revenue and equipment replacement made me feel great, by comparison.) Colorado would provide me with the energy for the run, but it would still be a good couple of hours on the road.

While going cross-country afforded a straighter path
back to Kayenta, I risked facing obstacles that I couldn’t pass without shape-shifting, and I didn’t know the lay of the land. I chose to stick to the roads instead. Once safely back to the highway and off the coal mine property, I considered dissolving my camouflage, because it was, frankly, an unnecessary drain on the earth. It was nighttime, I had no reflective clothing on, and no one would notice or care about a lone white man jogging well off the shoulder of the road. But paranoia made me keep it on. There were two skinwalkers out there with Famine’s curse on them, and their tummies wouldn’t stop rumbling until they tore into me.

While one of the skinwalkers might have been laid up and in no shape to hunt for edible Druids, the other one, I discovered, was quite able to stalk me, camouflage be damned. The speed and surprise of its attack overwhelmed me. I saw a flash of movement underneath a stretch of barbed-wire fence ahead of me, but before I could identify it as a kangaroo rat or a roadrunner or anything else, the bobcat it turned out to be drove me to the ground, its teeth at my throat. Before I could shout a completely pointless demand to get off, he’d already ripped out my windpipe and one side of my neck, my life’s breath and blood spilling into the cold air. I weakly brought a hand up to prevent further attack, but he was greedily gulping down the mouthful of flesh he already had. I dissolved my camouflage, since it was clearly useless, and triggered my healing charm, focusing my efforts on rebuilding my trachea, but I doubted it would make a difference. The skinwalker would snuff me long before I’d be in any shape to put up any sort of spirited defense. I wished I hadn’t left Moralltach in the trunk of Granuaile’s car.

As I finished that thought and the bobcat finished swallowing my poor neck, its fur looked like it was bubbling, rippling as if it had those scarab beetles from
The
Mummy
running around underneath its skin. Its dead eyes—curiously, not orange the way they had been in human form—were focused on me, considering where it might take its next mouthful, when something slapped forcefully into its flesh, sending it tumbling and howling over my head. Belatedly I heard the crack of a firearm. It howled anew in response to a second shot, and the skinwalker fled, which was just fine with me. He might have ended my long life with one more bite. He might have already ended it with one.

I was drawing on the earth, feverishly trying to rebuild my windpipe and stop the bleeding, all the while wondering why the Morrigan hadn’t warned me of this. It occurred to me that this encounter, with what was outwardly an animal, probably didn’t count as a battle to her, and thus it was out of her sphere of influence. I was on my own—with the possible exception of whoever was out there with a sniper rifle. That person, however, was a good distance away, judging by the delay in hearing the shots. To be in a position to take that shot, though, they had to be stalking me. Who was it?