Cody entered the clearing and sniffed the air. He saw me on the boulder and walked around to get a better view of what I was looking at. When he saw the body, he stopped, and a mournful howl rose from his throat. His coyote form melted away, and he crawled to the corpse on his hands and knees. I leapt from my spot to be near him if he needed me, but I didn't understand what was going on.
Then it hit me. This must've been someone Cody was related to. I shifted back to human and waited nearby, hoping to be a warm presence in his darkness.
"Jacy... How could you have done this?" he whispered. "Why?" He slid his fingers carefully over the corpse's open, frightened eyes, closing them. He cleared his throat, his voice choked with tears. "This is my cousin. I can't leave him here like this. I have to take him home before the wild animals decide to eat him."
"Do you want me to come with you?" While I wanted to get this all done and over with as soon as I could, there was no way I'd leave him to deal with his grief alone. He and his cousin had obviously been close.
He glanced over at me and sighed. "I’d like that. My shirt is over by the boulder." He lowered his gaze back to the body and shook his head. "I never thought he’d be the one behind this. I should've seen it, though. He'd been different recently. Not at all like the best friend I'd had since childhood." Cody lifted his cousin into his arms carefully, and my heart ached for him. I hadn't been strong enough to take Ezra out of the cavern we'd been in when the trap had sprung on us. We'd been fighting again, and he hadn't been paying close enough attention to where he was walking...
Ugh, not the time for that.
I grabbed Cody’s shirt, sliding it over my head. We walked side by side, the scent of impending rain and his dead cousin filling the air. I placed my hand on his upper arm and gave him a comforting smile.
He sighed, but smiled back weakly. We both had reasons for wanting this asshole wizard dead. While Cody was mourning his cousin for getting involved, I frowned as a sudden thought struck me. Wait, where had the talisman been? Had we missed it?
I darted back through to the clearing again and searched around the slightly tinted rock. There was no sign of the talisman anywhere. Instant disgust snapped inside me—maybe they'd taken the talisman in addition to Kevin. But that didn't make any sense. They’d wanted me to find it, and they even said that on the wall. They hadn't been able to locate it themselves. Unless it was still around here, or on Cody's cousin somewhere. I knelt to see if it had fallen from Jacy's hand when he'd died, and that made me think.
Cody walked back to where I was. "What's wrong?" He frowned down at me.
"The talisman. I don't see it anywhere." My eyes rose to his cousin, and I saw that his hands were clenched tightly, as if he was holding onto something.
Cody looked down, following my gaze. He gently set his cousin to the ground again and examined his closed hands. "It's there, but I'm afraid of breaking his fingers if I try to remove it."
I’d had a little too much experience with doing this, even for my own liking, but when you're regularly faced with prying treasure from mummies’ fists, you learn to do what you have to do.
"May I?" I took a step forward, and he nodded, although he looked a little reluctant to let me mess with his cousin's hand. "I promise I'll be gentle with him."
"I know."
I pinched the end of the talisman with my fingertips and wriggled it a little, doing my best to keep from moving enough to damage his hand. It was difficult, especially in the almost mummy-like condition his body was in. After a few minutes it finally slid free, and I let out a sigh of relief. The talisman was smaller than I'd expected, carved out of a dark, heavy wood. The odd-looking figurine had a man's legs and those of various other animals merged together to form the body of a figure sitting in a meditative pose.
My hand burned as I held it, and I dropped it to the ground, looking down at the red spot where it had touched my skin. Cody leaned in to look at my hand in the morning light, and pressed a kiss to it. "It should heal fairly quickly," he said.
"Thanks. I didn't anticipate it doing that."
"It's mindful of who it allows to hold it." He looked down at his cousin. "Maybe that's one of the reasons Jacy succumbed to it. He must have used it far too much for his safety. He shouldn’t have done this. He should've known just how powerful the damn thing is." Cody shook his head and picked the talisman up. It seemed to glow a little in his grasp, and I blinked at it in amazement. "Let's get him to my grandmother's house so we can get back to dealing with those sorry bastards who hurt you."
I nodded, not knowing what else to say. Cody was feeling the pain of the situation as much as I was, and I hated seeing him hurt like this. I loved his silly, grinning coyote, and his college boy side, who was a little too eager to convince me to help him. I followed him, letting chirping birds and the morning breeze fill the silence alone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Cody
Jacy's body lay in my arms. I really regretted that I had to present my grandmother with the news that he was dead. It seemed like he'd been using way too much power too quickly. From the looks of it, he was trying to turn the boulder into another golden rock. While Morgana had mentioned that the golden stones had been getting purer and purer in quality, it seemed like an awful big leap to go from smaller chunks of rock to an honest-to-God boulder.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered what had possessed him to do such a thing. Had he been coerced by the wizard who’d been responsible for ordering Morgana's kidnapping? That didn't quite make sense. I looked over my shoulder at her. She was watching our surroundings, her gaze scanning the forest as if expecting the enemy to jump out at us at any time.
I didn't blame her. I was keeping an eye out too. While I knew that the area near the forest where my grandmother lived was pretty secure—no one was stupid enough to cross her totems and the magical repellent she'd laid out—I knew these people were willing to do whatever it took to get what they wanted.
By the time we got to her house, the positioning of the sun told me it was nearly noon. My feet were kind of sore from stepping on all the little rocks and twigs on the forest floor. I caught the slightest bit of a limp from Morgana, but she kept her chin up and didn't say a word about it. She just soldiered on.
The door to the house opened, revealing my grandmother leaning against the doorframe. "I welcome the follower of the Raven back into the lands that once were. Welcome, daughter of the skies. I had hoped that we'd have a chance to meet at a different time, but adversities bring out who we really are, I suppose. Come over here so that I can have a better look at you," she said, her voice carrying easily across the distance between us.
Morgana didn’t seem fazed by her words as she made her way up the steps to the doorway. "Hello, Wise One. I think I'm somewhat responsible for what is going on," she began, but was quickly silenced by a wave of my grandmother’s hand.
"Don't fret. The spirits have been more than clear about it. Jacy is with them now, and he already knows what he’d brought upon us. There is no need for hostility, just acceptance. Do come in," Grandmother moved out of the way, deeper into the house. Not wanting to make her wait, I walked in after Morgana, closing the door behind us. The air felt different, heavy with emotion and isolation. It seemed that Jacy's passing, and how it had occurred, had hit my grandmother harder than I’d expected. There were whispers in the air, barely audible to my ears. I couldn’t pick any meaning out of them, but I could tell that the spirits were close to us.
"May I see it, Cody?" she asked, her voice tremulous with emotion.
I retrieved the talisman and let her have a good look at it. There was a glint of sadness, but also anger, in her eyes as she held the talisman at arm’s length, peering into it at something I couldn’t see. With a nod, she retrieved the pipe and blew a small portion of the smoke close to the talisman, appeasing whatever was trapped inside. Emotion left the surface of the magical figurine, and the air got slightly lighter afterward. Whatever the talisman was capable of in addition to changing materials to gold and spawning tornadoes, I didn’t want to know.
It had already brought ruin to someone in my family because of greed. The more I looked at the innocent-looking sculpture, the more I was certain that it was evil. And those who had been exposed to it in greed or lust for gold were more than likely to meet their untimely ends.
"I'm sorry, Grandson. I'll have to ask you to carry it a bit further. I must not touch it, for it would burn my hands. Your uncle will take care of it when he comes here tomorrow. Until then, you need to keep it close," my grandmother said, and locked her eyes onto mine.
Unable to refuse, I nodded, feeling displeasure grow from within the talisman. “Now, you two can't go out quite as you are. I may still have something of yours. Raven, could you help me?" She walked toward the back of the house without waiting for a reply from Morgana.
I waited out in the living room while Morgana and my grandmother talked quietly in the back room, searching for something. Occasionally I heard faint, half-contained laughter from the back, but with all the spirits pushing to break into our world, I wasn't sure if it was actually them. Ten minutes later Morgana returned wearing my old middle-school clothes. The band on the t-shirt had long ago broken up, and the colors on the jeans had faded. She carried a stack of other clothes with her, and I felt my heart sink a little. I knew that the only other clothes here that would fit me would be from when I was in high school. Sure enough, I found a black heavy-metal shirt I’d worn to school and a pair of ripped jeans among other similar ones. Ones I thought I’d given away.
"You've done well to ally yourself with the Raven, Grandson." My grandmother nodded at me. Sadness wrinkled her face even more, and her shoulders seemed more slumped as she walked back inside her home.
I wrapped my arms around Morgana, needing to feel her life and warmth. She held me gently, letting me lean forward to rest my chin on her shoulder. I wanted to cry and yell and fight, but I had to remain cool and calm. I had to let the coyote take his revenge for what happened to my cousin, and to Morgana. I slid my finger lightly over a bruise that marred her light complexion, and stood up straighter, pushing my shoulders back.
"Do you think you can find the place they took you again?"
She bit her lower lip doubtfully. "Um... I didn't really pay as much attention to where I was going as I should have. I think I can find my way back though. I was flying higher up in the air than I probably should've been at the time, but retracing my path is worth a shot. We'd have to go back to my house first, so I can go back to the last waypoint that I remember."
I nodded. "Yeah, that's not a problem." I looked at the keys to my grandmother's truck in my hand. "It'll probably be quicker for you to fly to where McGuire normally is, but maybe we could drive back to your place?"
She nodded quickly, and I could see the relief in her eyes. Morgana hadn't wanted to travel back like that any more than I did.
I opened the passenger door of the truck to let her in. I caught sight of her feet as the flip flops my grandmother had given her came away from the bottom of her foot. Her feet were bruised and red. It looked like they’d been bleeding. Her healing speed must've stopped them from getting worse, but it wasn’t enough to make the bruises go away.
She must've caught me looking, because she pulled her leg quickly into the truck and placed her feet flat on the floorboard.
"I'm fine. I swear." She leaned up to kiss me, and the feeling of it brought a level of relief that I hadn’t realized I'd needed. Her hand trailed over the thin shirt, snug on my skin now that I filled it out better than in high school. I couldn't believe my grandmother still had some of my clothes, but I guess she'd never gotten around to donating them.
I'd lived with her mostly in my high school years. Not only did she live closer to the high school, but after I'd shown signs of being more than human, she'd been more understanding than my own family. I'd already been different, and my being a Coyote shifter made me even more of an outcast.
I brushed the thoughts away as Morgana's face filled with concern, and closed the door to head over to the driver's side. I didn't really want to talk about my childhood with Morgana, at least not yet. But from what I had seen of the files in her living room, I could tell that she'd done her research well. I hadn't had time to go through all of it, but she knew more about me than anyone I had ever met, maybe even as much as my closest family members.
I slid into the driver's seat and started the engine. We drove to her house with only the sound of older country music on the radio to break the silence. I knew not to change it away from the station. My grandmother had a way of knowing things. Besides, I didn't really mind it. The music filled the gap between us, so I didn't feel like I had to talk about what was bothering me.
Morgana didn't seem to feel the need to either, and I liked that about her. We could just be here in a companionable silence. There was no pressure to do anything else.
I pulled into her gravel driveway, right beside the garage, where tire tracks still gouged the driveway. When I cut the engine, I looked over at her, and she was staring out the front window. She didn’t look anxious to get out of the truck.