Den of the Bear (Vanished, #6) by B. B. Griffith

Author:B. B. Griffith [Griffith, B. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Griffith Publishing LLC
Published: 2024-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

21

THE WALKER

Ihave trouble following soul threads on the move, but Owen and the girl are especially tough. She’s a force, that one. I know from experience. I think she picks up on the fact that Owen is trying to hide them from these things prowling the Rez, and she’s doing her part. She can make her soul quiet when she wants, and Owen’s, too, to hide.

But me and crows, we see eye to eye. And when I see the souls of a hundred crows moving with the discipline of a marching army, I take notice. I drop out of the soul map with my back to a big rock formation, smack dab in the middle of a ring of desert dirt, socked in by the burliest thicket of mesquite bushes I’ve ever seen.

And here is Yéʼiitsoh. The Big Giant. Eater of Men and the most powerful of the Anaye. He comes as a bloodied and inked man bigger even than Danny Ninepoint, but it’s Yéʼiitsoh, at least while he holds that black bear totem.

A fair number of my crow friends lie at his feet. He’s somehow bigger than when we last met. Bloodier. Fat but sunken with hunger, as if consuming this place has revved the dark machine inside of him to want more and more.

He slows when I drop in on the scene, though. Blood drips in two lines from his nostrils over his lips.

These things seem obsessed with me, so I try a command. “Stop,” I say.

He does. And I take the time to look around for the whole reason I’m here.

“Owen?” I call out.

Silence, of course. But you never know. A few of the crows at my feet shift to point their beaks directly behind me, and when I turn, I see Owen’s fancy leather shoes sticking out from what looks a bit like a stone pizza oven.

“Owen?” I ask.

The big freak is blubbering on again, giving me pennies and shitty cigarettes and promising blood and saying he’s this close to seeing me in all my glory and all that bullshit, and I want to cut his big black boots right out from under him, but I know I can’t hurt him in this world. What I might be able to do, though, is get a thought across. Let’s see if you can scent this one, you big freak.

“Your brother is dead,” I say.

This stops the shitty offerings real quick, stops the blubbering, stops it all. Maybe he heard my words, maybe not. Either way, I got the point across. He looks at the black bear totem in his hand like it’s burning.

“No,” he says. “It can’t be.”

He turns around and pounds his way out, and I know where he’s going—the Arroyo. I don’t like it, but one thing at a time.

With Yéʼiitsoh gone, the crows start leaving in twos and threes, chatting it up the whole way. I thought I might be able to talk with them for a bit, see what this place they found is all about, but no.

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