She had loved him truly after that. He’d never gone back to being the boy he was. He chased power, chased whatever it was that had called him on the edge of this precipice. He chased it even when it became dangerous, when it destroyed him, when everyone begged him to stop.
Those people deal in death, brother, Ursula had told him during the last fight that Jaila had witnessed, there is nothing holy in it.
And he had turned to her, his eyes blasted black with something more substantive than divinity, and said, There is nothing more holy than death, sister.
Jaila heard him again now as she fell. There is nothing more holy than death. The light of the stars and the moon and the first wisps of dawn were fast receding.
Ursula reached her, crashed into her chest and held on, and then they spun together, down and down to their deaths, as the coyote had commanded.
“I’m sorry,” Jaila said in the language of the trees, and the flames singed her dandelion hair and illuminated the inky black perfection of the rock around them.
Ursula hugged her. She didn’t say anything. It was okay—the wind rushed around them now, and Jaila couldn’t hear anything at all. She waited.
* * *
But they didn’t crash. They just kept falling. They were bunched up inside the wind, as though it were a net. Jaila knew they ought to have died already, but without any light to see, it felt more like floating through a tunnel. Ursula lifted her head from Jaila’s shoulder and then reached out her arm.
“What’s happening?” Jaila asked. She chose the weakest words, lobbed them past where she guessed Ursula’s head would be, and the fire unfurled like two flowers spinning around their heads. They were a meter away from the black wall. Ursula’s eyes were narrow with concentration, and her nostrils flared.
“I called the wind,” Ursula said.
“You can do that?” Jaila asked.
“Your grammar can catch fire?”
“I don’t know how that happened. You two were the powerful ones.”
“He always said that’s how it would be with you. That you’d have to find your power to come back to us. That you would when you wanted it enough. But you came too late for him.”
“Don’t say that. Didn’t you see the coyote? He brought us here.”
Ursula snorted, and the air surrounding them bucked and twisted. Jaila flung herself forward to keep her balance, and her hand brushed the wall. She shrieked, anticipating pain. But it didn’t hurt. Her fingertips had passed through, creating oily currents as she floated down. She snatched her hand back, but in the lingering light of her shriek, she saw weird figures in the slick.
A procession—a hundred people in brightly woven huipils and capes, walking behind men dressed in costumes of jaguars and eagles and fanged gods. Then a pyramid, an ancient temple with steps gleaming white and a chapel at the top painted blue and red. Ursula—it had to be Ursula, she had her nose and her hair and her mocking, mischievous eyes—but she was wearing the same clothes as the women in the procession, with golden plugs in her ears and lower lip. She was painting a figure on an accordion scroll of cedar bark paper.
“Ursula?” Jaila said. The girl’s head jerked up. For a moment their eyes met.
The image broke apart, spilled its constituent colors down the wall and re-formed again, briefly, into something more familiar: the woods of the surrounding hills. Jaila was running through them, her hair on fire, her laughter leaving a trail of ashes behind her. In the deep shadows of dusk, a coyote kept pace beside her.
The images faded as the wall regained its stillness.
“Where are we?” Jaila asked. She was gripping Ursula’s hand so tightly it had to hurt, but Ursula didn’t complain.
“Haven’t you figured it out?” Ursula said with that familiar curve of her lips, one a lip plug could do nothing to disguise. “We’re in between.”
“In between what?”
“Worlds. Our world and the gods’ world. Your world and my world. Real worlds and unreal worlds and almost-real worlds. He never talked to you about it?”
Now Jaila got bitter, and it threaded her flame with a sickly green. “He said dangerous things like that weren’t for sweet girls like me.”
Ursula snorted again, but this time Jaila kept her balance. “Machista fool,” she said.
Jaila laughed, and burning flower broke apart on the gleaming black behind them. A thousand rivulets swarmed and gathered until they outlined a coyote walking in the dark. It limped. As more lines converged, Jaila could see some kind of spear lodged in its side. It panted, glanced behind itself, continued down the path. It seemed to wind closer, or at least the coyote got bigger, near enough for them to see the blood matted to the fur by its hip and in front of its neck. It looked up and yipped.
They shouldn’t have been able to hear it. They hadn’t heard the other strange visions in the slick, but the coyote’s call came at them as though from underwater. It approached them and howled. Jaila leaned forward. Its eyes were clouded with pain, but they bored into hers, yellow and fierce with recognition. It wanted to tell her something. It had come back to tell her something.
“Tizoc?” she said.
It rushed from her lips with a roar that deafened her, with a shine that blinded her, with a heat that seared her skin. It poured onto the slick, poured until the fire burned a little bit of it away.
The coyote stepped through.
* * *
The coyote wheezed from the pain in his side. He was real, or real enough for his fur to smell like blood, for his breath to stink of river water.
The fur by his right eye was cut by an old scar, from when the three of them had gone to the river to fish and he’d waded in too deep and been carried out by the strong current of the late rainy season. They’d waited in an overcrowded emergency room for hours while blood soaked the rag he held there, and Jaila had shivered with alternating waves of horror at the misery of the place, and jolts of pleasure at being so near to him.
It was around that time that he found a chamán with a bad reputation from a few towns over—not respected but feared—who taught him how to find his nagual, to become a coyote. He drifted away from them then—became less Tizoc, the older brother and truest unspoken love, and more Tizoc, the sicario who did unspeakable things in the desert and came back with another tattoo and a habit for first-harvest cane liquor. He spent some nights on his knees, clutching the icon of San Judas Tadeo to his chest while he cried over a pain he swore was an enemy poisoning his soul.
You’re poisoning your soul, Jaila had wanted to tell him, but she had never dared. All her words had burned out around him, had fallen out of her mouth, as white as wood ash, and dusted his perfectly polished hand-tooled leather boots.
Go back to bed, Jaila, he’d growl at her. You don’t belong here. You shouldn’t be out at night. And he’d look at her, and she would know: he no longer trusted himself.
He hadn’t been dangerous before. He pretended it was his power, his nagual, his wild coyote that made him dangerous now. Even Ursula had tried to believe that for a while, before they found the photos on his phone. Dead men with their throats ripped out, faces slack, eyes wide with terror. One of the men clutched an icon of the Virgen de Guadalupe, now drenched and wrinkled with his blood. Oh, a coyote had done it, that much was true. But it was not the coyote that was dangerous.
It was the man.
Jaila had left not long after. She had left, or she had been dragged away—it depended on your perspective. Ursula had screamed at her, at the end—Why don’t you fight? Why don’t you tell them you don’t want to go? But Jaila was choking with ashes, with fear and regret. At what he had become, at what would happen to them all if they stayed here in the desert and the hills, invoking the bounty of Mother Earth with flowers and candles and the blood of dead turkeys. Maybe she had believed him when he said that she didn’t belong here, where the earth spoke in the only words that had ever felt at home in her mouth.
She had tried to
come back when she heard the news of him, when the wind whispered that he had disappeared. But they had stopped her. Just when she had decided to fight, they had stopped her.
So how had she found herself here, on the road back home at sunset, with water in her bag and a flame in her mouth?
“Is it you?” she asked the coyote now. “You brought me here?”
“Jaila,” Ursula said, urgent. “Jaila, don’t talk to him. He can’t be real. Do you see that spearhead in his side? It’s like something out of a museum. . . .”
He tilted his head and snorted a little. He lifted a bloody paw and smeared her arm with it.
Dead men don’t do magic.
Ursula stiffened against her. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. I just heard—”
“Heard what?”
“Him,” Jaila whispered, and the flame didn’t burn her anymore; it just gave her light and kept her warm.
You brought yourself here, the coyote said.
“Did you hear that?” Jaila asked.
Ursula looked at her and the coyote, then closed her eyes and exhaled. The wind bucked, tossed them high and dropped them low—in this in-between place, everything seemed to go in two directions at once—and Jaila grabbed the two of them, her two greatest loves, and held on.
The wind steadied again. “Will you let go a little?” Ursula said, muffled against Jaila’s shoulder, in the language of their sisterhood, their friendship, the language that had always connected one little outsider girl to these people and this land. They hadn’t spoken it before now.
Jaila released her. They were both covered in the coyote’s blood. His eyelids were sinking and then opening, as though he were about to pass out. Ursula gazed down at him, her eyes fierce and almost as yellow as the coyote’s in the lingering light of Jaila’s words. “And tell him he was a fool and a murderer, and he broke his sister’s heart, too—not just yours, Jaila; he broke mine too.”
“He can hear you,” Jaila said quietly. “And he’s not dead. Look! We have to get back to the woods, find where his human body is, and take him to the hospital. He’ll survive if we hurry. . . .”
They both turned to her. She fell back against the cushion of the wind, made dizzy by the familiarity of it: the brother and the sister turning those uncannily similar gazes upon her in the moment they realized that they understood something that Jaila, the perennial outsider, didn’t.
“Jaila,” Ursula said, “I found his body. His human body. In the ravine. Someone had stabbed him and then rolled him over the edge. They wrapped him in a goddamn blanket, Jaila, and I found him like that.”
It was Ursula’s eyes that made Jaila believe her. They were so steady and so full of pain, so sorry for everything they had seen. “But didn’t he lead you to the sacred well? Didn’t you see him bite me to push me in?”
“It wasn’t him,” she said. “His nagual is dead too.”
The coyote looked as though he were dying on her lap now, panting and groaning in an effort to stay conscious that Jaila didn’t understand.
“Then who are you?” Jaila asked softly.
Tizoc, he said. Not the same one but not a different one, either.
“And where are we?” she asked.
She got a faint grimace, which she took for a smile. The subjunctive tense.
“Shoulda, woulda, coulda,” she said in her first language, the one that the two of them didn’t understand, and she laughed so hard that she cried.
“It is him,” she told Ursula through her tears. They turned Jaila’s flames beautiful shades of purple and blue, but the fire held. “He’s dying again, but it is him.”
We cross paths with our other lives, with our other selves when we pass through here. We are in between our own possibilities.
Now Ursula gripped Jaila’s hand hard enough to hurt. “Tell him he could have been brilliant—tell him he could have been loved for his real self, not that power he chased until he died.”
The coyote gasped a laugh. I didn’t deserve it, but I was loved. You never told her?
Jaila remembered that one night—the blanket in the desert, the stars like sand strewn across the sky, the promises he’d whispered, the money he was saving, the plans he had. But she hadn’t seen the photos then. She hadn’t known the money was rotten, like those bodies in a hidden grave that their families would never find.
She shook her head, and the coyote sighed and was still.
They floated for a while afterward, heavy and pendulous with the dead weight of the coyote.
Ursula broke the silence. “We have to leave.”
Jaila nodded. “But we’ll never get back to where we were before.”
“We can’t stay here forever. We have to try.”
“We can’t go back together?”
Ursula hugged her. “No, little sister. You know we can’t.”
“You’ll find me?”
“Will you find me?”
Jaila gripped her shoulders. “Always,” she said, and the flame leaped from her mouth, blue and gold. It burned through the slick with the ferocity of an oil fire, and left a hole just large enough for her to jump through.
“Go!” Ursula shouted.
“But what about you?”
“Don’t worry about me. The wind will find me a way through. I have a debt, anyway, to the coyote.”
They met each other’s eyes one last time. Jaila caught herself smiling. Then Ursula pushed and Jaila tumbled, and she fell through the hole her heart had made.
* * *
She landed in a gas station bathroom in Pearsall, Texas, on broken tiles that had once been white. She recognized that sink, the broken pipe gushing water from fifteen seconds before, when she had tried to climb it to reach the window. She was wet. Her arm hurt from where she had fallen.
Federal agents were waiting for her outside. They had caught up to the bus, and she wasn’t going to escape them this time. She wasn’t going to make it to Ursula.
Jaila stood up. She peeled off her wet hoodie. It smelled, very faintly, of dried marigolds and coyote blood and the desert wind that blows down far away hills at night.
An officer pounded on the bathroom door.
“Always,” Jaila said, in the language of that place, and let him in.
“Aw, hell,” Jackie said. “You sure you didn’t eat some bad peyote or something?”
We’d been walking for a couple of hours, slowly making our way over increasingly rougher terrain. The woods had given way to rocky ground and boulders, and we’d had to backtrack a couple of times to find a path down that wasn’t so steep. Tino was out front again, but he was following Jaila’s directions, even if he wouldn’t admit it. He was a control freak, but he wasn’t stupid. Even if Jaila didn’t know exactly where we were or where we were going, she knew the general direction we needed to hike, which was more than the rest of us could say.
We picked some roots that Cody swore were wild onions, which he said he remembered from one of Doug’s lectures on what we could and couldn’t eat in the woods. Jaila said we had to be careful they weren’t death camas, but they smelled like onion, and that was good enough.
“Believe what you want,” Jaila said. “It’s just a story.”
“Did Tizoc or the coyote or whatever he was,” Georgia asked, “did he really die?”
“I said it was only a story!”
Tino started laughing. It was a dark, bitter sound that carried through the woods. “Girl falls down a well or some shit and thinks she knows how to get us back to camp.” He was shaking his head. “Come on, Jaila, talk to the wind or whatever and figure out where we are.”
Georgia shouldered up past Cody. “Leave her alone, Tino.”
“Mind your own business.”
“You really think Doug would miss you if you didn’t make it back with us?” Lucinda said. “Is there anyone back home who wouldn’t be happy if you disappeared? Keep talking and maybe we’ll find out.”
Tino snorted. “One
rich girl defending another. I’m shocked.”
“Why don’t you tell us why you’re here?” Jackie said. “What’d you do? Rob a convenience store or something?”
“Why I’m here’s none of your damn business,” he said. “But I got a story for you. I got the winning story right here.”
“A CAUTIONARY TALE”
by Stephanie Kuehn
I WAS ON THE BEACH when I met him. Dover Springs was throwing its annual Feast of Avalon party to celebrate the autumnal equinox. This tradition involved hundreds of wealthy college students playing pagan for the night. Gripping lit torches and armed with cases of beer, they’d marched off campus and down the hillside as a unified force to flood Dover Cove, that narrow sliver of beach carved along the southwest end of our midsize California coastal town, where they’d promptly set a massive bonfire ablaze. Everything after was flicker-flame and hedonistic persuasion. A drum circle pounded away near the water’s edge, a rhythmic invocation urging the toga-draped crowd to lose themselves in the sand and the darkness, to dance, drink, fight, and fuck, all beneath the bone-colored moon.
They were more than happy to oblige.
My job that night was simple enough: I was working as a student safety escort. That sounds boring, I know, but someone had to do it. It was a two-mile return hike back up to campus; Dover Springs was like a fortress, built high on a hill, overlooking the water, sequestered from the rest of the world by geography, by privilege—hell, even by iron gates. If someone felt unsafe walking alone in the darkness, I was meant to go with them and ensure they arrived back at school without getting mugged, abducted, or—the most likely scenario—passing out in their own puke before rolling into a drainage ditch to die. Of course, I wasn’t armed with a gun or pepper spray or anything other than a bright orange vest and a heavy-duty flashlight, so my role was one of illusion more than genuine protection. But that, I suppose, could be said about a lot of things.
Despite my role—or likely, because of it—I might as well have been invisible on that beach. No one bothered to speak or look at me, and the party was pretty much going full throttle by the time the stranger stumbled from the darkness. I didn’t get a chance to see where he’d come from or what he’d been doing—pissing in the sand dunes, no doubt—but I watched as he weaved his way in my direction before his legs gave out, sending him crashing to the ground, not five feet from where I was.