by Faith Hunter
Savannah sniffed. “That old woman? She may be old enough to be an Elder, but she has no wisdom or healing in her heart or hands. My father was an Elder and his father before him was a Medicine Man. I can lead you to healing of the spirit if such is possible for your kind of monster.”
Which told me that Savannah didn’t know that Sixmankiller was my grandmother. And she truly had no idea she was a skinwalker. Or how old she was. Interesting and interestinger. “And if my kind can’t be led to healing?”
“Then I will help your people take you to the top of the mountain and throw you from the heights to the rocks below.”
Well. At least she was honest.
She added shavings of wood to the fire and flame flared. The smell of cedar smoked into the room. Her eyes settled on the feather at my knees. “Where did you get the eagle feather?” she asked, though it was more a demand than a simple question.
“It was on the snow at the creek bank. I figured you put it there.”
Savannah frowned at me, her lips and jowls pulling down hard, making vertical tracks in her face. “I would never give you a primary flight feather. Mother Eagle herself gave you that feather.” Savannah snorted softly, a familiar, tribal sound, full of emotion. She clearly thought Mother Eagle had made a bad choice. “Yesterday, an eagle left me a feather. A golden eagle tail feather. That we both received a feather is a sign that we must work ceremony together.” But she didn’t sound too happy about it.
She went on. “Aggie One Feather and her mother have led you through many ceremonies and I am not certain that you can be healed. It is possible that you have walked a path into death for so long that you are no longer able to find a way to life, to healing, to Full Circle. But I will guide you as well as I am able.”
“Thank you, Lisi,” I said.
She frowned harder. “At least you have learned humility. We will start with masks.” She indicated my pelted body.
“I am willing, Lisi.”
She made a strange, ruminative sound. “Today we will talk about this mask and your totem and your guide.” She blew through her nose again, but not so hard, not so full of negativity. “You wear a mask, the mask that all others would see as the face of a monster. Two questions. Why do you not conform more to human shape? And how do you see yourself?”
“I’m dying in my human form,” I said, touching my face. It was pelted and slightly numb from the cold. “I was stupid and that stupidity gave me cancer.”
“Stupid or foolish?”
“Probably a lot of both. I’ve spent my life taking chances. That resulted in some spectacular wins and some really bad losses.”
Savannah was opening a packet of dried herbs and said nothing, so I went on.
“My skinwalker magics are my own. My . . . my totem, what I call my spirit animal, brought magics of her own,” I said, speaking of Beast without naming her. “She is a real and tangible presence inside me.”
Walkingstick didn’t disagree with my words, but I could tell she disagreed in principle. I thought about telling her that I was two-souled but let it go. If she asked, I’d tell. Maybe.
I said, “There are things I can’t talk about, because they aren’t my secrets to tell, but suffice it to say, I fought a coven of black magic witches, and their magic . . . I guess you could say it pierced me. It left a trace of darkness inside me. It’s been there for something like three years. And then, after I met rainbow dragons called arcenciels, I was given the ability to timewalk by an angel of the light, one called Hayyel.”
Savannah paused in pinching out bits of dried herbs and dropping them into a mortar for grinding, her fingers unmoving. “Dragons?” Her voice went up in pitch. “Angel? Timewalk?”
“Yeah. I can stop time. I can move outside of time. But every time I do, every time I did, I ripped my DNA. It’s shredded and doubled. When I look at my genetic structure, instead of a double helix, I see four strands. The magics and cancer that are tangled up in my human middle are in the shape of a star—a witch’s pentagram. I’m a mess. So yeah. I’m dying in my human form. I just discovered that I’m not dying in my half-form or my Beast form, so I’m staying in them for now.”
“The angel . . . You saw this being? In person? Face-to-face?”
“Yes, Lisi.”
She was silent for a while, adding herbs, but more slowly, and hesitant, as if she had lost her place. I wondered if she was a Christian or a pagan or a . . . whatever. Angels weren’t necessarily considered real by all religions. She might now think I was concussed or nutso in addition to being a monster. Not a good combo.
“You can move back in time,” she clarified. Not as if she didn’t believe me, which was odd enough, but in a hopeful tone. Her eyes lifted from her own fingers to my face, hers filled with fear and hope and grief. “You can change things that happened in the past.” Her words were laden with import, with dread and apprehension and agitation.
She saw the answer in my face, and her eyes went wider, then unfocused, her breathing shallow and fast. Her fear morphed into something different, and the scent of excitement erupted from her pores. This woman would go back into the past no matter the cost, if she could save someone, a particular loved one, who had suffered an injury or who had died unexpectedly. I nodded slowly. “There’s a high price for timewalking. And sometimes you only make things worse.”
Savannah dropped her eyes again. Her voice was without emotion when she said, “My daughter was raped by my boyfriend when she was twelve. I killed him. He was white so I went to jail for five years. You . . . You could go back and stop him.” It was hopeful and desperate.
Pain is a river in her, Beast thought, and anger like a great fire.
“I have the gift,” I said, sighing softly, my nose flaps moving. “But it’s a curse too. I can see the timelines, the possibilities of each course of action. Changing history, even recent history, has negative results, sometimes really bad outcomes. The farther back you go, changing history, the more drastic are the shifts in the timeline. And, not to be selfish, but timewalking is killing me.”
Anger burns her, Beast thought, sounding confused. Man is dead, yet anger still burns her.
That’s called hate, I thought back. And hate is never a single cut by a single blade.
Savannah breathed in and out, the sound hard and full of the tumult Beast sensed. “Aggie said taking you to ceremony would remake me. I didn’t believe her.” She sat back, and I realized she was wearing a shift like mine, having changed while I was trying to drown and freeze my butt off. Now that my nose was warmer, I smelled the smoke of native tobacco and white sage from where she had purified the sweathouse for ceremony. “If . . .” She stopped, started again. “If you could change the past for my daughter, would you?”
I studied the woman sitting on the floor in front of me. I thought about what I would do to save Angie Baby if she had been the child Savannah described. And then, understanding opened a cold fist in my chest. “If I went back and stopped him, and I told your younger self that you had sent me back to stop him, would you believe that he had tried to hurt her? Or would you get angry and tell me I was crazy and defend him?”
She jerked and whipped back an arm as if she might hit me across the flames of the sacred fire. She stopped, her arm back, her body frozen. Her eyes went wide and then closed. Moisture gathered in her lashes, glistening in the flame light.
“You knew,” I said. “You had an intuition and you ignored it. Or your daughter had complained about him and you ignored her.”
The flames popped and cracked. Savannah’s arm slowly dropped as tears trailed down her cheeks. “Chala hated him. She’d leave the room every time he was around. She was rude to him. And I didn’t listen to her. There were warning signs. But I loved him so much that I ignored them. I was stupid. I was so . . . stupid.”
“Been there. Done some stupid,” I said.
&n
bsp; “I’m a monster,” she whispered, quoting me. I said nothing and her face hardened. Savannah’s eyes opened. “I should get you another Elder. I’m not ready for this.”
“You could,” I said. “You probably should. Or”—I picked up the flight feather—“we could do this together. Long as you don’t try to hit me again,” I amended.
Savannah stuttered a laugh. “So this is a ceremony of healing for me too?” She reached over and pulled out her eagle feather from her pile of herb packets. “Tail feather,” she said, as if that was a bad thing. “Presumably I’m to be looking into the past while you’re meant to fly into the future. Selu, the corn mother, is laughing her ass off at me.”
Savannah sighed and her body relaxed. She met my eyes. “I can’t change the past. Like you, I can go only forward. Will you walk the Full Circle with me?”
“I will.”
She nodded tiredly. “Let us talk about the masks we wear, your cat and my . . . pride. And anger. And shame.”
* * *
* * *
Two hours later, we stopped and drank a decoction. It wasn’t awful. It was actually pretty good. “Aggie gives me tea that tastes like roots and twigs and silt from the bayou.”
“Aggie’s clans are from a different persuasion than mine. Aggie’s clans are from Eastern Cherokee and from Western Cherokee.” She sniffed as if that was a bad thing. “The Western band got mixed up with the Cree, the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw. Their Medicine Men and Elders took too much from other tribes, picking a bit of this and a bit of that. Their ways are not always the same as Eastern Cherokee, and their herbs are not the same. Their medicine is not the same. Besides, you seem capable of inward thought without being drugged.”
I almost said that she sounded prideful about her racial purity, but that was a mountain I didn’t want to climb.
“Tell me about the dragon,” she said.
I tossed back the cup of herbal tea. “There was a moment in my own home, when Gee DiMercy and Soul came to . . . visit. Kill me. Whatever. When I had first learned to timewalk.”
The memory came to me on the scent of musky soap like something from a brothel. And the smell of Leo Pellissier’s blood. It came in jumbled, overlapping, out-of-order images and smells and sensations, as if I was living them again and had just stabbed Leo. He’d had a silver stake in his belly, bleeding out on my floor in NOLA. Bethany, the not-quite-sane outclan priestess, had tugged the stake out of Leo. It made a gross sucking, grinding sound and black blood bubbled out after it, smelling of silver and death. The nutso priestess held her cut wrist over the open wound and blood dripped in, hers so thick it was almost congealed. Leo still looked dead. The smell of Bruiser’s blood was on the air too. He was badly injured. There were too many vamps in my home, and the ones I halfway trusted were out of action.
An odd prickling sensation had raced over me. I knew that feeling. I was still holding weapons, which I gripped more firmly, staring at the front door. “We got more company coming. L’arcenciel. Coming from thataway.” I pointed down the front street.
Eli had flipped the overturned couch over Alex and Bruiser, just as the light, brilliant as the dawning sun, glared in through the broken front door in stained-glass tints, like fireworks, but silent, no pops or sizzling.
A long alligator snout had entered, full of teeth and widened into a frilled head big as a water buffalo. A massive arcenciel, with a flicking black tongue and giant eyes, orange and bright. Her teeth were pearly and the frill on her head white and red. Soul.
Gee DiMercy sank to his knees, mumbling in a language of consonants and hoarse coughing sounds. “Soul?” I asked. “You want to tell us what’s happening?”
Her reply had been like bells ringing in an empty cathedral. “Your magics call to us. We see you in the Grayness Between Worlds. Your magics called the hatchling,” she accused. “She followed you, yet you did not protect her. You allowed her to be taken.”
“I did what?” I hadn’t known there was a hatchling, or that young ones were emotionally unstable, sometimes violent. I hadn’t protected the first hatchling on earth in millennia.
“You did not intend her harm?” Soul had asked, reading my face.
I shook my head.
“We old ones did not know there was a hatchling,” Soul said. “There have been no young ones in over seven thousand years. Now her magic has vanished.”
Gee said, “I will help you to find her and return her to the Waters of Life.”
“Come to me, little bird,” the arcenciel said. “I smell her scent on you. She bit you, yes?” Soul laughed, not unkindly. “Let’s fly together. And you can tell me all you know of the hatchling.” The memory broke up, pulling me back into the sweathouse, leaving me with a sense of something vital slipping away.
The hatchling. Not Soul’s hatchling. And the hatchling would be returned to the Waters of Life. The ocean, I had presumed, at the time. But . . . what if the Waters of Life were the Grayness Between Worlds, as Soul had called them? I needed to talk to Soul.
For now, I told Savannah some of what I knew about the dragons. Knew, not guessed, not ruminated on. The facts, ma’am. Just the facts, a line from an old TV show. I told her nothing about how to trap one or how to ride one. Nothing to bring hope to a woman so guilt-ridden and so needing to alter the past.
The Elder nodded, thoughtful, and changed the subject. “You have been many things in your life. And more than one person. Tell me all the names you have been.”
For Tsalagi, names and titles were often one and the same, so that was a lot of things. I stretched back against the oak seat, and my body crinkled with the movement, pulling and burning in each crack and crevice. My pelt was crusted with salt. I didn’t think pumas sweated, so this was all human sweat. I took a plastic bottle of water from Savannah and put it to my mouth, squeezed it flat, the water going straight down my throat. “I was given the baby name of We-sa at birth. Sometimes Gvhe. Then Dalonige’ i Digadoli, Yellowrock Golden Eyes.” I stopped.
“The white man gave you the name of Jane Doe. Later you added Yellowrock, yes?”
I nodded. Dalonige’ i meant gold, the gold dug from the mountains and found in the creeks. The gold the white man wanted so badly that he stole tribal land and sent the tribes west on the Trail of Tears. The yellow eyes because skinwalker irises were yellowish. Neither were traditional or clan names. “And I’ve been Janie and Legs and Leo’s Enforcer and Killer and Dark Queen.”
“If you could rename yourself with any word that best fits who you are now, what would it be?”
Beast is better than Jane alone and puma alone, Beast thought at me. Beast is more. Beast is us.
Ahhhh . . . , I thought. “Beast.”
“Beast. There is no Tsalagi word with the exact connotation as the English Beast. A better name might be Tlvdatsi,” Savannah suggested, “panther. Since the human part of you is dying.”
I had been a panther for far longer than I had ever been Jane, but that name was not quite right. “Beast,” I said. “Just Beast.”
The Elder tilted her head in acquiescence. “To find healing,” Savannah said softly, “we must accept what we are. For me it is to accept that I failed my child. That all my pride will always be false. That any success will always carry the taint of my failure. Do you accept that you are Beast? For the sake of healing, will you take that name for yourself for a time, as a reminder of personal sacrifice and strength?”
I breathed out a laugh, more whisper than anything else. “I’m not going to try to get that put on my driver’s license, but sure. Yes. We are Beast. Not that I know what to do with a name.”
I had slipped, but she didn’t react to the pronoun we. “There is power in self-acceptance,” she said. “In ceremony to change names.”
“Who are you, then?” I asked.
“I have been, for many years, Udalvquodi. Arro
gant,” she translated for me. “I am now Unastisgi. Crazy. I do not know what I will become after I have moved through the liminality between one part of being and the next.”
“What?” I asked, a stack of memories suddenly squirming at the back of my mind like worms on a fishhook.
At the expression on my face she went on. “All the worlds line up and down and all around, like the small pockets of a honeycomb.” Savannah held up her hands, slightly cupped, and showed how the cups of a honeycomb rest one on the others in a pattern of strength and solidarity. “You, Beast, sit in the liminality between one part of being and the next. You are becoming a new thing. Hence the ceremony name.”
“Liminality,” I whispered. “That was it.”
One of my stacked and squirming memories came clear to me. It was a conversation I had with Rick’s cousin, Sarge Walker, a pilot who lived outside of Chauvin, Louisiana, south of Houma. He’d been talking about liminal lines and liminal thresholds. I had said to him, “I’ve heard of sites and places on Earth where the fabric of reality is thin, where one reality can bleed into another. Places where the coin stack of universes meet and mesh and sometimes things can cross over from one reality to another.”
Sarge had replied, “Liminal thresholds are theoretical, the type of conjecture toyed with when physicists have drinking parties and alcohol loosens their tongues.”
“I was told that the Earth has three liminal lines. They supposedly curve across the Earth. One starts in southwest Mexico, curves across the Gulf of Mexico to Chauvin, Louisiana, then follows the Appalachians east and north in a curve like the trade winds sometimes make, but more stable, static, bigger, and smoother. Then it curves across the ocean.”
The memory faded, leaving behind the beginning of . . . something. Wisdom. A solution. A memory of an arcenciel long before current time.