by Faith Hunter
Aggie made a long-suffering sound, half sigh, half snort, something I remembered from The People, the Tsalagiyi, a sound that was pure Cherokee, and I smiled, relaxing at the familiar noise. On the back porch Uni Lisi was sitting on a deeply upholstered chair, a bowl of bean pods on the table in front of her, shelling them fast, her knobby hands flying through the beans, pinching off the ends and stripping the string down the side of the pods, exposing the plump beans inside, tossing them into a bowl, and dropping the empty shells on the table. It seemed like a lot of work when they could buy beans in a can, but I didn’t say that either. She paused in her shelling and gestured me to the table. “Come. Come, Jane. Sit.” I sat across from her, my little paper bag on my lap.
Aggie placed a glass of sweating tea in front of her mother, a single mint leaf in the bottom; two identical glasses went to the side. One was clearly mine. “Jane says Queenie is going to give us kittens soon.”
“Oh?” Uni Lisi leaned over and studied the cat. “We have to get her a basket and a blanket. That big pink one in the corner of my room. Make her a place on the porch so she doesn’t take the babies off. Good to see you, Jane. Go get the basket, Aggie.” Uni Lisi drank her tea and smacked her lips. I had never heard the old woman so chatty. “Drink,” she commanded. At her gesture I drank too, the tea so sweet it coated the inside of my mouth, good Southern tea, one-third sugar, the rest tea so dark it looked like bayou water. It was delicious. I tried to think of something to say, as the old woman went back to shelling beans. “We gonna have some kittens,” the old woman said, as if I didn’t already know. “You want a kitten?”
“Um, thank you, no,” I said, with my best Christian children’s home manners.
Aggie carried the pink basket back onto the porch. It was really pink—flamingo—with a pink bow on top. The basket was about three feet wide, with a huge hoop handle, the biggest basket I had ever seen, and Aggie placed it at Uni Lisi’s feet. The blanket Aggie set inside was fleece, yellow with red and green polka dots all over it, a color combo that was . . . interesting at best. Queenie walked past, her tail high, and hissed at me, warning me to stay away. She leaped gracefully into the basket and began pawing the blanket into submission, ignoring me totally now. Aggie sat beside me and drank her tea, sighing once as she eyed the cat. “Kittens,” she murmured with disgust.
“I brought you gifts,” I said. I tilted up the paper bag, and two small foil-wrapped packages fell into my hand, each one tied with hemp string. I placed the silver foil–wrapped one in front of Aggie, and the gold foil–wrapped one in front of Uni Lisi. The old woman clapped her hands together like a child and began tearing at the paper. Aggie took hers and untied the string. They both got them open at the same time. Both women made little oohing and aahing sounds as they lifted their necklaces to the light.
“I’d have brought them to you on my last visit, but I didn’t come inside.”
Uni Lisi swatted her daughter’s hand. “You should have brought her inside. She had presents.” Aggie looked at me under her brows and I stifled a grin.
“The amethyst came from a small mine near the Nantahala River,” I said, “on Cherokee land. A Cherokee silver artist named Daniel Running Bear did the silver work. Daniel Yonv Adisi. I found the silver chains online and they probably came from China. They should be long enough to just put over your head,” I finished. I had planned that part carefully, remembering the older woman’s knobby hands, but if I had seen her shelling beans, I’d have just bought her a short chain and let her use the clasp.
Aggie and her mother draped their necklaces over their heads in gestures that looked choreographed, the twin actions of people who had lived together for many years. Aggie looked at me with a smile, the first one I had seen on her face today. “They are beautiful. Thank you, Dalonige i Digadoli.”
“Oh yes. This is pretty. Pretty, pretty!” Uni Lisi patted her amethyst between her shrunken breasts. “I like purple.”
I nodded formally to each of them. “You are welcome, Egini Agayvlge i, Uni Lisi.”
“Mama, you wanted to tell Jane about your dream.”
“Yes.” The old woman nodded, her hands busy once again with the beans. “I have many dreams as I get older. Some are nothing. Some are something. This one was something.” A prickling ran up the back of my neck, as if cobwebs trailed across me. I placed the tea glass on the table, my hands curled around it, wet with condensation, cold from the ice. Uni Lisi drank again, her lips making that smacking sound when she was done. She reached down and stroked the cat, feeling along her belly. Queenie rolled over and let the old woman feel of her stomach. “Fat kittens. I count four. Maybe more.” She looked at me again. “You sure you don’t want a kitten?”
I shook my head, waiting on the dream. The dreams of the elders were important, not to be ignored.
“This dream was strange, even for me. It was about a man hanging over a fire.”
I stilled, slowly dropping my hands into my lap, my tea glass forgotten. “A white man?”
She nodded, returning to the beans. “Dirty. Naked. He had a beard, like he needed to shave. His mustache was longer, like he had it first. Brown hair. Brown hands. He was dead. He had been cooked over a slow fire for many hours.” She looked at me from under her brows. “This was not the way of Tsalagiyi. Not the way of The People. This was the way of the Mohicans, maybe. Or the Creek. Savages. Not Tsalagiyi.” She nodded once, firmly, her hands flying through the beans. “Not Tsalagiyi.”
If I thought it was strange for a member of one tribe to call another tribe savages, I didn’t show it. I kept still, waiting on the rest of the dream. Uni Lisi drank again, smacked again, and said, “There was an old woman standing beside the fire. She was wearing a long dress, blue or gray, and her hair was in braids down her back. She was holding a stick, the end sharpened and black from the fire. She poked the body and it didn’t bleed.” She pointed one knobby finger at me, her black eyes throwing back the light, like faceted stones. “When Aggie takes you to sweat, you will think on this.” She looked at her daughter. “Take her now. I’ll finish the beans and take a nap on the couch with Queenie. We gonna have us some kittens tonight, I think. Go, go.” She shooed us with her hands.
I stood, my knees feeling weak at the vision Uni Lisi had seen. Aggie made the sighing-snorting sound again and said, “Go to the sweathouse. I’ll be there shortly.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Bitsa Alone Could Wake the Undead
Once again I was sitting in the sweathouse, feeding kindling to the fire. The coals had been smoldering beneath a heavy layer of ash when I entered, and I had uncovered them, fed them twigs, then larger pieces. The rocks were heated, and the smudge basket was full of smudge sticks. It was as if they had known I was coming. Considering the dream, they probably had. I had started to sweat long minutes past, and had a steady trickle going when Aggie entered and closed the door on the rest of the world. She sat beside me, and I could feel her eyes on me. I kept mine on the fire, letting the flames steal my vision in the dark hut. More minutes passed. I was sweating freely and stewing in my own irritation when Aggie finally spoke.
“We have spoken of your soul house, of the cavern that drips with moisture, lit by flickering firelight, the place of your earliest memories.”
I nodded to show I knew what she was talking about. It was the cavern where I made my first shift into we sa, the bobcat, when I was a child of maybe five. When Aggie took me back into my own memories it was to this place I most often went.
“You carry anger around in your soul home like a trapped storm cloud full of thunder and lightning and heavy rain,” she said, her voice a murmur. “Your spirit overflows with that anger. This anger is too large for you to contain, and it is compressed within you.”
She fell silent while I envisioned the darkness within me, and the storm she could see there. She was right. It was a raging storm, bigger than Katrina, more destructive than Hurricane Andrew, trapped there, inside me.
In
the sweathouse, the fire crackled and spat, stealing energy from the wood with a soft hiss. “Do you want to tell me about the anger?” she asked.
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Fed the fire. Aggie waited. I had the feeling that she would wait until nightfall and say nothing else. She had given me an opening and now it was my turn, to take or not. “I killed a man in my hotel room in Asheville. I didn’t see a gun—it was down at his side—but I reacted to the threat I sensed, the fear I felt, and I shot him. He died. Only after he fell did I see that he was carrying a gun with a sound suppresser on it.” Aggie’s expression didn’t change; even her scent stayed the same, calm and waiting. “I found out later that he was only there to look me over in preparation to challenging me to a fight of some sort. And now all the vamps and blood-servants in the Southeast are in danger. Because I killed a man.”
After a long moment, during which Aggie added a log to the fire, she said, “He was only there to look at you? He could have done that in a restaurant. On the street. Anywhere. He came into your hotel room? With a gun in his hand?” I nodded. “Then perhaps he was going to kill you and slip away, so he didn’t have to challenge you.”
My head snapped up. I met Aggie’s eyes and she laughed at whatever was on my face. She shrugged, as if to say, “It’s just a thought,” but she said nothing.
Some of the shadow I carried fell away from my shoulders. “Thank you,” I said. Aggie shrugged again. “In your heart, you knew this. It is only part of your darkness.”
“Last night, Leo Pellissier and his heir forced a feeding on me. To bind me to them.”
Aggie didn’t flinch, but I smelled her reaction: surprise, anger, and something deeper. She was protective of me. That lifted my hurt even more, and the darkness was no longer so heavy. I took a breath and it felt clean and fresh, like the way air felt coming out of a cavern. The breath of the earth. The breath of my soul house, my spirit place, moving again, no longer blocked.
“I had stupidly claimed to be Leo’s Enforcer, a position that requires sharing of blood, and sometimes sex, in a binding ceremony. When I made the claim, it was to protect myself and others, and I had no idea it involved any kind of sharing. When it first happened, I wouldn’t let him bind me, but now that he’s facing a new threat, a bigger threat, he took what I’d verbally given him.”
“And are you bound by this vampire?”
“Not so much. It isn’t permanent.” But it should be. I didn’t say that part. “I’m angry. He had no right. It was an assault. And I have no legal recourse.”
“Because under this Vampira Carta you have told me of, you gave him certain rights over you when you came into his employ.” I nodded. “Rights you did not understand.” I nodded again. “But once you knew of these rights, you still remained in his employ.”
I didn’t nod this time. Aggie had hit the nail on the head. I had known a forced feeding could happen. I stayed because the money was good. Because I was curious about vamps, and had allowed myself to get caught up in their lives and society. And maybe for other reasons I didn’t yet understand, reasons that had to do with my own forgotten past. “I was stupid,” I said, now hearing my bitterness.
Aggie cocked her head, letting me think it through. She shifted and resettled her legs. “And now you are conflicted, because you gave him the rights over your body and blood, but you never expected him to take them.”
“Yeah. That about covers it. It proves I’m pretty stupid, doesn’t it?”
“A scorpion’s nature is to sting. A raptor’s nature is to rend and tear flesh. Did he do that which was normal and right according to his nature?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“And your nature is to protect and to serve. Did you do that which was normal and right according to your nature?”
“Yes,” I said again, my brows coming together. There was so much wrong with that line of thought. It’s the nature of a serial killer to trap and torture humans. It’s the nature of a pedophile to touch children. But nature doesn’t make everything right. It’s often just an excuse. Yet understanding one’s own nature is often a first step to personal growth. All this psychological crap was making me irritable.
As if she sensed my irritation, Aggie changed course. “Will you leave his employ?”
I thought about Leo. And Bruiser. And the other humans I had met and liked. “I should. I don’t know. I have to think about that.”
“If you stay, it will be with eyes wide open now. Fully adult and fully informed.”
“Yes. I understand.” I shook my head and started to rise.
“There is still an angry darkness inside you.” Aggie leaned back and relaxed, her eyes serene, like a nun’s, like a woman who had made her choices and was okay with them. Not anything like me. “This anger is perhaps the core of who you are. It storms in the very center of your being, and it forms the basis of every decision you have ever made. We should look at this anger.”
After a moment I said, “I made a vow when I was five years old.” Aggie waited, implacable, resting in that enveloping sense of peace. “I made a vow to kill the men who murdered my father and raped my mother.” To give her credit, Aggie didn’t flinch at the bald statement. I eased back to the floor, my heels and butt on the cool clay. “I put my hands in my father’s cooling blood.” I put out my left hand as I had done as a child, to show her. “And I wiped it down my face.” I lifted my hand, palm facing me, and dragged it down my face, slowly, feeling again my father’s blood, sticky. The air cool as it hit the streaks of blood on my cheeks and forehead. “And I promised to kill them. I looked them in the face, silently, but promising that they would die. I was only five. I thought I hadn’t succeeded. Until I remembered the bearded man hanging over a fire circle.” This time, Aggie sat forward, her pupils wide in the firelight, her mouth opening slightly. “He was the yunega in my memory. There was an old woman, my grandmother. She poked him with a stick. I want to remember that. All of it. I think that is part of the dark, angry place inside.”
“Anger, building and storming,” Aggie said. I nodded. “Okay.” She put on the music, a wood flute, playing a haunting melody. She lifted a heavy, earthen pitcher and dripped water over the hot rocks with a ladle. It hissed and spat. Steam rose, the air growing close and humid. My sweating increased instantly. Aggie passed me a bottle of water and I opened the top and drank. The water tasted bitter, and I stopped midswallow, watching her. “It’s got a little something in it to help you remember,” she said. I grunted and finished the bottle, draining it.
Aggie took the empty and chose a smudge stick from the basket. She lit the end. A bitter, acrid smell filled the steamy room. I breathed in. Closed my eyes. Time passed.
The room grew much lighter, as if the door was open. I turned to it, and saw an old woman enter. She was wearing a shift, coarsely woven cotton over her naked body, bony legs showing beneath, her feet bare. “The yunega is dead,” she said. “Come.”
I stood, the clay floor chilling the soles of my bare feet. I was wearing a blue dress, which I saw in glimpses as I walked out of the house, down the trail to the small clearing. I kept my eyes low as we entered the open space. In the center of it was a circle of white quartz stones, with gray rocks inside and the remains of a fire—ashes and one blackened log. Something black hung above the cold fire. It dripped once, a drop of reddish water trickling down and falling into the ashes. I let my eyes rise to the blackened stumps. They had once been feet. Now they were scorched meat, with blisters above in the scarlet flesh. The skin had split and wept. I let my eyes rise up the man’s body.
His upper thighs were red and covered with dried blood. I smelled burned hair, and saw little blackened curls of hair on his skin. His manhood was gone, leaving only a patch of raw meat. I remembered his scream when it was removed—a long ululating wail. Above the wound was a white belly, hanging and slack, like a fish belly. His chest had brown nipples and hair, like the stomach of a dog. Men of Tsalagiyi did not have so much hair on
their chests. Only the yunega had hair all over their bodies, like dogs or rats. My father’s chest had been smooth when I dipped my hand into his blood.
The white man who raped my mother hung from sharpened deer antlers that had been shoved through his shoulders. His hands were tied behind his back with rope. Lank hair, the color of acorns, fell forward, half hiding his bearded face. He had had no beard, only the mustache when Uni Lisi captured him. Now his face was scruffy, like a bear, with hair. His blue eyes were open and dry, staring down at his body. His mouth was open in a silent scream. With my skinwalker nose, I could smell his blood and the stink of rot, but white men always smelled of rot and unwashed bodies. “Are you sure he is dead, Elisi?” I asked.
Elisi picked up a stick from the fire and stabbed him. “He no longer bleeds.”
“Do we eat him?”
“No. Skinwalkers do not eat the bodies of our enemies. It is forbidden. It makes us sick.”
I nodded and turned away. “Good,” I said. I looked up at the leaves in the trees. They were golden and scarlet, with patches of blue sky showing through. “And the other one?” I asked.
“He is next.”
* * *
I swam back up from the vision of fall leaves and blue sky. I was gasping and wet with sweat. The thin cloth tied above my breasts and hanging to my knees was soaked and limp as I shoved up with my elbows against the clay floor. “Elis—” I stopped, my throat so dry I couldn’t speak. Aggie handed me another bottle of water. I opened it and drank it down, and nothing had ever tasked so good.
A demon had told me recently that I had never taken vengeance on my enemies. That he had killed my grandmother in the snow, as he had killed many of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. The demon had lied. A laugh escaped my mouth, half hysterical with shock. The demon had lied. Fierce joy threaded through me, weaving into my soul. “Elisi killed him. My grandmother killed him.”
Aggie nodded slowly. “Your grandmother was a warrior woman, like those of old.” There was no condemnation in the tones. “Did you see it? Did she make you watch his death?”