Relics and Runes Anthology

by Heather Marie Adkins

  4

  For a moment, I thought the roaring in my ears was the building collapsing around me. The Hollow had only just experienced an earthquake; aftershocks could rattle the walls, send the decaying skyscraper next door onto our heads before anyone could react.

  But I realized the roaring was the sound of my life shifting. The sound of everything I knew bending and cracking at the sight of my twin dead on his bedroom floor.

  I took three hesitant steps into the room. The flashing of his TV cast the scene in a surreal glow. Blood pooled around him like liquid ebony and streaked his arms and hands.

  I clenched my fists and had to fight to steady my breathing. Step One: Don’t lose control. I eyed the scene, looking for anything out of place. If I searched the room, I didn’t have to look at Rice. Though that hardly mattered – the visual had scarred itself into my mind. I had a feeling I’d never not see his bloody body and his face slack in death. Not for the rest of my days.

  Rice was a slob, but he went about it in a comically organized way. More clothes over his armchair than in his closet; bed a messy jumble of blankets and too many pillows; and his laptop sitting open on the desk.

  Powered on. I crossed to his desk and called up the screen. His webcam portal filled the display as it always did – my brother lived for gaming.

  I wasn’t familiar with the program; other than the Com – which ran mostly on fae magick - I wasn’t very good at keeping techie things alive. The Hollow’s dial up was notoriously shitty because the lines gave preference to Coms, so it was a waste of time in my opinion.

  I found the replay button.

  His webcam had been active when the intruder entered. Rice sat on the floor beside his bed, game controller in hand and the room dark but for the television. He sat in his little world, playing away. Something changed; he straightened and looked at the open bedroom door.

  A figure appeared, bathed eerily in the light of the TV. Broad shoulders and slim hips indicated a man, though the bulky black sweatshirt, loose jeans, and black ski mask made identifiers moot.

  My brother didn’t even have time to stand. He dropped his controller and threw his hands up as the intruder leapt. The knife slashed at Rice’s hands, but he still fought, grappling with the guy valiantly.

  Rice wasn’t a warrior like me. Not to say he wasn’t strong or couldn’t hold his own, but there’s more to being a warrior than just strength and capability. Timing. Precision. Planning in the heat of the moment. You can’t teach a warrior mentality; a person either has it or they don’t.

  Rice allowed the wrong angle to open. I watched the knife nearly decapitate him.

  The intruder didn’t stick around long. He rifled through my brother’s pockets and extracted a small black object. The picture quality was too grainy to see clearly; I had no idea what could have been in my brother’s pocket that would have been enough to murder him over. Then he left, still clutching his blood-soaked knife.

  I watched my brother twitch until he fell still.

  My mouth was dry. My fingers were numb. Time for backup, especially since my knees couldn’t hold my weight and my vision had begun to dance around the edges.

  I tapped the screen on my Com and waited for dispatch to connect.

  When I first started running for the Reina, we hit it off like we’d been friends since the dawn of Senka Hollow. We hadn’t, of course. Lila was a good many years older than me. She ruled the Hollow long before I wore cloth diapers in the dust of the Res.

  So my closest friend was Shana Clayton, a sassy, street-wise detective on the Sapiens Enforcement Agency — the human answer to the Senka Enforcement Bureau. Luck had abandoned me with Rice’s murder, but offered restitution in my best friend’s chocolate gaze.

  “Oh, sugar.” Her ebony skin deepened in the light from the TV, reminding me how weird it was to be sitting in the dark with my brother’s dead body. She wrapped me in a tight embrace that smelled of cigarettes and the coconut pomade she used in her short black curls. “You okay?”

  “Yes.” I squeezed my eyes shut and took a couple deep breaths of her comforting scent and limitless energy.

  I tried to not do it regularly. Shana was human. Being around her did something for me I didn’t fully understand, not in the same way we understand why the rain falls or the planet revolves. Breathing of her presence steadied me, filled my stores. It was pure fae magic, and it was dangerous.

  Over a century had passed since the world fell apart, and Rasha, our queen, saved us from ourselves. The Undoing annihilated human and fae populations across the planet. The merging of the fae realm and the human realm depleted natural resources, as fae magic began to take more than the earth could handle. When we realized we could draw energy from the humans, and they realized they could use our magic to fuel their technology, things only got worse. It was a matter of time before we destroyed one another.

  That’s when Senka came to us. Rasha buried her daughter deep beneath the core of the city, and her goodness perpetuated everything. We found our balance. We rebuilt our home.

  But the psychological damage had been done.

  I stepped away from Shana’s embrace, feeling like a bitch for the little energy I’d taken of her.

  Having given me efficient sympathy as befitting a friend, Shana extracted a steno pad from the inner pocket of her elegantly-cut suit jacket and flipped to a blank page.

  “You’re so old school,” I joked, because it felt normal. “That’s what your Com is for.”

  Shana glanced at the slim, fae-designed watch on her wrist. “I only wear it because it’s policy.”

  “It’s meant to make your job easier.”

  “It’s meant to take the ‘human’ out of ‘interaction.’” She leveled her chocolate gaze on me pointedly.

  I grinned. “Okay, boss.”

  “Should we relocate?” Shana glanced at the arriving crime scene techs.

  The question sent a chill through me. I looked at my brother on the floor. “I’m not ready to leave him.”

  “Fair enough. Start from the top.”

  “There isn’t much to tell. I came home. He was dead. His web cam recorded the murder.” I pointed to the laptop on his desk. Tiny, pixelated versions of us stared back from the screen.

  “Convenient.” Shana made a note on her pad. “When was the last time you spoke to him?”

  I pulled up the screen on my Com and opened the phone application. “Quarter after nine tonight.”

  “Did he sound distressed or worried?”

  “No. Just hungry.” My stomach twisted. If I hadn’t taken so long at Headquarters... if I hadn’t been held up by the jacked-up door sensor and Mr. Popovich’s infernal need to parent me, maybe I would have been here. Maybe I could have saved him.

  Instead, he died hungry and alone, because I always put my job first.

  Shana seemed to decipher my thoughts. More likely, she saw the abnormal glint of tears in my eyes. “Don’t blame yourself for this.”

  I breathed deep. “Okay.”

  “Any idea who did this or why?”

  I shook my head, my gaze drifting to Rice. The CSI techs were scraping beneath his fingernails. He always kept those fucking things so long, like Senka-damned bear claws. I hoped he’d scratched skin from the guy. I hoped there was something beneath those razor-sharp talons that could figure out who did this to him.

  “The video shows the perp taking something out of Rice’s pocket,” I said, returning my gaze to Shana. “Something small. Square. Black.”

  “Any idea what it could have been?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “The evidence team will study the video. We’ll figure it out.”

  Shana’s next question filled me with more fear than the idea of life without my brother: “Are you going to tell your mother, or should I send an officer?”

  Fuck. I’d been so caught up in my own disbelief, I’d forgotten about my mother.

  The rushing in my ears was back. “Me. I’l
l tell her. She’d never forgive me if a stranger delivered the news.”

  “Do you need a ride there?”

  “No.” I needed a lot of things. I needed strength. I needed courage. I needed a few minutes to breathe, to feel the wind in my hair and my bike between my legs, before I got to the Res and broke my mother’s heart.

  Most of all, I needed my brother. But that was no longer an option.

  5

  An infinity’s worth of stars blanketed an indigo sky, and Haseya Nez waited for me outside her pueblo.

  Call it a mother’s intuition, or a wise woman’s third eye. Or maybe a Chieftess’s sixth sense that life had gone akimbo and her daughter rode in on a Ducati with bad tidings.

  The night hung still and breathless after I cut the engine. My heart pounded as I dug my messenger bag from beneath the seat. I wanted to delay the moment when I would have to catch up to the worry on my mother’s handsome face and give her a reason to cry.

  “Shich'é'é.” Her voice carried the weight of the sky and the power of our clan.

  My daughter.

  I kept my back to her. Tension settled in all the crevices of my body. I would rather assassinate a dozen shadow-touched in the name of the Hollow than tell my mother her son had been murdered. Not now, not after she’d already lost so much.

  “Shich'é'é.” Her voice was closer. Behind me. She touched my bare shoulder, her fingers warmer than the desert night.

  I let go then. I let the horror and anguish take up residence inside me, and I turned to fall into my mother’s arms as if I were an awéé’, a baby at her breast seeking comfort and a promise that life would be okay.

  I towered over my mother by a foot, but when she rocked me, I felt as if the world could not reach me through the circle of her embrace. Many years from now, I knew I would feel the same, even as her body withered and her hair grew white and the wrinkles cradling her eyes grew into canyons.

  “What has happened, shich'é'é?”

  The rumble of her voice penetrated my grief. Warmth begin to shimmer from her fingertips as she worked magick on me, tiny rivers of light pooling into my back from her fingers.

  “Breathe, Maurelle. You are safe.” She grasped my shoulders and gently pushed me away to search my face.

  Her long black braid cascaded down her bosom, peppered with silver and entwined with feathers and leather cords of turquoise beads. She was short, but muscular and wiry. She thrummed with power, so much so I waited for the day flowers would begin to bloom beneath her feet. My mother was warrior and mage. I envied her that balance. The warrior took so much of me that little was left for the mage.

  Her dark eyes gazed through me. Beneath the indigo sky, on land sacred to my people, she could reach into me and know me. “Maurice?”

  “Shimá...” My voice cracked. My mother.

  “How?”

  “Murder.”

  In an eerily calm voice, my mother said, “Come. I will make you hominy.”

  Until I left my mother’s home, I never realized how small a universe the Res could be. All of my mother’s love and my formative years resided in less than seven hundred square feet: three tiny bedrooms and a combination kitchen-slash-living area.

  I sat at the crude wooden table my father had carved by hand years before I came squalling into the world. Mama put a kettle on to boil and filled two mugs with her delicious homemade chai powder. She lit a second burner on the stove and placed a saucepan over the flame, then lifted the rock in the floor, beneath which our limited perishables sat. She removed a clay pitcher and emptied heavy cream into the saucepan.

  Then she threw the pitcher on the dirt floor.

  I jumped to my feet, astonished as the pitcher shattered into fragments of her anger.

  “It is that... place,” she snarled, losing her calm placidity. “Those anarchists he joined. They spread hate and lies and dissention.” She opened a cabinet as if she hadn’t just lost her shit and reached for the hominy jar. “Do you want cinnamon, shich'é'é?”

  “Yes, please.” I stooped to clean up the broken shards. “I don’t think his friends would have killed him, Mama.”

  “Not his friends, Maurelle. The people he opposed.”

  “The government? Mother, are you seriously implying the government had Rice killed?” I tipped two handfuls of shattered pottery into the trash, and tried not to think of the time and effort once put into the forging – a waste of someone's talents. I returned to my chair, but remained poised on the edge of the seat in case my mother pulled another Mr. Hyde And went for the good China next.

  Mama shot me a stony look and sprinkled cinnamon into the hominy and cream mixture. “If not the government, who shall I blame? You? With your dangerous job and all the enemies you have made?”

  I bit my tongue to avoid lashing out at her in self-defense. The very thought that my job could have brought murder to my doorstep made me numb with fear. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Rice’s death had been meant for me. Was the assassin sent to murder me, but in my absence, chose my brother instead?

  Or worse still, had my brother been a pawn in some kind of power play against me?

  Mama dipped a wooden spoon into the saucepan and stirred the now-steaming concoction. Cinnamon laced the warm air. “Senka Hollow is poison, Maurelle. You must get out before it poisons you, too.”

  “Mama, it’s not poison. Right now, things are just... difficult.”

  “Difficult, she says!” Mama called. “Our tribe is a nation of its own, Maurelle Nez, yet word has still reached us of unrest in the Hollow.” She turned down the heat to let the hominy simmer. As she poured hot water from the kettle over our chai, she went on. “We have heard rumor of division in the council, spurred by difficulties between the Rein and Reina. Civil war is impending. The stars show me.”

  “The stars don’t show you war in the Hollow, Mama.” Though how could she know about Lila and Everett? As Lila’s one and only confidante, I often found myself privy to all the darkness seeping through their marriage. But their fighting wasn’t common knowledge.

  At least, it shouldn’t have been.

  “The Diné are crucial to the fragile balance of harmony that exists on Earth,” my mother intoned. She placed a mug before me on the uneven surface of the table. “Both the Diné of the fae and the Diné of the humans. We are vital to the balance of good and evil.”

  Oh, this conversation. I knew this one by heart. I wrapped my hands around the warm mug. I breathed deep of the spicy scent, my mouth watering and my heart aching at the sweet innocence of my mother’s delicacies. The scent recalled days when Rice and I roamed the Res, planning dreams bigger than the desert sky.

  Mama returned to the stove. “We raise our youth to know this, Maurelle. To know what important role you play in keeping our Earth healthy. Yet our children continue to abandon the reservation to live in that poisonous place. This is what happens when you do not listen to your elders.”

  “Mama, the fact that a few people left the Res for the Core doesn’t mean we’ve broken the balance of the world. The fae did that well on their own during the Great War.”

  “We have been in conference with the human Diné,” Mama said as if I hadn’t spoken. She set my plate next to my mug. “We must reunite our tribes and save our children from the poison of Senka.”

  “Senka is not poison!” I slammed a hand on the table. My mother and I stared one another down for a long, breathless moment. Her slight but muscular form loomed over me. I couldn’t remember a time I’d ever raised my voice at her in anger.

  Senka was my savior. She was the deity we worshipped in the Hollow. And yes, I knew her power was fading. I knew the outskirts had become shadow touched and dangerous. But she was still my princess. My goddess.

  No one, not even my slightly frightening mother, could get away with calling my princess poison.

  Mama finally relented and sank wearily into her chair. “Let us forget the Hollow for a moment. You cannot remain
in that apartment, shich'é'é. It is no longer safe. Your brother died in your home. His spirit will linger, as will the negativity left behind from his murder. The building is now cursed.”

  I spooned hominy, closing my eyes so I didn’t have to see her earnest gaze. “Mama, its not cursed anymore than the Hollow is poison.” My first bite loosened the tension in my shoulders better than any shot of whiskey.

  “The old laws stand, Maurelle, even when your faith does not. Maurice's death has cursed that building sure as you and I sit here. You must get out before the curse claims you.”

  A familiar tick picked up in my left eye. “I’m not leaving the Hollow, Mama.”

  “You must return one day anyway, Maurelle.” She smiled benignly behind her mug. “You will be the next chieftess of this clan.”

  From one usual disagreement to another. And my mother wondered why I never came to visit.

  She went on. “We have heard another rumor. One that suggests Senka may have risen.”

  My heart thudded in my chest. I forced my face to reveal nothing, even as the giant crevice in Senka’s tomb flashed in my mind. “What do you know?”

  “The earthquake cracked the earth.” Mama sipped her chai. Her eyes glazed as she looked inward. I recognized the look; my mother could step from this world into the astral plane with little more than a prayer. “Senka is awake. Darkness is coming.”

  “Mama, don’t be so dramatic. Senka has been dead for a hundred years. The quake just shook things up in the tomb. Maintenance will have a hell of a time fixing things, but they will.”

  “No, shich'é'é.” My mother grabbed my hand. I jumped, my fork falling into my bowl. “Senka has been slumbering for a hundred years. Now, she wakes.”

  6

  My mother left the pueblo to bring news of Rice’s murder to the Elders, the small council that governed the tribe. I had offered to accompany her and been resolutely turned down.