Relics and Runes Anthology

by Heather Marie Adkins

  “This is tribal business,” my mother snapped. “You have made it quite clear you are not interested in such.”

  After she flounced out the door like a child who'd won the last word, I abandoned my hominy only half-eaten. I'd lost my appetite somewhere between poison and ancestral duties.

  As I passed down the hall, headed towards my old bedroom in the back of the pueblo, a voice called my name.

  A familiar face poked from the crack of an open doorway. Huge dark eyes peered from a deeply suntanned face and a mane of wild ebony curls.

  Warmth flooded me. I walked to my little sister and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her so completely into me that her tiny feet dangled over the floor. She smelled clean, with a hint of Mama's homemade lotion. “Mai. My little flower.”

  “Were you and Mama fighting?” she asked, voice muffled against my neck as she squeezed me tightly. Mai was all angles and bones, like me at age ten, and she felt infinitely fragile in my arms. But where I'd remained hard and tough, there was something much more delicate and lovely about her; somewhere in the heart shape of her face or the brightness of her smile. She carried less weight in the world than I had.

  “No, little flower. Mama and I weren’t fighting. We were having a discussion.” I nudged the door open with a boot and entered her cozy room, Mai still swinging from my embrace. The covers were clean but rumpled on her small bed, where a handmade stuffed animal — that might have been a rabbit at some point in its adventurous life — waited. I deposited her softly on the messy blankets and tickled her ribs until she screeched.

  “Stop! Stop!”

  Her giggles and her futile attempts to shove me away banished the turmoil inside me, if only for a moment.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, and we linked fingers.

  “I missed you, shilah,” Mai said sleepily. Sis. “You stay away so long.”

  “Work keeps me busy, flower.” I traced a fingertip over her delicate knuckles. At ten years old, Mai was fourteen years younger than me and Rice. Life hadn’t yet hardened her skin or her eyes. I hoped it never would. “You must have grown five feet since I saw you last.”

  Mai giggled. “Liar.”

  “I am not. You’re a giant among the Diné!”

  Mai rolled to her side, tucking a hand beneath her cheek. Her long black hair splayed wildly around her and over her: a blanket in and of itself. “Tell me a story, shilah.”

  I kicked off my boots and scooted to rest my back against the wall beside her.

  She wrapped an arm over my tank top and laid her cheek on my abdomen. Her breath tickled the bare skin of my stomach beneath the hem of my shirt, as she said, “Tell me how Rasha beat Acura.”

  I smiled, even though she couldn’t see it. My mother didn’t like sharing stories of the Hollow. The Hollow’s history was not the history of our people, she would say.

  But it was. It is. And telling my little sister a bedtime story felt so much easier than telling her Rice was gone.

  “A very long time ago, the fae and the humans existed on separate worlds. We didn’t know they existed, and they didn’t know we existed. But the two races unknowingly drew power from one another. Our magic gave energy to the earth, which helped the humans survive, and the humans took care of the earth, which in turn gave us energy for our magick.”

  “I bet it was beautiful.”

  “It was,” I agreed, brushing a hand over her hair. “For a time. But the fae had a problem much bigger than we could handle.”

  “The dark fae.” Mai pulled a face and turned enough to look up at me. “They ruined it.”

  “They did. The dark fae grew more and more, until they overran our realm. They elected a leader, Acura, a horrible, nasty fae man with a thirst for power and no regard for the sanctity of life. Our queen, Rasha of the Light, knew something must be done to save us.”

  “We went to war.”

  “We did. An awful war that nearly killed off our kind. We eliminated Acura, but his essence infiltrated everything. The residual darkness seeped into everything in our realm and everything in the human realm.”

  “That’s when the Undoing happened?”

  “You got it, little flower. The barrier that separated us from the humans collapsed. We lost the balance we had held for so long. Both races became one, and the earth began to die. We had no wind. Precious little water. Soil bore no fruit, and oxygen began to grow scarce as all the plants and trees withered.”

  “The humans started hunting us.”

  “They did, but for good reason, little flower. Never forget that. The dark fae were taking all the energy to fuel their power. Even the good fae were unknowingly drawing more than they meant to. To the humans, we were a threat to their existence. So they came after us.”

  “But they used us for their own means,” Mai reminded me, as if I didn’t know. “It worked both ways, shilah.”

  “You are right again, flower!” I tweaked her nose. Her grin lit up the room like the corn-oil lamp on her bedside table. “Do you remember what happened next?”

  “Rasha gave us Senka.”

  “Rasha gave us all her daughters in thirteen places around the world. Senka is ours. Her power keeps us safe.”

  “Mama says something is wrong with Senka. Is something wrong with Senka, shilah?” Her sweet face looked so worried, brow wrinkled and small, thin lips tight with a frown.

  I couldn’t lie to her. “It’s possible, Mai. We don’t know for sure. Things have been changing.”

  “The shadow touched.” Her eyes were closed now as sleep began to claim her.

  I nodded, sad that my kid sister knew about them. I kissed her forehead, and gently extracted myself from her bed. “Get some sleep, flower. I’ll be here in the morning when you wake.”

  Before I closed the door, I glanced behind me one more time. Mai clutched her stuffed rabbit in one arm and twirled a lock of hair around a finger, her eyes closed. She looked so beautiful. So perfectly normal and healthy.

  First, my father. Then Rice. Mai was yet another piece of my heart that could be taken at any minute.

  Exhaustion shut down my body the moment I fell into my old bed. I slept fitfully for several hours, cast in dreams of Rice’s sightless eyes and Senka’s gaping tomb. Through it all, the scent of clove cigarettes, and Warren’s steady voice: “You have a long night ahead of you. I’ll see you again real soon.”

  I awoke to the purple hush before dawn, clove smoke still lingering in my senses. I didn’t bother with shoes, or pants to cover my boy shorts, as I silently left the pueblo and walked east.

  I walked until the pueblo — and the village beyond — were still in sight but far enough away to feel remote. I found a bare patch of dusty ground and sat cross-legged, gazing into the eastern sky as I awaited the sun.

  I’d spent most of my life only miles from the Rim. Growing up on the Res, a girl learned early to block out the darkness that crept in from that empty place. It’d been a while since I’d sat here and felt that niggling pressure. Could have been my imagination, but it seemed stronger now. More potent. I saw Senka’s grave in my mind, and I shuddered.

  I closed my eyes, listening to the waking birds and bugs of the desert. I gathered my energy: the ball of power and magick within me that made me fae, that could manipulate reality and emotions. Piece by piece, I bricked up the walls that kept the darkness out. I’d started doing it as a girl, and I kept a semi-barrier between me and the darkness erected every day, especially when tracking a mark in the Rim. But I hadn’t built the big wall in a while. I hadn’t needed to while I lived so close to Senka.

  Power buzzed through me. I could no longer sense the darkness, and it could no longer sense me.

  I opened my eyes to watch the sun rise.

  My mother’s absolution that Rice had died because of the Insurgentia echoed through me. He’d taken up with them six months ago after the first riot. A human kid, no more than a teenager, threw a Molotov Cocktail through the plate glass window of a fa
e man’s business. The place burned to the ground. The fae man was a member of Senka’s High Council.

  The gauntlet had been thrown.

  The Insurgentia didn’t believe the council had remained as balanced as Rasha had intended when she put the Hollows into motion a hundred years ago. They believed the council was corrupt and biased, giving preference to the fae as “higher beings.”

  Rice believed in their mission: to bring peace and balance back to the Hollow. He’d expressed concerns to me about the execution of their mission, but he’d thrown himself into it like he was chasing religion.

  I didn’t think the fae were better than the humans; not by a long shot. I blamed my own race for the current world we lived in. Quite frankly, I didn’t give a fuck whether you were human or fae, as long as you weren’t shadow touched. Once Acura’s residual darkness had infiltrated you, human or fae, you were the enemy.

  I loved my brother’s passion, though. Not just for the Insurgentia. Rice never lived anything halfway. If he threw his lot in with something, he did it at one-hundred-and-ten-percent. Training at the SEB had taught me doing something so blindly and completely could be a horrible weakness. Maybe that was why my brother was dead now.

  But with Rice... I guess I never saw it as weakness in him. I saw it as a strength, one to be admired. My passion extended to capturing other people to be sentenced to death. What did that say about me?

  I closed my eyes on my tears. I didn’t want to cry again. To lose control, as I had done in my mother’s arms last night.

  My grief is the desert, endless and interminable.

  I needed to stay strong and steady. I had work to do.

  I am lost and alone.

  I stayed there, lost in limbo between tears and my need for strength, as the sun’s rays began to spread over the Res.

  Mama awoke as I was sneaking out the door to leave.

  “Where are you going, shich'é'é?” she asked quietly, knotting the tie of her yellow bathrobe. The color looked stunning on her. “You have just arrived. We have much to plan for your brother’s funeral.”

  I swallowed hard at those words. An ache opened inside me where my brother’s heart had once beat alongside mine.

  “I won’t be gone long. I have to go to work.” It was a half-truth. I did have to go to work and check in with Lila, plus I needed to start tracking down my next mark.

  But I also had to pay a visit to the Insurgentia.

  “You will return, shich'é'é?” Mama’s question was straightforward, but the look in her eyes was not. The look in her eyes told me she expected me to vanish, to avoid my responsibilities to the tribe as I had done too many times in the past.

  I backtracked and hugged her, an internal plea passing between us: Please trust me, Shimá.

  Her tight embrace returned her own plea: Please don’t let me down, shich'é'é.

  “I’ll be back,” I promised.

  The desert sun had grown hot in the time it took me to dress and get my things. I tossed my messenger bag in the seat compartment of my bike, and then tossed a leg over.

  “Relle.”

  Shit. I fought the urge to groan out loud, kick the bike to life, and spew gravel as I roared away from the man I had once been engaged to marry.

  Tohyah Yazzie was shirtless and sweaty, a sheath of broken cornstalks flung casually over one muscled shoulder. He didn’t have a stunning face, or even a remarkable one, but he had the chiseled body of a god and he was incredible in bed. And he was so fucking nice. He was the material for a perfect husband.

  And the biggest reason I left the Res.

  His chocolate gaze drifted over me, taking in my thigh holster and the way my tank top exposed my belly button. He chewed thoughtfully on a grain of wheat. “I’m sorry to hear about your brother. Mo was a good man.”

  “He hated that nickname.”

  Tohyah grinned around the wheat and tossed a lock of black hair from his forehead. “Yeah, I know.” His smile faded. “How is Haseya?”

  “Planning a funeral while also planning to carry me back here kicking and screaming.”

  “It’s not safe in the city.”

  “You’ve never even been to the city.”

  He inclined his head in agreement. “You look good, Relle. Real good.”

  Heat crept up my neck, and it had nothing to do with the desert.

  “You should stay a while.”

  Dammit, why did he have to look so good?

  “There’s nothing for me here,” I told him. I started the bike, drowning out anything else he might have said with the angry rumble of my Ducati.

  7

  I had driven Old Reservation Road so many times, I could likely have done it in my sleep.

  But something felt different today. The sky, though sapphire blue, seemed pale and colorless. The sun, shining as hot as a desert sun could shine, barely warmed me. The air tasted different. The ride didn’t thrill me, even as I sped beyond the legal limits and roared towards the city skyline at a reckless pace.

  I was half awake. Half alive.

  My other half was dead, and with him, parts of me.

  I swung by Headquarters and showered off the dust of the Res in the gym bathroom. Lacking a hair dryer, I opted to twist my unruly mane into a thick bun and secure it with a band. I never pulled my hair up. The air brushed cold and alien against my bare neck.

  One of my earliest memories of my father was also my most vivid. I was five. Maybe four. We sat cross-legged in the dirt, knee to knee. Rice had a cold, so I got a precious few days without his presence, where my father’s attention could be solely on me.

  He was showing me something with twine. That part of the memory is unclear. But his shining black hair hung loose and free around his body, the soft ends trailing against the desert floor. I reached out and touched the mass with my tiny fingers.

  Papa laid the twine in his lap. He mimicked my touch, grasping a gentle handful of my own long hair. “Sitsi’, your hair is power. Every strand is an extension of your body. Every strand is a nerve that can send warning to you. Leave it long. Leave it loose. It will serve you well.”

  When we buried him, we left his hair loose: a puddle of silky black around his strong shoulders.

  I didn’t have clean clothes, so I beat the dust from my jeans and tank top as best I could before I shimmied into both and headed out the door.

  The Insurgentia weren’t bad people, not truly. They were misguided and a bit overzealous. Nostalgic for a world that had never existed.

  They occupied a nondescript office near the Core, close enough to the seat of the council to seem like they’d done it on purpose, but far enough away to not get caught. I’d driven Rice on the back of my bike here several times when he was too lazy to walk and couldn’t afford a cab, the only means of public transport we had in Senka Hollow.

  A weathered sign over the reflective glass door stated Collier & Sons, LLC. That particular business, whatever it had been, had probably gone out of business long before the Undoing. But it was a clever disguise for the anarchists of the Hollow.

  My grief had evolved somewhere between fifty and eighty miles per hour. It had been scrubbed clean by my hot shower. Now I was pissed and ready for a fight.

  I tugged on the door. Locked.

  I unholstered my Taurus and slammed the solid butt of the gun into the window.

  Shattered glass rained down, accompanied by cries of alarm from inside. I kept the Taurus in hand — because it made me feel pretty — and reached through to flip the lock and let myself in.

  The occupants of Collier & Sons scattered like roaches in the light as I strode through the dimly lit front room. The musty interior smelled of coffee and cigarette smoke. A reception desk near the door stood unoccupied, though the occupant had likely ducked beneath the moment my gun shattered the door. Two more desks flanked a door in the back wall, shadows crouched behind the flimsy metal and plywood as if I couldn’t see them.

  Between the desks, a man s
tood by the open door: buzzed-short auburn hair, blue eyes, face twisted in shock and anger.

  Josiah Bishop was the unelected leader of the Insurgentia. I’d met him once or twice, and I knew my brother was fond of the human. His too-young face was the first, and only, I needed to see.

  He didn’t get a chance to open his mouth and berate me for breaking his window.

  Without a pause in my stride, I slammed him against the wall with one hand.

  I pressed my gun to his forehead and cocked the hammer.

  Click-click.

  “What happened?” I said quietly, biting out every syllable as if he were too stupid to understand spoken word.

  Josiah’s eyes closed. He swallowed hard; I felt the action beneath my palm in the convulsion of his Adam’s apple. His voice trembled as he responded. “I-I don’t know. We’re trying to find out.”

  “Try harder.”

  He cried out as I jammed the gun into his skin. He barely held himself on his feet, most of his weight between the wall and my hand on his neck. Some part of me knew I was out of line. Tossing the weight of my authority around like a weapon. But the anger — the fucking anger, so vivid and red and blistering beneath my skin.

  The Insurgentia may not have wielded the blade, but they’d killed my brother just the same by getting him involved in their underhanded stunts.

  “Did he die because of his role here?” The words were bitter on my lips. I was afraid the kid would say no, argue that it was me, my fault that Rice had been killed. Maybe I would have believed him, maybe not. But I didn’t care about that; I cared about someone, anyone, telling me my brother hadn’t died because of who I was.

  Tears squeezed out from beneath Josiah’s pale red lashes. “It is likely.”

  My fingers tightened involuntarily. The rush of relief I should have felt for the admission didn’t come. Another blaze of red-hot rage flooded me.

  “Please,” Josiah choked through my grip. “I loved Rice like a brother. Like a brother.”

  “No!” I snarled, but I let go of him. Without my hand to hold him up, Josiah sank to the floor and started to cry. “He was my brother. My twin. Don’t you dare say those words to me.”