Soul Survivor

by Misty Evans

Chee shifted ever so slightly in the doorway, blocking her exit. “Bring him back? Where did he go?”

  On the surface, the similarities between the police chief and his grandson were barely noticeable. However, the way each man filled a doorway and found subtle ways to intimidate were a matched set. She had no doubt Chee favored directness just like Rife. “Enann took him.”

  “Enann. That ghost from your bedroom?”

  Keva nodded and Chee said, “Took him where?”

  So far Chee had accepted the supernatural as easily as breathing. This was no time to hold back, so she prayed he’d also accept the latest news so easily. “Into the past. My past to be specific.”

  Chee frowned and studied the floor for a moment before meeting her gaze again. There was a measure of awe in his voice. “How’d he do that?”

  Keva shrugged. “The Thunderbird amulet, I’m guessing. He moves like a ghost but believe me, he has a corporal body. When he disappeared, like he did in front of you earlier, he took Kai, I mean, Rife, with him. I believe they traveled back in time to our joint past together.”

  Chee’s chin tipped down a micron and he looked at her over the top of his glasses. He had the intimidation thing down, like Rife, but his was tempered where Rife’s was intense, consuming.

  Jerking a cell phone off his belt, he dialed a number. All the time the other end was ringing, he kept his hard-ass gaze on Keva.

  She really didn’t have time for this. “If you’re calling Rife, he can’t answer. His phone is on the bathroom counter at your house.” When Chee continued to listen to Rife’s phone ring, she added, “Even if he had it, he’s in a time where there are no such things.”

  Chee closed the phone with a deliberate snap and tapped it against his leg. “Maybe you better start at the beginning.”

  “The beginning starts a thousand years ago. We don’t have time for an agonizingly long history lesson, and believe me, it is agonizing. Enann will kill Rife if I don’t stop him. I need the Moon Water knife. Can you or can you not get it for me?”

  The old man was silent for so long Keva thought she’d have to goose him. But then he sighed wearily and returned the phone to his belt. “So you’re going to follow this Enann through time, stop him—which I assume you mean kill him—and bring Rife back to the present.”

  “I’m going to send Rife back to you.” Keva zipped her backpack closed. “But I most likely won’t return.”

  Chee grunted. “Why?”

  She hoisted the backpack onto her shoulders, glad she was still wearing Rife’s shirt. Every time she moved, she smelled him on it. A small measure of comfort, but she’d take it. “There’s nothing left for me here. My family’s dead. I have no friends. My home is no longer a home. It’s time I settled things once and for all with Enann, and at the point in time where he’s taken Rife, I’m not immortal yet. If I do this right, I can stay there and die with my clan. Settle things with them too.”

  “What about Rife?”

  Keva steeled herself from giving into the bite of pain in her heart. The thought of leaving Rife hurt physically as well as emotionally, overwhelming her like a black abyss.

  She swallowed the emotions, forcing them past the lump in her throat as she struggled not to cry. “He’ll be okay physically, but since he doesn’t believe in the supernatural, you may have to help him with the psychological after-effects of time travel.” She tried for a grin but failed. “I promise. He’ll get over it.”

  Chee laid a hand on her arm and shook his head. “That’s not what I meant.” He ushered her out of the bathroom. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever seen him go nuts over, Keva, whoever and whatever you are. If you send him back to the present, but don’t come with him, he’ll never be able to live with himself.”

  He squeezed her elbow. “I’m not exaggerating. He’s walking a fine line right now and after all this, after finding you and falling in love for the first time in his life, if you leave him, well…”

  The dam broke and the emotions threatening to do her in overflowed. Tears flooded her eyes and her chest hurt so much, even her Moon Water tattoo burned.

  She couldn’t blink fast enough to keep the tears back and one slipped over her lid and ran down her left cheek. “Rife deserves a relationship with a woman who doesn’t have baggage. I’m drowning in a thousand years’ worth of the stuff. You can tell him that. Tell him I’m no good for him. Convince him I am, was, a psychotic nut case. Whatever you have to do.”

  The man wasn’t one to roll his eyes, but he did close them for one brief second as if he wanted to throttle her. “Rife’s got his own baggage. Sacrificing yourself to save him will only add to his skewed view of life.”

  Stopping in the sanctuary, she faced the police chief. She knew everything about Kai, but she didn’t really know Rife. Now it looked like she never would. Time was ticking by, and yet, she had to know what made Rife the man he was. “What happened to him?”

  Running his gaze over the crime scene, Chee put his hands on his hips. Again, Keva saw Rife in the small gesture. “His mom was killed by a stalker, a religious freak, when Rife was ten. He came to live with me, but what happened to his mom messed him up good. Thought it was his fault. That he caused it or something.”

  At her frown, Chee waved his hand in the air. “I know, I know. There’s no way he caused it, and yet he still feels responsible, like he should have prevented it. He’s been carrying guilt the size of that totem—” he motioned his head at the Moon Water family pole in the corner, “—all these years, and it’s dragged his ass through hell and back.”

  “Oh, God.” In her mind, Keva pictured Rife as a kid, agonizing over his mother’s death. The image blurred and then sharpened again, only this time, she saw Kai, explaining what had happened to his own mother, his voice raw and filled with guilt. “He was just a boy. It wasn’t his fault.”

  “Natural for a kid to feel guilty under the circumstances. I put him in counseling, took him to see different shamans.” He swallowed hard, as if reliving the past was equally difficult for him. “The shamans said Rife’s soul was dead, that he’d somehow sectioned things off. A psychiatrist told me basically the same thing. All these years, he’s lived with the idea that he should’ve been able to protect her, and since he didn’t, he’s closed himself off to love.”

  A familiar protectiveness rose in Keva’s chest. Now she understood why she’d had such a difficult time reaching Kai’s soul. Like a river that separated into two different streams, Rife had effectively separated his past, both as a young boy and as Kai, from the present.

  The human mind and its soul were amazing things.

  Especially when history repeated itself.

  Chee spoke again, more softly this time, still struggling with his own emotions. “Only thing Rife wants to do, the only thing he ever wanted to do since his mother’s death, is stop killers. Unfortunately, even that’s causing him problems right now.”

  “With work?”

  “He won’t admit it, but this vacation he’s supposedly on is actually part of an ultimatum. If he didn’t take time off, the Bureau was going to put him on suspension for his own good. The last serial murderer he caught, he put in the hospital with a head concussion and three broken ribs. He was going crazy on this forced vacation, and I’d hoped consulting on this case would help him focus and get his feet back under him. There’s nothing in this world more important to him than his job.”

  Hunting killers, seeing what they did to innocent people, would take its toll on anyone. “I’m not sure why he cracked,” Keva reassured Chee. “But I’m sure Rife would never dispense personal justice unless it was truly deserved.”

  A visible weight seemed to lift from Chee’s shoulders as he considered her words. “That’s what I think, too, but law enforcement doesn’t allow for vigilantes.”

  Wasn’t that what she was about to become? A vigilante? Keva bit her lip, refusing to go there, and wiped the tears off her cheeks. This was different. In essence, she’d
created the monster. It was her duty to take him out. There was no FBI to stop Enann and exact justice in the past. Only clan law existed, and Keva, as Chieftess, was it.

  She looked at the outlines of bodies to her left and her tattoo burned under its bandage. “Were there any symbols carved on my sisters?”

  Chee nodded. “I haven’t identified their meanings yet. Why?”

  Keva could identify them, because she’d seen Enann’s handiwork before on two slaves from another tribe. He’d marked those victims the same way. She just hadn’t known he was the killer then.

  Some of the past’s puzzles involving another murder fell into place. “Kai’s mother died when he was a teenager,” she said more to herself than to Chee. “She was poisoned, but Kai told me she had two funny markings carved into her skin when they found her. It must have been Enann.”

  Chee’s blank expression frustrated her, but she couldn’t blame him. The logic in her mind must seem like random, meaningless trivia to him.

  “I don’t know if they were poisoned.” The police chief pointed at the outlines. “But my experienced guess from looking at the wounds is your knife killed them. This guy’s a nut case and somebody’s gotta stop him, agreed, but you can’t do it on your own. I’m going with you.”

  The images of her family members carved with a knife turned Keva’s stomach upside down. Bile rose in her throat.

  Again she blinked back tears and swallowed her emotions. “I can’t risk taking you with me. I’m not sure I can even get myself where I need to be in one piece. I haven’t practiced magic in a long, long time, and this kind of magic is…unpredictable at best.”

  “So you’re going to leave me behind with no witness, no weapon, no grandson and a bunch of questions from the Feds I can’t answer.”

  The sarcasm in his voice was another reminder of Rife. If she could have stuck around, she was sure she and Chee would have been the best of friends. “Ever think of retiring early?”

  Another grunt, but a smile played around his mouth. “The knife’s at the station waiting to be sent to the State with the rest of the evidence. I’ll go get it and then we’ll continue this conversation.”

  “Would you bring me the doll too?”

  At Chee’s reluctant nod, she kissed him on the cheek. “Meet me at Starved Rock. Do you know where it is?”

  “That haunted cliff on the coast twenty miles north of here?”

  The haunted cliff. She smiled ruefully to herself. “That’s the one.”

  Chee shuddered under her hand. “Crap. You are a witch, aren’t you?”

  She sighed as she hooked her arm through Chee’s and they walked toward the front door. “I prefer the term High Chieftess, but in the twenty-first century, witch is probably more accurate.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Enann sat in the damp bed of ferns and pine needles and watched the man who claimed he wasn’t Kai struggle against the magic that pinned him to the tree. As a boy, Enann had skewered beetles with small sticks he had sharpened the ends of just to watch them squirm. The effect was the same.

  His mind had easily shrugged off the effects of the time travel but not the image of seeing Kai and Keva locked in an embrace. The sight continued to bring back the memory of the first time he’d caught them…

  The dead whale on the beach is surrounded by people old and young. I have never seen an animal so large. Thunderbird himself must be awed by the size of it. As I stand and watch the whale hunters boast of their success and laugh at crude jokes over the carcass, I envy the pride in their voices. I have nothing to be proud of on this day. My future as chief here rocks in limbo.

  A woman notices me standing on the stony ledge and breaks from the others cutting strips of meat from the carcass. The slave woman who Keva treats like a sister walks toward me, careful to avoid eye contact but with a smile on her face. When she is close to the ledge, she bows and then speaks. “The children will not go hungry tonight. Matron Keva will be pleased.”

  The slave annoys me, her constant thought only of Keva’s pleasure. She remembered to show me reverence, however, and the shape of her hips entices me. When I am Chief, I will bring her to my robes and make her forget pleasing Keva. Her only job will be to please me.

  “Shall I bring some whale to your fire for breakfast?” she asks, chancing a glance at my face.

  The smell of cooking whale meat already permeates the air and my belly growls with anticipation. I nod, keeping my usual distant silence. I’m practicing for my role as Chief. It is important the slaves remember they are beneath me. If Keva does not return from her Pathwalk this morning, perhaps this slave will learn her place among my robes after she has cooked my breakfast.

  “Will the Red Fire warriors be joining you?”

  Red Fire warriors. Her words slingshot through my brain. I break my silence as unease crawls into my belly to replace its hunger. “What Red Fire warriors?”

  The slave immediately recognizes her opportunity to gain my favor. She chances a direct look again. “They arrived before sunrise when the whale hunters were blessed by the Great Mother with their catch. Three of them. A war chief and two others.”

  A war chief. My unease turns to hate. “And what did they want?”

  “The war chief asked your whereabouts. I told him you were sleeping. Then he asked if you were sleeping with Matron Keva.” At this she bows her head and stares at the sand. “I explained the Matron was on Starved Rock, seeking guidance from the spirits, and no one was allowed to bother her.”

  “Where are the warriors now?”

  Her head sinks lower. “I saw them head north, toward Starved Rock. Matron Keva will be angered if they interrupt her.”

  Kai sought Keva. Why? If he brought a message from my father, why defy the Salt Coast Clan’s matron and seek her out in her sanctuary? To chastise her unwillingness to complete the contract between our clans? Or to find out why I fail to satisfy her?

  Forgetting the slave woman, I head north toward the rock precipice jutting over the ocean. Keva is mad to use such a place as her sanctuary, but the condition of her brain is the least of my worries. She is a handful and knows not her place. Once our marriage ceremony is done, I will correct her behavior.

  And exact pleasure doing so.

  The mist is so thick I can see only a few feet in front of me. By the time I come upon Kai’s companions sitting by a fire, I am sweating from exertion. Star Root and Odam jump to their feet and bow in hurried supplication.

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  The two exchange a sideways glance. Star Root points up the coastline. “The war chief wanted to bathe before he sat at your fire.”

  Kai’s skills at deception equal his skills in battle, but even these brainless idiots know he has gone to seek the shaman Chieftess who holds all our futures in her hand. His boldness angers me even more than his mere presence.

  I tamp it down, hide my anger under a stiff smile. Good rulers never allow their emotions to show. “Return to my lodge at the camp and see that the slave woman there feeds you.”

  “Our orders are to wait here,” Star Root says, shuffling his feet, “for War Chief Kai to return.”

  That they would place Kai’s orders above mine sends my anger surging again. My voice heralds as much. “In this village, I command you. Now, do what I say.”

  Another bow and the two begin packing up, Odam much more quickly than his older counterpart. Star Root is less cooperative, knowing Kai will have his testicles roasted over his dinner fire for disobeying him, but he still fears me more. Star Root knows I will come for his testicles in the dead of the night and stuff them down his throat.

  Leaving them, I continue the walk to Starved Rock. A seagull trots along the ground beside me like a pet and I kick at it. It flaps its wings twice to keep out of my way but continues to follow me on its tiny legs. Sunlight is burning holes in the fog and the mist has stopped. Scanning the distance, I see the point of the ragged mountain jutting out over the ocean. Keva
refuses to let me near her precious sanctuary. She claims my male energy clouds the powerful spirits of the gods. How could she allow Kai to come here?

  Finding a path up the hillside is difficult. The footpaths are narrow and, in places, completely gone from rock slides. As I near the top, I hear Keva moan and I freeze. Is she hurt? Has Kai harmed her? I will kill him if he has in any way damaged my future position in this clan.

  Rushing ahead, I use my hands to pull myself up the final incline. The fog has dissipated enough for me to see the entire ledge. The view before me makes me stagger, understanding leaping into my brain at the sound of another moan…a moan of pleasure.

  The High Chieftess of the Salt Coast Clan has taken my lowly half brother as her mate.

  Unsheathing the knife tied to my waist, I raise it and approach their rutting bodies. Nobody takes what is rightfully mine.

  Nobody.

  Thunderbird beat his wings overhead, interrupting Enann’s memory. Thunder rolled up from the ocean, piercing the forest and vibrating off the trees, making his stomach quiver. As rain poured from the clouds, he glanced at the moon. Thunderbird had eaten over half of it. In another hand of time, the moon would be gone. Kai, in agonizing pain from the poison eating his guts, would beg Keva to kill him in order to save her people and end his slow demise, and Enann himself would lead the warriors of the Red Fire tribe to Starved Rock to surround the High Chieftess and demand she bow at his feet and declare them married.

  A thrill of anticipation vibrated through Enann’s body. He’d been planning all the painful ways he could bind Keva to him during the ceremony. Finally, he was going to enact every last part of his plan.

  If only he’d killed Kai on Starved Rock the first time he’d found him rutting with Keva. Common sense had won, though. Taking on the warrior in hand-to-hand combat would have cost him his life. Little did he realize the price he would pay for not fighting him that very day.

  No matter how many times Enann went back in time and tried to change the events that followed, the power held within Starved Rock would not allow the souls to rest. It always pulled the spirits of those who’d died in the aftermath back to the same spot, forcing them to repeat the scenario over and over. Enann had even tried stealing the knife before, only to have it magically reappear on Keva’s belt. This time, however, the knife was in a different dimension. How would the power of Starved Rock materialize a weapon that no longer existed in this time and place?