by Celia Roman
The most precious thing ever.
I opened my eyes and caught him staring down at me. That same wonder filled them hazel eyes of his, shining out of him like sunlight through heavy clouds.
“We’re going to be late,” he said.
“No,” I replied, though I hardly knowed what I was saying.
“Can I just…” He touched the tip of his nose to mine, easy and reverent, then his breath feathered over my mouth and he inched himself off of me. “Five more minutes, ok?”
I gazed up at him, so confused by the interlude, I hardly knowed what to do. My mind was muddled and my tongue was clumsy in my mouth, and danged if my heart weren’t about to pitter patter right outta my chest.
A mischievous grin curved his mouth, and next thing I knowed, his fingers loosened the towel and it slid to the floor, revealing tall as an oak Riley in all his natural glory. My eyes followed the towel’s progress down muscled legs, then flicked up again and caught on the hard evidence of his arousal.
I placed a hand over my heart and patted, and danged if butterflies didn’t set to in my tummy, along with a good dose of heat. “Lordy, Riley.”
“Get a move on, Sunshine. We don’t have all day.”
He strode past me, cool as a cucumber, and I flipped over on my tummy and watched him go for the second time in an hour, admiring ever inch of him I could see and then some.
We arrived at Libby’s a good half hour before we was supposed to, after eating lunch and meandering through some errands along the way. Riley parked down the street at a cousin’s house, one we met at Henry’s memorial service, though I couldn’t put name to face to save my soul.
Could be my mind still lingered on Riley’s teasing, earlier whilst we was getting ready, or maybe on the way his hand draped over my thigh on the ride over, or maybe both. All I knowed was, the longer me and him hung out together, the bigger a chunk he stole of my life. The whole matter bemused me. If I coulda set it aside for later pondering, I woulda, but for the life of me, about the only thing rattling around in my noggin was Riley Treadwell.
We walked over to Libby’s along the grassy shoulder of the paved street. Cousin Libby lived in the middle of Snowbird Territory, the branch of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee situated near Robbinsville, North Carolina, outside the biggest chunk of Qualla Boundary to the east. Even though locals called it the Res, the land weren’t actually reserved a’tall; it was owned by the tribe and held in a trust of sorts by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, had been since at least the mid eighteen hundreds or so when them Cherokee what fled removal during the Trail of Tears finally come forward and reclaimed a little of their own.
What was left here was a remnant of a much larger tribe. Daddy never said much about it, but I do remember him mourning not being able to speak or read Cherokee. He learnt English instead, though the hows and whys of it was beyond my ken. I’d heard some time back that to keep the language alive, the schools brung in non-native speakers, scholars what’d studied Sequoyah’s tongue and knowed it better’n most natives. Maybe even among the insular Snowbird, the language was hard to preserve.
I sighed as Riley led me around a mud puddle and into Libby’s driveway. He’d insisted on carrying Johnny’s present, and good thing, too. I woulda dropped it sure as tootin’.
‘Course, I wouldn’ta had one a’tall if Riley hadn’t drug me out shopping yesterday. I couldn’t even get riled up about it. That’s what was so sad. That boy about had me wrapped around his little pinky, he did. I was beginning to think there weren’t nothing I could do about it neither.
Libby met us at the door before we even got there and wrapped me in a big ol’ bear hug. “I’m so glad you could make it.”
I patted her real tentative like on her back and tried hard not to wish she’d hurry up and let go. “He’s my grandpappy, ain’t he?”
“Yes, but.” She eased away with a sigh and fixed them stoic brown eyes of hers on me. “With your uncle in jail and your aunt found dead, I thought you might have other, more pressing duties right now.”
“Them’s taken care of,” I said, and that was mostly true. Weren’t nothing I could do about Fame’s situation on a Sunday afternoon, leastwise not ‘til I figured out how to kill that monster. Speaking of. “I got something I need to ask you about later, if you got a minute.”
“Anything.”
She stepped back and motioned us in, then shut the door behind us, and away she went, like a whirling dervish through the room. Me and Riley trailed along behind her, nodding to folks what looked familiar and them I didn’t recognize a’tall.
Now, here’s something most folk don’t ken. One’d expect a registered member of the Tribe to look like a Cherokee. Glossy, almost black hair, dark brown eyes, rich brown skin, stocky frame. Only, the Cherokee’d intermingled with other folks for so many generations, they now come in a lot of different colors, shapes, and sizes. One cousin I knowed for a fact was nigh on three-quarters pure had hazel eyes and dishwater blond hair. That was genetics for ya. Ya never knowed which genes you’d draw from the pool, which’uns would stick, and which’uns would dig you into trouble faster’n spit.
Look at me. I mighta come out looking like my daddy, but not a single soul’d deny Mama’s bits and pieces. If not for them, I woulda been in a world of trouble a time or two, and that’s a fact.
Just ‘cause I knowed I was a coon crazy killer like my mama didn’t mean I regretted it.
Riley put the birthday boy’s present down on a table piled high with cheerfully wrapped gifts, then led me to the nearest couple and, real polite like, inserted us into the conversation. He kept one hand on mine, like he knowed I was raring to bolt, but it weren’t hardly necessary. I committed to wishing Johnny a happy birthday. Least I could do was follow through.
About ten minutes before the party’s official start, Libby hushed ever body up and jockeyed ‘em into place. The lights in the rest of the house was cut and she made darn sure nobody was grouped in front of a window where the shadow could be seen from outside.
Just in time, too. A car swung into the driveway, splashing light through the windows against outside’s fallen night. Car doors slammed, muted voices drifted to us, and the door opened on my daddy’s daddy.
We all yelled “Surprise!” and he tried real hard to act that way, bless him. Ever body surged forward wearing more grins than I ever seen on their mugs, and when it was my turn, I didn’t hesitate one bit. I held out my arms to Johnny and let him wrap me up against his old bones.
“You’ve got a secret,” he whispered in my ear, then he let go and shook hands with Riley, and I just stood there like a lump wondering how that ol’ coot divined the inner workings of my mind.
Chapter Eighteen
Now, them what knowed me knowed I ain’t never let nobody get the best of me, and I weren’t about to start now. I bided my time. Sure, I did. We was here for a celebration, after all, not for me to nag the star of the party.
That didn’t mean I was gonna let Johnny get away neither.
We had cake and ice cream, and I helped a cousin wipe up the Kool-Aid her young’un spilt. Charlie, Libby’s youngest, climbed into my lap whilst Johnny opened presents. Riley draped an arm around my shoulders and looked at me with this secret smile tilting his mouth, and I blushed and fixed my attention where it was supposed to be, on the goings-on.
Dang his sexy hide.
Later, whilst I was plotting all the ways I could corner my wily grandpa, I wandered around Libby’s living room studying the artwork. A bookcase tucked into a corner of her living room held native pottery and woven baskets, some so finely crafted, I was skeered to breathe on ‘em. A coupla statuettes, one of bronze, another carved out of some dark wood, faced off against each other on the top shelf of another bookcase.
It was the paintings what captured my interest, though. A large, framed piece depicting a group of children playing in the woods was mounted to the wall behind the couch. Two smaller paintings bracketed the large
r one, the left of a woman, the right of a man. Before I could sort out the figures, Libby planted herself beside me.
“The Yunwi Tsundsi,” she said.
I glanced at her. “Huh?”
“The Little People.” She raised a plastic cup full of punch toward the central painting. “Fairies, some call them, but to us, they’re Yunwi Tsundsi.”
“Oh,” I said. I’d heard of the Little People before. Just hadn’t seen ‘em in a painting. “Who painted it?”
“Me.” She sipped punch, sighed. “Don’t have much time now with a family to tend.”
“I reckon not.” I gestured toward the other two paintings. “What’s them of?”
“Selu, the corn woman.”
I didn’t need two guesses to figure out why she was important. “And t’other?”
“Kana’ti, the Great Hunter. I have more, if you’re interested.”
I pondered the fine brush strokes, the lifelike features, the realism of the scenes she’d colored onto canvas. “Don’t wanna be nosey, but this is some fine work.”
She laughed and slid her arm through the crook of my elbow, like we was the oldest and best of friends, which we mighta been if my grandma hadn’t killed hers, and me and Libby’d growed up together. That shoulda been the natural order of things ‘stead of the craziness Betty brung into the world.
At least now we was making amends.
“Come on,” she said. “We can go to my studio. I need some fresh air anyway.”
Me and her snuck outta the house by way of the back door, like two teenagers creeping out to sip some hooch and flirt with boys, and she led me through the chilled night toward what looked like a small storage shed squatting at the edge of the close mowed back yard.
She opened the door and flipped on a light, then shut us in amidst a clutter of canvases faintly underscored by the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. “Here’s where the magic happens, when I find time.”
I stepped in and gawped at the paintings leaned against the walls around an empty easel, and the pile of fresh supplies stacked in one corner. “You did all this?”
“My life’s work, in a way. I’ve been painting since I was a kid. Here.” She tapped the top of one painting. “Charlie when he was a baby.”
I wanted to marvel at it, truly I did. There was the little rugrat I was growing so fond of, snuggled belly down on a blanket with them big ol’ eyes of his staring straight at us.
Libby flipped the painting forward, revealing another of two boys I recognized right away as her eldest. I oohed and ahed as she showed each painting, and tucked any envy worming its way outta my gut down deep where it wouldn’t do no harm. This was real talent here, this knack she had of capturing mood and movement. Oh, now, not all of ‘em was perfect, but most was as good as any I ever seen.
We moved from family portraits to landscapes (an attempt to master lighting in college, Libby claimed) to more like the ones decorating her living room. Painters featured heavy, and why shouldn’t they when Libby herself turned into one on occasion? Them I found interesting, but it was t’other supernatural critters what fascinated me.
Libby patiently explained each one, answered my questions real even like, and didn’t once treat me like all my knowledge come outta books, which it had. We’d just finished talking about the Nunnehi, the Spirit People, when Libby’s flipping ended on a portrait of a stone skinned critter.
The hairs on the back of my neck went stiff as boards and ever cell in my body screamed, That one. I grabbed her forearm in a tight grip. “What’s that?”
“That?” She glanced at me, surprise etched all over her pretty, round face. “That’s U’tlun’ta. Spearfinger.”
Spearfinger. ‘Course, it was. I inhaled a slow breath, let it out even slower, and loosened my grip on my cousin before I bruised her good. Bits and pieces of the legend sprang into my noggin, pulled from decades of reading up on my daddy’s kin, and more recent from the research I done trying to figure out why painters was acting like humans.
I backed up a pace, though my gaze stuck to that painting like glue. “You mind if I borrow that for a while?”
Her laugh sounded as puzzled as she looked. “You can have it.”
I shook my head right sharp. “Just need to borrow it.”
“Sunny, what is it?”
“I think that’s the thing what killed my aunt and uncle.” The certainty gnawed at me, gnawed and chewed and nipped like it was scraping away my innards one swipe at a time. “I think that’s what me and the sheriff seen a coupla days ago.”
Libby’s dark eyes went round as saucers and her mouth tightened into a thin line. “Tell me.”
So I did, starting with Lily and Ferd being found on Cemetery Hill that night and ending with a wild chase through the woods with Riley’s daddy and Harley Jimpson at my side. I left out not one thing, not that voice growing ever stronger in me, different from instinct but similar, nor Lily’s ghost, nor the wildness what come over me a time or two when I least expected it.
She listened good, did Cousin Libby, and when she was done, she picked up that painting with one hand and wrapped the other around my elbow. “Let’s get back to the party. You’re shivering.”
I hadn’t noticed. Honest to goodness, it didn’t hit me ‘til right then that the shed where Libby created her work was nigh on as cold as the winter air surrounding it.
What in tarnation?
I shook my head again, more confused than ever, and let her lead me into the warmth of her home, like a lamb she found out in a storm.
Johnny was holding court on the sofa dandling two toddlers, one on each knee. The shrieks of laughter and encouragement from them and the kids arrayed around him peppered the lower-pitched adult conversations.
Riley stood facing the hallway leading to the back doorway, talking to two cousins I thought was cops. Shop talk, I reckoned, and more power to him. I waved just to let him know I was ok as I followed Libby to where my grandpa sat.
Soon as he saw me, Johnny set the kids down and scooted ‘em off with firm pats to their diapered bottoms, then dropped a gnarled palm onto the couch beside him. “Sit, granddaughter.”
One by one, the folks surrounding us drifted away, kids to find their parents, parents to round up belongings for the trip home, or into the kitchen for another taste of Libby’s blueberry dump cake.
‘Twas Johnny’s favorite, way I heard tell. I probably needed to get the recipe from her before I left, just in case. It’d been a year of just in cases, so I weren’t taking no chances now.
Johnny laid his hand real gentle over mine. “You found something.”
I’d found a lot of somethings. Only, which one did I start with?
The sofa dipped on my other side and Libby said, “She hears the panther spirit.”
Johnny nodded and hummed, like he expected nothing less. “She’s spending too much time with us.”
“Or not enough,” Libby retorted. “The panther is within her. Why not bring it forth?”
“It will never be with her as it is with you.” Johnny sighed and squeezed my hand. “I could be wrong.”
I swallowed past the hurt. Always on the outside, always different. Never fully part of my mama’s family, and now this. “But you don’t think so,” I said, and my voice was thick on my tongue in spite of intentions to the contrary.
“I could be wrong,” he repeated in that time worn way he had. “That’s not why you’re here.”
Weren’t that the truth. “I seen something in the woods a coupla days ago, some stone-skinned critter. Had a long finger and seemed kindly bent on killing me and the folks I was with.”
Johnny’s gaze slid past me to Libby and back again. “Spearfinger. She’s a dangerous woman.”
“Woman?”
He shrugged. “What else would you call her?”
Monster, demon, cursed. I shook them away. A precise definition weren’t needed, only how to find her and how to kill her. “What do you know about her?”<
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“She craves blood, organs. The liver is her favorite, but she’ll take the heart, too, especially from a warrior.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t recollect whether Lily and Ferd had more holes in ‘em than the ones in their chests. Reckoned I could check the autopsy reports again when I got home. “How do I track her?”
His expression turned sly. “You already know how.”
Libby huffed out a laugh. “You just said—”
“I know what I said and I know what she needs to do,” he said, kindly firm. “Listen within, Sunshine. You’ll be fine.”
I gaped at him. “That’s it? That’s all you’re gonna tell me?”
“It’s all you need to know. Thank you for the book. Or should I thank that white devil over there?” He cackled as he pushed himself slowly off the couch. “I need some ice cream. Heard there was some cake left. Next time somebody makes it, I might be in the ground.”
He muttered something else, but it was drowned under Libby leaning in and whispering, “That old coot. I should’ve known better than to ask him for help.”
I shrugged. “I’m used to doing for myself.”
“You don’t have to anymore, Sunny.” She grabbed my hand and squeezed a lot harder’n Johnny had. “Blood means something around here, and even if it didn’t, we’re still friends, right?”
That took me aback. Libby was a lotta things to me, but I never thought on how we might be getting to be friends.
I flipped my hand over in hers and squeezed right back. “Sure. Only, I don’t want you messed up in this.”
“I already am.”
She touched her forehead to mine, and for just a moment, I caught the wild scent of the hunt, blood pounding in my veins, the moonlight shining on me near as bright as the sun, the rich loam of dirt under my paws, and something else, something buried so deep within me, I couldn’t quite catch it.
I knowed what it was, though, knowed it sure as I knowed my name. It was that voice, more’n instinct, and it was strong and free and twined up in whatever stretched between me and Libby.