by Faith Hunter
“Yup. It nice. How much time till the power company get here?” uni lisi, the grandmother of many children, a Cherokee honorific for an old woman, asked, her tone garrulous.
“In time for your show, Mama.”
“Them kids, they gonna fix our light?”
“Their parents said they’d pay for it, Mama. And Deputy Antonelli said he’d make sure or he’d help us press charges.”
“That good. Good enough.” The rocker rocked on, a peaceful sound in the night. “If I get to watch my Jeopardy!”
I holstered my weapon and called out, “Aggie? It’s Jane Yellowrock. Ummm . . .” I thought about the fact that I always just dropped by. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest thing I could do. “Ummm, are you taking callers?”
“Come around to the porch, Jane,” Aggie called back. “Some kids looking for a place to neck shot out our security light and hit the electric lines.”
Neck? Instantly I thought about vamps and fangs and blood-meals. Then I realized she was talking about hooking up in the backseat of a car. Old-people slang. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.” I made my way to the porch and up the stairs. Aggie was right; the porch and the night were nice. The house’s foundation was several feet high, to protect it against hurricane storm surge, and it looked out over a backyard I had never paid much attention to. There were fruit trees and a garden behind a chicken-wired fence, smelling of freshly turned earth and frustrated rabbits. A row of bee boxes stood at the back of the property, the bees silent, the smell of honey soft on the air. I closed the door behind me, making out the location of the two women and the mama cat sitting on uni lisi’s lap. I took a chair. Aggie moved in the dark and I heard a gurgling sound, and smelled cold tea and fresh mint. She pushed a glass across the table to me. I took it and sipped. “Thank you.” A silence filled the space between us, uncomfortable on my part. “Ummm,” I said again.
Aggie made an amused humming sound. My lack of social skills was not a secret to her. Not that she would help me through it.
I puffed out a breath. “That bomb maker I called you about? If she’s who I think she is, then she’s also a sniper and she smells like The People.”
I smelled Aggie’s shock, so strong it might have actually burned through my skin, like an electric spark. Maybe I should have tried some small talk before I jumped into the mess of my life. The weather. Their health. Too late now. “She is War Woman,” Aggie asked, “like you?”
“No.” I hesitated. “I don’t think so. She’s female, and a human blood-servant. I don’t think a War Woman would allow herself to be fed upon by vamps. And she’s not someone I’ve ever smelled before.”
“You being a skinwalker,” uni lisi said, unperturbed. “That true?”
I sipped again, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That how you can smell what this woman is?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And this woman who smell like The People. She chasing you?”
I started to answer and stopped. Not just targeting me at my house to kill me, but chasing me? If so, was she trying to get me to lead her somewhere? Tracking me everywhere I went? Like to here? “Maybe,” I said, as the possibilities bounced around in my head. What the heck did Satan’s Three want? The things in my possession that were magical. That was all that was left for them to be after.
“I see on the TV, ’bout them little things people stick to cars,” uni lisi said. “So they can follow peoples. You got one on you car?”
My hands went cold on the iced tea glass. I hadn’t checked. I wasn’t used to being a target myself. If I had been a client, I’d have been over the car with a microscope. I set down the tea glass and hit the button for Eli. “Yeah?” he answered.
“You didn’t think to check my vehicle for tracking devices, did you?”
“You were clean this morning. The only way we can be totally sure is to put a camera on it, check it every day, and park it in a vault.”
“Excuse me,” I said to the One Feathers, and left the porch at a run. I still had my flashlight and clicked the light on as I neared my SUV. “Anything new I should be looking for?” It might sound like a dumb question, but the market for monitoring and tracing equipment was changing and evolving so fast that keeping up required constant attention to company updates. I’d left that to Eli.
“Second- and third-gen magnetic trackers are smaller and adhere better than the first generation. They still can be fired from a cannon or tossed over a fence to land anywhere on the exterior, but even the old trackers cost five hundred bucks apiece and none of them always stick. The math sucks unless you have bottomless pockets. It’s easier to walk by, open the door, and toss one under the seat, except you keep your vehicle locked. A public street is not the place to disable the alarm and attach one inside the engine compartment or the trunk. So that leaves walking by, pausing, and sticking a GPS tracking device under the wheel well or bumper. Old-style craft. They can be small enough to hide between two fingers, but those cost. Most people still use the ones the size of a pack of cigarettes. You checking now?” I grunted the affirmative and he said, “I’ll hold.”
I walked around the vehicle and saw nothing on the exterior. I bent and checked each wheel well. Empty except for mud from where I’d gotten stuck earlier, and the rain splashing up from the roads hadn’t completely washed it clean. Anything pushed through the mud to adhere to the metal would have left an impression different from ones nature left, and the mud coating all looked uniform. I lay down and rolled under the front, then the back. Nothing was stuck to the bumpers. “I’m clean. But I want a more thorough inspection when I get home.”
“Okay.” He disconnected.
Back on the porch I asked, “You have a gun?”
“Course we have a gun,” Aggie said, as if I’d asked a stupid question. Maybe I had. These were country women facing rabid animals, carrot-stealing rabbits, and kids with nefarious and salacious intentions. And maybe evil people looking to rob, rape, and steal.
I sat and drank half of my tea, my mouth as dry as a bone from dread. “My vehicle looks clean, but there’s no way to be sure. And since I’m here now, it’s too late. I’m sorry.”
“We be okay,” uni lisi said. “What you come here for tonight?”
Not to get you killed, I thought. I said, “Are there any Cherokee stories about dragons?”
“Some,” Aggie said.
“There Uktena,” uni lisi said. “He a dragon-like serpent with horns.”
I repeated the name. “Ook-tay-nah?”
Aggie said, “Close enough. The first Uktena was said to be transformed from a human man in a failed assassination attempt on the sun. Most other Uktena tales have to do with Cherokee heroes slaying the Uktena monster. The dragons are malevolent and deadly.”
“The assassination attempt on the sun sounds a little like Apollo. So maybe the dragons are made of light?”
“Or they aliens like that professor with the hair say.”
I wasn’t sure who uni lisi was talking about, but the idea that the arcenciel was an alien was a possibility—though not an alien who came to Earth in a spaceship. Rather, one who got here from another universe at a liminal threshold, a place where one universe touched another.
“Then there’s the Tlanuwa.” I cocked my head in question and Aggie produced it again. “Tlah-noo-wah.” I nodded and she went on. “Tlanuwa are giant birds of prey with impenetrable metal feathers. They’re common to the oral tradition of many southeastern tribes and may be the same things as the Thunderbird in southwestern tribal mythology.”
“Now, that sounds like a spaceship,” I said, but thought that it could also be a storm god. An Anzû. I had never actually seen one without its glamour blocking the way and I had never seen one fly.
Aggie shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling in the dark. “It has a strong resemblance to a jet
fighter. Noisy, sleek, powerful, dangerous, and darting through the sky with a roar. You want to tell us what you’re looking for?”
I described the arcenciel. And the Anzû. Aggie watched me as I talked, her eyes holding me in place like spears. “I’m wondering if they are real creatures that came to Earth through a liminal threshold. A weak place in reality where creatures can get to Earth.”
“That old man,” uni lisi said derisively, “that Choctaw old man. Him talk about seeing strange things down in the bayou.”
“The Choctaw are south of Houma?” I asked. That was one place I’d seen the arcenciel, playing in the waters of a bayou.
“No. The Choctaw tribal regions went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border,” Aggie said. My eyes went wide in surprise.
“But in the last war, our people beat them good.” Uni lisi sounded satisfied, the way a soccer mom might when recounting an old high school rivalry.
Aggie ignored it and said, “Locally the tribal members are represented by the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, but they’re composed of an amalgamation of several tribes which include Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Acolapissa, and Atakapa.”
I nodded, but current tribal politics didn’t help me.
“Each community is governed by its own tribal council and advised by their respective Council of Elders,” uni lisi said. “That old man, he talk about thing he see in the bayou and the swamps. Him a member of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, but there the Isle de Jean Charles Band, and the Bayou Lafourche Band too.”
“All three bands are ancestrally related. Mama was being courted by a leader of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, but he was killed trying to save a family during Hurricane Rita. That’s the old man she’s talking about.”
“Him too old for me anyway. I need me a young man.” Uni lisi cackled with glee.
“Was there any specific place where he saw the creatures?” I asked.
“Nah.” Uni lisi waved her hand in the air as if it was all unimportant. “He seen them when he smoking wacky weed. He a crazy old man.”
Aggie added, “He did say once that the Uktena tried to talk to him. That his ancestor killed one with a steel knife and drank its blood, and that it made him strong. But he didn’t say where any of this happened.”
“How about a Cherokee flood story?” I asked.
“There a silly story about a dog who tell a man to build a raft, and then that dog, he tell the man to throw him into the water to kill him. Stupid dog, he was. Then the flood came and the man on the raft lived but all the other peoples were just a pile of bones.”
“Their spirits danced,” Aggie said, looking troubled. “It sounded like the pile of their bones dancing. Mama’s beau said he heard it once.” She nodded and sipped her tea, her eyes far away, in the past of the old stories. When she spoke again, she sounded uneasy. “Like a pile of bones . . . dancing. I always hated that image.”
Uni lisi waved her hand again. “Some stories silly. This one silly. You don’ be unhappy about this silly story or about that old man. That a long time ago.” But her voice no longer sounded like the story was silly, or that she had stopped grieving for her old man.
Out front I heard a truck turn into the cul-de-sac. Truck lights swept the property as it went around my SUV and circled the small turn-around of the cul-de-sac. I slipped out and determined it was indeed a power company truck, and its diesel engine was idling as a man with a powerful flashlight stood beneath the pole, looking up at the damage, muttering imprecations about kids these days. I returned to the One Feathers’ back porch, offered my thanks, and said my good-byes. I slipped out and to my SUV. Checked my GPS.
I called Derek and asked, “If I give you a GPS, can you send a guy to sit in a tree and keep an eye on two old ladies? Like you’re doing with Leo’s clan home property? I can pay.”
“Sure, Legs. I’ll send Blue Voodoo. He hunts. Sitting in a tree will be like a day off with pay for him.”
I gave Derek the GPS and the address, described the layout, and left it to Derek and Blue Voodoo. I didn’t know the guy well, but he was one of Derek’s longtime men. The One Feathers would be safe from anyone targeting my friends to get at me.
Without turning on my lights, I started the engine and backed out of the street. Where would a tribal elder have heard a sound in the bayou, a sound like bones dancing?
I was no closer to discovering anything, spinning my wheels. But something about dancing bones sounded important. And sad.
With the night off, I could have changed and let Beast hunt, but it felt too dangerous to shape-shift and play. Too much was going wrong and I had too little information. And yet, the arcenciel had gray energies like the ones where I changed form. So . . . maybe it wasn’t play. Maybe it would be research. I didn’t know but I decided to stay human, for now.
I was still on the west side of the river when I saw an SUV like the ones I’d seen before, maybe tailing me, though this one was grayish in the night, not black. I asked my cell to dial the Kid, and when he answered, I said, “You remember the license plates Eli and I got you for the black SUVs that were tailing us?” I knew the Kid would remember, so I didn’t wait for an answer. The question was rhetorical. “What did they come back as?”
“Local leases. Both came back to a Paul Reaver, not Revere, but Reaver.”
“Fake name?” I asked, as I slowed, letting the vehicle close the gap on me.
“Probably, but the credit card is good, so whoever created the ID did a good job. The cars have GPS, which I got, and I’ve been following them. Both are currently near the corner of Beryl Street and Jewel Street, hear Harlequin Park. Eli rode by, talked to a neighbor who says they are nice people. Nice house. Rental. You need me to send you a photo?”
The tail vehicle pulled up fast and its lights hit my mirrors, blinding me. My heart rate sped and I reached to the passenger seat and pulled a nine-mil from the thigh holster. “Is there another car rented under the same name?”
“No. I checked. Why?”
The SUV took that moment to pull around me and roar off. It was full of people and was blasting some heavy bass beat into the night and trailing odors of weed and booze. Teenaged rockers, full of hormones. I let the tension drain away, even as I memorized the license plate. “No,” I said, hearing the relief in my voice. “But just for grins, run this plate.” I gave him the number. “And is Soul there?”
“She went out about half an hour ago.”
“I’ll get back to you.” I ended the call and wondered how much of what I was seeing and worrying about was nothing and how much was various supernatural beings hiding things from me. Maybe it was time to beard the lion in her den.
Pulling over, I parked in the shadow of an abandoned warehouse, the front of the vehicle snugged up against the building. There were lots of warehouses up and down the Mississippi, some old and fancy with intricate brickwork and some thrown together out of metal and steel. This was a newer, and therefore uglier one, with tall grasses growing up in cracked concrete and birds flying through broken glass in the ventilation windows high off the ground. There were no security cameras that I could I see, and I was far enough off the road so that traffic cams would have a hard time picking anything up, if there even was a traffic cam on the isolated road.
I rolled down the window and sniffed the night air, smelling rats and feral cats and exhaust. A far-off skunk. Dead fish. Water. No people had been here recently. I made sure that the thigh holster Bruiser had provided was secure on the passenger seat beside me. Loosened both nine-mils and chambered a round in each. Standard ammo, not silver. It would likely be rednecks or gangbangers, not supernats, who would bother me out here.
I slouched down in the vehicle seat and took a chance; I dialed Soul. She picked up instantly. “What have you learned?” she asked.
“Too much and too little. I need you to confirm that
you are the same species of creature as the arcenciel that attacked Leo and Gee DiMercy. Gee hints that it might be so. And I need to know what the gray place of the change is—that’s what I call the shape-changing energies that seem to operate outside ordinary Earth physics and time. And I need to know now.”
Soul didn’t answer at first, and I rolled the window down an inch so I could hear anyone or anything approaching. The window was still cracked from when the light-dragon hit my vehicle. I really needed to get that fixed before a cop pulled me over and ticketed me. By the unchanging scents, there was still nothing anywhere around, only the smells of small animals, the heady heaviness of freshwater, the soft susurration of the wind, and the deeper, more powerful vibration of the river on the other side of the levee.
“I will call you back,” she said, and the call ended.
I waited for perhaps two minutes, before I began to wonder whether she had blown me off, or if maybe she had meant she would call me back later. Then my cell rang, an unknown number on it. Burner phone?
“Yellowrock,” I said.
Soul said, “Some have hinted that you are dangerous, with your questions and your species-gifts untaught and unproven. Those same have proposed that you be removed to lessen the danger to the rest of us.”
Removed? Meaning killed? But before I could ask, Beast pressed down on my mind with her paw. In the darkness of my mind, I saw a mental image of a puma high on a ledge over a trickle of water. Waiting, still and silent, for prey.
Soul went on. “I have offered my recommendation that you be allowed to hunt for truth where you might find it and use such truth as you might wish. An experiment that might lead the imprisoned into the light.”
“Thanks,” I said, my tone offended. “It’s nice to have someone in my corner when I’m being judged without the chance to speak for myself. Some who?”
“Some of my ilk. My species, as you said.”
“Okay. So there are a lot more of you than I was thinking.”
“The lines are open again. For now, yes.”