“Are you so certain of that?”
“Where do you think your medicine comes from?” Ruby asked her.
Abuela laid a hand upon her chest. “From my heart.”
Ruby shook her head. “It comes from ma’inawo blood, but that blood runs so thin in you five-fingered beings that you have to draw power from the land and true ma’inawo to give it any potency.”
“True ma’inawo? Are you such a pure and perfect race?”
“We were untouched by evil spirits until the desert people came to share our land. Then they took it from us, just as the Spanish took it from them, and the Anglos stole it again, in turn. You might think that I should have sympathy for you, relegated to this barrio while the Anglos live high on their spoils, but in my eyes you are all thieves. You enslave; you kill at random.”
“Some humans do, but not all of us.”
Ruby held her gaze. “This land wasn’t always desert. You made it so. And you, in particular, continue to squeeze the medicine from it, giving no thought to replenishing what you take.”
“So you hate all humans, do you?”
“Only witches. Most five-fingered beings aren’t worth considering.”
“Yet you offered up your soul for that despicable girl.”
Ruby shrugged.
“And you live with Abigail White Horse. She’s as human as I am.”
“If you think that, you truly know nothing.”
“I know she’s no ma’inawo,” Abuela said. “Is she a witch?”
Ruby smiled. “If she was a witch, the dog boys would have killed her and eaten her heart.”
“A Kikimi witch, you mean.”
“Witches are all the same,” Ruby said. “The dog boys just don’t bother with the ones outside their tribe.”
“Yet they leave the Women’s Council untouched.”
“They are medicine women, not witches.”
“As am I.”
Ruby fell silent. It was a pointless argument, she realized.
“So what do you need from me,” she asked, “to harness my medicine?”
Abuela shook her head. “I need only to lay a hand on your shoulder or arm while I set the enchantments for my charms and milagros.”
“Then this is the last conversation we will have,” Ruby told her.
That was when she took her dog shape.
In the days that followed, Abuela tried to get her to change back, but Ruby would have nothing to do with her. She let the witch touch her while making her spells, but any attempt to treat Ruby as a pet made her growl low in her chest. If Abuela persisted, Ruby would snarl, baring her teeth.
When the witch didn’t have need for her, Ruby would spend her time outside. She’d lie in the dirt, moving around the house with the sun so that she was always in the shade. From there, she watched what she could see of the neighbourhood, which consisted mostly of the goings on next door around the clubhouse of the 66 Bandas. They worked on their cars and bikes. People would come and go. At night there were parties, the deep bass of the narcocorridos they favoured, the thumping sound resounding throughout the neighbourhood.
Nobody complained.
The witch didn’t either, but her house was soundproofed with some kind of spell so the music couldn’t make it inside. When the noise in the yard got to be too much, Ruby would come in and lie by the door.
She was also inside when the witch’s customers came, and then she was surprised to find that Abuela had apparently spoken the truth. None of her charms appeared to be evil. There were milagros and votive candles that the buyers would take to nearby Santa Margarita Maria to increase the potency of their prayers. Charms for health. Charms for love or prosperity. Charms for finding lost things or people. Charms of protection.
And always, before she gave the finished product to a customer, Abuela would call Ruby to her. She’d lay a hand on the red dog’s shoulder and Ruby would feel a shiver of something travel from her to the witch’s hand, and from there to the charm.
If the witch worked evil, she didn’t do so in front of Ruby. Ruby might have regretted the harsh words she’d delivered to the witch when they first met, except that she could see how, with every charm she made, Abuela drew a sliver of vitality from the land along with what she took from Ruby herself, unlike Morago and the medicine women in the Painted Lands who always gave thanks for what they used.
Ruby was sometimes tempted to shift to her human form to point this out, but she didn’t bother. She already knew what the witch’s answer would be. She would say that she did this for herself and her own people, and had no concern as to how it might affect others. It was merely how most five-fingered beings dealt with the world around them.
The first Sunday that Ruby was with her, she followed Abuela when she left the house. Now her darker ways would be revealed, Ruby thought. But Abuela only went to Santa Margarita Maria for Mass, and came home afterward.
Whenever the witch left the house Ruby kept her in sight. She followed her to market, where Abuela bought groceries, and to the desert, where she collected plants. Unlike Aggie, she didn’t thank the plants for their sacrifice, but that was as evil as she got.
Although Ruby always stayed close to the house, she explored the dry wash that ran behind the property. Sometimes she lay on the border between the Bandas’ yard and Abuela’s, head resting on her paws while she watched the gangbangers.
She knew her presence bothered them. She also knew they feared the witch and would leave her alone. The nervous looks they cast her way was one of her few sources of amusement.
One afternoon as she lay near the dry wash, her attention was on a ground squirrel but she was also vaguely aware of a crow in the branches of the mesquite tree above. She paid it no attention until it fluttered down to the ground and became a man.
“So she hasn’t killed you yet,” Xande said.
Ruby cast a quick glance in the direction of the witch’s house before she slipped down into the wash. Xande followed, then Ruby took her own human shape and sat on the bank of the wash.
“I don’t think she means to,” she told the crow man. “But not even the mountain can withstand an endless trickle of water.”
Xande sat down beside her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Every charm she makes, she fuels with a whisper of my spirit.”
Xande frowned. “That can’t be good.”
“My point, exactly.” She turned to look at him. “How’s Aggie?”
“She’s doing well. One of the women who came to see her from Newford is staying with her.”
“And the girl?”
“She’s in jail.”
Ruby’s eyebrows went up. “So she got caught.”
“No, she turned herself in. Manny says she’s actually trying to fix the mess of her life.”
Ruby smiled. “So my being here is doing some good.”
“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
He picked up a pebble and sent it skittering down the wash, where it startled a half-dozen quail under some brush.
“Sorry, cousins,” Xande murmured. “Didn’t see you in there.”
Ruby’s sharp ears caught the sound of the witch’s door opening. She rose to her feet before Abuela could call for her.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Don’t give up hope,” Xande said.
Ruby shook her head. “What do I have to hope for, beyond a quick end?”
“You know Steve—lives in that old Airstream that belonged to Possum?”
“Sure. He comes by Aggie’s place all the time, visits, gives her a hand in the garden and such.”
“Manny says he’s got some plan to help you.”
“Steve?” Ruby was confused. Steve was a kind man, but what could he possibly do to help her?
Xande nodded. “Word is, this big-time cousin owes him a favour. Steve’s just waiting for her to show up.”
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever he thinks he can do, won’t chan
ge anything. I gave my word.”
She heard the witch call for her. “Now I really have to go. Thanks for stopping by,” she added before she shifted back into dog shape.
She went up out of the wash and through the brush that had hidden them from the witch’s house. Behind her, she heard wings lift into the air, but she didn’t look back.
* * *
After that, she was visited from time to time by various ma’inawo. Old pack members would find her in the dry wash and bring her packrats and other small game. The Yellowrock Canyon crows perched companionably in the trees above, sometimes taking human form so that they could pass the time with conversation. There was no more talk about Steve, or Ruby’s fate at the hands of the witch, though her pack members would talk of revenge if Ruby were to die. Ruby tried to make them promise not to avenge her, explaining how Abuela wasn’t an evil witch, but they refused.
After a while she gave up because she knew if the situation were reversed, she wouldn’t have made that promise either.
One evening, almost two weeks after she’d first come to live with Abuela, the noise from the 66 Bandas’ clubhouse drove her inside once more. She lay by the door watching Abuela fill jars with the finely ground herbs and other plants that she hung from the rafters to dry.
It was getting late when Ruby suddenly lifted her head. Something—some presence—was approaching the house. At first she didn’t recognize who or even what it was. All she knew for certain was that it was old and powerful.
Before she could bark a warning, the witch’s front door suddenly blew open and a tall black-haired woman filled the door. Ruby had the impression of huge black wings disappearing into her back, but that might have been just the play of light on the darkness behind the stranger.
Ruby rose to her feet, hackles raised. A growl rumbled deep in her chest. Her warning wasn’t so much to protect the witch or her house, as a reaction to having been startled.
Abuela didn’t move from the table where she was working, except to lift her gaze. “You’re either very stupid or very brave,” she told the stranger. “Do you know whose house this is? Do you know who I am?”
The woman smiled mockingly. “Will I be suitably impressed when you tell me?”
Ruby backed away so that she no longer stood between the stranger and the witch. She lay down once more, thinking, this could be interesting. She smelled corbae on the stranger—not crow, but raven. She’d already heard the story of an old corbae who called herself Night Woman having recently visited the Painted Lands.
Abuela stood up from the table. “You can’t come in, so you might as well go away before I decide to teach you a little respect for your elders.”
Was she blind? Ruby wondered. This woman’s aura was so ageless and powerful, she might well have been here when the world was first born.
The woman snorted at Abuela’s use of the word “elder.”
“I can’t come in?” she said. “Do you have something to guard your house besides this little ward you’ve cast upon it?” She ran a long finger through the air in the doorway. There was sudden flash of light and a sharp electric smell, as though a wall socket had overloaded. Then she stepped inside, followed by the thump of bass and drums drifting over from the 66 Bandas’ clubhouse.
Ruby grinned at the look of shock on Abuela’s face.
“You shouldn’t be so unfriendly,” the stranger told the witch. “I’m actually here to help you.”
Suspicion lay in Abuela’s eyes. “Help me…how?” she asked.
Ruby could also detect…not so much fear, as nervousness. Which was probably why Abuela said nothing when the woman made herself comfortable in one of the room’s armchairs. The stranger crossed her long legs at the ankles, then cocked her head to study the witch over her steepled fingertips.
“I want you to think about what you’re doing with Ruby,” the stranger finally said. “Think of it as a head’s up.”
Abuela gave her a puzzled look.
The stranger smiled. “You do know that when you’ve used her all up, you’ll have every canid within a hundred miles out for your blood.”
Abuela scoffed. “I’m not afraid of a few mangy dogs.”
“You should be. You’re starting a blood feud here, and surely you realize that among the ma’inawo there’s only one way to stop a feud: when the guilty party is dead.”
Ruby knew the exaggeration was deliberate, to scare Abuela, but the witch chose only to defend herself.
“I’m not guilty of anything but making a bargain that Ruby agreed to of her own free will.”
The stranger tapped one foot against the other. “That would be a good argument,” she said, “except she was in an untenable situation, which you used to your advantage such that she had no choice but to agree to your disgusting bargain.”
“I didn’t seek that child out. She came to me.”
“And you took advantage of her.”
“She entered my house uninvited. There is a cost for everything.”
“As you will find out.”
The witch’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t know who you are, but you have just done the same, and I won’t have you come into my home to disrespect me.”
The woman regarded Abuela with a steady gaze. “Understandable. You should remove me.”
Ruby smiled to herself. She could already see that, while Abuela had no idea who the stranger was, the witch knew that the woman would only leave when she was ready and there was nothing she could do about it.
“And then you took further advantage of Ruby, an innocent,” the stranger went on. “You’re familiar with how loyalty works in the canid clans, even when it’s as misplaced as it was here. You know their belief that the strong must protect the weak.”
“You’re too late. The bargain has been struck.”
The dark-haired woman nodded. “On the basis of treachery, which makes its validity questionable. Even if it holds, it will only last until you’ve used her up, and then they will come after you—by the hundreds.”
The witch let out a derisive laugh. “There aren’t that many ma’inawo dogs.”
“Are you so sure of that? Not on the rez, perhaps, but there are dogs everywhere. I haven’t counted how many live in this area, even just in your own barrio, but I’ll wager there are more than enough to extract their revenge.”
“Not many are ma’inawo,” Abuela tried again.
The stranger shrugged, ignoring the comment. “Of course, the other way to conclude the bargain is for you to die.”
“You can try your worst—” Abuela began.
The stranger cut her off with a lazy wave of her hand. “Oh, it wouldn’t be me. I don’t really see violence as the best solution to anything. My sister, however, has no such scruples. And, I should warn you, rather a heavy hand. She’s as likely to lay waste to your entire barrio, simply to deal with you. The trouble with the ma’inawo in this area is that we despise witches. We find it hard to differentiate between what you think you are, and the evil of the Kikimi witches.”
Ruby had been taking some pleasure in Abuela’s discomfort, but this was going too far. She shifted to her human form so that she could speak.
The stranger turned to look at her with a radiant smile. “Ohla, Ruby,” she said. “I’ve come to take you home.”
Ruby shook her head. “No matter how bad the bargain was, I still gave my word.”
The smile faded and was replaced by a world of sadness in the woman’s eyes. “But you know it’s true,” she said. “Your kin will have vengeance when the witch is done with you.”
“I’ve asked them not to.”
The woman reached out and touched Ruby’s arm. “And will they listen to you?”
Ruby gave a slow shake of her head.
“So you see,” the stranger told Abuela, “your only hope to survive this is to set Ruby free.”
“What’s to stop the canids from still attacking me?”
“I give you my word.”
Abuela wasn’t foolish enough to question the word of this elder ma’inawo, but Ruby couldn’t see how the woman could speak for the canid clans. Whoever she might be, the stranger had no hold over them.
But apparently Abuela wasn’t taking that into consideration. “Very well,” she said. “Ruby can go. But now the debt returns to the girl.”
The stranger sat up straight, feet on the floor, eyes flashing with dangerous light.
“Now you’re just pissing me off,” she told Abuela, all pretense at polite talk gone.
Abuela glared back at her. “You can’t expect me to come out of this empty-handed.”
The stranger stood up. She seemed even taller than she’d been when she entered. Black wings unfolded behind her, spreading out from wall to wall, ceiling to floor.
“You’re right,” she said. If frost and ice were given a voice, it would sound like hers. “I came with such absurd expectations,” she went on. “I should have realized that you five-fingered beings are all the same. It’s never how you can help those around you, but what’s in it for yourself.”
Abuela bristled. “I help my community,” she said. “If that comes at the cost of some foolish white girl, why should it bother me?”
“No reason. As always, you five-fingered beings always come up with some ill-reasoned justification that you presume will kill any argument.”
Her voice had lost some of its coldness, but Ruby couldn’t help feeling that her anger had grown even more. But that appeared to be lost on Abuela as well.
The witch reached behind her and picked up a staff that had been leaning against the wall. Ruby couldn’t quite make out the symbols carved on it. They seemed to swim in her vision when she tried to focus on them. Her nostrils twitched. The staff reeked of magic.
A sly smile came over Abuela’s face. “You won’t be the first of your kind to underestimate me,” she told the stranger, fingering the engravings.
Her gaze went to Ruby. “Come to me,” she said.
Ruby didn’t move.
“She’s no longer yours,” the stranger said, “You renounced your hold on her.”
Abuela had been holding the staff upright. Now she tipped it until its top was pointed at the stranger. “I do whatever I wish in my own house,” she said through gritted teeth.
The Wind in His Heart Page 49