"No," he said in a flat voice. "What did you hear?"
"Nothing. I…."
He frowned at her. "There must be truth between us, Kymbria. Otherwise, this won't work. And we could be in danger."
"Could be?" she sneered. "And danger from what?"
Keoman stared at the wall of the sweat lodge, past her shoulder.
"I…." Determination flared again, and she touched his arm, refusing to continue until he met her gaze. "I don't know why I attacked you. I thought at first that it might have been due to the PTSD. But somehow I think it was connected to whatever was out there."
"Why do you think that?"
When he continued to stare, she bit her lip, then said, "I truthfully don't know what I heard. Most of it was faint, not even a whisper. More like…you know, like I heard some voice in my mind but couldn't understand the words."
"Most of it?"
"I think…I might have recognized a couple words, but I'm not sure. They don't make sense. And…."
"And?" he prodded.
She sighed and admitted, "Whatever was on the lake last night did the same thing to me. I flew into a rage and…and nearly attacked Scarlet. Now, will you please tell me what you know?"
He shrugged. "That's the problem. I don't know what I know. I'm going to have to talk to the Elders."
"Then tell me what happens when a ceremony is disrupted like this."
Refusing to answer, Keoman rose and held out a hand to help her up. "We need to go now. We can talk as we walk."
He picked up his midewayan, then motioned her to precede him through the entrance. She hesitated, then straightened her shoulders and pushed aside the deerskin.
A nearly full moon silvered the snow, stars as bright as icicle points in the obsidian sky. Even in her down-filled snowsuit, Kymbria shivered in the drastic change of temperature. Her breath fogged the air in front of her face, as thick as the steam in the lodge had been.
She scanned around them, surprised she didn't feel on the verge of attack. But Keoman had been out there for a while. Whatever else had been there had already had plenty of time to leave.
Keoman nudged her with her snowshoes and waited until she strapped them on before he said, "Start back down the trail. I'll be right behind you."
By now she knew better than to argue with him. She pulled her knit cap down further and turned her collar up, then started walking. Before she'd gone a hundred yards, a thunderous whoosh filled the air, and she nearly fell as she wobbled and half-turned. The sweat lodge was already blazing, the flames outlining Keoman's figure as he hurried towards her.
Keoman took the lead, and she followed in his tracks, a repeat of the journey they'd made an hour before. Only this time Keoman set a much faster pace. She waited for him to speak as promised, but when he hadn't said a word for over three-fourths of the way back to where they'd left his vehicle, she moved up beside him.
"What happened?" she repeated.
"Not now, Kymbria. We'll talk, but not until we're sa…until we're back on the road."
Safe? Did he start to say 'not until we're safe?' Is — whatever that thing was — still in the area?
A chill that lifted hair chased itself over Kymbria's head, down her spine and along her arms. A chill that shouldn't have been there, given their pace and the fact her body had already warmed. She dropped back to follow Keoman again and glanced behind.
Nothing. Only wilderness, tall snow-covered pines and stark, leafless trees. Only their footprints strung out behind them marred the pristine snow. No shadows; no wind blew to move a limb to create any. Strange. No noise, either, beyond the slap-crunch of their snowshoes, and even that muffled. At night in the winter, wolves called, owls hunted, deer and moose roamed and broke cover when humans approached. This icy silence echoed eerily, as though brittle with the lack of noise.
Keoman drove a jeep, scarred with rust from the salt used during long months of trying to keep roads viable for travel in the Northwood. He hurriedly removed his snowshoes, as Kymbria did. She handed hers over and struggled across the snow piled beside the road from snowplows, around to the passenger door. As she reached for the door handle, the dome light went on. Keoman tossed both pair of snowshoes on the back floorboard, but he reverently lifted his midéwayan toward the sky before he placed it on the backseat.
She waited until they'd driven a couple miles on the backcountry road before she spoke. By then, it was clear to her that Keoman had either forgotten his promise to explain things to her…or, probably, didn't feel it was important enough to worry about a woman's fears.
"Truth between us," she reminded him. "What was up there with us?"
He glanced at her, but quickly returned his attention to the road when the jeep slid over an icy spot. "Are your beliefs returning, Kymbria?" he asked.
He was good at that — evading her by answering a question with another. She could play that game.
"How did you know I'd lost touch with them?" she responded quietly.
"I've kept in contact with Niona. With what you've gone through, you have to have suffered doubts. We all do, at times. I imagine yours began a long time ago. When you barely survived that fire."
The fire. Tina's screams as she died.
"Your father helped me through that," she reminded him. "And you're changing the subject. I need to know if that thing out there was what made me attack you. Or whether I need to start taking my meds again."
"I honestly don't know," he said around an exhaled breath.
More confused than ever, Kymbria remained silent as Keoman drove on, until they entered the outskirts of Neris Lake. There, instead of taking the intersecting road to her cabin, he turned down the road with the flashing sign for the casino.
"Hungry?" he asked, then went on before she answered, "I am. I've fasted since yesterday, in preparation for tonight. There's a snack bar at the casino. Remember Leota?"
Kymbria sighed in resignation. For now she wouldn't push him. Keoman had never responded well to coercion. But before they got back to her cabin, she would have some answers. She had to have some answers.
"How could I forget the woman who makes the best hamburgers on earth?" she replied. "But can we make it quick? Scarlet's usually pretty good when I leave her, although if I'm gone too long, she sometimes retaliates."
"By doing what?" Keoman asked with a chuckle. "Eating your shoes?"
As he pulled into the casino parking lot, Kymbria said, "Do you know that darned dog has learned how to open closet doors? And do you have any idea what a pair of Italian sandals costs? I had to child-proof my apartment a week after I got her, long before Risa started to crawl."
Chapter 10
After the isolation at the sweat lodge, the clamor in the casino inundated Kymbria. Dark and dim, even in the daytime — perhaps to give the players a measure of anonymity as they lost their billfolds — lights flashed, bells gonged, and some machines even spoke to the players. A constant, low-growl murmur filled the air as the players responded in kind, either urging the reels to stop or imploring them to continue. As one of the last bastions of nicotine, a diffuse haze of smoke hung over everything, furthering the murkiness.
Considering Keoman's continued evasiveness, Kymbria kept a tight lid on her questions, as well as her emotions. Frankly, she resented his lack of concern for her fears and turmoiled thoughts. Only he and her mother, Niona, knew the depths of her angst, how her entire future rested on the success of this venture to the Northwood. She'd spent hours on the phone with Keoman before she arrived, even telling him the truth about Risa's origin, another fact to which only Niona was privy. But since they'd left the sweat lodge, Keoman had appeared more and more preoccupied with something on his mind other than how the interruption of an extremely vital ceremony would affect her.
Or…did it all fit together somehow? She'd never know until the Midé talked straight to her instead of boomeranging her questions back at her with his own.
Just inside the entrance, they pa
ssed a tiny elderly lady who erupted off her stool as three red sevens lined up across the face of a slot machine. It startled Kymbria for a second. But Keoman took her arm and whispered a steadying word, and she managed to smile at the woman. Who would have thought such an ancient could move that fast? But mindless gambling did work wonders sometimes.
After the past few hours, Kymbria herself itched to drop a few dollars in a slot, focus her gaze on the reels and shut out all else. Feel the delicious tension build as the numbers flashed past and settled one by one. Pout at the near-misses and feed the slot for another chance. Right now gambling appealed more than digging deeper into the fear she'd faced in the sweat lodge. The fear that continued to dog her.
She eyed a particularly appealing video slot — one where a sappy smiley-face danced out and racked up extra points should a player be lucky enough to enter the inner Bonus domain — and sighed. Once this was over, she would give in to the idiotic diversion of gambling. For now, she was done running away from her problems.
Safely past the elderly lady's enthusiastic cheers at her good fortune, Keoman dropped her arm. They passed one aisle, and Kymbria paused and took a step back. The table games were laid out in the center of the casino building, and she thought she recognized one of the players. In order to illuminate the players' cards, there was more light, and the man's blond hair shone. With his back to her, she couldn't be sure it was her neighbor Caleb, though.
"Want to play a machine while I order for us?" Keoman asked, a smile of understanding on his face.
"No," she said reluctantly. "Not right now. I didn't bring any cash."
"I can loan you a few bucks. Or they take checks or credit cards. And there are some really cool penny slots."
"I know," Kymbria admitted as they threaded their way towards the snack bar, her gaze sliding to each side of the aisle to note the various one-armed bandits they passed for future reference. "Do they have that Black Cat one?"
"Where you break the mirrors or the cat chases the crow up and down the ladder?"
"Yeah, that one," she said with a laugh as they slid into a booth in the rear of the snack bar. They both unzipped the upper part of their snowsuits and shrugged to let them lie across the back of the booth. "You play here with the customers?"
"Sometimes," he said. "But I'm more into the far room over there behind us."
Kymbria leaned a bit to see past him. "High Dollar Slots?" she asked with a gasp. "You mean, like more than a dollar?"
He shrugged. "That's where the real payoffs are. Didn't you see my picture on the wall as we came in? Won fifty thou on a five dollar slot a couple months after we opened."
"Ah," Kymbria scoffed. "You probably had to pay most of it in taxes. Now, if you keep under the IRS limit, they don't take your money away from you."
Keoman motioned to someone at the counter. "Two burgers with the works, two sides of fries, and a couple 7-Ups," he called, then asked Kymbria, "That work for you?"
"Perfect, except I was wondering if this casino serves alcohol."
"As a matter of fact, it's recent, but yeah, they do. Only beer. None free, like in the non-white casinos, but you can buy one. I'll stick with my soda."
"Then I'll have a beer. Change one of those sodas to a…Bud Lite," she called to the cook, who nodded in reply.
Growing serious again, Kymbria asked, "Does your avoidance of alcohol come from your path in life, or that addiction some Native Americans seem to have? A gene which I'm glad overlooked me."
"We don't like to pollute our bodies, especially since we are granted the gift to perform our crucial ceremonies and a certain amount of reverence because of that ability," he told her, although she couldn't miss the fact that his answer didn't totally address her questions. He was still playing his evasiveness game.
"Lots of older people here," she mused to change the subject. Maybe she could ambush him after he'd eaten.
"Retirees have more time to gamble," he replied.
"Although not necessarily more money." He only shrugged, leaving the conversation at a standstill.
The burgers arrived quickly and were every bit as delicious as she remembered. Silence ensued while Kymbria finished hers, her fries and most of her beer. Then she pushed the plastic basket aside and leaned into the cushioned booth behind her.
"Does what went on out there tonight have anything to do with why my neighbor across the lake is here in our area?" she asked in order to initiate the conversation she now intended to have.
As usual, Keoman was stubborn enough not to respond if he didn't want to, and he definitely appeared not to want to answer that.
Kymbria gritted her teeth. "Caleb's as close-mouthed as you. He said he wasn't at liberty to discuss the reason he was here. I'll bet he'd be one of those white males who understand the story about why early tribes used only their women for pack mules!"
"There was another reason for that, at least for the Midewiwins who traveled with the clans to their new camps." Keoman drained his 7-Up and signaled for a refill. "We always consecrated our dwelling places, but moving left us open to…anything we happened to pass through."
Kymbria lifted an eyebrow. "And you needed your hands free to fight evil spirits?"
"No," Keoman said with a chuckle. "But we did need our concentration, and being tired can leach that out of you. Another beer?"
"Yeah, since you're driving."
The waitress delivered the beer and fresh soda, and Kymbria sipped in the silence between them, although all around the booth a cacophony sounded. Finally, just as she decided they might as well leave, Keoman looked up from toying with his soda can.
"You asked what happens when a ceremony is interrupted. I was not supposed to cut the ceremony short for any reason. It isn't done. We're expected to fight any evil spirit that tries to interfere in a sacred ceremony."
The cold lump the food had eased re-settled in Kymbria's stomach. For a Midé to go against his teachings….as Keoman indicated, it just wasn't done. Her dismay at his revelation made her realize how much faith she was actually starting to have again in the powers of her ancestors and tribal spirits. The deep desire — and hope — their guidance, gleaned through ceremonies such as the one they had attempted, could put her future back in her own hands, as it had in her teens. Losing the possibility filled her with dread, not only for herself, but for the daughter whose future meant more to her than her own.
"Will there be repercussions?" she whispered.
Keoman stared over her shoulder as he twisted his soda can. Her skilled gaze, achieved as a result of years of experience in psychological counseling of others, noticed an ever-so-slight tremble in his fingers.
He shrugged in a tense manner "As far as I know, it's never happened before."
Even though they were alone in the snack bar, Kymbria leaned toward him to protect their conversation further. "Then what the hell are you hiding from me?" she snarled in a quiet growl. "Nothing…nothing is more important than a sacred ceremony. Not just to me, but to generations of our people. You can't blame the fact you had a woman there. Women have been part of the Midewiwin Society for a long while now. There was something out there, something angry at what we were doing. Wasn't there?"
"It's not supposed to be here for another three weeks," Keoman whispered back in an adamant undertone. "It's never appeared early in three hundred years!"
"What?" Kymbria demanded again.
He faced her fully, his shadowed brown eyes probing for her reaction. "A windigo."
She drew back in puzzlement, a mixture of astonishment and laughter trapped in her chest. Keoman's direct gaze told her she better extinguish the laughter; this was for real, not a joke.
"Windigo?" she asked. "We don't have windigos here. I would have heard about one. Or Mom would have mentioned it."
"Have no doubt, we do have a windigo. Have had for…well, as we say, for many moons. I don't know if that's what was up there at the sweat lodge. Not for certain. It's just…there have been ru
mblings among the Elders. And then McCoy showed up. But he, too, was under the impression our windigo wasn't due until next month."
"Ours? Come on, Keoman."
He leaned toward her. "You can bet your pretty ass that our windigo is real, Kymbria James. It's been real every forty years since Cocoman and his war party of revenge seekers got caught in those blizzards. And Cocoman was the only one who came back."
Kymbria searched her memory for the Old word. "Cocoman? Snow Snake?" Then something else hit her. Shocked, she went on, "I remember that legend. Snow Snake ate parts of the other people in his war party."
Keoman nodded. "This legend is true, not just a tale with a moral. And every forty years since that happened…well, since a year after the blizzards…a windigo has hunted these lands. Has preyed on our people. Did you ever wonder why there were so many stories of drunken Indians who passed out on the way home and were never seen again? Every forty years, sixteen people disappear. One for each person in the war party."
"Only men?" she asked.
"No," he said hesitantly. "There have been a few women over the years."
He held up a hand when she started to ask another question. "Three weeks of blizzard after blizzard descended on them before the other sixteen all died. The number never varies. Legend says that It, for we don't speak his name…another screw-up I've just made. Legend says It feeds on fifteen of the prey and saves one to eat and regain strength for the next hunt, forty years down the road."
"Why was it a year later before Coco…It turned into a windigo?"
"That's how long it takes," Keoman explained with a distasteful shrug. "And I need to meet with the Elders, tell them what happened. I think you should pack up and go on home for now. Come back in February, and we'll work on our lessons again."
"I…I think you're right," she agreed. She damned sure didn't need to be mixed up in something like this, not with her mind already shaky. She couldn't quite quell a sneer of incredulity, though. It was one thing to trust the power of spirits and beliefs that were part of the religion of her tribe. The power of the mind was awesome, something she had learned through practice over the years. It was another thing to actually believe an evil paranormal entity — a physical entity — could stalk the Northwood and prey on her people.
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