by Faith Hunter
“No!” I said.
Leo flashed me a grin that was all teeth and fangs and bloodlust. “Yes, my Jane. It is done.” He popped away in a small sound of displaced air and the door slammed.
I gasped and my vision darkened around the edges in reaction to shock and pain. Eli, the evil man, laughed again. To Edmund, kneeling on the floor at Bruiser’s feet, I said, “This is all your fault.”
Edmund, whose face had gone white, and his eyes vamped out, looked up to me, the pupils like pits, staring into hell. With an effort of will, his fangs schincked back up on the little hinges in the roof of his mouth, and his eyes bled back to human. He bowed his head to me, leaning over his bended knee. “My master.”
I thought that I had avoided this, had actually thought that Edmund’s request to become my primo was a ploy on Leo’s part, something to delude the European Vamps that I had such strong magic that I deserved a vamp primo but was all bombast and no action. But . . . this had happened. It was serious. And with the little secretary putting it all in writing, there was no way to refuse. But I did it anyway. “I refuse. I don’t want a primo.”
“Then I shall face the dawn one day hence,” Edmund said, his brown eyes on the floor at my feet. “I will have this day to sleep here, in the council chambers, in safety. Then I must remove my belongings and myself. I no longer have the funds to purchase a lair in such a short time period, and banks are notoriously difficult for Mithrans to deal with.”
“Hotels? Boardinghouses? Acton House caters to vamps.”
“I am yours. Send me where you will.”
“Twenty-four hours,” Eli said, sounding as if he was holding in laughter. “We have time to figure out something.”
* * *
I might have slept, because when I woke, Eli was carrying me toward the sweat house at Aggie One Feather’s place. It was dawn, and the eastern horizon was golden as viewed through the pine trees near her home. Eli pushed open the door with an elbow and knelt on the packed clay floor, sitting me down in front of a fast-burning fire. The sweat house hadn’t been used in a while; I could tell because the air moved with the rising heat and the coolness of the wooden walls. And because there were no coals in the pit, only crackling wood, hickory and pine and cedar. I looked back to the open door to see that the rain had stopped. Mosquitoes buzzed in a cloud, kept at bay when Aggie closed the door on them.
I lifted my left hand. It was shaped like a war club, bones protruding beyond the pelt, bones that had no order or direction, as if they had been built by a toddler with sticks and Play-Doh. My wrist was now involved, the bones bulging. In a normal human wrist, there are twelve main bones. My left wrist looked as if I had twice that many, the tendons attached in the wrong places, stretching in the wrong ways, pressing apart the bones of my lower arm. I was in agony. Closed my eyes and cradled my arm against me.
“How long before the witch is here?” Aggie asked.
“My brother is bringing her,” Eli said. “ETA twelve minutes.”
“I’ve never allowed workers of magic into a sweat.”
“You’re gonna need them. This is a magical attack on Jane.”
“We need her out of her clothes. It’s going to hurt her.”
“No, it’s not.”
I heard the familiar sound of steel sliding from a leather sheath and then Eli was cutting through the expensive clothing, undies and all. “Perv,” I whispered.
“Totally, babe.” He unbuckled all my hidden weapons and piled them beside me. “Miz Aggie, you got scissors? I don’t want to risk the blade near her arm.”
“I brought a pair,” Molly said from the door.
“I am Aggie One Feather. Welcome. Have you ever been to sweat before?”
“Witch version. Not Cherokee. We’ll work around it. What feels right from both practices, blended to help Jane. Yes?”
“I suppose. . . .” Aggie didn’t sound all that certain.
But Molly did. “Thank you, Eli,” she said. “But you need to go now. We’ll handle it.”
“But—”
“No buts,” Molly said. “This is women’s work.”
“Technically, it’s Tsalagi work,” he said.
“True. But also, technically, it’s not men’s work and it’s also not military work,” Molly said with asperity. “Honestly, Eli. Your energies are all wrong. You might cause problems with ceremonial aspects of this. We can handle this. Please go away.”
“You may wait with my mother, Eli,” Aggie said. “She was making breakfast when you called. Pancakes.”
Eli didn’t reply. He just turned on a heel and left the sweat house. I could smell his frustration and worry over the scent of burning wood. And I caught a whiff of Alex on the air as well. I managed to get my eyes open a slit while the women finished ruining my clothing, and I found Aggie in my blurry vision. “No more cats.”
Aggie laughed. “How is Kit-Kit?”
“She’s Molly’s familiar now,” I said. “She adopted her.” Which might imply that Molly had adopted Kit-Kit or that Kit-Kit had adopted Molly, which was closer to the truth.
“My mother said Kit-Kit was supposed to keep you alive, someday,” Aggie said, reminding me of the prophecy warning.
“Mighta already happened,” I said, remembering the lightning that had struck me. Kit-Kit had been there and I had survived. “Or if it hasn’t happened yet, then she’ll be there when I need her.”
“Oh. Sorry,” Molly said. “I’m Molly Everhart Trueblood, earth witch with a touch of moon magics. I am honored to be seated before your hearth. That’s an old witch pleasantry, which means you’re in charge and I’m your willing and helpful assistant.”
“Except where Eli was concerned.” I could hear the laughter in Aggie’s tone.
“Men. Always underfoot.”
Aggie laughed and I felt the two women move toward accommodation until Aggie said, “You are pregnant. I can’t let you stay for a sweat. It’s bad for pregnancy. I’m sorry, but you have to go. You can’t stay here.”
“I wasn’t planning on staying the whole time. I’ll be in and out. Mostly out.” She patted her baby bump. “Casandra Evangeline Jane Yellowrock Everhart-Trueblood is demanding.”
And a witch, I thought. Cassy’s parents didn’t yet know if she was a double-gened witch like Angie, or a single-gened witch like Molly. Either way, she would already be demanding. I remembered Molly pregnant with Little Evan. Her tantrums and emotional outbursts had been spectacular.
“It is against my best instincts, but if you are certain . . .”
Molly said, “I’m good. I promise.”
“Then I offer you welcome in the sweat house of the Tsalagi.”
“What herbs will you put on the fire?” Molly asked.
The two women talked herbs and herbal concoctions and herbal reactions and herbal interactions. They talked ceremony. And all the while, Molly drank from a gallon bottle of Gatorade. The blue kind that always made me want to barf. Just looking at it made me all gaggy.
“I’m thirsty,” I said. “But none a’ that blue stuff. Just water.”
“Soon, Jane,” Aggie said soothingly. More tentatively, she asked Molly, “What do you know about Jane?”
“Everything,” I said. “More than you do.” I tried to focus on Molly, but she was blurry in the firelight. She was dressed in one of Aggie’s coarse white shifts, and so was I, my once-pretty clothes in a heap by the fire, as if to be thrown in and burned. My weapons were nowhere in sight, and I knew that Eli had taken them with him. To Molly I said, “Aggie saw me half-shifted, and we’ve talked while I was under the influence of whatever stuff she gives me to drink, so she knows what I am. How old I am. But she doesn’t know about Beast.”
“Beast?” Aggie said.
“That’s my story to tell, I suppose, since you’re not yourself,” Molly said, settling to a
log seat, her baby belly less obvious beneath the sweat clothes. “When Jane was five years old, her father was murdered by two white men. They also raped her mother, all right in front of Jane. She went to live with her grandmother, who helped her track down and kill the white men. The old bat made Jane help in the killings, according to the War Woman way.”
Aggie’s mouth tightened in response. My story sounded so violent and savage, so cruel and brutal when stripped of the emotions and the pain of a proper Tsalagi telling. “I have heard this tale. Jane was not responsible for the actions of her grandmother, nor what her grandmother forced her to do. There is no judgment against her for the deeds of another.”
“Agreed. But then the political world shifted,” Molly said, “and they were sent on the Trail of Tears.”
“So she has told me,” Aggie said, agreeable, though mildly irritated. I hadn’t decided if she believed me about it all. She might just think I was a nutcase.
Molly went on, relentless. “Jane doesn’t remember much about it. But at one point, in the middle of a raging snowstorm, her grandmother forced her into the animal she knew best, a bobcat, and tossed her out into the snow to live or die.”
“Jane has told me this, and that makes her over one hundred seventy years old.”
“Give or take.”
“And yes, I know that Dalonige’i Digadoli is a skinwalker.”
“Good,” Molly said. “I didn’t know if you got that part yet. Anyway, she was out in the snow, in her bobcat form, and she found a frozen deer carcass. She was eating when a nursing female cougar came back for her kill and attacked Jane. Jane did accidental black magic and took both the form of the mountain lion and its soul inside with her. She’s two-souled.”
Aggie One Feather muttered something in the tongue of The People. It contained the word ti, which was buttocks, and the phrase sounded like a curse, which made me chuckle. “Yeah. Kinda the way I feel about it,” I said, holding up my deformed left hand. “And it’s probably the major reason why weird stuff keeps happening to me.”
Molly said, “It’s taken a long time for her accept that she isn’t a liver-eater, but the possibility of someday becoming one still worries her.”
“I understand this better now,” Aggie said. “The two-souled are . . . dangerous.”
“She knows. But she and Beast have come to an accommodation and work together to achieve common goals.”
Which made me sound like a business merger with customer relations issues.
Molly continued. “She feels guilt for killing the two men who murdered her father and it’s shaped and formed her whole personality and being. But she’s been working on guilt with you, and things are better.”
Aggie muttered the same words, and this time I got them. Tsalagi don’t have cusswords or curses like the white man, but some phrases can be used in that way, according to the intent of the speaker. “Uskanigigaluda tsi ti,” loosely translated, meant “scalping my butt.” I laughed, the movement shaking my hand, and ended on a pained breath and a curse of my own.
“You know she’s hurting if she’s cussing,” Molly said, of me. “And the little one doesn’t like the heat, so I’m moving back against the wall. I’m here if you need me.”
Through slitted eyes, I watched as Aggie stirred the wood and the new coals beneath, muttering in Cherokee too low for even me to hear. She now knew all my secrets, and she hadn’t tossed me to the curb, which had always been my private fear. She rearranged the river rocks that would take heat from the fire, pushing them closer to the flames. She rearranged the clay bowl filled with water and the dipper, and a fired red clay tile, like one off a roof, something new that she hadn’t used before, her actions and the way she was breathing indicating that she was using the motions as a formulary, a methodology, trying to settle herself, to make room inside for all the things she had heard.
She didn’t look at me, not even once, keeping her gaze on the fire, and I didn’t like the fact that she kept her gaze averted. Aggie was having a hard time dealing with this. With me. “Can you accept me, even knowing this, Aggie?” I asked.
Aggie scowled and, from a basket at her side, pulled a sprig of dried rosemary and held it to the fire. Rosemary hadn’t been a traditional Cherokee herb, having been brought by the first European settlers, but many medicine men and wise women of the Americas had incorporated anything that worked into their ceremonies, and rosemary had strong oils that performed well with many other herbs. The scent filled the sweat house as the dried leaves curled, sparked, and caught fire. Aggie placed the burning stem in the curved arc of the red clay tile, which she had turned concave side up, perfect to hold the blazing stem as the rosemary leaves burned to ash. The stem burned as well, and the sweat house was thick with the scent. When the rosemary was ash, she slanted her gaze at me and said, “I’m your elder. Or I was your elder. It was difficult for me to find out you’re older than lisi. It is doubly difficult to hear of your souls. There is no story in the histories to tell me what to do or how to help you. But it doesn’t matter. I will try to help one of The People who comes to me for wisdom. Breathe.”
She pulled another herb from the basket and extended that branch toward the fire as well. When it caught, she placed it too in the clay tile. The herb was something even stronger than rosemary, smelling of camphor. I sneezed three times in succession, which jarred my arm horribly. When I looked at it again, the abnormal shape-change had worsened, and now my elbow was involved, the joint trying to bend backward. I groaned in misery.
“Breathe!” Aggie demanded, and I breathed in the stink. In and out. In and out. She threw another branch on the fire, and I watched it flame and turn to ash. She repeated the command to breathe and burned small branches of the stinking herb until she had done it seven times. Then she lifted the clay tile and emptied the ash over her clay bowl and tapped it until the ashes were transferred. I had a bad feeling about what she was going to do with the stuff in that bowl.
Aggie burned three more herbs, these smelling of two varieties of mint and one that stank of creosote, adding the ashes to the bowl. She had a small pile of stinking ash, like a tiny volcano cone, in the bowl. She unscrewed a Mason jar, and the stench of moonshine filled the sweat house. She added a splash of that to the bowl too. With a whisk made of plants, she stirred the contents.
“Aggie,” I said, “none of those were Cherokee herbs.”
Her scowl deepened. “No. These are herbs suggested by a crazy old Navajo man. He’s one who saw the photos I sent of your last spell-instigated injury. He said they might help you attain a higher state of energy, one strong enough to reach inside and pull your own shape back out. I thought he meant a healed version of yourself. Only later, I realized he had to know you were a skinwalker or a were and he was seeing a maltransformation, not simply an injury. A dark magic spell might have brought about this particular problem, but the treatment would still be the same, no matter how it was acquired.” At my confused look, Aggie said, “Never mind. Maybe this will help. Maybe it won’t. So breathe and meditate and we’ll see what happens.”
I breathed, watching as she added something bluish green to the bowl’s mix; it looked like a small upside-down cup made from a wrinkled cactus, but without the spines. She took a pestle to the mix and ground it for a long time, adding more moonshine. And when she passed me the moonshine, ashes, and wrinkled green thingy, I didn’t refuse, question, or hesitate. I drank it down. The moonshine was so strong, I didn’t half notice the other tastes, though the texture was gag-worthy all on its own. I coughed and spluttered and thought my esophagus might catch fire, but it didn’t. It hit my stomach like a bomb going off, however, heat flaming back up, and I had to swallow it down again. This time, the vile concoction didn’t come back up. Instead the alcohol hit my system and I dropped down into a meditative trance, faster than I ever had. Almost as if the moonshine and other stuff pulled me down.
And down.
I fell into my soul home as if dropping though an opening in the roof and I landed beside the fire pit on all fours, Beast form. I/we shook myself, loose coat sliding across my frame.
We bent to the fire and breathed, the scent strong and warm, of cedar heartwood and hickory. Here, proper herbs had been burned on the flames, sage and sweetgrass. Tsalagi herbs, not that awful peyote. Peyote. I wasn’t certain how I knew that the greenish wrinkled cuplike thing was peyote, but it was. And I was having a drugged dream in my soul home.
I sat upright, front paws together, and studied the cave that represented my own soul, my spirit, a place of refuge and safety, which, on the surface, might seem to indicate that it should never change, but it did, and often, as a reflection of my life and what was happening to me. It was like a three-dimensional representation of my psyche.
Beast growled. Soul den. Place where Jane and Beast are one.
Yeah. Pretty much.
It was a cave in the real world, somewhere, because I had been there when I first changed into my bobcat form, helped along by my father and my grandmother. In that long-ago past, the cave walls and ceiling had been a grayish stone, the roof melting down in drops and spirals, soft and puddling, like melted candles, the rock seeming magical. The cave roof had cried the tears of the world in soft plinks, the sound of falling water merging with the drums and flute of my first change.
Since, it had become this representation, where I saw myself as I was, moment to moment, sometimes standing on four legs, sometimes on two. The shadows on the walls merging often into one, a form with no certain shape, both cat and human, furred and skinned, four-pawed and two-footed. A shadow shimmering with black motes of light.
On one wall I had once seen circles and swirls painted in soot and fat and crushed pigments. Carved into the stone were arrows pointing to the right. Lines parallel. Lines like waves—the symbols of The People. And there had been paw prints. They padded across the rounded stone roof of the world, big-cat paws in the red of old blood. Human footprints walked beside the paw prints, up and over the roof of the world. Side by side. Like Beast and me.