Windigo Thrall

by Cate Culpepper

  It was easily the longest speech Jo had ever heard Elena make, and she struggled to digest it through the murk rising in her mind. Looking down at the suddenly fierce Elena, Jo was nearly afraid of her. Then she was swept by a thoroughly unexpected sensation of regret and almost childlike hurt feelings.

  “Elena,” Jo whispered. “I was very rude. I apologize.”

  Elena did not ease her iron-fingered grip on her chin. Her glare was infused with the strangest kind of authority, rendering her somehow taller and older and wiser than Jo, but then her aura of certainty began to fade. For a moment, Elena looked as confused as Jo felt. Her touch grew more gentle.

  “Ah, Jo. That’s all right. We’ve all had such a long day.” Elena rested her palm lightly against Jo’s cheek. “Try to get some rest soon, okay?”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  Elena patted her face, her touch contrite now.

  Jo watched Elena until she disappeared up the stairs to the second level.

  She thought of Becca and Grady outside, alone in the hot tub, out of her sight. She started to go out to them. Her stomach rumbled again.

  Jo turned back toward the kitchen. Pat and Grady may have cooked all the bacon that morning, making their gratuitous breakfast, but if not, Jo was frying the rest of it.

  *

  Elena’s knees were shaking as she climbed the carpeted stairs. Faint music chimed in the pocket of her robe. She made it to the landing, well out of the hearing of the alien creature below, before she opened her cell.

  “You left your heathen gringa wife outside in a bathtub with another heathen gringa?” Her mother hissed. “And then you tell me this, and then you hang up the phone! On your madre. I did not raise you to be so disrespectful, or to be so estupida as to leave your naked esposa alone in the night with a naked gringa!”

  “They’re not naked.” Elena rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes, comforted by her mother’s voice. “Grady sends her best to you.”

  “Pah. Tell her I made six batches of empanadas today and stuffed them all down my maw, saving not one for her. She will get none of them, because she stole my only daughter.” The querulous tone, as much a part of her mother as her faint moustache, was draining from her voice. “What is it, niña? You sound so far away from me.”

  “I feel far away, Mamá.”

  Inez Montalvo was only rarely able to summon the genuinely selfless maternal concern Elena heard clearly now. “Tell me what worries you.”

  “I’m going to be tested up here, it turns out. I don’t know that I’m equal to this test.” Elena thumped her head softly against the wall. “And the stakes are enormous, Mamá. I’m a little scared.”

  “What is this test?”

  “It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later. Just not tonight. I’m pretty tired.”

  “Ay, Dios.” Her mother was thoughtfully silent a moment. “But have you prayed on this burden, my Elena?”

  “Yes, I have. Often.”

  “With every breath?”

  “With every breath.” Elena smiled through the tears in her eyes. “Just as you taught me.”

  “My good girl. And the gringa, she is helping you with this test?”

  “Yes, as much as she can.”

  “Grady is a good person, Elena. A strong person. You let her help you. This is not always easy for you, as you are pig-headed. Yes?”

  “Yes,” Elena agreed.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Thank you, Mamá. Sweet dreams to you.”

  “And you will call me in the morning.”

  “Sí, I will. Good night.”

  “Te amo, Elenita. Take good care of my daughter.”

  Chapter Six

  Maggie would have sworn an oath she remembered no Chippewa words from her childhood, but she was wrong. She spewed every foul obscenity ever born in two languages as she staggered through the snow.

  “Bastards,” she gasped. Oh, her slimy coward of a father. Let him slink smugly home to Minnesota now. Let the whole sorry clan go with him. She wanted nothing more to do with any of them.

  Maggie stopped and leaned against a tree because she had to. She bent over and rested her hands on her knees and pulled in air, her nose and eyes dripping. “How the hell far…are you?” she wheezed. She meant the dark woman, Pat, and the four others who had come with her that morning. She had only the vaguest notion where any of them lived. “A mansion,” and “that way,” were little fucking help, but that was the only direction her family would give her. They were already packing as she slammed out the door and into the night.

  Every single Abequa had flatly refused to come with her. To Maggie’s incredulity, they also refused to let her use one of their dilapidated junk heap cars to find the women, or even to drive her to them.

  “We’re headed the other way,” her father had said. “The highway is east of here.”

  “But you said it was less than two miles!” Maggie protested. “Just help me find them and drop me off!”

  “Let them take care of their own.” Her father had shrugged. “We always have.”

  She pushed off the tree and plowed on, grateful for the faint tire tracks she could see in the road, made by Pat’s vehicle only that morning, and now filling with fresh snow. They were like Pat’s footsteps, leading back to her.

  The storm had begun, but it hadn’t hit in full yet. A determined, steady snow had been falling for almost an hour, and she had to churn through it with each step. Luckily, Maggie’s people knew cold and snow, and the bitter chill of the night air didn’t faze her.

  She didn’t know how far she had walked, only that it had been miles, or how late it was, only that it was after midnight. An uneasy sense of déjà vu crept over her, and she shook off the false memory impatiently. To her knowledge, she had never before risked a fucking heart attack by running through a blizzard in the middle of the night, so she had no time for lying illusions.

  Gold lights. Very far up a steep side road, but the fading tire tracks turned that way. Maggie drew breath into her aching lungs and began the climb. When she finally reached the top of the icy drive, she stopped short. Pat’s big truck was parked at the side of the house, but what was a park ranger doing living in a place as grand as this? Did she actually live with the rich white women?

  She couldn’t even find the damn entrance! Maggie staggered around the side of the huge house, hoping she wouldn’t be jumped by guard dogs, then back toward what had to be the front door. The moon was supposedly full but so scudded by cloud cover the night was almost fully dark. And the tasteful, recessed lights dotted here and there were no help—

  Fury streaked through Maggie’s exhaustion, her fear and her grief, and she snatched up a good-sized rock from the yard. She hurled it at one of the windows and screeched, as loud and long as her breathlessness would allow.

  The rock smacked against one of the high windows, but the richness of the thick pane held; of course, these people could afford thick windows. Enraged, Maggie screamed again and searched the ground. She found a bigger rock beneath the snow, and she pitched it at a front window as hard as she could.

  This one smashed through, a soul-satisfying explosion of sound.

  Maggie tried to form words but found she had none. All she could do was shriek them awake. High in the house, at last, another low light flickered on. She backed up a few steps in the slush, trying to see the upper floor.

  And then Maggie was hit so hard, so solidly, she flew off her feet and crashed into the snow. What little air she’d had was gone gone gone, and all she could do was grapple with the gorilla holding her down.

  “Park security.” The voice was recognizably Pat Daka’s, maddeningly calm in spite of the strength of her grip flipping Maggie onto her back. “Lie still.”

  Maggie had no choice. Pat’s face emerged above her, inches above her. Her fierce eyes studied Maggie in the dim light, and then recognition seeped in.

  “Maggie?”

  They were both m
otionless, Maggie on her back in the snow, Pat clenching her arms, holding her down. That intense déjà vu again.

  “Pat?” Another voice, faint, from the entry. More irritated than afraid. “What the hell’s going on out there?”

  “It’s all right, Jo.” Pat stared down at Maggie. “Just go back in the…” Her words trailed off and her eyes widened.

  Terror like Maggie had never known closed her throat, and the world went dark.

  *

  Elena seemed to know what she was doing. Pat told herself this for the third time and struggled to keep her distance from the deep sofa where Maggie lay, still unconscious. Elena was some kind of healer, she had looked after Jo earlier, and she assured them Maggie would be fine soon. But Pat thought she’d been out a rather long time.

  “Did she really walk here?” Becca must have shared Pat’s worry because she kept hovering behind the sofa. “Grady gave Maggie her card. Surely she knew she could call and we’d pick her up—”

  “But then she would have had no excuse to break my window.” Jo frowned at the mess of broken glass in one corner, and Pat hated her for a moment. Jo seemed to hear her own callousness. She scowled and plucked a blanket from the back of another couch and draped it over Maggie, who was already swaddled in two others.

  Pat started to speak, but Elena lifted one finger to silence her. Wrapped in a flannel nightgown, she was seated on the sofa beside Maggie, measuring her pulse at the throat.

  Elena nodded. “She’s calming down. Her heart rate is almost normal now. I don’t see any signs of hypothermia or other injury. And Maggie is young and strong; we just need to give her time to rest and warm up.”

  “I hit her pretty hard.” Pat heard the plaintive note in her voice and silenced it. Her job was protecting Jo Call, her friends, this property, and all of this national park. She’d had no way of knowing this screaming, rock-throwing lunatic was Maggie Abequa. “Any chance she smacked her head, maybe a concussion?”

  Elena slipped her hand beneath Maggie’s tumbling curls and probed the back of her scalp again. “I still feel no swelling, Pat, and her pupils are equal and reactive. If she doesn’t wake up in the next several minutes, we’ll run her to the nearest hospital. But for now, I’m not too worried.”

  “Pat, would you build a fire.” Jo hadn’t asked a question; she had issued an order, but she looked grudgingly concerned. “Please. It’s rather cold in here, and this girl’s still trembling.”

  Pat was relieved to have something to do. She went to the wide hearth and lifted the heavy iron fire screens in one motion, still galvanized by a sick rush of adrenaline. Her knees were shaking, and it was a relief to crouch away from the others and pile wood high on the grate.

  “Something happened,” Maggie had told her that morning, before Jo passed out. Pat remembered the dismay in her eyes. It was nothing compared to the fear that had consumed Maggie as Pat knelt over her in the snow a few minutes ago.

  Maggie hadn’t passed out because Pat tackled her, or because of her long, chilling hike through a mountain blizzard. She had fainted from soul-shriveling horror. Pat had seen that reaction once before, when she had to tell a mother that her beloved son had died hiking on Rainier. It wasn’t an expression you could forget, and Pat had witnessed it again tonight.

  And before tonight, she realized, and not just in that bereaved mother. The Native woman in Pat’s dream, the one who thrashed beneath her murderous lover’s hands. Every night now, in Pat’s fevered sleep, she looked up at her killer with the same raw terror.

  “Hey.”

  Pat recognized Becca’s shaggy bear slippers coming up beside her and had to smile at this small welcome note of levity. She finished lighting the fire and got to her feet, and Becca helped her replace the screen.

  “Are we feeling all right tonight, ace?” Becca spoke quietly, with a note of older sister solicitation. “You’re looking a little shook.”

  Pat was usually adept at keeping her emotions to herself, but apparently, Becca was unusually adept at picking up on them anyway. She shook off the dream’s lingering creepiness. “I’m all right, thanks. Just startled out of a deep sleep when I heard that yelling.”

  “We were too. Scared me to death. Listen.” Becca rested a hand on Pat’s wrist. “It didn’t escape my notice this morning that you were willing to take on a whole mob of angry Abequas after Jo passed out. You were Xenic, Pat.”

  Pat was puzzled. “I was what?”

  Becca sighed. “You were very impressive. Thank you for looking out for Jo.”

  “You’re welcome, Becca.” Pat responded with automatic courtesy. She studied her grandmother’s painting over the mantel to avoid Becca’s discerning gaze.

  Pat figured Becca knew that she was, for all practical purposes, Jo’s employee. Jo paid her to look after the property, to cook for her when she was up here. Becca might even know that Jo’s grandparents bought the land that had been in Pat’s family for generations. What she might not understand was Pat had loved Joanne Call like a sister since she was a very little girl, and no one on earth could threaten or mock her in her presence.

  But Maggie was her concern now, and Pat started to turn back to the sofa to check on her. Then she hesitated. Something about her grandmother’s painting nagged at her. The fire was beginning to catch, and red and gold light flickered at the base of the framed canvass.

  “Pat?” Becca’s hand was still on her wrist. “What’s—”

  “I’m just worried about our guest.” Pat turned, and Becca’s fingers slid off her arm. She offered her a rueful smile and walked toward the sofa.

  Pat refused to succumb to the chill working up her back. In the painting, Mt. Rainier looked swathed in gray shadows. Someone had been smoking a lot in here, or something was wrong with the fireplace. There was nothing supernatural in the slight darkening of the pigment of the painting. It must have been damaged by smoke recently, and the damage was slight. No one else had even noticed it.

  “Ah,” Elena was saying. “It looks like our friend is—”

  Maggie came to in a galvanic rush, and immediately began thrashing beneath the blankets.

  “Hey, Maggie, it’s all right. You’re safe.” Elena rested her hand on her brow, but Maggie snapped her head away from her.

  “Get me out of this thing,” she snarled. Pat thought she still sounded afraid.

  “You shouldn’t move too quickly, chica. It’s okay, you’re—”

  “Let me up, I said!”

  Elena nodded. “Okay, you got it.” She helped Maggie disentangle herself from the blankets.

  Maggie flailed to her feet, and Elena rose with her. She looked around the large room wildly, and settled on Pat.

  “So, I knew it!” Maggie hissed. “I was jumped by a guard dog! Where the fuck do you get off, Smokey Bear…”

  Maggie closed her eyes, and if possible, went even more pale. Elena sighed and placed the tip of her finger on Maggie’s chest. She pushed gently, and Maggie collapsed bonelessly back into the sofa. Elena sat beside her again and lifted her wrist to check her pulse.

  “Bueno. Are we through with our tantrum? Now maybe you will listen to Dr. Elena. Who is only a nurse, but a good nurse.” Elena smiled at Pat, who was clenching the back of a chair. “You’ll be fine, Maggie. Just sit for a moment. Ah, here’s Grady.”

  Grady emerged from the kitchen, holding a steaming cup. After Pat had carried Maggie in here, Elena had dispatched Grady up to their room to retrieve some kind of tea. She yawned, looking younger and sleepy without her glasses, and handed the cup to Elena. “Sip this slowly, please.” Elena wrapped Maggie’s hand around the cup. “We need to warm you up inside too.”

  “What is it?” Maggie grumbled, blinking into the steam.

  “A wonderful blend of leaves from the Chihuahuan Desert, near my home. I’m also an herbalist, and this tea should help you feel more yourself soon.”

  Pat thought Elena’s soothing voice would help ground Maggie as much as any tea; at leas
t it was helping Pat.

  Maggie allowed Elena to drape the blankets across her shoulders again as she sipped the tea, still trembling visibly. Her tumbling hair was damp from the snow, and the way she held herself reminded Pat of a roe paused in mid-flight. The cavernous room was silent except for the crackling of the fire.

  Grady finally stirred and started to speak, but Elena reached over and touched her arm. Elena shook her head, and then looked at Becca. Becca was watching Maggie with her usual friendly interest and compassion, as was Jo, with her usual detachment. Then Elena looked at Pat and nodded. She patted the cushion of the sofa to beckon to her and got up.

  Pat came around the sofa and sat carefully next to Maggie. “Tell us why you’re here, please. Does this have to do with Selly?”

  “Not anymore.” Without warning, Maggie’s arm flashed out and she hurled the empty cup across the room. It shattered against the flagstone of the hearth. They all jumped, but that seemed to be it. That was all the violence Maggie had in her, and she slumped back into the cushions. “Selly’s dead.”

  “What?” Becca whispered.

  “I found her a few hours ago. She tore a blanket into strips and hanged herself in her room. And why not?” Maggie was so young, so cynical, and she sounded so lost. “Her job is finished.”

  *

  The fading blue tattoo of the labrys on the back of Maggie’s shoulder had been the scandal and gossip of her clan, once they understood its meaning. Inexpertly done, she’d had it etched into her skin the day she turned twelve, shortly before she ran away the first time. Maggie pulled down the neck of her sweatshirt and rubbed the two-headed axe with her finger, waiting for Deputy Dog to get the hell out of her bedroom.