Windigo Thrall

by Cate Culpepper

  Grady chuckled. She set down the poker and turned in Elena’s arms. “I guess being cut off from Inez is a mixed blessing. Are you fretting about her?”

  Elena shook her head, and she was spookily beautiful in the gold light of the flames. “No, we left Mamá in good hands. I just know she worries about us.”

  “Yes, she does. I’m afraid she’ll worry more if we can’t reach her and we’re not on that flight into El Paso in the morning.” Grady sighed. “Meanwhile, our chances for hot monkey sex are slightly dimmed by our breathless audience around here.”

  Elena glanced back at Jo and Becca on the sofa and arched one dark eyebrow in a suggestive quirk. “Only slightly. The night is still young and maybe we’ll all get bored. Or at least cold enough for a little group groping.”

  “We can hope.” Grady rubbed Elena’s arms briskly to warm her.

  “Cara mia, ‘my face.’” Elena brushed Grady’s brow with her fingers. “I know this face. I know how burdened you are, querida, by what’s happening to all of us. Will you let me help?”

  “Of course, Elena.”

  “Listen, then.” Elena stared at the flames for a moment. “I have come to accept that you will always approach mysteries from the world of the mind, Grady. Just as I will always approach them from the world of the spirit. And these are both good things, good ways of seeing, as long as we respect each other’s worlds, sí?”

  “Yes. I agree.”

  “Okay. Then for you, I will consider the possibility that Jo is in the grip of this terrible madness, this Windigo Psychosis, as you and Becca believe. And for me, you must consider the possibility that this Windigo is more than a legend. That it exists today, and its curse is real. And that this curse has passed into Jo, as Maggie and I believe.”

  Grady tried to buy time to form a reply. “You and Maggie?”

  “Yes. Maggie is Native, and so is the Windigo. She doesn’t need me to convince her of the truth. Pat is also Native, but the Windigo is a winter demon. It has never haunted her tribe, because the Makah live here, in a land without real winters. And Pat has a university degree, like the rest of you.” A disquieting flicker of irritation passed over Elena’s face. “I see her struggling with all this. And Becca and Jo are still so far from accepting what’s happening. I might need your help to fend off this Windigo.”

  “Fend it off?” Grady hoped she would soon be able to do better than just repeat Elena’s last few words. “How are you thinking you’ll do this, sweetheart?”

  “I haven’t worked it all out yet.” That annoyance again, so unlike Elena. “I’m just telling you I might need your support, Grady. If Becca and Jo, even Pat, fight me on this, you might need to step in and convince them to let me work. I don’t care what they say. Don’t let them stop me.”

  “Elena.” Grady cupped her face in her hands. “Darling girl. I’ve listened to you. Are you listening now?”

  “Of course,” Elena whispered.

  Grady closed her eyes, thinking hard. She’d never said anything like this to Elena, never had reason to. “Please be careful of pride, my love. You just said you value both our worlds, but you’re telling me you’re certain you’re right about this; that your way of doing things will be the only way to go. I know you’ve had wonderful success in your dealings with the paranormal in the past, but there’s just something off about you right—”

  Elena stepped back, out of the circle of her arms. She looked up at Grady in a way she hadn’t since the days right after they met, when Elena still considered her an ignorant gringa academic. “Okay, Grady. Thank you. I’ll be careful of my pride. And now I should heat up some more cocoa for Maggie and Pat. They’ll be cold when they get back.”

  Grady was cold too, and colder still as Elena moved silently past her and out of the firelight.

  *

  “Jesus f-f-fricking…” Maggie was almost giggling as she and Pat scrambled into the front seats of the big truck, but it was laughter born of bone-deep chill and gnawing anxiety. Pat had had to use real force to yank the ice-frozen door open, only to admit them to a plushly interiored icebox. “Just w-what do you think will work in here that isn’t w-working out there?”

  “Well, the heater, for one thing.” Pat fumbled with a ring of keys and finally inserted one into the ignition. “Jo needs to demand a refund on that damn dead generator. It’s not even five years…”

  Maggie’s heart sank as Pat twisted the key again, the other keys on the ring jangling. Silence, except for their gasping breath. She hadn’t expected the truck to start, just as she knew the generator wouldn’t, but she could feel Pat’s astonishment in a bleak wave.

  “No,” Pat murmured. She cranked the key again. “I keep this fucking thing tuned like a watch, Maggie.”

  “I’m sure you do.” Maggie hoped their reality was sinking in at last. It was very dark inside the truck, and she struggled to make out the rugged outline of Pat’s face. There was no artificial lighting, of course, and only that strange, thin green glow of the Snow Moon to beat back the night. She could see a faint reflection of the fire’s glow inside the cabin through a side window. “I don’t think any of our toys are going to work again until this is finally over, Pat.”

  Pat said nothing. Maggie heard her fumble with buttons on the dashboard. “Even the radio’s out. Christ. I was counting on being able to call for backup if we need it.”

  “Look, it’s just one night. We only have to make it until morning.” Shivering, Maggie hunched and wrapped her arms around her knees. “All my family stories are real specific about the Windigo descending one t-terrible night. So if we can just hang on until the sun rises—”

  “Maggie, you’re getting all this from family stories? Seriously?” Pat sighed harshly. “What would your family say about all our technology going dead, then?”

  “Hey, I don’t have all the answers, okay?” Maggie snapped. “Selly told us the old stories. The last time this happened, the last time the Windigo came, there probably weren’t computers and iPods around to go dead.” She was shaking hard. “Could you ease up on me a little? I’m just as scared as you are.”

  She waited miserably, her face numb with cold. A silence fell between them and lingered. Maggie tried again to make out Pat’s face. “What?” she asked.

  *

  She’s your sewa, right? So kiss her.

  Pat heard her grandmother’s voice clearly in the hushed darkness. Delores Daka had lost most of her teeth early in adulthood, and her speech held a lisping quality. Her tone was teasing and fond in Pat’s mind, but very sure. It could be no one else.

  Pat was stunned and freezing, and she couldn’t see Maggie. But she had promised her grandmother that she would listen for her, all of her life. And these were pretty direct instructions. You walked your talk or you didn’t, another of her grandmother’s teachings.

  “Maggie?” Pat cleared her throat, a gravelly rattle, and then she could think of nothing else to say, how to explain or ask permission. “Excuse me, all right?”

  She reached out tentatively and touched Maggie’s shoulder, which was suddenly all the navigation she needed. Her uncertainty vanished, and she slid her hand beneath Maggie’s tumbling curls and cupped the back of her neck. She leaned toward her and their lips met smoothly, effortlessly, with a unique glide-click of homecoming.

  The chill began to drain out of Pat.

  *

  “You planning to avoid me until the glaciers melt?”

  Becca heard the gentle teasing in Grady’s voice, the lack of blame, and she made herself relax. She couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder to be sure Jo couldn’t hear them. Jo was dozing again on the sofa; Elena was sitting on the stone lip of the hearth, gazing moodily into the fire.

  “That depends.” Becca hesitated, then patted the seat of the cushion beside her and waited until Grady sat. It took some courage to meet her eyes, but Becca had never lacked courage. “Are you going to let me apologize again for jumping you like that?”


  “Yes, I am. I’m sorry for my part in it too.” Grady’s simple acceptance was a balm to Becca’s sore soul. “I know neither of us wanted that, Bec.”

  “Not when we’re in our right minds.” Becca shivered and lowered her voice, wishing they were closer to the heat of the fire. She felt a small twinge from the stinging half-moon of teeth marks on her breast. “Grady, what’s happening to us? I would never do anything to make Jo doubt my love for her. Mind you, you’re adorable and everything…” At this point, under any other circumstance, Becca would have touched Grady’s wrist. When she spoke to friends she was a toucher, but now she refrained. “I’m attracted to you, Grady, but then I have a pulse. I’m attracted to lots of women, and I’m sure Jo is too. We would just never act on it. I acted, with you.”

  “I acted back.” Grady looked at Elena, by the fire. “And believe me, it was as out of character for me as it was for you.”

  “Something you asked Jo this morning keeps coming back to me.” Becca grasped this fragment of memory with a relief that felt desperate. “You brought up the power of ritual. You wondered if Selly’s antics with the smoke might have convinced Jo, unconsciously, to believe in the Windigo legend. If her subconscious believes she’s possessed, she might behave as if she’s possessed. That’s the theory, right? Well, you and I witnessed the same ritual, pal.”

  “We did. So did Elena.” Grady was still watching Elena. “I’ve wondered that too, whether we’re all getting caught up in a culture-bound syndrome.”

  “Is there anything in the Windigo legends about the entire family going as bonkers as the person who’s cursed?” Becca was half kidding, but only half. She’d rather see this in terms of some group psychosis than the malevolence of a monster bleeding through an entire family.

  “I just think we might be getting as vulnerable to suggestion as Jo,” Grady said. “We might be affected in different ways and to different degrees, but we’re each―hey, Jo.”

  Grady’s tone was still pleasant, but Becca saw her eyes widen and she looked around quickly. Jo was rising from the sofa.

  “Honey?” Becca’s heart stammered in her chest.

  Jo’s face was a pale mask of rage as she lifted the iron poker from the rack by the fireplace.

  *

  The chill began to drain out of Maggie, quite literally.

  Their kiss was sweet and long, and a sensual heat was surely rising in her center, but some part of Maggie’s mind remained rational enough to wonder at what was happening with the rest of her body. The truck itself was warming. The engine remained dead, but Maggie’s shivering began to ease as a delicious comfort crept through the biting cold and banished it entirely.

  She wrapped her fingers in the soft fleece of Pat’s collar and pulled her gently back, sorry as hell to end the moment. “Are you feeling this?” she whispered.

  “Yeah.”

  Maggie could see Pat pretty clearly now and not by the sick green light of that moon. Her features were illuminated in a mild gold glow. They stared at each other. Not even the sheer, visceral chemistry connecting them could account for that light, or the growing warmth in this truck.

  Maggie made a conscious effort to cage her arousal. She could do that. She’d had practice controlling her urges when necessary. She was relaxing against the seat, her body surrendering the locked tension that comes with unrelenting chills. Maggie was suddenly sleepy and hungry and almost content.

  “I don’t understand this,” Pat said softly.

  “Me either,” Maggie whispered. “Where in the hell is this light coming from, this—”

  “Maggie.” Pat touched her face again. “I don’t understand this.”

  And Maggie got it, this quiet woman’s wonder at that unexpected kiss, how natural and beautiful their touch felt. She smiled and cupped Pat’s palm against her cheek. “You sweet idiot. Right now, this is the only thing that makes perfect sense to me.”

  And then she was distracted by shadows darting against the side window of the cabin, and she ducked her head and tried to see inside. “What the hell is happening in there?”

  She heard faint shouting.

  *

  Pat kicked the front door wide-open with a resounding crash. Maggie was right behind her as she barreled into the cabin’s deep living room, and the first thing Pat saw was the spark-strewn log that had burst from the fire grate and rolled across the wood floor. The glass-iron grate was half-shattered, shards scattered across the hearth.

  Then Pat heard the grunting, gasping efforts of a dark knot of bodies thrashing at the foot of one of the sofas, and she leapt over it in an adrenaline-fueled burst of acrobatics.

  “Hey! Hey!” she bellowed and grasped the first collar she could. It seemed all four of the women were in a tangle of arms and legs on the floor, but with some effort, Pat was able to haul Grady off of Jo. She tossed her onto the sofa then dropped to her knees, straddling Jo’s sprawled form. Elena was trying to restrain one of Jo’s arms, and Becca knelt on her other side, one knee across her shoulder.

  “Let go,” Becca shouted, and Pat saw she wasn’t talking to her—Jo was clenching a fire poker across her chest, trying to wrench it free.

  Pat took hold of the poker immediately and shifted it across Jo’s throat. She bent over her, not pressing the iron into her skin but letting her feel it. Elena fell back at once, lifting her hands to make way for Pat, but Becca stayed with Jo, half-lying across her, all of them gasping for breath.

  “Jo,” Pat said clearly. “Drop your hands. Joanne! Drop it.”

  It took a moment for Jo to hear her; Pat could almost see her awareness seeping back, the blind rage in her features fading. She blinked and then gaped up at Pat, and slowly, her fingers unwrapped from either end of the poker and her hands fell from it.

  Pat didn’t budge. “Is she hurt?” she snapped at Becca.

  “I don’t th-think so,” Becca stammered.

  The smoke from the log that had toppled off the grate was stinging Pat’s eyes. She lifted the poker from Jo’s throat and extended it to Maggie, who stood transfixed behind the sofa. Maggie accepted the heavy iron with shaking hands.

  “Jo, I’m turning you over.” Pat leaned and took her weight on her left foot. She grasped Jo’s elbow, and Jo offered no resistance to being turned onto her stomach. Pat held her wrists together at the base of her back with one hand, and fished through the pocket of her long coat with the other. She’d taken several plastic restraints from the back of the Outback before she and Maggie got into it, and she slid one now around Jo’s wrists. “What happened in here?”

  “She lost it, she just―” Becca broke off and stroked Jo’s hair. “Honey, lie still. I’m here. Pat’s here. You’re okay.”

  “Grady, I think you’re bleeding,” Maggie said.

  Elena scrambled to her feet. Grady was sprawled on the couch where Pat had thrown her, and blood was running freely down the side of her face. She touched her head and winced, but sat up straighter in the deep cushions.

  “I’m okay, Elena.” Grady was staring down at Jo, but Elena sat on the sofa beside her and turned her head carefully so she could see her brow.

  “Becca?” Facedown on the floor, Jo’s voice was precise and urgent. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, honey. Please, just hold still.”

  “Becca.” Pat made sure the restraint was secure around Jo’s wrists, grateful she wasn’t fighting her. “Tell me what happened.”

  “We were talking.” Becca was coming around, regaining composure, her touch on Jo’s hair tender. “Grady and I were here. Elena was by the fire. I thought Jo was asleep. But suddenly she stood up and just…grabbed the poker.”

  “And she took a swing at Grady?”

  “No,” Becca whispered.

  Pat’s heart sank. “She attacked you?”

  “No, not Becca,” Elena said. She was examining Grady’s bleeding forehead, but she glanced down at Jo with compassion. “Grady was injured when she stepped in to stop Jo. J
o came after me.”

  “Pat?” Maggie’s voice was high and thin, and they all turned to her. She extended one trembling hand to the fireplace.

  Pat looked at the hearth with its shattered screen, at the photo of her smiling grandmother above it, at the painting of Rainier over the mantel. It had changed again.

  The mountain in the background was more distant still. The luxury cabin, built years after Delores Daka had created this painting, was now visible in the foreground. And the cheerful gold light that had originally bathed the image, the light that had turned murky and dark only that morning, had altered again.

  The painting of Rainier was now illuminated by the bilious green glow of the full Snow Moon looming above it.

  Chapter Twelve

  Elena stepped out onto the broad front porch and closed the door firmly after her. She wasn’t sure why she took this precaution; the inside of the cabin was almost as cold as the air out here.

  She grimaced as she swept snow off the railing and washed her bare hands with it. No power up here meant no running water, so snow would have to do. This was going to be real interesting later, with all that cocoa she’d been pouring into everyone; peeing off this porch would be fun.

  She scrubbed her wrists, hissing at the icy sting but relieved when the last streak of Grady’s blood washed away. The sight of it disturbed her beyond good sense. She knew Grady was all right. Jo’s wildly swinging poker had only struck her head a glancing blow, thanks to the Goddess, but the cut had bled liberally.

  It was eerily quiet out here, which she preferred to that haunted wind. Elena rested her shoulder against the wood pillar and gazed out over the greenish plane of snow, wondering if her Goddess had lied to her. If She wasn’t everywhere, and could only be found in the desert sands of her valley. Elena still couldn’t hear Her voice, and her head ached with listening.