Blood Cross: A Jane Yellowrock Novel

by Faith Hunter

  I opened my eyes and looked up into the pine tree tops for the owls. If they were there, they were hidden by the gray light. The spider legs crawled faster and I shivered. I really didn’t like not seeing the owls. Not at all. I closed the baggie and dusted my hands.

  My stomach was no longer hurting. My heart felt lighter. Cleaner. The tingly feeling still coursed through me, slightly breathless, but exhilarated now, with something expectant, almost like joy. I wondered for an instant what herbs had been in the herbal emetic, and if they did anything other than empty my stomach.

  I snaked through the trees upstream in the general direction Aggie had taken, the earth sucking at my flip-flops as if it wanted to pull me within. The world smelled fresh and new, the clean tang of fresh fish, duck and goose and hawk, the distant reek of skunk; even the mold smelled good if that was possible.

  Just as the trees opened out at a sharp curve of the bayou, I caught a whiff of burning pine. In the center of a tiny clearing, Aggie and her mother were sitting on flat stones, naked except for small beaded bags hanging on thongs around each neck. Their clothes were folded neatly beside them. U ni lisi, grandmother of many children, tended a tiny, smokeless fire.

  I turned my gaze away, wondering why so many of the Cherokee rituals seemed to involve getting naked. Knowing I was supposed to follow suit, I stripped to the skin and folded my clothes on the far side of the fire beside a third stone that I assumed was mine.

  Aggie jutted her chin to the green pine boughs in a pile to the side. Right. I was supposed to pick them up and scatter them in a circle around us. Aggie had called it a protective circle. Trying to bend so I didn’t expose my backside to the two women, I picked up the sap-rich branches, the bark scratching my unprotected skin, and walked clockwise around the fire, dropping a thick layer of the branches in a circle. The sap made my hands sticky but the act of bending and lifting settled my mind. Any lingering self-consciousness was gone by the time I closed the pine bough circle. The faint morning breeze died again and the air went still, heavy with possibility. Waiting.

  At a gesture from Aggie, I placed the last of the green boughs on the fire. The scent of pine smoke billowed up; Aggie had said no evil could cross the circle or enter the fragrant smoke; it acted as a ward against malevolent spirits. Finished, I sat, the stone cool beneath me. The old woman stood and faced east. Her skin hung in folds from her arms and thighs, and her rounded belly looked like a half-empty balloon, her breasts heavy and pendulous. But there was strength in her limbs and something quietly powerful about her form as she raised her hands to the rim of sun. As they lifted, yellow light pushed through the tree trunks and touched her face. Warming her. Pine smoke rose and swelled, curling around her, gray in the dawn.

  I shivered in the morning light as she began chanting. The language was Cherokee, some of which I remembered, the version older than what Aggie and she spoke, the cadence formal, whispered as much as spoken. I placed my palms flat on the ground for balance as her words brushed over me with the smoke, rising and falling. Rising and falling. The world seemed to undulate beneath my hands like the tides of the ocean, though I knew it didn’t move.

  The chill pulled my skin so tight that it ached all over as if I’d jumped into an icy creek. Smoke batted at me, swirling, filling the protective circle. Tears gathered fast in my eyes to fall across my cheeks and splash on my chest. The smoke, I told myself, just the smoke. But the deeps of my mind knew it was something else, something more, and so did my Beast, who hunched deep inside, far back in my consciousness, head on paws, killing teeth hidden.

  U ni lisi’s words had a rhythm and life of their own, ancient and powerful and full of the memories of the past. When the chant ended, she dropped her arms. Nothing but the soft susurration of bayou could be heard. The skin of my face was tight with drying salt; fresh tears ran through it, burning.

  She opened the beaded bag hanging around her neck. From it, she pulled a tablespoon of the native tobacco and held it in her left hand. With her right, she added other herbs, Aggie calling out their names in English for me. “Sage for cleansing. Sweetgrass for life and joy.”

  Aggie’s mother added a final herb, and Aggie didn’t speak its name. Perhaps it didn’t have an English equivalent. Or perhaps it was part of the mysteries of going to water, and no one knew but her. The old woman rolled the herbs all together into a fat cigarlike cylinder and tied it with what looked like hemp string, creating a smudge stick. She held a burning twig from the fire to the smudge stick until the herb tube was lit and smoking. She dropped the twig back to the fire and stood. She handed the smudge stick to Aggie, who took it kneeling, almost as if making obeisance.

  With unhurried, circular motions, she smudged the air around her mother. The old woman was silent, her eyes almost closed, her face serene. Slowly she turned, lifting each foot and placing it just so, like a dance or the measured and balletic martial art form of Tai Chi. Her mother held out her own braids and the smoke curled around them like a living snake, touching and spiraling up. It coiled around her legs and back and belly, up over her face, more gentle than a lover’s hand. As the smoke wreathed her, the wrinkles on her face softened; a small half smile touched her lips and she sighed as if some ever-present pain was temporarily gone. When she was satisfied, Lisi sat, eyes closed, seeming to barely breathe.

  Aggie held out the stick to me and turned her back. Feeling clumsy, I took the smudge stick and came to my knees, concentrating on the smoke rising on the still air, brushing up her body like the finger of God. She lifted her hair and I held the stick so the smoke passed through it. I turned and she turned, lifting a leg so the smoke could touch the back of her thigh and curl over her buttocks. When every part of her had been blessed by the smudging smoke, she opened her eyes and smiled, though her gaze seemed far away.

  With a slow gesture, Aggie indicated her mother, and I gave the old woman the smudge stick. I turned to the side as each of them had and closed my eyes. The smoke was warm, curling up from my ankles, fragrant and rich, and I breathed it in. And turned a half step, then another. Lifting my arms. Moving into the dance of the smoke.

  “Hold out your hair, Dalonige i Digadoli.” My whole body shuddered with the words, with hearing them spoken properly, in the whispered syllables of the language of the People, the Cherokee. “Hold out your hair.”

  I sobbed once, hard. Tears pouring down my face, I lifted my hair. Aggie’s mother walked slowly around me, the smudge stick rising and falling, the aromatic smoke touching my skin, wisping through my hair, which fell through my fingers in a long veil, over and over again. The smoke curled up my legs, across my stomach. It brushed my back, touching, so delicately, my face, as if tasting my tears. I breathed in the scented smoke, drawing it deep. My lungs trembled. The world spun and steadied. My heart tripped and slowed, finding a rhythm older than human memory. I closed my eyes and breathed. Just breathed. As the water flowed in the bayou nearby, singing a nearly silent, ancient song.

  “We sa,” a soft voice whispered. “Time to go, we sa.” Cat. Bobcat. One of my beasts. I heard my name spoken by my father, his voice echoing in my memory, as it had so long ago. I opened my eyes and saw the protective circle was open, and U ni lisi was stepping into the bayou water, Aggie behind her. I followed them to the water’s edge, across a dark, slick, claylike bank, and into the bayou, thick muck pulling at my ankles. The water was clearer here, not as muddy with hurricane runoff, and I could see my feet pressing into the black mire.

  I remembered that I was supposed to pray, but the words and ritual prayers Aggie had instructed me were gone from my mind. Unbidden, other words came to my lips. “I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul.” With the words, I bent my knees and sank beneath the water. It closed over me, dark, moving sluggishly on my skin, cool and wet, the womb of the world.

  Seven times I rose and sank into the bayou, each time asking my prayer. When I came up the last time, Aggie and Lisi were on the bank, dressin
g. The sun had risen. And I was empty and light and so . . . free.

  I walked through the deep mud, out of the water, and up the muddy, black clay bank. I shook both feet. Looking down, I was amazed that I didn’t seem to have any mud on me. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.

  Quickly I dressed. Still silent, we put out the fire with bayou water, stirring the coals until it was cold. Together, in a short line of three, we walked back to the car and drove away.

  CHAPTER 12

  Would Little Evan go crunch?

  I called a part-time cabdriver I used, catching Rinaldo just before he hit the sack after his third shift at a local plant. He showed up pretty quickly; I was only a mile or so from Aggie’s street, trudging along in my flip-flops, hands in the pockets of the loose pants, and already sweating in the day’s heat. He pulled his bright yellow Bluebird Cab over and hung halfway out the window. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

  I was pretty sure the line didn’t deserve the amount of laughter it got as I climbed into the front seat, but Rinaldo thought I was a party girl, always needing a ride home after a wild night out, so he probably assumed I was on a giggly high. I slammed the door and buckled in as he tire-crunched through a three-point turn and eased his way toward a paved street in the distance. With a sly grin, he slanted a look at me. “Hungry?”

  “Starving. Where’s the nearest fast food joint? I could eat a buffalo.”

  “If I ate like you, I’d be big as a house. There’s a Bojangle’s near here. Chicken okay?”

  “Long as it’s fried protein, I’ll be happy.” My stomach punctuated the statement with a growl. I ate as Rinaldo drove, putting away three Cajun filet biscuits, two egg and cheese biscuits, a sausage biscuit, and three servings of Potato Rounds, all washed down with a gallon of sweet iced tea. I treated Rinaldo to a biscuit and let him watch me eat, which always seemed to give him enormous pleasure and cost me next to nothing. It paid to keep my emergency transportation happy. The meal was wonderful. Half asleep, belly rounded out against the thin fabric of my T-shirt, I lolled all the way to my front door while Rinaldo listened to zydeco music on the radio, his fingers banging out the African rhythm on his steering wheel. I handed him thirty bucks, which was my standard payment, and made it inside just as Molly and the kids came downstairs, Angelina knuckling her eyes.

  “Morning, Aunt Jane.” She held her arms up, and though Molly had been telling her she was too big to be picked up all the time, I hoisted her to my hip and nuzzled her hair. She smelled of sleep and pillow and safety. “Did you and the ladies have a nice swim?”

  Molly met my eyes over Angie’s head as we maneuvered the kids into the kitchen, and she took in my damp hair. I nodded. At this further demonstration of her daughter’s rare and potent gift, a gift she was trying to keep under wraps from the human media and government, Molly’s reply was carefully neutral. “Sweetheart, how did you know Aunt Jane went swimming?”

  “Biscause she did. And they were all naked.” Angie yawned, her mouth open wide, face scrunched. “Mama, we can’t go home yet. Aunt Boadacia and Aunt Elizabeth is fighting a big bad ugly that showed up in their circle last night. It was purple and red and had big teeth and it wanted to eat them, and Aunt Boadacia says to stay gone, that it would eat Little Evan. Mama, would Little Evan go crunch? Like the deer bones Aunt Jane ate this morning?”

  Molly closed her eyes and mouthed what looked a prayer, maybe for guidance and protection for her gifted children. Or maybe she was cussing silently. I couldn’t help it. I laughed and squeezed Angie.

  Molly’s sisters, both the witch sisters and the humans ones, owned Seven Sassy Sisters’ Herb Shop and Café near Asheville. Business was booming, both locally and on the Internet, selling herbal mixtures and teas by bulk and by the ounce, the shop itself serving gourmet teas, specialty coffees, breakfast, brunch, and lunch daily, and dinner on weekends. It was mostly fish and vegetarian fare, whipped up by Mol’s oldest sister, water witch, professor, and three-star chef, Evangelina Everhart. Her sister Carmen, an air witch, newly widowed and newly delivered of a bouncing baby, ran the register and took care of ordering supplies. Two other witch sisters, twins Boadacia and Elizabeth, ran the herb store, while the wholly human sisters, Regan and Amelia, were waitstaff in the café.

  Boadacia and Elizabeth, the youngest and most adventurous of the bunch, were always trying new incantations and spells, and had been known to get into trouble with the results. It sounded as if they had a minor demon trapped in a circle and weren’t quite sure how to dispel it.

  Usually, they spent quite a while trying to extricate themselves from the messes they made before calling in the big guns, their elder sisters. I could imagine the ruckus when they admitted to Evangelina that they had messed up again. The eldest often had assisted with the cleanup and her tirades were legendary and generally ignored by the twins.

  “Angie, how did you know that Aunt Jane went swimming this morning?” Molly dropped Evan Junior into the highchair that had appeared at my table with my guests. “Did you dream it? Were you awake and just thought it? What?”

  Angie shrugged as I sat her into her chair, the table nearly to her chin. “I want oatmeal like Aunt Jane fixes it.”

  “It’s important, honey,” Molly said. “How do you know things like that?”

  “I just do. I see Aunt Jane a lot. But sometimes other people. And Aunt Elizabeth sometimes talks to me inside my head. Can I have oatmeal?”

  Molly’s mouth formed a thin line, and I knew what the expression meant. Visions and mind-speech were new and troubling indications of her daughter’s power, which shouldn’t have manifested until she was sixteen, and which should have been tightly bound beneath the magical constraints applied by Big Evan and Molly when the power came upon her too potent and far too young.

  “I’ll fix it,” I said, meaning the oatmeal. Pans banging, I turned on the gas and began making oatmeal the way my housemother had taught me so long ago. As the water heated for oatmeal and tea, I flipped on a light switch and realized that we had power. I plugged in the refrigerator and adjusted the AC down to a bone-chilling seventy-four, making a circuit around the house to close all the windows. It was already a sweaty eighty-five degrees inside. Thank God for air-conditioning.

  While my guests ate, I asked Molly, “Why would the big bad ugly eat Little Evan?”

  Molly touched her ear and gave a warning glance at her kids that said she couldn’t say much in front of big ears. “Some things think witchy X and Y chromosomes are tasty.”

  Witchy X and Y chromosomes meant the things that made Little Evan a male witch, or what some called a sorcerer. I nodded. Demons like to eat male witch babies. Ouch.

  “Comosos are tasty,” Angie repeated, trying on the words. “Like Aunt Jane thinks deer is tasty. Would Little Evan go crunch?” Angie wasn’t going to be deterred.

  I grinned and poured hot water over tea leaves, a strong gunpowder green that had a good caffeine kick. “Probably. But we love Little Evan.” When she tried to interrupt, I said, “Even Beast loves Little Evan. But we don’t talk about Beast or big bad uglies, right?”

  “I can’t even tell Uncle Ricky-Bo? Biscause he’s wanting to know stuff.”

  “Especially not Ricky-Bo,” I said dryly. “He’s nosy. Speaking of Mr. Nosy, I need to go to NOPD and do some more research. You okay today here, Mol?”

  “We have power, and I can wash clothes over at Katie’s, including the stinky diapers piling up on the back porch. I’m fine.” Molly was a firm believer that diapers were the most dangerous disposable item ever invented, to be used only in emergencies. She used cloth with old-fashioned pins. Before I could ask who would watch the kids, she smiled into her teacup without looking at me and said, “Bliss will watch them.” Angie wasn’t the only Trueblood who could read minds upon occasion.

  After a long shower to wash off the bayou stink, I multibraided my hair with lots of beads that clicked pleasantly when I walked, dressed, and m
ade several phone calls that required me to leave messages this hour of the morning. I kissed the kids, strapped on Beast’s pack in lieu of a pocketbook, made sure my cell and camera had battery power, tied my braids back, powered up Bitsa, and roared into town.

  My first stop was Audubon Park, at the Audubon Trail Golf Course, one of the sites in the city where there had been young-rogue attacks on humans in the past, and the only one I had never visited. The last attack on record had been in 2001, and I quickly discovered why. The golf course had been redesigned in that year, and there was no place suitable for a grave site. That left me only two locations to worry about, which made my life easier. Able to cross it off my list, I gunned Bitsa and headed for NOPD.

  I had a lot of questions and not much info. I needed to see if there was anything in the history files about the last vamp war. And I wanted to see if I could find out what Innara had been talking about last night, the devoveo. It sounded as though it had to do with the madness of young rogues. Mad young rogues was what the city of New Orleans had on its hands. And maybe I would try to get a handle on what the Sons of Darkness were. They had come up twice now; if they had something to do with young rogues, I needed to know it. And then there were the witches I’d seen across the street, likely standing in a pentagram. What could their connection be? What had seemed like a simple contract to track down a vamp breaking vamp law was turning into a bewildering investigation into vamp history and politics.

  The wind in my face was damp and heated, like a warm, wet blanket, and Bitsa purred beneath me like Beast when she slept. With the world flashing by, I was feeling peaceful, rested, and strangely calm, even without any sleep. I was pretty sure the emotion I was experiencing was serenity, though I’d never felt that before. I didn’t expect it to last. Cynical, but true.