Instead, he died hungry and alone, because I always put my job first.
Shana seemed to decipher my thoughts. More likely, she saw the abnormal glint of tears in my eyes. “Don’t blame yourself for this.”
I breathed deep. “Okay.”
“Any idea who did this or why?”
I shook my head, my gaze drifting to Rice. The CSI techs were scraping beneath his fingernails. He always kept those fucking things so long, like Senka-damned bear claws. I hoped he’d scratched skin from the guy. I hoped there was something beneath those razor-sharp talons that could figure out who did this to him.
“The video shows the perp taking something out of Rice’s pocket,” I said, returning my gaze to Shana. “Something small. Square. Black.”
“Any idea what it could have been?”
“Not a clue.”
“The evidence team will study the video. We’ll figure it out.”
Shana’s next question filled me with more fear than the idea of life without my brother: “Are you going to tell your mother, or should I send an officer?”
Fuck. I’d been so caught up in my own disbelief, I’d forgotten about my mother.
The rushing in my ears was back. “Me. I’ll tell her. She’d never forgive me if a stranger delivered the news.”
“Do you need a ride there?”
“No.” I needed a lot of things. I needed strength. I needed courage. I needed a few minutes to breathe, to feel the wind in my hair and my bike between my legs, before I got to the Res and broke my mother’s heart.
Most of all, I needed my brother. But that was no longer an option.
5
An infinity’s worth of stars blanketed an indigo sky, and Haseya Nez waited for me outside her pueblo.
Call it a mother’s intuition, or a wise woman’s third eye. Or maybe a Chieftess’s sixth sense that life had gone akimbo and her daughter rode in on a Ducati with bad tidings.
The night hung still and breathless after I cut the engine. My heart pounded as I dug my messenger bag from beneath the seat. I wanted to delay the moment when I would have to catch up to the worry on my mother’s handsome face and give her a reason to cry.
“Shich'é'é.” Her voice carried the weight of the sky and the power of our clan.
My daughter.
I kept my back to her. Tension settled in all the crevices of my body. I would rather assassinate a dozen shadow-touched in the name of the Hollow than tell my mother her son had been murdered. Not now, not after she’d already lost so much.
“Shich'é'é.” Her voice was closer. Behind me. She touched my bare shoulder, her fingers warmer than the desert night.
I let go then. I let the horror and anguish take up residence inside me, and I turned to fall into my mother’s arms as if I were an awéé’, a baby at her breast seeking comfort and a promise that life would be okay.
I towered over my mother by a foot, but when she rocked me, I felt as if the world could not reach me through the circle of her embrace. Many years from now, I knew I would feel the same, even as her body withered and her hair grew white and the wrinkles cradling her eyes grew into canyons.
“What has happened, shich'é'é?”
The rumble of her voice penetrated my grief. Warmth begin to shimmer from her fingertips as she worked magick on me, tiny rivers of light pooling into my back from her fingers.
“Breathe, Maurelle. You are safe.” She grasped my shoulders and gently pushed me away to search my face.
Her long braid cascaded down her chest, black hair peppered with silver and entwined with feathers and leather cords of turquoise beads. She was short, but muscular and wiry. She thrummed with power, so much so I waited for the day flowers would begin to bloom beneath her feet. My mother was warrior and mage. I envied her that balance. The warrior took so much of me that little was left for the mage.
Her dark eyes gazed through me. Beneath the indigo sky, on land sacred to my people, she could reach into me and know me. “Maurice?”
“Shimá...” My voice cracked. My mother.
“How?”
“Murder.”
In an eerily calm voice, my mother said, “Come. I will make you hominy.”
Until I left my mother’s home, I never realized how small a universe the Res could be. All of my mother’s love and my formative years resided in less than seven hundred square feet: three tiny bedrooms and a combination kitchen-slash-living area.
I sat at the crude wooden table my father had carved by hand years before I came squalling into the world. Mama put a kettle on to boil and filled two mugs with her delicious homemade chai powder. She lit a second burner on the stove and placed a saucepan over the flame, then lifted the rock in the floor, beneath which our limited perishables sat. She removed a clay pitcher and emptied heavy cream into the saucepan.
Then she threw the pitcher on the dirt floor.
I jumped to my feet, astonished as the pitcher shattered into fragments of her anger.
“It is that... place,” she snarled, losing her calm placidity. “Those anarchists he joined. They spread hate and lies and dissention.” She opened a cabinet as if she hadn’t just lost her shit and reached for the hominy jar. “Do you want cinnamon, shich'é'é?”
“Yes, please.” I stooped to clean up the broken shards. “I don’t think his friends would have killed him, Mama.”
“Not his friends, Maurelle. The people he opposed.”
“The government? Mother, are you seriously implying the government had Rice killed?” I tipped two handfuls of shattered pottery into the trash and tried not to think of the time and effort once put into the forging—a waste of someone's talents. I returned to my chair but remained poised on the edge of the seat in case my mother pulled another Mr. Hyde and went for the good China next.
Mama shot me a stony look and sprinkled cinnamon into the hominy and cream mixture. “If not the government, who shall I blame? You? With your dangerous job and all the enemies you have made?”
I bit my tongue to avoid lashing out at her in self-defense. The very thought that my job could have brought murder to my doorstep made me numb with fear. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that Rice’s death had been meant for me. Was the assassin sent to murder me, but in my absence, chose my brother instead?
Or worse still, had my brother been a pawn in some kind of power play against me?
But the video had shown something being taken from Rice’s pocket. It wasn’t only my deep need to be guilt-free in my grief; they had come for Rice.
Mama dipped a wooden spoon into the saucepan and stirred the now-steaming concoction. Cinnamon laced the warm air. “Senka Hollow is poison, Maurelle. You must get out before it poisons you, too.”
“Mama, it’s not poison. Right now, things are just... difficult.”
“Difficult, she says!” Mama called. “Our tribe is a nation of its own, Maurelle Nez, yet word has still reached us of unrest in the Hollow.” She turned down the heat to let the hominy simmer. As she poured hot water from the kettle over our chai, she went on. “We have heard rumor of division in the council, spurred by difficulties between the Rein and Reina. Civil war is impending. The stars show me.”
“The stars don’t show you war in the Hollow, Mama.” Though how could she know about Lila and Everett? As Lila’s one and only confidante, I often found myself privy to all the darkness seeping through their marriage. But their fighting wasn’t common knowledge.
At least, it shouldn’t have been.
“The Diné are crucial to the fragile balance of harmony that exists on Earth,” my mother intoned. She placed a mug before me on the uneven surface of the table. “Both the Diné of the fae and the Diné of the humans. We are vital to the balance of good and evil.”
Oh, this conversation. I knew this one by heart. I wrapped my hands around the warm mug. I breathed deep of the spicy scent, my mouth watering and my heart aching at the sweet innocence of my mother’s delicacies. The scent recalled
days when Rice and I roamed the Res, planning dreams bigger than the desert sky.
Mama returned to the stove. “We raise our youth to know this, Maurelle. To know what important role you play in keeping our Earth healthy. Yet our children continue to abandon the reservation to live in that poisonous place. This is what happens when you do not listen to your elders.”
“Mama, the fact that a few people left the Res for the Core doesn’t mean we’ve broken the balance of the world. The fae did that well on their own during the Great War.”
“We have been in conference with the human Diné,” Mama said as if I hadn’t spoken. She set my plate next to my mug. “We must reunite our tribes and save our children from the poison of Senka.”
“Senka is not poison!” I slammed a hand on the table. My mother and I stared one another down for a long, breathless moment. Her slight but muscular form loomed over me. I couldn’t remember a time I’d ever raised my voice at her in anger.
Senka was my savior. She was the deity we worshipped in the Hollow. And yes, I knew her power was fading. I knew the outskirts had become shadow touched and dangerous. But she was still my princess. My goddess.
No one, not even my slightly frightening mother, could get away with calling my princess poison.
Mama finally relented and sank wearily into her chair. “Let us forget the Hollow for a moment. You cannot remain in that apartment, shich'é'é. It is no longer safe. Your brother died in your home. His spirit will linger, as will the negativity left behind from his murder. The building is now cursed.”
I spooned hominy, closing my eyes so I didn’t have to see her earnest gaze. “Mama, my apartment is not cursed anymore than the Hollow is poison.” My first bite loosened the tension in my shoulders better than any shot of whiskey.
“The old laws stand, Maurelle, even when your faith does not. Maurice's death has cursed that building sure as you and I sit here. You must get out before the curse claims you.”
A familiar tick picked up in my left eye. “I’m not leaving the Hollow, Mama.”
“You must return one day anyway, Maurelle.” She smiled benignly behind her mug. “You will be the next chieftess of this clan.”
From one usual disagreement to another. And my mother wondered why I never came to visit.
She went on. “We have heard another rumor. One that suggests Senka may have risen.”
My heart thudded in my chest. I forced my face to reveal nothing, even as the giant crevice in Senka’s tomb flashed in my mind. “What do you know?”
“The earthquake cracked the earth.” Mama sipped her chai. Her eyes glazed as she looked inward. I recognized the look; my mother could step from this world into the astral plane with little more than a prayer. “Senka is awake. Darkness is coming.”
“Mama, don’t be so dramatic. Senka has been dead for a hundred years. The quake just shook things up in the tomb. Maintenance will have a hell of a time fixing things, but they will.”
“No, shich'é'é.” My mother grabbed my hand. I jumped, my fork falling into my bowl. “Senka has been slumbering for a hundred years. Now, she wakes.”
6
My mother left the pueblo to bring news of Rice’s murder to the Elders, the small council that governed the tribe. I had offered to accompany her and been resolutely turned down.
“This is tribal business,” my mother snapped. “You have made it quite clear you are not interested in such.”
After she flounced out the door like a child who'd won the last word, I abandoned my hominy only half-eaten. I'd lost my appetite somewhere between poison and ancestral duties.
As I passed down the hall, headed towards my old bedroom in the back of the pueblo, a voice called my name.
A familiar face poked from the crack of an open doorway. Huge dark eyes peered from a deeply suntanned face and a mane of wild ebony curls.
Warmth flooded me. I walked to my little sister and wrapped my arms around her, pulling her so completely into me that her tiny feet dangled over the floor. She smelled clean, with a hint of Mama's homemade lotion. “Mai. My little flower.”
“Were you and Mama fighting?” she asked, voice muffled against my neck as she squeezed me tightly. Mai was all angles and bones, like me at age ten, and she felt infinitely fragile in my arms. But where I'd remained hard and tough, there was something much more delicate and lovely about her; somewhere in the heart shape of her face or the brightness of her smile. She carried less weight in the world than I had.
“No, little flower. Mama and I weren’t fighting. We were having a discussion.” I nudged the door open with a boot and entered her cozy bedroom, Mai still swinging from my embrace. The covers were clean but rumpled on her small bed, where a handmade stuffed animal — that might have been a rabbit at some point in its adventurous life — waited. I deposited her softly on the messy blankets and tickled her ribs until she screeched.
“Stop! Stop!”
Her giggles and her futile attempts to shove me away banished the turmoil inside me, if only for a moment.
I sat on the edge of the bed, and we linked fingers.
“I missed you, shilah,” Mai said sleepily. Sis. “You stay away so long.”
“Work keeps me busy, flower.” I traced a fingertip over her delicate knuckles. At ten years old, Mai was fourteen years younger than me and Rice. Life hadn’t yet hardened her skin or her eyes. I hoped it never would.
Call me a coward, but I couldn’t tell her about Rice. I couldn’t put that pain on her, age her eyes, crack her heart. I would leave that unholy responsibility for my mother.
“You must have grown five feet since I saw you last,” I teased.
Mai giggled. “Liar.”
“I am not. You’re a giant among the Diné!”
Mai rolled to her side, tucking a hand beneath her cheek. Her long black hair splayed wildly around her and over her: a blanket in and of itself. “Tell me a story, shilah.”
I kicked off my boots and scooted to rest my back against the wall beside her.
She wrapped an arm over my tank top and laid her cheek on my abdomen. Her breath tickled the bare skin of my stomach beneath the hem of my shirt, as she said, “Tell me how Rasha beat Acura.”
I smiled, even though she couldn’t see it. My mother didn’t like sharing stories of the Hollow. The Hollow’s history was not the history of our people, she would say.
But it was. It is. And telling my little sister a bedtime story felt so much easier than telling her Rice was gone.
“A very long time ago, the fae and the humans existed in separate worlds. We didn’t know they existed, and they didn’t know we existed. But the two races unknowingly drew power from one another. Our magic gave energy to the earth, which helped the humans survive, and the humans took care of the earth, which in turn gave us energy for our magick.”
“I bet it was beautiful.”
“It was,” I agreed, brushing a hand over her hair. “For a time. But the fae had a problem much bigger than we could handle.”
“The dark fae.” Mai pulled a face and turned enough to look up at me. “They ruined it.”
“They did. The dark fae grew more and more, until they overran our realm. They elected a leader, Acura, a horrible, nasty fae man with a thirst for power and no regard for the sanctity of life. Our queen, Rasha of the Light, knew something must be done to save us.”
“We went to war.”
“We did. An awful war that nearly killed off our kind. We eliminated Acura, but his essence infiltrated everything. The residual darkness seeped into everything in our realm and everything in the human realm.”
“That’s when the Undoing happened?”
“You got it, little flower. The barrier that separated us from the humans collapsed. We lost the balance we had held for so long. Both races became one, and the earth began to die. We had no wind. Precious little water. Soil bore no fruit, and oxygen began to grow scarce as all the plants and trees withered.”
“The h
umans started hunting us.”
“They did, but for good reason, little flower. Never forget that. The dark fae were taking all the energy to fuel their power. Even the good fae were unknowingly drawing more than they meant to. To the humans, we were a threat to their existence. So they came after us.”
“But they used us for their own means,” Mai reminded me, as if I didn’t know. “It worked both ways, shilah.”
“You are right again, flower!” I tweaked her nose. Her grin lit up the room like the corn-oil lamp on her bedside table. “Do you remember what happened next?”
“Rasha gave us Senka.”
“Rasha gave us all her daughters in thirteen places around the world. Senka is ours. Her power keeps us safe.”
“Mama says something is wrong with Senka. Is something wrong with Senka, shilah?” Her sweet face looked so worried, brow wrinkled and small, thin lips tight with a frown.
I couldn’t lie to her. “It’s possible, Mai. We don’t know for sure. Things have been changing.”
“The shadow touched.” Her eyes were closed now as sleep began to claim her.
I nodded, sad that my kid sister knew about them. I kissed her forehead, and gently extracted myself from her bed. “Get some sleep, flower. I’ll be here in the morning when you wake.”
Before I closed the door, I glanced behind me one more time. Mai clutched her stuffed rabbit in one arm and twirled a lock of hair around a finger, her eyes closed. She looked so beautiful. So perfectly normal and healthy.
First, my father. Then Rice. Mai was yet another piece of my heart that could be taken at any minute.
Exhaustion shut down my body the moment I fell into my old bed. I slept fitfully for several hours, cast in dreams of Rice’s sightless eyes and Senka’s damaged tomb. Through it all, the scent of clove cigarettes, and Warren’s steady voice: “You have a long night ahead of you. I’ll see you again real soon.”
I awoke to the purple hush before dawn, clove smoke still lingering in my senses. I didn’t bother with shoes, or pants to cover my boy shorts, as I silently left the pueblo and walked east.
The Shadows and Sorcery Collection Page 4