by Faith Hunter
“Please,” I whispered.
“Why should I help you, Jane Yellowrock, of the Tsalagi?”
I was too tired to even feel the shock of her question, the shock of her, maybe, not helping me, and I whispered into the night, “Because I’m lost without your help.”
“You have not spoken truth to me. You have kept truth far from me. You have lied. Why should I help you, Jane Yellowrock, of the Tsalagi?”
I realized she was asking something ritualistic, something important. And if I answered wrong, I might never get her help again. I laughed, the sound broken and croaking, like a raven dying. What the hell? What the hell? What the hell?
“When I was five years old,” I said, “I led my grandmother to two men, the two who killed my father and raped my mother. She took them. I don’t remember how. She kept them in a cave.” I laughed again, the sound now like the cawing of crows on a battlefield crowded with the dead. “I watched Uni lisi, the grandmother of many children—my own grandmother—kill the first man. When she hung the second man over a pit of stones, she gave me a knife. I helped her kill him.”
Aggie drew in a long breath. It sounded like pity and pain, as if she suffered with me. But not for long. She wanted truth? Well, I was tired of hiding it, not saying it aloud to any who asked.
“I’m over a hundred and seventy years old, as close as I can guess. I walked the trail of tears with The People before my grandmother helped me to escape. I’m a skinwalker.”
To give her credit, Aggie didn’t go pale or back away as if she were facing a crazy woman. The silence between us stretched, like drops of sweat from a prisoner’s back, long and thick and gelatinous. “You are not u’tlun’ta. You are not the creature called liver-eater. Spear Finger. You do not kill children and eat their livers or kill the sick and steal their hearts.” She said, her tone growing vehement, “You do not!”
Hearing the certainty in her tone, seeing the belief on her face—belief in me—I closed my eyes. A sound, equal parts fear, pain, and relief, ripped from my throat before it closed up again. Tears tore out of me, the tissues of my throat rending and rough, tasting of my blood as I struggled to breathe past the obstruction blocking my airway. I couldn’t name the emotion that raged through me. Too intense for peace. Too raw for acceptance. Maybe redemption of a different sort from what I’d experienced so far in my life.
I felt as if I’d been crying for days. I hated crying. Hated it. I’d been depressed not that long ago, and this felt a lot like that, a black cloud filling me. But this jag didn’t last long. As quickly as it started, it ended, and I found myself leaning against Aggie’s house, exhausted and empty. “Sorry ’bout that,” I said, my voice a croak.
“Have you eaten?” she asked gently. I shook my head no. “Go to the sweathouse. I’ll be there soon.” I started to push away from the wall and Aggie said, “God does not condemn the children led into deeds by a War Woman. Such actions are not evil.”
I stopped. “But does he condemn the adult who looks back and remembers? And is glad?”
“You were baptized, yes? Poured in the blood of the sacrifice? The redeemer does not condemn his own. He sees only his own blood when he sees you. Not the blood of those you have killed.” She closed the door in my face. I blinked, hearing her words again. He sees only his own blood . . . Broken, as if I hadn’t healed from a beating, I turned toward the sweathouse. And a vision of myself I didn’t know if I could stand.
An instant later she opened the door again. “You need to tell someone you are alive?”
“Ummm.” I wiped my eyes and they ached as if I’d been staring at the sun too long. “I’d love to borrow a phone.”
Aggie opened the door wider. “Make it fast and go back out. Be quiet. Mama is watching Wheel of Fortune reruns.”
Standing in the hallway, I dialed home and didn’t bother to respond to the hello. “Have you heard from Bruiser or Rick?” I asked, Aggie’s old-fashioned landline phone cradled between ear and shoulder as I braided my hip-length hair.
Eli said softly, “Good to know you’re alive. George crashed on your couch about an hour ago. Evan is playing his flute, trying to heal him.”
Bruiser is alive. My fingers twisted in my hair, pulling on my scalp as I breathed out in relief.
“Rick is a no-show here,” he added. “Are you okay?”
“Ducky. Bruiser. Details.”
“Bruised,” he chuckled sourly at his own play on words. “Blood loss. Strange abrasions over his throat and back and one leg. Looks like he lost about twenty pounds. He keeps mumbling your name and stuff about snakes.”
I closed my eyes in relief. And if a rather loud voice was shouting in the back of my head that I had left him to die and shouldn’t be so worried now, I was able to shove it down along with all the other stuff I’d have to deal with someday.
“So tell me how your bike and your gear ended up scattered all over the street.”
“Bruiser’s snake. Or . . . I don’t know what it was, but it kinda looked like a snake. My bike?”
“Busted. I don’t know how bad. Jodi let me pick it and your gear up. You need to call her. But first, debrief me.”
Bitsa! some small, bereaved part of me howled. I shoved it down inside too and, concisely, I filled Eli in on the fight and how I’d spent the day—which felt weirder than anything I had ever done before. I wasn’t sure how to be honest about being in Beast form; saying the words made me feel as if I’d eaten something slimy. But Eli seemed to take it in stride, or maybe he was standing bug-eyed on the other end of the line and I just thought he was nonchalant. I ended the debrief with “I won’t be home soon. Some stuff I need to take care of.”
“Okay. Call Jodi. She has news she won’t give me. Or maybe she wants to schedule mani-pedis and facials.” He ended the call. I didn’t call Jodi. I knew there wasn’t time. And I didn’t want her to have access to this number in relation to me. Her news or spa-day plans would have to wait.
CHAPTER 17
Killer Only, Killer Only, Killer
The sweathouse was still hot. Aggie had done an all-day ritual for someone, several someones by the sweat-stink on the air. I had to wonder how much she had left inside herself, drained of the toxins, yes, but also all the minerals that allowed a heart to beat and muscles to contract and expand.
Not choosing one of the log benches, I sat on the clay floor near the circle of stones that marked the fire pit. Heat radiated from the clay and the stones and the old coals. I shivered hard once more, and started to sweat as my body reacted to the change in temp.
From the metal bucket nearby, I took tinder—dry slivers of wood—and used them to brush away the coat of ash on the coals, dropping the curls of cedar into the red heat. The room brightened as the wood caught the flame, and I added more tinder, then larger pieces—stems and twigs. The flames seemed to dance with the shadows along the walls, a dance of day and night, of good and evil, like the dance of light energy and dark energy in physics, moving to an unheard beat. Sweat pearled and trickled down my spine in the heated room. I added a split log of hickory. The flames licked into the wood.
I was surprised that Aggie had let me use her phone. Usually the elder would tell me to put the things of the earth away, to concentrate on my breathing and the emptiness inside me. So I tried to do that now. I blew out my breath, trying to find a calm center in the darkness that swirled through me like a storm.
Aggie One Feather opened the door and slipped inside so fast that the heat didn’t escape. She settled across from me and blew out a breath that sounded both tired and satisfied. “You came. You spoke truth. This is good.”
I shrugged, my drying hair sticking to my sweat-damp skin. I leaned back, my body resting against the log bench.
Aggie swiveled to her side and hit a button, turning on the old boom box. The sound of a tribal flute skirled into the room. “Close your eyes. Breathe, as I have taught you. Slowly. In and out. In . . .” We both inhaled, slowly to a beat of three.
“. . . and out.” We exhaled together to a beat of three, syncing our breathing. “In . . . and out. In . . . and out.”
We went through breathing exercises, which were a lot like yoga breathing, and I began to relax. The room darkened as the wood burned down. Outside, I heard a barred owl calling, hooting over the sound of the music. The track changed to drums, soft and slow, and I felt my heart rate slow to match.
My eyes were half-closed when Aggie dropped something on the fire. Bright flame burst out, devouring dried herbs. I breathed in the scents of rosemary and harsh sage and tasted something bitter in the back of my throat. Aggie poured liquid into a wood cup. I didn’t ask what was in it. I drank it down, the bitter substance like gall.
And I remembered the first time I tasted gall. I was standing beside my father, his tall form blocking the sun. Before him were two trees, a length of rough board spanning them, the horizontal surface taller than my head.
“A tsa di,” he said, speaking the language of The People, which, in my memory, I understood as fish, “must be cut fresh, cleaned well, cooked and served quickly, or dried over a smoky fire for winter stew. In cleaning, the gall must be removed whole, not cut with the blade, or the bitter taste will pass through the entire fish and it will be no good to eat. Just as a bitter heart will poison an entire human, so the gall will poison the entire fish. Here. Taste.” He squatted and pressed a yellowish white blob to my lips. The taste spread through my mouth and I spat. Edoda, my father, laughed, the sound filled with tenderness. “As with all things, aquetsi ageyutsa, my daughter, there is both good and bad in the a tsa di.”
“Is there both good and bad with the white man, Edoda?” I asked.
Edoda’s face fell, the long lines pulling in more shadow. He held up the steel knife, the blade kept sharp with the whetstone in the cabin. “Yelasdi made of white man’s steel is good. Yunega himself is not good.”
“Is his god good?”
There was a long silence after my question and Edoda stood to resume cleaning the fish. “His god is not bad. His god understands kindness, taking care of the old and the infirm. His god understands forgiveness. It is Yunega who does not follow the rules of living laid out by his god. Who does not forgive or offer respect to the land that his god said to place under the dominion and care of all people. Yunega thinks that he owns the land and can do what he pleases, when dominion means nothing of ownership.”
“Yunega is stupid?”
Edoda looked over my shoulder and chuckled, a soft burr of his big-cat growling in his voice. “Yunega is very stupid,” he said, but his attention was no longer on me.
I sucked a breath, started to turn to look over my shoulder, and was pulled out of the memory, back into the sweathouse, wondering what my father had seen behind me that made him laugh, made his face change with hardness, made his cat—his preferred animal—come close to the surface. Aggie asked no questions, she just handed me another cup of the vile liquid. And I drank. When the cup was empty, my hand went lax. The cup fell toward the warm clay ground. It fell slowly, as if gravity had forgotten how to pull things to the earth. When it hit, it made a hollow thump, like the sound of a bare heel hitting the ground in a dance.
Jane is killer only, a voice breathed. Jane is killer only.
The words echoed from stone walls, killer only, killer only, killer.
I was standing in a cavern, a familiar place, the place where I first shifted into we sa, my little cat, my bobcat form. But I was grown now, and wearing vamp-hunting leathers, making this a dream, and not memory. Light and warmth danced across the chilled wet stone walls from the fire at my booted feet. The rounded cavern over my head was lost in darkness. The smell of burning wood grew stronger, as did rosemary and the astringent sage. But nothing happened. I realized that my dream state had stalled. I asked, “What would you have me to do, Egini?” Aggie in the language of The People.
“Look around,” her voice said to me. “What do you see?”
“Shadows and firelight.”
“And the silver chain? What does the silver chain do?”
At my feet was a silver chain that hadn’t been there only a moment before, appearing in the way of dreams. And as in the way of dreams, I was no longer in my human form. I was Beast, pelt, killing teeth, and huge paws on the stone floor. The silver chain was clipped around my foot above my paw with a silver clasp, leaves and cougar claws engraved on it. It gleamed in the light.
Tilting my head, I let my eyes follow the chain to the far wall, where shadows were darker still, piled up like cats in a den, against the winter temps. The chain entered the pile of shadows, its other end hidden. I padded across the shadowed floor, the silver chain dragging behind me, my paws silent. As I neared the pile, I made out Leo in the form of a cat, a black African lion, his mane full and commanding. His black eyes watched me as I neared, and he yawned, casually showing me his fangs. The chain went to him, and circled his neck with a loop. One paw was on the chain.
“This is your fear,” Aggie said to me, her voice like the breath of the cave, slow and low. “Being chained. But you are skinwalker. You cannot be chained.”
The cavern changed yet stayed the same. I was sitting now, on the cold floor in front of a different fire. My father’s face loomed over me, half lit by flame, glowing with life and love; half shadowed, as black as death. “Edoda,” I whispered. His eyes were yellow, like mine. Not the black of The People, the chelokay, the tsaligi, but the yellow eyes of the skinwalker.
I struggled up from the cave. I knew this memory. I had lived it before in the sweathouse, and I didn’t need it again. I needed something new. But it pulled me down, into the past.
Edoda smiled and I breathed in his pride with the herbed smoke—stern, yet full of laughter. Uni lisi, grandmother of many children, bent over me, her face crosshatched with life and age, her skin withered and drooping. Her eyes—yellow like mine and Edoda’s—were lively and full of tenderness. “A s di ga,” she murmured. Baby . . .
The fire was harsh with the smoke of dried herbs. Drums were playing.
“We sa,” my father whispered. Bobcat . . .
Time passed. Edoda sat close, his flesh hot in the chill air. Uni lisi sat near him, her fingers tapping on a skin-head drum. The echoes of her fingertips on the skin beat through me, vibrating deep. Touching sinew, bone, heart, and liver. Flowing through my blood. The beat reaching into my blood, my flesh, melding my heartbeat with it.
“A da nv do,” she crooned. Great Spirit . . .
“Follow the drum,” Edoda said.
I looked at the cave wall, at the shadows swaying with exhaustion. The beat of the drum filled me, slow and sonorous, echoing through my soul home.
Warmth settled onto me. Fur tickled me. On the wall of dancing shadows, I saw myself as the cat rested on me, a cured skin, with fur still on, ears pointed, tufts curling out. Pelt brushed my sides. My legs. We sa . . . bobcat. My face. The overlay of cat face, above my own.
Edoda settled a necklace of claws, bones, and fierce teeth over my head onto my shoulders. “Reach inside,” Edoda murmured. “Breathe inside. Into we sa, into the snake within.” The snake of the bobcat, the snake of my first shift, my first change. The snake of the double helix of DNA in the skin of the cat . . . Magic tingled along my sides, into my fingers as I slid down, inside the bobcat pelt. Dreaming. Floating in grayness.
For a moment, I remembered the gray place where Bruiser and the thing that was not Soul, but was like her, fought. I had seen her species playing in the black waters near Chauvin. I remembered the energies and the energy of the blade of steel, wielded by Bruiser. But before I could put it all together, I was pulled back into the memory.
Beneath the drumbeat, I saw the snake resting below the surface, encapsulated in every cell of the hunter cat, in its teeth and bones, in the dried bits of its hardened marrow. A snake, holding all that we sa was. The awareness of where the cat and I differed. Where we were the same. And how easy it would be to shift from my shape
into the bobcat. So simple.
As simple as bringing steel with me into the place of the change, as Bruiser had done. This was important. I struggled to fight free of the ancient dream memory, but again it held me. Sucked me down into the past.
My first beast. My first shift. In the memory, I let go. I melted, taking the shape of bobcat. Pain, like spokes of the white man’s wheels, radiated out, cutting me. The shadows on the stone walls merged and glittered, gray and dark and light. All color bled out of the night. The shadow was a young cat with a short stubby tail.
The past and the present merged too. And I understood. If I brought white man’s steel into my cave home, I could cut the silver chain and free Beast from Leo. Freeing her, I could free myself from Leo.
I was back in the dream, the past and the old memories dissolved around me, falling like notes of the flute echoing in the distance through the cavern. In human form, I stood facing the pile of shadows. And I realized that Beast was there too. Tlvdatsi, but more than simply the form of mountain lion. This was the soul of Beast that I had pulled into my soul home when I was in we sa form, and stealing the kill of a bigger cat—when I had stolen both the living body of my attacker and her life-force to save my own life. This was darkest black magic among my people. But I could undo the evil I had done.
I could cut the silver chain. I could free myself from Leo. And I could free Beast. With the same steel blade, I could cut her out of me. Standing in my soul home, I could see how it would be done. Like cutting through the joints of prey, separating us, I could incise her from me, undoing the terrible sin that brought her soul inside with me. I could set her free forever. Forever.
I could be what nature intended—skinwalker. I could silence the second voice that clawed and tore at me, that demanded her way. I could cut her out.
In the dream Beast hissed and bared killing teeth. She said, Jane and tlvdatsi are I/we. Jane and Puma concolor are Beast. Together Jane and Beast are more than Jane or Beast alone.
