Shaman

by Chloe Garner

  “No, it is,” Samantha told him. He felt as hang-dog as he looked. Something really bad had happened, worse than what Jason had told her. “I knew there was something wrong, and I shouldn’t have waited as long as I did to fix it. I accept that.”

  “How is Elizabeth?” Jason asked.

  “Hi, Jason,” Elizabeth called softly from the kitchen. She came into the dining room carrying a stack of plates and started setting the table. Samantha had thought the first time she saw the girl that she looked like she was sixteen. She looked even younger now, with her hair in twin braids down her chest. She had to have been twenty-three by now.

  “How are you?” Samantha asked.

  “I’m fine, Sam. How are you?”

  “I’m good, thank you. How is school?”

  “Very good, thank you,” Elizabeth said. Heather stepped out of her way as she came around the end of the table.

  “She’s getting straight A’s now,” Heather said. “Going to graduate a semester early.”

  “That’s great,” Samantha said. Elizabeth looked up at her and smiled.

  “Thank you.” She looked at Heather. “Would you like me to put dinner in the oven?”

  “Please,” Heather said. Heather narrowed her eyes at Jason as Elizabeth went back into the kitchen.

  “You’re done with her,” she hissed at him. Jason’s eyes opened in surprise and he tried and failed several times to find something to say.

  “Heather, what happened?” Samantha asked. Heather jerked her chin at Jason.

  “My daughter doesn’t remember, and Carly told us nothing, so all we have is his story.”

  “We went to Dallas for a party, all four of us. Double date. Sam got bad seafood at dinner, sushi, seriously. Who actually thought that was a good idea?” Heather grunted and Sam glared. “Anyway, so he went back to the car to sleep it off. Carly and Elizabeth didn’t want to go home yet. So we went to the party and Elizabeth and I were having a good time, and Carly heard about this other party in another part of town, and Elizabeth wanted to go…” Jason paused, remembering the decision. “So we went. I lost track of them. It was at this huge apartment complex, and the party was most of three stories of it, and… Heather, I know we shouldn’t have been there. I was looking for them to get us out of there.” She regarded him stonily, and he turned back to Samantha. “I found them in a bathroom of one of the apartments. Carly was high. Elizabeth…” He turned to find Elizabeth leaning on the doorframe behind him. “I’m sorry,” he said. She nodded. “Elizabeth was passed out on the floor. When I picked her up, she wasn’t breathing.” His eyes got distant and he leaned onto his fists on the table top. “Someone from the party came and helped her. She couldn’t walk… I don’t think she understood me… But she woke up for a few minutes. I asked Carly what she’d gotten, and Carly wouldn’t tell me. If I’d have known she was a demon…”

  “She was a demon?” Elizabeth asked. Jason nodded at her.

  “She was a demon. Sam ashed her.”

  Elizabeth looked at Sam, who pointed up at Samantha. Elizabeth gave her the slightest of nods.

  “Anyway, I carried her back to the car and we came back here. I thought she just needed to sleep it off. Carly said she was a big baby and that she’d be fine.”

  “We took her to the ER, unconscious, a few hours later,” Sam said. “Weak pulse, tremors. She sat up, screaming, in the back seat on the way there, but she never woke up.”

  “Carly slept,” Heather spat. “She told us she didn’t know what Elizabeth took. The doctor told us she had less than a fifty-fifty chance of survival.”

  Samantha looked at Jason, who pulled his mouth to the side.

  “I didn’t think she was evil like that. I didn’t think she’d just let Elizabeth die,” he said. “I’d never seen anyone OD before.”

  “I had,” Elizabeth said softly. All heads turned to look at her.

  “You guys treat me like a little girl. I’d been to those parties before. I’d done the drugs. Maybe she talked me into it, I don’t know, I really don’t remember, but it wasn’t like I was going ice skating when I went to Dallas. I played with fire and I got burnt.” She looked at her mother with a trace of her former spunk. “You shouldn’t blame them, Mom. I’m sure I knew what I was doing.”

  Heather’s mouth pinched, like she was only just containing an explosion of anger.

  “I’m going to finish setting the table, and then we’re going to have a nice dinner. And you’re going to be nice, Mom. It wasn’t their fault, and Carly’s dead now. It’s over. Maybe you should be thanking them.”

  Heather blew her lips out at the girl, but the storm had mostly passed.

  “Please. Sit. What does everyone want to drink?” Elizabeth asked. Samantha sat down next to Sam and Heather pulled out her chair at the head of the table. Jason remained standing.

  “Water is fine, thank you,” Samantha said. Sam nodded.

  “Water.”

  “I’ll help you,” Jason said. Elizabeth smiled at him, no teeth, and he followed her into the kitchen. Sam, Samantha, and Heather sat silently at the table until they came back, Elizabeth placing glasses that Jason filled out of a pitcher.

  “I have a boyfriend now,” Elizabeth said, pulling out her chair. She let Jason push it in as she sat. “Monroe.”

  “He’s a good boy,” Heather said. “He grew up on the reservation.”

  “He wants Mom to expand her business. He’s good with cars,” Elizabeth said, teasing.

  “Elizabeth, was your father Kiowa?” Samantha asked. Elizabeth looked at her lap, then over at Heather. Samantha slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry. They told me not to ask. I forgot.”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

  “He was white,” Heather said. Sam and Jason both jerked to look at her. She glowered at them. “This story leaves this room, I will gut you both.”

  “Why not her?” Jason asked, motioning to Samantha.

  “She doesn’t know anyone to tell,” Heather said. She looked at her daughter. “You are a woman now. You deserve to know. He was the last innocent. I failed to save him, but he gave me my daughter.”

  “What happened?” Jason asked.

  “What was his name?” Elizabeth asked. Heather sighed.

  “Wilson,” Heather said. “He was a kind man. Unafraid, even to the end. A beautiful man.”

  “What happened?” Jason asked again. She looked at him.

  “That is still my own story,” she said.

  The oven dinged and Elizabeth sat staring at Heather.

  <><><>

  That night, Samantha dreamed of flying. It was a normal dream for her. She flew all the time, but Sam was afraid. He kept trying to stop her. She told him over and over again that you just have to lean into the wind, and maintain the right angle, and you fly, but he just ran around on the ground, yelling for her to come back down.

  <><><>

  Sam dreamed that Samantha was falling. She hadn’t noticed yet that she had fallen, and he yelled to her, but he couldn’t stop it. The dream was endless. She just kept falling, and she never noticed, and he couldn’t stop it. He couldn’t save her.

  <><><>

  Eventually, he caught hold of her. His terror dumbfounded her, and she came back down to comfort him, and he held her. Then he held her harder. And kissed her. And made love to her. In her dreams, sex was a confusing and fully-clothed, but no less erotic, event, and she woke up sweating, heart racing, maddeningly turned on. The storm of desire coming from Sam the next room over startled her awake, realizing what had happened. He woke, and she shoved the tangled mess of thoughts and feelings away, hoping he wouldn’t figure it out.

  <><><>

  Heather was in her robe to wave them off the next morning before dawn. Samantha snuggled down into her blanket, trying not to think anything too specific. Sam glanced at her once, a spark of something between guilt and awkwardness flaring and dying, then jerked back around as Jason stretched and yawned lo
udly.

  “Chapel Hill or bust,” he said. Sam looked out the window. Samantha closed her eyes, wishing that pretending to be asleep still worked.

  <><><>

  A few hours before lunch, Jason pulled off the interstate to get gas, and Sam looked back at her again.

  “I had strange dreams last night,” he said. She couldn’t find anything to say that was misleading and true at the same time. He winced his eyes a little, trying to figure out how to ask without asking. He gave up. “Did you?”

  Direct question. Dang.

  “Yes.”

  “About me?”

  Like pulling teeth. She was cornered and didn’t know how to get loose.

  “Yes.”

  She had to talk to him. It wasn’t just going to go away. He couldn’t come up with anything to say, either, though, and turned to look back out the front window. The profile of his cheekbone triggered the image of her hands on his face, and her adrenaline spiked. He looked down and laughed.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  <><><>

  Jason stared out the windshield, watching headlights. The giggling had started at lunch. They couldn’t look each other in the eye, and Samantha kept blushing. He had used up his entire store of insults and mockery by the time they’d left the restaurant, still amused at his brother and his friend being happy together.

  That had been seven hours ago.

  Sam laughed and looked at the door, pulling his hair back behind his ear. It was like they were passing imaginary notes to each other. Like a pair of pre-teen girls.

  “Like a pair of girls,” he said. Couldn’t help himself. Samantha gasped in mock-shock, and Sam put the back of his hand to his mouth, grinning at it. Jason wasn’t even sure that they could hear him. He looked at Sam. Again. The boy had never actually been in love in his life. Even with Carly, there had been devotion, happiness, satisfaction, certainly, but not love. Not this grinning, puppy-dog, teasing, thing. Sam looked at him apologetically, then tipped his head back laughing. It was hard not to be insecure.

  Samantha sat up in the back seat and shook her head.

  “Enough. Enough. We can’t do this. Sam, this isn’t a good idea.”

  “I know, it’s just…”

  “I know.”

  Sam twisted in his seat to look at her.

  “What do we do?”

  “Act like grownups. This is serious.” She didn’t sound serious. She sounded like she wanted to play. “We need to train you, we need to find Brandt. We need to keep you away from demons. And apparently there’s something important in Chapel Hill. We’ve got a job to do. We should just. Do it.”

  “Doesn’t stop him,” Sam said, jerking a thumb at Jason. Jason didn’t like being the one on the outside in the conversation with all the holes in it.

  “Yeah, but this would stop us,” Samantha said, apparently coming down from whatever place in un-reality they had been occupying.

  “I know.”

  “Why? Why all the freaking will-they-won’t-they crap? Just get it over with, for crying out loud,” Jason said. “I told Aunt Connie we’d be there tonight, but it isn’t written in stone. We can pull over, find the two of you a motel room, and you two can just go at it. Somewhere far, far away from me. Please. Tomorrow you’d be normal, and you can cut the flirting and the giggling and the acting like little girls. Please.”

  “It wouldn’t work like that,” Sam said.

  “Why the hell not?” Jason asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” Sam said. He was coming down off the high, too.

  “Try me,” Jason said. Sam took a breath, but Samantha cut in.

  “You ever been high, Jason?”

  “Sure.”

  “No. Really high. Spacey high. Like, don’t-drag-me-back, I-don’t-want-to-go high?”

  He paused. Tempted to say yes just to see what she’d do, he shrugged.

  “Fine. No.”

  “Like the universe doesn’t exist and you’re just stewing in your own all-you-ever-wanted.”

  “That’s called sex,” Jason said.

  “No. More than that. Higher than that. More addicted than that. Maybe we could work like high-functioning addicts for a little while, but eventually we’d push it too far, and we’d never come back. You’d come looking for us, and there wouldn’t be anything left.”

  Jason remembered the old-wives’ tale Samantha had told Sam.

  “You eat each other to death. Right. Like I believe that could happen.”

  “I bite,” she offered. Sam and Jason both spun in their seats, and the car swerved. Jason bolted forward again, straightening out in his lane.

  “You what?”

  She snorted.

  “Sorry. Wanted to see what you’d do.”

  “It was true, though,” Sam said. She groaned.

  “Don’t start,” she said. Apparently that didn’t help anything, because she groaned again and tossed herself sideways in the seat.

  “Your brother, Jason. He has no idea how to control his imagination.”

  “I did not want to know that,” Jason said, staring at the road. He shook his head hard and blinked a few times. “I never want to think about that again.”

  <><><>

  They stared at each other over the table at the all-night diner Jason stopped at in Nashville. The play was gone. Jason looked from Sam, across from him, to Samantha, next to him, and said nothing. He wished he was anywhere else. They stared.

  Finally, Samantha stood.

  “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” she said. Sam watched her go, then stood. He started to follow, but Jason caught his wrist.

  “Dude, you know I’m in favor, but are you invited?”

  Sam glanced at him.

  “She isn’t saying no.”

  <><><>

  Samantha stood in the bathroom staring at the door. She knew he was following her. She knew she could stop him if she wanted to. If she wanted to, she was confident that she could simply hold the door closed against him with her mind. She knew she should.

  And yet she stood.

  The six months alone had been miserable. Two years on her own were nothing, but those six months she had been lonelier than she had ever been in her life. The night she had cured Sam, after they came back from the bar and he had passed out drunk in bed, she had laid with her head on his chest and listened to his heart beat. She had laid perpendicular to him, using him as a pillow, and that steady beat had put her into a silent, heavy sleep. She had woken curled up against him. Her head had hurt, her ear hurt, her shoulder hurt, her neck hurt, her back hurt. She had never wanted to stay exactly where she was more. He was alive. He didn’t hate her. She had lay, remembering the tiny snatches she could remember from the kiss, then forced herself to get up and go back to her own room before he woke.

  If it weren’t for the bond, they would have been sneaking away into bathrooms and around corners for days now. If they were normal, it would have just been a fun game. Just happy. It wouldn’t have changed anything.

  The bathroom door swung open and Sam closed it behind him, turning the bolt lock. He was decided. He had made it clear. This was the point of decision. She put her arms up and he stepped into them, his mouth finding hers. For a few moments, she was still aware of what was going on, if vaguely. She hit the wall in the large stall, the handrail cutting across her lower back, then she was sitting on it, her legs wrapped around Sam’s waist, his mouth on hers, his hair… his scent… She was gone. A black ocean of heartbeat and chemicals claimed her, and she let go.

  <><><>

  Jason sat at the table, playing with his straw. He looked up at the ceiling, bemused. He had done this to Sam dozens of times. Hundreds, maybe. And Sam and Carly had hardly been discrete. But Samantha was a friend. It made it less impersonal, harder not to wonder. He frowned.

  Sam came and sat across from him, leaning his back against the glass window and putting his legs up on the seat.

  “Just occurred to me,” Jason
said. “Please tell me her first time was not in a diner bathroom.” He looked at his watch. “In four minutes.”

  Sam was lost in thought for a moment, then, as if hearing him on a time delay, looked over.

  “No.”

  “No… It wasn’t, or no, you can’t tell me that?”

  Sam looked at him incredulously.

  “It wasn’t,” he said. “Give me some credit, dude.”

  “Then where is she?” Jason asked.

  “Apparently she actually had to pee.”

  “Oh.”

  He wondered why that hadn’t occurred to him.

  “So what happened?”

  “We’re still kind of talking,” Sam said. “Give me a minute.”

  Jason leaned on his elbow, staring at Sam to try to make him uncomfortable, but without success. Samantha landed in the booth next to him and shouldered her way under his arm.

  “So?” Jason asked. She grinned meaningfully, but damn if Jason knew what it meant.

  “Yeah.”

  He sighed.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” he said. She nodded.

  “Yeah. I can live without that.”

  He looked at Sam and frowned.

  “Come again?”

  “We’re okay,” Sam said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means, sorry, I’m with you again,” Samantha said. “I’m hungry.”

  They got to Chapel Hill after midnight, but the lights were still on in the house. A woman in a knee-length sweater jacket came out, hands tucked under her elbows, and hurried to the car. Sam got out.

  “Aunt Connie,” he said. Samantha opened her door.

  “You got so big,” the woman said as he leaned down to hug her. Jason got out of the car and he and the woman looked at each other awkwardly.

  “Thank you for coming,” she finally said. He nodded sharply. Connie’s eyes found Samantha and she frowned.

  “Oh,” Jason said. “I guess I forgot to mention. Connie, this is Sam. She’s…” he paused. “She’s…” He swallowed.

  “He doesn’t like the word girlfriend,” Samantha said. Connie raised an eyebrow at him.

  “An overwhelming show of affection,” she said, then hugged Samantha with the manner of a woman who doesn’t often give hugs trying to prove she’s friendly. Her warmth with Sam had been genuine; she was uncomfortable with them being there.