The Purification Ceremony

by Mark Sullivan

  Then I sensed a rapid reversal in the maelstrom and a hot, piercing energy flew straight at me from the center of the cone.

  It was like one of those times when you touch something terribly hot and you react by pulling away your finger even though you have not yet experienced the hurt. I dove forward and down, hitting snow even as I heard the smack of the arrow striking soft wood above me.

  I rolled over twice and got up tight behind a blowdown tree. Ryan was here, close enough to shoot at me. I nocked an arrow onto the bowstring and brought the whole contraption into a position where I could draw fast and release.

  Ryan must have taken the way I dove forward as sign of a hit. For he came close to giving me the perfect shot; when I caught sight of him, he was sprinting diagonally through logging slash at about forty yards. The gray wolf's cape fluttered behind him. He was trying to get above me to see whether I was down for good.

  There was an opening in the brush about fifteen feet ahead of the religion professor, and I drew and swung the arrow at the opening and released a fraction of a second before he entered my line of fire.

  Admittedly, my experience with a bow was limited; as a girl, I'd learned the art at summer camps and continued in my backyard on a target Mitchell built for me out of hay bales. And I had hunted for two seasons with a recurve, but had never taken a shot at an animal because I wasn't sure of the distance.

  Still, there's no doubt in my mind that the release was good and the arrow flew true. But in the middle of a full sprint, Ryan changed direction by a few degrees of angle and made a flicking motion with his left hand, his bow hand, even as he crashed to the ground and rolled from my sight. My arrow clattered harmlessly into the saplings beyond him.

  A sickening feeling came over me. It was one thing for me to have ducked at some extrasensory warning I did not fully understand. It was quite another to have such a high degree of awareness that redirecting a speeding arrow was part of your Power. I was not up to this challenge. My mind turned hazy with the thought that sooner or later today I would die.

  But before that thought could hamstring my will, I heard a guttural whine on the flank opposite Ryan. The feather snow there bulged, the swell becoming tubular just before she stepped into view. A thick crust of blackened blood had formed over her left eye. The flesh below it was pink and worried free of fur. She cocked her head in my direction, slunk forward two steps and growled.

  Then I sensed Ryan sneaking through the slash to my left, both of them pinching toward me, sure that the steep rock face at my back would prevent me from fleeing. My throat constricted and I fought against the squeezing off of breath that seemed to slow the flow of the feather snow around me.

  I felt, but never saw, the crow pass over the opening. I only knew that I was suddenly certain of all of the features of the landscape around me, and just as certain of my escape route.

  About twenty yards to my left, hidden by a curve in the shelf on which I hid, was a steep-banked old streambed that cut down-ridge. I drew, raised up and fired an arrow at the wolf. It crashed into the dry deadwood right beside her. She turned tail at the racket and loped into the thicket. She was not frightened. She would merely try another angle of attack.

  But I was already up and dashing toward the streambed. It looked like a ten foot-wide frozen staircase, in places denuded of vegetation, in others choked with shoulder-high cedars. The streambed went straight up for twenty yards, then began a snake dance of curves to a spring at the ridge top. The footing was good and I bounded up the stairs, anticipating the curves and the openings in the cedars even before I saw them.

  I had gained about four hundred vertical feet in elevation before I felt Ryan and his ally below and behind me in the streambed. Accelerating, I burst through several openings and over a series of downed logs before flashing on the crow's perspective again.

  The streambed changed course just ahead of me. The bank rose sharply on the left side. There were downed tamaracks there in which I could hide and shoot. A place of Power. An ambush.

  What followed seemed to unfold in slow motion.

  Long before I saw her, the feather snow emanating from the cedar jungle below me jetted and swirled. I craned my head forward, waiting. The snow swirled again.

  And then I heard the snarl and snapped my head over my shoulder upstream to the opposite bank. She had circled me! In one leap, the wolf carried herself over and down and halfway across the stream. I could not turn to get the shot. I was trapped.

  In a low crouch she came up the bank, wary, her shoulder blades popping with controlled effort. She bared her teeth and flicked her tongue even as I made a futile effort to get myself turned around with the bow, even as I knew it was over.

  There are moments in a life that are inexplicable. This was one of mine. In the streambed below me, exactly where the feather snow had swirled moments before, a tenpoint buck stepped from the cedars and paused in the opening. Flecks of bright, frothy blood, lung blood, shone at his muzzle. I do not know if Ryan had shot the animal as he'd followed me up the streambed and that was what had caused the bizarre patterns in the feather snow prior to the wolf appearing. Perhaps it was just the energy being given off by a wounded animal fighting for its life. I do not know.

  I only know that the buck was there and that I believe it was the oxygen-saturated scent of his lung blood that saved me; the Power of the liquid life force draining from the deer seemed to sever whatever hold Ryan had on the wolf. She stopped cold in her tracks and responded to an instinct ingrained over thousands of generations. She turned her head so the blind eye faced me and sniffed the air. Sinking inside herself, she made ready her attack and took two catlike steps toward the deer.

  The wolf never knew that my arrow split her lungs and heart and passed out behind her opposite shoulder and buried itself in the snow. Instead, she leapt away on a dead run, confident of an easy kill on wounded prey.

  The buck faced her, his rack down and swinging to and fro. Ten yards from him, the wolfs front legs buckled and she plowed face-first into the snow, twitched and died. The buck came up walleyed in terror at the sight. In two bounds he was gone.

  I made it to the ridge top in time to hear, far below me, an explosion of hatred when Ryan found his ally dead. The feather snow behind me reacted as if blown by a hurricane.

  For the first time that morning, I smiled. For more than a week we had used tactics that had us acting as hunter while Ryan played the deer. And he had foiled us, crippled us, killed us by adopting that strategy.

  Now the deer and the crow occupied my mind. I would set the pace. I would choose the terrain. I would let him hunt me until I could lay some kind of trap for him again. I would try until one of us was dead.

  I ran across the ridge top, then looped backward, cutting my own tracks and those of Ryan in pursuit before retreating back down the streambed, taking the frozen stairs three at a time. Halfway to the bottom, I spun backward into my own tracks of a half hour earlier, tracing them with care for ten paces before jumping far to one side and breaking up the bank and then traversing a shelf.

  Here the wind of the previous night's storm had blown the snowpack as hard and smooth as a billiard table. I flew across it as if I no longer had feet, but wings. My head was up, aware, culling the information flowing into my brain the way my computers do running data. I had confidence that I was in control, that I had Power.

  Ahead, the shelf narrowed to a bottleneck. I ran through the funnel, noting how steeply the land fell away to my left toward the flat and the clear-cut where not an hour ago Ryan and I had attempted to shape-change each other forever. A cluster of thirty-foot pines had grown up in the bottleneck. Where the funnel drained into a broad, long hardwood glen, I jumped downslope and crabbed back just under the shelf lip before stopping in a tangle below the tightest part of the bottleneck. I got an arrow, my second to last arrow, nocked it tight and held the bow loosely in the direction from which I expected him to come. I knew he'd sensed my arrow in flight
before, but I hoped the death of the wolf would be enough to disturb his focus.

  There was no noise or movement in the woods around me for the longest time. Then the feather snow wafted and fluttered right along the surface of the shelf above me like the hem of a thin curtain brushed by a meandering summer breeze.

  My chest tightened at the sight of it. The shift in the pattern of the snow was so subtle, so gentle, yet so intentional that I knew that he knew I was inside his world now. Surely not as honed in my abilities as he, but inside it nonetheless; and he was coming after me with respect, hunting slow and methodical.

  The sound of my heart had been a comforting presence all morning. Now my nerves rose and began to clash with the consistent beat of my heart. The feather snow tapered almost to flurries. I drew back the bow and held it. I struggled to remain clear, to see him before he saw me.

  But from deep inside me a gnawing sadness wormed its way toward my heart and clouded me with regret.The gaunt-ness of my father's face in the morgue. Patrick begging me to come home. Phil crying for Butch. Lizzy Ryan gazing into the last blue sky of her life. All these things whirled about me, then slowed.

  Ryan was kneeling between two boulders thirty-five yards away. He was at full draw, too.

  I don't remember releasing my arrow. That memory was swallowed whole by the slicing punch of his arrow through the fleshy part of my right breast. It glanced off my rib cage and continued through the muscles at my armpit before leaving me. My numb arm trembled and contracted. Heavy dark spots appeared before me. I shook my head, trying to free myself from the shock of the wound. But nothing prepares you for this. You actually feel the Power seeping from you.

  I heard a cry and the spots shrank and my vision cleared. My arrow had caught Ryan in the thigh. With both hands he had hold of the broadhead, which thrust out a good four inches from the side of his leg. He was staring at me and I knew that he had caused the sadness that destroyed my concentration as a way of masking his movements. I tried to get my dying hand to react, to take my last arrow and finish him, but it would not answer my call. It had curled up like a claw.

  "You will die for Lizzy!" he screamed at me. "You will die for her and Kauyumari and Tatewari!"

  I knew what Ryan was going to do even before he did. The Datura smoke had anesthetized him to pain that would have finished another man. It had turned him to animal. The sudden knowledge that I had brushed only the surface of his insane world spurred in me an abject, blind terror. I ran downhill toward the Dream, my arm flopping uselessly beside me.

  I cannot describe the sound he made in the woods behind me as he wrenched the arrow shaft from his leg, only that it seemed like thunder clapping after lightning and that the lightning followed me the way it would a metal boat on open water.

  I had a head start of maybe a hundred yards while he cut a length from the wolf cape sufficient to stem the flow of blood from his leg. I kept reaching inside my coat to gauge the extent of my own wounds from the wet, sticky feeling under my arm. Nerve damage for sure. To the muscles and tendons as well. But, miraculously, his arrow had not sliced a major artery.

  I slipped my dead arm between the string and the arm of the bow and pulled it tight to my body. The cross-pressure would limit my blood loss and keep my arm from swinging as I ran. The happy effect of that improvement fled when I turned after another hundred yards to see that I was leaving not only tracks, but bright red evidence of my passing in the snow.

  Ryan would find it and it would trigger bloodlust and he would come after me as the wolf had come after the wounded buck in the streambed. I ran on, trying to call up my heart as a sense and the crow as my ally. But I was a novice at entering the other worlds, a novice who required a still forest, a still mind, a still body to slide open the curtains and peer through the window. All around me now was chaos. I'd lost my heart.

  The faint gurgle of the Dream reached me and I realized I'd be trapped ahead on the flat along the river. It would end there. I would end there.

  I thought of Patrick and Emily and even Kevin, and I began to sob, the tears clouding my vision, and I tripped passing through a choke of serviceberry and crashed onto my wounded shoulder.

  The pain shot up and through me, firing my brain to a white coil. And in that superheated state I saw my father standing before me, telling me not to give up, to hunt in the way I knew best. "Know the deer," I heard him say, and then he was gone and the pain with him.

  Now I studied the terrain before me as any good deer hunter would, as an evolving situation that with finesse could be worked in my favor. I went straight to the bank of the Dream, wrenching myself free of the camouflaged anorak and hanging it over a piece of driftwood on the bank. I put my hat there, too. From thirty yards back, it all might suggest a slumped woman. Letting my right arm dangle free again, swallowing hard at the broadening red circle on the right side of my chest, I walked in circles to encourage the thick drops of blood to paint the snow, to tell the story of an animal wandering deranged in the shadow of death.

  I glanced at the piece of deer skin and the photographs of Emily and Patrick pinned to my shirt. Lizzy Ryan's face in the photograph was smeared with my blood. Then I jumped down the bank and trotted north twenty yards along the river's edge, mindful not to step on the weak ice that masked the furious current. I clawed my way up the bank and slipped through the jack pines toward my back trail. Ryan would be coming slow again, especially with a wounded leg. I had time.

  I got my left foot between the bowstring and the tip of the bottom bow limb. I grasped the tip of the top bow limb with my good hand and pressed downward, reaching with my teeth for the groove in which the loop of the string had been set. It freed on the third try. I laid the bow on the other side of, and perpendicular to, a pair of saplings growing about six inches apart, then brought the string around the back side and, after thirty seconds of struggle, got the string looped back on the opposite bow limb.

  Panting now, murmuring directions to myself to keep my mind off the predator sneaking my blood trail, I got my last arrow on the string and laid it between the saplings. I sat behind the bow, then shimmied the weapon to about knee height, hooked three fingers around the arrow nock, got my feet against the saplings and pulled back. The riser of the bow held tight to the saplings and the limbs flexed toward me.

  I had to scrunch down to look across the plane of the arrow and through the V of the three-bladed broadhead. I aimed at a point thirty yards back from the bank from where I felt sure Ryan would see the concentration of my blood in the snow as well as the anorak and the hat. If that caused the slightest shift in his attention, I had him.

  I had no time to think about anything. He was suddenly there, limping his way through the choke of serviceberry. kneeling where I'd fallen to look at the blood swatch, to make his own assessment of my physical condition. He smiled, stood and took an awkward step forward out of the thicket.

  "Keep coming," I whispered to myself. "Ten more feet, you sick bastard."

  Ryan stopped after another step and let his eyes trail my trail across the flat to the heavy splash of blood I'd left on the bank. And finally to my anorak and hat.

  If I'd been able to support the bow with both arms, I could have shot him then. But the way it was, with the riser against the tree, I could not move the bow in his direction at all. I had one shooting lane and he was still five feet from entering it.

  Ryan swiveled his head, taking in the woods around him. I hunkered down, praying the saplings and the brilliant sunlight in his face would protect me. He paused for a fraction of a second as he turned to face my direction, and I felt his awareness pass just over me, return and pass again toward my anorak and hat.

  He stayed still, looking at the anorak and the hat and the blood. I had been holding the bowstring and the arrow nock with three fingers for close to four minutes now and my fingers began to quiver.

  "Come on," I whispered. And then he moved.

  Whether it was the trembling in my fingers or
the sudden release of pressure against the riser that affected my shot, I'll never know. But I'm positive that when Ryan grinned and moved into my shooting lane, I had the broadhead locked on his chest. I let the arrow go. It flailed sideways, a reddish flash in the late-morning air, then straightened and struck him low with the sound of a fist plumping a pillow. He humped up and dropped his bow and grabbed his stomach. He looked at his stomach as if he couldn't believe it.

  "Gut-shot," Ryan said, shaking his head. "She gut-shot me."

  I had gotten up by now and stepped out from behind the saplings, expecting him to fall at any moment.

  Instead, he raised up and turned toward me. I shivered as the shadow of something evil and powerful surrounded me.

  Ryan's eyes flared and he reached to his waist and brought out that wicked stone-bladed knife he'd had in the cave. "I'll destroy you!" he threatened, seething, and he came at me, no limping, no sign of the arrow that had just passed through his paunch.

  I ran toward the river, hysterically thinking that maybe Theresa had been right; in the Datura state, he could not be killed in any conventional sense.

  Ryan caught me the first time ten feet from the riverbank. He threw himself forward and got his hand around my ankle. I crumbled through the dead branches of a blowdown with my bad shoulder. The agony seared through me again.

  But my own Power surged, reacting, feeding off and against his. I lashed out with my free leg, catching him on the ear with the toe of my steel-shanked boot. His hold on me wavered and I kicked again, knocking the knife from his other hand. I struggled forward on my knees, slipping and falling as I tried to get back on my feet.

  He caught me the second time right at the edge of the river. He hit me hard with both fists between the shoulder blades, knocking the wind from me. I collapsed forward and he went with me, pinning me on the shore next to the thin ice.

  "Know my name?" he chanted in that hoarse voice.