Qaletaqa

by Gladden, DelSheree

  Melody paused and I almost sighed. I should have been discouraging her from talking any more about it, but I couldn’t. Wanting, maybe even needing, to know what else she remembered, I forced myself to keep silent. I could see the meadow where we stood, hear the songbird, and feel the breeze. I could feel her lips against mine. It was as if her words were unlocking my memories as well.

  “But I did. I did forget, Uriah,” Melody said, slightly louder than before. The loss of her mesmerizing whisper gave me enough strength to pull back from her. “I forgot for a long time, but being near you, even in this strange place, is making me remember.”

  “What else do you remember?” I asked.

  Melody sighed. “Nothing as specific as the kiss. Just flashes mostly, moments we spent together before coming here.” Dropping her eyes, she seemed to ponder the weave of her blue jeans very studiously. I waited, knowing that she had something else to say.

  “I…miss you,” she said. “Not the you that’s here with me now, but the you I used to know. Does that make sense?”

  It did, in the strangest sort of way. I could feel a longing to find the woman I used to love. The only thing was, I didn’t think either of us were the same person we used to be. There was an empty space in my life growing up, but Claire had filled it. I wanted so badly to be the person Melody missed, but I didn’t think he existed any longer.

  “Whoever we were before, we aren’t them anymore,” I said.

  Melody nodded, but she didn’t look entirely convinced. Neither was I, but I had to hold onto that distinction. If the lines blurred anymore, I might truly become the man Melody was missing. And that man would not remember Claire. I needed to make sure Melody knew she wasn’t the woman who wanted that long gone version on me. She wanted someone else now.

  “Melody,” I said, “let me tell you about another first kiss.”

  24: Promises

  The sound of the clattering door startled me awake. I sat up wanting to scream my warning about the attacking wolf from my dream to Uriah again, but the bland floral décor of the hotel room quickly shut my mouth and reminded me it had only been a dream. I blinked at the morning sunlight peeking through the edges of the closed curtains.

  “Oh, sorry, did I wake you up?” Uriah asked as he stepped away from the bathroom door.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. I was glad he woke me, even though it meant missing the rest of the dream. The ending was no more certain than any other part of the future. The wolf, that was worth warning Uriah about, though.

  “Uriah, I was dreaming about you facing the Matwau,” I said. “And-”

  “You dreamed about that?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Kaya taught me how to induce dreams. But anyway, I saw something that I wanted to tell you about.”

  Uriah’s eyes narrowed and his fists clenched, drawing my eyes to his hands. In my eagerness to tell him about the wolf, I had barely even noticed his appearance. His knuckles were dark red from dried blood in a few places. One of his cheeks was definitely a little swollen and he was leaning on one leg as if the other one couldn’t support its normal portion of weight.

  “What happened to you?” I exclaimed. “I thought you were going out to call your mom last night?”

  “Oh, crap,” Uriah mumbled, “I completely forgot to call her.”

  “What happened?” My tone was meant to remind him he shouldn’t try leaving anything out.

  “I, uh, met someone. Things got a little rough, but I’m okay. Don’t worry about it.” His eyes were immediately looking at everything in the room but me.

  Jumping up, I grabbed his chin and forced his eyes to look at mine. “Uriah Crowe, what happened to you out there?”

  His cheeks reddened and his mouth opened, but nothing came out. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem scared of it, but he didn’t want to tell me about it, either. He almost looked embarrassed.

  “Do you really think there’s anything you could tell me at this point that I would think was crazy?” I asked him.

  “This might be pushing it,” he said.

  I waited. Uriah sighed.

  “Okay fine, I met a guy named Ahiga in the parking lot. He attacked me, but I beat him off. Then he offered to teach me how to kill the Matwau. And I took him up on his offer.”

  “Ahiga? How would some guy in a parking lot know about killing the Matwau?” I asked. This was pushing it.

  “Ahiga fought the Matwau…twice.” Uriah waited. “Three hundred years ago.”

  “Oh.”

  What else could I say? I was officially pushed past the limit of being able to make a sensible reply. I switched back to the one piece of information I could logically hold onto. “This Ahiga guy taught you how to defeat the Matwau?”

  “Uh, yeah, the theory anyway. There’s no way for me to actually practice without facing the Matwau, but I think it will work.”

  “Well, how? What do you do? Quaile’s book hasn’t said anything about how to actually defeat the Matwau yet. Maybe it’s in there somewhere, but mostly there has just been things she was supposed to teach you in preparation for meeting him,” I said.

  “I don’t think the answer will be in Quaile’s book,” Uriah said.

  My nose crinkled in confusion. “How could you know that?”

  “It was something Ahiga said. He told me he’d been sent because the gods knew how to defeat the Matwau, and mom, of all people, had failed to show me how seek their advice. I don’t think the shamans ever knew. The shamans had their part and my parents had theirs. I guess they didn’t trust the shamans to be able to do everything, either.”

  Well, at least there was one thing I could agree with the gods on.

  “So, do you know how to kill the Matwau?” I asked.

  Uriah ran a hand through his hair, wincing when his shoulder lifted too far. “Kind of.”

  “What do you mean, kind of?”

  “I’m not sure if I can explain it. I can feel how to do it, but using words to describe what I’m doing with my power…I just don’t have any.” He paused, staring at nothing. No…pointedly not staring at me. Was he hiding something?

  “It’s like I’m taking my power and…collecting it, I guess. I have to get it all into one place and then use it against the Matwau, push it away from me and into him. It felt a little like what you do to me when we touch.”

  “How do you use your power against him?”

  “That’s the part neither of us was sure about. I still have to figure that piece out on my own, apparently. I don’t know what will happen. I just know it has to be all of my power.”

  I felt like my bones had just turned to sawdust. I slid down to the bed in disbelief.

  “All your power?” I whispered.

  That had been my last hope, that Uriah could use the power I gave him to break the bond when the Matwau was dead. If he had to use all of his power to kill him…

  “Claire, are you alright?” Uriah asked, suddenly hovering over me.

  “Yeah, fine,” I lied. “Just tired. I didn’t get a lot of rest last night.”

  He seemed to accept my answer straight up, wrapping me in his arms as if one embrace could erase the spirit crushing defeat I had just suffered. It almost could. Before this all started, there wasn’t anything in this world I didn’t think Uriah could fix. Illusions don’t just shatter and leave you, the jagged edges dig into your skin and leave scars that will never fade.

  “Hey, what was it you wanted to tell me?” Uriah asked when he pulled back enough to meet my gaze.

  He was obviously trying to get me talking about something else, but I was more than happy to take the bait and let thoughts of Uriah fighting centuries old dead men in the parking lot of the hotel and crushing my hope of not losing him slide into the very, very back of my mind.

  If this Ahiga character was on our side, then I wouldn’t complain about where he came from or how he found us. I still might complain about how ragged Uriah was looking, though. If I ever got the chance, I’
d certainly have a few things to say to Ahiga. But for now, I needed to get back to what I had seen and forget everything else.

  “The wolf, the one you said you threw into a tree when you first escaped the Matwau’s creatures…he comes back,” I said, still finding it difficult to focus on what I was saying.

  “The wolf comes back? What does it do?” Uriah asked.

  “It attacks you.” I couldn’t imagine what else it might do. “After you beat back all the other creatures you turn and start running at the Matwau. That’s when it attacks. You didn’t seem to know it was there. It looked like it was ready to kill you, no matter what the Matwau told it to do.”

  “Huh, that’s never happened in any of my dreams,” Uriah said. He stared at nothing as he thought.

  “That’s never happened in your dreams?” I asked. “Maybe it’s nothing, then.”

  “No, it’s not nothing. My dreams are nothing like yours, Claire. I dream about facing the Matwau every night, but they’re training, not prophecies. I’m sure you’re right about the wolf. I’ll have to be prepared for it.”

  I was about to argue, pointing out how new I was at dreaming or touching souls or seeing into someone’s future, but a sharp pounding on the door scattered my thoughts. I looked over at Uriah. He shrugged and went to the door.

  “It’s Harvey,” he said after looking through the peep hole. He opened the door wide and let an ecstatic Harvey rush into the room.

  “Hey, Harvey. You should really be sleeping,” I said. If he felt half as tired as he looked we should have had to wake him with a bullhorn.

  “I just got off the phone with Mark…” Harvey stopped. “Whoa, man what happened to you?”

  “It’s a long story, just forget about it.”

  Harvey shrugged, probably guessing he didn’t want to know anyway. “My friend Mark just called. I told him about the trees going from aspen and such to piñon right before you reached the desert like you mentioned at dinner last night and he narrowed the list down to two places. Pinetop, Arizona and Taos, New Mexico. Now I know you told me not to bother with New Mexico, Uriah, but I told Mark to search everywhere just in case.”

  Taos. I had been to Taos a couple of times to go skiing with family. The hulking mountains in the middle of the New Mexican desert certainly fit, but there was something else. Something from the dream. I remembered the trees. The odd strip of bare ground slashing through the forest. The formation had seemed familiar at the time, but I couldn’t place it. It was the wrong season.

  Cover the scene with snow, and it was easy to recognize a ski slope.

  I had never been to Pinetop, but I did know that they had both a ski slope and casino. My father had been to the casino several times to meet with the owner before the casino opened in San Juan. I remembered him complaining about how small the ski slopes were in Pinetop. Judging by the distance I had to travel with the lone wolf, the ski slopes I had been on in the dream were not small.

  Another bit from the dream jumped out at me. The pueblo ruins. Both times we went skiing in Taos we drove down to Pueblo de Taos to visit the pueblo ruins. They were one of the best preserved ruins in the state. I wanted to kick myself for not seeing it sooner.

  If Harvey hadn’t burst in right then to give me the answer, I might have carried it around for who knows how long before figuring it out on my own.

  “It’s Taos,” I said, breaking into the guys’ conversation. They both turned and stared at me.

  “What?” they asked in unison.

  “It’s Taos. That’s where he’s leading us. That’s where you’ll fight The Matwau.”

  “Are you sure?” Harvey asked. “Mark had a few other possibilities, but he thought these two were the most likely. I could tell you the other ones just to be sure.”

  Shaking my head, I said, “No. It’s Taos. I’m sure.”

  Uriah rubbed his hand across his mouth and chin. “Are there prairie dogs in Pinetop?”

  “Prairie dogs?” Harvey asked. “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “Melody said the creatures working for the Matwau were having trouble getting rid of some prairie dogs at the meeting site. It confirms he’s driving out the animals so they can’t help me, but I already expected that,” Uriah said. “Can we find out whether there are prairie dogs in Pinetop?”

  “You talked to Melody again? What did she say? How’s she holding up? Did you tell her the stories?” Harvey’s words tumbled out, stepping one over the other in his hurry to get them all out.

  Uriah’s head popped up. “She’s fine, Harvey. I told her the stories, don’t worry.” Uriah turned away from Harvey, a deep frown creasing his face. I knew that frown.

  Startled awake as I was, I still would have felt any noticeable changes in the Twin Soul bond immediately. I took the time now to feel the bond again. No difference. It changed constantly depending on how both Melody and Uriah were feeling at the time, but there was no overall change in the bond. There was something, though. Something Uriah didn’t want to talk about.

  I carefully stowed that bit of information in the back of my mind for later. “Harvey, can you use your phone to check the internet for the prairie dogs, and for pueblo ruins around Pinetop?” I asked. “I saw some ruins in the distance when I got down to the desert in the dream.”

  Harvey stopped tapping his foot and snatched his phone out of his pocket. “Yeah, uh, just gimme a second,” he said.

  I walked over to where Uriah was pacing. Putting a hand on his arm to calm him, I stared into his eyes. He stopped his pacing, but avoided looking at me. I think he knew the questions I was holding back.

  “We’ll talk about it later,” he said, glancing at Harvey, “when we’re alone.”

  I nodded my agreement as I stroked his arm. Careful of the little cuts and bruises dotting his skin, I tried to calm whatever it was that had flustered him.

  “How do you know it’s Taos?” Uriah asked quietly.

  “In the dream last night, there were ski slopes, which both places have, but there were ruins in the distance when I reached the desert area. I saw them, but I didn’t realize I’d seen them before until Harvey mentioned Taos,” I said. “I’ve been to the ruins near Taos. I think it’s safe to assume Taos has prairie dogs too. Just like every other part of Northern New Mexico.”

  Letting out a deep breath, Uriah pulled me into a hug. “All Melody could really tell about the meeting place was that there were prairie dogs. I knew it wasn’t very much, but I hoped it would help. The ruins, though…it has to be Taos. It has to be.”

  Despite everything still left to face, Uriah sounded like we had just won a battle. Perhaps we had, a small one, but one that might change the odds in our favor. We needed that extra edge so badly.

  “Well, I can’t find anything about there being prairie dogs in Pinetop. That’s not really an exact ‘no’ about them living there, but it seems like a good sign that they’re not there in numbers large enough to be a problem, anyway,” Harvey said. “The closest ruins to Pinetop are in Springerville, about an hour away.”

  “An hour way? Is that close enough to fit with your dream?” Uriah asked me.

  “No, I think that would be too far. I ran for a while, but nowhere near sixty miles,” I said. “The Taos ruins are much closer, less than fifteen miles I think. That fits a lot better.”

  “Are you sure?” Uriah’s eyebrows were knitted together in anxiety. The wrong choice would be devastating.

  “I’m sure.” The moment I heard Harvey say Taos, I knew it was the right place.

  Harvey glanced between us, still looking unconvinced, but desperate to see Melody again. He looked ready to bolt out the door. “So, what do we do now?” he asked.

  “Split up,” Uriah said.

  “What? You promised, Uriah. You said we would do this together.”

  Tears burned my eyes. Did this have something to do with whatever he didn’t want to talk about? He couldn’t possibly have figured out why I needed to go with him so badly, could
he have? My breath caught in my throat as I struggled to speak. I would not leave him alone. I knew what he was facing. Nobody else did. Nobody else could help him like I could.

  “Claire, I know what I promised. I’m not asking you to abandon me. I’m asking you to go ahead of me with Harvey. I need you to get to Taos as fast as you can,” he said. He took my hands in his and waited until I met his pleading eyes. “Melody said there would be traps. I want you and Harvey to go ahead of me and see if you can find out what the Matwau has planned. But only if you can do it safely.”

  “Why can’t we go together?” I asked.

  Uriah reached up and stroked my face, right down my jaw line, a gesture that nearly melted all of my resistance. “You know why we can’t. The Matwau will know the second I start heading for Taos. I have to follow him. If I rush ahead, I risk putting Melody in danger.”

  I did know. I knew before I asked the question, but still I wanted to deny it. “Can’t I stay with you?” I asked. It was selfish, but I was afraid to leave.

  “Harvey will need your help,” Uriah said. “I can’t send him there alone. I need you to go.”

  I couldn’t fight him on this. We’d be back together before the fight, and then I would fight him with everything I had if I needed to. He was not going to face the Matwau alone.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go.” I wanted to cry. Instead, I took a deep breath and turned away.

  “I need you do something else, too.” Uriah paused. “Remember how I told you that Kaya said you would have to make a choice?”

  “Yes.” A queasy feeling in my stomach made me look toward the bathroom. Please don’t ask me, I thought.

  “I need you to make that decision. I need you to promise me you won’t try to help me once we reach the Matwau.”

  He asked me.

  “You promised,” I whispered, still not able to face Uriah.

  “I know. I promised we would do this together, and we have. You’ve helped me so much already. I just don’t think you can help me when it comes to actually facing the Matwau,” he said. I could hear Uriah pacing again. “What could you do, really? I’m the only one that can hurt him, the only one who knows how to kill him. I think Bhawana’s vision is right. I have to fight the Matwau alone.”