The Wind in His Heart

by Charles de Lint

  The first thing Jerry did when he went into the main area and sat at his own desk was unlock the bottom drawer and replace the missing clip in his revolver. Then, bracing himself for the flack that was coming his way, he dialed the police chief’s number.

  35

  Sadie

  Sadie glared at the old lady. Everything had spun way out of control and Aggie’s calm gaze just pissed her off more. Aggie was like everybody else, thinking she knew it all. The difference was, she wrapped her superiority up in this phony Indian spiritual crap. But Sadie didn’t buy it. Just because the sicko monsters in her paintings were real didn’t mean you’d be a better person just because you knew the story of your pizza before you ate it.

  “Why are you doing this?” Aggie asked.

  The truth was, Sadie had no idea. To get back at Calico, she supposed. When she saw the cop she’d just said the most hurtful thing that came to mind. From there, it went spiraling downward.

  But it wasn’t her fault. If people hadn’t interfered, none of this would be happening. Leah Hardin was supposed to email her back and offer a bunch of money for the information Sadie had. They’d figure out a way to pay Sadie off, and she’d walk away rich—end of story.

  But no. Instead they’d all screwed it up on her. Leah, by coming here. Aggie, for talking to that idiot Leah. Calico, for being so damned mean and pushy. Not to mention her stupid old man, for making her life a constant miserable hell in the first place.

  It was so infuriating. She’d been this close to getting away from everything horrible in her life. This close to starting over again somewhere else, where there’d be no one to boss her around or give her their stupid advice.

  “We can still fix this,” Aggie said.

  It was like she’d read Sadie’s mind and still thought anybody cared about her freaking stories and Indian wisdom.

  News flash, old lady: I’m not an Indian. And I’m not one of your freak show animal people either. Your crap’s not going to work for me.

  Sadie wasn’t stupid enough to buy into the promises either Aggie or Jackson Cole had made to her. Nothing was easy and nothing was free. With her old man, she knew the price she had to pay to survive, and she’d decided she couldn’t pay it anymore. With these people, who knew what they’d want to carve out of her soul?

  She stood up. “Yeah,” she said, “I’m not going to be doing this anymore.”

  Aggie rose to her feet as well. The blond woman turned from the map she was studying to look at them.

  “You need to back off,” Sadie told the old woman.

  “Don’t do this,” Aggie said. “The people here just want to help you.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  She was close enough to walk to the city now, and once she got there, she knew she could disappear. She’d figure out some new angle, some way to get out from under everybody’s thumb and be her own person.

  She started to push by Aggie but the old woman wouldn’t move out of the way. Instead, she reached out and grabbed Sadie’s biceps, trying to stop her from leaving.

  Sadie didn’t have a choice. The old woman wasn’t giving her a choice.

  So she reached into her front pocket, yanked out her utility knife, and with a practiced flick of her thumb the blade was out. She slashed hard at Aggie’s stomach.

  The sharp blade cut deep, and for a long moment the two of them stared at each other. Sadie watched the calm brown eyes flare with shock and pain. Aggie’s grip tightened on Sadie’s arms, then she let go to grab at her belly. Flowers of bright red blood blossomed on Aggie’s top. When she pushed her hands against herself, it welled up between her fingers.

  “Oh my god,” Sadie heard the blond woman say as Aggie dropped to her knees, still clutching at her stomach.

  Then Sadie was pushing past Aggie, out of the room racing for the front door. She saw Jerry and the cop at the desk stand up, but before they could come after her the younger woman started shouting.

  “I need some help in here! Call for an ambulance!”

  The cops hesitated, then the one at the front desk picked up his phone as Jerry dropped his. He tried to get around his desk to make a grab for Sadie, but he was too slow. She pushed a rolling chair in his way and he fell over it, crashing to the ground and leaving Sadie free to make her escape.

  The blond woman was still yelling when Sadie pushed through the door, out into the parking lot.

  She was closer to the city than she’d been at Aggie’s house, but it would still be too long a hike, especially with the cops after her. Scrambling over to the first pickup with the Kikimi Tribal Police logo on the door, she peered in through the window. Score. The keys were inside. A moment later, she was too.

  The truck started up with a cough of exhaust before the engine smoothed out. Sadie put it into drive and spun out of the parking lot, gravel and dust spitting out from behind the wheels. She gave a one-finger salute out the window as she drove away.

  36

  Thomas

  When Thomas joined Consuela, he saw a car parked at the mouth of the canyon that hadn’t been there earlier. And not just any car. It was an early Ford sedan, glossy black in the morning light, customized with a long sloped back like the low riders the Mexican kids drove in the city, except its chassis rode high on big fat wheels.

  “Oh, that Gordo,” Consuela said, chuckling under her breath. “He does like his jokes.”

  Gordo was the name of her monstrous dog, Thomas remembered, then realized he hadn’t seen the animal since they’d started talking to the raven woman. Maybe the creature could only be out at night and vanished with the coming of dawn. Maybe it had turned invisible. It was hard to know what to expect anymore.

  “Do you want to drive?” Consuela asked as she started walking toward the car.

  “What happened to your Caddy?”

  Consuela shrugged. “I have many ways to travel. Today it seems I’m being chauffeured in some kind of hot rod—unless you’d rather I drove?”

  Are you kidding? Thomas thought. He’d love to get behind the wheel of that car. He started to wish Santana were here until he remembered whose company he was in.

  “No, I’m good,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Where are we going? To the casino?”

  “Eventually. I thought we’d take a little detour first.”

  Thomas wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that, but he opened the driver’s door anyway. Before he got in he checked the backseat to make sure there was no vicious canine waiting to rip his throat out, then he turned for a last look in Morago’s direction. Surely, the shaman would realize this was a mistake and call him back. But the tall man only nodded to him and smiled.

  Why, Thomas wondered, was he the only one to think any of this was weird?

  Consuela slipped into the passenger seat, looking younger than she had when she’d been standing outside the car. By the time she shut her door she was a twin for the woman who’d come by the trading post this morning, except she was wearing slim camouflage capris with a scoop-neck white T-shirt tucked into the waist. Thomas caught his gaze going to the scoop of the T-shirt and quickly looked away, but not before he saw her raven aura smirk. A flush crept up from under his collar.

  He closed his own door and the car started up by itself, making him jump.

  Don’t freak out, he told himself. Morago believed he could do this, so it was time he thought the same.

  He cleared his throat. “So…do you even need me behind the wheel?” he asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Consuela said. “Gordo’s just playing a joke on you.”

  Okay. So she had a dog that could turn invisible, as well as a raven aura sitting on her shoulder. He checked the rearview, but the backseat was still empty. The absence of anything to see didn’t fill him with confidence, but he did his best to hide his misgivings.

  “Where to?”

  “Take a right out of the canyon.”

  Thomas nodded. He knew the road ended in another couple
of miles at the base of a mesa that held the ruins of an old village of the pueblo people, so he supposed that was where they were going. He wondered if they were going to hike all the way up to the ruins. He’d find out soon enough. But in the meantime, he had other questions.

  “Why did you leave that feather with me?” he asked.

  “It was left to wake you up.”

  “I wasn’t asleep.”

  “Are you sure? What about your connection to the tribe?”

  “I have that without needing to be woken up.”

  “Then why are you so set on leaving?”

  Thomas sighed. Were they gossiping about him in the otherworld too?

  “How would you even know, and why would you care?” he asked.

  “I’m a friend of your Aunt Lucy.”

  “You mean my Aunt Leila. Aunt Lucy’s passed.”

  “No, I mean Lucy.”

  Thomas took his gaze from the road for a moment to give her a confused look.

  “Has no one ever explained to you,” Consuela said, “that there is no such thing as linear time? What people call the past, the present, the future—it’s all happening at the same time.”

  “Of course it is,” Thomas said and somehow managed to not roll his eyes.

  “I’ll grant you most people tend to live in one set of moments and ignore the rest. But that doesn’t make the fact of it any less true.”

  “I don’t believe in fate,” Thomas told her. “I don’t believe that our lives are already all laid out for us.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “But—”

  “Weren’t you listening? It’s all happening at the same time.”

  “Then why does it seem linear?”

  “Because,” she said, “that’s how we choose to view it.”

  “This is crazy.”

  “If you think this is crazy, wait till you see what comes next.”

  He glanced over to find her smiling, then returned his attention to his driving because they were running out of road. He moved his foot from the gas pedal to the brake.

  “No, don’t slow down,” Consuela said.

  The only way to the top of the mesa was a narrow switchback path that led up through the cacti and scrub, barely wide enough for an ATV. The road ended in a small turnaround. If they didn’t slow down, they were going to smash right into a tall wall of red rocks.

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” Thomas told her.

  Her raven aura began to cackle madly.

  He slammed on the brakes but instead the car sped up. He tried hauling on the wheel but it had a mind of its own and kept them straight on a collision course with the rock face.

  His knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “I’m not some frigging immortal ma’inawo!” Thomas yelled. “I can’t survive this.”

  “Use your shaman’s eyes,” Consuela told him over the cacophony of the ghost raven’s calls and his own shouting.

  “I don’t have any—”

  But then it was too late. Thomas shut his eyes and crossed his forearms in front of his face, bracing for the impact while he cursed the woman, her crazy aura, and her haunted car.

  The impact never came.

  When Thomas dared to open his eyes it was to find they were cruising down a long dirt road that went off into the desert as far as he could see. He put his hands back on the steering wheel and tried the brakes again, and this time the car slowed, finally coming to a stop. He put it in neutral, then laid his head against the steering wheel. His heart drummed in his chest and he was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. When he was finally able to sit up again, his hands shook so badly he had to keep a hold on the steering wheel.

  He glared at Consuela. “What the hell was that all about?”

  “You have the sight,” she said. “I thought you would see the road.”

  She wore an apologetic look, but once again her raven aura had its head tilted back in laughter.

  Thomas bristled. “It’s not funny. I thought we were roadkill.”

  She smiled. “But we’re not.”

  “Yeah, no thanks to you.”

  “You mean, thanks to us, you travelled between the worlds unscathed.”

  Us? he thought. He checked the rearview but the backseat remained empty. So she either had somebody in the trunk or a ghost. Or maybe she was referring to her raven aura.

  At least his pulse was finally starting to slow down. The sweat had evaporated in the desert heat. His hands didn’t feel so shaky anymore. He took a steadying breath.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Thanks to you.”

  Both she and the raven aura still wore amused smiles.

  “I still don’t know what you find so funny in all of this,” he said.

  “Funny?” She shook her head and her expression changed. “This is serious business. We go to determine the guilt or innocence of a man of your tribe. Reuben says he has faith in you, but I’m not so sure you speak with the will of the People when you’re so disconnected from them.”

  “So you came and gave me a feather to wake me up because you saw this would be a problem in the future.”

  She started to speak, but Thomas cut her off, adding, “Why don’t you just look ahead and see how it all turns out?”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “No? Then how does it work?”

  “First, we go see your Aunt Lucy.”

  Thomas looked away from her and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re making my head hurt.”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “But why can’t you just look ahead to see what happens?”

  “Because I can’t remember how to do that anymore,” she said.

  Thomas let out an exasperated sigh. “Is this some kind of ma’inawo Alzheimer’s?” he said.

  “No, it’s—do you know anything about Norse mythology?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Not really, unless you count the Thor comics and movies.”

  “One of their chief thunders was named Wodan, and he had two ravens: one named Memory and one named Thought.”

  That twigged a recollection in Thomas. “That actually sounds familiar,” he said. “Except they called him Odin in the comics I read, and he was this big hairy dude with only one eye. But he did have these two ravens, one on each shoulder.”

  “Except they aren’t two separate ravens,” she said. “Or at least they weren’t always. At one time, they were a single bird, but something—the passage of time, some accident of fate—split them, and their names each represent their own part of the original bird. One holds all of its memories, the other lives day to day with only that day’s thoughts.”

  “How are storybook ravens relevant to you losing your…” But then he thought he understood, hard though it was to believe. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re one of Wodan’s ravens?”

  “No. But this is something that can happen to old ma’inawo corbae—the crow and raven clans. We learn to not hold on to everything we’ve experienced. We compartmentalize our experiences and memories so that we’re not trying to deal with our entire history all at once. But sometimes we lose track of those hidden parts of ourselves, and they wander off to have lives of their own.”

  Thomas’s gaze went to her raven aura, now preening its feathers, giving him the odd smug glance.

  “Yes,” she said. “Si’tala is my memory. She stays with me, but we can’t communicate with one another.”

  “I guess that sucks.”

  She shrugged. “It has its benefits. For a ma’inawo as old as I am, it makes the weight of all the years less of a burden since I can’t remember them.”

  “How many years are we talking about?”

  She gazed out the window. “That I do remember. I was born in the long ago, soon after the world was born. I wasn’t there to see Raven stir his pot—like his crow girls, or Cody and Old Man Puma were—but not long after that I remember stepping from the shadow realms into the world he had made for us all
.”

  She looked back at him, smiling at his doubtful expression. “You don’t believe that Raven created the world?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose. It’s what I was taught. But I’ve always wondered about the other religions. The Christian god is supposed to have created the world in seven days.”

  “Their world—not ours.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Here in the dreamlands, all times and all possibilities exist at once, and some of them are reflected in the first world. Now, can we keep driving?”

  “To meet my dead aunt.”

  She rolled her eyes and Thomas held up his right palm. “Okay, okay,” he said. “One last question.”

  “And that is?”

  “If you can’t access your memories of the past and future, how did you know to leave the feather for me yesterday morning?”

  “I didn’t leave it.”

  “But you said I needed to wake up.”

  She nodded. “But I wasn’t the one who took the initiative to do so. I usually try to stay out of people’s personal business.

  “Then who…?”

  His gaze went again to Si’tala, the raven aura. The ghostly bird seemed far too pleased with herself.

  “Never mind,” he said.

  He put the Ford in gear and pulled out onto the road. With the vehicle’s fat tires, the ride was pretty smooth, all things considered. There was no traffic, obviously, but habit had him checking the rearview and he was surprised to see a big eighteen-wheeler in the distance.

  “Looks like we’ve got company,” he said.

  Consuela turned to look out the back window.

  “That’s not right,” she said.

  He glanced her way. “What isn’t?”

  “They’re not supposed to be around here today.”

  She faced the front again and leaned forward, peering at the road that lay before them. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the raven aura, Si’tala, her expression now deadly serious, keeping her full attention on the road behind them.