Jack didn’t respond. When she turned to look at him, his features had taken an unhappy cast. “Yeah, she’s not with us anymore,” he said.
Leah felt like she’d been punched in the chest. She’d really liked Ruby, both the dog and the woman, and had been looking forward to spending some time with her.
“What happened?” she asked.
“She got swallowed by an hechicera.”
“A what?”
“Hechicera. A witch that controls spirits.”
He turned quickly and carried Leah’s bag to the door before she could ask what he meant. She followed after him, the dogs still swirling around her legs. Jack set the suitcase down and pulled a piece of paper from his pocket.
“This is the number for my uncle Reuben’s store,” he said. “If you or Aggie need anything, just call and someone will fix you up.”
“Thanks. I—”
He didn’t give her a chance to go on. “Everybody really appreciates your helping out like this,” he said. “Aggie’s kind of an institution around here.”
Then he was walking briskly back to the truck.
Leah stood in front of the door, surrounded by all the dogs. Jack gave her a wave as he backed up the truck and she automatically waved back. Then he was driving away, leaving only dust in his wake. Leah looked down at the dogs.
“So,” she said to them. “Any one of you want to change into a human being so you can tell me what that was all about?”
But the dogs just acted like dogs. A couple touched her leg with their noses, then they all went trotting into the desert, back toward where they’d come from earlier. From the roof above her, a pair of crows took wing, trailing after them. Leah took a few steps away from the house and shaded her eyes to follow their passage through the scrub. Their destination was a large open circle of dirt with a fire pit in the center. Off to one side, where the land rose in a jumble of red rocks, she could see a pair of figures, one kneeling, the other sitting on the ground nearby. It took her a moment to recognize them. Morago and Steve Cole.
She couldn’t tell what they were doing, but clearly it had gathered them an audience of rez dogs and crows.
It wasn’t any of her business, and she was about to go into the house when Steve glanced in her direction and raised a hand. Perhaps it was in greeting, perhaps to beckon her over. She decided it was the latter, if only to satisfy her curiosity.
Although she had a clear sight line to where they were working, she realized it would be easier to take the meandering path that presented itself at the end of the yard, rather than a direct route through the desert scrub where she’d have to be careful of all those cacti with their barbed thorns. When she finally circled the large fire pit and joined them, all she could do was stare at the odd thing they’d been making.
She wasn’t sure if it was a sculpture, a fetish, a voodoo doll, or what. It was made of red clay, a rough human-like figure over a foot long, with black feathers stuck in the top of its head in the shape of a fan. The features were just as basic: the suggestion of a nose, two holes poked into the clay for eyes and a curved indented line for a mouth.
“Hey,” Steve said, looking up. “Glad to see you made it back okay.”
She nodded, but didn’t really want to think about the last time she’d seen him because that had been beyond weird. Except the funny thing was, until seeing him and Morago here with their odd clay figure, the past day’s events had already begun fading a little, just as Marisa had said they would. No. Not so much fading, as losing their intensity. They were beginning to feel like a story told, without the emotional resonance of having been a part of it.
“What brings you out here?” Steve asked.
It took her a moment to register that he’d spoken.
“I’m going to look after Aggie while she’s recuperating.”
“I would have thought you’d be on a fast track back to Newford.”
“No, I like the desert.”
He smiled. “Even after all you went through?”
He obviously had no trouble remembering. She could tell it wasn’t the same for him as it was for her. Her being here didn’t change a thing. But his presence brought her memories some uncomfortable clarity.
“That was challenging,” she said, “and not something I’d want to repeat in quite the same way, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting to get to know it all a little better. The landscape’s so primal and the beauty is so stark, both here and in that other place.”
“So you decided to stay on.”
She nodded. “I was going to stay at the motel, but Manny and Aggie made the suggestion of coming here, and I couldn’t refuse.”
“You’ll find that living here is something else. I fell in love with the area, just hearing about it from Morago.”
She smiled and looked at the shaman. “Are you that eloquent?”
“I have my moments,” Morago said, “though I can’t string words together like He Who Rides the Wind Like a Song.”
“Like who?”
Morago jerked a thumb in Steve’s direction.
“Don’t pay any attention to him.” Steve laughed. “He’s just yanking your chain. Seriously, he comes up with a new Indian name for me every time I see him.”
“Someday one of them’s going to stick,” Morago said.
They joked with the familiarity of old friends.
Leah laughed. “So what would my Indian name be?” she asked.
Morago pretended to think, humour twinkling in his eyes. But when he spoke, his features went still, his eyes serious.
“Probably something like, Dancing With Secrets,” he said.
Her eyebrows went up. “You think I’ve got secrets?”
Morago smiled. “Everybody does. But you’re dancing with yours.”
Before Leah could ask what he meant, Morago turned back to Steve. “It’s time we finished up here,” he said. “Refocus.”
“What exactly are you doing?” Leah asked, looking down at the strange figure again.
“Nothing you could call exact,” Morago replied at the same time as Steve said, “Making a body for a raven spirit.”
They looked at each other and laughed.
Leah looked from one man to the other. “So which is it?” she asked.
“Bit of both,” Morago replied. “Steve told the raven spirit he met in his head that he’d make her a body.”
There it was again. Inside Steve’s head. Where she’d been, too.
“And that’s what you’ve made for her to inhabit?” she asked, unable to hide a slight grimace. “Isn’t it kind of…small?” And ugly, she added to herself.
“It’s symbolic,” Morago explained. “Making the figure opens a passageway between spirit realms and the physical world, with Si’tala and Steve standing in for the two states of being, and the figure serving as a door. Once she is inside the figure, she’ll be able to look however she wants.”
“But she’ll still be so small, like a child’s toy.”
“When she first manifests in it, I suppose,” Morago said. “But after that—you’ve seen how crows can become men and men can become crows?”
Leah shook her head. But she had seen a dog become a woman.
Ruby.
She’d been so full of life, it was hard to imagine she was gone.
“I understand the concept,” she said, “but the physics defy me.”
“It’s the medicine of the ma’inawo. How a rabbit can become a woman, or a snake a man. These transformations should be impossible, except I don’t think they actually transform, so much as shift from one form, to nothing, to the new form.”
“So how does she get inside it?” Leah asked.
“I’m still trying to work that out myself,” Steve told her.
Morago adjusted another of the feathers coming out of the figure’s head.
“Getting in—that’s the easy and hard part,” the shaman said. “All the stories of what could possibly happen here are waiting for us, with each br
eath we take. Steve just has to reach into all those possibilities and pull out the one we need by calling the raven spirit to this sacred place.”
He gave Steve an encouraging smile. “And you’ve been doing exactly that since you first started making the clay figure.”
“Because of my intent as I was making it,” Steve said, as much to explain it to Leah as to reassure himself.
Morago nodded. “Mostly. But also because you’re doing it here, in one of our sacred places. The prayers we sing in a medicine circle are magnified. The older the circle, the stronger the prayers, and this is a very old circle.”
“Except I haven’t been praying,” Steve said.
Morago smiled. “Haven’t you? You’re asking the thunders to allow a spirit that has never had a body to be housed in one you’ve made for her. What else would you call that?”
Leah thought Steve would say the first thing that came to her mind: wishful thinking.
But Steve seemed to perceive something she didn’t. Or couldn’t. He placed his finger on the figure’s chest, brushing softly against the clay surface. His gaze went inward. He whispered something under his breath—she thought it was a name—and closed his eyes. The surrounding desert went still and the shadow of a cloud fell upon them.
Steve suddenly opened his eyes and looked up. Leah followed his gaze and realized the shadow wasn’t caused by a cloud. A woman with black hair and enormous wings floated above them, her wings filling the sky.
The stranger drifted down to where they were standing, and the sunlight returned as she folded her wings gracefully behind her back. The sunshine gleamed on Morago and Steve’s skin, but the woman seemed to absorb any light that fell on her. She looked even darker than she had in the sky.
Leah realized that this must be the spirit raven that Steve had been trying to call. Only why did she even need a body when she was already here, so tall and present in the moment?
“Consuela Mara,” Morago said to the woman. “We did not call you, and you are not welcome in these Painted Lands.”
The woman tossed her hair back from her face and glared at him. “And you, little shaman,” she said. “You have no right to intrude into my life, doing your best to steal away a part of who I am. So each of us is cast in an unfavourable light. But in the days to come, when the tale of our meeting here today is told by storytellers, no one will blame me for holding on to what is mine.”
Her gaze shifted to Steve and she held out a hand. “Give me the doll,” she demanded.
Steve shook his head. “Not happening.”
A mocking smile came over her features. “I’ve found it amusing when you’ve stood up to me in the past,” she told him, “but my patience has its limits. You have no idea how easily I could end your life. You might have stolen a few extra years by walking in the dreaming lands, but I have been here since the first days. You are like an idiot child to me, and your attempts to interfere in my affairs can only be as effectual as a child trying to stay my hand, when he needs punishing.”
Steve picked up the clay figure, cradling it carefully in his arms. He didn’t offer it to the raven woman. Bits of dried clay fell onto the ground below it, but mostly, it remained intact.
“You’re so full of shit,” he said.
Consuela seemed to grow taller still. Her dark eyes went black.
Morago touched his shoulder. “Steve,” he began.
Steve paid him no attention. His gaze remained fixed on Consuela as he stood up. “You don’t get to throw something out,” he said, “then demand it back when someone else takes an interest in it.”
“I didn’t throw her out. I put her aside for safekeeping.”
Steve shook his head. “We both know that isn’t true. Si’tala started out as a vessel for all the memories you didn’t think worth keeping. But the problem is, you’ve ignored her for so long that she’s become something else. And so have you. She doesn’t belong to you anymore. She never did—not once you put her aside.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Consuela told him, extending both arms in his direction. “Give me that or I’ll tear you in two first, and then take it.”
“I’ve talked to her,” Steve said. “I’ve listened to her. Have you done the same? Can you even hear her voice? It’s all a one-way street with you—admit it.”
“Go away,” Morago added. “Steve is under the protection of the Kikimi people as well as the ma’inawo that live in these canyons. If you lift a hand against him, you’ll awake a blood feud that you can never end.”
The woman laughed derisively. “The days of big medicine are long gone. I’m not afraid of you. Your tribe has dwindled, and you are only a shadow of what your ancestors once were. And why would the cousins care about some five-fingered being whose life span is so short that he’s here and then gone in the blink of an eye?”
“I don’t know,” Morago said. “Why don’t you ask them?”
So riveted had Leah been on the argument that she hadn’t realized that the four of them were no longer alone. She looked around to see dozens of beings standing in a circle around them, with more and more approaching from every direction. Some were human—they looked like Kikimi, though their skin was darker and they didn’t have the Kikimi’s broad features—and some were animals. Coyotes, birds, lizards, rabbits, every creature she could imagine. But the ones that held her gaze were the ones that weren’t quite one or the other. They were like Aggie’s paintings come to life—a bewildering array of magical creatures, part human, part animal. They all stood quietly, with their attention focused on the raven woman.
Staring wide-eyed at them, Leah took a nervous step closer to Steve and Morago.
Consuela regarded the crowd with a tired sigh. “I came to answer your call for help,” she said, “yet here we are and you view me as the enemy. How can you stand by him? He’s a five-fingered being who protects the five-fingered beings that hunt you and take your homes.”
“He’s been a good neighbour and friend to us all,” someone in the crowd said.
Leah couldn’t see who’d spoken.
Consuela shook her head. “A good friend doesn’t let Sammy Swift Grass kill you for sport, leaving your bodies to rot in these precious canyons of yours.”
A red-haired woman stepped out in front. Fox ears poked through her hair and two small antlers rose from her brow. Leah recognized her as the woman she’d seen with Steve when she’d first met him. “Steve has always been honest with us,” she said. “He never came sneaking into our lives pretending to be something he’s not.”
“He’s stealing away a part of me! How would you like to have your soul ripped in two and then half taken away?”
“You mean the half you threw away?” Steve said. “And I’m not taking her from you. I’m giving her the body that she asked for. If you don’t like it, you can take it up with her. But I gave her my word that I would do this.”
Consuela gave him a sneer. “Who values the word of a five-fingered being?”
“I do,” Steve told her. “Si’tala gets her body. End of story.”
“I’ll have your heart for this,” Consuela told him. “I’ll cut out your tongue, and your eyes, and I’ll wear your entrails as a bloody necklace.”
Leah couldn’t suppress a shudder, looking at all the tiny bones that adorned her hair and dress.
“You have to be alive to do that,” a woman’s voice said.
She stepped forward from the crowd and pointed a six-gun at Consuela, the old-fashioned kind of handgun that Leah had only ever seen in cowboy movies. The stranger seemed human, and old, but her hand was steady.
“I have no quarrel with you,” Consuela told her.
“Too bad. I’ve got one with you.”
Consuela’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t dare. Shoot me and you’ll start a blood feud with all the corbae clans.”
The old woman cocked her six-gun with her thumb.
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t think so.”<
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70
Thomas
Thomas woke late, jolted out of a dream so abruptly that it took him a moment to figure out that he was actually still in his own bed rather than the desert landscape in his dream. He’d been back at Aunt Lucy’s house in the otherworld—or maybe that should be the otherwhen. Or both. In the dream, it didn’t matter. He was just there, sitting at the old wooden table under the spreading boughs of the mesquite tree in her yard. Aunt Lucy was at the adobe oven, bowl in hand, doling out a big helping of stew. The smell of the white tepary beans, peppers and short-ribbed beef, combined with chipotle and who knew what other mysterious spices, drifted in Thomas’s direction. A platter of fresh cornbread sat on a plate on the table. Beside it was a fat clay jug, condensation beading on its sides, a wet ring on the table beneath it. Beyond the shade of the tree, the sun was scorching. Heat waves shimmered among the cacti out in the desert scrub.
“Eat,” Aunt Lucy said as she set a bowl of stew in front of him. “You’re a young man with not nearly enough meat on your bones.”
“This is a dream. What difference could my eating here possibly make?”
“A dream,” she repeated, then gave a slow nod. “Yes, of course. Seeing it that way makes it easier for you.”
“Are you saying I’m actually here?”
“Eat.”
Thomas automatically obeyed her. When she used that tone, the same as his mother’s or Auntie’s, he knew there was no point in arguing.
The stew was perfect, better than anything his mother could make, though he’d never tell her that. The cornbread was moist but not greasy, and melted in his mouth.
Aunt Lucy sat across from him at the table. “I know you haven’t decided what you want to do yet,” she said, “and I don’t want you to feel that I’m trying to manipulate you, as Consuela did, but I was wondering if you’d do me a favour.”
She didn’t play the old woman card, the way Auntie sometimes did. It wouldn’t work anyway, looking as youthful as she did. Instead, she was conspiratorially sweet.
Thomas swallowed another mouthful of stew. For something eaten in a dream, it was pleasantly filling.
The Wind in His Heart Page 42
