Loud cackles burst out of me as we entered the kitchen. I nearly ran into the doorframe from laughing so hard. “Morph? Mom, I’m not a Power Ranger!”
“I can’t help it. Just popped into my head. I mean, when you were little, you used to run around the house and yell mighty morphin’ power rangers, and they changed forms too, right?”
“Oh, yeah, she did! And didn’t she have a pink costume or somethin’?” Meemaw chimed in.
My cheeks were on fire. “Okay, really? Can we forget the fact I ever watched that show and had some strange fascination with the characters? Please? By the way, the correct term is skin-walk.”
Meemaw, busy gathering fruits and veggies from the fridge and arranging them on a plate at the table, interjected. “Skin-walk. I like the sound of that. Much better than shape-shiftin’ or morphin’. I mean, you are walkin’ in the skin of another. Sort of.”
Mom rolled her eyes and began fixing sandwiches. She handed Dad the bacon and he turned on the stove and began to fry it. “I still can’t believe Papa Joe was over three hundred years old! And we are all part Choctaw. Ain’t none of us look it.”
“Aww, come on now, Mom. All three of us may have fair complexions, but in the summer, our skin gets dark, and we don’t burn. And in the winter, all of our hair darkens to a dirty blonde. We all have high cheekbones and thick hair. Guess Nana’s genes were stronger in the outward features department than Papa Joe’s.”
“Another good thing about all of this is we can stop thinkin’ Nana’s cup was half-empty. Huh, isn’t that ironic? She knew all along, and we were the blind ones.” Meemaw’s slender fingers brushed a straggler tear as it slid down her face at her statement. I sensed the guilt she felt, we all felt, from all the years we assumed Nana was nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake.
To break the tension, I snatched a few pieces of raw bacon away from Dad and gave him a wicked smile as I shoved them into my mouth. “Yum.”
“Sheryl! Yuck!”
“At least we’re laughin’ instead of freakin’ out.”
“Time of doubts and disbelief are over, my dear. We need to concentrate on what we know and work toward figurin’ out what we don’t. And in a hurry before another from our community dies.”
“Your mom’s right, Sheryl. So…any ideas who this Hat’ta..ha ta…oh, what’s his name again?”
I laughed at Dad’s butchering of the name. “Hattak’katos.”
“Yeah, okay. So do you?”
I took in a heavy breath and plopped down on the kitchen chair closest to my father. “Not really. I mean, I sensed his presence in the woods the other day and, of course, fought with him in my other form, but he was in his as well. I caught the same stench and followed it to the Cohestra plant a few days ago. I didn’t know it then, but it was the same, foul smellin’ odor. All I knew at the time was the scent revved me up into a wicked frenzy.”
“What do you mean?” Meemaw queried.
“I…I don’t know how to explain it, Meemaw. Really. Not with words. It was like I tasted, felt, and smelled anger. It took complete and total control of me and my body. It was just one giant, overpowerin’ urge to follow the smell and kill him when I found him. It pushed everythin’ else out of the way.”
Meemaw lowered herself into the chair next to me, her warm hand covering my own. “Sheryl, do you have all the same abilities as Papa Joe? I mean, can you control other’s minds like he did to Ms. Johnson and Sheriff Gilmore?”
I stuttered and averted my eyes from hers. “No clue. I’ve…never tried.” I hung my head in shame at my lack of knowledge of all my new gifts. After I deposited Dane’s unconscious body on his back porch three days ago, I watched from the woods until his mother found him and drove him to the hospital. I didn’t remember much after that until I woke up in my bed. It was almost twenty-four hours later. I had been covered in dirt from head to toe and felt like a grain silo had fallen over on me. Every muscle ached, and my head felt like I’d been on a five day drunk. Then, dealing with Papa Joe’s death and all the fallout from Barb and Tami’s left me little time to deal with much else.
“What about changin’ into a different creature? Like how Papa Joe turned into Tinker? Can you do that?” Meemaw pressed.
Frustrated for some strange reason by Meemaw’s questions, I jerked my arm away and stood up. I sighed heavily and looked out the window in the direction of Dane’s house. A stab of pain ripped through me when I thought about him. God, I missed him. The pull to see him unnerved me. “I don’t know that either. It’s only been a few days, and the first night is a blur. I can’t really remember much—just glimpses of feelin’s, sensations. Splashes of images. Ones I don’t want to ever recall.” I turned around and faced my family. All three of their worried faces stared at me as they waited on pins and needles for my next words. For a brief second, I envisioned myself standing naked at the front of class, giving a speech on an unfamiliar subject—like foreign policy or Greek literature—to a room full of dumbfounded third graders. “Why do you ask, Meemaw? What are you thinkin’?”
A glint of mischief backlit her blue eyes. Her smile was warm, genuine, and made me feel like a complete and utter ass for my previous thoughts. “Your enemy is expectin’ you to hunt him, or at least search for him, as a big cat, right?”
“I suppose…” I offered.
“Then don’t give him what he wants, dear. Do your sleuthin’ under the cover of somethin’ much smaller. Stealthier. It will be harder to pick up on your scent if the trail isn’t as large, don’t you think?”
I smiled at my Meemaw’s devious mind and moved across the floor to hug her neck. “I love the way your mind works, Meemaw.”
“Try it, honey. Your mind trick. Let me be the guinea pig, so to speak.”
My jaw dropped as I stared at my Dad. He was serious!
“Don’t look at me like I’m crazy. It’s just, well, if you have the ability, shouldn’t you test it out on the most stubborn person you know first? I mean, if you can make me believe somethin’ or change my mind about somethin’, then…”
“Then there will be no mistaken it’s a gift from above, all right. Lord knows I’ve been prayin’ for years for him to…”
Dad laughed. “Stop right there, Jolene. Let’s keep this civil, shall we?” Mom held her hands up in mock surrender. “Start off with somethin’ small, honey.”
I moved away from Meemaw and the rest of them to the doorway. I wouldn’t have admitted it out loud, but I worried what would happen when I tried using my abilities. What if, once I tapped into the particular corner of my mind that controlled my body’s new skills, I was unable to stop? What if I went from, Hey, I can control your thoughts! to Oops, I just turned into a huge beast and destroyed the house?
“Come on, baby. It’s okay. Concentrate.” Meemaw’s gentle voice pulled me out of my worried thoughts. I squared my shoulders and focused my eyes on Dad’s. I closed my ears to the sounds of the sizzling bacon, the hypnotic tick tock, tick tock of the grandfather clock in the hallway. I ignored the collective breath my family was holding and their rapid heartbeats I felt thrum through me. I pushed all other thoughts aside and hung on to just one mundane, trivial item and zeroed in on it. In my mind, I repeated it over and over.
Tell Mom how beautiful she looks in her new pink shirt. Tell Mom how beautiful she looks in her new pink shirt. Tell Mom how beautiful she looks in her new pink shirt.
After the third repetition, an electrical surge shot through my mind and I nearly gasped when it left my body. It shimmered and moved like languid waves of heat above the blacktop in the summer. It crossed the expanse of the kitchen and disappeared when it reached Dad’s chest. For a second, I stood frozen, fearing what it would do once it barreled its way inside his body. I wanted to break my gaze with Dad and see if Mom or Meemaw saw the clear burst of energy as well, but I didn’t.
Dad’s dark blue eyes, surrounded by thick black lashes and full of playful mischief, glazed over. He blinked once, gave an odd
nod of his head, and then he looked over at my mom. He spoke in a halting, monotone voice, “Jolene, you look so beautiful in your new pink shirt.”
Mom eyed him with curiosity and a coy wink at first as her hands pressed down the wrinkled edges of her vibrant blue T-shirt. “Very funny, Jared.”
Dad looked confused. “Givin’ my wife a compliment on her new shirt is funny?”
“No, it’s just…hmm. You meant my blue shirt, which, by the way, isn’t new.”
Dad’s eyebrows furrowed in irritation. “Jolene, we ain’t got time for no games. Sheryl needs to work on her…wait, did you already?”
Meemaw and I both grinned from ear to ear, answering Dad’s question. Meemaw picked up her blue coffee mug from the table and held it up. “Jared, what color is this?”
“Blue.”
“And what color is Mom’s shirt?” I asked, pointing at her.
“Pink.”
“Oh, my…it worked!” I yelped, jumping around the kitchen like my feet were stepping on needles. “I did it!”
“Well, I’ll be. If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear this was a joke. ’Cause your Mom’s shirt is pink!”
I flung my arms around Dad’s neck and squeezed tight. In his shoulder, I muffled, “Did it hurt?”
“Did what hurt?”
I pulled back and gave him a good once-over. “When it, the energy wave, the force, hit you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about, darlin’.”
“Mom? Meemaw? Did you see it? When it left me?”
Both of them shook their heads no.
Dad clapped his hands together and smiled. “Okay, ladies. Enough standin’ around waitin’. Let’s see what else our little gal here can do.”
“I think we should wait until its dark before she tries the other, Jared. Don’t want no pryin’ eyes peekin’ through the windows now, do we? I still can’t grasp it all, and tryin’ to explain it to someone else would be impossible.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I tried to rest. It was a wasted plan. Nervous energy hummed through my mind and body like a car engine pushed to the red line. My fingers hovered over the thick scar on my right flank. I cringed at the knobby indentations from the closed wound. Thinking about how fast the skin healed made me feel weird, like I wasn’t a member of the human race any longer. A quiet chuckle left my lips, for I wasn’t completely human anymore. I was a real-life Catwoman, a freak of nature with numerous abilities, including healing at an accelerated rate. My thumb traced the numb spot, and the sensation brought back the emotions of the night in the woods. It made my head swim in the dark visions I witnessed down by Caney Creek. I jerked my hand away and forced it to remain still in my lap.
My gaze settled at my desk, where my silent computer sat. Earlier, I shut the system down before the urge to throw it out the window overtook me and I succumbed to the pressure. The second I logged on, the screen overloaded me with notifications. Emails, instant messages, pokes, tweets, you name it—the vibrant screen displayed them all. I thought things would quiet down when I shut the system down but was sorely mistaken. Junction City’s underground teen chat app, known as ChatnSnap, created by Albert Crittendon, our local geek guru, was installed on the cell phone of everyone under the age of twenty-five in Locasia County, including me. My phone had been inundated with chat notifications from friends and squad mates, all jockeying for my attention. Most wanted to discuss the deaths of Barb and Tami, but some asked me how Dane was doing. The messages were full of pathetic, shallow questions about how the squad would change now that two slots were open. Things like when we should schedule new tryouts so we could get back on track…the newbies up to speed on the moves. Savannah Richardson even asked our thoughts on how we should announce the tryouts without upsetting the families of Barb and Tami. Should a memorial service for our teammates be held at the school, and if so, when should it be scheduled? Savannah insisted we just had to do something, otherwise we wouldn’t be ready for football season. The ones that really made my blood boil were the thinly veiled questions about how Dane had been hurt. Savannah casually typed, “Hadn’t he gone with Barb to go search for Tami? How come Barb was shredded to pieces, but Dane wasn’t?”
Ugh. It was enough to make me want to puke.
I ignored them all. How could I not? I mean, really. Yes, this was the digital age, and my age group lived and died by their electronic addiction, but text messages about a very sensitive subject matter seemed so wrong, so impersonal. Characters on a screen didn’t even come close to truly reflect the feelings inside one’s heart. Then again, the hearts of the senders seemed cold as ice, concerned only with trivial, surface-level crap. It seemed to me they were sent to entice more mellow-dramatic, bullshit responses from the recipients. Not one person even hinted at getting together, in person, to discuss the matter or to collectively grieve for our dead friends. No one mentioned a word about all of this when we attended the funerals. Nor was there any discussion about the well-known fact that had already burned its way through the town courtesy of the Gossip Queens: a very large animal was responsible for Tami and Barb’s deaths, not Dane—or any other human for that matter. Not one. Any other time, I wouldn’t have blinked an eye because I had been just as shallow, uncaring about the real truths, the real issues, but now, my perceptions on things had shifted.
These are the people I’m protecting? Why?
It had been twenty minutes since I’d called to check on Dane. Ms. Emma said he was taking a shower, and although she told me she’d have him call me back, I knew she wouldn’t. The distant, annoyed tone in her voice spoke volumes. She wouldn’t pass along the fact I’d called him. Again. It was the tenth time in two days. Ms. Emma was in full parental protective mode, and who could blame her? Two of his friends died, and he showed up, unconscious and bleeding in their backyard on the same night. Plus, if Dane had been awake and had seen the enormous cat attack him and Barb, and told his mother what he’d witnessed, she probably assumed he was either lying or was suffering from paranoid delusions.
Whether Ms. Emma informed him of my calls or not, I knew my sweet Dane hadn’t tried to call me because he probably thought I needed some space to deal with everything. He knew how close I was to Papa Joe and Barb. The entire town did. On the outside, I may have seemed like an effervescent, social diva, but Dane understood me. He’d seen me retreat inside the walls of my own mind when I was upset. But that was the old me. The new me craved his touch, needed to see his face and hold him just one more time. Five minutes to explain to him why the kiss would be our last and the intense, heated lovemaking on his living room floor a few days ago was the final hurrah. I needed a few minutes alone to tell him I wished him well and loved him so much, but he needed to find someone else to share his life with.
I sighed and stared up at the picture of Dane on my nightstand and felt my heart break. I knew I couldn’t do that either. He wouldn’t just let me walk away without a real, plausible explanation. He’d want to know why, and telling him the truth was out of the question. So I’d have to break it off between the two of us by lying to him. Force myself to stand and look into those beautiful eyes and say the words “I don’t love you anymore, Dane. It’s over.” Hurt him by ripping his heart out, stomping it into the ground, and then spitting on top of it. I would console my own wounded heart with the fact it was better for him to experience the metaphorical version rather than actually having it happen to him. He’d come close to dying because of his association with me, and I wouldn’t let it happen again. Being a part of my life made him a target now, just like everyone else I loved.
Nahu’ala’s words of warning about Dane made sense to me now. Dane posed a great threat to me because I loved him so much, and my feelings toward him competed with my new duties. God, how in the world did Papa Joe stand being around Nana for all those years without succumbing to the yearnings, the gut-wrenching, overwhelming desire to be with her? How did he have the intestinal fortitude to watch her from af
ar as she lived her life alone, only spending time with her on Sundays? No wonder Nana was a bit off in the mental department. She had to do the same thing. Not only did she experience great sorrow and loss of a love that could never be, but then she died and came back, and knew the man she loved was some otherworldly being who could never return her love. Not because he didn’t want to but because of his duty to protect and guard the Tree. How intense and painful the struggle to watch Nana marry another must have been for Papa Joe! Then again, they did end up together at least once during her marriage, which ended up producing Meemaw. Guess both of them, in a moment of weakness, succumbed to their yearnings.
I felt a lump of hot, salty tears form in my throat and pushed them back down. No way would I do that to him. I was barely able to stand what my new reality had done to my family. Adding Dane to the mix would surely push me over the edge into insanity. No, it would be better for him to believe our little high school romance was just that, a high school romance, and let it be snuffed out so he could move on. After all, wasn’t that the usual way for teenage sweethearts to end? Weren’t we supposed to grow up and apart, spread our wings and fly off to new territories? My parents were among the limited few who broke the tradition, got married, had a family, and stayed happily married. The odds were favored in the other direction. I sighed. Yes, Dane needed to find a new life, a new woman to love him and one he could love back. A woman who could offer her love to him without any worries or fears of having to take her love for him away.
God, how I wanted the woman to be me.
Though all these thoughts were difficult to wrestle with, I had to make the hard choice. I had a new destiny, a new duty to uphold. I felt a twinge of shame at my personal feelings when compared to the unbelievable suffering others before me had experienced. People had been murdered, families decimated, everything they loved destroyed because of Hattak’katos and his insatiable quest for the location. For water that didn’t grant immortality, but merely extended human life by many years. An ancient sibling rivalry had resulted in the near annihilation of an entire race. For nothing but a few extended years on the planet and the money holding that little treasure would put in the pocket of whomever held the rights to the water.
Growl Page 19
