The soldier stood over it with his ax posed to strike again. He didn’t see the shadow rising from French Stick’s carcass, a large, hideous form in the dappled morning light. The pig-faced demon, freed from the human body it had occupied.
The demon lurched free of its latest form and balanced his massive, skull-gray body on short, knotty legs. His small, round eyes gleamed crimson. He bared long tusks and roared at me. The guttural sound filled the barn.
“You cannot harm me in this realm, Soul Catcher. You are no more than a wisp of putrid air.”
I lifted a hand in warning. “But neither can you harm me, Demon.” My boons and angles gathered around me, along with the newly dead—my father, Red Bird, Turtle, Cera. The being from the Talking Rock rose in a white glow around us all, facing Pig Face. “And you are out-numbered.”
The red-coated soldier, a living being, did not hear or see any of us. The soldier dropped his ax and staggered to my body. He stood looking down at it with his hands clenched; he shivered violently and uttered a sob. His devotion was a mystery to me. I wanted to soothe him, but also to shoo him away.
Finding Ian, that is my only interest.
Pig Face snarled at the spirits massing against him, but he began backing away. “Remember what I said, Soul Catcher. I will find you in every new life. I will find him too—” the demon cast a clawed hand toward Ian’s body—“and I will make you both suffer, and I will make you both die. And in the end, my soul will live on, and yours will give up. It is you who will be banished from this world forever. Not me.”
He kept laughing as he faded away.
I stood alone in the barn with the mysterious, tormented redcoat. He dropped to his knees beside my body. Sobs wracked him. He tore at the thongs that tied me down. When my body was free of them, he curved his arms underneath my body and lifted it to his chest. He bent his head to my bloody skull and rocked me as he continued to cry.
The world of Mary and Ian Thornton was becoming too vague for my understanding. Who was this stranger?
The white light whispered gently, You are beginning to forget. Just as you wanted.
I caught my breath. Not yet, let me see. Who is he?
The soldier tilted my head back and stroked my dead face with a shaking hand. Suddenly I saw him as he was, not as the body his soul had taken after his death.
“Ah, Mary, Mary,” Ian groaned. “I let this happen to you.”
Ian.
After his body died, his soul had taken a stranger’s body. Using that body, he had rushed here to save me.
Ian cradled my body tighter against him and held my head to his shoulder. The deep, racking sounds of his despair grew dimmer even as I strained to listen. Not yet, I told the white light, who was tugging at me.
The Talking Rock sighed. It left me alone to watch as Ian, his eyes now dull and staring, wrapped my body, and then his, in French Stick’s blankets. He found a horse wandering nearby and used it to drag our corpses on a sling he made from rope and tree branches. I followed as he led the horse down a path into the secluded cove, where our cabin stood.
He slung his red soldier’s coat off with a groan of disgust, then took a spade from our little barn and dug a single large grave in a small meadow that fronted our home. By the time he finished he nearly collapsed from grief and exhaustion. The sun was setting.
He dragged his own body into the grave with no ceremony, then fell to his knees beside mine and gathered it in his arms again. He was beyond tears, now, just gently rocking my body and groaning. He laid it in the grave alongside his own. Then he sat by the open hole a long time, his head slumped on his chest, before he could bring himself to take the shovel in hand and fill the grave. When the dirt was mounded he covered the pile with dozens of large rocks from a stash Ian and I had gathered to build the foundation of our cabin.
He made a cairn over the grave.
Long shadows crept through the mountains. The sun splayed gold and blue rays through creamy clouds above the horizon.
Everything was so quiet.
I stood beside him, crying, telling Ian’s soul goodbye forever, promising him that staying apart was the only way we might survive Pig Face’s eternal revenge.
He couldn’t hear me.
He pulled a small, sharp knife from his British solder’s britches, stabbed it into his wrist, and sliced upwards.
“Ian, no,” I moaned.
Blood poured from his gashed arm. He mutilated the other wrist the same way.
He sank to his knees, spurting blood, then spread himself face down on the stones of our grave, as if blanketing me for the night.
The blood in his new body stained the rocks. He shut his eyes.
He is doing a very unwise thing, the Talking Rock told me. He will return to being a soul hunter now, but with no soul catcher to anchor him. He will spend all his lives hunting for you. He will be a lost soul. Are you sure you want to hide your soul from him?
More tears slid down my face. “Yes. It’s safer for him, that way. I’m going, now. Make me forget him, now.”
“So be it,” the light said gently.
As my memory of that life, and of Ian, faded with the sunset, my last glimpse was of his soul forming in the mists by the cairn. He was tall and strong, just as in life, his long, dark hair catching a slip of the evening wind, his head lifted high, his loving blue eyes already searching for me.
But in that moment, that turning point in our many lives, I frowned lightly and floated upward on the same evening breeze, thinking, That ghost looks so urgent. I wonder who he’s looking for? I wonder who he is?
And then I was gone.
14
The bright morning sun stabbed my eyes. I lurched upright in the grassy clearing where Ian and I had sat inside Crow Walker’s mystical shanty. I heard Ian gagging nearby.
Our motorcycle was still parked under a tree—one little sign of reality—but now there was no shanty, no booger masks, no Crow Walker. My t-shirt and jeans were drenched with sweat and dew.
I pitched forward on all fours as I vomited.
It’s hard to puke, sob and punch a fist into the ground all at the same time, but I managed the trifecta. A couple of feet from me, Ian was doing the same thing.
He crawled to me. “Mary-Livia.” His voice was a hoarse, ripped-out growl. I shoved myself away from the watery bile I’d spewed on the meadow grass then continued slamming the ground with one fist. I wanted to eliminate the excruciating feel of what I’d seen, to channel it through my fist and into the earth. I wanted to forget how Ian and I and everyone we’d loved had died, and why.
“Stop it, you hear, Mary-Livia?” Ian shouted raggedly.
I kept pounding the grassy soil. “What your body looked like . . . what he did to you . . . and me . . . and to everyone we loved.”
Ian wrestled me down. He pressed himself to my back then snared my scratched and bleeding fist in one hand and trapped it against the ground. His chest heaved against my shoulder blades.
“I heard what the Talking Rock told you, Mary-Livia. You did the right thing by banishing the Other. ’Twas not your fault that Pig Face came lookin’ for us. ’Twas me who had too much pride. Me who wouldn’t listen to your warnings. I was all about fighting the fecking English no matter what you begged of me, and that’s what brought the feckers there to slaughter everyone.”
I shook my head. “If I’d just let Liver Eater go . . . none of it would have happened. I’m the reason he came there. He wanted revenge on me for killing his . . . mate. I’m the reason everyone died. I’m the reason they ambushed and tortured you. Ian, they cut off . . . ”
“No need to remind me, love. I was there.” Ian shook me gently. “Mary-Livia, for godssake, are you blind? ’Twas you who saved Wonaneya from the pox. That she-demon would’ve put the whole village in the grave if you hadn’t banished her. Because of you the people lived.”
“Lived? Just long enough to be massacred by the English.”
I twisted onto my back
, staring up at him beneath the weight of Greg Lindholm’s body. “Pig Face has tracked me down in every life I’ve lived since then, and every time you’ve found me he’s killed me and you, Gigi, Dante, Sarah, Charles” I struggled. “Let me go, please, Ian. Please. You need to get as far away from me as you can. ”
“No. Fecking no. Enough, Mary-Livia. Enough.” He threw one long leg over mine when I tried to kick. We looked at each other tearfully, face to face, dirty and damp and filled with the memory of torture and grief and regret.
“You listen to me,” he said through gritted teeth. “I left you to be killed by that bastard once, and I’ll n’er fecking do it again, you ken? Never. That was my fate, too. I’ll n’er get over the sight of what he did to you. N’er, not in this life, not in a thousand more lives. I’ll n’er stop until you and me bring the bastard down. We’ve got a chance this time, love. We’ve got to believe that this time we’ll beat him.”
“You’ll always be sacrificed if you try to help me.”
“Then so be it. I’d ruther stay a soul hunter, fightin’ by your side, dyin’, havin’ to find you over and over again, than losin’ you forever.”
My hands unfurled. I cupped them around his jaw. It was still hard for me to touch Lindholm’s face. I kept my attention on its gray eyes, looking behind them, looking inside them, at Ian.
“All right,” I lied, dropping my voice to a soft promise. “You win.” I stroked the short brown beard that now fully covered Lindholm’s lower face. “Let’s go back to the casino. Under the protection of the casino pog. Get some rest. Try to sleep. Try to forget what we’ve seen, if only for a night. Let’s find out if we’ve still got the mojo to love each other like there’s no tomorrow.”
I tried to sound seductive. Not an easy thing to do when you’re shivering and smell like puke. If I could distract him, I’d think of a way to disappear. I’d lure Pig Face away from him. I’d be a decoy.
Ian studied me intently. For a split second an achingly tender look filled Lindholm’s gray eyes. Then he jabbed his free hand between his thighs and mine. I bucked and yelled, but he wiggled his fingers inside the front pockets of my jeans and plucked out the motorcycle’s ignition key.
He held it where I could see. ”I’ve come to understand that the motor thing won’t roll without this magic key, eh?”
“Goddammit, Ian.” My voice cracked.
“Ay, damn me all you want.” Tears glittered in his eyes. “But I’ll truss you up like a wild goat if that’s what it takes to keep you with me.”
Exhaustion, frustration, fear, love. I turned my face away and shut my eyes. He bent his head to mine. I still held his face between my hands, giving into the need to touch him.
You must come with us now, a deep voice said. The Talking Rock sent us to bring you.
Yes, hurry, it’s a long ride to Wonaneya, a second voice added.
We sprang to our feet.
Two horses, saddled and waiting—and talking—stood at the forest’s edge.
*
“Talking animals shouldn’t surprise me,” I said wearily as I clung to a western saddle. My tall bay mare climbed a narrow mountain path through the forest without me guiding her. She didn’t even wear a bridle. “After all, the Talking Rock showed me how to turn you into a panther.”
Ian’s big gray horse had no bridle or reins either, but Ian didn’t hold onto the saddle horn like a rookie, the way I did. He rode with his hands resting comfortably on his thighs. His axes clicked gently in the backpack he’d hung from the saddle horn. “Speaking of which,” he went on, watching the trail take us higher into the mountains and closer to more no-doubt sickening secrets of the life we’d lived together. “Next time you’re in need of my help, could you not turn me into a big fecking puss cat, Mary-Livia?”
Except for the fear strangling my throat, I might have laughed.
*
Ian and I stood on a knoll high in the forest, looking down at creek bottoms now filled with trees more than two centuries old. “We were right there, just like yesterday,” Ian said quietly. “But now it’s no more’n a dream.”
The site of the village that had been Wonaneya was still beautiful, but so heartbreaking. Only Ian and I knew that a community of human beings had once lived in this cove along a mountain creek near an Ulsterman’s trading post. This forgotten Cherokee town had been filled with families, children, laughter. People had planted corn and beans in the creek bottoms, they’d made love and played stickball games and worshipped and gossiped and dreamed in a place that had been a safe little paradise with the high blue mountains looking down on it.
And then they had all been murdered.
Nothing was left. It was if the whole town—along with Ian and Mary Thornton—had never existed. Mother Nature is one tight dominatrix. She cleans up the messes we leave behind.
“It’s as if there were never any bloodstains,” I said hoarsely. “No memorial to the lives that were sacrificed here. No justice.”
No justice.
A shiver went through me. Strange energy. I didn’t recognize the emotion immediately. I curled my hands in fists, then unfurled them and held them up, trembling, studying them. They had a soft white aura.
I am a Soul Catcher. I am the only one capable of bringing justice here. I can fight the evil that continues to massacre the innocent of this world.
Righteous. For the first time in my life, I felt . . . righteous.
I whirled toward Ian. “The Talking Rock brought us here for a reason, but it’s up to us to figure it out. We need—“I paused, frowning, searching my intuitions, my rusty knowledge of the spirit world . . . the word markers rose in my mind—“we need to connect with the past. Help me. There have to be remnants of the trading post. A rock foundation, a fireplace hearth.”
Ian’s eyes gleamed. “Ay, that’s a notion!” He swept the terrain with a frontiersman’s eye for details. “Down the way, yon. That little ridge. As I recall it, that was the lay of the land.”
He strode down the knoll with me trotting after him. The land flowed into a wooded plateau. When I squinted through the trees I glimpsed the creek valley below. Ian pivoted, arms out, assessing the site. “Picture a clearing, with a wagon road yon—” he pointed—“so’s there was a view of all visitors from the valley.”
I turned in a slow circle as well, trying not to cringe as I relived the sad scenes of our past life. “There!” I jabbed a hand toward a granite outcropping, now nearly submerged in the roots of tall trees. “Mary liked sitting on that rock ledge. When Ian first came to the post, she would sneak up to the ledge and watch him work below, at the forge.”
“Well, well,” the modern Ian said jauntily. “That’s a bit of flattery Mary never shared with me.”
We hurried to the spot, weaving among the trunks of trees, stumbling over rooted and jumbled terrain that could easily hide the submerged foundations of the post. When I reached the rock I flattened my palms on its cool, mossy face. “Is there a pog here?” I asked softly. I shut my eyes. “I have an image of a sweet, mossy face with eyes flecked with mica. Eyes like gold.”
A voice rumbled in my mind. Hello, Mele. You are always so gracious. How long has it been?
Over two hundred years, I’m afraid.
Just a short spell, then.
Clearly, rock pogs have a different concept of time.
I stroked the rock’s soft coat of moss. We’re trying to find some of your fellow rocks. The small ones that were used to build the foundations of the buildings here. Can you help?
Yes, Mele. But . . . if you’re hoping to find any other old friends here . . . the boons, I mean . . . I don’t know if they’ll show themselves. They went into hiding after that terrible Pig Faced demon was here. He put a shadow on this place. It draws banes now. Lots of them. I’m not afraid. Rock pogs don’t fear much of anything. But the boons have battled so many wicked banes since then. They don’t trust strangers anymore.
I was silent, my heart twisting.
Behind me, Ian said, “I can make out enough of what the pog’s sayin’ to you. I tell you, Mary-Livia, a Soul Catcher’s work is no’ just about protecting the souls of the flesh world, but the souls of other realms, too.”
I nodded, and took a deep breath. I’m here to redeem my mistakes, I told the pog. Ian and I . . .we’re here to make this place safe again. We’ll earn the trust of the boons here.
Well, Mele. Let’s get started then.
The rock pog reeled off directions, speaking like an antique compass come to life. Ian stepped off the distances, knelt, pulled one of his axes from his back pack, and used it to chop the soil. Dark loam and bits of frayed roots arched into the air. I rushed over, knelt beside him, and scraped the debris aside.
A foot beneath the surface, his ax hit stone. He laid the ax aside, and we traded a breathless look. Slowly, we both reached down into the earth, our fingertips stretching out. We touched a large, flat surface.
Warmth zoomed up my hand and arm, along with memories of kind flames, comfort, family, food. Us. When I looked at Ian again his eyes were half-shut, savoring the memory too. “’Tis the hearth of the main room,” he said. “On a cold fall night in front of this hearth, warm and happy, whilst all others in the family slept or pretended to sleep, you kissed me for the ver’ first time, Mary-Livia. Do you ken? Do you remember?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “It was wonderful.”
Branches snapped. Limbs rattled. It sounded as if the forest had come alive with creatures descending on us from all angles. We shot to our feet, Ian grabbing his axe. I pulled my knife.
“I see a world o’ shadows in the trees,” Ian said. “I’m thinkin’ they’re boons, but it worries me that they’re not showin’ themselves, even to you.”
“They’re afraid of us.” I scanned the trees. I glimpsed soft, wide eyes, fearfully twitching ears, and snuffling noses. They resembled ordinary animals but . . . not quite. Some of the faces were as small as a mouse’s. Others . . . larger than the biggest bear.
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