by Annie Bellet
“You, too,” he said, his eyes crinkling as he returned my smile. “Veritable spring chicken.”
“Craddle-robber,” I muttered. The chuckle we shared felt forced, but at least it was something.
We lapsed back into silence and I went back to staring out the window, watching dirt and trees slide by until they blurred, one patch of road the same as another, me trying to not remember as hard as I knew how.
Jasper had given Alek directions, but we didn’t need them. Somehow, even thirty three years later, I knew the turn-off, knew the shape of the trees and recognized the gravel road leading into Three Feathers.
Of course, all the “no trespassing” signs with obligatory shotgun holes in them would have tipped off anyone. Sky Heart pretended his land was an official Indian Reservation, though it was no such thing. The locals in the nearest town figured it was, however, and he kept people paid off in the local government to look the other way as well. The humans must have figured it was just a big patch of woods full of crazy Indians and left it at that. The People kept to themselves, homeschooling their kids, living on whatever investments Sky Heart had made and whatever they crafted to sell. Woodworking, pottery, weaving, and game meat had all been popular choices when I was a kid, and I doubt Sky Heart had changed much since.
I guess when you are over three hundred years old and an egomaniacal cult leader, change doesn’t really come easy.
I swallowed my bitter thoughts along with the nerves in my stomach as we drove up the main road and approached the group of buildings that formed the core of Three Feathers. The sun was sinking in the sky, its rays limning the treetops and casting long shadows over the huge clearing the road dead ended into.
The big log house was Sky Heart’s, though he often shared it with whomever he was sleeping with, and one of its rooms had been the dedicated school room when I was little. Two large pole barns flanked the house, their sheet metal siding stained with rivulets of rust, like old blood. The roofs were new, as were the solar panels decorating them. The People preferred to live as off the grid as they could, so that development didn’t surprise me at all.
Dotted further out in the clearing and along paths through the trees were more small cabins and clusters of trailers. Three Feathers could almost be mistaken for a campground. Trucks and a few cars were parked in neat lines beside the pole barns.
Everywhere, there were the People. They came out of the shaded forest and houses, gathering in stiff clusters around the edge of the gravel turn-about where Alek brought his truck to a stop. Most were Native, at least in part. Most were related to each other, and, I guess, to me. Inbreeding wasn’t exactly uncommon what with Sky Heart’s obsession with the purity of his crow shifters. I recognized many of the faces, though names flitted through my mind like angry birds, refusing to be caught.
The air was thick with tension and I could almost taste the anxiety I read on the faces around me. Lines etched in skin that shouldn’t have seen signs of age for centuries, mouth after mouth pressed into pale lines, dark eyes wide and haunted. Knives and small caliber pistols tucked into belts, hands close by, hovering like disturbed insects. Fear reigned here.
Then one face trapped my gaze. Pearl, my mother, was still tall and beautiful, her back ramrod straight and her long black hair pulled tight into two braids, the ends wrapped in red leather. She was near two hundred years old but looked early forties, only tightness around her eyes and small wrinkles at her mouth disturbing her smooth brown skin.
I had a lot of questions for her. I just hoped she had answers that weren’t more lies, or that didn’t only lead to more questions.
“Time’s up,” I muttered. “Let’s do this.”
Alek raised an eyebrow at me. He didn’t get the Leroy Jenkins reference, but that was okay. It was mostly for me, to remind myself who I was. Not the girl they’d forced out decades ago, that was for sure.
I opened my door and stepped out as Alek did the same. The sound of a pump-action shotgun being racked drew my immediate attention and I reached inside for my magic even as I turned toward the porch of the big house.
“This is tribal land,” the man descending the steps called out, the shotgun in his hands pointed right at Alek. “Go away, or else.” He punctuated the “or else” by lifting the shotgun and poking the air with the barrel as though it had a bayonet on it.
Sky Heart was the same as I remembered, though not quite the boogeyman of my nightmares anymore, not after knowing Samir. He was a big slab of a man with red-brown skin, and light blue eyes that were his namesake. His black hair was down to his knees, woven through with crow feathers and brightly colored threads until it looked more like a Plain’s Indian headdress than a man’s hair. He wore a western style shirt with mother of pearl buttons and jeans with cowboy boots and had the physical and charismatic presence of John Wayne and Charles Manson all rolled into one.
Alek held up one hand and made sure his silver feather necklace was visible. “I am a Justice of the Council of Nine,” he said in a tone I remembered from the time we met and he accused me of being a murderer. It’s not a tone you want directed at you, that’s for damn certain. “I am here to investigate the murders of your people.”
“And her?” Sky Heart swung the gun toward me and I think I burned a couple permanent willpower points not blasting him off his feet.
“Hello, Granddad,” I said instead. Technically he wasn’t my grandfather, something I hadn’t known until Jasper did the whole reverse Darth Vader thing on me, but it still felt satisfying to see Sky Heart’s face tense and then squeeze into an unattractive expression of disgust.
“You are an exile,” he said.
“She’s with me,” Alek said at the same time. “We have questions for you, if you’d prefer to answer them inside.” He motioned at the house after casting a pointed glance around at the growing crowd.
“You, I will talk to,” Sky Heart said. “Not her.”
“It’s fine,” I said to Alek. “I’ll talk to people out here.”
He looked unhappy about it, but nodded, seeing the logic, and followed the already retreating Sky Heart into the house. The people around us started moving again, and a hum of low conversation buzzed in my ears, the words blending together but the sounds giving off impressions of hope and fear mixing like oil and water.
“Go on, all of you,” my mother said to the crowd, making a shooing motion with her hands. “You’ve got better things to do than gawk.”
I recognized my two cousins standing near Jasper, John and Connor. The infamous two who had led me into an abandoned mine when I was very small and left me there, lost and alone. I’d gotten Wolf out of the deal, so it wasn’t all bad. They looked like men now, not the gangly boys they had been when I had left. They didn’t meet my gaze, turning away at Pearl’s shooing, and fading back into the trees with most of the rest of the People.
One girl didn’t. She hovered at the edge of the nearest pole barn, her face somehow familiar to me even though she couldn’t have been older than her early teens. Shifters can live for hundreds of years, but until about twenty or so, they age at the same pace as humans. The girl had chin length black hair and deep green eyes, the only anomaly on her otherwise perfectly Native American face. Her lips were wide, her nose straight, her cheekbones high and sharp.
She looked a bit, well, like me.
“Fuck,” I muttered. I looked at Pearl. “Tell me that’s not your daughter?”
Pearl stepped forward, her dark eyes inscrutable. “Emerald,” she said, waving at the girl, “come meet your sister.”
In the last two days I’d learned that my father wasn’t my father and now I had a sister. Awesomesauce. And someone was kind of literally decimating these people. Double awesomesauce.
“I’m Jade,” I said.
“She’s not my sister,” said Emerald, who was clearly the latest victim of our family’s rock-centric naming scheme.
“Half, I guess,” I said, dishing out a glare for Jasper
.
“You told her?” Pearl said, her lips pressing into a line.
“She needed to know. Where have the lies gotten us?”
“Yeah, about that,” I said.
“Not here.” Pearl turned and walked away.
Emerald gave me a searing once over with all the scorn a teenager could muster, and stomped after our mother.
I had little choice but to follow.
They say you can never go home again, but I think that’s more for poetic value. That or it should be changed to “you really shouldn’t go home again” which applied a lot harder in my case.
Our home was a three-bedroom log cabin and the kitchen and bathroom were about the only thing that had been updated since the seventies. The eighteen seventies. The walls were logs and decorated with woven blankets that had been here when I was a kid. The couch was different; our old one had been dark blue, but this had the same heavy Victorian style that looked opulent and sucked to sit on. I chose a handcrafted kitchen chair instead.
“Who was my father?” I asked. No point in small talk. I didn’t care how they were doing. Besides, I could see how that conversation would go. Hi, how are you? Oh, in danger of being horribly killed, and yourself? Yeah. No.
“Is she really my sister?” Emerald said.
“Go to your room, Em,” Jasper told her.
“Why? Who is she? She’s not Crow.”
“No,” I said, forming a small ball of purple fire in one palm, “I’m something much, much cooler.” It was more prestidigitation than real magic, but flashy. The stress was getting to me and I felt the need to be petty and push back a little. To remind these people I wasn’t just a kid anymore.
“Shit,” Em said, her green eyes going wide.
“Em, language! Jade, please,” Pearl said in a perfect “cut it out” mother voice.
“Let the kid stay. She should learn how fucked up we really are, eh?” I looked at Em and offered her a wry smile. She couldn’t have been much older than fourteen or fifteen, but I wasn’t sure if she had changed yet, had found her inner shifter animal. Just because her parents were crow shifters didn’t mean she would be. I hoped for her sake that she was.
Em flopped down onto the couch and gave her parents a stubborn look. Jasper sighed, and Pearl sank down onto one of the other kitchen chairs. Their movements had the feel of habit, of set pieces shifting on a stage.
“He gave his name as Ash. He was maybe Shoshone or Blackfoot,” Pearl said, wiping her hands on her sundress and leaving sweaty streaks behind on the green cotton. “I don’t have answers for you, Jade. I’m sorry.”
Sorry? Fuck this. I rose from my chair and paced the short distance to the kitchen window. The view was as I remembered, too, from all those evenings doing dishes standing in this very spot. My life seemed layered onto itself, past and present swirling into an unreality. I had never thought to be back here, so I’d never mentally prepared for this moment. I turned back to them.
“You just ran off, slept with some random Indian dude, and then came home?”
“I was confused, lost, and he gave me a lift. It was a strange time for me, after Ruby died.” She shrugged. “I didn’t know I was pregnant until Sky Heart brought me back. I had no way to contact your father anyway, and I hoped, well…” She trailed off. It was clear what she had hoped. She had hoped I was a crow shifter, not whatever my father had been.
“He was a sorcerer?” I asked. It wasn’t like there were a lot of sorcerers in the world. We tended to kill each other off, or get hunted down and killed by other people. Gaining power by eating the hearts of other magic users doesn’t exactly make us a popular bunch.
She nodded. “He could do things, like light a fire with just his will. No words, no rituals. He was… special.” The wistfulness in her face was there and gone again like a shooting star, but I didn’t think I’d imagined it.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Em stared at her sneakers, chewing on her lower lip. Jasper slipped his hand into Pearl’s and she pressed imagined creases out of her dress, not meeting my eye.
What was there to say? So Jasper wasn’t my dad. Oh well. He hadn’t been my dad for over thirty years. This family wasn’t mine anymore; they’d given up that claim pretty spectacularly by kicking me out and dumping me with an awful woman and her rapist husband.
Yet, here I was. So, I wanted to say, how ‘bout them murders? I repressed a nervous giggle.
“Thank you,” Jasper said, looking over at me finally. “For coming. Sky Heart won’t admit it, but he has grown old and tired. I am not sure he can keep us safe this time.”
Em looked up at him with a gasp. “Dad,” she said. I guessed she didn’t hear him talk negatively about the supreme leader very often.
“Wait,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘this time’? Has this happened before?” That would have been, you know, good to know. My frakking family and their frakking secrets. It was getting old.
He and Pearl exchanged a look, then both glanced at Em, then turned their gazes back to me. Again it felt like players on a stage, moving from cue to cue for an audience, only now it seemed the play was hitting the climax, but the actors couldn’t remember their lines. Jasper’s thin shoulders hunched and he looked a decade older as he opened his mouth to answer, though his eyes told me what his words would say before he spoke.
He didn’t get a chance to speak.
Screams tore through the quiet clearing and a woman ran toward the big house, crying out for Sky Heart.
We bolted from the cabin and across the gravel drive. My family’s house was close to Sky Heart’s, given their direct blood ties as well as status in the tribe. Close enough that I had made it onto the big house’s porch by the time Alek and Sky Heart came through the door.
Close enough to hear the woman’s first coherent words.
“He’s dead. It’s happened again. He’s dead. Dead.”
The body was staged just beyond the furthest out trailer in a recently cleared area at the edge of the older trees. There were a couple of large rocks and a tree stump that had been dug around but not cut from the ground yet and hauled away. It was next to that stump that the man’s body was staked out.
I felt an odd tingle on my skin as we crossed into the clearing and filed away the sensation for examining later. The air was eerily still and the sinking sun shot weak red-tinged light through the trees, spearing the corpse.
“Back,” snarled Sky Heart as other people tried to follow him closer. Jasper and two other men turned and held out their arms, pushing away the growing crowd.
Alek and I ignored them all and approached the body. He was middle aged, which meant he was one of the older residents. His face seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place a name to it. His eyes were open, clouded and reflecting only sky. There was a tiny trickle of blood dried at the corner of his pale lips.
The air was thick with the sweet smell of blood underpinned with feces and dirt. The man’s plaid shirt was ripped, his hands staked through with large iron nails but there wasn’t much blood on them. His nails were dirty and broken. My brain took in details, eyes looking everywhere but at the mess of his chest. Until his chest moved.
“Fuck,” I yelled, jumping back.
Alek, cool as always, didn’t even flinch, just gave me a sideways look before bending over the body. I moved back up beside him and forced myself to look, to really see.
His chest had been ripped open, like something from a B-grade horror movie, his ribs grey and brownish with drying blood, broken and protruding into the open air. Pinned inside his chest, where his heart and lungs should have been, was a live crow. Its beak was wired shut and its wings were stuck through with crude iron nails, but the poor thing still struggled, its feathers soaked and sticky with blood.
Alek reached into that nightmare and broke the crow’s neck.
“Were they all like this?” he asked Sky Heart.
Sky Heart nodded, fingering a small leather and bead bag that hung around his neck.
“Yes,” he said. He looked in that moment as Jasper had described. Old. Tired.
“Is this how it happened before? Years ago?” I asked. It was a guess, going off what my parents had been talking about before this new murder interrupted us.
He jerked as though struck and looked at me, hate creeping into his pale eyes.
“Before?” Alek asked, rising to his feet.
“This is Crow business. Shishishiel will protect us. This is not for outsiders to interfere.”
“Yeah, ‘cause Shishishiel the great crow spirit dude is really doing a bang-up job so far, right?” I glared at him, refusing to be intimidated anymore. Jasper had been right about more than one thing. Something unnatural was at work here.
Killing a shifter isn’t as hard as killing a sorcerer. You don’t have to eat their heart, for example. Decapitation will do the trick, or just a large amount of physical damage all at once. Like exploding someone’s chest and removing their heart and lungs and stuff. That seemed pretty effective. Not an easy thing to do, however, to a man who could turn instantly at will into a bird and fly away. A man who would have hundreds of years of experience, be stronger and faster than a human, and who could tank a lot of damage.
“You will be gone from this place by nightfall,” Sky Heart said to Alek, though he pitched his voice loudly enough that I’m pretty sure the whole camp could hear him. “And you will take that woman with you.”
“Shifters are dying,” Alek said. “I will be going nowhere until that stops. You can either help or get out of my way. I obey the Council, not you.” He was standing up to his full six foot six height and had turned on his Alpha power, as I liked to think of it. Waves of it radiated off him like heat on asphalt and for a moment it was as though the huge white tiger that was his alternate shape lived just beneath his skin, his ice blue eyes the eyes of an apex predator, his muscles tensed and ready to make the kill.
Sky Heart seemed to shrink under that power, but he clutched the beaded bag around his neck and pressed his lips into a line. “I must discuss with Shishishiel,” he said loudly, and then added so quietly that I barely heard him, “please, give me tonight to think on this.”
