by Faith Hunter
“Your boots are dirty,” she said, her voice as smooth as watered silk.
“Yeah,” I said, handing her the bag. “The head of the vamp I just killed.” Her eyes tightened, an infinitesimal flicker. “A young rogue,” I said. “I’ll collect the bounty later, but I need the cleanup crew sent to the New Orleans City Park to dispose of what’s left of her.”
Dominique opened the bag and stared at the face in the baggie. “She was young. Her fangs are not yet full sized.”
I had thought her fangs were just small, not that they’d get bigger. Interesting. “I watched her rise from her grave,” I said. Dominique lifted her gaze to me. “Her first rising,” I said, to clarify.
Dominique closed the flap. She pressed a button on the small table beside her. WWF opened the door fast. “Take this. Tell Ernestine that a bounty check should be drawn up for Ms. Yellowrock. Retrieve the head and return the satchel before she leaves. Ms. Yellowrock will also provide you with a locale. Send a sanitation team in to dispose of the body before morning.” Dominique looked at me. “Is that all?”
I thought about Derek Lee and the heads he was keeping. For some reason he didn’t want me to negotiate with the council in his name. “I have six more heads in a cooler. Young rogues.”
This time Dominique’s eyes did widen, surprise on her face. WWF shifted on his feet and looked at me, his gaze traveling up and down me, reassessing. A different expression raised his brows. Amusement and maybe respect. Which I didn’t deserve since I hadn’t killed the vamps, but now I was stuck in the sort-of lie.
“Six more?” Dominique asked. When I nodded, she said to WWF, “See that a retrieval car is sent for the heads at a place and time of Ms. Yellowrock’s choosing. Once the fangs are verified as young, instruct Ernestine to write an additional check to Ms. Yellowrock.”
To me, she said, “Will there be anything else, Ms. Yellowrock?”
“Nothing at the moment,” I said. Remembering manners, I added, “Um, thank you.”
Dominique inclined her head, very regally. “You may go.”
I hated that about vamps, especially the old ones. Everyone was an inferior, a servant. They always kept you waiting and then dismissed you, which ticked me off. But then, I was on their territory, not my own. Holding my tongue, I followed WWF out of the room.
In the hallway, he again studied me, this time as if looking for proof of my vamp-killing prowess. He gestured with his hand for me to follow him. “Six more?” he asked as we walked to an intersecting hallway.
Since he didn’t ask if I had actually killed the six, I nodded.
“Damn. George said you were good.”
“George Dumas?” I murmured. WWF nodded and I allowed myself a smile. George was Leo’s blood-servant, first in command of Leo’s household security. The guy was seriously cool. And he had a nice butt, which I might not mind seeing out of his jeans, someday.
“He says you call him by a nickname, him and Tom, Katie’s blood-servant, but won’t tell us what they are.” Katie was the vamp who had done my employment interview, owned Katie’s Ladies, the house of ill repute that backed up to mine, and was the title owner of the house where I was living. She was currently in an honest-to-Bella-Lugosi coffin, drowned in mixed vamp blood, healing from a near-true-death experience. And her bodyguard, Troll, was talking about me? I wasn’t sure I liked that, but I wasn’t about to tick off the security of the vamp council. I shrugged and didn’t enlighten him.
“Do you give us all nicknames?” When I shrugged again, the tiniest bit, he said, “What’s mine?”
I looked him over, feeling mildly self-conscious.
“No. Really. What’s mine?”
I sighed. “WWF.”
After a moment he said, “World Wrestling Federation?” I nodded and he laughed, the tone appreciating. He ran a hand over his bald dome, considering. “WWF. I like.” He stopped at a doorway and knocked before opening it. Inside was a small room, an even smaller desk, a huge safe, its thick black door open to reveal stacks of money and papers. Sitting in a leather desk chair was a shriveled, wrinkled crone of a human, whom I instantly and tritely nicknamed Raisin, for obvious reasons.
“Ernestine, this is Jane Yellowrock,” WWF said.
The woman stared at my boots and lied. “Charmed, I’m sure.” Her accent was British, maybe Welsh, and I put her age at over one-fifty. Blood-servants lasted a long time, extended longevity being one benefit of letting vamps drink your blood and use you as they wanted.
WWF said, “Ms. Dominique said to cut her a check for twenty thou, and make funds available for a hundred twenty more, bounty money, to be paid on proof of death of six young rogues.”
Raisin’s eyebrows went up nearly to her hairline, pulling lines out of her eyelids and depositing them onto her forehead. “Six? Well.” She looked me over and for some reason I couldn’t explain even to myself, I felt the way I had as a teen, when I was called to Mr. Rawls’s office for a discipline breach. Discipline in a children’s home is swift and unyielding, especially for fighting, and while not corporal punishment, it was unpleasant. For a variety of reasons I used to get into a lot of fights, and clearly, if I had taken down seven vamps, I had been fighting, hence my discomfort. “Six,” she repeated, sounding mildly surprised. She pulled a book of checks to her and lifted a pen. “Quite remarkable.”
I didn’t quite know what to say to that, so I stood mute, looking over the office, memorizing vamp party dates on Ernestine’s calendar, categorizing everything I could identify in the safe, and staring at the electronic brain of a security system as she wrote a check, making a lot of curlicues and flourishes with the antique-looking pen. She blew on the check as if the ink took a while to dry and scooted it across the desk to me, along with a card. Her name with the initials CPA was centered on it, a phone number beneath. “There you are, my dear. Next time, please call ahead. I’ll have a check ready, and will leave it at the front desk.”
So I wouldn’t have to bring my muddy-booted, bad ol’ fighting self inside. Got it. “Thank you,” I said, taking the check and folding it into a pocket. WWF backed from the room and I followed. At the front door, I weaponed up and gave a two-fingered salute to WWF as I left.
Out on the street, the muggy wind in my teeth, I shuddered hard. When I went into vamp headquarters and came out alive, I felt as if I had fought a battle and survived. Not won it. Just survived it. And for some reason that I couldn’t name, this trip had been worse than the last.
CHAPTER 3
Golden eyes, my daughter
Back at home, I slipped through the ward, which was keyed to me in some arcane way that Molly had tried to explain one time and which I had totally not understood. After locking away the weapons so the kids couldn’t find them, I stripped, showered, and fell into bed. Beast had wanted me to shift so she could roam until sunrise, but I needed sleep. Once on the mattress, however, I couldn’t relax, seeing again and again the tiny fangs hinge down, like baby teeth in a human. Most of the time it was easy dispatching a rogue, but watching this young rogue rise in her stained party dress, and then seeing her eyes bleeding back to humanity as she died, had left a bad taste in my mouth; I felt shaken by the experiences of the night, dirty almost. I needed . . . cleansing. I rolled over on the mattress, knowing it was time to do something I’d been putting off for a long while.
At five thirty I crawled from the bed, bleary eyed and groggy, stumbled into jeans, T-shirt, and Western boots. As ready as I could be for this experience, I left the house again without eating or waking Molly or the kids.
Bitsa sputtered when I started her, but pulled into the dark street and went up to speed quickly enough. On the far side of the river (all directions in New Orleans are in relation to Lake Pontchartrain or the Mississippi River, upstream or down), I took the necessary turns and straightaways, and finally veered into a white-shell, dead-end road and the tiny house at the end. The smell of wood smoke was sharp on the air, the scent denser as I pulled into the dr
ive.
The air was graying with light when I pushed the bell, and I started when it opened instantly. The slender, black-haired woman inside was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. She smiled at me as if she had known I was coming—which was impossible, wasn’t it?—and when she spoke, her voice was soft and breathy, in the way of the speech of the People. “Gi yv ha,” she said, and held open the door. “Gi yv ha” was Cherokee for “Come in.”
I nodded formally, almost a bow, and said, “Thank you, Egini Agayvlge i—Aggie One Feather.” I wished that there was more of the People’s tongue in my memory, wished that I was a speaker, as the People said of the few who still could converse in Cherokee. But the words were scattered and broken, mostly lost, in my damaged mind. I had spent too long in Beast form and had forgotten the ways and tongue of the People.
“Are you ready, Jane Dalonige’i, Jane Yellowrock, or Jane Gold, in the speech of the white man?” Aggie asked. Her voice was soft, melodious, the gentle voice of dreams and nightmares both. When I nodded, she asked, “Did you fast today?”
“I did.” Beast was hyperalert, but hunkered down, deep inside me, watchful and silent.
“Then I will take you to sweat. And afterward, if you are ready, I will take you to water.” The words were similar to the traditional words of the shaman, the tribal helpers. Shamans and elders would assist, free of charge, any who asked, even the white man, for healing ceremonies, council, or more practical help.
Today, Aggie One Feather was hoping to bring me into contact with my true self, my spirit self, to steer me on the road to spiritual healing. And though I had not told her what I was, she knew bits and pieces of my story; perhaps she had guessed much more. I was hoping she could help me find the child that I once had been, so very long ago. Before Beast. Before I lost my memories. Before the hunger times, which I remembered only vaguely. Before I was found wandering in the Appalachian Mountains, scared, scarred, naked, and with almost no memory of human language. Finding her here in New Orleans shouldn’t have been a surprise—the People lived all over the States—but it still felt like one of the weird coincidences the universe tossed my way occasionally. Since it brought me closer to learning about my past, this time it was a welcome one.
Aggie lifted a stoneware pitcher of water and a long wooden ladle, which were ready on a table by the door. Both items looked like traditional Cherokee ware, and though I tended to have very few possessions, I suddenly wanted to own a pitcher and ladle like them. I curled my fingers in, to keep from stroking the pitcher, as she led the way outside and around back.
The sweat lodge was a low wood hut with a metal roof, located at the back of the property, hidden in the drooping limbs of trees. The smell of wood smoke was strong here, and wisps of smoke, nearly invisible in the pale half-light, wafted from a circular opening in the very center of the roof. I stood beside the doorway, watching as Aggie stripped off her jeans and T and draped them over a wood hook on the outside wall. Naked, she wrapped a coarsely woven cotton cloth around her and tied the overlapped ends above her breasts. Covered from underarms to knees, she entered the lodge. Heat blasted out. The door swung silently shut.
There were a dozen such hooks, each with its white covering, similar to Aggie’s, some long, some shorter. Feeling oddly uncomfortable, I stripped and tied a makeshift robe around me, leaving my clothes on a second peg and my boots against the wall. The covering was dry, and must have been hung since Ada passed. My hair was still in a fighting queue, tight to my head. I left it that way. Barefoot, I stared at the door. I had been all around the lodge in cat and human form, but this was the first time I would go inside.
I put a palm on the rough plank door and pushed gently. The darkness inside reached out to me, warm and solid. Holding the door open with one hand, I stepped in, ducking my head to avoid hitting it on the low door header and roof supports. My bare feet stepped on a hard-packed clay floor, level with the outside ground.
A memory came, unbidden, of another sweat lodge, this one with a long step down into the dark, the floor scooped out, flat and smooth inside, but a foot deeper in the ground. A single snapshot-type memory. Then it was gone. But the vision left me with a calmness that settled against my skin like the scented dark of the lodge.
Without asking, I knew that the floor of this sweat lodge had not been dug out because the water table was so high here. Water would have collected in any depression.
I released the door and it closed behind me. Warm, wet heat and darkness surrounded me, steam rising from red coals and heated rocks piled in the center of the small hut. Beast yawned deep inside and settled herself in my mind. She liked the warmth.
I stood hunched over, my head brushing the roof supports, letting my eyes adjust. The fire was built on a low bed of rocks, other rocks ringing it. It had been burning a long time, long enough for the heat to feel alive and powerful, as if she had known I would come today. Around the fire were low seats made from logs that had been shaped and rounded for sitting. Aggie was on a log on the far side of the fire, her eyes on the coals, her hands busy in a basket beside her. There were other baskets woven from grasses, each with a woven lid hiding its contents. The pitcher was on the ground beside her, the ladle inside.
I lowered myself to the seat closest to the door, my knees rising, and I squirmed to find a comfortable position. Aggie seemed fine with the seat, and I copied the pose of her legs, but she was much shorter than my six feet and it wasn’t working for me. I stretched out my feet to the fire and waited, palms flat on my thighs, not knowing what was going to happen. No more memories came to enlighten me. I had lost so much of myself, of my past.
Neither of us spoke. Aggie, moving slowly, as if everything she did were choreographed, put a blackened length of wood on the fire, using it to shuffle the coals. Brighter red light seeped out. From a basket, she pulled something tied with twine. It was too dark in the lodge to identify, but it was a foot long, about an inch and a half in diameter, and she held it to the coals. Instantly it lit, throwing bright white light for a few seconds, the flames a greedy whisper as they ate into it. I drew in the scent. Sweetgrass. Sage. Something tart, like lemon camphor. Herbs used in making a smudge stick. I remembered. . . .
I closed my eyes and breathed. Time passed. Aggie added more herbs as the first of them smoldered into ash. My legs seemed to settle and relax. Sweat rose to my skin, beading, puddling, and ran in sluggish rivulets on my hands, along my arms and legs. Thick drops rolled down and plopped against the smooth clay floor beneath me. I sighed, the breath long and slow.
From somewhere came the soft sound of a drum beating a measured, rhythmic four-beat. I chuckled softly, little more than a breath. “A CD? In a sweat lodge, Lisi?”
From some part of my deeper mind, I knew the word li si. Grandmother. Though Aggie wasn’t my grandmother, it was a term of respect for an elder. “Yes. Lisi,” I said again. “Lisi.”
Aggie smiled in the dark. I knew it, though my eyes were closed, my head back, neck stretched out. I breathed in the scented smoke. Her voice like a whisper of a dawn breeze, Aggie said, “It is music from a Cherokee musician. With only the two of us, it would be difficult to call the drums.”
“Drums,” I said. “I had forgotten about the drums.” She lifted my hand and guided it to a handle, pressing it toward my lips. A ladle full of water. I drank. She took the ladle away.
I heard a sizzle, and knew Aggie had spilled water over the hot stones, like an offering. A gift. Steam sputtered into the scented air. As the music and the heat and the cleansing steam surrounded me, I relaxed, letting my body find the shape of the wood beneath me. Beast slept. Perhaps I did too.
Long hours later, I heard a voice in my dreams, softer than the quiet drums. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa.” Granddaughter. “Tell me what you remember.”
The drums pulled at me, calling, calling. The herbs and the heat pressed down on me. “Aquetsi, ageyutsa, tell me what you remember.”
“E lisi.” My grandmother. A
n old, old, old woman, her skin pulled into drooping wrinkles, her hair black and streaked with silver, parted and braided to either side of her head, the plaits hanging down, tied at the ends with leather thongs and the bones and feathers of her beasts. Fire danced over her skin, down her cotton dress, to the drum in her thin hand. The drum she beat, so slowly. Four beats: one firm and three sliding, softer beats.
“E lisi,” I said again. “E lisi, e tsi, e doda.” My grandmother, my mother, my father. Words that had lost meaning, newly found. “E lisi had eyes like mine. Like my father’s. Dalonige i digadoli. Yellow eyes.”
From somewhere a flute began to play, the notes rich with sadness. I opened my eyes. Cave walls surrounded me, the roof melting down in drops and spirals, like the white man’s candles, the rock magical, soft and puddling, like the sweat from my skin. The cave roof was crying the tears of the world in soft plinks, the sound of tears merging with the drum and flute.
Elisi was speaking, measured and slow. But though I could see her lips move in the flicker of firelight, her words were lost, whispered echoes. Then my father spoke, and his words I could hear. In low, breathy tones he spoke animal names. “We sa. Gvhe. Unodena. Usdia soquili. Gvli. Ugugu. Uwohali. When you are older, bigger, tlvdatsi. Tlvdatsi, like me. Dalonige i Digadoli, aquetsi ageyutsa.” Bobcat. Wild cat. Sheep. Pony foal. Raccoon. Owl. Eagle. When you are older, bigger, mountain lion. Panther, like me. Golden Eyes, my daughter.
My father’s voice went on, speaking the names of animals I could choose. But I knew already, though my body was too small to find them, that I would call we sa and tlvdatsi. Bobcat and panther. Like my father. Because he had told me so.
Dalonige i Digadoli. Golden Eyes. My name.
“Wake up, Jane. Wake up,” a voice murmured. “It’s time to go.”
