Merkaba, a supernatural suspense series (Walk the Right Road, Book 3)

by Eckhart, Lorhainne

  Alecia rolled her eyes but stopped when she was rewarded with a sharp pain in her head. The dull throb that had been there the night before had finally eased, but she still felt lightheaded.

  “Patrick, sit down. You’re wearing a hole in the carpet, and the people next door are going to start complaining.” Harriet was calm when she spoke. Her brown hair was shoulder length and wavy, she had big brown eyes, and her skin was lightly tanned. She patted the seat beside her until Patrick stomped over and sat, but not before letting her and Alecia know he was still furious.

  Unfortunately, with one look in the mirror before she opened the door to her parents, who’d just arrived from the airport, Alecia had expected his reaction. Her dad had raged and yelled and hugged her a little too hard. Her mother had said nothing, but her dark eyes flashed with fire before they calmed. Between the two of them, Brian should have been terrified.

  “Mom, I’d like to go back out to the medicine wheel this morning, if you feel up to it. Or would you like to rest for a bit?” Alecia ignored her father, whose eyes were darting between her and her mother and who was about to launch into another tirade.

  “I think it’s a fine idea to go to the medicine wheel. Your father will drive.” Her mom smiled and winked encouragingly.

  Her dad shook his head but then jumped just as quickly, snatching Alecia’s keys. “Breakfast first.” He jabbed his long finger at Alecia. “And I know you haven’t eaten yet.”

  ***

  Alecia sat through breakfast with her parents at a family restaurant around the corner, again wearing the ball cap and dark glasses. Her mother, of course, had given her one of her looks, and her father had tensed again, reminded that his daughter had been beaten up. Now, as she rode in the back of her Jeep as her father drove out to the parkland and the empty lot close to the trailhead, she felt much like a child again, told where to sit, to order a bigger breakfast as she wasn’t eating enough, and not being allowed to drive her own car.

  Her mother stretched her arms up and looped her own beaded leather pouch over her head so it hung across her body. “Come on, Alecia, show me the medicine wheel. I think we have some work to do.”

  But Alecia was frowning at her father, who had his back to both Alecia and her mother, standing behind the Jeep as though he was their bodyguard. She recognized the stiffness in his broad shoulders, his arms held out just away from his body, fisting his hands. No one was getting anywhere near her. She realized then that the nervousness that had plagued her and left her shaken since Brian attacked her had retreated. This should have made her happy, but Alecia’s hard-won independence had also gone south, and that made her very unhappy. She was a grown woman, for God’s sake. Her father shouldn’t have had to come to her rescue.

  Her mother must have known, as she took Alecia’s hand in hers and started walking with her. Alecia guided her parents to the open field where she’d built the wheel. Her dad, of course, saw it and stared with interest, but she knew he didn’t understand its importance, so he walked over to the large boulder just behind them and sat, out of the way.

  Harriet strode around the circle and stopped at the eastern door. “Alecia, burn some sage. We need to cleanse it. She did as her mother asked and then tucked the burning bundle of sage in between the rocks at the eastern line. Her mother was sitting on the ground, cross legged, and she’d pulled out colorful square cloths, a handful of embroidery ties, and a packet of tobacco.

  “Come sit.” Harriet set a handful of red cloths on the ground in front of Alecia and gestured to the tobacco. She didn’t need to utter one word. Alecia picked up a cloth using her left hand, pinched tobacco and set it in the cloth, and tied the bundle.

  “The line of rocks connecting east to south runs from your childhood and my youth, the hurts that were imbedded there from events we have no control over. When I was a child, the church people came with the law. That was what the sheriff did then. The government’s war with the Indian continued. Their objective was to kill the Indian in the child, to transform us inside and out. However, it was also to control us in the most wicked sense. They always started with the leaders’ children, you know. They were holding the children hostage in a school far away to control the community, as if saying, ‘Ah, yes, you will do as we say because we have your children.’ Children were ripped away from their mothers’ arms. My mother had tried to hide me and my brother.”

  Alecia stared at her mother, and she felt a heaviness in her heart. “I didn’t know you have a brother. Where is he?”

  “Had a brother, dear Alecia. He’s dead.”

  Chapter 13

  Her mother had never spoken of her family and what she had gone through as a child. She had tears in her eyes when she smiled at Alecia. “Little Sikwai, which means sparrow. He was only five years old. I remember his screams because they were my own. But nothing would come from my mouth. I trembled when men in uniforms grabbed me by the collar and put me on a bus, and my brother was screaming for our mother before they dumped him in my lap. I remember the bus pulling away and seeing my mother through the dirty window, stumbling in the mud after us. A policeman was hitting her and knocking her down, and when she was on the ground, he hit her with a club, over and over.

  Harriet got up and placed a pebble on the wheel between the east and west. “The school wasn’t about teaching us or giving us an education. Girls were separated from the boys and taught how to clean to be a housekeeper, while boys were taught a trade, menial labor. Our hair was hacked off on the first day, and we were given scratchy white-man clothes to wear. Ours were burned. One of the teachers there had this triangle-shaped face, these icy blue eyes, and her hair was always pulled tightly back. She walked around with a long yardstick and would beat us with it, our heads, backs, arms. It didn’t matter where she put the welts. It was anger so deep that she carried, and she was given the power to hurt us. And she got off on it—she’d become stronger, more powerful. She gave us our new names. Mine was now Harriet. We weren’t allowed to speak one word of our native tongues or be those dirty Indians again, she said over and over. There comes a point where you begin to believe you’re worthless, you’re nothing. And it wasn’t long before Wayah died, and there was only Harriet.”

  “Wayah means wolf. You never told me that was your name.” Alecia waited, knowing she couldn’t push her mother. She was surprised she’d shared this much. She knew what she’d survived was horrible, but Alecia didn’t know the details.

  “The school’s basic foundation was to destroy the Indian, and what it did was destroy each of us physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. I can remember standing in darkness for hours in line without being allowed to move, scrubbing the floor on my hands and knees until my fingers were raw and my knees ached to the point that I didn’t think I could stand. I remember watching as the other girls were raped, beaten with a strap by the men who wore the coats of God. And it was then that I saw into the face of pure evil. I would recognize that evil now if it walked down the street. You can never forget it.” As her mother spoke in a voice free of emotion, she circled the wheel, seeking rocks and placing them all in the same place between the east and the south. “My brother was sent to the boy’s school, so I never saw him again, but I learned later that he had been beaten so severely that his head was busted open, and he was left to lie dying alone. The other boys were forced to stand and watch and had to lie to the authorities when his tiny body was carted away. They had to say that he fell.”

  There was an eerie silence that fell over Harriet and Alecia as she watched her mother staring out into the trees. Harriet sighed, and something softened in her as she slouched a little and did something she hadn’t done in a while. She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply before blowing out that poison. Her hand was shaking.

  “When I was there, it was the sixties, and it was said the schools were now civilized, that we now had rights. But we didn’t. We were supposed to see our families in the summer, but I wasn’t allowed. The
others, I don’t know. I was sent to be a servant to the wealthy farmhands in the area. The reason, I was told, was that I needed to learn civility. I was ten. I never saw my mother again. I’ve never been back here because as soon as I was freed, I fled and went east with a one-way ticket as far as I could go, and that was Boston. I buried everything and locked it away inside my heart—in this metal box, I like to call it—and kept it there. It was easier to pretend it never happened, but you can’t bury it. That kind of darkness, it shapes you into who you are, finds a way out in dreams, in the people in your life, in every breath you take. So I drank to drown it out, drank enough every night that I passed out and didn’t dream. I avoided it for so long. I don’t know how you were spared, because I drank while I was pregnant with you. I hid it from your dad.” She glanced over to Patrick, who sat perched, scanning the area, very much a watchman.

  “He was right to keep me from you. You may not believe that, but I was dangerous, and until I chose to get help, to face my demons, I couldn’t be around you.”

  Alecia felt her own heart swell with a loss and hurt that she’d never openly admitted to anyone. “You left me,” she said. “You chose booze over me.”

  “I loved you so much that I chose life over booze. It took me just five years to walk it off. For others, it takes a lifetime.”

  Alecia really looked at her mother, because she had never once thought about it that way. She just assumed it had been a simple choice. Now she realized that walking through hell, filled with tricks and dead ends and brick walls, would have been anything but easy. And God, if she drank to keep out those nightmares … then what were those nightmares doing to her now?

  “Mom, can I ask you something?”

  Harriet sat beside her daughter, crossed legged on the ground.

  “How do you get through the nights now? What about the nightmares?”

  Harriet squinted over at Patrick and back down at Alecia. “By doing what we’re doing now, we’re healing generations of hurt. But we’re not alone. What you’re doing here, you may have thought it was for me, for our people, but it’s also for you—for everyone, because when we have peace in ourselves, in our homes, then the world will be at peace.” Harriet jerked her head toward the path and stood up, blocking her daughter. “The mist is coming, something bad and wicked. Do you know what you face, daughter?”

  Chapter 14

  Alecia jumped up beside her mother, and Patrick was instantly alert.

  “Who’s coming?” Patrick took deep, heavy steps and stopped beside Alecia.

  Dan stood in the shadows and then shoved his hands in his pockets as he strode toward them.

  “Who is that, Alecia?” Her mother never turned to face her.

  “That’s Dan McKenzie. He’s the one who got Brian off me.”

  Alecia watched as Dan strode to her and stumbled, almost hesitant, as if unsure of his footing. She could feel her mother’s gaze burning into her, and it was filled with uneasiness, as if she thought Alecia had lost her mind.

  “Maybe you had better start at the beginning, daughter, because I don’t remember hearing that someone got Brian off you,” Patrick said. “You left me with the impression that the police scared him away.”

  She realized then that she had done just that, and, to her father, it was the same as lying. He’d forgiven her before when she omitted the number of times Brian had hit her—abused her. She knew her father would have seen it, and that was why she’d avoided her parents when she was bruised, because they would have known.

  “Dan, this is my mother, Harriet, and my father, Patrick.” Alecia felt both parents step closer to her side, as if to bolster her. It was comforting.

  Nobody said anything, but everyone stared at each other as the tension notched up a degree.

  It was her father who spoke first: “So, my daughter says you were the one to get Brian off her.” Patrick stuck out his hand to shake the other man’s, but Harriet moved quickly in front of her husband and slapped his hand down.

  “Do not touch him; do not offer your hand. He’s no hero.”

  Alecia stared at her mother. She’d never seen her behave in such a way. Dan had taken a step back and crossed his arms in front of him.

  Harriet jabbed a finger toward him. “I saw you before you came here. My daughter is not for you. You can’t have her.”

  “What are you talking about? I saw she was in trouble, and I just tried to help.”

  This time, Alecia realized she had overlooked something. How had Dan seen she was in trouble, and why had he burst into her room? “You were watching me, weren’t you?” she said.

  Her father darted his gaze between Dan and Alecia, and then he stepped forward to shield Alecia from the other man.

  Dan had the good grace to flush. “Well, you should be thankful that I was. I actually followed you and was on my way up to your room when I heard you scream, and then there was a crash. I got the maid who was two doors down, wide eyed and terrified, to give me the key to open it, and what I saw was a monster whose only intent was to kill you. He had no intention of leaving.”

  “I remember what you said to me. What was it? It takes a snake to know one.”

  He smiled and then frowned. “What I said was that it takes a snake to recognize one. A snake has fangs with poison—it’s inside him. Some snakes have poison, and some don’t. Just ask your mother here.”

  Dan focused all his intention on Harriet, who stood unwavering and silent and filled with an anger that Alecia hadn’t felt in a long time.

  “You bring out the worst in me. We all have the ability to channel that darkness, but when you practice it, bringing it in again and again, it takes over you. And you cast it well, or you did, but there is something not quite right, I’d say. What happened?” Harriet asked.

  Alecia was watching the two of them, Dan and her mother, as if they were the only two in the area. She glanced up at her father, and he clamped on his stony mask, the one that didn’t give her a clue as to what he was thinking or what he was about to do.

  “Dad.” She touched his arm and could feel his muscles bunched.

  “Alecia, you let your mom talk,” he said in his thick Irish brogue.

  Dan, for the first time since she had met him, flushed and cast his eyes downward, and he clicked his tongue. The man had the gall to stall while speaking to her mother, of all people.

  Harriet swept her hand in front of her to let him know she was done with him, and she turned her back on him. “We have no time for this. Please go.”

  Dan—Alecia would swear it—had physically jumped. He took one step back, then another. “Look, I met a shaman down in South America, so I ran back here.”

  This time, Harriet turned around and sprinkled tobacco from her pouch in front of Dan. She lit sage and held it in front of her, burning it and wafting the smoke toward him.

  “Alecia, shamans are very powerful, and they know how to channel energy, but it’s their choice whether that power is used for good or evil, and it takes one to recognize one. This man before you was born with that power, but he was born into a family shrouded in darkness, so he channels only that. Shamans are able to communicate with and command spirits. Those who choose to become shamans are not as powerful as those who are recruited and trained. Shamans travel through spiritual realms and should only act to benefit communities.” She flicked her hand toward Dan. “This shaman he speaks of was powerful enough to detect what he’s been doing, to see the darkness of the spirits he’s been using for his own benefit, out of greed, selfishness, everything that isn’t love. He is practicing black magic, which is easy and requires little effort.”

  Harriet didn’t look at Dan but over his shoulder, instead. “Kind of turned your entire universe upside down, didn’t he? What was easy for you, focusing that bad energy, is all messed up now, backfiring on you, working against you. Things are coming undone. Money’s jammed up, and you have problems in business, with your personal life, yet you still don’t get it. You�
��re to cleanse yourself of the evil that you brought into this life with you. I see you for what you are, for what you chose. You’ve had generations to master your power with no interference, but no more. We are now in a time where balance will be brought back to the universe. I must ask you to leave.”

  “Now, hang on a second, Harriet. I want to know more about what he saw of Brian, and I just bet he knows where that monster went.” Patrick had been quiet, listening as his wife spoke, until now.

  Dan glanced at Harriet, maybe for permission. Alecia wasn’t sure what to do, as she hadn’t seen this side of her mother before.

  “I don’t know where he went. He ran, and I heard a car squealing away. I didn’t see him when I left.”

  “A man who runs before the police get there has something to hide. So what is it, boy?”

  Dan flinched when Patrick barked, and he shook his head, this time backing away and hurrying to the path.

  Alecia didn’t know what to make of it, but her mother did, as she turned to Alecia and said, “You forgive too easily. He was counting on that.”

  Chapter 15

  Alecia lay down on the pullout sofa when they returned to her motel room, relinquishing the very comfortable king-size bed in the bedroom to her parents. Her mother was resting there now.

  Alecia ached, which was most likely why she was so tired, as it was hard to relax, let alone fall asleep, when she wasn’t comfortable. Her head throbbed, too, but she didn’t want to take anything. She could, of course, ask her mother to go down and get her some aspirin, but she realized that maybe she needed the pain to remind her of what she’d allowed into her life.