Skinwalker

Page 18

“Ummm,” I said, not knowing how to reply.
“Carlos is not a rogue,” Miz A said. “He is safe from retribution. Did you have a nice time last night, dear?”
Tia reached for a cucumber sandwich. “Carlos is a dream. Mr. Leo and Miss Katie say I can be a blood-servant soon, if they get the right offer.”
“Offer?” I said, hearing the edge in my tone.
Miz A patted my hand. “I will explain. Tia,” she said to the girl, “take your coffee and snack upstairs, yes? Miss Jane and I must speak privately.”
“Oh.” Tia nodded sagely, her ringlets bobbing. “Business. I gotcha.” She gathered up a handful of sandwiches and made her way out of the room. The girl glided like a dancer, her big fuzzy slippers sliding on the wood floor. At the door she turned and said, “Thank you for not killing Carlos.” Before I could formulate a reply, she was gone.
“Offer?” I repeated. “Slavery was abolished a long time ago.”
Miz A nodded and topped off my tea. As she poured, she said, “It seems Tia’s parents were unaware of that. They were selling their twelve-year-old daughter out of the trunk of their car.” At my hissed breath, Miz A nodded, her wrinkled face looking grim as she placed another salmon cracker on my plate. “My Katie heard about the girl’s . . . situation. She put an end to it, but it was too late for her proper development. She had been badly scarred, emotionally. Katie has spent a great deal of time and money rehabilitating Tia, and trying to find the right protector for her.” Miz A looked up at me, her black eyes suddenly snapping. “She cannot live alone and she is too sexually aware and vulnerable to simply be set free on the city’s streets. She would end up used, homeless, and destitute. A husband might eventually desert her. A vampire master will provide for and protect her for as long as she lives. She needs only the proper arrangement.”
I had no idea how to respond to that so I ate my pretty little sandwich and didn’t say a word. When I could get away, I thanked Miz A for the tea and snack, jumped the fence, and fired up Bitsa, needing to blow the vamp webs out of my head. What can you say to logic built upon pragmatism and compassion? But it gave me the willies.
I tooled around the Quarter on Bitsa, sniffing things out, finding places where vamps frequented, but not discovering more fresh rogue trace—or maybe rotten rogue trace is the right phrase—even though I motored along last night’s route. Finding my way into the Lake Catouatchie area—which is mostly swamp and infested with mosquitoes, and which Beast had entered off-road along the sick vamp’s trail—wasn’t fun. But I finally caught the distant scent of rogue and tracked it. I ended up on a dead-end, crushed-shell street in the middle of nowhere.
I slowed my bike at the dead end and stopped, putting my feet down, the motor rumbling softly beneath me like a big cat’s purr. The house was small, probably built in the 1950s: a gray, asbestos-shingled house of maybe twelve hundred square feet, with the screened porch I vaguely remembered seeing in the back. It was well kept, with fresh-painted charcoal trim, a new roof, and a garden that smelled of herbs in the midday heat.
In human form, something called to me from the house. Distant memories, things clouded in smoke and fear and blood. And the sound of ceremonial drums. The power of The People. Tsalagiyi. Cherokee, to the white man. Cold prickles raced along my skin. Tsalagiyi was a Cherokee word. I remembered it.
A sweathouse was out back. An elder of The People lived here. And the rogue had hunted here, close, too close. Stalking him? Her? I shivered in the heat, hope and fear crawling through the sweat beading on my skin.
Not quite sure what I intended, I turned off the bike and set the kickstand. Propped the helmet on the seat. I walked up the crushed-shell drive, shells crunching under my feet. In the Carolinas, roads and driveways were coated with gravel when unpaved, and stone was mixed in with asphalt when paving was used. Not much stone in the delta; they used what was handy. Shells. Dim-witted thoughts, my mind steering away from the fact that I was walking up the drive to an elder’s house. I took the steps to the porch, noting only then that the house was on brick pylons, raising it up above hurricane flood line. I pushed the bell. It dinged inside.
I stood in the heat. Waiting. Sweating. Flies and bees buzzing around, the distantly remembered scent of sage and rosemary hanging on the air. And no one came. This is stupid.
I pushed the bell once more as I turned away and was startled when the door opened. I don’t know what I had expected, but the slender, black-haired woman in jeans and a silk tank wasn’t it. She didn’t speak. She just looked at me. My shivers worsened. Time did one of those weird rocking things where the earth seems to move.
“Gi yv ha,” she said, and held open the door.
Come in. . . . She had said, Come in. And I understood her words.
CHAPTER 8
A warrior woman
I sat at her table and she smiled down at me as she handed me a partially frozen Coke, the old-fashioned bottle crusted with ice, ice crystals gathered in the top. The woman was spare and muscular, but older than my first thought. Maybe mid-fifties, maybe older, but not a strand of gray traced through her black hair. Her eyes were full of life, laughter and, oddly, compassion. I took the Coke and drank, and when she offered a plate of cookies still warm from the oven, my shivers dissipated along with my sense of trepidation. How can you stay worried when someone gives you warm chocolate chip cookies? Beast’s hyperalert state was still with me, however, hunched deep within, silent and watchful.
“My name is Aggie One Feather.” She paused. “Egini Agayvlge i, in the speech of The People.”“I’m Jane Yellowrock. Jane”—I took a breath—“Dalonige’i.”
Aggie sat across from me, holding her own Coke. “You know some of the speech.” Her voice was soft, melodious, the gentle voice of dreams and nightmares both.
“I don’t remember much of the old words,” I said, my voice and English grating by comparison. I lowered my volume and tried to find the melody and rhythm of the old speech. “When I hear it, maybe it will come back to me.”
“How may I help you?” she asked, the question similar to the traditional words of the shaman.
Shamans were tribal helpers, there to assist, free of charge, any who asked, whether for healing ceremonies, counsel, or more practical help. I remembered this. I remembered. I looked at my icy hands on the frozen Coke. I had no idea what I was going to say until the words fell from my mouth. “Are there old tales about a creature called a liver-eater?”
“Yes. Several. Why do you ask?”
Shock slithered through me, snakelike. “Because I was hired by a representative of the vamp council to hunt down whatever is killing and eating tourists and cops. I followed it. And according to a very good source, what I saw last night was a liver-eater.” Beast coughed with amusement in the deeps of my mind at the idea of being “a very good source.”
Aggie stiffened. The skin around her eyes tightened, the fine wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deepening. “Why do you think this?”
Because I smelled it? Because I followed it here in cat form? Rather than reply, I said, “The thing I saw looks like a vampire, smells like something rotten, and hunts in the woods and swamp behind your house. I followed it here.” Ah, crap. Yep. That came out of my mouth.
Aggie sat back. “Ahhh,” she breathed, sounding relieved. “I read about the rogue vampire in the newspaper.” She tilted her head, watching me. I tried to interpret her body language and expressions, but they were too swift, too ephemeral. “Why would it come here?”
“It was interested in your sweathouse. It circled it several times.”
“You saw this creature?”
I paused, remembering the scene in the alley, the form bent over the girl’s body. “Yes.”
Aggie watched me as myriad thoughts, speculations, and conclusions raced behind her eyes. I had a bad feeling that I shouldn’t have come here. “What clan are you?” she asked.
The question was unexpected, but the answer was there, instantly, for the first time in more years than I could accurately remember. Surprised, I said, “My father was ani gilogi, Panther Clan.” I caught a fleeting image: a mountain lion pelt and a man’s face. My father . . . An image of shadows on upright logs followed it. I couldn’t tell what the shadows meant, but I knew it was something bad. I said, “My mother was ani sahoni, Blue Holly Clan.”
My shivers worsened and I let go of the frozen bottle, clenching my cold fingers. Other images, senseless fragments of memories, stabbed me. A shadowed cave wall, a vision of snow, a memory of freezing cold. A fire in the center of a wooden longhouse. Drums, softly beating, a four-beat rhythm, the first beat strong. And the smell of sage, sweetgrass, and something harsh like tobacco burning. Beast gathered herself, but not to leap. To watch. To stalk. She had said my past was hidden in the depths of my mind. Now it seemed as if the past was pushing to the surface, like a spring from far underground. Would I finally remember the years I had forgotten? Was I going to remember who and what I was? Breathless, I asked, “You?”
“My mother is ani waya, Wolf Clan, Eastern Cherokee, and my father was Wild Potato Clan, ani godigewi, Western Cherokee.”
Which could be a problem, my unreliable memory told me. Long ago, before the white man gathered us up and sent us into the snow along the trail west, there had been bad feeling between some families of Wolf Clan and Panther Clan. Remembrance of insult and blood feud was often generations long among the Cherokee. Had the conflict been resolved? Clans passed through the matriarchal line, so perhaps the bad blood had been worked through. My memories shouted that there was a problem, but it was all fractured and shattered.
“My great-grandfather was Panther Clan,” she added, as if acknowledging something important. And perhaps it was significant. Tribal relationships were valued by the elders. I remembered that, in the mishmash of my past.
The sound of drums still echoed in the back of my mind, insistent, and the reverberations brought fear. I would dream about this. And it wouldn’t be good.