Black Arts

CHAPTER 17 Killer Only, Killer Only, Killer

The sweathouse was still hot. Aggie had done an all-day ritual for someone, several someones by the sweat-stink on the air. I had to wonder how much she had left inside herself, drained of the toxins, yes, but also all the minerals that allowed a heart to beat and muscles to contract and expand.

Not choosing one of the log benches, I sat on the clay floor near the circle of stones that marked the fire pit. Heat radiated from the clay and the stones and the old coals. I shivered hard once more, and started to sweat as my body reacted to the change in temp.

From the metal bucket nearby, I took tinder—dry slivers of wood—and used them to brush away the coat of ash on the coals, dropping the curls of cedar into the red heat. The room brightened as the wood caught the flame, and I added more tinder, then larger pieces—stems and twigs. The flames seemed to dance with the shadows along the walls, a dance of day and night, of good and evil, like the dance of light energy and dark energy in physics, moving to an unheard beat. Sweat pearled and trickled down my spine in the heated room. I added a split log of hickory. The flames licked into the wood.

I was surprised that Aggie had let me use her phone. Usually the elder would tell me to put the things of the earth away, to concentrate on my breathing and the emptiness inside me. So I tried to do that now. I blew out my breath, trying to find a calm center in the darkness that swirled through me like a storm.

Aggie One Feather opened the door and slipped inside so fast that the heat didn’t escape. She settled across from me and blew out a breath that sounded both tired and satisfied. “You came. You spoke truth. This is good.”

I shrugged, my drying hair sticking to my sweat-damp skin. I leaned back, my body resting against the log bench.

Aggie swiveled to her side and hit a button, turning on the old boom box. The sound of a tribal flute skirled into the room. “Close your eyes. Breathe, as I have taught you. Slowly. In and out. In . . .” We both inhaled, slowly to a beat of three. “. . . and out.” We exhaled together to a beat of three, syncing our breathing. “In . . . and out. In . . . and out.”

We went through breathing exercises, which were a lot like yoga breathing, and I began to relax. The room darkened as the wood burned down. Outside, I heard a barred owl calling, hooting over the sound of the music. The track changed to drums, soft and slow, and I felt my heart rate slow to match.

My eyes were half-closed when Aggie dropped something on the fire. Bright flame burst out, devouring dried herbs. I breathed in the scents of rosemary and harsh sage and tasted something bitter in the back of my throat. Aggie poured liquid into a wood cup. I didn’t ask what was in it. I drank it down, the bitter substance like gall.

And I remembered the first time I tasted gall. I was standing beside my father, his tall form blocking the sun. Before him were two trees, a length of rough board spanning them, the horizontal surface taller than my head.

“A tsa di,” he said, speaking the language of The People, which, in my memory, I understood as fish, “must be cut fresh, cleaned well, cooked and served quickly, or dried over a smoky fire for winter stew. In cleaning, the gall must be removed whole, not cut with the blade, or the bitter taste will pass through the entire fish and it will be no good to eat. Just as a bitter heart will poison an entire human, so the gall will poison the entire fish. Here. Taste.” He squatted and pressed a yellowish white blob to my lips. The taste spread through my mouth and I spat. Edoda, my father, laughed, the sound filled with tenderness. “As with all things, aquetsi ageyutsa, my daughter, there is both good and bad in the a tsa di.”

“Is there both good and bad with the white man, Edoda?” I asked.

Edoda’s face fell, the long lines pulling in more shadow. He held up the steel knife, the blade kept sharp with the whetstone in the cabin. “Yelasdi made of white man’s steel is good. Yunega himself is not good.”

“Is his god good?”

There was a long silence after my question and Edoda stood to resume cleaning the fish. “His god is not bad. His god understands kindness, taking care of the old and the infirm. His god understands forgiveness. It is Yunega who does not follow the rules of living laid out by his god. Who does not forgive or offer respect to the land that his god said to place under the dominion and care of all people. Yunega thinks that he owns the land and can do what he pleases, when dominion means nothing of ownership.”

“Yunega is stupid?”

Edoda looked over my shoulder and chuckled, a soft burr of his big-cat growling in his voice. “Yunega is very stupid,” he said, but his attention was no longer on me.

I sucked a breath, started to turn to look over my shoulder, and was pulled out of the memory, back into the sweathouse, wondering what my father had seen behind me that made him laugh, made his face change with hardness, made his cat—his preferred animal—come close to the surface. Aggie asked no questions, she just handed me another cup of the vile liquid. And I drank. When the cup was empty, my hand went lax. The cup fell toward the warm clay ground. It fell slowly, as if gravity had forgotten how to pull things to the earth. When it hit, it made a hollow thump, like the sound of a bare heel hitting the ground in a dance.

Jane is killer only, a voice breathed. Jane is killer only.

The words echoed from stone walls, killer only, killer only, killer.

I was standing in a cavern, a familiar place, the place where I first shifted into we sa, my little cat, my bobcat form. But I was grown now, and wearing vamp-hunting leathers, making this a dream, and not memory. Light and warmth danced across the chilled wet stone walls from the fire at my booted feet. The rounded cavern over my head was lost in darkness. The smell of burning wood grew stronger, as did rosemary and the astringent sage. But nothing happened. I realized that my dream state had stalled. I asked, “What would you have me to do, Egini?” Aggie in the language of The People.

“Look around,” her voice said to me. “What do you see?”

“Shadows and firelight.”

“And the silver chain? What does the silver chain do?”

At my feet was a silver chain that hadn’t been there only a moment before, appearing in the way of dreams. And as in the way of dreams, I was no longer in my human form. I was Beast, pelt, killing teeth, and huge paws on the stone floor. The silver chain was clipped around my foot above my paw with a silver clasp, leaves and cougar claws engraved on it. It gleamed in the light.

Tilting my head, I let my eyes follow the chain to the far wall, where shadows were darker still, piled up like cats in a den, against the winter temps. The chain entered the pile of shadows, its other end hidden. I padded across the shadowed floor, the silver chain dragging behind me, my paws silent. As I neared the pile, I made out Leo in the form of a cat, a black African lion, his mane full and commanding. His black eyes watched me as I neared, and he yawned, casually showing me his fangs. The chain went to him, and circled his neck with a loop. One paw was on the chain.

“This is your fear,” Aggie said to me, her voice like the breath of the cave, slow and low. “Being chained. But you are skinwalker. You cannot be chained.”

The cavern changed yet stayed the same. I was sitting now, on the cold floor in front of a different fire. My father’s face loomed over me, half lit by flame, glowing with life and love; half shadowed, as black as death. “Edoda,” I whispered. His eyes were yellow, like mine. Not the black of The People, the chelokay, the tsaligi, but the yellow eyes of the skinwalker.

I struggled up from the cave. I knew this memory. I had lived it before in the sweathouse, and I didn’t need it again. I needed something new. But it pulled me down, into the past.

Edoda smiled and I breathed in his pride with the herbed smoke—stern, yet full of laughter. Uni lisi, grandmother of many children, bent over me, her face crosshatched with life and age, her skin withered and drooping. Her eyes—yellow like mine and Edoda’s—were lively and full of tenderness. “A s di ga,” she murmured. Baby . . .

The fire was harsh with the smoke of dried herbs. Drums were playing.

“We sa,” my father whispered. Bobcat . . .

Time passed. Edoda sat close, his flesh hot in the chill air. Uni lisi sat near him, her fingers tapping on a skin-head drum. The echoes of her fingertips on the skin beat through me, vibrating deep. Touching sinew, bone, heart, and liver. Flowing through my blood. The beat reaching into my blood, my flesh, melding my heartbeat with it.

“A da nv do,” she crooned. Great Spirit . . .

“Follow the drum,” Edoda said.

I looked at the cave wall, at the shadows swaying with exhaustion. The beat of the drum filled me, slow and sonorous, echoing through my soul home.

Warmth settled onto me. Fur tickled me. On the wall of dancing shadows, I saw myself as the cat rested on me, a cured skin, with fur still on, ears pointed, tufts curling out. Pelt brushed my sides. My legs. We sa . . . bobcat. My face. The overlay of cat face, above my own.

Edoda settled a necklace of claws, bones, and fierce teeth over my head onto my shoulders. “Reach inside,” Edoda murmured. “Breathe inside. Into we sa, into the snake within.” The snake of the bobcat, the snake of my first shift, my first change. The snake of the double helix of DNA in the skin of the cat . . . Magic tingled along my sides, into my fingers as I slid down, inside the bobcat pelt. Dreaming. Floating in grayness.

For a moment, I remembered the gray place where Bruiser and the thing that was not Soul, but was like her, fought. I had seen her species playing in the black waters near Chauvin. I remembered the energies and the energy of the blade of steel, wielded by Bruiser. But before I could put it all together, I was pulled back into the memory.

Beneath the drumbeat, I saw the snake resting below the surface, encapsulated in every cell of the hunter cat, in its teeth and bones, in the dried bits of its hardened marrow. A snake, holding all that we sa was. The awareness of where the cat and I differed. Where we were the same. And how easy it would be to shift from my shape into the bobcat. So simple.

As simple as bringing steel with me into the place of the change, as Bruiser had done. This was important. I struggled to fight free of the ancient dream memory, but again it held me. Sucked me down into the past.

My first beast. My first shift. In the memory, I let go. I melted, taking the shape of bobcat. Pain, like spokes of the white man’s wheels, radiated out, cutting me. The shadows on the stone walls merged and glittered, gray and dark and light. All color bled out of the night. The shadow was a young cat with a short stubby tail.

The past and the present merged too. And I understood. If I brought white man’s steel into my cave home, I could cut the silver chain and free Beast from Leo. Freeing her, I could free myself from Leo.

I was back in the dream, the past and the old memories dissolved around me, falling like notes of the flute echoing in the distance through the cavern. In human form, I stood facing the pile of shadows. And I realized that Beast was there too. Tlvdatsi, but more than simply the form of mountain lion. This was the soul of Beast that I had pulled into my soul home when I was in we sa form, and stealing the kill of a bigger cat—when I had stolen both the living body of my attacker and her life-force to save my own life. This was darkest black magic among my people. But I could undo the evil I had done.

I could cut the silver chain. I could free myself from Leo. And I could free Beast. With the same steel blade, I could cut her out of me. Standing in my soul home, I could see how it would be done. Like cutting through the joints of prey, separating us, I could incise her from me, undoing the terrible sin that brought her soul inside with me. I could set her free forever. Forever.

I could be what nature intended—skinwalker. I could silence the second voice that clawed and tore at me, that demanded her way. I could cut her out.

In the dream Beast hissed and bared killing teeth. She said, Jane and tlvdatsi are I/we. Jane and Puma concolor are Beast. Together Jane and Beast are more than Jane or Beast alone.

I studied her, trying to read her body language, trying to understand what she was saying. Her eyes glowed yellow and fierce and her claws extruded, piercing the floor of the niche. Simultaneously, I felt them pierce my mind, painful and cutting, holding me in place like prey. Don’t you want to be free? I asked her, flinching away, only to be caught by the claws and held down.

Freedom is death now, she said, her breath hot on my face. Freedom was lost to me/us long ago. Long before last litter. Long before Jane became human again. Now I alone am no more. We have become we/us, I/we. Together.

We’ve . . . merged, I thought. Become one thing. And if I cut you free anyway?

I will die. And Jane will be killer only. She blinked at me, her eyes closing and reopening slowly. Beast . . . wants to live.

Sucking a breath, I woke. Gasping. Shuddering. And I met Aggie One Feather’s eyes across the dying embers of the fire. “Your eyes glow with pain and excitement,” she said softly. “You have learned something.”

“Yeah. I have.” My eyes burned, as if I had forgotten to blink, and they had dried out. “Yeah,” I said again, breathing as if I had run for miles. If I wanted, I could be a skinwalker only, a shape-changer with only one soul, and no Beast soul, no big-cat fighting to be in charge of my future and my life.

“Do you want to talk about this?” Aggie asked.

“I . . . I want to think about it.” I had never told Aggie about Beast, about the unintentional evil that had bound Beast’s soul with mine. It was the most foul black art, according to my memories of skinwalkers, according to the things I remember Edoda teaching me before he died.

I had been without Beast once before and it hadn’t been fun. It had been difficult, a time when she was lost or hiding somewhere inside me, in the dark places of my soul. It had been troubling and lonely; I had hated the experience of not knowing where she was. Deep within me, Beast said, as if trying to convince me, I/we are better and stronger and faster than Jane is alone. Better than Puma concolor is alone. Better than mountain lion. Better hunter. Better. I/we are more. Beast is more. Angel Hayyel made us even more than we together were before.

Yeah, I thought back. Yeah. I looked at her, at her golden eyes, so like my own. Slowly, I reached out a hand and touched her face. The hair there was smooth and dense, softer underneath, near the skin, thicker and coarser near the surface. I scratched her face, up behind her jaw, and she leaned into me, rubbing her head into my palm. I scratched the base of her ears and stroked down her side, my hand closing on her thick tail, and running its long length. The tail was warmer than I expected. Beast retracted her claws and the headache eased. She released me and I stood, looking into her eyes.

“Water?” Aggie offered, holding out a glass to me. I pulled from the dream that wasn’t a dream and looked at the glass. It looked like clear water, but with Aggie one never knew.

“More drugs?” I asked.

“No. You have sweated out the toxins of hate and troubles. You need liquid to be restored.”

I took the water and drank it down. It tasted wonderful, like mountain spring water, or glacier melt. Fresh and perfect, and I could practically feel my body soaking it up. “More?” I asked, and Aggie refilled the glass from a pitcher. “Thank you, Aggie One Feather, Egini Agayvlge i in the speech of Tsalagi. Thank you for the sweat. For the cleansing. For the memories and the wisdom you share so freely.”

“The memories are your own. Wisdom is there for any who seek.”

“Seek and you shall find?” I paraphrased the Bible.

Aggie smiled slightly. “Yes. Knock and it shall be opened to you. The gift of wisdom can be found, if one wishes to search for it, and is willing to be altered by it. It is not a gift given without cost or transformation, nor one to be used lightly.” Her eyes twinkled for a moment and when she spoke, her words sounded as though she was quoting, though I didn’t recognize it. “Stand in the crossways and look, Jane Yellowrock. Search for the old and ancient pathways. These are the good ways. Walk in them, and find peace and wisdom. This is old philosophy. Ancient teaching.” She shrugged slightly. “I changed them a little. You have done well, Dalonige’i Digadoli. But I sense you have questions.”

“Yeah. One. Earlier, you—or maybe it was your mother—used the term War Woman. And once you called me War Woman. In the history of our people, what does War Woman mean?” At her puzzled look I said, “What were their—our—duties?”

“In Tsalagi society, before the white man changed who we were and are with their God and their ways, women were of great value in the tribe. We owned all property. We farmed and were in charge of all commerce. All arts and crafts. All children. Men were for use in hunting and battle and war and husbands when the winter was cold, and for as long as they amused or satisfied us. But War Women”—I could hear the capitalization of the words, the importance of them—“War Women were more. They were Beloved. Wise. Stern. Gentle. Demanding. They sat on the council of men as equals, voted in council, fought in wars with their husbands, took their husbands’ place in battle if they fell. They were strong. Fierce.”

I nodded, her eyes holding mine. And in her words I saw the promise. The memory. The equality of women in the tribe.

“In war,” Aggie said, her voice going softer, “it was important that the losses in battle be compensated. If warriors of the tribe were killed, no matter if our people won a battle or lost, those warriors had value that had to be replaced in some way. After a battle, the Tsalagi would take the same number of prisoners, scalps, or lives that they lost.”

Aggie paused, watching my face. Even more gently, she said, “Women led in the execution of prisoners. In the torture of prisoners. In the buying and selling of prisoners as slaves to recoup the financial cost of war. In the adoption of prisoners into the tribe. Such was the right and responsibility of women. As mothers. As widows. As warriors in their own right.

“There was no one more fierce than a woman avenging her husband or son.”

I closed my eyes. Understanding. Finally understanding. I felt again the hilt of the knife as my grandmother put it into my hand, too large, hard to hold. I saw the blade, bright gray steel, the same blade Edoda had used on the fish when he gave me gall to taste. I saw my hand as I reached out and made the cut in the white man’s flesh. Watched as he bucked. Heard the strangled sounds he made as my grandmother, a woman of another age, another culture, a War Woman in every way, started to train me for my life’s work—to avenge the losses of the tribe. And then I remembered the feel of the hilt in my hand as I killed Evangelina, her blood a hot flood over me.

Evangelina, who had once been something like a friend, a woman I had always respected. And who had died because she . . . had killed the innocent. Was trying to kill others. Who had broken all the laws of her own kind. No one else could have killed her in time. Had I not acted, many more might have died. I knew that. But my soul still held on to the grief and guilt, because I wanted there to have been something, anything, different that I could have done.

Hot tears coursed down my cheeks. Burning.

I hadn’t forgiven myself for either death. Not yet.

Aggie went on. “Our women celebrated the capture of prisoners. They sang and danced and joined in the torture of their enemies at the stake.” I nodded, closing my eyes, understanding, remembering, and Aggie’s voice softened yet more. “Women had the right,” she insisted, making certain that I heard and understood what my grandmother had been doing when she led me to torture and kill, “and the power to claim prisoners as slaves, or adopt them as family and kin, or condemn them to death, ‘with the wave of a swan’s wing,’ as the old words go. The right.” Her fist struck the clay floor. “And the responsibility. Sometimes . . . ofttimes . . . it sat heavy upon them.”

“Oh,” I said. I opened my eyes and wiped my cheeks, to see Aggie patient, drenched in sweat, her hair plastered and salty. She needed nourishment and electrolytes and water. And I knew that somehow, Aggie One Feather had come to know what I was some time ago, without me saying anything. She had discovered that I was a killer, a rogue-vamp hunter. And she had taken me in anyway, because the duties of a War Woman, a woman of the Cherokee culture, were not so dissimilar to my own. My eyes burned, but my tears had stopped. I was too dry, too empty for crying.

“Ghigau,” Aggie said, and repeated the word again, so I could learn it, “Ghee ga hoo. She was wise and full of knowledge, a person of great respect and value to a clan and to a tribe. War Woman. Beloved. You are all of these things.”

“Maybe not wise,” I said, a hint of humor in the words.

“But learning. Growing. Such things are precursors to wisdom.” Aggie gestured to the door and I led the way, out into the dawn. The air was nippy and the sky overcast with rain clouds. I looked up and a splatter of rain spat over me, icy and sharp, pelting. But the rain stopped, as if the microshower was a promise of more, or maybe a warning. Or maybe Mother Nature was bored and teasing.

Twenty-four hours ago, I had been attacked in the streets of the French Quarter, crashing my poor bike, and running away from a fight with an energy thing. Running away and leaving Bruiser there, wounded and hurt and bleeding, to fight alone. I had run away from people. I had spent the last day and night trying to find myself, and when I did, I was different from what I had always thought, always feared. Not necessarily better, but certainly stronger.

I thought about losing Rick to Paka, to the magic of black-wereleopard heat. To the bristly and powerful magic of the African continent, and the were-taint, and the mating needs that had claimed him. And I smiled, my teeth baring with Beast’s fury.

My mate, Beast thought. Mine!

Oh yeah. Ours, I thought. I could tell by the way he fought against Paka. Not.

But before I could deal with Beast’s claim and Ricky Bo, I needed to go discover what had happened to Bruiser, find Molly and the missing girls, Rachael and Bliss. And make sure that Beast understood that she and I were . . . the I/we of Beast.

Yeah. That.

Deep inside, Beast lifted her head and screamed, the shriek that planted terror in the hearts of the Tsalagi long before the white man came. I/we are Beast, she cried. This is our place! Our hunting grounds! Our mate for as long as we choose him!

I heard a soft sound and turned my head as Aggie stripped off the unbleached linen and balled it up in a plastic container that smelled of other people’s sweat and a little of mold. Naked, she turned on the spigot and stood under it. I had figured out that, to Aggie, being naked in ceremony was not the same thing as being naked in public. Tsalagi had no shame of the human body in ritual.

I stripped and stood beneath the other spigot. And as the water rushed over me, I at last discarded the guilt and the grief. I was a lot easier than I had expected. More a thing of letting go, releasing it, rather than cutting something foul out of my soul. I would grieve no more for Evangelina. No more for the death of my first human. No more for the loss of Rick. I was Tsalagi. I was washed in the blood of a redeemer and in the blood of my enemies. And I no longer needed to take back what had been stolen. I dipped my head beneath the rush of water and felt it sluice me clean.

When we both were sweat free, Aggie handed me a towel and I dried off with it, then took another of the linen drapes and shook it out before wrapping it around me. This one was free of spiders, thank goodness.

Aggie looked at me, curiosity on her face. “Where are your clothes?”

“Last time I saw them, on Royal Street.” I met her eyes. “I was attacked by something. It was a coil of energy, like a snake, pulsing with power. It landed on me from overhead, though if it came at me out of the sky or had been waiting on a rooftop, I don’t know. It wrapped around me like a big snake, like an anaconda, and constricted around me. I’ve seen something like it before, but I still don’t know what it is.”

Aggie’s eyebrows nearly met her hairline. “You didn’t think it important to tell me this before I took you to sweat?”

“Do you recognize the thing I’m talking about?”

“Maybe. How did you get away?”

“I changed into my Beast, which should have saved me, but the snake followed me into the place of the change and kept squeezing. George Dumas was there, and he was pulled into the change. I ran away. Or rather my Beast ran away. I don’t remember it.”

Aggie blew out a breath, pursing her lips like a bird’s short, thick beak, wrinkles around her mouth making her look older. “Jane Yellowrock went from telling me nothing to telling me more than I can understand.” She tied the fresh linen around herself with a jerk on the ties, gathered up her clothes, and canted her head, again like a bird, but not the weird bird-neck-twisting thing vamps do. She said, “I can find out what the elders know of such a creature. But it sounds as if you left a battle. You should deal with that first, Jane Yellowrock.”

I let a smile pull up my mouth and it felt weird, the way it did when I hadn’t smiled in a while. “Thanks, Aggie. I will. Um. May I use your phone?”

Aggie chortled and jerked her head at the house. “I smell coffee and bacon. Mama’s up and cooking. You come in. Call your people. Eat. By the time they get here, you will be full and ready to fight any battle you must. And Lisi might have a gift for you, something in that regard.”

Lisi was her mother, and a shaman like Aggie, maybe more powerful and knowledgeable than Aggie herself. But—for reasons I had never been able to articulate—Uni lisi was much more scary. “Oh. Goodie,” I said, meaning Oh, crap, but one did not refuse the gifts of an elder.