Trail of Lightning

Chapter 14

Their voices keep me company as I work. There’s a gentle songlike quality to their conversation, and the sound flows through my tiny trailer, filling the space. I only half listen, and not to their words, but to the rhythm of the talking itself.

I look around the kitchen. I’ve been on my own for so long that it takes me a moment to think about what I can possibly make them to eat. I usually eat standing over the sink, and the food I eat is cheap and convenient. Dried meat. A handful of nuts. Things that come in cans that I can open with a pocketknife and heat in a single pot. Again, remnants of a life with Neizghání despite being without him for the better part of a year. But now I need, no, I want to make a meal.

I’m not much of a cook. In fact, my natural lack of homemaking skills scandalized my nalí when I was young. But even I can heat up some canned beans and make frybread. I find a can of diced chiles and toss it in with the beans. Next comes a little lard, scooped in a flat pan to melt. I unfold the towel that I keep my soft lump of dough in. I mixed it before I got the message to go to Lukachukai, so it’s still good. I dip my hands in the flour and pound out three pieces of dough pat-a-cake style, the slapping sound bringing back memories of my nalí’s kitchen and the daily ritual of making bread.

My nalí. She raised me herself, just the two of us living in a trailer not unlike the one I live in now, up along the isolated pine ridge above Fort Defiance. She was a good woman, not overly warm or loving, but she made sure I was fed and clothed and she got me to school every day. My grandmother didn’t deserve what happened to her, what happened to us, on that winter night all those years ago.

I can’t say why the memory rushes back with the force it does. I’m good at keeping it locked away. Maybe it was Tah’s careless mention of my childhood, maybe Coyote’s crude prodding at the ugly facts, and maybe the truth was that any time I get the least bit comfortable and let my guard down, it’s there, waiting for me, and it always will be.

The blood.

I remember there was so much blood.

Rivers of it, lakes of crimson soaking into the cheap carpet around my grandmother’s broken body. She’s wearing her bathrobe, a fuzzy blue-and-white Walmart bargain find that I keep trying to get her to throw away. She insists it’s fine for an old woman, and teases me for being vain for preferring my pink velour sweatpants, also last season from Walmart, but certainly more fashionable than her baggy thing.

We are sitting on the couch watching an old Western. We don’t often run the generator just to watch videos, but we’re celebrating. It’s my sixteenth birthday. We’ve even made cake.

On the screen a proper white lady in a bonnet and hoop dress is asking the beleaguered hero with a star pinned to his chest for help against the Comanche Indians. I make some crack about the ridiculous braided wigs the “Indian” actors are wearing, and my grandmother hushes me, not wanting my sixteen-year-old cynicism to ruin her good time.

We both flinch at the unexpected hammering on the door. Short on its heels comes the hooting and laughter and the pounding on the walls outside. Somewhere a coyote yips wildly, its own eerie laughter. Faces glimpsed and then lost through the windows, flickering in and out like firelight. Around and around, and we realize they’re circling us. At least half a dozen of them, maybe more, dancing around our trailer like movie Indians circling the wagon, but we’re all Diné here, and for a minute we can’t figure out what’s going on.

We stare at each other, stunned helpless in our confusion and panic. Slow terror creeps up my neck, cold whispers licking at my ears. I sit there uselessly. Until my grandma yells at me to get the shotgun. She keeps one by her bed. In the other room.

But by then it’s too late.

The door bursts open, ushering in the February air and the evil that rides behind it.

I catch a glimpse of the yee naaldlshii witch wearing the wolf skin and dead man’s jewelry before his pack of followers is through the door, flowing around him like an uncontained tide.

I sprint for the gun. Hear my grandmother’s voice rise in shrill indignation. And then the terrible sound of impact as something cracks across her skull.

There’s a heaviness on my back, and I’m falling, tackled from behind. My chest hits the floor. Air whooshes from my lungs. The taste of chemicals fills my mouth as my head is shoved into the carpet. A fleshy hand scrapes across my face, smelling like burned pig fat. I bite, drawing blood. A man screams and lets go.

A chance to run, and I fight with all I have, scrambling on hands and knees to get away. Until a booted foot smashes me to the ground. Strong fingers massage the back of my head, almost a loving caress through my hair at first, and then he grabs a fistful and slams my face into the floor. Again, again. Pain explodes behind my eyes, blood flows where I bite through my tongue. He doesn’t stop until I lie still.

My vision begins to fail under the onslaught of agony. I force my eyes to focus long enough to see the witch’s face peer down at me. He’s wearing a wolf’s head on top of his own, the jaw gaping at his forehead and the boneless arms hanging down past his ears. The witch’s eyes are a pale gray and his teeth, as he smiles at me, are rotted and yellow.

His face disappears as the edges of my world close in and everything goes black.

I wake. For a moment, I think I must be dead. But my mouth still tastes like ammonia and blood. And there are voices, arguing. The witch and his men. My head throbs in blacks and purples and the words they speak are too fast for me to follow. Strange words I don’t recognize. No. There’s one. Ná’á’ah. The Navajo word for butchering.

And I know why they’ve come. What they plan to do. And that the fat I smelled on the man’s hands wasn’t pig fat at all.

Another voice. My grandmother. I dare to open my eyes, and at first all I see is the dizzy swirl of snow through the open door, the pale landscape bled white and cold. Then my grandmother speaks again, this time a low desperate begging. A scrambling noise, grunts and shouts, and the popping sound of a fist striking jawbone. My grandmother silenced. I hear a new noise and can’t figure it out. Until I do. The sound of rope against wheel, as they string my grandmother from the ceiling.

Sudden hands on me. I’m hauled to my feet. The earth careens, unsteady. Blood drips from my nose, my lips. I swallow and taste my own death.

The witch shoves something at me. Forces my fingers tight around it. He steps back, diseased eyes never leaving mine. Points at my nalí and then mimes a sharp cut across her throat. He whispers one word. Mercy.

My hand shakes. I drop the knife. Someone laughs, a sound like the hooting of an owl. The witch shakes his head in mock disappointment. It’s a joke to him. It’s all a joke.

The punch to my gut comes so fast all I feel is the dull nausea afterward. Tears flood my eyes.

A braver girl, a smarter girl, would fight. Would take that knife and use it against the witch. Find a way to kill them all and save her grandmother. Be the hero. But I’m not that girl. I’m slow and dumb and can’t even hold a knife in my shivering hand.

I drop to the ground when they release my arms. Lay my head down in the wet carpet. The sticky sweetness of my own vomit coats my cheek as I lie there, silent, and listen as they butcher my grandmother for meat.

When it is my turn to die, I don’t resist. They rouse me from the pool of sick on the floor. Loop the cord around my hands so they can hang me up.

A sound outside.

The witch pauses, rope still loose around my wrists. He turns toward the door. We all do. A noise, faint at first, the wind through the shattered windows. A kiss of cold touches my face, a whisper of words in my ear. A song I’ve never heard, but the melody is sweet like the taste of blood, the descant as bright as new steel. It wakes me from my stupor, clears my mind in a skull that no longer aches.

It strengthens the resolve of a will that was once broken.

Hardens a heart that was once soft.

And I see.

The dull glint of dirty silver around the witch’s neck. The red lake that laps at my toes. The hard killing metal of the butchering knife lying momentarily forgotten on the floor next to their abomination of fresh meat.

And I move.

The first one is easy to kill. The rope in my hands wraps around his neck, and the butchering knife dances in my hand, and the man is dead before I even realize I am in motion. That I’ve done it at all. Silence, the others so stunned that they only turn and stare at the girl who moments ago was a lamb willing to be led to the slaughter.

And then the quiet breaks.

Shouts, as the fragile men move in slow motion around me. I see their actions, the path their bodies will follow before they do. And I am there, making sure they never move again. Even the spray of blood from the witch’s throat seems to spatter my face in slow motion, and I watch, pleased, as his gray eyes go dim.

I can’t say what awakened my clan powers in that moment, before I knew these powers existed, before it was known among the Diné that such a thing could happen. I sometimes wonder if it was the ghostly kiss I felt from the wind, and whether it was the wind that touched me at all. Or something more. Something, or someone, else. That showed me just how terrible I could be.

I’m not sure how many I’ve killed when I feel the first tug of my clan power fading, like the ebb of an ocean tide. The massive adrenaline rush I’m riding falls away too, leaving my hands shaking and me suddenly straining against an all-consuming exhaustion.

I search the trailer, wild-eyed, reeling and terrified that I have not killed them all and now my body is failing and it will be too late. But I only see dead men on the ground, smell their loosed bowels and coppery blood mingling with that of my dead grandmother.

My shoulders sag and a sob flies from my lips.

Until I see him.

He is huge, broad and tall, and he bends his back to fit through the front door of our trailer. He carries a sword made of white fire.

At first I think he is one of them. Then I see his wings. Wings that aren’t wings at all but hair so long and black that it seems to take flight as it flares out around him. He is terrible and beautiful and there is nothing human about him. I understand. He is a demon, come to punish me for the horrors I’ve committed.

But I won’t let him take me. I won’t make that mistake again. I stumble backward. Slip in a pool of blood and viscera. With my last ounce of strength I raise my knife in front of me, grasping it with both hands to keep it steady, praying for one more miracle.

And the demon smiles.

He tells me his name is Naayéé’ Neizghání and he is honored to have been there at my rebirth. He calls me “Chíníbaá’,” a traditional Diné name that means “girl who comes out fighting.” He thanks me for killing the witch and his three men, as they are the very monsters he’s been tracking for days.

I only killed four? I ask him.

He laughs. Are not four lives in one day enough?

In the grasp of the clan powers it felt like more. But no, he killed two who fled, and left the leader and three others for me.

Mercy, I tell him. Whisper it to him through a hideous bloody smile and gritted teeth. Whisper it again. And again. Until I fall, shattered, into his arms and he carries me away from that trailer and back to his camp. He leaves me to wash the blood of my enemies from my skin. He feeds me. He explains to me that I am touched by death now and that it’s changed me, but I can heal if I have the proper ceremonies and allow the seasons to pass.

I never go back to my grandmother’s house, to that trailer on the ridge. There is nothing there for me. With Neizghání, I have something, even if it is born from blood and violence. He agrees to train me, teach me how to fight, how to use weapons and track slyer creatures than the first ones I killed.

I never have those ceremonies to take the touch of death away from my spirit, but the seasons do pass. In time the wounds of that night begin to scab over, and as long as I don’t pick at the memories, as long as I only use them to fuel my savagery and lock them away in the dark places inside me when I am done, I’m okay.

And it becomes a life. My life. Hunting monsters for trade and learning the ways of violence at the feet of a master. It is a life that I can endure, even sometimes enjoy.

Until Neizghání leaves. And I am left alone to hunt the monsters by myself, both the visible kind that steal away little girls to eat their flesh, and the invisible kind that live under the skin, eating at the little girl from inside.