Blood Cross

CHAPTER 11 Biting things, too small to eat

Strength poured in, filling my veins and arteries, a stunning, exhilarating, arctic force, as potent as the night sky at the top of a frozen mountain. The weakness that had drained me was gone. Power shuddered through me, cold force and might. Though it reminded me of Molly’s magic, it wasn’t witch power, not exactly. It was something else. Something uniquely Bethany, or uniquely shamanistic. Beast panted in my mind, her breath a frozen mist, killing teeth exposed. As if she lay in a powdery snow, she rolled over, cold, cold, cold beneath her, her rough pelt brushing inside my skin, scoring along bones and nerves. Needing to shift, she was pushed close to the change by the rising energies.

As suddenly as she struck, Bethany slipped back from me, her teeth and mouth and hands sliding away, leaving me slumped in my seat, my head rocked against the side window. Slowly, my vision cleared, the dim night sky coming into focus. The waxing moon rested in the limbs of a young oak. City lights glowed in the near distance.

My heartbeat was a wet susurration, a faint movement through me. My skin was tingling, tight and expectant, as if waiting for the next pain or the next pleasure. I took a breath and the night air was damp, muggy, though the Porsche’s air conditioner hummed steadily. I placed my palms on the seat, pushed myself upright, and swallowed gingerly. I touched my neck, finding crusty blood and tight new skin beneath my fingertips. Healed. I felt . . . pretty good. I looked at Bethany and couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

She sat across from me, swiveled at an angle in the seat, her back to the door, her depthless dark eyes on me. No trace of emotion hovered on her face. She didn’t breathe, didn’t move at all. She might have been a black marble statue.

When she moved to draw breath and speak, it was a shock. “You taste of several vampires. And violence. And the wildness of trees and rock and rushing rivers. You are not human and never have been.” Her head cocked to one side, more lizardlike than birdlike. “I do not think I have tasted one such as you, and I have tasted many.” When I didn’t respond except to wrap my fingers around my own throat, she said, “I gave you a bit of my essence. You will be energized, more powerful for a time.”

I swallowed again and forced out the worrying words. “What is essence? Hope you didn’t try to turn me. I don’t want to wake up all dead and fangy.”

Bethany laughed, and her eyes opened wide as if the sound surprised her. When it passed, a small smile rested on her mouth. “Many would choose to be one of us, even with the ten feral years. No. I did not turn you. If I had, you would be in the near-death sleep of the turned. I shared with you a drop of my own essence, not my Mithran essence.”

I thought about that for a moment, remembering the cold power, then guessed, “Shaman? Were you an African shaman?”

“Yes. You know of my world?”

She seemed almost pleased with the thought, and though that wasn’t what I had meant, I agreed. “Um. Some. A little.” I mean, I could pick it out on a map.

Bethany said, “I was shaman of the Odouranth tribe, a peaceful, farming people.” Her face fell, nearly human pain in her expression, and her voice carried the weight of old, dusty pain when she said, “We were destroyed by the Masai, long before they were called Masai, in the mountains of what is now southeastern Africa.”

I blinked and a picture of sere grass, burned huts, bodies on the ground, bloody and hacked, flashed over the backs of my lids and was gone, leaving only the memory of ancient agony and grief. She looked puzzled. “You saw this. This memory, just now. Yes?”

I nodded once, the motion jerky. Her eyes watched me, her face inert. “No one has seen inside my memories in over a century.”

“I saw,” I said. “But I don’t know why or what it meant.”

“Such a sharing was . . . not unpleasant. Shall we see if more such can be shared?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, and she took my silence as indication to go on. “I was considered a woman of great value, and so was captured alive, for my magic. I was given to the son of the conquering chief as a minor wife. And when he died at the next full moon”—her lips moved slowly into a smile, satisfied and unexpected—“I was beaten and sold to a traveling slave merchant who took me to Egypt. There I was sold again, to a Roman, and taken to a new land. The land of the Hebrew.”

Something about the way she said “land of the Hebrew” made me ask, “When? When were you in the land of the Hebrew?”

Sharp bewilderment creased her forehead. “I do not know why I speak to you of this. I have done so only seldom.”

She had already forgotten the shared memory. That lapse was a danger sign of a vamp going old-rogue wacky. When I didn’t reply, she said, “My master was a centurion, part of a legion of soldiers in charge of the destruction of Yerushalayim. Did you know him?”

Yerushalayim, also known as Jerusalem . . . The city was destroyed by the Roman army in AD 70 or so. Did I know him? No, and he’s been dead two thousand years. I didn’t say it. The expression in her eyes made sense now. Rogue. She wasn’t far from going rogue. And she’d had my throat in her fangs. . . . I licked my lips, which were suddenly dry and cracked, and a question fell from them. “Who turned you?”

A little click sounded as her fangs snapped down. Her smile was predatory, as cold and barren as the energies she had shared when she healed me. Slowly, her eyes bled black and her sclera bled scarlet as she vamped out, but the transition was slow, not the eyeblink speed of the others. She seemed in control even as she lost it. Old . . . she was old.

“I was among the first hundred who followed the Sons of Darkness, turned by one who was among the first ten of the Cursed.”

I remembered the term Sons of Darkness mentioned at the party, and that one of them had been contacted by Rafael. I’d also seen the term on a scrap of paper in room 666. She swiveled in the seat, a motion as supple and sinuous as a snake, and put the Porsche into drive. “You are not human. You have been honored to receive my essence and live.” Without another word, her fangs retracted with a soft click, and she pulled out of the alley, around the convenience store, into the street. Moments later she slowed in front of my house and said, “You may leave me.”

I unbuckled, opened the door, and stepped from the car, not ticked off that I’d been dismissed, as I usually was when one of them acted all high-handed. I was satisfied to get away alive. She reached over, pulled the door shut, and the tires ground away from the curb, the car a low throb in the night.

We still didn’t have power and so when I was inside, I lit a single candle, carrying it with me. Filthy, I stripped, tossed the dress into the sink, added soap and water, just in case the dress could be salvaged, and showered off fast. I was almost getting used to the sight of blood rinsing off me and down the drain. Naked, damp hair unbraided and knotted in a ponytail hanging down my back, I dialed Derek Lee. When he answered, I said, “I’m hunting rogue. Want to come?”

His answer was a succinct “Hell yeah.”

“Meet you at your place,” I said, and closed the cell.

When Bitsa and I motored up to his housing unit, Derek and three of his guys were waiting. From the look of them, they were all military or ex-military. Cold, expressionless, ready. They were in jungle camo, boots, and bore a single pair of night-vision goggles. I could smell the steel and gun oil from the street. I didn’t bother to say hi, I just killed the engine, slung a leg over the bike, and kicked the stand down.

“You leaving that nice piece a’ art here?” one of Derek’s guys said.

“Witchy locks. Anyone who touches it gets a shock.”

“What we doing?” Derek asked, moving into the street.

He didn’t introduce his crew; I guessed he didn’t intend me to know their names. Okay by me. Trust had to be earned; it worked both ways. And I was starting out with a lie but there was no help for it. So much for trust. “I want to see if I can track the rogues’ hunting ground, find out if there are any more young ones feeding in the area.” I held up a shard of sharp stone I’d grabbed from the rock garden. “This is spelled. I feel a sort of vibration in the presence of vamps. I can track them with this.” Total lie but it was all I had. I was gonna sniff them out, but I couldn’t say that.

“You leaving it with us when you’re done?” Derek asked.

“Sure. It’ll be nothing but a piece of rock, but you can have it.”

“Onetime spell. Damn witches got no heart,” guy number one said.

Derek lifted a careless one-shouldered shrug of the fighting man. “After you.”

Two hours later I was done. Using the magical rock I had mapped the entire hunting ground of the two young rogues we had killed, and the others killed and beheaded by Derek and his crew. There were no more young feeding in the projects, which relieved my mind, but I had learned nothing new, which was a bummer.

The men followed Bitsa and me out of the projects, threading through the city to vamp headquarters, a cooler full of vamp heads in the backseat of their car. I tried to call ahead, but cell towers, or the erratic power to them, were back down. I pulled up at the front door and unloaded the cooler, surprised at the weight. Vamp heads were heavy. Derek and his soldiers took off, which was still sort of weird, as I knew they worked for Leo.

I rang the bell, and when the same security blood-servant opened it, I handed WWF the cooler. He grunted when he took it and set it on the table inside. “Can I get a check?” I asked.

“Ernestine’s gone home for the night. Call tomorrow.” He opened the cooler and made a face at the smell. I stepped back fast. The dry ice hadn’t done a very good job and the heads were ripe. WWF pulled on latex gloves and inspected the fangs, verified them to be young rogue, and wrote out a receipt. I took it and left, feeling that I hadn’t accomplished a dang thing today.

Wired, unable to sleep, I stripped again, and put the weapons under lock and key so the kids couldn’t find them. Grabbing my puma concolor fetish necklace and my travel pack, I stopped by the kitchen for some warm beef jerky and went out back to the rocks I used for meditation and to shift. I had two hours till dawn and a lot of frustration to burn off.

Yesssss. Hunt, Beast thought at me. I hadn’t hunted in days, and she pressed against my flesh, her pelt abrading me, her claws opening and closing, sharp tips biting into my mind.

Standing on the broken rocks, I pulled the travel pack over my head, adjusted the double chain securing the gold nugget necklace to its proper length, and snapped on the travel pack. Together, they looked like an expensive collar and tote, such as a St. Bernard rescue dog might have carried in the Swiss Alps. I bent over and scraped the gold nugget across the uppermost rock, depositing a thin streak of gold. It was like, well, like a homing beacon, among other things.

Hunt. Kill. Blood and meat. Beast, while always present in the depths of my consciousness, was talking to me as a separate entity now, as a self-aware creature with desires of her own. I looked at the jerky I’d dropped on the ground, knowing she would hate it, but there wasn’t anything I could do, not with the power still off. Besides, Beast needed to roam free for a while, and I needed the more perfect healing that shifting would bring. The drop of Bethany’s essence had kept me alive, and if I had no other experience to compare it to, it would have seemed nearly miraculous. But it wasn’t a substitute for Beast and my own skinwalker magic.

I sat on the boulders, the rock warm beneath me. Mosquitoes swarmed, biting. Beast hissed. Biting things. Too small to eat.

The necklace of the mountain panther—commonly called the mountain lion—was made of the claws, teeth, and small bones of the biggest female panther I had ever seen. The cat had been killed by a rancher in Montana during a legal hunt, the pelt mounted on his living room wall, the bones and teeth sold through a taxidermist. The mountain lion was hunted throughout the Western U.S. but was extinct in the Eastern states, or it had been. Some reports said panthers were making a comeback east of the Mississippi. I could hope. I didn’t have to use the necklace to shift into this creature—unlike other species, the memory of Beast’s form was always a part of me—but it was easier.

I held the necklace and closed my eyes. Relaxed. Listened to the wind. Felt the pull of the moon, growing gravid, nesting the horizon. I listened to the beat of my own heart. Beast rose in me, silent, predatory.

I slowed the functions of my body, my breathing, my heart rate, let my blood pressure drop, my muscles relax, as if I were going to sleep. I lay on the boulder, breasts and belly draping the cool stone in the humid air.

Mind clearing, I sank deep inside, my consciousness falling away, all but the purpose of this hunt. That purpose I set into the lining of my skin, into the deepest parts of my brain, so I wouldn’t lose it when I shifted, when I changed. I dropped lower. Deeper. Into the darkness inside where ancient, nebulous memories swirled in a gray world of shadow, blood, uncertainty. I heard a distant drum, smelled herbed wood smoke, and the night wind on my skin seemed to cool and freshen. As I dropped deeper, memories began to firm, memories that, at all other times, were submerged, both mine and Beast’s, but had been brought closer to the surface by the time in the sweat lodge with Aggie One Feather. Had that been only this morning? It seemed forever ago.

As I had been taught by my father—so long forgotten—I sought the inner snake lying inside the bones and teeth of the necklace, the coiled, curled snake, deep in the cells, in the remains of the marrow. Science had given the snake a name. RNA. DNA. Genetic sequences, specific to each species, each creature. For my people, for skinwalkers, it had always simply been the inner snake, the phrase one of very few things that was certain in my past.

I sank into the marrow hidden in the bones. I took up the snake that rests in the depths of all beasts and I dropped within. Like water flowing in a stream, a whirling current. Like snow rolling down a mountainside gaining momentum, unstoppable. Grayness enveloped me, sparkling with black motes, bright and cold as the world fell away. I slid into the gray place of the change.

My breathing deepened. Heart rate sped up. And my bones . . . slid. Skin rippled. Fur, tawny and gray, brown and tipped with black, sprouted. Pain, like a knife, slid between muscle and bone. My nostrils widened, drawing deep.

Jane fell away. Night was rich with wonderful scents, dancing like trout in stream, each distinct. I panted. Listened—cars, music, the sounds of humans, and the sounds of animals. Hopped from rocks. Sniffed food. Hacked. Old dead, cooked meat. Dead prey. Wanted hunt, to tear flesh from bone. But stomach burned with need. Hunger. I ate.

Belly silent, I stepped to top of rocks, broken and sharp, and leaped to top of tall fence, brick warm and high like limb in sun. Dropped down, to yard on side of house without small dog. Good eating, but Jane says no. Only opossum, deer, nutria, rabbit. Alligator. If I can catch one. Am Big Cat, but gator is big underwater.

Long time later, near sunrise, belly was full of small deer, hooves and bones and not-eat parts on the ground, my heart happy with hunt and blood. With last lick of tongue, groomed paws and face clean, and rolled over on pine needles, paws in air, staring at night sky. Was near shaman’s house. Not shaman from far away, not new shaman who was also vampire, but shaman of Jane’s people. Cherokee shaman. Aggie One Feather. Jane needed to be here. Jane needed shaman, though she did not know it.

Mind of Jane rose, curious. Why? she thought. Why do I need Aggie?

Did not answer. Sometimes Jane was foolish, like when she did not mate, though her body and soul needed a mate. Three males would mate with her. All fast and strong and healthy. But she did not. Curious.

Yawned and rolled to feet, nosed carcass. No good meat left. Satisfied, padded through trees and scrub and along path to shaman’s, careful to step on pine needles piled deep, not on mud, careful to hide tracks. Padded along path where liver-eater had once hidden, checking for his scent. Fading. Liver-eater was true-dead.

Circled sweat house. Shaman’s dogs were asleep on back stoop, snoring. Easy prey, if I was hungry. Looked at sky, dawn not far away. Time to change. Time to let Jane be alpha.

Located good place under tree with low branches. Safe, protected. Lay down on leaves and needles, their scent fresh and strong. Thought of Jane. Human. Found her snake. And shifted. Painpainpain like knives sliding on bone, cutting deep.

In the gray dark of almost dawn, I lay on a bed of pine needles, their sharp ends pricking my bare skin. “Why do I need Aggie?” I asked my other half, my voice raspy, dry, and unused. Deep in my mind, Beast rolled over and closed her eyes. I cleared my throat, said, “Big help you are,” and pushed to my knees. Unclasping the travel pack from my neck, I shook out my clothes—T-shirt, lightweight pants, and flip-flops—and dressed quickly, already smelling bacon and eggs cooking nearby.

Despite the deer Beast had brought down and gorged on, I was still ravenous, the energies used by the shift partially provided by the calories in the protein and fats of the big meal. But it was never enough and I was always hungry after. The smell of breakfast cooking made me salivate.

I pulled my long hair back and tied it in a knot as I walked toward Aggie’s house, hoping she and her mother would still be asleep or looking elsewhere when I exited the woods because I had no explanation of why I was in the park property that bordered theirs. I wasn’t so lucky. They were sitting on the screened porch in the dark of near dawn, the older woman drinking from a mug, and I felt the weight of their curiosity and speculation as I stepped onto the lawn. Aggie stood and opened the screened door. “Have you come to go to water?”

“Um . . . yes.” It seemed safest to agree, though I didn’t really remember what it meant. At the sound of my voice, dogs rose and pitched from the porch, barking. Beast hacked with amusement at the sound before going to sleep in my mind.

“Are you fasting?” Aggie asked.

“Yes. And starving.” And hoping she’d ask me to breakfast. She didn’t.

“Go wait on the front porch. You need to pray and center yourself, and I need to gather my things. Our breakfast can wait.”

I sighed. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get nourishment any time soon. Center myself, she said. Something about that thought raised my hackles, and I didn’t know why. I was centered. I was always centered. Whatever the heck that meant.

Around front, I dropped down on the porch and waited as the sky began to brighten from the darkest blue of night to the bleak charcoal of early dawn. I was hungry and tired and sleepy. And annoyed, not that I’d let Aggie see that.

Faster than I expected, Aggie opened the front door and walked out, no lights on inside, which preserved her night vision. In the dark, she placed a small black cloth bag on the step and sat beside me with a stretch and a yawn, her manner grave, until she met my eyes. Hers took on a twinkle as if she could see the orneriness squirming beneath my skin. I pressed my lips together to keep from saying something crass and she chuckled softly. I wanted to make claws of my hands, but gripped them together around my knees instead, the knuckles white.

Aggie’s expression went from amusement to compassion, which somehow made me madder. And again, I didn’t know why. She patted my clasped hands as if to say, “Take your medicine, little girl. It won’t taste bad,” which surely was a lie. She then began to explain the ritual of going to water, offering explanations on its purpose, and instructing me in my part, as if I was really going to do this.

My aggravation grew until I was grinding my back molars. And I had no idea why I was so irritated. Angry. Whatever. When she paused I said, “So, to put it simply, we throw up, talk to God, and then go for a swim. In a bayou that’s full of all sorts of things. Snakes. Twenty-pound rats. And alligators.”

Aggie laughed, the sound like water burbling over stones, her face creased into smile wrinkles that otherwise didn’t show. “Pretty much. There are ritual prayers, but I can walk you through them.”

I was used to doing my praying in church, but somehow this felt natural too.

“Usually women don’t have to purge,” Aggie continued, “but you are a warrior woman, and my mother and I agree that you must go to water as a man would, at least this first time. After, you will be cleansed inside and out; your spirit will be open, and restored. You will be ready for battle or pain or difficulty, and you will be without the shadows of the past that darken your soul. Come. Sun’s getting ready to rise, and going to water is best done at dawn.” Aggie stood and reached back to the house, opening the door. From the darkness within, an old woman tottered out, Aggie One Feather’s mother. Maybe I was dense, but I hadn’t realized that the older woman would be joining us.

I bowed my head to her and murmured, “U ni lisi, grandmother of many children.” It was a term of greatest respect.

Her hair was braided down to her hips, the thin tresses black as a raven’s wing brightened with rare white strands. She nodded once to me and blinked into the dark, leading the way to the car parked in the yard, a little four-wheel-drive Toyota barely seen in the unlit driveway. Chattering in Cherokee, she climbed into the backseat and buckled herself in, her actions certain and determined. I looked at Aggie, but she was too busy following her ancient mother’s orders to notice my dismay. Now I had two lisi to deal with, and it was clear whose word held sway. Elder Grandmother’s.

Unable to figure out a way to avoid the ritual, and not knowing why I was feeling so stubborn, I climbed in the front passenger seat. Aggie drove us out of the cul-de-sac and down a series of shell roads, white in the dawn light. Unpaved roads in the Delta states were often covered with crushed shell, and the farther we drove, the sparser the shells on the roadway became until we were on a two-track trail, the car bouncing into and out of potholes and over washboard ruts.

She gunned the engine like a wannabe dirt-track racer, skewing around curves between ever-closer trees, the dark world bouncing in the headlights, which didn’t help the state of my nerves or the condition of my hunger. Like the woman in the backseat, who seemed familiar with Aggie’s driving, I held on with both hands while my stomach growled and cramped with hunger and Beast pressed paws into my consciousness, kneading, her way of offering comfort. Why did I need comfort?

The old women laughed and chattered as Aggie drove, including me in the conversation from time to time, mostly instructions about the ritual to come, and I wasn’t certain whether I was growing happier about what we were going to do or more uncomfortable.

“The old beliefs say that a Great Creator made us,” Aggie said as she spun the car around a hundred-twenty-degree curve and back in a graceless swerve. “There was a split in beliefs generations ago, I think influenced by Christians, with some saying the Creator still was listening to us and some saying he had gone back to the Great One, or possibly somewhere creating other worlds, and had left three guardians to watch over us.”

Interesting that they had a trinity too.

“Some talk about these three guardians and some talk about the guardians of the four directions. As for actual names to call on, the major one would be Unelenehi, who is the Great One. It’s also the name for the sun, but according to my grandpa,” she said, taking her eyes from the narrowing road to give me a look that said her grandpa had been an important, knowledgeable, and wise man, “the sun was only a reflection of the Great Light behind it, which was the One. You call on this when facing east. Many people like to call on Selu, who was first woman, the corn mother. Her husband, first man, was Kenati. There was also a great female spirit. I’ve never seen her name written, but it’s pronounced like Ag is see qua.”

Aggie glanced at me, and seemed to catch my discomfort. Her mouth twisted in thought and she slowed, taking a particularly deep bump that cracked my head against the car roof. While I held on and rubbed my head, she and Lisi chatted in Cherokee for a while; then Aggie said to me, “Going to water is not a hard and firm ritual. It isn’t about calling on a specific god or a specific spirit. It is a way of recognizing our roots, our heritage, and calling on the past to lead and direct us into the future. It is as individual as the way you pray, as the god or spirits you believe in. You may adjust it according to your need, and as your god directs.”

She braked, turned off the car, and got out, helping her mother out as well, white shell dust and road dust billowing past. The two women moved into the trees, leaving me sitting there, alone, the engine pinging. We were in a small clearing about half the size of my kitchen, surrounded by thin rails of young pine trees growing so close together they would keep out most wildlife.

Wordless, I opened my door, brushing it against the scrub to the side and closing it only with difficulty. I followed the women, my flip-flops spanking the earth, along a flat trail that snaked through the trees, to the edge of a bayou where the ground became so muddy my thin shoes sucked and pulled against my toes with each step. The water in the bayou channel was brown and muddy from the recent storm, running high, overlapping its banks into the trees. It was very different from the clear streams of the Appalachians, and a sudden gust of homesickness swirled through me like a dust devil.

Chatting to her mother, Aggie hung her black cloth bag from the stub of a broken tree limb and unscrewed the lid on her Thermos. She poured the liquid inside into the plastic cup top; it was hot and black, and it smelled like boiled tree limbs and lichen and pinesap. I wrinkled my nose. Aggie gave the cup to her mother, who guzzled it down and said something that sounded unkind before moving into the trees. “Mother doesn’t like purging like the men have to do. She likes the women’s ritual better, but it must be done.”

From the woods I heard retching and my gorge rose in sympathy. I clasped my arms around my waist. I so did not want to do this.

Aggie poured a second cup and swallowed it in a single gulp before pouring another for me. “There are good reasons why we go to water,” she said, her tone gentle but not soothing me. “When we face war or trouble, or some great decision must be reached, we must be clean inside and out in order for the gods, or God, to talk to us. Drink. Then go into the woods and do what you must.” And this time it was a command. Aggie handed me a small baggie and tapped it. “Native tobacco. Use it like I told you. It’s hard to come by these days. Don’t waste it.” She hurried into the trees, leaving me alone.

. . . War or trouble, or some great decision. Yeah, that kinda spelled out my life right now. I looked at the liquid, black in the darkness.

Beast huffed deep inside. Jane needs this. Beast that is I/ we needs this.

Which is why I don’t want to do it, I thought back. My mental tone sounded stubborn. Whiny. Sorta the way my housemates sounded when I was a teenager and my housemother wanted us all to clean the bathrooms or do laundry. I sighed. That was why I was feeling so antsy. It had been a long time since I had to do something against my will because it was good for me.

I sniffed again and grimaced at the earthy stench of the herbal mixture before tossing it back. I gagged getting it down. The elixir from hell didn’t taste any better than it smelled and it wanted to come up faster than it went down. I held it in and ran deeper into the woods. Gorge rising with about-to-die nausea, I fell against a tree. I hated throwing up. It was a crazy way to start something that was supposed to be spiritual. In the children’s home the only rituals had been daily Bible study, a required theology course during my high school years, the Lord’s Supper on Sunday, and being baptized, which I’d done in a river. Oddly, that had been at dawn too.

Suddenly the emetic hit and I bent over, my empty stomach cramping. I lost liquid. I lost stomach acid. I lost bile so bitter it made my teeth hurt. It felt as if I lost everything I had eaten for the last month until I was retching only air. I was cleaned out down to my toes.

Empty, I spat, getting rid of the last of my stomach contents. This was just gross.

Hunger from the shift was riding me hard and my stomach twisted into a single vicious spasm. As quickly as it began, the spasm and nausea stopped. I stumbled to a clean spot a few feet away and held on to a thin rail of a tree until I could remember to breathe and was able to stand on my own. It had been a whole lot easier just getting baptized.

Beast rolled beneath my skin, sick and angry. Jane let human shaman give . . . She stopped, no words in her Beast vocabulary. Jane ate bad meat. Kit mistake. Foolish. Sick.

Poison. Beast was talking about poison. My skinwalker metabolism began to react again, and my body rejected the potion, this time from the other end of my digestive tract. It took forever. It was awful.

I hung against a tree, pine bark sharp and sorta crinkly under my palms, and breathed as if I had run a long race. I felt hollow and tingly, drained and bare, like an empty room, sound ringing off the barren walls of my soul. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling.

Somewhere in the last minutes, Beast had disappeared, leaving my mind vacant and lucid. I rocked, my back against the thin tree. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ankles and along my arms. I held out a hand in the dim light, my skin looking tight and drawn, desiccated. I’m going to water. My housemother at the children’s home would throw a hissy fit if she knew.

I bounced the tobacco baggie in my palm as if measuring it. This wasn’t a worship service. It was meant to be a physical and psychological cleansing. If I did it at a therapist’s office or as part of a high colonic, I wouldn’t think twice.

I opened the plastic baggie and sniffed the tobacco inside, the scent unlike most tobacco I’d smelled, being richer, more raw. It was an earthy dark brown, the leaves curled and moist, perhaps a tablespoon altogether. I was supposed to salute the four directions with it.

I faced east, the sky a pale gray there, against the cerulean backdrop of the night. The air was calm and expectant, the quiet marred only by the purl of water nearby. The quiet pressed against me, steady, almost solid.

Taking a pinch of the tobacco in my right fingers, I thought about what Aggie had said. This was supposed to be a ritual to prepare me to fight, a ritual of my own making, not hers. So maybe I could use my own words but Aggie’s grasp of the stories and the olden times.

I held the tobacco high, as if greeting the sun, and paused, thinking. I drew on some old Bible studies into the ancient Hebrew names of God. “I call on the Almighty, the Elohim, who are eternal.” I let the bit of tobacco fall and a cool chill brushed across me, like an unseen breeze. But nothing moved, the trees around me motionless.

I turned to my right, facing south. “I call upon my ancestors, my skinwalker grandmother, and my father. Hear me.” I dropped a bit of the tobacco. A sudden morning wind skirled through, taking the leaves away before they hit the ground, and died as fast as it rose. Cold prickles lifted across my flesh. I resisted the urge to look behind me. But I knew that I wasn’t alone. Not anymore.

I turned west, holding up a pinch of tobacco. Aggie had used the name Unelenehi, whom she referred to as the Great One. “I call upon the Great One, god who creates.” Again the breeze blew through, harder, stronger, smelling of wet and mold and the soil of the earth, and the tobacco was whipped from my fingers before I could drop it. My breath went hot and noisy in my throat, like a bellows wet with steam.

I turned right again, now facing north, pinching the tobacco in my fingers, my heart rate too fast, thumping erratically. “I call upon the trinity, the sacred number of three.” The skin on the back of my neck crawled as I spoke the words, and I hunched my shoulders as the wind swirled past. Beast growled low in my mind, the sound far away; the place where she usually hunched was vacant.

I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to complete the circle and didn’t remember the instruction from Aggie, but it felt right, so I pivoted back to the east. I gathered up the last bit of tobacco and closed my eyes, my fingertips tingling and cold. I let it fall. “I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul.” In the distance an owl called, loud and long, the hooting echoing. Nearby another answered, three plaintive notes. Terror like spider legs crawled down my spine, yet there was no reason for fear.

I opened my eyes and looked up into the pine tree tops for the owls. If they were there, they were hidden by the gray light. The spider legs crawled faster and I shivered. I really didn’t like not seeing the owls. Not at all. I closed the baggie and dusted my hands.

My stomach was no longer hurting. My heart felt lighter. Cleaner. The tingly feeling still coursed through me, slightly breathless, but exhilarated now, with something expectant, almost like joy. I wondered for an instant what herbs had been in the herbal emetic, and if they did anything other than empty my stomach.

I snaked through the trees upstream in the general direction Aggie had taken, the earth sucking at my flip-flops as if it wanted to pull me within. The world smelled fresh and new, the clean tang of fresh fish, duck and goose and hawk, the distant reek of skunk; even the mold smelled good if that was possible.

Just as the trees opened out at a sharp curve of the bayou, I caught a whiff of burning pine. In the center of a tiny clearing, Aggie and her mother were sitting on flat stones, naked except for small beaded bags hanging on thongs around each neck. Their clothes were folded neatly beside them. U ni lisi, grandmother of many children, tended a tiny, smokeless fire.

I turned my gaze away, wondering why so many of the Cherokee rituals seemed to involve getting naked. Knowing I was supposed to follow suit, I stripped to the skin and folded my clothes on the far side of the fire beside a third stone that I assumed was mine.

Aggie jutted her chin to the green pine boughs in a pile to the side. Right. I was supposed to pick them up and scatter them in a circle around us. Aggie had called it a protective circle. Trying to bend so I didn’t expose my backside to the two women, I picked up the sap-rich branches, the bark scratching my unprotected skin, and walked clockwise around the fire, dropping a thick layer of the branches in a circle. The sap made my hands sticky but the act of bending and lifting settled my mind. Any lingering self-consciousness was gone by the time I closed the pine bough circle. The faint morning breeze died again and the air went still, heavy with possibility. Waiting.

At a gesture from Aggie, I placed the last of the green boughs on the fire. The scent of pine smoke billowed up; Aggie had said no evil could cross the circle or enter the fragrant smoke; it acted as a ward against malevolent spirits. Finished, I sat, the stone cool beneath me. The old woman stood and faced east. Her skin hung in folds from her arms and thighs, and her rounded belly looked like a half-empty balloon, her breasts heavy and pendulous. But there was strength in her limbs and something quietly powerful about her form as she raised her hands to the rim of sun. As they lifted, yellow light pushed through the tree trunks and touched her face. Warming her. Pine smoke rose and swelled, curling around her, gray in the dawn.

I shivered in the morning light as she began chanting. The language was Cherokee, some of which I remembered, the version older than what Aggie and she spoke, the cadence formal, whispered as much as spoken. I placed my palms flat on the ground for balance as her words brushed over me with the smoke, rising and falling. Rising and falling. The world seemed to undulate beneath my hands like the tides of the ocean, though I knew it didn’t move.

The chill pulled my skin so tight that it ached all over as if I’d jumped into an icy creek. Smoke batted at me, swirling, filling the protective circle. Tears gathered fast in my eyes to fall across my cheeks and splash on my chest. The smoke, I told myself, just the smoke. But the deeps of my mind knew it was something else, something more, and so did my Beast, who hunched deep inside, far back in my consciousness, head on paws, killing teeth hidden.

U ni lisi’s words had a rhythm and life of their own, ancient and powerful and full of the memories of the past. When the chant ended, she dropped her arms. Nothing but the soft susurration of bayou could be heard. The skin of my face was tight with drying salt; fresh tears ran through it, burning.

She opened the beaded bag hanging around her neck. From it, she pulled a tablespoon of the native tobacco and held it in her left hand. With her right, she added other herbs, Aggie calling out their names in English for me. “Sage for cleansing. Sweetgrass for life and joy.”

Aggie’s mother added a final herb, and Aggie didn’t speak its name. Perhaps it didn’t have an English equivalent. Or perhaps it was part of the mysteries of going to water, and no one knew but her. The old woman rolled the herbs all together into a fat cigarlike cylinder and tied it with what looked like hemp string, creating a smudge stick. She held a burning twig from the fire to the smudge stick until the herb tube was lit and smoking. She dropped the twig back to the fire and stood. She handed the smudge stick to Aggie, who took it kneeling, almost as if making obeisance.

With unhurried, circular motions, she smudged the air around her mother. The old woman was silent, her eyes almost closed, her face serene. Slowly she turned, lifting each foot and placing it just so, like a dance or the measured and balletic martial art form of Tai Chi. Her mother held out her own braids and the smoke curled around them like a living snake, touching and spiraling up. It coiled around her legs and back and belly, up over her face, more gentle than a lover’s hand. As the smoke wreathed her, the wrinkles on her face softened; a small half smile touched her lips and she sighed as if some ever-present pain was temporarily gone. When she was satisfied, Lisi sat, eyes closed, seeming to barely breathe.

Aggie held out the stick to me and turned her back. Feeling clumsy, I took the smudge stick and came to my knees, concentrating on the smoke rising on the still air, brushing up her body like the finger of God. She lifted her hair and I held the stick so the smoke passed through it. I turned and she turned, lifting a leg so the smoke could touch the back of her thigh and curl over her buttocks. When every part of her had been blessed by the smudging smoke, she opened her eyes and smiled, though her gaze seemed far away.

With a slow gesture, Aggie indicated her mother, and I gave the old woman the smudge stick. I turned to the side as each of them had and closed my eyes. The smoke was warm, curling up from my ankles, fragrant and rich, and I breathed it in. And turned a half step, then another. Lifting my arms. Moving into the dance of the smoke.

“Hold out your hair, Dalonige i Digadoli.” My whole body shuddered with the words, with hearing them spoken properly, in the whispered syllables of the language of the People, the Cherokee. “Hold out your hair.”

I sobbed once, hard. Tears pouring down my face, I lifted my hair. Aggie’s mother walked slowly around me, the smudge stick rising and falling, the aromatic smoke touching my skin, wisping through my hair, which fell through my fingers in a long veil, over and over again. The smoke curled up my legs, across my stomach. It brushed my back, touching, so delicately, my face, as if tasting my tears. I breathed in the scented smoke, drawing it deep. My lungs trembled. The world spun and steadied. My heart tripped and slowed, finding a rhythm older than human memory. I closed my eyes and breathed. Just breathed. As the water flowed in the bayou nearby, singing a nearly silent, ancient song.

“We sa,” a soft voice whispered. “Time to go, we sa.” Cat. Bobcat. One of my beasts. I heard my name spoken by my father, his voice echoing in my memory, as it had so long ago. I opened my eyes and saw the protective circle was open, and U ni lisi was stepping into the bayou water, Aggie behind her. I followed them to the water’s edge, across a dark, slick, claylike bank, and into the bayou, thick muck pulling at my ankles. The water was clearer here, not as muddy with hurricane runoff, and I could see my feet pressing into the black mire.

I remembered that I was supposed to pray, but the words and ritual prayers Aggie had instructed me were gone from my mind. Unbidden, other words came to my lips. “I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul.” With the words, I bent my knees and sank beneath the water. It closed over me, dark, moving sluggishly on my skin, cool and wet, the womb of the world.

Seven times I rose and sank into the bayou, each time asking my prayer. When I came up the last time, Aggie and Lisi were on the bank, dressing. The sun had risen. And I was empty and light and so . . . free.

I walked through the deep mud, out of the water, and up the muddy, black clay bank. I shook both feet. Looking down, I was amazed that I didn’t seem to have any mud on me. Or maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised at all.

Quickly I dressed. Still silent, we put out the fire with bayou water, stirring the coals until it was cold. Together, in a short line of three, we walked back to the car and drove away.