I had worn flip-flops last time too, though for different reasons, and now the flops splattered rainwater up over me even as more rain fell through the pine needles. The trail snaked through the trees to the edge of the muddy bayou, though the water was much higher now, drowning the roots of the trees, and it moved faster than I remembered. I finally took off my flops and carried them.
We stopped and my stomach cramped with the memory of what was to come.
Aggie hung her black cloth bag from a branch above a stump and peeled off the lid from a coffeehouse travel mug. Steam curled out into the cold, winterlike air as she set it on the stump beside a small freezer bag containing a bit of native tobacco, harder and harder to find these days. She gave neither to me.
The smell in the cup was different from what I remembered. It still smelled like boiled tree limbs and lichen and pinesap, but now it also contained something more bitter. I remembered the odor and the effects of it from my last time in the sweathouse. Peyote.
Aggie opened a small thermos and poured some of the contents into the plastic thermos cup, giving it to her mother, who guzzled it down and moved into the trees. Aggie drank her own dose in a single gulp and made a horrible face. She poured a third cup and handed it to me. “Drink. Purge. Then come back and drink that one, the whole thing.” She pointed at the second mug. “And follow the ritual.”
“Why is this time different?” I asked as her face continued to twist in distaste.
“You take strong medicine now. Drink.” Aggie closed her thermos, put everything back into the black bag, and turned quickly into the trees. Dual sounds of retching moved through the pines. The breeze sprang up, a whipping wind, and I clenched my teeth against their clatter. Big bad vampire hunter not able to take a little chill, when the older women seemed fine? No way.
She hadn’t explained the next part of the ritual, and that was surprising, as carefully as she had kept to the original format. But she had left the travel cups and the small freezer bag on the stump below the branch where her carry bag had hung. I tossed back the first drink, this one exactly like the first time, and ran deeper into the woods, gorge rising with each step. I gagged. Gagged again. I stumbled and fell to my hands and knees as the emetic hit and my previously empty stomach cramped. Everything inside me came up, from my toes to the top of my head. I vomited until I tasted bile, remembering the bitter taste only then. It felt like I was turning inside out, retching hard. All the energy left my body, and I was limp and shaking. I had no idea how I was going to get to my feet again. And I had most of the ritual still to go.
Beast rolled beneath my skin, sick and angry. Jane is stupid kit. Let human shaman give bad things to Jane again. Foolish stupid! Like bad meat. Kit mistake. Foolish. Sick!
I agree, I thought as the herbal drink flushed through me with a roil of vicious cramps. I got to my feet and yanked off my clothing just as the last of the stuff hit bottom and my body rejected the potion, this time from the other end of my digestive tract. Just like last time, it took forever and I was even more sick and weak when it was over. I looked at my legs, arms, and belly and the moonlight-pale scars there. The scars that hadn’t yet healed from the lightning strike. The scars that the lightning had illuminated like some kind of claiming. And there was that word again. Claiming.
In a pouring, drenching rain, I stumbled back to the stump and cleaned myself with the baby wipes in the bag, then put the waste in the garbage bag Aggie had left for me. Quivering with reaction and fatigue, I sat on my folded clothes, the smell of pine sharp and sneezy. I was hollow, tingling, drained. But like last time, the cramps subsided; any hunger I had misted away. The rain eased. Energy flooded back into me. But the cold air struck against my sweat-streaked body and I shivered even as heat flushed through me.
I lifted the second travel mug and drank down its contents. The taste was so bad that I nearly lost it and held the foul stuff down by an effort of will.
Stupid foolish stupid kit! Beast raged inside, her golden eyes glaring at me, her claws digging deep into my brain. Then suddenly she was gone. My mind was clear and lucid and empty of Beast.
CHAPTER 6
Peyote Made Everything Weird
I picked up the smaller plastic bag, opened it, and sniffed the dark brown tobacco, perhaps two teaspoons of curled leaves with a raw, rich scent. Less than last time. I stood and faced east, the sky a deep gray, clouds building. Thunder rumbled, a temblor beneath my feet. The world went brighter, lighter. Thunder grumbled again and this time it didn’t stop, a long, drawn-out sound that lasted a minute or more. When it finally faded, I could see curls of magic around every tree and blade of grass, and purling across the water in the fog that was still rolling in. The magic of the land danced and sparked, amazing iridescent hues of blue and brown and green and yellow, like Mother Nature on drugs, except that I was the one on drugs. The peyote was working. And maybe something stronger.
Taking a pinch of the tobacco in the fingers of my right hand, I thought about what Sabina had said. “Purify yourselves.” Purification was an ancient thing, spiritual and holy and dangerous, but necessary to face hard times, battle, or great danger. War.
I faced east, lifting my fingers through the blue twinkling mist. I didn’t remember what I’d said last time, but it seemed important to keep the ritual similar, as if treading the same sacred ground. “I call on the Almighty, the eternal, the Elohim, the god in three.” I dropped the bit of tobacco and it fell across me, bright red motes on my skin, and an echoing red from inside me.
The motes. The motes the Damours released when I killed them. My goddaughter told me the motes of magic were still inside. As was a dark shadow, poised next to my heart. This was what I needed to purify. This darkness, this remnant of blood magic, this shadow that lived inside me and beat with my own heart. It kept the Damours’ magic alive even when I tried to kill it. I needed to be free of it.
Raindrops splatted onto my skin, hard and punishing for a few moments as I curled around the tobacco, keeping it dry. The raindrops left little droplet-shaped white spots before they trailed down me to the ground, and the spots on my flesh turned red. My breath was heated on the cold air, puffing bright, a sign of life, pink as a baby’s toes.
I turned to my right, facing south. “I call upon my skinwalker father. I call on the skinwalkers who have gone before me, but without the taint and dishonor of u’tlun’ta. Those valiant ones who died in war, with the blood of their enemies in their fangs. Hear me.”
I dropped a bit of the tobacco. It too fell against me, and this time it burned, hot as sparks from an ill-built fire, catching the wind, skirling in the magic of the mist. Rain thundered down, putting out the sparks where they burned, the rain purple and glorious. I laughed and my laughter joined with the rain and fell to dapple the ground. But my breath was brighter, a richer shade, like blood mixed with water.
A stick cracked behind me. My flesh tightened. Shoulders hunched. I was not alone. If I had ever actually been alone before. I didn’t look. I didn’t want to see.
I turned west, holding up a pinch of tobacco, wet in the rain. The drops pelted down, icy as sleet on my bare skin. My feet were black from the mud I stood in, and black mud splattered up my legs like dark tears. I remembered the term Unelenehi, who was the Great One. “I call upon the self-existent, eternal god Yehovah, who is the god who creates.” When I spoke these words, my breath was red, scarlet as the Damours’ magic, and shadowed black with their evil. Evil they had placed inside me and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it . . . or at least not alone.
I had been five at my first kill. I could still see the hilt of the knife in my small hand as the blade pierced the white man’s flesh. I could hear his screams, though his mouth was bound. All this was stored deep in my soul. The dark spot grew, expanded. It beat like my own heart.
I realized that the Damours’ dark magic had combined with the evil done to me by my grandmother when she taught me to kill. Together, they had become something else. Something much more powerful than I had understood. Something that conflicted with the sacred name of the Almighty.
The wind swirled around me and the tobacco was drenched from my fingers to wash down me, across my body. Where it touched, it trailed hot and scalding. Some small part of me knew that the ceremony shouldn’t go like this. Something was wounded and broken in the ritual. Or in me. I had gotten off course. But if I stopped, the black mote of shadow would be forever with me. Endlessly a part of me. And the scarlet motes would eventually destroy me, eating me from the inside out. Like what they were doing inside me each time I bubbled time. They cut me. And I bled.