Ahhhh . . . I thought. The foreign magics cut me. My body then tried to vomit them out of me, tried to free me of the evil motes and the shadows.
My breath went hot and noisy in my lungs, like a roaring sea in a blizzard, a whiteout of clarity and understanding.
I turned right again, now facing north, shuddering so hard I thought I might drop the tobacco pinched in numb fingers. My heart beat erratically, shaking my chest. “I call upon El Shaddai, the all-sufficient one, the feminine of the godhead. El Shaddai, that aspect most often associated with the Holy Spirit, hear my call.” I felt the presence behind me move closer. Colder than a glacier on the flesh of my spine. I hunched my shoulders against the pounding rain.
Beast growled low in my mind, the sound far away; the place where she usually hunched was vacant.
I slid my feet through the mud, rotating back to the east, and scraped the last bit of wet tobacco to the tips of my fingers. I closed my eyes, my body grayish with the cold. I let the pinch of tobacco fall into the rain. “I seek healing of and freedom from the dark shadow that grows within me. I seek the destruction of the purpose of another’s power, that power manifested in scarlet motes that infest me. I seek wisdom to cure my weakness. Strength in battle. Purity of heart and mind and soul.”
The air sizzled. The wet ends of my hair lifted. Terror zapped across me like electric sparks. Rain shattered down. Wind slammed into me like a fist. I nearly fell. Lightning struck. It ignored the trees and hit the center of the bayou only twenty feet away. The brilliance stole all vision from me. All but the vision of magic.
The darkness that lived inside me was close to the surface, the shadow beating with the rhythm of my heart, the scarlet motes zipping through me, painful as barbed wire. But as I watched, the Gray Between opened around me and silver motes of my own magic reached inside me and began . . . herding the scarlet motes. Like prey.
I dropped my arms and slumped forward, following the bright and silver colors of all the motes as they raced through me. My dark silver power moved the scarlet motes into some kind of weird geometric design. They moved from my left fingertips to my right toes, to my head, to my left toes, to my right fingertips, and back to my left fingertips. I held my arms out to the side like Vitruvian Man and . . . the motes formed a pentagram. Holy crap.
Before, they had been unfocused, unstructured power within me, the magic random. Until now. There now was a working, one organized like a witch working—geometric and steady. This ceremony and my skinwalker magics had stirred it all into some different path, some new purpose. I knew that it was possible for a working to take black magic, overcome it in some kind of great battle, and then use it. But it took testing and fire and suffering, and I had endured none of that. Yet the darkness within me was changed.
Memory surfaced, full of blood and terror, my fangs tearing the head off a blood-servant sent to kill me. Memory of being shot by El Diablo, one of Derek’s men, in a bayou. Of shifting into Beast in the back of Leo’s limo. Of nearly dying on the floor of sub-five basement in HQ, after fighting and defeating the Naturaleza vamp De Allyon. Of the first instant I bubbled time. Of achieving the half form of the fighting skinwalker. Maybe . . . Maybe I had been tested all along? Maybe my magic had been waiting until I was whatever I was now to fix me. To fix itself.
Rain again drenched me, black bayou mud splattering up to my knees with the force of the drops landing. My breath came fast. The mist rose around my feet and ankles, up my calves, a pearled shimmer of moisture and magic and peyote dreams, leaving me breathless but exhilarated. I traced the pentagram within me and discovered that my stomach was no longer hurting. My heart felt lighter. Cleaner. My breath blew shades of red, dispersing light from scarlet to fuchsia to palest pink. To crystal clear.
Around me, the world was bright, sharp, each raindrop distinct and glistening and full of magic light.
I gathered all the things we had brought and wove through the trees upstream in the general direction I had taken last time, the earth sucking at my bare feet, water swirling around my ankles, muddy and thick.
The trees opened out at a slow, easy curve of the bayou, a place that had once been a tight twist of water. Smoke blew across me, black and choking, kerosene to start a fire of wet wood. In the center of the tiny clearing, Aggie and her mother were sitting beneath a canvas tent top, one coated with polyvinyl chloride so that the water ran off. The tent was just a covering with no sides, held up by a metal framework. The wind caught the top and billowed it with a hollow, flapping sound.
Aggie and Uni lisi were sitting on flat stones, situated on top of what looked like garden cloth, the kind that let water through but not plants. Like me they were naked, except for small beaded bags hanging on thongs around each neck. Their clothes must have been in the bags beside them. I could see their magic, Aggie One Feather’s a deep, dark lavender, near purple. It should have appeared soft, like a flower, but it was hard and stony, like amethyst. Uni lisi’s was much darker, a purple so deep it looked nearly black, shot through with white light, and the white was crystalline and pointed, sharp, like clear quartz arrowheads. Dangerous. Deadly.
Peyote made everything weird.
The fire smoked and stank and Uni lisi called to me. “Sabina call us and so we got one them young men to set up tent and bring us kerosene and dry wood. Not too dry now but it be okay.”
I realized that I had stopped. I pushed against the earth with the soles of my feet and floated over to them. My own magics floated behind me, silver and red and black and gray in a swirling pointed star. Violent shades of stone and blood. But my breath was clear as purest water in the midday sun.
I took the third sitting stone and settled to its flat surface. Aggie jutted her chin to the green pine boughs and I scattered them in a circle around us. Aggie had called it a protective circle. Witches called it a witch circle. No matter what it was called, circles have power and the pine boughs began to glow a pliable, deep green, the color of emeralds. Aggie put several of the green branches on the fire and wet pine smoke billowed up, black and green and choking, glowing with power. Smoke gathered in the low canopy above and writhed there. Small fingers of smoke and blackness trailed from the tent covering and out into the clearing.
Aggie said, “No evil can cross the circle or enter beneath the scented shelter of smoke. We are warded here, the three of us, against malevolent spirits.”
Uni lisi stood and faced east. The last time I had seen her naked, her skin hung in folds from her arms and thighs, and her rounded belly looked like a deflated balloon. Now she looked decades younger, her power enfolding her, magic meant for battle, for the might of war. She raised her hands to the place on the horizon where the sun would have been had the clouds not eaten it. She pushed apart the clouds and a speck of blue showed through, blue sky and a lance of sunlight on the horizon. She said something in Cherokee, words I should have understood but no longer did.
I decided in that moment that when my job here was done, I would go to North Carolina and the college or university that taught Cherokee. I would learn, and perhaps I would remember.
“This is a good thing,” Uni lisi said. I realized I had spoken aloud and clamped my mouth shut.
Aggie began to speak, a chantlike pulse to her words, the cadence formal, whispered into the mist that grew up around us. The world ducked and rolled with the smoke. Last time, I had placed my palms flat on the ground for balance. This time, I began to rock slightly with the words, back and forth, as her chant rose and fell. Rose and fell like a boat rocking on slow swells of the sea. Through my body the motes coursed, the star-working inside me doing whatever it wanted to, or whatever the Almighty had told it to. If I hadn’t been drugged out of my mind, I’d have been afraid.
Sleet began to fall, beating sporadically on the canvas tent, bouncing on the wet ground, melting in seconds. I had chill bumps all over me, and yet I felt hot, feverish. The fire before me flamed and smoked and my eyes watered as magic stung them. Tears coursed down my cheeks, hot and burning, just like the last time I was here. Everything was the same this time. Except the storm, the cold, the vision of magic, and me. I was different. I was very different. My magic was changing, flowing in a pentagram. Salty, hot tears splashed on my chest. Beast, eyes glowing, moved through the darkness that was the I/we of our two souls. She stared at the pentagram of power for many lines of chanting, then padded into the front of my mind. I knew my eyes were glowing gold when Aggie One Feather faltered in the chant.