He had not answered my question, instead muddying the emotional waters with insults and turning the table with his own questions. Basic reverse interrogation tactic. Law enforcement tactic. I decided to roll with it for now. “You always shoot unarmed women and ask questions later?”
He looked away at that one. Shoulders tensing in shock. As if just remembering that part.
“In front of witnesses? There were people on the sidewalk.” My tone called him stupid.
His lips were firm and tight. I realized that he didn’t know why he’d tried to kill me. He had reacted on instinct when he smelled me, just like vamps did. Interesting. Last time that happened I nearly had to kill a vamp in Sedona. Time before that I had to threaten Katie and then hurt Leo. “You ever met an u’tlun’ta? They smell like rotted meat.”
His eyes widened in surprise.
Clearly I had hit the nail, and he had never met a liver-eater. I pointed to my chest. “I don’t. I smell like predator. Not pretty flowers like you. Not like dead meat. And I killed the only u’tlun’ta in NOLA.”
“I saw the footage,” he said, no inflection to tell me what he thought about me killing a massive half-human, half–sabertooth lion.
“Uh-huh.” I had still shots. The video was Leo Pellissier’s private in-house security footage. No way should this man have been able to get it. Yet his offhand reply told me he had really seen it. Not good.
Eli placed a mug in front of me. It was really a soup mug, white, with a picture of Santa Claus on it, the dialogue bubble saying, “Jane Takes Care of My Naughty List.” Below that was the body of a dead vampire, staked and his head removed.
The stranger’s eyes took in the mug. “Cup’s a little out of date, isn’t it? You work for the Mithrans now.”
I still killed vamps who got out of line. A lot of vamps. Either his intel was bad or he was being a pain in the butt. I was going for door number two, so I said nothing. Eli placed a tub of Cool Whip on the table and I used the soup spoon to dig out a glob of the white frothy stuff and place it on top of the tea. I added a similar amount of sugar from the restaurant-style pour-decanter and stirred. Eli sat down and placed a cup at his side. Another one with a straw in it went in front of the killer.
“You don’t think I’m going to drink that. It could be poisoned.”
Despite the stabbing headache, which had developed razor edges cutting its way out of the left part of my head and into the middle of my brain, I chuckled softly. Eli gave me a twitch of a smile. We actually had a mug with the words YOU’VE JUST BEEN POISONED in the bottom, so you saw it only after you finished the drink. It was cute.
Eli pulled out a chair and turned it around, sitting, straddling it. He took his own weapon in one hand and his mug in the other and sipped. “We don’t poison. We shoot, stab, cut, slice and dice, eviscerate, disembowel, and decapitate. Sometimes shoot and blow up our enemies. We’ve been known to bury our dead in the swamp. But we don’t poison. Poison is wussy.”
I laughed aloud and drank a gulp of the tea. It was a really good Bombay chai with fresh ginger, strong, and the caffeine might help the headache a bit. The nausea receded. “Now that we’ve laid out the consequences of trying to get feisty again,” I said, “talk.”
The stranger looked at me. His squint was less and his color was almost normal. He leaned in and sipped the coffee through the straw. “If it’s poisoned, it’s good poison,” he said.
I thought about the muscle power of a skinwalker at full strength, and any weak link on the cuffs. “He’s just about healed enough to get free. He’ll be fast. And though you’ve had the hand of Uncle Sam in your training, he could be decades old. He’ll have experience in multiple martial art forms.”
“I’ve sparred with you, Babe. He’s going no place fast, not without a hole in him and leaking a blood trail.” Eli sipped, slouched, seeming relaxed, gun pointed at our violent visitor. “What she said. Talk.”
The man ignored my partner, which showed stupidity on his part, as he studied me. “Not u’tlun’ta? So why do you smell of predator?”
“Talk,” I said, so softly he would have missed it had he been human. “Now.”
His eyes tightened in surprise. For sure he had golden eyes, not black, not eyes of The People, but eyes of a skinwalker. My heart ached. If he was a trap, he was a good one. “I had a speech all prepared,” he said, a swift hint of humor appearing in those golden eyes, “and despite the unfortunate way we have made our acquaintance, I would like to speak the words.”
I nodded. He leaned and sucked up coffee through his straw. Eli sipped. I gulped. Headache eased some more.
The man sat back and tossed a lost strand of hair from his face. It wasn’t a feminine gesture. It stirred a memory in me, one that was tied to the Tsalagi and to my past. A memory of my true youth, before my grandmother had forced me into the shape of the bobcat and cast me into the snow to live or die. That had been on the Trail of Tears. Nunna Daul Tsuny. But the memory was from before that. Just the vision of a man’s long hair being tossed back against a sunset sky.
Then the vision of golden hands braiding that hair before a crackling fire, the strands picking up the light of the comforting flames. My father’s hair. My mother’s hands. Edoda had let no one touch his hair but her. Braiding hair was a spiritual exercise for the Tsalagi, a sharing of power and energy. I had forgotten that. I had let lots of people braid my hair.
The visitor spoke, shattering the memory. “Few people outside of my family know this, and no one in PsyLED except my mentor, who keeps secrets of her own. It isn’t in my PsyLED personnel folder. It isn’t in my records. I’m sharing this with you so you will know I mean it when I say I come to make peace with you. I speak the truth.”
As he talked, the cadence of his speech had changed, the rhythm altering. It was the unconscious linguistic dance of a speaker of The People speaking English.
“I am Cherokee skinwalker,” he said. “I was named at birth Nvdayeli Tlivdatsi of Ani Gilogi, or Nantahala Panther of the Panther Clan. But the name was a thing of sadness, as the Nantahala River was only a memory, lost to our people since the yunega forced the tribal peoples away from their lands to the territories. And since the panthers had been hunted to extinction. It was a name of failure, of loss, a name I hated.”
His eyes were holding mine, trying to read me, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. He shifted and his cuffs clinked softly as he rearranged his position. Eli’s weapon followed, as if anticipating the movement.
“When I grew up, I took the name Ayatas Nvgitsvle, or One Who Dreams of Fire Wind, for the raging fires I saw in my dreams.” His lips were chiseled, sharply defined, the tissue dry and smooth, and they moved in familiar ways when he spoke the Cherokee words of his name. The syllables were murmured, just as they ought to be. “I left home, from the Indian Territory, west of the Mississippi, and out to the Wild West, where I stayed for some years.”
My eyes flew to the man’s at the words Indian Territory and Wild West. Eli centered his weapon on the man’s chest in a two-handed grip. I didn’t have to ask if there was a round in the chamber. The use of the words suggested that the man was far older than expected. Maybe nearly as old as I was and I’d been around some one hundred seventy years, not that I remembered much about the first hundred fifty. He had called me e-igido. That felt important, though I couldn’t say why, the word prying at my mind.
I sipped my tea, but I no longer tasted it. Wild West. Terms of an older man. Manners of an older man. Eyes of an older man, one who had seen too much, lost too much. Ayatas was old. Hope spiraled up again, signaling a desire I had forgotten I ever had. Hope, traitorous and volatile, insubstantial as smoke and as difficult to grasp. Hope was a well-baited trap.
“Let him talk,” I said softly. I slurped again, positioned the tea a little to my side, pushed it away, and leaned in. I had his scent now. I had it when he was calm, had it fearful and angry and full of fight-or-flight pheromones, had him pained. If he lied, I’d detect it in his scent. If my head didn’t explode, that is. “Go on.”