“Are you fasting?” Aggie asked, again repeating the same sequence of words, like a formula she had memorized.
“Yes. I’m starving.”
“Go get in the car. Our things are already in there. I will getElisi.” She meant her mother, the one I calledUni lisi, which was a term of respect rather than one of endearment.Grandmother of many children, a title used for a tribal or clan elder, one who knew the old stories and had old magic and even older secrets of healing.
I climbed into the Toyota’s backseat, knowing better than to call shotgun. I settled in, buckled in, laid my head back, closed my eyes, and was instantly in that strange almost-sleep where my body felt paralyzed but I was aware of everything: my own breathing, my own heartbeat, the sounds of water pattering onto the car, the permeated smellsof the old women, the puppy, the mean old cat they had adopted, and a strong scent of coffee.
Aggie and her mother got into the car. I heard it turn over and felt the motion as it eased down the road. The wipers squeaked back and forth; rain tapped down softly. That precise sound of tires on wet roads filled the car, soothing, and then we traveled down a series of shell roads, which would be shining bright even in the gray light and rain. The sound of the tires changed as the shells on the roadway became sparser and the roads became progressively less maintained. I knew the moment we veered onto the two-track trail, the car bouncing into and out of potholes and over washboard ruts. I’d been here before.
As the four-by-four Toyota crawled down the ruts, Aggie again explained the ritual of going to water, unconcerned if I was listening or asleep.
In my near dream state, I heard every word, and as she spoke I drifted back into myself, feeling oddly and unexpectedly rested and free of pain. I sat up when she finished, and I stretched and decided that since she had used the same formula this time as last, I should too. “So, we go in the woods, throw up, talk to God, and go for a swim in the bayou that’s full of snakes, nutrias, and alligators.”
Aggie and her mother laughed, the sounds like water rippling over stones. “Thought you was asleep,”Uni lisisaid. “We walk you through the ritual prayers.”
I hadn’t done much praying lately, in or out of church, so maybe this would help me in more ways than I had thought. When I stopped, which wasn’t often, and considered my own soul, which was never unless I had to, it was dusty and dry and scoured by winds. It was also dark as a cavern, and I suddenly worried that no soul should ever be so dark.
“Your vampire priestess, she call us today, before dawn.”Uni lisiwatched me absorb this in the little mirror in the sun visor. I nodded. “She old and powerful. She know you a war woman, so we take you to water as a man, like last time,”Uni lisisaid, returning to the general outlines of the last time we went to water. “After, you will be cleansed inside and out; your spirit will be open and restored. Youwill be ready for battle or pain or difficulty, and you will be without the shadows of the past that darken your soul.”
“We know you worship the Christian god,” Aggie said, again following the same ritual steps as before. “The old beliefs say the Great Creator made us. Some say the Creator still listens to us and some say he is gone, but all say he left three guardians to watch over us.”
I nodded, my hair rubbing loud on the seat back. Cloud-to-cloud lightning brightened the sky, lambent and gentle-looking. Around us fog closed in. Rain splattered the old car.
“In Cherokee ritual, the numbers four and seven are important,”Uni lisisaid. “Four guardians of the four directions, seven when you add in the three guardians left byUnelenehi.Unelenehi, is the Great One. You call on this name when facing east.Seluwas first woman, the corn mother. Her husband, first man, wasKenati. There is also the great female spirit which we callAgisseequa. But going to water is no hard and firm ritual calling on a specific god or a specific spirit. You call on who you want, who you want to lead you, who you want to clean you soul.”
The small Toyota turned into the same pine trees I remembered from before. Aggie braked and turned off the car.Uni lisicontinued the narration. “This not like baptism. This a way to recognize ourTsalagiyiroots and heritage, to call on the past to lead and direct us into the future. It your ritual, the way you pray, the god or spirits you believe in. We done said what we needed to say. Come on. Sun done rose. We late.”
I bowed my head to them and murmured, “Lisi, elder of the People, andUni lisi, grandmother of many children, thank you for taking me to water.” They each nodded regally and left the car for the rain. I peeled myself out of the car and followed them into the woods, flip-flops squelching on the rain-soaked ground.
Aggie’s hair had grown out and both women wore their hair braided, Uni lisi’s down to her hips, the thin white tresses laced with the black of the midnight sky. Their bodies moved with grace and elegance and I felt awkward and noisy in my flops.
I had worn flip-flops last time too, though for differentreasons, 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 thefirst 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
