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. “Notu’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.Edodahad 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 birthNvdayeli Tlivdatsiof 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, lostto our people since theyunegaforced 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 wordsIndian TerritoryandWild 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 mee-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.”
“I am Senior Special Agent Ayatas FireWind of PsyLED, in charge of the states east of the Mississippi.My up-line boss is the newly appointed assistant director in charge of all paranormal investigations. Soul. No last name. You know her.”
I nodded, a single drop of my chin in the tribal way. “How are you classified species-wise with PsyLED?”
PsyLED had once been a human-only law enforcement organization created to deal with paranormal creatures who attacked humans or broke human laws. In the last few years, when it became apparent that humans without heavy artillery were no match for paras, the agency had begun to draw on the paranormal community for agents, whom it classified according to species and gift. They might not know he was skinwalker, but they could read his magical energies with a device called a psy-meter. I knew because I’d been read by the device. There was no hiding paranormal abilities, not anymore.
“You’re well versed in PsyLED internal policies,” he said. When I didn’t reply, he added, “I am an unclassified, noncontagious, non-moon-called shape-shifter. No mention of a Cherokee skinwalker in my dossier.”
Skinwalkers weren’t unknown in the mythos. That had to be willful blindness or the influence of someone in high places. “Go on.”
“I had heard of the woman who killed a sabertooth lion. Had heard rumors of the woman who changed shape into a mountain lion in the car of the Master of the City of New Orleans. I had heard she claimed to be Chelokay. Yet had yellow eyes.”
I nodded, breathing slowly through nose and mouth, letting his scent trace over my tongue. As well as I could tell on such short acquaintance, he was speaking the truth. And Soul had been present when I shifted. So Soul was a likely source of his intel. Had she sent him to me? And if so, why not an official meet-and-greet? Why the personal ambush, followed by a weapon-based one? Had Soul expected this? Allowed it to happen?
“The woman’s name was Jane Yellowrock. My research took time to compile, but once it was together, it all suggested she was like me. Skinwalker.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to respond, but I said nothing.
“I have lived in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Wyoming for decades, in law enforcement, as a teacher, a lawyer.” He frowned slightly. “I joined PsyLED ten years ago, and...” He shrugged, a very Cherokee gesture, lifting the shoulder blades in back, tilting the head, eyebrows quirking just a bit. “They discovered I was a para. They kept me on. And then there was the evidence of you on YouTube. A video of you walking from a cave, injured, your eyes glowing.”
I knew the video he was talking about and gave him the same shrug back. I wasn’t ready to show interest or ask questions. Not yet. Because I knew way more than this guy seemed to think I knew.
