He placed the spoon back in the bowl and looked from one to the other of us as if trying to figure us out. “According to her history, Jane appeared from the woods. My sister disappeared in a snowstorm, many years past. We are long-lived. Her body was never recovered. Why would Jane not have a long-lost brother?”
“Because she’s a lot older than she looks.”
“Alex?” This was not a topic of conversation I had expected to be having. This was my most personal information and Alex was on the verge of giving it all away. I put down my spoon, again sick at my stomach. Though the food, and maybe the OTCs, had helped my headache some, the pain wasn’t gone, and nausea was one of the symptoms I suffered with the migraine-like agony.
Alex didn’t look at me. “I mean, dude, she looks maybe twenty-five, but she’s old. She could be thirty.”
I wanted to laugh. He sounded like a typical teen, though he was twenty now himself and growing up. Mostly. And he was, not so subtly, pumping Ayatas.
“If we are siblings,” Ayatas said, picking up his spoon again without looking my way, “then Jane is much older than twenty-five.”
The words hung on the air for a dozen heartbeats. The odd emotions welled up in me again, a vortex of feelings that swirled together. Things like,I’m not alone. The People still exist.They came for me.Finally.Finally.Finally. Mixed with the hope and the fear and the unanticipated possibilities was a wash of anger and suspicion. Why now? Why did you wait so long? Only to use me? Is the skinwalker—the one who taught me to kill my first man and who pushed me into the snow to live or die—still alive? Is my mother still alive? I had posited that the skinwalker gene was X-linked, like with witches, passing on the mother’s X chromosome. I had assumed that I’d gotten the gene from my father, passed down from his mother, but for Ayatas to be a skinwalker, and my full-blooded brother, my mother had to be a skinwalker too, since any brother would have gotten his only X chromosome from her.
I shoved down on all the emotions, useless passions that were obscuring the rational, reasonable parts of me, the parts that might let me find my way through the maelstrom. It was unlikely that any of my family were alive. A demon calledKalona Ayeliskiclaimed to have sucked the blood of a woman I remembered only asUni Lisi, a term of respect meaning Grandmother of Many Children, and possibly actually my own grandmother or great-grandmother. The demon had been one of theSunnayi Edahi, the invisible nightgoers in Cherokee tradition. The demon claimed to have killed the grandmother who had taught me to kill. I had believed that the woman I remembered as Grandmother was dead. But demons weren’t known for telling the truth.
“Like, how much older?” Alex asked. “Jane’s a woman. Women don’t like to talk about their ages.”
I might have laughed or rolled my eyes, but this was deadly serious, vitally important, and my headache was still pretty bad. Eye rolling was out.
“I’m telling you my history, my deepest, most personal story.” He looked at me now, his golden eyes intense beneath hawk-wing brows. He pushed away the fruit cobbler and bent his elbows on the table, his fingers interlaced. Long fingers, very slender. Familiar. I clenched my fists together beneath the table. I didn’t know the PsyLED cop who claimed kinship, but he seemed quiet, wary, contained, as if holding down emotional reactions until he could deal with them later, privately. Almost shooting me, a future confrontation with his boss about that attempted shooting, had to be weighing heavily on him, yet there was nothing of that in his demeanor.
“I’m telling you this because I hope you are my sister and there is no way to prove or disprove that hope unless I share everything with you. Things I have not discussed with anyone in decades.”
I nodded, that peculiar,Tsalagichin jut of affirmation.
“I was born on theNunna Daul Tsuny.The Trail of Tears.”
No one was eating. No one was even breathing.
“My mother told me that my five-year-old sister had been killed by soldiers after she attacked one of them with a knife. It was the lie they told the soldiers to keep them from searching for her. I learned later that my sister had attacked a man who raped a Cherokee woman, and grievously wounded him. The leader of our clan had forced my skinwalker sister into the form of a bobcat and drove her into the snow to save her from the soldiers.” He knew too much. He knew things I didn’t. Or claimed things.
But... it fit. It all fit.
“Who was the leader of your clan?” I asked, my words as soft as a speaker of The People.
“She goes by the name Hayalasti Sixmankiller.”
It was an interesting choice of names he fed me. Hayalasti was one of the Cherokee names for “knife.” If Hayalasti was the woman I knew so long ago, then I had been present for the deaths of two of the six men she killed.
“I just call herUni Lisi,” he added and smiled. “She scared me to death when I was a child.” He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and placed it on the table between us. “Call her. She is still alive. She and a small group of her family and clan moved back to the Appalachian Mountains about seventy years ago.”
Still alive... Small group of her family and clan...
I smiled, a twitch of my lips. I took a breath that moved air over my tongue, through my nose, filled my parched lungs. He scented of the truth. Yet, though everything this man said could be truth, and would fulfill the deepest unrecognized longings of my heart, nothing—absolutely nothing—could be proven. What he thought was truth could be lies he believed. “My... our mother? Human or skinwalker?”
His face fell into a vision of dour grief, old but potent. “Our mother was skinwalker-born, though she lacked the ability to shift and therefore aged as a human. She died while I was in the West. She was seventy-five years old, in good health, but one morning she simply did not wake.” He seemed about to say more, but fell silent.
I looked at Eli and Alex, who were watching me. Kindness on their faces. Kindness that made tears prick my lids. I pushed away from the table without touching the cell. “Eat your cobbler. Leo will be up at dusk. Alex has sent an official request to bring a visitor. For now, I’m getting some sleep.” Looking at Eli, I communicated a lot of things in one glance before going to my room, where I stripped and fell onto my bed. I didn’t expect to sleep, but I did, dreams like a vortex of head pain and possibilities and half-recalled bloody memories.
My hand holding the crosshatched hilt of a knife. Bloody. Blood everywhere. Just like my entire life.
• • •
I laid out the slim black pants, black jacket, and white silk men’s-style dress shirt on the bed. Added a silk scarf and black dancing shoes. The straps over the instep gave me excellent balance in case of unexpected attack, and the heels gave me an extra three inches over my six feet in height. With my weapons, I’d look lean, mean, and scary.It was what Madame Melisende, Modiste du les Mithrans, my business and formal clothes designer, called dangerous business dressy, meaning it had slits, fake pockets, and loops, for weapons. I took a fast shower, pulled my hair up, and braided it into a fighting queue, so tight it made my head ache, but in a different way from the headache before my nap. I stuck silver and ash wood stakes into the braided topknot bun like a deadly crown. Satisfied that the hair was less of a weapon than it otherwise could be, I started dressing.
I strapped on a sleek harness around my waist, slightly to the right, inserting a tiny Walther PK .380 handgun into the soft leather holster. Kydex was nice, but not if I had to sit with the weapon cutting into me. The small gun would be easily available to me through the right pocket slit in my pants, and with a shirt that belled out around me slightly, and the scarf hanging to my hips, no one would ever know the gun was there. Scarves were dangerous in a fight and I didn’t wear them, but this one had caught my eye, gold and silver and copper silk. Onto the same waist harness, I strapped two blade sheaths and secured them to my upper thighs for right- and/or left-hand extraction. Into the sheaths, I secured short-bladed, silver-plated vamp-killers with six-inch blades. I pulled on and adjusted a brand-new tactical sports bra with built-in dual underarm holsters for the matching HK45s. I adjusted the cant of each weapon and made sure there were no rounds in the chambers, even at the expense of the time I’d use to ready the weapons in the event of a firefight. I might not start a small war, but I could finish one—unless I shot myself in the boob. That hadda hurt. So, safety first.
I pulled on the outer clothes and slid bare feet into my dancing shoes, securing the clasps. I looked like a businesswoman. No weapons visible. The men’s shirt appeared to have buttons but was closed with hidden snaps that I could rip through in a heartbeat to get to the H&Ks. Sometimes speed of draw is less of a factor than appearing to be unarmed.
