“I’m dying in my human form,” I said, touching my face. It was pelted and slightly numb from the cold. “I was stupid and that stupidity gave me cancer.”
“Stupid or foolish?”
“Probably a lot of both. I’ve spent my life taking chances. That resulted in some spectacular wins and some really bad losses.”
Savannah was opening a packet of dried herbs and said nothing, so I went on.
“My skinwalker magics are my own. My... my totem, what I call my spirit animal, brought magics of her own,” I said, speaking of Beast without naming her. “She is a real and tangible presence inside me.”
Walkingstick didn’t disagree with my words, but I could tell she disagreed in principle. I thought about telling her that I was two-souled but let it go. If she asked, I’d tell. Maybe.
I said, “There are things I can’t talk about, becausethey aren’t my secrets to tell, but suffice it to say, I fought a coven of black magic witches, and their magic... I guess you could say it pierced me. It left a trace of darkness inside me. It’s been there for something like three years. And then, after I met rainbow dragons called arcenciels, I was given the ability to timewalk by an angel of the light, one called Hayyel.”
Savannah paused in pinching out bits of dried herbs and dropping them into a mortar for grinding, her fingers unmoving. “Dragons?” Her voice went up in pitch. “Angel? Timewalk?”
“Yeah. I can stop time. I can move outside of time. But every time I do, every time I did, I ripped my DNA. It’s shredded and doubled. When I look at my genetic structure, instead of a double helix, I see four strands. The magics and cancer that are tangled up in my human middle are in the shape of a star—a witch’s pentagram. I’m a mess. So yeah. I’m dying in my human form. I just discovered that I’m not dying in my half-form or my Beast form, so I’m staying in them for now.”
“The angel... You saw this being? In person? Face-to-face?”
“Yes,Lisi.”
She was silent for a while, adding herbs, but more slowly, and hesitant, as if she had lost her place. I wondered if she was a Christian or a pagan or a... whatever. Angels weren’t necessarily considered real by all religions. She might now think I was concussed or nutso in addition to being a monster. Not a good combo.
“You can movebackin time,” she clarified. Not as if she didn’t believe me, which was odd enough, but in a hopeful tone. Her eyes lifted from her own fingers to my face, hers filled with fear and hope and grief. “You can change things that happened in the past.” Her words were laden with import, with dread and apprehension and agitation.
She saw the answer in my face, and her eyes went wider, then unfocused, her breathing shallow and fast. Her fear morphed into something different, and the scent of excitement erupted from her pores. This woman wouldgo back into the past no matter the cost, if she could save someone, a particular loved one, who had suffered an injury or who had died unexpectedly. I nodded slowly. “There’s a high price for timewalking. And sometimes you only make things worse.”
Savannah dropped her eyes again. Her voice was without emotion when she said, “My daughter was raped by my boyfriend when she was twelve. I killed him. He was white so I went to jail for five years. You... You could go back and stop him.” It was hopeful and desperate.
Pain is a river in her,Beast thought,and anger like a great fire.
“I have the gift,” I said, sighing softly, my nose flaps moving. “But it’s a curse too. I can see the timelines, the possibilities of each course of action. Changing history, even recent history, has negative results, sometimes really bad outcomes. The farther back you go, changing history, the more drastic are the shifts in the timeline. And, not to be selfish, but timewalking is killing me.”
Anger burns her,Beast thought, sounding confused.Man is dead, yet anger still burns her.
That’s called hate,I thought back.And hate is never a single cut by a single blade.
Savannah breathed in and out, the sound hard and full of the tumult Beast sensed. “Aggie said taking you to ceremony would remake me. I didn’t believe her.” She sat back, and I realized she was wearing a shift like mine, having changed while I was trying to drown and freeze my butt off. Now that my nose was warmer, I smelled the smoke of native tobacco and white sage from where she had purified the sweathouse for ceremony. “If...” She stopped, started again. “If you could change the past for my daughter, would you?”
I studied the woman sitting on the floor in front of me. I thought about what I would do to save Angie Baby if she had been the child Savannah described. And then, understanding opened a cold fist in my chest. “If I went back and stopped him, and I told your younger self that you had sent me back to stop him, would you believethat he had tried to hurt her? Or would you get angry and tell me I was crazy and defend him?”
She jerked and whipped back an arm as if she might hit me across the flames of the sacred fire. She stopped, her arm back, her body frozen. Her eyes went wide and then closed. Moisture gathered in her lashes, glistening in the flame light.
“You knew,” I said. “You had an intuition and you ignored it. Or your daughter had complained about him and you ignored her.”
The flames popped and cracked. Savannah’s arm slowly dropped as tears trailed down her cheeks. “Chala hated him. She’d leave the room every time he was around. She was rude to him. And I didn’t listen to her. There were warning signs. But I loved him so much that I ignored them. I wasstupid. I was so...stupid.”
“Been there. Done some stupid,” I said.
“I’m a monster,” she whispered, quoting me. I said nothing and her face hardened. Savannah’s eyes opened. “I should get you another Elder. I’m not ready for this.”
“You could,” I said. “You probably should. Or”—I picked up the flight feather—“we could do this together. Long as you don’t try to hit me again,” I amended.
Savannah stuttered a laugh. “So this is a ceremony of healing for me too?” She reached over and pulled out her eagle feather from her pile of herb packets.“Tail feather,”she said, as if that was a bad thing. “Presumably I’m to be looking into the past while you’re meant to fly into the future.Selu, the corn mother, is laughing her ass off at me.”
Savannah sighed and her body relaxed. She met my eyes. “I can’t change the past. Like you, I can go only forward. Will you walk the Full Circle with me?”
“I will.”
