She nodded tiredly. “Let us talk about the masks we wear, your cat and my... pride. And anger. And shame.”
***
Two hours later, we stopped and drank a decoction. It wasn’t awful. It was actually pretty good. “Aggie gives metea that tastes like roots and twigs and silt from the bayou.”
“Aggie’s clans are from a different persuasion than mine. Aggie’s clans are from Eastern Cherokee and from Western Cherokee.” She sniffed as if that was a bad thing. “The Western band got mixed up with the Cree, the Choctaw, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw. Their Medicine Men and Elders took too much from other tribes, picking a bit of this and a bit of that. Their ways are not always the same as Eastern Cherokee, and their herbs are not the same. Their medicine is not the same. Besides, you seem capable of inward thought without being drugged.”
I almost said that she sounded prideful about her racial purity, but that was a mountain I didn’t want to climb.
“Tell me about the dragon,” she said.
I tossed back the cup of herbal tea. “There was a moment in my own home, when Gee DiMercy and Soul came to... visit. Kill me. Whatever. When I had first learned to timewalk.”
The memory came to me on the scent of musky soap like something from a brothel. And the smell of Leo Pellissier’s blood. It came in jumbled, overlapping, out-of-order images and smells and sensations, as if I was living them again and had just stabbed Leo. He’d had a silver stake in his belly, bleeding out on my floor in NOLA. Bethany, the not-quite-sane outclan priestess, had tugged the stake out of Leo. It made a gross sucking, grinding sound and black blood bubbled out after it, smelling of silver and death. The nutso priestess held her cut wrist over the open wound and blood dripped in, hers so thick it was almost congealed. Leo still looked dead. The smell of Bruiser’s blood was on the air too. He was badly injured. There were too many vamps in my home, and the ones I halfway trusted were out of action.
An odd prickling sensation had raced over me. I knew that feeling. I was still holding weapons, which I gripped more firmly, staring at the front door. “We got more company coming.L’arcenciel.Coming from thataway.” I pointed down the front street.
Eli had flipped the overturned couch over Alex andBruiser, just as the light, brilliant as the dawning sun, glared in through the broken front door in stained-glass tints, like fireworks, but silent, no pops or sizzling.
A long alligator snout had entered, full of teeth and widened into a frilled head big as a water buffalo. A massive arcenciel, with a flicking black tongue and giant eyes, orange and bright. Her teeth were pearly and the frill on her head white and red. Soul.
Gee DiMercy sank to his knees, mumbling in a language of consonants and hoarse coughing sounds. “Soul?” I asked. “You want to tell us what’s happening?”
Her reply had been like bells ringing in an empty cathedral. “Your magics call to us. We see you in the Grayness Between Worlds. Your magics called the hatchling,” she accused. “She followed you, yet you did not protect her. You allowed her to be taken.”
“I did what?” I hadn’t known there was a hatchling, or that young ones were emotionally unstable, sometimes violent. I hadn’t protected the first hatchling on earth in millennia.
“You did not intend her harm?” Soul had asked, reading my face.
I shook my head.
“We old ones did not know there was a hatchling,” Soul said. “There have been no young ones in over seven thousand years. Now her magic has vanished.”
Gee said, “I will help you to find her and return her to the Waters of Life.”
“Come to me, little bird,” the arcenciel said. “I smell her scent on you. She bit you, yes?” Soul laughed, not unkindly. “Let’s fly together. And you can tell me all you know of the hatchling.” The memory broke up, pulling me back into the sweathouse, leaving me with a sense of something vital slipping away.
Thehatchling. Not Soul’s hatchling. And the hatchling would bereturned to the Waters of Life. The ocean, I had presumed, at the time. But... what if the Waters of Life were the Grayness Between Worlds, as Soul had called them? I needed to talk to Soul.
For now, I told Savannah some of what I knew aboutthe dragons. Knew, not guessed, not ruminated on.The facts, ma’am. Just the facts, a line from an old TV show. I told her nothing about how to trap one or how to ride one. Nothing to bring hope to a woman so guilt-ridden and so needing to alter the past.
The Elder nodded, thoughtful, and changed the subject. “You have been many things in your life. And more than one person. Tell me all the names you have been.”
For Tsalagi, names and titles were often one and the same, so that was a lot of things. I stretched back against the oak seat, and my body crinkled with the movement, pulling and burning in each crack and crevice. My pelt was crusted with salt. I didn’t think pumas sweated, so this was all human sweat. I took a plastic bottle of water from Savannah and put it to my mouth, squeezed it flat, the water going straight down my throat. “I was given the baby name ofWe-saat birth. SometimesGvhe. ThenDalonige’ i Digadoli, Yellowrock Golden Eyes.” I stopped.
“The white man gave you the name of Jane Doe. Later you added Yellowrock, yes?”
I nodded.Dalonige’ i meant gold, the gold dug from the mountains and found in the creeks. The gold the white man wanted so badly that he stole tribal land and sent the tribes west on the Trail of Tears.The yellow eyes because skinwalker irises were yellowish. Neither were traditional or clan names. “And I’ve been Janie and Legs and Leo’s Enforcer and Killer and Dark Queen.”
“If you could rename yourself with any word that best fits who you are now, what would it be?”
Beast is better than Jane alone and puma alone,Beast thought at me.Beast is more. Beast isus.
Ahhhh... ,I thought. “Beast.”
“Beast. There is no Tsalagi word with the exact connotation as the EnglishBeast. A better name might beTlvdatsi,” Savannah suggested, “panther. Since the human part of you is dying.”
I had been a panther for far longer than I had ever been Jane, but that name was not quite right. “Beast,” I said. “Just Beast.”
