Tex, the dogs, and Koun wandered toward the house and whatever little miracles Deon had provided.
Kojo and Thema came closer. Kojo asked softly, “You do not try to capture and ride the arcenciels? Throughout the ages, all Mithrans and Naturaleza have tried to capture them in crystals and ride the past and the future.”
“I don’t believe in slavery. And time travel is dangerous in ways no living being can guess at.” I knew. I’d done it without trapping arcenciels, had gotten cancer from it, and had made some mistakes I couldn’t correct. Ever.
The two looked at each other and back to me. Without another word, they glided into the night with that disconcerting snake-like vamp grace.
Alex and I stood alone, almost eye to eye. He was taller, leaner, more muscular. And he was shaving. He had a moustache and a chin beard. I hadn’t noticed. “Hey, Kid,” I said. “What’s up?”
“We got the DNA results back from Dr.Northern at the lab. Can we talk? Privately? Just us two?”
Something odd tickled at the back of my heart, as if something had wrapped around it. “Sure. My rooms?”
“No. Let’s go for a ride around the block. No vamp ears to listen in.”
CHAPTER 15
Kickstart the Old Bastardized Panhead Harley
Alex led the way through the house and to an SUV that was idling at the curb. He got in the driver’s seat, which felt all kinds of odd, accepted the fob from the human standing there, and waited for me to get into the passenger seat. He pulled into traffic. An SUV was already in front and another eased in behind us. Security for the queen.
I hated it.
Alex drove with excellent precision and confidence, which meant he had likely taken lessons in defensive and offensive driving. But he looked pensive.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m listening.”
He stared into the night, following the security SUV in front, being followed by the SUV in back. Brake lights lit his face through the tinted windshield. “I wasn’t sure what the results meant, even with Dr.Northern’s interpretation, and Eli and I didn’t want them sent out for interpretation or second opinion. We got the doctors Paquet—Solange and Pierre—to look over them. You know. The ones who took over the fanghead funeral home. They’ve lived longenough to have studied a lot of everything, and they explained it to me.”
“Okay.”
“Your DNA and the DNA on your grandmother’s robes is human, but both contain some genetic errors that appear and are reproduced on one or both of the X chromosomes. You might remember that the witch trait passes on genes linked to the X chromosome. Skinwalker genes pass through in the same manner. Aya got his Y chromosome from your father. Aya got his X chromosome from your mother, and it had a genetic abnormality.”
“My mother couldn’t shift.”
“No. Something about her recessive genes, though she was from a skinwalker bloodline. Anyway, your mother married your dad, a man with an X chromosome that had abnormalities too, though different abnormalities from her own. Through marriage to your mother, your father became a part of the Panther Clan.”
“But they weren’t of the same exact bloodline or clan.”
“Correct. I posit that the woman you know as grandmother has tracked the bloodlines and made sure that people with the proper traits married out of clan, and then their children, later on in the line, married back into the Panther Clan or were adopted into the clan.
“You got your skinwalker X chromosome from your father and it was in bad shape; you got your mother’s normal-ish X. Ayatas got your mother’s abnormal X, with different replications. So you and Ayatas started out with very different replications. Your original DNA, tested from before the rift and the cancer, has more replications than Aya’s does. Four times the number.”
“Is that bad?”
He made a turn and skirted Bourbon Street, where the night’s activities were already in full swing. “The abnormality is actually a doubling or tripling of specific genes, and is passed down from generation to generation, but it’s exclusive to one bloodline. So, as I understand it, it’s like this. Two sisters receive their genetic makeup and X chromosomes from the same parents, but the sisters’ X genes might combine differently. One sister might have nearlythe same genetic reproductions as the gene donors, while the other might have multiplied reproductions, say two or four or eight times as many, as the gene sequence”—he waved his right-hand fingers in the air—“mutatesisn’t exactly the right word because all the genes are the same, just way more of them, but it will do. These particular sets of genes don’t transfer like normal genes on the X chromosome, but more like a human mutation called Fragile X. Basically, this means that all skinwalkers are likely to have different powers and different power levels, even within one family, and the way the replicated sequence is passed on is different for each family member.”
My firstTsalagiElder, Aggie OneFeather, had raised the question of clan and my father, so she had known something about genetic lines. “Tangled X chromosomes. Fine. I get that. So why do you look all intense and upset? Wait. You said my DNA frombefore. Then I went into the rift. Is mine the same before and after?”
“No. You have fewer replications than you did.”
I wondered if the extra replications had been responsible for my ability to timewalk. And the magical cancer. And if the current replications were making my shifting unreliable.
He made a left turn and checked his rearview. “The DNA also suggests that aging occurs faster in some lines than others. And aging is the prime cause for becomingu’tlun’ta.”
“Did Ka age more rapidly than me, and therefore that made her becomeu’tlun’tasooner? Will I age more rapidly now that I’ve been through the rift? Or maybe stop aging?” I looked down at myself. When I came back from the rift, I looked eighteen. I still did.
“We need Ka’s DNA to compare, but I’m thinking your DNA was repaired more than we thought during your trip through the rift.” His tone said there was more.
