“Is his god good?”
There was a long silence after my question and Edoda stood to resume cleaning the fish. “His god is not bad. His god understands kindness, taking care of the old and the infirm. His god understands forgiveness. It is Yunega who does not follow the rules of living laid out by his god. Who does not forgive or offer respect to the land that his god said to place under the dominion and care of all people. Yunega thinks that he owns the land and can do what he pleases, when dominion means nothing of ownership.”
“Yunega is stupid?”
Edoda looked over my shoulder and chuckled, a soft burr of his big-cat growling in his voice. “Yunega is very stupid,” he said, but his attention was no longer on me.
I sucked a breath, started to turn to look over my shoulder, and was pulled out of the memory, back into the sweathouse, wondering what my father had seen behind me that made him laugh, made his face change with hardness, made his cat—his preferred animal—come close to the surface. Aggie asked no questions, she just handed me another cup of the vile liquid. And I drank. When the cup was empty, my hand went lax. The cup fell toward the warm clay ground. It fell slowly, as if gravity had forgotten how to pull things to the earth. When it hit, it made a hollow thump, like the sound of a bare heel hitting the ground in a dance.
Jane is killer only, a voice breathed. Jane is killer only.
The words echoed from stone walls, killer only, killer only, killer.
I was standing in a cavern, a familiar place, the place where I first shifted into we sa, my little cat, my bobcat form. But I was grown now, and wearing vamp-hunting leathers, making this a dream, and not memory. Light and warmth danced across the chilled wet stone walls from the fire at my booted feet. The rounded cavern over my head was lost in darkness. The smell of burning wood grew stronger, as did rosemary and the astringent sage. But nothing happened. I realized that my dream state had stalled. I asked, “What would you have me to do, Egini?” Aggie in the language of The People.
“Look around,” her voice said to me. “What do you see?”
“Shadows and firelight.”
“And the silver chain? What does the silver chain do?”
At my feet was a silver chain that hadn’t been there only a moment before, appearing in the way of dreams. And as in the way of dreams, I was no longer in my human form. I was Beast, pelt, killing teeth, and huge paws on the stone floor. The silver chain was clipped around my foot above my paw with a silver clasp, leaves and cougar claws engraved on it. It gleamed in the light.
Tilting my head, I let my eyes follow the chain to the far wall, where shadows were darker still, piled up like cats in a den, against the winter temps. The chain entered the pile of shadows, its other end hidden. I padded across the shadowed floor, the silver chain dragging behind me, my paws silent. As I neared the pile, I made out Leo in the form of a cat, a black African lion, his mane full and commanding. His black eyes watched me as I neared, and he yawned, casually showing me his fangs. The chain went to him, and circled his neck with a loop. One paw was on the chain.
“This is your fear,” Aggie said to me, her voice like the breath of the cave, slow and low. “Being chained. But you are skinwalker. You cannot be chained.”
The cavern changed yet stayed the same. I was sitting now, on the cold floor in front of a different fire. My father’s face loomed over me, half lit by flame, glowing with life and love; half shadowed, as black as death. “Edoda,” I whispered. His eyes were yellow, like mine. Not the black of The People, the chelokay, the tsaligi, but the yellow eyes of the skinwalker.
I struggled up from the cave. I knew this memory. I had lived it before in the sweathouse, and I didn’t need it again. I needed something new. But it pulled me down, into the past.
Edoda smiled and I breathed in his pride with the herbed smoke—stern, yet full of laughter. Uni lisi, grandmother of many children, bent over me, her face crosshatched with life and age, her skin withered and drooping. Her eyes—yellow like mine and Edoda’s—were lively and full of tenderness. “A s di ga,” she murmured. Baby . . .
The fire was harsh with the smoke of dried herbs. Drums were playing.
“We sa,” my father whispered. Bobcat . . .
Time passed. Edoda sat close, his flesh hot in the chill air. Uni lisi sat near him, her fingers tapping on a skin-head drum. The echoes of her fingertips on the skin beat through me, vibrating deep. Touching sinew, bone, heart, and liver. Flowing through my blood. The beat reaching into my blood, my flesh, melding my heartbeat with it.
“A da nv do,” she crooned. Great Spirit . . .
“Follow the drum,” Edoda said.