I sniffed again and grimaced at the earthy stench of the herbal mixture before tossing it back. I gagged getting it down. The elixir from hell didn't taste any better than it smelled and it wanted to come up faster than it went down. I held it in and ran deeper into the woods. Gorge rising with about-to-die nausea, I fell against a tree. I hated throwing up. It was a crazy way to start something that was supposed to be spiritual. In the children's home the only rituals had been daily Bible study, a required theology course during my high school years, the Lord's Supper on Sunday, and being baptized, which I'd done in a river. Oddly, that had been at dawn too.
Suddenly the emetic hit and I bent over, my empty stomach cramping. I lost liquid. I lost stomach acid. I lost bile so bitter it made my teeth hurt. It felt as if I lost everything I had eaten for the last month until I was retching only air. I was cleaned out down to my toes.
Empty, I spat, getting rid of the last of my stomach contents. This was just gross.
Hunger from the shift was riding me hard and my stomach twisted into a single vicious spasm. As quickly as it began, the spasm and nausea stopped. I stumbled to a clean spot a few feet away and held on to a thin rail of a tree until I could remember to breathe and was able to stand on my own. It had been a whole lot easier just getting baptized.
Beast rolled beneath my skin, sick and angry. Jane let human shaman give . . . She stopped, no words in her Beast vocabulary. Jane ate bad meat. Kit mistake. Foolish. Sick.
Poison. Beast was talking about poison. My skinwalker metabolism began to react again, and my body rejected the potion, this time from the other end of my digestive tract. It took forever. It was awful.
I hung against a tree, pine bark sharp and sorta crinkly under my palms, and breathed as if I had run a long race. I felt hollow and tingly, drained and bare, like an empty room, sound ringing off the barren walls of my soul. I wasn't sure what I was feeling.
Somewhere in the last minutes, Beast had disappeared, leaving my mind vacant and lucid. I rocked, my back against the thin tree. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ankles and along my arms. I held out a hand in the dim light, my skin looking tight and drawn, desiccated. I'm going to water. My housemother at the children's home would throw a hissy fit if she knew.
I bounced the tobacco baggie in my palm as if measuring it. This wasn't a worship service. It was meant to be a physical and psychological cleansing. If I did it at a therapist's office or as part of a high colonic, I wouldn't think twice.
I opened the plastic baggie and sniffed the tobacco inside, the scent unlike most tobacco I'd smelled, being richer, more raw. It was an earthy dark brown, the leaves curled and moist, perhaps a tablespoon altogether. I was supposed to salute the four directions with it.
I faced east, the sky a pale gray there, against the cerulean backdrop of the night. The air was calm and expectant, the quiet marred only by the purl of water nearby. The quiet pressed against me, steady, almost solid.
Taking a pinch of the tobacco in my right fingers, I thought about what Aggie had said. This was supposed to be a ritual to prepare me to fight, a ritual of my own making, not hers. So maybe I could use my own words but Aggie's grasp of the stories and the olden times.
I held the tobacco high, as if greeting the sun, and paused, thinking. I drew on some old Bible studies into the ancient Hebrew names of God. "I call on the Almighty, the Elohim, who are eternal." I let the bit of tobacco fall and a cool chill brushed across me, like an unseen breeze. But nothing moved, the trees around me motionless.
I turned to my right, facing south. "I call upon my ancestors, my skinwalker grandmother, and my father. Hear me." I dropped a bit of the tobacco. A sudden morning wind skirled through, taking the leaves away before they hit the ground, and died as fast as it rose. Cold prickles lifted across my flesh. I resisted the urge to look behind me. But I knew that I wasn't alone. Not anymore.
I turned west, holding up a pinch of tobacco. Aggie had used the name Unelenehi, whom she referred to as the Great One. "I call upon the Great One, god who creates." Again the breeze blew through, harder, stronger, smelling of wet and mold and the soil of the earth, and the tobacco was whipped from my fingers before I could drop it. My breath went hot and noisy in my throat, like a bellows wet with steam.
I turned right again, now facing north, pinching the tobacco in my fingers, my heart rate too fast, thumping erratically. "I call upon the trinity, the sacred number of three." The skin on the back of my neck crawled as I spoke the words, and I hunched my shoulders as the wind swirled past. Beast growled low in my mind, the sound far away; the place where she usually hunched was vacant.
I wasn't sure if I was supposed to complete the circle and didn't remember the instruction from Aggie, but it felt right, so I pivoted back to the east. I gathered up the last bit of tobacco and closed my eyes, my fingertips tingling and cold. I let it fall. "I seek wisdom and strength in battle, and purity of heart and mind and soul." In the distance an owl called, loud and long, the hooting echoing. Nearby another answered, three plaintive notes. Terror like spider legs crawled down my spine, yet there was no reason for fear.