Dark Queen (Jane Yellowrock #12)

“And you didn’t think to share that with any of the people who love you?”

“I’d thought about it. A lot.” But I’d been alone most of my life. I had figured to end it that way. Not knowing what else to say, I shrugged.

Bruiser moved into the room. I let him. Shut the door. Crossed my arms over my chest, knowing I looked defensive. Not able to care.

Bruiser sat on the end of my bed, feet planted, legs splayed, hands clasped loosely between them. He looked at me. Silence and time and a weird sensation of space built between us, though neither of us moved. “Do you want to die?” he asked. When I didn’t answer, he said, “If you want to die, I’ll get on Grégoire’s Bell Huey and leave you to your business. But if you want to live, we have options. Well, one option.”

I frowned at him. “I’m not doing chemo. My RNA and DNA are screwed up. I’ve seen how fast this stuff is growing. How aggressive it is. And I have a feeling chemo might kill what’s left of the healthy cells faster than the cancer.” The cancer was growing in a star-shaped pattern. The Vitruvian Man pattern of my magic. I pressed my middle, feeling the lower points of the star. Magic cancer. Go, me.

“Chemo isn’t on the list.”

“Onorio magic?”

“Onorio magic kills and tames. My magic can’t heal. Not you. Not anyone.”

I frowned harder. “So what’s your plan?”

He shook his head. “Do you want to live or not?”

Tears spilled over. I nodded, the motion jerky. “Yes.”

“With me?”

I nodded again.

Bruiser’s smile appeared, so full of relief and joy that tears prickled at my lids. Gently he said, “Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove, Of golden sands, and crystal brooks, / With silken lines, and silver hooks.” When I frowned harder he laughed and shook his head. Got up and opened the door.

Outside, leaning against the wall opposite, stood Ayatas FireWind. His hair was loose, a silken wave, his body relaxed. “May I enter your house, e-igido?”

I nodded. He entered and stood before me, his feet spread, his body rooted. “Where is the box Eli gave you before you left New Orleans? The box with our father’s medicine pouch in it.”

I lifted the box from the dresser and gave it to him. I wouldn’t need it anymore. Dead people didn’t need mementoes of the past. They were, themselves, mementoes of the past.

“Do you remember the note that said there was something in it if you ever needed it?” Aya asked.

I nodded.

“Did Eli Younger not tell you to open the pouch?”

I nodded. “I didn’t.”

“And do you remember the story I told about the soldier you stabbed on the Trail of Tears?”

I nodded again.

“Uni Lisi instructed me not to tell you this unless you needed to know, or if you asked. You didn’t ask. I would have told you had I known you were sick.” I watched my brother, his face calm, inscrutable as an Elder of the Tsalagi. “When you stabbed the soldier, he hit you very hard. Enough to break bone. To cause you to bleed great amounts of blood.” He opened the box and removed the medicine bag, handling it so carefully that the dry-rotted edges didn’t even dust away. “Uni Lisi put this in your father’s medicine bag that day.”

Gently he pulled out a leaf-wrapped something, the leaf cracking and falling to the floor, desiccated into nothing. Inside was a short length of broken bone and three teeth, a canine, an incisor, and one molar. Whole and complete. Child’s teeth. I blinked. The memory came back to me, a vision of a fist rising to my face. Fast. Powerful. Violent. The sensation of pain exploding through me. A bone-breaking agony that tore through my jaw as the memory forced its way to the surface. My breathing sped up. Then the memory fell away, leaving a place of darkness where it had been only a moment before, bright and vivid. I didn’t speak, staring at the small bit of bone and teeth.

“When you attacked the white man on the Trail of Tears, he hit you,” Aya said. “He knocked out your teeth. Broke out part of your jaw. Uni Lisi gathered it up and kept it, even after she forced you into the bobcat and sent you into the snow.” His golden eyes glinted at me. “They’re your teeth. It’s the only way she could think to convince you who you are. Who I am. She said that you’d remember. That you’d know.”

I remembered, but . . . I also knew the depths of revenge and treachery. Uncertainly I asked, “You’re sure? It’s mine?”

“That is what the Keeper of the Secrets of the Skinwalkers said.”

I accepted the small, fractured length of bone and teeth, holding it on my outstretched hand. Holding a memento of the before times. A piece of myself.

Bruiser asked, “Do you think there might be enough genetic material?”

When I didn’t answer, Bruiser said, “Can you use the genes in these teeth to shift into a healed you?”

I considered them. “I don’t know. I’d likely be five years old. If there was enough viable genetic material to find a pattern.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you can merge the DNA with your own. Clean yours up.”

I looked at Bruiser. And let a small smile onto my face.

“Will you try?” he asked. “I have searched for you all of my life. I don’t want to lose you now.”

“Yes,” I said softly. “I’ll try.”

Relief flashed across his face, like the sun peeking between storm clouds, and quickly gone. “Good. Will you marry me? The Roberes will write up a binding prenuptial agreement to protect your holdings and your status as Dark Queen.”

My throat hurt, but I managed wryly, “It’s immoral, and against the law, even in Alabama, to marry a five-year-old child.”

“If you shift into a child, then I’ll wait until you grow up. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

Aya closed my fingers over the bone and teeth. “I can’t promise anything,” I said. “But I’ll try to heal my body.”

“And you’ll marry me?”

“I will. But not until we see if this thing works,” I said. Bruiser’s face fell. I tucked the teeth and bone back into the medicine bag. Closed it up in the white box.

“So what now?” I asked them. “I’m heading to the mountains, to Robbinsville, North Carolina. I’d planned to shift there and let my Beast wander the mountains.” And maybe track down Uni Lisi, Sixmankiller, the evil woman who had set me on this blood path, and kill her. Didn’t say that.

“We have a Bell Huey waiting in the parking lot,” Bruiser said. “Room enough for us three. And the bikes. Mine is in there already, waiting for Bitsa. You can get to the mountains in style. And fast.”

I nodded, thinking, feeling the paper of the white box in my fingers, the hope inside.

Hate helo-copter, Beast said.

I know, I thought back. But Beast is best hunter. Beast can hunt for a way for me to live.

She thought back at me, The I/we of Beast is not prey. We can find a trail through dense brush that is Jane’s sickness. We can defeat timewalking death.

Yeah. We are. We can. We can do this.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s make this happen.”





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    BLOOD OF THE EARTH

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