She Returns from War

FIFTEEN



A frown passed over the woman's face. Somewhere nearby, skulking beneath the faint moonlight, she could feel a presence. Like her, it was at once human and inhuman, but it was not ant'iihnii. Closing her eyes, she slipped her skin and rose above the ruined city. Yes, there was a new creature in the desert, one she had never before encountered.

The woman shaped her aura and extended it toward the presence. Black as burnt wood, the channel of energy stretched out over the desert. The creature took notice of it, and the woman filled its heart with a desire to seek her out. Once the seed of thought had taken root, she returned to her body and waited.

She did not need to wait long. As the creature approached, she could feel its intense hunger, its desire to feed on her, but she did not fear it. Not here, in this ancient place once inhabited by the ancestral enemies of her people. Here, the veil between worlds was thin; the ruins hummed with spiritual power. Other Dine feared and shunned this place, calling it dangerous and evil, but to her, it was a place of power.

When the monster stepped into view across the remains of the kiva, she opened her eyes. It looked like a man, but its eyes burned with an inhuman radiance.

"Stay, demon," she said in the American tongue.

The figure halted.

"What do you want of me?" she asked.

"Your blood," the demon replied.

"You will not have it," the woman said.

The demon snarled at her. In response, the woman bent her will around it, testing the strength of its mind. Finding it weak, she smiled again. This creature could be of use.

"You will help me."

The blue eyes flickered with hesitation for only a moment. "How?"

"We are both creatures of the night," the woman said, her own eyes gleaming red. "There is a woman who lives near this place. She hunts those such as us. I must kill her, and you will help me."

"A woman hunter?" the demon asked. "Just so happens I'm looking for one, myself. Yours got a name?"

The woman felt anger flowing from the creature in great dark waves. Perhaps controlling him would be easier than she thought.

Her elation was short-lived, vanishing beneath an unexpected shadow of regret. How would her father look at her if he knew what she was? The daughter of a singer, now a skin-walker and companion of demons. Could she make him believe that it was for the protection of all Dine that she did these things? Surely the warrior spirit in him would admire her bravery and determination to right the wrongs done to them. Yet all she could see at that moment were his eyes, filled with disappointment.

The demon was waiting for her answer.

She drew herself up to her full height and looked into his eyes. "Her name is Cora Oglesby."

The ground dropped away as Victoria rushed upward. The air whistled around her, but she could not feel its chill. She spun around, ecstatic in the giddy weightlessness, the absolute freedom. Her eyes drank in the view, marveling at how the world changed when one saw it from the sky. The rational aristocrat in her mind still insisted it was a dream. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't; she no longer cared.

She wanted to continue sailing through the sky, a hawk drifting effortlessly on the night air, but time was short. Taking herself in hand, she turned her gaze eastward, down the cliff and on toward the horizon. A panic filled her when she realized she felt nothing in that direction. No familiar sense of darkness, no ominous shadow on her mind. She waited for a few minutes, hoping that the sensation would come to her in time. When it didn't, her heart sank. How had she done it before? It wasn't through any conscious act that she could remember, but she had believed it all to be a dream then, acting with the carefree trust that comes naturally in dreams. If only she could recover that same instinct.

Perhaps she was too high up. She swooped toward the earth, picturing herself as a bird with wings swept backward in a graceful dive. The ground rose to meet her. Banking this way and that, she skimmed along just above the tallest bushes. Whimsy guided her course as she lost herself again in the wondrous sensations.

Mesas, dark and brooding, loomed against the horizon ahead. Below her, the ground swelled and receded like ocean waves as she flew over dry riverbeds and small, rolling hills. She wondered how others with this gift, the Navajo spirit walkers mentioned by the old Indian, ever thought of returning to themselves. The spirit world was so free, so invigorating and limitless. She never wanted to trap herself in her small, confined prison of a body again.

Her body.

The thought halted her carefree flight beneath the stars. What was her body doing without her? She imagined it slumped in the saddle as if asleep, perhaps drooling out of drooped lips. If a wild animal, one of the many creatures she had heard calling and screaming and laughing in the night, came upon her like that, would she realize it? Would she know to return to her body in time to save herself? If she didn't, the animals could very well kill her body and leave her stranded, a nomad of the spirit world. The idea washed over her like cold water on naked flesh. Despite her earlier wish, she found herself not at all eager to learn what such an existence would be like.

Victoria's worry blossomed into full-blown panic when she realized she no longer knew where her body was. She may very well have traveled miles from the small cliff where she and Cora parted ways. The desert landscape, now barely discernible in the advancing gloom of the night, offered her no clues. Desperate, she began zipping to and fro, hoping for something - a prominent rock formation or odd-looking hill - to jump out at her as a familiar sight.

So great was her panic that she did not notice the creeping shadow on her mind at first. When it finally caught her attention, she dismissed it as a product of her own mounting fear. It burrowed deeper into her awareness, pricking and poking at her mind like a grain of sand in her undergarments. Finally pulling her mind away from her frantic search, Victoria paused to consider the growing sensation. It only took her a moment to recognize it. A thrill of excitement and fear ran through her. It was the skin-walker's aura; she was certain of it.

The dark energy flowed out from beneath the approaching night to the east. It would be easy enough to follow, but Victoria had to find her way back to her body first. Shutting the skin-walker's power out of her mind, she envisioned her own aura as a sphere around herself. She willed the sphere to expand, to envelop the landscape beneath her. The radiating power from the witch became a visible stream in her mind, but she turned her attention away from it, stretching her energy westward.

After a few minutes, her growing alarm broke her concentration. Maybe the Navajo spirit walkers could navigate the world in such a manner, but she didn't seem to have the power herself, and now she would be forever trapped in the spirit world. Worse, the skin-walker might find her in this state and devise some method of torturing or enslaving her spirit. The singer had been vague on what sort of interactions could happen between spirits, but Victoria's imagination was more than willing to supply various outcomes, all of them terrifying.

The skin-walker's ripples of energy abruptly changed. They became waves, large and full of purpose. Victoria could sense them closing in on her like the jaws of an animal trap. She dove for the desert floor, hoping to somehow hide herself from the witch's awareness. Pressing herself as close to a large rock as she could, she watched and waited.

Above her, the waves began forming a narrow cone of darkness against the evening sky. They swept through the space she had just occupied like an animal sniffing after some escaped prey. Had her spirit needed breath, she surely would have been holding it. She didn't know what she would do if the skin-walker discovered her. Flee, most likely, but to where? The desert's endless march of shrubs and rocks had already defeated her sense of direction; a blind flight through it would destroy any hope she had of finding her body again. If only she could stumble upon that same instinctive reflex that transported her back in an instant during her last journey. Somehow, though, she figured it wouldn't work if she was expecting it to, much like a kettle refusing to boil until she looked away.

Giving herself a mental shake, Victoria pulled upon the rational side of herself that even now insisted that she was only dreaming. Her body was somewhere west of her, and the skin-walker was somewhere to the east. She didn't know how far the dark waves - now looming scarcely twenty feet overhead - could reach, but she knew it wasn't forever. Their power had to fade over distance, or she would have sensed them when she first left her body.

Could she risk moving with the skin-walker's attention so close to discovering her? What would happen if that sinister, pulsing energy enveloped her fragile spirit form? Looking upward, she realized that she would soon discover the answer whether she moved or not. The cone of shadow swept back and forth no more than ten feet above her hiding place.

Victoria gathered her resolve, took one last look at the dark predator, and ran.

She felt the attention, the malice, the raw power of the skin-walker descend upon her immediately. The shadow energy filled her vision, swirling like the murky trails of a fever dream. Unbearable heat swept through her. She fled before it, hoping that the witch could not take a spirit form herself and pursue her. For all she knew, her damnation had been guaranteed when she first made her move, and it was only a matter of time before she was overrun and devoured. The skin-walker had no doubt mastered more than the art of transformation that gave her that name. If an ignorant foreigner like Victoria could walk so easily in the spirit world, her enemy must know every path and every crevice it contained.

The desert flora whisked by beneath her, hardy plants dozing in the cool of the evening. Stars grew brighter in the sky as Victoria's vision began to clear. Soon, the burning sensation faded to a dull heat, and even that vanished over the next ridge. Relief washed through her in its place, but she dared not stop just yet. Even if the witch's power was fading, Victoria wanted to put as much distance between the two of them as she could.

Finally, when the lights of Albuquerque became visible on the horizon, she allowed herself to stop. The cone of darkness had faded into the night behind her along with any sensation of the skin-walker's awareness. Even better, she could see the route she and Cora had taken out of town, meaning she could find her body again. Assuming she had a body to return to, anyway.

Finding it was even easier than Victoria expected. It sat slumped in the saddle just as she expected. She took a moment to marvel at seeing her own body from this perspective. If she didn't know better, she would have taken herself for a man at first glance, some young American frontiersman searching for his fortune among the lawless towns and endless horizons. Mounted on his trusty steed like some time-displaced knight from the court of King Arthur, he rode forth with a gun on his hip and a swagger in his stride. How her parents would have started to see her dressed in such a fashion.

Victoria laughed at the thought, then jerked her head upright. The laughter came from her own lips. Blinking in surprise, she lifted her hands for inspection. Somehow, without intending to do so, she had slipped back into her body in the midst of her musing. She stretched her arms toward the stars with a groan. Her joints were stiff and cold, and she massaged life back into them with her fingers.

The cliff still blocked her way. Rubbing her eyes, she peered to either side, looking for the shortest way down. To her right, the cliff stretched on for several hundred yards before arching back westward. The opposite direction saw it slope gently downward for some distance before meeting the ground below. That seemed the more likely route, so she turned her mare left and tapped her heels into the animal's ribs. The mare responded with a shake of its mane as it began plodding forward. Victoria's legs ached with the motion, but she gritted her teeth and shifted her weight in the saddle.

The daylight had waned to nothing but a thin yellow ribbon on the western horizon. Victoria looked at it as she rode, wishing for a moment that she had followed Cora back to town. The hunter was undoubtedly planted at one of her tables, a jug of whiskey within easy reach, fleecing some local cowboys for their month's wages. Victoria wondered if she'd gotten into another fight and if she'd survived it with all of her parts intact.

Reaching the bottom of the slope, she turned her mare eastward and eased her into a trot. The night was young, but she didn't know how many miles she had to cover before reaching her destination or what she would find there. If it was only the skin-walker and her vampire accomplice, she would consider herself lucky. Her satchel rested against the horse's flank, and she reached for it with one hand to reassure herself it was still there. It contained the special weapons - holy water and sacred ash - that she would need to overcome her foes. Much too late, she remembered she had given some of the ashes to her erstwhile companion before they rode out that evening. Nothing could be done about it now. She would just have to pray that her remaining supply would be enough.

The grip of Cora's revolver lightly pressed into her belly as the horse moved beneath her. Alone and inexperienced though she was, she was as ready for the coming battle as she could be. Her will was set: she would not turn back or give up until she defeated them or they killed her.

Behind her, standing at the edge of the cliff, a shadow watched her ride into the gathering night.