I pulled the memory of her snake to the surface. I melted into it. Into her. Rock rumbled beneath me. Pain ratcheted along my bones and I gasped. Fell onto the breaking boulder. It split wide. Dumped me to the ground. Knocked out my breath. Jagged rocks tumbled over me.
Stunned and hurting, I lay on the ground, staring at the sky. I was woozy, not sure what had happened, remembering only that I had been Bubo bubo. Hadn’t I? I looked down, proving to myself that I was human. Slowly, the memories came back to me. My stomach growled. I took up the gold nugget and placed the necklace over my head. A golden streak crossed from the east. A bird began to sing. A striped yellow cat walked along the fence between Katie’s place and my garden, watching me.
The boulders in the back garden hadn’t been so lucky. The top one had been reduced to rubble, its largest chunk less than half the size of the original, the smallest like pea gravel. I didn’t like storing mass. I didn’t understand how I did it, and I had the feeling it was dangerous. But so far, I had come back whole. Leaning against the stone, I touched the nugget.
When I turned eighteen and left the children’s home, I headed to the mountains, following some innate imperative north and west. After motoring my bike up Wolf Mountain as far as the dirt road, then a trail, led, I found myself at Horseshoe Rock. I hiked down from it into the woods. At the bottom of a narrow ravine, I scuffed through dry leaves and found a quartz boulder, weather stained, canted down the gully. Through the center of it ran a vein of gold.
In the dark and the rain, I crawled inside a sleeping bag and slept near the boulder. And for the first time in six years, though I had no necklace, no marrow to find the snake within, I shifted. Into a big cat. Beast spoke to me like an old friend, long silenced. For weeks, I/we hunted, ate, visited old dens. Hid from humans. Searched for my/ our progeny. All my kits were gone. All others of my kind were gone. I was the last one. Anywhere.
When I shifted back to human, I dug out a few nuggets of gold and tucked them into a pocket. I later had one strung on an adjustable, doubled gold chain, to carry it with me, while the rest went into a safe-deposit box for a rainy day. If I concentrated, I could sense the gold, no matter where I was, both the position of each nugget and the original vein in the boulder deep in the mountains. It gave me security, a sense of refuge. Of comfort.
Now, shaking, I hung the nugget necklace over my head and went inside. I made it to the stove as my cell rang. “Mol,” I answered, “I’m okay.”
“It’s me, Aunt Jane,” Angelina said, sniffling. “You scared me.”
Stunned, I said, “Huh?”
“Don’t be the bird no more, Aunt Jane. You coulda fell.” She was crying.
I clutched the cell, my frozen heart melting. “Okay, Angie baby. No more bird.”
“I love you,” she murmured. “I gotta go. But Mommy says we’re gonna come visit you.” And the call ended.
After a two-quart pot of oatmeal, one of Beast’s steaks grilled nearly rare—but not quite—under the oven broiler, and a whole pot of strong black tea, I felt more like myself, more or less, though I was emaciated and sick to my stomach, and was experiencing vertigo to the point that I held on to the cabinets or furniture when I walked. Angie was right. What I had done was dangerous. Really bad stupid.
Cold, unable to get warm even after steaming until the hot shower water cooled, I curled up under the covers with a pen and pad, and jotted down what I remembered about the night. The location of the chapel—not nonchapel, but chapel. It had contained a cross and a nun. Well, a priestess, but close enough. That made it a chapel, right? The half-remembered location of the house where the creature entered. Had he killed? The TV had been on. Had I mistaken a sound track for a real murder? Had the rogue-liver-eater gone to ground under the house? Questions, no answers, and a fractured, hazy memory.
My last coherent thought was of the priestess, holding aloft a wood cross, shining with light. Wood didn’t do that, not even in the presence of evil, which is why I always carry silver crosses. Weird. Just plain weird. And weirder still—a vamp holding a cross. How did she survive it? Halfway through my recollections and questions, I fell asleep.
I woke up feeling warm and annoyed. Someone was pounding on my door with loud, impatient fists. I wasn’t sure, but it may have been going on a long time. Couldn’t people just let a girl sleep in? Stiff and sore, I rolled out of bed, trailing covers, found the borrowed robe, and slid it on. Through the glass I saw the Joe, Rick LaFleur.
“Crap.” With ill grace, I opened the front door. “It better be freaking damn important.”