“Yes, mamamama’am.”
“One last thing,” Aggie One Feather said as we turned down her street through the rain. “From the words you spoke in the water, it is clear that we must speak of your lineage. When we first met, you said that your father was of Panther Clan and your mother was Blue Holly Clan. But Panther Clan is a subdivision of Blue Holly, and the tribal elders would not have allowed them to marry. Your father was Panther Clan only after he married into Blue Holly Clan and, as a skinwalker, the clan grandmothers likely gave him the secondary Panther Clan designation. The old woman you call uni lisi was Panther Clan and she had yellow eyes like you and like him, but she would not have been his mother. The clan relation was too close. Do you understand?”
“My father’s birth clan would have been something else,” I said, feeling even lighter than after I walked from the bayou. “So that my grandmother with yellow eyes, the old woman that I recall in my few early memories.” My throat tightened again. “She was related as a skinwalker, but may not have been my biological grandmother. Or may have been a grandmother from many generations up the line.” I felt my mouth pull into a smile, tight and sere. Somewhere deep in my soul, I had hoped this.
Aggie turned off the Toyota and we sat in the driveway, none of us eager to go back into the cold, not even to get inside to the warmth of the tiny house. I let my mind wander through the revelation. The old woman who made me kill two men as a five-year-old child, the old woman who forced me into my bobcat shape and threw me into the snow on the Trail of Tears, she wasn’t my real grandmother.
Softly, Aggie said, “You have many memories, buried, suppressed. Memories of your mother. Of whom you never speak. Memories of your clan and tribe. Of the grandmothers who would have taught you to farm and how to gather foodstuffs, how to live off the land. How to make pottery or weave baskets. Even as a child of five, you would have begun learning such things, and you have no memories of this?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.” And maybe that should have frightened me, that I didn’t remember, but I had forgotten so much. This was only one more thing. The face of my mother. The vision of her hands working. The sound of her laughter. Was that all still buried inside me, in some place that could be found?
Aggie said, suddenly sounding stern and staring me down in the rearview mirror, “Last thing. We told your brother this. When you take the Youngers into your Cherokee family, they will not be Yellowrock Clan. That would be according to vampire tradition, not Cherokee tradition. So you will have to adopt them twice, once into Panther Clan as your grandmother chose for you, or into Blue Holly Clan. Then once into your own clan as the vampires do. Understood?”
I ducked my head, hiding my reaction from Aggie. “Yes. I understand.”
The rattletrap truck bearing the old Choctaw man and the Youngers pulled down the street and idled at the drive. Alex and Eli got out of the truck and shut the doors. Without looking our way, they went through the rain to the porch and waited. They looked different too. Tired. Wan. Worn out. Aggie One Feather and her mother got out of the car and we all trooped inside, silent, frozen.
Inside, the old women once again fed us a king’s feast.
CHAPTER 7
The Crown of the Orcs
It was nearly ten a.m. when we drove back into town, Eli at the wheel. He had spent the night feeding a dying vamp and being healed and the morning puking and voiding. He looked exactly like a human in those circumstances should. Wan, pale, slow moving, and weary. Eli never looked tired.
The rainstorm hit again as another band of showers wheeled across us. The air was warmer now, though not by much, and the rain was free of sleet. Lightning blasted again, multiple strikes, and my magic responded with a flicker of the Gray Between, which made me less than happy. I had hoped going to water would free me from that, but at least it wasn’t as intense as before.
We were turning into the French Quarter when Alex, sitting in the backseat, said, “Got a problem on Bourbon Street. Mob forming. Cops have been called in. SWAT. The gang task force.” He was scanning reports on his tablet and through his earbud. Eli tapped on the radio to a local channel that gave news, weather, and traffic updates every ten minutes.
Alex said, “They called in ambulances but ordered them to take shelter on the uptown side of Canal Street. Shots fired.”
Eli turned right and then left and began the slow process of fighting traffic to bypass the riot. Lightning struck again. And again. Each time, my newly altered magics reacted and fluttered inside me.
Alex said, “Dispatch says lightning hit the pavement at the corner of Bourbon Street and Bienville. Arnaud’s is on fire.” The Kid’s voice sounded funny and I angled the sun visor’s mirror so I could see him. He looked intent. Older. As if he had matured in the last twelve hours or so. “Two rioters are receiving medical attention from bystanders and cops until medic gets there,” he said, “but the downpour is so bad that traffic came to a standstill and the ambulances aren’t moving.” He shook his head, tight ringlets bobbing. “The Royal Sonesta Hotel has been invaded by tourists escaping the rain, but the gang followed and brought the fight into the hotel. The lobby and restaurant are being trashed.”
Eli took more side streets. The storm worsened, the wipers not much help against the deluge. The SUV created a bow wave, and I remembered the truck from this morning doing the same thing. Lightning hit-hit-hit, blasting the entire world in flashing lights. Making my body spark and the time-bubbling reaction quake on and off. It also sent shocks of something different through me and I thought maybe the lightning might be exciting my new pentagram magic. Things fluttered inside me.
“Annnd the power is out,” Alex said.
Eli said nothing, his hands steady on the wheel as he took us far away from our house, trying to stay free of the snarled cars, circling slowly around to come in on the downtown side of our street. A half-hour drive across the French Quarter took over an hour and when we got home, there was no parking. Oddly enough parking on our little one-way street wasn’t usually difficult to find but, with the storm, today was different. Cars had pulled off the roadway and taken all the available spaces: people sitting inside, fogging up the windows, checking e-mail and talking on the phone.
Eli found a space one block over, which meant that we ducked and ran, getting soaked again by the time we got to the porch. We were met on the front stoop by Brute, growling, guarding the entrance, not letting us in.