Blood Ties (31 page)

“Thanks,” I said, peeping at her too.

“No problem. Anything to help you.” Addison strode to the other side of the room, to Adrian’s CD player. She put on a recording of one of his songs. Surely an attempt to make me feel guilty.

The music started, and I must admit if things had been different, I would have fallen under the trance of the surreal, haunting melody. The orchestration consisted of a hypnotizing twelve-tone atonality that had the ability to bewitch most people. Adrian’s angelic voice came in so innocently. I squirmed, becoming more uncomfortable with each note and chord. I tried to put a force field around me to prevent Adrian’s voice from entering. It didn’t work, and I was violated a second time.

“He was so great,” Addison said as her smile grew inordinately wide. She was trying to stop the pain from coming, but she gasped as the grief clutched and stilled her. She looked at me with a maddening mix of resentment, compassion, and sadness.

“You know, Adrian and I only volunteered for this because of James. We didn’t want him to go it alone. We went against our family for you, and we lost everything. Do you think it was worth it?”

Her sorrow visibly emanated out of her in whorling, yellow tendrils that reached around the room, trying to latch onto me. One found its target. It was sharp, and my flesh burned at its very touch. I could see more tendrils coming at me. I was not about to stick around and get poked and burned by a multitude of etheric octopus arms. Without even giving Addison a goodbye, I got the fuck out of there.

The tendril arms followed me up the basement steps. As soon as I entered the hall, I slammed the door behind me. I could see a faint yellow glow peeking from under the door and then receding back down to Addison.

Relieved that I’d dodged that psychic onslaught, I went straight to the kitchen to get some comfort from Aunt Evelyn. However, that voice inside me advised against it. Of course I did not listen, and went in anyway. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that something was up with Aunt Evelyn too.

She didn’t even notice I was there. She was intently going through cabinets, searching for something. Not finding it, she slammed the doors, each slam louder than the one preceding it. She stepped back and saw what she wanted not in the cabinet, but on top of it. She got on chair, but it was too short; her arms could not reach. As she got off the chair, the thong of her flip-flop slipped from between her toes, causing her almost to fall off the chair. And that pissed her off. She threw her hands up, and with a magical swoosh flung a hodgepodge of cereal boxes off the top of the fridge. Then Aunt Evelyn swiped again, this time over the kitchen table. A plate Adrian had eaten off of slung against a wall, along with a cup Hari had drank out of. All the cabinets opened, and pieces of ceramic tableware flew about the kitchen. Aunt Evelyn stood amid the jagged pieces. She was spent. She put her face in her hands and broke down in tears.

I quietly removed myself and went up upstairs, quite horrified by the way everyone around me was falling apart. At the same time, however, something wonderful was happening to me. I was growing physically stronger due to the infusion of blood from the young woman I’d cannibalized. With each step my spine straightened, making me walk taller and more square-shouldered. I felt like I could run a marathon and climb Mount Everest all in one day. I was a dichotomy. Emotionally I was hobbled by grief and guilt. But my body was enjoying the power and prowess gained from that shape-shifter’s blood.

“What the fuck?” I said to myself. I felt like such a hypocrite. I had to get to James. He would know how to handle my predicament. He would tell me what to do.

I entered my bedroom filled with the expectation that James would make it all right. I knew he’d tell me it would be okay and only good would come out of this. He would tell me to take it easy; he’d handle it. Like he always did.

“James, something weird is happening to me,” I said as soon as I got into the room. He was standing at the window with his hands in his pockets.

“What’s wrong?” He didn’t turn around.

I went to him and presented myself, programmed to get a hug. He still just looked out the window.

“James?”

He turned to me. He looked so lost. “Something’s wrong, you said?” He asked like he’d just caught on to what I’d told him.

I knew then that I could ask him for comfort, and he would try his best to give it to me. But he would fail because he needed his strength to come to terms with killing his brother. This was an extremely disturbing revelation to me—that there would be times when I couldn’t even rely on James.

“Oh, nothing. Can I get you anything?” I asked.

He turned back to window. “No.”

I walked out and closed the bedroom door behind me. I didn’t know what to do or where to go. So I just stood at the door and looked down the hallway. I hoped Aunt Evelyn or Addison would snap out of their funks and come to my rescue. I waited and waited. No one came up those stairs. For the first time since all this got started, I had no one to lean on. And I had absolutely no clue what to do next.

The number was thirty-three. Catherine and her minions had devoured thirty-three innocent men, women, and children that day.

Chief Weylen stood amidst dried pools of blood and bits of graying flesh. Body parts were strewn about the reservation in arrangements that almost seemed purposeful. The few whole corpses were collected in a collage of sheets from survivors’ houses.

The injured were gathered up on makeshift stretchers and carried to a provisional triage. This was necessary, as they could not be taken to any mainstream hospital or clinic. Not only would the shape-shifters have to explain how they were injured, but there were the exams and blood work to be reckoned with. Those clinical tools would show that the wolves were in no way normal physiologically.

Chief Weylen had foreseen the need for medical care a long time ago and financed two young shape-shifters’ medical-school educations. These doctors lived double lives. In one they were both prominent New York City physicians. In the other they were holistic medicine men for the tribe. The two doctors, despite the catastrophic injuries, worked adeptly to service the wounded. With the rest of the tribe acting as impromptu physicians’ assistants, everyone dealt the best they could with missing limbs, massive blood loss, contusions, bruises, and broken bones.

The hours of caring for the infirm went well into the night. After they were all attended to, Chief Weylen and the elders prepared the dead for the next life. The chief took out an eagle’s quill that had been passed down for centuries, and used only during times of death. He dipped it in ink and wrote names in the Book of the Dead. He had never had to write more than one name at a time…until now. The bodies were cleaned, anointed in essential oils, and dressed in traditional regalia. As the elders adorned the bodies, the common thought was how only ten protégés could kill so many.

Though the shape-shifters were Native American in descent, the origins of their lineage could be traced back to the original coven. Many of their burial practices reflected this. Thirty-three funeral pyres were surrounded by dazed family members. The fetid smell of gasoline emanating from the kindling did not bother them at all. Some young wolves brought Kaya’s body over to the chief. She was dressed in a simple pink dress with a garland of baby’s breath around her head. To the chief she looked like a napping flower girl. He was thankful her face had not been disfigured in the attack, and her injuries had been concentrated from the chest down. Kaya’s beautiful face, so peaceful, would be his last remembrance of her. The chief fixed her hair and kissed her forehead. Before he became overwhelmed, he signaled to the young wolves to place her atop the pyre.

Duty called, and Chief Weylen steadied himself. His presence loomed large as he adroitly addressed the grieving crowd. The spirits were with him as he found just the right words to guide and support his people. As the tribe followed him in fervent prayer, the elder woman who’d given Grace the bracelet looked on. Being wise, she saw how her people’s anger and hate boiled within them so strong it poisoned the air. She knew she had to do something to repair the damage done to their once-tranquil souls.

Julie stayed inside the chief ’s house for the duration of the ceremony. In no way could she could bear seeing Hari laid out like a butchered piece of meat. She watched her parents gripping each other as if they were facing a ferocious storm. Her mother wore her open-sored grief like a shroud for everyone to see. Her father, however, closed his up, knowing if he let his agony go, he’d die right there himself.

Each family selected someone to take up a torch. The chief was the last one. They all held the flames to the incendiary kindling under the corpses. Thirty-three fires blazed up, hauntingly illuminating the bodies’ white coverings. The wails of women and usually strong men echoed throughout the clearing.

As the fires consumed the pyres, the once-bright linens wrapping the bodies changed colors: from stark white to spotty beige, to dark brown, to black. The red glow of the fires reflected off Chief Weylen’s eyes as he breathed in the smell of incinerating flesh.

“Goodbye, Kaya, my love,” he said with dying embers falling around his face.

The next morning the reservation was a virtual ghost town. There were no children playing. No joyful, chattering adults sitting on porches. The birds couldn’t even bring themselves to sing.

The elder woman opened her cottage door and was immediately struck by the morose atmosphere. She turned right back around and emerged from the house a half hour later. She carried a water bottle, a hand towel, and a small bucket of water. She trudged past the smoldering remains of the pyres and headed toward the sweat lodge.

Though the lodge was primarily a male domain, the old woman had a rebellious streak. She had been breaking the traditionalist rules about women communing with the spirits in the lodge since her teens. The spirits that came through to her during trances gave her not only spiritual knowledge but scientific information. Outsiders were always amazed by how she had no formal schooling but was able to tackle problems like engineering, chemistry, math, and such.

Before entering the hut, the old woman smudged with sweet grass and left her slippers outside. She entered, and once she closed the flap, the area was nearly pitch black. The interior was lined with a tarp, and there were many ancient buffalo hides on the floor. The elder woman ducked down as she made her way to the altar space in the middle of the hut. She was mindful as she lit the twigs in the pit and heated the carefully selected stones. When they were red hot, she ladled the purified water from her bucket onto them, creating a remarkable sauna. It took her old bones a while to sit down. But once she did, she began to pray her way into a contemplative state, and then into a total trance. As more and more steam rose from the stones, the ancient spirits awakened.

“Great spirits, I come to thee in great peril and distress. Our people have been attacked by the vilest of evil. Many have been lost.”

The foggy condensation was aglow with crimson from the rocks. The figures of spirits snaked through the vapor, appearing and disappearing intermittently.

“My family is trying to deal with the horrible occurrence, but the thought of hateful vengeance is overtaking their minds. It will consume them and snuff out their goodness. Tell me what to do.”

A humanoid form smoked out from the rocks. It was small and did not speak, but the old woman understood it all the same.