Shadow Rites: A Jane Yellowrock Novel (17 page)

Aggie scowled and, from a basket at her side, pulled a sprig of dried rosemary and held it to the fire. Rosemary hadn’t been a traditional Cherokee herb, having been brought by the first European settlers, but many medicine men and wise women of the Americas had incorporated anything that worked into their ceremonies, and rosemary had strong oils that performed well with many other herbs. The scent filled the sweat house as the dried leaves curled, sparked, and caught fire. Aggie placed the burning stem in the curved arc of the red clay tile, which she had turned concave side up, perfect to hold the blazing stem as the rosemary leaves burned to ash. The stem burned as well, and the sweat house was thick with the scent. When the rosemary was ash, she slanted her gaze at me and said, “I’m your elder. Or I
was
your elder. It was difficult for me to find out you’re older than
lisi
. It is doubly difficult to
hear of your souls. There is no story in the histories to tell me what to do or how to help you. But it doesn’t matter. I will try to help one of The People who comes to me for wisdom. Breathe.”

She pulled another herb from the basket and extended that branch toward the fire as well. When it caught, she placed it too in the clay tile. The herb was something even stronger than rosemary, smelling of camphor. I sneezed three times in succession, which jarred my arm horribly. When I looked at it again, the abnormal shape-change had worsened, and now my elbow was involved, the joint trying to bend backward. I groaned in misery.

“Breathe!” Aggie demanded, and I breathed in the stink. In and out. In and out. She threw another branch on the fire, and I watched it flame and turn to ash. She repeated the command to breathe and burned small branches of the stinking herb until she had done it seven times. Then she lifted the clay tile and emptied the ash over her clay bowl and tapped it until the ashes were transferred. I had a bad feeling about what she was going to do with the stuff in that bowl.

Aggie burned three more herbs, these smelling of two varieties of mint and one that stank of creosote, adding the ashes to the bowl. She had a small pile of stinking ash, like a tiny volcano cone, in the bowl. She unscrewed a Mason jar, and the stench of moonshine filled the sweat house. She added a splash of that to the bowl too. With a whisk made of plants, she stirred the contents.

“Aggie,” I said, “none of those were Cherokee herbs.”

Her scowl deepened. “No. These are herbs suggested by a crazy old Navajo man. He’s one who saw the photos I sent of your last spell-instigated injury. He said they might help you attain a higher state of energy, one strong enough to reach inside and pull your own shape back out. I thought he meant a healed version of yourself. Only later, I realized he had to know you were a skinwalker or a were and he was seeing a maltransformation, not simply an injury. A dark magic spell might have brought about this particular problem, but the treatment would still be the same, no
matter how it was acquired.” At my confused look, Aggie said, “Never mind. Maybe this will help. Maybe it won’t. So breathe and meditate and we’ll see what happens.”

I breathed, watching as she added something bluish green to the bowl’s mix; it looked like a small upside-down cup made from a wrinkled cactus, but without the spines. She took a pestle to the mix and ground it for a long time, adding more moonshine. And when she passed me the moonshine, ashes, and wrinkled green thingy, I didn’t refuse, question, or hesitate. I drank it down. The moonshine was so strong, I didn’t half notice the other tastes, though the texture was gag-worthy all on its own. I coughed and spluttered and thought my esophagus might catch fire, but it didn’t. It hit my stomach like a bomb going off, however, heat flaming back up, and I had to swallow it down again. This time, the vile concoction didn’t come back up. Instead the alcohol hit my system and I dropped down into a meditative trance, faster than I ever had. Almost as if the moonshine and other stuff pulled me down.

And down.

I fell into my soul home as if dropping though an opening in the roof and I landed beside the fire pit on all fours, Beast form. I/we shook myself, loose coat sliding across my frame.

We bent to the fire and breathed, the scent strong and warm, of cedar heartwood and hickory. Here, proper herbs had been burned on the flames, sage and sweetgrass.
Tsalagi
herbs, not that awful peyote.
Peyote
. I wasn’t certain how I knew that the greenish wrinkled cuplike thing was peyote, but it was. And I was having a drugged dream in my soul home.

I sat upright, front paws together, and studied the cave that represented my own soul, my spirit, a place of refuge and safety, which, on the surface, might seem to indicate that it should never change, but it did, and often, as a reflection of my life and what was happening to me. It was like a three-dimensional representation of my psyche.

Beast growled.
Soul den. Place where Jane and Beast are one.

Yeah. Pretty much.

It was a cave in the real world, somewhere, because I had been there when I first changed into my bobcat form, helped along by my father and my grandmother. In that long-ago past, the cave walls and ceiling had been a grayish stone, the roof melting down in drops and spirals, soft and puddling, like melted candles, the rock seeming magical. The cave roof had cried the tears of the world in soft plinks, the sound of falling water merging with the drums and flute of my first change.

Since, it had become this representation, where I saw myself as I was, moment to moment, sometimes standing on four legs, sometimes on two. The shadows on the walls merging often into one, a form with no certain shape, both cat and human, furred and skinned, four-pawed and two-footed. A shadow shimmering with black motes of light.

On one wall I had once seen circles and swirls painted in soot and fat and crushed pigments. Carved into the stone were arrows pointing to the right. Lines parallel. Lines like waves—the symbols of The People. And there had been paw prints. They padded across the rounded stone roof of the world, big-cat paws in the red of old blood. Human footprints walked beside the paw prints, up and over the roof of the world. Side by side. Like Beast and me.

There were also white man symbols, brought here since we had lived in the modern world, diamonds and stars, signs and ciphers, and an image of a cross that burned. And of course, there had been the blue hands in circles of white, and white hands in circles of blue. Pigments, signs of ownership applied to the walls of my soul house by Gee, who had thought to use me.

Cleansed by fire.

“Mine,” I growled. “My place.”

Until I had been hit with a spell by the Son of Darkness. Then I had seen above us, in the dome of the roof, red lines, like blood vessels, veins, and arteries pulsing with silver and black and red motes of power and full of blood. Magic that hurt us was black magic. Blood magic. Like the magic of witches turned to darkness. Like blood magic stored in stone. The blood diamond had such magic, magic that sent out red pulses and motes of power. But in my soul
home the vessels had looked clogged and bruised, full of clotted and dying blood, and they had been leaking. It was what I understood a soul might look like when under attack from vampire blood.

Later, the walls had appeared blackened as if by fire, the smell of sour smoke hanging on the damp air. It had smelled unused, had sounded silent, had felt cold and empty. My cavern had been damaged, as if fire—or lightning—had left soot and char all over it, black and gray and dirty, with the undamaged wall showing through in places, white and the palest of greens and creamy grays in what looked like strange symbols, nonpatterns that I didn’t recognize at first. I had walked around the pit, studying the shapes, and they had resolved into hundreds of representations of the Blood Cross scorched into the walls at every angle, as if the lightning and the cross had been spinning around, engaged in a dance—or some arcane form of combat.

More recently there had been a vision that had worried me more than any of the others, even more than the burned, lightning-struck vision. The cavern had no longer looked sooty and burned, its walls creamy gray, tinted with greens, but directly overhead had appeared the shape of wings, white wings and dark wings, as if a snowy owl and a crow fought there. It had seemed a symbolism of danger, as if forces of light and dark engaged in combat for my soul.

And lastly, there had been wings, possibly angel wings draping across the roof of the world. And there had been that black mote pulsing beside it, like a heart of darkness, full of power. The angel wings were still here, in this peyote dream, draping across the roof and down the walls, the flight feathers resting curled on the floor. The dark mote was still there, where Angie Baby had pointed it out, up high, near the joining of the angel wings, where the heart of the angel itself should be.

I stared at the place overhead, straining to see the dark mote clearly. Where the angel wings joined together, the mote was shackled with a large blue ring the color of woad, and from the other side of the ring fell a triple-linked chain, in style like an ornate necklace chain. The links draped
along the wings, following the shape of the roof, until it came to a stalactite, thick and strong, one that had been forming for millennia, long enough to meet the stalagmite below it and merge into a single column that reached from ceiling to floor. There the silver chain looped loosely around the pillar down to the ground to lie coiled like a woman’s necklace dropped and forgotten in the shadows.

That chain was what Angie Baby had used to pull the black mote from my chest so we could see it together. The chain she said might kill me if I broke it. I padded to the pillar and sniffed the chain. It smelled of metal. And ozone, like the aftermath of lightning. And it smelled of blood. Vampire blood. Beneath that stink was the reek of burned hair. I sat down again, studying the chain. It was thinner near the floor, and the way it was curled, it had taken on the shape of a flower. A rosebud, which seemed significant but I couldn’t remember why. Overhead, as the chain fell downward, the links were thicker, and the higher I looked, the more organic they appeared, less perfectly made and heavier, as if the chain was alive and was growing and the roots were overhead, like a plant growing upside down, to flower on the floor.

I extended my claws and poked at the bloom, pricking it. The bud opened, fast, like the special photography showing the “pop” of some flowers opening. Inside the petals, where the stamen should be, was an eye, green and blurry and unformed, but looking at me.

Every time I’ve been attacked by magical means, it left a mark,
I thought.
Like a crack in a piece of pottery that allows water to slowly drain through, continuing to damage the dish.

Jane is not dish. Jane is not in cage. Jane is free,
Beast thought back, which didn’t sound like a reply to my comment, but an altogether different observation.

Okay. I’ll think about that one. For now, we need to fix my hand.

Jane can fix hand. Jane is not in cage.

I chuffed out a breath. Lay down and thought about our twined and twisted double helix of genetic material, the double spiral that once was, a double helix for Beast
and a double helix for me. But like the last few times I tried to find one or the other, they appeared together, a tripled helix of tangled DNA polymers. The nucleic acids held together by nucleotides, which should base-pair together, were instead in rows of three, twisted back on themselves and knotted in odd places. I had read as much as I could understand about how the helix should work, but it wasn’t enough to separate the strands.

Chain and mote and flower eye,
Beast thought.
Three links
.

Tripled links,
I thought back, and examined more closely the chain that hung from the roof of my soul home. I had thought it looked organic and it was. The chain was the spiritual representation of our twisted genetics. Twisted by all the strange magics I had come in contact with over the time I was in New Orleans. Just as radiation forced mutations on genetics, so the magic had forced a change, a mutation. And that mutation was tied to the dark mote of power at the heart of my soul. And was part of the eye-in-my-palm spell that was tied to me. Through my RNA and DNA. It all made sense, here in this place.

Beast extended all our claws and gathered herself.

Beast, what are you—

She shoved off the floor of the soul home with all four powerful legs and leaped high, catching the pillar in her claws the way she would sink them into tree bark. The pillar should have been slick and slippery as water-smoothed stone, but there were rough edges and a spongy feel to the mineralized column that allowed my claws to sink deep. Beast climbed the pillar just as she would a tree. High, to the top of the cavern. I didn’t look down, but Beast chuffed a laugh at my fear.
Beast has leaped much farther.

Fine. Okay. But what the crap are we doing up here?

Beast set her claws and held on, her nose only inches from the woad blue link and the dark pulsing mote as she sniffed, drawing the air in over her tongue and the scent sacks in the roof of her mouth in flehmen behavior. The smell of vampire was stronger here, as were all the scents. And the stink was a mixture of Leo, Gee DiMercy, Joses, the Son of Darkness, and . . . Bethany.

Bethany. Holy crap. When she healed me the first time, she left something inside me . . .

Vampire!
Beast snarled.
Ambush hunter!

Faster than thought, she snapped at the woad ring. It was the striking of a big cat on prey, canines sinking deep and ripping out. The blue link broke and she yanked it free of the pulsing mote. The edge of the mote burst outward in a shower of blue and silver and scarlet sparks. The chain slid free and fell, slithering around the pillar. The blue link crunched and bled, a bitter taste like the drink Aggie One Feather had given me. And the stink of iron, salt, and burned hair.

Below me on the floor, the silver chain piled up as it fell, rattling like snake scales, a sliding shush of sound that was nothing like the metallic ringing chimes it should have been.