Death's Rival

Not the way of The People. This was the way of the Mohicans, maybe. Or the Creek. Savages. Not Tsalagiyi.” She nodded once, firmly, her hands flying through the beans. “Not Tsalagiyi.”

If I thought it was strange for a member of one tribe to call another tribe savages, I didn’t show it. I kept still, waiting on the rest of the dream. Uni Lisi drank again, smacked again, and said, “There was an old woman standing beside the fire. She was wearing a long dress, blue or gray, and her hair was in braids down her back. She was holding a stick, the end sharpened and black from the fire. She poked the body and it didn’t bleed.” She pointed one knobby finger at me, her black eyes throwing back the light, like faceted stones. “When Aggie takes you to sweat, you will think on this.” She looked at her daughter. “Take her now. I’ll finish the beans and take a nap on the couch with Queenie. We gonna have us some kittens tonight, I think. Go, go.” She shooed us with her hands.

I stood, my knees feeling weak at the vision Uni Lisi had seen. Aggie made the sighing-snorting sound again and said, “Go to the sweathouse. I’ll be there shortly.”

CHAPTER TWELVE Bitsa Alone Could Wake the Undead

Once again I was sitting in the sweathouse, feeding kindling to the fire. The coals had been smoldering beneath a heavy layer of ash when I entered, and I had uncovered them, fed them twigs, then larger pieces. The rocks were heated, and the smudge basket was full of smudge sticks. It was as if they had known I was coming. Considering the dream, they probably had. I had started to sweat long minutes past, and had a steady trickle going when Aggie entered and closed the door on the rest of the world. She sat beside me, and I could feel her eyes on me. I kept mine on the fire, letting the flames steal my vision in the dark hut. More minutes passed. I was sweating freely and stewing in my own irritation when Aggie finally spoke.

“We have spoken of your soul house, of the cavern that drips with moisture, lit by flickering firelight, the place of your earliest memories.”

I nodded to show I knew what she was talking about. It was the cavern where I made my first shift into we sa, the bobcat, when I was a child of maybe five. When Aggie took me back into my own memories it was to this place I most often went.

“You carry anger around in your soul home like a trapped storm cloud full of thunder and lightning and heavy rain,” she said, her voice a murmur. “Your spirit overflows with that anger. This anger is too large for you to contain, and it is compressed within you.”

She fell silent while I envisioned the darkness within me, and the storm she could see there. She was right. It was a raging storm, bigger than Katrina, more destructive than Hurricane Andrew, trapped there, inside me.

In the sweathouse, the fire crackled and spat, stealing energy from the wood with a soft hiss. “Do you want to tell me about the anger?” she asked.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Fed the fire. Aggie waited. I had the feeling that she would wait until nightfall and say nothing else. She had given me an opening and now it was my turn, to take or not. “I killed a man in my hotel room in Asheville. I didn’t see a gun—it was down at his side—but I reacted to the threat I sensed, the fear I felt, and I shot him. He died. Only after he fell did I see that he was carrying a gun with a sound suppresser on it.” Aggie’s expression didn’t change; even her scent stayed the same, calm and waiting. “I found out later that he was only there to look me over in preparation to challenging me to a fight of some sort. And now all the vamps and blood-servants in the Southeast are in danger. Because I killed a man.”

After a long moment, during which Aggie added a log to the fire, she said, “He was only there to look at you? He could have done that in a restaurant. On the street. Anywhere. He came into your hotel room? With a gun in his hand?” I nodded. “Then perhaps he was going to kill you and slip away, so he didn’t have to challenge you.”

My head snapped up. I met Aggie’s eyes and she laughed at whatever was on my face. She shrugged, as if to say, “It’s just a thought,” but she said nothing.

Some of the shadow I carried fell away from my shoulders. “Thank you,” I said. Aggie shrugged again. “In your heart, you knew this. It is only part of your darkness.”

“Last night, Leo Pellissier and his heir forced a feeding on me. To bind me to them.”

Aggie didn’t flinch, but I smelled her reaction: surprise, anger, and something deeper. She was protective of me. That lifted my hurt even more, and the darkness was no longer so heavy. I took a breath and it felt clean and fresh, like the way air felt coming out of a cavern. The breath of the earth. The breath of my soul house, my spirit place, moving again, no longer blocked.

“I had stupidly claimed to be Leo’s Enforcer, a position that requires sharing of blood, and sometimes sex, in a binding ceremony. When I made the claim, it was to protect myself and others, and I had no idea it involved any kind of sharing. When it first happened, I wouldn’t let him bind me, but now that he’s facing a new threat, a bigger threat, he took what I’d verbally given him.”

“And are you bound by this vampire?”

“Not so much. It isn’t permanent.” But it should be. I didn’t say that part. “I’m angry. He had no right. It was an assault. And I have no legal recourse.”

“Because under this Vampira Carta you have told me of, you gave him certain rights over you when you came into his employ.” I nodded. “Rights you did not understand.” I nodded again. “But once you knew of these rights, you still remained in his employ.”

I didn’t nod this time. Aggie had hit the nail on the head. I had known a forced feeding could happen. I stayed because the money was good. Because I was curious about vamps, and had allowed myself to get caught up in their lives and society. And maybe for other reasons I didn’t yet understand, reasons that had to do with my own forgotten past. “I was stupid,” I said, now hearing my bitterness.

Aggie cocked her head, letting me think it through. She shifted and resettled her legs. “And now you are conflicted, because you gave him the rights over your body and blood, but you never expected him to take them.”

“Yeah. That about covers it. It proves I’m pretty stupid, doesn’t it?”

“A scorpion’s nature is to sting. A raptor’s nature is to rend and tear flesh. Did he do that which was normal and right according to his nature?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“And your nature is to protect and to serve. Did you do that which was normal and right according to your nature?”

“Yes,” I said again, my brows coming together. There was so much wrong with that line of thought. It’s the nature of a serial killer to trap and torture humans. It’s the nature of a pedophile to touch children. But nature doesn’t make everything right. It’s often just an excuse. Yet understanding one’s own nature is often a first step to personal growth. All this psychological crap was making me irritable.

As if she sensed my irritation, Aggie changed course. “Will you leave his employ?”

I thought about Leo. And Bruiser. And the other humans I had met and liked. “I should. I don’t know. I have to think about that.”

“If you stay, it will be with eyes wide open now. Fully adult and fully informed.”

“Yes. I understand.” I shook my head and started to rise.

“There is still an angry darkness inside you.” Aggie leaned back and relaxed, her eyes serene, like a nun’s, like a woman who had made her choices and was okay with them. Not anything like me. “This anger is perhaps the core of who you are. It storms in the very center of your being, and it forms the basis of every decision you have ever made. We should look at this anger.”

After a moment I said, “I made a vow when I was five years old.” Aggie waited, implacable, resting in that enveloping sense of peace. “I made a vow to kill the men who murdered my father and raped my mother.” To give her credit, Aggie didn’t flinch at the bald statement. I eased back to the floor, my heels and butt on the cool clay. “I put my hands in my father’s cooling blood.” I put out my left hand as I had done as a child, to show her. “And I wiped it down my face.” I lifted my hand, palm facing me, and dragged it down my face, slowly, feeling again my