Frank let that feeling settle in and get comfortable before he said anything. “They’ll be back. If not tonight, then tomorrow.” That caused some restless shifting of feet. “An’ if you’re thinkin’ you might call in sick tomorrow, think about it again. This project here can’t fail. It ain’t just your job at stake, it’s everyone’s. Besides, that man out there woulda wanted us to finish. An’ you know we can finish it right.” The workers all nodded solemnly, Sophie choked back a sob, and Frank led them in a new song.
Granuaile shot a querying glance in my direction. “That man?” she whispered.
I replied in the same low tones. “He’s talking about the construction foreman. The one the skinwalkers killed.”
“You mean Dar-”
“Shh!” I held up a hand to stop her. “Some cultures, including Navajos, don’t speak the names of the dead.”
Granuaile checked to see if our murmured conversation was being overheard. “Why not?”
“The reason varies from culture to culture. But with the Navajos, they don’t want to attract the ghost of the man by calling his name. They call the ghosts ch’iidii, and they’re not benevolent. You take all the bile and discord and unrest a person has inside of them, every evil thought and all the impulses they repress during their life, and that’s what escapes upon death to become a ch’iidii.”
“Ew. Those things are just floating around?”
“Well, they disperse if nothing keeps them here. But they have to be in the open to do that. When someone dies inside a hogan, no one will live there anymore, unless it gets blessed and renewed.”
“Oh, because it’s haunted? Things that go bump in the night? Like poltergeists and such?”
“No, nothing like that. Ch’iidii can make you sick with their malevolence. They call it ghost sickness or corpse sickness. Skinwalkers use it, actually, to kill people.”
“How do they do that?”
“You heard Frank tell me he reversed a curse on a skinwalker long ago by shooting a bone bead into it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what they’re really doing by shooting pieces of bone into you is inviting a ch’iidii into your body. Ch’iidii linger around the bodies, see; they’re anchored to them until they have a chance to disperse. So if you’re shot with a piece of a corpse, you’ll get corpse sickness and die. And there are stories about witches sneaking up to hogans and dumping corpse powder down chimneys-that’s ground-up bones mixed with ash. Everyone inside breathes it in, and the family is wiped out. That’s all part of the Witchery Way.”
“That is some seriously evil shit,” Granuaile said. “Are these witches like you’re used to in Europe?”
“No, the Navajo witches are mostly men. And what they’re doing is inverting the wholesome rituals of the Blessing Way-they’ll make their paintings using ash instead of sand, for example. It’s similar to conducting the Black Mass.”
Granuaile frowned. “I’m starting to see why you don’t like witches.”
“Yeah. I keep hearing that there are good ones out there, but I haven’t met any, with the possible exception of Malina’s coven.”
“Have you ever seen a ch’iidii? I mean in the magical spectrum?”
“No, I’ve never had occasion to.”
She looked down at the ground and said quietly, “Guess you’ll have a chance in the morning.”
Chapter 9
Most of us managed to get three or four hours’ sleep once the skinwalkers were gone. Frank called a temporary halt to the ceremony and told us to get some rest. My sleep was plagued by troubling dreams of shapeless, smoky demons that never felt the bite of my sword but whose claws and teeth found ample purchase on my skin. They were like congealed darkness, and I could neither bind them in place nor unbind their substance-for how does one control an absence of light?
Once dawn arrived, the Navajos greeted the sun-a tradition that stems from their belief that the gods rise with the sun, and the reason that hogan doors always face east-and we went to see what happened to Darren.
We found him lying on the road, torn from his truck and his body savaged by the skinwalkers. His blood had sunk into the earth, red dust made doubly red. Down the hill, north of the road, Darren’s truck was a mess of crumpled metal and shattered glass.
Sophie Betsuie lost her composure and returned to the hogan, crying. She was beating herself up with a club made out of the words if only, and I knew what it felt like. If only I hadn’t done this. If only someone else hadn’t done that. I hoped she would learn sooner, rather than later, that you can’t unchoose anyone’s choices, least of all your own. All you can do with your past is try to grow out of it.
Darren’s crew gave the body a wide berth as they walked down to their trucks, some of them already talking on cell phones, calling the police and perhaps family members.
“Can you see it?” Granuaile asked, one hand absently petting Oberon. “The ch’iidii?”
“Let me check.” I flipped on my faerie specs and looked at the space above Darren’s body. What I saw made me shudder. It reminded me uncomfortably of my dreams.
“Atticus, what is it? Can you see it?”
“Yeah. Sit down, I’ll bind your sight to mine.”
She sat cross-legged on the ground next to Oberon, and I concentrated on her aura until I could isolate the threads of her consciousness. Choosing the ones that represented her sight, I bound them to mine, and she breathed in sharply as her vision was wrenched from her perspective to mine. Then she scrambled backward, crablike, once she saw the ch’iidii.
“Gah! That thing-it looks evil!” she cried.
“I know,” I said. An inky cloud-funnel-shaped and with a pair of pale, blank eyes that faced us consistently- swirled counterclockwise over Darren’s body. It was unnerving to see such steady regard in the midst of that restless motion.
“But he seemed like such a nice guy,” Granuaile said. “How could that have been inside him?”
“We all have our dark sides.”
“You mean I have something like that inside me? That will float above my body when I die?”
“Not unless you believe it will. That which is immortal in us all must express itself somehow when we die. He believed in ch’iidii, and thus you see it here.”
“That is so fucked up.”
“Eh, let’s not be so quick to judge. It’s not that bad. The way he saw it-the way the Navajos see it-the good parts of him were already in harmony with the universe, see? Much of their spiritual lives are spent trying to achieve that which is hozh, or spiritually balanced and beautiful-and isn’t that what we all want, regardless of what we call it? This remnant is nothing but the shadow of his baser nature. Contrast that with some people who send their entire souls to a plane where they are tortured and burned for eternity. You could judge that if you wanted, but it would be nothing compared to how they judged themselves.”
Granuaile sat in silence for a while, digesting this. She’d never confronted anything so concrete in her philosophy classes. Frank Chischilly came over and stood next to her but didn’t say anything. He could see we were studying Darren’s body. When next she spoke, Granuaile’s voice was sad and subdued. “What are we going to do about him?”
“You’re going to sit there,” I replied. “I am going to see if I can help this ch’iidii disperse a bit quicker, send him on to his peace. We cannot wait for it to disperse on its own-I don’t know the half-life of things like this, anyway.”
“What? Hey,” Frank protested, spurred to speech by my intrusion on his territory. “You can see the ch’iidii?”
Granuaile spoke over him. “You’re going to unbind it somehow?”
“Not with any spell. I’m merely going to give it a taste of cold iron.” I took a few steps forward and the ch’iidii shifted, eyeing my approach.
