Kitty Takes a Holiday

'Nobody!' she called over her shoulder.

The door opened wide, revealing a short man with desert-burnished skin aiming a rifle at us.

I wondered if he knew that he'd need the bullets to be silver.

'My daughter's right,' he said in perfectly decent English. 'We've had enough. Get out, now, before you bring more evil with you.'

It seemed to me that we weren't the ones carrying evil around with us. We just kept finding it. I had the good sense not to say anything. Funny how a loaded gun can shut you up.

'Well. Thanks for your time,' I said. 1 took Ben's arm and pulled him away from the door. Slowly, we backed along the path, until the door to the house slammed shut.

Ben's muscles were so tense they were almost rigid, like he wanted to pounce. 'Keep it together, Ben,' I whispered.

'What a pack of liars.'

'Does this surprise you? This is the family that produced John and Miriam Wilson. Both confirmed monsters.'

'Okay, but you're living proof—in fact you've based your whole career on the belief—that being a monster doesn't make someone a… a…'

'A monster,' I finished, grinning wryly. 'A fucked-up family's a fucked-up family, whether or not werewolves are involved.'

'You think I'd have figured that out by now,' he said.

'You know, I'm sick and tired of people pointing rifles at me.'

'That was a shotgun, not a rifle.'

For some reason, that didn't make a hell of a lot of dif­ference to me.

We got back in the car and pulled out on the dirt track. We didn't speak. Another door had closed, figuratively speaking. One less chance to boost Cormac's defense.

'Kitty, wait, look.' Ben pointed to a figure running toward us, from the Wilson house. Small against the landscape, it looked like it fled something terrible. It was Louise, her black hair tangling in the desert breeze.

I hit the brakes and waited for her to catch up. I didn't see anything chasing her, but I wondered.

I'd started to unbuckle and climb out, but Ben said, 'Wait. We may have to drive out in a hurry.'

He was probably right. I left the car running while Ben got out and waited for her. She reached us more quickly than I expected—she was fast, and we hadn't gone far. The house was still visible. I wondered if her father would show up in a minute with his shotgun.

Sliding to a stop, she leaned on the car's trunk. Her dark eyes were wide, wild. She seemed too flustered to speak, but she said in a rush, 'Let me in. I'll talk to you, but we have to go.'

Ben put the seat down so she could climb in the back, then he returned to the front.

'Go, now, hurry,' Louise commanded. I was already driving, before Ben even closed the door.

I glanced at her in the rearview mirror. She perched at the edge of the seat, her hands pulling at the fabric of her jeans. Her gaze never rested. She looked around, out both side windows, over her shoulder to the back window, duck­ing to see out the front. Like she was worried something might follow us. She had the look of someone who was always afraid that something was following her.

1 said, 'Do you always jump into strange people's cars and tell them to drive? How do you know we're not mur­derous psychopaths?'

Her gaze settled on me, briefly. 'I know a murderous psychopath when I see one.'

'A murderous psychopath like Miriam?'

'Yes.'

'Miriam was a skinwalker,' Ben said.

'Yee naaldlooshii. Yes.'

'What else can you tell us?'

'Not here. Someplace safe. We'll talk someplace safe.'

'We're in a car driving forty miles an hour,' I said, annoyed. 'What could possibly get at us?'

She gave me a look that clearly pitied my ignorance. 'You never know what could be listening. Waiting.'

I wanted to laugh, but I couldn't. I said, 'If we're not safe driving, where do you want to go?'

'There's a place close by. I'll tell you where to go. Turn right on the highway.'

Her directions steered us farther away from Shiprock, then off the highway. I feared for the car's suspension. Many miles out, a dirt track led down a slope to a ravine— gullies and dry riverbeds like this cut across the desert. 1 never would have found this cleft in the hills if I hadn't been guided here. It was very well hidden.

Ahead of us, toward the end of the ravine, was a hut made of logs sealed with mud. It was octagonal—almost round—ancient-looking, with a low-sloping roof.

We all climbed out of the car, and Louise hurried ahead of us.

She said, 'This hogan belonged to my family years ago, in the old days. Everyone's forgotten about it. But 1 found it again. It'll keep us safe.'

'Safe from what?' It seemed like the obvious question.

She gave me a look over her shoulder.

Ben was the one who said, 'If you have to ask, you haven't been paying attention.'

'Just trying to make conversation.'

He took my hand and squeezed it quickly before let­ting it go and walking on. A brief touch of comfort.

The scene we were walking into was from another world, something out of a tour book, or maybe an anthro­pology textbook: the desert, the cold wind, the round hut that might have been sitting there for decades. I looked up, expecting to see vultures. I only saw crisp blue sky.

Louise pushed aside a faded blanket that hung over the door and invited us in with her intent stare.

The hogan was dark, windowless, except for a hole in the ceiling, through which a shaft of sunlight came through. My lycanthropic sight adjusted quickly. The sin­gle room was almost bare. Toward the back, to the right, a blanket lay spread on the floor. A couple of wooden trunks sat by the wall nearby, along with a pile of firewood. Clearly, this wasn't a room for living in. It was a sanctu­ary. I could feel it, the way the walls curled around me, the way that I was sure that even though only a blanket hung over the doorway, nothing could get in. No curses, no hate. I felt a great sense of calm.

Even Louise seemed calm now, confident in the hogan's security. She knelt in the center of the room and struck a match to light the fire that was already built there. The kindling lit, glowed orange, and flames started tickling the firewood. The air smelled of soot and ash, of many previous fires that had burned themselves out. The smoke of this one rose up through the hole in the roof.

She showed us where to sit, on the ground to the right of the blanket.

She sat on the blanket. Before her, spread on the ground, was a sandpainting.

The pattern showed a complex and highly stylized scene. The colors were earth tones—brown, yellow, white, red, and black—yet vivid. In the firelight, the figures seemed to move.

Four birds, wings outstretched, marked the four quar­ters of the picture. Their clawed feet pointed inward, toward a circle at the center of the painting. In the middle of the circle stood a figure, a woman: black hair streamed from her square head, and she held arrows in both hands. Crooked white lines—lightning, maybe—rose up from her feet. Her eyes and mouth were tiny lines, hyphens, making the figure seem expressionless. Sleeping. The whole picture was bounded on three sides by rainbow stripes ending in bunches of what must have been feath­ers. The fourth, unbounded side faced the door. All of it was symbolic, but the symbols eluded me, except for one: the dark-haired woman at the center of great power, armed for battle.

Louise picked up a plastic dish, an old margarine tub. She took a pinch of something out of it: a white, powdery sand, or some other finely ground substance, which she sprinkled onto the image. I didn't know how she got the lines so straight. Her movements added bolts of lightning radiating out from the circle, between the soaring eagles.

'Tell me how Miriam died,' she said.

Ben looked at me. I was the talker. But I didn't feel much like telling the story. 'She attacked me. Our friend shot her.'

'Friend. The same man who shot John.'

'That's your brother. The werewolf.'

She said, 'John and Miriam were twins. They were destined to be killed by the same man. It all happened so quickly. I didn't expect it to happen so quickly.'

'What happened, Louise? How did this all start?'

She continued adding to the painting as she spoke. 'John went to work in Phoenix. When he came back—he was different. That must have been when it happened. When he became the monster. He wouldn't talk to anyone but Miriam. They'd go off together, for days at a time. Then Joan died. Then John. Then Miriam.' Her voice never cracked, her expression never slipped. She'd lived this over and over in her mind for weeks now. 'I knew,' she said. 'Somehow I knew what had happened, that Mir­iam took Joan. This magic, this evil has lived in the land since the beginning of the world. My family has been part of it, on both sides. I've learned what I can, but I've had no one to teach me the right way. The way of harmony. The old ways are gone.

'My father believed that because John brought a new evil from outside, an outsider should stop it. He knew someone who knew of a wolf hunter—your friend. The wolf hunter came and did his work. But it didn't stop the evil. It only made it stronger.'

The flickering light from the fire made the figures in the painting waver and move. I blinked, flinching back, bid­den by an animal instinct to escape. My eyes watered, and I shifted so my arm touched Ben's. He felt shaky, nervous. Like me. Louise caught the movement, understood the way Ben and I stared at the picture on the ground.

'This is for Joan. She didn't die; she was killed. There's no one to help her find her way to the next world. No one else cares. I don't know how, but 1 have to try to help her with what I know.'

It came from the heart, Alice had said. That had to count for something.

'She's still here. She hasn't traveled on. Maybe she'll talk to you. Maybe she'll tell you what happened.'

'How will we know?' I said. 'How will we know if she's talking to us?'

Ben muttered, 'If she can't testify or sign a statement, what's the point?'

I elbowed him in the side.

'Joan?' Louise sat at the head of her painting, hands on her knees, gazing unfocused at the painting, or the light, or phantoms of her own imagination. She had the voice of a little girl calling in the dark. 'I'm here.'

Then she spoke a phrase in another language—Navajo, each sound punctuated, melodic.

The fire dimmed suddenly to embers.

Ben tensed; 1 felt for his hand, gripped it. He squeezed back. I expected the sudden spike of fear to rouse the Wolf. Any sense of danger always woke her, sparked her instinct, made her want to fight. I expected that instinct to kick in, but it didn't. This space, this weird timeless feeling, soothed her somehow. She slept, even though my brain was firing. It gave me a strange, disembodied feeling, like I wasn't really here. Like I couldn't feel the ground under me anymore.

After a long silence, Louise said, 'She is telling me the story to tell to you. I can tell you like she's telling me.'

An aura of blue light glowed around Louise, like some kind of static charge danced around her. No—she was backlit. The light was coming from behind her. I wanted very much to move around