Sadie’s bravado had been fading during the whole long walk from the Ghost Mall to the hospital. Neither she nor Gonzalo had said another word to each other and that was fine with her. She wasn’t in the mood to talk with anyone.
By the time the automatic doors opened for them at the front entrance, she felt empty and sad. She had no idea what she hoped to accomplish by seeing the old lady, and she couldn’t imagine that Aggie would be particularly happy to see her. She dreaded seeing Manny, too—the quick disapproval in his eyes every time she opened her mouth or did anything.
She didn’t even know why she cared. But it was too late to back out now, so she stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her hoodie and followed as Gonzalo strode into the elevator.
There’d been crows lining the hospital’s roofline and perched on the mesquite and cacti out front, a couple of the crow men inside the hospital’s entrance. There were two more in the corridor when they exited the elevator. They had all given her the same flat, hard stare as she went by. Sadie was pretty sure that, if not for the witch’s protection, she’d be lying in a shallow grave right now somewhere out in the desert.
Which would probably be the best end to this whole crappy business.
Yeah, she’d pushed Gonzalo hard to come here, except once she saw the old woman, then what? She could say she was sorry, but after that, there’d be nothing for her. She hadn’t just burned bridges, she’d blown them all into so many tiny pieces it was like they’d never existed.
If only she could just learn to think things through first. Ever since Reggie had dumped her out in the desert, she’d been out of control, like the rabid dog that the cops had shot on her street last summer.
Even right now, while she wasn’t exactly foaming at the mouth, she was trying to figure some way out of this mess and wishing she hadn’t thrown away her utility knife. She’d like to plunge it right into Gonzalo’s arrogant back.
Stop with the crazy talk, she told herself.
If she had her knife, what she would really do was ease the growing pressure that was making her skin feel tight and her head all loco.
She took a deep breath. God, her throat was dry.
As they passed a restroom, she said, “I need to use the can,” and ducked inside before Gonzalo could react. She ran the tap, drinking with cupped hands, then splashing more on her face. Lifting her head she saw some sketchy pyscho girl looking back at her from the mirror.
She bit hard on her lip and the scab broke open. The salty iron taste of blood filled her mouth and she felt herself calm a little.
Now the psycho girl in the mirror looked more like some pathetic street kid with a bloody lip.
She spit into the sink and watched the gob of spit and blood inch toward the drain until she turned on the faucet and washed it away.
She grabbed some paper towels. Wetting them, she gave her face and neck a good scrub to clean up the worst of the dirt and sweat. She used her fingers to comb her hair. Her clothes were grubby and smelled rank, like that hellhole mall, but there was nothing she could do about that. She put her mouth to the faucet and took another drink. Straightening up, she went back out into hall to find Gonzalo leaning against the wall, arms folded across his chest.
“You ready now?” he asked.
Sadie nodded.
They walked by a nurse’s station to a doorway where another crow man was standing guard. Gonzalo ushered her into the room, but stayed outside.
Sadie ran her tongue over her cut lip and swallowed. The taste of blood was vague enough that it could almost have been a memory, but it helped.
Manny was sitting in a chair near the head of the hospital bed. He stood up when she came in. Aggie lay with her eyes closed. Her skin had a weird pallor, but that might have been from the fluorescent light coming through the large observation window. “There’s not going to be trouble, right?” he said.
“What? No!” She peered more closely at Aggie. “Maybe I should come back when she’s awake.”
Aggie’s eyes opened and Sadie took a quick step back. “Who says I’m sleeping?” the old woman asked.
Sadie moved warily to the foot of the bed. “How are you doing?” she asked, shifting from one foot to the other.
“I’ve been better.”
“Yeah, about that. I’m, you know, sorry. That you got hurt. Um.” She cleared her throat and tried again. “That I hurt you.”
Aggie studied her for a long moment without speaking. Her gaze was so dark and serious that Sadie wanted to drop her own, but she couldn’t seem to look away.
“I know that what happened at the police station wasn’t entirely your fault,” Aggie finally said. “You panicked and I was in the wrong place.”
Sadie gave a slow nod.
“But that doesn’t excuse how you treated Steve, the hurtful lies you told.”
“I—I know.”
“Perhaps your father’s given you no reason to trust men, but you only have to consider Steve’s kindness toward you to know that they’re not cut from the same cloth.”
Sadie nodded again. “It was wrong.”
Aggie sat up a little with a grimace, waving Manny away as he moved closer to help her. Her gaze never left Sadie’s. “I wonder,” she said. “Do you really believe that, or is it only what you think I want to hear?”
It took Sadie a moment to realize that Aggie was asking her the question, not talking to herself. “Probably a little of both,” she replied, surprising herself with her honesty.
“Huh.” Aggie turned to Manny. “What do you think about that?”
The crow man’s gaze remained harsh. “I think she also went and traded Ruby’s soul for a witch’s favours.”
Oh, God. Ruby. That might be the worst of what she’d done.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Sadie said, all her defensiveness back. “I had it under control, but then she had to go and offer herself.”
“What was supposed to happen?” Manny asked.
Sadie turned to him, her jaw set. “I was going to beat Reggie over the head with a baseball bat until he agreed to do it.”
“Who’s Reggie?” he asked.
She shrugged. “My old man.”
The unfriendliness in the crow man’s eyes was still there, but now it didn’t seem completely directed at her.
The old woman just looked sad. “There’s something wrong with you,” Aggie said.
Sadie clenched and unclenched her fists. “You think I don’t know that? I hate myself and I’m angry all the time. I’m about as fucked up as you can get.”
“It can be fixed,” Aggie said.
For a moment, hope blossomed in Sadie. “You’d do that? Help me?”
Aggie nodded. “I would. I hope I get the chance to try. But you know what you have to do first.”
Sadie’s shoulders slumped. “What’s that?” she asked, feeling the energy drain from her body.
“There’s the world of the spirit and the world of the body,” Aggie told her. “I can help you in the world of the spirit, but first you must set things right in the world of the body. If you don’t fix this first, the spirits can’t help you.”
“Spirits,” Sadie replied. She nodded with her chin at Manny. “You mean, like him?”
Aggie smiled. “Yes and no. Manny’s from Yellowrock Canyon—a ma’inawo. People think of the ma’inawo as spirits, but when you consider the thunders—the big mysteries—they’re more like little ones.”
“So they’re…little mysteries?” Sadie tried.
She didn’t have a clue what that actually meant, and Aggie’s “Exactly!” didn’t help.
“So I’ve got to make things right with the cops,” Sadie said, her voice dull.
Aggie nodded.
“You know they’re going to put me away in some jail. They won’t call it a jail, but that’s still what it’ll be.”
Aggie nodded again. “Think of it as a time-out. And don’t be shy of the counselors. I’m sure you have an excellent bullshit detector. If you trust any of them, don’t be shy about accepting their help.”
“And then what?”
“Then you come back and see me, and I’ll teach you how to walk large. I’ll teach you how to bring yourself back into balance with the spiritual world.”
“Is that hard?”
Aggie shrugged. “Everything’s hard, if it means anything.”
But why did it have to be this hard? Why did she have to feel so bad all the time? Why did she have to always break whatever came into her orbit?
Not everything, she realized. She’d never hurt Aylissa or any of the other foster kids that had come through the house.
She remembered back in the Ghost Mall, thinking there was nothing left for her. But maybe she’d been wrong. Like Aggie said, it’d be hard. Facing the cops. Facing Reggie. Taking her medicine.
But hard made sense. With everything she’d done, she deserved hard.
She met Aggie’s steady gaze. Here was the woman she’d put in the hospital with her knife, the woman who was still offering to help. Yeah, she was a space cadet, and yeah, all her mumbo jumbo about food having feelings was weird. All those crazy stories had come out while they were making what had pretty much been the best meal she’d ever eaten. But right now, Aggie seemed like a light in the darkness.
Sadie had tried it the other way. Reggie’s way. The asshole way.
Maybe it was time she tried the space cadet way. How had Aggie put it? Bring yourself back into balance with the spiritual world. Sadie wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she knew she’d never been in balance in her life, and it sounded a hell of a lot better than any of her other options.
She thought about her knife, how it provided a sense of release and helped her cope with being powerless. The knife was gone, but she still needed something—some kind of hope to take with her while going through the pile of crap she’d face as soon as she walked into the police station.
Now she wished she’d been paying better attention when they were making dinner at Aggie’s house.
She felt like a little kid when she asked, “Will you tell me a story before I go? Something to help when the cops put me away?”
Aggie nodded. “Come sit here beside me.”
Sadie edged her way around the bed to the chair where Manny had been sitting. He stepped back and leaned against the windowsill, arms folded across his chest. Not exactly friendly, but not as hard-eyed as he’d been earlier.
“The People of Turtle Island don’t have all the same medicines and mysteries,” Aggie said, when Sadie was sitting. “But from tribe to tribe, there are some stories and beliefs we hold in common. I’ll tell you one of the oldest stories I know. I’ve heard many versions over the years, but this is how it’s told around the campfires of the Kikimi.”
Long ago, Tía Sweet Smoke, an Aunt of the desert people, took her granddaughter Pela down from the mountains to trade with the river people. They left the Painted Lands early in the morning, but between trading and gossip, by the time they were returning home, the shadows had grown long before them, the sun was ready to find her bed in the mountains, and they were still hours from home.
Pela grew nervous as the darkness fell around them, but Tía Sweet Smoke wasn’t worried. Why should she be? She knew the trail well, the moon would rise soon to light their way, and who would dare trouble an Aunt of the People? Everyone knew that while the men of their tribe had a magic that let them fight in the shape of dogs, the Aunts were magic. Medicine ran in their veins the way blood runs in ours.
But Pela was just a girl and the medicine hadn’t yet come to her. She wasn’t as fearless as her grandmother. When they heard something moving in the scrub nearby, she thought: demons, where her grandmother thought: some animal, perhaps a ma’inawo.
They were both wrong, though Pela was partly right. When the moon rose, what they saw on the trail ahead of them didn’t look like a demon—it looked like a young boy of the People—but Tía Sweet Smoke immediately knew it had the heart of a monster because she knew what it was.
A skinwalker.
In the dream of the world, skinwalkers are spewed forth from the darkest corners. Black witches abduct young girls from the tribe and impregnate them. The infants from these unions are nurtured with black magic and fed on the flesh of their own mothers. In time, they are taught how to take the shapes of other beings by wearing their skins. Doing this, they can even assume the likenesses of the dead.
One such creature was fearsome enough. It would be hard, but not impossible, for an Aunt to destroy it. But Tía Sweet Smoke could hear more of them in the scrub on either side of the trail—perhaps as many as half a dozen.
She put her mouth to her granddaughter’s ear. “When I say run,” she told the girl, “run as fast as you can and don’t look back. Run as fast as you can, and then a little faster still. If—when—you make it back to the village, tell my sisters what you have seen. They will know what to do.”
“But—”
“No argument. If you wish to live to see the morning, you’ll do as I say.”
Tía Sweet Smoke straightened up and walked briskly toward the skinwalker, her granddaughter trotting behind to keep up. The semblance of a boy grinned at their approach until Tía Sweet Smoke took a few quick steps.
“Run!” she cried as she grabbed the boy.
Pela darted past them and took off as fast she could run.
The skin the boy wore slipped a little under Tía Sweet Smoke’s grip, pulling tight until the seam broke at the back of his head and she was staring into the face of a nightmare. A skinwalker’s true shape has no skin, only a translucent sheath to hold the muscles and organs in place. Undaunted, Tía Sweet Smoke laid the palm of her hand in the center of the creature’s face and spoke the beginning of a blessing ceremony.
Her medicine flowed forth, and where she held the skinwalker, his skin began to smoke, then burn. He cried out, writhing in her grip, but she held fast. She had extra strength, not from concern for her own safety, but for that of her granddaughter. She knew that some of the others might have gone chasing after Pela, but as soon as they heard their pack mate’s screams, they would converge on her.
Tía Sweet Smoke was an old Aunt, and more than a match for one skinwalker. But not two, or three, or the five that attacked her as medicine cleaned the evil from the first of them. He burst into flame before the others could pull her away.
She fought, but there were too many. All she could do in the end was make certain that she held silent, so that no cries she might make would draw Pela back.
But Pela was already far away. Fear lent her feet wings. The moon rose and the path was easy to see, easy to follow. She arrived breathless at the village, calling her alarm. The dog boys came first, some in their human shapes, most of them in a dog pack. The Aunts arrived almost as quickly.
Pela told her story, tugging at the sleeve of this Aunt or another when she was done. “Come,” she said. “We have to go help her.”
But the Aunts shook their heads. “Our sister Sweet Smoke will survive or not by her own strength and will,” Tía Marita told her. “If any of us were to go to her aid, it would leave the village undefended, for we are only strong when all are here.”
Pela tried to pull away to run back to help her grandmother, but the Aunts wouldn’t let her go. They waited with her near the mouth of the canyon, which was the entrance to the village in those days.
The dog boys patrolled the cliff top borders. Juan Carlos Morago, the tribal shaman, joined the Aunts. He leaned on a wooden spear that he carried as though it were a staff. Feathers and shells dangled from leather strips tied to its top, upon which a sharp flinthead stone glowed bluish-green with its own light.
The moon rose and set. And they waited.
The stars wheeled in a slow dance across the sky. And still they waited.
Finally, just before the dawn, a figure came up the trail. Pela gave a cry of joy, recognizing her grandmother before anyone else did. Tía Sweet Smoke was bloodied and bruised. She walked with her head bowed in weariness and a limp so severe she was almost dragging her leg.
But she was alive.
Juan Carlos walked out to meet her, banging the end of his spear in the dirt with each step that he took, raising little plumes of dust in his wake.
“Oh honourable sister,” he said when he stood before her. “We can see that you fought long and hard.”
Tía Sweet Smoke raised her head and nodded her appreciation for his words.
Juan Carlos banged his spear on the ground again.
“Hey ya, hey ya,” he said.
Then he suddenly thrust the glowing flinthead straight into her chest.
Pela gave an anguished scream and it was all the Aunts could do to hold her back.
But it was not her grandmother who fell to the ground. It was some awful creature, wearing her skin. A skinwalker. It writhed and tried to pull itself up the haft of the spear, but Juan Carlos kept the creature pinned down until it began to smoke and finally burst into flame. Moments later, there was only the sharp end of the spear left in the ground with a circle of ash in the dirt around it.
Pela was never the same again after that night. She turned her back on the Aunts, and trained instead with the warriors, intent on learning dog magic from Marco Little Tree, the chief of the dog boys. But that magic he wouldn’t teach her because, while she could outrun and outfight even boys older than her, she was always angry. She had focus, but no stamina because everything she did was fueled by anger, and that anger burned too bright and hot inside her. She was fierce, but she could never stay the course for any of the exercises they practiced.
Finally, Marco took her aside. He made her sit with him on the red rocks that jutted out high above the canyon. For a long time, neither of them spoke. They watched the Yellowrock Canyon crows ride the winds above the canyon, chasing each other in a rough and tumble game of catch-me-if you-can.
“You understand,” Marco said finally, “that it wasn’t your grandmother that Juan Carlos killed.”
Pela didn’t look at him. “It doesn’t matter. I still hate him. But I hate the skinwalkers more. I’m going to kill every last one of them.”
“We defend. We don’t take the fight to the enemy.”
“You don’t know what it feels like, this awful hole I have to carry around in my chest. How everything I see reminds me of her. It hurts so much. All I want to do is break everything around me.”
“You’re not the first to lose a loved one,” Marco told her, “and sadly, you won’t be the last. At some point in our lives, we’re all forced to take up that burden, and there’s nothing any of us can do to make that feeling go away. They say time heals, but I’ve found that all it does is blur the rawness.”
“Then what’s the point? Why love anything?”
“Love doesn’t have a point,” Marco told her. “It just happens.”
Pela shook her head. “I don’t want it to—not ever again. It hurts too much.”
“Would you rather never have known your grandmother?”
Pela didn’t answer. She kept her gaze on the distant mountains.
“Pela?”
Finally, she shook her head.
“The anger and hate you feel does you more harm than anyone else,” Marco told her.
“But how do I stop feeling this way?”
“I don’t know. What I do know is that each of us has two spirits constantly warring inside us. Think of them as hummingbirds fighting over flowers—and in this case, we’re the nectar. One is made strong by our anger and greed and ego, the other by our love and kindness and compassion. In the end, we become whichever of the two spirits we allow to be the strongest.”
Pela thought about that, then asked, “How do we know which one will win?”
Marco smiled. “That’s the simple beauty of it. The one that wins is always the one that you feed.”
“That’s a terrible story,” Sadie said. “I mean, it was a good story, but jeez, the crap Pela had to go through. And her poor grandmother.”
Aggie nodded. “Remember what I told you when you stayed with me at my house? How the stories the People tell help us to understand the world we live in, and our neighbours?”
Sadie nodded.
“This is a story for the landscape that lies inside us,” Aggie said.
“Yeah, I got that,” Sadie told her, then she sighed. “You make it sound so easy. Feed the good spirit, starve the bad one.”
“It’s simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. At times in our lives, it becomes the hardest struggle we will ever face.”
Sadie nodded.
Aggie took her hand. “I meant what I said. Come back when you are in balance with the physical world, and I will help you as best I can.”
When she let go, Sadie stood up. She looked from Manny back to the old woman in her hospital bed. The hospital bed that she had put her in.
“Why would you want to help me,” she asked, “after all I…after everything?”
Aggie smiled. “Maybe I’m just feeding the good spirit inside me.”
Sadie nodded. She felt weird and flushed, but for some reason she wasn’t itching to be alone somewhere with her utility knife.
“Okay, then,” she said. “I hope you start, you know, feeling better and everything.”
“Thank you. Ohla, Sadie.”
Sadie nodded again. There wasn’t anything left to say. She sidled past Manny.
“Sadie,” Manny said as she reached the door.
She turned to look at him.
“You might think about tattoos instead of cutting. You still wear them like a scar on your skin, but they can tell different kinds of stories than the ones you’ve been putting on yourself so far. Better ones.”
“Like you give a shit,” was out of her mouth before she could stop herself.
“Actually, most people do.”
“Not the ones I know.”
“You need to meet some new people,” Aggie said from the bed. “And remember which spirit to feed when you’re with them.”
“I guess I could give it a try,” she said.
Then she was out the door and walking down the hall under the watchful gazes of the crow men guarding Aggie’s room and the elevator.