“What are your parents’ names?” she asked.
“I don’t remember. I was found in the woods near the Old Nation. I was hoping . . .” Impossible hope burbled up with memories, the need of all orphans, to discover their blood kin.
“You hoped I could tell you?” she guessed. “Send you to your clan, your people?” I nodded. “I will help if I can. If you are of The People,” she said gently. “But from your eyes, I see that you are not full-blooded Cherokee. What are you?” Aggie asked.
I stood so quickly her eyes didn’t follow. She tensed. Half rose. I forced myself to stop, hands high on the jambs in the doorway of her kitchen as if hung, suspended over a fire, from deer antlers thrust through the flesh of my back. Where did that image come from?
Aggie flattened her hands on the table, her palms hugging the surface. She relaxed one joint at a time, slowly. I turned to the kitchen, hands out as if balancing, and remembered to breathe. Beast restrained herself, gathered tight, close to the surface. Claws flexed. Ready.
“Forgive me,” Aggie said, controlled, subdued, motionless as the air before winter snows. “I didn’t wish, didn’t intend, to cause you pain.”
“Why did you ask me what I am?” The words were half growled, and I saw her flinch, the reaction minuscule. Everybody was asking me that these days.
Aggie shrugged, a slight lifting of narrow shoulders. “Your eyes proclaim you are part white. And I see something in you, a shadow of something . . . old.” She pointed to my stomach, between my ribs. “There. Like two souls in one flesh. They do not battle, but live in uneasy harmony.” When I said nothing, when the moment stretched into discomfort even for a shaman, she blew out a breath and took a cookie, ate it. Visibly gathered herself and her thoughts. “To answer your first question, the liver-eater is a skinwalker.”
Breath caught in my throat, hot and burning. I don’t know what she saw on my face, but she paused again and waited as if she thought I might speak. I looked Cherokee. Had spoken a Cherokee word. In the years in the children’s home, I had read Cherokee tribal history, mostly through the old writings of James Mooney, hoping that I would find something that correlated with my splintered past, but nothing I read had sounded like what I was. I found my breath, shook my head, and gestured for her to continue.
“It is also called skinchanger. There are several tribal stories about liver-eater. In one, she is female. In her human form, she is usually a grandmother and so is respected and trusted for many years. But when she is aged, and the greed for youth and power overtake her, she seeks to replace what she has lost and temptation leads her into the practice of evil. She changes her skin for another human’s. This is the blackest of magic.
“Our stories tell us that when she gives over to evil, the skinwalker has one long fingernail that she can insert into a child and remove the liver.” When I still said nothing, Aggie went on. “Another skinwalker is Callanu Ayiliski, the Raven, Moker. He likes to steal hearts.” Her eyes studied me, missing nothing.
“The liver-eater is usually referred to as a skinwalker who has gone mad. Skinwalkers can be a nasty bunch,” she said. “However, in distant times, before the white man came, with his lusts to always have more, before the Spaniards in metal helmets came to enslave us, skinwalkers were the protectors of The People, keeping our ancestors safe from evil and evil magic. Only when they became old, and after the white man came, did many turn from protection to darker tasks and black magic.” Her voice fell silent.
Aggie watched me, her body loose, tranquil, her eyes seeing more than I wanted her to. “Some call liver-eater Spear Finger. U’tlun’ta.” She pronounced it like hut luna, which was a different pronunciation from the word in my distant memory, but it was a word I remembered from the legends in Mooney’s books. Aggie smiled. “I see that you know of Spear Finger.”
I nodded. “Is there any chance the liver-eater is a vampire instead of a skinwalker?”
“No. Vampires are foreign. They came with the Spaniards, the first white men.”
I nodded slowly, though it didn’t make much sense. Deep in the house, I heard the soft turning of fan blades, the sound of the motor driving it a steady hum. The refrigerator ticked, popped, and an automatic ice maker dumped ice cubes with a clatter. I moved back to the table and sat in the chair. “The words between an elder or shaman, and a seeker in pain, are protected, aren’t they?” I asked. “Like discussions between a psychologist and patient?”
Aggie inclined her head. “Somewhat. If you tell me you are going to kill someone, I will put the needs of The People, and even the white man, before yours. But if you come for counsel, I will help as I may, and retain your confidence.” She tilted her head, like a bird studying the ground from a tree, amusement playing at her lips. “You aren’t going to kill anyone, are you?”
“Yes. I am.” She twitched, a faint movement of shoulder blades, and her amusement slid away. “I’m going to kill the thing I followed here. It’s an old rogue vampire, a male. I’m sure of it. But my source . . . my source says it’s a liver-eater, not a vampire.”
After a moment, Aggie said, “Skinwalkers, before they turned to evil, were of The People. They lived among us from the earliest times as protectors, as warriors, sharing our history.” Aggie shrugged. “When the white man came, much was lost, much changed. I have heard it said: The skinwalkers shared the blood of The People. The liver-eaters stole it.”
Beast’s focus sharpened. Blood. And the strange scents caught in the bit of fabric that carried the rogue’s saliva and the blood of his victims, and the stink of rot. Beast went still, as if she understood, but if she did, she didn’t explain it to me. I needed to get back to the house and take another sniff of the bloody cloth.
But suddenly Aggie was talkative, her placid eyes intent, her mouth turned up in a smile. “My favorite story of the crone liver-eater is about Chickelili,” she said, “whose name means Truth Teller. Chickelili is a little snowbird, and the only one who tells the truth about the crone. Since Chickelili is little, nondescript, and has a small voice, her words are drowned out by the jays and crows, until a little boy listens and warns the parents that the killer of children is near. The message of the story is that the small voice is sometimes more important than loud ones.”
I stared at her, not knowing what her words might mean, but knowing that an elder seldom spoke unless there was great truth in the story, truth that was pertinent to the current situation. Little voices? I flashed on Katie’s ladies sitting at the dinner table.
“This creature you saw near the sweathouse. Does it have a long fingernail?”
I thought back to the vision of it in the alley, the prostitute’s body cradled in his arms. Then the brief glimpse as it lunged up the wall. “No. I didn’t see one.”
“Could you see its energies?” she asked.
“Gray light, black motes. I smelled them on the wind,” I said, and felt instantly foolish.
Aggie nodded. “Yes. I see that. You are a tracker of evil. A warrior woman, like the great ones of the far past.” I felt a blush start at the praise, and shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden chair. “I will set wards and burn smudge sticks at dusk,” she said, “to cleanse the taint of any evil that may be nearby. And my mother and I will watch in the night.”
“Your mother?” I asked, surprised.
“My mother is only seventy-four, and is still vibrant. My grandmother passed last year.”
Things clicked in my mind. “Her bones are buried in the back? Near the sweathouse.”
The same things clicked in Aggie’s mind and the animation drained from her face, showing me a clearer picture of her age. “You think this creature, this rogue vampire you hunt, is after the bones of my ancestors,” she said, her voice so low it was like grass in the wind. “Or after one of us to have power over the bones of my family and the magic in them.”
It made sense, and unknown knowledge fell into place in my mind; it made a lot more sense than anything Beast was thinking. “Having the bones of an elder who shares a bloodline buried nearby helps boost a shaman’s power, yes?” I said. Aggie nodded once, a jerky motion, full of fear. More gently, I said, “If the thing I’m chasing is a vampire, and if he turned one of you, could he call upon the ancestors, the macheiaellow, to give him strength?”
Aggie whispered, “Perhaps. It depends on what he knows. What magic he has.”
“He’s old,” I said. “Very, very old. Several hundred years, I’d guess. How many generations of ancestors are buried out back?”
Aggie dropped her eyes to her hands; she laced her fingers on the tabletop. “My grandmother, her mother and father, and my great-great-grandmother, who slipped away from the Removal—the Trail of Tears—and settled here.” If I reacted to the mention of the Trail of Tears, Aggie didn’t see it, her eyes downcast. “The bones of my sister, who died when a child. My uncle and his wife, who was a white woman but who joined us when she married. My grandmother’s brother, much older than she. Seven of the blood of The People, and one who joined us.”
“That’s a lot of powerful bones in one place,” I said.
“I’ll let the dogs loose tonight, to guard the yard,” Aggie said.
“Aggie,” I said gently. “It killed two of your dogs already.”
She closed her eyes, as if to block out the truth. But when she opened them again, they burned with fury. Low and fierce, she said, “I’ll kill it.” Her hands clenched on the table, small and dark and fragile, but with a terrible underlying strength of purpose. “If it comes here, I’ll kill it.” She took a breath that seemed to ache as she drew it in. “Do you have a cell phone number?”
I pulled a card out of my T-shirt pocket and placed it on the table between us. Aggie took it up and rubbed it gently, as if feeling the texture of the paper, but I knew she was feeling my energies stored in it. “You have decided to keep your true nature from me?” she asked.
