Shadow Rites

With Leo calmer and me exhausted, I said, “We’ll be back after dark.”

Leo didn’t look my way, his Frenchy-black eyes on the screen. “For now, get some rest. You were grievously wounded earlier today and I would not have my Jane weak or in peril.”

* * *

Back home, I again changed clothes, this time into a stained loose T-shirt and stretchy pants for meditation, so if I decided I could shift, I wouldn’t ruin my clothes. Even in mountain lion form I could get out of the shoddy duds.

Outside, on the back corner of the porch, I curled on the wooden floor, legs in guru position, my spine against the post holding up the porch. Mosquitoes buzzed around me, annoying. In the mountains they would have been mostly dormant by now, the early frost in Asheville killing them off, but here, they were a year-round nuisance.

I blew out a breath that didn’t hurt and relaxed against the post. Though I would rather be sitting on the pile of busted boulders in the back, the rain was falling faster, the storm still coming off the Gulf of Mexico, with lightning flashing across the sky and the roll of thunder. The Truebloods were driving through this and would be here by morning, if not sooner. Neither Molly nor Evan was a water witch, and it would make sense for them to drive straight on through instead of stopping for the night. Though Molly, newly and unexpectedly—to me—pregnant, might need to stop and rest. Selfishly I’d like them to be here as soon as possible, and not just for the company of friends I missed. I could use their opinion on the scan of the house and the magical thingamabob eye on my palm.

Flash floods weren’t uncommon in the flatland of Louisiana, but I knew that Big Evan, Molly’s husband, could handle most anything that happened around him, in the real world and in the metaphysical world of magic. They would be fine. I shouldn’t be worrying about the big bad magical witches who could take care of themselves better than I could.

Lightning slashed the sky open again, striking close. The ground shook, and all around me lights flickered. A shiver raced through me, reaction to the electric energy of nature, and if I was honest, a leftover reaction to being struck by lightning. I took a calming breath and exhaled. No way was I giving in to fear over a little storm. Or a little almost-died-but-didn’t experience. I’d had too many to let them bother me now.

I had more important worries about the scar and the inability to shift when I was in danger and an odd feeling of exhaustion that tugged at my consciousness. But I was having trouble dragging my thoughts back into meditation, seeing the Trueblood’s soccer-mom van sliding into an overflowing bayou, two witches with green merged magic working against them.

I blew out another breath and opened my left hand. It was plain, unmarked, but it was my real source of worry. The memory of the green eye in my palm. An eye similar to the magical impression of the Mercy Blade’s watching blue eye, the eye he had marked me with when we first met and he healed me from a werewolf attack.

Old magic was dangerous. Traces of it were even more so, as time dulled the importance of old spells and the mind forgot the opening into the soul that could be left. The misericord had deliberately marked me long ago. Now he had harmed me, probably partly as a result of his own magic. And I hadn’t shifted. That. Yeah, that was the problem.

Holding the old image of the blue eye in my mind, I finally let myself drop away into the place that was the home of my soul, the place I remembered from long and long ago, when I had been a child of five and my father and grandmother—edoda and elisi—had coaxed and forced me into my first change, into wesa—bobcat. That cavern in the Appalachian Mountains that had taken on such importance in my regular, ordinary life, a place that was all memory and healing, a place in my mind and my spirit, and in reality, though the location had been lost to me for going on two centuries. The place that told me what was happening in my own mind and heart, that showed me when I was under attack. The place I went to for spiritual healing.

The place Gee DiMercy had marked with his power over me.

The Cherokee didn’t mark rites of passage on cave walls or lay claim to the caves, not like what the ancient white man did in Europe and in other places of the Americas. They didn’t make handprints on cave walls. Yet Gee DiMercy had made handprints of his own in my soul home, as if claiming my place for his own.

I had been forced to cleanse my soul home with fire and spirit.

I remembered. And I slid down into the memory, like cooling smoke sliding down cave walls.

“Hands,” I had whispered. “Hands on the roof of the world.” My thoughts of that time in my soul home came clear to me.

My own memory of my own words, as I saw the hands marked all over the cave walls all around, and even up to the roof of the dome overhead. They had been blue hands in circles of white, and white-toned hands in circles of blue, pigments applied like signs of ownership fixed to the walls of my soul house.

Each kind of handprint had been made in a different way. I knew this even without acquiring the learning, as if it was part of me. For the blue handprints, the white pigment had been blown through a hollow reed onto the walls in a circular or oval pattern, and then pigments had been crushed and mixed with fat or spit. This paste had been applied to Gee’s hands and the blue prints pressed against the walls. For the white handprints in circles of blue, the procedure had been different, possibly because of the nature of the pigments themselves. I never bothered to discover why the different methods had been employed. The blue pigments had been crushed and sucked up into a reed. A hand had been placed on the cave wall, and the pigments had been blown over it, leaving the unpigmented print in the whitish gray of the cavern rock.