Have Stakes Will Travel: Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock (2 page)

I/we had talked in mind-den about this. I said to
We sa
again
, White devils must die. If white alpha devil dies, then all white men will stop killing earth. Yes?

We sa
did not answer.
We sa
shivered in back of mind, in cave-den of mind, in place she had made her own. We watched white men in gorge. We had watched them for two days. We knew where the den of the alpha devil was. We knew he went there at night, always by the same path. Just as deer once used to take same path to water in gorge below, alpha devil took same path to his train-car-den. I had been ambush hunter even before
We sa
came to me. I knew to study prey.

After long time, shadows began to stretch upon ground.
We sa
stirred and asked,
We will kill yunega asgina? We sa
knew this, but still she thought, silent in mind as we watched white man
. I do not like to kill humans.

White humans are devils. They kill the earth. I/we will kill them.

But not eat them, We sa
said
. Elisi,
grandmother
, say man-flesh makes us sick.

We will not eat him. But I/we will kill killer of hunting territory. Killer of trees and killer of prey.

Man was not good hunter, man was stupid. But man was winning and I/we were losing. After killing alpha male human, I/we would leave this place for deep gorge, many days walk away.
We sa
knew this. She did not like it, but she understood.
We sa
had once been human, but not white man human.
Tsalagi
human—
Cherokee
.
Tsalagi
understood how to live with earth and not kill it. Some
Tsalagi
did not protect the earth, some killed her, but not most. All white men killed earth. White man was evil.

I stood up on paws on tree limb and watched as night dropped darkness over all of earth. When shadows were long and human men left from killing trees to go eat food, I leaped to ground.
We sa
hid in dark of mind-den, afraid.

I raced down from ledge and trees on sheer part of gorge, place where white man could not get to easily, place of stunted trees and snakes and rock. I leaped straight down, thick tail whirling for balance. Half way down gorge-fall, I twisted like snake, and whipped tail. Changed direction, and landed on tiny ledge. There was small cave in back of ledge. Had once used this place for den to have kits. Liked this place long ago. White man had ruined it. Killed it. I did not go to den now, but pawpawpaw down across tiny ledges, leaping from ledge to ledge, which white men called
outcropping
, until I reached bottom of gorge. Then I moved in shadows for train car of white man, den of white alpha devil.

Night vision came as sunlight left. Earth turned into silvers and greens and grays. Liked this time of day/night.
We sa
called it beautiful. I called it safe. Shadows were dark and deep and
We sa
had explained that humans could not see in dark. I padded through dark over rutted bare earth to den of alpha devil. Curled into darker shadow beneath train car. I waited. I/we are good at waiting. Time passed. Night was dark. No moon stood in sky. Moon had died and would be reborn as kit-moon in one night, tiny and shaped like thin claw. I/we had chosen this night for this reason.
We sa
closed her eyes, afraid.

When night was full, I alone crept up stairs and leaped high, onto roof of train car. It was warm from sun of day. Was good place to ambush hunt. Looked over edge of train car, to path white man took for food. Was like ambush hunting on ledge in high hills before white man came and sent prey away.

Heard man-paws on earth, loud and scuffling inside dried skin of cow—boots. Man was not balanced and graceful and should not walk on two legs. Would be more quiet and graceful on four legs. But I was happy that white man was stupid and noisy. Listened and watched as he came closer. He carried in one paw much meat. It was cooked, which was bad, but it was meat and I/we had not eaten in two days. We hungered. White man came closer.

I gathered paws close under belly, balanced and steady as rock on flat land. White man came closer. He put one foot on step, one foot still on ground. Was unbalanced on one foot. I leaped. Landed on white man.
Hard!
Tumbled to ground, tangled in his upper legs. Landed on top of white man. With killing teeth, I ripped out his throat. Then held him by throat as he thrashed. He died. His blood was hot in my mouth. It did not taste good, but I hungered! Wanted to drink!

But
We sa
put her mind on top of my mind.
Tlano!
She said.
Do not eat!

I snarled but I did not drink blood or eat white man meat.
We sa
was smart. Blood tasted like blood of buzzard, full of dead things. I took his cooked meat and carried it into night. In shadows, I ate. And listened to sounds of white men when they found my enemy. They gathered together like wolf pack. Like pack hunters. They shouted into night, many white man words. They grabbed white man sticks and made loud noises.

Guns, We sa
whispered.

When all the white man’s cooked meat was in my belly, I turned and walked into hills. But that night, the foolish white man pack let man-fire go free. The hills began to burn and burn and burn. Hunger Times were upon us.

I would not come back to my old hunting grounds for many, many years.

Author’s note: This story takes place after the short story “Kits” and before the short story “Signatures of the Dead.” Molly Everhart Trueblood is the narrator.

Haints

“Nothing unusual here, Molly,” she said.

I watched Jane Yellowrock as she crawled across the floor of the old house on all fours. Most adults looked foolish or ungainly when crawling, but Jane was graceful, her arms lifting and moving forward with feline balance, her legs raising and lowering, toes pointed like a dancer, even in her western boots. My friend moved silently in the hot, sweaty room, easily avoiding the bird and mouse droppings, the holes in the old linoleum, and avoiding the signs of recent reconstruction—the broken plaster walls, large holes in the floor, and the shattered remains of the toilet, tub, and kitchen sink in the corner. Her shoulder blades lifted up high with each crawling step, visible beneath her thin T-shirt, her head lowered on the thin stem of her neck, moving catlike. I envied her the grace and the slenderness, but little else. Jane was more alone than anyone I had ever known.

Now she breathed in with a strange sucking hiss. Flehmen behavior, she called it, using her hypersensitive senses to smell things the way a cat would, the way a mountain lion would, sucking air in over her tongue and the roof of her mouth, her lips pulled back and mouth open. Mostly, she did it only when she was alone, because it sounded weird and looked weirder—not a human action at all. But because I had asked her for help, and because no one but me would see her, she did it now, scenting for the smell of . . . of whatever.

As I watched, Jane crawled out of the half-renovated kitchen and into the dining room beyond. We were both dressed in old jeans and T-shirts, clothes that could get filthy and be tossed into the washer, and already Jane looked like something the cat dragged in, which was funny in all sorts of ways. Jane Yellowrock was a Cherokee skinwalker, and her favorite animal form was a mountain lion. She called it her inner beast, which I still didn’t understand, but I figured she’d tell me someday.

I’d met Jane in the Ingles grocery store, when a group of witch haters caught me in the frozen foods section and harassed me. None of us Everharts were officially out of the closet then but most townspeople were okay with my family maybe carrying the witch gene. It was the out-of-towners who had the problem—a group that wasn’t from the religious right, but were just as rabid. I still don’t know what Jane did—she stepped in front of me so all I saw was her back—but the haters departed. Fast. I gave her my thanks and a card to my family café and we parted ways.

The next morning Jane came into the Seven Sassy Sister’s Herb Shop and Café, and nearly cleaned us out of bacon, sausage, and pancakes. The appetite of that morning was because she had just changed back from an animal form and needed calories to make up for the shift, but I didn’t know that then. I just thought it was a crying shame that a woman who was so skinny could eat like that. If I tried to shovel in that much food, even half that much food, I’d weigh four hundred pounds. I think I gained three pounds just watching her eat, that first day.

And then the group of witch haters from the day before started picketing out front. I guess they were in town and figured they should make the most of it. They were carrying signs about not suffering a witch to live—the usual crappola—and chanting, “Save our children! Save our children!” Two cars pulled by and slowed, as if to turn in, and then pulled on away. Such attention was going to be damaging to business.

Jane paid her bill, went outside, and revved up her bike. And revved up her bike. And revved up her bike again. At which point I realized she was doing it on purpose. Then she did something to the engine, and revved it up again. And black smoke came out. So Jane rode in circles around the parking lot, shouting to the witch haters, “So sorry about the noise! I have engine problems!” After about ten minutes of noise, the witch haters left. It was so cool. I thought the twins, Boadacia and Elizabeth, were going to have twin cows.

That’s Jane. A loner with a cause. Any cause, as long as it’s protecting someone.

She sneezed, bringing me back from my daydreams to my friend crawling around on the floor of a deserted, possibly haunted house.

The dining room had little floor left, and I could see the ground and the foundation beneath the house, between the struts. Still on her hands and knees, Jane moved into the foyer, circled its perimeter once, ignored the stairs leading to the second story, and crawled into the parlor beyond. I followed, watching from the foyer, which had been exposed when the construction crew pulled off the old boards covering the entrance. Oddly enough, though every other room in the house showed the results of men with mallets and hammers and crowbars, the parlor had still not been touched. The finish of the original handmade woodwork below the chair railing and the moldings at the ceiling were dark and filthy, the plaster between was cracked and split with water damage, and the last bits of old, red wallpaper curled, hanging loose, covered with spiderwebs and the dust of decades.

I stood in the six-foot-wide opening, watching my best friend track through the dust. The flooring beneath the accumulated filth was wood parquet, probably cut from the land the house stood on, milled by the lumber baron who built the house in the previous century. He had died a gruesome death, killed by a bear beside his train car, or so the old story went. His son had married a witch, and their daughter had inherited, and so had her daughter. However, the old house hadn’t been occupied in decades, not since Monique Ravencroft, the most powerful witch in the Appalachians, had disappeared without a trace.

The family had died out except for a son who no longer wanted the property, and the old house had been sold to a local lawyer for his business offices. Construction had begun quickly thereafter. The workers, however, had abandoned the project two days ago, after a flying mallet attacked a plumber standing in an empty room. The construction company owner had asked the local coven in the little township of Hainbridge to investigate, but the women had had no luck identifying the spiritual miscreant. They had called me in to discover if the troublemaker was a ghost, demon, or haint—haint being a term applied, in this part of the woods, to a form of poltergeist, or supernatural energy that usually manifests around a person instead of around a place. Whatever had attacked the plumber, it needed to be identified so the coven could coerce or force it to vacate the premises. Unfortunately, all I’d found was a sense of something dead in the house, and I’d had no luck calling to or talking to any non-corporeal would-be-killer. I hoped Jane, with her hyper senses, might discover something I had missed.

Jane sniffed around the fireplace on the far side of the room, the interior walls black with wood or coal smoke, the old grate rusted through and coated with spider webs. She seemed to find the opening uninteresting, and moved on to the corner. She paused there, repeating the openmouthed sniffing, and looked up, puzzled. “Molly, are you sure there’s something dead here?”

I nodded. I’m from a long family of witches, all of us pretty much in the witch-closet, and while I’m an earth witch, with the gift of growing plants, healing bodies, and restoring balance to nature, I’m a little unusual for an earth witch, in that I can sense dead things. And there was definitely something dead in this house somewhere.

“I smell witch and vamp,” Jane said.

The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up in alarm. “Vampire? There shouldn’t be a vampire here.”

“It’s been years, but I think . . .” She put her nose back to the dust covered floor, sniffed delicately, and started sneezing. She rolled to her feet and crossed the room, sneezing all the way, her nose buried in the crook of her elbow to keep her filthy hands away from her face. I counted twelve sneezes before she stopped and her face was red from the sneeze effort. “I think I smell vamp and witch together,” she said, the back of a wrist to her nose, pressing against more sneezes, “and both of them were bleeding.” She stood beside me and turned to face the room. The evidence of her crawling progression was a clear trail through the layers of dust.

“Moll,” she said, “I dropped a stake.” She pointed to the fourteen-inch-long stake in the corner. “Would you go get it, please?”

“No,” I said instantly.

“Why not? You chicken?”

Anger shot through me. “I’m not going—” I stopped, and the anger filtered out of me. Around me the house seemed to wait, expectant, and I turned in a slow circle, standing in the doorway, letting my senses flow out, seeing the hand-carved woodwork, the once-elegant stairs leading up to the second floor, the carpenter’s ladder against the wall. Smelling the dust, the fresh wood, the dirt under the house, and the sweat of the workers from two days past. Hearing the small sounds an old house makes, the pops and quiet groans. Feeling the breath of the house as air moved through it, cool and moist from the open floor and up the stairs, a faint trickle of breeze. I opened my mouth, as Jane did, and breathed, almost tasting the house, its age, elegance, and history.