Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) (5 page)

"Creator," Cyrus At Dawn began.  His voice was loud, but raspy, like he'd swallowed a fistful of rocks.  "Today we renew our covenant with the Wise Wolf.  We accept the lifeblood given to us and vow to return it."

Luke Owns Forty stared at me from across the prayer circle.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I saw the livid, flickering anger in his eyes.  I never felt comfortable when I was around that guy.  I knew if he got me alone he was going to do something to me he couldn't take back.  He wasn't going to regret it.

"The track of the sun across the sky leaves its shining message," Cyrus said.  "Illuminating, strengthening, warming those of us who remain."

It was an old prayer.  Everyone started holding hands.  Daisy At Dawn grabbed my left hand, wiggling her eyebrows and smiling sneakily.  Uncle Gabriel grabbed my right.  Tingling energy shot through me, bouncing off the pulses in my arms.  That's the one thing I hate about touching people:  Their feelings travel through your skin.  On my left I felt giddy, infectious, contemplating lazy summer days.  On my right I felt distracted, vaguely worried, but I couldn't place why.

"We are yet alive," Cyrus prayed.  "And this fire, our fire, shall not die."

Restless, uncomfortable, I imagined that everyone was a different animal.  The At Dawn girls were falcons; you could see it in their noses, in the shapes of their jaws.  Zeke had to be the Coyote, Wolf's immature brother:  He twitched with frantic excitement, scarcely standing still.  I guessed that made Andrew a turtle, his grubby, shabby clothes his shell.

"Aho!" Cyrus said.

We broke hands and broke the prayer.  We split up into hunting parties.  Uncle Gabe and I teamed up with Andrew and Stuart and decided we would take the forest trail in search of elk.  The At Dawns hiked into the badlands, Daisy whistling, Holly looking like her dog had died.  Zeke trailed after Holly very adamantly, because he wasn't Zeke if he wasn't annoying people.  Luke started following his son, but stopped.  He turned around.

"I don't know that we should be encouraging you to kill things," Luke said to me, over his shoulder.

His voice was quiet.  His profile was quietly menacing.  He morphed in front of my eyes into a venomous coral snake, jarring red scales splashed with angry yellow stripes.

I hunched in on myself.  I shoved my hands in the pockets of my too-big trousers.

"I'm not raising Rafael to kill," Uncle Gabriel cut in.  "I'm raising him to provide."

Uncle Gabriel was a mountain lion.  They look harmless, like giant, domesticated cats, but they're the deadliest animal in the badlands.  You can't run from a mountain lion; you'll trigger his attack reflexes.  You can't play dead, either, or he'll happily take a bite out of you.  There's a reason we have so many children's songs about staying away from them altogether.  "Yuapi annu hinna kwasikun mappuingku?"

Luke shrugged, glancing dismissively away.  "
You
know the difference," he said to Uncle Gabe.

"So does Rafael," Uncle Gabriel said calmly.  "Or I should think I've raised him to know the difference.  I hope you're not questioning my parenting skills?"

The mountain lion tore the coral snake apart with its claws.  The coral snake bled clear yellow on the grass.

"Come on, Raf," Uncle Gabriel said cheerfully.

Uncle Gabriel took the dirt road out east, passing the stone water well.  I followed him, my spear in my hand.  I felt a line crease my forehead when I frowned.  Uncle Gabriel had been awfully young when he'd taken Mary and me in: twenty years old and raising two small kids, his only other relative a thousand miles away.  I was seventeen, and I couldn't imagine becoming a parent in the next three years.  I couldn't imagine becoming a parent at all.  I'd probably wind up hurting my children without meaning to.  Uncle Gabriel had inherited two kids when he was just a kid himself.  Mary and I had effectively destroyed what were supposed to be the best years of his life.  He'd never complained.  He'd never once let on that we were exhausting him, that we weren't the dream he'd envisioned for himself.  My uncle, I thought, feeling tired and sad, had sacrificed as much for us as the elk had.  But more.  A lot more.

We entered the woods and veered off the path.  We started north, Andrew Nabako trailing at the back of our train.  The beech trees stretched so tall they fought the sun for dominion in the sky, tri-colored leaves painting the ground in green and white and pink.  The trunks forked in two's and three's, reminding me of many-armed Hindu gods.  Lizards and bullfrogs scampered across the floor, the lizards looking for caterpillars, the frogs looking for the lake.

The darkness in the back of my head crept into the front of my eyes.  Everything went black, so black that I couldn't see.  I could hear Uncle Gabriel rustling through the forest brush ahead of me and it reassured me, but made me feel worse, because I didn't want to depend on him all the time.  I pretended it was nighttime.  Imaginary stars blazed to life in the sky.  The constellations clustered together, forming buffalo and prairies.  I watched star-hewn hunters on horseback chase stampeding bison, wheatgrass quaking with dust.

"This way," Stuart said hoarsely, lit up by pretend moonlight.

The hunting party crossed the brook.  We took a sharp turn to the right, skirting around the clearing where amsonia grew, powder-blue flowers shaped like five-pointed stars.  I imagined that the floral stars lifted off the ground on an airless breeze and joined their counterparts in the sky.  We hiked up a steep arroyo, thankfully dry, although it wouldn't be come monsoon season.  Uncle Gabriel gestured with two fingers and the four of us scattered.  I hid behind a knotted willow tree with leafless, spiky branches.

Any hunter who says he's got a 100% success rate is full of shit.  Even the best hunters only get the kill half the time; and that's why we had to hunt every single morning if we wanted to bring back enough yield for our neighbors.  That day's hunt was a good one, though.  Andrew was our caller.  He bugled, and the bulls bellowed back, and we crept east, hiding in the silvery sagebrush while he cow-called until a bull tiptoed toward us, new antlers covered in fuzzy velvet.  I stood up.  The spear shot out of my hands like water through a mesh net.  The elk ran, but the spear struck him just west of his hind flank.  He went down.  It was a fast kill, a humane one, the artery severed before he could have known what hit him.  If there's pain, you're not doing it right.

The bull was maybe six hundred pounds.  Uncle Gabe cut the yield with his handsaw and we each wound up with a heavy quarter.  We let the blood drain out through the incisions before we picked up the meat, careful not to stain the pelt.  I tossed my haunch over my shoulder and almost buckled under the weight.

"Who are we delivering to today?" Stuart asked.

"Thorn Bush and Begaye, Samson and Brandywood," Uncle Gabe said spiritedly.

We carried the elk out of the woods.  My shoulders hurt, but in a good way, like when you know you've done something a lot of people can't do, and it's going to help them.  Imaginary shadows dogged me, but I let them.  I summoned the White Buffalo Calf Woman, a legendary prophetess with snowy hair.  She walked alongside me in fringed buckskin, frost crystals forming under her delicate feet.  They say White Buffalo Calf Woman was the one who gave us the vision quest and the peace pipe, the Sun Dance and the Round Dance.  Without her our souls were hardly our own.  It wasn't my fault if her face looked like my mom's, same sloping chin, same snub nose.

It was two in the afternoon by the time we'd all finished boning, skinning, and distributing the elk meat across the reservation.  Uncle Gabe made me go home and bathe again, which annoyed me; I'd already bathed two days ago.  After I washed myself I put my old clothes back on.  The shirt sleeves were bothering me; I tore them off.  I went outside the house and sat under the southern oak.  I'd run out of library books to read, so I perched Uncle Gabriel's copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
on my knees.  Three pages in I realized I hated it.  It didn't even have magic or mermaids.

You know what I like about
The Little Mermaid
?  I mean the real one, not the Disney one, although I'd never seen the Disney movie; I'd never seen any movie.  I liked the Little Mermaid because she was so compassionate it hurt.  She was mute, and she couldn't talk to the guy she loved, or her own sisters, but she didn't need to speak for people to see the inherent goodness in her heart.  When the prince asked her to dance for him, she did it, even though it made her feet bleed.  When he fell in love with someone, and it wasn't her, she was happy; because he was happy.  The Little Mermaid scared me.  Nobody should be so selfless that they can't feel their own pain.  It's self-sabotaging.  It's unhealthy.  Selfless people need somebody to take care of them.  They're too busy taking care of everybody else.

I was still thinking about that at dinner that night.  The whole tribe gathered around the communal firepit north of the hospital and pitched the biggest bonfire you've ever seen.  That's always how dinner goes in Nettlebush.  Little kids sat on the picnic tables, or on the logs on the ground, and families like the Little Hawks and the In Winters handed out covered dishes of grilled chicken, grilled corn, and this really slimy coleslaw, which I secretly didn't mind all that much.  My mind's shadows had followed me, cloaking my neighbors, cloaking the sky until everything looked like the same pulsating black soup.  Someone rolled a drum onto the communal grounds--probably Mr. Wind Comes Home--and I only knew it by the hollow sound it made when it settled upright.  Morgan Stout played the Plains flute, keening and belly-deep, and I couldn't see his face, shadows covering his mouth and eyes.  I stood with my hand against the trunk of an oak tree.  Darkness swirled on the ground in an empty vortex, reaching for my legs.  I stepped back, and it wasn't good enough; I could feel the sucking at my ankles, could feel the air going hard and cold in my chest, freezing into blocks of ice.

That was when I saw him.

At first I thought I was looking at a ghost.  It wouldn't have been the first time.  Except I was the only person who could see my ghosts, but this ghost was sitting on the Looks Over porch with Annie Little Hawk, a live oil lamp between them, their hands flying a mile a minute in some kind of weird sign language.  The lamp's liquid yellow glow spread over the not-ghost's face, chasing away my fabricated shadows.  He was definitely low blood quantum, his skin pale and milky and his hair a shock of blond, fine-spun curls flopping around his forehead, his ears.  You could see the Native in him, though, or I could; his eyes were small brown slants,
foxlike, and his cheekbones stuck out like a sore thumb.  The hell was he wearing a jacket for?  It wasn't even that cold out.  He leaned toward Annie with his hands on his knees, big fingers splayed out, a wide puppy dog grin on his face.  Puppy dog was a good way to describe him, from his long, gangling legs to his equally long, rail-thin arms.  Why wasn't he eating anything?  He should have been eating something.  He had a brown birthmark on one cheek and a straight, thin, kind of pointy nose.  He reminded me of an elf.  He reminded me of a muffin.  His hair was the fluffiest thing I'd ever seen.

Christine St. Clair was written all over that guy's face.  I'd seen her face before, not just in my blurry memories, but in Uncle Gabriel's photo albums, in my own drawings, apologies I'd left on her grave and in her abandoned house.  The ghost of my father was written on my face, a face everyone hated, me most of all.  I wanted to rip my face off.  I wanted to rip Christine's kid's face off.  I really thought I might kill him.  First I figured it was Dad speaking through me.  Either he wanted to finish the job he'd never completed, or he wanted to relive whatever sick fantasy killing Christine had satiated in him.  Then I realized:  These weren't Dad's feelings.  These were my feelings.  I knew they were irrational.  I knew they were wrong.  But when Christine St. Clair's son survived that night, I lost my dad.  I missed my dad.  I didn't understand how he had turned into a monster without my noticing, or--or maybe he had been a monster all along, maybe I'd been too stupid to see it, we all had; but how?  How do you look right into a devil's eyes and think you're staring at a human?  What was wrong with me?  By loving my dad, by missing my dad, wasn't that the same as saying it was alright for him to take so many lives?  That he should have taken more?

My hand tightened against the oak's trunk.  I was the monster.  I was the one the council should have killed by blood law.

My shoulders stiffened; because at that moment the blond guy lifted his head.  His eyes trailed through the shadows--my shadows--covering the crowd.  Tendrils of darkness reached for him, but drew back.  I couldn't see anybody's face, just his.  I'd made up my mind that I was going to hate him.  It didn't have to make sense.  Nothing about me made sense.

The guy locked eyes with me.  I forced my face into the most hateful, concentrated glower I could muster.  He jumped in his seat and I immediately felt guilty.  He hadn't done anything wrong.  I could see in his eyes that he recognized me; which meant he recognized Dad's face on me; which meant he remembered the night he'd lost his mom.  I was a painful, walking reminder, the living commemoration of seven lives lost, hundreds of lives ruined.

The guy smiled at me.

The shadows covering the ground burst apart.  The shadows released my ankles, warmth spreading up my legs, into my knees.  The faces around me went completely visible, talking, laughing, a mother chasing her kid around the firepit, three old men viciously arguing about their quinoa crops.  Light spread into the sky and stripped the shadows down, reproachful, but gentle.  The sky bled red with sunset, matching the bonfire.  The clouds lit up yellow, fanning out like daisy chains, their glow so clear, so crisp it felt like I'd never seen it before; I'd never seen anything before.  Light splashed across the dry grass on the ground, the dead brown tinting bronze, alive.  Light enveloped Morgan Stout with his flute and Solomon Knows the Woods with his wineskin and Autumn Rose In Winter, the big white bow in her girlish, bobbing ponytail, the soft smile on her face when she talked with her brothers.