Big Evan’s eyes filled with tears as he watched his wife. The fine trembling of her fingers eased. She took more breaths. And her smile widened.
“It was the wrong thing to do, of course,” I said. “I was never going to free the kitten. It wasn’t really trapped. But it was all I knew to do. Culturally, educationally, emotionally, I did the only thing I could. I pulled up each piece of the puzzle and looked at the table beneath. Then at the back of the puzzle piece. There was no kitten anywhere. I sat down and studied the puzzle. And I slowly put the picture back together. I realized it was like a spell, a moment of magic captured in the paper, printed on the puzzle pieces. And I enjoyed the moment, the moment of . . . the kitten, crouching beneath the flowers.”
I relaxed. “Kinda like what just happened here. This moment of magic. Her name is KitKit. An old Cherokee woman gave her to me. I gave her to Angie Baby, but I’m sure she’ll share the gift with her mother.”
“Familiars are rare, if not totally fictional,” Big Evan said, as if trying to make sense of what we were seeing. “Witches keep animals, not for their magic, but for their love of animals.”
“Yeah. Maybe. But this animal is absorbing Molly’s death magic.” I shook my head and grinned, picturing Lisi’s face when I told her about her KitKit. “Somehow, some way.”
“It won’t be enough,” Molly said, bumping her nose to the kitten’s, “not by itself. But it’s enough for now. It gives me a chance to learn how to deal with it, without hurting someone by accident.”
Big Evan’s fists unclenched. His stormy air magic quieted. He crossed the room to his wife and gently folded her in his arms. Her head didn’t even reach his chin, and he had to drop his face down to place a kiss on the top of her hair. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it your way. I won’t fight you anymore.”
I had no idea what they were talking about, but it sounded promising, so I let it go. Then Molly raised her face and kissed Big Evan. There was a lot of passion in the kiss, so I got the heck outta Dodge, leaving them to some privacy. In front of the house, in the heat of the day, I removed my weapons and secured them in the back of Eli’s SUV, all but one throwing knife—just in case some angry blood-servant wanted to try to take me out.
And then, having nothing else to do with myself, I got in and drove.
I ended up at the little church where I had attended a few times since I got to New Orleans. The place was quiet, seemingly empty, and I checked my phone for the time and day. And discovered that it was Sunday, well after noon. I locked the SUV and went to the door, knocking before I entered. Most churches stayed locked when not in use, against vandals and thieves, but the door was open, and I pushed it wider. Inside, it was cool, and I realized how hot it was outside. But it was cool here. Boots thumping on the worn floor, I went to the little chapel. It was empty but smelled of humans and peace and acceptance.
I took a seat in the front pew and stared at the cross hanging on the wall. It was the empty cross, not the cross of the dead Jesus, and that was obscurely comforting. I had seen too much blood in the last day or two. Even redemptive blood, the kind Aggie One Feather talked about, was something I didn’t want to see right now.
When I was growing up, counselors in the children’s home were always talking about redemption, especially to me, because I was always in fights, stirring up trouble, though at the time I had seen my actions as protecting the helpless and the bullied, and in hindsight I’d have done nothing different. Early on, I hadn’t understood why the counselors had wanted me in Christian training classes, why they talked so much about salvation. I didn’t understand what I needed to be forgiven for. But even back then I had understood about peace and the lack of peace. And I had accepted the kind of redemption that brought peace, the kind that brought me peace, or as close to it as I ever got.
Now? I wanted that peace I had lost. I wanted to forgive myself for the lives I had taken, knowing full well that I would take more. I wondered if soldiers felt this confusion, this mixed-up, complex, complicated, crazy set of drives—for peace and for battle. For rest and for blood.
I was War Woman. I was meant to kill.
But . . . I was never meant to enjoy it, to take pleasure in it. My uni lisi hadn’t taken pleasure in the deaths of the men who killed my father. It was a job, a responsibility, and she did it well. That was all. That was what she was trying to teach me when she put the knife into my hand. That lesson was my obligation—to see that I performed my job well, for good and for life, not for death. Weird as all that seemed.
I closed my eyes and sought my center, my core, the dark place in the midst of myself that was my soul home. Here I found a peace of a sorts, though it was far from the peace of the soul that the redeemer brought. It was a cavern, dark and damp, smelling of flames from a dancing fire. And the redeemer had never been here. There had never been that kind of peace here.
I opened my eyes to see the flames, to smell the burned, dried herbs, sharp and astringent. In the dream state, I was dressed in deer hide, tanned in the old way, the way of the Tsalagi. The leggings brushed against me as I walked, to my right, toward the shadows, my moccasins tied tightly to my feet, making my passage silent. I was carrying a blade in my right hand. A steel blade, exactly like the one Edoda carried in the memory of the fish gall and the lesson learned. It was oft honed, the cutting edge curved and sharp and promising death. I carried it to the niche in the wall, where the black big-cat slept.
The black cat—not truly a lion, but something else, something known only to my dream state—was not without defenses, even here, in daylight, should I try to hurt him. But I had no intention of hurting him. I only wanted to free myself from him. I could let my anger against him go. I could find that much peace.
With my left hand, I reached up and touched the mountain lion tooth that hung around my neck on a leather thong, and I entered the gray place of the change. There, in the gray, flashing energies of the skinwalker, I bent and took the silver chain that shackled me to Leo Pellissier and I cut it with the steel knife. In the way of dreams, the metal parted easily, falling into two pieces. They landed on the floor of the cavern with a clanking rattle.
Leo opened his lion eyes and stared at me. “Jane?” he said.
“Yes. You are free.”
And Leo thinned into a mist and smoked away, the air of his passing smelling like sweetgrass and cedar and papyrus. The smoke rose in a spiral and touched the curved ceiling of my soul home to spread slowly on the calm air.
His passing left my soul home cleansed, like the burning of aromatic and bitter herbs.
I turned slowly, knowing what I would see behind me. Whom I would see.
Beast was on a ledge, at head height, stretched out, chin on her paws, her amber eyes watching me. “I’m not a killer only,” I said to her. “And I’ve gotten used to you being here. Even if it makes me insane, I’d like you to stay.”
“I/we should be together,” she said aloud. “We are much more than Jane and Puma concolor alone.”
It was the first time I had really heard Beast’s voice. It was softer than I would have thought, and purring. Not unlike Molly’s familiar. I reached out a hand to Beast and scratched her behind her ears. The purring increased in volume. “Molly is in danger still,” Beast said. “KitKit is not enough to contain her death magics.”