I walked around the vehicle and saw nothing on the exterior. I bent and checked each wheel well. Empty except for mud from where I’d gotten stuck earlier, and the rain splashing up from the roads hadn’t completely washed it clean. Anything pushed through the mud to adhere to the metal would have left an impression different from ones nature left, and the mud coating all looked uniform. I lay down and rolled under the front, then the back. Nothing was stuck to the bumpers. “I’m clean. But I want a more thorough inspection when I get home.”
“Okay.” He disconnected.
Back on the porch I asked, “You have a gun?”
“Course we have a gun,” Aggie said, as if I’d asked a stupid question. Maybe I had. These were country women facing rabid animals, carrot-stealing rabbits, and kids with nefarious and salacious intentions. And maybe evil people looking to rob, rape, and steal.
I sat and drank half of my tea, my mouth as dry as a bone from dread. “My vehicle looks clean, but there’s no way to be sure. And since I’m here now, it’s too late. I’m sorry.”
“We be okay,” uni lisi said. “What you come here for tonight?”
Not to get you killed, I thought. I said, “Are there any Cherokee stories about dragons?”
“Some,” Aggie said.
“There Uktena,” uni lisi said. “He a dragon-like serpent with horns.”
I repeated the name. “Ook-tay-nah?”
Aggie said, “Close enough. The first Uktena was said to be transformed from a human man in a failed assassination attempt on the sun. Most other Uktena tales have to do with Cherokee heroes slaying the Uktena monster. The dragons are malevolent and deadly.”
“The assassination attempt on the sun sounds a little like Apollo. So maybe the dragons are made of light?”
“Or they aliens like that professor with the hair say.”
I wasn’t sure who uni lisi was talking about, but the idea that the arcenciel was an alien was a possibility—though not an alien who came to Earth in a spaceship. Rather, one who got here from another universe at a liminal threshold, a place where one universe touched another.
“Then there’s the Tlanuwa.” I cocked my head in question and Aggie produced it again. “Tlah-noo-wah.” I nodded and she went on. “Tlanuwa are giant birds of prey with impenetrable metal feathers. They’re common to the oral tradition of many southeastern tribes and may be the same things as the Thunderbird in southwestern tribal mythology.”
“Now, that sounds like a spaceship,” I said, but thought that it could also be a storm god. An Anzû. I had never actually seen one without its glamour blocking the way and I had never seen one fly.
Aggie shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling in the dark. “It has a strong resemblance to a jet fighter. Noisy, sleek, powerful, dangerous, and darting through the sky with a roar. You want to tell us what you’re looking for?”
I described the arcenciel. And the Anzû. Aggie watched me as I talked, her eyes holding me in place like spears. “I’m wondering if they are real creatures that came to Earth through a liminal threshold. A weak place in reality where creatures can get to Earth.”
“That old man,” uni lisi said derisively, “that Choctaw old man. Him talk about seeing strange things down in the bayou.”
“The Choctaw are south of Houma?” I asked. That was one place I’d seen the arcenciel, playing in the waters of a bayou.
“No. The Choctaw tribal regions went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border,” Aggie said. My eyes went wide in surprise.
“But in the last war, our people beat them good.” Uni lisi sounded satisfied, the way a soccer mom might when recounting an old high school rivalry.
Aggie ignored it and said, “Locally the tribal members are represented by the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, but they’re composed of an amalgamation of several tribes which include Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Acolapissa, and Atakapa.”
I nodded, but current tribal politics didn’t help me.
“Each community is governed by its own tribal council and advised by their respective Council of Elders,” uni lisi said. “That old man, he talk about thing he see in the bayou and the swamps. Him a member of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, but there the Isle de Jean Charles Band, and the Bayou Lafourche Band too.”
“All three bands are ancestrally related. Mama was being courted by a leader of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band, but he was killed trying to save a family during Hurricane Rita. That’s the old man she’s talking about.”
“Him too old for me anyway. I need me a young man.” Uni lisi cackled with glee.
“Was there any specific place where he saw the creatures?” I asked.
“Nah.” Uni lisi waved her hand in the air as if it was all unimportant. “He seen them when he smoking wacky weed. He a crazy old man.”
Aggie added, “He did say once that the Uktena tried to talk to him. That his ancestor killed one with a steel knife and drank its blood, and that it made him strong. But he didn’t say where any of this happened.”
“How about a Cherokee flood story?” I asked.
“There a silly story about a dog who tell a man to build a raft, and then that dog, he tell the man to throw him into the water to kill him. Stupid dog, he was. Then the flood came and the man on the raft lived but all the other peoples were just a pile of bones.”
“Their spirits danced,” Aggie said, looking troubled. “It sounded like the pile of their bones dancing. Mama’s beau said he heard it once.” She nodded and sipped her tea, her eyes far away, in the past of the old stories. When she spoke again, she sounded uneasy. “Like a pile of bones . . . dancing. I always hated that image.”
Uni lisi waved her hand again. “Some stories silly. This one silly. You don’ be unhappy about this silly story or about that old man. That a long time ago.” But her voice no longer sounded like the story was silly, or that she had stopped grieving for her old man.
Out front I heard a truck turn into the cul-de-sac. Truck lights swept the property as it went around my SUV and circled the small turn-around of the cul-de-sac. I slipped out and determined it was indeed a power company truck, and its diesel engine was idling as a man with a powerful flashlight stood beneath the pole, looking up at the damage, muttering imprecations about kids these days. I returned to the One Feathers’ back porch, offered my thanks, and said my good-byes. I slipped out and to my SUV. Checked my GPS.
I called Derek and asked, “If I give you a GPS, can you send a guy to sit in a tree and keep an eye on two old ladies? Like you’re doing with Leo’s clan home property? I can pay.”
“Sure, Legs. I’ll send Blue Voodoo. He hunts. Sitting in a tree will be like a day off with pay for him.”
I gave Derek the GPS and the address, described the layout, and left it to Derek and Blue Voodoo. I didn’t know the guy well, but he was one of Derek’s longtime men. The One Feathers would be safe from anyone targeting my friends to get at me.
Without turning on my lights, I started the engine and backed out of the street. Where would a tribal elder have heard a sound in the bayou, a sound like bones dancing?
I was no closer to discovering anything, spinning my wheels. But something about dancing bones sounded important. And sad.
With the night off, I could have changed and let Beast hunt, but it felt too dangerous to shape-shift and play. Too much was going wrong and I had too little information. And yet, the arcenciel had gray energies like the ones where I changed form. So . . . maybe it wasn’t play. Maybe it would be research. I didn’t know but I decided to stay human, for now.