Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock)(4)

In the dojo, I had finally found a place where I belonged, where I fit in, with Sensei and the kids he groomed as fighters. I never stood for belt testing, but I stuck out the training program, living with the bruises, sprains, and occasional broken rib. I was good. But mostly, as far as the school counselors and their opposite number, the bully masters, were concerned, I was just really good at looking dangerous.

I also worked after school at the dojo, my first real job, cleaning floors and the workout mats, washing windows, general handyman stuff. Sensei taught me how to do the books, pay the taxes, order supplies. He was my first real friend. Even if he did knock me silly when we sparred.

I took Bobby’s hand, his flesh soft and moist, and held it, drawing his unwilling eyes to mine. “As soon as I get the trainee position and get started, I’ll schedule a few days off and come back. I promise.”

Tears filled his eyes. “Okay,” he whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he wasn’t. Bobby’s parents had been killed in an automobile accident with a drunk driver. Though his grandmother had taken in his three brothers and sisters, she had decided she didn’t have the strength to raise a kid with a seventy-four IQ. So she dumped him here, which I understood on one level, but it still made my brain boil. Bobby went home to Gramma’s to visit on Christmas, on Easter, and for a week in the summer. That was it. That was as much as his grandmother could take of her less-than-normal grandkid.

Of course, I never went anywhere, but I was used to it. I had always been alone.

Weak. Prey, my inner voice whispered. My own personal demon, never acknowledged aloud, never alluded to, never hinted at. The counselors would have thought me insane or possessed, depending on their religious beliefs. Either way, I’d have been medicated and sent to more counseling sessions. And been subjected to more torment by my housemates. Again, I shoved it deep and silent.

“I’ll be bringing you a present,” I said. “Something from the mountains.”

Bobby’s eyes lit up. “From your spirit quest?”

I dropped his hand and chucked him on the chin. “Right. See you soon.” Before he could delay me more, I turned the key and gave the Yamaha a bit of gas. It spat for a sec and then shot me forward. Into the future. I wove through the grounds of the children’s home one last time. I would come back. But Bobby was right. This would never be my home again, and it would always-ever-after be different.

Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home was located near the Sumter National Forest in South Carolina, within spitting distance of Georgia and North Carolina, in a locale with more rednecks than all other ethnic groups put together, and ten times more livestock than people. Maybe a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. The place I was going was a lot less populated and a lot more remote.

I dropped down my face shield, cutting the hot wind but making a steam bath inside with my own breath. Speeding, I passed the main offices and lifted a thumb to the one person standing outside to see me go—Belinda Smith, one of my former houseparents. She smiled and waved, and I knew that of all the people at Bethel—besides Bobby—she really was sad to see me leave. She had liked my essays.

I glanced in the rearview to see her place a hand over her mouth, and I could have sworn that she was crying. Not possible. No way.

I looked back at the street and the road before me. Gunned the motor again. The outer gates neared, passed, and fell behind. The bike tore out of the grounds of Bethel, along the main road, and out of the city.

Soon I was gunning it up the mountains.

The quality of the air changed around every bend, freshening each time the elevation rose. The world changed as I two-wheeled into my future and—I hoped—my past.

I didn’t have a history. I had wandered out of the Sumter National Forest when I was somewhere near twelve years of age, traumatized, weak, skinny as a rail, totally unsocialized, and with complete amnesia. The newspaper that captured the story and sent it out on the newswires suggested that I was raised by wolves, an accusation that contributed more than almost anything else to the drubbings I took until I could hold my own. Well, except for the fact that I couldn’t speak a word of English. That had brought on a lot of pain and suffering too. I couldn’t even remember my own name.

All I had muttered was a Cherokee word that one of the park rangers who found me was able to interpret. Yellow Rock. So I became Jane Yellowrock Doe. Eventually they dropped the Doe and I acquired a birth certificate as Jane Yellowrock, birthday August 15, the day of the month when I had been found, and a presumed birth year that made me twelve. No records of me had ever been located, and no one had ever come forward to claim me.

The only memory I had was of a granite mountain cliff, a sunrise, and a white quartz boulder. It was as if I had been born with the vision of the mountain’s rock face as seen from above, standing on the crest and looking down on it, and also from far below it, looking up. The horseshoe-shaped granite had been pitted with perfectly round holes, some large enough to act as a cup holder, some sized as if for candles, all in long strands of eroded or carved holes, like tears across the stone of the mountain face, a confusing gray pattern in the rising sun.

On the Internet, it hadn’t been that hard to find a mountain fitting the horseshoe description. Horseshoe Rock was in Jackson County, North Carolina, in the Nantahala National Forest. Not all that far from where I had been found. If the pictures were right, there was a gigantic curving rock face on the eastern front of Wolf Mountain. And if that was really true, then so were my dreams, my possible past, and any hope of a family I might ever have.