Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(25)

“House is secure,” he said. “I tapped on the shelf to Edmund’s room and he cursed me, I think, in some foreign language. Sorry I lost my temper, sorry I cussed, sorry I went out last night, and I’ll get a shower as soon as we’re secure.”

Tears burned my eyelids and my shoulders slumped. “If you had been here you would be asleep like your brother. Thank you. I think my magic needs Aggie. Will you call her and make sure we can come to water today? Sabina sent a message via Gee, telling us to purify ourselves. I have a feeling that we shouldn’t wait.”

Alex picked up my cell and punched in my code. Which I didn’t know he knew. He pulled up Aggie’s number and I heard it ring. “Who’s us?” Alex asked oh-so-cautiously as it rang.

“Eli. Me. And you. That is, if you haven’t eaten anything this morning. You have to be fasting.”

He turned away slightly so I couldn’t see his face. “Good morning, Aggie One Feather,” Alex said, speaking like an adult. Totally adulting. More tears gathered in my eyes and a single one slid down my face. “Egini Agayvlge i,” he added, using her Cherokee name. “This is Alex Younger calling on Jane Yellowrock’s cell. The outclan priestess of the suck—vampires said we all needed to come to water. Something big’s about to happen.” He listened a while and then said, “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.” He put a hand over my phone and said, “She said we have to come before the storm gets worse again. She said she won’t take men, but she knows an old Choctaw man who will take Eli and me. That the ceremony isn’t as good as the Cherokee one, but that it will do.”

Which was essentially what she had told me. “We’ll have to wake up your brother,” I warned. Eli had done serious active duty. When woken unexpectedly, he came up fighting.

“I can handle it. And I’ll drive.” Into the cell, Alex said, “Clan Yellowrock will be there in an hour.” He listened and then said, “Yes, ma’am. I understand, ma’am. That’s just what we call ourselves.” He disconnected.

“Problems?” I asked.

“She says there are only a few Cherokee Clans, and Yellowrock Clan isn’t one.”

I knew what he was saying and it was something that I had figured out in the last months, since we missed the big October tribal meeting. But I wanted to see how Alex would handle it, so I let him talk.

“We can’t call ourselves Yellowrock Clan when we go through the adoption process into the Cherokee tribe. We’ll be adopted by Blue Holly Clan or Panther sub-Clan, and by the clan elders, not you, specifically. Nothing we can’t handle later,” he assured me. “Aggie said she would sponsor us, or whatever they call it, and not to worry. But before the official adoption process, we’ll need to talk to the elders and ask how it’ll be handled.” He changed the subject. “I’ll get my bro. Can you get dressed by yourself?”

“I’ll figure out something.”

Well. That was interesting. The Kid was growing up fast.

? ? ?

I watched as Eli and Alex were loaded into the rattletrap pickup. Aggie’s “old Choctaw man” looked about seventy, wore his black and silver-streaked hair in a short, deer-hide-wrapped tail down his back, and was dressed in loose work jeans, work boots, a short-sleeved T-shirt, and a sweat-stained cowboy hat that a fifties Western TV star might have worn. There was a hole in the crown that could have been a bullet hole, and a feather that looked like a turkey-buzzard flight feather in the band. He looked old, but he moved like a well-oiled machine, easy and smooth. Once he got my family loaded into his truck, he turned and studied me. Staring, reading, not speaking. His face was grooved and lined and his eyes were a black so deep they made Leo’s look pale. He touched one finger to the hat brim, got in his truck, and drove away.

I wasn’t happy about the Youngers heading off with a stranger into a ceremony that had been known to expose all sorts of things about one’s inner self. And Eli was on the edge of aggression after the night he’d been through. He needed calories, but he wasn’t getting them until we had done what Sabina wanted. Get pure.

Feeling like I had baked in the sun for hours, I eased out of the car. I hadn’t paid attention to myself since my flesh had glowed so brightly from the lightning, but my skin had remained red and burned looking. I was wearing clean sweats and a pullover hoodie and soft shoes. I wasn’t wearing armor or carrying arms, not to the house of an Elder of The People.

My hair was again tied back in a knot and thumped silently against my back as I walked toward Aggie’s house. The door opened before I got there and a brown nose appeared at knee height. The nose was attached to a brown-and-white face and long floppy black-and-brown ears. Aggie had a beagle puppy. She better not try to make me take it. Last time I was here, she had given me a cat. Fortunately I was able to foist it off on Molly. Aggie was standing behind the dog. She asked, “Are you here to go to water?”

That was pretty much the same question she had asked the last time I came for the purification ceremony.

“Yes.” With Aggie, it was always safest to agree.

“Are you fasting?” Aggie asked, again repeating the same sequence of words, like a formula she had memorized.

“Yes. I’m starving.”

“Go get in the car. Our things are already in there. I will get Elisi.” She meant her mother, the one I called Uni lisi, which was a term of respect rather than one of endearment. Grandmother of many children, a title used for a tribal or clan elder, one who knew the old stories and had old magic and even older secrets of healing.