Cold Reign (Jane Yellowrock #11)(28)

A stick cracked behind me. My flesh tightened. Shoulders hunched. I was not alone. If I had ever actually been alone before. I didn’t look. I didn’t want to see.

I turned west, holding up a pinch of tobacco, wet in the rain. The drops pelted down, icy as sleet on my bare skin. My feet were black from the mud I stood in, and black mud splattered up my legs like dark tears. I remembered the term Unelenehi, who was the Great One. “I call upon the self-existent, eternal god Yehovah, who is the god who creates.” When I spoke these words, my breath was red, scarlet as the Damours’ magic, and shadowed black with their evil. Evil they had placed inside me and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get rid of it . . . or at least not alone.

I had been five at my first kill. I could still see the hilt of the knife in my small hand as the blade pierced the white man’s flesh. I could hear his screams, though his mouth was bound. All this was stored deep in my soul. The dark spot grew, expanded. It beat like my own heart.

I realized that the Damours’ dark magic had combined with the evil done to me by my grandmother when she taught me to kill. Together, they had become something else. Something much more powerful than I had understood. Something that conflicted with the sacred name of the Almighty.

The wind swirled around me and the tobacco was drenched from my fingers to wash down me, across my body. Where it touched, it trailed hot and scalding. Some small part of me knew that the ceremony shouldn’t go like this. Something was wounded and broken in the ritual. Or in me. I had gotten off course. But if I stopped, the black mote of shadow would be forever with me. Endlessly a part of me. And the scarlet motes would eventually destroy me, eating me from the inside out. Like what they were doing inside me each time I bubbled time. They cut me. And I bled.

Ahhhh . . . I thought. The foreign magics cut me. My body then tried to vomit them out of me, tried to free me of the evil motes and the shadows.

My breath went hot and noisy in my lungs, like a roaring sea in a blizzard, a whiteout of clarity and understanding.

I turned right again, now facing north, shuddering so hard I thought I might drop the tobacco pinched in numb fingers. My heart beat erratically, shaking my chest. “I call upon El Shaddai, the all-sufficient one, the feminine of the godhead. El Shaddai, that aspect most often associated with the Holy Spirit, hear my call.” I felt the presence behind me move closer. Colder than a glacier on the flesh of my spine. I hunched my shoulders against the pounding rain.

Beast growled low in my mind, the sound far away; the place where she usually hunched was vacant.

I slid my feet through the mud, rotating back to the east, and scraped the last bit of wet tobacco to the tips of my fingers. I closed my eyes, my body grayish with the cold. I let the pinch of tobacco fall into the rain. “I seek healing of and freedom from the dark shadow that grows within me. I seek the destruction of the purpose of another’s power, that power manifested in scarlet motes that infest me. I seek wisdom to cure my weakness. Strength in battle. Purity of heart and mind and soul.”

The air sizzled. The wet ends of my hair lifted. Terror zapped across me like electric sparks. Rain shattered down. Wind slammed into me like a fist. I nearly fell. Lightning struck. It ignored the trees and hit the center of the bayou only twenty feet away. The brilliance stole all vision from me. All but the vision of magic.

The darkness that lived inside me was close to the surface, the shadow beating with the rhythm of my heart, the scarlet motes zipping through me, painful as barbed wire. But as I watched, the Gray Between opened around me and silver motes of my own magic reached inside me and began . . . herding the scarlet motes. Like prey.

I dropped my arms and slumped forward, following the bright and silver colors of all the motes as they raced through me. My dark silver power moved the scarlet motes into some kind of weird geometric design. They moved from my left fingertips to my right toes, to my head, to my left toes, to my right fingertips, and back to my left fingertips. I held my arms out to the side like Vitruvian Man and . . . the motes formed a pentagram. Holy crap.

Before, they had been unfocused, unstructured power within me, the magic random. Until now. There now was a working, one organized like a witch working—geometric and steady. This ceremony and my skinwalker magics had stirred it all into some different path, some new purpose. I knew that it was possible for a working to take black magic, overcome it in some kind of great battle, and then use it. But it took testing and fire and suffering, and I had endured none of that. Yet the darkness within me was changed.

Memory surfaced, full of blood and terror, my fangs tearing the head off a blood-servant sent to kill me. Memory of being shot by El Diablo, one of Derek’s men, in a bayou. Of shifting into Beast in the back of Leo’s limo. Of nearly dying on the floor of sub-five basement in HQ, after fighting and defeating the Naturaleza vamp De Allyon. Of the first instant I bubbled time. Of achieving the half form of the fighting skinwalker. Maybe . . . Maybe I had been tested all along? Maybe my magic had been waiting until I was whatever I was now to fix me. To fix itself.

Rain again drenched me, black bayou mud splattering up to my knees with the force of the drops landing. My breath came fast. The mist rose around my feet and ankles, up my calves, a pearled shimmer of moisture and magic and peyote dreams, leaving me breathless but exhilarated. I traced the pentagram within me and discovered that my stomach was no longer hurting. My heart felt lighter. Cleaner. My breath blew shades of red, dispersing light from scarlet to fuchsia to palest pink. To crystal clear.