I saw it crackle down, reaching for the ground right in front of my toes. A bolt wider than my waist, shivering with power, blinding white-blue-black. Searing my eyes. A smaller bolt reached up from the ground, a thin trickle stretching high. As if guiding the greater energies down. They connected. The bolt from the heavens rammed down on the smaller thread. Hit, slamming against the earth. I heard the explosion begin, a roar that beat against my eardrums. Felt the power lift me. Saw my boots leave the ground. Saw them cross over the edge of the wyrd spell. Above me, I saw the impression of wings, one pair black and sooty, shadowed by the lightning, one pair white, reflecting it.
Multiple energies encased me, shocked through me. Witch magics. Lightning. Not pain exactly, not yet, but sensation—heat and cold all at once. Smaller, but distinct, I felt a sear of pain burning in my closed fist. In my palm. Where the blood diamond was resting in my blood. Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea.
I didn’t hit the ground. I think I was still in the air. Flying. Stuck in time and space. The world went black. Silent. The way it might if I was dead. Or dying. Or if I did hit the ground, maybe I was dead before I landed.
A second pain followed, suggesting that I was still alive. This pain was in my chest. Over the place where the sliver of wood from the Blood Cross was snagged in my gorget, pure heat as it tagged the titanium. Oh yeah. Three bad ideas together—witch magics, lightning, and magical artifacts. The pain pulsed through me, increasing but still muted, as if stuck in balls of cotton. As if, when they released, I was going to suffer, and badly. If I survived at all.
Beast? I thought. She didn’t answer.
Time had stopped for me. It had done that before. Each time I nearly died from my body’s reaction. Maybe if I was dying, time would stop automatically, time and my body’s perception of it, my consciousness slipping into the Gray Between. As if the two were related in causality—death and time.
I reached outside of me, and inside of me, searching for the Gray Between, the space/no-space of matter/energy where my power rested. Nothing happened. Not for a long beat of no-time. And then I felt it answer me. Sluggish. Cold. A silver mist that lifted and swirled slowly, shimmering, touched with black and silver and blue motes of power that trembled and quivered and tried to move like the dancing motes of energy they were in real time. But there they couldn’t quite seem to twirl and pirouette like they normally did.
I was stuck outside of time, hanging in the air in the middle of a lightning strike. Probably dying.
Light flashed at me. Sound thudded at me. Pain lanced through me from my hand and my chest. Pain like fire and blades and glacial ice all mixed together. An ache in my heart and lungs and every nerve ending in my flesh, like poison spreading.
As fast as it hit me, the sensation was gone again. A moment of real time in the real world. Separate from the world I was inhabiting right now. Bad. I was hurt bad. If I’d had access to my own lungs, I would have gasped and screamed and groaned.
Jane?
Beast! Where were you?
Jane is hurt. Jane is dying.
Kinda guessed that. Getting used to it.
Come.
Instantly I was in my soul home, the cavern deep beneath the Appalachian Mountains, and I gasped in air. Cold and damp and fresh air. I was crouched, arms wrapped around my knees, breathing hard in this nonreality, as if I’d been running and needed to catch up on oxygen, though I probably wasn’t breathing in my physical body, back there, in linear time.
There, in that cavern, I was safe. It was the place where I first was led into my wesa form, my bobcat form as a child of five, and watched edoda, my father, shift into his tlvdatsi form, his panther, one so unlike my Beast. Edoda’s panther had been a black panther, the rare melanistic coat color of the species. My first shift had taken place in the cavern that was the physical manifestation of my soul home. I had memory of the cave in the natural world, though I had never been back to it. It was a real place, perhaps lost to humankind again, since the nunahi-duna-dlo-hilu-i, the Trail of Tears. It may have fallen into disuse with so many of The People gone. It might be forgotten entirely. But there in the Gray Between, the cavern was a real place again. Real to me.
A faint light came from my right fist. I was holding the blood diamond, but there, it was glowing a pure white light, as bright as the sun. I tucked my hand beneath my thigh to protect my eyes from the brightness, but the glow escaped from between my fingers, shining through my flesh, illuminating my bones. I could feel no blood on the gem. There I was unwounded, hadn’t pricked myself with the knife.
Keeping my fist hidden, I rose to my feet in the cave, in the dark, smelling something burning, unidentified, but inorganic, the scent acrid and dry, like hot metal and acid. There was only the light escaping from my fist, but I knew the cave as well as I knew my human form. I moved through the dark and knelt at the fire pit, one knee on the cold stone floor. Found the matches that had never been there before—matches being a white man’s invention, the easy way to make fire, even with one hand unusable. But they were there then, when I needed them. I struck one, looking away from the flame to protect my night vision. Beside the circle of stones there was a pile of wood shavings and sawdust. Small, dried-out branches. Larger logs, split by an ax. I lit the tinder, starting a fire. Coaxed it to grow and spread. Added little strips of wood, and then the larger branches, until it was crackling and putting out heat.
To the side, in the widening glow of the flames, I saw Beast, curled in a tight ball, her tail wrapped around and covering her front paws. Her eyes were glowing, reflecting the flames, staring at me.
“Hey,” I said to her, aloud.
Jane is dying. Must decide.
“Decide what?”
Decide.
“Not very helpful,” I admonished. Beast huffed, watching me. “Dying is getting old,” I added.
I looked down at myself. I was wearing moccasins, plain and unadorned, tied at my ankles with thongs. I was dressed in a cotton shirt that hung over my leggings, a fringed cloth around my waist as a belt. A medicine bag hung on a leather thong around my neck to dangle over my heart, the leather dyed green on one side and black on the other. An empty knife sheath was belted at my hip. I was dressed like a man of my people, a hunter. A warrior. A War Woman? Had we dressed as men when we went to war? Was I at war right then? My hair was braided to either side of my head and the hair swayed with my motion.
In that reality, the sliver of the Blood Cross had been run through my shirt like a needle, keeping it in place. I pulled the sliver with my left hand and hefted the two weapons in my hands as if measuring their weights, sliver in one fist, glistening diamond in the other.