The Lineage (Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter Book 3)

By Brian P. Easton

When a werewolf delivers the severed heads of two colleagues to Sylvester Logan James, he finds himself embroiled in an ancient grudge between the First Beast Prince and the seven Wolves who tried to overthrow him. Sylvester’s feud with the Beast has wracked his body and bedeviled his soul, and even after twenty-five years it has failed to satisfy his need for vengeance.

Baited by a trail of dead werewolves and following a particularly cunning Wolf with its own agenda, Sylvester journeys across the world–from Belize to Botswana, Morocco to Malta, Cyprus into the Himalayas. What comes next will be the most important hunt of his life, one that will lead him across the continents to the very lair of the Beast–and the werewolf who was once his mother.

Here is one last, unflinching entry in the Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter–a final measure of redemptive violence where every victory is dearly purchased and honor is poisoned by shame. Don’t look away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Permuted
• Release date: Apr 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781618685568

Brian P. Easton

PictureThe son of a Southern Illinois pastor, Brian Easton grew up a fan of classic horror films during the 70's. His favorite, as you might imagine, was The Wolfman."When I was a baby, my mother used to rock me while watching Dark Shadows. I cut my teeth on a steady diet of Creature Feature and Night Gallery, the old school Universal Monsters and spaghetti westerns. I started writing when I was ten, after I was given a hand-me-down Royal typewriter."He has studied the occult since 1985 and obtained a degree in anthropology to further his research. His first novel When the Autumn Moon is Bright and his second novel Heart of Scars were finalists in the 2003 & 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards."I'm a sucker for tragedy and anti-heroes. Even the most unscrupulous character can become the good guy when pitted against an evil greater than himself. My novels, 'When the Autumn Moon is Bright' and 'Heart of Scars' feature such a protagonist and deliver an autobiographical account of the awful price of hatred. It tells the life story of Sylvester James whose life is tragically altered by a marauding werewolf, and what happens when he hardens his heart to vengeance. As he becomes a man, he learns that it takes more than just silver bullets to kill a werewolf...it demands a perfect willingness to die. A third book is planned to complete the trilogy, and after that a prequel chronicling the life of Sylvester's mentor."

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Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter

The Lineage

Brian P. Easton

A PERMUTED PRESS BOOK

Published at Smashwords

ISBN: 978-1-61868-555-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-61868-556-8

THE LINEAGE

Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter Book Three

Copyright © 2015 by Brian P. Easton

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Christian Bentulan

This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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The distinctive features of the wolf are unbridled cruelty, bestial ferocity, and ravening hunger. His strength, his cunning, his speed were regarded as abnormal, almost eerie qualities, he had something of the demon, of hell. He is the symbol of Night and Winter, of Stress and Storm, the dark and mysterious harbinger of Death. ~ Reverend Montague Summers, The Werewolf

"A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. ~ Agatha Christie, The Hound of Death

I proudly dedicate this final installment in the Autobiography of a Werewolf Hunter series to my son, Samuel whose birth considerably slowed production but also made my life better than I could’ve imagined.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my wife upon whom I rely for feedback at the earliest stages. Also to my very good friend Larry who is always willing to help me un-paint myself from a corner. Special thanks as well to Miles Boothe of Emby Press, who has honored me more than he probably realizes.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Gilles Garnier

Chapter IV

Ulucan & Cashile

Chapter V

Anahid Fairuza

Rowena Robyn

Chapter VI

Thiess the Livonian

Chapter VII

Khoonbish

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Alaric

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Epilogue

Prologue

I’m basically a man of the world. I prefer the tactile to the intangible, which means I’ll take a pistol over a prayer any day. I’ve been made to understand the spirit side of life better than most, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Keep the visions and ghosts, I’d rather have something that bleeds; something that can be punched, stabbed or shot. I seldom get my ‘druthers.

The man behind the rough-hewn podium was a relic from another time and another place, but had ceased to belong to either. He looked out over the empty chairs of a revival tent to address a congregation of one. He was dressed in the livery of his office; black tunic and clerical collar. His shirtsleeves were starched but rolled into cuffs at the elbows. His hair was slick and parted down the middle, and his beard was cut in the fashion of certain Dutch sects, but he was not of them. A pale, bald scar ran obliquely from his cheek and beneath a patch covering his right eye. Over his vestments he wore a gun holster, which lent him an outlaw quality, and a hexagram medallion marked by sigils that spoke of powers rival to those of his calling. He kept his pistol on the left side of the pulpit and his copy of the Good Book on the right; both appeared to be well used. He said he was born in the caul and that he had seen the Devil. He said he could speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but he spoke of the Beast.

What shall we say about werewolves, he asked, as he wiped with his sleeve the blue-black locks clinging to his brow, who run about the countryside devouring men and children? Ye may ask what I know about them, and I can tell ye there are seven different accounts by which they kill.

The curious reverend squinted in the light of coal-oil lanterns, which sent up strong-smelling clouds of black soot and composed his shadow enormous and uncanny on the canvas wall behind him. He may have been one eye from blind, but the one that remained had seen more than it could hide, and it smoldered in its socket.

In the first instance, he said, they kill for no less a reason than hunger. And we know that the hunger of werewolves is debauched and craven. They do not eat for sustenance, as natural wolves do, but for the wanton pleasure of gluttony. And so we may observe that the aspects of werewolf nature also reflect the deadly sins.

He was not a man of fiery rhetoric. There was no hellfire and brimstone in his speech, but there was gravity. His tone was as foreboding as a storm-front as he took the Bible in hand.

On the second account, he said, "werewolves kill because of their inherent cruelty. Their savagery, which owes to their very condition, is also compounded by the moon in its phases. There are ordinary creatures in this world that sometimes kill for pleasure, but for the werewolf this is the rule. No more savage demon ever defiled the earth. These are the terrors by night the Psalms caution us against."

He paused to open the grayed bindings of his book, and then to crackle through its pages, his fingers spiderlike among the crisp leafs of paper. He finally set a frayed, purple ribbon down the gutter and continued.

Werewolves also kill because of infirmity, which in this instance has less to do with passing time than accrued injury. Precious few circumstances aside, these are everlasting monsters of which we speak. However, through misadventure of silver, astral wounding, or the ire of a fellow werewolf they may become feeble. Such a reduced state makes the werewolf no less cunning or vile in its intentions, but its frailties force it to hunt the fragile and the lame, as do natural predators.

The tone of his voice had become progressively more solemn, and had all but lost its ecclesiastical edge. He sounded and conducted himself more like an officer of the court than a man of the cloth.

The fourth reason why werewolves kill is based on experience. By this I mean: what they have grown accustomed to. Just as it is said that a tiger who has tasted human flesh desires to taste it again, so do certain werewolves favor specific victuals. Like all connoisseurs, they will be put off by inferior quality. They may have cultivated a taste for certain entrails or tenders, or perhaps a preference for a certain age or race. Some may have acquired a need to gratify themselves from a peculiar act of violence, after the manner of sexual peccants. Such is the depravity of the Lineage.

Once again he paused, but this time it was as if he took the moment to gauge the reception of his sole spectator; I, the lone witness to his testimony. He daubed the sweat from his bare upper lip and carried on as before in the wild, black shadows of the lamps.

Under the fifth head, a werewolf may kill for the sake of madness. Consider a mad dog that will bite anyone and does not recognize its own master. A werewolf may become insane from an incompatible ancestry, and so afflicted will kill without regard to daylight or discovery. Such a mad beast will even be so bold as to attack others of its ilk without provocation, and may be compared to a rabid animal in this respect.

He was more prophet than preacher, more prosecutor than judge. His points were brief and clear, and it seemed they had not been learned second-hand. Even so, the importance of his message appeared greater than his capacity to express it.

In the sixth instance the Devil himself will arouse murder in the werewolf. And is he not the fount of its very existence? The werewolf was created in the Great Fiend’s own image, as the dread Beast of St. John’s Revelation. Little wonder the werewolf will kill at his black sire’s behest, when Satan has imbued his wolves with his own infernal character.

His old 1848 Colt had seen battle, had taken lives, and it wore its scuffs and scratches and patches of worn bluing like badges. He touched the Dragoon with his left hand, and drummed the cylinder with his fingers as though waiting for an, amen from me.

The seventh and final reason werewolves kill, comes under the improbable heading of God’s ordinance. As scripture shows us, God will use evil agency and beasts as instruments of His wroth. So we read that some impudent boys mocked the prophet Elisha, and God sent two bears to kill some forty-two of them. Yes, the Devil may serve at the sinister side of Providence. There are, on the rarest of occasions, opportunities for werewolves to do the same.

He closed his Bible and holstered his weapon without further ceremony. He turned down his sleeves and buttoned them around his wrists, and then he tucked the amulet bearing the Seal of Solomon under his collar. He was not flesh and blood; hadn’t been for a very long time, but he had delivered more than a sermon. He had issued a warning whose significance and consequences were beyond me.

Chapter I:

I was still dreaming, but at least I was aware it was a dream. That was nice because at times it’d become tough to discern them from waking reality. Not that knowing made much of a difference; if there’s one thing I’d learned in recent years, it’s that just because it’s a dream doesn’t mean it isn’t really happening.

I was down to one silver bullet with my finger on the trigger, stalked by a long-legged werewolf whom I had shot, but not killed. I crouched behind a gallery of headstones with the .45 at port and directed all my faculties at finding my hunter before it found me; like that was going to happen. Noble Wolven are more resilient to silver than most of their kin so I should’ve tapped it in the head instead of going for the cheap shot, a bad call that had left me ducking and hiding behind tongues of slate in a graveyard straight out of a Christian nightmare. The tombs were carved with the likenesses of demons not saints, and from atop the mausoleums where angels should’ve trod, gargoyles leered instead. There were crypts decorated with inverted pentacles and crosses, and death masks with tongues lolling in comedic horror. The entire population of this hellish potter’s field ranged from parricides and deviants, to heretic martyrs and megalomaniacs; pariahs of every stripe. There were shrines to the casualties of the inquisitions and monuments to witches, burned and drowned. Some of those buried here were out-and-out aberrations of nature, and some were dyed-in-the-wool devil-worshippers. Others were sinners or simpletons who’d shamed their families enough to be buried alongside the monsters. At the fringes of this baleful cemetery skulked the dim shapes of shambling creatures whose dull black eyes returned no light.

Among the stone rows I thought I could hear the Wolf’s long footfalls, like some nameless ghoul loping back to its corpse-feast. It was out there somewhere, bleeding; hopefully dying with my bullet in its crotch, but most likely zeroing in on the smell of my breath, the beat of my heart. I was just as thirsty for the kill, tensed for the latest shot I couldn’t afford to miss. From the roof of a moss-cloaked crypt something came at me with the hard scent of blood in its wake and I nearly fired...a dead calf with its belly torn open landed in a heap before me. As I eased off the Colt’s trigger, the Wolf made its true play and bore down on me from behind, snapping the gray shale marker at my back and sending me hurtling out of one boot. I slammed against the packed earth and snagged my shoulder on a stray menhir stone but twisted through the breathless pain and came up to fire between my knees. All I saw were its open jaws as I put a bullet down its throat, and it was so close I could see its entire mouth in the muzzle flash. In the next instant its chops gushed with bloody slaver, and the percussion had blown out its ears and some of its teeth. Still, it snapped and snarled and snapped again, but with tonsils hanging out the back of its neck it just couldn’t follow through.

With a wick of fire hissing through my shoulder, I pulled away from the Wolf and discarded the empty pistol. I coughed for air and fumbled at my remaining boot. I withdrew my silver-steel Bowie knife and slung away the sheath. The Noble Wolven dragged itself to an upright sitting position and slumped, lopsided against the ruined menhir. Its coat was awash in blood to the waist, and it bobbed and drooled, trying to lift its huge head. I sucked at the air, too worn out to make the final play.

"I’m supposed to tell you, hello," It gurgled through a shattered soft palate, its own words deaf in its ears, from your bitch-mother.

The next thing I knew I had launched myself at it and was cursing in an unknown tongue while driving the Bowie through its prodigious skull. On the first strike I felt the air go out of the creature like it had actually deflated. Its limbs and body mass shrank and became light beneath me. I withdrew the blade and then plunged it in a second time, but to no greater effect. Its eyes were only puckered black holes in its face, and its hide had shriveled to a brittle husk. As I watched, the snout wizened into a black fist and its purplish gums darkened and wasted away in scalloped ribbons, leaving it with a rictus maw. Its cracked teeth were in pieces; its savaged mouth containing only shards of fangs and a stiffened dead worm of a tongue. The pelt had become as delicate as cheap doll’s hair and it sloughed off in sheets, leaving only gray shrink-wrapped bone and a withered skull set with demonic horns. It looked like it had been dead a hundred years.

When I woke up that next dawn it was to the smell of horses, not Wolf’s blood. At first I thought my shoulder ached more than usual, but it was just my imagination. The battle had been in a dream, but not on the Other Side. I sat on the edge of my cot and listened to the horses complain, then hitched up my pants and boots and went out to feed them.

It was the second week of March, 1988. The Winter Olympics in Calgary were over, and I was working for a riding stable near Rosetown, Saskatchewan. The job provided room and board, a cozy little living area built into the barn and hot eats with the rest of the hands twice a day. The folks who owned the place liked to keep things simple and they never asked my name more than once. I’d always liked horses, even if they hadn’t always been as fond of me, and I could work with them well enough to hold down the job. Mostly that meant feeding and watering, shoveling out the stalls, saddling them up for twenty dollar trail rides, and brushing them down when they returned. It was minimum-wage work; easy on the brain, hard on the back, and a far cry from shooting-center for an international cast of spooks.

Over a year before, a mandatory psych evaluation had diagnosed me with Windigo Psychosis—they called it a culture-bound syndrome—and Dan Rogier decided to cut me loose. He called it a vacation. Of course by that time I’d already survived him and the Windigo, but I went quietly.

I’d come back to the western provinces and took various jobs to keep myself busy. Regular unskilled labor; the kind of work you can usually get without a resume, or a driver’s license. The deceased don’t keep documentation and, thanks to the Victorian Ring, Sylvester Logan James was legally dead.

After the first six months I’d become surprisingly content with the hum-drum world of 8:00 to 5:00, and the boredom had become my sanctuary. It was like a sensory deprivation chamber that kept me grounded, and I needed that tranquil, dead-air to give me time to work out a new way to live. I had things to tend to if I was ever going to make it back to my dead wife and baby and their place in eternity. I knew I couldn’t fix the damage I’d done, but I had to try to temper my hatred with the things I loved. Only problem was, there weren’t too many of them left.

I had also been struggling with things from the Other Side intruding on this one. Phantom doors and roads, disembodied voices and apparitions in mirrors were coming at me four and five times a day. Sometimes I’d break into a vision and see some outlandish scene or occurrence from the past, and nine times out of ten they had nothing to do with me; just unchecked psychic chatter. Seeing things that weren’t physically there wasn’t only distracting, it could be outright unnerving. Once, I was taking a shower in a motel room when a lady who’d cut her wrists fifteen years earlier showed up in the tub with me.

As for the Beast, there hadn’t been any Wolves come calling since Peter Stubbe. I hadn’t even felt their presence. It was almost like they wanted me to relax and get comfortable, but this was just prologue...the subversive calm before the storm.

My personal recap of 1987 goes something like this: In June, when Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev, Tear down this wall, I was mopping floors at a strip mall in Regina. At the end of that July, when that F4 tornado ripped through eastern Edmonton, I was washing dishes at a greasy spoon and took cover with everyone else. Later on in October, Black Monday found me breaking up brawls at the Rooster’s Roost Roadhouse outside Medicine Hat.

Early in my forced sabbatical I’d made the decision not to stray more than a few days’ drive from Michael Winterfox and his hermitage. The things I had to deal with couldn’t be tackled by hiding out in the woods with him, but by the same token there were a lot of things I wasn’t going to learn anywhere else. I’d been Michael’s pupil since Papa died, and from the age of fourteen he’d taught me to hunt and kill, armed and bare-handed. He’d also instructed me in the brutal art of withstanding pain, as well as serving it up. Both kinds of lessons were fairly gruesome, and I still carried the scars as evidence.

The Reydosnin warrior society was, on its face, a mystical branch of the Northern Cheyenne Dog Men, and Michael was all that remained of their tradition. But, from what I’d read of his journals, the word was written rédo’osnin and isn’t part of the common Cheyenne language. It’s derived instead from a hidden tongue called ononeovätaneo, which was used in olden times only by medicine men and those who worked for the sacred, maheonhetaneo. Michael didn’t remember what rédo’osnin meant exactly, but the tradition actually pre-dated Tsistsistas military societies by several hundred years.

I’d made the trip deep into the Canadian Rockies four times during my hiatus, but none of them as memorable as that past September on my thirty-seventh birthday. He’d almost died in the snow less than a year before, but after he’d recovered had seemed healthier and in better spirits than I’d seen him in awhile.

We’d been sitting around a pit fire in the clearing he called his front yard, burning some dead brush. I was working the silver-steel Bowie on a whetstone and he selected a coal with which to light his pipe.

Mind you keep that edge straight, he’d said, even though he hadn’t appeared to be watching me.

I’ve done this before, I said.

Well, when I gave it to you it’d cut through a good free-hanging horsehair rope with one pass. Look at it now, he harrumphed, like you been digging bait with it.

I just smiled to myself and looked back to the sharpening. How much silver did you say was in this thing? I asked.

"Don’t recall that I ever did say, he replied. I had that made in Bavaria after the Big War."

He’d told me this before, but I wouldn’t have said so for anything. It was unusual enough for my grandfather to volunteer information without discouraging him with details.

Fitted that crown stag handle myself, he said, lighting his pipe with the chosen ember. You know, time was when we didn’t have any silver at all.

And you used to walk to school in the snow, uphill and barefoot, I said, jokingly.

Never mind making it to thirty-eight, he said. Worry about going to bed tonight with your ass not kicked between your shoulders.

Then he resumed his former thought without missing a step.

Until the Spanish showed up we didn’t have much in the way of silver—didn’t have many Wolves as far as that goes. Back then, the spirits were our main weapon against the Beast.

I’d set the whetstone on an empty, upturned nail keg that sat next to me and carefully wiped the damask blade along my pant leg. He’d mentioned something like this before, a story about a medicine man and a spiritual battle with the Beast, or Shungmanitu-Wa-Chah, One Who Is Wolf. I’d sat very still and watched him attentively, trying not to look like I was hanging on his next word. I’d kept quiet too, because to ask him a question was a good way to get him to clam up.

"My great grandfather took his weapons to several different medicine men for their blessings, and after they’d been passably consecrated they were deadly to the Wolves. They worked on the same principle as silver, and could strike the spirit of the Beast even from the land of the living.

Used to be a sacred lance head—not even the old ones knew for sure where it came from. Tradition said it fell from the moon way up north. It had been cold formed from a piece of meteoric iron, and there were stress cracks around the edges from where it had been forged and flattened. It was heavy and dull in color, but the splits around the edges were like serrations and it was extremely sharp. They said it had been made for killing monsters and that it became more potent every time it did. By the time it came to old grandfather, it was said no Wolf could survive even a scratch from it.

I’d sheathed the knife, but Michael took it and tested the edge I’d put on it with the ball of his thumb. He peered through the smoke at me.

There is a song that went with it. The words didn’t make sense to us; the language had been lost, but it invoked the full power of the lance. Without the song, it was mostly just an ancient piece of sky metal.

He’d then proceeded to sing the song—if you could’ve called it that—which started out very low, as a doleful chanting. As it grew louder it became more eerie, like a chattering dirge or the lament of coyotes. It rose from the back of his throat, a nocturne escalating into the strains of a war hymn, culminating in the staccato scream of a damned soul. In that apex the tendons of Michael’s neck stood through his skin, tight as ropes, and a wash of gooseflesh swept over my scalp and down my spine. The silence that followed had been so profound, even the forest was dumbstruck; the very mountains lost in frightened reverie.

"God damn, Michael."

I’d thought about that incident and what I’d learned during that visit for a long time afterwards, and I thought about it again while putting fresh hay in the stalls. I reminded myself why I was tending horseflesh instead of hunting down the Wolf who used to be my mother.

She called herself Rhea Silvia Lupa, a pseudonym based on the mother of Romulus and Remus, and the she-Wolf who nursed them. She had haunted my dreams for years, long before I knew who she was. All my life I’d believed my mother had died giving birth to me; it was what Papa had told me and Michael had let me believe. I’d lived with that guilt for as long as I could remember. Growing up, I’d attributed her conspicuously absent photographs to my father’s broken heart. It had really been due to fear; a fear that was realized the winter of 1963, when the monster who had been his wife, his Abigail, came back for him. She would’ve made him like her if it hadn’t been for Winterfox, whose resolve had saved Papa where it had failed his daughter. The night she’d turned—the night I was born—Michael had a chance to finish her, but had wavered in that instant and had been tormented by regret ever since; decades of regret.

Since the moment I’d learned all this I’d been planning her destruction. What had kept me pumping gas and bouncing bars instead of acting on those plans was the generally poor state of my soul. My spiritual condition would’ve been laughable against the kind of Wolves I’d have to face just to get to her. Hatred and guilt had left my soul almost completely compromised; a weakness the Windigo had exploited for its own purposes. Aside from burning in Hell, demonic possession is about the worst thing that can happen to you, spiritually speaking. Not a lot of people come back from that kind of thing, and I’d had some recuperation to do.

In the custom of crawling before walking, the first phase of that procedure had been to find the middle ground between hate and inarticulate rage. In my life it had been as reckless as a wildfire and as withering as a blast furnace. It was an essential part of who I’d become and it wasn’t going anywhere, but now it seemed to have finally cooked down to coals; fervent as ever, but infinitely more manageable. Coming to this point had been a violent birthing process, comprised of costly experiments in trial and error and progressively painful false starts. After a year of making my way in anonymity I seemed to be emerging from the crucible, leaving guilt and fear burned up behind me like scoria.

Interferences from the Other Side had also subsided to a tolerable frequency, and my physical health had benefitted from the work-a-day tedium. A few scrapes aside, I hadn’t faced a threat of bodily harm since the Isle of Man. No one had shot at me or tried to engineer my demise in any way; you know, except for a few drunks with knives. My strength had returned and my blood pressure had dropped back into normal range, largely because I wasn’t in constant pain every day. Amazing what’ll happen if a body gets a chance to heal.

Over twenty years ago the rattlesnake accepted me as his blood brother. It had been a hazardous connection, accomplished only after I’d survived his best attempt to kill me. He’d imparted to me his wisdom, and the fire of his venom had made me sicker than I’d ever been up to that point.

My covenant with the owl had been less dangerous, but much more difficult. After following the same great horned owl from dusk to dawn, I’d rescued it from marauding crows who’d taken it to the ground. As the crows had scattered, I’d managed to secure a small feather from the owl; a token of brotherhood from my new nightwatch.

These were more than just my totem animals, they were my spirit guardians and they’d been as aggrieved by the Windigo as I had. I relied on their vigilance at the outposts of my soul; the rattler by day and the owl by night. As my brothers they’d allowed me to see through their eyes or feel through their skin, but more importantly, they were persuasive allies on the Other Side. Whatever I’d come to believe or question; whatever gods were false, my brother-guardians were the real deal, and I was going back home again to renew my bonds with them.

What had been a bright and friendly fire a few minutes earlier had become a blackened stew of smoking cinders. I sat tailorwise before the fire pit but could barely see its ring of stones through the downpour. Just before noon an unexpected norther had swept down from the Yukon and turned an already somber ceremony ominous. Michael bent down and handed me the snake, which was already pissed-off and rattling.

He doesn’t like the weather, Michael said.

I took the pit viper and held it aloft in one hand, his body coiled and cocked. He was a black phase timber rattler and through sheets of blowing rain he looked like a primeval dark lord. I spoke to him and acknowledged his wisdom and power. I thanked him for his guidance, and I thanked him for his life. I asked his forgiveness as I brought him closer. The sound of his rattling was subdued by the storm but his fangs were as sharp and hot as I remembered, and I received his bite just below the top of my shoulder. Blood and urine-colored venom oozed from the punctures and streamed away in the torrent. I closed a fist behind his spade-shaped head and bit through his spine, killing him instantly. His scales were tasteless, unpalatable shingles, but I tugged and tore through them to get at the white, raw flesh underneath. I swallowed the meat and his cool, sour blood, ingesting his spirit and taking it into myself while Michael applied poultices to the wound.

Having been bitten before I’d developed a degree of resistance to the venom, and even though it hadn’t been a dry bite, the rattler hadn’t juiced me as much as he could’ve. The bad news was he’d struck above my heart and my lips had already started to go numb; time was critical.

Xamaeše’šenovôtse, as he’s known in Cheyenne, is a cold-blooded son of a bitch and not the forgiving sort. This was his judgment on my weakness, the penance he required. I’d been prepared for such a verdict and, still sitting cross-legged in the mud, quieted myself amidst a rage of rain and thunder.

I turned my concentration inward the same way I would if I was going to leave my body. Regulating my internal chemistry was actually the same basic process except instead of vacating the premises my intent was to batten down the hatches. It was something I’d picked up on my own and hadn’t practiced much, but I had to try to stem the tide of the poison. I focused on lowering my heart rate first, and then on slowing my lymph flow so the poison would reach my heart as a trickle not a flood. Next I went to work curbing the rush of white blood cells at the bite area. They naturally sought to dilute the venom, but too many of them would swell the tissue and cut off blood circulation. Doing this also helped counter the venom’s hemorrhagic properties, but to keep clots from forming I dilated my blood vessels everywhere else. Rattlers have proteins in their blood which neutralize the toxicity of their own venom; I’d already consumed much of that blood, and called on my brother even in the throes of his wrath to grant me its use.

My trance dissolved into a fevered sleep and I woke sporadically through the rest of the day, marginally aware of the pain flashing in my shoulder and the foul-smelling sweat seeping from my pores. This was all very familiar, but in my stupor I couldn’t discern past from present and was the same snake-bit teenager who’d labored under this fever once before. I vomited a viscous red liquid that tasted like a chemical swamp and I remember Michael putting the damp end of a blanket in my mouth. In my intense thirst I sucked the rainwater out of it and could taste the blood leaking from my gums.

When I came to again it was dark and my wallow had partially dried to dirt. This time I knew where I was and what was happening. I didn’t see Michael anywhere, but when I tried to sit up I became aware of another presence in my periphery. A strange, dark silhouette almost three feet high stood near the tree line at the clearing, and I couldn’t place what it was. Then I realized the oddity of its shape owed to an unfurled wing that had, in profile, looked something like a beaver’s tail. It was a female owl; the largest Great Horned I’d ever seen, and she was watching me.

"Haáahe méstaa’e," I said, greeting her as the old bogeyman she was.

She lazily batted her golden saucer eyes and then canted her head as though I’d asked her a question. Seemingly annoyed with me, she chittered and stood from foot to foot; gestures of impatience that transcended language and species.

When I managed to sit upright, I recognized the object of her interest was the rattlesnake carcass next to me. With her injured wing there was no telling how long she’d been unable to hunt, but she was plenty hungry to resort to scavenging. I didn’t know if one spirit guardian consuming another was considered bad medicine or not, but I figured if I could do it so could she.

You want this? I asked feebly, still sick as a dog.

My fingertips could just reach the dead snake and I strained forward and flung it toward the owl, who immediately seized it in her beak. Too starved to take her handout elsewhere and possibly with nesting young to feed, she ate where she stood. She held the partially eaten viper fast in her talons, and as she ate flared her bad wing a few times, as though startled by pain. It didn’t appear to be broken, but in contrast to its pale underside I could see a handful of dark protrusions like long fir needles. They were porcupine quills, at least a dozen of them at various depths of penetration. Porcupines are part of the great horned owl’s diet, and this big girl was wearing the souvenirs of her last kill. Porky quills have backward facing scales that make them hard to extract if you don’t have thumbs, but if they’re not removed they can actually migrate deeper into the flesh over time. I needed to get those spines out of her, but she wasn’t going to just let me.

The poison had broken, but I was having a hard time navigating prone to vertical. My shoulder had turned a bluish-yellow hue and I made a half-assed attempt of shutting off the pain as I went to all fours. Mostly I acted on brute force willpower and crawled toward the owl. She regarded my clumsy advance with a hiss, took a step backwards and ripped another bite from the snake. I retched between my elbows and then looked back up at the owl; she seemed to be getting further away. Another determined push resumed my approach, ridiculous as it was. I was initiated in the Reydosnin tradition, and had learned to fight upside down, blind and underwater. I’d tangled with the Windigo and the Death Bear, dealt with professional assassins, demoniacs and werewolves on both sides of the ocean. Catching one lame owl shouldn’t be this difficult, I thought.

That’s when the significance of what was happening dawned through my venom-addled brain. Ma’xeméstaa’e had never been as punitive as Xamaeše’šenovôtse, just substantially more complicated. She had come to me to re-pact, and just like the first time there was no ritual to it. The few feet between us were long ones, and she showed no intention of escaping me. Doubtless, she thought I wanted the snake carcass back, and was prepared to fight me for it. Few birds of prey are as aggressive or as intense as the great horned owl, especially when it comes to defending what’s theirs. Catching the bird wasn’t going be an issue. She lowered her head, rapidly clacking her beak and warning me away with low screams that sounded like a woman’s.

On my right, Michael’s blanket laid rumpled and soggy. I pulled it out of the half-dried mud and rose to my knees, twisting part of it around my forearm. I was off balance when the owl’s temper hit critical mass, and she came at me with claws bared. I fell sideways but defended myself with my newly-wrapped arm. Her talons snapped through the blanket and into my skin like miniature bear traps, and she bit at my face, seeking my eyes. All I could do was tuck my chin and roll into her. Her horned bill sliced through my scalp while I pinned her thrashing body against the ground and kept her talons tangled in the blanket.

Quit, I said, and used the rest of the blanket to cover her and control her head. I isolated the bum wing and started plucking out quills as fast and precise as I was able. Immobilized, she stopped screaming and made small trilling sounds from beneath the blanket. Each of the fourteen porky spines were lodged fast and I could see where she’d removed a host of others by herself—resourceful old girl. Pulling out the last quill, I rocked backwards and shook her out of the blanket. She flailed a little until she found her bearings and then stood upright with both wings folded in front of her like shields. I let myself fall back as the blood she’d drawn wended through my hair and down my temples. She watched me, more wary than angry I think, as I examined the wounds she’d left on my forearm.

Don’t mention it, I said, and she chittered in reply before launching from the clearing into the trees.

I don’t know if my attempt at biofeedback had done any good, or if I’d affected the poison flow at all. I don’t know what role Michael’s poultices had played, or how much being previously bitten even entered into it. My gut was that the rattlesnake had loaned me his own resistance as I’d asked. All I knew for sure was that by the next morning, aside from being bruised at the shoulder socket, and sporting new owl-related injuries, I was feeling better. Michael returned about an hour after dawn, to find me drying my clothes by a new fire.

I hadn’t been to Papa’s grave for a long time. What had once been a pile of heavy stones over his remains had become, over the years, a smooth mound in the forest floor. The rocks were still there of course, you just couldn’t see them under the sediment and the moss and the wild plants that’d grown over and in-between. I wished I had something to say to him that was worth a shit.

It’s been awhile, I know, I said, walking around the tomb with my hands in my jeans pockets. Seemed wrong to be this close and not stop by.

Through a dark canopy of virgin timber, fingers of afternoon sun prodded through branches of old poplar and oak. The sparse, random shafts of light added to the spot’s dreamlike quality, and except for the distant cry of a hawk the wood was as silent as its stones. God, it was a lonesome place we’d chosen to bury him, but a secret one, and that had been the point.

I can’t remember what you looked like, Papa, I said, and instantly regretted the way in which I’d said it. "I just