“You being a skinwalker,” uni lisi said, unperturbed. “That true?”

I sipped again, my mouth suddenly dry. “Yes, ma’am.”

“That how you can smell what this woman is?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And this woman who smell like The People. She chasing you?”

I started to answer and stopped. Not just targeting me at my house to kill me, but chasing me? If so, was she trying to get me to lead her somewhere? Tracking me everywhere I went? Like to here? “Maybe,” I said, as the possibilities bounced around in my head. What the heck did Satan’s Three want? The things in my possession that were magical. That was all that was left for them to be after.

“I see on the TV, ’bout them little things people stick to cars,” uni lisi said. “So they can follow peoples. You got one on you car?”

My hands went cold on the iced tea glass. I hadn’t checked. I wasn’t used to being a target myself. If I had been a client, I’d have been over the car with a microscope. I set down the tea glass and hit the button for Eli. “Yeah?” he answered.

“You didn’t think to check my vehicle for tracking devices, did you?”

“You were clean this morning. The only way we can be totally sure is to put a camera on it, check it every day, and park it in a vault.”

“Excuse me,” I said to the One Feathers, and left the porch at a run. I still had my flashlight and clicked the light on as I neared my SUV. “Anything new I should be looking for?” It might sound like a dumb question, but the market for monitoring and tracing equipment was changing and evolving so fast that keeping up required constant attention to company updates. I’d left that to Eli.

“Second- and third-gen magnetic trackers are smaller and adhere better than the first generation. They still can be fired from a cannon or tossed over a fence to land anywhere on the exterior, but even the old trackers cost five hundred bucks apiece and none of them always stick. The math sucks unless you have bottomless pockets. It’s easier to walk by, open the door, and toss one under the seat, except you keep your vehicle locked. A public street is not the place to disable the alarm and attach one inside the engine compartment or the trunk. So that leaves walking by, pausing, and sticking a GPS tracking device under the wheel well or bumper. Old-style craft. They can be small enough to hide between two fingers, but those cost. Most people still use the ones the size of a pack of cigarettes. You checking now?” I grunted the affirmative and he said, “I’ll hold.”

I walked around the vehicle and saw nothing on the exterior. I bent and checked each wheel well. Empty except for mud from where I’d gotten stuck earlier, and the rain splashing up from the roads hadn’t completely washed it clean. Anything pushed through the mud to adhere to the metal would have left an impression different from ones nature left, and the mud coating all looked uniform. I lay down and rolled under the front, then the back. Nothing was stuck to the bumpers. “I’m clean. But I want a more thorough inspection when I get home.”

“Okay.” He disconnected.

Back on the porch I asked, “You have a gun?”

“Course we have a gun,” Aggie said, as if I’d asked a stupid question. Maybe I had. These were country women facing rabid animals, carrot-stealing rabbits, and kids with nefarious and salacious intentions. And maybe evil people looking to rob, rape, and steal.

I sat and drank half of my tea, my mouth as dry as a bone from dread. “My vehicle looks clean, but there’s no way to be sure. And since I’m here now, it’s too late. I’m sorry.”

“We be okay,” uni lisi said. “What you come here for tonight?”

Not to get you killed, I thought. I said, “Are there any Cherokee stories about dragons?”

“Some,” Aggie said.

“There Uktena,” uni lisi said. “He a dragon-like serpent with horns.”

I repeated the name. “Ook-tay-nah?”

Aggie said, “Close enough. The first Uktena was said to be transformed from a human man in a failed assassination attempt on the sun. Most other Uktena tales have to do with Cherokee heroes slaying the Uktena monster. The dragons are malevolent and deadly.”

“The assassination attempt on the sun sounds a little like Apollo. So maybe the dragons are made of light?”

“Or they aliens like that professor with the hair say.”

I wasn’t sure who uni lisi was talking about, but the idea that the arcenciel was an alien was a possibility—though not an alien who came to Earth in a spaceship. Rather, one who got here from another universe at a liminal threshold, a place where one universe touched another.

“Then there’s the Tlanuwa.” I cocked my head in question and Aggie produced it again. “Tlah-noo-wah.” I nodded and she went on. “Tlanuwa are giant birds of prey with impenetrable metal feathers. They’re common to the oral tradition of many southeastern tribes and may be the same things as the Thunderbird in southwestern tribal mythology.”

“Now, that sounds like a spaceship,” I said, but thought that it could also be a storm god. An Anzû. I had never actually seen one without its glamour blocking the way and I had never seen one fly.

Aggie shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling in the dark. “It has a strong resemblance to a jet fighter. Noisy, sleek, powerful, dangerous, and darting through the sky with a roar. You want to tell us what you’re looking for?”

I described the arcenciel. And the Anzû. Aggie watched me as I talked, her eyes holding me in place like spears. “I’m wondering if they are real creatures that came to Earth through a liminal threshold. A weak place in reality where creatures can get to Earth.”

“That old man,” uni lisi said derisively, “that Choctaw old man. Him talk about seeing strange things down in the bayou.”

“The Choctaw are south of Houma?” I asked. That was one place I’d seen the arcenciel, playing in the waters of a bayou.

“No. The Choctaw tribal regions went from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border,” Aggie said. My eyes went wide in surprise.

“But in the last war, our people beat them good.” Uni lisi sounded satisfied, the way a soccer mom might when recounting an old high school rivalry.

Aggie ignored it and said, “Locally the tribal members are represented by the Biloxi-Chitimacha Confederation of Muskogees, but they’re composed of an amalgamation of several tribes which include Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw, Acolapissa, and Atakapa.”