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.

I climbed into the Toyota’s backseat, knowing better than to call shotgun. I settled in, buckled in, laid my head back, closed my eyes, and was instantly in that strange almost-sleep where my body felt paralyzed but I was aware of everything: my own breathing, my own heartbeat, the sounds of water pattering onto the car, the permeated smells of the old women, the puppy, the mean old cat they had adopted, and a strong scent of coffee.

Aggie and her mother got into the car. I heard it turn over and felt the motion as it eased down the road. The wipers squeaked back and forth; rain tapped down softly. That precise sound of tires on wet roads filled the car, soothing, and then we traveled down a series of shell roads, which would be shining bright even in the gray light and rain. The sound of the tires changed as the shells on the roadway became sparser and the roads became progressively less maintained. I knew the moment we veered onto the two-track trail, the car bouncing into and out of potholes and over washboard ruts. I’d been here before.

As the four-by-four Toyota crawled down the ruts, Aggie again explained the ritual of going to water, unconcerned if I was listening or asleep.

In my near dream state, I heard every word, and as she spoke I drifted back into myself, feeling oddly and unexpectedly rested and free of pain. I sat up when she finished, and I stretched and decided that since she had used the same formula this time as last, I should too. “So, we go in the woods, throw up, talk to God, and go for a swim in the bayou that’s full of snakes, nutrias, and alligators.”

Aggie and her mother laughed, the sounds like water rippling over stones. “Thought you was asleep,” Uni lisi said. “We walk you through the ritual prayers.”

I hadn’t done much praying lately, in or out of church, so maybe this would help me in more ways than I had thought. When I stopped, which wasn’t often, and considered my own soul, which was never unless I had to, it was dusty and dry and scoured by winds. It was also dark as a cavern, and I suddenly worried that no soul should ever be so dark.

“Your vampire priestess, she call us today, before dawn.” Uni lisi watched me absorb this in the little mirror in the sun visor. I nodded. “She old and powerful. She know you a war woman, so we take you to water as a man, like last time,” Uni lisi said, returning to the general outlines of the last time we went to water. “After, you will be cleansed inside and out; your spirit will be open and restored. You will be ready for battle or pain or difficulty, and you will be without the shadows of the past that darken your soul.”

“We know you worship the Christian god,” Aggie said, again following the same ritual steps as before. “The old beliefs say the Great Creator made us. Some say the Creator still listens to us and some say he is gone, but all say he left three guardians to watch over us.”

I nodded, my hair rubbing loud on the seat back. Cloud-to-cloud lightning brightened the sky, lambent and gentle-looking. Around us fog closed in. Rain splattered the old car.

“In Cherokee ritual, the numbers four and seven are important,” Uni lisi said. “Four guardians of the four directions, seven when you add in the three guardians left by Unelenehi. Unelenehi, is the Great One. You call on this name when facing east. Selu was first woman, the corn mother. Her husband, first man, was Kenati. There is also the great female spirit which we call Agisseequa. But going to water is no hard and firm ritual calling on a specific god or a specific spirit. You call on who you want, who you want to lead you, who you want to clean you soul.”

The small Toyota turned into the same pine trees I remembered from before. Aggie braked and turned off the car. Uni lisi continued the narration. “This not like baptism. This a way to recognize our Tsalagiyi roots and heritage, to call on the past to lead and direct us into the future. It your ritual, the way you pray, the god or spirits you believe in. We done said what we needed to say. Come on. Sun done rose. We late.”

I bowed my head to them and murmured, “Lisi, elder of the People, and Uni lisi, grandmother of many children, thank you for taking me to water.” They each nodded regally and left the car for the rain. I peeled myself out of the car and followed them into the woods, flip-flops squelching on the rain-soaked ground.

Aggie’s hair had grown out and both women wore their hair braided, Uni lisi’s down to her hips, the thin white tresses laced with the black of the midnight sky. Their bodies moved with grace and elegance and I felt awkward and noisy in my flops.