Relentless (11 page)

“Well, you’re right to be scared. I’ve only been involved in a few things, but it’s nerve-wracking. I had to keep telling myself that I could handle whatever came at me next. Even if it wasn’t true.”

“Have you been able to handle whatever happened?”

I laughed. “That’s probably a matter of opinion. I think I’ve done okay, but my aunt Louise would say that I’ve been in some fiascos, most of my own making. She’d say I’m alive only by sheer luck.”

Lana leaned forward on her stool. “I think those are talents—confidence and sheer luck.”

When I turned to look at her, she was grinning. I tossed an empty test tube at her, and she nearly fell off the stool trying to catch it. “You’re right, you have no coordination.”

She grabbed a syringe that didn’t have a needle attached and pressed the plunger, sending a spray of liquid across my chest.

“That better have been water.”

“Don’t be a baby. Of course it was water.”

I spotted a similar syringe a few tables away. With a jerk, I came off the stool and leapt, clearing the table next to me then another one. I grabbed the syringe and filled it with water at the sink. Two tables over, Lana was on her feet.

“Do not get me wet, Alexis.”

I sprang over the two tables, landed with a thud, and sprayed her in the face. She screeched and took off running to the other end of the lab to refill her syringe. I waited for her to get the sink turned on. I moved slowly, or at least slower than I could have, just so she’d have a chance. Water sprayed across the room and hit me in the ear as I turned my head. Running toward her, I held up the syringe and sent my water flying. Lana darted away, and suddenly the door behind where she’d been standing opened. Water hit Robert right between the eyes as he stood in the open doorway. Lana and I both froze. He took off his glasses and wiped them on the edge of his lab coat. Then he turned and disappeared back into the room. I clamped my hand over my mouth and doubled over laughing.

“I don’t think he’ll be mad.” Lana giggled as she tried to project her voice across the room without shouting at me.

Suddenly, the door swung wide, and Robert stepped into the room with a huge soaker gun pressed to his shoulder. I straightened and stopped laughing. Lana’s eyes widened as she looked from Robert to me.

Then she spun and screamed, “Run!”

I dropped my pitiful syringe and sprinted toward the front of the lab just as the first torrent of water hit me in the back of the head.

I glanced around the small shop and took a deep breath, inhaling the mixture of sage, lavender, vanilla, and a bitter smell I couldn’t place, which lay on top of the others. It left a tanginess in my nostrils. Rayna Aucoin bagged up candles, spices, and a decorative cloth for two tourists who were making their last purchases before heading back to the cruise ship they’d left that morning. It had been a week since I’d last come to Key West. That had been the afternoon after Robert had managed to drown Lana and I in a water fight. I hadn’t been able to meet up with Eric that day. He’d left Key West for a few days. I was hoping for better luck very soon.

I glanced back at Rayna and her customers. After the few trips I’d made to Key West, I’d realized the number of people in town grew enormously whenever a cruise ship or two docked. This evening, I had noticed one when we’d come in. With her customers’ purchases complete, Rayna followed them to the door and locked it as they left.

She turned, studying me with her dark eyes before she spoke. “I’m glad you could come.”

I shrugged. “You said I should.”

I’d visited Rayna’s shop the last time I’d been in town, and we’d settled on today as the day I’d come for her rune ceremony, or whatever it was.

“You could have chosen not to do it.” She went down an aisle toward the back of the store, and I walked behind her. Her slick black hair was knotted at the back of her head without one strand out of place.

“When you mentioned the rune thing before, I got the feeling you thought I should do it. I’m not so sure it matters. I mean, do all werewolves get the rune thing done?”

She stopped at the counter and leaned against it. “It’s not a rune thing.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know what to call it.”

The ties of Rayna’s red and blue wrap dress had come undone, and she knotted them back together before answering me. “Generally, people call it a rune casting, but what I do with werewolves is really quite different than what is done by others who practice such things. Our history is intertwined with the voodoo. It’s become its own practice over time. What we will do tonight we call a Reckoning. Our family has a special relationship with the Lycernians. The Aucoin family dates back centuries. Of course, our name wasn’t Aucoin then. That has only become the family name over the past few hundred years when we ended up in Louisiana. There are a few other families that all have bloodlines traceable back to the original.”

I picked up a bag of dried seeds and grasses from the shelf next to me and sniffed the spicy scent. “Where are the others?”

“One family is in Germany now, though they move around to other areas much like I do. Another is in Argentina.” She turned toward the counter to straighten a row of crystal bottles filled with colorful liquids.

I put the bag back on the shelf. “That’s all, just the three families?”

“Yes, three base families, but our family members may travel to all parts of the world at any time. I have a sister who has lived in China for the past few years.”

“It seems weird you have your own religion.”

She shook her head at me. “It’s not a religion.”

“What is it, then?”

“It is a lifestyle that we lead, a set of skills that we practice to help others.”

I pushed a strand of hair back from my face. “So you’re like a doctor who helps people when they’re sick.”

She smiled. “Exactly. We are doctors for the spirit and soul.”

“Witch doctors.”

At that, she tilted her head back and laughed. “No, not witch doctors. We do not claim to be witches, though I have many friends in that particular practice, and I respect them. It’s not what we do.”

“So are you going to look into my soul?” I shuffled my feet and didn’t look directly at her, slightly afraid of the answer.

“Maybe. Hopefully, we’ll begin to learn about your spirit and purpose. Something to help guide you in making decisions in the future.”

I wasn’t certain I wanted someone looking at my spirit or soul or whatever. “You think I make bad decisions now?”

She sighed. “I think you struggle.”

I snorted. “You’re right about that.”

“It’s because you don’t know your center, your purpose.”

I grabbed another bag off the shelf next to me, trying to find something to do with my hands. This whole thing was beginning to make me nervous. “Is this going to be some deep, get–to-know-myself-better experience?”

Rayna crossed her arms. “Alexis, if you do not believe and are not ready for the Reckoning, then we should go no further. It will mean nothing and will not help you if you’re not open to it and its power.”

I chewed my lip, glancing at the door behind the counter. I knew I could just walk out. Rayna wouldn’t hold it against me. She’d accept that maybe I wasn’t quite ready for this. But I was ready. I hated to admit it, to myself and even to Rayna, but I knew there were other powers out there and that some of them were relevant to me. Being a werewolf was not the only oddity in my life.

“No, I want to do it.”

“You have to be open and believe. Can you do that, Alexis?”

“Yes. I don’t want to believe all this stuff, but I see it, and I know it’s true. I have to learn how to use the powers that I have and the powers that are around me.”

She nodded. “And that is the right answer.”

I followed her around the counter where she turned off the main store lights. We went into the back room, and Rayna picked up a large tote bag from beside the door then led me outside, locking the door behind her.  An ancient Jeep with no top or doors waited in the drive, and Rayna climbed into the driver’s seat. Under the nightlight, the dingy metal was a sickly shade of green, and I hesitated before climbing in and fastening my seatbelt. We drove off through the thick traffic of Duval Street, but Rayna quickly maneuvered onto a side street, and we left the noise and traffic behind. We bounced along for a few minutes, neither of us bothering to try to speak over the roar of the engine. The Jeep slowed.  In the glow of the headlights, I spotted a dirt road off to the right. Rayna jerked the steering wheel, and the Jeep groaned as its wheels skidded onto the unpaved surface. The road ran alongside a huge, dark house. Tree limbs hung over the road, and I had to duck to keep from being smacked by them. She braked suddenly, and I was thrown against my seatbelt. Before I could loosen my belt, Rayna was out and tugging her bag from the backseat. We crossed a rocky surface to the edge of a small bluff. Just below was a small, sandy beach with the ocean only a few yards away. I glanced from her to the precarious hill beneath us. She didn’t seem to notice.

She went over the edge first, and I took a breath before sliding after her. We scrambled down the side of the bluff, scattering rocks as we went. At the bottom, my feet sank into the sand.

“This is beautiful. How do you know about it?”

I could see Rayna’s smile in the moonlight. “A friend owns this property. I’m glad you like it. Some people don’t appreciate the beauty of the rock and the water in the night.”

“I’ve found a greater appreciation of the night since my Becoming. Even though I can change to my werewolf form anytime, it feels more comfortable at night.”

“That’s why we come at night to perform your Reckoning. Many others who use the runes would cast them in the day with an eye to the sun, but what our family has done over the years has evolved differently. The night and the moon call to the werewolf, so we cast under the darkened sky with only the light of the moon and our candles. It is our family’s way, the werewolf way.”

A shiver started low in my spine and spread over the nerve endings in my body until my skin seemed to take on a life of its own. I reminded myself this was not a good time to transform into my werewolf self. Focusing on the rhythmic motion of the waves and the warm, moist air against my face, I managed to calm my overwhelming urge to change.

“Does the water ever come all the way up here?” I tried to distract myself with something completely unrelated to what we were about to do.

“Depending on the tide, it is sometimes underwater. But now is the perfect time. The tide won’t be coming in until the morning.”

Overhead, a huge, glowing, full moon was suspended amidst a sky full of stars, and it lighted our way as Rayna moved to the middle of the beach and put down her bag. She placed two towels on the ground.

“For us to sit on,” she said.

She took out two smoothly folded items and handed one to me. When I unfolded it, I saw it was a loose robe. It was black and streaked with what appeared to be red, but it was kind of hard to tell in the moonlight. Rayna had slipped the robe on over her clothes and nodded at me to do the same. I was afraid it would be hot, but the fabric was thin and light. She motioned toward the towels on the ground, and she sat down on one. I sat on the other towel, crossing my legs. Rayna was on her knees.

She slid the tote bag closer to her and pulled out a cloth that looked to be different colors, but again, it was hard to tell colors in the dim light. She spread the cloth on the ground in front of us. Next, she set up candles around the cloth, one on each corner and one on the edge of the fabric directly in front of us. With both hands, she took a large, square stone from the bag. It was about a one-foot square and glowed white in the moonlight. It shimmered when she set it down in the center of the cloth. I could see it had been inlaid with other stones, darker ones, in a circular design. Then the lighting of the candles began. Rayna clasped her hand above each one. Her lips moved, but I couldn’t hear all her words. The ones I did hear I didn’t understand.

When she came to the candle that rested in front of us, she handed the long lighter to me.

“What do I do?” My voice came out low and gravelly, though I hadn’t consciously planned to speak quietly.

“Light this candle, but first take a few breaths and focus.”

“Am I supposed to say something?”

“We’re here to look for guidance for you as to your place in the world. You should ask for that or at least that you will be open to see what the spirits would have you see.”

“What spirits?”

“The ancient werewolves, of course.”

I looked out to the ocean, its waves visible in the light of the moon. I thought of wanting to be with Eric and how I had offered to leave my own pack and become part of his. Was that the right thing to do? Did I really want to leave my aunt Louise and the friends I’d made here and become their enemy? My grip tightened on the lighter. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it like that. I would be the enemy. I shook my head. I would never be their enemy, no matter what pack I was in. Guidance. I focused on the word and pressed the button on the lighter so the flame appeared at the end of it. Then I touched the flame to the wick of the candle, and it sparked to life. Rayna took the lighter from me and put it back in her bag.

On the left side of the cloth, she had placed two worn leather pouches, one dyed red and one purple. She took the red one and removed a handful of white pebbles from it. With her hands pressed together as if in prayer, she moved them back and forth, chanting softly. I could hear the soft click of the pebbles bumping against each other. Then, with a jerk, she let them drop onto the larger stone. At first, some of them were hard to see against the white of the stone, but those that fell onto the darker inlaid areas stood out. Not pebbles. Bones. She had tossed six or eight small bones onto the stone. She immediately clasped her hands again, her eyes closed, and rocked back and forth.

The wind gusted and fluttered the edges of the cloth. The flames of the candles danced then seemed to get larger, as if energized by the wind. A cloud covered the moon, and the night closed in around us, the waves sounding louder, as if they were slapping against the sand. My chest tightened, and I had to work a little harder just to breathe. Rayna took the next pouch, loosening the golden string that ran through the top. Onto the edge of the cloth, she poured small brown squares with designs etched into them. I recognized many of the designs as the marks that werewolves had on their wrists or arms.

“They’re wooden. The ones in the shop were stone.”

She nodded. “For this, I use wooden ones that were handmade by my family years ago.”

She took out a small vial and opened it before sprinkling a thick, dark liquid onto the hard surface. Blood. I could smell its metallic flavor in the air. She picked the stones off the cloth and put them back in the bag. She drew one and placed it near the bottom of the stone close to me. Then she held out the leather sack. I drew out a tile, and she pointed for me to place it to the right side of the stone.

“This rune signifies you,” she said softly.

We repeated this seven more times until the wooden pieces were laid out in a three by three pattern. They were side by side where possible, but occasionally a bone was in the way, and we had to place the tile on the other side of it. I tried to ignore the smattering of blood she’d cast about.

“Are the bones and blood always used with the runes?” I whispered.

Rayna shook her head. “Only with the werewolves.”

She leaned over each tile and examined it. I bent forward, feeling heat from the candles against my face. The wind had picked up, and the waves sounded closer, making me wonder if they’d overtake our spot soon.  Oblivious to our surroundings, Rayna pressed her hands together.