Chapter 13: NONE OF YOUR BEES' WAX!

Pitch black. Black. Dark grey. Grey. Clotted cream. Pale white. White.

“Ohhhhhhhhh.” The latter hurts his eyes.

“It’s all right,” a low, masculine voice reassures him.

Maybe, but Johnny Three Spirits doesn’t feel all right, although he is encouraged.

“Grandfather, is that you? I thought I’d killed you.”

“Yes, grandfather, here. For awhile there, thinking you had killed me. As it turns out, though, I’m alive and well, and possibly more enlightened from having had my near-death experience.”

“Where are we?” Not the sweat lodge, unless the rocks are cooled, the heat all gone, electric lights installed.

“Back at my house.”

“You carried me here?”

“Actually, it would seem you carried me here, and then collapsed.”

“I’m sorry. I lost control — again.”

“Not as badly as the last time. Last time you were snake, and cougar, and wolf. Last time, you bit Melissa Remoth. This time you were only snake and didn’t bite grandfather. Progress. Or, so we shall see it until it is proven otherwise.”

“What keeps happening that so puts things out of whack?”

“An answer which obviously still needs more searching.”

“Did chant-to-see-the-future tell us nothing, then?”

“Snake interrupted chant. In afterthought, I’m thinking we need call upon a source far more insightful than chant.”

“Such a source exists?”

“If I can still believe my dreams.”

“You had a dream?”

“If dream is what can occur when losing consciousness from life-sucking squeeze of form-changer grandson as snake.”

“And what did you dream?”

“Of you and I scooping warm wax of angry scrubland bees. Of you and I working the wax to make it malleable. Of you and I rolling a waxy column of crusty gold and creamy fragmented honeycombs with wick.”

“A candle, you mean?”

“So it would seem.”

“Have you become a candle-reader, then, between sweat lodge and now?”

“No. Have you?”

“Not that I’m aware. And for as long as I can remember, I have heard you and the other elders complain because our people have been deprived of one for more than three generations. Which was why we set out to snatch Melissa Remoth to know her latest reading, yes?”

“Possibly why, in my dream, grandson, it’s Melissa brought with us to do the reading.”

“Unless, of course, I again spoil things by snatching her sister.”

Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE

Chapter 11: BITTEN, BUT NOT BY FROST

“Thank God!” Roger Remoth says into the telephone mouthpiece. “Is she okay? …Where did you find her? … Does she know who abducted her? … Yes, of course, I understand.” He checks his wristwatch. “We can be there within the hour. … Thank-you, and please tell our daughter we’re on our way.” He hangs up and says to his wife and to his younger daughter, “They found Trish across town on the lawn of one of the tract houses allocated families of air-force personnel.”

“To have transported her so far so fast, the shape-shifter would have had to be large dog or cat,” Melissa says.

“Is Trish okay?” Mary anxiously asks her husband.

“She’s rambling, by the police’s way of thinking,” Roger says. “She’s babbling about abduction by wolf, snake, and cougar. The police assume she’s been drugged and still suffers the aftereffects. They even think they’ve located two syringe puncture wounds.”

“The shape-shifter, as snake, bit her,” Melissa says; it isn’t a question. “Neither the police, nor doctor, will recognize it as a snake bite; the punctures are too far apart for any snake they know. The larger the shape-shifter, the larger the snake. The larger the snake, the larger the bite.”

“They’re taking her to the hospital for a rape kit.”

“Oh, dear God, tell me she wasn’t raped,” Mary begs.

“She says not, but the police have to be sure. They’ll run a tox screen, as well.”

“Melissa,” Mary turns to her daughter, “please tell me your sister wasn’t raped.”

Melissa shrugs. Shakes her head. “I don’t know. I only know that if there is any poison in her, whatever it may be, we’ll have to watch her very closely. As will the shape-shifter. He’ll have to help her, if he’s turned her, won’t he? So, Trish constantly should be on guard for someone, anyone, more curious about her than usual. Which might prove difficult once it gets around she’s been kidnapped — everyone curious. I would think, though, the shape-shifter will be a local Native American. Maybe even one of our classmates. Then, again, it could be someone older.”

“You can’t be more specific?” her father presses.

“I sense that he bit her by mistake. Therefore, snake probably a mistake.”

“He? His?” Mary wants gender confirmed.

“I think so. Also, I think, as I’ve already said, that his intent was merely to have answers. That would have best been achieved by wolf or cougar and quick and hurried carrying of Trish out of the area. That he lingered, even bothering with snake, let alone with snake bite, says incomplete control. Someone grown old, his powers not what they once were. Someone young, his powers not yet fully realized. Someone old or young with powers in shift because of whatever is happening all around us.”

“Is he our friend or our enemy?” Roger asks.

“We really should get to the hospital,” Mary interrupts. “The police and Trish will be wondering what’s holding us up.”

“Is this shape-shifter our friend or our enemy, Melissa?” Roger persists, determined to have an answer before going anywhere.

“I feel the presence of many friends, many enemies,” Melissa says, “but I can’t, at least at the moment, identify any of them.”

“We have to go,” Mary insists and heads for the door.

It’s only when they’re all in the car, pulling out of the driveway, when Melissa adds, “I can tell you that there are many more — friends and enemies, beasts and beasties — still determined to get here.”


Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE

Chapter 10: MORE CREATURES THAN A ZOO

“Oh, Mom, please, no!” Melissa’s punctuating groan is low and loud and full of frustration.

Back in their home, her mother has returned with the third candle in the last hour. This one is bright yellow and smells of freshly-squeezed lemon. Mary Remoth is desperate to have Melissa divine some hint as to Trish’s whereabouts. Even the police helicopter that scanned the Dry Wash Gulch camp area with infra-red hasn’t found Trish’s heat source. Which means what? Trish is no longer alive but stone-dead cold?

“Not one of your candles is working,” Melissa insists. She’s tired, even though she doubts she’ll ever sleep again. “We’re wasting our time.”

“Don’t say that!” Mary chides her daughter. “If the candles aren’t working, it’s because it’s the wrong combination of candles and you. Your father and Trish and my candle-powers have been in decline for quite some time. We all know that.”

“But are mine really on the rise, as you keep suggesting? It doesn’t seem so.”

“Did you, or did you not envision, the chimera while candle-reading at Dry Wash Gulch?”

“Chimera? That part cat, snake, and dog creature, you mean? Do you actually think any such thing exists?”

Mary takes Melissa and the candle to the table. She lights the candle wick and pulls out a chair into which she gently insists her younger daughter sit.

“You tell me,” she says. “In that, there are people who still don’t believe vampires exist, or werewolves exist, or witches, or warlocks, or candle-readers exist. You and I, though, know that they all do, don’t we? So, just because we’ve never seen a chimera in its own tangible flesh and blood, only the phantom you envisioned at Dry Wash Gulch, doesn’t mean that one or more isn’t out there — somewhere now — with your sister. You need merely ask the candle and wait for an answer.”

Melissa leans forward and blows out the candle flame. Inadvertently (or, is it on purpose?) she inhales the resulting twisting thread of smoke.

“No need to ask,” she says and turns to her mother. “Know that chimeras do exist. Know that we shall one day soon, to our peril, have to deal with one. Know that this time, though, it isn’t a chimera but a shape-shifter. And a shape-shifter who doesn’t any more have answers than we do but is merely seeking them as frantically as we are.

”The telephone rings.

Mary and Roger, though, are so taken back by what their daughter has just told them that they seem unable to register that it’s the phone that beckons them.

The phone rings again.

“A shape-shifter,” Roger finally echoes and nods the possible likelihood of that. “Why didn’t you or I think of that, Mary?”

The phone rings again.

“We didn’t think of it, my dear, because we’re more and more quickly being excluded from a game we’re too old to play.” The phone rings again. “Answer it,” Melissa says. “The authorities are anxious to tell us they’ve found Trish; though they can’t know it’s only because the shape-shifter has purposely dropped her there.”



Copyright 2009 W. MALTESE