Stormfeather Ch. 03

Ximena had lost some of her good humor as an old recollection came to her, "I know what he is as well. And they are here. My people have legends of this but, no weapons, some magic, and just crazy killing."

"We have the legends too, Ximena," Maeve said, "They're something not spoken of late at night where I come from in Ireland. Ours carry no weapons or magic either. They show up in rumors now and then, and most times it's all malarkey -- nonsense. But sometimes one hears of them, and they're very hard to kill as the legends go. They have some power in their eyes, it's said, and it's best not to ever look into them." She smiled, "Then again, if you find that you're close enough to look into their eyes, it doesn't matter whether you look or not -- you're a dead little leprechaun."

They looked back at the scene that Amy had drawn. In it, there was a frightened colt lying down near the background of fir trees. Standing in front with his back to the colt as if defending it stood a being who looked so intelligent, so righteously powerful that it would take a stout heart indeed to face something like that. He stood in a breechcloth, and the beaded thongs were the same as the first picture. Even the braids from the first picture were there in this one -- thin braids here and there in his mane. His legs ended in large clawed feet like a huge dog, and though the eyes were the same if one compared the pictures, -- in this one, he had long ears, a lupine face, no less noble than he'd worn as a man, but it was not the same structure at all.

"Nahual," Ximena whispered and then crossed herself.

Maeve was a lot more definite when she said it, "Werewolf."

"What?" Amy asked.

"What you've drawn there, what you've dreamt of, Amy that's a werewolf. The tales that I've heard, they're not really dressed at all, and they're crazy barking mad and really strong. They just kill everything they see until they're killed themselves. And as I've said, they're very, very hard to kill. It's said that they change their shape only during the full moon. You might be talking to your neighbor about them in the daytime, and find that night that your neighbor is the very beast itself. They have no fear of the cross or the priest, they just kill. And if they don't rip you completely apart, if they just bite you and you survive it, then you become the next one. I certainly hope that this one in your dreams is not real, and that he doesn't actually live."

Ximena nodded and crossed herself again, "With my people and those around where we are from, a nahual is a person -- a powerful sorcerer or witch who can become an animal. They are either good or evil according to their nature as a person. If they are good, the people may respect them out of fear, and even hire them to cure sickness or remove curses or ghosts. If they are evil, the people may try to kill them, forgetting how powerful they are. Sometimes the wrong person is killed by mistake and superstition, but if there is a real nahual nearby, they soon seek revenge for just the attempt and kill many soon after."

Amy shrugged, "I don't know anything for sure. But it certainly feels to me that he is alive somewhere and that he has a young horse with him. From what you say, he'd kill the horse, and he wouldn't use weapons or magic, but this one does. I also know somehow that he's not bad or evil, he's just himself and he's not crazy at all. He can change when he needs or wants to and the moon plays no part in it. I can't tell you how I know it, but he doesn't want to hurt anything. Anyway," she said by way of ending the discussion, "that's what I dreamt about."

Ximena went back to the kitchen to get a start on dinner, and the two women talked about things that Amy had to make some decisions about in the coming months. The subject of her dreams didn't come up again.

Later, when the house was quiet deep in the night, Amy lay wide awake in her bed. She'd been thinking of him for hours. She rejected what she'd been told. She just knew that he wasn't anything at all like what they'd said. To her, he was some kind of solitary, sane, and intelligent warrior of some sort. She had no idea why he traveled or what he might be seeking if that was what drove him. She was a little glad to have shared the dreams with them. At least she had some vague notion now of what he was when he wasn't a man. But she was also glad that she hadn't told it all. The rest, she'd keep to herself and hoped to have more dreams of him.

What she'd told had only been bits and pieces of his life and times that she'd seemed to have looked into as she'd slept. She hadn't said a thing about the other dreams -- especially the other ones from the second night at the farm, the ones that she woke from in the stillest part of the night covered in sweat and wildly aroused.

Amy smiled to herself remembering how he'd come to her and loved her in those unspoken dreams, at times so gently that she'd wept happy tears. The thoughts excited her almost as much as the other times when he'd taken what he'd wanted from her as something far wilder and she'd seen herself bucking against him until he raised up on his knees and impaled her while holding her up easily as she hung quivering against him. Her thoughts of him kept her fingers busy under the sheets until she finally reached for her hairbrush.

In those dreams, she wasn't Amy Monaghan the Santa Fe schoolteacher who sometimes loved to ride horses and could hunt and shoot as well as any man. In those dreams she was something wilder as well, something that needed him as much as he needed her.

In those dreams, she was his woman.