Moving to the canyon wall, her breathing heavy and ragged, she reached out, touched the cool stone, then laid her forehead against it.
What could she feel moving in her brain? In her memories? What in God’s name had really happened that night?
“Where did the sweat lodge sit?” Turning to Stygian, she acknowledged the fact that she had forced herself to ask the question.
“Dog and his team have been trying to rebuild it with the materials that were originally used,” he told her as he led her from the headlights brightening the area to the curve of the stone wall as it continued to slice through the land.
It was just out of sight.
As she followed that curve, the lights of Dog’s Dragoon flared on, spilling over the roughly made wooden structure.
There were a lot of pieces missing, she realized. They were all blackened from the fire that had been used to attempt to destroy them, charred, some more rotted than not. She imagined the missing were mostly ash.
“We found the burned wood in the back of a cave farther down the canyon,” Stygian stated as he stood behind her. “The attempt to hide it was obvious.”
“How do you know it was part of a sweat lodge?” Wrapping her arms across her br**sts, she gave herself a chance to acclimate to the building tension invading her.
“The scent of the herbs used were still on the wood, but more so on the stones used for the ritual fire inside. Several of the Breeds in the area work with the chiefs of the Six Tribes and recognized the scent of the herbs immediately when we brought the stones to them.”
The moment her eyes locked on the structure, memories began to slam through her brain.
She remembered walking to the entrance. She hadn’t been alone.
Turning her head slowly, she looked at the bend of her shoulder where a hand had laid. Broad, strong, yet the flesh had been aged. It hadn’t been a young man who had walked with her that night.
How could she have walked to the lodge if she had been thrown from that vehicle? And she knew Liza had been thrown from it. Her father had explained the wreck to her many times over the years. How the chiefs of the Six had been in the canyon that night, meeting in the lodge, so she knew it had been there. How they had run to the site and attempted to give medical aid until the EMTs could arrive.
Not once had it been mentioned that they had been taken, or had been conscious enough to walk, into the sweat lodge.
“The chiefs of the Six were here that night in a sweat lodge,” she said, trying to find an explanation for the contradictions. “They were meeting as they sometimes do to discuss Navajo Nation matters.”
“The herbs used in such instances are different, according to the Breeds we talked to,” he told her softly. “The herbs used in that fire that night were ones that the Breeds had never known the chiefs to mix in a sweat lodge. One of them was a ritualistic herb, used only when their strongest medicine is required.”
She nodded and forced herself to take a step closer to the entrance.
“It’s safe?”
“Would I allow you to enter it without first warning you if it wasn’t safe?” he asked.
She wanted to smile but couldn’t find the lightness of spirit to allow her lips to make the move to do so.
“Do you know, I remember getting in the car with Claire, and I remember driving out here. I remember being so determined to be a rebel. To do all the things our friends were doing so we wouldn’t be considered weak.”
“You could never have been weak.” The confidence that rang in his voice wrapped around her and gave her strength.
“Before the wreck, Claire and I were in our first months of becoming a pain in the ass for our parents. After we awoke in the hospital, it was as though our entire personalities had changed. Even our friends remarked that we were so radically different that it was as though they didn’t even know us.”
She and Claire had also been concerned because it was as though they didn’t really know those who had been their closest friends.
“And it could be explained away the same as the reason for the plastic surgeries and the differences in your features,” he pointed out.
“Because of the wreck.” Inhaling deeply she stepped forward, lowered her head and moved inside the remnants of the sweat lodge.
Reality was like a mirrored mirage that began to shimmer around her. The past and the present were slamming together, attempting to merge and to separate as hazy images flashed before her and then escaped just as quickly.
She and Claire were laid out on the ground, bloodied, broken. There was a sense of urgency in the men who filled the small lodge and stroked the fire hotter, brighter, as the sizzle of water and the scent of herbs filled her senses.
But she wasn’t lying out on the floor. She was watching—herself?
The murmur of voices whispered past her ear, and shadowed images moved about the lodge. Breathing roughly, she felt her senses being bombarded by memories that weren’t memories, but rather misty threads of information that made such little sense. Clenching her fists, she fought to keep her mind open, to hold her fear back.
There was something there, information she needed. Liza could feel it drifting through her mind, just out of reach.
“What the hell happened? Ah God, Liza!” She swung around, expecting to see her father.
His voice was so angry, so agonized and filled with horror.
But he wasn’t there.
Stygian stood watching her silently, his gaze intent, his expression somber.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered, turning back, the wispy images of a past that made no sense rushing over her again.
The two girls, she and Claire, were laid out on one side of the fire. On the other side—she could feel herself trembling as the memory rushed over her—were two other girls.
Claire turned to look at her—the Claire that wasn’t broken and bloody—“I’ll never see him again,” she whispered as a tear fell down her cheek. Linking her fingers with her, Liza tried to give her friend comfort where only confusion and fear existed. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” Liza whispered. “Perhaps it’s the only thing that will keep us alive.”
The memories, hazy and fragile as they were, drifted away. But she wasn’t left with nothing to fill the place of where the memory had been. It remained there, a part of her now, pulled from the deepest reaches of her subconscious and now a part of her conscious memories.