SAILORS ON STRANGE SEAS_PART 2 OF 4_TWILIGHT'S CHILDREN

{For all of you out there who weren't quite ready for it to end for Wolf Howl,

here he is at the End of All Things in the year 2012.

Chained to the bed rail by a handcuff, Wolf Howl senses a dark, hungry presence at his hospital window.

He is quoting Thomas Wolfe on death

but stops in the middle of the passage as he spots the Mossad assassin, Shadow, standing in his doorway.

The remainder of her injuries from the Wendigo has been healed by the Turquoise Woman ....}



The door to my hospital room opened silent and quick. A chill filled the darkness within me.

Shadow, the Mossad assassin, stood in the doorway and looked at me with haunted green eyes. In her mid-thirties now, she had been a lost angel at twenty when I had spared her on the Isle of Skye.

Now she was just a fallen angel, no longer able to remember the scent of lost innocence.

She continued the Wolfe quote in a husking British accent,

"To lose the earth you know for greater knowing. To lose the life you have for greater life. To leave the friends you loved for greater loving.

To find a land more kind than home, more large than earth --"

She couldn't go on. Her jade green eyes seemed cold to most. But they were only a bold front to hide the fact that they had lost their way long ago. Maybe mine looked the same.

"I see the hours have been kind to your body but hard to your heart," I said.

Her smile was a raw wound. "It seems we only meet when death has you boxed in."

I glanced at the dark window, then back to her. "More than you know."

Green eyes flashed in sudden anger. "Oh, Wolf Howl, why did you have to bring a dead girl to a hospital? You knew what they would do to you."

"Abby died being true to her word to the Mossad. She deserved a decent burial. And I had to honor a worthy enemy."

She shook her living waterfall of black hair. "There will be no honor in how you will be treated."

"I am Lakota. We are used to that."

I cocked an eyebrow. "Last I checked you were Mossad. You with the Agency now?"

She made a face, gesturing gracefully with long fingers at her simple black business pant suit. "I still am. I have infiltrated the F.B.I. "

"Well, that must make you the most special Special Agent I've ever seen."

Her eyes became hollows. "I am their ... Expeditor."

She had spoken the last word as if it had been dipped in filth.

I looked away from the self-hate in her eyes up to the blank television mounted on the wall, a mute symbol of the wisdom of the White Man. No remote, of course.

Drew August, AKA Wolf Howl, was much too dangerous to be given something he could use as a weapon.

As if I needed a weapon. I was a weapon. GrandMother had seen to that.

And that was why, at first, all the intelligence agencies the world over had courted me. My face grew more sour.

As if I would be the bought dog of any government. I finally convinced each one of them I was not available.

That was when the fun began.

They all had come to the unofficial conclusion that if they could not have me, then no agency could.

The hunt had been on.

The F.B.I. sending their expeditor told me that they were tired of losing agents to me. But those who start the war have no right to complain of its cost.

I jerked lightly on the handcuff chaining me to the hospital bed railing.

Now they thought they had run me to ground. They couldn't imagine it was they, all the peoples of the world in fact, who were in danger.

I smiled like my namesake. What was it that an old friend had once told me ... God punishes us for what we can't imagine.

I looked up at the television. Its one great dark eye looked back down upon me. What was the latest craze in programing these days? Oh, yes, I remembered. Reality T.V.

Reality. I wanted to laugh. Or to cry. Maybe a little of both.

How like the White Man to smear himself in the blood and despair of strangers and call it entertainment.

To view desperate, talentless dreamers make fools of themselves and to laugh as they were fileted by smug judges. And the white doctors said I was insane.

Too much paranormal power had pushed me over the slippery cliff of reason their reports all read. I no longer saw reality as it was.

Maybe.

Or maybe I did see clear, and it was the white man who saw only what he expected ... what he needed to see.

It was in Man's nature to destroy himself, destroy the very world around him.

I kept looking up at the one eye of the television. A change crept into the room like chill, invisible fog. Life seemed to grow slow and terrible as when dream becomes nightmare.

Shadow, the very special Special Agent whispered, "Drew, are you doing this?"

I shook my head. "We are strangers now in the stars, sailors on strange seas."

Her full lips curled, "What the bloody hell are you going on about? They're the same stars."

"Yes, but the space we swim through has changed."

"Space is space."

"The Aztecs thought different. It is October of the last year in their calendar. We have until ...."

"December twenty-first. I know, I read those phony tabloids, too."

The blank cyclop eye of the television blurred. This put a whole new twist to "Reality TV."

No longer shiny and black, its surface grew gray and smoky. Faint tendrils of mist breathed from it as if from Hell.

"Check out time," I whispered.
***

***

ONLY THE LIGHTNING IS TRUE_PART 7 of 7_THE COLOR OF HER THOUGHTS

{The Wendigo has attacked.

Killing the remaining cannibals, it turns to Wolf Howl and the Mossad assassin, Shadow.

She ignores Wolf Howl's wisdom and attacks the Wendigo alone.

In an attempt to heal her, Wolf Howl is attacked by the Wendigo. He needs Shadow's help to defeat it.

But the Mossad assassin refuses in order to follow her orders to assassinate the man she loves ...}


The Wendigo tackled me. We hit hard beside Shadow. The breath was knocked out of me. A cold so utter it was a fire swept through me. I flung out my hand to Shadow.

"T-Take my hand. To-Together we can ...."

Still sprawled on the wet grass, she snatched her hand right up against her chest.

"No! No, Drew. There is no Wendigo. No Grandmother. Only you, and you are killing yourself. With you dead, the world is safer."

The Wendigo started laughing again.

I stopped trying to hold the creature back with my right hand. With no resistance to stop him, he thrust his foul-smelling face into mine. I locked my teeth into his throat.

I flung both hands palm down to the grass, sinking my fingers deep into the soil.

Into the body of Gaia. Of Estanatlehi.

Of GrandMother.

I let go of the creature's fur-matted throat. I only had time for a few words.

"W-Wendigo is l-laughing. Sh-Shadow is blind. Ti-Time for the soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain. Science deceives, GrandMother. Only the lightning is true."

For three heartbeats all was silence but for the tears of Shadow, the chattering of my teeth, and the guttural laughter of the Wendigo.

Then, GrandMother spoke.

As she usually does. In actions.

The White Man struts in his imagined power. Power he badly copies from the designs of GrandMother. Compare his puny atomic bomb to the perpetual nuclear furnace of the sun.

Flames burst from the soil at my back. Legend said the Wendigo's heart was ice. GrandMother's was a living pool of sizzling magma.

Wendigo's heart, along with the rest of his body, was vaporized in an instant.

I felt cool, caressed as if by Autumn's kiss.

Wings of fire lifted me, and I heard Shadow cry out, "The phoenix."

No. Not the phoenix. The Wakin'yan. Wahka for sacred. Kiya for winged. The Thunderbird.

Its cry rumbled across the heavens whose boiling clouds we now flew through. That same cry had awakened me aboard the Greyhound bus.

Wrapped in its fiery breast, I could not see its form. Which was fortunate, for to view clear the Thunderbird was to die.

Having seen all of this, Shadow would yet be blind. She would see this as only evidence that my power had grown as my insanity had worsened. She was only half healed.

But I was under no illusions. When she fully mended, she would begin hunting me again with increased, not lessened, dedication.

In the heart of Wakin'yan, I could sense no up, no down, nor any change of direction just the buffeting from the warm feathers of wind. So I was startled when I felt hard ground thump underneath my hiking boots.

The world seemed filled with the hollow rumbling cry of the Thunderbird. Then, the fire embracing me was gone. I saw movement above me. I looked up.

Yes, I still knew it was death to see Wakin'yan. But I was Wolf Howl, always seeking, always yearning to know the unknowable.

Wakin'yan had ascended to the upper reaches of the heavens, its form almost unrecognizable, its wing span reaching from horizon to horizon.

I knew the legends. To be visited by Wakin'yan was to become Heyoka, the Contrary Man. The Trickster who taught in riddles, who did all things backwards.

The breath left me in a sigh that was almost pain. The Great Mystery knew I did love all backwards.

"As you do life. Your years have ended but not your days."

GrandMother. Her voice had come from behind me. And she had not sounded happy.

I took stock of my surroundings. I was on the shoulder of the feeder road. I turned around slowly. I was facing the broken, smoldering Greyhound.

Things had not gone well in my absence.

GrandMother had moved all the survivors outside, although survivors was too cruel a word to call them now. They were all dead, sprawled awkward on the damp grass. Hissing rattlers bunched in squirming coils on their chests.

Estanatlehi stood tall, defiant with her slender alabaster arm encircling a terrified Abby. The small blonde stood shivering, her eyes round with fear and horror. Those eyes were pleading with me silently.

The grim turquoise eyes which looked down upon her left no doubt that the girl was only a heartbeat from joining the others.

Playing for time, I said low, "My years have ended but not my days?"

Eyes which had looked upon the stark landscapes of the first ice age regarded me in a gaze a galaxy away from anything resembling warmth. "When my power surged through you, your body ceased aging."

She stabbed a look at my right knee. "That would have been healed had you not first sought aid from that whore."

"Good. The pain will help keep me centered. Besides, killing the Wendigo my way would have healed Shadow as well."

Turquoise eyes flashed, and thunder rumbled angry overhead. "She wished you dead ... as did all these."

I nodded. "I knew all you spared were part of the Mossad team."

The thunder got worse, and chill winds started to buffet me. "Then why did you not kill them?"

"Dead they would learn nothing. I wanted to give them a chance to reflect, to perhaps choose another path besides deceit and death."

Estanatlehi snorted. "The donkey always says 'thank you' with a kick. There was another Lakota who thought as you do. His name was Crazy Horse. He was betrayed to his death by his own People."

I gazed down on the mottled face of Larry Cedar Face. "That feels a familiar story."

I looked at Abby, then back at Estanatlehi. "Crazy Horse also formed The Last Child Society."

Estanatlehi said nothing, but the winds picked up strength. "These people offered no danger. Why did you kill them?"

"I grew weary of hearing them plot to kill you should you return."

Abby pulled free from the arms encircling her. "Lady, they didn't say word one."

A turquoise eyebrow arched. "Ungrateful whelp, I understand all the tongues of Man, even those spoken by gesture of hand."

Abby went sick white and turned to me. "Help me, Mr. Drew."

I held out my open arms.

She rushed into them. Her face beamed. Almost as fast as Shadow could have done it, a knife appeared in her small right hand. It stabbed straight for my heart. She grinned wide.

"I told Shadow I'd be the one to kill ...."

The knife became what it had always been. A rattlesnake. Sometime while I was gone, Estanatlehi had replaced the blade with the snake. Now, GrandMother awakened it.

The wet-scaled snake hissed then spun in Abby's hand. The girl shrieked shrill. Two needle fangs sank deep into the girl's throat. Abby gurgled in a husk.

She turned wild eyes to me. "Mr. Dre ...."

Abby reeled to the ground, laying awkward and still. For a sick heartbeat I just stood there, then I kneeled down beside her body.

The snake coiled. I glared at it. It hesitated, then slithered slowly away into the shadows.

I reached out and tenderly stroked her still warm cheek. From the cliff of our birth we keep falling, falling. Abby had hit bottom sooner than most.

It was a world of sorrows because we made it so.

I tried to see some echo of the innocence that had once been hers. I couldn't find it, only a hard hollowness to the eyes I slowly closed. Perhaps that innocence had died with her grandfather.

Perhaps it had been choked bit by bit by her Mossad trainers, her handlers. Had they fed her on lies until her heart had starved to death?

I fought another sigh. She had died from their last lie : that Estanatlehi was a projection of my will. I shook my head sadly.

I never killed the young, while they comprised the majority of GrandMother's victims. To say that she and I held different views of life was an understatement.

GrandMother sounded puzzled. "You knew that she was one of the Mossad team all along?"

I nodded. "The color of her thoughts was always death. Always."

From the heart of the dark woods, Bu, the Owl, cried in the voice of the recent dead.

{END?}
***

HE WHO EATS THE FLESH OF MAN_PART 3 OF 7_THE COLOR OF HER THOUGHTS

{The last Lakota Shaman, Wolf Howl,

has helped a young white girl survive a bus accident that was no accident.

Going back into the smoldering remains of the vehicle,

Wolf Howl discovers the Mossad agent who has been hunting him ....}

Shadow did the impossible and smiled even sadder. "Oh, Drew, don't tell me you've been quoting Yeats to her?"

I walked to her side and kneeled next to her, and her smile seemed a raw wound as she husked, "Come, give a girl a kiss."

We kissed. Her lips parted. Mine met hers.

And it was all I remembered from so long ago. It was a fire, an all consuming passion of fused spirits. It tingled with icy needles.

Only part of the tingle was from the poison on her lips.

I eased back, tweaking her nose. "Lethal lipstick you have on. Pity no venom on earth can hurt me."

Abby's mouth dropped. "What's with you, lady? He loves you for God's sake."

Shadow's face hardened. "Not for God's sake, but for the world's, Drew must die. And only those he cares for can get close enough to kill him."

Abby sputtered, "Ha-Have you seen what he can do, lady?"

"It is not his power for which he must die, but for the insanity driving that power."

Shadow cocked a brow. "Has he talked to you of his GrandMother yet?"

Abby backed up a step. "You're gonna kill him because of his relatives? Jeez, lady, you're the one who's nuts."

I ruffled Abby's blond mop. "The ancient Greeks called her Gaia. The Navaho call her Estanatlehi, The Turquoise Woman. I call her GrandMother."

And with my naming her, she laughed with a crackle of fierce lightning, and Abby glanced up, slowly nodded, and even more slowly stretched out,

"O.K."

"What?," exclaimed Shadow. "You believe him?"

"Hey, lady, with what I've seen, I'm willing to go on a little faith here."

And because she gave me the courtesy of willingness to believe, I explained, "Abby, you've heard about the electro-magnetic field around the earth, haven't you?"

"Yeah, in science class."

"Well, somehow over the eons that field gained self-awareness."

"You're shitting me!"

I smiled. "No, I am not 'shitting' you. But, though GrandMother has never told me this, I believe it took the birth of the species of Man before she could grow into more than a sense of being."

Now, I even had Shadow's attention as she murmured, "Why?"

"Language. GrandMother was aware, but it took her listening, then comprending Man's language before she, too, could put into focus her awareness."

I shrugged. "When that happened, given her unique perspective on all living on and within her body and the vast cosmos that lay beyond it, she far surpassed Man's limited, stunted view of reality."

Abby's lips turned ugly. "I know what's real, alright."

I shook my head. "Our minds only allow to filter through what is understood and believed.

Language can only put into words that which the mind has experienced or reasoned. How can we comprehend that which we have never seen or even guessed?"

I quoted from Walden again, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

Shadow husked, "The universe is indeed wider than our views of it. Your delusion has made you a sweet mystic. If only you possessed no power, I would let you live."

"We Lakota hear that a lot."

"You have no People!," cried Larry from behind us.

Abby made a face. "And I hear that a lot."

I stroked Shadow's face. "I'll free you if you promise to stop trying to kill me until I can show you some false teeth."

She laughed in a velvet splash of sound. "How could a girl resist an offer like that?"

Abby glowered at her. "You must be a red princess."

"Actually, I am more dangerous than that. I am Jewish."

"Me, too."

"I rest my case."

I made a lever of my Orenda and pried the twisted seat from her, and Larry called out, "Hey, you gonna free me, too?"

I turned. "No. Company's coming over for a bite. Thought you'd make a good appetizer."

"Go to Hell!"

"You first."

Shadow studied me for a long moment. "I told them that you were making this too easy. Americans. They never listen. Not even you."

"I listen to the voices in the wind."

"In your head, you mean."

I ignored her and led her and Abby past the moaning passengers yet alive. Sylvia was nowhere to be seen. Some begged me to help. I ignored them as well.

Abby whispered, "Aren't you gonna help them?"

"I am not a priest or a psychiatrist."

"That's supposed to tell me something, right?"

"The color of their thoughts is death."

She paled. "You can read thoughts?"

"I am not a Peeping Tom. I limit myself to observing the colors of thoughts, not their substance."

She looked at me. "What colors are your GrandMother's thoughts?"

"The colors of her thoughts are the Northern Lights."

"Well, whoop-de-doo for her. What about mine?"

I mussed her hair sadly. "They could use some scrubbing."

"Says you."

We passed the returning soldier. I sighed. He had survived Iraq, only to die on a "safe" bus ride. There was a life lesson there if I cared to look deep enough. I didn't.

We had reached the bus driver, impaled on the steering column. Abby made a face as she stared at the slumped body. I hated to expose her to this, but there was no choice.

She said low, "She was always nice to me."

I kneeled down next to the black woman and parted her lips. "That might have ended if she had ever invited you over ..."

I flicked off the false teeth she wore to reveal the filed sharp needles under them. " ... for a bite."

Abby scuttled back so fast she fell on her butt. "Shit!"

Shadow muttered, "But she was on the team."

"Just not yours. She was ... co-opted by those killers up the mountain when they tricked her with their phony detour some months back. Got her to like the taste of human flesh, the thrill of the hunt."

I shook my head. "Today, she wasn't tricked by the detour. She was part of it."

Shadow murmured, "I wondered why she did not call ahead when she took that detour."

I raised an eyebrow. "Your own detour was thirty miles from here. Going to take the rest of your team some time to notice we're not coming and back track."

Abby husked, "We're on our own."

She jerked as a wolf howled much too close for comfort. A two legged wolf. Another far to his right answered him, closer still.

Abby cleared her throat. "Relatives of yours?"

I tapped the filed teeth of the dead bus driver. "Her pack. And they sound hungry."

Shadow's eyes narrowed into slits. "You knew about them."

"Yes."

"You led us to this damn mountain on purpose."

"Yes."

"Why, damn it?"

"You folks want to kill so bad, thought I'd give you targets worth the killing."

"How did you know about these filthy cannibals?"

"GrandMother."

I ignored Shadow's rolling eyes. "She doesn't much care when we eat our own through war or politics. But the real thing releases the spirit of the Wendigo."

"I do not believe in the supernatural."

"And GrandMother wants you and the rest of your civilized brethren to keep on thinking that. The moment you suspect her existence, you will never stop hounding her, trying to exploit her, and ultimately destroying her."

I made a face. "It is what the White Man does best. So she asked me to stop these predators and the unclean spirit of Wendigo that they have given birth to. Stop them before the White Man takes notice of them ... and of her."

Abby frowned. "Wendigo?"

"From the Cree word Witiku, he who eats the flesh of Man."

Larry snorted, "You're nuts. There ain't no such mon ...."

A howl that grated on the marrow of my bones shrilled from far up the mountain. It scaled high, husky yet taunt with hunger.

Undying hunger.

Seconds later it sounded much closer. Three wolf howls peppered uncertainly right afterwards. The hunters were beginning to suspect that they might have become the hunted.

I blew out my cheeks. "The two-leggeds have it all wrong. It is not the cannibal who becomes the Wendigo. Their victims' rage and fear give birth to it."

Shadow sneered, "Superstition."

"No. I stumbled onto one long ago. Mists of crystalized breath snorting in front of its face, black with frostbite, the furred creature was bent over in hunger pains, vomiting ice."

Abby, eyes wide, whispered, "Ice?"

I nodded. "Yes. Ice. Its very heart is ice, which, of course, is its one weakness."

Abby rasped, "But you killed it, right?"

"Yes. But it was a near thing. And I was younger then. Which is why I needed these government killers to act as a diversion."

I remembered the bus driver's words. "But these human cannibals got too greedy and peppered the road with too many tire-busters. Now, Shadow, it's up to just you and me."

She snorted, "What do you mean we, red face?"
***