Chapter 46
In her bedroom, the door safely closed, Kymbria laid her right hand on her spirit bundle. Nodinens was still so traumatized and weak from her experience with the windigo that she couldn't even keep her eyes open through one cup of coffee. She and Scarlet were now safely ensconced in the bedroom Nodinens was using, Kymbria's bedroom. The room where she and Caleb -
Continuing to hold the spirit bundle tightly, she drew on her memories of what Adam taught her so long ago.
The condition for entering the Land of Souls is peace of heart. The prayer we use for that is the most important one I will ever teach you.
Kymbria banished everything from her mind and recited:
"Mino-dae/aeshowishinaung
Tchi mino-inaudiziwinaungaen
Fill our spirits with good
Upright then may be our lives
Nanaukinumowidauh matchi-dae/aewin
Zhaugootchitumowidauh matchi-dodumowin
Defend our hearts against evil.
Against evil prevail."
Then she took a deep breath and stepped into the doeskin dress and moccasins. Moments later, she zipped up the snowsuit and finished dressing for her journey.
The sliding glass doors opened soundlessly, and she closed them behind her and waded through waist-deep snow around the cabin to the rear of the garage.
Inside the garage, she found a flashlight kept there and shielded the light with her body as she filled one of the two remaining snowmobiles with gas. She pushed it out the back door of the garage. Starting it up there wasn't an option. Nodinens would be outside and catch her in an instant. She would put off the elderly woman's worry as long as possible. She groaned and managed to jockey the machine down the road, with the help of the downhill slant. Hopefully, she was far enough away to go unheard. It fired up with the first turn of the key.
Bless you, Pete, my brother, for your attention to our safety in these hard winters up here.
~~~
A half-hour later, Kymbria halted the snowmobile on the edge of the woods. As she had told Caleb, the journey across land was shorter than on the convoluted roads. Ahead, the trail ran through an open space, a swampy meadow in the summertime. Diamond bright pinprick stars gushed across the black night sky overhead, spilling into and out of the Milky Way, Big Dipper and other constellations. The full moon actually intensified the cold, the bright light so dazzling it outlined the landscape and snow-shrouded trees to the point where they appeared brittle. No snug-in-its-burrow animal had yet ventured out to track the spotless snow with prints.
The clothing kept the cold at bay, at least, the cold from the below-zero temperature. The other cold - the iciness that had descended on her several times over the past few days, the inner sense of fear and barely restrained panic - accompanied her.
It had all come down to this. She could ignore her destiny no longer. Niona had managed to avoid being a part of the legend that had played out for generations, but Kymbria couldn't keep letting things pile up in her life, one conflict on top of another unresolved.
I guess this damned windigo is the straw that threatens to break my back, she mused as she stared through the deceptively beautiful night. It seemed inconceivable that danger could lurk beneath all that splendor. Yet Mother Nature's playground was anything but serene and peaceful. Life and death struggles played out every minute.
Right now, everything from moose to wolves to rabbits huddled drowsy and warm in the pine-thicket beds, dens and underground burrows they had retreated to in order to avoid the blizzard. A blizzard not nearly as horrible as the ones that had started this chain of events. A blizzard that was over for now, but whose brother, according to Nodinens, was looming just on the other side of that full moon. One of a line of blizzards similar to those that had isolated her ancestors.
She had no way of knowing whether or not she herself might be trapped out here, or for how long, when this next storm set in. Earlier, she'd rationalized that major rescue attempts would be expedited should she and Caleb disappear, since they were smart enough to notify Hjak where they were going. Now, she was out here alone. No one would know where to look, should she go missing, unless Nodinens figured it out.
She gritted her teeth as a picture of Risa flashed through her mind. She didn't have any right to risk her life and leave her daughter motherless...for the second time. Did she?
No, but she wasn't going back. She couldn't be the mother Risa needed if she turned coward now. The prayer filled her mind as though Adam stood there with her.
Mino-dae/aeshowishinaung
Tchi mino-inaudiziwinaungaen
Nanaukinumowidauh matchi-dae/aewin
Zhaugootchitumowidauh matchi-dodumowin
"Against evil prevail," she repeated aloud.
Surely Nodinens would suspect where she had gone, but Kymbria doubted anyone would check the bedroom until morning, and initially, this had been a plus for her plan. Now, though, faced with the reality of what she had done, the breadth of the wilderness she was navigating and the fact that perhaps she and the windigo were the only two inhabitants in this vast land....
She should head back and wait until she gathered help. The cave that held the lair was off the beaten path, in an area that hardly anyone ever explored, even in the summer. If the blizzard trapped her out here, the search would focus in an area a mile or so away from where she was headed, where numerous other caves spotted the landscape. Far enough away to make a difference in her being found in time.
But if she went back, it might be days before she could return. Everything pointed to the fact that this final confrontation was between her and her ancestor. Did she have enough faith and confidence in herself to see this through?
Listen when your heart speaks its honesty to you.
"I hear you, Adam. And right now, my heart is telling me that I'm tired of running away. That it's time to take an active part in my destiny."
Other words brushed her mind in a whisper that Kymbria didn't even try to comprehend. They weren't teachings from Adam; they were another attempt by the windigo to gain her attention. She almost expected the beast to appear to her again, as it had twice on the trail, both times fostering the enigma of the tie between them. Once, it had threatened someone she cared about to try to force her to accompany it. When she thwarted that, it appeared in rescue mode to guide her to safety.
She gritted her teeth as she stared into the distance, but the monster didn't show itself. This would never end until she ended it.
She fed the machine gas and slowly crawled out into the open. She supposed the beast was watching her from somewhere. How ineffective she must look in all this vastness: a tiny figure on a toy machine crawling across the last portion of land between her and the hill that contained the cave she sought.
Could the creature be smart enough to lie? To manipulate Kymbira into coming to it so it could add her to its list of prey? Did it, instead, want to kill her? Would her death empower the windigo in some manner that couldn't be foretold, since no windigo had ever interacted with a human before?
Thankfully, her daughter didn't carry her blood, Kymbria mused as she rode on. There would never be a chance that, if she failed, her daughter would have to take up this quest forty years from now.
~~~
Wired on coffee and aspirin for pain, Caleb steered his pickup into the cabin driveway. Now his ears were ringing. No. The satellite was still working up here. He turned off the truck engine before he answered.
"Mona's actually grateful," Daniel said. "She was going to try to call you. Admit what she'd done and try to work things out."
"We need to go ahead with a divorce," Caleb said. He forced himself not to look at the cabin, where Kymbria lay asleep. "She'll never be happy with me again. Assure her that I'll be fair."
"I already talked to her. She wanted to speak to me before she did you. Test the waters, I guess, with me the lesser of two evils."
The word evil resonated in Caleb's mind, but he maintained his concentration on the phone call. "Tell her that I'll get in touch with her soon. And make sure that Skippy knows I haven't deserted him."
"Will do," Daniel assured him. "Take care, friend."
Caleb disconnected and slid out of the pickup into the frigid pre-dawn cold. He waded through the drifts to the door, pausing a minute before he knocked.
The marriage falling apart was as much his fault as hers, but damn her, Mona could have asked for a divorce. What the hell made her take off like that and allow him think she and their son were dead? He knew, though. She'd made no attempt to hide her distaste over his beliefs and his paranormal activities, nor the fact that she didn't want their son involved in things like that. It would be something Mona would do: let him believe that she and Skippy had been killed as the result of his paranormal activities.
He would sort all that out later.
The light illuminated the kitchen before he could knock and a second later, Nodinens opened the door and indicated for him to enter. He hugged her briefly, but when she started to speak, he strode past her toward the bedroom Kymbria had been using when he left. He flung the door open. Brrrrrr. The room was at least twenty degrees colder than the rest of the cabin. The bed clothing was lying smooth, no bump signifying that Kymbria was curled up beneath the sheet and comforter. He walked across the room and tapped lightly on the bathroom door.
"Kymbria? Sorry to disturb you, but since you're awake, can I talk to you for a minute?"
No one answered, and he checked the bottom of the door. No light seeped out. Why would she be in the bathroom with no light on and the door closed?
"Kymbria?" He knocked harder.
A movement caught Caleb's attention and he turned in time to see Scarlet slip into the room. She jumped on the bed, then whined and stared at him for a moment. Steeling himself for a tirade for disturbing her privacy, Caleb opened the bathroom door and found the room empty. He even stepped inside and drew back the shower curtain, although he had no idea why he'd think Kymbria was hiding behind it.
"Maybe she's over in Nodinens' room," he said as he walked back into the bedroom, but already his heart pounded in alarm.
The dog wasn't on the bed, and when Caleb started out the doorway, he felt a gush of frigid wind. Anxiety heightening, he strode over to the curtains along one wall, where the wind seemed to be originating, and pushed one panel aside. Behind the heavy curtain, the glass patio door stood open far enough for the dog to have squeezed out. Indeed, when he stuck his head out, he could see the setter's paw tracks in the snow...inside the heavy boot prints at the bottom of a trench someone had waded in the snow.
"God, no. Jesus, Kymbria, you can't do this alone!"
He raced out of the bedroom into the kitchen. Nodinens caught his arm as he opened the outside door.
"Wait!" she demanded.
Caleb glanced out the window before answering her. Over by the garage, he caught a red flash as the dog struggled through the deep snow. He threw the door open.
"Scarlet!" he called. "Come!"
At first, the setter obeyed him, but she stopped a few feet away and barked at him.
"Get in here!" Caleb ordered, but Scarlet refused.
He glanced at Nodinens. "Kymbria's gone. She slipped out the patio doors in the other bedroom. I think she's gone after the windigo."
"Of course she has," Nodinens agreed. "And you are going after her. But don't go off unprepared. That will help neither of you."
He glared at the tiny woman as though she were the cause of the hollow pit of anxiety in his stomach. "She has no business going out there. Not in the shape she's in! She was falling apart earlier tonight."
"And we have no right to stop her. She has done this of her own free will."
"We need to get the dog inside," he said in a distracted voice. "She'll have our hides if anything happens to Scarlet before she gets back." Assuming she makes it back.
Nodinens stepped through the doorway, pushing Caleb back inside. "Come!" she ordered the dog, one hand pointing behind her at the open door. The setter stared at Nodinens for a second, then slunk towards her and into the cabin. Nodinens shut the door firmly.
"You." She pointed at Caleb. "You check your protections and make sure you have enough on to protect yourself. Where is the protection you wear around your neck?"
Caleb's hand instinctively went to his throat, where he grabbed the zipper clasp and pulled it down. Then he remembered that the chain had bothered him as he drove. He drew it out of his coat pocket and dropped it over his head, securing it inside his shirt. By then, Nodinens was holding out a ski mask.
"There is one snowmobile left in the garage," she said. "For something to do, I went out earlier and checked it over, to see if it ran. The spark plug was bad, so I put in a new one I found on a shelf. But you must fill it with gas again before you go. I will contact Sheriff Hjak as soon as I can, but I need a phone for that. The cabin one is not working again."
Caleb handed her his phone. "It's working. I just got a call on it."
When Nodinens nodded, Caleb stared at the phone. Skippy. He was alive. A windigo hadn't desecrated his life after all. He had no reason for revenge. No reason to discover how to kill this paranormal beast, then return to Colorado to hunt the other one.
I have plenty of reason to go after this windigo. The woman I care about...perhaps love...is in danger.