The Spirit Walker (BOOK ONE): The Ripple

Chapter Forty: Communing with Spirits

The woman dancing around the fire had blended into the crowd. With Ceallach wearing her skin, however, her every movement is suffused with grace, dripping with power. The possessed woman's hypnotizing eyes settle on me, fixing me in place. I am as paralyzed as a butterfly beneath an entomologist's pins.

"Ceallach," I whisper, hoarsely, once she is standing an arm's length away from me. She inclines her head, her gaze a vortex, but she says nothing.

"Are... are you here to help me?" I rasp, and she tilts her head to the side, like a cat, the arch of her neck infinitely elegant. The firelight dances against the soft flesh there, over the line of her jaw, across her lips. She is magnetic in her silence.

The woman whose skin she wears is not attractive, in the conventional sense, but with Ceallach's spirit within her, she has become arrestingly beautiful. No wonder Calum and Arran continue to fight over her.

I push the thought away.

"Say something, please," I whisper, when it becomes clear that she has no intention to speak. She raises a hand to her neck, and gently presses three of her fingertips against her throat.

All at once, I am both in front of the fire and somewhere else.

There are branches above me, a weight on top of me. My heart pounds and I struggle and there is the silver glint of a knife. The images swim in my mind, but I can see the fire and the Voudon Queen beyond.

The knife comes down, hard, and I scream as it slashes across my throat.

I grab at my neck, choking on a torrent of blood, but still breathing. Copper and ash are on my tongue. I scream and scream as the knife comes down again, sawing to the side, carving my neck wide- brutal flashes of a memory that is not mine.

All at once, the vision and the pain and the blood are gone. There are whispers from the assembled voodoo practitioners, and the crackle of the fire is as loud as my own heartbeat. I am doubled over, panting, shaking, the woman possessed with Ceallach's soul staring through me with Ceallach's eyes.

"He cut your throat," I whisper, my voice ragged, hoarse, as I push myself upright again. Ceallach uses the possessed woman's skin to nod. "You can't speak?" She nods again.

I whisper a low stream of curses under my breath, and look past Ceallach's borrowed skin to the Voudon Queen. Elder Chenoa is silent- her eyes shrewd and calculating, but her facial expression gives none of her thoughts away.

"Then... how are you supposed to help me?" I croak, and Ceallach steps closer in her borrowed skin. She reaches out and takes my hands in hers. The moment we touch, I am bombarded with images- discordant fractures of memory that come too quickly to make sense.

Tea leaves swirling in a chipped porcelain cup. A strange man with a band of black paint across his black eyes, a hand stamped in red across his mouth. A red-painted horse with one blue eye. Two piles of seeds- one sprouting with green shoots. Calum's lips on my forehead. Two white paws, pressing into the muddy earth. A canoe, battered by the rocks. A dark-haired woman muttering ancient words as she grinds something into dust. War drums. A fist full of bloodied scalps. The sharp tang of whiskey. And faces- so many faces. They flash behind my eyelids in dizzying succession until their features merge and morph and lose their shape. Until...

The tanned curve of a cheek, muddied hair on the blonder side of brown.

I reel backwards, but Ceallach's borrowed skin holds me fast.

"Him?  Did he...?"

Master.

Ceallach dips her head.