Lending Light (Gives Light Series Book 5) by Rose Christo Read Free Book Online

something a lot of people can't do, and it's going to help them.  Imaginary shadows dogged me, but I let them.  I summoned the White Buffalo Calf Woman, a legendary prophetess with snowy hair.  She walked alongside me in fringed buckskin, frost crystals forming under her delicate feet.  They say White Buffalo Calf Woman was the one who gave us the vision quest and the peace pipe, the Sun Dance and the Round Dance.  Without her our souls were hardly our own.  It wasn't my fault if her face looked like my mom's, same sloping chin, same snub nose.
    It was two in the afternoon by the time we'd all finished boning, skinning, and distributing the elk meat across the reservation.  Uncle Gabe made me go home and bathe again, which annoyed me; I'd already bathed two days ago.  After I washed myself I put my old clothes back on.  The shirt sleeves were bothering me; I tore them off.  I went outside the house and sat under the southern oak.  I'd run out of library books to read, so I perched Uncle Gabriel's copy of To Kill a Mockingbird on my knees.  Three pages in I realized I hated it.  It didn't even have magic or mermaids.
    You know what I like about The Little Mermaid ?  I mean the real one, not the Disney one, although I'd never seen the Disney movie; I'd never seen any movie.  I liked the Little Mermaid because she was so compassionate it hurt.  She was mute, and she couldn't talk to the guy she loved, or her own sisters, but she didn't need to speak for people to see the inherent goodness in her heart.  When the prince asked her to dance for him, she did it, even though it made her feet bleed.  When he fell in love with someone, and it wasn't her, she was happy; because he was happy.  The Little Mermaid scared me.  Nobody should be so selfless that they can't feel their own pain.  It's self-sabotaging.  It's unhealthy.  Selfless people need somebody to take care of them.  They're too busy taking care of everybody else.
    I was still thinking about that at dinner that night.  The whole tribe gathered around the communal firepit north of the hospital and pitched the biggest bonfire you've ever seen.  That's always how dinner goes in Nettlebush.  Little kids sat on the picnic tables, or on the logs on the ground, and families like the Little Hawks and the In Winters handed out covered dishes of grilled chicken, grilled corn, and this really slimy coleslaw, which I secretly didn't mind all that much.  My mind's shadows had followed me, cloaking my neighbors, cloaking the sky until everything looked like the same pulsating black soup.  Someone rolled a drum onto the communal grounds--probably Mr. Wind Comes Home--and I only knew it by the hollow sound it made when it settled upright.  Morgan Stout played the Plains flute, keening and belly-deep, and I couldn't see his face, shadows covering his mouth and eyes.  I stood with my hand against the trunk of an oak tree.  Darkness swirled on the ground in an empty vortex, reaching for my legs.  I stepped back, and it wasn't good enough; I could feel the sucking at my ankles, could feel the air going hard and cold in my chest, freezing into blocks of ice.
    That was when I saw him.
    At first I thought I was looking at a ghost.  It wouldn't have been the first time.  Except I was the only person who could see my ghosts, but this ghost was sitting on the Looks Over porch with Annie Little Hawk, a live oil lamp between them, their hands flying a mile a minute in some kind of weird sign language.  The lamp's liquid yellow glow spread over the not-ghost's face, chasing away my fabricated shadows.  He was definitely low blood quantum, his skin pale and milky and his hair a shock of blond, fine-spun curls flopping around his forehead, his ears.  You could see the Native in him, though, or I could; his eyes were small brown slants, foxlike, and his cheekbones stuck out like a sore thumb.  The hell was he wearing a jacket for?  It wasn't even that cold out.  He