Shaman's Blood Read Online Free

thinking about it now, how Suzanne had kept Alice at arm’s length for so long and then performed a one-eighty once she became a grandmother—wanting to know every little thing that might have the slightest impact on Margaret’s welfare. Alice smiled against the pillow. Over the past week Suzanne had gotten an earful as she lay trapped on her deathbed, listening without reprieve to Alice’s memoir of love and pain and loss.
    “Did you care the least little bit about me? What did you hate seeing when you looked at me?” Alice had demanded of the comatose figure. “Hey, are you listening?”
    As usual, Suzanne refused to be interrogated, and Alice was left to fill in the gaps with her own imagination. In life, and now in death, it was the only relationship mother and daughter had ever known.
     
     
     

 
     
     
    Chapter 2
     
     
     
    July 1953
     
    “Hey boy, you alive?”
    Ned cracked an eyelid. Daylight lanced his skull, and he clamped the lid shut. He tried to speak, but there was no feeling in his tongue. He willed it to form words.
    “Unnggh.”
    “Shit, he is alive! Gimmie a hand here. We’ll lay him in the truck.”
    “Dead weight,” another voice grunted.
    “Just a skinny kid. Here, hoist up his legs ... holy fuck, lookit that.”
    “Snakebite. See them double fang marks?”
    “Cottonmouth?”
    “Nawsuh, rattlesnake. This fella’s lucky to be alive.”
    “Wouldn’t wanna be alive in that shape.”
    Ned felt his body lift off the ground. The motion was nauseating, but then he felt a sublime sensation of floating. He sprouted wings and soared high above the pine scrub and palmettos. Far below, he saw a battered gray pickup truck with two dark-skinned men wrestling something into the truck bed. Then his wings evaporated, and he was plummeting toward the tiny figures, landing hard with a loud metallic clunk.
    “Hey, watch his head there.”
    Merciful darkness descended.
     
    *   *   *
     
    When the light returned, it was muted. Ned opened his eyes and blinked a few times. He was in somebody’s bedroom. Sun-faded lace curtains shielded the single window, and late afternoon light heated a patch on the bare plank floor beside the bed. Against the wall directly opposite the bed, a chest of drawers in dark wood dominated the room, its top covered by nearly a dozen framed photos. A few were in color, most were black and white, and some seemed quite old. He sniffed. The room had a clean, scrubbed smell.
    He tried to sit up and wished he hadn’t. Pain stabbed through his head and his left leg, and he fell back, cursing. His envenomed foot was propped up on a stack of pillows, looking evil and misshapen. It was sticking out of the leg of a pair of faded pajamas, something he’d never worn in his life. Whose? he wondered.
    Lifting his hands to rub his eyes, Ned realized with a shock that something else was not right—the tiny scars dotting both forearms were gone, replaced by a pattern of faint overlapping crescents. Ned stared in disbelief. What the fuck? He ran his hands over the skin and its surface was smooth, with no ridges at all. He wet his finger and vigorously massaged a patch of the design, but it wouldn’t rub off. On top of that, the skin of his hands and arms, and probably the rest of him if he could have looked, had turned olive complexioned instead of pasty white and freckled like his mother. Ned was stunned. What had happened to him?
    “You’ve been through one nasty ordeal, young fella.” A small black man stood in the doorway, dressed in a crisp white shirt and dark trousers. “But Doc Avery says you’ll survive. The worst is over. We put you in my father’s pajamas, hope you don’t mind. They seemed a pretty good fit.” 
    Ned didn’t remember any doctor, and he had for sure never seen this person before. He stared at the man, who could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old for all Ned could tell.
    “Where...?” he croaked. His vocal cords felt like they