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It didn’t take long for Stygian to arrange the outing to the area where Liza and Claire had taken Ray Martinez’s sports car over a canyon cliff.
After twelve years, evidence of the crash should have been completely wiped away; instead, there were still several signs of the wreck as well as the hastily erected sweat lodge that
had been placed a short distance from where the vehicle had slammed into the opposite canyon wall.
As Liza stepped from the Desert Dragoon and surveyed the damage to the rock wall, she didn’t attempt to fight any memories or sensations that swept through her.
One of the reasons why she was beginning to suspect she was Honor Roberts was the distant fuzziness of the memories of her life before the crash as well as the memories that seemed determined to torment her since Stygian had come into her life.
She remembered parts of her childhood well, especially those things her parents often reminded her of. Picnics at the lake, birthday celebrations, certain amusing or even embarrassing moments in her life. And though the memories were there, they had that hazy, uncertain quality as well. A lack of detail, or even periods of time when she couldn’t recall certain memories at all.
Now, standing to the side of the Dragoon’s multiple lights directed on the stone wall, it wasn’t being in the wreck that flashed through her mind.
It was seeing the wreck.
Staring at the unnatural crack in the stone from the force of the vehicle slamming into it, she felt a flash of light tear through her memories, the ground rocking with the explosion as flames overcame the vehicle, and remembered looking down to see the two bodies that had been thrown clear.
Her father had told her that that memory was the result of having “died” more than once that night.
Three times.
She had died three times. The last time had been in the ambulance as she was being transported to the hospital.
Moving to the canyon wall, her breathing heavy and ragged, she reached out, touched the cool stone, then laid her forehead against it.
What could she feel moving in her brain? In her memories? What in God’s name had really happened that night?
“Where did the sweat lodge sit?” Turning to Stygian, she acknowledged the fact that she had forced herself to ask the question.
“Dog and his team have been trying to rebuild it with the materials that were originally used,” he told her as he led her from the headlights brightening the area to the curve of the stone wall as it continued to slice through the land.
It was just out of sight.
As she followed that curve, the lights of Dog’s Dragoon flared on, spilling over the roughly made wooden structure.
There were a lot of pieces missing, she realized. They were all blackened from the fire that had been used to attempt to destroy them, charred, some more rotted than not. She imagined the missing were mostly ash.
“We found the burned wood in the back of a cave farther down the canyon,” Stygian stated as he stood behind her. “The attempt to hide it was obvious.”
“How do you know it was part of a sweat lodge?” Wrapping her arms across her breasts, she gave herself a chance to acclimate to the building tension invading her.
“The scent of the herbs used were still on the wood, but more so on the stones used for the ritual fire inside. Several of the Breeds in the area work with the chiefs of the Six Tribes and recognized the scent of the herbs immediately when we brought the stones to them.”
The moment her eyes locked on the structure, memories began to slam through her brain.
She remembered walking to the entrance. She hadn’t been alone.
Turning her head slowly, she looked at the bend of her shoulder where a hand had laid. Broad, strong, yet the flesh had been aged. It hadn’t been a young man who had walked with her that night.
How could she have walked to the lodge if she had been thrown from that vehicle? And she knew Liza had been thrown from it. Her father had explained the wreck to her many times over the years. How the chiefs of the Six had been in the canyon that night, meeting in the lodge, so she knew it had been there. How they had run to the site and attempted to give medical aid until the EMTs could arrive.
Not once had it been mentioned that they had been taken, or had been conscious enough to walk, into the sweat lodge.
“The chiefs of the Six were here that night in a sweat lodge,” she said, trying to find an explanation for the contradictions. “They were meeting as they sometimes do to discuss Navajo Nation matters.”
“The herbs used in such instances are different, according to the Breeds we talked to,” he told her softly. “The herbs used in that fire that night were ones that the Breeds had never known the chiefs to mix in a sweat lodge. One of them was a ritualistic herb, used only when their strongest medicine is required.”
She nodded and forced herself to take a step closer to the entrance.
