Chapter 16

I woke up at 4:20. Or so said the clock in my head.

[Congratulations, Lexi! There are no notices in the Shoshone Powwow that I could discern and none in the regular newspapers either.]

Good. This is going to be a difficult maneuver to pull off, but I could NOT take the chance that one of them would ... I dunno, wander off.

[There never was a chance of that. Alexandra Bright Moon’s father is never determined. Neither is her twin, James Bright Moon. Father also undetermined. They will be born in May. Tauruses. Do you want to know the year?]

No. Why did you tell me this much? Twins? Now I have to think about every September, getting pregnant. GAAK!

[You will decide when it happens. But they must be old enough to participate in the defense of the people when it happens, in the mid-90s. That’s a decade from now, give or take.]

WHAT? Defense of the people? What’s that about?

[It just appeared. It’s in the Shoshone Powwow AND the Navajo Peacepipe. Both are local weeklies. No mention of those events in broader papers until the late 90s, when you become a political figure. Then it’s only a one-line entry in your bio. I don’t really have any more detail. I’m searching further in the future.]

Sometimes you drive me crazy. There’s some work I have to do. Play me the theta recording, please.

I just lay in the bed, sandwiched between my lovers ... Between my soon-to-be husbands.

I closed my eyes and found nothingness before the recording even got started. Eisenstat first. He was just getting into his morning exercise routine. He got on his treadmill, while he was thinking about the day ahead. He had a meeting with his in-house council to review the partnership papers. Margarite Thorne was coming back early from a Fiji vacation to deal with the partnership deaths.

You ain’t gonna make that meeting, sorry old chap. You were the one who started all this. Authorized the bribe to the man at Charlie Schwab’s. Pushed years ago to kill me off. I pinched off both of the coronary arteries feeding his heart. It wasn’t hard. He was due for a multiple bypass judging by the restricted blood flow. But now the blood flow was zero.

He staggered and clutched at his chest. He fell off the back of his treadmill and hit the floor. I couldn’t resist letting him know why he was dying. ‘Good bye, Robert. Did you forget about me? I’m Alexis White Owl, and I’m in your mind. Or am I? It’s not too late to feel bad about trying to kill me. Maybe in your next life, karma will be kinder to you, if you’re kinder to the world. Your heart is giving out, and it’s too late for that.’

It took five minutes, more or less, for things to progress to a level that was fatal. If he didn’t have somebody over him NOW, it was too late. He didn’t have anyone near in the failing moment of his life.

How could I feel positive in my mind about killing someone? But I did. It didn’t bother me at all about snuffing out a man who participated in hiring men to kill and rape me. That only left one partner who was in on the conspiracy. But Ms Thorne would eventually speak to one of the people I could call on at the law firm. I’d find her eventually.

Time to move on to better topics. I decided to mentally visit my guys. Rock was having an erotic dream. I placed a hand on his chest. He was getting a scorching BJ from Bo Derek, of all people. He’d just spent several hours getting his ashes hauled by yours truly, and he was thinking of Bo Derek, cornrows and everything. At least he wasn’t hard. Well, not fully hard. I left him to his Derek-ian pleasures.

Bear, on the other hand, was just drifting along. When a person is sleeping and not experiencing REM sleep, his mind was just ‘drifting’ as I thought of it. There were random snatches of memories. Some were made up: like your third-grade boyfriend and the guy from the Mexican brothel playing Go Fish. Random. That was mine. Bear didn’t have a dream about his grammar school boyfriend, or being in a Mexican brothel, for that matter.

I left Bear alone. Time for something more serious. Dark Wolf was asleep and reliving a day from his youth. He and his horse, Wild Wind, were riding across a mountain plateau. I left him to his dream and searched his body. His heart was strong, if a bit larger than I would have expected. Ooo. He had a tumor in his belly. I slipped into my medical text.

[It’s a pancreatic cancer. Always bad, Lexi.]

I didn’t know what to do with it. There were three arteries and two veins feeding this thing. Could I just mulch it up and get rid of it? What if the cancer cells thus released made homes in lots of other parts of his body? No. Suppose I just cut off the blood supply. Then there would be dead cancer cells. How to cut off the arteries without giving him lots of bleeds in his body? They were fairly small arteries.

I had to do something. This thing would kill him, and fairly soon. I broke through an artery and pinched it off. The platelets should deal with the broken artery, pretty soon, I guessed.

Ut Oh. Trouble. It seemed that breaking through the artery, caused enough pain that Dark Wolf woke up, clutching his belly.

I just went to Crying Wolf’s mind. He was having a peaceful night, and I hated to do this. ‘My father is dying. It’s his belly.’ That was the thought I kept repeating over and over in Crying Wolf’s mind. He woke up pretty soon. He wondered where the vision had come from, decided that it didn’t make any difference. He woke Desert Flower and explained what he dreamed. He got up and started to dress.

She got up and threw on a skirt and blouse, and went to the kitchen. She got two Mountain Dew’s from the fridge and went outside to the car. Wolf was already there, starting the car. She got in, handed the caffeine-loaded can to Wolf, and then dialed for an ambulance.

“Don’t you think we should see if it’s true or not?” asked her husband as he red-lined his SUV.

“In forty years, you have never had a vision like this. We can apologize to the medics if it’s not true,” she replied.

I went back to Dark Wolf. The old man was sitting on the side of his bed, doubled over. It felt to me like he was having his guts ruptured. But that wasn’t happening. There was a little blood in the abdomen. The artery I’d torn asunder was not bleeding. But the tumor WAS. It didn’t want to die.

I hadn’t thought of that. Would the blood from the tumor spread the cancer? Who knew? This wasn’t exactly typical medical treatment. SHIT! I’d caused this. I found the other arteries feeding the tumor. It was about the size of a golf ball. That was a lot of blood going to this cancer. It was greedy!

I pinched off the other arteries, but didn’t rupture them. The bleeding from the tumor slowed and soon stopped. But I kept the arteries shut down. Now what? Would platelets come and block the arterial flow where I’d pinched it off? What if it took hours? Or even days?

I traced the nerve pathways back to the spine. It was only one little nerve that was causing his pain. But I didn’t dare shut down the nerve. I went up to his brain. I was more familiar with the synapses there. I mentally poured ‘calm’ into the section that was firing so wildly.

Crying Wolf burst into the room and the elder Wolf mumbled something about his appendix. I knew that the old man had wanted to say “it hurt as much as when I burst my appendix” but Crying Wolf only heard “(mumble) (mumble) (mumble) appendix.” The EMTs were next. They placed Dark Wolf on a stretcher, but the old man would not unclench from his fetal position. They carried the stretcher out to the living room, where they put it on a wheeled gurney, and began to move him to the ambulance.