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He struggled to find the right words.

“Special,” he finally said. “Her mother too.”

Then he said, “Sho’qa’i”.

“Some say, witch. Powerful female energy, … can defeat darkness.”

I didn’t know what that meant.

The one thing I did realize was that there was something about Kaya and where she came from, her background. Everything that had happened to her, had been for a reason. The acts of violence, the accident even, nothing was coincidental. She was on some kind of mission, although she didn’t seem to know it yet.

After about an hour, I knocked on the door and asked if she was all right.

“You can come in,” she said in a quiet voice. I opened the door and found her sitting on the steps outside the bath, dressed in a robe.

“What can I get you to eat?” I asked. “The old man said you must eat.”

She waved her hand, dismissively. “Anything, whatever.”

I went to order room service and then went back to her, leading her to the bedroom and tucking her into an enormous four-poster bed. I wanted to get into bed with her, to put my arms around her but I didn’t want to scare her. It was clear to me that she had not fully returned from her trance world.

“Can you talk about it yet?”

She nodded.

I sat down on the foot end of the bed.

“It wasn’t a vampire,” she said slowly. “That attacked my family? It was… a skin walker.”

“What?”

“It was… sudden… and vicious. Like a wild animal that jumped and ripped us apart. It didn’t want to eat us. It wanted to kill us. I saw this shape transform into a person, who walked away.”

“Someone walked away?”

She nodded. “He had changed into this… thing… to do this. But I had survived. I was not meant to survive.”

“How do you know?”

She appeared to be thinking. “I don’t know but I do somehow.”

I said, “The old man said you were sho’qa’i. Do you know what that means?”

She shook her head. “But I will find out.”

“Your parents don’t have family you know of?”

“They were estranged from their families. I don’t even know where we came from before the time in the wilderness.”

When the food arrived, Kaya tried to eat but she was weak. She took a few bites and fell asleep.

I lay on the bed next to her, thinking about what she’d told me.

When she woke up in the night, screaming, I took her into my arms and comforted her, stroking her hair and telling her everything was going to be all right.

“What do you mean?!” she called out, crying wildly. “Nothing is all right! I am remembering all these crazy things. I don’t even know what to do with all of it!” I kept stroking her hair until she fell asleep again.

When daylight came, I closed the curtains and checked in with Natania. I had a few emails to answer and to look into. Ispoke to some of our teams around the country, checking in on various projects.