Jaguar Sun (3 page)

“Okay.” I swallowed hard. “You know how I’ve been having all those dreams lately? Well, they’re still all about that one animal.”

“You mean that jaguar or panther thingy?” Damian asked.

“Yeah, but then the dreams got worse.”

“What do you mean by worse? Like nightmares?” Lyssa asked, popping a fry into her mouth.

I took a sip of diet Coke for strength, stared her straight in the eye, and said, “I mean, I’m seeing the same animal while I’m awake now too. Or at least its shadow.” Man, that took some guts. Unfortunately, those same guts were now threatening to make an appearance on our table.

Words cannot describe the looks on the twins’ faces. I had expected Lyssa to make some kind of crack about how I need to get some sleep, but they just sat there looking at me. It was the longest moment of my life. Well, up until that point at least. Finally, Damian broke the silence.

“Have you spoken to your grandma about this?”

“Yesterday. I drove out there after school.”

“What’d she say?” Lyssa asked.

“Well, she reminded me that the Mayan people believe we all have an animal counterpart, like an animal totem. It’s called a
nagual
. I guess it’s not at all unusual to dream about it.” I took another sip of soda, mostly to give them a minute to process.

“Okay,” Damian said, “so it’s normal to dream about them. What about seeing their shadows when you’re awake?”

Normal
. My brain somehow got stuck on the word. My mouth turned to sawdust. This was the part of the conversation I had been dreading. I peeked around and lowered my voice.

“Well, I guess seeing your
nagual’s
shadow while you’re awake is pretty, uh, uncommon.” I fidgeted with my napkin.

“Okay, so what else did she say?” Lyssa asked.

“She said that maybe I’m going to be...you know.... a shifter.” God, I wanted to hurl.

“Hey, you’re white as a sheet,” Damian said, reaching over the table and rubbing my arm. “It’s gonna be okay.”

And Lyssa said, “Look, Maya, you know I love your grandma and all, but there’s no way she could know that for sure. I mean, you don’t have the mark, right?”

The mark! That’s right! I completely forgot about that. Every shifter had the mark of their
nagual
on the back of their neck!

“No, no, there’s nothing on the back of my neck,” I said.
Thank God.

She smiled. “See? And all shifters have a mark. Everybody knows that.”

“Listen, I don’t think it’s all that surprising that you would have a strong connection to nature,” Damian said. “Considering your heritage.”

I looked across the table at my friends and felt so thankful for them. I realized that neither one of them was freaking out about the possibility that I might become a shifter. They weren’t judging me at all.

“Thanks, you guys,” I said, giving them both a huge grin.

A few minutes later, I watched as the twins drove off in the little two-door Civic they shared. Their dad owned a small dealership. My dad had bought my Jeep from him. Driving home, I felt the best I had in days. The twins were absolutely right about the mark. I guess in my panic I had completely forgotten about it. But it was a surefire guarantee that I wasn’t a shifter. At least not yet. I had a feeling I was going to sleep better tonight than I had in ages.

When I arrived home I found a note from Dad saying that he would be working late again and I should study. He was the first in his family to go to college and he was determined that I would go, too. And I did intend to study, well...something. He worked hard to support us, but I also knew it was easier for him to work a lot and stay busy. That kept him from obsessing about things he’d rather not think about, like his past.
Our
past. Specifically, my loser-mom. When I was younger, she used to send me a card on my birthday with five bucks in it. Like my friends’ grandparents usually did. Except even they got more cash than that! Eventually, the cards just stopped coming. By then I barely noticed.

I wasn’t hungry after Scoops, so I decided to head straight upstairs and get a headstart on my homework. I can’t say I’m the type to dive into homework on a Friday night, but academics had been taking a back seat lately as lack of sleep continued to kill off more brain cells. I’d always been reasonably smart, but math was something that always seemed to kick my butt. I was lucky. Damian could often spare some time out of his tight honors-only schedule to tutor me. That’s if Lyssa didn’t need his help. And, let’s face it. Damian was her brother, so she got dibs.

I sat staring at my notes, trying to make heads or tails of what I’d written in class. But my sleepless nights were taking their toll. It wasn’t long before I was struggling to keep my eyes open.

...
the night air was cooling from the day’s warmth and I focused my attention on it briefly. I felt no need to feed after having taken such a large kill this morning. The moon hung low above me, and I was suddenly taken by a wild desire to give chase, as if all of the strength in my body could bring me closer to her. On and on I ran, feeling my weight as it fell heavily into the desert sand. I headed north toward Bear Canyon. I eased myself down rocks and along jagged cliffs. The cool, refreshing waters at the bottom were in my sight, and with a feeling of complete and utter freedom I launched myself from the cliffs and, for just a fleeting moment, it seemed as though I would finally touch the moon. I broke through the water’s surface, shattering her reflection. I swam until exhaustion set in and finally pulled myself onto the shore.

I tossed and turned. My sheets were sticking to me and my hair was soaked against my pillow. Had I showered before bed? I hated going to bed with wet hair. Oh, man, I was sore all over. Again. Why did this keep happening? Why was there always sleep but no rest? I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep functioning like this. I pushed myself up on my elbows and then eased myself into a sitting position. It was then that I noticed the sand on the rug beside my bed. It didn’t register at first; either because it didn’t belong there or because I wasn’t awake yet, possibly both. I looked toward the door of my room and noticed that there was an entire trail of sand leading to the bed. I took hold of the edge of my blankets and threw them off. I gaped in horror at the dirt and mud covering my legs. I leaned over the side of my bed and dry heaved until I thought the pressure would pop my eyes out of their sockets.

Suddenly, all I could think about was getting into my bathroom and seeing myself in the mirror. The thought of it made me want to be sick again, but I just had to see (kinda like an accident on the highway, you just gotta look). I stood up and walked across my sandy rug and into the bathroom, where I took a round make-up mirror out of the drawer. I pulled up my long hair, and picked up the mirror with my other hand. Slowly I turned around to peer at the back of my neck. I gasped. I had expected to see a mark of
Balam
or, ideally, nothing at all. But there on the back of my neck was the mark of a
tree.
It was the most beautiful tree I had ever seen. Its leaves began at the edge of my hairline. They were lush and pushed toward one side, as though blowing in a warm, gentle breeze. The trunk was long and graceful as it moved along the length of my neck. But it was the roots that I couldn’t stop staring at. They were long and expansive, twisting below the base of my neck and running along my back all the way to the tops of my shoulder blades. So, it had happened. It had really happened. I was a shifter.
Crap
.

CHAPTER THREE

“What the eff—” Lyssa said, gaping at my mark for, like, the fiftieth time. “That is just insane.”

“Oh. My. God,” Damian said from the back seat. “Lyssa, I swear if you don’t put her hair down—”

“Okay, you two, I’m trying to drive here, and we’ve still got another twenty minutes before we get to Grandma’s,” I said. Thank God it was Saturday. I’d been able to sneak out of the house before Dad got up and go see the twins. I had (barely) sat through their intramural soccer game. I always enjoyed watching the twins play on their varsity teams at school, but watching them play together on their intramural team was a whole different experience. When they played together, they were so in sync with one another it was like each one knew what the other would do before it even happened. It was incredible. It had been that way since they were kids. Sadly, today I was so damn stressed I was hardly able to focus on the game.

“Don’t listen to her,” Damian said. “It’s incredible.”

“Thanks. Let’s just hope my grandma can tell us something about it,” I answered nervously. Like, I didn’t already feel like a big enough freak? (I mean, the marks were beautiful and all, but a tree? Huh?)

As always, the moment I walked into Grandma’s house and smelled the sweet scent of
copal
, I felt myself relax.

“
Mis mellizos!
” Grandma greeted the twins affectionately. “Oh, Maya, honey,” she said, reaching out and pulling me into a long hug. “Come on, let’s all go in and sit down and you can tell me everything that’s happened.”

After I told her about my dreams and showed her my mark, she smiled warmly. I needed to hear her reassuring words.

“Well, it most certainly seems that you have phased,
ts’unu’un
. I’m afraid I can’t say why your mark is not of
Balam
, but I can tell you what it is. It is a
ceiba
tree. Our tribes consider it to be the Tree of Life. The branches represent the heavens above us, the trunk is our world, and the roots symbolize the Underworld.”

I shivered when she said “Underworld.” I couldn’t help it. It just sounded so, well,
evil
.

Damian noticed. “I don’t think she means Underworld in the malevolent sense,” he said. (What the hell?
Ha
!)

“Damian, in English, please,” Lyssa said, losing patience.

Grandma answered for him. “I think what Damian means is that the Mayan people regard each part of the tree as part of a whole,” she said. “The roots support the trunk, and the trunk supports the branches which hold up the sky. No one part is more important than any other. If you lost any one of them, the whole universe would collapse.”

“Huh,” I said. I guess that made sense. “But why that instead of
Balam
?”

“I honestly don’t know,
ts’unu’un
, but I’m sure that will be revealed in time. One thing we do know is that the
ceiba
tree is very important. It is at the heart of the Mayan people. We even plant one in the center of our villages. I think that having that mark means that you too will be very important.”

“Me? But, Grandma, I don’t even know how to deal with being a shifter! I mean, it’s just a lot to take in. You know, they’re not all that accepted.”

“I think your friends can help you quite a lot with that part.” She smiled at Damian and Lyssa who were both grinning like Cheshire Cats.

“Don’t worry, honey, we’ll figure it out,” Damian said.

“Yeah, we love you no matter what. You’re our girl,” Lyssa said.

“You know,” Grandma said after a minute, “I know a woman who is both Mayan and a shifter. She’s older than me, and I think it might be helpful to have someone who knows what you are going through. She doesn’t live far from you. I’ll give her a call. In the meantime, I think you will find that if you commune with your
nagual
and honor it, you will sleep a lot better. I have some extra
copal
and the candles you’ll need. Let me go and get them.” She stood up and went into her kitchen.

We sat quietly and waited for her to come back. I kept looking at the twins, wondering why they hadn’t run out of there screaming in terror. I mean, if I was horrified by all this, how could they not be? But then I reminded myself of what they’d both just said, and I felt like kicking myself in the butt for selling them so short. Jeez, I really needed to do something about my crappy self-image. Just then, Grandma interrupted my thoughts.

“Here, honey.” She handed me a small box of
copal
resin and four different colored candles. “I also have some reading for you to do about the proper way to do a Mayan prayer. And I’m sending you with an incense stove. You know how smoky it can get with charcoal, and I don’t think that’s a very good idea for your bedroom.”

“Your dad would
love
that,” Lyssa snorted.

“Thanks, Grandma. I love you.” I choked up a little as she hugged me tight. I swallowed hard, but couldn’t seem to get rid of the lump in my throat.

“I love you too, sweetheart. I really think this will help. Call me if you need anything.”

I could feel my eyes burn as we walked out to the car. I refused to cry, but it was all I could do not to run back to the house and beg her to let me stay.