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Chapter 1

A storreat-grandlected to ic could kill

Mid-July in northern Georgia was an air conditioner salesman’s wet dream In theory, the creek behind my home should have been balmy In practice, it wasn’t Nevertheless, I dropped my robe and waded in; then I lifted my face to the full Thunder Moon and chanted the words ht me

“I stand beneath theand drink of the rain The thunder is your song and mine”

I wasn’t sure what the chant was for, but it was the only one I remembered completely, so I said those words every tireat-grandood memories I had

According to her, a chant spoken in English orthless Only one spoken in Cherokee would work Unfortunately, she’d died before she could teach e I’d always meant to learn more, but I’d never found the time

She’d left me all her books, her notes—what she called her athered into a grade school binder, so they accumulated dust in the false bottom of my father’s desk

I’d loved her deeply, and I reat black cloud of depression settled over me that was very hard to shake

“Soht “Someday I’ll know all those secrets”

Lightning flashed, closer than it should be The h clouds now skated across its surface Thunder ru the hills that surrounded me

The Blue Ridge Mountains had always been home I could never desert them The mountains didn’t lie, they didn’t cheat or steal, and, most important, they never left The mountains would always be there

They were as reen eyes, and the skin that was so much darker than everyone else’s in town My ancestors had been both Indian and African, with a good portion of Scotch-Irish mixed in

Once upon a ti When tiot bad, as they so often did in Ireland, they’d come to America where they’d first been known as Irish However, when the wave of Irish caer fashionable to be Irish—had it ever been back then? Frorants preferred to be called Scotch-Irish, not Scots-Irish as one would expect, but a purely American term

My toes tingled with cold, so I rose froround I slid low of the moon went out as if snuffed by a heavenly hand The histled through the towering pines, sounding like an angry spirit set free of bondage

I stood at the creek and watched the storm come I liked storms They reflected all the tur However, this storm was different froer, quicker, stranger I should have started running at the first trickle of wind

Lightning flashed so brightly I closedup and the electric sheen spilling out seemed scalded into my brain The scent of ozone drifted by, and the thunder seemed to crash from below rather than from above