Ride For Me, Die For Me.

Chapter 26: Ash on the Tongue

Justin’s P.O.V.

The dirt on my lips tasted like blood and roots. I woke slow—like my body didn’t know if it was still in that vision or back in the real. My chest was sore like something had been carved outta it and stitched back together with fire.

I pushed myself up, palms pressing into warm soil. My fingers brushed against something soft—black, slick, and still. A crow feather.

Papa Toussaint was already waiting.

“You came back,” he said simply.

“Felt like I never left,” I muttered, voice cracked raw. My throat was dry, but my bones buzzed. That kind of deep vibration that don’t come from adrenaline—it comes from bein’ cracked open and put back together by somethin’ older than language.

He nodded, walking with that same calm rhythm, like the wind moved around him outta respect. “Your ancestors been waitin’ on you to quit duckin’ your birthright.”

I stood, slow, everything in me stretched thin but solid. Different. My tattoos were faintly glowing—only in certain spots—like they were still charging up from the inside.

“How long was I out?” I asked, rolling my neck.

“Long enough,” Papa Toussaint said. “Long enough for the spirits to show you truth, and short enough to remind you that walkin’ it takes more than one night.”

The Crossroads was already different. What was wild and tangled when we came in now felt still. Like it had breathed me in, judged me, and decided I could stay.

Monica was sitting on the low stone wall near the path, eyes wide and red-rimmed. She didn’t say a word when I walked toward her—just handed me a flask of water and nodded.

“You saw her, didn’t you?” she asked under her breath.

I didn’t even ask how she knew. I just nodded.

“Waiya,” I said, name heavy in my mouth. “She was there. Not like a ghost, not like a dream. Like… like she was inside me. Guidin’ me out the dark.”

Monica smiled, tired but knowing. “She don’t even realize how strong she is.”

“She will,” I said. “She’s about to.”

Papa Toussaint cleared his throat behind us.

“You think the vision was the lesson?” he asked. “Nah. That was the invitation. Now the real trainin’ begins.”

I followed him back toward the bayou trail, muscles tight but heart calm. We walked deeper into the trees—not back toward town, but farther out, where the moss grew long like secrets and the water whispered spells you weren’t supposed to hear unless you’d earned them.

“You and that girl,” he said after a while, “y’all ain’t just connected. You’re mirrored. What she unlocks, you unlock. What you heal, she heals. That’s rare. Dangerous if you don’t do it right. But powerful if you walk it clean.”

“So what do I do?” I asked.

“Stay,” he said. “Study. Sweat. Let this place strip the last of your street habits and sharpen what’s true. When she’s ready to rise, you’ll feel it.”

I looked up at the hanging vines, at the way the sunlight cracked through like it was breakin’ open heaven.

“I already do.”

Papa Toussaint stopped beneath an arch of hanging cypress, his cane tapping against a tree root like a drumbeat call. He pointed ahead, to a clearing where seven stone markers circled a pit of ash and bone.

“This is where you start,” he said. “Before you swing a blade or call a spirit, you gon’ learn silence. Stillness. You gon’ sit in the fire and listen.”

I frowned. “Listen to what?”

He looked at me, his eyes deep as burial dirt. “To yourself. The part of you that been hidin’. The part you ain’t proud of. The part she gon’ need when the time comes.”

A sharp wind blew through the trees, and with it, the scent of burnt rosemary and blood iron. My skin prickled. Somewhere inside, the tether between me and Waiya tugged—subtle but sure. Like a reminder that she was fighting too.

Papa Toussaint walked to the center of the stones and drew a spiral into the dirt with his cane. “Tomorrow, we begin the work—cleansing rites, ancestral communion, spirit drills. Ain’t no half-steppin’. You either all in… or you don’t leave this place the same.”

I looked down at my glowing forearms, the way the ink pulsed with something alive.

“I’m already not the same.”

He nodded once. “Good. Then let’s burn the rest of what you used to be.”

Waiya’s P.O.V.

The sage curled heavy in the air, clinging to my skin like a second breath. Granny’s medicine room was dim, lit only by the fire in the clay hearth and the flicker of a red prayer candle. I sat cross-legged on the buffalo hide, sweat dotting my brow, hands open on my knees, palms facing the earth. My shirt stuck to me—salt and smoke binding me to this sacred heat.

“Breathe, díyá,” Granny said from behind me, her voice the sound of roots cracking the earth. “You don’t need to force it. Let the anger speak.”

The anger didn’t need an invitation. It’d been simmering beneath my ribs for weeks.

“I’m trying,” I muttered, voice tight. “It just won’t… move.”

“You’re trying too hard,” came another voice, softer but sharper.

I didn’t have to turn around to know it was my mother. She’d been hovering every damn day, walking around like she didn’t leave us for years, like she didn’t miss my high school graduation or pretend Granny’s stroke wasn’t her cue to return. She said she came back for me. I didn’t believe her. Not yet.

Granny stayed quiet.

“Why you even here, huh?” I asked, finally opening my eyes and tilting my head back. “You think showing up now makes it all better?”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t answer.

“Exactly.”

The tension snapped between us, electric and raw, but I turned back to the flames before I said something I couldn’t take back. I was supposed to be focusing. Growing. Shifting.

But how could I, when the weight of everything she never said sat like ash on my tongue?

Lily had been holding down my classes like a champ—she had that bossy big sister energy that middle school kids weirdly respected. Nyla stayed by my side, her seer’s spirit always brushing against mine like wind before rain. She helped keep me grounded when the visions got too loud or the scar on my back throbbed with heat and warning.

But none of them could help me with this.

This fire inside me.

This block.

Granny called it hozhoji’—a fracture in the harmony. I was out of alignment. Not just with the spirits, but with myself. And until I faced it, no power in the world would come clean.

“You need to walk with the storm, not fight it,” Granny told me later that night, handing me a small stone carved with a spiral. “He said you’d need this.”

I looked up sharply. “Who?”

She didn’t answer.

That night, I couldn’t sleep.

The moon was cracked in the sky like a broken bone. I walked barefoot outside, through the dirt and herbs and bones strung on cedar poles. I passed the chicken coop, the firepit, and the willow tree where my siblings and I used to tie ribbons for wishes.

I sat there.

And I prayed.

I prayed in Diné.

Shiyázhí, shimá, shicheii… Great Spirit, my mother, my grandfather…

Díí shí éí nił hodooniił. Shí yáhoot’ééł dooleeł, t’áá ajiłii’—this is my burden to bear. I want to be well. I just don’t know how.

The wind stirred.

And then—

The earth under me vibrated like a breath. My eyes fluttered closed.

When I opened them again, I was standing in a canyon of red stone, where the air smelled like rain before it fell. The sky bled twilight. My hands glowed with a faint silver light, and my scar pulsed softly, no longer burning, but echoing like a drumbeat.

He stood ahead of me.

Not a shadow this time.

Not just a feeling.

My father.

His long braid was streaked with gray, his eyes lined with the wear of hard living but warm—so warm. He stood on the other side of a small stream, watching me like he’d been waiting.

“Shiyázhí,” he said, smiling faintly. “You’re stubborn. Like your mama.”

Tears welled up instantly. “Why now? Why not before?”

“Because now you’re listening.”

I stepped closer, water cool around my ankles.

“I don’t know how to let go,” I whispered. “Of the hurt. The fear. I’m trying but… it’s like it owns part of me.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s because you haven’t mourned what you lost. You buried it under duty. Under silence. But grief don’t disappear just because you act strong.”

A crack formed in my chest.

He stepped closer to the edge. “I came to give you something. A name. One you’ll need later.”

My breath caught. “What name?”

He leaned in, and the canyon darkened. The name he spoke was ancient, not English, not Diné, but something older. Something that hummed in my bones. I couldn’t repeat it, but I knew I’d remember it.

I reached out to him. “Please don’t go.”

But already the vision was fading, the canyon crumbling, light slipping through the cracks like sand.

His last words echoed as I fell backward into my body:

“Tell her. Even her anger can be medicine.”

I gasped awake on the floor of the medicine room, heart pounding, fingers clenched around the spiral stone Granny gave me.

Sweat poured down my back.

Outside, the first light of dawn cracked the horizon.

I wasn’t whole yet.

But something had shifted.

The fire inside me didn’t burn so wild now. It smoldered—contained.

I still had so much to learn.

But I wasn’t running anymore.

And when I saw my mother that morning, standing at the sink with her hands in sage water, I didn’t say anything.

I just watched.

Because for the first time… I didn’t want to fight.

I wanted to understand.