Pea chittered at me, trying to say something I couldn’t understand.
I tilted my head, my wet hair clinging to me with cold. My body felt numb rather than frozen, which meant I was hypothermic. “Brother Ephraim, who is near death, once controlled the punishment house,” I explained to the furious green critter. “It’s the place where women were sent to be reminded that they were only the helpmeet, not the man, that they were born to do and be and feel and live as their menfolk told them.
“He had my mother one time, for a whole day. She came back changed, crying in the night, flinching at the slightest move. Daddy brought her home, but he never did a single thing against old Brother Ephraim, even when she had a baby the next spring that looked more like Brother Ephraim than like Daddy.” I settled my eyes on the thing that had leaped from Rick’s shoulder. It sat on the ground, feet caught in roots and earth, its small body tense and rigid, prepared to attack Paka the second it got loose, steel claws glinting. “Ephraim hurt my mama. He hurt a lot of women. He came here today to hurt me, to take me back into the church against my will and punish me. I know that because he told me so. The judgment is mine. His life is mine. The choice is mine. Mine. Not yours.”
I leaned forward, against the pull of the muck. My arms began to slide free, slowly. I wanted to be covered when Jackie got here.
“Joshua, now, he’s just an angry, silly little boy who’ll still be a silly little boy twenty years from now, if he lives. While he’ll most likely continue on this road and become the same kind of evil as his friend Jackie, he hasn’t actually accomplished much in the way of evil.” And I wouldn’t sentence him to death despite the blood he had shed on the forest floor, blood that was mine to take. The woods seemed to flow beneath my feet in reaction to my words, making me wonder what it heard, what it felt from me. The big black cat retracted her claws and stepped away, still poised over her prey in threat. With a back paw, she sent Joshua’s shotgun spinning off the rocks into the darkness. It clattered down the stones.
I lifted my chin and raised my voice so it would carry up the pile of rock. “You hear me, Joshua? I’m offering leniency. I’m offering mercy.” Joshua said nothing and I called out, “You hearing me, Josh? ’Cause iffen you don’t answer me, I’ll let that big ol’ cat eat you.” I almost added, the way it ate Brother Ephraim, but I didn’t.
“You’re insane,” he shouted back, gasping. “You need to be locked away, chained in the attic, where crazy women go.”
“That’s not an answer,” Rick said, his voice oddly low and without emotion. I thought it might be his cat talking. “Answer the lady.”
“I hear,” Joshua ground out.
I figured that was the best I was going to get. I dropped my voice again, low enough to exclude Joshua. “The leader of God’s Cloud of Glory Church is nigh,” I said in my strongest childhood dialect. “He’ll wanna kill us all. He will not be a respecter of the law. He finds pleasure in destruction and death and the pain of his victims.” I leaned harder and my left hand came free, slinging clay and pond goo across the small clearing. I swished the hand in the pond water to clean it and held my bib up over my breasts, as I swiveled and leaned away to free my right hand. The moment it was free, I swished it too, and stood, bare feet on the edge of the tiny pool. I slipped my hand into the bib and around the small .32. Joshua was incompetent, too busy feeling up breasts and not busy enough making sure his prey was defenseless. I gripped the gun with my right hand and held the bib with the left, swiveling to see the path where Jackson Jr. would appear.
“Jackie!” I shouted. “Brother Ephraim is gone and Joshua is pinned down, weaponless. You come into this clearing and you’ll not make it out again!”
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!” the words screamed, batting through the trees, a hollow sound, lacking in the power Jackie always found from the pulpit and the microphone that gave him a range God hadn’t.
I smiled, more a twitch of lips than anything else. “That all you got, Jackie?” I mocked. “That old line about witches? I got a gun and two helpers.” I looked at Pea. “Maybe three.”
“You got no help. You got no backup. You are mine; all the women are mine.”
Was that the way things were now in the church compound? All the women belonging to one man? I didn’t believe it. Even the rancid old pedophiles wouldn’t give up all their womenfolk to the preacher. But some families might have married off the older daughters to the preacher, just as Lot, in the Bible, had offered his daughters to the crowd of rapists to keep himself and his men friends safe. That sounded like the thinking of some of the churchmen.
I said, “Wrong again. I got me a special agent of PsyLED here, Jackie.”
Rick called out, “I’m Special Agent Rick LaFleur. I’d like to talk to you about a number of things, one of which is the attack up at the house. Do you know who shot up the house owned by Nell Ingram?”
There was no answer. Through the soles of my feet, I felt Jackie move away, not back toward the house, but up along the ridge, fast, weirdly fast. Running with his tail between his legs at a speed I’d need to think about later. A speed maybe given him by the vampire blood he’d drunk in years past, blood provided when his daddy kidnapped vampires for him to drink from. The forest carried his emotional overload—fury, panic, sexual frustration. Fear brought about by the unexpected presence of law enforcement.
I relaxed my shoulders and said to Rick, “He’s gone.” I told the leopard, “Let the little boy go. No harm, no foul. This time.” I might hate Joshua Purdy, I mighta killed a man here in the heart of the woods once, but then as now, I was a judge, not a murderer, and judges should have some small speck of mercy about them, somewhere.
Paka backed away, leaving Joshua laying on the stones, bleeding and terrified. I could smell urine and knew he’d pissed his pants, not that I blamed him. I looked at Rick. “You sure he isn’t gonna go catty on the full moon?”
“Yes. I’m sure,” he said, his voice tight. “She didn’t use her teeth. There was no exchange of body fluids.” Rick moved cat fast and knelt, one hand fisted in the green fur of the thing with its feet buried in the earth. He put away his gun and petted the creature like a kitten, a swipe from ears along its back and tail. “Pea,” he said, as if the animal could understand him. “Nell says the man won’t die at Paka’s fangs.”
It didn’t sound like any kind of cop talk I’d heard on the films I watched. It sounded like a paranormal conversation rather than the law of the United States, conversation with the metaphoric hand of justice rather than the hand of the written law with Is dotted and Ts crossed, which was good for me. It meant that Rick was unlikely to consider my next acts as a crime. Rick added, shaking the green creature slightly, “He won’t turn on the full moon. And Paka didn’t kill him.”
“My land. My rules,” I said to Pea. “Paka goes free, so you can back off, you little green . . . thing.”
The green thing turned to me, chittered in disgust, and sniffed the air as if perplexed. Animals picked up conversations from body language, but I was pretty sure that this one understood English. It spat, clearly repulsed, and looked up into the trees, chittering some more.
Pea went silent, its nose still working like a rabbit’s, twitching and bunching.
To Rick I said, “Would you take Joshua away, outta my woods? Paka and me, we got us a little talking we need to do.” The black cat looked at me, her eyes a beautiful shade of greenish gold in the early night, her black mottled coat disappearing entirely in the shadows. “We can walk back to the house together. Okay?”
Rick looked from me to his mate and shrugged. “Paka doesn’t like other females. It’s taken her a week to settle in with the trainees.”
“She’ll be fine with me,” I said, hoping I was right, hoping my claiming of her for the land hadn’t done something to her. I had only ever claimed plants, not a breathing animal, let alone a werecat.
Rick released Pea’s green fur and climbed the stones, bent, slung Joshua’s arm over his shoulder, and half carried him back down. None too gently, he helped the man back along the narrow trail to the house, shouldering Joshua’s bent gun without missing a step. “I’ll see him on his way and wait for you at the house,” Rick said. Being part cat, Rick had no trouble negotiating the path in the fast-falling dark; Joshua stumbled a bit and Rick didn’t seem to care, dragging the smaller man until Joshua caught his feet.
When they were out of earshot I reached into the woods and into the ground, feeling for Pea. I had no idea how I had buried its feet, trapping it, and I didn’t want to get close enough to use my hands to free the green thing. But I thought about letting it go, and instantly Pea bowed its back, digging in with its hand-claws, freeing its back feet. Hissing, it sat and began cleaning those steel back claws on the ground, the feel of metal sharp and cutting, as if razor blades slashed me instead of the forest floor. Then it raced into the shadows, reappearing back at my feet so fast I would have missed it had I blinked. It carried a droplet of Brother Ephraim’s blood on one steel claw, and held the blood up to me. Hesitantly I leaned down and extended a finger. Pea smeared the drop of blood onto my fingertip, careful to not cut with its claw. It chittered at me, its tone oddly formal sounding, as if this was a ceremony of sorts. I hoped it wasn’t a death sentence aimed at me.
I wasn’t sure what all this meant, and said to it, “I accept the blood, and the price, if there is one.” It chittered at me, softer now, and backed away.
I searched the ground for Paka’s life force, then felt for Brother Ephraim above us in the trees. Both were present in the woods, part of the earth beneath my feet and part of the woods over my head. Somehow I’d claimed them both when I claimed Paka. Maybe claiming predator and dying prey made them one? Maybe because Paka had eaten part of Brother Ephraim and his flesh was her flesh? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of much of anything in the land that was mine, except that it had claimed me too, long ago. With something like instinct, I had been claiming it back ever since. And now, with that same instinct, I was choosing to feed its magic, its power, again, by taking another life. That wasn’t something I had ever wanted to do. Or maybe I was lying to myself and I had always wanted to use the power of the woods, always wanted to feed them. To the werecat, I said, “You feeling any different?”
Paka sat, front paws together. Watchful.
I almost said, I did something when you were tracking Joshua an’ me. The forest, it was wanting to stop you. I told it you were mine so it let you through. I hadn’t thought to claim the others, which seemed wise in retrospect. But Paka appeared no different now from before. Calmer maybe. Hunting living prey made cats calm and happy. Killing made them happier still. So I didn’t tell her what I’d done, mostly because I had no idea how to undo it. I’d play a wait-and-see game instead, and maybe not ever have to confess. The coward’s way, but I had often feared that I was a coward, shamed by some part of me that I never even saw, never knew. “Your prey. He’s still alive, up in the trees.”
Paka’s big head raised up, looking into the trees, and dropped down, then back up, nodding once, her eyes aiming back at me like weapons. “His life is the forest’s to take,” I said.
Paka did nothing, so I turned my back and took the slow steps into the dark, to the ground beneath the tree limb where Brother Ephraim lay, as close to death as a man could get and still cling to this Earth. Blood had dripped and splattered on the leafy forest floor. I stared at it, not sure how to do this. I had only ever done this once before, in fear, fighting for my life, against a man who wanted to hurt me. So much of my woods was unknown to me; so much of my power over it was unknown as well, and I had intended it remain that way if possible. But Jackie and Joshua were never gonna let me be. Not now. And tonight indicated that the woods and I were closer, more twined, than I had previously thought.
I bent my knees, placing my palm on the blood. Blood didn’t have an odor that humans could smell, not until it began to sour and rot, but this blood smelled metallic, bitter, something odd just at the edges of my ability to detect. Beneath my hand, the forest was seething with need, with hunger, the scent and patter of blood, the stench of bowels still releasing, and the reek of fear, the race between predator and prey, all had waked it. The woods thrummed through me, as if blood that pulsed and air that breathed.
I called to the blood on the earth and to the life draped high above. And I plunged my hand through the splattered blood, into the soil, fingernails breaking with the impact. I pulled on the blood, on the body hanging above me, drawing the life force to me, gathering it as if webbed between my fingers, which were buried in the dirt. I hovered my other hand over it, holding the life force like a ball of light balanced atop the ground, between my two hands a single tether of life, still secured to the body above. And I felt Ephraim begin to pass away, his spirit falling, disentangling from his body. His life force shuddering through the air. My magic caught it, pulling it to me and across my flesh like a caress, or a promise, or a threat, heated and icy both, into a glowing ball that held together, for a moment. Brother Ephraim began to slide away from me, into the ground. The process was slow and purposeful, my mind focused. The life force slid past me, clutching at me as it went, trying to slow its passage, screaming deep into the dark beneath.
The woods shivered, the soil moving in fractions of inches, fast and furious. Drinking the life away. Claiming the soul as its own. Things fell from the branch above, hitting the ground around me, bouncing, breaking, fracturing, and crumbling to powder. Bones. Hair in short strands. Fingernails. Clothes. Boots. Crumbling and sifting into piles and then into the dirt, sucked down. Along with the soul I’d stolen to feed Soulwood. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
And so I fed the life of Brother Ephraim into the earth.
This was resolute. Deliberate. This was judgment. Utter. Complete. And I didn’t care. Even knowing that this power made me evil, far more evil than a witch, no matter what the Scriptures might say. Scriptures that had no mention of my kind anywhere in them. I’d looked.
The limbs above shook and trembled. Leaves rustled hungrily. Time passed. The earth stilled. Satisfied. Pleased. Aware . . .
I breathed in, smelling loam and water. Hearing the trickle of spring water. Night had fallen, dark and thick with promise, threat, and gratification. I stood and brushed my hand off on my damp clothes. My fingertips were bleeding, blood dripping onto the ground, but as I watched, the skin healed over, clean and new. I was no longer cold; I felt warm and sated and relaxed, the power still pulsing in me. I didn’t know what that might mean, but it felt good. The church would call me witch and evil and murderess and burn me at the stake. But the church wasn’t here. And the law enforcement officer who was here? He’d never tell what he knew or thought he knew, because if he did, Paka’s secret would be out—that she had hunted a human and eaten of him. And that fact would forever alter the precarious balance of humans, paranormal creatures, and law enforcement in the United States.
I stood over the place where Brother Ephraim had vanished and quoted Shakespeare. “‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? . . . If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?’ You’re gone now, Brother Ephraim, into a life of my choosing and my judgment.” The ground beneath me went still, leaving the woods hushed and silent as the grave.
I considered Paka, a black smear on the night, and said, “You didn’t eat much of Ephraim, so I reckon you’re hungry. I have a venison roast in the freezer. I can thaw it and cook it for you to eat in human form, or let you eat it raw in cat form.” Paka yawned, showing me her teeth, white in the night. I wasn’t sure what answer that was, but I turned and led the way through the woods, back to the house. Paka followed in my path, her huge paws silent on the earth.
* * *
Rick, Paka, and I were sitting around the table, silent, me finally warm and dry, a blanket wrapped around my shoulders, drinking homemade wine bottled by Sister Erasmus. She was my maw-maw’s friend, and her wine was delicious, at least to me; I’d had two and a half glasses, leaving me tipsy, twirling my goblet in my fingers, sleepy, like the forest surrounding the house. The goblets had thick stems and deep bowls, earthenware that had been hand-thrown by a local woman, cooked in a wood-fired kiln, and glazed in greens and browns with touches of blue. I’d had the goblets for two years, having traded vegetables and herbs for them, just because I liked them. I’d never used them until now, making do with water glasses or empty Mason jars. Company deserved better. The night itself deserved better.
Paka, in her human form, poured another few ounces into my goblet and I sipped, the wine dark and rich, which I liked, though Rick had called the wine too sweet. I hadn’t bothered to learn much about wines, knowing I’d never have a chance to try the expensive good ones, but I had considered growing grapes for local vintners. I figured my land would grow better grapes than any place in Europe. I could plant an acre, maybe two, in the front yard, if I was of a mind, and watch over it through the front window.
Paka finished off the small venison roast, which was bloody in the center and too tough, from being still frozen when it went into the oven to thaw in heated stew juices. But she didn’t seem to notice or care. Eyes dark and hooded, Rick watched her as she sliced off pieces of the roast and picked them up with her fingers, eating with dainty movement but no manners. He seemed entranced by her, but not like a normal man in the presence of a beautiful, wild woman. More as if he was pulled to her, like the moon to the Earth, held in her orbit, but always separate. I couldn’t guess at the nature of their relationship, but whatever their bond was, peace wasn’t part of it.
Paka looked at him, and slid one slender finger out of her mouth. It was unconsciously alluring, until she spoiled it with the words, “His blood, the blood of the man, it was . . . wrong.”
“We can talk about that later,” Rick murmured.
I frowned, remembering the feel of Ephraim’s life as it slid along my skin. “Metallic,” I said. “His blood smelled and felt, metallic and tart, like pennies soaked in vinegar.” Rick didn’t reply. I looked out into the dark, beyond the creature they called Pea, sitting in the windowsill, staring into the night through the glass, its tail twitching slowly. Not a cat tail—too short and too thick for that. And too neon green for any mammal on Earth. Parrot green maybe, or pea green, after which it had been named. It had hidden its huge claws, which had to be magic, because they were longer than its feet. Not an Earth creature. Something from somewhere else. If the church was right, the only other places for beings to come from were heaven and hell, but Pea looked like she—I wasn’t sure about its gender and neither were the others, but they called her female—belonged to neither. Rather, she looked like something out of a fairy tale, one of the old stories, fluffy on the surface but dark and bloody underneath.
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders, glad for the warm clothes and mostly dry hair. Glad for the Waterford Stanley cookstove. Glad for a roof over my head and a house that was mine alone. Glad to have my guns back at the windows where they belong and not left outside in the raised beds, abandoned. Glad to be alive.
Not happy about the damage to the house. I’d have the insurance company out tomorrow afternoon, and I’d have to find a way to pay the deductible. I knew exactly how much cash I had on hand and it came to enough to pay for a single pane of window glass. I hadn’t looked at the other mess, the damage inside. The dollar signs were adding up fast and I hadn’t even gone to work for Rick yet. It could only get worse. I would be smart to kick them to the curb, but I couldn’t. We were bound now, in a way, by the death of Brother Ephraim, and by my claiming Paka. I didn’t know what I could do about any of it.
Having people in my house was unexpected. Except for a rare townie customer looking for an herbal remedy, I’d been alone here since John died. I’d gotten used to the feel of the floor beneath my feet, untouched by the vibrations of other people walking, used to the empty table and chairs. The silence. Used to washing only one plate. One glass. One fork or spoon.
In theory, after John died, I could have left, sold the land to a development company, moved to the city. But I stayed here, probably foolishly, waiting to see if my sisters would ever come to their senses and run away from the cult, from their lives in multiwife marriages, to freedom.
Now there were people here and the house felt full, as if it needed to stretch to contain us all. The dirty dishes on the table were . . . more. The noise was more. The more I might have had if John had given me children. But he hadn’t been able to give his wives babies and the others had requested divorce, which he’d granted, and left him for other men, all except Leah. She had died here in the farmhouse, in the bed in the biggest bedroom on the south side of the house, leaving John alone except for me. Later he had died in that same bed. I hated that bed but I hadn’t been able to throw it out. Instead, I slept on the sofa or in the small cot in the loft that had been mine since I came here. Or on the screened porch in the hammock. I slept with guns at every window. I slept safe, for the most part. Safe, but alone.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Rick asked, his tone gentle.
“About what?” I asked. Tears pricked my eyes and I stood quickly, dipping my head forward so my wet hair slid over my face and shoulders and down to my hands as I cleared the table. “About what happened in the woods? What my life was like with John? Why I left the church? Why I still live here?” I glanced at him as I stood and stacked the heavy stoneware, none too gently. The clank of pottery and the clink of utensils sounded thunderous in the silent house. “What do you want to know?”
Rick tilted his head, observing me, his black eyes still kind. No man had ever been kind or gentle to me. Not even John, no matter that he’d loved me, saved me. He’d never been tender even when he finally took me to wife at age fifteen—he hadn’t known how to be. But he’d given me freedom and safety and that was worth so much more than any kind of gentleness that there might have been.
I set the dishes in the sink and put the vegetable leftovers into the steel composter on the back porch, the meat scraps and juices into a separate tin, wiped off the plates. I stopped, staring out into the night, letting my senses free. Impressions came from the woods, fast and intense, much more so than only yesterday. The trees were happy, satisfied, alert, though not in any way that a human might have understood. Back at the sink, I piled up the dirty dishes, and realized that my tie to the woods was stronger. I had known for a long time that I wasn’t strictly human. Hadn’t been in years. Maybe forever. But this . . . this was different. This was more . . . more whatever I was.
And with the sensations coming at me from the woods, I also had to think about the fact that I had killed a man tonight. One who would have died anyway. But still.
That should have made me afraid, or shamed, or shocked, or . . . something negative. Instead, it made me happy—fiercely, ferociously happy. But that knowledge was mine alone, not something to share with strangers, no matter that we now shared the knowledge of the death of Brother Ephraim.
I turned on the spigot that let water into the farmhouse sink from the woodstove’s water heater. It steamed in the air as it gathered. I added soap and watched bubbles rise.
“Nell?” Rick prodded. Gentle. His voice so tender. No wonder he was a heartbreaker.
“I was always different,” I said, without looking back at them, “from the other women. I wanted to read books, to spend time in the gardens or the greenhouses, rather than in the sewing rooms or the kitchens or the nursery, chatting and gossiping. I never wanted the things the other girls did: a husband and a passel of children. I wanted a man who would treat me with respect, who would marry me according to the laws of the land instead of the laws of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. A man who would wait to bed me until I was of age.” I turned off the water and bowed my head, my hair sliding against me, still damp and chilled.
“When I was twelve, Colonel Ernest Jackson—Jackie’s father—asked my father for my hand in marriage.” I began washing the plates, my face firmly turned away from my guests. “I waited until Sunday and told the colonel no, in front of God and everybody, in front of the whole church. Made a ruckus, I did. I told him I’d rather marry a horse’s backside, though I wasn’t so polite about it. And then I ran out.”
Rick said nothing. I didn’t look his way.
“I guess Jane Yellowrock told you about the colonel kidnapping vampires and drinking their blood.” Rick didn’t move, not even the smallest bit, but Paka, who sat within the range of my vision, glowered at her mate. “It’s common knowledge that he and his cronies did it for Jackie Jr., to save him from a cancer. They must a also figured out how it gave the old men power in the bedroom. They kept kidnapping and drinking off and on until Jane finally put a stop it. I figure the colonel was drinking undead blood about the time he wanted me. Feeling his oats.
“Anyway, I was in trouble and afraid. I hid in the barn after the scene in the church. I was still there when John Ingram and his wife, Leah, wandered in and found me. We got to talking, him and his wife and me. Leah was sick and dying. Everyone knew it. And because John hadn’t given her children, she would be alone in her dying. So. She suggested John marry himself a nurse for her, someone young and strong and independent, who might not mind never having young’uns. They proposed to me, and promised that I wouldn’t have to take up my wifely duties until I turned fifteen. I accepted.”
In the silence of the great room, I finished washing and rinsing the plates and stacked them on the wood dish drainer that John had made in the church’s woodworking shop years ago. For Leah. Everything in this house had been made for Leah or one of his other wives, not me. But I was the one who’d ended up with it all. Life was puzzling. Unpredictable. But one thing was sure. The meek didn’t ever inherit the Earth. I wasn’t meek. And I had the land. The others were dead and gone, and it was mine according to the law of the United States and the state of Tennessee and according to the land itself. Leah had been gone since I was nearly fifteen. John had been dead since I was nineteen. More than three years I had been alone. So maybe it was time and past time to claim the house and the things in it too, to make them mine. To maybe move from the tiny half bed to a bigger one, to make a room my own.
No one was talking and the water wasn’t hot enough, so I dried my hands and opened the wood box on the side of the stove. I put a single split log inside, turning the bottom damper almost closed, the top damper shut tight. The log, sitting on the coals, would last all night, and leave me plenty of coals to start a fire in the morning. It would also heat the water. That was the first thing I’d learned when I came here, as John’s affianced wife—how to maintain the stove and its attached water heater, how to do maintenance on the windmill that ran the well pump, how to check the cistern, how to pump water by hand when needed. Chores, arduous work. But worth it for the freedom they had offered me.
“I never loved John,” I said, “not the way library books say is possible, all that passion and kissing and stuff, but John and me had married in the eyes of the church. I respected him and loved Leah, and nursed her through her dying, and I gifted him with my virtue and my honor when I came of age, according to the church.” I’d not been happy to go to John’s bed, but I had been grateful enough for his protection that I’d gone willingly at age fifteen. “Leah hadn’t been in the grave a good year when John took sick and the men of the church came sniffing around, knowing he was dying, hoping to get his land.” One of whom I had killed, my first sacrifice to the earth of Soulwood, but that wasn’t to be shared, ever. And I would never know who had attacked me. Half a dozen backsliders left the church that year. Coulda been any one of ’em. “When I turned eighteen, we married again, this time according to the law of the state of Tennessee.
“I nursed John as best I could, and kept him alive longer than the doctors said was possible. And when he was gone, I inherited Soulwood.” I rinsed the last of the dishes in tepid water.
“Why do you stay here?” Rick asked.
My shoulders went back stiffly. “I stay to honor John and because my sisters are still part of the church.”
And I also stayed, despite the danger from the churchmen, because the land and I were tangled together. Tighter now than only hours past.
I turned to my guests. “What do you want with me? Everything, this time, not just the easy stuff, asking questions. What about that consulting you talked about? What’s that really mean?”
Rick glanced at Paka, who had moved to sit at the kitchen table with my cats, one on her lap and the other sleeping on her shoulders, and back to me. Instead of answering my question, he asked another one himself. “What did you do with the man Paka killed?”
Pea turned at the question and gathered herself. She leaped all the way from the window to the back of the sofa. With another single leap, she landed on the table, sauntered up to Paka, and butted her in the nose. Paka hissed at her and batted her away, in the manner of cats.
I said, “Paka didn’t kill him. I never laid a hand or a weapon on him. He died of nature. And he’ll never be found.” If Rick the cop thought I meant natural causes, so be it.
“You buried him?”
“Persistent, ain’t ya?”
He pointed to himself and gave a half smile. “Cop.” It was a charming expression, black eyes flashing with good humor, showing the man he might have been once, before life, before loving Jane Yellowrock, and maybe before being magically tied to Paka, who seemed to be sucking him dry of life and happiness, like some kind of spiritual vampire he couldn’t get away from.
“There was no chance of Brother Ephraim surviving. He passed away but not at Paka’s hands.” I firmed my lips. “No one will ever find a single cell of his body or thread of his clothes.”
Rick’s smile vanished, leaving the calculating, discerning cop in his stead. He stared at me with the same intensity Jezzie used when she spotted a mouse that she wanted to eat.
“You’re thinking with a different part of your brain now. Earlier you were thinking like a cat. Now you’re thinking like a cop. You’re thinking you might be forced to arrest me. But if you do, then you have to arrest Paka. Paka was there,” I said. “She hurt him to save me. He was dying.” More slowly, I said, “He was dying at her teeth. He was going to die on my land. So I . . . helped.” I didn’t have to add, If I hadn’t let him die the way he did, Pea would have killed her. Or you would have had to arrest your cat-woman. He knew that. And he knew that I knew. “Paka was there when Brother Ephraim . . . departed. Neither of us lifted a hand or paw against him.” Not as humans understood it.
Her words languid, Paka said to me, “The words you have claimed are true. I did not kill the male. The were-taint will not be spread. The male will not turn at the full moon. He will not return at all.” She looked at Rick. “This woman and I did not kill. Except to protect her, no one’s hand was lifted against him. He is gone.”
Her word choice and syntax were odd, but she was a foreigner and maybe that was the way she spoke English, because it wasn’t her first language. Maybe an African language was first for her. Or cat.
Rick glowered, the cop in him fully taking over from his other form, the cat who had been pleased to survive and eat and rest. I wondered for a moment how a cop could take off time to visit with me, but decided the answer might be in the name of his law enforcement organization, Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. Living in the church with conspiracy theorists for so many years, I knew lots about the way the law worked, in principle.
Paka said, “There is no crime scene. There is no body. There is no blood. There is nothing. This is her land in the way of the ancient among many tribal peoples, and her word rules over all. Also”—she shrugged slightly—“Pea is satisfied at the woman’s judgment.” I didn’t know what she meant about me ruling, but I’d take what I could get.
“If someone reports a crime,” I said, “you can come back here and look. I give you my permission and you won’t even need a warrant.” The cop frowned, thinking things over, as if different scenarios were playing out at warp speed in his mind.
“Thank you,” Rick said, finally.
I didn’t want him to thank me. I frowned at him and went back to the last of the dishes in the tepid water. “Farmers’ market is in Market Square. There’s other markets, but the one in town is the best known and best attended. The churchmen drop off their women just after the traffic eases. The women set up the tables in the church booth and sell vegetables, honey, jellies, quilts—things made by the women—and handmade dough bowls, rolling pins, stools, tables, rocking chairs, and toys made by the men in the wood shop. Church pamphlets are on the booth table extolling a glorified version of the church. The market earns them money and goodwill from the townspeople and makes them look as humble and moral as the Amish. My mama and my maw-maw might be there, along with my sister Priscilla, one or the other or even all three, and if so, I can ask your questions. They might answer.” I gave a small shrug and pushed my hair out of my face. “They might not.”
“Why have you decided to help us?” Paka asked.
Reluctantly I said, “Because if you hadn’t come back to help me, I might be dead.” Or entertaining guests tonight in ways I didn’t even want to think about. Or I mighta had to kill them all, all three, and feed them to the earth. One possibility filled me with a dread and the other with an eagerness I couldn’t shake off.
I arranged the plates and glasses so that they would dry easily and turned to the couple, crossing my arms over my chest, a habit of both self-protection and succor. “You said you wanted my help. How much do I get paid if I help you? I got five hundred dollars when I let the blood-suckers cross my land to rescue a blood-sucker that the colonel kidnapped, back when Yellowrock Security wanted my help.”
Rick said, “You’ll be a consultant. Pay would be calculated based on what you can tell us and how much assistance you give.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and walked to the desk John had used for business. “I want a contract, signed by your superiors, in my hand before I start work.”
The couple exchanged glances, saying nothing, but it felt as if they reached some kind of decision. “Where is the booth so we can be in place?” Rick said.
Rick had said something similar before, before the attack on my home, when a visit to the market was just hypothetical, and not a reality. “Why do you need to be there?” I asked.
“We’re your backup, Nell,” Rick said in that gentle way of his. “You don’t go in alone. Never.”
And that sent a curious shaft of emotion through me, of something unknown and precious and impossibly seductive. A sense of safety. It was so elusive that I didn’t know how to reply. You don’t go in alone. Never. The words broke me in ways I hadn’t known I could break.
To hide my reaction, I swiveled away and stepped slowly into the dark of the shelving behind the kitchen, where I kept preserves and seeds and dried foodstuffs, dishes and pots and serving bowls and crockery. I stood in the unlit space and dried my tears, a cold breeze on my damp face and hair. I followed the breeze and discovered the first of the damage from Brother Ephraim’s shotgun. I hadn’t looked for damage. Hadn’t wanted to until they were gone and I was alone. My teary eyes went flinty and dry with fury as I took in the broken dishes on the floor, and the broken back window, which was spiderwebbed with cracks. If I hadn’t already agreed to be a consultant, this would have decided me.
I walked through the house, noting that Brother Ephraim had shot out four of my back windows, top and bottom panes both, damaging the frames and the walls, inside and out, and some wood trim inside Leah’s and John’s old bedroom. But the pellets had only pierced the screening and so critters and bugs couldn’t get in tonight, even without window glass.
Back in the kitchen, I pulled a magnifying glass out of the tool drawer and went over the stove and its water heater. “Nell?” Rick asked.
I held up my hand like a traffic cop telling him to stop. “I need a minute,” I said, verifying that the stove system was undamaged. Repairing it would have been a time-consuming and expensive fix, but it was fine. When I was done, I stood over the stove and looked around my house, my blanket forgotten, my body heated by anger.
Women were expected to simply take whatever the churchmen dished out. Take it and cry and grieve and then accept whatever they did. No more. Not for me.
The churchmen would stay away for a bit, what with a special agent involved, but eventually they would be back. I had always assumed that they would burn me out and make me wish I was dead, and there was no help for it. I could get a restraining order, a piece of paper to wave in their faces and burn in their fire. I could move, or try to. I could ask for protective custody. But that wouldn’t last. Eventually the churchmen would find me.
But maybe being part of PsyLED would give me protection from the church. One of my attackers, Brother Ephraim, was dead and gone. And the cop, who was part cat, sitting in my front room, had told me I wouldn’t be alone.
Not alone. That was temptation.
I went back to the great room and opened the wooden box where I kept all my records. I removed two business cards. I used a local company for roofing, the solar panels, and the windows, and they would be right out when called, but if I didn’t involve my insurance company, it was going to cost me. I didn’t want to contact my agent for this, but I knew that the replacement would be a lot more expensive than I could afford. I had to bite that bullet.
I said to Rick, “The men shot up my house. I could call the cops but I think it would be wiser to just call it vandalism.” I handed him the first card. “This is my insurance company.” For the first time ever, I blessed John’s foresight in getting insurance. God’s Cloud was anti-insurance, but John had worried about me living here alone and had insisted that I have top-of-the-line policies for the truck and the house. It had seemed a waste until now.
I handed Rick the second card. “This is for the people who put the windows in.” I wrote a short note on a scrap of paper and put it in his hand with the cards. “If you would be so kind as to call them both, I’d be appreciative. Tell the repair people these are the damaged windows and that the siding over the logs in back was peppered with bullet holes. They’ll handle it, turnkey job.” Rick smiled and tucked the cards into his chest pocket. Watching him do that was oddly final feeling, as if by asking him to do this one small thing I was sealing my own fate.
Shortly after that, I saw Rick and Paka to the door, their list of questions clutched in my fingers. This time, I had to bodily drag Jezzie and Cello away from Paka, an act that left me bleeding and them mad, but once the couple drove off, the cats quieted. I doctored my cat scratches with my own poultice made of plantain, arnica, calendula, and comfrey leaves mixed with aloe, applied with soft rags tied in place. I also treated my bruised jaw and eye socket where my sweet suitor had clocked me a few. It was painful and puffy and hadn’t healed like my cut fingers when I jerked them out of the earth, but the same herbs that worked on open wounds would help that, except in tincture form. I applied a bit with a heated rag, followed by a rag cold from the well water, back and forth between temperatures until the pain eased, though the bruises were an ugly purple, spreading down my neck with the pull of gravity and all around my left eye.
Once the pain was eased and the bleeding had stopped, I finished putting away the pots and dishes and brought in the dry clothes off the line, carrying up the basket to the small bed in my little room for folding later. I didn’t want to do it now. I didn’t want to do anything right now. I had taken a man’s life tonight. He’d have lost it in moments anyway, but . . . I had hastened it on by seconds and claimed it for the woods. I should feel something about that, some guilt for killing, or happiness for vengeance satisfied. Instead, for reasons I didn’t understand, I felt only overheated, itchy, and twitchy, as if my skin wanted to ripple and bubble up, like a science fiction movie I had watched one time. I stopped, bare feet on the floor, feeling the wood beneath my soles, and below that the foundation, resting in the earth that had nourished the trees used to build the house, when they had lived. Alexandre Dumas, in The Count of Monte Cristo, had said something like, “. . . I have been heaven’s substitute to recompense the good—now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!” I wasn’t sure if God had yielded anything to me at all, or if I had stolen that right from him, and if so, he might just be taking his own good time to swat me down.
At the thought, my skin seemed to settle. This was why I had been so twitchy. Tonight I had finally found some small part of vengeance, justice, and no small measure of satisfaction when I took Brother Ephraim for my woods. But tonight, between one of Brother Ephraim’s heartbeats and his last, I had also committed murder. And I felt no guilt. The dirt beneath my house seemed to throb once, the feeling it sent through me vibrant and alive. And darker than I ever remembered. I didn’t know what to think about that.
Unsettled, I went through the house more carefully, cataloging damage. There were broken dishes, still sitting on the shelves up high, and I brought in John’s old stepladder to take an inventory. I swept the shattered dishes into a plastic dishpan and swept up the mess of broken crockery that had hit the floor.
My fingers traced the lines of the shattered antique hand-thrown pitcher. It had been made by Leah’s great-grandmother in the mid-eighteen hundreds. There had been no one to give it to when Leah passed, and I had put it on the top shelf in the kitchen pantry, thinking it would be safe, but a pellet had found it. My eyes burned and tears threatened, my throat clogged with pain. I owed her better than to let the church destroy Leah’s things, her memory, or me. She had taught me better. I put the broken pitcher back on its shelf, even though I knew that there was no way I could mend it.
Later, carrying my blanket, a book, and the list of questions that Rick had placed on the stack of books where he had left his cash earlier, I wandered to the back porch. It was a lot neater than when John was alive, piled as it had been with garden tools and buckets and boots and tillers and such. I never understood how a man could accumulate so much stuff. Now everything was neat, the tools hung on nails I had hammered in the back wall, John’s boots and hats and work gloves given away. The garden tools were now stored in the small enclosed space on the south side of the porch, one I’d had built with the insurance money from John’s death. The church didn’t believe in life insurance, but by the time Leah had died, John didn’t believe in the church and so had provided a small sum for me. The life insurance money was mostly gone now, except what I’d invested in a fund at the bank. The shed took part of the view, which I hated, but it also protected the back porch from the hottest summer sun, and the small window inside kept the shed warm in winter, from radiant heat alone. The dogs had slept in there some nights, when they hadn’t wanted to come inside the house, kept warm by the last rays of the sun.
Now, the floor of the much smaller porch was taken up only with the washing machine (an old model that drained into the garden), one chair, a tray on legs for use as my table, and my hammock. I’d bought the hammock from my sister Priscilla, when she was pregnant with her first child, and paid too much for it, just for the chance to make sure she was okay. Not unexpectedly, she was happy, married to Caleb Campbell, who was ten years her senior and already had one wife when they wed, Priscilla’s best friend, Fredi. Priss didn’t want to escape, didn’t want another life. She was happy, living in a big house full of children and wives and a husband who loved them all. The very life I’d been raised to aspire to, and had run away from, was the one she wanted. Up to the moment some churchman tried to take her to the punishment house. I stayed on Soulwood for that day, to be a safe haven to run to. And I stayed because when I did leave, even just to market, I felt the land’s call like a dark wound in my chest.
Priss, like my mama and my baby sisters, loved God’s Cloud. They loved the life there, the people there. Mama had even forgiven Brother Ephraim for his sin against her. The churchwomen were blind to the wicked acts of the ones who did evil in the name of God. The call to forgive was a powerful weapon, used against them for too long.
I had a feeling Jackson Jr. wouldn’t be forgiving me. But with Brother Ephraim missing and Joshua scared, he wouldn’t make a fast decision about me this time, no matter how mad he was, not with a special agent involved, no matter how tangentially. He’d want to let time pass and things settle, and when he came again, he’d make sure he had more than three men. He’d want to come in fast, grab me, and haul me out, leaving no trace. Then he’d burn my house and garden to the ground. And he’d take me to the punishment house personally. Or at least that would be his plan, once he convinced enough of the men to help him kidnap me. And I figured he’d forget to mention to the men the presence of police or black leopards leaping from my rooftop to protect me, and maybe Joshua would hold his tongue too. So . . . I was safe for a little while. Long enough to try to derail their plans. Long enough to figure out how to use the title of PsyLED consultant to my best advantage.
I let my thoughts wander for a bit at the memory of Jackie running through the woods, his speed not quite human, too fast, too surefooted. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and not something good. I remembered the bitter smell of Ephraim’s blood and of Paka’s description of it as wrong. I remembered Pea offering me a drop of Ephraim’s blood and her incomprehensible chitter. I wished I knew what all that meant, but whatever it was, it too wasn’t good.
I wished I had a method of making the woods grow thorny vines among the trees along the borders of the property, like Sleeping Beauty’s forest. Protective, passive defense. But my power wasn’t magic. It didn’t work that way.
Except . . . the ground had risen up and grabbed Pea’s feet like a trap when I’d wanted her stopped. I didn’t know what that might mean either. Not yet.
Thoughts and plans and worries swirled around in my brain, rising and dying back like fire in a brazier, hot and uncertain and potentially destructive. And possibly useful.
I crawled into the hammock, turned on the small lamp, and opened Rick’s list of questions. There was a short paragraph at the top that read:
Human Speakers of Truth is an antiparanormal, anti–human rights, quasipolitical terrorist group with once-deep pockets and ties to energy. They own outright or through shell companies a small oil company in Texas; several small natural gas companies in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina; and several other less legitimate companies, possibly for money laundering. With the FBI and secret service involved, and financial assets frozen, they need a place to regroup. We know they came here, to Knoxville, Tennessee. We believe that they are still here, and we are searching for evidence to prove or disprove their location. For your contacts in the church:
1. Have there been any new men around?
2. Describe any changes in leadership and any power struggle.
3. New tensions?
4. New weapons?
5. Anything at all different?
To ask such questions of me, Rick LaFleur truly didn’t understand how people lived in the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. The women would know nothing unless pillow talk had loosed the tongues of their men. The questions and the presence of PsyLED on an investigation told me that this was more than just an investigation into some homegrown terrorist group and church politics and finances. PsyLED was involved in the investigation because HST was a group that espoused killing all paranormal creatures. The FBI would have handled something strictly human, and the secret service would have handled any kind of financial wrongdoing. I folded the paper and tucked it into the bib of my clean overalls with the .32. I turned off the lamp. Rolled over and snuggled down in the hammock. The night was chilly and silent, even when the mouser cats unexpectedly leaped up onto the hammock and settled on me, purring. They had never done that. Never.
For a moment I missed my dogs so strong my chest ached. They had been John’s dogs, working dogs, and he’d found my love of them amusing. Even before he died, they had been too old to work, but they hadn’t been too old to love or to love back. But the cats never had. Until now. Until Paka tamed them for me with her magic.
The dogs had been all I’d had for years, all that loved me when I was lonely or empty or afraid. And they had stayed with me all these years, until the churchmen decided them being dead would make a good message to me. I hoped my message to Jackie was just as strong, not that he’d ever cry over Brother Ephraim’s disappearance. No. He’d be after me eventually. And this time, things would be different. Because I was different.
At the thought, my hands burned and itched, as if in memory of the wood’s power zapping Joshua. Or the memory of Ephraim’s life slipping through my fingers. I might not have defeated Jackie today, but I’d put a hurtin’ on him he would never forget.