I remembered Rick’s comment about a Mexican standoff, and for half a second, this looked like the same thing, except no one here would heal easily from gunshot wounds. We’d bleed and die like regular humans. That was the thought I had before Jackie’s gun thundered, reverberating blamblamblam in the tall ceilings, the shots loud and too fast.
I had a moment’s thought about the training Daddy had given his family, because all of them hit the floor as the first shot was fired, all but me. Daddy shoved me into the pew, to the floor, where I landed on top of Mama and a passel of Nicholson young’uns who were crawling for the exits. Daddy’s shotgun blasted twice, then several others. Daddy fell on top of me, and his blood pulsed across my face. Without thinking, I pulled off the scarf Mama had wrapped me in, shoved it deep into Daddy’s wound, and covered it with my hand, pressing. The pulsing stopped, but the gunfire went on. Deafening, breath-stealing, glass-shattering booms that went on forever. I could make out screaming, Some of it from the Nicholsons below and around me. Mama and Mud were still here, and my sister pulled off her jacket, applying it to another gunshot, this one a leaking hole in Daddy’s leg, not the pulsing mess I was trying to stifle. Mud looked mad. Determined. Not afraid. Mama stretched out beside us, holding John’s old revolver, which had tumbled in the carnage, as if she knew how to use it. The gunfight blasted away the dawn. Screams. Deafening concussions. Mama fired my gun at someone in the aisle.
Mama Carmel crawled across the empty space under the pew in front and slid up to Daddy, adding a pile of clean cloth diapers to my scarf. I had stopped breathing, and I remembered to inhale only when the blackness of oxygen deprivation closed in on my eyesight and I was near to passing out. With the breath came thoughts from my self-schooling, my mind bombarding me with trivia, searching for a way out of this. A quote by Patton came to me, one by Sun Tzu, both useless.
Then one by Harry Truman came to me, saying, “Carry the battle to them.”
“Yeah,” I whispered to myself. Now, that was helpful.
I rolled out from under Daddy so Mama Carmel could get to him better, and I took his shotgun with me. I felt around in his jacket pockets and found four more shotgun shells. In the cramped quarters, Daddy bleeding and maybe dying on one side, and the Nicholson women on my other side, I reloaded the shotgun.
Someone grabbed my arm and I jerked away, but it was only Priss, my sister, lying with her sister wife on the floor behind us, under the Campbell pew. Cowering. And that made me madder. We women didn’t need to be cowering on the floor. We needed to be taking the battle to Jackie and whoever was helping him. We needed to be fighting back. Protecting ourselves, not waiting on a man to save us. But it would kill my sister to shoot another person. And I had ample proof that I wouldn’t give a moment’s thought about it.
At that thought, the awareness of blood, rich and thick and full of life, hit me. Blood everywhere. So much blood. But it wasn’t on the ground and not on Soulwood, and the longing to take it for the land was muted. But the longing for vengeance beat in me, like a drum through my veins.
“Stay down,” I shouted to Mud and Priss and the other Nicholson women. Mama shouted my name as I crawled to the front of the church, in the shadows beneath the pews, my knees and toes and elbows pushing and pulling me forward, my skirt dragging. Wishing I was in my overalls.
I reached the front of the church and spotted Jackie crouched behind the pulpit. He was reloading his revolver. I rolled to my knees and then to my feet, and pushed off the wood floor, into a sprint. Screaming, I took the three long steps to fall upon the dais. Half rolled to the side of the podium. Pointed the shotgun. Squeezed the trigger. The recoil slammed me back, bruising my shoulder. My heartbeat pounded in my ears. My breath heaved, hidden beneath the deafness from the concussion of shots.
Jackie was bleeding, but still on his knees, staring at me, his mouth a snarl of hatred. I resettled the shotgun and fired again. He staggered. I reloaded even as Jackie finished reloading his pistol. He lifted his gun to center it on me. I fired first. And again. By the last round, time had done something perplexing. It had slowed down. And it was as if I could see each shot leave the weapon, a puff of smoke, a shadow of shot pellets.
The shot was tightly centered at this distance. Right into the middle of Jackie Jr.’s torso and up his arms. Crimson blood gushed and pulsed into the room. The stink of gunfire and the smell of released bowels was foul on the air.
Blood spattered and pulsed. Jackie fell backward, and as I watched, his face went white. His hands loosed, and he dropped the big handgun. I watched it fall, and, without even thinking about it, I batted the gun away and back into Jackie’s vacant chair, so it wouldn’t land wrong and go off. In hindsight, that would be a move that I shouldn’t have made, as hitting the gun could have caused the same firing problem I was trying to prevent, but at the time I was glad the gun was on the chair and out of his hands.
Jackie bounced on the floor and went still. His blood spread scarlet all across the dais, the pool widening fast. His legs bent backward beneath him. I peeked out from the podium and saw Joshua vault out the front door and off the small front porch, directly at Occam and Rick.
I rolled over and retched. And then Occam was there with me, taking away the shotgun and wiping it free of my fingerprints. He left the shotgun on the floor in the pool of Jackie’s blood and lifted me like a baby. His skin was hot and feverish. Or I was going into shock and feeling too cold.
I looked down and saw the bloodstain on my good gray skirt. At first I thought, Daddy’s blood, but it was spreading. I’d been shot. My mind scrambled for something to hold on to and it found Tecumseh’s words. “‘When your time comes to die . . .’” I whispered, “‘sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.’” I wondered what kind of song I was supposed to sing when I was dying, and all I could think of was “Onward Christian Soldiers” and, oddly, that made me laugh. Which hurt really bad.
“Nell? Nell! Medic! I need an ambulance!” Occam’s voice was tinny with the damage to my ears, but even with the concussion damage, I could hear the growl in his throat. And his eyes were golden brown as he carried me out the back entrance of the church, the one behind the podium. “Gunfight at the damn O.K. Corral,” he growled. “Fools with an arsenal in a church full of children. Medic!” He was right. Half the men and boys in the church must a had guns.
“Put me under that tree.” I pointed to an oak I had hugged when I was child, hugged for the solace I needed after a whooping with Daddy’s belt. I had come away soothed, and the tree had been soothed as well. Would it remember me? My own trees recognized me, but would this old friend? I took a breath and pain blossomed inside me, through me, like a bomb going off, like a cactus flower opening, though such things were opposites in every possible way. When Occam tried to take me around to the front of the church, I set my nails into his skin like a cat might and pushed on him with my mind. “Human medicine might hurt me more than help me. Take me to that tree.” When he didn’t turn around, I said, “Stop!”
Occam stopped, standing as still as the tree I wanted, uncertainty and confusion holding him in place, turmoil rushing through him so intense that I could feel his cat roil beneath the skin of his arms. “But we have SWAT and FBI and ambulances coming,” he said.
“Please,” I whispered, my fingers gripping his biceps.
He reversed course and carried me to the tree. “Put me down,” I said. Moving stiffly, as if he was doing something he was already regretting, he set me on the ground, my back against the tree. His motions were jerky, and my body lurched, making pain pummel and twist through me. I couldn’t hold back a moan. Occam growled, longer, louder.
I reached up and grabbed his chin with my bloody hand, and said, “Stop that. You cannot shift into your cat here. They will burn you.”
Occam went as still as death for perhaps an entire second before he said, “Thank you, Nell, sugar.”
“Now I need to be alone or I may die.”
“And if I leave you alone, will you live?”
“I don’t know. I ain’t never— I have never . . . done a healing before, but it might work. It feels right to try.” It was possible that the tree could help. Or, no, I couldn’t say that.
“Then try. But I’m calling for an ambulance crew back here too, Nell, sugar. Every unit in the county is heading this way.”
“Take care of my daddy first.” My back was to the bark, and my legs were stretched out, spindly in the leggings beneath the bloody skirt. The tree’s warmth hummed through the ground, content, as soothing as the last time I came to it for consolation. But would the tree recognize me? I laid back my head. Occam punched his cell phone, demanding an ambulance.
I put both of my hands into my rushing blood, and it was warmer and stickier than I expected. I placed both hands on the lower trunk, near the ground, propping myself. And I called to Soulwood through the tree. My trees didn’t answer. Nothing but the soothing of this one tree, which wasn’t mine. I called again. And again. My breath came fast and shallow. My heartbeat stumbling. And softly, distantly, a weak pulse of my land answered, Soulwood turning its attention to the feel/smell/taste of my blood trickling across the tree roots and soaking into the ground. Salty taste of death.
Within the tree behind me, something shivered, something loosened, some ineffable, warm something, shivered through the oak and out to me. Recognition. “Yes,” I whispered. “Hey there.” From far away, Soulwood beat through the ground, finding me. Enveloping the tree. Encircling me. The earth bubbled and roiled beneath my palms, the dirt vibrating up and over my fingers, covering my bloody hands, rootlets growing fast, trapping me.
Occam stepped back, swearing. Voice unsteady, he canceled the ambulance he had demanded for me.
Life throbbed from my wood and the earth answered, the trees recognizing me, even from here. Soulwood latched onto the oak, through the hill and the soil and the rocks. The tree behind me quivered, its leaves rustling in a wind that wasn’t there. Its roots and the earth they were planted in drank down my blood, pulling it into the earth, sucking it greedily from my fingers.
They reached for my blood. Oak rootlets bent and distorted, rotated and curled and rose from the ground, sending small plumes of dirt into the air. Roots wrapped around my hands and wrists, holding me tight.
I was too weak to fight, even had I wanted to. Other rootlets, thin, knobby things with even smaller fingers, spun and revolved and climbed across my skirt, sucking up the blood that flooded out of me. They drank it down. Empowered by my life force, by the blood that was pumping hot and fast, the roots grew in size and purpose, stealing breath and heat, and pressing into me. Into my wound where they pirouetted and looped and twined together and wove a knot, inside the wound. Another knot. They tightened. And they stilled.
My blood flow stopped. It just . . . stopped. I couldn’t draw a breath. Couldn’t move. My heart beat funny and fast, skipping like a toddler pounding on an overturned pot, no rhythm, no purpose. I wasn’t sure I remembered how to breathe.
Occam leaned over me, shock and horror and bewilderment on his face. But no fear, no pulling away. I smiled at him and because I wanted to speak, I forced the breath I had forgotten. Voice scratchy and rough as bark, I said, “It’s okay. I’ll live now. Don’t cut me free until I ask you to.”
Occam nodded, covered me with a shiny metallic sheet he had found somewhere, his voice directing people to do . . . things. I didn’t pay attention. I was too tired to care. I closed my eyes and let the last of the breath flow from me, not needing it now. I needed my woods, and though I was not on them, there was enough of me here in this tree for my woods to reach across, enough of me here and enough of me there to bleed over from my woods. To connect here. To direct here.
I claimed this tree for my own, for Soulwood.
My heartbeat steadied and grew negligibly stronger. My breath, when I took one, much later, didn’t hurt quite so bad. The sound of rushing water echoed in my ears, a distorted vibration, the sound of water below ground, the drumming of blood in my veins. I was healing. With roots inside of me.
Shadows shifted under the ground. I felt them through the earth, the dark things that hadn’t been on my property until I gave Brother Ephraim to my wood. Once again, I trailed the dark shadows within the ground, the fractured and broken things, watching me, curious, intent, but also agitated and distressed—afraid. And that’s when I realized, and knew I should have seen it instantly, but I’d been so busy with new people, new things, that I hadn’t bothered to look at the earth, to see, to understand.
Unlike the man who had attacked me in the woods when I was fifteen, the man who had fed the woods and become one with them, Ephraim was still whole, still sentient, still self-aware. And he was trapped in my wood, not able to get free, even with the wood healing me from afar. I should have known it sooner, ever since I smelled his blood, metallic and pungent. Brother Ephraim hadn’t been human. And he was not helping my wood. He was resisting it. He was trying to change Soulwood.
I didn’t know what to do about him, buried there, beneath the soil, but his presence didn’t mean my death in this moment, didn’t affect my healing in this moment, and that was the only thing that mattered right now. Except . . . I remembered Daddy. Wondered if he was dead. If I could have saved him the same way I saved myself. And wondered if he would have shunned me as a witch if I had. I let sleep take me.
* * *
When I woke it was to feel Occam holding my forearm. I knew it was him by the sound of his purring breath. Without opening my eyes, I could tell that he was curled around me protectively. His body was heated as if with a fever, and shivers ran through his flesh, ripples of muscle spasms. He might have been about to shift into his leopard when I last remembered him. The spasms suggested that he was in a great deal of pain.
On my other side, curled firmly against me, but not quite so warm, was Tandy. His worry leached into me; I could feel his disquiet as if I were an empath myself. I had claimed Tandy just as I had claimed Paka. Both were probably huge mistakes.
My lips parted and I exhaled. Occam noticed the change in me and raised his head, the movement rustling the metallic sheet over me. “Nell?”
Tandy sat up as well, and I could feel him staring at my face.
“Yes,” I breathed, the sibilant barely there. “I’ll live.” I managed another breath and felt just a hint stronger. “I think. How’s Daddy?”
“Alive,” Tandy said. “A woman named Carmel went with him to the hospital with a GSW—gunshot wound—to the middle of his torso and another to his thigh. There’s some fear the round nicked what they called his descending aorta, which I understand is a big artery.”
“Oh. That isn’t good. Daddy hates hospitals. Why are you curled around me, Tandy?”
“You are the only stable place here. There is too much fear and anger and emotion except for right here, next to you.”
“Ah,” I said. “This tree is comforting. Always has been.”
“It isn’t the tree,” Tandy said, his fingers wrapping over my bound ones. “It’s you.”
“Nell, sugar,” Occam said gently. “You have . . . roots growing into your body.”
He paused as if waiting for me to say something, but what could I say? I did have roots growing into me. I opened my eyes and looked down. Tandy lifted the sheet so I could see my exposed belly, roots climbing inside, just the way they climbed into cracks of rock when seeking water. They were over my arms and twined around my hands and fingers. And up my legs, sealing me to the ground. Claiming me.
“You told me to leave them alone,” Occam said, his voice a Texan cat growl, “so I did, but them things are getting bigger and stronger. Soon it might be impossible to cut you free without carving out something important, like your liver or lungs or kidneys.” I still didn’t reply and he went on, his voice deepening as if this was the difficult part. “Rick wanted to cut you free. I made him go away.”
“Thank you.”
“He was kinda ornery about it all.”
I smiled for real and said, “He’s a mite prickly about being told how to run things, isn’t he?”
“He’s the senior agent. It’s possible that I shouldn’t have bitten him when he came at you with a knife.”
I had a feeling that laughter would hurt rather badly, and so I just let my smile widen. “Probably not.”
“Hindsight and all that,” Occam said. When I didn’t respond, he asked, “When do you want to be cut free, Nell, sugar?”
I’d been evaluating my body while we talked and I said, “I think I’m as healed as I can get.” Occam slid his hand from me and I heard him draw a knife from somewhere. I opened my eyes to see him take a root in his free hand and bend over me. “Be careful,” I said. “The tree won’t like it when you cut its roots. It’s got opinions now and I think it wants to keep me here, so watch out. It might try to hurt you.”
He paused. “A tree. With opinions.” He sounded disconcerted.
“Trees are very opinionated,” I said, “mostly about rain and sunlight and fire, as you might expect, but also about other things, like sharp blades cutting into them.”
“A tree,” he repeated, the Texan twang coming out strong. “With opinions.”
Letting the smile into my voice, I said, “You turn into a jungle cat on the full moon, and other times too. Who are you to judge?”
After a moment he said, “True.”
From one side, I heard Rick walk up, his feet so silent that only the vibrations through the rootlets told me he was close. From above us he asked, “You got a quote for this one?”
I settled on, “‘All things must come to the soul through its roots, from where it’s planted.’ Teresa of Avila said that, or something like it. And right now I’m planted by this tree.”
“What are you?” Rick asked in his cop voice.
I looked up to see him holding his psy-meter, measuring my psychometric energy. “I have no idea. But after today, I’m fairly certain I’m not human. I’m also not a tree. Beyond that I don’t know. What do I read?” I asked, oddly curious.
“In the FBI office you read high in the human range, but still human. Right now, you aren’t reading at all. I can’t pick you up over Occam.”
“Well. Right now I’m stuck inside a tree and it inside of me. Check it again when we get back to my woods.” I thought I sounded very reasonable, but Occam frowned. “What?” I asked.
“Nothing. Cutting now. And watching out for roots that fight back.”
Tandy said, “I’ll grab them if the tree tries to trap you.”
“Did SWAT or the FBI see the roots in me?” I asked.
“No,” Rick said shortly. “Neither did your church people, though they can be demanding, especially your mother. We take care of our own.”
My smile softened and I felt Occam cutting into the roots, a distant awareness that wasn’t pain, but wasn’t pleasure either. I said, “Thank you. But they aren’t my church people. My family is still my family, yes, and maybe more so than I thought, but I don’t have church people. They don’t let the inhuman worship in their church.”
“Nonhuman,” Occam said, slicing through a rootlet that roiled and snaked in his hand, fighting his blade. “Not inhuman. Different things entirely. I’m not human either, but I’m not inhuman in any way.”
“Whatever,” I said, borrowing a phrase from JoJo.
“Nell?” I made a mmm sound and Occam said, “This root? It’s bleeding.”
My eyes had closed and I forced them open again. Occam had cut open my shirts, revealing my midriff and abdomen, which was mostly healed over, with roots growing inside me, three of them, each nearly an inch in diameter. Occam’s blade was poised over the cut root, which was moving, snakelike, severed about six inches from the ground and right at my skin. The woody root was bleeding. Interesting. Had my blood mutated the tree? I kept that thought to myself. “Better hurry,” I said. “It’s a mite antsy.”
“Ouch,” Occam said. “It bit me!”
Self-protecting trees? Carnivorous trees? Now, wouldn’t that be something to see. I felt a tugging on my flesh as Occam cut, but no pain, which I figured meant good things, like the tree hadn’t taken over my central nervous system or my brain. But I had a feeling that the tree had probably changed me as much as I had changed it. Mutations were likely mutual. I felt him sawing through the wood of a second root. “Ow!” I said, my eyes popping back open.
“Sorry,” Occam said. The root had twisted my skin when it popped free, leaving a red abrasion. Dull red blood, thick as sap, gathered into a droplet on the root’s cut end. Tandy reached out, grabbing the severed roots.
The empath hissed. “The tree is angry. It is thinking about growing thorns.”
“Self-protective tree,” I said speaking my earlier thought. “Thorns exist in the plant world, and the tree knows this.” I wondered aloud if the tree would send out rootlets and roots and stems, reaching through soil and air, searching for something with thorns, to study or copy. And I wondered if the oak could steal the DNA pattern from thorns and incorporate them into its own DNA. Some plants could do that. But I kept all that silent until I had a chance to study DNA and RNA so I could sound, and be, intelligent and well-read on the subject. That is, if I talked about it at all.
Occam’s blade severed the last root in my belly; this time the sting was much sharper, as if he had cut me, and I hissed with pain. I looked again and the blood from the tree root was thicker and darker. Inside me, deep in my belly, I felt something stirring, drawing tight. “I think . . .” I paused, paying attention to the movement inside me. “I think you better cut my body free fast.”
“Yes,” Tandy said, urgency in his tone. “Fast!”
Occam didn’t question, but repositioned Tandy’s hands on a root and applied his were-strength to the wood. Three rootlets severed fast but the blade nicked my skin. I hissed as my blood landed in a wide microsplatter. The ground beneath me sucked the blood down and a tiny vibration, a faint tremor, began in the soil. Occam’s blade slicked through the smaller roots trapping my fingers and encircling my legs. I raised them, bending my knees, keeping my flesh off the ground. The blade sawed through the larger roots at my hips and shoulders, tree blood welling at each cut.
Occam attacked the final, midsized rootlets, which were wrapped around my wrists. They popped and the pain shocked through me, the root’s red blood splattering my face, throat, and belly. “Move me,” I said. “Move me now!”
Occam slid his arms around my back and under my knees and lifted me. Rootlets reached up from the earth, stretching and tearing, fresh rootlets ripping from my ankles and wrists and shredding my clothes as Occam jerked me two steps away from the oak.
“Move, move, move!” I said. “Out from the drip line.” I pointed and Occam started to take a step. Roots tore from the earth as he lifted his foot, where the oak had already wrapped around his feet. He whirled from the tree with cat grace, a slinking, supple, willowy step, almost dancing, or like a cat leaping for prey. Carrying me. I remembered being carried as a child, once or twice, until little’uns smaller than I was took my place.
His arms tightened around me as he landed. I was gasping, breath too fast, but I felt warm. Safe. Occam’s body was warm, his arms muscled, keeping me . . . safe. Such an odd, rare feeling, safety. And not one I could let myself get used to. I twisted my head to see that Tandy was with us, safe as well. His skin was white, the Lichtenberg figures bright red on his skin, his face full of tension and fear. But he tucked the metallic sheet around me, hiding me, hiding my blood.
Occam carried me across the compound, which was full of police and ambulances and crime scene vehicles, to Unit Eighteen’s van. He set me on the long middle bench seat, closed the door, and went around to the other side. He and Tandy climbed in. “We got two choices, sugar. I can take you home,” he said, “Tandy and me. Or you can put on Paka’s after-shift clothes and we can go back to work. Up to you. But you need to know there could be repercussions for you going into the compound against orders.”
“I’ll stay. I left my basket in the church, with my laptop inside.”
“I’ll notify Rick,” Occam said as he tossed a gobag over the seat. “Get changed. I got me a ton of texts and e-mails while you were healing to go through.” He climbed out of the van and shut the doors, giving me privacy, pulling his cell. While he talked, I zipped open the gobag. The catty scent of Paka met my nose. Occam didn’t look my way, guarding the van. Like a cat, I thought, who sits in the window, knowing you are looking at him, and ignoring you, aware of your scrutiny, but not reacting to it. Which eased my embarrassment as I stripped off my shredded clothing.
Sunlight turned Occam’s lightly tanned skin a pale gold, and made his amber-hazel eyes glow. He was wearing loose cotton pants and a stretchy T-shirt, the clothing dark blue with the words PsyLED stenciled on the shirt in white. And he was barefooted again, toes pawing the ground, the way a cat might milk the earth.
I realized he was wearing his gobag clothing. He had been in leopard form at some point this morning and had probably changed from his leopard form to his human one when he came to save me. That was why he eyes had glowed. I wondered, briefly, where he had been when the shooting started, how much ground he had covered, and how fast he had shifted and then dressed, to get to me so quickly. He was tall, all muscle and bone, long-limbed and lean, with long fingers and slender hands, like a guitar player or a pianist. His blondish hair was unevenly cut and ragged, hanging to his collarbones in places, longer now, perhaps a result of shifting several times in the last few days.
Tandy stood on the other side of the van, facing outward and he waved off a woman in an FBI jacket when she came too near. I felt terribly exposed to be changing in the van, so I slid to the floor, where I stripped off my skirt and pulled the elastic-waist sweatpants on over my blood-crusted undies. I couldn’t make myself go without and there were no panties in the gobag, not that I felt I could wear another woman’s undies anyway.
When I was dressed, the unfamiliar feeling of sweatpants on my legs, and my shoes back on my feet, I tapped on the door. Occam and Tandy opened them at the same moment and slid in. “Good timing,” Occam said. “We’re heading to the Stubbins farm through the old farm road. Rick says the FBI is there already, and he thinks one of churchmen ran off that way. Buckle up, Nell, sugar.”
Occam drove across the compound, allowing for the ruts and the invisible bumps and holes hidden by weeds and grasses. He hit a particularly deep rut and we all bounced. When we settled, he looked back over his shoulder. “Sugar, you mighta walked into a firestorm of trouble back at the compound, but according to the texts that bombed my cell while you were healing, you just went from problem child to asset of the hour, the week, and the month. The FBI is drooling over what they’ve found since they responded to Rick’s ‘code ninety-nine and shots fired’ alert. They got a gold mine at Jackson Jr.’s house and now a ton more at the Stubbins farm. And they didn’t even have to get that subpoena.”
I didn’t know what a code ninety-nine was, but I understood the rest. “Are they happy enough that I won’t get fired as a consultant for PsyLED?”
“I doubt anyone will even mention that possibility,” Tandy said, a smile in his words.
Unexpected relief flooded through me. I nodded and pressed a hand to my middle, staring out at the little-used, narrow roadway, never paved, and with saplings grown in close. Beneath my hand, the rooty feeling of my belly seemed softer, as if things were settling.
Occam’s cell rang, a quiet vibration with tinkling bells. He answered with, “Occam. What do you have, LaFleur?” Occam listened a long time before he said, “Understood. I’ll tell her.” He ended the call and looked my way. “Your daddy is out of surgery, Nell. He’s expected to make it.”
I closed my burning eyes. “That’s good. Him and me—he and I—have a lot of things to catch up on. But Rick had a lot more to say, didn’t he?”
“Yes. But that can wait until we get a gander at the Stubbins farm. Rick wants us on-site.”
The van rolled out of the trees. The Stubbins house was set in a flat area about halfway down a slope, between two hills, with the gully where the hills met about a hundred fifty feet from the front door. A trickle of water ran through it, but the topography of the land suggested that the gully would carry a lot of runoff in big rains. The area around the house was hill mud, brown and grayish, with a goodly rock content. Not as good for farming as Soulwood, but okay for cattle. The extralong cattle trailer behind the house and the fences that cordoned off pastures to the south and west said it had been used for that purpose. The absent smell of cow manure said it had been a while. The place was a proverbial anthill of activity.
There were FBI vehicles, an ambulance, sheriff cars, two crime scene vans, and, in the distance, news vans behind a barricade. There were also ruts in the grass of the house’s yard where eighteen-wheeler-sized trucks had been parked, and then had recently churned up the lawn, driving away.
There was a large group of men and women in white suits at the cattle trailer, mud to their ankles. And damp from a rain that hadn’t fallen in the compound. Occam rolled down his window and tilted his head, as if listening to the wind. Tandy held still, watching the werecat, and I watched them both. When I couldn’t stand it any longer, I asked, “What’s over there?”
“Body,” Occam said. “The feds are all over it like white on rice. According to what I’m overhearing, the body ties the Stubbinses to HST.” He slanted a look at me and tapped the side of his head, sending his blondish hair swinging. “Cat ears. And they got a boy over there.” He pointed to a small group of men near a car. A boy’s familiar head was about chest high on them. The boy who had led the attack on my house. Occam tilted his head at a slightly different angle, listening. “He claims . . . he’s Jael Stubbins, son of Nahum Stubbins. His daddy lost his job recently and they came back to stay on the family farm awhile.”
Occam listened and I stayed so quiet I scarcely breathed. Nahum Stubbins had left the church, according to the Nicholson women. Had Nahum really lost his job or were these more backsliders staying at the Stubbins farm? Too much coincidence.
After a bit he said, “The boy was at the church when the shooting started and he hid under the floor of a house. When he got here, the place was deserted. His daddy and uncle and two of the mamas are gone. He’s been abandoned. He’s sniffling, crying.”
He turned his head, picking up parts of conversations from different parts of the grounds. I made a note to never whisper secrets in his presence, and decided that my escape from my own house this morning had been sheer luck. A bit later, Occam said, “Jael’s daddy and his uncle have been having company, what the older men call townies.
“The feds over there”—he pointed to a group standing on the front porch of the house—“found HST manifestos. We now have a clear link between the church, or at least a faction, and HST.”
That meant that the FBI would be all over the church grounds. I didn’t know whether be happy about that or miserable at the trouble it would eventually cause my daddy.
Another car pulled up and Rick got out, walking with a long-legged stride to the porch. The men there walked down the steps and away, not speaking. Ignoring Rick. Who was PsyLED and a were-leopard. It was a clear indication of the rampant prejudice in the state’s law enforcement agencies, and it had to hurt. But Rick walked through them and inside as if he didn’t notice.
Occam and Tandy got out of the van. I followed much more slowly. It had grown cold this morning, with a wind blowing, and low, wet clouds scudding across the hilltops. I had only a thin layer of clothing, no coat or sweater. Though the trees were still mostly green, colorful leaves swirled in the breeze and danced before me in loose spirals. I crossed my arms and followed the men across the rutted, muddy road and up the stairs.
Inside it was just as cold. The door closed behind us, cutting off the wind, which made me feel warmer, but inside, the smell of urine was horrible. Ammoniac, astringent, harsh, an eye-burning stench. I turned in a circle to see why. There were traces of urine running down the walls . . . everywhere. Someone had peed on the walls.
A white-clad crime scene tech looked up at me and laughed, not unkindly. She was wearing goggles and a face mask. “I know, right?” she said. “Men.”
“Watch the sexism, Sharon,” Rick said, semiteasing, his face as relaxed as if the ostracism on the front porch hadn’t happened. But she was right. The smell was horrible. I covered my nose and breathed through the cracks between my fingers.
Rick said to Occam, “Same one?”
“I think so. What does Paka say?”
“Same one,” Rick said. Neither one explained the exchange to me.
The house was a shambles. A hundred-year-old handmade wooden table lay on its side. Hand-turned spindle chairs were broken everywhere. Shattered pottery appeared to have been swept or kicked into the corners, spoiled food still on some surfaces. Pizza boxes and beer cans had been stacked and tossed. Chairs had been destroyed. The couch and a recliner looked like someone had slashed them with a knife, and stuffing erupted like a fluffy volcano.
Crime scene techs were working in every room. An older tech barked, “Stay between the markers. The walkway has been worked up already. The rest of this place is a disaster.” I nodded in silent agreement and stepped into the walkway through the mess, the wood floor clean and marked with what looked like little pink plastic triangles. Yellow triangles, each of them numbered, were in other places. I figured the yellow ones were for evidence, the pink ones were for directions.
Holding my wrist against my nose, I took the pink-marked path. In the first-floor bedroom were more yellow markers. Books and papers were on the floor, files were strewn across the bare mattress. Rick stood in the room, alone, his face lined and drawn, staring at the file in his hands. From where I stood I could read the title stenciled on the front: PARANORMALS WITHIN OUR BORDERS. Beneath that, in larger print, were the words CIA: CLASSIFIED, and below that were the initials FYEO, which I didn’t understand.
Tandy was standing close to me, and I was so cold that I could feel his body heat across the minuscule space. I met his reddish-brown gaze, looked to the file and back with a question on my face. Tandy leaned close and whispered, “A classified file from the Central Intelligence Agency marked ‘For Your Eyes Only.’”
I thought about that and little pieces came together in my mind with almost audible clicks. This was the file with a list of all registered paranormals, which HST had been said to possess, but it hadn’t been created by them. The data had been amassed by a government or law enforcement group—or better yet, by one or two researchers in such a group—and sent to one government person. That couldn’t be good. That spoke of factions and maybe of one high-up individual using resources to a personal, paranormal-hating end. And then giving the list to the HST . . .
A second puzzle piece slid into place that suggested PsyLED had been provided with incomplete information into the FBI’s abduction investigation of the human girls, for some purpose other than case jurisdiction, command structure, and decisions. Maybe because of this file, which proved the government had been tracking paranormals, and they didn’t want the paranormal cops in PsyLED to know about it.
I remembered the ostracism on the porch and nodded my understanding.
“LaFleur,” someone shouted from the front. “Where the hell are you?”
Rick looked up and handed me the file. “Under your shirt. Quick.”
I tucked the file under my shirt, the icy papers cold on my skin. I wrapped my arms around myself and Tandy seemed to notice for the first time that I was underdressed. He pulled off his coat and hung it on my shoulders. I should have protested, but I had begun to shiver and the coat was marvelously warm.
To Tandy and Occam, Rick murmured, “See what else you can find that pertains to paranormals. Make it fast and get it out of here.” To me he added, “You’re our mule. Don’t let anyone see.”
I didn’t know what was happening, but I didn’t like this. Rick was hiding things from the FBI officers and the crime scene techs. Secrets always got me in trouble. But Rick walked away, leaving us in the bedroom surrounded by stacks of papers. Occam and Tandy moved fast, as if speed-reading everything and making decisions faster than light. Moments later, Occam handed me two more files and a paperback book titled, How to Kill Paranormals. I stuffed them up my shirt with the other file, and looked like I had gained twenty pounds, all in my belly.
Tandy used his cell phone to take photographs of dozens of other papers, but even I could tell that they were not near finished when Rick called them to head back to the van. We left behind important papers, four handguns, two assault rifles that Occam called Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifles, and the thousand rounds of nine- and ten-millimeter ammo he found under a floorboard in the closet, all boxed up. He had also found a large box of .223 Remington rounds and a box of 5.56 NATO rounds. Lots of weapons, lots of ammunition, and lots and lots of papers.
Holding the papers against my skin, and my arms crossed against the cold, I wandered back through the pink trail, looking lost and as innocent as I could manage. As we left the house, we passed several suited agents, all with muddy shoes and looks of disgust on their faces at the stench. It was a different and better-dressed group from the one that had shunned Rick, and I expected at any moment to be stopped and searched, but it didn’t happen. We ended up outside in the icy air, which smelled wonderfully sweet and fresh, and then in the van, the van engine running and the heater on high. I stuck my booted feet into the heater blast and willed my toes warmer, but it seemed they weren’t interested in obeying.
Rick took the top secret file and Tandy and Occam each took one of the others. I was left with the paperback book. What the title lacked in imagination, the book itself made up for in barbarity and cruelty. It was poorly spelled, improperly punctuated, and full of grisly descriptions of death, with accompanying illustrations drawn by an untrained hand. There were drawings of witches being burned at the stake, drowned, and skinned alive. There were pictures of werewolves being shot with silver, doused with caustic acid, and skinned alive. Skinning alive was the method of choice for many other forms of paranormal beings, most of which were mythical. The author was singularly unimaginative and with a bloody bent. I closed the book and when Rick stepped out of the van to talk to another federal agent, I asked, “Same one what?” Occam looked up, clearly confused, and I said, “When we went in the house, Rick, the werecat, asked you, the werecat, if it was the same one. And you said yes, you think so, and then asked Rick if Paka, also a werecat, thought so too. Ergo dipso, you smelled something humans can’t. What did you smell?”
Occam gave me a half smile. “Do you mean ‘Ergo, ipso facto?’”
I gave him a hard look back. “Are you over being mad at me?”
“I don’t know, sugar. You over getting shot and growing roots in your belly? Because that nearly did me in.”
Which sounded like a Texan way of saying he had been scared for me. Which was nice. No one was ever scared for me. I offered a half smile back to him. “I’ll do my best to not get shot. Since I don’t know what I am, I can’t promise I won’t grow roots. And yes, I meant ergo, ipso facto.”
He said, “Yes. Smell. The dog that peed all over that house was the same one we smelled at the Claytons’. We smelled it on the compound today too. And our Nellie has a saying about coincidence and enemy action that seems to have become a rule in Unit Eighteen.”
I ducked my head in pleasure at that one. Occam went on. “The feds’ K-nine dog indicated that the first two kidnapped girls were at the Stubbins farm for a while. They found evidence that Girl One died there. Girl Two was kept there too. But not our girl. Not Girl Three, Mira Clayton. Yet the dog that was at Mira Clayton’s house was here and kept inside long enough to mark the walls. A lot.”
Which meant that somehow, Mira Clayton’s kidnapping had been part of the same plan as the others, and had been carried out by the same people. Or a faction of the same people. I was mighty tired of thinking about factions and their possible convoluted plans.
“Could it be a werewolf?” Tandy asked.
“Not a were. Just a big, stinking dog that likes to mark its territory. The abductions are all related somehow, but we don’t know how or why.”
“So all the kidnappings are related to HST?” I asked.
“Related to, yes. And related to some members of the church, but we don’t know the participants.”
“Factions,” I said. “It has to be factions of both.”
Rick climbed back into the van and said, “We’ve been kicked out of this part of the investigation. We’re picking up JoJo and T. Laine and going for lunch. We need a break and we’re going to Sweet P’s, where Girl Four was taken. We never checked out that location, and we need to see what it smells like.”