Blood of the Earth (3 page)

“Not exactly the same, though,” Rick said, his weapon aimed steadily at me, even though I’d put down my shotgun. “I was infected when I was bitten. She was born this way.”

“Why do you tell our secrets?” Paka asked, not as if in disagreement, but as if she was mildly curious while being bored.

“Because we need her help,” Rick said. “We need to know about the Human Speakers of Truth and any possible connection to the church. Nell’s the only one who might be willing to talk to me. To us,” he added, including his mate.

“Who are the Human Speakers of Truth?” I asked, letting the power and safety of the woods wrap around me like crawling snakes, like vines, growing in place. All I needed was one drop of his blood and I could take his life. It was my best protection; it was my magic and the magic of my land. His blood on my land, on Soulwood, put his life into my hands. “What do you want to know? The federal and state raid on the compound told most folks all there was to know about the church.”

“Do you still have family ties to God’s Cloud?” Rick asked, again not answering my question. It was probably a police tactic, but it set my teeth on edge. “Someone you could go to, or talk to, safely, but not get into more trouble with the people who killed your dogs?”

“I have family there,” I said, using the time to gather as much of the woods’ energy as I could. “We run into one another from time to time. Farmers’ market. Yard sales. Why you asking?” I said, my tone challenging, deliberately accented by years in the church.

“The FBI, state police, and PsyLED have reason to believe that a group calling themselves the Human Speakers of Truth, on the run from the authorities, stopped in Knoxville. But HST disappeared. They don’t have a home base here, so they may have joined forces with a local group. We want to rule out that the HST allied with God’s Cloud of Glory Church.”

“Never heard of HST,” I said.

“They’re a homegrown terrorist, anti-anyone nonhuman, militant group,” Rick said, “investigated by PsyLED for years. Our unit’s been tracking their financial trail, but it went cold five days ago here in Knoxville.”

“What kind of reason?” I asked. When he looked confused I said, “You said you had
reason to believe
that Human Speakers of Truth may have holed up in Knoxville. What kind of reason?”

“HST needed a place to regroup after the arrests of three high-ranking members and the freezing of the group’s financial accounts. We tracked them here and then lost the trail.

“God’s Cloud of Glory Church—your old cult—was in trouble with the Tennessee child services department, after the state arrested some of their leaders and placed the children in foster care. Both groups are ultra–right wing paranormal-haters, and both are in trouble with the law and financially. It makes sense for them to join up, but we can’t find anything electronically that supports that possibility.”

“Guesswork,” I said, but I couldn’t help my small smile. I’d helped damage the church. Me losing my peaceful life had meant getting one hundred thirty-eight children, some of them sexually abused, out of the clutches of God’s Cloud. I had helped, even if only passively, by letting the team have access to the church’s compound through my property. But I knew a fishing expedition when I heard it. There was no evidence in Rick’s statements, just supposition and wishful thinking.

Rick LaFleur acknowledged my smile with a tight one of his own. “HST stopped here, we know that, so it’s possible that they might have joined forces with the church, even if just temporarily. And if that’s true, then HST and God’s Cloud merging was a match made in, well, not heaven. Maybe in the boardroom.”

“Huntin’,” I said. “The menfolk would have made a deal with rifles or shotguns and dead meat for the dinner table.”

Something in my tone made Rick holster his gun. I tapped off the energies from the woods, holding the gathered power under my palms, flat against the table. The wood of the table had been cut from my forest, over a hundred years ago. I could use it. “So, yes. I got family there. Some will still speak to me at market. If I choose to talk to them.”

Watching my posture, Rick said, “Can you ask your family a few questions? For instance, if any new people have been admitted onto the compound?”

“That’s it?” I asked. “Information?”

“That’s one reason why we came up here today,” Rick said.

There was a lot of wiggle room in his answer, but there was also no threat. This was a negotiation.

Realizing that, I started to let the power I had gathered trickle back through the table, into the floor, and into the ground beneath the house. I took a slow breath. “Jane Yellowrock asked for help to save a captured vampire, and in return, she got the children out of there. My life is in danger because
of her, but, if I’m honest, I think it was a fair trade. And she paid me. You ask for help with nothing in return. Why would I be so stupid?”

“Because helping us might make the church leave you alone. For good,” Rick said.

“I can’t see how that might even be possible.” But it sounded like heaven. They had done research on me, enough to know what buttons to push to make me do what they wanted.

“You could come to work with PsyLED, on a consultant basis.”

And there it was, the carrot Jane Yellowrock had suggested so long ago. A way to be safe, finally and completely, from the church, because they might walk away if I worked for law enforcement, especially one of the shadow organizations like PsyLED. I would have a different lifestyle, a different place to live . . . assuming I could leave the land, which was in doubt, but wasn’t something I could say to strangers. To anyone, for that matter. I set a thoughtful expression on my face, as if their offer was okay, but not all that great. “I’ll consider talking to my family.” I stood straight and rubbed my palms on my thighs. “I’ll think about consulting. If the money’s good enough. For now, though, you gotta go.”

Without replying, my guests watched as I shook open a used plastic grocery bag, filled it with late fall squash, a small plastic baggie of an herbal air-freshener mixture that contained catnip, and a bottle of local honey. I put it on the table between them. “Twenty-five bucks. Cash. And make sure the bag is visible when you go to your car. The men watching my place need to see you with it. If they stand in the road as you leave, you have two choices: run through them, which I recommend, or stop. If you run through them, be prepared to be shot at and for the local law to do next to nothing. If you stop, don’t let them know you’re a cop. Just act like honeymooners and tell them you bought my Blue Pill Herbal Tea and Aromatherapy.”

“Blue pill?” Rick asked.

“Some men need a little help in the bedroom. They come to me for my herbal Blue Pill Blend.”

He frowned. Paka smiled. I said, “Git.”

“Thank you for your time.” Rick placed a small stack of five-dollar bills on the side table, beside his nearly full mug.
He touched Paka’s shoulder and she stood, still holding my cats. The cop moved to the door without ever quite turning his back to me. He paused at the small table beside the door, one laden with library books and DVDs. He set a business card on top. “I know you don’t have a cell signal here or a landline phone, but if you need me and can get to one, call the number on that card. I’ll get here as quick as I can. Tomorrow is Tuesday, and the farmers’ market is going all week in honor of the Brewer’s Jam fall festival.” When I looked surprised that he knew that, he added, “We do our homework. In case you decide to help us, call when you get to town. We can be at Market Square early in the day. We’ll find you.”

They’d find me. Yeah. That was plain. No matter what I did or where I went, someone would find me. “Git,” I said again, this time with a little heat, letting the power of the land writhe around my hands and into my flesh.

Paka scented the air with her lips drawn back, sucking air over her tongue, then set my cats on the floor just inside the door and followed her mate out, closing the door behind her. I grabbed up the gun and raced to the window, watching them as they entered the car, Rick carrying the bag prominently and placing it on the floor of the backseat. The small catlike creature that had run around in the car was gone from the dash. The car made a three-point turn and wheeled sedately down the drive for the road.

As I watched, Jezzie walked up to me and sat, her front feet together, posing as only a house cat can, and mewled. I bent down hesitantly and picked her up. Jezzie wasn’t fond of people, but this time, she snuggled against me, purring, and scrubbed her head on my chest. Cello walked up and wound her body around my feet, and she had never done that before.

Paka had done this.

I glowered at the sight of the retreating rental car. I hadn’t given them my little blue pill mixture, but on cats, the catnip mixture might work the same way. If so, Rick would probably have a fair number of scratches on him by morning and Paka would be smiling and purring. She looked like the kind of female who liked a lot of sex a lot of the time. Some women did, not that I ever understood that sentiment. It was mean of me to give them my catnip blend, and had I known that Paka
was mesmerizing and taming my cats for me, I might not have. But at the time, I hadn’t been able to help myself. It had seemed the least they deserved for the trouble that would follow their visit.

I stayed at the window, petting Jezzie, watching, waiting. Maybe ten minutes later, I saw a form move down the drive, keeping to the shadows. Two others followed it. The churchmen were here, and they were sneaking in along the east side of the property, not coming openly down the drive, which meant nothing good. The only good thing was that there weren’t enough of them to surround the house, which meant they were likely here to threaten, not to burn me out. Looked like I’d get to use the energies I had been gathering from the forest after all. I set Jezzie on the floor and scooted the cats up the stairs, where they liked to watch birds from the dormer windows.

Moving methodically but with practiced speed, I grabbed up my guns, extra ammo, and raced to the front porch, down the steps of the house, to the ground, where my bare feet touched the earth. Power I had banked away flared up in me again, through me, out my palms, which itched and burned in reaction, my fingertips tingling. I ducked into the depression between the raised beds in the front yard, a series of narrow, twisting pathways about three feet deeper than the beds and marked with large flat stepping-stones. Places to stand and fire, paths to get away through if necessary. Paths made by the sweat of my brow and lots of broken blisters.

The walls of the beds had been made of poured concrete that came to my waist, and bloomed with medicinal plantings: spotted touch-me-not jewelweed, a dozen varieties of thyme, and some other medicinal herbs in pots that were pretty to look at, like lamb’s ears, mullein, monarda, and graybeard. They were all mixed in with the ornamental impatiens and geraniums—some in clay pots—for the pretty flowers. I placed the guns on the raised beds, except the shotgun. Holding it beneath one arm, I scratched my palms one at a time until they were red from the pressure of my nails, trying to ease the pain of drawing on the forest’s energies. That power still boiled inside me, hot and potent but useless at a distance and without blood. But if they bled onto my land, they were mine.

I rolled my shoulders and knelt, most of my body now protected by the concrete and the earth the beds contained, placing my back against the flagpole I’d had installed in the center of the four beds, all designed for just this purpose. The flagpole was little more than a twelve-foot-tall angle iron, and it had never flown a flag. Most people never consciously saw it.
I braced my body against the concrete and settled into a comfortable, if not relaxed, firing position, raising the loaded shotgun, and placing the back of the weapon against the flat side of the flagpole. It was an unorthodox method of firing a shotgun, but I wasn’t a large woman. I had fired an unbraced one once, and the recoil had tossed me back. I’d landed flat on my backside, with a shoulder so bruised I couldn’t use the arm for two weeks. I wanted to buy an automatic rifle, a weapon much better suited to a woman’s physiology than a shotgun, but they were expensive, and I wasn’t exactly rolling in money.

I dug my toes into the cool grass of early autumn, blew out my breath, just like John had taught me, and shouted, “Stop!” I waited a moment as the word echoed and faded away, surprised when my invaders actually came to a halt in the shadows of the woods.

“State your piece,” I yelled.

“Put down your weapons, woman!” one of the men called. They were too far away for me to make out their faces yet. But they’d be coming closer.

“Don’t make me hurt you!” I yelled.

No one answered. I couldn’t see them well enough to identify them, but I felt them through the dirt and placed the three men in a tight grouping about a hundred fifty feet away, in the cover of the forest. At least they hadn’t split up. That would make it more difficult to bring them down. They were too far away, however, for a shotgun to protect me, and plenty close enough to take me down with a rifle, providing they found a higher vantage point to fire down at me, hidden in the low paths between the beds. For the first time in my life, I wished I were a real witch, as the church had once accused, one who could bring up a protective circle or send fire shooting outta my eyes or whatever witches did to people who wanted to hurt them. Not having better options, I decided to goad them.

“You’uns come outta the woods,” I shouted in church-speak. No one moved. “Cowards! Afraid to face a woman on equal terms? Whatchu gonna do, huh? Shoot me from a distance like some kinda cheat? Maybe you think you’uns is all like some kinda assassins, but you ain’t! You’re chicken!” I shouted. “Each and every one of the churchmen is all chickens! Come out and face me, ya chickens!” Schoolyard taunts. They worked.

No one spoke loud enough for me to hear over the distance, but I felt them start slowly toward me, widening into a triangle shape, which was unfortunate, the man in the middle hanging back, the ones on the sides coming forward faster. The man in the center stumbled, the muscadine vine catching his foot. His hand touched the ground, bare skin to the earth, and I felt a tremble through the woods. A wrongness I couldn’t place, deeper and darker than the wrongness of Rick and Paka. But there was no time to dissect that feeling. He righted himself and moved faster. The trees around the clearing began to sough, branches swaying back and forth slowly, like a sensation of breathing, though I felt no wind in the lowered paths of the raised beds. The grass beneath me shifted and bent beneath my weight, scratchy between my toes.

Smoke from my woodstove swirled and twisted around the house, smelling of warmth and false reassurance. The man on my right moved out of the woods and I saw his face. It was Brother Ephraim, my personal nemesis, a small man, but one who carried a big hate. He thought all women were evil and needed to be put in their places, beneath his boot, starting at an early age. Brother Ephraim hated me for lots of reasons, all of them related to my disobedience. I hadn’t done as the church decreed and married the former leader, the old pervert better known as Colonel Ernest Jackson Sr., at age twelve. I hadn’t been punished for my infraction either. Instead I’d accepted a proposal from John and Leah Ingram, and gone off church land with them, away from the men who wanted to either marry me off to the highest bidder or burn me at the stake for being a witch—because even then I’d had magic enough for the churchmen to notice. My leaving had been as much a taunt as my words just now.

From that day over a decade ago, Brother Ephraim wanted me in the punishment house, my punishment left in his hands.

I’d die first.

The man on my left stepped out of the trees—Joshua Purdy. No surprise. Joshua had tried to court me starting the week John died, the moment it was discovered that he’d left me his land, instead of leaving it to the church, like any self-respecting churchman should have. The land gave me value in the church’s eyes, and Joshua was determined to claim me and the property both.

I’d die—second
. I almost smiled.

The man in the center walked free of the trees and the shadows starting to stretch with early evening. Ernest Jackson Jr., called “Jackie,” had become the head preacher and had taken over running the church. The colonel’s son and heir was the meanest human being on the face of the Earth. I’d looked up what men like him were called. Misogynists. Sociopaths. Maybe even psychopaths. Dangerous, no matter what they were called. If the others hated me, then Jackie hated me with a burning passion, like coals of hatred piled up and waiting for the smallest inflammatory incident to flame up and roar, destroying everything his path. The thoughts were too poetic for the little turd. The hatred was mutual. And Jackie had drunk vampire blood long ago, to help cure him of a childhood cancer. Drinking blood of the damned had to have contributed to changes in his brain. Likely made him crazier than he woulda been in the first place.

Maybe that was why his touch had spooked my woods. Hatred was like fire, capable of destroying everything in its path. Woods feared fire. Perhaps hate made them feel the same sort of terror.

Jackie’s hatred had gotten much worse when he discovered that I had allowed Jane Yellowrock’s raiding party through my property to church land, the night his daddy went missing. It made me partially responsible for the arrests and the removal of the children by the child protective services of the state of Tennessee and the loss of his daddy, both in his eyes and in my own. Jackie and I had history. I could only hope I’d live long enough to see Jackson Jr. dead and gone too.

Brother Ephraim raised his shotgun and fired, but not at me. Into the back of the house. Two shots, a few seconds to reload, and two more shots, interspersed with the sounds of breaking glass and things shattering. When the sound died away, I heard him laughing as he again reloaded.

From behind me, from along the southwest border of the property, down the mountain a goodly ways, I felt something race up the road and leap into my forest. A creature that didn’t belong here. Foreign. Wrong. The forest scratched the soles of my feet in warning. The grass shifted beneath me in alarm. The leaves thrashed overhead.
Wrongwrongwrong
thrummed
up through my flesh. But I had more immediate problems—the three men hiding in the shadows.

“Stop!” I shouted at my visitors. They halted, each man holding his ground and a shotgun, the weapon of choice for most hunters, for the churchmen, and for every redneck around here. “Say what you came to say,” I demanded, “and get off my land.”

“You’re dressed as a man, Sister Nell,” Brother Ephraim called over the intervening distance. He was wearing camo greens and blended into the woods just beyond. “We would counsel you in womanly ways,” he said.

Nothing new there.

“We’uns jist seen you entertain a strange man in your home without the presence of a family man to protect your honor and virtue,” Jackie said. “You are now sullied in the eyes of the church and must submit to punishment to bring about repentance and atonement. It’s time to return to the arms of the church and the family of your God.”

“You’re living alone, instead of as a helpmeet to a husband,” Brother Ephraim said. “Women are weak, and apt to fall into the clutches of evil men.”

Again, nothing new.

The new feeling of wrongness was growing closer, much closer, from the men before me and from the gorge behind me, from where the road curved around the property. My back tensed with apprehension, but there wasn’t time to look over my shoulder. There was no way I could turn from the churchmen. “There aren’t many men more evil than you, you perverts! Go away,” I shouted. “I don’t need to hurt you.”

The men laughed at my words, and Joshua Purdy stepped from the shadows. He shook his oily hair back from his narrow face and said, “I’ve offered for you, time and again, to make you an honest woman, Nell. Accept my offer in the manner it was intended. Don’t make us do something we might regret.”

“Regret this,” I muttered. I fired my shotgun. The boom was enough to damage my eardrums. The butt of the gun jerked down along the length of the flagpole, the barrel rising with the recoil. The men darted into cover as I steadied the weapon, tracking Jackie, who had ducked behind the vegetable garden not far from the side of the house and was crouching his way to
the house corner for better cover. I fired again, taking down a vine of second-crop string beans, in a haze of green leaf shrapnel. I was deaf from the concussion and my eyes were tearing from the blasts as I reloaded with practiced ease.

All I needed to do was wing them. Just a single scratch by a shot pellet or vine thorn or anything, and I’d have the injured one’s life force in my hands. But according to what I felt through my feet, no blood had dripped onto the soil of my land, onto the soil of Soulwood.

I blinked to clear my vision, catching sight of a flashing shadow, the shadow of wrongness that had been racing toward me, up the hill. From one side, a black shape leaped thirty feet and landed on the house roof, a leopard digging in with her claws as she raced over the roof ridge. A black leopard, dark as night, dappled with spots like moon shadows on the forest floor. Shock sliced through me as if I’d slipped a knife blade along my flesh.

An instant later I heard a shotgun blast and Brother Ephraim’s high-pitched wail. His blood splattered in a sharp arc across the trailing muscadine vine and the dirt at its roots. The hunger for that blood roared up like wildfire. The soil sucked at the blood, the attention of the forest awakening and turning to the fight, eager. A tremor like electricity zapped through the trees and through me. Brother Ephraim was mine
.
This was part of my magic, my singular powers. To take the life of anyone who bled onto my land. To feed that life to the woods.

Jackie, hiding behind the beans, swiveled his shotgun toward the commotion and Ephraim’s scream. He stood, raising his gun into firing position. I took careful aim at him, my finger on the trigger. Without firing, so fast I didn’t have time to blink, Jackie pivoted his body, shifted his aim to me, and fired.

But he aimed too low. I felt the shot as it peppered into the soil of the raised beds. A terra-cotta pot busted, shards flying. Two impatiens plants took balls of hot shot to the roots and died.

Which made me mad.

I steadied my gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun boomed, plant parts flew inside the garden. I reloaded. Fast. So
far as I could tell, I hadn’t done anything except make a salad. I tightened my finger on the trigger.

The blast shocked through my hands and arms as the gun slipped off the flagpole. The world tumbled around me, recoil sending me rolling across the yard. A fractured shiver came from the ground, one that felt heated, like fire burning the grass, ripped, like fescue torn and killed by sheep. This was fear and danger as grass understood them.

I saw Joshua Purdy as I rolled. Unbloodied. I tried to right myself. Tried to pull my shotgun into place. Tried to pull the power of the land around me and hit him with it, not even knowing if that might actually work. The last thing I saw was Joshua’s fist, coming at me.

*   *   *

I woke choking, drowning, shivering. I coughed and spluttered, pushing up from the water. I shook my head like a dog, my hair slinging water. By the feel of the earth beneath me, I knew where I was, about two hundred feet from the house, still on my land, where a spring cascaded from the rocks high behind the house, dropping to form a crick that ran most months out of the year. The water was still, unmoving in this natural bowl of earth, a shallow pool about a foot deep atop the clay depression. I rolled, dropping my backside into the chilled water, my knees up and arms locked, holding me in a sitting position. I coughed, expelling the water from my chest, the sound ragged before it finally eased. When I could breathe, I took in myself and my surroundings.