Blood of the Earth (12 page)

“I’m T. Laine.” The woman smiled, showing straight and even pearly whites, the kind that came with a high price tag and a youth living with a metal mouth, or very good genes. “I’m a moon witch with strong earth element affinities and enough unfinished university degrees to satisfy the most OCD person on the planet. But that’s what made me attractive to PsyLED.”

“I’m JoJo. I’m the token human in the group.” JoJo was African-American, maybe mixed with something else, like Korean, and she was pretty, with tip-tilted eyes and a small bow of a mouth, but she also had piercings everywhere: nose, eyebrows, lips, all over her ears. She had tattoos too, the small
tips of some picture peeking out of her shirt collar that must have gone down her chest. One side of her neck displayed the only tattoo that was completely visible—a small full moon with a spotted leopard stretched out on a limb, and below the leopard, a pool of water in which the leopard was reflected. It was delicate, fine work in oranges and reds and blues, with midnight outlining. I had never known anyone with tattoos, and all I could think was that they had to make it impossible to go undercover and not be recognized. Which was a very surprising thought for me.

“Tandy,” the other male said. He hadn’t taken his eyes from me the whole time they stood there, and both hands held on to the edge of the porch as if to keep him from falling or running off. “I’m an empath. I pick up on emotions and feelings and . . . I love your woods.” He smiled with his whole face and the skin at the corners of his glistening brownish-red eyes crinkled. His accent was different, and I didn’t know how to place it. American, but from somewhere else. “They whisper,” he said.

“They do,” I acknowledged, oddly pleased that someone besides me could tell that.

“Do they talk to you?” he asked, his peculiar eyes widening with delight and what might have been exhilaration, his hands clenching on the porch. “Is that how you know about the deer stand?”

“In a way. I guess,” I said.

Tandy had puzzling reddish tracings all over his exposed skin, as if a child had drawn on him with a red pen. There was no meaning to the erratic lines, which appeared at his hairline, as if they started on the top of his head, beneath his red-brown hair, and jerked their way down and across his body and limbs. They looked like lightning in scarlet miniature, traced across the very whitest flesh.

“Why were you watching my house?” I asked them.

“Rick said to keep an eye on you,” JoJo said. “Protection duty. We thought we were done until we heard a gunshot.”

I tilted my head, hearing the question in the words. “Vermin needing to be scared off.”

T. Laine said, “But we’re really still here because once we came close to your land to break the deer stand, we couldn’t keep Tandy away.”

“Your woods. They call to me,” Tandy said.

I gestured for them to come in. “I’m Nell. You’uns been out there all day. You thirsty? Hungry?”

They answered all at once with opposing responses. “No.” “Yes.” “I’m a vegetarian.” And the strangest response, from Occam, “I’d gladly pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

The other three laughed at the obscure statement. I frowned, not knowing why it was funny. “I don’t have hamburger. I have cubed venison steak thawing, bread in the oven, and a garden full of vegetables. Welcome to my home. Hospitality and safety while you’re here. As long as you act right,” I amended. “You act wrong and I’ll kick your butts to the curb.”

Subdued by my threat, but curiosity leaking off them like heat from a stove, they came in. Beneath my feet, the woods were aware and alert, but not upset or angry. From the trees came a low hum of what felt like contentment. I pulled my cardigan closer, uncertain at the changes taking place around me, the people—beings—with me. I closed the door on the dying day, and wished I had gotten more sleep.

*   *   *

They ate a mountain of food, much like John had when he was working the land, before he fell ill and had to be nursed like a baby. And they talked. And talked. And made jokes I didn’t understand. And referenced movies I hadn’t seen and books I hadn’t read. I might have felt as if I was being shunned in my own home, if they hadn’t worked so hard to include me, especially Tandy, whose reddish eyes followed me as I cooked and served and ate. It was a little unnerving having him around, knowing he was reading my emotions, but it wasn’t like I could kick him out. One did not kick out a guest after one had offered hospitality.

And the cats loved Occam as much as they had Paka. Seems they had a thing for werecats.

As soon as I politely could, I stood, began removing plates from the table, and started dishwater in the copper kitchen sink. As it scudded into the bottom, suds rising, I began washing and felt a jolt of shock when Occam joined me there. He picked up a dry rag and dried a plate. “What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Drying the dishes, ma’am,” he said simply.

“Why?” I demanded. “That’s women’s—” My words cut off abruptly.

“Women’s work, Miz Nell?” he asked mildly, his words Texan slow, his dark blond hair swinging forward to his jaw as he worked.

I looked down at my hands in the dishwater, suds up to my wrists.
Women’s work.
The foolishness the church taught.

As he dried another plate, Occam said, “I spent a lot of my life in unpleasant conditions, but back when I did have a mama, she taught me to clean our house, wash my own clothes, and cook, though I admit I’m a sad excuse for a chef. I can mop, sweep without stirring dust, and iron, if I don’t mind the risk of scorched britches. And I make a mean pot of chili, hot enough to burn out your gullet.”

“Totally,” JoJo said from the table. “If
gullet
means esophagus, stomach, all your small and large intestines, and the plumbing you empty that chili into. He served it to us at Spook School when we signed up for temporary duty with him. I thought we were going to have to call out the fire marshal.”

“I warned her,” Occam said, sliding me a crooked grin as he dried two forks, and a green glass so old the glass had bubbles in it, hand-blown early in the previous century. “She didn’t listen.”

He tilted the big stockpot I’d used to make enough pasta for them all and dried the inside, then the outside. “I even know how to work that mysterious device known as a vacuum cleaner.” He sent me that small, uneven grin again.

“I’ve seen men on films wash dishes,” I said reluctantly. But even when Leah was dying and I was so busy caring for her, John hadn’t washed dishes or cooked or done any of a hundred chores that needed doing with a sick woman in the house. He’d never done a lick of women’s work in his life.

“Culture shock,” Tandy said from behind me.

Occam said, “I had it when I got here from Texas. I’d spent twenty years in a cage there, a spectacle in a traveling carnival.”

“Twenty years?” I asked as shock spiked through me. I shot a look at Occam’s face to see if that was some kind of horrible joke, but he nodded in that slow, easy way of his.

“From the time I was ten until I was thirty,” Occam said,
though he didn’t look a day over twenty. Maybe that seeming youth was part of being a werecat.

“You were kept in a
cage
?” I asked. “Like you were some kind of
animal
?” My next thought that the women in God’s Cloud were kept like animals too.

“I
am
an animal,” he said softly, “by most of humanity’s definition.”

“I’ve never been too impressed with humanity’s ability to use its noggin, when it’s so much easier to hate for no good reason. You are
not
an animal,” I said. But Occam just sent me that uneven grin and dried the next plate I handed him. I wasn’t sure what to do with a man who thought less of himself instead of more, and one who didn’t argue with me, to boot. And who washed dishes.

I let my eyes slide to Tandy’s face and the reddish lines that marked him, trailing down his cheeks and jaw and chin, dividing and redividing like the veins in a leaf, feathering along his neck into his collar. The empath looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I figured he was picking up my agitation. He had to be a walking, talking lie detector. I’d have to be careful what I thought and felt around him, which I didn’t like at all. I wasn’t good at playing games.

Occam, on the other hand, radiated calm, despite the direction of our conversation, placid as a cat sitting in the window staring out at the day.

“What’s your story?” I asked Tandy. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

His face lit with delight at my question, as if most people stared without asking, and being asked was a sort of a compliment. “Permanent Lichtenberg figures—broken capillaries after being struck by lightning. Three times in one summer.”

“Three times.”

“I’m serious. Three times. No one could explain it.” When I didn’t reply he said, “Statistically the chance of being struck by lightning is one in three thousand, but realistically, it’s much more like one in thirty or fifty thousand people are ever struck by lightning. That’s my number, not a statistician’s number, but it seems to fit.” He pointed to the plate I was rinsing. “You missed some spinach there. But there are people
who get struck more than once,” he said as I rewashed the plate. “There’s a YouTube video of a guy getting struck three times in a row, but I think it’s fake. It takes a long time to get over being struck. You don’t just get up and walk away. But there is the case of a man in Colombia who was struck four times, and a man in North Carolina who was struck three times, like me. Roy Sullivan was struck seven times over the course of his life. None of them became empaths. Being struck by lightning.” Tandy looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “Worst superpower ever.”

I giggled. It came out as a squeak, air bubbling through my lips, making them flap. My eyes went wide and Occam laughed with me, his eyes lighting up. Tandy stopped moving. He didn’t lift his eyes back to me. He just stood there, staring down. “You don’t laugh,” he said after a too-long moment. “Ever. You can actually remember the last time you laughed. It was months ago. And before that when you watched a movie.”

“Stop that,” I said, my tone sharp. “Get outta my head.”

“I’m not in your head,” Tandy said softly. “I’m an empath, not a mind reader. Normally.”

“What’s that mean?
Normally
.”

“I can feel your reactions, just as I can feel other people’s, but with you, after having spent the better part of the day hiking along your land, in your woods, I can . . . I can feel much more with you.” Tandy lifted his eyes from the floor to my face and he smiled, his reddish eyes bright. “I like you. But you think you’re too dangerous to be anyone’s friend. You think you’ll do damage to them, put them in danger from . . . your cult? No. That’s not it. But something. You also think that having friends will call attention to you in ways that will bring trouble down on you and them.”

“Stop that,” I whispered. “I got no friends. Women aren’t allowed to . . .” I stopped, horrified at what I had been about to say.

“Have men friends?” Tandy asked. “Only women friends, and then only women that their male authority figures approve of?” He held my gaze with his own. “Only friends that their husbands or fathers say they can have? Their own sister-wives or cousins or half sisters? Only people in the church?” I backed slowly away, until I felt the heat of the stove at my back.

“In your own way,” Occam said, drying the last clean dish, “you were just as caged as I was when you were a child. Still are, I’m thinking.”

“That’s not religion,” Tandy said. “That’s cult talk. Real religion is about love and redemption and healing, not putting people down, segregating them into smaller and smaller groups so they can be controlled. Controlling people is evil, real evil. Even God doesn’t control people. He gave us free will.”

I blinked at the words. At the truth in them. For years I’d been reading and studying about cults and how they affected people. How they squeezed them down into a small constricted place and kept them there.
Controlled
. That was it exactly. Converts had no free will, the cult taking away that one right given by God. To choose.

T. Laine brought over the last of the dirty dishes and set them in the sink. “You got a deck of cards?” she asked me. I shook my head.
Cards?

Tandy plucked my washing cloth from my hands and wrung it out before he elbowed me aside and continued washing the dishes. Occam nudged me away from the kitchen, with a soft, “’Scuse me, ma’am. We got work to finish here.”

I stood at my kitchen table watching two men—
men
—washing my dishes. There was something practically obscene in the vision. Obscene and wonderful.

“Well,” I said. “How about that.”

Tandy turned around and winked at me and then went back to washing. Tandy’s clothes hung on him as if he was wearing a big brother’s hand-me-downs. Occam’s jeans and tee fitted to his form as if he’d been poured into them. Both men were barefooted, like me, and the sight was strange. John had never gone without shoes or slippers. Neither had Daddy.

Feeling odder than I had since I was twelve and first came to live here, I walked into the living room and curled up in John’s old recliner, watching as the witch and the human woman found a deck of cards in one of their backpacks and started a fast-paced game of cards. And I noted that the devil himself didn’t rise up out of the cards and set the place on fire.

Things got more bizarre when I felt a vehicle on the road, driving up the hills, and I knew, without a doubt, that Paka and Rick were inside. My awareness of the cat was far stronger than it should have been, as far away as they were.

My heart raced; my breath came too fast. I shouldn’t know this, except that I had claimed her.

“Nell?” Tandy called, his voice filled with the same alarm I was experiencing. Barefoot, I left the room for the front porch, the chill in the air biting through my bare soles. Orion hung in the Southern sky, revealed above the tree line as the lawn slid down the arch of the hill. I pulled my cardigan closer and waited.

Behind me, in the house, Tandy watched me through the window, outlined by lantern light. The empath looked twitchy the few times I looked back, feeling the emotions I was feeling, but not knowing why. It had to be confusing for him. But with people in my house and others on the way, I was out of my element. I waited, seeing the vehicle’s lights flicker through the trees, hearing the strain on the engine, climbing the rutted road.

I was still alone on the porch when a van turned in, its headlights picking me out where I stood in the cold, my feet on the smooth boards of the porch as the engine was turned off and as Rick and Paka got out, the doors closing quietly. I wrapped my arms around me as they approached in the total dark, sensing Paka’s sexual satisfaction in her body language, and Rick’s dissatisfaction in the stony look on his face. He was most unhappy and swatted Paka’s hand away when she clung to him. They stopped at the bottom of the stairs.

“You think giving us catnip is funny?” he asked, his tone far too mild for the roiling emotions I was picking up from them.

“I had me a fine giggle at the time,” I said. “Now, not so much.” I had a feeling that a were-creature who was born in her animal form treated mating a mite differently from the way a human did, making my actions more dangerous than I had expected. “You all scratched up?”

Rick blew out a breath and rubbed a hand over his face, which was bristly with whiskers. Something peeked over his shoulder at me, furry face inquisitive. Pea. She ducked her head back down, and I realized she was playing hide-and-seek, clinging to his shirt back. “If I said I was still bleeding,” he said, “would you be happy?”

“Not really. Not anymore,” I said. “I see the attraction of Paka—believe me, I do. Her magic makes my cats tame, and my land practically dances in anticipation every time she’s near.” I didn’t add,
but you don’t want to be tied to her,
though it must have been in my tone, because Paka slanted her cat eyes at me. Rick sighed a curse, a plain old American curse.

I said, “You know, that word always seems to lack in imagination, as if you ain’t got the learning to communicate what you really mean.” Rick nearly laughed, surprise bubbling up in him before dying away. “You can come in,” I said. “Hospitality to you both.” I went in and sat in John’s recliner, pulling my feet up under my body to warm my toes.

Once inside, Paka raced to T. Laine and JoJo, gathering them up in a group hug, as if she had missed them for days. Carefully bypassing Tandy, she also hugged Occam, who patted the seat next to him, the way a human would tell a child where to settle. The neon green creature leaped from Rick’s shoulder, where it had been play-hiding, across the furniture, to join her on the sofa. My two house cats—no, three, as the one from outside raced in through the open door—were a big ol’ pile of cat, on top of the humans. The human forms. I wasn’t sure how to refer to them all. The cats were growling, spitting, and purring, and finding laps and nooks and crannies between bodies to curl up in. I’d been trying to catch the feral cat for weeks so I could get her shots and neutering. But it looked like she had decided that werecats on the premises was a good reason to make an appearance.

I figured I’d have to name the new mouser; she was making herself at home and becoming domesticated fast, rolling her
scent all over Occam, batting at him, scratching him to show affection. He batted back, gently, murmuring in his Texan accent, “Hey there, sugar. Ain’t you a purdy lil’ thang.” With her black head and aggressive personality, I decided she would be Torquil, Thor’s helmet, not
Sugar
.

Rick, on the other hand, who was supposed to be a werecat too, was standing at John’s desk—no, at my desk—ignoring us all, his back to the room as he paged through papers he had brought in. He was the lone cat, maybe? Like a lone wolf, but a leopard version? Rick ignored the chatter as if he didn’t really care what the others did, arranging printed papers and a laptop on the desk.

Several long, narrow, parallel trails of blood dotted his starched shirt as he moved, reopening the wounds in his back, wounds scratched there by Paka, in what had to have been wild and bloody sex. I shook my head. I had been mean to give them catnip. I should be ashamed. But I wasn’t.

I turned my attention back to Occam, who was now watching the card game. These people were bewildering and fascinating. While I was thinking, Rick placed two six-packs of beer on the center table, passing bottles around. I’d been so focused on other things that I hadn’t even noticed he’d brought them in. Beer. In my house. My eyes went wide, and I covered my mouth.

John would come back and haunt me. He’d had a fit when Leah traded for the muscadine wine the first time, saying, “We will not consort with the devil in my house, woman.” But he’d settled when Leah had starting quoting Scripture about the health benefits of wine, and ended up muttering about drunkards, eternal judgment, and uppity women. He had even learned to enjoy a glass from time to time. He’d have done anything for Leah. And later for me.

John had been honest and kind, and that was a far better compliment than I could offer about most humans. And he had been hospitable in his way. I could almost hear his voice saying, “Hospitality means more than opening the door. It means accepting the person you welcomed, warts and all.” If Leah Ingram had offered hospitality to strangers, then she would have let them drink beer in her house. And she wouldn’t give them catnip. At that thought, shame gushed back.

The three others, Tandy, JoJo, and T. Laine, were playing a loud and energetic game of cards, which included lots of cursing, insults, name-calling, and flipping each other off when a point was scored. It looked like fun, but I didn’t know how to play or how to ask if I could learn. They clinked bottles and drank, sticking the rest in my refrigerator. The beer made them more unruly and noisy. I frowned mightily at them, but they ignored me, and I didn’t know how to take that.

I was studying the people and the cats so intently that I missed what Rick said until he repeated it. “Your work at the market was helpful. Here’s the contract you asked for, signed by the head of HR, for the position of consultant.” He tossed a sheaf of papers into my lap, sealed with a fancy clip. “You said you wanted to know what we’re investigating. Sign everywhere it’s highlighted in yellow, and I’ll read you in. You can skip the drug testing for the moment.”

I neatened the sheets of paper and scanned the first page. The paperwork was for hiring me to be a temporary consultant with the Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. Beer and cards and now this. John was probably rolling over in his grave with horror.

But
I
wasn’t rolling over in horror. Excitement leaped up in me like a flame through gasoline, a hot, bright
poof
of exhilaration and anticipation that washed away the momentary guilt. I wasn’t sure what was happening in my life, but I wanted it, whatever it was.

Feeling flighty and capricious, more things no good woman should ever be, I scanned and signed everything and folded a copy of the three he had tossed at me. I’d read my copy more thoroughly later. Not reading something the government had thrown at me meant John would be double rolling. I smiled at the thought and tossed the two copies back at Rick. “I signed. Read me in.” When he looked at me, inquisitive and surprised, I said, “That’s what you said. You’d read me in. So do it.”

Rick cleared his throat and the rowdy room fell silent as he addressed his crew. Team. Whatever they were. “You were all assigned to Knoxville for temporary duty when you graduated last week, assigned to take on the investigation into the Human Speakers of Truth for the purpose of tracking them online and researching their financial activities. This was a job in line
with your lack of experience, an on-the-job training exercise, predominately paperwork, social media, and Internet, Deepnet, and Darknet searches, to be overseen by the local FBI agent and me, to prepare you each for inclusion into existing PsyLED units elsewhere. As of this afternoon all that changed. Look around, people. This is the first official meeting of the newest PsyLED Paranormal Investigative Unit.”

Occam whooped, sounding like something from a rodeo.

T. Laine said, “Us four? All probies?”

Over her questions, Tandy said, “We’re Unit Eighteen. Or is it nineteen?”

“Eighteen. But we can discuss unit designations later,” Rick said, relaxing and letting that rare, charming smile out. “For now, we have official orders.” He read from a short paper he pulled from a file. “‘A team of recently graduated special agents will be assigned to the new Knoxville/Asheville/Chattanooga region, under newly promoted senior special agent, Rick LaFleur.’” There were catcalls—literally—and hoots of delight.

“Why here?” Occam asked, his words laconic but his tone laced with something darker, suspicious. “Why us? Because we’re mostly paranormals, so they stick us together in a backwater?”

“No,” Rick said. “Secret City is my best guess. They want us here to protect it, and they think a human/para unit is the best way to do that.”

A line appeared between Occam’s brows as he processed what that might mean. He didn’t argue. Secret City was the name of the underground testing and R&D part of the US government.

“Unfortunately,” Rick said, “our first investigation just went from looking around and asking questions about the homegrown terrorist group, the Human Speakers of Truth, getting our feet wet, and writing reports, to a higher priority.” A sensation like electricity flashed through the people in the room and through me. Outside, the woods rustled in anticipation. To me, Rick said, “We were initially only intended to see if the Human Speakers of Truth had moved into the region, an easy, strictly information-gathering and investigative assignment as part of the FBI’s investigation into the organization.
As of this morning, there was a confirmed kidnapping of a human teenaged girl in Knoxville.”

I stood and went to John’s desk, pulled the small news sheet, and handed it to Rick. He made a face. “Yes. Fortunately, for the girl’s sake, it’s being downplayed by the mainstream media, and it hasn’t hit social media yet. In fact, the latest info is that this photo and the security camera it came from were part of an early Halloween prank.” He handed it back to me and booted up his laptop.

“HST raised funds through kidnapping in the past,” Occam said, sitting forward.

“Correct. But we’re not jumping to conclusions. We don’t yet have independent confirmation that HST is in the area. No confirmation of HST involvement. And the methodology of the kidnappings didn’t precisely fit the previous pattern,” Rick said.

“But PsyLED and FBI took down three of the top people in HST,” JoJo said, “so maybe someone else is in charge, putting their own ideas into play.”

Occam said, “I get all that. But why are we involved? We work crimes and cold cases with paranormal connections.”

“Correct again,” Rick said. He whirled the laptop and we watched as fuzzy black-and-white footage moved across the screen. Four girls were standing in a clump, all wearing identical short skirts and showing a lot of bare leg. A grayish van pulled up. Three men jumped out. They grabbed one girl, threw a sheet over her, and pulled her into the van. The van roared off, leaving behind a puff of dark exhaust and a group of screaming teenagers. There must have been three more people standing nearby, as the group increased in number. Cell phone cameras went to work. A moment later, a police car pulled up.

Rick played the sequence again, and the others detailed physical characteristics of the kidnappers. One large and clumsy. One small and jumpy. One halfway between the two. All wearing toboggans, the kind that cover the whole face.

Rick said, “Two hours ago, the FBI received a ransom demand on the girl. One million dollars for her safe return, with an offshore account for the transfer of funds. They let her talk to her mother. She was alive, terrified, but unhurt at the time. The call was on a cell phone, but by the time the agents triangulated it and got a team there, the only thing left was a
cheap burner crushed in pieces on the roadway. No cameras in the area. No prints but the girl’s on the cell. We’ll know more when they get more.

“There is one paranormal connection. It’s tenuous, but was enough to read us in. When the ransom call came for the girl, it was for one million, to be deposited into an account in the Turks. The family said they could get the money, and then called a blood-servant of Ming Glass, the Master of the City.”

There was a soft sound of interest from JoJo.

Rick nodded. “It took the feds by surprise. Apparently the family thought a century-old relationship couldn’t be part of their current crisis, so it wasn’t initially disclosed to the feds, but they have a link and a prior attachment to Ming Glass or one of her scions, back a few generations.”

“You’re right, though,” T. Laine said, pointing at the laptop. “That is definitely not the MO of HST.”

“MO?” I asked.

“
Modus operandi
,” Rick said. “Latin for ‘method of operation.’ The kidnapping took place on school grounds in front of witnesses in a nonfamily, stereotypical kidnapping.”

Modus operandi,
I repeated to myself. I was gonna have to learn Latin? I needed to watch more crime shows and fewer comedies. And was there such a thing as stereotypical kidnapping? As if reading my mind, Tandy opened a saved file on his laptop with information from a .gov site on kidnappings. And
stereotypical kidnapping
was a proper term claimed by the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Thrownaway Children.