Blood of the Earth (18 page)

My breath came fast, my heart speeding. I raced through the trees, a zigzag course as if to unsettle a hunter who had me in his sights. Birds startled and called out, the alarm tones shrill. The trees caught my fear, throwing out warnings that felt like,
Fire! Fire!
Their greatest fear except for man. I could feel them through my thudding feet, their deep rootlets spreading like fingers, siphoning up water from far below ground as my fear spread and they prepared for danger. They shared the warning root-to-root, tree-to-tree, species-to-species—the old fear,
Fire! Fire!
I ran faster, my breath burning. Leaves fell like rain, hiding my passage.

I realized I was on a path and I spun away from it, into the underbrush. I must be far from the school, because here, there was heavier growth. Blackberries that scratched my skin and pulled at my clothes and hair. I dropped to hands and feet and crawled into a patch of bracken, pushing aside the large fern-leaves and ducking beneath low limbs of trees. Hiding. Heart pounding. Around me, field mice, lizards, and snakes dashed and undulated away in fear.

Lungs burning, I crawled deeper into the bracken until I was surrounded by ferns and my bare hands were buried beneath last year’s leaves, into the mosses and the damp soil. Things crawled over my wrists and arms, many-legged and fast, as my hands disrupted their lives.

People were watching me. Always watching me.

And . . . Occam had bled.
Were-blood, hot and potent, all across the earth beneath him. The wood had wanted that blood. I had wanted that blood. Had thought, just for an instant, about what it would feel like to feed him to the earth. I was . . . I was evil.

I was evil, just like the churchmen had said.

And . . .
the moon. Were-creatures and the full moon.
That meant something, explained something, but I didn’t remember
what. I only remembered that I had been terrified, and when I was terrified I wanted blood. Always, even if just for a moment, I wanted blood for the earth, to give the trees strength and power and to claim it for my own as I had Soulwood.
Oh God. What am I? What kind of devil am I?
My leg muscles twitched, my heart and lungs pumped, my skin burned. With each breath, my lungs made a retching, tearing sound.

My unbunned hair was tangled in a snarl and draped around me like a lank veil, sweaty and full of twigs. I realized I was crying when tears dripped forward and off the tip of my nose and from my chin, falling to the ground like a salty offering. I didn’t know why I was crying. No one had hurt me. No one had even chased me. They had let me go. But . . . but I had seen something inside me. Something I didn’t know was there. Something I couldn’t quite identify, didn’t recognize. Something that I feared.

Occam had bled. Beautiful, strong blood.

I heaved breaths until my trembling eased. Until the tears stopped and dried on my cheeks. Until I heard-felt through ears and palms the sound vibration of someone slowly approaching. I rolled to my butt, sitting up, hidden in the ferns, and wrapped my skirt and my arms tight around my legs, holding myself like a child, my back to a pin oak, the bark rough and soothing against my spine. Night had fallen, the darkness harsh and deep and encompassing. Shadows were long and lean across open ground and hovered, like raven wings spread into darkness, over the bracken.

And then I remembered why the moon was important. I had read once, long ago, about were-creatures. They were moon-called, their blood infected with something called prions that initiated changes in their genetic structure. They changed shape into another creature most easily on the full moon, when the lunar cycle made their blood potent, the prions multiplying during the full moon and forcing the change upon them. Which . . . which might be why his blood had affected me so strongly. His blood was powerful and vital, and, right now, the earth knew that. Liked that.

Twigs snapped, in what had to be a deliberate sound, since the creature tracking me was probably werecat.

“Nell?”

It was Occam. If he had cat eyes in his human form, then my trail was likely lit up, bright in every misplaced leaf, every broken stem, every disarranged fern, my fear sweat in droplets everywhere. My scent was probably hot on the air from running, from anger and fear pheromones, smelling like prey when I was a bigger predator than anyone, even I, had guessed. I hugged myself tighter.

“I see you in the dark,” he said softly. “May I come in?”

I laughed silently, and wondered if I was a mite insane. An invitation into a wood that wasn’t even mine?
Fine
. “Yes. You may. But the moon’s gonna be full in few days, and I don’t know how much control you have at this point. So please refrain from eating me.”

I could hear the smile in his words when he said, solemnly, “I promise.” A long-fingered hand, the skin tanned in the daylight, was nothing more than a pale glow in the night as he pushed aside the tall ferns and crawled beneath the trees on his hands and knees. He settled himself near me, leaning his back against a tree across from me. I stared at my arms, hugging my legs.

“Can you tell me why you ran?”

I shrugged in uncertainty. How did I tell him, anyone, about . . . everything? The breeze grew more chilled and the shadows abruptly darker as clouds covered the waxing moon. Occam waited patiently, and the silence pushed against me, demanding an answer even if Occam himself wasn’t pushing. I frowned. “I was running away from myself more than anything,” I admitted unwillingly. “But I don’t like being watched. Wasn’t right.”

I said nothing about the blood on his fingers, but as I sat in the bracken, I realized that the wood no longer hungered, or if it did, then I had somehow cut my awareness of it. Run away from it. I didn’t say,
And this wood wanted you.

Occam nodded, his face serious. “You’re a very private person. I get that. Rick said you might be a
yinehi
. Or a couple of other Cherokee names. I know I’m not pronouncing it right in the Cherokee tongue. But he was talking about fairies, maybe wood nymphs, though in your case, mostly human. He said you were intensely private. And I forgot that. I promise that it will never happen again. I’ll never watch you, not without your permission.”

I thought about that, from the perspective of the church and the menfolk and the way they did things. Nothing was ever free.

“If you’re thinking about quitting,” he said, “I’d like you to stay. All of us would. We’d like you to try again. Find a way to merge with this team. Learn how to get along with all of us.”

I looked into the dark orbits where his eyes hid in the shadows. In the daylight, they were amber-brown eyes, but in the dark they were just holes in his skull. “Don’t watch me unless I ask you to. I been watched and spied on my whole life, hiding who I am, what I am, whatever that is. Been watched by the men in the church as I approached womanhood. Been watched from the deer stand for years. Nothing I can do about none of it. But you. I can stop you.”

“Understood. No one watches you without your permission. Anything else?”

“Never lie to me.”

Occam thought about that one for a moment. “I will never lie to you unless I have to.”

“Why would you have to?”

“Secrets that aren’t mine to share,” he said instantly. “Need-to-know info on cases unrelated to you. PsyLED has certain levels of security clearances. Yours is much lower than mine.”

Occam stuck out a hand and I studied it a moment. Menfolk sealed deals with handshakes, man-to-man. Deals with a woman were usually different. Sealed with other words or in other ways. I had signed a contract, but I had a feeling that this handshake would be much more final, much more permanent. This handshake was about trust, and expectation, and protection, and commitment. Hesitantly I placed my hand into his. His palm and fingers were heated, like a furnace, and in an instant, something wild and fiery flowed through his flesh, skin-to-skin, something that made his eyes glow golden in the night. My hand felt small and cold inside his grip, but just as strong. I gripped his hand back. We shook on it. His eyes faded to human amber. When he let go, he rolled to his knees, all feline grace, and crawled out of the bracken. Silent, wondering if I had made the right decision, I followed him through the deepening dark, toward the lights of the school.

When I emerged from the woods, walking silently behind Occam, Tandy raced toward me, some unfamiliar emotion on his face—part fear, part sorrow, part something else—his strange hands reaching as if to grab me, pale in the night. I jerked back several steps and Occam stepped in front of Tandy’s hands. “Not without her permission,” Occam said. “Not to watch or to touch. Never again without her permission.” He looked at the rest of the group. “She’s not a cat in a pride or a den. She’s private. We abused her sense of privacy, Tandy and me. No one watches her unless she is in danger or she asks. Understood?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Tandy said, the words running into each other, his hands gripping Occam’s arm, his face nearly frenzied, his words running together. “I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry. I didn’t understand.” I recognized the expression on his face then. Pain
.
He was feeling some inexplicable kind of ache, like a throbbing in his red-lined flesh. “I beg your forgiveness for overstepping my bounds. But I find you . . .” He shook his head as if searching for a word he couldn’t find. He settled on,
“. . . fascinating.”

I took another step back at that, surprise slipping through me like a cold rain down my collar, knowing my posture was still defensive.

“We all do,” Occam said, “the ones of us who aren’t human. You smell like . . . like home, sugar. Like safety, perched in the trees with fresh kill before us.”

“You smell of jungle and tall trees,” Paka said. “Of deep water and rich earth. And death. Much death, the earth wet with the blood of prey, an offering, a gift, that I might eat and live.”

T. Laine had been leaning against the van; she pushed off
with her hands and came to stand near Rick, many feet of space between us when she stopped. “I don’t have Tandy’s sense of empathy or the cats’ sense of smell, but my magic likes you. I think I could bounce a spell through you, like a routing, like the way a comet picks up speed when it circles a planet and boomerangs off into space. But I’d ask first. I’d always ask. Men? And worse, cats?” Her tone was incredulous. “You have no idea. They have no sense of privacy when they turn catty.”

I nodded, the agreement jerky. I’d seen house cats do things that would sear my eyeballs if a werecat did them. I turned my attention to JoJo, the token human of the group, wondering what she would say. “I don’t get the whole privacy thing,” she said, pulling on all the earrings in her right earlobe, sliding them through her fingers, which pulled her lobe out of shape, to rebound, earrings swinging. “I’m a party girl. Gimme a beer and bucket of wings or some of Mama’s cooking and a bunch of half-drunk pals all piled on the couch watching a game, and I’m down with that. But I also don’t get hunting down prey and eating it raw or shifting on the full moon—or not shifting and going nutso over it.”

That part made no sense, but I let it go.

“But I don’t have to get it. I just have to live and let live,” JoJo said. “And if that means not following you on a hike into the woods, I’m down with that too. And, hey, you don’t smell like anything to me. Sorry.”

I let a half smile curl my mouth. “Down with that,” I repeated, shaking my head. “I guess I’m down with that too.”

“Good,” Rick said. But there was something in his tone that said my taking off like a cat with her tail on fire was a problem I needed to work on. “Now, if you can stand it, we need to know what just happened. Not the little chat you had with Occam. We get what happened and how we overstepped and what we need to do to keep it from happening again. We all saw you sitting near the trees. Your scent changed, just like it did in the market, when you sat under the trees. Something was happening. Tandy calls it communing. To the cats’ noses you released something almost like a mating pheromone.”

T. Laine said, “I felt magic. And not a magic I ever felt before.”

“What was happening?” Rick asked.

“I . . .” I shrugged uncertainly. “I ain’t never—I have never explained it. Or talked about it. But I guess
communing
is as good a word as any. I learn things from a wood, if it’s old enough. I learn things from individual trees sometimes too.”

“Okay,” Rick said, his voice even and controlled. “Tell us what you discovered in the woods. Please.”

I gave a small shrug. “Runners on the trails, people having sex in the woods—two people, probably male, who were . . . not good people,” I said, trying to find English words for the trees’ emotions. “Dangerous people who come here often. One came from the trailer park and one from somewhere across the road.”

Rick nodded. “No more games, people. T. Laine, you and Occam check out the trailer park, a quick magic and scent search. See if you see or smell anything wrong, out of place.” He handed Occam a plastic baggie with a T-shirt in it. “Get a good baseline. If you pick up Girl Three’s scent, I want you back here to recheck.”

Occam took the baggie and opened it, sticking his nose into the bag and sniffing, fast and hard, several times, through his mouth and nose both before handing the baggie back to Rick. The two disappeared into the shadows, moving fast, and I realized Occam had been taking a scent, like a tracking dog. I figured werecats must have a better-than-human nose, and decided that they had gotten the T-shirt from the chauffeur.

To the rest of us, Rick said, “We have one more stop to make tonight. Girl Three’s home. Then I have reports to write up.” He opened the side door of the van. “Let’s go. We’ll pick up Occam and T. Laine on Dutchtown Road.” I remembered that this girl’s mother was a vampire, one of the scions of the Blood Master of Knoxville, Ming of Glass. Even the church knew about Ming of Glass, the vampire used sometimes as a threat against unruly children.
You be good or Ming of Glass will snatch you outta your bed.

Because I was only a consultant, the team didn’t always think to explain to me what was going on. Worse, I didn’t pay enough attention to the team’s chatter while we drove, letting the events of the last few hours ring and thrill and settle through me. Trying to decide if I’d made a bad mistake signing the contract to help out these people, trying to decide if
shaking Occam’s hand had meant less than I thought it had. Trying to decide if I really cared that I had done any of those things. Because though they had to learn to understand me, and I them, I liked the idea of being part of a team. And maybe, just maybe, having friends. Except for Kristy at the library, I’d . . . been alone . . . for a long time.

*   *   *

Sequoia Hills was a fancy place, gracious-like, the roads weaving up and down in long curving lanes; the center area between lanes was planted with trees and shrubs and exotic grasses I didn’t recognize in the dark, but I guessed that they had been imported. Nothing like these was native to the hills or the Tennessee Valley. The lawns were also bordered by and filled with gardens full of plants I didn’t recognize; they looked healthy and pretty and froufrou, placed for effect, but not a one of them was grown for eating or medicinal purposes.

Unlike the tract housing I had glimpsed on the drive this afternoon, where every home was a cookie-cutter version of the others, none of these houses had . . .
homogeneity
might be the right term. They were each and every one a different style and built of different materials. Most had smaller houses in the back or an extra wing that had been added on to it, though likely not for the reasons the churchmen added on to theirs—more wives. I guessed that each house held only one family, which the churchmen would say was a waste of real estate. I smiled slightly, seeing my reflection in the van’s middle window.

We pulled up into a driveway and stopped, the van on an incline, so that Rick set the parking brake. He looked to me, sitting in the passenger seat and asked, “What impressions did you get as we drove through?”

I looked back at the others, but they appeared to be buried in their laptops, which meant the question was probably directed only to me, maybe some sort of test. I said, “Money. Good breeding.” I thought a bit and added, “Exclusivity. They import their plants and pay someone else to do the designing and the work. They probably never put their hands in the soil or ever get dirty. When they do good deeds, they do it by writing a check. They spend money on cars for luxury instead of
practicality or the environment. I could tell more if I could put my feet on the ground.”

“Knock yourself out.”

I hesitated a moment and then remembered that phrase from a film. It was a peculiar way of telling me I could do anything I wanted. I nodded and slipped off my shoes, opened the door, and stepped out onto the concrete drive, which sent spears of cold into my soles. The night was more than chilly; we had frost on the way, and the air bit and nipped my exposed skin with icy teeth. My hair, which was still down from my run, swirled and twisted like mare’s tail clouds in the wind until I coiled it around my hand. I should have brought my coat.

I walked across the two feet of drive to the lawn and stepped slowly onto the grass. It wasn’t a wild grass, of course, but it was happy grass. Some variety of centipede, the mat stretching across the open spaces, the leaves and roots and runners heavily steeped in time and good water and care and nitrates. It felt . . .
satisfied
, maybe, and very oddly, it also felt . . . snobbish, if grass can feel snobbish. My own mixed grasses at home felt useful, functional, and beneficial. “
You
are supposed to be eaten,” I told the snobbish grass softly, “by sheep and cattle and goats and geese. You are foodstuff.”

“Nell?” Rick asked.

“Nothing,” I said, walking away, the grass tickling my arches and pressing up between my toes. “Just talking to the grass.”

I walked around the front yard, which was rolling and landscaped with flowering fall plants. Purple pearls, brandywine plants, late-blooming varietal hydrangeas, and black lace. The plants were deeply layered, the ones that had been in place for years feeling superior and the newest ones feeling uncertain, but settling roots deeply into the well-mixed soil. I had a feeling that the owner of the house was going to be snooty. And maybe even the gardener.

The lawn surrounded Girl Three’s home, a house of . . .
stately proportions
might be a good term—nothing forbidding like the Batman family home, Wayne Manor, or glamorous like the Biltmore house. I’d seen pictures of that house, and it was ultrafancy. This wasn’t a small house, nor a large one either, though I had only the multifamily, multiwife, many multichildren homes of the
church to go by in measuring size. This house had what they called a brick façade with rock faces, stark white window trim and mullions, a black door, and several peaks in the roofline. The roof was made of slate, the tiles curved on the lower sides, making it look like a gingerbread house, and the slate had been there long enough to grow moss. There were skylights in the roof and a big screened porch near a pool on one side. A full basement sat in the earth underneath it all. In back was a garage with three doors and a small second house, totally separate from the front house, the windows dark. The pathways in the back were poured concrete in curving arcs, plants with big leaves curling at the path edges. Yes. Gracious. And elegant. Except where the dog had peed. There was dog urine on many of the plants, the backyard marked by a large and stinky dog. I was reminded of the men who had marked my yard, and made a mental note to look for a dog in the house and to have the werecats in the group double-check my assessment.

I walked back to the van and said, “The people who take care of the yard have good taste in plants and know how to keep them happy. But whoever keeps it up is snobby, and most gardeners and lawn care people aren’t snobby —they’re too busy and dog tired to be snobby—so it’s confusing.”

“No one new came through here?” Rick asked.

“Plants don’t understand
new
things. They understand things that they can note over time. But if someone new just walked across the lawn, they wouldn’t notice unless he set the grass on fire, or pulled plants and weeds out of the soil, or killed something on it so the blood drenched the ground, or cut down some of the trees.

“One thing. A dog marked the backyard recently, but the urine hasn’t killed any of the plants like it would have if the dog belonged to the house and regularly did his business out here. Just to be safe, you might send a cat nose to double-check.”

Rick nodded, his gaze beyond me into the night as Paka, in her human form, slid out and through the shadows around the house. Moments later she returned and said, “Dog. Big dog.” Her nose curled; she sneezed a tiny cat sneeze and shook her head as if at something foul. JoJo chuckled in sympathy. “It does not belong to this house. It wandered through. It stinks like wet, sick dog.”

Rick said, “Okay. A stray. Let’s check out the house. T. Laine, you’re on point with evidence gathering, close attention to magical signatures and trace magic.”

I looked up at that, wondering why he’d said
magic
. But before I could ask, he went on.

“JoJo, you’ll be with the feds.” He led the way to the front door and up the brick steps to the porch. I followed at the back of the team, shivering and carrying my shoes, my toes frozen, chill bumps all over my arms and legs, looking for a place out of the way to sit and put on my shoes, and watching what the team did, how they moved, and what things they said to each other. Curious. Captivated.

The door opened before Rick knocked and a woman stood there. She was dressed in dark slacks that had been tailored to her; it was fine, delicate work, the kind the best church seamstresses did on the side, to supplement their incomes. White shirt, gray sweater, her hands fisted in her pockets, dragging down the sweater in front. Her hair was brown with blond streaks, and pulled back into a short ponytail. She looked jittery and shaky, and I could see the effects of tears on her skin, long hours of tears, and stress, and worry. Her skin was the pale white of undeath. This was a vampire.

Vampires had crossed my land before, and I remembered the feeling that had crawled over my flesh of
death, death everywhere
, but that was on my land, my wood, where every sensation was intense, dazzling to my senses, and I hadn’t been prepared for that. Here, I had been prepared, but the vampire didn’t spend time in the yard. The house would be a different matter, but—I took a stabilizing breath—I was ready.