Blood of the Earth (26 page)

That was disquieting. I reached out, trying to soothe the shadow as I might soothe a rootlet or encourage a seed. Rather than lean in, as plants did to receive the soothing, or race away to avoid my touch, it broke apart and fled in streamers deep into the ground. In an instant, it was gone. On the other side of the spreading wall of thorns, the four-legged creature was moving away as well.

I pulled my thoughts out of the ground and back into myself; I opened my eyes. The night had grown darker and deeper, and the moon hung as if trapped in the grasping limbs of distant trees. Despite the darkness of shadows in the ground, and the wall of thorny vines that hadn’t been there before, and the four-legged creature on the Stubbins side of the property boundary, I felt much better: calmer, settled, if far colder. I breathed the icy air, tasting snow on it, feeling the sting of fog freezing. The house windows glimmered with lantern light. The smell of burning wood danced on the night breeze. I hugged myself, thinking.

Despite the edicts of the church, I had never had to be hospitable to guests. I had few social skills to draw upon. I would likely be considered taciturn and remote and uncommunicative. A prickly stick-in-the-mud. I also wasn’t human. But tonight I’d try to act against my nature and be gracious, courteous, and genial. I didn’t expect to be successful at any of it.

I went inside, standing near the stove so I might warm up. I turned up a lantern, added a bit more wood to the fire, and tested the dough, which wasn’t quite ready to go into the oven.
My toes were frigid but felt good pressed into the wood flooring, connected to the forest outside.

I wasn’t afraid—not exactly—of anything I had sensed in the land, but it was . . . disturbing. I splattered water droplets on the stovetop in various places to test the temperature. Moved the rice off the hottest part of the hob.

People in my house.

I wondered if I would be able to sleep in a houseful of people. I hadn’t done that since I was twelve. The panicky feeling welling up in me again, I pulled on boots and went to the garden. In the dark, by touch and feel, I harvested the last of the salad greens, hoping there would be no frost and the plants might yield some more, and raked the mulch up higher over the plants as protection. I pulled up a mess of turnips. I gathered the clean clothes out of the washer and into a plastic basket. Back inside, I hung the clothes up to dry on wood racks placed behind the cookstove to humidify the house as they dried, and turned on the overhead fans for a bit to move the warm air around. I cut up a fresh salad, put the greens to cook, and the turnips themselves to the side for later. I got out jars of preserves in case someone had a sweet tooth. Busy. I needed to stay busy.

I began pulling dried herbs off the shelf to make a tea to stimulate Tandy’s appetite. The boy needed to eat.

*   *   *

The beans and rice were done and the bread was just coming out of the oven when I felt Paka racing across the land. Another cat ran beside her, through the dark and up the hill, toward the church’s compound. I felt them startle a deer and, in the way of cats, they changed direction midstride, leaping to the side, almost choreographed. Together they took down the deer and started eating even as the buck struggled and kicked.

City folk would have been horrified—the ones who didn’t hunt or fish. For me, it was simply part of the wood. Part of the land. Part of the cycle of life and death and rebirth.

The van’s lights cut through the trees in strips of light and shadow as it pulled up the hill and into the drive. The PsyLED team—the ones still in human shape—piled out of the van. I
had company. And just in time. Tandy’s first appetite tea was freshly brewed.

*   *   *

Rick had brought groceries. As if he’d lived here all his life, he put things into the refrigerator and freezer, while my mouser cats trailed around behind him, mewling as if he carried raw fish. I sat in my chair at the table and watched as he lifted the top off the bean pot and tasted the beans with a spoon. He pronounced them perfect. “As good as my mama’s. And you made rice. Even more perfect. Red beans and rice. It must be Monday.” Which made me blink because I didn’t make beans and rice only on Mondays, and it wasn’t Monday anyway. Maybe it was a New Orleans thing. Without a change in expression, he asked, “Where are Occam and Paka?”

It was a trap. I knew that even as I answered. “Eating a deer. They’ll be a while before they get to the compound. And then they’ll stop to eat again on the way home.”

“How do you know what’s happening with them?”

I shrugged. I knew. I wasn’t sure how I knew, as this knowing was different and unexpected. It had started when Brother Ephraim fed my woods. How it worked was something I was still figuring out.

T. Laine and JoJo started setting the table, asking me which stoneware to use, and hunting through the drawers for flatware, in the cabinets for glasses and paper napkins. They were stunned that I didn’t have paper anything in the kitchen, washing cloth ones as needed instead. “Paper’s wasteful,” I said, pointing to where the cloth napkins were stored.

Sounding horrified, JoJo asked, “
Toilet
paper?”

I let a tiny smile claim my mouth. “I do use toilet paper,” I said primly, knowing my mama would be horrified if she heard me talking about such personal subjects with a guest at the kitchen table. “But I don’t have much on hand. Be sparing.”

“Good God in heaven,” T. Laine muttered. “How do people live like this?”

“Efficiently,” I said sharply. “Cheaply. Off the grid as much as possible.”

T. Laine’s face tightened, an expression like a mask, covering up whatever she was really feeling, holding the world at
bay. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. I get the theory. I just don’t get the practice. Is that why you only have lights lit in the rooms where we are?”

“Mostly,” I said. “With this many people, we’ll run out of stored power and be forced to use lanterns early, so the lanterns are in place, some already lit.”

“So the night we visited . . . ?”

“I ran out of power shortly after you left.”

“No cable? No network news? No TV at all?”

“Movies on DVD,” I said. “If you go into withdrawal, there’s a battery-powered radio with a good antenna.”

T. Laine said, “Son of a witch on a switch,” which was cussing for witches, or so I’d heard.

There was a lot more grumbling, mostly under their breath, but with so many people working, dinner was served within half an hour after they arrived, Rick ladling up beans and rice, T. Laine cutting a loaf of bread, JoJo passing out beer and pouring well water into glasses, and Tandy sipping his tea while trying to hide a look of distaste. I watched and let people serve me in my own house, knowing that these activities—things they could control—were helping to calm and settle them.

Three of the team had new wounds and bandages. Rick’s was the worst, with blood seeping through his dress shirt. When he came near, I said, “Paka said she would shift into her cat and heal. She and Occam shifted and they’re feeling fine.” Rick’s face went stony hard. “You’re still wounded from the catnip sex. You can’t shift into your cat, can you?” He didn’t reply, and I said, “You mentioned a werewolf called Brute who’s stuck in wolf form. You’re stuck in human form, aren’t you?”

JoJo said, “It isn’t something he talks about.” I turned to the pierced and tattooed woman. Her hair had been fluffed out in tiny ringlets, her skin oiled and shining. She had slashing cuts on her cheeks, the result of flying glass from the shooting, but in the shadows of the lanterns she was all angles and sharp planes, shadow and light, like an African priestess. “It hurts, not being able to shift. Hurts like hell. He’s learned to live with pain for most of the lunar cycle, but it nearly drives him crazy during the full moon. He has a music spell he plays those three days.”

T. Laine said, “I’m working on a backup spell to help him
deal, but he needs the services of a full moon witch coven, and those are harder to find.”

“I wasn’t supposed to know?” I asked.

“It was Rick’s place to tell,” Tandy said.

“I was going to tell you before the full moon,” he said, grudging and resentful.

“Okay,” I said. He had a timetable. I understood that. It was a way of maintaining control in a life that had little. “I got a healing salve that will help your cuts.” I brought out a jar of salve and set it on the table. “Arnica, gotu kola, calendula, yarrow, and aloe. I got one without aloe, if anyone is allergic.”

As if it was an invitation, they gathered and sat around my large kitchen table and JoJo applied some of the gel to her facial wounds. “My gramma would like this,” she said, which sounded like high praise. And the mood seemed to lighten, which was a good thing. It had gotten tense in the house.

My guests served dinner, and we ate. No one talked business or the cases at dinner, focusing on downtime, as they called it, telling jokes and picking at each other just like families did. Pea jumped onto the table, and Rick fed her small chunks of bacon from the beans, which she seemed to love. The mousers took up places on the couch and on the open shelves, bored. I sat quietly, taking it all in, and it was . . . nice. Pleasant.

I feared it might take a long time to find pleasure in the silence of my empty home once they were gone again. Perhaps a very long time. Perhaps never. So I savored the moments, paying attention to every small detail, watching Tandy eat every morsel and complain about being too full, as if that was uncommon, letting my emotions take a respite in the presence of so much activity and chatter. It was like my childhood all over again—the good parts of it, the parts I hadn’t realized that I missed. It left me with an impression of melancholy and nostalgia and a peculiar sense of regret that I couldn’t put my finger on and tried to banish, to no avail.

*   *   *

After dinner, T. Laine and JoJo washed dishes, saying it was their turn, and Tandy sat on the sofa with his tablet, tapping keys, occasionally rubbing his stomach and hiding tiny burps.

Rick and I went over the hotel security camera footage of the shooting, which required the constant moving of the mouser cats from the desk and his laptop to the floor and to Rick’s lap. The cats were drawn to him like a magnet, and I pretended not to feel jealousy at their affection for him. They never chased me like that, but then I wasn’t a werecat, I just fed and provided for them, which should have earned me some loyalty but didn’t.

In the first footage taken from an outside camera, an older-model, dark-colored SUV, with a big, roomy cab, raced into the hotel parking lot. Two figures in the front seats stayed in the SUV, barely visible through the tinted windows. Two others leaped from the passenger side and raced through the outer doors into the hotel. All I could tell about the fuzzy images was that the men wore toboggans, the kind that covers the face except for eyeholes. And they carried what might be fancy assault rifles.

A second camera picked up the men as they raced in from the parking lot and through the lobby, a big man in front, a smaller just behind, as if being protected. There were three seconds of visual as the hotel clerk dropped behind the front desk.

A third camera showed the men racing through the hallway and up the fire stairs. This video camera was crisp, and I could make out more details. The man in front was heavy but fast. The man in back was lithe and wiry, probably average height. Both men wore jeans, flannel shirts, and work boots. There wasn’t audio, but I could tell that the heavier man was stomping with each step. Both were in good shape, running without stopping to the fourth floor, and when they paused at the fourth-floor landing to confer, neither appeared winded. Some kind of discussion took place at the landing. Maybe directions, orders, last-minute reminders of a plan.

The big man tore open the fire door, and they raced into the hallway and directly to the suite. They positioned themselves to either side of the door, the bigger man nodded, and they began to fire. The wood of the door and the glass of the window exploded outward and inward, shrapnel flying. The men fired, changed magazines, and continued firing until the second magazines were empty. Then they turned and raced back the way
they had come, down the stairs, through the lobby, and back into the SUV, still idling at the front door. The vehicle gunned away, leaving a cloud of black smoke. The license plate was missing. I thought the SUV was dark green. Or maybe dark gray.

Rick said, “The others have seen this. What do you think?”

I shook my head, uncertain. “The little guy moves like one of the kidnappers, jerky, quick-like. There was a big man there too. Their toboggans match, both with a stripe and diamonds on the forehead. Their clothes could come from anywhere. Play it again, please?” I watched, shaking my head, trying to force it all to make sense as the shootings took place again, and then a third time.

Rick asked, “Could they be churchmen?” When I didn’t reply, he said, “Nell?” His voice was nudging, pushing me to make a claim one way or the other.

“They’re dressing to look like churchmen. Flannel shirts. Work boots. But the jeans aren’t hand-stitched. I can see a leather tag on the little one’s belt when they talk at the top of the stairs. The toboggans are store-bought headwear, and no churchman would wear a store-bought toboggan. They don’t work as well or keep people as warm. It almost feels like they’re
half
churchmen. Play it again, please?”

Silent, Rick pushed buttons on his tablet and repositioned a cat whose brushing tail was in the way. “We’re starting over, looking at everything, beginning with the FBI’s info, which we received before we left town. Some of their analysts are still proposing that the church might have taken them in, might be providing them a safe haven.”

“Why?” When he looked at me blankly, I asked, “Why do the feds think that?”

“Probably because neither the FBI’s nor PsyLED’s analysts can find where they moved on. HST is here in Knoxville. We’re pretty sure of that. So where else would a cult hole up but with another cult?”

That sounded like wishful thinking to me, but I wasn’t experienced enough to feel comfortable voicing that opinion. I didn’t know what to make of it. Not exactly. But one thing was pretty clear. “I had been thinking, but”—I stopped—“they didn’t follow me from the library. They came in fast, and they knew
which room we were in. They were after the team, not just me. If the shooters are churchmen, then they’ve been watching long enough to follow someone in and get the room number. Or they got the information from a hotel clerk earlier.”