Blood of the Earth (41 page)

Face on the ground, my legs tangled in my skirts, I opened my hand on the ground, pressing the earth of home, to mix with the land beneath me and with my trickling blood. I dug my fingers into the mixed soils and curled them around a small fistful of dirt.

The grass, the land its roots grew in, and I woke up fast, as if I’d ingested a pot of Rick’s coffee directly into my bloodstream. I
reached
into the ground. And I connected with . . . something. Not my land, not my woods, but something deep, something that rested in the dark, somnolent and content. I scratched my broken nails into the soil, mixing the dirt of here with Soulwood dirt, together with my blood. Jackie gripped my elbows behind me with his claws, piercing my skin, and I hissed, like the engine. Jackie laughed.

He lifted me to my feet and shook me. “Be good.” With one hand, he pulled me after him toward the mansion, past
upscale landscaping and an artificial pond with a waterfall. The door of the house opened. Roxy stood silhouetted in the light. A man. A man with clawed hands and hellfire eyes. Another
gwyllgi
. And I knew him. As a dozen children gathered around the dog in mostly human form, I put it all together. It had been there all along if I had just made the connections.

Roxbury T. Benton had been his ancestor and an early member of the church, the name misspelled in the newspaper as Roxbury T.
Bantin
. Four generations later, R. Thomas Benton the fourth ran the Knoxville FBI. And he had somehow made friends with Jackie. Maybe through Dawson, who had come through the legal system. Dogs recognizing dogs . . . Dawson led Roxy to Jackie. And now Dawson was dead.

More things fell into place, nearly clicking together as I comprehended each one.

Dogs might have bred true in some of the churchmen. Maybe recessive genes in some who had come from the old country among the first church settlers, like Mama’s people. Out of multiple wives and so many children in each generation, there was a much greater chance of more dogs being bred.

Vampire blood maybe made the trait stronger.

Roxy might even have generated the relationship with HST. So he could know that the
gwyllgi
were safe from detection. That would explain why the HST had been trapped in the warehouse and drained dry. They hated paranormals. They would have hunted
gwyllgi
down and killed them, so Benton took the war to them first. That assumption in my sea of assumptions felt solid.

Whatever his motives, Roxy was the lynchpin who tied it all together. My fear spiked, sweaty and cold.

Benton smiled at me and I knew he was remembering my sassy talk in the FBI meeting when I had attempted to school him. Now I was at his feet. He said softly, “So much for your vaunted reasoning.”

My lips wanted to quiver, but I clutched the dirt and blood in my fingers as more of my blood ran from my ripped flesh and pooled into my fist. I said, “I would have had to know that you and Jackie had two or more things in common in order to make an assumption that you would also have others in common. Had I known that
Roxy
was your nickname earlier, I
might have made part of the connection. Had I checked to see who in the legal system Dawson had met, I might have made another part.”

When the leader of the Knoxville FBI tilted his head, I continued. “I had no idea that your first ancestor to this area was a churchman, and therefore I could make no deductions or assumptions. Though now that I do know that, I can assume that the Dawsons, the Jacksons, and the Bentons are—or were—all in cahoots together.
Gwyllgi
. Dogs of darkness.”

Benton stepped down the steps to the ground, his posture negligent, a big dog on his own hunting grounds, walking closer, studying me with unwavering eyes. He leaned in and sniffed. Like a dog. Coiled a hand in my hair and yanked me closer.

He and Jackie half carried me around the house, through a basement door and a bright room filled with lawn equipment, through a door that was well hidden. It opened into an area under the house—bare rock floor, concrete block walls, no windows. The lights glared, bright and intense after the dark of the night. They landed on a vampire, chained to the wall. It was skin and bones, with ratty long reddish hair wearing the remains of denim pants and a once-white shirt. It looked like a scarecrow until the scent of my blood hit it, and its eyes opened wide. It inhaled fast, its fangs snapping down with a sharp
click
. But the sclera of its eyes weren’t red with blood-flush, rather they were a pale pink lined with darker veins, its pupils blacker than a moonless night. The
gwyllgi
had starved it and chained it to the wall with silver, hanging off the ground. Benton had done with the vampire what Jackie and his father had done.

Humans who drank of vampires became blood-drunk, open to compulsion, addicted. Not
gwyllgi
. They were free of the compulsion, and the blood made them stronger.

That would be the source of their power—to be able to drink vampire blood, to grow stronger and more powerful without becoming addicted, without becoming captive to the fanged ones. And they could also farm out the blood to the desperate, people who were hoping to drink vampire blood to remain young, to regain health, to survive when their own bodies turned against them. And if someone they sold or
traded blood to became addicted, that just gave them more control.

That
was the final, real reason why the
gwyllgi
had joined with the HST. The CIA knew that the group had acquired the list. And added to it. Benton found that out. To get the names and personal information of the paranormals, he and his dogs had found a way into the organization. To get the information on which vampires might be easiest to take. Which women might be easy to breed with. I understood it all. And it was too late.

They shackled me to a chair with handcuffs, which was plumb stupid, as it was nothing more than an old captain’s chair, the wood dry and long-dead. I
know
wood. They thought a chair and handcuffs would be enough to keep me cowed. But my shoes rested on the stone floor. They turned off the lights and left me there, in the dark, with a starving vampire, closing the door behind them.

As my eyes futilely tried to adjust to total darkness, I kicked off my boots—which took some time because I’d tied them on tightly—and toed off my wool socks to place my bare feet on the cold rock. The vampire hadn’t been on this spot of rock, so there was no sensation of maggots and death. I sighed with relief. Behind me, my blood dripped off my fingers to pool into the seat and trail down the turned wooden legs to the rock.

“I thirst,” the vampire whispered, the
sss
ing sibilants bouncing through the underground room. “Feed me.”

“No,” I said, pushing my consciousness into the stone beneath my feet, searching for contact with the dirt beneath it, or to the side of it. But instead of soil I found rock, rock, and more rock, a single massive, rounded boulder that extended far beneath the ground, probably the result of some geologic event so far in the past that even the earth itself had forgotten it. My consciousness spread out and around and down, searching for soil and moisture and life, looking for the strong sense of life that I had found in the front yard. Roxy had chosen his housing site well, and according to Biblical principles about building one’s house on rock, but . . . there was a small, hairline crack and the first grains of soil filled with moisture, just . . .
there
.

I gasped with relief, following the moisture as it gathered in the narrow crack of boulder and moved slowly, my mind
following it down through the stone and then up into dirt and rocks and decayed matter and . . . the roots of plants and grass. I knew where my awareness was—the backyard, just on the other side of the concrete block wall where the vamp hung.

I recognized the sense of life I had felt in the front yard, old and sleeping and
powerful
.

“What are you?” the vampire asked, its voice rasping like leather on bone. “You are not human.”

I didn’t have time, breath, or energy to respond, too busy trying to think of a way to contact my woods from so far away. I didn’t know if the paltry bit of soil clenched in my fist and on the stone beneath me—Soulwood soil, from my busted pot—was enough. I dropped the bit of bloody Soulwood dirt onto the floor I
reached
 . . .

My belly heaved, not with nausea, but as if the rooty muscles were straining, as if I were trying to do sit-ups. Or as if the roots inside me were stretching through solid ground, seeking water. Seeking life. Seeking home. My hands itched. I felt as if I were falling, the world twirling around me. I
reached
. And
reached
.

But it was too far. And I was too small. Too weak.

Bright lights flashed before my eyes, like stars falling. Pain beat through my bloodstream.

*   *   *

When I came to myself, I was gasping, pouring with sweat, muscles trembling. The world of blackness around me tilted and spun, a sickening whirl. I breathed deeply, trying to find some sort of stability in the blackness.

On the wall the vampire clanked its shackles. “Hungry . . . ,” it rasped.

“Yes. I get that,” I whispered, the words a faint echo from the concrete walls. Maybe, instead of reaching Soulwood, there was a way to stimulate the ancient power beneath the ground. Maybe I could get it to . . . do what? I wasn’t sure, but I had few other options.

Breathing deeply, slowly, I reached into the soil toward the slumbering sentience. I touched the consciousness beneath the ground, the way I might stick a toe into a great pool. It slept on, unmoved by the slight pressure of my mental tap, though
something passed between us: a flare of energy, or perhaps of life force. I was suddenly able to take a breath without pain or exhaustion; the strength of the consciousness flowed into me, filling me, the way water flows into a pool: effortlessly.

From far away, I felt something shift. Brighten. It was a feeling akin to the visual act of seeing a candle lighted on a distant mountain peak on a moonless night. A vague, remote spark in the far darkness, seen best when looking away, to the side, and not directly on.

“I smell your blood. I thirst.” The vampire sounded stronger, more alert, and it clanged its shackles, the metal loud.

I
reached
toward the spark of light, the flicker of contact, a life force that was waking and stretching. The glow brightened on the distant mountain, suddenly familiar, oddly, unexpectedly aware of me. I realized that I was visualizing my actual home, not a virtual location in my own mind, but a place in time and reality; bouncing off contact with the sleeping sentience below me, I
reached
again through that life force. I touched the power of my woods. It latched onto me, wrapping itself around me, as if I was tied to it even more securely than I was tied to this old chair.

I had known that Soulwood was
my
land,
my
wood. I belonged to it as surely as it belonged to me. Perhaps more than I imagined.

My intestines twisted and writhed, rigid as wood within me. It hurt, the way a tree hurt after lightning hit, or when vines sent root tendrils into its bark.
Attack
. I felt as though I was responding to attack.

Across the room, I heard metal squeal. “I thirssst.”

I reached out to my land. And, through my land, to Paka.
Here,
I thought at her.
I’m here.

I felt her response. She was still in cat form, and her ears perked high, her whiskers shivered; she was aware of me. Paka nudged a warm, sleek body next to her and made a cat noise that was half scream, half challenge. She leaped out of a moving car’s window. Occam followed, landing and jumping from the ground into a tree all in one move, claws sinking deep, to race along a branch. They were close. Very close.

How had they followed me?

Ah. Right. The cell phone.

Maggots followed the werecats, leaping, racing maggots. A vampire,
two
of them, on their trail, as fast as they were, perhaps faster.

Maggots crawled across the stone floor onto my feet.

Something clanked. Closer.

The vampire was getting free.

My eyes flew open in the darkness, like a cave, far underground. But I knew without being able to see that the vampire was no longer hanging on the wall. It had worked its shackles loose, had probably been working them loose for ages, as it was bled to feed the things in the house. And then I showed up, bleeding, the reek of lifeblood giving it the final impetus to wrench free. The maggoty feeling crossed the rock to me the moment it touched the floor. By the clanking and jangling sounds, I knew it was coming toward me. Dragging itself.

I reached out to Paka.
Hurry
.

But Paka was just now passing the abandoned chicken coop. They would be too late.

I rolled my weight forward and then back, the chair rising up on its back legs. I rocked forward and rocked back again, then forward, until the chair went far enough for my feet to take my weight. My ankles hadn’t been chained to the chair legs, and so, bent over, I raced, if the shuffle of feet can be called such, for the wall I had seen in the moments of light, the wall farthest from the vampire. I
felt
the wall growing closer, a solid force. At the last moment, I twisted my body and
threw
myself back, the chair legs taking the brunt of the leap and my body’s weight. They hit the wall with a splintering
crack
. I half bounced and rolled, bruising my knees and banging my head on the stone. Shards of dry wood pierced my side and back. It hurt, a stabbing, puncturing agony. There might be time for pain later, if I lived.

I rocked and rolled until I reached my feet again. And I threw myself at the wall, twisting to take the hit on the chair. But my aim was off, and one arm of the chair and my forearm took the hit instead. My head whiplashed and cracked. I saw more stars, white bursts of light that seemed to fall like snow. Dazed, I lay on the floor, blinking into the dark. My hair was caught under me, pulling my head back at an odd angle.