Home > Curse on the Land (Soulwood #2)(2)

Curse on the Land (Soulwood #2)(2)
Author: Faith Hunter

I was no longer just a consultant; I had graduated under “special circumstances” at e3/GS 2 grade level. Technically, because I had passed background checks, stringent physicals, and weapons training as well as course work, I was a special agent, with an official title, a badge, and everything. However, because of my speciation classification and because I had no undergraduate degree and only a GED, I would be a probationary employee in PsyLED. If I survived the first full year of my employment in the paranormal branch of law enforcement, I’d move up to permanent employment, a higher pay grade, and access to greater levels of classified material.

To get here, most of my deepest, most private secrets had been released to the world of law enforcement I was now inhabiting. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Not yet.

Now lots of people knew that I wasn’t human. I had magic. I was categorized as “nonhuman, paranormal, undifferentiated” by the government medical experts and biologists—undifferentiated because I didn’t fit into the most common categories. I wasn’t vampire, were-creature, witch, arcenciel, Welsh gwyllgi—pronounced something like gwee-shee—or even any of the other, lesser-known paranormal creatures that were being identified. So far as the biologists at Spook School knew, my sisters and I were a genetic family singularity, with Mud and me being the most alike and least human. I’d have kept us all a secret if I could have, but a paranormal-hating group called Human Speakers of Truth had outed us. I still hadn’t told my family, proving me a bona fide coward. I was putting that off as long as possible.

The new, top-of-the-line psy-meter 2.0 I carried up the stairs all by itself. The device was the newest version, created just for field agents, and was capable of measuring far more than the previous model. They were freakishly expensive. Thirty thousand dollars for the one device. I placed it on the porch floor, carefully. I had been trained in its use and entrusted to bring it to Knoxville, but it wasn’t mine. It belonged to Unit Eighteen. The new witchy cuffs—three precharmed pairs for the unit’s witch to use—I tucked under the truck’s front seat with the strange, silver-toned ballpoint pens in a plastic lock bag. The cuffs and the pens—which scuttlebutt said contained a Spook School–created spell, though no one was talking about them—weren’t expensive, but only a witch could activate them.

I debated bringing in the weighty containment vessel that I had been charged to protect and deliver. It might be a top secret part of my job, but it was heavier than a good western saddle and a lot less manageable. Since I would know if anyone took a single step onto my land, there was no way anyone could get to it—short of parachuting in and landing on the Chevy C10, in the dark—without me knowing. With the containment vessel, I left the box full of small handheld psy-meter 1.0s. They were for use in the field when smaller was better than having more specific intel. They were each about the size of a pack of cigarettes and came with wrist or belt straps and locator key fobs, so if one was dropped, the field agent could find it easily.

At my grade level in the government, and not yet graduated, I was mostly a delivery girl.

A delivery girl with full government benefits, but still a mule, even on holidays off.

PsyLED thought my magic made me special enough to train me and give me a chance at a job. They also had offered me the opportunity to go to university on the government’s dollar, taking night classes while working full-time. And like other covert and federal law enforcement agencies, I could earn my way up the employment ladder. We’d see. Unlike normal, human American girls, I had grown up thinking I would be a wife and mother, without the opportunity for schooling or a career. Ever. Thanks to an upbringing in God’s Cloud of Glory Church, I hadn’t conceived of the idea of being a member of law enforcement. I had just hoped to survive and not be burned at the stake for the magic I carried in me. But that magic gave me value in the eyes of PsyLED, value I couldn’t help but appreciate.

I locked the truck and entered my house, expecting it to be cold and dank inside. Instead, someone had made a fire in my wood-burning stove, and the house was warm. It smelled of fresh bread and there was a pot of something wonderfully beefy-smelling on the cooker hob. There were also fall flowers—sunflowers and mums—in a bouquet on the kitchen table. I knew who had been here, and I warmed all over. My family relationships were still healing after a youth of misunderstandings and lies, but I recognized Mama’s touch in the food and Mindy’s in the flowers. Like me, maybe far too much like me, my sister was gifted with plants.

I stowed the gear away fast and checked the pot to find beef stew with barley and vegetables, Mama’s secret recipe. I gave kibble to the cats, freshened their water, spooned up the stew, and texted my boss, Rick LaFleur, the senior special agent in charge—or SAC—of Unit Eighteen, to let him know I had made it to Knoxville and had his new equipment.

Duty appeased, I called Mama while I ate. Once greetings had been exchanged and I had described the trip and the roads and the traffic and the weather, all things one did before reaching the heart of a conversation, I said, “You shouldn’t have brought me dinner, Mama, but thank you. The stew is wonderful and the house looks beautiful. Tell Mud I love the flowers.”

“Of course we should. You’un are our girl and you’un’s back after time away. Mindy and I made the stew together. She’uns learnin’ right quick-like, and turning out to be quite the cook. Some young man will snatch her up fast, unless I miss my guess. And then we’uns spent the afternoon airing out your house, putting new sheets on that fancy new bed you got, and dusting. Good heavens, those cats of yours are a noisy bunch.”

I let the comment about Mud—“Mindy” to Mama—marrying young pass by, but I had no intention of allowing my sister to be married off before she was eighteen. Not happening. If she wanted a life of polygamy, the life espoused by the church, then fine, but it wasn’t a decision she would make until she was of legal age.

The phone call ended on a high note, with me promising to come over for lunch tomorrow, lunch with the whole family: Mama, Daddy; Mama Carmel and Mama Grace, Daddy’s other two wives; my true sibs and half sibs; and my brother Sam’s new wife, according to the church and according to the law of the land, both. A girl I hadn’t met. They had been legally married, proving that his wife was of legal age. The legal marriage and the legal age together indicated that things had changed at the church, and hinted that things might be changing even more. I could always hope.

As I washed the single bowl and spoon and put the leftover stew in the refrigerator, my cell trilled out its repeating notes. I’d had exactly seven phone calls on the cell, and it was still exciting when it warbled the notes announcing a call. It was Rick, and instead of responding to my hello, he said, “Can you come into the office?”

My childhood had me automatically trying to say yes, but all the weeks in Spook School had given me better instincts. “I just spent over nine hours on the road in a truck. In a truck,” I repeated. “It’s cold and dark and I am home and staying here.”

Rick was silent for so long that I thought we might have lost the connection, but he finally said, “We have a case that fits your special abilities. Unit’s on the way to your place. ETA thirty-five, and have my new equipment ready.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” He ended the call and I sighed, not sure if I was sad or eager. A case meant that my long holiday week off was a goner, which was sad, but starting a job, a real job, chasing real paranormal perpetrators would be exciting. Well, most investigations would be predominately paperwork and making deliveries to my coworkers, but sometimes things happened, started moving fast, and that part of the job was undeniably thrilling.

At least the house was clean and dust free, so I wouldn’t be embarrassed that guests—coworkers—would see it. I started coffee in the brand-new Bunn coffeemaker, set out small plates, cloth napkins, and spoons, sliced a loaf of Mama’s bread, and opened a jar of preserves, since I had nothing else in the kitchen to offer guests. I put the strawberry preserves in a microwaveable bowl to warm when the unit arrived. And I thought about how much my life had changed in the last few months. I had a microwave. It was practically sinful, though I did note that Mama hadn’t said anything about my changing and decadent lifestyle—other than my bed, and widder-women often bought new beds—over the phone or in the note on the table. Churchwomen didn’t have microwaves or coffeemakers. Ever.

In the last few minutes of alone time, I unpacked, showered, and dressed in fresh clothes, leaving my feet bare on the chilled floors so I could maintain contact with Soulwood.

Before I left my room, I prepared and crammed a fully kitted-out, four-day overnight gobag with clean undies, toiletries, a faded pink blanket, and two changes of mix-and-match clothes. The personal gear was enough for a four-day trip, and included my passport, extra chargers, battery backups, a bottle of water, and high-energy snack food, for emergencies. If I needed to leave in a hurry on unit business, I would be able to. My large gobag, like all the gobags of the other unit members, would be stored at HQ. I also packed a smaller bag to use in the field, containing minimal gear, two evidence collection kits, field boots, gloves, and one change of clothes for any bloody, wet, muddy, or torn emergency.

When I was as ready as I could make myself and the house, I signed on to the house’s Wi-Fi to check my e-mail. Having tech in the house felt surreal. Having a cell phone, a laptop, that fancy-schmancy microwave, and a real coffeemaker instead of the metal percolator I had been content with for years felt almost evil in the blatant consumption of the world’s goods. I had lived on the edge for so long that it was taking a lot of time to realize that not all convenience was the devil’s hand in the world. Growing up in God’s Cloud, and leaving it only to become a junior wife to John Ingram, had given me a skewed view of life, and I was still working through it.

* * *

Six minutes before the unit was supposed to arrive, I felt the deep thrum of a four-wheel-drive truck or SUV coming up my mountain. I closed the laptop and added a log to the firebox, warmed the preserves in the new microwave, and checked the solar battery levels on the new gauges at the stairwell wall. The solar cell and battery system had been upgraded while I was at school, thanks to the sale of John’s old four-barreled shotgun—which turned out to be an expensive collectible—and I now could run up to three days on full backup power. If I was careful about fuel usage, I could even outlast the lightless days of most ice storms, when I might be trapped on the mountain with only the wood-burning cookstove and the cats for company for a week at a time.

Tossing a shawl over my shoulders, I walked out onto the front porch as the microwave pinged behind me. The SUV came to a stop and Unit Eighteen boiled out of the open doors. JoJo, who had been heard to refer to herself as the unit’s token human, also the unit’s IT specialist, was wearing a wildly patterned skirt and turban, her braids flinging out around her, the electronic tools of her trade tucked beneath her arms. T. Laine, the moon witch (one with strong earth magic affinities), was dressed in jeans, hiking boots, and a wool jacket with a hood. She moved with a deliberate slowness, as if feeling my land through the soles of her boots, and she carried what looked like two boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts; my mouth started watering. Tandy, the empath, stepped out more slowly, his face wreathed in a smile that faded into something odd in the security lights, but perhaps that was the effect of shadows on the permanent Lichtenberg lines that marked his skin from being struck by lightning three times. Occam, the wereleopard, practically danced up the stairs, and Tandy fell behind as Occam and JoJo grabbed me in a hug.

   
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