Home > Curse on the Land (Soulwood #2)(3)

Curse on the Land (Soulwood #2)(3)
Author: Faith Hunter

I patted JoJo’s shoulders and, hesitantly, Occam’s back, which was solid muscle under his work shirt. I’d only ever hugged family and John, my husband, and he’d been dead for years. Physical contact was not a part of my daily life. The hug by the wereleopard was strong and unexpected and the contact did strange things to my insides. I jerked back a moment too soon for good manners and, at JoJo’s surprised expression, I blurted in church-speak, “You’uns come on in. Hospitality and safety while you’re here.” The formal welcome was an old God’s Cloud saying, and though the church and I had parted ways, some things stay with a woman, like accent, hospitality, and a steady hand on the trigger.

“Nell, sugar,” Occam said in his strongest Texan accent, “we done missed you something awful.”

“What the white boy said,” JoJo added. “If you can call a dude who changes into a leopard a white boy. The jury’s still out on that one.”

Paka, a native of Gabon in the African Congo region and a black wereleopard, slinked past us and opened the door to snatch up the house cats that raced out. “I have not missed you,” she said, her black eyes glinting at me in a cat tease, “for I have hunted on your land and eaten of its prey.”

Occam play-swatted at Paka—a cat move—as he swept me inside my own home. “The huntin’ was nice, I admit, Nell, sugar, and you’re a peach to let us hunt here on our moon-called nights.”

“Hurry up,” JoJo said. “Let me in. It’s cold out here for the humans and witches among us. Damn, Nell, look at you in pants!”

Self-conscious, I touched my hips and slid my palms along my thighs. It still felt strange to wear pants. Before I went to Spook School, I had only ever worn pants when working in the garden, and then they had been a pair of Farmer John–style coveralls. I still hadn’t worn my first pair of blue jeans yet, but the knit slacks were another step in the direction of becoming a modern woman. “You like?” I asked, my uncertainty clear in my tone.

“I had no idea you had legs that long,” T. Laine said. “If I had legs like that, I’d be in pants all the time. Or a short skirt. You look like a model. And you cut your hair again.”

“I love the look,” JoJo said, reaching out and flipping my short bob. “You took a page out of Lainie’s fashion style. Nice cut for a probie. What’d they do, grab you by your hair and force you to the mat during sparring practice?”

“Pretty much,” I said. It had been humiliating and I had sworn it would never happen again. I had cut my hair to prevent that hold, and though I’d hit the mat many times afterward, it was never because my hair gave an opponent a handhold.

The group gathered inside, with Rick, Pea on his shoulder, entering last. I kept my mouth shut only by an effort of will. The senior special agent looked as if he had lost ten pounds. Deep lines ran from his nose to his chin, like parentheses cradling his mouth. He was pale. Dark circles marred the flesh beneath his eyes like bruises. Now that I knew his story, I had to wonder if not being able to shift into his werecat was wearing him down. Or maybe the relationship with Paka, which was one-sided in every way, was doing that to him. I knew a lot more about that peculiar relationship now. Paka grabbed Rick’s hand and pulled him inside. She was petite but strong, and it appeared that Rick had given up fighting her on anything. He took the seat beside her on the couch, his olive skin looking pale and drab beside her glistening dark skin and curly black hair.

Pea, the unit’s grindylow, padded across Rick’s shoulders and settled in Paka’s lap. The supernatural were-creature killer butted the werecat’s hand, demanding to be petted, just like a regular house cat, though Pea was neon green and had hidden steel claws with which she was equipped to kill were-creatures who stepped out of line. Absently Paka petted her judge, jury, and potential executioner.

Paka wasn’t a US citizen and was part of PsyLED by way of a complicated liaison agreement between her native country’s government and the State Department. I didn’t particularly like that Rick was so captivated by her, but Paka wasn’t my problem.

The rest of us gathered around the kitchen table, the group asking me questions, all of us talking over one another. It was a great reunion, and it gave me something I hadn’t expected. It gave me the feeling of being part of something special. Something important. I had almost gotten that feeling in Spook School, that awareness of significance and value and consequence. As if I was doing something worthwhile with my life instead of hiding on my mountain. I had figured out at Spook School that marriage and a future family were far less important to me than they were to my full and half sibs. I had been born an outsider, and I had finally found a home in PsyLED.

After twenty minutes of homemade bread and preserves, donuts and chatter, Rick cleared his throat. Before he could speak, JoJo said to me, “Ricky Bo’s gonna steal your time off. You know that, don’tcha?”

I ducked my head and smiled as I opened my laptop. “I assumed as much.”

“Sorry, Nell,” Rick said. And he did sound sorry. “I’ll make sure you get time with your family. But we have a case, and it falls right into your skill set. However, I don’t want to tell you about it until you demonstrate the new psy-meter for us. And you can read your own land as part of the demonstration.”

There was something just a bit off in all that, but I drew the psy-meter 2.0 from its carry case. “It’s bigger than the incarnation model,” I said, “and way bigger than the pocket models. Side switch.” I turned on the counter. “Four gauges for the four psysitopes it can read, as opposed to the total psy-value the earlier models had access to.”

“Psysitopes?” T. Laine asked.

“That’s what the physicists are now calling the energy particles used during magic activities by paranormal creatures. They can be measured, like radiation on a Geiger counter, but unless they’re directed, they don’t do harm.”

I’d studied psysitopes in my Introduction to Paranormal Creatures and Workings class. “Psysitopes are produced both actively and passively—actively by workings, when a were-creature shifts into a different form; passively by being a magical creature. The things we measure on the psy-meter, the psysitopes, are like light, being both particles and waves, but are energies emitting from the paranormal. So far as the physicists studying magic know, there are four psysitopes, each acting a little differently, but the differences are measurable.”

The others, including Rick, gathered around. Paka stretched out on the couch with Pea and closed her eyes, looking bored. JoJo watched the werecat with something that might have been disdain in her eyes, but the emotion vanished when she caught me looking. She gave me a bright smile. I had seen fake before, and that smile was fake.

I said, “Like the original model and the smaller units that we had been using in the field, we have to set the device for interference. The werecats and witches will have to compensate for their own background readings, which means that JoJo, Tandy, and I will find it easier to fine-tune the more delicate parts of the device. We now can measure psysitopes one through four, and all four have to be zeroed for ambient magic.” I zeroed each level on the device. “Once a day we calibrate for standardized readings of known paranormals. That would be T. Laine for witches, JoJo for humans, and Occam for were.” I read each of them—except Rick, who would read differently because of his magical tattoos—and touched the button pads to standards. “Then we take a different known reading for quality control.” I aimed the sensor at Paka, and psysitope three rose into the high midrange. Psysitopes one and two rose about half that much, and psysitope four stayed nearly at zero. “Perfect for a werecat,” I said. I zeroed it and again extended the sensor to T. Laine. Psysitope one measured higher than the others. “Perfect for a witch.”

I set the device down and passed out the handbooks that came with it. “Hard copy for the Luddites among you, provided by Q. I already sent you the e-files.”

“Q,” T. Laine said. “Ms. Marsters still hate the James Bond nickname?”

“More than ever,” I said cheerfully.

“What do you read as?” Rick asked.

I shrugged and touched my belly, an instinctive reaction, feeling the rooty sensation beneath my fingers. His question didn’t surprise me, but he could have asked me private-like. “I read essentially human, with a little elevation of psysitope four. I can feel the roots, but the medical scans show nothing but thick scar tissue.” The roots had grown into me when a tree healed me of gunshot wounds. This was the newest part of my magic, and one I had no idea how to control. “The medical team scanned me top to toe and everything looked perfectly human except the PET scan. On positron emission tomography, my belly is full of inexplicable green energies and red blobs that look like full-blown systemic cancer. Except I’m healthy, as proved by the other tests and scans.”

“Poked you full of holes, did they?” T. Laine asked.

“You have no idea.” I rubbed my inner left arm where most of the blood draws had taken place. I had been bruised black and blue for two weeks as they worked me over before labeling me street safe. That wasn’t the PsyLED term, but it was what I heard the techs call me. Spook School wasn’t for the faint of heart or the politically correct. It was more like boot camp for the military, where they insulted you and tested you and studied you and tried to knock you down so they could see what you were made of and if you’d pick yourself back up.

“Okay. Let’s see the land, Nell,” Rick said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because our case is about land and a paranormal event. I want readings from all around Knoxville. Here is a good enough place to start as any.”

Tandy said, “And besides, we’re curious. We all feel something magical on your land.”

I frowned at the boss, but I had made a promise to do everything I could to be an equal part of Unit Eighteen, and that meant being open and honest about everything. Well, almost everything. I had been honest about Soulwood being a spiritual, powerful place that I could commune with, but I had never offered information—what was called “full disclosure”—about feeding souls to the land, or my desire for blood. I had just told people that I could kill attackers if I had to.

I had learned to lie by omission. The church taught that that was a sin, but I had never felt bad about the lie. I knew that said something unscrupulous about me, but some things were going to remain my secret. Well, Rick’s, Paka’s, and mine. We were inextricably tied together with the feeding-the-earth one. Together we had killed a man, who’d turned out to be a Welsh gwyllgi, a creature called a dog of darkness—a creature that had been Brother Ephraim, a churchman from God’s Cloud of Glory—and I’d fed him to the earth.

This wouldn’t be the first time Soulwood had been scanned with a psy-meter, but it was the first time with the newer, more efficient, powerful model. Even I was curious. I didn’t have to zero the device between scans, but it didn’t hurt, so as we traipsed outside, I aimed at the sky and went through the zero-and-cal process again until I was satisfied that the background readings wouldn’t interfere.

   
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