Home > Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(6)

Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(6)
Author: Faith Hunter

This meant that Yummy could move faster than a master vampire. That was interesting. I wished I could remember Yummy’s real name. Yummy was the nickname given to her by Jane Yellowrock, the vampire hunter who worked for the vampires in New Orleans. I couldn’t remember anything else about Yummy, except that she had been part of Jane’s team the night Jane raided the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church to find and save a kidnapped vampire.

Yummy continued, almost as implacable as Ming herself, “There was a fire, my mistress. Mithrans are flammable.”

I nearly choked on the “flammable” comment. Yummy went on.

“You were safe where I placed you. Cai is pleased.” From Yummy’s tone, that subject was now closed. Cai, Ming’s primo blood-servant, was the ultimate authority and Yummy reported to Cai, not Ming. More interesting.

Ming met my eyes again and said, “I remained on the floor until I was helped to my feet by a properly deferential human. I do not know his name but he was wearing a black shirt with brown pants. A name tag hung from his shirt. He assisted me into the kitchen and inquired after my health. He informed me that my scion was injured and was in the dining room. I proceeded there, fed her, and healed her.” She looked at Yummy again. “She is insufferable.”

“I am,” Yummy agreed. “I am also your hero tonight.”

There were a lot of subtexts in this conversation. I pulled it back to the line of questioning and addressed my next question to Yummy. “Is that your blood in the entrance to the dining room?”

“It is,” Yummy said, her eyes on her mistress. “The shots were still striking the house. I shielded two women with my body and got them to safety. I was injured during that time.”

“You could have been killed,” Ming said.

“There was no silver in the bullets. I am strong, healthy, and well fed by my generous and kind mistress,” Yummy drawled, locking eyes with Ming. “I healed well enough to bring others into safety and have them call the cops.”

“How many others?” I asked.

“Ming, the first two women, three men, and two more women. Then the shooting stopped.”

“Did you, at any time, see anyone who might have assisted the shooter?” I asked.

“No,” they both said, more or less in unison.

“Did you hear anything that might suggest that someone inside was part of the attack?”

“No,” they said again.

“Did you smell anything non-human or peculiar before, during, or after the shooting?”

Both hesitated but didn’t glance at each other. “Possibly peculiar,” Ming said, after a moment that stretched too long. “But the river and cove are heavy with scent. Human partygoers wear a disgusting amount of perfume. The fire was odorous.”

Yummy said, “Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Have there been any threats against you or the Mithrans of Knoxville?” I asked.

“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Yummy repeated. Ming said nothing.

“Will you provide documentation about any of the ordinary threats to PsyLED?”

“Yes,” Yummy said, turning away from her mistress’ eyes.

I finished with my final question. “Ming of Glass. Are you aware that you were standing beside the senator and directly in front of the woman who died? That the first shot is believed to have missed everyone, deflected by the window glass? That you moved in the fraction of a second before the second shot? And that it struck the victim?”

Ming turned her gaze to me, pinning me to the chair. I felt like a bug on some collector’s insect board. Holding this gaze was a lot harder than holding her ordinary gaze. This one made my skin want to crawl. “She died because of me?” Ming asked. “Because I moved? I was the target?”

“We haven’t ruled that out.” I scanned several pages and looked back up, having learned case details for the first time. “Her name was Margaret Clayton Simpson. Did you know her?”

“I knew her grandmother. My clan does business with her husband, with his son, and with a Clayton uncle. I have a scion by the name of Clayton, whom you have met. I did not know Margaret personally except by name and to shake her hand. She feared Mithrans. I do not force my presence on such humans.”

Yummy said, “I knew her name. That’s it. We’re leaving. I have to get my mistress home before dawn, and we’ll just make it.” They both stood and I followed only a half beat behind them.

“Will you contact us if you think of anything more?” I pulled a card from my pocket and handed it to Yummy, who leaned in and accepted it. “Thank you for your time, Ming of Glass.”

“You are welcome, Special Agent Ingram.”

They turned to leave and Yummy said over her shoulder, “Later, Maggots.”

Tandy smothered a laugh. I said, “Ditto, Yummy.”

The blond woman flinched just the tiniest bit.

“Yummy?” Ming asked.

“I’ll explain later, my mistress.” Yummy tossed a glare my way and preceded her blood-sucker master out of the room and down the stairs.

Tandy turned off the recorder and fell into the chair vacated by Ming, laughing. I gave him the same glare Yummy had given me.

“Don’t,” he said, holding his hands in a gesture of surrender. I could hardly believe this was the same man I had first met, when he was fresh out of Spook School and fighting to stay sane in the presence of multiple people with conflicting emotions.

I huffed out a breath. “Okay. Were they telling the truth?”

“More or less. They have a very complicated relationship.”

I gathered up the papers and stacked them neatly in the folder. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You’re hungry and sleep deprived and grieving. People died here, but I don’t think you knew them. Who are you grieving for, Nellie?”

Tears welled up in my eyes. I walked from behind the desk and toward the door, which Yummy had left open. “An oak sapling. Never mind. I’m making my report to Rick and going home.” Which I did.

• • •

I walked into my cold, dark house just after dawn.

Moving on muscle memory alone, I put winter wood into the firebox of the wood-burning cookstove that also heated my house and my water, topped off the hot water heater mounted on the back, and turned the mousers out into the cold with orders to catch mice and rats. They stalked off, ignoring me except to give me dirty looks. Clearly I was a bad mama. The water was tepid, but I showered off the long night, redressed in the flannel pajamas, wool socks, and slippers I had thrown off when the call came in about the shooting, and wrapped up in my faded pink blanket before joining the cats in the icy morning air outside.

I sat on the intertwined roots of the sycamore and the poplar, roots that looked as if the trees were holding hands, fingers interlocked. I called them the married trees and sitting here, upon their clasped hands, was the first place where I had communed with the land of Soulwood, my land, long before I knew what I was doing.

Eleven years ago, I had come to this farm, escaping the leader of God’s Cloud, who wanted me as his junior wife or concubine. To get away from Colonel Ernest Jackson, a pedophile and sexual predator, I had accepted a marriage proposal as junior wife, from John Ingram and his only remaining wife, Leah, and moved away from the church compound, away from my family, away from all I knew, to nurse Leah as she died. It had been a good bargain. I was twelve years old. A few years later I legally married John. Our arrangement was completely without romance, a business proposition that had left me with the land after John sickened and passed away. Thought of in such bald terms it was a horrible thing to have to do, but at the time, it had been like salvation shining down from heaven.

When I agreed to marry into the Ingram household, I hadn’t known I would inherit anything, and this small patch of land and these two trees was all I felt I could claim. It was where I’d gone when nursing duties for Leah had gotten to be too much, where I came even now when I wanted solace. I tucked my blanket around me, placed my palms flat on the frozen ground, and breathed out, letting the tension flow away.

I could hear the faint click and hum of the windmill that powered my pump and sent water into the cistern. Could smell smoke from my fire. The faint and faraway stench of polecat or skunk. Both should be sleeping but perhaps a hungry hunting fox had risked the scent-weapons for a chance to eat.

I sank down, through the bare ground, into the roots of the trees. They were sleeping, the whole woods, all hundred fifty acres that bordered the flatland around the house, up the steep hill, and down into the gorge. All of it was in winter sleep, dormant. Perhaps dreaming, if the Earth and her plants dreamed. It was warm, deep in the darkness of the land. And the soul of the woods reached up to me, as if taking me by the hand. The woods embraced me. And I sighed out my misery, putting one hand to my belly to rub away the anxious feeling, the rooty scars deep inside, hard and unyielding. The woods didn’t understand why I was sad, but they didn’t care either. They wrapped me in their calm and peace and I let the long night go.

Much later, when the sky had grayed and whitened and blued, and the sun had risen over the hills, I pulled back from the sleeping land and turned my attention to Soulwood’s problems. I nursed a failing patch of muscadine vine, and told the land it was a good thing to send water up to the spring above the house. I searched out and checked on the pregnant bear that was hibernating in a split in the rock not far from the spring. Bolstered the health of the asparagus I had planted above the windmill two years past. I had forgotten it, knowing that when it was ready to put forth enough shoots to eat, I’d remember. But now some kind of grubs had been chewing on its roots. I sent a pulse of energy to make them trundle away from the easy food source.

When I had done all I could to nourish the land, and I couldn’t put it off any longer, I turned my attention to the boundary between Soulwood and the church compound, to the dark, hollow place where the foreign entity once known as Brother Ephraim had carved out a space for his soul. It was still there. A little larger. A little more vile. A little more entrenched than before. The place he had carved out beneath the ground of Soulwood was dark and virulent, like a pocket of pus growing beneath perfect flesh, preparing to attack the entire organism.

Brother Ephraim watched, silent. He had been my enemy and the enemy of my family for years. He had been an evil, cruel, horrible man who used religion as an excuse to hurt women. When he came on my land to hurt me, and had bled on Soulwood, I had fed him to the earth. That was my own special gift, to take the body and soul of humans and feed them to the land, to nourish it, to support it.

I had fed Soulwood twice, the first time when a man had tackled me in the woods and tried to have his way with me, to get both my body and the land that came with it. I hadn’t known the first man’s name, had never even seen his face. But he had died fast and his essence had fed my land, making my trees grow strong and swiftly, so much that the forest now looked like old-growth trees.

   
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