I had thought taking Ephraim would be the same. But either my land had rejected him or Brother Ephraim had found a way to keep his consciousness intact, because the old pedophile and sexual predator was still here, an infection that I hadn’t yet figured out how to kill.
The last time I had studied him this intently, he had attacked me, a psychic attack that had been enough to kill me, had my land not deflected the hit. Soulwood had fought back, had protected me. This time, as I watched him, Ephraim did nothing, though I knew he was aware of me, aware and watching me back, planning something horrible and violent, some way to kill me or, worse, some way to trap me with him in his tiny cell.
More thoroughly, more minutely, I examined the cave-like place he had carved out of my land. It was separated from Soulwood by a membrane that was much thicker than before, soil that he had compacted, soil that he had sterilized. I feared that he’d learned how to do that from me. His one physical assault against my land, I had sealed off by salting the earth at the point of entry. The land there looked a lot like the land now around his hidey-hole. It made it hard to see what was happening on the far boundary, shoved up against the church lands. But I slid my consciousness around to the side and pressed to the very edge of Soulwood.
The membrane on the far side was thinner, less structured than the membrane on my side. The membrane near the church was stretched out, sending long tendrils through the land, deep, and down the cliff face onto the church grounds.
Well, well, well, I thought. You’uns is trying again, ain’tcha. Trying to reach that vampire tree. Trying to do something evil. I know it. I just don’t know what you’re planning yet. I reinforced the cell walls that encapsulated Brother Ephraim on that side, thickening them, hardening them, making them as impervious as I could. Studying their construction.
Because I was lying to myself. I knew what Ephraim wanted. He wanted to contact the tree in the middle of the church grounds. The tree was part of his plan to bring harm to me. And the tree might actually have the ability to hurt me and to help Brother Ephraim.
The tree had once been an oak, but thanks to contact with my blood, it was now a devil tree, a vampire tree, growing vines and thorns and erupting rootlets from the ground, roots that tried to grab little girls’ and boys’ feet and pull them in. Tried to stab any adult who intervened. It killed pets—puppies and kittens. It wanted blood, had, ever since it tasted mine. It acted like a depraved and evil tree, but I had the feeling that the vampire tree had a purpose, needs, and desires. I had tried to give the tree a job, thinking that was all it wanted, but instead of doing what I encouraged it to do, the tree was still growing wild and acting out, killing or trying to.
The last time I’d been on church grounds, the tree was nearly twenty feet around, with serpentine roots like bark-covered boa constrictors petrified in place, leaves like some prehistoric succulent, and four-inch thorns. It had eaten a bulldozer. Had destroyed a concrete block fence. Had resisted burning, chain saws, explosives, and herbicides. I needed to figure out what it wanted and how to contain it. It and Brother Ephraim. Until I figured all that out, I once again choked off Ephraim’s little tendrils with my reinforced wall. No way was I letting the tree that had once had access to my blood merge with my enemy.
Satisfied that I had done all I could to contain Brother Ephraim, I pulled away from the boundaries of Soulwood and back into myself to discover that I had become a daybed for the cats. Torquil was in my lap, curled between the blanket and me in a warm nest. Jezzie was stretched across my shoulders. Cello had made a hammock of the blanket at my elbow and stretched out and twisted like melted taffy in what looked like an anatomically impossible position.
I shooed them away, gathered up my blanket, and went inside. The house had warmed and I turned on the slow-moving overhead fans to move the air around. The cats streaked ahead of me and ignored me when I told them they had a job to do outside. They leaped onto the bed and burrowed under the covers. I did not want to sleep with cats, but I was too tired to make them obey me and put them back outside. I turned on my brand-new electric blanket and crawled in.
And really, with three cats warm and purring, my new bed had never felt so good.
THREE
I was up at noon to let the cats out, add wood to the stove, and tumble back into bed. And I was up again at three, the sunlight peeking through the blinds. I wasn’t sure what species I was, but my kind didn’t do well with lack of sleep, unless that lack of sleep was spent in the woods communing with the trees—and even that had its own consequences. I started coffee in the new Bunn coffeemaker, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and checked my . . . well, they weren’t fingernails. Not anymore. My nails were slightly green, thicker at the nail beds than they had been, thinner at the tips, where they flattened out and spread into leaves—green leaves with distinct veins and curling tips. As part of my morning—afternoon?—ritual, I clipped my leaves. It had become part of my daily grooming habits, one that was even more necessary after time spent communing with the woods. I also clipped the leaves that tended to appear at my hairline at the nape of my neck. I liked the way they felt against my skin, but they tended to creep people out—a new phrase for me. Had I left my hair long, they wouldn’t show, teaching me that some seemingly simple decisions often had long-term consequences.
While gooping up my hair I caught a glimpse of my eyes in the mirror. They were greener. I had noticed a color change a few weeks past and it seemed to be accelerating. I wasn’t sure I liked the color, and it too creeped out some people, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I dressed in one of five mix-and-match outfits that worked for the office and the field, refilled my one-day gobag, and checked my messages, an act that had become SOP—standard operating procedure—since Unit Eighteen became part of my life and the cell tower went up at the highest point of my land. There were six e-mails and double that many texts, one that had come while I was sleeping and informed me of a meeting at headquarters. I was likely to be late for that unit briefing. I had somehow slept through the group text, slumber claiming my brain and not letting go.
As a probationary agent, I wasn’t supposed to miss meetings, so I tossed some of my homemade granola into a plastic sealable bag and grabbed a carton of milk—which had horrified my mama the last time she was here. Good churchgoers drank only milk they took fresh out of the cow or goat, but I didn’t have time to care for animals or barter for essentials, so packaged and processed foods had entered my diet.
I was out the door roaring down the mountain in my Chevy pickup in minutes and was only a bit late to the meeting, even without turning on the new lights and siren mounted inside the cab and up on the roof. Rick had barely introduced the case, and was giving a summary of the particulars, when I thrust myself into my chair.
“Thank you for joining us, probie,” Rick said.
I didn’t much like apologizing for things I didn’t do on purpose. Traffic and sleeping and horrible work hours seemed good reasons to be late, but I wouldn’t say that unless pushed. And telling him I was late because I had to clip my leaves seemed . . . unnecessarily comedic. I held in a grin and nodded.
“Something amusing to you, probie?” he asked.
“Not a thing. You’uns was sayin’? ’Acause I’m alistenin’ with all my ears,” I said in church-speak.
T. Laine coughed into her hand, covering an aggressive jaw, as if trying to hide a laugh. She said, “Our Nell’s learned snark.” Her dark eyes sparkled, a sure sign I was going to bear the brunt of her wicked sense of humor.
“Nothing to learn, Tammie Laine,” I said, knowing she hated her first name. “All churchwomen learn how to speak the truth in ways that keeps them from getting the back of some man’s hand.”
“Ouch,” she said.
“Mmm,” I said back.
“To continue,” Rick said, “we have three dead and three injured from a shooting at the home of Conrath and Carolyn Holloway. The party was a fund-raiser for the political VIPs of East Tennessee . . .”
I tuned him out except to listen for anything I didn’t already know. I’d learned early on that repetition and more repetition was a big part of any investigation. There were good reasons for that, but it was still boring.
Occam’s head dipped; his hair swung forward. He was watching me with hooded eyes, unblinking, concentrated. He didn’t have to say a word for me to know what he was thinking. He’d sink his claws into any man who gave me the back of his hand. It warmed me all over, but it was a bit intense and I dropped my gaze. It settled on the coffee urn on the table and the metal travel mug in front of me. Someone had painted green leaves all over it. T. Laine? Tandy? Somehow it felt like Tandy’s work. That warmth inside me spiked. I knew a gift when I saw it. And then I realized that all our mugs had been artistically enhanced. Occam’s had a stylized spotted leopard on it. Rick’s, a black leopard and the letters SAC. JoJo’s showed a caricature of her, wearing a red turban and dozens of earrings of every sort. T. Laine’s showed a hand holding a gray stone with a full moon behind it, for her moon gift magics. Tandy’s showed clouds and huge lightning bursts, which was kinda mean, as being struck by lightning had given his skin the red tracery and his gift of empathy. Soul’s mug was undecorated except for the letters AD for assistant director of PsyLED. But then, not everyone knew that Soul was an arcenciel, a rainbow dragon shape-shifter. That intel was need-to-know.
“Nell?” Rick asked. “Woolgathering?”
I thought back to what he had been saying.
I said, “There was nothing in the land that I recognized. I included in my report about the dead plants and the sapling. Ming of Glass and Yum—her assistant—asked if the shooter was a vampire. It wasn’t. I have no idea what species it was except that it—he—I’m going with he—wasn’t human.”
“So you were listening,” he said.
“Not actively. I was hearing but not listening. There’s a difference.”
Rick shook his head. He looked tired, like he needed protein. Or like I made him tired. That was actually a possibility, since I had claimed him for Soulwood as part of healing the curse on his soul and body. His olive skin was paler than usual and his black hair seemed streaked with more silver each time I saw him. Oddly, his white shirt needed ironing and his pants looked like the same pair he had worn at the Holloways’ the night before, which meant he hadn’t been home to sleep or shower or anything. I got up and found a protein bar in the drawer by the sink. Tossed it to him. He caught it, looking from me to the bar, and dropped into his chair with a soft, drawn-out sigh. “T. Laine?” he asked, opening the package, taking a bite.
T. Laine said, “I hung around the feds as much as I could. There was no sign of magical use in the house or on the investigators. All human, all the way. The feds didn’t want to talk around me, so I put in earbuds and pretended to play with my phone. But in reality I was wearing the new MMs.”