by Faith Hunter
I kept back from Occam as he cut his way through the overgrown field behind the two houses, the blade rising and hacking down. I was probably better with a machete than he was, being that I used one every year to take down overgrown plantings, but Occam seemed the kind of man who needed to protect the women around him. There were plenty of women who would take him down a peg or two, and fast, on the sparring mat at Spook School, but I didn’t have the physical strength to defeat a wereleopard, unless I was sneaky and kicked him in the privates first. I had to admit that he looked good swinging the blade, his jeans shifting with the muscles underneath, his back muscles pulling on his shirt.
And my appreciation was, again, totally, totally, totally unsuitable for a widder-woman.
* * *
Had the brush remained so thick, the quarter mile of cutting our way through would have taken Occam over an hour, but the trees took over, at first saplings, and then, quickly, trees that were ten to twenty years old and would provide a tall canopy in summer. There had been a controlled fire back this way at some point, the trunks blackened and the brush thinned out. Rocks appeared and the ground became far more uneven, no longer the level ground of a once-planted field left to go fallow, but the uneven surface of the rocky earth, too stone-filled to plow. We crossed over a rill of water, and Paka stopped to lap at it. I ran my hand through a short drop, where the water ran over stones and fell several inches. “Springwater,” I said at the touch of cold. I dried my fingers. Paka chuffed at me, sniffed, and chuffed again, telling me she smelled something on the water. She leaped into the tree nearest and from there to another tree, following her nose.
Occam followed her with his eyes and motioned us forward, on the cat’s trail.
“Slight level-one psysitope reading above ambient normal,” T. Laine said as we tromped on. A moment later she said, “Level two is coming up. And now three.”
We made it to the site where the P 2.0’s readings said the paranormal psysitopes had originated, where the deer were contaminated. The P 2.0 was redlining on all four levels. Unlike at the pond, there was nothing here but an open space between trees where wild grasses were rucked up and swirled around, the way deer move grasses as they prepare for the night. There was no pond, no ramshackle building in the distance, no lean-to, no signs of a burned-out farmhouse. No shed. No dead animals. There were no signs of human habitation, and even traffic sounds were scarcely in the audible range.
T. Laine pulled her pocket-sized psy-meter and took a reading to compare by, saying simply, “Still redlining. We shouldn’t stay here long.”
Occam took my blanket and folded it flat on the ground, which was still damp from the night’s dew. I watched him, thinking about T. Laine’s comment and everything that had gone wrong. “Did I ask you to look for reasons why a herd of female deer and juveniles might have traveled four miles? Dogs? Coyotes? Coywolves?”
“You did,” he said. “I checked with nose and eyes both. No signs of predators, except a few unoccupied tree stands and a pond that away”—he pointed—“with a duck blind.”
Human predators. I looked up into the trees and spotted Paka, stretched out on a limb, her golden green eyes on me. Sitting on the folded blanket, I pulled off my boots and socks and set them to the side. I placed my uninjured hand, palm down, on a bare patch of ground, my bare feet flat on the grass, knees bent up under my chin. I closed my eyes. Let my worries go instead of holding on to them. It was so stupid to cradle worries the way I did. I let my fears go. Let myself go. I relaxed and slumped forward over my knees, breathing. And I reached down into the ground.
FIVE
I sank into the dark and instantly heard words, not like a woman’s voice, but ringing like bells, vibrations high and deep, humming through my bones. “Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools.” But this time instead of saying “Gone, gone, gone,” there were two new lines.
“Dead. All dead. All dead. Forever.
“Dead. All dead. All dead. Forever.”
The words no longer had the same cadence as the first two lines. The movement and shape of the shadow-and-light was different too. It had coalesced. Drawn together. It was close to the surface, dancing among roots. The motion I sensed matched the cadence of the words, the power and gloom pirouetting. The light-and-shadow dancer swirled in a figure eight, a form employed by experienced magic users, ones advanced and powerful enough to control the energies and alter their shapes. The shape signified the rhythms of energy, space, and time, something beyond three dimensions.
And then it—they?—saw me.
The silk that had caressed my wrist yesterday slapped around my foot, sliding up my ankle. In an instant it tightened, roughened, pulling me deep.
Once again the dancer had taken my consciousness. Darkness and pressure surrounded me. I lost contact with the ground. With my own body. I was . . . buried alive. I struggled, trying to move, trying to fight. But it was like being wrapped in heavy carpet, around and around. Pulled down and down and around and around.
Wake her. Free me, the dancer hummed at me.
A deeper, human thought slashed at me, Get out! Get out! You can’t have it!
It was the woman. She— Pain exploded inside me. Pinpoints of agony. On the surface, my heart stuttered as if a huge hand had squeezed it. The pressure of the deeps. No breath. I struggled. Fought. Desperate. Warmth fled. The part of me that was on the surface, my body, was dying for want of air and heartbeat. Ice froze the blood in my veins. Crystalline, cutting. I was dying. The woman’s thoughts said to me, What are you? What do you want?
Lost. Dead. Gone, the dancer thought at me. Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Dead. All de—
Shut up! the woman screamed. Shut—
Something slammed around me, a shattering breaking force, shards of lightning and blue power, cutting through the binding. The dancer screamed. The silk slithered free, shrinking, shrieking. The woman cursed.
I ripped myself out of the deeps. Grabbed hold of the blue brightness. Held on.
I was moving. Then stopped. Enfolded against something heated.
I groaned, the sound like sandpaper over rubber. My stomach rebelled. I pressed away from the warmth. Stopped. I retched, lost my breakfast. The movement began again. I managed to wipe my mouth with some part of me, succeeded in drawing a breath, but I couldn’t see. Couldn’t open my eyes.
The movement jerked, as if falling a long distance and landing hard. The world swirled and my gorge rose again. The movement stopped. My stomach settled. I tried to control my breathing. My lungs were working hard and fast, as if I had been drowning. Or smothered. Buried. Underground. In the fists of two things, two creatures that each wanted something of me.
Sense returned. I concentrated on slowing my breathing and my heart, which was racing at a tripping, thudding, painful pace. Slowly my body began to achieve a rhythm that felt more normal. A steady tempo that meant I wasn’t dead. Wasn’t dying.
After what felt like ages, I tried again to open my eyes. I poured all my strength into that single aim. Open my eyes. My lids fluttered open.
I was sitting on a rock the size of a small stool, at the rill we had passed on the way in, my feet in the icy water. An icy wet rag was on the back of my neck. Something heated was wrapped around me, something alive, breathing with a deep, shuddering vibration. A bottle of water appeared in the air before me, a hand holding it. My own hands rose and I wrapped my fingers around the bottle. Oh good. I still control my body. I blinked slowly, and my eyes felt gluey.
“Drink.” Occam.
I pulled the bottle to me. I drank. My brain came rushing back at me.
Occam was holding me. He was sitting at my back, my spine against this chest. His arms around me. His legs around me. Holding me upright. I stiffened, and he eased away, taking his warmth with him, and he circled me until he was kneeling in front of me, his heated hands on my shoulders, hol
ding me upright. “Nell, sugar. You okay?”
I nodded. My neck moved like an iron rod had been implanted in my spine. Pain shot up my back, into my head, and exploded. Little lights and fireworks went off, bright in the threatening darkness. I was pretty sure if I moved again my skull would disintegrate.
“We need to know what happened back there,” Occam said.
I frowned and blinked until I could look into his gold-flecked eyes. I managed a bare whisper. “Did you carry me out?”
“Yes. Nell? Are you okay?
“I . . . No. I have a headache big enough to drive a tractor into.”
He put something in my free hand. Two Tylenol. “Oh,” I murmured. “Magic pills. Goodie.” I set them on my tongue, finished the bottle of water, and gave him the empty.
Occam breathed out a shaky laugh. “What does she read?”
“Back to normal,” T. Laine said. “I think I’ll set it to default zero and not the fudged zero I started at.” At which point I realized that she had been reading me with the psy-meter 2.0 while I read the earth.
“Fudged zero?” Occam asked.
“With all the redlining, I set the background ambient zero as high as it would go. The way I’d set it if a small coven of witches were getting ready to do a working and I wanted to be able to read the energies of the spell itself over the energies of the witches.”
Occam hummed a note that reminded me of a purr. That had been the vibration at my back. Things were beginning to return to me, to make sense. Paka was sitting, front feet together, at my side. She was not purring, but was watching me with a cat stare, the kind a well-fed, bored cat gives a mouse. Alert, interested, but not ready to attack.
“What did I read when I was scanning the land?” I whispered. I looked at T. Laine and the movement of my head made the world swirl and nausea rise. There was a glare everywhere, and my eyeballs ached. I put my hands flat on the rock beneath me. And very deliberately did not allow myself to commune with the deep.
“You redlined,” she said shortly. “Even at the higher zero.”
Feeling more steady, I lifted my palms and studied them. My fingers were white and quivering, but there was no bleeding, no places where a knife had nicked me, cutting me free. The stitches were clean and neat, the flesh they held together looking far more healed than it should. The ground and the living things in it had attacked. I looked at my feet. No damage except a streak of red. I thought back to the questions Occam had asked me. “I’m okay. I think. Sick to the stomach. A little woozy.
“The smaller consciousness, the dancer . . . recognized me. From yesterday. It . . . didn’t grab me, exactly. I was probably only a few feet into the earth when it saw me. It wrapped around me. Yeah. Like a ribbon on my ankle. But not . . . not like it was taking me prisoner.” I touched my ankle. The skin was tender, but nothing had penetrated my flesh. “More like it was trying to get my attention. Trying to get me to see something.”
A flare of heat from a branding iron pierced through my brain. I breathed slowly, carefully, trying not to throw up. Or hurl, as I had learned in Spook School. I pressed a hand to my middle, to the rooty scars that marked me. Nothing felt different. That was good.
“I think . . . I think the dancer was trying to tell me something,” I said, “the same thing it told me yesterday. ‘Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools.’ But the last lines had changed. It was saying ‘Dead. All dead. All dead. Forever.’ It was singing the words, like bells. It was dancing in a loose, looped, figure-eight shape. It . . .” I stopped, trying to think what I wanted to say. “It’s almost as if it wants to communicate something.
“Then there was another presence. The woman, I think, human or witch. I didn’t sense magical energies, so I couldn’t tell. She grabbed me and pulled me down. Between them, they were smothering me. Dragging me deeper. The woman seemed to know I wasn’t human. So, two presences, one humanoid in its thought processes, one not. Not at all. I need to go back there.”
“Not happening,” Occam said.
“What cat man said. It took everything I had to Break you free.”
I squinted up at T. Laine. She flowed with the glare, like an aura surrounding her. Ah. I had a migraine. Auras came with migraines. The headache stabbed through my skull. “Owww.” I placed one hand to my head, and the stitches on my fingers shocked me. “Owwwie again.”
“Nell, sugar?”
“Headache is bad. Maybe a migraine? I never had anything like this before.” I squinted through the pain and asked T. Laine, “Was that the blue energies I saw? The Break?”
“You could see the energies?”
“Something blue cut straight down through the earth all around me in a circle. It cut through the dancer energies that were holding me. Cut me away from the woman. And I was free.”
“Go me.” But T. Laine sounded unhappy still and her face was set in a frown so deep it cut lines into her skin, and hair hung in black tangles around her face. She was staring at the small psy-meter in her hands.
Occam, still kneeling at my feet, handed me two things. They were soft and pink. Pretty. “Can you put them on?”
I examined them. Turned them over in my hands. “Oh. Socks.”
“Yes. Socks.” He sounded amused and improbably gentle. Paka hacked, laughter in the syllable.
“Sure. I can do socks.” With motions that sent spikes of pain through my eyeballs, I pulled the socks onto my feet and then pushed my feet into the boots Occam held out for me.
“How we doin’, Lainie?” he asked.
“So far, so good.”
“What’s going on?” I asked, knowing that something was wrong but not knowing what, other than the headache that speared me and the ache that was growing in my hips and knees and shoulders. I tried to unfold my limbs against the discomfort, but I didn’t want to move enough to complete the stretch.
“Remember the crabgrass-looking stuff that grew into you yesterday?” T. Laine asked. Before I could reply, she went on. “Well, about three minutes into your scan, we started to see the topsoil move. And at about four minutes, thirty seconds, shoots came up from the ground. Exact same moment the P 2.0 redlined. They wrapped around your ankle. I dropped the psy-meter and started my Break. The moment Break hit, Occam picked you up, I grabbed your things, and we hauled ass outta there.”
I was reading for only five minutes? That was all? That seemed important, but my headache was getting worse, and I closed my eyes instead of trying to put it all together. My stomach felt as if it would erupt with the slightest movement. “Did Paka sense anything?” I whispered.
“She’s shaking her head no,” T. Laine said.
The world swirled around me like I was being sucked down a drain.
“Nell? Nell, sugar?”
And then I heard nothing more at all.
* * *
I woke when Occam tried to maneuver me into the car. I heard the word ambulance.
“No. No ambulance,” I mumbled. I was cold and thought that if I started shivering I’d not survive the headache. “Just some aspirin and ibuprofen on top of the Tylenol, a blanket, and a candy bar. I think my sugar bottomed out.”
“Nell, you need—”
“I’m okay.” I lay my head against the seat back and took a bottle of water from T. Laine. Occam tucked my faded pink blanket around me. “I think . . .” I had to stop and lick my dry, cracked lips. “At Spook School,” I whispered, “there was a class on backlash from interrupted magical workings. The usual stuff: fire, explosion, death. But they also said something about physical reactions.”
“Backlash,” T. Laine said, sounding relieved. “With headaches. Bad ones. Sometimes with auras, both visual and audible. You seeing an aura?”
I mouthed the word yes.
The seat dipped, and I felt the presence of someone near. I identified Paka by the sound of her purring bre
ath. She curled in the backseat, leaning against me, her heat like a furnace. As if she knew I was cold, she pressed against me, warming me like a hot fire in a stove. The threat of shivering eased away.
“I didn’t interrupt a working,” T. Laine said. “While you were getting ready, I drew a circle and prepared Break. But I didn’t hit you with it. I hit the ground with it.”
“I was in the ground,” I said, not knowing how to explain it any better now than I had in Spook School. I licked my lips again and said haltingly, “If something was full of psysitopes . . . or someone was being attacked by psysitopes . . . by a combative or offensive spell . . .” I breathed, hurting all over, trying to calm myself.
“You,” T. Laine said.
I splayed the fingers of my uninjured hand in a yes motion. “And I was in the ground, grounded, as it were, and the Break spell hit, Break being a defensive working, that could result in backlash.”
“Oh. Presumably yes,” T. Laine said, guilt lacing her words, “since the thing that had you was magical. Nell, I am so sorry.”
I waved the guilt away. “How about a consciousness or an artificial intelligence program that runs on magical energy?” I said. “Could it be hurt too? ’Cause I gotta tell you’uns. Them things act as if they’re alive.” The silence that followed was telling. It might have told me more had my eyes been able to focus more than a foot away, but I was doing the best I could.
“No ambulance?” T. Laine asked again.
“No ambulance,” I said. “Just OTCs.”
“Look at you all medical-talking. Over-the-counters. Nice,” T. Laine said. “Allow me to be your street-corner drug dealer. Here’s the aspirin and the ibuprofen. Take aspirin now and the ibuprofen in an hour.”
“Okay,” I said and popped the two aspirin with more water. I barely got them swallowed before I sank into sleep, to wake again only when the car braked at HQ. I swallowed two ibuprofens and tried to get out of the car, but I’d stiffened up and it took both Occam and T. Laine together to get me up the stairs, Paka leading the way. I let them help me because I didn’t want to throw up on the stairs. But about halfway up I retched again.