Curse on the Land

by Faith Hunter

  Leaving the door open, I raced into the woods, full pockets banging on my sides. Occam followed and pulled even with me. Together we leaped a downed tree and sprinted into an area that was all pine, in rows. A false forest of nothing but lumber. The underbrush had been burned out over the summer, the trunks blackened with soot. There was no scrub, no place to hide.

  “Nell?” Occam darted ahead and said. “This way. We need to get back to the road.”

  “Why? What good would that do us? We need a place to hide, where we’uns are protected and they ain’t. Where we can shoot from and they can’t hit us.”

  I opened my senses. I stopped and dropped to one knee, and rubbed the mouth blood on my wrist onto the ground. Offering it something of me. Knowing it was stupid, this close to the pond and the circular magics. I would never have done it except we were in danger and I had no time to do anything else. Behind us, the chasing engine roared and tires spun.

  Through the smear of my blood, I pushed down. Sent a single tendril of consciousness into the earth. The forest was lazy and spoiled and sleepy, roots narrow and twisted. But blood calls to blood, and I felt the blood of deer, old and dried. Somewhere ahead, several deer had been gutted and the remains left to the forest scavengers. Close by was a boulder rounded up, big and humped and even more massive belowground.

  Beneath the earth, something shimmered and shifted toward me. I broke away and stood quickly. “This way.” The car braked hard behind us.

  We sprinted along an open area between trees, Occam on my trail. A door slammed behind us. Another. They were in the woods. I could feel their feet stomping on the ground as they ran. They would have weapons. Guns. “We have two choices,” I said, my voice low and breathy from the run. “A deer stand or some big rocks.”

  “Three choices,” he replied, his voice guttural. I glanced his way to see his eyes were solid gold. There was a golden brown scruff on his cheeks and inch-long whiskers beside his nose. Occam was changing on the run, which I had never heard was even possible.

  The rocks were visible just ahead. I aimed my body directly at them. Slowed and bent to pick up a stick. And then pounded up the boulders at a run, the glacier-smoothed stone making it a hard climb, on all fours, though Occam made it look graceful and easy. There was a crevice . . . there.

  I halted, dropped flat, and used the stick to reach in and hook a rattler hibernating in the rocks. I threw it at the ground below me. Occam growled at the sight. I threw another one. And the last one. They hissed and spat and slithered away fast for cold snakes. I wiped my mouth again and put my bloodied wrist on the stone. There were no more snakes. I leaped into the crevice, which hid me perfectly, while giving me a good vantage to shoot from, about elbow high. But there was only room for one. “You said we had three choices, and no way am I sharing a hidey-hole with a werecat and me bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  Occam chuffed. He was shirtless and his shoes were somewhere else, behind us. His feet were paw shaped.

  “Guns,” I demanded, holding out a hand.

  He placed his service weapon in my left hand and I shoved it into my waistband. He lifted his leg, pulled out the tiny ankle-holstered .380, and placed it in my hand. His eyes were slanted, his brow furry, his jaw nothing like a human’s. He made a growling, clicking sound and licked his jaw. Then he dropped his pants. I looked away and out into the linear, straight-lined trees. Weapon extended out and steady. As a shooting position it was well anchored, perfect tripod, though I might abrade my wrist on the stone with the recoil of each shot. And my body was protected by rock that I could duck behind when I ran out of ammo. The snakes I had tossed whipped into the trees and disappeared.

  Beside me, bones snapped and cracked, breaking and reshaping. A strangled sound of pain, half whine, half growl, came from Occam’s throat. And then he leaped past me, into the branches of the nearest tree, a graceful shape of spotted gold and long sleek tail.

  I pulled my cell and set it on the stone. “You still there?” I murmured.

  “I’m here,” Rick said. “We have deputies in two marked units, ETA from the pond about four minutes.” In the distance I saw two figures. Racing after us.

  “It’ll all be over by then,” I said. “All but the blood and the mopping up. We have two armed suspects, male.” I strained, squinting against the glare. “Carrying indeterminate long guns, heading to my twenty. I’m hidden in some boulders. Occam went furry.”

  Rick cursed, and there wasn’t much I could say in reply. I had said damn earlier. I was pretty sure I had never said damn in my life until I became part of Unit Eighteen. Of course, I had never been chased like this, or not when off my land. If I took the two humans, I’d claim these woods as my own. And I’d kill two people, though I didn’t really care about that since they were hunting me, and not to give me a Publishers Clearing House prize, but to shoot me dead. Here I had only a gun for protection and no chance to pull on the earth or feed the land, because if I did, the infinity loop below the ground would see me. And trap me. And learn from me. Damn, damn, damn, I thought, my breath too fast.

  “Why did he drive the two of you there?” Rick asked, as if that choice was the stupidest thing ever. “Why did he take you to where the magics are strong and you both could be trapped by the land? Did the land make him come there? Did it draw him to itself?”

  That was something I had considered, but it would have to wait. I watched, seeing human shapes come nearer, bending, and looking ahead, and I realized they were tracking us by following Occam’s discarded clothes. We had been stupid. I could hear their voices now, hissing whispers and mutterings. The crack of a stick. They were moving fast, now taking cover, rushing from tree to tree, protected by the trunks. They had some training. But . . . they didn’t look up.

  “Tell me what’s happening,” Rick said.

  I steadied my aim on the man closest and murmured. “Two males. One Caucasian, under six feet, in jeans, ball cap, and a zipped hoodie. One African-American, well over six feet, in jeans and a Windbreaker-type jacket, hair in multiple braids to his shoulders.”

  “Who are they? Why are they chasing you, Nell?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t know. They aren’t churchmen.” A laugh tittered in the back of my throat, where I smothered it, saying, “That’s a first.”

  Occam perched high, about twenty feet above the ground, as the men maneuvered toward the rounded rock outcropping. Where else could we go, anyway? It was the perfect defensive position and the perfect lure. And Occam’s clothes pointed them straight at me.

  They came closer. I started to sweat. My vision went blurry and I forced my breathing to slow and blinked my eyes, trying to clear them.

  “Stay calm, Nell,” Rick said softly, as if he could smell my fear, hear my breathing.

  But what he didn’t know was that I wasn’t afraid of the men stalking me. I was afraid of the land. And its awareness of me. I was standing on stone, surrounded by stone, unmoving. No raw earth touched me. Yet the land was attentive. It knew I was here from the scant reading I had done and the trace of my blood on the dirt. It knew Occam was here, in the trees. It was pulling on me, a slow tug to the pond. Rick was right. The magic of the pond was calling me. I looked to my left. Through the trees I saw the water, calm and still, reflecting back the sun. An oily darkness rested just at the surface.

  As we ran, we had somehow circled around and headed back to it. Which meant that it was summoning me. Occam too. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  The men had worked their way to within thirty feet of Occam’s tree. I had seen a wereleopard leap, and the trajectory was just about right. The werecat tightened his body over the branch. He looked from the men to me and snarled silently, showing teeth so sharp they were like knives. He was trying to tell me something. He looked at the man closest to me, the one my weapon was centered on. Snarled again.

  Oh. Right. I shouted
, “Stop! PsyLED. Put down your weapons! Put! Down! Your! Weapons!”

  Instead the man farther back fired at the rocks. I ducked. Shrapnel flew, bits of rock peppering down on me.

  Cover fire.

  I lifted my head just high enough to see. The closest man was racing toward me. The long gun was an automatic rifle. With an extended mag. He saw me. Raised his weapon, the barrel coming across his body.

  I aimed at him. Squeezed the trigger. Fired. The blast stole the silence from the world.

  The shot went wide. But the man ducked and crouched behind a trunk without firing. The other man raced out to the side, as if drawing my fire. Occam leaped from the branch. Landed on the man who had fired at me. I raised up and fired at the man rushing to the side. He returned fire. The sound was thunderous. Rock chips and shrapnel shattered around me. A hail of gunfire. I could do nothing but crouch and wait it out.

  The rain of gunfire stopped, and I stood up, spotting the man, hunched over his weapon, half-hidden behind a tree. Changing out the magazine. My only good shot was about three inches of his backside, poking out from behind the tree. I steadied the weapon, breathed in. Out. Held my breath, lungs about three-quarters empty. Squeezed the trigger. Fired. He landed on one knee, his lower leg and foot exposed on one side of the tree, his head on the other. I aimed at the foot and fired twice more. Three shots total. I felt the man’s blood hit the ground in two places. Something lightless and empty opened within me.

  I could take him for these woods. I could feed him to the earth.

  The space inside me was deep and black and starless. And full of longing. It rose within me. Filling me with nothingness. I had his blood. I had his life. He had been trying to take mine. This was my right.

  I tried to draw a breath. Tried to breathe past the desire, thick and hot and needing. To take. To kill. To feed the earth. That was my sole gift. To send life into the earth. To nourish it.

  I was gasping. Mouth open. My belly cramped, wanting. “No,” I whispered. “No. Not gonna . . .” I forced myself upright. The body of the man Occam had taken down was flat. Unmoving. Out cold. There was no sign of Occam.

  Movement caught my eyes, and I scanned the trees to see the man I had shot shuffle-running into the standing lumberyard, bent over, holding his backside, limping on a bleeding foot. I’d hit him twice. He was disabled but still moving. Directly toward the pond.

  The pond. The working had called the man whose blood landed upon the ground. The magic beneath the ground had snared him. He was nearly at the water, with its glistening blacker-than-night surface.

  “Occam!” I screamed, pointing. “That man!”

  TWELVE

  The cat’s ears lifted, swiveling. His head turned toward me, to the man, tracking movement at the pond’s edge. The wounded man. Heading toward the water. He leaped up, from tree to tree, covering yards with each bound, faster than any human. Catching up. When he was close, Occam sprang twenty feet to the earth, landed, and dropped his head, shoulders rising. He crouched. On paws and belly, low to the ground, he crawled toward the scant kudzu near his car.

  Walking to the lip of the water, the man took one step into the pond.

  With a single massive lunge, Occam tackled the man and knocked him away from the pond, banging the shooter’s head with the landing. A siren cut through the air, close, pulling along the drive. Flashing lights caught on the trees and reflected blue on the black water. Occam growled at the man beneath him and swiped his prey with his paw, batting hard, but not slashing. Frustrated, Occam slinked away from the pond and the sheriff deputy’s bumping, grinding car. Into the brush, where he leaped up into the trees. Vanished in the green needles. I remembered to breathe.

  By the time the deputies pulled to a stop, I was in control of myself, mostly, and told Rick to call dispatch and tell the cops to put on 3PEs. I climbed out of the hole in the rocks and got the man Occam had landed on and knocked out safely in handcuffs. He was unconscious, so I didn’t Mirandize him, just patted him down and left him where he was.

  The deputies had given similar treatment to the man I had shot, and tossed him in the back of the unit before Rick’s orders came through, the officers walking the Earth with no problems, seemingly with no desire to go for a swim—yet. The attackers’ weapons were confiscated, rounds removed, weapons and equipment were tagged, placed in evidence bags, with heavy rubber straps acting as trigger guards, and stored in the deputies’ cars. And somehow, through it all, I controlled the desire to feed the earth the blood of my victim, pressed down on it, smothered it. And remembered to breathe.

  KEMA’s ETA to the pond was forty minutes. Rick’s was only slightly shorter. For now, I was on my own. My partner was at his car, mostly dressed. Missing a shoe, both socks, and his ankle holster. He was dressed in his outer clothes, though his shirt was open to the waist, the tails fluttering in the cold wind, and he seemed to have no desire to button it. His badge and ID were both clipped at his belt, to be seen easily. He was grim-faced, leaner than he had been only an hour before. His beard was half an inch long, scruffy and uneven. His hair had grown out too, a tousled blond tangle. His eyes were mostly their usual amber-brown shade and he seemed moderately in control, once he drank several bottles of water that I found in the trunk of his car. But he wouldn’t dress out in proper protective gear, and I knew his head wasn’t on straight yet—a phrase I had learned in Spook School but had never seen in action until now.

  The deputies and I were wearing the requisite antispell white unis with the ugly orange stripe across the chest. I was pretty sick of seeing them by now. I had marked off the crime scene around the boulders with crime scene tape. Brought out the basic crime scene evidence kit. It was my first arrest, my first crime scene, and was something I should have been walked through. Instead, I took it step by step, alone, according to protocol laid out in PsyLED training, because I was the PsySAC, PsyLED special agent charge, until someone with seniority showed up. Or Occam got his head together. This was bizarre.

  He wasn’t himself. He was silent, unsmiling, and went about making reports in monosyllabic grunts. I had a feeling the reports he was writing were going to be equally terse. But he finally agreed to wear the uni-style booties I gave him, protecting his feet from the magic in the land. He didn’t say thank you. Hadn’t called me sugar. But he kept away from the pond and the men who had attacked us, so I was counting that as a win.

  When Rick arrived and took over the scene as SAC, even he noticed Occam’s silence, but he did nothing about it, except to find earbuds in the sportster and hold them out to the werecat. Which I should have done. I was Occam’s partner for the day, and I should have been thinking for him. Occam had dropped his antimoon music while driving. I should have grabbed the antispell music. I was an idiot.

  I said so in my report. All the reports, including the reports I had to fill out for having drawn and fired my service weapon. And the one for having hit a suspect. So much paperwork. There was more paperwork when the ambulance picked up the injured attackers. Neither had ID on them, and it would take a while for AFIS—Automated Fingerprint Identification System—to deliver any fingerprints that might be on file. The car was stolen just this morning, and there might be traffic cam or security cam footage, but everything took longer than on TV and in film fiction. And no one was talking.

  Both suspects were taken to quarantine at UTMC where they would be given medical treatment and held against their wills. Interrogated. Background checks. They had fired fully automatic weapons at federal law enforcement. Life wouldn’t be easy for them.

  Midway through the workup, a deputy found Occam’s lost shoe. The werecat took it and walked away, without a thank-you or a comment. His face like a stone.

  In the ordinary course of life, I didn’t experience guilt about living, didn’t overthink what I said or replied or did, didn’t agonize about what I should have done. But this was different. I had let m
y partner down. I had let him shift in a dangerous situation where he might have bitten someone and then might have died at Pea’s claws. I should have played the music and forced him to stay human shaped. That was my job. And I had failed at something Unit Eighteen had required of me as the most basic part of my job.

  Just before the three days of the full moon.

  I couldn’t fix what I had done, but I could take Rick’s advice and do my job.

  * * *

  Within hours, the site had been worked up and Occam drove off in his car, without a word, with all my gear except my laptop behind the seats. Without me. He was being a typical moon-called werecat, but still. Abandoning me was just mean, no matter where his head was. Once again, I hitched a ride back to HQ with a deputy, where I got in my truck and drove to LuseCo. Still on the job. Because for some reason, Rick had accepted my gun when I offered it, but hadn’t asked for my badge, hadn’t pulled me from the field, hadn’t sent me home. At best, I was supposed to be deskbound now, until an investigation into the shooting was completed. That hadn’t happened. It had to be the effect of the impending full moon, making him forgetful or cranky or something. I knew he would get around to it, but for the moment, I had time to do the job.

  I had one innate talent: reading the land. I was going to use it for as long as I could. Wearing my uni, I parked my C10 in the visitor parking lot in front of LuseCo and got out.

  I walked out into the center of the lawn, facing the building. It had a gated entrance and was built like a medieval fortress, three stories high with long, narrow windows, and a flat roof with four turret-looking things, one on each corner. There were trees on the roof, and a tentlike awning was visible, possibly a location where employees might take breaks or even work in the sun. The drive split, leading to visitor parking in front and probably to employee parking in back.

  The plantings out front were sparse, over- or undertrimmed, underfertilized, and underwatered. There were spindly nandinas that reached for the second-floor windows. The first time I’d driven here, I had barely noted the landscaping around the building. Now I saw that it had been poorly planned, poorly executed, and was uncared for, winter bare, and slowly dying. The grass had been cut so low, so often, that the roots were dying. The nandinas were too tall for the location and in need of trimming. All the plantings needed fertilizer. Mulch. A decent irrigation system. All this I took in without thought, processing it, letting it go.