by Faith Hunter
My hands moving with muscle memory, I tested the land with the psy-meter 2.0. All around the sapling, the trees read as they should. But the sapling itself and the ground beneath it read ambient on level one through three, with a little elevation of psysitope four. Exactly like me. And very unlike the sites where black goo toadstools were growing, and unlike the people at the hospital. Whatever was happening in town was different from what was happening at Soulwood, despite Rick’s bloody, bloody words. A weight dropped off my shoulders. I turned off the psy-meter.
Less tentatively, I crouched and placed my palm on the ground away from the red mess. Nothing tried to grab me. Nothing tried to pull me under. The land arched up into me, healing and satiating. Beneath the surface, Soulwood itself was healthy except for the area around the sapling and the area where Brother Ephraim had carved out a place for himself. I followed the pulsing line of shadowed energies from the sapling to Ephraim and then out and down to the tree on the church compound. The trail of energies was no more energetic, no more active than it had been earlier.
The problem in Knoxville was spreading.
But the problem here was contained.
I stood and dusted off my hands.
I had forgotten safety glasses, but I wasn’t going back to the house. I took up the chain saw and pressed the button. The awful screaming whine sliced the night like a knife on stone. Occam leaped away, into the trees, and disappeared. Musta really hurt the poor cat’s ears. Moving carefully into the small clearing, I stepped onto the bloody earth, carefully making sure it would take my weight. Turning my back to the flash, I stood so the tree caught the light. It trembled, as if in fear. Our shadows fell onto a Soulwood poplar, massive and strong.
Chain saw blaring, I positioned the spinning blade and cut into the small tree. The tree reacted.
Newly grown branches lashed at me. Roots rippled and tried to rise through the soil to grab my feet. I cut up and ripped through the branches, then down and cut into the roots. Something splattered over me, but I didn’t care. I cut through the trunk, severing the stump from the roots and the roots from the earth.
Over the whine of the chainsaw, I could hear the tree screaming, the sound coming up through the ground and into my bones. From far away, a twin scream echoed, from the direction of the church compound where I grew up. Still, I didn’t stop. I cut it to pieces.
When I was done, I switched off the chain saw and stepped back. The tree was sticks and sawdust. Something trickled down my face. I wiped it and my hand came away red and oily in the flash. The liquid looked like blood, but it was cold and greasy, tacky, like drying glue when I tapped my fingers together.
I opened the two boxes that had come from the pantry and upended the contents of the first one on the ground, in a three-foot diameter circle around the sapling. The ancients had salted land, rendering it incapable of supporting crops, thereby killing the farmers who depended on nature for food. Monarchs and generals and warriors had used starvation as weapons and punishment for centuries. Maybe for millennia. I scattered the rock salt with my boots. Beneath the layer of crystal, the bloody earth shriveled and curled and moaned in pain. In short order, the moisture would dry out and the land would be a brick. No plant would grow in the three-foot diameter circle for years. Which broke my heart, but not enough to stop. Tears misting into my vision, I smoothed the chunks of rock salt into an even layer.
Then I layered the box of borax on top and stomped it down, my boots making a sucking sound as the wound in the earth bled and the liquid was absorbed by salt and borax. Sam had said that salt hadn’t worked against the tree on the church grounds, but this tree was a sapling. Its roots were young, close to the surface. It should work here. The trees nearby would suffer from the rock salt poison too. Everything in the area would unless I sealed it off. So when I was done killing the tree, I scuffed my boots clean and walked to the nearest patch of healthy ground. I placed my hand on the earth and willed the land to seal off the wound, keeping it separate from the rest of the area. Willed it to seal away water and nutrients and to let the tree die. I didn’t know how Soulwood would manage that, but the land had done more amazing things even without my help.
Hand on the earth, I thought about the long strand that draped through the ground to the huddled form of Ephraim. I imagined snipping it in two with loppers. Nothing happened, but it made me feel better. And maybe the land would smother the line of energy now that the sapling was dying.
Finished, I gathered up the severed parts of the tree and tucked them under my arm. I left the blanket beside the tablet, which I left playing, and repacked my gear. I checked the area to make sure I had left no branches, no rootlets, nothing that might root or sprout. And I walked away. Ahead of me on the path, a giant cat dropped from the trees overhead and looked at me. The flash caught his golden eyes and the spots and striations in his pelt. Occam turned away and padded before me, as if leading me once again. I understood that Occam had appointed himself my protector. It was sweet, if unnecessary. “You trying to make up for being catty rude at the pond today?” I asked him.
He glanced back, slant eyed, and I couldn’t have said why, but I got the impression that Occam was amused at the thought of a cat being called to task for rudeness.
Back at the house, I replaced the tools, checked to make certain that rootlets hadn’t sprouted on any of the chipped-up bits of sapling, and stopped at the marriage trees. One knee on the ground, I put a palm on the twined roots, intending to do a light surface scan. What I got was a lot more. The land around Brother Ephraim’s little bolt-hole was churning with anxiety. And Ephraim himself was roiling with fury, sparkling with black lights that had even blacker centers.
If I were using my eyes to see his reaction, I’d have seen nothing, but since I was just sensing his feelings with my brain, the black on black made sense, an indication of fury. As I studied him, I realized that his tenuous connection to the place where he died—the thin strand of energies—was gone. I had broken it without magic, with purely mundane and human things. Power tools and ice cream salt. I chuckled, and it wasn’t a nice chuckle. It was mean sounding. I didn’t care if Ephraim knew it or not.
Pride goeth before a fall and all that kinda thing.
The energy that was Ephraim heard me. Or felt me. Or saw me. And he lanced at me like a spear launched from an atlatl—a spear-thrower. I tore myself up from the ground and leaped away. I landed hard, and the dirt and roots where I had knelt roiled for a moment as if an earthquake rattled the earth. Then it fell still and I felt Ephraim as he raced back to his hidey-hole. “Last time I laugh at you,” I said.
From the back door, Occam snorted, the discharge of air an interrogative.
“Never you mind,” I said to him. “This is not a problem you need to deal with. It’s my problem. And yes, I’ll ask for help if I need it.”
* * *
When I got back to the house, I locked Occam outside, much to his amusement, and put the tree pieces in the still-hot stove to burn. They lit up instantly, a bright red flame. I showered the bloody tree stuff off me. It had grown sticky as it dried, like tree sap, which was interesting but not overly helpful.
As I dried off, I discovered a voice mail on my cell phone from my brother Sam, which had come in only seconds past. It was short and pointed. “Nell. We’uns got trouble at the church grounds. I’d look kindly upon a visit from you. As soon as possible. Sooner, maybe.”
FOURTEEN
“Can you meet me at the entrance to the church?”
T. Laine knew what I meant by the words “the church,” though there were dozens of churches in Knoxville.
“Why?” she asked, talking and yawning at the same time. “You got black mold growing there too?”
“No. Well, I hope not,” I added quickly. “Remember that tree that grew roots into me?”
T. Laine grunted. I feared she was already halfway back asleep.
“Well, it’s going crazy. Growing thorns. Attacking children. It’s put on a couple thousand pounds of wood over the last few months.”
“Attacking . . . That sucks. But . . . what can I do to stop that?” she grouched. “We’ve already got a case.” I didn’t blame her. We were overworked and tired, and here I was asking her to help with something personal.
“You can tell me if a witching will kill it.”
“Witches don’t kill.”
“According to PsyLED files, a death witch can kill with her magic.”
“Death witches don’t use magic; they use curses.”
“Whatever,” I said, trying out the word and the attitude that went with it. It must not have come out the way I wanted, because T. Laine laughed, though not unkindly.
“I wanted to sleep in till at least six a.m.,” she said.
“I wanted to sleep in till four.”
“Four? Well, hell. I guess if you can burn the midnight oil, I can at least help. ETA forty-five. But you owe me breakfast.”
“Eggs, bacon, biscuits, grits, and pancakes or waffles?”
“God, yes.”
“See you then,” I said, not feeling the least bit guilty that I would be foisting my family off on her with breakfast at the Nicholson place. Not in the least.
* * *
T. Laine’s car followed me in, the witch driving, Tandy in the passenger seat, sipping on coffee-shop coffee. I could see the logo through the window. I was glad to see the empath looking so hearty, and also happy to see that he and T. Laine were so friendly. Tandy needed someone stable in his life, someone other than a romantic interest. But I hadn’t expected him to be here. I was suddenly worried what effect the massed emotions of the church and my family would have on him.
It was after dawn, and the church was finished with devotionals, the members walking and driving away, each and every one making a wide detour around the tree in its cement-block prison. Mostly because the walls around the tree were far more cracked and broken than before. One whole section was rubble.
To the side of the crumbled wall, a gleam of yellow utility paint could be glimpsed beneath a mound of vines that hadn’t been there yesterday. The vines originated up in the tree, as if the tree had decided to grow finger vines and attack. Deep inside the vines, I could see a bulldozer’s external tracked extensions—grousers. It looked as if a heavy-duty bulldozer had taken on the walls and the tree and had lost.
In the early light, the tree was massive, curling limbs and twisting roots in shapes a live oak attained after centuries, not decades. Today it was mostly leafless. The trunk and branches, the cement walls, and the ground for ten feet around it were blackened by fire. Where the fire had missed a section of the tree, a scarlet blaze brightened the bark. The branches there were covered with thorns as long as my fingers. The few leaves remaining were deepest green with crimson veins and scarlet stems.
The tree had started mutating when it had access to my blood. At the time, I had wondered if the mutation was mutual and if I would be changed as much by the tree as it was by me. Now that fear had waned. Though I had scars, I was otherwise unchanged. The tree, however, was an alien mutant ninja oak. I didn’t know what to do with it.
I got out of my truck and heard T. Laine’s vehicle doors closing. My brother walked up, leaving the chapel, the pointed-arched windows casting diffused light onto the ground. Sam had been in line to take over the leadership of the church, a contentious decision, but I had been too busy, and too thoughtless, to ask what had happened with the elders’ decision.
Sam walked closer, dressed in green camo pants and green camo shirt, with a matching camo coat over it and a camo ball cap. His boots were brown. “We tried what you suggested,” he called over the short distance.
“What happened to the bulldozer?” I asked.
“We think the tree ate it.” Which was what I had thought. I smiled at my true sibling as he continued. “Driver got away clean.” He stuck his hand out to T. Laine and then to Tandy, saying, “We met before. Sam Nicholson. Nell’s full sib.” Sam surprised me that he didn’t address all his actions and comments to the man first. My brother went up a notch in my estimation. The special agents gave their names, and together we approached the tree, stark in the headlights I had left burning. We stopped about twenty feet out, beyond the drip line.
Sam said to the others, “We cut off the branches, poured herbicide on it, and burned it. It kept coming back. Last night we tried to knock it down. It ate our bulldozer.”
“Mean-assed tree,” T. Laine said thoughtfully.
My brother coughed and laughed at the same time, surprised by the language. T. Laine looked at him, an innocent expression on her face. I just shook my head. “A dog nibbled the lichen last evening,” Sam said, his face going hard.
“Dogs’ll eat anything,” T. Laine said.
“This one died,” Sam replied. His voice was even, but something in his stance suggested he was not at ease at all. And then I realized what had happened.
“Oh. Sam,” I whispered. “Tell me it wasn’t one of Chrystal’s grandbabies.”
My brother scowled and hunched his shoulders. Chrystal had been his best hunting dog, a liver, white, and tan springer spaniel who could sniff out a bird at a hundred paces. I had heard she had passed while I was at Spook School due to a sudden-onset cancer. She had been fine one day and died the next. Sam hunched his shoulders tighter in the dawn light and said, “It was Tally. That tree’s dangerous.”
Tandy placed a hand on Sam’s shoulder, the first time I had seen him voluntarily touch another human in . . . ever. Sam looked at Tandy and controlled his double take at the up-close sight of Tandy’s Lichtenberg lines. A sense of pride opened in me like the lift of a hot air balloon. My brother was more open-minded than I had expected.
Mama walked up, her long skirts swaying in the headlights, a heavy scarf around her shoulders. “You’un gonna curse this tree, Nell? Lordy. I swear it’s a devil tree. It ate that behemoth yonder”—she gestured to the vine shrouded bulldozer—“and then it tried to eat Mindy.”
“Curse—? I’m not sure how to curse anything, Mama.” Mindy—Mud—was my true sib in more ways than genetics and parenting. Mud was a nonhuman creature like me. Whatever I was. And had it tried to eat her or incorporate her? They were very different things. Ultimately the same result, but different intents.
“Kill it,” Mama said. “Kill the damnable thing.”
I blinked. And blinked again. Mama cussing? I resisted looking at the sky to see if Jesus had come.
“Mama speaks from a position of power,” Sam said, his tone carefully modulated to demonstrate no emotion at all. “She and Sister Erasmus are the newly selected deaconesses, in charge of women and women’s complaints. And the women want it gone.”
Deaconess? Mama and the outspoken Sister Erasmus? Women with positions of power in the church? God’s Cloud was about to face trouble with a capital T. A chortle bubbled in my throat, but I forced it down, deciding to not respond to Sam’s comments. “Any chance there might be breakfast for guests?” I asked Mama instead. And the thought that I was a coward flashed through me.
“Always, baby girl. I’ll see you and your friends at the kitchen table in half an hour.”
“We’ll be there,” I said.
Mama and her sister-wife Mama Carmel moved away, trailing my true and half sibs. Other attendees to the morning devotionals made their way home, and in every case, avoided the tree.
When the last church member was gone and it was just Sam and my coworkers standing in the brightening daylight, T. Laine murmured, “Is the tree like the things growing at the pond and the neighborhood?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They read differently on the psy-meter 2.0. They have a different color.”
“They?” T. Laine asked.
Ouch. I h
ad forgotten that I hadn’t told them about the tree on Soulwood. But now that Rick and company were running around naked and pelted on my land it wasn’t much of a secret. Quietly I told them about the newly butchered tree. “What I did to it isn’t a curse. And the two trees we’re seeing are not the same things as the other odd growths. But they might be connected in some way to the sleeping”—I made a little circular gesture with my hand, trying to find a word for what I felt when I communed deeply—“entities . . . ? In the earth? The Old Ones. The things we aren’t supposed to disturb.”
“We have to take your word for that,” T. Laine said.
And there was nothing to reply to that truth. But Sam wasn’t so complaisant. Voice hard as stone against stone, he said, “My sister don’t lie. Not when she was a little’un, and not now.”
A warm glow lit me from within, and I said, “She’s talking empirical evidence, Sam. Not trust.” At least I hoped so.
“Trust we have in plenty,” T. Laine said. A tension I hadn’t noticed eased from my brother’s shoulders. Protective. My brother was protective of me. It brought a silly smile to my face.
“PsyCSI could rule out that the two things are the same,” Tandy said quietly.
The tension hunched me up again. But he had a point.
“If you break off a thorn and a leaf and scrape up some of the red stuff, that should be sufficient,” he said. And even softer, he added, “I can do it for you.”
I looked up from the study of my toes. “You think the tree will let you?”
“I think I can convince it to let me.”
I was seeing all kinds of confidence from the empath, and not a one I had expected.
“I have evidence bags and some plastic baggies in the car,” T. Laine said as she opened the passenger door.
Tandy took the baggies and the paper evidence bags from her and moved slowly toward the tree. No roots sprang from the ground. No branches whipped at him. I walked to the side so I could watch him, see his face. Tandy looked calm, peaceful, as if he was meditating, his odd white skin shining pale, and the Lichtenberg lines bright in the morning light.