by Faith Hunter
When Jane told me about the man she would send, she said that he would break my heart if I let him, like he’d broken Jane’s. This Rick was what the few romance novels I’d read called tall, dark, and handsome, a grim, distant man with a closed face and too many secrets. A heartbreaker for sure. “That’s a start,” I said. In their car, a small catlike form jumped to the dash, crouched low, and peered out the windshield through the daylight glare. I ignored it, all my attention on the pair on my land, moving slowly. Rick pulled out his cell phone and thumb-punched and swiped it a few times. He paraphrased from whatever was on the screen, “Jane said you told her you’d been in trouble from God’s Cloud of Glory and the man who used to lead it ever since you turned twelve and he tried to marry you. She also said Nell Nicholson Ingram makes the best chicken and dumplings she ever tasted. That about right?”
I scowled. Around me the forest rustled, expectant and uneasy, tied to my magic. Tied to me. “Yeah. That sums it up.” I draped the shotgun over my arm and backed into my home, standing aside as they mounted the last of the steps. Wondering what the church spies in the deer stand on the next property would think about the standoff.
They thought I didn’t know that they kept watch on me all the time from the neighbor’s land, but I knew. Just like I knew that they wanted me back under their thumbs and my land back in the church, to be used for their benefit. I’d known ever since I had beaten them in court, proving that John and I were legally married and that his will had given the land to me. The church elders didn’t like me having legal rights, and they didn’t like me. The feeling was mutual.
My black cat Jezzie raced out of the house and Paka caught her and picked her up. The tiny woman laughed, the sound as peculiar and scratchy as her words. And the oddest thing happened. Jezzie rolled over, lay belly-up in Paka’s arms, and closed her eyes. Instantly she was asleep. Jezzie didn’t like people; she barely tolerated me in her house, letting me live here because I brought cat kibble. Jezzie had ignored the man, just the way she ignored humans. And me. It told me something about the woman. She wasn’t just a werecat. She had magic.
I backed farther inside, and they crossed the porch. Nonhumans. In my house. I didn’t like this at all, but I didn’t know how to stop it. Around the property, the woods quieted, as if waiting for a storm that would break soon, bringing the trees rain to feed their roots. I reached out to the woods, as uneasy as they were, but there was no way to calm them.
I didn’t know fully what kind of magic I had, except that I could help seeds sprout, make plants grow stronger, heal them when they got sick and tried to die off. My magics had always been part of me, and now, since I had fed the forest once, my gifts were tied to the woods and the earth of Soulwood Farm. I had been told that my magic was similar to the Cherokee yinehi. Similar to the fairies of European lore, the little people, or even wood nymphs. But in my recent, intense Internet research I hadn’t found an exact correlation with the magics I possessed, and I had an instinct, a feeling, that there might be more I could do, if I was willing to pay the price. I had once been told that there was always a price for magic.
“Come on in,” I said, backing farther inside.
I watched the two strangers enter, wondering what was about to happen to my once sheltered and isolated life. I wondered what the churchmen watching my house with binoculars would have to say about it. What they would do about it. Maybe this time they’d kill my cats too—more graves to feed the earth. Grief welled up in me, and I tamped it down where no one could see it, concentrating on what I could discern and what I already knew about the couple.
Paka seemed less human than anything I’d ever seen before, not necessarily unstable, but all claws and instinct with a taste for games and blood. Rick was with PsyLED, a branch of law enforcement, which meant he’d have a certain amount of self-control.
The constitution, the different branches of government, citizens’ rights, and law enforcement were all taught from the cradle up in the church school, so all the church members would know how to debate the illegality of any incursion or line of questioning. But PsyLED was an organization that had been formed after I had left the church. Instead of learning about the quasi-secret agency at my husband’s or my father’s knee, I had made a trip to the local library, where I had looked up the paranormal department and discovered that PsyLED stood for Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. PsyLED units, which were still being formed, investigated and solved paranormal crimes—crimes involving magic and magic-using creatures: blood-suckers, were-creatures, and such. They had unusual and broad law enforcement and investigatory powers. They worked at the request of local or state law enforcement, and took over cases that were being improperly handled or ignored by local law. Officially the head of PsyLED reported directly to two organizations, the National Security Agency/Central Security Service, and Homeland Security, and by request to the CIA, the chief of the Department of Defense, the Secret Service, and the FBI. They were a crossover branch of law enforcement, one created just for magic.
In the back of my mind flitted conspiracy reports, urban legends, government machinations, and treachery. Things left over from a life lived in the church. Even John and his first wife, Leah, had believed that the government was evil, and living in Knoxville, near Secret City (where the US government has its ultra–top secret research facilities, the ones that made the first atomic bombs and contributed to every other major military creation since) only made the stories more plausible.
Warily, keeping my body turned toward them, I backed into the main room of the house, sliding my bare feet on the wood floor into the great room that was living room, the eating area, and the kitchen at the back. I jutted my chin to the far end of the old table and mismatched chairs that had been John’s maw-maw’s. He’d been dead and gone for years now, but in my mind it was still his and Leah’s. Leah had been sister and mother and friend. I had loved her, and watching her wither away and die had broken me in ways I still hadn’t dealt with. When I walked through her house, I still missed her. “Set a spell. I got some hot tea on the Waterford.”
The man waited until the woman sat to take his own seat. Solicitous—that’s what the romance books called it. Stupid books that had nothing to do with the life of a mountain woman. City women, maybe. But never the wives and women of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. I moved to the far side of the table. When I was sure we were all in positions that would require them to make two or three moves before they could reach me, I set the shotgun on the table and got out three pottery mugs. I wasn’t using John’s maw-maw’s good china for outsiders whom I might have to shoot later. That seemed deceitful.
With a hot pad, I moved the teapot to the side of the woodstove, where the hob was cooler, and removed the tea strainer. I could have made some coffee—the man looked like a coffee-drinking type—but I didn’t want to encourage them to stay. I poured the spice tea into the mugs, smelling cloves and allspice, with a hint of cinnamon and cardamom. It was my own recipe, made with a trace of real ground vanilla bean, precious and expensive. I put the mugs on an old carved oak tray, with cloth napkins and fresh cream and sugar. I added three spoons and placed the tea tray on the table in front of the sofa. I took my mug and backed away again, behind the long table, to where I could reach the shotgun.
“Welcome to my home,” I said, hearing the reluctance in my tone. “Hospitality and safety while you’re here.” It was an old God’s Cloud saying, and though the church and I had parted ways a long time ago, some things stayed with a woman. Guests should be safe so long as they acted right.
The nonhumans took the tea, the woman adding an inch of the real cream to the top and wrapping her hands around the mug as though she felt the chill of winter coming.
With a start, I realized my cats, Jezzie and Cello, were both on the woman’s lap. I tried not to let my guests see my reaction. My cats were mousers, working cats, not lap cats. They didn�
�t like people. Annoyed at the disloyal cats, I pulled out a chair and sat.
The man held his mug one-handed, shooting surreptitious glances at my stuff, concentrating on the twenty-eight-gauge, four-barreled, break-action Rombo shotgun hanging over the steps to the second floor. It was made by Famars in Italy and had been John’s prize position. I narrowed my eyes at him. “See something you want?” I asked, an edge in my voice.
Instead of answering, Rick asked a question again, as if that was a built-in response. “You cook and heat this whole place with a woodstove?”
I nodded once, sipping my tea. The man didn’t go on and for some reason I felt obliged to offer, “I can heat most of my water too, eight months of the year. Long as I don’t mind picking up branches, splitting wood, and cleaning the stove.”
“You are strong,” Paka said, Jezzie on her lap and Cello now climbing to her shoulders to curl around her neck. “You use an ax as my people use our claws, with ease and . . . what is the English word? Ah.” She smiled sat Rick. “Ef-fort-less-ness. That is a good word.”
She sniffed the air, dainty and delicate, “Your magic is different from all others I have smelled. I like it.” Her lips curled up, she kicked off her heels, and shifted her feet up under her body, moving like a ballerina. She drank the tea in little sips—sip-sip-sip, her lips and throat moving fast.
I wasn’t sure what she might know about my magic, so I didn’t respond. Instead I watched the man as he looked around, holding his tea mug, one hand free to draw his weapon. He had noted the placement of the other guns at the windows, the worn rug in front of the sofa, the few electronic devices plugged into the main outlet at the big old desk. Upstairs on the south side of the house, farthest from the road and any sniper attack, was the inverter and batteries. Rick looked that way, as if he could see through the ceiling to the system that kept me self-sufficient. Or he could hear the hum of the inverter, maybe. I was so used to it that I seldom noticed unless I was up there working.
He looked to the window unit air conditioner, which was still in place for the last of the summer heat, and up to the ceiling fans, thinking. “The rest of the year, the solar panels on the dormer roofs meet all your needs, I guess,” he said. I didn’t reply. Few people knew about the solar panels, which were situated on the downslope, south side of the dormers. John had paid cash for them to keep anyone from knowing our plans. I didn’t like the government knowing my business and wondered if Rick had been looking at satellite maps or had a camera-mounted drone fly over. I didn’t usually ascribe to the churchmen’s paranoid conspiracy theories, but maybe they had a few facts right. I glared at the government cop and let my tone go gruff. “What’s your point?”
He said, almost as if musing, “Solar is great except in snowfall or prolonged cloudy days. They run the fans overhead?” he gestured with his mug to the ten-foot ceiling. “The refrigerator?”
It felt as if he was goading me about my lifestyle, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was a police thing, the kind of things the churchmen said the law always did, trying to provoke an action that would allow them to make an arrest. But there were ways to combat that. I set my mug on the smooth wood table, the finish long gone and now kept in good repair with a coating of lemon oil. I spoke slowly, spacing my words. “What. Do. You. Want? Make it fast. I’m busy.”
“I understand you have good intel on God’s Cloud of Glory Church. We need your help.”
“No.”
“They killed your dogs, yes?” Paka said, her shining eyes piercing. To Rick, she said, “I smell dogs in the house; their scent”—she extended her thumb and index finger and brought them closer together, as if pinching something, making it smaller—“is doing this. And there were piles of stones at the edge of the front grass.” To me she said, “Graves?”
My lips went tight and my eyes went achy and dry. I’d come home from the Knoxville main library to find my two beagles and the old bird dog dead on my porch, like presents. They had been shot in the yard and dragged by their back legs to my front door. I still hadn’t gotten the blood out of the porch wood. I’d buried the dogs across the lawn and piled rocks on top of the graves. And I still grieved.
I gave Paka a stilted nod, my hair slipping from the elastic, swinging forward, across my shoulders and veiling my face, hiding my emotions.
Paka nodded absently, her eyes distant, the way some people look when thinking about math or music. “I also smelled three men. Outside. They . . .” She paused as if seeking words. “. . . urinated on your garden as if marking territory. This is strange, yes? They are only human, not were-kind.” Peeing on my garden sounded like some of the men of the church, childish and mean, to kill my plants, to urinate on my dinner. “My people do not keep dogs,” she said, “but I understand that humans like them as pets, like family. There was dog blood on your porch. The men should not have killed your pets.”
Rick said, “That was what I smelled coming in.”
Without turning her head, Paka shifted sharp eyes to me. “Do you want me to track and kill the killer of your dogs?”
“Paka,” the man said, warning in his tone.
A suspicious part of me wondered why she was being so kind, while another part heard a murderous vengeance in the words, and yet a third part wanted to say, Yes. Make them hurt. But vengeance would only make the churchmen come back meaner, and this time they’d kill me for sure, or make me wish for my own death. The churchmen were good at keeping their women pliant and obedient, or hurting them until they submitted. I didn’t plan on doing either, and I didn’t plan on leaving, not until I could get my sisters and their young’uns to come with me, to freedom and safety. I shook my head and said, “No,” to make sure they understood. “Leave them be.”
“Is that why won’t you help us with intel on the church?” Rick asked, his voice gentle. “The dogs? You’re afraid of their killers coming back and hurting you?”
My mouth opened and I said words that had been bubbling in my blood since I saw them in my yard. “You were supposed to be here months ago. Jane said you’d help me stay safe. Instead, the churchmen have come on my land—my land,” I added fiercely, “three times and they done bad things. Threatened me. Shed blood.” I lowered my voice and clenched my fists tightly on the tabletop to keep the rising energies knotted inside or maybe to keep from picking up the gun and shooting them. “And then you come here and want more favors instead of the help she promised.”
Rick started to move. I whipped to the side, one hand grabbing the shotgun, aiming. Fast as I was, the man was faster. He had drawn a fancy handgun in a single motion, so quick I hadn’t even seen him move. It was a big gun. Maybe a ten-millimeter. And it was aimed at my head.
Beside him, Paka draped an arm across the sofa back and watched him. And she purred. The sound was like a bobcat, but louder.
“Get outta my house,” I said. “You might shoot me, but I’ll put a hurting on you’uns too.” But they just stayed there as if they were rooted to my furniture. Cello crawled around Paka’s neck and nestled with Jezzie on her lap, her nose lifting close to the werecat’s face. Traitor. Something that might have been jealousy settled firmly in my chest like a weight. I scowled. Paka blinked, the motion slow and lazy.
“Mexican standoff,” Rick said, his voice soft. “Unless you have silver shot, we’ll heal from anything you can do to us. You won’t heal from a three tap to the chest.”
I laughed, the sound not like me. It was a nasty laugh. I set the shotgun back down and placed one hand flat on the table. Paka raised her head. “I smell her magics,” she said. “They are rising. Your gun might not hurt her as it would a human.” She petted Cello and she smiled again, her eyes tight on me. “This woman is dangerous, my mate. I like her. Her magic smells green, like the woods that surround the house. And it smells of decay, like prey that has gone back into the earth.”
“You’re like Paka, aren’t you?” I ask
ed Rick, reaching through the wood table and floor, down into the ground, into the stone foundations and the dirt below the house, into the roots of the woods that gave the farm its name, roots tangled through the soil in the backyard, deep into the earth. “Werecat.” I placed my other hand on the table too, flat and steady.
“We are African black were-leopards,” Paka said watching me in fascination, her nostrils almost fluttering as she sniffed the air.
“Not exactly the same, though,” Rick said, his weapon aimed steadily at me, even though I’d put down my shotgun. “I was infected when I was bitten. She was born this way.”
“Why do you tell our secrets?” Paka asked, not as if in disagreement, but as if she was mildly curious while being bored.
“Because we need her help,” Rick said. “We need to know about the Human Speakers of Truth and any possible connection to the church. Nell’s the only one who might be willing to talk to me. To us,” he added, including his mate.
“Who are the Human Speakers of Truth?” I asked, letting the power and safety of the woods wrap around me like crawling snakes, like vines, growing in place. All I needed was one drop of his blood and I could take his life. It was my best protection; it was my magic and the magic of my land. His blood on my land, on Soulwood, put his life into my hands. “What do you want to know? The federal and state raid on the compound told most folks all there was to know about the church.”
“Do you still have family ties to God’s Cloud?” Rick asked, again not answering my question. It was probably a police tactic, but it set my teeth on edge. “Someone you could go to, or talk to, safely, but not get into more trouble with the people who killed your dogs?”
“I have family there,” I said, using the time to gather as much of the woods’ energy as I could. “We run into one another from time to time. Farmers’ market. Yard sales. Why you asking?” I said, my tone challenging, deliberately accented by years in the church.