by Faith Hunter
The new feeling of wrongness was growing closer, much closer, from the men before me and from the gorge behind me, from where the road curved around the property. My back tensed with apprehension, but there wasn’t time to look over my shoulder. There was no way I could turn from the churchmen. “There aren’t many men more evil than you, you perverts! Go away,” I shouted. “I don’t need to hurt you.”
The men laughed at my words, and Joshua Purdy stepped from the shadows. He shook his oily hair back from his narrow face and said, “I’ve offered for you, time and again, to make you an honest woman, Nell. Accept my offer in the manner it was intended. Don’t make us do something we might regret.”
“Regret this,” I muttered. I fired my shotgun. The boom was enough to damage my eardrums. The butt of the gun jerked down along the length of the flagpole, the barrel rising with the recoil. The men darted into cover as I steadied the weapon, tracking Jackie, who had ducked behind the vegetable garden not far from the side of the house and was crouching his way to the house corner for better cover. I fired again, taking down a vine of second-crop string beans, in a haze of green leaf shrapnel. I was deaf from the concussion and my eyes were tearing from the blasts as I reloaded with practiced ease.
All I needed to do was wing them. Just a single scratch by a shot pellet or vine thorn or anything, and I’d have the injured one’s life force in my hands. But according to what I felt through my feet, no blood had dripped onto the soil of my land, onto the soil of Soulwood.
I blinked to clear my vision, catching sight of a flashing shadow, the shadow of wrongness that had been racing toward me, up the hill. From one side, a black shape leaped thirty feet and landed on the house roof, a leopard digging in with her claws as she raced over the roof ridge. A black leopard, dark as night, dappled with spots like moon shadows on the forest floor. Shock sliced through me as if I’d slipped a knife blade along my flesh.
An instant later I heard a shotgun blast and Brother Ephraim’s high-pitched wail. His blood splattered in a sharp arc across the trailing muscadine vine and the dirt at its roots. The hunger for that blood roared up like wildfire. The soil sucked at the blood, the attention of the forest awakening and turning to the fight, eager. A tremor like electricity zapped through the trees and through me. Brother Ephraim was mine. This was part of my magic, my singular powers. To take the life of anyone who bled onto my land. To feed that life to the woods.
Jackie, hiding behind the beans, swiveled his shotgun toward the commotion and Ephraim’s scream. He stood, raising his gun into firing position. I took careful aim at him, my finger on the trigger. Without firing, so fast I didn’t have time to blink, Jackie pivoted his body, shifted his aim to me, and fired.
But he aimed too low. I felt the shot as it peppered into the soil of the raised beds. A terra-cotta pot busted, shards flying. Two impatiens plants took balls of hot shot to the roots and died.
Which made me mad.
I steadied my gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun boomed, plant parts flew inside the garden. I reloaded. Fast. So far as I could tell, I hadn’t done anything except make a salad. I tightened my finger on the trigger.
The blast shocked through my hands and arms as the gun slipped off the flagpole. The world tumbled around me, recoil sending me rolling across the yard. A fractured shiver came from the ground, one that felt heated, like fire burning the grass, ripped, like fescue torn and killed by sheep. This was fear and danger as grass understood them.
I saw Joshua Purdy as I rolled. Unbloodied. I tried to right myself. Tried to pull my shotgun into place. Tried to pull the power of the land around me and hit him with it, not even knowing if that might actually work. The last thing I saw was Joshua’s fist, coming at me.
* * *
I woke choking, drowning, shivering. I coughed and spluttered, pushing up from the water. I shook my head like a dog, my hair slinging water. By the feel of the earth beneath me, I knew where I was, about two hundred feet from the house, still on my land, where a spring cascaded from the rocks high behind the house, dropping to form a crick that ran most months out of the year. The water was still, unmoving in this natural bowl of earth, a shallow pool about a foot deep atop the clay depression. I rolled, dropping my backside into the chilled water, my knees up and arms locked, holding me in a sitting position. I coughed, expelling the water from my chest, the sound ragged before it finally eased. When I could breathe, I took in myself and my surroundings.
My coveralls’ straps were cut, my shirt torn away. My upper chest was exposed. Joshua was sitting above me on a rounded boulder, his shotgun resting on his knees, watching me. I couldn’t tell much from his expression, but I knew that he had tried to hurt me before he threw me in the pool, while I was unconscious. Tried to hurt me and couldn’t. Not in my forest.
My hands felt odd, as if I had held them too long against a heating pot, slightly burned. The power of the woods tingled on the air, up through the clay and the water, full of fury and fear, the same feeling in my hands. I had a feeling that my woods had zapped Joshua. It hadn’t been enough to kill him, but enough to stop him, make him rethink, giving me a chance to pick and choose my response. But now I was drained. I had nothing left inside me, unless he was bleeding, and I felt no blood where he sat.
I worked my jaw, feeling bruises and strained jaw joints, tender eye, swollen nose. He’d beaten me and taken me to a private place to do evil things to me, if not for the eerie woods that cast long, murky shadows and burned him with their anger.
Dark was coming. The trees of the woods raised above us, massive, big enough that three men couldn’t have held hands and circled the trunks with their arms, trees as big as those in an old-growth forest. My woods. Eight years ago, the trees had had less than a third their current circumference, only twenty-five to fifty years old, and showing the girth of all such trees. My magic had made them stronger, bigger, tying them to me in some way I didn’t understand. My magic had made the woods something else. Something other than just trees.
Years ago, I had killed a man who attacked me, much as Joshua had and for similar reasons. In fear and terror and panic, fighting for my life, I had fed him to the forest. I hadn’t even known for sure who he was. I still didn’t know. But that was my secret, never shared, not with anyone.
I was still slightly deaf, ears ringing, but I saw the branches move in their artificial wind, a breeze of the trees’ making. My woods were alert and eager, had been since they tasted the blood earlier. They were full of power, waiting to be used. Waiting to be fed. I hadn’t fed Soulwood but the once. Eight years ago. But the forest remembered.
The woods felt . . . hungry.
I dug my hands deeper into the bottom of the small pond, the reek of decay strong. The clay held the surface water in place, and a layer of leaves, dead and decaying from last winter, coated the bottom of the hollow. I shoved my hands through the muck and the soft clay, pushing back with my weight, forcing my hands deeper. My fingers found a thin strand of a root, not much bigger than a hair, but alive and pulsing with the forest’s life. I pulled on its energies and it released its life into my skin, the root instantly shriveling, dying. I’d pulled too much and I released the life force back into it quickly, rattled and surprised.
Breathing out, I was not aware until then that I’d been holding my breath. More carefully, I pulled on the energies in the soil, knowing this was dangerous, but needing what Soulwood could give me. Joshua had made a mistake leaving me here on my land, in contact with the soil and water, roots and plants, that were the surface of its soul. Now all I needed was for him to come close enough for me to scratch him. “Joshua,” I said, acknowledging his presence after a too-long silence.
His face didn’t change; he didn’t blink; I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, until eventually he said, “I’ll tell ’em I had my way with you.” His voice was toneless. “They’ll believe me. And they’ll marry us in the chu
rch to protect the reputation of a widder-woman.” I didn’t reply, just sat there, exposed, cold and wet with the chill of early autumn, night falling, watching him watch me. Feeling the weight of the snub-nosed .32 still in the bib’s pocket, weighing it down, remembering that I had more than one way out of this—though how he had missed the gun in his destruction of my clothes, I couldn’t know. I’d have pulled the gun and shot him now if I thought I could hit the side of a barn from this distance, with that gun. The .32 was for close-up work, not target shooting. I needed him closer. Much closer. Gun and magic both required me to be up close and personal with my opponent. Shifting my body weight back onto my hands, I pushed farther down into the clay and sludge.
Joshua kept talking. “They’ll marry us in front of witnesses. And I’ll have your land and you. The way it was supposed to be.”
Joshua, John’s nephew, had been my husband’s heir, until I came along. Joshua had believed that everything his uncle owned was going to be his, me included, and according to church law that would have happened, eventually. But Joshua didn’t want to wait. He never had.
Joshua, his brother, Jackie, and a couple of friends cornered me at the door to the ladies’ restroom, alone, after church services one day. I’d been almost fourteen and, though married to John in the eyes of the church, still a virgin.
John had caught his nephew and Joshua’s friends, all older than me by five years or more, pawing me, and the vengeance he had administered with his fists were images I carried with me still. My husband had changed his last will and testament soon after that. And for all intents and purposes, we left the church a year later. Everything had begun to change after that event outside the ladies’ room. And now here I was, with Joshua again, my virtue and life in danger.
“You hear me, woman?” he asked, his voice rising, a thrum of anger in it.
I quoted the Bible. “‘But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.’”
“Take off your clothes, woman,” Joshua said, his voice vibrating with threat.
In the distance I heard a sound, rhythmic, a kind of throbbing resonance that might result if a music producer combined the rumble of a powerful engine with the purr of a house cat. In, out. In, out. Purring on the inhale and the exhale both. Paka. The black wereleopard in her animal form was close by.
Deep in the clay, my frigid fingers touched something solid and springy, and I wrapped them around the larger root, careful this time to take only a little, not what my panic screamed I would need. Holding on to the life of the forest, I tracked the purring, chuffing sound to a point of wrongness just to my right and slightly downhill, but . . . high, high in the trees. Below the leopard’s paw, hanging on the branch beside her, was a body, mostly dead. I could feel his blood on the tree bark, his breath slight and fast in the shadows, his heart fluttering. This blood felt wrong as well, but a wrongness I couldn’t explain. The wrongness was Brother Ephraim, and he was dying, dragged along an enormous tree branch by the powerful jaws of the black leopard. Blood poured from him onto the tree, as if deep gouges scored his flesh. The pumping of his heart was speeding, but the circulation itself was slowing as he bled out. Paka had wounded him most grievously while saving me, and he was dying. Dying fast. Blood loss and shock would kill her victim in minutes.
Joshua shifted on his pile of boulders. “Jackie said you’d let the devil into your house. A she devil and her devil man. And we had to take you back or you’d lose your soul. So . . . you’re mine. Jackie said so.” When I didn’t reply he said, “Put aside the Taser you used on me. I won’t have my wife with a weapon.”
Fear welled up in me. This . . . this was what I’d feared all my life. Punishment at the hands of a churchman. “No,” I said, so softly it was more a vibration in my chest. “No. I won’t.”
Joshua heard me and his face twisted in hate. “Take off your clothes. Submit. And I won’t hurt you.”
There was no cell signal on my land, and as best as I could tell, Jackson Jr. hadn’t gone down the road, to a place where he could call for help. He was tracking the leopard, his footfalls steady and determined. Reckless. Arrogant. But not stupid. Cunning evil on two legs. If Jackie got here first, he’d shoot Paka and help his pal Joshua rape me, while his other friend died in the trees. They’d rape me just like they’d tried to outside the ladies’ room when I was a kid. I’d kneed him in the groin then and tried to run, leaving him in the dirt. The boys still standing had grabbed me, hands up my dress. Until John found me. If John hadn’t come . . .
But I wasn’t a kid this time. I wasn’t helpless, even without a man to protect me. Even without Paka in the trees above.
“No,” I said, louder. “I won’t have you.” I shook my head. “And I won’t let you hurt me.”
Joshua’s fury beat through the ground, hot and cold all at once. I felt him gather himself, ready to attack.
I didn’t have a choice. I pushed my hands deeper into the clay, trapping myself if I had to move fast, the suction pulling at me, the cold stealing my life’s warmth, but burying me in the earth of my woods. I found a second root with my other hand, this one larger. A poplar tree root as big around as my lower arm, tiny rootlets feathering off into the soil. This one pulsed with life like a fire hose, full and potent.
With the two roots in hand, I could follow every life source in the forest, every bird, rat, snake, beaver, red deer, lynx in a distant tree, watching prey, and the wrongness that stalked my land. Jackie. Joshua. Brother Ephraim, dying overhead, all wrong. Paka, Wrong. And Rick LaFleur. He was still human-shaped, moving among the trees, silent and stealthy, more so than any human I’d ever known. He was closing on Jackie. He had the churchman’s scent. With him, on his shoulder, was a large rodent or small cat, another life force not seen here before, its energies wrapped around Rick’s. Cat on the dash of the car. Such wasted thoughts amid everything wrong that was poised to erupt into some new thing, something so very dangerous.
Above, Paka left the body of Brother Ephraim in the limbs and began moving through the trees, leaping from huge limb to huge limb, from tree to tree, silent, except for that double purr growing closer. It reverberated through the trunks of the poplar grove and into my bones. Paka was a wrongness here in the Appalachian Mountains, the trees resisting her. I feared that my woods might hurt her like they’d hurt Joshua. Instinctively I reached out to her through the trees, accepting her, pulling her in close to me, making her part of the land. It was the same thing I did when I put seeds or a plant’s roots into the soil; I claimed them for the land. In the same way I claimed Paka, giving her access to every part of the woods, making her part of them. Like the trees and plants, I could use her to help me as I desired. But I knew that by claiming her, I was also accepting responsibility for her actions. This was the good and the bad of living in Soulwood.
Joshua pulled his legs up under his body, in preparation to stand. “I said, take off your clothes, woman.”
From all around came a sound that had never belonged in this forest, a sound that was powerful and terrifying. Not a roar like an African lion, but like the dark of a moonless night, half scream, half rumble, a hacking, growling roar that spoke of death and menace. Joshua cringed and looked around. Paka had moved fast through the canopy of trees.
Overhead I caught a glimpse of a soaring hawk as it dove, hurtling through the limbs, half closing his wings. He tilted his body up, his claws opening, reaching. He caught a squirrel in his talons, the prey silent, swiftly crushed to death. The hawk spread his wings and flapped past me, to settle on a branch above Joshua. It ripped into the still warm body of the rodent and tore off a strip of bloody meat, the raptor staring down at Joshua as it ate. The squirrel’s blood splattered as it died. I knew it because of the roots I clutched, because they knew it, because the forest knew it all. Almost a whisper, Joshua demanded a third time, “Ta
ke. Off. Your. Clothes.”
I lifted my face and smiled at him, eyes only half-open, lips closed, demure, like the womenfolk were trained. “Nooo,” I said, drawing out the word.
Overhead the hawk paused, seeing the movement of a black shadow in the tall branches. Paka. Stealthy. Just above me. Her paws padding along a limb, about twenty feet away from Joshua. I had seen her leap onto my house. Joshua was well within Paka’s range. I wasn’t gonna have to kill this man, or not alone, at any rate. I laughed, the tone low and mocking. Slowly I added, “And if you touch me again, I’ll make you shit your britches, boy.”
Joshua stood, the shotgun gripped so tightly in his hands that his knuckles went white. A drop of something fell from above and hit him, square on his head. Joshua flinched and raised one hand, letting go, holding the gun by the barrel only. With the other hand, he touched the crown of his head. When he drew back his palm, it was smeared with blood. His eyes went wide; he tilted up his head, eyes darting through the branches. But Paka had already leaped. Flying through the air, silent as the shadow of death in the valley of evil.
Joshua saw. Movements jerky, he tried to raise his gun. Too late. Paka crashed into him and rode him to the earth, her claws embedded in his face, the long retractable claws holding his skull and jaw. Her back feet slammed into his middle, crushing out his breath in a strangled scream as they landed.
“Paka! No!” Rick darted into the opening between the trees and waded through the small pond, his boots sinking in the clay and splashing me with icy water.
Paka roared again, a hacking, growling scream that sent shivers through the forest and into my cold flesh. She turned greenish-gold eyes to me and hacked, asking me what I wanted to do. Rick came to a stop at the edge of the pool and looked from her to me, his eyes wide and uncertain, watching.
On his shoulder something moved, the other life force I’d noted earlier. It chittered and bounced up and down to see in the gloaming dark. When I didn’t react, it leaped ahead and landed, racing from Rick, fast as a flying bird, bounding as if winged, toward Paka. More wrongness rocked through the earth, shocking the breath from me.