by Faith Hunter
Rick’s smile vanished, leaving the calculating, discerning cop in his stead. He stared at me with the same intensity Jezzie used when she spotted a mouse that she wanted to eat.
“You’re thinking with a different part of your brain now. Earlier you were thinking like a cat. Now you’re thinking like a cop. You’re thinking you might be forced to arrest me. But if you do, then you have to arrest Paka. Paka was there,” I said. “She hurt him to save me. He was dying.” More slowly, I said, “He was dying at her teeth. He was going to die on my land. So I . . . helped.” I didn’t have to add, If I hadn’t let him die the way he did, Pea would have killed her. Or you would have had to arrest your cat-woman. He knew that. And he knew that I knew. “Paka was there when Brother Ephraim . . . departed. Neither of us lifted a hand or paw against him.” Not as humans understood it.
Her words languid, Paka said to me, “The words you have claimed are true. I did not kill the male. The were-taint will not be spread. The male will not turn at the full moon. He will not return at all.” She looked at Rick. “This woman and I did not kill. Except to protect her, no one’s hand was lifted against him. He is gone.”
Her word choice and syntax were odd, but she was a foreigner and maybe that was the way she spoke English, because it wasn’t her first language. Maybe an African language was first for her. Or cat.
Rick glowered, the cop in him fully taking over from his other form, the cat who had been pleased to survive and eat and rest. I wondered for a moment how a cop could take off time to visit with me, but decided the answer might be in the name of his law enforcement organization, Psychometry Law Enforcement Division of Homeland Security. Living in the church with conspiracy theorists for so many years, I knew lots about the way the law worked, in principle.
Paka said, “There is no crime scene. There is no body. There is no blood. There is nothing. This is her land in the way of the ancient among many tribal peoples, and her word rules over all. Also”—she shrugged slightly—“Pea is satisfied at the woman’s judgment.” I didn’t know what she meant about me ruling, but I’d take what I could get.
“If someone reports a crime,” I said, “you can come back here and look. I give you my permission and you won’t even need a warrant.” The cop frowned, thinking things over, as if different scenarios were playing out at warp speed in his mind.
“Thank you,” Rick said, finally.
I didn’t want him to thank me. I frowned at him and went back to the last of the dishes in the tepid water. “Farmers’ market is in Market Square. There’s other markets, but the one in town is the best known and best attended. The churchmen drop off their women just after the traffic eases. The women set up the tables in the church booth and sell vegetables, honey, jellies, quilts—things made by the women—and handmade dough bowls, rolling pins, stools, tables, rocking chairs, and toys made by the men in the wood shop. Church pamphlets are on the booth table extolling a glorified version of the church. The market earns them money and goodwill from the townspeople and makes them look as humble and moral as the Amish. My mama and my maw-maw might be there, along with my sister Priscilla, one or the other or even all three, and if so, I can ask your questions. They might answer.” I gave a small shrug and pushed my hair out of my face. “They might not.”
“Why have you decided to help us?” Paka asked.
Reluctantly I said, “Because if you hadn’t come back to help me, I might be dead.” Or entertaining guests tonight in ways I didn’t even want to think about. Or I mighta had to kill them all, all three, and feed them to the earth. One possibility filled me with a dread and the other with an eagerness I couldn’t shake off.
I arranged the plates and glasses so that they would dry easily and turned to the couple, crossing my arms over my chest, a habit of both self-protection and succor. “You said you wanted my help. How much do I get paid if I help you? I got five hundred dollars when I let the blood-suckers cross my land to rescue a blood-sucker that the colonel kidnapped, back when Yellowrock Security wanted my help.”
Rick said, “You’ll be a consultant. Pay would be calculated based on what you can tell us and how much assistance you give.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and walked to the desk John had used for business. “I want a contract, signed by your superiors, in my hand before I start work.”
The couple exchanged glances, saying nothing, but it felt as if they reached some kind of decision. “Where is the booth so we can be in place?” Rick said.
Rick had said something similar before, before the attack on my home, when a visit to the market was just hypothetical, and not a reality. “Why do you need to be there?” I asked.
“We’re your backup, Nell,” Rick said in that gentle way of his. “You don’t go in alone. Never.”
And that sent a curious shaft of emotion through me, of something unknown and precious and impossibly seductive. A sense of safety. It was so elusive that I didn’t know how to reply. You don’t go in alone. Never. The words broke me in ways I hadn’t known I could break.
To hide my reaction, I swiveled away and stepped slowly into the dark of the shelving behind the kitchen, where I kept preserves and seeds and dried foodstuffs, dishes and pots and serving bowls and crockery. I stood in the unlit space and dried my tears, a cold breeze on my damp face and hair. I followed the breeze and discovered the first of the damage from Brother Ephraim’s shotgun. I hadn’t looked for damage. Hadn’t wanted to until they were gone and I was alone. My teary eyes went flinty and dry with fury as I took in the broken dishes on the floor, and the broken back window, which was spiderwebbed with cracks. If I hadn’t already agreed to be a consultant, this would have decided me.
I walked through the house, noting that Brother Ephraim had shot out four of my back windows, top and bottom panes both, damaging the frames and the walls, inside and out, and some wood trim inside Leah’s and John’s old bedroom. But the pellets had only pierced the screening and so critters and bugs couldn’t get in tonight, even without window glass.
Back in the kitchen, I pulled a magnifying glass out of the tool drawer and went over the stove and its water heater. “Nell?” Rick asked.
I held up my hand like a traffic cop telling him to stop. “I need a minute,” I said, verifying that the stove system was undamaged. Repairing it would have been a time-consuming and expensive fix, but it was fine. When I was done, I stood over the stove and looked around my house, my blanket forgotten, my body heated by anger.
Women were expected to simply take whatever the churchmen dished out. Take it and cry and grieve and then accept whatever they did. No more. Not for me.
The churchmen would stay away for a bit, what with a special agent involved, but eventually they would be back. I had always assumed that they would burn me out and make me wish I was dead, and there was no help for it. I could get a restraining order, a piece of paper to wave in their faces and burn in their fire. I could move, or try to. I could ask for protective custody. But that wouldn’t last. Eventually the churchmen would find me.
But maybe being part of PsyLED would give me protection from the church. One of my attackers, Brother Ephraim, was dead and gone. And the cop, who was part cat, sitting in my front room, had told me I wouldn’t be alone.
Not alone. That was temptation.
I went back to the great room and opened the wooden box where I kept all my records. I removed two business cards. I used a local company for roofing, the solar panels, and the windows, and they would be right out when called, but if I didn’t involve my insurance company, it was going to cost me. I didn’t want to contact my agent for this, but I knew that the replacement would be a lot more expensive than I could afford. I had to bite that bullet.
I said to Rick, “The men shot up my house. I could call the cops but I think it would be wiser to just call it vandalism.” I handed him the first card. “This is my insurance company.” For
the first time ever, I blessed John’s foresight in getting insurance. God’s Cloud was anti-insurance, but John had worried about me living here alone and had insisted that I have top-of-the-line policies for the truck and the house. It had seemed a waste until now.
I handed Rick the second card. “This is for the people who put the windows in.” I wrote a short note on a scrap of paper and put it in his hand with the cards. “If you would be so kind as to call them both, I’d be appreciative. Tell the repair people these are the damaged windows and that the siding over the logs in back was peppered with bullet holes. They’ll handle it, turnkey job.” Rick smiled and tucked the cards into his chest pocket. Watching him do that was oddly final feeling, as if by asking him to do this one small thing I was sealing my own fate.
Shortly after that, I saw Rick and Paka to the door, their list of questions clutched in my fingers. This time, I had to bodily drag Jezzie and Cello away from Paka, an act that left me bleeding and them mad, but once the couple drove off, the cats quieted. I doctored my cat scratches with my own poultice made of plantain, arnica, calendula, and comfrey leaves mixed with aloe, applied with soft rags tied in place. I also treated my bruised jaw and eye socket where my sweet suitor had clocked me a few. It was painful and puffy and hadn’t healed like my cut fingers when I jerked them out of the earth, but the same herbs that worked on open wounds would help that, except in tincture form. I applied a bit with a heated rag, followed by a rag cold from the well water, back and forth between temperatures until the pain eased, though the bruises were an ugly purple, spreading down my neck with the pull of gravity and all around my left eye.
Once the pain was eased and the bleeding had stopped, I finished putting away the pots and dishes and brought in the dry clothes off the line, carrying up the basket to the small bed in my little room for folding later. I didn’t want to do it now. I didn’t want to do anything right now. I had taken a man’s life tonight. He’d have lost it in moments anyway, but . . . I had hastened it on by seconds and claimed it for the woods. I should feel something about that, some guilt for killing, or happiness for vengeance satisfied. Instead, for reasons I didn’t understand, I felt only overheated, itchy, and twitchy, as if my skin wanted to ripple and bubble up, like a science fiction movie I had watched one time. I stopped, bare feet on the floor, feeling the wood beneath my soles, and below that the foundation, resting in the earth that had nourished the trees used to build the house, when they had lived. Alexandre Dumas, in The Count of Monte Cristo, had said something like, “. . . I have been heaven’s substitute to recompense the good—now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!” I wasn’t sure if God had yielded anything to me at all, or if I had stolen that right from him, and if so, he might just be taking his own good time to swat me down.
At the thought, my skin seemed to settle. This was why I had been so twitchy. Tonight I had finally found some small part of vengeance, justice, and no small measure of satisfaction when I took Brother Ephraim for my woods. But tonight, between one of Brother Ephraim’s heartbeats and his last, I had also committed murder. And I felt no guilt. The dirt beneath my house seemed to throb once, the feeling it sent through me vibrant and alive. And darker than I ever remembered. I didn’t know what to think about that.
Unsettled, I went through the house more carefully, cataloging damage. There were broken dishes, still sitting on the shelves up high, and I brought in John’s old stepladder to take an inventory. I swept the shattered dishes into a plastic dishpan and swept up the mess of broken crockery that had hit the floor.
My fingers traced the lines of the shattered antique hand-thrown pitcher. It had been made by Leah’s great-grandmother in the mid-eighteen hundreds. There had been no one to give it to when Leah passed, and I had put it on the top shelf in the kitchen pantry, thinking it would be safe, but a pellet had found it. My eyes burned and tears threatened, my throat clogged with pain. I owed her better than to let the church destroy Leah’s things, her memory, or me. She had taught me better. I put the broken pitcher back on its shelf, even though I knew that there was no way I could mend it.
Later, carrying my blanket, a book, and the list of questions that Rick had placed on the stack of books where he had left his cash earlier, I wandered to the back porch. It was a lot neater than when John was alive, piled as it had been with garden tools and buckets and boots and tillers and such. I never understood how a man could accumulate so much stuff. Now everything was neat, the tools hung on nails I had hammered in the back wall, John’s boots and hats and work gloves given away. The garden tools were now stored in the small enclosed space on the south side of the porch, one I’d had built with the insurance money from John’s death. The church didn’t believe in life insurance, but by the time Leah had died, John didn’t believe in the church and so had provided a small sum for me. The life insurance money was mostly gone now, except what I’d invested in a fund at the bank. The shed took part of the view, which I hated, but it also protected the back porch from the hottest summer sun, and the small window inside kept the shed warm in winter, from radiant heat alone. The dogs had slept in there some nights, when they hadn’t wanted to come inside the house, kept warm by the last rays of the sun.
Now, the floor of the much smaller porch was taken up only with the washing machine (an old model that drained into the garden), one chair, a tray on legs for use as my table, and my hammock. I’d bought the hammock from my sister Priscilla, when she was pregnant with her first child, and paid too much for it, just for the chance to make sure she was okay. Not unexpectedly, she was happy, married to Caleb Campbell, who was ten years her senior and already had one wife when they wed, Priscilla’s best friend, Fredi. Priss didn’t want to escape, didn’t want another life. She was happy, living in a big house full of children and wives and a husband who loved them all. The very life I’d been raised to aspire to, and had run away from, was the one she wanted. Up to the moment some churchman tried to take her to the punishment house. I stayed on Soulwood for that day, to be a safe haven to run to. And I stayed because when I did leave, even just to market, I felt the land’s call like a dark wound in my chest.
Priss, like my mama and my baby sisters, loved God’s Cloud. They loved the life there, the people there. Mama had even forgiven Brother Ephraim for his sin against her. The churchwomen were blind to the wicked acts of the ones who did evil in the name of God. The call to forgive was a powerful weapon, used against them for too long.
I had a feeling Jackson Jr. wouldn’t be forgiving me. But with Brother Ephraim missing and Joshua scared, he wouldn’t make a fast decision about me this time, no matter how mad he was, not with a special agent involved, no matter how tangentially. He’d want to let time pass and things settle, and when he came again, he’d make sure he had more than three men. He’d want to come in fast, grab me, and haul me out, leaving no trace. Then he’d burn my house and garden to the ground. And he’d take me to the punishment house personally. Or at least that would be his plan, once he convinced enough of the men to help him kidnap me. And I figured he’d forget to mention to the men the presence of police or black leopards leaping from my rooftop to protect me, and maybe Joshua would hold his tongue too. So . . . I was safe for a little while. Long enough to try to derail their plans. Long enough to figure out how to use the title of PsyLED consultant to my best advantage.
I let my thoughts wander for a bit at the memory of Jackie running through the woods, his speed not quite human, too fast, too surefooted. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and not something good. I remembered the bitter smell of Ephraim’s blood and of Paka’s description of it as wrong. I remembered Pea offering me a drop of Ephraim’s blood and her incomprehensible chitter. I wished I knew what all that meant, but whatever it was, it too wasn’t good.
I wished I had a method of making the woods grow thorny vines among the trees along the borders of the property, like Sleeping
Beauty’s forest. Protective, passive defense. But my power wasn’t magic. It didn’t work that way.
Except . . . the ground had risen up and grabbed Pea’s feet like a trap when I’d wanted her stopped. I didn’t know what that might mean either. Not yet.
Thoughts and plans and worries swirled around in my brain, rising and dying back like fire in a brazier, hot and uncertain and potentially destructive. And possibly useful.
I crawled into the hammock, turned on the small lamp, and opened Rick’s list of questions. There was a short paragraph at the top that read:
Human Speakers of Truth is an antiparanormal, anti–human rights, quasipolitical terrorist group with once-deep pockets and ties to energy. They own outright or through shell companies a small oil company in Texas; several small natural gas companies in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina; and several other less legitimate companies, possibly for money laundering. With the FBI and secret service involved, and financial assets frozen, they need a place to regroup. We know they came here, to Knoxville, Tennessee. We believe that they are still here, and we are searching for evidence to prove or disprove their location. For your contacts in the church:
1. Have there been any new men around?
2. Describe any changes in leadership and any power struggle.
3. New tensions?
4. New weapons?
5. Anything at all different?
To ask such questions of me, Rick LaFleur truly didn’t understand how people lived in the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. The women would know nothing unless pillow talk had loosed the tongues of their men. The questions and the presence of PsyLED on an investigation told me that this was more than just an investigation into some homegrown terrorist group and church politics and finances. PsyLED was involved in the investigation because HST was a group that espoused killing all paranormal creatures. The FBI would have handled something strictly human, and the secret service would have handled any kind of financial wrongdoing. I folded the paper and tucked it into the bib of my clean overalls with the .32. I turned off the lamp. Rolled over and snuggled down in the hammock. The night was chilly and silent, even when the mouser cats unexpectedly leaped up onto the hammock and settled on me, purring. They had never done that. Never.