by Faith Hunter
“Good,” Rick said. But there was something in his tone that said my taking off like a cat with her tail on fire was a problem I needed to work on. “Now, if you can stand it, we need to know what just happened. Not the little chat you had with Occam. We get what happened and how we overstepped and what we need to do to keep it from happening again. We all saw you sitting near the trees. Your scent changed, just like it did in the market, when you sat under the trees. Something was happening. Tandy calls it communing. To the cats’ noses you released something almost like a mating pheromone.”
T. Laine said, “I felt magic. And not a magic I ever felt before.”
“What was happening?” Rick asked.
“I . . .” I shrugged uncertainly. “I ain’t never—I have never explained it. Or talked about it. But I guess communing is as good a word as any. I learn things from a wood, if it’s old enough. I learn things from individual trees sometimes too.”
“Okay,” Rick said, his voice even and controlled. “Tell us what you discovered in the woods. Please.”
I gave a small shrug. “Runners on the trails, people having sex in the woods—two people, probably male, who were . . . not good people,” I said, trying to find English words for the trees’ emotions. “Dangerous people who come here often. One came from the trailer park and one from somewhere across the road.”
Rick nodded. “No more games, people. T. Laine, you and Occam check out the trailer park, a quick magic and scent search. See if you see or smell anything wrong, out of place.” He handed Occam a plastic baggie with a T-shirt in it. “Get a good baseline. If you pick up Girl Three’s scent, I want you back here to recheck.”
Occam took the baggie and opened it, sticking his nose into the bag and sniffing, fast and hard, several times, through his mouth and nose both before handing the baggie back to Rick. The two disappeared into the shadows, moving fast, and I realized Occam had been taking a scent, like a tracking dog. I figured werecats must have a better-than-human nose, and decided that they had gotten the T-shirt from the chauffeur.
To the rest of us, Rick said, “We have one more stop to make tonight. Girl Three’s home. Then I have reports to write up.” He opened the side door of the van. “Let’s go. We’ll pick up Occam and T. Laine on Dutchtown Road.” I remembered that this girl’s mother was a vampire, one of the scions of the Blood Master of Knoxville, Ming of Glass. Even the church knew about Ming of Glass, the vampire used sometimes as a threat against unruly children. You be good or Ming of Glass will snatch you outta your bed.
Because I was only a consultant, the team didn’t always think to explain to me what was going on. Worse, I didn’t pay enough attention to the team’s chatter while we drove, letting the events of the last few hours ring and thrill and settle through me. Trying to decide if I’d made a bad mistake signing the contract to help out these people, trying to decide if shaking Occam’s hand had meant less than I thought it had. Trying to decide if I really cared that I had done any of those things. Because though they had to learn to understand me, and I them, I liked the idea of being part of a team. And maybe, just maybe, having friends. Except for Kristy at the library, I’d . . . been alone . . . for a long time.
* * *
Sequoia Hills was a fancy place, gracious-like, the roads weaving up and down in long curving lanes; the center area between lanes was planted with trees and shrubs and exotic grasses I didn’t recognize in the dark, but I guessed that they had been imported. Nothing like these was native to the hills or the Tennessee Valley. The lawns were also bordered by and filled with gardens full of plants I didn’t recognize; they looked healthy and pretty and froufrou, placed for effect, but not a one of them was grown for eating or medicinal purposes.
Unlike the tract housing I had glimpsed on the drive this afternoon, where every home was a cookie-cutter version of the others, none of these houses had . . . homogeneity might be the right term. They were each and every one a different style and built of different materials. Most had smaller houses in the back or an extra wing that had been added on to it, though likely not for the reasons the churchmen added on to theirs—more wives. I guessed that each house held only one family, which the churchmen would say was a waste of real estate. I smiled slightly, seeing my reflection in the van’s middle window.
We pulled up into a driveway and stopped, the van on an incline, so that Rick set the parking brake. He looked to me, sitting in the passenger seat and asked, “What impressions did you get as we drove through?”
I looked back at the others, but they appeared to be buried in their laptops, which meant the question was probably directed only to me, maybe some sort of test. I said, “Money. Good breeding.” I thought a bit and added, “Exclusivity. They import their plants and pay someone else to do the designing and the work. They probably never put their hands in the soil or ever get dirty. When they do good deeds, they do it by writing a check. They spend money on cars for luxury instead of practicality or the environment. I could tell more if I could put my feet on the ground.”
“Knock yourself out.”
I hesitated a moment and then remembered that phrase from a film. It was a peculiar way of telling me I could do anything I wanted. I nodded and slipped off my shoes, opened the door, and stepped out onto the concrete drive, which sent spears of cold into my soles. The night was more than chilly; we had frost on the way, and the air bit and nipped my exposed skin with icy teeth. My hair, which was still down from my run, swirled and twisted like mare’s tail clouds in the wind until I coiled it around my hand. I should have brought my coat.
I walked across the two feet of drive to the lawn and stepped slowly onto the grass. It wasn’t a wild grass, of course, but it was happy grass. Some variety of centipede, the mat stretching across the open spaces, the leaves and roots and runners heavily steeped in time and good water and care and nitrates. It felt . . . satisfied, maybe, and very oddly, it also felt . . . snobbish, if grass can feel snobbish. My own mixed grasses at home felt useful, functional, and beneficial. “You are supposed to be eaten,” I told the snobbish grass softly, “by sheep and cattle and goats and geese. You are foodstuff.”
“Nell?” Rick asked.
“Nothing,” I said, walking away, the grass tickling my arches and pressing up between my toes. “Just talking to the grass.”
I walked around the front yard, which was rolling and landscaped with flowering fall plants. Purple pearls, brandywine plants, late-blooming varietal hydrangeas, and black lace. The plants were deeply layered, the ones that had been in place for years feeling superior and the newest ones feeling uncertain, but settling roots deeply into the well-mixed soil. I had a feeling that the owner of the house was going to be snooty. And maybe even the gardener.
The lawn surrounded Girl Three’s home, a house of . . . stately proportions might be a good term—nothing forbidding like the Batman family home, Wayne Manor, or glamorous like the Biltmore house. I’d seen pictures of that house, and it was ultrafancy. This wasn’t a small house, nor a large one either, though I had only the multifamily, multiwife, many multichildren homes of the church to go by in measuring size. This house had what they called a brick façade with rock faces, stark white window trim and mullions, a black door, and several peaks in the roofline. The roof was made of slate, the tiles curved on the lower sides, making it look like a gingerbread house, and the slate had been there long enough to grow moss. There were skylights in the roof and a big screened porch near a pool on one side. A full basement sat in the earth underneath it all. In back was a garage with three doors and a small second house, totally separate from the front house, the windows dark. The pathways in the back were poured concrete in curving arcs, plants with big leaves curling at the path edges. Yes. Gracious. And elegant. Except where the dog had peed. There was dog urine on many of the plants, the backyard marked by a large and stinky dog. I was reminded of the men who had marked my yard, and made a menta
l note to look for a dog in the house and to have the werecats in the group double-check my assessment.
I walked back to the van and said, “The people who take care of the yard have good taste in plants and know how to keep them happy. But whoever keeps it up is snobby, and most gardeners and lawn care people aren’t snobby —they’re too busy and dog tired to be snobby—so it’s confusing.”
“No one new came through here?” Rick asked.
“Plants don’t understand new things. They understand things that they can note over time. But if someone new just walked across the lawn, they wouldn’t notice unless he set the grass on fire, or pulled plants and weeds out of the soil, or killed something on it so the blood drenched the ground, or cut down some of the trees.
“One thing. A dog marked the backyard recently, but the urine hasn’t killed any of the plants like it would have if the dog belonged to the house and regularly did his business out here. Just to be safe, you might send a cat nose to double-check.”
Rick nodded, his gaze beyond me into the night as Paka, in her human form, slid out and through the shadows around the house. Moments later she returned and said, “Dog. Big dog.” Her nose curled; she sneezed a tiny cat sneeze and shook her head as if at something foul. JoJo chuckled in sympathy. “It does not belong to this house. It wandered through. It stinks like wet, sick dog.”
Rick said, “Okay. A stray. Let’s check out the house. T. Laine, you’re on point with evidence gathering, close attention to magical signatures and trace magic.”
I looked up at that, wondering why he’d said magic. But before I could ask, he went on.
“JoJo, you’ll be with the feds.” He led the way to the front door and up the brick steps to the porch. I followed at the back of the team, shivering and carrying my shoes, my toes frozen, chill bumps all over my arms and legs, looking for a place out of the way to sit and put on my shoes, and watching what the team did, how they moved, and what things they said to each other. Curious. Captivated.
The door opened before Rick knocked and a woman stood there. She was dressed in dark slacks that had been tailored to her; it was fine, delicate work, the kind the best church seamstresses did on the side, to supplement their incomes. White shirt, gray sweater, her hands fisted in her pockets, dragging down the sweater in front. Her hair was brown with blond streaks, and pulled back into a short ponytail. She looked jittery and shaky, and I could see the effects of tears on her skin, long hours of tears, and stress, and worry. Her skin was the pale white of undeath. This was a vampire.
Vampires had crossed my land before, and I remembered the feeling that had crawled over my flesh of death, death everywhere, but that was on my land, my wood, where every sensation was intense, dazzling to my senses, and I hadn’t been prepared for that. Here, I had been prepared, but the vampire didn’t spend time in the yard. The house would be a different matter, but—I took a stabilizing breath—I was ready.
Rick flashed his badge and ID and said, “Mrs. Clayton, I’m Senior Special Agent Rick LaFleur. These are my team members. I called earlier about your daughter’s disappearance. Do you mind if we come in?” It was all official-like, until he added, “I’m a wereleopard, as are two others of my team. Will our scent be a problem for you, ma’am?”
I didn’t hear what the woman said, but saw her step back and gesture us in. I was still carrying my shoes when I stepped into the foyer. Onto the wood flooring.
The moment my soles touched the wood, the feeling of death hit me, stronger than at home, that last time. Maggots and slime and rot beneath my feet, remembered by the wood of the floors. Absorbed by the floor. And given back to me tenfold. Rot, decay, putrefaction, corruption. The stench and texture of the air and of the floor were as real to me as if I had fallen into a pool of rotted flesh and the things that fed on it.
I sucked in a breath, and it froze my lungs. Before the door closed, I whipped around and back outside. Into the night. Running. Running for the largest copse of trees at the boundary of this lawn and the neighbors, running from the dead that crawled all over me like maggots and worms and filth. Vampires.
I thought I was prepared. I wasn’t. The wood of the floor had given a best-forgotten memory back to me.
Retching, I crawled under the protection of the trees on the neighbor’s side of the boundary, and I scrubbed my feet into the bark mulch. It was commercial stuff, dyed black, horrible for the plants both from the chemicals and the heat the black retained. But better on my feet than nasty vampires. I twisted my feet until I worked them through the mulch and into the soil, rubbing them into the dirt, cleaning off the death that clung to them. Only then did my gagging cease. Then I sat and pulled on my socks. Shivering so much my teeth chattered.
I should have been wearing my shoes. This was nobody’s fault but mine.
I had the left shoe on when I heard my name called. It was T. Laine, the earth witch, and she could see me in the landscaping lights. I had her pegged as a no-nonsense woman, and her words didn’t surprise. “Honey, you gotta quit running away when you’re scared.”
“I don’t have my shotgun. I couldn’t shoot her.”
She came to an abrupt stop in the night. “Come again?”
“I’ve never been in a vampire house. The wood floor.” I gagged again and thought I’d lose my supper, but I kept it down. “The floor absorbed the undeath. And I was barefoot. I felt them through my feet on the wood floors. It’s . . .” I picked a word I had heard them use. “It’s gross.”
T. Laine breathed out a soft “Ohhh. Really?” She crossed the mulch to me and asked, “What do they feel like?”
“Like I’m walking on maggots and worms and rotten ’possum. I stepped in one once when I was a little ’un. Barefoot. It was horrible. I gagged for a week.” I pressed a hand to my stomach. “Until I could get that rotten feeling off my feet.”
“Ick. Sounds gross. So that was what you felt when . . . ?”
“When I put my foot on the wood floor. Maggots. Dead things. Vampires.”
“But you didn’t feel any of that when you walked in the yard?”
“No. She’s an inside vampire.” I pulled on my right shoe, still thinking. “But maybe I can go inside if I keep my shoes on.” And with a nice thin layer of dirt on the soles of my feet, I thought, standing.
T. Laine said, “I could . . . well, I mean.” She stopped, perplexed.
“You could what?” I asked.
“I could put a temporary ward around your feet so you don’t feel the floor as much.” Before I could ask she said, “A ward is like a fence or a wall, but made of magic. I know your church believes that all magic is Satan worship or something, but it’s not. Really.” When I didn’t reply, she added, her tone growing acerbic, “I don’t need to sacrifice a goat or a chicken or call on the Lord of Darkness. You don’t have to drink warm blood right out of a dying animal. Magic isn’t evil, it just is. It’s everywhere around us, in everything, everyone, every rock and blade of grass. It’s mathematics and atoms and electrons and protons. It’s dark matter and light matter, time and space. Not evil.”
I couldn’t hide my amusement when I said, “I agree.”
“You do?”
“Yes. I should be fine with shoes on.” I hope.
T. Laine backed away as I scrambled to my feet. T. Laine was medium height, nearly black hair, eyes the same color, a round face but with an aggressive jaw. Pretty. Stubborn. Honest to a fault. Despite Occam’s admonishment to not touch me, she grabbed my hand and headed to the house at speed. I’d have had to hit her to get free, which I had no desire to do, so instead, I ran to keep up as she towed me up the drive, up the steps, and into the front of the house.
When my feet touched down it wasn’t nearly as bad as before. I made a face to show her it was still ick but not unbearable, and she pulled me into the front room and through it, closer to where I could hear Rick talking. I
didn’t get a good look at the house except for the orchids. Orchids everywhere, all kinds of varieties. And all in bloom. That wasn’t right. I yanked my arm free, breaking T. Laine’s hold on me long enough to stick my fingers into the coarse wood chips of the orchids nearest.
T. Laine got her fingers back around my arm again and dragged me into what had to be the great room. It was huge, with vaulted space and skylights and a fireplace big enough to roast a whole hog in. The room was decorated in greens. All kinds of greens. And here too were orchids, hundreds of them, lining the shelves of every wall. All blooming. All. Not possible. It simply wasn’t possible to get every variety of orchid to bloom at once. Not possible. Not even for me, and I was real good with plants. I rubbed my fingers and thumb together, evaluating what I had felt when I touched the orchid bark mix.
The vampire woman, Mrs. Clayton, looked up when I entered the living room and now stopped talking. Her head tilted weirdly, and she seemed to be sniffing the air, her nostrils fluttering like a horse’s did when it sniffed new people, when it was deciding if it was gonna let them close or kick them. Or, in this case, bite them.
“And what is she?” Mrs. Clayton asked, tilting her head to me. “She isn’t human.”
My head shot up. “At least I’m not rude enough to ask,” I said, stung by the question. “Kinda like I wasn’t rude enough to say that your floors feel like dead ’possum.”
“Nell!” Rick said.
He sounded shocked, but I didn’t look his way, keeping my eyes on the dead thing, who seemed, oddly enough, to be holding in a small smile now, buried beneath heaps of worry and fear, but there. “What do you think I am?” I asked the vampire.
“I have no idea.” Her head tilted again, this time too far, the not-human too far I’d heard vampires could do, which was creepy. “I haven’t smelled a creature like you before. I’d be honored to taste your blood someday”—she smiled at last—“despite your appalling lack of manners.”