by Faith Hunter
I let my scowl deepen, let her read on my face that drinking my blood was not gonna happen. “Who tends your garden?”
“Nell!” Rick said, a hint of anger in his tone this time.
Again I ignored him. Mrs. Clayton said, “My daughter does.” Her smile disappeared, replaced by the weight of her fear. “My daughter is wonderful with plants. She can grow anything, anywhere, anytime. She is in great demand even now, still in high school, with her university degree not yet acquired, to design and work with landscaping.”
“And the orchids? She tend them too?”
“Yes. She is—”
“Not a human. You’re hiding whatever she is. Maybe to protect her. Maybe for some other reason. And I’m betting she isn’t even your daughter, at least not biologically.”
Mrs. Clayton’s shoulders hunched up and her pupils went black and wide in scarlet sclera. “Hoooow do you know thisss?” she hissed. A real hiss, like a snake. And she leaned forward in the wood chair she was sitting in, her neck stretched out like a lizard’s. Her fangs slowly snapped down on their little hinges, and fell into place with a soft schnick.
I felt the weight of Mrs. Clayton’s whole attention on me, and I nearly flinched, but something told me that if I did, I’d be perceived as breakfast. The chill bumps that been left from the cold tightened again, this time from fear. “The orchids told me. You told me when you said she’s the gardener. Because no gardener ever can make this many orchids bloom at once.”
The vampire blinked. Blinked again. And went back to aping human, just that fast. She looked to her left, from orchid to orchid, and her brow crinkled. “I . . .” She twisted her head the other way, taking in the dozens and dozens of plants. “I never thought . . .”
Rick nodded to T. Laine, who put her fingers into the orchid pot nearest. The earth witch jerked her hands away and stumbled back, almost as if she had been shocked by electricity. She flung her hands back and forth, as if shaking water from her fingers, and nodded to Rick, then shrugged, her gestures saying that it was magic, but not something she recognized.
“Mrs. Clayton,” Rick said, speaking gently. “If your daughter isn’t Mithran or human, we need to know what she is. That might be important to the investigation and to locating her. To getting her back to you.” He didn’t add the word alive at the end of the sentence, but it hung in the air, unspoken but powerful.
From the hallway a woman entered. No. Not a woman. Another vampire. Blond and limber looking, as if she did yoga every day, but with the broad shoulders of a plowman or a boxer. She was pretty in a deadly-looking way. She looked vaguely familiar, which meant I had probably seen her back when Jane Yellowrock had come through my land, but I didn’t remember her name, and no one introduced her. Or the vampire behind her, a slender male with long red hair. It was no wonder the floors felt maggoty.
The head vampire’s lips pressed together, and she shook her head, but it wasn’t in refusal, more as though she was conflicted. “She is gone. In danger.” Mrs. Clayton shook her head again, and seemed to decide what she wanted to say. “Mira was a foundling.” Her gaze met Rick’s, and she added, “Most literally. Clan Blood Master Ming found her on her doorstep sixteen years past. I . . .” The vampire was wringing her hands, and I was certain I had never seen anyone do that. She seemed to notice, and she placed both hands on the arms of her chair, over the knobs, which were carved like African lion heads.
“When no one came forth to claim her, she was placed in the foster care system for a short time before one of my human servants arranged that I might adopt her. She is the only child I’ve ever had, and I thought her part elven, though mostly human, until last year, close to eighteen months past, I suppose, when her scent began to change. It was only slightly at first. She still smells human, but human and something else, perhaps. Her gift with plants manifested then too.”
“Did she start having her menses then?” T. Laine asked. “When the gift with plants started?”
“My daughter has not yet begun her menses.”
T. Laine eased into the great room, massaging her fingertips as if they still tingled. “Perhaps her species doesn’t have them?”
“We don’t know what she is,” Mrs. Clayton said uncertainly. “We had considered asking the Europeans when they come to visit the Master of the City of New Orleans, but there is some fear that the oldest Mithrans might claim her as their own under the Vampira Carta. Her lack of humanity may make her fair game to them.”
Not much in that sentence made sense, so I made a mental note to look it all up—on my new laptop. When I got time.
Rick said, “Your daughter is an American citizen, no matter what species she is. They can’t take her. You’ll have the help of PsyLED, the US Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the State Department on that. But first we need to find her. What else can you tell us?”
Mrs. Clayton clasped her hands, the fingers of which wore sparkling diamond rings and one single huge black pearl. As if again sensing that she was broadcasting her emotional state, she looked down and spread her fingers wide for a moment, stretching them. Her attention settled on the black pearl ring, and she rotated it with the fingers of the other hand, around and around the digit. “Her . . .” She stopped and started again. “My daughter has . . . pointed ears.” No one in the room said anything, and the silence went on a beat too long, making me aware of where every member of the team was. Tandy stood against a wall, his eyes flicking from person to person, as if he was picking up emotional tags from each of us as well as from Mrs. Clayton. Occam was kneeling, his fingers spread on the floor, his weight on the balls of his feet, and something made the posture look very catlike and dangerous, as if he was about to pounce on prey. Paka stood behind Rick, watching, her eyes slit, gaze piercing. Other humans stood in the opening to the great room—law enforcement, wearing suits and ugly shoes. The FBI, I decided, the team that had set up the electronic equipment, waiting to hear about a ransom call. JoJo was standing with them.
The vampire went on, still twirling her pearl ring around her finger, her attention on only it. “They were noticeable on her baby photographs. For some years she wore her hair over them, until they kept growing and her hair no longer hid them. Now the points are quite pronounced. I purchased a charm for her with a glamour in it to keep the tips hidden. The glamour must have sunlight to recharge it. It looks like this.” She extended her hand to display the black pearl. “She wears it on her left hand.
“And Mira also . . .” The vampire’s brows came together. “She has no body hair at all, though her brows are quite unruly and difficult to keep shaped. She also has acute seasonal affective disorder.” Mrs. Clayton looked up for a moment, her eyes sweeping the room before returning to her hands. “She needs far more sunlight than most people. If left too long in the dark, she becomes ill, physically so. In winter, when the days are shorter, Mira is badly affected by the early nights, and so we have installed artificial lighting in her room, to give her bright lights, what they call full spectrum, and she uses them several hours each day. If the people who took her don’t allow her enough sunlight, her glamour will fail. Her ears will show.” She frowned and shook her head, the heavy worry sloping her shoulders again. “She will become angry, sometimes violent. Enough darkness and Mira’s hair will begin to fall out, she will fall into a deep depression, and she will sleep away the day. Day after day.”
The vampire smiled, a bittersweet expression that made her look totally human. “My daughter is gentle and full of life and can make anything grow. And she hates the dark. She is so very, very unlike me. We are total opposites in everything. And yet, in the hours of dusk and dawn, we have built a life here. I would give up all that I am and all that I have to see her safe and free.” She looked at the FBI team, two men and a woman, still standing in the doorway. Her voice dropped an octave, almost to a growl when she added, “No matter wha
t they ask, I will give them. Make certain that they know that when they call.”
The phrase hung on the air between us all, unspoken: If they call. So much said in so few words, when I was accustomed to lots of words, and total clarity of intent from everyone, in the way of God’s Cloud of Glory. The cultural differences were making my new job challenging.
“Agent LaFleur,” the FBI woman said. “We’d like a word with you, please.”
Rock nodded and left the room. The others drifted back into the other parts of the house, leaving me alone with the vampire. Mrs. Clayton didn’t seem to notice they were gone for long seconds before she looked up from her hands to see the room, empty but for me. “I had wondered if you were the same species as my daughter. There is something of the same scent about you, but”—she shrugged—“different as well. Are your ears . . . ?”
“Not pointed,” I said, and pushed back my hair to show the rounded curves. “No glamour. No surgery to make them round.” I didn’t add that if I’d been born with pointed ears, I might have been smothered in my cradle.
An uneasy silence settled between us, and I felt like I should go closer and sit near her. It was what the churchwomen did when there was distress. Hugs and kind words. But I couldn’t get any closer to the death feeling I got from Mrs. Clayton. So I said, “I’m sorry I got all riled. I don’t know what kind a species I am either, so I took offense when none was intended.” I mimicked her shrug. “You’re not my first vampire, ma’am, but this is my first vampire house.”
She smiled slightly. “Do I still feel like dead opossum?”
“No offense intended, ma’am. Honestly.”
She stared up at me suddenly, her eyes black again, and scary looking. I grew instantly still, like a rabbit under the eyes of a hawk, and tried to draw a breath that seemed stuck in my throat. “My daughter’s life is in your hands,” the vampire said. “Yours and the others’. Please. Get her back for me.”
“We will do everything possible, Mrs. Clayton,” Rick said coming back through the door. “PsyLED will be taking over the investigation of your daughter’s disappearance, with FBI assistance. The Bureau has done a spectacular job, and will still be working the case, but we’ll be dedicating all of the efforts of our entire team on Mira. Mira alone.”
I realized that with Mira not being human, responsibility for her case fell directly into PsyLED’s lap. Anxiety I hadn’t expected wrapped itself around me and tightened like a boa constrictor.
The vampire looked to me. “You. You will get her back for me,” she commanded. Before I could reply, Mrs. Clayton got up and left the room. Fast. Way faster than a human. Scary fast. With a little snap of air that made my ears pop. But at least the maggoty feeling dissipated some with her gone.
To us, Rick said, “Their systems are already in place and FBI will continue to monitor the house and phones. We’ll be handling the investigation on the streets and electronically. JoJo, you’ll liaise with the FBI, remaining here. You being human will make them happier than any of the rest of us. I want to know everything they learn the moment they find it out. And I’m rather certain that they haven’t told us everything, so be nosy. If Mrs. Clayton or one of her Mithrans come back out to visit, be nosy with her too. See if she left out anything, any detail. Even if it doesn’t seem important.”
JoJo smiled and flicked a ring in her nostril, leaving it swinging. “I’m real good at being nosy, boss.”
Rick smiled and nodded the rest of us to the door. “Let’s go.”
* * *
The special agents talked while Rick drove, and this time I took a place in back, on the bench-style seat, beside Paka, who curled up like a cat and fell instantly asleep. Again, I had nothing to offer and sat silent, listening to the woman’s purring breath.
We were nearly back at the hotel when Rick said, “It’s almost midnight. Tandy, you and T. Laine are the night owls. You take the first shift and go over all the FBI information on all the cases. Compare and contrast everything with the other cases and with Girl . . .” He stopped. “With Mira Clayton.” I realized that using pseudonyms for the girls wasn’t going to work anymore. We had been to her house. Touched her magic and her personal belongings. Met her mother. We had our own girl. That had made it personal, even if it wasn’t supposed to become so. Rick said, “The rest of us will get some shut-eye.”
T. Laine said, “I need caffeine and sustenance for an all-nighter. Coffee and lots of it, and pizza. And it comes off the company plastic.”
“Done,” Rick said, tossing his cell phone to the witch. “There’s Community dark roast coffee in my bag that I’ll contribute to the cause. Order a couple of large. One supreme and one veggie lovers.”
“Boss, I love you.”
Rick chuckled, and I didn’t understand what had happened until Tandy said, “Community Coffee is from Louisiana, and it’s hard to get here. Rick has it shipped in monthly for his personal use. It’s really good coffee. And the pizza just went on the unit’s credit card, so we don’t have to figure out how to list things on our expense reports. Makes things easier.”
I nodded, suddenly exhausted. The weight of the day landed on me, the prickly feeling of being around all the people and creatures and their multitiered and interlaced emotions, the need to be alone, on my property, with the woods at my back, all heavy. “I need to go home,” I said, stretching. “How soon do you need me back in the morning?”
Rick looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “How does six a.m. sound?”
I’d have to be up long before five o’clock to make that. “Horrible,” I said. “But I’ll be at the hotel by six.”
“Good,” he said. “Because if Mira Clayton is being held somewhere in the dark, we may need to move fast. This abduction wasn’t exactly like the others, so the first thing I want to do is rule out any copycat involvement.”
I considered that statement in light of the girl’s need for the sun. Would she really die if she was kept in the dark too long? I felt my ears, rounded and human. I sometimes wondered if I’d die if I left Soulwood for too long a time, as if I was tied to the land. Maybe it was like that for Mira, with the sun. Out of nowhere, Pea leaped across the room and landed in my lap, chittering loudly, distracting. Pushing her away, I repeated softly to myself, “Six a.m. I can do that.”
TEN
The cats were on the front porch, yowling, when I got home. I let them in, fed them enough cat kibble to keep them around without keeping them from working, and while they ate, I stirred up the last of the coals in the stove, added some kindling and winter wood that would burn fast and hot, to warm the cold house. The chill of fall had left the place miserable, and I’d need a shower to wake up in the morning. For tonight, I was simply too tired to wait on hot water. I dumped some beans into a pot, checked them for rocks or grit, rinsed them, and added more water, leaving them to soften on the warming shelf above the stove. Then I used the tepid water in the stove’s water heater and a washrag, standing in the tiny bathroom behind the kitchen to give myself, my face, and my feet what Mama called a sink bath. I brushed and braided my wind-snarled hair, pulled on my winter flannels for the first time this season, and climbed the stairs to my cot. At least it was warmer upstairs. After a few spoonfuls of cold stew, I fell into bed with the cats for what would surely be far too little sleep.
As the chilly sheets warmed and sleep enfolded me, I thought about my woods. I had never been away for so long at a time before. And never so late into the night. It was strange to contemplate, but I felt as if they were sighing with relief at my return. As if they had missed me.
I lifted a hand out from the covers and touched the wood floor, feeling, somehow, the chill of the wind outside, stirring the trees with the thought of winter’s sleep. Feeling their leaves closing off with the season as they changed color and fell. It felt as if the woods had been searching for me for hours and were finally at rest. At th
e fringe of the property was the darkness I had felt, restless and fragmented and afraid, if broken shadows could be any of those things. But it seemed calmer than before. That had to be good. In the distance, gunfire again echoed through the night, new and worrisome.
I rolled over in the warming bedding, pushed a cat’s body off me, closed my eyes, and let sleep take me.
* * *
I was awake at five a.m. on Friday, gripey, gritty eyed, cold, and wanting coffee. I hadn’t used any of the battery power the night before and so had lights to help wake me, and soon had coffee percolating on the woodstove and fresh wood heating the house. To make it easier to heat the main part of the house, I kept the extra bedrooms closed off in the winter—the bedroom once used by Leah and John, and the bedrooms upstairs that had been used by his second and third wives, Brenda Bell and Leota, the wives who had left him when he couldn’t give them babies, long before he married me.
I’d met them a time or two after I married John and before we left the church. They were happy women, full of satisfaction, with a passel of young’uns between them. After they each had divorced from John, they had married brothers, twins, and lived in a huge house of merged families. They seemed nice enough and happy enough, and if I was honest, I was glad they hadn’t stayed with John. He’d not have needed me if they had stayed, and I might have been given to the down-the-hill Hamiltons, Maw-maw’s folk, or given as a junior wife or concubine to the colonel. Or maybe not, if Sister Erasmus was right about Maw-maw and Mama conniving to keep me out of the colonel’s hands. If John and Leah hadn’t been around, maybe my family would have found another way to keep me safe. I wanted to talk to them soon and . . . and see if I could determine the truth from the untruth of John’s tales to me about my family. Just thinking that he had misled me left a hurting place in my heart.
I showered while the coffee perked, and washed my hair. There was enough leftover power to dry my hair with the handheld hair dryer that I seldom used. And I had one clean gray skirt I could wear, with leggings underneath for warmth. Over two T-shirts and a buttoned blouse, I added a thick, hand-crocheted cardigan. On my feet I pulled two pairs of socks and my best pair of heavy, lace-up ankle boots. The boots were scuffed and needed to be polished, but they were comfortable and warm enough for all day. The outfit’s colors didn’t match, but the soft grays and greens didn’t clash either. I could shuck layers as the day warmed, if it warmed. I braided my waist-length hair into a crown around my head and slipped a thick hairband around my neck, one I could pull up around my ears and over my head to hide the crown, which might be considered too proud for a childless widder-woman to wear in public.