by Faith Hunter
I began pulling dried herbs off the shelf to make a tea to stimulate Tandy’s appetite. The boy needed to eat.
* * *
The beans and rice were done and the bread was just coming out of the oven when I felt Paka racing across the land. Another cat ran beside her, through the dark and up the hill, toward the church’s compound. I felt them startle a deer and, in the way of cats, they changed direction midstride, leaping to the side, almost choreographed. Together they took down the deer and started eating even as the buck struggled and kicked.
City folk would have been horrified—the ones who didn’t hunt or fish. For me, it was simply part of the wood. Part of the land. Part of the cycle of life and death and rebirth.
The van’s lights cut through the trees in strips of light and shadow as it pulled up the hill and into the drive. The PsyLED team—the ones still in human shape—piled out of the van. I had company. And just in time. Tandy’s first appetite tea was freshly brewed.
* * *
Rick had brought groceries. As if he’d lived here all his life, he put things into the refrigerator and freezer, while my mouser cats trailed around behind him, mewling as if he carried raw fish. I sat in my chair at the table and watched as he lifted the top off the bean pot and tasted the beans with a spoon. He pronounced them perfect. “As good as my mama’s. And you made rice. Even more perfect. Red beans and rice. It must be Monday.” Which made me blink because I didn’t make beans and rice only on Mondays, and it wasn’t Monday anyway. Maybe it was a New Orleans thing. Without a change in expression, he asked, “Where are Occam and Paka?”
It was a trap. I knew that even as I answered. “Eating a deer. They’ll be a while before they get to the compound. And then they’ll stop to eat again on the way home.”
“How do you know what’s happening with them?”
I shrugged. I knew. I wasn’t sure how I knew, as this knowing was different and unexpected. It had started when Brother Ephraim fed my woods. How it worked was something I was still figuring out.
T. Laine and JoJo started setting the table, asking me which stoneware to use, and hunting through the drawers for flatware, in the cabinets for glasses and paper napkins. They were stunned that I didn’t have paper anything in the kitchen, washing cloth ones as needed instead. “Paper’s wasteful,” I said, pointing to where the cloth napkins were stored.
Sounding horrified, JoJo asked, “Toilet paper?”
I let a tiny smile claim my mouth. “I do use toilet paper,” I said primly, knowing my mama would be horrified if she heard me talking about such personal subjects with a guest at the kitchen table. “But I don’t have much on hand. Be sparing.”
“Good God in heaven,” T. Laine muttered. “How do people live like this?”
“Efficiently,” I said sharply. “Cheaply. Off the grid as much as possible.”
T. Laine’s face tightened, an expression like a mask, covering up whatever she was really feeling, holding the world at bay. “Don’t get your panties in a wad. I get the theory. I just don’t get the practice. Is that why you only have lights lit in the rooms where we are?”
“Mostly,” I said. “With this many people, we’ll run out of stored power and be forced to use lanterns early, so the lanterns are in place, some already lit.”
“So the night we visited . . . ?”
“I ran out of power shortly after you left.”
“No cable? No network news? No TV at all?”
“Movies on DVD,” I said. “If you go into withdrawal, there’s a battery-powered radio with a good antenna.”
T. Laine said, “Son of a witch on a switch,” which was cussing for witches, or so I’d heard.
There was a lot more grumbling, mostly under their breath, but with so many people working, dinner was served within half an hour after they arrived, Rick ladling up beans and rice, T. Laine cutting a loaf of bread, JoJo passing out beer and pouring well water into glasses, and Tandy sipping his tea while trying to hide a look of distaste. I watched and let people serve me in my own house, knowing that these activities—things they could control—were helping to calm and settle them.
Three of the team had new wounds and bandages. Rick’s was the worst, with blood seeping through his dress shirt. When he came near, I said, “Paka said she would shift into her cat and heal. She and Occam shifted and they’re feeling fine.” Rick’s face went stony hard. “You’re still wounded from the catnip sex. You can’t shift into your cat, can you?” He didn’t reply, and I said, “You mentioned a werewolf called Brute who’s stuck in wolf form. You’re stuck in human form, aren’t you?”
JoJo said, “It isn’t something he talks about.” I turned to the pierced and tattooed woman. Her hair had been fluffed out in tiny ringlets, her skin oiled and shining. She had slashing cuts on her cheeks, the result of flying glass from the shooting, but in the shadows of the lanterns she was all angles and sharp planes, shadow and light, like an African priestess. “It hurts, not being able to shift. Hurts like hell. He’s learned to live with pain for most of the lunar cycle, but it nearly drives him crazy during the full moon. He has a music spell he plays those three days.”
T. Laine said, “I’m working on a backup spell to help him deal, but he needs the services of a full moon witch coven, and those are harder to find.”
“I wasn’t supposed to know?” I asked.
“It was Rick’s place to tell,” Tandy said.
“I was going to tell you before the full moon,” he said, grudging and resentful.
“Okay,” I said. He had a timetable. I understood that. It was a way of maintaining control in a life that had little. “I got a healing salve that will help your cuts.” I brought out a jar of salve and set it on the table. “Arnica, gotu kola, calendula, yarrow, and aloe. I got one without aloe, if anyone is allergic.”
As if it was an invitation, they gathered and sat around my large kitchen table and JoJo applied some of the gel to her facial wounds. “My gramma would like this,” she said, which sounded like high praise. And the mood seemed to lighten, which was a good thing. It had gotten tense in the house.
My guests served dinner, and we ate. No one talked business or the cases at dinner, focusing on downtime, as they called it, telling jokes and picking at each other just like families did. Pea jumped onto the table, and Rick fed her small chunks of bacon from the beans, which she seemed to love. The mousers took up places on the couch and on the open shelves, bored. I sat quietly, taking it all in, and it was . . . nice. Pleasant.
I feared it might take a long time to find pleasure in the silence of my empty home once they were gone again. Perhaps a very long time. Perhaps never. So I savored the moments, paying attention to every small detail, watching Tandy eat every morsel and complain about being too full, as if that was uncommon, letting my emotions take a respite in the presence of so much activity and chatter. It was like my childhood all over again—the good parts of it, the parts I hadn’t realized that I missed. It left me with an impression of melancholy and nostalgia and a peculiar sense of regret that I couldn’t put my finger on and tried to banish, to no avail.
* * *
After dinner, T. Laine and JoJo washed dishes, saying it was their turn, and Tandy sat on the sofa with his tablet, tapping keys, occasionally rubbing his stomach and hiding tiny burps.
Rick and I went over the hotel security camera footage of the shooting, which required the constant moving of the mouser cats from the desk and his laptop to the floor and to Rick’s lap. The cats were drawn to him like a magnet, and I pretended not to feel jealousy at their affection for him. They never chased me like that, but then I wasn’t a werecat, I just fed and provided for them, which should have earned me some loyalty but didn’t.
In the first footage taken from an outside camera, an older-model, dark-colored SUV, with a big, roomy cab, raced into the hotel parking lot. Two figures in the f
ront seats stayed in the SUV, barely visible through the tinted windows. Two others leaped from the passenger side and raced through the outer doors into the hotel. All I could tell about the fuzzy images was that the men wore toboggans, the kind that covers the face except for eyeholes. And they carried what might be fancy assault rifles.
A second camera picked up the men as they raced in from the parking lot and through the lobby, a big man in front, a smaller just behind, as if being protected. There were three seconds of visual as the hotel clerk dropped behind the front desk.
A third camera showed the men racing through the hallway and up the fire stairs. This video camera was crisp, and I could make out more details. The man in front was heavy but fast. The man in back was lithe and wiry, probably average height. Both men wore jeans, flannel shirts, and work boots. There wasn’t audio, but I could tell that the heavier man was stomping with each step. Both were in good shape, running without stopping to the fourth floor, and when they paused at the fourth-floor landing to confer, neither appeared winded. Some kind of discussion took place at the landing. Maybe directions, orders, last-minute reminders of a plan.
The big man tore open the fire door, and they raced into the hallway and directly to the suite. They positioned themselves to either side of the door, the bigger man nodded, and they began to fire. The wood of the door and the glass of the window exploded outward and inward, shrapnel flying. The men fired, changed magazines, and continued firing until the second magazines were empty. Then they turned and raced back the way they had come, down the stairs, through the lobby, and back into the SUV, still idling at the front door. The vehicle gunned away, leaving a cloud of black smoke. The license plate was missing. I thought the SUV was dark green. Or maybe dark gray.
Rick said, “The others have seen this. What do you think?”
I shook my head, uncertain. “The little guy moves like one of the kidnappers, jerky, quick-like. There was a big man there too. Their toboggans match, both with a stripe and diamonds on the forehead. Their clothes could come from anywhere. Play it again, please?” I watched, shaking my head, trying to force it all to make sense as the shootings took place again, and then a third time.
Rick asked, “Could they be churchmen?” When I didn’t reply, he said, “Nell?” His voice was nudging, pushing me to make a claim one way or the other.
“They’re dressing to look like churchmen. Flannel shirts. Work boots. But the jeans aren’t hand-stitched. I can see a leather tag on the little one’s belt when they talk at the top of the stairs. The toboggans are store-bought headwear, and no churchman would wear a store-bought toboggan. They don’t work as well or keep people as warm. It almost feels like they’re half churchmen. Play it again, please?”
Silent, Rick pushed buttons on his tablet and repositioned a cat whose brushing tail was in the way. “We’re starting over, looking at everything, beginning with the FBI’s info, which we received before we left town. Some of their analysts are still proposing that the church might have taken them in, might be providing them a safe haven.”
“Why?” When he looked at me blankly, I asked, “Why do the feds think that?”
“Probably because neither the FBI’s nor PsyLED’s analysts can find where they moved on. HST is here in Knoxville. We’re pretty sure of that. So where else would a cult hole up but with another cult?”
That sounded like wishful thinking to me, but I wasn’t experienced enough to feel comfortable voicing that opinion. I didn’t know what to make of it. Not exactly. But one thing was pretty clear. “I had been thinking, but”—I stopped—“they didn’t follow me from the library. They came in fast, and they knew which room we were in. They were after the team, not just me. If the shooters are churchmen, then they’ve been watching long enough to follow someone in and get the room number. Or they got the information from a hotel clerk earlier.”
I sipped my tea, thinking. “Something else about it doesn’t look like churchmen. God’s Cloud of Glory trains hunters, not shoot-’em-up assassins or Old West gunslingers.” Slowly I said, “But the one in front moved like a farmer, not a soldier, not a police officer. He ran with heavy feet, not light feet, but stomping. The smaller man is more light-footed.” I frowned, talking my way through it. “He flowed. He moved like a dancer.”
“Or a predator,” Rick said.
“And there’s an odd back-and-forth movement with their shoulders hunched. It’s strange.” I cocked my head, considering. “Play it again? All the way through?” I watched the entire sequence again from arrival to departure. “The little man,” I said, “he’s in charge. He’s giving orders, except at the end, when it was time to fire. But the bigger man has the experience with the location and maybe the experience with the automatic weapons. There.” I pointed at one short section of the action on the screen. “The way they turn their heads and raise their shoulders. That’s a strange movement. Their heads swivel back and forth the same way, a ducking motion like lowering their heads between their shoulder blades.”
Rick grunted in what sounded like surprise. “I didn’t see that. You’re right. It’s not the same motion a vamp makes, but it’s not . . .” He paused and something like pain crossed his face. “Not normal.”
“I’m guessing you brought all the security footage from the time you checked in, and someone’s been looking through it for the men.”
“Yeah. My copious IT department with their dozens of video-search programs.”
Even I heard the amused sarcasm in the comment.
“Thanks, boss,” JoJo said.
“But it wasn’t as hard to find as expected,” Rick said. “JoJo?”
She typed something on her tablet and new footage appeared on Rick’s laptop. I saw JoJo and Tandy troop into the hotel, carrying gear and a stack of pizza boxes. They were wearing the clothes they had been in before the shooting, and were followed a moment later by a big guy who looked like he knew where he was going. His head was down, so I couldn’t see his face, but his hair was short, dark, and worn in a stubbly brush cut. The cameras followed him as he passed the team, seeming to ignore them as they got on the elevator. When the doors closed, he reversed his course and pressed the UP button, watching the lights as they took the team straight up. He followed and stepped out of the elevator. He went left, then turned around and went to the right. He followed slowly, pausing, then moving on, his head down, but with that odd twisting, ducking motion to the left and the right as he moved. Moments later, he passed the suite, stopped, and went back. He stood in front of the team’s door for a moment before moving at speed back through the hotel to the parking lot. He got into the same SUV with no plates and left, the tailpipe blowing black smoke.
“How did he follow us to the room when we were already inside?” Rick asked.
“Pizza,” I said, giving him a grin. “He followed the pizza smell. Then he stood in the hallway until he heard a voice he recognized.”
Rick asked, “Do you know him?” He punched a button. A photograph of the man appeared on the screen.
I breathed in, a quick intake of air that whistled as my throat tried to close up. This photo might have been pulled off the security video feed, but it had been cleaned up and enhanced. It wasn’t crystal clear, but it was good enough. And it changed everything. I pulled my feet off the floor onto the chair and wrapped my arms around my legs. “Yes. I think so.”
When I didn’t go on, Rick looked at Tandy and back to me, fast, as if he was waiting for cues from the empath. Rick asked, “You want to tell me who?”
“I’m pretty sure his name is Boaz Jenkins,” I said, my words toneless.
“What can you tell us about him?” Rick asked.
“Last I heard, back when I was a girl, he was a churchman with aspirations of becoming an Elder. He’s a paranormal hater from way back. Says all paranormal beings are the devil’s work.”
“Which would make him the
perfect person to be brought into the Human Speakers of Truth,” Rick said.
“Satan’s spawn, he called me. He’ s been wanting to burn me at the stake for a decade.” The room was dead quiet, except for the purring of a cat, stretched out on Rick’s feet. “He has two wives, Elizabeth and Mary.” Mary was my friend when I was growing up, but I didn’t say it aloud. It hurt too much.
“Outside of wanting to kill all witches, he’s steady and patient, can sit in a deer stand or a duck blind all day without moving, and he’s a good shot. Brings a lot of game to the compound and gives a portion to the widows and the people too old to hunt or farm. He’s . . .” The words stuck in my throat, and I swallowed to make room for talking. “He’s said to be heavy-fisted with his women and children. Strong. Works hard. Not real bright sometimes. A follower, not a leader. He’d never make it as an elder.”
“You’re upset,” Tandy said.
I scowled at the empath, who was staring at me. “You reading my mind again?”
Tandy shook his head. “You’re sad. Grieving. You loved him?”
“Me?” I squeaked on the word. “Love Boaz? No! But . . . his wife was my best friend when I was little. Her, I like a lot. Liked.” Mary had been rebellious, like me, and we had spent one entire summer skipping sewing class, running into the woods after morning devotional, damming up creeks and chewing gum stolen from my brother, Sam. Talking about dolls and toys and books and God. She hadn’t laughed when I told her that God was everywhere, in every rock and tree and bush and blade of grass.
Marriage to Boaz had changed her. The last time I’d seen her, she was pinch-faced and hadn’t made eye contact with me.
“Who do you think the other man was?” Rick asked. “When they came to shoot,” he clarified.