“And back to that quote? This looks like enemy action,” I finished hotly.
“She was right,” Rick murmured. Paka snarled and, from her reaction, I realized that the “she” Rick was talking about had to be Jane Yellowrock, the vamp hunter who had brought me to the attention of this group. Jane must a said something to him about me, something good, to get him interested in my consulting with his team. Maybe I owed Jane an apology for all the bad things I’d thought and said about her.
“Yes, she was,” Tandy said, his Lichtenberg lines glowing a bright, unvarying red.
T. Laine was watching me with delight; Occam and Paka with something like the way cats look at a new toy, as if they wanted to sink their claws into me and see if I’d bleed. A small smile crept over my face. Here I was in a hotel room with a bunch of people I’d not met until recently, men and women both, in a hotel room, not a one of the people related by marriage or blood—and no one had molested me, not once. The churchmen had been wrong about the constant danger to the womenfolk. And I was having fun. How ’bout that? I hadn’t had fun since before I became a woman growed, but I was having fun.
“So, if we were in charge, what do you think should be our next move?” Rick asked, “Assuming we won’t interview the family until tonight.”
I felt the test in the question. He was checking out my vaunted deductive reasoning. I tapped my pursed lips with a finger. “The police are probably all over the crime scene, messing up the scent patterns for the cats among you. But just in case we can pick up something that a human can’t, I say we should go to the school as soon as possible.” Rick didn’t indicate an answer, just waited patiently, like a cat staring at a mouse that was acting distinctly un-mouse-like. “And it’d be nice to get the chauffeur driver to the school to show us exactly where he dropped her off. Exactly. Not in general. It would be even nicer if the local cops were told to stay away from the site so you could all smell it, but I’m guessing that won’t happen.” While there, I’d also be able to take off my shoes and put my toes into the soil where Girl Three stepped out of the car, to see if I could pick up anything, but I wasn’t gonna tell them that.
I said, “If the FBI hasn’t already done it, somebody should talk to all the girls’ friends about whether any of them were seeing someone on the side. Boyfriend, someone their parents were against them seeing. Something secret that they might not put on social media.” They were all looking at me even more weirdly, as if I were some new critter they’d caught in one of my own snares and they weren’t sure what to do with me.
Crossly, I said, “I’ve read a few mystery books. It’s called looking for clues. Like, were there fingerprints where the cameras were disabled?”
“The FBI is on-site, checking everything you mentioned and a good deal more besides,” Rick said.
“But you got cats, and they can smell around to see if anyone new was in the school. The cats can also smell for Girl Three’s scent patterns and blood or body fluids where the driver let her off. If she was scared, she mighta peed a little, and some cats can see body fluids in ultraviolet, in the dark. Can you’uns, when you change into cats?”
Rick laughed softly. “She was right. And yes, Watson, the FBI crime scene techs are doing most of those things, and we will redo anything that looks pertinent. The ones that haven’t been done are on the list for the day.”
Near sundown Rick got word that the FBI crime scene techs were finished with the private school, and we headed for Wyatt, where Girl Three, the vampire’s daughter, had been taken. The team chattered and entered things into their synced laptops as we rode toward Wyatt School. Here, there were trees, enough to actually make a wood.
I studied the roads and the surrounding area the way a hunter might, taking in details like high ground for observation spots—not many—roads in and out, nearby streets and buildings, bodies of water, the thick woods, subdivisions, and a trailer park. Dutchtown Road took us to Wyatt School Lane, and that road took us to the school itself, which occupied a lot of acreage, bigger than most family farms in the state. The school had multiple entrances off Wyatt School Lane, making any observation about the cameras less than helpful. A black limousine was waiting for us at the entrance to the Upper School, parked in a small, paved, circular turn-around area. I got out, looking around like the others were doing. The cameras on this entrance were the ones that had been disabled. On the other side of the road from the school were trees and what most people called natural areas, in this day and age, though the trees were only a few decades old and a grounds crew kept the undergrowth clear. The rest of the team went to talk to the chauffeur and sniff around the spot where Girl Three had been let off by her chauffeur. I went to the woods.
They were oak varieties, maple varieties, poplars, longleaf pine, and sweet gum. This time of year the leaves had started to form a carpet on the ground, but there were enough still on the limbs and twigs to hide a good climber. I walked deeper into the trees, studying, letting the woods recognize me. Trees in general—despite the scared dogwood—are deep thinkers, slow to become aware, slow to recognize new beings in their midst. But if someone spent any time in a wood, they might have been noticed, especially if he, or she, hurt one of them.
According to the maps, there were residences nearby, a mobile home park, a few businesses. Nearer the school, there were running paths through the woods for the school athletes, the tracks and the grounds near the campus all neat and weed-free. Farther off, the grounds crew had been less interested in landscaping, just keeping the paths clear. Beside the sculpted paths, there were lower trails used by rabbit and opossum and raccoon, where the shorter vegetation had been reshaped by their passage, higher paths used by deer, the ground cover thinner where the deer hooves had damaged the low plants and higher where their bodies had pushed aside and broken the branches and stems on the way to the water of Kilby Lake, not far from the school. And there were the littered paths employed by nonstudent humans. Random beer cans, plastic water bottles, and used condoms on the trails leading to the mobile home park. I walked toward it along one especially trashed path, and wondered if an upscale teenager had a thing for a trailer park teenager. Or maybe, unbeknownst to her family, this missing girl was on drugs and walked here to buy them, or alcohol. Or any kind of secret a teenager might keep. I studied the metal homes for a while before I turned and went back through the woods. The trees were awake now, and recognizing me, recognizing Paka and the other big-cats, the life force of the woods a low, deep, vibrant pulsation I could feel along my skin. Overhead the leaves rustled as a breeze stirred through them, the trees stretching limbs against the pressure of movement.
The air was brisk, leaves falling steadily now as I walked back toward the school. When I could see glimpses of the limousine again, I stopped and sat on the ground, took off my shoes and socks, bent my knees up under my chin, and, my skirt demurely tucked around me, put my bare feet on the ground, flat, soles evenly distributed, toes pressing in. I put my hands flat beside me. I closed my eyes and sought out the spirit of the trees as I could do so easily at home. Back at the single dogwood, all I had needed to do was touch the ground, because the space was so small and the tree so alone. Here it was harder, the trees not accustomed to communing with anything not plant-based. But they were aware of me now, and they were curious. At which point I realized I had no way to find out what I needed to know.
Even in my own woods, the trees can’t see. They experience the world around them through touch, temperature, pressure, and vibrations of sound. My woods don’t see anything, only the vibrations and awareness telling me what was going on. Here, all I could tell was that people passed through these woods with regularity, from the school and from the residences nearby, some at speed, pounding along, some meandering, some with stealth. Athletes ran. Bored people meandered. The stealth part was disturbing, however, and I was able to narrow it down to two humans who had moved like foxes, one from the trailer park, and one who came back and forth across Dutchtown and into the trees there.
According to the maps, that part of the area was heavily residential, with the woods broken up by roads and tract house neighborhoods. Little by little the trees of the woods had been slaughtered and hauled away. There wasn’t a significant woods until Hardin Valley Road, and that was earmarked for destruction. There wasn’t enough connection for the woods where I sat to speak to the woods across the way, so I had no idea if the stalker routinely came through there too. The woods weren’t strong enough to show me much more.
If the missing girl had spilled her blood here, I might be able track her. I had followed an injured deer once, across Soulwood, its blood dripping onto the earth. Blood was easy to follow. Tracking a human had to be similar. But I was not going to get her blood.
I blew out my breath, opening my eyes, stretching out my legs, flat on the ground. And saw the bulbous moon hanging in the trees. Night had fallen.
“Whadju find, sugar?”
My head jerked toward the sound. It was Occam, high in a tree to my left. I frowned up at him. He shouldn’t have been watching me. “What do you mean?”
Slower, he said, “What did you discover when you”—he made a rolling motion with one hand—“communed?”
Tandy leaned out from behind a tree and softly said, “That was incredible. I never felt anything like it before.”
A spike of fear shocked up through me, like being stabbed and electrocuted all at once. The fear multiplied in intensity. They had been watching. Watching me. Around me, the breeze picked up, colder than only an hour earlier. Chill bumps rose on my skin, prickling, and my fingers started to shake. Hiding my reaction, I pulled on my shoes and stood up, brushing down my skirt and smoothing strands of my hair toward the tight bun. The wind had pulled some loose while I was unaware. The two men still watched.
Watching me. Watching me use my power. I shivered hard.
Occam said, “I never saw anyone commune with a forest before.” There was something like awe on his face. “That was amazing.”
They had watched. They all knew.
“Nell?” Tandy asked. I didn’t look at him. “Oh,” he said. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I didn’t understand. Occam, please give us a moment. We’ll meet you back at the van.”
“I said something wrong, didn’t I?” Occam said, leaping from the tree limb with cat grace. The jump was marred when his index finger caught on the sharp bark and drew blood. He landed between Tandy and me on the balls of his feet and his fingertips, microdroplets of his blood hitting the earth. Droplets that I felt through the ground, sharp and heated and . . . Something tugged at me through the ground, needing, wanting, hungering.
Occam rose fluidly to his full height. “Whatever I said, sugar, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Blood. Hunger wrapped itself through me and wrenched, demanding. I turned and ran.