My breath came fast, my heart speeding. I raced through the trees, a zigzag course as if to unsettle a hunter who had me in his sights. Birds startled and called out, the alarm tones shrill. The trees caught my fear, throwing out warnings that felt like, Fire! Fire! Their greatest fear except for man. I could feel them through my thudding feet, their deep rootlets spreading like fingers, siphoning up water from far below ground as my fear spread and they prepared for danger. They shared the warning root-to-root, tree-to-tree, species-to-species—the old fear, Fire! Fire! I ran faster, my breath burning. Leaves fell like rain, hiding my passage.
I realized I was on a path and I spun away from it, into the underbrush. I must be far from the school, because here, there was heavier growth. Blackberries that scratched my skin and pulled at my clothes and hair. I dropped to hands and feet and crawled into a patch of bracken, pushing aside the large fern-leaves and ducking beneath low limbs of trees. Hiding. Heart pounding. Around me, field mice, lizards, and snakes dashed and undulated away in fear.
Lungs burning, I crawled deeper into the bracken until I was surrounded by ferns and my bare hands were buried beneath last year’s leaves, into the mosses and the damp soil. Things crawled over my wrists and arms, many-legged and fast, as my hands disrupted their lives.
People were watching me. Always watching me.
And . . . Occam had bled. Were-blood, hot and potent, all across the earth beneath him. The wood had wanted that blood. I had wanted that blood. Had thought, just for an instant, about what it would feel like to feed him to the earth. I was . . . I was evil.
I was evil, just like the churchmen had said.
And . . . the moon. Were-creatures and the full moon. That meant something, explained something, but I didn’t remember what. I only remembered that I had been terrified, and when I was terrified I wanted blood. Always, even if just for a moment, I wanted blood for the earth, to give the trees strength and power and to claim it for my own as I had Soulwood. Oh God. What am I? What kind of devil am I? My leg muscles twitched, my heart and lungs pumped, my skin burned. With each breath, my lungs made a retching, tearing sound.
My unbunned hair was tangled in a snarl and draped around me like a lank veil, sweaty and full of twigs. I realized I was crying when tears dripped forward and off the tip of my nose and from my chin, falling to the ground like a salty offering. I didn’t know why I was crying. No one had hurt me. No one had even chased me. They had let me go. But . . . but I had seen something inside me. Something I didn’t know was there. Something I couldn’t quite identify, didn’t recognize. Something that I feared.
Occam had bled. Beautiful, strong blood.
I heaved breaths until my trembling eased. Until the tears stopped and dried on my cheeks. Until I heard-felt through ears and palms the sound vibration of someone slowly approaching. I rolled to my butt, sitting up, hidden in the ferns, and wrapped my skirt and my arms tight around my legs, holding myself like a child, my back to a pin oak, the bark rough and soothing against my spine. Night had fallen, the darkness harsh and deep and encompassing. Shadows were long and lean across open ground and hovered, like raven wings spread into darkness, over the bracken.
And then I remembered why the moon was important. I had read once, long ago, about were-creatures. They were moon-called, their blood infected with something called prions that initiated changes in their genetic structure. They changed shape into another creature most easily on the full moon, when the lunar cycle made their blood potent, the prions multiplying during the full moon and forcing the change upon them. Which . . . which might be why his blood had affected me so strongly. His blood was powerful and vital, and, right now, the earth knew that. Liked that.
Twigs snapped, in what had to be a deliberate sound, since the creature tracking me was probably werecat.
“Nell?”
It was Occam. If he had cat eyes in his human form, then my trail was likely lit up, bright in every misplaced leaf, every broken stem, every disarranged fern, my fear sweat in droplets everywhere. My scent was probably hot on the air from running, from anger and fear pheromones, smelling like prey when I was a bigger predator than anyone, even I, had guessed. I hugged myself tighter.
“I see you in the dark,” he said softly. “May I come in?”
I laughed silently, and wondered if I was a mite insane. An invitation into a wood that wasn’t even mine? Fine. “Yes. You may. But the moon’s gonna be full in few days, and I don’t know how much control you have at this point. So please refrain from eating me.”
I could hear the smile in his words when he said, solemnly, “I promise.” A long-fingered hand, the skin tanned in the daylight, was nothing more than a pale glow in the night as he pushed aside the tall ferns and crawled beneath the trees on his hands and knees. He settled himself near me, leaning his back against a tree across from me. I stared at my arms, hugging my legs.
“Can you tell me why you ran?”
I shrugged in uncertainty. How did I tell him, anyone, about . . . everything? The breeze grew more chilled and the shadows abruptly darker as clouds covered the waxing moon. Occam waited patiently, and the silence pushed against me, demanding an answer even if Occam himself wasn’t pushing. I frowned. “I was running away from myself more than anything,” I admitted unwillingly. “But I don’t like being watched. Wasn’t right.”
I said nothing about the blood on his fingers, but as I sat in the bracken, I realized that the wood no longer hungered, or if it did, then I had somehow cut my awareness of it. Run away from it. I didn’t say, And this wood wanted you.
Occam nodded, his face serious. “You’re a very private person. I get that. Rick said you might be a yinehi. Or a couple of other Cherokee names. I know I’m not pronouncing it right in the Cherokee tongue. But he was talking about fairies, maybe wood nymphs, though in your case, mostly human. He said you were intensely private. And I forgot that. I promise that it will never happen again. I’ll never watch you, not without your permission.”
I thought about that, from the perspective of the church and the menfolk and the way they did things. Nothing was ever free.
“If you’re thinking about quitting,” he said, “I’d like you to stay. All of us would. We’d like you to try again. Find a way to merge with this team. Learn how to get along with all of us.”
I looked into the dark orbits where his eyes hid in the shadows. In the daylight, they were amber-brown eyes, but in the dark they were just holes in his skull. “Don’t watch me unless I ask you to. I been watched and spied on my whole life, hiding who I am, what I am, whatever that is. Been watched by the men in the church as I approached womanhood. Been watched from the deer stand for years. Nothing I can do about none of it. But you. I can stop you.”
“Understood. No one watches you without your permission. Anything else?”
“Never lie to me.”
Occam thought about that one for a moment. “I will never lie to you unless I have to.”
“Why would you have to?”
“Secrets that aren’t mine to share,” he said instantly. “Need-to-know info on cases unrelated to you. PsyLED has certain levels of security clearances. Yours is much lower than mine.”
Occam stuck out a hand and I studied it a moment. Menfolk sealed deals with handshakes, man-to-man. Deals with a woman were usually different. Sealed with other words or in other ways. I had signed a contract, but I had a feeling that this handshake would be much more final, much more permanent. This handshake was about trust, and expectation, and protection, and commitment. Hesitantly I placed my hand into his. His palm and fingers were heated, like a furnace, and in an instant, something wild and fiery flowed through his flesh, skin-to-skin, something that made his eyes glow golden in the night. My hand felt small and cold inside his grip, but just as strong. I gripped his hand back. We shook on it. His eyes faded to human amber. When he let go, he rolled to his knees, all feline grace, and crawled out of the bracken. Silent, wondering if I had made the right decision, I followed him through the deepening dark, toward the lights of the school.
NINE
When I emerged from the woods, walking silently behind Occam, Tandy raced toward me, some unfamiliar emotion on his face—part fear, part sorrow, part something else—his strange hands reaching as if to grab me, pale in the night. I jerked back several steps and Occam stepped in front of Tandy’s hands. “Not without her permission,” Occam said. “Not to watch or to touch. Never again without her permission.” He looked at the rest of the group. “She’s not a cat in a pride or a den. She’s private. We abused her sense of privacy, Tandy and me. No one watches her unless she is in danger or she asks. Understood?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Tandy said, the words running into each other, his hands gripping Occam’s arm, his face nearly frenzied, his words running together. “I’m so sorry, so sorry, so sorry. I didn’t understand.” I recognized the expression on his face then. Pain. He was feeling some inexplicable kind of ache, like a throbbing in his red-lined flesh. “I beg your forgiveness for overstepping my bounds. But I find you . . .” He shook his head as if searching for a word he couldn’t find. He settled on, “. . . fascinating.”
I took another step back at that, surprise slipping through me like a cold rain down my collar, knowing my posture was still defensive.
“We all do,” Occam said, “the ones of us who aren’t human. You smell like . . . like home, sugar. Like safety, perched in the trees with fresh kill before us.”
“You smell of jungle and tall trees,” Paka said. “Of deep water and rich earth. And death. Much death, the earth wet with the blood of prey, an offering, a gift, that I might eat and live.”
T. Laine had been leaning against the van; she pushed off with her hands and came to stand near Rick, many feet of space between us when she stopped. “I don’t have Tandy’s sense of empathy or the cats’ sense of smell, but my magic likes you. I think I could bounce a spell through you, like a routing, like the way a comet picks up speed when it circles a planet and boomerangs off into space. But I’d ask first. I’d always ask. Men? And worse, cats?” Her tone was incredulous. “You have no idea. They have no sense of privacy when they turn catty.”
I nodded, the agreement jerky. I’d seen house cats do things that would sear my eyeballs if a werecat did them. I turned my attention to JoJo, the token human of the group, wondering what she would say. “I don’t get the whole privacy thing,” she said, pulling on all the earrings in her right earlobe, sliding them through her fingers, which pulled her lobe out of shape, to rebound, earrings swinging. “I’m a party girl. Gimme a beer and bucket of wings or some of Mama’s cooking and a bunch of half-drunk pals all piled on the couch watching a game, and I’m down with that. But I also don’t get hunting down prey and eating it raw or shifting on the full moon—or not shifting and going nutso over it.”