That part made no sense, but I let it go.
“But I don’t have to get it. I just have to live and let live,” JoJo said. “And if that means not following you on a hike into the woods, I’m down with that too. And, hey, you don’t smell like anything to me. Sorry.”
I let a half smile curl my mouth. “Down with that,” I repeated, shaking my head. “I guess I’m down with that too.”
“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 mental 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.