It felt as if he was goading me about my lifestyle, and I didn’t know why. Maybe it was a police thing, the kind of things the churchmen said the law always did, trying to provoke an action that would allow them to make an arrest. But there were ways to combat that. I set my mug on the smooth wood table, the finish long gone and now kept in good repair with a coating of lemon oil. I spoke slowly, spacing my words. “What. Do. You. Want? Make it fast. I’m busy.”
“I understand you have good intel on God’s Cloud of Glory Church. We need your help.”
“No.”
“They killed your dogs, yes?” Paka said, her shining eyes piercing. To Rick, she said, “I smell dogs in the house; their scent”—she extended her thumb and index finger and brought them closer together, as if pinching something, making it smaller—“is doing this. And there were piles of stones at the edge of the front grass.” To me she said, “Graves?”
My lips went tight and my eyes went achy and dry. I’d come home from the Knoxville main library to find my two beagles and the old bird dog dead on my porch, like presents. They had been shot in the yard and dragged by their back legs to my front door. I still hadn’t gotten the blood out of the porch wood. I’d buried the dogs across the lawn and piled rocks on top of the graves. And I still grieved.
I gave Paka a stilted nod, my hair slipping from the elastic, swinging forward, across my shoulders and veiling my face, hiding my emotions.
Paka nodded absently, her eyes distant, the way some people look when thinking about math or music. “I also smelled three men. Outside. They . . .” She paused as if seeking words. “. . . urinated on your garden as if marking territory. This is strange, yes? They are only human, not were-kind.” Peeing on my garden sounded like some of the men of the church, childish and mean, to kill my plants, to urinate on my dinner. “My people do not keep dogs,” she said, “but I understand that humans like them as pets, like family. There was dog blood on your porch. The men should not have killed your pets.”
Rick said, “That was what I smelled coming in.”
Without turning her head, Paka shifted sharp eyes to me. “Do you want me to track and kill the killer of your dogs?”
“Paka,” the man said, warning in his tone.
A suspicious part of me wondered why she was being so kind, while another part heard a murderous vengeance in the words, and yet a third part wanted to say, Yes. Make them hurt. But vengeance would only make the churchmen come back meaner, and this time they’d kill me for sure, or make me wish for my own death. The churchmen were good at keeping their women pliant and obedient, or hurting them until they submitted. I didn’t plan on doing either, and I didn’t plan on leaving, not until I could get my sisters and their young’uns to come with me, to freedom and safety. I shook my head and said, “No,” to make sure they understood. “Leave them be.”
“Is that why won’t you help us with intel on the church?” Rick asked, his voice gentle. “The dogs? You’re afraid of their killers coming back and hurting you?”
My mouth opened and I said words that had been bubbling in my blood since I saw them in my yard. “You were supposed to be here months ago. Jane said you’d help me stay safe. Instead, the churchmen have come on my land—my land,” I added fiercely, “three times and they done bad things. Threatened me. Shed blood.” I lowered my voice and clenched my fists tightly on the tabletop to keep the rising energies knotted inside or maybe to keep from picking up the gun and shooting them. “And then you come here and want more favors instead of the help she promised.”
Rick started to move. I whipped to the side, one hand grabbing the shotgun, aiming. Fast as I was, the man was faster. He had drawn a fancy handgun in a single motion, so quick I hadn’t even seen him move. It was a big gun. Maybe a ten-millimeter. And it was aimed at my head.
Beside him, Paka draped an arm across the sofa back and watched him. And she purred. The sound was like a bobcat, but louder.
“Get outta my house,” I said. “You might shoot me, but I’ll put a hurting on you’uns too.” But they just stayed there as if they were rooted to my furniture. Cello crawled around Paka’s neck and nestled with Jezzie on her lap, her nose lifting close to the werecat’s face. Traitor. Something that might have been jealousy settled firmly in my chest like a weight. I scowled. Paka blinked, the motion slow and lazy.
“Mexican standoff,” Rick said, his voice soft. “Unless you have silver shot, we’ll heal from anything you can do to us. You won’t heal from a three tap to the chest.”
I laughed, the sound not like me. It was a nasty laugh. I set the shotgun back down and placed one hand flat on the table. Paka raised her head. “I smell her magics,” she said. “They are rising. Your gun might not hurt her as it would a human.” She petted Cello and she smiled again, her eyes tight on me. “This woman is dangerous, my mate. I like her. Her magic smells green, like the woods that surround the house. And it smells of decay, like prey that has gone back into the earth.”
“You’re like Paka, aren’t you?” I asked Rick, reaching through the wood table and floor, down into the ground, into the stone foundations and the dirt below the house, into the roots of the woods that gave the farm its name, roots tangled through the soil in the backyard, deep into the earth. “Werecat.” I placed my other hand on the table too, flat and steady.
“We are African black were-leopards,” Paka said watching me in fascination, her nostrils almost fluttering as she sniffed the air.
“Not exactly the same, though,” Rick said, his weapon aimed steadily at me, even though I’d put down my shotgun. “I was infected when I was bitten. She was born this way.”
“Why do you tell our secrets?” Paka asked, not as if in disagreement, but as if she was mildly curious while being bored.
“Because we need her help,” Rick said. “We need to know about the Human Speakers of Truth and any possible connection to the church. Nell’s the only one who might be willing to talk to me. To us,” he added, including his mate.
“Who are the Human Speakers of Truth?” I asked, letting the power and safety of the woods wrap around me like crawling snakes, like vines, growing in place. All I needed was one drop of his blood and I could take his life. It was my best protection; it was my magic and the magic of my land. His blood on my land, on Soulwood, put his life into my hands. “What do you want to know? The federal and state raid on the compound told most folks all there was to know about the church.”
“Do you still have family ties to God’s Cloud?” Rick asked, again not answering my question. It was probably a police tactic, but it set my teeth on edge. “Someone you could go to, or talk to, safely, but not get into more trouble with the people who killed your dogs?”
“I have family there,” I said, using the time to gather as much of the woods’ energy as I could. “We run into one another from time to time. Farmers’ market. Yard sales. Why you asking?” I said, my tone challenging, deliberately accented by years in the church.
“The FBI, state police, and PsyLED have reason to believe that a group calling themselves the Human Speakers of Truth, on the run from the authorities, stopped in Knoxville. But HST disappeared. They don’t have a home base here, so they may have joined forces with a local group. We want to rule out that the HST allied with God’s Cloud of Glory Church.”
“Never heard of HST,” I said.
“They’re a homegrown terrorist, anti-anyone nonhuman, militant group,” Rick said, “investigated by PsyLED for years. Our unit’s been tracking their financial trail, but it went cold five days ago here in Knoxville.”
“What kind of reason?” I asked. When he looked confused I said, “You said you had reason to believe that Human Speakers of Truth may have holed up in Knoxville. What kind of reason?”
“HST needed a place to regroup after the arrests of three high-ranking members and the freezing of the group’s financial accounts. We tracked them here and then lost the trail.
“God’s Cloud of Glory Church—your old cult—was in trouble with the Tennessee child services department, after the state arrested some of their leaders and placed the children in foster care. Both groups are ultra–right wing paranormal-haters, and both are in trouble with the law and financially. It makes sense for them to join up, but we can’t find anything electronically that supports that possibility.”
“Guesswork,” I said, but I couldn’t help my small smile. I’d helped damage the church. Me losing my peaceful life had meant getting one hundred thirty-eight children, some of them sexually abused, out of the clutches of God’s Cloud. I had helped, even if only passively, by letting the team have access to the church’s compound through my property. But I knew a fishing expedition when I heard it. There was no evidence in Rick’s statements, just supposition and wishful thinking.
Rick LaFleur acknowledged my smile with a tight one of his own. “HST stopped here, we know that, so it’s possible that they might have joined forces with the church, even if just temporarily. And if that’s true, then HST and God’s Cloud merging was a match made in, well, not heaven. Maybe in the boardroom.”
“Huntin’,” I said. “The menfolk would have made a deal with rifles or shotguns and dead meat for the dinner table.”
Something in my tone made Rick holster his gun. I tapped off the energies from the woods, holding the gathered power under my palms, flat against the table. The wood of the table had been cut from my forest, over a hundred years ago. I could use it. “So, yes. I got family there. Some will still speak to me at market. If I choose to talk to them.”
Watching my posture, Rick said, “Can you ask your family a few questions? For instance, if any new people have been admitted onto the compound?”
“That’s it?” I asked. “Information?”
“That’s one reason why we came up here today,” Rick said.
There was a lot of wiggle room in his answer, but there was also no threat. This was a negotiation.
Realizing that, I started to let the power I had gathered trickle back through the table, into the floor, and into the ground beneath the house. I took a slow breath. “Jane Yellowrock asked for help to save a captured vampire, and in return, she got the children out of there. My life is in danger because of her, but, if I’m honest, I think it was a fair trade. And she paid me. You ask for help with nothing in return. Why would I be so stupid?”
“Because helping us might make the church leave you alone. For good,” Rick said.
“I can’t see how that might even be possible.” But it sounded like heaven. They had done research on me, enough to know what buttons to push to make me do what they wanted.