Home > Blood of the Earth (Soulwood #1)(4)

Blood of the Earth (Soulwood #1)(4)
Author: Faith Hunter

“You could come to work with PsyLED, on a consultant basis.”

And there it was, the carrot Jane Yellowrock had suggested so long ago. A way to be safe, finally and completely, from the church, because they might walk away if I worked for law enforcement, especially one of the shadow organizations like PsyLED. I would have a different lifestyle, a different place to live . . . assuming I could leave the land, which was in doubt, but wasn’t something I could say to strangers. To anyone, for that matter. I set a thoughtful expression on my face, as if their offer was okay, but not all that great. “I’ll consider talking to my family.” I stood straight and rubbed my palms on my thighs. “I’ll think about consulting. If the money’s good enough. For now, though, you gotta go.”

Without replying, my guests watched as I shook open a used plastic grocery bag, filled it with late fall squash, a small plastic baggie of an herbal air-freshener mixture that contained catnip, and a bottle of local honey. I put it on the table between them. “Twenty-five bucks. Cash. And make sure the bag is visible when you go to your car. The men watching my place need to see you with it. If they stand in the road as you leave, you have two choices: run through them, which I recommend, or stop. If you run through them, be prepared to be shot at and for the local law to do next to nothing. If you stop, don’t let them know you’re a cop. Just act like honeymooners and tell them you bought my Blue Pill Herbal Tea and Aromatherapy.”

“Blue pill?” Rick asked.

“Some men need a little help in the bedroom. They come to me for my herbal Blue Pill Blend.”

He frowned. Paka smiled. I said, “Git.”

“Thank you for your time.” Rick placed a small stack of five-dollar bills on the side table, beside his nearly full mug. He touched Paka’s shoulder and she stood, still holding my cats. The cop moved to the door without ever quite turning his back to me. He paused at the small table beside the door, one laden with library books and DVDs. He set a business card on top. “I know you don’t have a cell signal here or a landline phone, but if you need me and can get to one, call the number on that card. I’ll get here as quick as I can. Tomorrow is Tuesday, and the farmers’ market is going all week in honor of the Brewer’s Jam fall festival.” When I looked surprised that he knew that, he added, “We do our homework. In case you decide to help us, call when you get to town. We can be at Market Square early in the day. We’ll find you.”

They’d find me. Yeah. That was plain. No matter what I did or where I went, someone would find me. “Git,” I said again, this time with a little heat, letting the power of the land writhe around my hands and into my flesh.

Paka scented the air with her lips drawn back, sucking air over her tongue, then set my cats on the floor just inside the door and followed her mate out, closing the door behind her. I grabbed up the gun and raced to the window, watching them as they entered the car, Rick carrying the bag prominently and placing it on the floor of the backseat. The small catlike creature that had run around in the car was gone from the dash. The car made a three-point turn and wheeled sedately down the drive for the road.

As I watched, Jezzie walked up to me and sat, her front feet together, posing as only a house cat can, and mewled. I bent down hesitantly and picked her up. Jezzie wasn’t fond of people, but this time, she snuggled against me, purring, and scrubbed her head on my chest. Cello walked up and wound her body around my feet, and she had never done that before.

Paka had done this.

I glowered at the sight of the retreating rental car. I hadn’t given them my little blue pill mixture, but on cats, the catnip mixture might work the same way. If so, Rick would probably have a fair number of scratches on him by morning and Paka would be smiling and purring. She looked like the kind of female who liked a lot of sex a lot of the time. Some women did, not that I ever understood that sentiment. It was mean of me to give them my catnip blend, and had I known that Paka was mesmerizing and taming my cats for me, I might not have. But at the time, I hadn’t been able to help myself. It had seemed the least they deserved for the trouble that would follow their visit.

I stayed at the window, petting Jezzie, watching, waiting. Maybe ten minutes later, I saw a form move down the drive, keeping to the shadows. Two others followed it. The churchmen were here, and they were sneaking in along the east side of the property, not coming openly down the drive, which meant nothing good. The only good thing was that there weren’t enough of them to surround the house, which meant they were likely here to threaten, not to burn me out. Looked like I’d get to use the energies I had been gathering from the forest after all. I set Jezzie on the floor and scooted the cats up the stairs, where they liked to watch birds from the dormer windows.

TWO

Moving methodically but with practiced speed, I grabbed up my guns, extra ammo, and raced to the front porch, down the steps of the house, to the ground, where my bare feet touched the earth. Power I had banked away flared up in me again, through me, out my palms, which itched and burned in reaction, my fingertips tingling. I ducked into the depression between the raised beds in the front yard, a series of narrow, twisting pathways about three feet deeper than the beds and marked with large flat stepping-stones. Places to stand and fire, paths to get away through if necessary. Paths made by the sweat of my brow and lots of broken blisters.

The walls of the beds had been made of poured concrete that came to my waist, and bloomed with medicinal plantings: spotted touch-me-not jewelweed, a dozen varieties of thyme, and some other medicinal herbs in pots that were pretty to look at, like lamb’s ears, mullein, monarda, and graybeard. They were all mixed in with the ornamental impatiens and geraniums—some in clay pots—for the pretty flowers. I placed the guns on the raised beds, except the shotgun. Holding it beneath one arm, I scratched my palms one at a time until they were red from the pressure of my nails, trying to ease the pain of drawing on the forest’s energies. That power still boiled inside me, hot and potent but useless at a distance and without blood. But if they bled onto my land, they were mine.

I rolled my shoulders and knelt, most of my body now protected by the concrete and the earth the beds contained, placing my back against the flagpole I’d had installed in the center of the four beds, all designed for just this purpose. The flagpole was little more than a twelve-foot-tall angle iron, and it had never flown a flag. Most people never consciously saw it. I braced my body against the concrete and settled into a comfortable, if not relaxed, firing position, raising the loaded shotgun, and placing the back of the weapon against the flat side of the flagpole. It was an unorthodox method of firing a shotgun, but I wasn’t a large woman. I had fired an unbraced one once, and the recoil had tossed me back. I’d landed flat on my backside, with a shoulder so bruised I couldn’t use the arm for two weeks. I wanted to buy an automatic rifle, a weapon much better suited to a woman’s physiology than a shotgun, but they were expensive, and I wasn’t exactly rolling in money.

I dug my toes into the cool grass of early autumn, blew out my breath, just like John had taught me, and shouted, “Stop!” I waited a moment as the word echoed and faded away, surprised when my invaders actually came to a halt in the shadows of the woods.

“State your piece,” I yelled.

“Put down your weapons, woman!” one of the men called. They were too far away for me to make out their faces yet. But they’d be coming closer.

“Don’t make me hurt you!” I yelled.

No one answered. I couldn’t see them well enough to identify them, but I felt them through the dirt and placed the three men in a tight grouping about a hundred fifty feet away, in the cover of the forest. At least they hadn’t split up. That would make it more difficult to bring them down. They were too far away, however, for a shotgun to protect me, and plenty close enough to take me down with a rifle, providing they found a higher vantage point to fire down at me, hidden in the low paths between the beds. For the first time in my life, I wished I were a real witch, as the church had once accused, one who could bring up a protective circle or send fire shooting outta my eyes or whatever witches did to people who wanted to hurt them. Not having better options, I decided to goad them.

“You’uns come outta the woods,” I shouted in church-speak. No one moved. “Cowards! Afraid to face a woman on equal terms? Whatchu gonna do, huh? Shoot me from a distance like some kinda cheat? Maybe you think you’uns is all like some kinda assassins, but you ain’t! You’re chicken!” I shouted. “Each and every one of the churchmen is all chickens! Come out and face me, ya chickens!” Schoolyard taunts. They worked.

No one spoke loud enough for me to hear over the distance, but I felt them start slowly toward me, widening into a triangle shape, which was unfortunate, the man in the middle hanging back, the ones on the sides coming forward faster. The man in the center stumbled, the muscadine vine catching his foot. His hand touched the ground, bare skin to the earth, and I felt a tremble through the woods. A wrongness I couldn’t place, deeper and darker than the wrongness of Rick and Paka. But there was no time to dissect that feeling. He righted himself and moved faster. The trees around the clearing began to sough, branches swaying back and forth slowly, like a sensation of breathing, though I felt no wind in the lowered paths of the raised beds. The grass beneath me shifted and bent beneath my weight, scratchy between my toes.

Smoke from my woodstove swirled and twisted around the house, smelling of warmth and false reassurance. The man on my right moved out of the woods and I saw his face. It was Brother Ephraim, my personal nemesis, a small man, but one who carried a big hate. He thought all women were evil and needed to be put in their places, beneath his boot, starting at an early age. Brother Ephraim hated me for lots of reasons, all of them related to my disobedience. I hadn’t done as the church decreed and married the former leader, the old pervert better known as Colonel Ernest Jackson Sr., at age twelve. I hadn’t been punished for my infraction either. Instead I’d accepted a proposal from John and Leah Ingram, and gone off church land with them, away from the men who wanted to either marry me off to the highest bidder or burn me at the stake for being a witch—because even then I’d had magic enough for the churchmen to notice. My leaving had been as much a taunt as my words just now.

From that day over a decade ago, Brother Ephraim wanted me in the punishment house, my punishment left in his hands.

I’d die first.

The man on my left stepped out of the trees—Joshua Purdy. No surprise. Joshua had tried to court me starting the week John died, the moment it was discovered that he’d left me his land, instead of leaving it to the church, like any self-respecting churchman should have. The land gave me value in the church’s eyes, and Joshua was determined to claim me and the property both.

I’d die—second. I almost smiled.

The man in the center walked free of the trees and the shadows starting to stretch with early evening. Ernest Jackson Jr., called “Jackie,” had become the head preacher and had taken over running the church. The colonel’s son and heir was the meanest human being on the face of the Earth. I’d looked up what men like him were called. Misogynists. Sociopaths. Maybe even psychopaths. Dangerous, no matter what they were called. If the others hated me, then Jackie hated me with a burning passion, like coals of hatred piled up and waiting for the smallest inflammatory incident to flame up and roar, destroying everything his path. The thoughts were too poetic for the little turd. The hatred was mutual. And Jackie had drunk vampire blood long ago, to help cure him of a childhood cancer. Drinking blood of the damned had to have contributed to changes in his brain. Likely made him crazier than he woulda been in the first place.

   
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