Home > Blood of the Earth (Soulwood #1)(5)

Blood of the Earth (Soulwood #1)(5)
Author: Faith Hunter

Maybe that was why his touch had spooked my woods. Hatred was like fire, capable of destroying everything in its path. Woods feared fire. Perhaps hate made them feel the same sort of terror.

Jackie’s hatred had gotten much worse when he discovered that I had allowed Jane Yellowrock’s raiding party through my property to church land, the night his daddy went missing. It made me partially responsible for the arrests and the removal of the children by the child protective services of the state of Tennessee and the loss of his daddy, both in his eyes and in my own. Jackie and I had history. I could only hope I’d live long enough to see Jackson Jr. dead and gone too.

Brother Ephraim raised his shotgun and fired, but not at me. Into the back of the house. Two shots, a few seconds to reload, and two more shots, interspersed with the sounds of breaking glass and things shattering. When the sound died away, I heard him laughing as he again reloaded.

From behind me, from along the southwest border of the property, down the mountain a goodly ways, I felt something race up the road and leap into my forest. A creature that didn’t belong here. Foreign. Wrong. The forest scratched the soles of my feet in warning. The grass shifted beneath me in alarm. The leaves thrashed overhead. Wrongwrongwrong thrummed up through my flesh. But I had more immediate problems—the three men hiding in the shadows.

“Stop!” I shouted at my visitors. They halted, each man holding his ground and a shotgun, the weapon of choice for most hunters, for the churchmen, and for every redneck around here. “Say what you came to say,” I demanded, “and get off my land.”

“You’re dressed as a man, Sister Nell,” Brother Ephraim called over the intervening distance. He was wearing camo greens and blended into the woods just beyond. “We would counsel you in womanly ways,” he said.

Nothing new there.

“We’uns jist seen you entertain a strange man in your home without the presence of a family man to protect your honor and virtue,” Jackie said. “You are now sullied in the eyes of the church and must submit to punishment to bring about repentance and atonement. It’s time to return to the arms of the church and the family of your God.”

“You’re living alone, instead of as a helpmeet to a husband,” Brother Ephraim said. “Women are weak, and apt to fall into the clutches of evil men.”

Again, nothing new.

The new feeling of wrongness was growing closer, much closer, from the men before me and from the gorge behind me, from where the road curved around the property. My back tensed with apprehension, but there wasn’t time to look over my shoulder. There was no way I could turn from the churchmen. “There aren’t many men more evil than you, you perverts! Go away,” I shouted. “I don’t need to hurt you.”

The men laughed at my words, and Joshua Purdy stepped from the shadows. He shook his oily hair back from his narrow face and said, “I’ve offered for you, time and again, to make you an honest woman, Nell. Accept my offer in the manner it was intended. Don’t make us do something we might regret.”

“Regret this,” I muttered. I fired my shotgun. The boom was enough to damage my eardrums. The butt of the gun jerked down along the length of the flagpole, the barrel rising with the recoil. The men darted into cover as I steadied the weapon, tracking Jackie, who had ducked behind the vegetable garden not far from the side of the house and was crouching his way to the house corner for better cover. I fired again, taking down a vine of second-crop string beans, in a haze of green leaf shrapnel. I was deaf from the concussion and my eyes were tearing from the blasts as I reloaded with practiced ease.

All I needed to do was wing them. Just a single scratch by a shot pellet or vine thorn or anything, and I’d have the injured one’s life force in my hands. But according to what I felt through my feet, no blood had dripped onto the soil of my land, onto the soil of Soulwood.

I blinked to clear my vision, catching sight of a flashing shadow, the shadow of wrongness that had been racing toward me, up the hill. From one side, a black shape leaped thirty feet and landed on the house roof, a leopard digging in with her claws as she raced over the roof ridge. A black leopard, dark as night, dappled with spots like moon shadows on the forest floor. Shock sliced through me as if I’d slipped a knife blade along my flesh.

An instant later I heard a shotgun blast and Brother Ephraim’s high-pitched wail. His blood splattered in a sharp arc across the trailing muscadine vine and the dirt at its roots. The hunger for that blood roared up like wildfire. The soil sucked at the blood, the attention of the forest awakening and turning to the fight, eager. A tremor like electricity zapped through the trees and through me. Brother Ephraim was mine. This was part of my magic, my singular powers. To take the life of anyone who bled onto my land. To feed that life to the woods.

Jackie, hiding behind the beans, swiveled his shotgun toward the commotion and Ephraim’s scream. He stood, raising his gun into firing position. I took careful aim at him, my finger on the trigger. Without firing, so fast I didn’t have time to blink, Jackie pivoted his body, shifted his aim to me, and fired.

But he aimed too low. I felt the shot as it peppered into the soil of the raised beds. A terra-cotta pot busted, shards flying. Two impatiens plants took balls of hot shot to the roots and died.

Which made me mad.

I steadied my gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun boomed, plant parts flew inside the garden. I reloaded. Fast. So far as I could tell, I hadn’t done anything except make a salad. I tightened my finger on the trigger.

The blast shocked through my hands and arms as the gun slipped off the flagpole. The world tumbled around me, recoil sending me rolling across the yard. A fractured shiver came from the ground, one that felt heated, like fire burning the grass, ripped, like fescue torn and killed by sheep. This was fear and danger as grass understood them.

I saw Joshua Purdy as I rolled. Unbloodied. I tried to right myself. Tried to pull my shotgun into place. Tried to pull the power of the land around me and hit him with it, not even knowing if that might actually work. The last thing I saw was Joshua’s fist, coming at me.

* * *

I woke choking, drowning, shivering. I coughed and spluttered, pushing up from the water. I shook my head like a dog, my hair slinging water. By the feel of the earth beneath me, I knew where I was, about two hundred feet from the house, still on my land, where a spring cascaded from the rocks high behind the house, dropping to form a crick that ran most months out of the year. The water was still, unmoving in this natural bowl of earth, a shallow pool about a foot deep atop the clay depression. I rolled, dropping my backside into the chilled water, my knees up and arms locked, holding me in a sitting position. I coughed, expelling the water from my chest, the sound ragged before it finally eased. When I could breathe, I took in myself and my surroundings.

My coveralls’ straps were cut, my shirt torn away. My upper chest was exposed. Joshua was sitting above me on a rounded boulder, his shotgun resting on his knees, watching me. I couldn’t tell much from his expression, but I knew that he had tried to hurt me before he threw me in the pool, while I was unconscious. Tried to hurt me and couldn’t. Not in my forest.

My hands felt odd, as if I had held them too long against a heating pot, slightly burned. The power of the woods tingled on the air, up through the clay and the water, full of fury and fear, the same feeling in my hands. I had a feeling that my woods had zapped Joshua. It hadn’t been enough to kill him, but enough to stop him, make him rethink, giving me a chance to pick and choose my response. But now I was drained. I had nothing left inside me, unless he was bleeding, and I felt no blood where he sat.

I worked my jaw, feeling bruises and strained jaw joints, tender eye, swollen nose. He’d beaten me and taken me to a private place to do evil things to me, if not for the eerie woods that cast long, murky shadows and burned him with their anger.

Dark was coming. The trees of the woods raised above us, massive, big enough that three men couldn’t have held hands and circled the trunks with their arms, trees as big as those in an old-growth forest. My woods. Eight years ago, the trees had had less than a third their current circumference, only twenty-five to fifty years old, and showing the girth of all such trees. My magic had made them stronger, bigger, tying them to me in some way I didn’t understand. My magic had made the woods something else. Something other than just trees.

Years ago, I had killed a man who attacked me, much as Joshua had and for similar reasons. In fear and terror and panic, fighting for my life, I had fed him to the forest. I hadn’t even known for sure who he was. I still didn’t know. But that was my secret, never shared, not with anyone.

I was still slightly deaf, ears ringing, but I saw the branches move in their artificial wind, a breeze of the trees’ making. My woods were alert and eager, had been since they tasted the blood earlier. They were full of power, waiting to be used. Waiting to be fed. I hadn’t fed Soulwood but the once. Eight years ago. But the forest remembered.

The woods felt . . . hungry.

I dug my hands deeper into the bottom of the small pond, the reek of decay strong. The clay held the surface water in place, and a layer of leaves, dead and decaying from last winter, coated the bottom of the hollow. I shoved my hands through the muck and the soft clay, pushing back with my weight, forcing my hands deeper. My fingers found a thin strand of a root, not much bigger than a hair, but alive and pulsing with the forest’s life. I pulled on its energies and it released its life into my skin, the root instantly shriveling, dying. I’d pulled too much and I released the life force back into it quickly, rattled and surprised.

Breathing out, I was not aware until then that I’d been holding my breath. More carefully, I pulled on the energies in the soil, knowing this was dangerous, but needing what Soulwood could give me. Joshua had made a mistake leaving me here on my land, in contact with the soil and water, roots and plants, that were the surface of its soul. Now all I needed was for him to come close enough for me to scratch him. “Joshua,” I said, acknowledging his presence after a too-long silence.

His face didn’t change; he didn’t blink; I couldn’t tell if he was breathing, until eventually he said, “I’ll tell ’em I had my way with you.” His voice was toneless. “They’ll believe me. And they’ll marry us in the church to protect the reputation of a widder-woman.” I didn’t reply, just sat there, exposed, cold and wet with the chill of early autumn, night falling, watching him watch me. Feeling the weight of the snub-nosed .32 still in the bib’s pocket, weighing it down, remembering that I had more than one way out of this—though how he had missed the gun in his destruction of my clothes, I couldn’t know. I’d have pulled the gun and shot him now if I thought I could hit the side of a barn from this distance, with that gun. The .32 was for close-up work, not target shooting. I needed him closer. Much closer. Gun and magic both required me to be up close and personal with my opponent. Shifting my body weight back onto my hands, I pushed farther down into the clay and sludge.

   
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