Once the pain was eased and the bleeding had stopped, I finished putting away the pots and dishes and brought in the dry clothes off the line, carrying up the basket to the small bed in my little room for folding later. I didn’t want to do it now. I didn’t want to do anything right now. I had taken a man’s life tonight. He’d have lost it in moments anyway, but . . . I had hastened it on by seconds and claimed it for the woods. I should feel something about that, some guilt for killing, or happiness for vengeance satisfied. Instead, for reasons I didn’t understand, I felt only overheated, itchy, and twitchy, as if my skin wanted to ripple and bubble up, like a science fiction movie I had watched one time. I stopped, bare feet on the floor, feeling the wood beneath my soles, and below that the foundation, resting in the earth that had nourished the trees used to build the house, when they had lived. Alexandre Dumas, in The Count of Monte Cristo, had said something like, “. . . I have been heaven’s substitute to recompense the good—now the god of vengeance yields to me his power to punish the wicked!” I wasn’t sure if God had yielded anything to me at all, or if I had stolen that right from him, and if so, he might just be taking his own good time to swat me down.
At the thought, my skin seemed to settle. This was why I had been so twitchy. Tonight I had finally found some small part of vengeance, justice, and no small measure of satisfaction when I took Brother Ephraim for my woods. But tonight, between one of Brother Ephraim’s heartbeats and his last, I had also committed murder. And I felt no guilt. The dirt beneath my house seemed to throb once, the feeling it sent through me vibrant and alive. And darker than I ever remembered. I didn’t know what to think about that.
Unsettled, I went through the house more carefully, cataloging damage. There were broken dishes, still sitting on the shelves up high, and I brought in John’s old stepladder to take an inventory. I swept the shattered dishes into a plastic dishpan and swept up the mess of broken crockery that had hit the floor.
My fingers traced the lines of the shattered antique hand-thrown pitcher. It had been made by Leah’s great-grandmother in the mid-eighteen hundreds. There had been no one to give it to when Leah passed, and I had put it on the top shelf in the kitchen pantry, thinking it would be safe, but a pellet had found it. My eyes burned and tears threatened, my throat clogged with pain. I owed her better than to let the church destroy Leah’s things, her memory, or me. She had taught me better. I put the broken pitcher back on its shelf, even though I knew that there was no way I could mend it.
Later, carrying my blanket, a book, and the list of questions that Rick had placed on the stack of books where he had left his cash earlier, I wandered to the back porch. It was a lot neater than when John was alive, piled as it had been with garden tools and buckets and boots and tillers and such. I never understood how a man could accumulate so much stuff. Now everything was neat, the tools hung on nails I had hammered in the back wall, John’s boots and hats and work gloves given away. The garden tools were now stored in the small enclosed space on the south side of the porch, one I’d had built with the insurance money from John’s death. The church didn’t believe in life insurance, but by the time Leah had died, John didn’t believe in the church and so had provided a small sum for me. The life insurance money was mostly gone now, except what I’d invested in a fund at the bank. The shed took part of the view, which I hated, but it also protected the back porch from the hottest summer sun, and the small window inside kept the shed warm in winter, from radiant heat alone. The dogs had slept in there some nights, when they hadn’t wanted to come inside the house, kept warm by the last rays of the sun.
Now, the floor of the much smaller porch was taken up only with the washing machine (an old model that drained into the garden), one chair, a tray on legs for use as my table, and my hammock. I’d bought the hammock from my sister Priscilla, when she was pregnant with her first child, and paid too much for it, just for the chance to make sure she was okay. Not unexpectedly, she was happy, married to Caleb Campbell, who was ten years her senior and already had one wife when they wed, Priscilla’s best friend, Fredi. Priss didn’t want to escape, didn’t want another life. She was happy, living in a big house full of children and wives and a husband who loved them all. The very life I’d been raised to aspire to, and had run away from, was the one she wanted. Up to the moment some churchman tried to take her to the punishment house. I stayed on Soulwood for that day, to be a safe haven to run to. And I stayed because when I did leave, even just to market, I felt the land’s call like a dark wound in my chest.
Priss, like my mama and my baby sisters, loved God’s Cloud. They loved the life there, the people there. Mama had even forgiven Brother Ephraim for his sin against her. The churchwomen were blind to the wicked acts of the ones who did evil in the name of God. The call to forgive was a powerful weapon, used against them for too long.
I had a feeling Jackson Jr. wouldn’t be forgiving me. But with Brother Ephraim missing and Joshua scared, he wouldn’t make a fast decision about me this time, no matter how mad he was, not with a special agent involved, no matter how tangentially. He’d want to let time pass and things settle, and when he came again, he’d make sure he had more than three men. He’d want to come in fast, grab me, and haul me out, leaving no trace. Then he’d burn my house and garden to the ground. And he’d take me to the punishment house personally. Or at least that would be his plan, once he convinced enough of the men to help him kidnap me. And I figured he’d forget to mention to the men the presence of police or black leopards leaping from my rooftop to protect me, and maybe Joshua would hold his tongue too. So . . . I was safe for a little while. Long enough to try to derail their plans. Long enough to figure out how to use the title of PsyLED consultant to my best advantage.
I let my thoughts wander for a bit at the memory of Jackie running through the woods, his speed not quite human, too fast, too surefooted. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I knew it meant something, and not something good. I remembered the bitter smell of Ephraim’s blood and of Paka’s description of it as wrong. I remembered Pea offering me a drop of Ephraim’s blood and her incomprehensible chitter. I wished I knew what all that meant, but whatever it was, it too wasn’t good.
I wished I had a method of making the woods grow thorny vines among the trees along the borders of the property, like Sleeping Beauty’s forest. Protective, passive defense. But my power wasn’t magic. It didn’t work that way.
Except . . . the ground had risen up and grabbed Pea’s feet like a trap when I’d wanted her stopped. I didn’t know what that might mean either. Not yet.
Thoughts and plans and worries swirled around in my brain, rising and dying back like fire in a brazier, hot and uncertain and potentially destructive. And possibly useful.
I crawled into the hammock, turned on the small lamp, and opened Rick’s list of questions. There was a short paragraph at the top that read:
Human Speakers of Truth is an antiparanormal, anti–human rights, quasipolitical terrorist group with once-deep pockets and ties to energy. They own outright or through shell companies a small oil company in Texas; several small natural gas companies in Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina; and several other less legitimate companies, possibly for money laundering. With the FBI and secret service involved, and financial assets frozen, they need a place to regroup. We know they came here, to Knoxville, Tennessee. We believe that they are still here, and we are searching for evidence to prove or disprove their location. For your contacts in the church:
1. Have there been any new men around?
2. Describe any changes in leadership and any power struggle.
3. New tensions?
4. New weapons?
5. Anything at all different?
To ask such questions of me, Rick LaFleur truly didn’t understand how people lived in the compound of God’s Cloud of Glory Church. The women would know nothing unless pillow talk had loosed the tongues of their men. The questions and the presence of PsyLED on an investigation told me that this was more than just an investigation into some homegrown terrorist group and church politics and finances. PsyLED was involved in the investigation because HST was a group that espoused killing all paranormal creatures. The FBI would have handled something strictly human, and the secret service would have handled any kind of financial wrongdoing. I folded the paper and tucked it into the bib of my clean overalls with the .32. I turned off the lamp. Rolled over and snuggled down in the hammock. The night was chilly and silent, even when the mouser cats unexpectedly leaped up onto the hammock and settled on me, purring. They had never done that. Never.
For a moment I missed my dogs so strong my chest ached. They had been John’s dogs, working dogs, and he’d found my love of them amusing. Even before he died, they had been too old to work, but they hadn’t been too old to love or to love back. But the cats never had. Until now. Until Paka tamed them for me with her magic.
The dogs had been all I’d had for years, all that loved me when I was lonely or empty or afraid. And they had stayed with me all these years, until the churchmen decided them being dead would make a good message to me. I hoped my message to Jackie was just as strong, not that he’d ever cry over Brother Ephraim’s disappearance. No. He’d be after me eventually. And this time, things would be different. Because I was different.
At the thought, my hands burned and itched, as if in memory of the wood’s power zapping Joshua. Or the memory of Ephraim’s life slipping through my fingers. I might not have defeated Jackie today, but I’d put a hurtin’ on him he would never forget.
FOUR
I woke the moment the churchmen began their trek along the boundary of my property. The feel of their footsteps yanked me from a sound sleep, and I rolled from the hammock to the porch floor, dislodging the cats, who hissed and arched their backs in displeasure. Heart pounding, I pushed through the screened porch door and stepped onto the grass. There were three churchmen, treading steadily, carrying equipment that clanked, making the animals dart away or crouch and grow still, as was their nature.
But I’d been wrong. They weren’t on my property, they were a good fifty feet out, on the Peays’ farm, which adjoined my property to the northeast. And they were crossing over into the Vaughn farm. I realized that these weren’t men here to kill me. These were the watchers who spied on my property from the deer stand on the neighbor’s land, churchmen who had been there off and on for months. And I realized that I hadn’t seen them during the time when Jackie had attacked. He had sent them home, taken their place. That made sense. But, I had never before been able to feel the watchers that far out. This was new and unsettling, as if, with the gift of Brother’s Ephraim’s body and soul, my woods had grown, had spread their borders.
Overhead the leaves rustled uneasily.
I felt the men climb the wooden ladder nailed to an old bur oak, and settle on the deer stand that was built like a triangular treehouse, secured to the bur oak and two black walnut trees. One of them peed off the side of the deer stand. Stupid, that. Deer would avoid the place now. I didn’t feel worry or anger off the men. More that friendly, chatty emotion men exuded when they were with their friends and intending to be sociable for a few hours. I had never picked up so much from people on my land. It was more than disconcerting. Surely this awareness would dissipate over time.