I tilted my head uncertainly, not sure where this conversation was supposed to go or what they wanted. “Thank you,” I said, relying on manners.
“You knew when we broke it?” he asked, his head jerking in the general direction of the destroyed deer stand. His tone implied that he already knew the answer, but I nodded anyway.
The man glanced around the group and back to me. “I’m Occam, ma’am. Wereleopard,” he said, moving a hand down along his body like a carnie magician displaying himself, “from Texas, originally.” He pushed his pale hair from his long jaw, and I saw the hint of dimple in one cheek, low down.
“I’m T. Laine.” The woman smiled, showing straight and even pearly whites, the kind that came with a high price tag and a youth living with a metal mouth, or very good genes. “I’m a moon witch with strong earth element affinities and enough unfinished university degrees to satisfy the most OCD person on the planet. But that’s what made me attractive to PsyLED.”
“I’m JoJo. I’m the token human in the group.” JoJo was African-American, maybe mixed with something else, like Korean, and she was pretty, with tip-tilted eyes and a small bow of a mouth, but she also had piercings everywhere: nose, eyebrows, lips, all over her ears. She had tattoos too, the small tips of some picture peeking out of her shirt collar that must have gone down her chest. One side of her neck displayed the only tattoo that was completely visible—a small full moon with a spotted leopard stretched out on a limb, and below the leopard, a pool of water in which the leopard was reflected. It was delicate, fine work in oranges and reds and blues, with midnight outlining. I had never known anyone with tattoos, and all I could think was that they had to make it impossible to go undercover and not be recognized. Which was a very surprising thought for me.
“Tandy,” the other male said. He hadn’t taken his eyes from me the whole time they stood there, and both hands held on to the edge of the porch as if to keep him from falling or running off. “I’m an empath. I pick up on emotions and feelings and . . . I love your woods.” He smiled with his whole face and the skin at the corners of his glistening brownish-red eyes crinkled. His accent was different, and I didn’t know how to place it. American, but from somewhere else. “They whisper,” he said.
“They do,” I acknowledged, oddly pleased that someone besides me could tell that.
“Do they talk to you?” he asked, his peculiar eyes widening with delight and what might have been exhilaration, his hands clenching on the porch. “Is that how you know about the deer stand?”
“In a way. I guess,” I said.
Tandy had puzzling reddish tracings all over his exposed skin, as if a child had drawn on him with a red pen. There was no meaning to the erratic lines, which appeared at his hairline, as if they started on the top of his head, beneath his red-brown hair, and jerked their way down and across his body and limbs. They looked like lightning in scarlet miniature, traced across the very whitest flesh.
“Why were you watching my house?” I asked them.
“Rick said to keep an eye on you,” JoJo said. “Protection duty. We thought we were done until we heard a gunshot.”
I tilted my head, hearing the question in the words. “Vermin needing to be scared off.”
T. Laine said, “But we’re really still here because once we came close to your land to break the deer stand, we couldn’t keep Tandy away.”
“Your woods. They call to me,” Tandy said.
I gestured for them to come in. “I’m Nell. You’uns been out there all day. You thirsty? Hungry?”
They answered all at once with opposing responses. “No.” “Yes.” “I’m a vegetarian.” And the strangest response, from Occam, “I’d gladly pay you on Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
The other three laughed at the obscure statement. I frowned, not knowing why it was funny. “I don’t have hamburger. I have cubed venison steak thawing, bread in the oven, and a garden full of vegetables. Welcome to my home. Hospitality and safety while you’re here. As long as you act right,” I amended. “You act wrong and I’ll kick your butts to the curb.”
Subdued by my threat, but curiosity leaking off them like heat from a stove, they came in. Beneath my feet, the woods were aware and alert, but not upset or angry. From the trees came a low hum of what felt like contentment. I pulled my cardigan closer, uncertain at the changes taking place around me, the people—beings—with me. I closed the door on the dying day, and wished I had gotten more sleep.
* * *
They ate a mountain of food, much like John had when he was working the land, before he fell ill and had to be nursed like a baby. And they talked. And talked. And made jokes I didn’t understand. And referenced movies I hadn’t seen and books I hadn’t read. I might have felt as if I was being shunned in my own home, if they hadn’t worked so hard to include me, especially Tandy, whose reddish eyes followed me as I cooked and served and ate. It was a little unnerving having him around, knowing he was reading my emotions, but it wasn’t like I could kick him out. One did not kick out a guest after one had offered hospitality.
And the cats loved Occam as much as they had Paka. Seems they had a thing for werecats.
As soon as I politely could, I stood, began removing plates from the table, and started dishwater in the copper kitchen sink. As it scudded into the bottom, suds rising, I began washing and felt a jolt of shock when Occam joined me there. He picked up a dry rag and dried a plate. “What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Drying the dishes, ma’am,” he said simply.
“Why?” I demanded. “That’s women’s—” My words cut off abruptly.
“Women’s work, Miz Nell?” he asked mildly, his words Texan slow, his dark blond hair swinging forward to his jaw as he worked.
I looked down at my hands in the dishwater, suds up to my wrists. Women’s work. The foolishness the church taught.
As he dried another plate, Occam said, “I spent a lot of my life in unpleasant conditions, but back when I did have a mama, she taught me to clean our house, wash my own clothes, and cook, though I admit I’m a sad excuse for a chef. I can mop, sweep without stirring dust, and iron, if I don’t mind the risk of scorched britches. And I make a mean pot of chili, hot enough to burn out your gullet.”
“Totally,” JoJo said from the table. “If gullet means esophagus, stomach, all your small and large intestines, and the plumbing you empty that chili into. He served it to us at Spook School when we signed up for temporary duty with him. I thought we were going to have to call out the fire marshal.”
“I warned her,” Occam said, sliding me a crooked grin as he dried two forks, and a green glass so old the glass had bubbles in it, hand-blown early in the previous century. “She didn’t listen.”
He tilted the big stockpot I’d used to make enough pasta for them all and dried the inside, then the outside. “I even know how to work that mysterious device known as a vacuum cleaner.” He sent me that small, uneven grin again.
“I’ve seen men on films wash dishes,” I said reluctantly. But even when Leah was dying and I was so busy caring for her, John hadn’t washed dishes or cooked or done any of a hundred chores that needed doing with a sick woman in the house. He’d never done a lick of women’s work in his life.
“Culture shock,” Tandy said from behind me.
Occam said, “I had it when I got here from Texas. I’d spent twenty years in a cage there, a spectacle in a traveling carnival.”
“Twenty years?” I asked as shock spiked through me. I shot a look at Occam’s face to see if that was some kind of horrible joke, but he nodded in that slow, easy way of his.
“From the time I was ten until I was thirty,” Occam said, though he didn’t look a day over twenty. Maybe that seeming youth was part of being a werecat.
“You were kept in a cage?” I asked. “Like you were some kind of animal?” My next thought that the women in God’s Cloud were kept like animals too.
“I am an animal,” he said softly, “by most of humanity’s definition.”
“I’ve never been too impressed with humanity’s ability to use its noggin, when it’s so much easier to hate for no good reason. You are not an animal,” I said. But Occam just sent me that uneven grin and dried the next plate I handed him. I wasn’t sure what to do with a man who thought less of himself instead of more, and one who didn’t argue with me, to boot. And who washed dishes.
I let my eyes slide to Tandy’s face and the reddish lines that marked him, trailing down his cheeks and jaw and chin, dividing and redividing like the veins in a leaf, feathering along his neck into his collar. The empath looked distinctly uncomfortable, and I figured he was picking up my agitation. He had to be a walking, talking lie detector. I’d have to be careful what I thought and felt around him, which I didn’t like at all. I wasn’t good at playing games.
Occam, on the other hand, radiated calm, despite the direction of our conversation, placid as a cat sitting in the window staring out at the day.
“What’s your story?” I asked Tandy. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
His face lit with delight at my question, as if most people stared without asking, and being asked was a sort of a compliment. “Permanent Lichtenberg figures—broken capillaries after being struck by lightning. Three times in one summer.”
“Three times.”
“I’m serious. Three times. No one could explain it.” When I didn’t reply he said, “Statistically the chance of being struck by lightning is one in three thousand, but realistically, it’s much more like one in thirty or fifty thousand people are ever struck by lightning. That’s my number, not a statistician’s number, but it seems to fit.” He pointed to the plate I was rinsing. “You missed some spinach there. But there are people who get struck more than once,” he said as I rewashed the plate. “There’s a YouTube video of a guy getting struck three times in a row, but I think it’s fake. It takes a long time to get over being struck. You don’t just get up and walk away. But there is the case of a man in Colombia who was struck four times, and a man in North Carolina who was struck three times, like me. Roy Sullivan was struck seven times over the course of his life. None of them became empaths. Being struck by lightning.” Tandy looked at me out of the corner of his eyes. “Worst superpower ever.”
I giggled. It came out as a squeak, air bubbling through my lips, making them flap. My eyes went wide and Occam laughed with me, his eyes lighting up. Tandy stopped moving. He didn’t lift his eyes back to me. He just stood there, staring down. “You don’t laugh,” he said after a too-long moment. “Ever. You can actually remember the last time you laughed. It was months ago. And before that when you watched a movie.”